Rick Cook - Wizard’s Bane

That made a crazy kind of sense, Wiz told himself. What he had just written functionally was very close to a Forth interpreter. And he was basing his language in part on Forth. Apparently the shape of a demon was influenced by the mental image the magician has of the process.

I wonder if he speaks with a lisp?

Then he sobered. More to the point, how could he be sure that his language’s commands would respond only to the explicit spells that defined them and not by some chance idea or mental image? Wiz made his way back to the castle in deep thought.

It wasn’t at all as easy as that. The first thing Wiz discovered was that the universe was not orthogonal. The rules of magic were about as regular as the instruction set on a Z80. Some things worked in some combinations and not in others. Murphy said "constants aren’t" and Murphy was apparently one of the gods of this universe.

He was uncomfortably aware that he didn’t really understand the rules of magic. He deliberately limited his language to the simplest, most robust spells, counting on the power of the compiler to execute many of them in rapid succession to give him his power. But even that turned out to be not so simple.

There were some things which seemed to work and which were very useful, but which didn’t work consistently or wouldn’t work well when called from other spells. Wiz suspected the problem was that they were complex entities composed of several fundamental pieces. He deliberately left them out of the code. After all, he rationalized, this is only version 1.0. I can go back and add them later.

He benchmarked his compiler at about 300 MOPS (Magical Operations Per Second). Not at all fast for someone used to working on a 3 MIPS (Million instructions per Second) workstation, but he wanted reliability, not speed. Besides, my benchmarks are for real, he told himself, not some vapor wafting out of the marketing department.

There were other problems he hadn’t anticipated. Once he tried to write down a simple definition using a combination of mathematical notation and the runes of this world’s alphabet. He gave up when the characters started to glow blue and crawl off the board. After that he was careful never to put a full definition on a single piece of anything. He split his boards into strips and wrote parts of code on each board.

The clean, spare structure of his original began to disappear under a profusion of error checking and warning messages. To keep side effects to a minimum he adopted a packaging approach, hiding as much information as possible in each module and minimizing interfaces.

Wiz spent more and more time at the hut poring over his tablets and testing commands. Sometimes the mice would come out and watch him work at the rude plank bench under the window. Wiz took to eating his lunch in the hut and left crumbs for the mice. Winter was a hard time for the poor little things, he thought.

Moira noticed the change in Wiz, but said nothing at first. Part of her was relieved that he was no longer constantly underfoot, but part of her missed the ego boost that had given her. Deep down there was a part of her which missed seeing Wiz constantly, she finally admitted to herself.

If Shiara noticed, she said nothing. She and Wiz still talked magic, but now it was no longer an everyday occurrence.

What Ugo noticed was anyone’s guess. Probably a great deal, but the goblin kept his counsel and grumbled about his chores as always.

Like a small boy with a guilty secret, Wiz went well beyond Heart’s Ease for the first test of his new system. He found a sheltered glade surrounded on all sides by trees and bushes. There he set to work on his first real spell.

There was a jay’s tail feather lying on the leaves, slate blue and barred with black. Wiz picked it up, held it by the quill and slowly and carefully recited his spell.

Nothing happened. The spell had failed! Wiz sighed in disappointment and dropped the feather. But instead of fluttering to the ground, the feather rose. It rotated and twisted, but it ever so gently fell upward from his hand.

Wiz watched transfixed as the feather wafted itself gently into the air.

It wasn’t much of a spell, just enough to produce a gentle current of air which could barely be felt against the outstretched palm. But Wiz was elated by its success. He had actually commanded magic!

They marked Mid-Winter’s Day with a feast and celebrations. Ugo cut a large log for the fire. They had mulled wine flavored with spices, nuts, dried fruits and delicacies. With the nuts, fruit and spices Moira whipped up what she called a Winter Bread. It reminded Wiz of a fruitcake.

"In my country it is the custom to give gifts at this time of the year," Wiz told them. "So I have some things for you."

Wiz was not very good with his hands, but from a long-ago summer at camp, he had dredged up the memory of how to whittle. He reached into his pouch and produced two packages, neatly tied in clean napkins for want of wrapping paper.

"Lady," he said, holding the first one out to Shiara. She took it and untied the knot by feel, fumbling slightly as she folded back the cloth. Inside lay a wooden heart carved from dark sapwood, laboriously scraped smooth and polished with beeswax until it glowed softly. A leather thong threaded through a painstakingly bored hole provided a way to wear it.

"Why, thank you Sparrow," Shiara said, running her fingertips over the surface of the wood.

"This is for you," he said holding the second package out to Moira. Inside was a wooden chain ending in a wooden ball in a cage.

"Thank you, Sparrow." Moira examined her present. Then her head snapped up "This is made from a single piece of wood," she said accusingly.

Wiz nodded. "Yep."

She stared at him gimlet-eyed. "Did you use magic to get the ball into the cage?"

"Huh? No! I carved it in there." Briefly he explained how the trick was done.

Moira softened. "Oh. I’m sorry, Sparrow. It’s just that when I see something like that I naturally think of magic."

"It’s a good thing I didn’t make you a model ship in a bottle."

"No," she said contritely. "I’m sorry for believing you had gone back on yur promise not to practice magic."

"It’s all right," he mumbled uncomfortably.

In spite of that, the holiday passed very well. For perhaps the first time since he had been summoned, Wiz enjoyed himself. Part of that was the holiday, part of it was that he now had real work to do and part of it—a big part of it—was that Moira seemed to be warming to him.

Wiz was chopping wood the next morning when Ugo came out to see him. "More wood!" the goblin commanded, eyeing the pile Wiz had already chopped.

"That’s plenty for one day," Wiz told him.

"Not one day. Many day," the goblin said. "Big storm come soon. Need much, much wood."

Wiz looked up and saw the sky was a clear luminous blue without a cloud in sight. The air was cold, but no colder than it had been.

"Big storm. More wood!" Ugo repeated imperiously and went on his way.

Well, thought Wiz, it’s his world. He turned back to the woodpile to lay in more.

All day the sky stayed fair and the winds calm, but during the night a heavy gray blanket of clouds rolled in. Dawn was rosy and sullen with the sun blushing the mass of dirty gray clouds with pink. By mid-morning the temperature had dropped ominously and the wind had picked up. Ugo, Moira and Wiz all scurried about last-minute tasks.

It started to snow that afternoon. Large white flakes swirled down out of the clouds, driven by an increasing wind. Thanks to the clouds and the weak winter sun, dusk came early. By full dark the wind was howling around Heart’s Ease, whistling down the chimneys and tugging at the shutters and roof slates.