The problem with a kludge is eventually you'regoing to have to go back and do it right.
—Programmers' saying
"You're sure this will work?" Wiz asked for the fourth time that morning amid the bustle of final preparations. He was wearing warm wool tunic and pants, a heavy travelling cloak and a very apprehensive look.
"If you can remember to do your part of it," Moira said a little sharply. Then she caught his expression and placed her hand on his arm.
"Do not worry, love," she said softly. "The spells are as simple and foolproof as we can make them. What was your phrase?—`Idiots-and-English-majors' simple."
Wiz didn't object to the characterization. In spite of the power his spell compiler gave him, he had absolutely no talent for this world's magic. It had taken Moira and Bal-Simba weeks to teach him what he would have to do today.
Wiz was much more warmly dressed than necessary for the Council chantry where he stood. But the clothing didn't entirely explain the sweat beading on his forehead.
He was standing in the middle of a circle traced in white powder on the flagged stone floor. Around him stood eight of the blue-robed wizards of the Mighty, each of them at one of the points of the compass. Late morning sunlight pouring in through the stained glass windows cast gaily colored patterns on the floor and the wizards, but beside each of them burned a pair of tall wax candles. Apprentices bustled around the edges of the room putting the finishing touches on preparations and sometimes conferring in hushed low tones. On the dais at one end of the room, Arianne, Bal-Simba's second in command, was overseeing three Watchers hunched over their communications crystals. Next to the tall blonde woman stood a pudgy little man in the blue robe of the Mighty, his lips moving silently and his eyes focused far away as he maintained contact with other of his fellows at their assigned tasks.
"Are we prepared then?" asked Bal-Simba from his spot on the circle.
"Lord, the patrols are off the beach," Arianne told him, pushing back a stray lock of blonde hair.
"The other wizards are standing by," reported Malus, the wizard next to her.
"Operation 500-Pound Parakeet is ready to go," Jerry called from his place at the side of the room. Everyone looked to the sun stick which cast a shortening shadow on the marks on the opposite wall. The tip of the shadow was inexorably approaching one of the marks.
Danny and Jerry stepped into the circle to clap Wiz on the back and wish him well.
"I never did understand why you call this after a giant parrot," Moira said as they waited for the last minutes to pass.
"Parakeet," Danny corrected. "It's how you get rid of cats. You get a 500-pound parakeet and teach it to say `here, kitty kitty kitty.'"
Moira started to frown and then laughed as she caught the joke.
"So you call this Operation 500-Pound Parakeet."
"They call it Operation 500-Pound Parakeet," Wiz said sourly. "I had nothing to do with the name."
"Hey man, it's gonna be easy," Danny told him lightly. "All you gotta do is zip back to the City of Night, off a demon who's waiting to toast you, and then call for the cavalry—us. We handle the rest." He made a palm-down gesture as if sweeping aside minor details. "Nooo problemo."
"It is indeed simple if you remember your spells and execute them correctly," Moira agreed.
"I rest my case," Wiz said sourly.
"Crave pardon?"
"Almost time," Bal-Simba called from his place at the head of the circle. "Make ready."
"I mean you just proved my point. Oh well, if we're going to do this thing, let's get on with it."
He kissed Moira long and hard.
"Okay," he said. "Places everyone."
Moira, Jerry and Danny stepped back and out of the circle, being careful not to scuff the chalked lines. The seven other wizards looked at Bal-Simba and he watched the sun stick as the shadow crept the last fraction of an inch along its track.
Then all the wizards raised their hands and began chanting. Wiz gripped his staff and tried to breathe slowly and evenly as the chant rose around him and the air seemed to fill with smoke. The sound became louder and louder, then began to fade as the air around him became thick and opaque.
There was a flash of darkness and suddenly the air was so cold it burned his lungs.
Wiz Zumwalt clung to his staff and pressed his eyes tightly shut as waves of dizziness washed over him. When he opened his eyes he found he was nose to nose with a wall of crudely dressed black basalt.
He turned and nearly fell when he stepped on a patch of ice in the wall's shadow. He scraped his palm as he caught himself against the rough wall. Then his vision cleared and the dizziness receded as he looked out over desolation.
Even at its height the City of Night had not been attractive. Its builders, the wizards of the Dark League, had cared much more for power than for beauty. Most of the city had been crudely built out of the volcanic stone of the southern continent with no regard to appearance or city planning.
But when the Dark League had ruled here at least there had been a kind of sinister vitality to the place. In its ruin and abandonment the city was simply ugly. The cobbled street fell away steeply and over the roofs of the close-huddled buildings Wiz could see the steel-gray harbor merging at the horizon into steel-gray sky. Behind him the volcano on whose flank the city stood curled a thin plume of smoke to the leaden sky. Even the snow that capped the mountain was dirty gray.
