George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

Let me just say to you kids that being made up of nothing but encrypted UDP packets is not all its cracked up to be. Worse, my code was a little buggy, and I’m missing a toe now. I should have written better error-handling. But I got back, even if it wasn’t in entirely one piece.

I find Atretius in my Bat Cave, my inner sanctum. He’s set up an altar that looks like it was made by Ikea. I can smell defensive sprogs thick in the air, I can taste the gigs of mojo burning up. Within a protective summoning circle of Cat-5 cables, Atretius sits coding at a laptop. He has discarded the casual wear for the traditional black robes of evil-doing. I think that the entities are kind of old-fashioned when it comes to formal wear or something. I’m determined not to let the bastard impress his master with his sense of fashion.

I launch every attack sprog I have, which isn’t many given my crap phone. They error out immediately, stymied by the defense sprogs. Atretius doesn’t even look up. I laugh and give my attack sprogs my backdoor passwords, counting on his arrogance.

Oh, yeah. Lesson number four: there’s always a backdoor password.

Sure enough, he is using my own work to defend himself. They come down leaving him defenseless but also leaving me out of almost out of mojo.

Atretius looks up then… and smiles.

A rip in the fabric of space, like the universe’s own dead pixel, forms before the altar. Something huge is trying to squeeze through. Distracted by this, I’m not ready when Atretius hits me with the Manacles again. I’m down. The Magister sighs and steps out of his circle.

“If you just pin your arms to your sides, I’ll pull on your horns,” Atretius says.

“That’s something you know a lot about, huh? Jerking on demon horn,” I say.

He lets loose of the demon and turns his full attention on me. I can sense him drawing mojo from his hacked Zune. But it’s suddenly cut off by my inner sanctum’s network defenses coming online.

“This is a nix-only house, asshole,” I say with a grin which quickly fades to terror.

Baalphoruum exits the portal with a slurping sound, followed by a deep and teeth-shattering laugh. The demon fixes his hundreds of red eyes on Artetius. He frantically pushes buttons on his gadget to no effect.

“YOUR SERVICES WILL NO LONGER BE REQUIRED, BARRY,” Baalphorum says in a voice like ten thousand babies crying. “I AM INVOKING THE TERMINATION CLAUSE OF OUR CONTRACT.”

“What — what termination clause?” The “Barry formerly known as Artetius” stutters, but then his head is several feet from his neck. I guess his uncle wasn’t such hot shit at contract law after all. With the turncoat deader than Kurt Cobain (Google him, kids), the manacles dispelled.

Unfortunately, now Baalphoruum has turned his attention to me. And it seems he’s intent on killing me slowly. He wraps a six-fingered fist around my neck and lifts me into the air to stare at me with his many fiery eyes.

You know, I never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer , so I don’t know any badass moves to take out a demon. (I’m more old-school in my entertainment. I grew up watching a little movie called Monster Squad . You can catch it on cable every once and a while. Check it out.)

So, lesson number five: like a wolf man, arch-demons have ’nards.

A well-placed kick drops me to the floor and my vision fades back in around the edges. I had a plan before coming in, but I hadn’t counted on physical contact with a demon. I’m a little winded, but then, so is Baalphorum. And he’s still weak, overdrawn on soul mojo. That’s when I point and execute the Box pendant.

Pwned. Now here is where things get tricky. The Box spell is good, but it won’t keep a demon like Baalphorum trapped for long. After I catch my breath, I hack out a little old-fashioned web code and insert it into the Box sprog.

I didn’t actually see this next part, but I imagine this is how things went:

Baalphorum stalks the small space of the Box spell, roaring with fury. He hammers on the walls and they crack ever so slightly. He could break free with time, but he wants to take what is his now .

A pair of buttons appear in the air before him, along with text:

“Do you wish to escape, my master? YES/NO”

Ahh, the mortal (me) has seen the error of its ways. He will escape and slaughter Earth more quickly now.

An endless, sprawling legal agreement appears, tiny text, miles of it. A checkbox labeled “Check here to continue.” On the surface, it seems simple enough, and each moment he spends outside his prison without the souls, he grows weaker.

Even Elder Ones can’t stand reading the damned things. Baalphorum checks the box and readies himself for a rampage. Instead, he is promptly hurled back into his prison across a thousand astral planes. I hope it hurts like hell.

And that’s lesson number six: software user agreements will fuck you every time.

Jonathan L. Howardis the author of the novels Johannes Cabal the Necromancer and Johannes Cabal the Detective . His short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy and H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror . He has also worked in the computer games industry since the early ’90s as a game designer and scriptwriter. He lives in Bristol, England.

If you were a necromancer, how would you feel if you found yourself in the middle of a zombie outbreak? One that threatened the future of the entire world? Well, if you’re Johannes Cabal, you’re not particularly worried — you’re just a little put out.

Cabal has an unusual way of looking at the world, and it’s not just because of his profession, although working with corpses might have colored his outlook. As quick on his feet as James Bond and as selfish as the worst comic book villain, Cabal is an unlikely savior of the world, but when he’s confronted by a magician with more ability than brains, this wizard of the dead is our last and only hope. Unfortunately, all he’s got on his side is one bumbling constable, a bit of rope, and top-notch reconnaissance.

This story fills the gap between the short story “Exeunt Demon King” and the first novel about Cabal, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer . Jonathan Howard says of this story’s inspiration: “I myself halted a zombie apocalypse a couple of years ago, and I remember thinking at the time, ’This would make a good story.’ ”

We think he’s joking.

This was not the first time a corpse had abruptly sat up on the mortuary slab and turned to face Johannes Cabal with murder in its eyes; it was, however, the first time one had done so without waiting to be formally reanimated. They stared at one another for a moment before the corpse, apparently unaware of the faux pas , made a cry like somebody receiving terrible news, and lunged at Cabal. Cabal, whose faults were mainly moral, grabbed the dead man by the scruff and threw it face first to the floor. While keeping it prone and thrashing with a foot to the back of its neck, he pulled a nearby wheeled trolley to him and reached into the brown leather Gladstone bag that lay open upon it.

The performance was observed in a baleful silence by a dishevelled police constable who sat against the wall, gagged and bound. He watched as Cabal drew a handgun of egregious aspect from the Gladstone, placed the muzzle at the junction between the occipital lobe and the atlas vertebrae, and completed the ad-hoc de-animation procedure with the introduction of a.577 bullet. The sound of the shot was deafening against the morgue’s hard walls and floor, echoing harshly from the cold stone slabs. Cabal kept his foot in place and drew back the revolver’s hammer in anticipation of further trouble. The corpse, however, showed no signs of attempting any further movement other than slumping. Cabal waited for a long moment in case it was a cunning zombie ruse, before gently thumbing the hammer back to rest. He glanced sideways as if sensing the policeman’s accusing glare.