Rick Cook - Wizardry Compiled

Moira threw open the door.

"Danny!" Jerry yelled.

The young programmer was rocking back and forth, his body slamming first forward almost to the desk and then back so forcefully the chair teetered.

"Something’s wrong! He’s having a stroke or something."

"Stay away from him!" Moira ordered. "He is caught in a spell."

"Stop it."

"I do not know how. The command should be in the book.

Jerry edged around the still-thrashing Danny and hooked the Dragon Book off the desk. The dragon demon ignored him, watching Danny the way a cat watches a new and particularly interesting toy.

"Damn, no index!"

"Try the table of contents," Karl suggested.

"No table of contents, either!" He paged frantically through the book and muttered something about hackers under his breath.

"Here it is." He read hurriedly. " reset!" he commanded.

Danny continued to jerk back and forward.

"Exe, My Lord," Moira said frantically. "You must end with exe."

"Oh, right. reset exe!"

Suddenly Danny flopped forward and hit the table with a thump.

Moira and Jerry gently raised him up and leaned him back in the chair.

"Are you okay?" Jerry asked as the teenaged programmer gasped for breath.

" ’s alright," he slurred as he lifted his head off his chest. "I’ll be alright." Jerry saw he was white and shaking but he was breathing more normally.

"What happened?" Danny mumbled.

Moira pressed a cup of wine into his hands.

"You were entrapped by the spell you created, My Lord," she told him. "The spell repeated endlessly and you could not get out."

"In other words you were stuck in a DO loop," Jerry explained.

Danny raised the cup in both hands and drained it in a gulp.

"Jesus. I was in there and it started and it just kept going over and over. Like a live wire you can’t let go." He lowered the cup and it slipped from his numbed grasp to clatter on the table. "Jesus!"

"Tell us what happened."

"Well, I was flipping through the manual and I figured I’d try it out. So I set up a simple little hack, only when it started it just kept going. I didn’t think I’d ever get out."

"That was a dumb-ass stunt," Jerry told him. "You’re lucky it wasn’t worse."

"How the hell was I supposed to know?" Danny snapped. "I didn’t think…"

"You sure as hell didn’t," Jerry cut him off. "And you’d better start thinking before you do a damn fool thing like that again!"

Danny muttered something but Jerry ignored him.

"Okay," Jerry said. "From now on nobody practices this stuff alone."

Wiz was feeling almost jaunty as he made his way up the street with the broken halberd over his shoulder. He was still cold, but on a day as bright as this he could almost ignore that. Besides, the cold was easier to bear when you weren’t hungry all the time.

The halberd made a big difference in Wiz’s standard of living. There turned out to be a lot more food left in the City of Night than he had realized. But almost all of what remained was locked behind doors or in cupboards or chests. In the last few days he had gotten very good at using the halberd’s axe blade and the heavy spike behind to pry, chop and smash things open. Finding food was a full-time job, but it wasn’t quite the hopeless one it had been.

Today he was well-fed on magically preserved meat and bread so dry and brick-like he had to soak it in water before he could eat it. The meat had an odd taste and the water he soaked the bread in hadn’t been very clean, but his stomach was still pleasantly full.

And now this neighborhood looked promising. The street was lined with smaller buildings, two and three stories. A number of small buildings, shops or houses, were more likely to yield food than a few big ones. Best of all, the doors and window shutters on nearly every house on the street were intact. That meant they had not been systematically looted and larger scavengers had been kept out.

The weather added to his mood. There was not a trace of the clouds that usually hung low and gray over the Southern Lands. The only thing in the pale-blue sky was the sun and it was almost at its zenith. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in it, but there was a certain amount of cheer.

A motion above the buildings caught his eye. Wiz turned his head just in time to see a black-robed wizard drift lazily over the rooftops. The man’s robe fluttered about his ankles and his head moved constantly as he scanned the city.

Wiz shrank back against the wall. But he knew he stood out sharply against the dark volcanic rock of the street and buildings. There wasn’t even a shadow to hide in and the wizard was floating in his direction. He was as exposed as an ant on a griddle and he would be fried like one as soon as the wizard spotted him.

Wiz bit his lip and silently cursed the bright sun and the shuttered houses. He looked up and down the street frantically, but there was not an open door or window to be seen.

There was a storm sewer opposite. It didn’t look big enough to take him and it was covered with an iron grate, but it was the only chance he had. Wiz dashed across the street and levered up the grate with a quick jerk of his halberd. Then heedless of how deep the hole might be he thrust himself through.

It was perhaps eight feet from the street to the trickle of freezing slime that ran through the bottom of the sewer. The shock and the slippery bottom forced him to his hands and knees before he regained his balance. He looked up just in time to see the wizard float down the street housetop high.

Wiz dared not breathe as the man passed over the grating. The sorcerer looked directly down at his hiding place, but floated on by majestically. Apparently the shadows in the hole hid Wiz from him.

Once the man passed out of Wiz’s field of vision, he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he froze again. There was something moving in the tunnel behind him. Something big.

The tunnel was as black as the inside of midnight, but Wiz heard a splash-scrape sound as if something too large to move quietly was trying to do so. He listened more intently. Again the splash-scrape, nearer this time.

Wiz realized he was trapped. He couldn’t see the flying wizard, but he could not have gone far. Leaving the shelter of the sewer meant exposing himself to his enemies. On the other hand, whatever he was sharing this tunnel with was getting closer by the second.

For some reason it stuck in his mind that he had found no bodies in the ruins. Not even bones.

He listened again. There was no further sound from the tunnel except the drip, drip of water. The lack of sound reminded him of a cat getting ready to pounce.

With one motion he twisted around and lashed upward with the halberd. The spike caught on the edge of the hole and he swung himself up to grab the coping with his other hand.

Behind him came a furious splashing. He swung his leg up and rolled free of the sewer just as a huge pair of jaws snapped shut where he had been. Wiz had a confused impression of a mouth full of ripping teeth and a single evil eye before he rolled away from the opening.

Gasping, Wiz gained his feet and flattened against the building. There was no sign of the flying wizard and the creature in the sewer showed no sign of coming after him.

Muddy, chilled and thoroughly frightened, Wiz ran off down the street, looking for a place to hide.

"Well," said Jerry Andrews, "what have we got?"

The team was crowded into the Wizard’s Day Room, which they were using as a temporary office while the last renovations were completed on the cow barn.

For the last two days the programmers had torn into Wiz’s spell compiler and the material he had left behind. By ones and twos they had pored over the Dragon Book, Wiz’s notes and conducted small and carefully controlled experiments.