Studded here and there around the city were gaunt black towers, several of them with their tops blown off. A few yards ahead of Wiz the street was blocked by rubble where one of the buildings had collapsed. Many of the buildings between him and the harbor were ruined, roofless or in a couple of cases simply melted.
He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a tiny bit of blue crystal he wore on a thong around his neck. "I'm here," he said into the communications crystal. "Start Operation 500-Pound Parakeet."
Then he looked out over his handiwork again and shivered, not entirely from the cold.
Directly or indirectly, Wiz was responsible for most of the destruction. In his first great battle with the Dark League he had used his mixture of computer programming and magic to rout the League and destroyed a good part of the city in the process. In the second confrontation, he had been kidnapped to this place by the remnants of the League. For weeks the enemy wizards had hunted him through the freezing ruins of the City of Night while a tracking demon waited to destroy him if he used the least of his new magic.
He had been rescued after he had incited a magical battle between the wizards and Bale-Zur, the invincible slaying demon who had once served them. The effect of so much magic unleashed had attracted the attention of the Council's Watchers and brought a patrol of dragons south over the City to his rescue.
However the battle had stirred up the slaying demon. Instead of staying in one place and killing whatever came to him, the Watchers reported Bale-Zur now roamed the City of Night ceaselessly looking for victims. Worse, it had begun to range beyond the City itself. If this kept up it was sure to use its powers to travel across the Freshened Sea to the lands of men.
Wiz knew he was safe enough, but he kept his back to the freezing wall anyway. The communications crystal used the old magic of the Mighty, not his new spell compiler that would activate the tracking demon. Even though it needed eight powerful wizards and a complicated ceremony, Bal-Simba had sent him along the Wizard's Way by conventional magic so he did not have to use his own spells.
Of all the mortals in the World only three were safe from Bale-Zur. The demon would not touch Wiz, Jerry and Danny because their full names—their true names—had never been spoken anywhere in the World. To Bale-Zur they were no more prey than a rock.
However Bale-Zur was only half the problem. The other half was the hunting demon the Dark League had created in their attempt to destroy Wiz. Unlike Bale-Zur it could not range much beyond the Southern Continent. However it was keyed to Wiz's special brand of magic and would attack and destroy anything that used it.
But spells built with the magic compiler were the only kind Wiz, Jerry and Danny knew. If they tried to make magic the demon would be on them instantly.
It presented a pretty problem. Wiz, Jerry and Danny were immune to Bale-Zur, but if they used their magic they would be immediately attacked by the hunting demon. The hunting demon would not respond to conventional magic, but not even all of the Mighty together could hope to stand against Bale-Zur.
Until Bale-Zur was contained it was horribly risky for any mortal but Wiz or his friends to enter the City of Night and until the hunting demon was contained, they could not be safe here.
The demons weren't the only dangers in the City of Night. Remnants of the League's old magic remained and there were other monsters here as well. However none of those were the equal of a well-prepared magician—well,probably not, Wiz told himself—and most of them were not active by daylight in the open. We don't think!
Naturally they had backup. He was being closely watched by magical means, and several of the Mighty were poised to jump to his aid if he appeared to be in danger. There were two squadrons of dragon riders circling just off the beach. But he was still here alone and if anything went wrong he would be the first to know it.
Well, now I know how a worm on a hook feels, Wiz thought. He pulled his cloak tighter and set to work.
After hashing it over repeatedly, they had worked out a plan. It seemed like a good idea back at the Capital, but standing in the shattered city, Wiz was growing less fond of it by the minute.
He shifted his grip on his staff. The sooner they got this part of the operation over with the sooner he would be able to protect himself. And the sooner I can use a spell to stay warm.
He reached into his pouch, drew out four pieces of blue stone and set one at each point of the compass. Then he stood between them and began to scratch in the frozen dust with his staff.
Carefully he traced the figure in the dust as he had been taught. The old magic of this world depended for its success on precise execution. Everything had to be done just right and even the tiniest deviation from the rituals could mean disastrous changes in the outcome. The secret of the success of his magic compiler lay in the fact that it used extremely simple, reliable little spells that could be built up to produce complex, powerful effects with little or no talent on the part of the user.
With his new magic Wiz was easily the most powerful mortal magician in this world. But he was as natural a klutz as he was a computer programmer. Even this simple spell would tax him to the limit.
He finished the tracing and made especially sure the lines crossed to close the figure around him. The freezing wind whipped up little eddies of dust, but it did not erase the pentagram.
Finally he surveyed his handiwork one more time and reached back into his pouch. This time he pulled out a bit of forked, twisted root. Stepping to the edge of the circle, he lifted the root to his mouth and whispered to it the words Moira and Bal-Simba had spent so long pounding into his head. He leaned over and placed it outside the circle. Then he stepped back and waited.
