Rick Cook - Wizardry Compiled

Only it’s not empty! I’m here. He looked closely at the mirror. The mirror fragment showed the room, but there was no sign of Wiz. It was as if he was not there.

A cloak of invisibility! That was why the magicians hadn’t seen him. He looked in the mirror again, turning this way and that and admiring his lack of reflection.

He’d heard about cloaks of invisibility, but he had never seen one. What was it Moira called it? A tarncape. That was what he had found. He laughed aloud and spun in a full circle, the cloak standing out from his body from the speed.

Then he froze. Magic! Wiz thought, his heart pounding, I’ve been using magic! But the demon hadn’t come for him. He hadn’t even felt the quiver he felt when he tried to frame a spell.

Wiz slumped into the corner, his back against the cold stone wall, and tried to think. What was it the wizard had said?

Of course! The demon wasn’t looking for him, it was looking for the kind of magic he made. He knew that the output of his spell compiler "felt" different from normal magic, probably because each of his large spells was built up on many smaller spells—the "words" in his magic language.

But the tarncape wasn’t magic he had made. It was someone else’s magic he had found. It didn’t register with the demon even when he used it. And that meant that he could use magic after all! Provided it was magic not of his making.

Wiz thought about it, but he didn’t see how that helped much. Obviously most of the magical items in the City of Night had been carried off in the chaos that followed the Dark League’s defeat. There were undoubtedly some things left, but he didn’t know how to use them and magical implements did not come with users manuals. Worse, he wasn’t a wizard in the conventional sense. He had no training in the usual forms of magic so he probably wouldn’t recognize a magical object unless it bit him on the ankle.

Still, he thought, fingering the cloak, there ought to be something I can do with this.

The garden was beautiful this early, Moira thought. The sun painted the towers of the Wizards’ Keep golden and made the colors of the pennons leap out against the blue of the sky. The dew still filmed the plants and made diamond sparkles on the grass and the occasional spider web. The air was cool and perfumed with the fragrance of roses.

Moira plucked a yellow one off the bush. Wiz had liked yellow roses on her. He thought they looked good against her red hair and fair skin and he especially liked her to wear them in her hair.

What was it he had told her? Some custom in his world where a woman wore a rose over the left ear to show she was taken and the right ear to show she was available. Or was it the other way around?

Moira smiled at the memory and bit her lip to keep from crying.

A shadow fell over her. She gasped and whirled to see Bal-Simba.

"Oh, Lord, you startled me. Merry met."

"Merry met, Lady."

"Is there any news?"

"None, I am afraid, but it is a related errand that brings me to you. Do you recall the three-demon searching spell Wiz created to seek news of you? I mentioned it to Jerry today and he says they have found no trace of such a spell in Wiz’s notes."

Moira frowned. "None? I could have sworn he had something, at least the copies on parchment of the wooden slabs he wrote on at Heart’s Ease when he created the spell."

"Jerry says there is nothing in the material he has. Is there anything they missed?"

The hedge witch shook her head.

"Nothing." Then she brightened. "But Lord, what about the searching system Wiz set up to find me? Could we not direct the searching demons to seek out Wiz?"

"We thought of that," Bal-Simba told her. "But it appears that the spell requires constant attention. The small searchers, the ones like wisps of dirty fog, are easily blown about by the wind. The larger ones drift as well, given time. A year’s storms have scattered the demons beyond recall."

"And without the spell we cannot recreate the work." Unconsciously she crushed the rose in her grasp.

"Wait a minute! Lord, what about the spell Wiz used to find me in the dungeon?" Moira asked. "The Rapid Reconnaissance Direction Demon?"

Bal-Simba slapped his thigh and the sound rang off the walls. "Of course! It could search the entire World in hours."

A quick survey of the notes in the Bull Pen turned up the spell. With Jerry and several of the other programmers who hadn’t yet turned in at their heels, Moira and Bal-Simba went out into the courtyard to put the spell in operation.

"Now then," Bal-Simba said to himself as he flipped between the pages where the spell was written, alternate lines on each page to prevent activating the spell by writing it down. "Hmmm, ah. Yes, very well." He faced into the courtyard, squinted into the morning sun and raised one hand.

"class drone grep wiz,"he commanded in a ringing voice. There was soft "pop" and a squat demon appeared in the courtyard. Its cylindrical body was white, its domed top was blue and it supported itself on three stubby legs. "exe!"commanded Bal-Simba.

The demon emitted a despairing honk and fell forward on its face. A thin trickle of smoke curled out of its innards.

"Let me see that spell again," Bal-Simba said to Moira.

Three repetitions produced no better results. Once the demon simply froze, once it flashed off never to return and once it ran around in tight little circles emitting little beeps and squawks. At last Jerry listed out the spell to see if he could discover the difficulty.

"I think I see what’s wrong," Jerry said finally. "But it’s not going to be easy to fix."

"What is the problem?" Bal-Simba asked.

"The problem is that this code wasn’t written for anyone else to use."

"You mean this spell is protected by magic?" Moira frowned. Such protections were not unknown on powerful spells.

"Worse," Jerry said glumly. "This code is protected by being write-only."

"Eh?" said Bal-Simba.

"Wiz hacked this thing together to do a specific job, right? From the looks of it he was in a tremendous hurry when he did it."

"I was a prisoner of the Dark League," Moira said in a small voice. "He wrote the spell to find me."

"Okay, he needed it fast. He never expected that anyone else would use it, he used the quickest, dirtiest methods he could find, he didn’t worry about conforming to his language specification and he didn’t bother commenting on it at all." Jerry looked at the glowing letters again and shook his head. "I don’t think he could have understood this stuff a month after he wrote it and I don’t have the faintest idea what is going on here."

"This," he said pointing to a single line of half a dozen symbols, "apparently does about four different things. Either that or it’s some kind of weird jump instruction." He scowled at the code for a minute. "Anyway, the whole program is like that. I don’t see three lines in a row any place in this that I understand."

"We do not need to understand the spell," Bal-Simba rumbled. "We only need to use it this once."

Jerry shook his head. "It’s not that simple. What are the commands? What are the options you can use? How is it all supposed to work? You already tried this and it failed. Until we understand it we won’t know why it failed."

"How long will it take you to find out?"

Jerry shrugged.

"I don’t know. The hardest part of a job like this is always getting your head cranked around to see the other guy’s way of doing things. Once you do that, sometimes it just falls right into place." He frowned. "And sometimes not. Anyway, I’ll put a couple of people on it. I wouldn’t count on being able to use this any time soon, though."