He had barely reached the center when the root stirred in the dust. As he watched it seemed to untwist and swell until it became a tiny brown man shape, no longer than Wiz's thumb. It got to its knees and then to its feet and then shook itself once, as if to clear its head. It strode forward, placed its hands on its hips, threw back its head and began to shout.
Inside the circle Wiz heard nothing but the wind. He knew that the manikin was reciting a simple spell in the new magic. The spell didn't do much, but it should be enough to attract the demon. Wiz gripped his staff harder and forced himself not to hold his breath as he watched.
Suddenly with an earsplitting roar the demon arrived.
A clawed foot crushed the mandrake manikin to the dust. The burning red eyes searched right and left and the horned, scaled, fanged head swiveled on the snakelike neck as it scanned for more prey. It stopped when it saw Wiz standing perhaps twenty feet away, seemingly unprotected and reeking of traces of the new magic. Without warning and without seeming to gather itself it leapt at Wiz, jaws gaping and talons spread. Its bellows rang off the surrounding stone walls.
Perhaps five feet from the human, the demon bounced. It stopped dead in mid-air and with talons scrabbling for purchase it slid slowly down the invisible barrier that lay between it and its would-be prey.
Again and again, the thing hurled itself against the invisible barrier that separated it from its prey. In spite of himself Wiz flinched and shrank back from its fury.
It was wasted effort. The demon clawed impotently at the barrier and scrabbled frantically against it, but it could not come close to penetrating it.
Wiz raised his staff and spoke. "demon debug begone exe!" he proclaimed.
The demon renewed its desperate attack on the magical barrier and its screams rose to a crescendo. Then the spell took hold. The demon became translucent. Its roars faded to the merely deafening, down through the loud and then trailed away like a locomotive whistle disappearing in the distance. It became transparent, faded to a mere outline and then it was gone.
Wiz let out his breath in a great gasping sigh and sagged against his staff.
"Okay," he said into the communications crystal. "Phase one is accomplished. Come on through and let's get the rest of this thing over with."
There were two soft pops behind him and there were Jerry and Danny, looking disoriented and a little sick, but clutching their staffs gamely. They were burdened with packs and hung about with an assortment of pouches, crystals, strangely shaped bits of metal and other less identifiable things. In addition Danny carried a large leather sack that pulsated and moved as if the contents were alive.
The contents of the sack were to help them in their search. Everything else Danny and Jerry carried was for protection or defense. Looking them over, Wiz reflected there was probably enough magical firepower between the pair of them to defeat the Dark League ten times over. Far more than they would need for anything they were likely to meet here.
Which was fine with Wiz. He had not the slightest intention of giving anything in the City of Night an even break.
"You okay?" Wiz asked as his friends seemed to become aware of their surroundings.
"Yeah," Danny mumbled. Then he shook his head to clear it. "Boy that's a weird feeling."
"It'll be a good feeling when we get out of here. And the sooner we start the search the sooner that will be."
Danny nodded and bent to open the leather bag.
Hundreds of things like dirty gossamer handkerchiefs half-flapped half-floated out of the sack and wafted off in all directions. Behind them came a half-dozen things of the same stuff about the size of a bath towel. Finally Danny reached in and pulled out a crystalline object about a foot high. The facets flashed in the pale light and the thing began buzzing weakly as it started receiving data from the searching units.
"It will take them a few minutes to get some kind of search pattern set up," Wiz said into the comm crystal. "There s not a lot we can do until then."
"Just be careful doing nothing," Moira's voice admonished them. "That place is not safe."
"No kidding," Wiz said, thinking of the close calls he had when he was a fugitive in the city.
"They're spreading out fast," Jerry said, craning his neck and shielding his eyes with his hands to try to follow the searchers' progress.
All the things in the sack were variants of the system of searching demons which had been one of Wiz's first projects with his new magic. The smaller searchers had almost no intelligence or volition. They were passive receptors which passed information back to the bath towel things for concentration and interpretation. They in turn passed the information back to the crystal object which did the final evaluation.
Unlike Wiz's original system, this one was tuned to look for only one object, the heart of Bale-Zur. The demons had been trained on similar demon hearts held in the vaults beneath the Capital. When they found a demon heart they would report back to the humans.
Danny poked at the rubble with his staff. "What does the heart of a demon look like anyway?"
"It's a cloudy sphere about as big as your head," Wiz told him. "Anyway, that's how it was described to me."
"Do not worry about identifying it," Moira's voice came inside their heads. "Your searching demons will know it when they see it."
"If it still exists, it should be somewhere in Toth-Set-Ra's old palace," Moira's voice told them. "That is," she paused for a second while she translated what the Watcher's crystal was showing her into their coordinate system, "almost straight behind you."
"I hope it is there," Wiz said. "It will make our job a lot easier."
He motioned toward the palace and all three of them gathered up their magical paraphernalia and set off.