"Hi. Uh, I'd like to see Judith Conally."
The nurse looked up from her paperwork and flashed a professional smile. "Are you a relative?"
"No, I'm a friend."
"I'm sorry, but only relatives are allowed to visit patients in the neurological unit."
"She doesn't have any relatives out here. I'm her best friend. Can't I please see her?"
The nurse looked him over. He wasn't much more than twenty. A pale and soft youth with brown hair and a complexion that bore a trace of adolescent acne. He was wearing an old flight jacket with several felt-tip pens in the left sleeve pocket and a T-shirt with a picture of a warrior in a horned helmet air-brushed on it.
He had laid a three-ring notebook on the counter with a couple of library books on top.
A student, she decided. Harmless and very earnest.
The nurse glanced at the chart. The visiting rule wasn't rigidly enforced in the Neurological unit unless the doctor requested it and there was nothing on the chart about that. The patient hadn't had a visitor in a while.
She smiled again, a little less professionally. "I suppose it would be all right, but you'll have to be very quiet."
The searchers found the heart of the demon before Wiz and his friends reached the palace.
As they got close to the former seat of the Dark League's power the destruction got worse and the going got harder. In some places it was hard to tell the streets from the flattened houses and in a couple of instances it was easier to avoid the street and go over the remains of the buildings. Once they came to a place where the stone had melted into glassy slag with razor sharp edges everywhere. Another time seeping water in deep shadows had formed a waterfall of ice nearly ten feet tall.
They saw no signs of life, but once they heard something scrabbling over the rubble as if fleeing their approach.
"Boy, what a mess," Jerry panted as they pulled themselves to the top of the latest obstacle.
Wiz shaded his eyes and looked ahead, trying to find the easiest route. "I don't remember it being this bad. On the other hand, I stayed away from this part of town as much as I could."
Danny consulted the crystal device. "It's over that way, in that big black pile of rubble."
Jerry scanned the horizon. "Which big black pile of rubble?"
"That one," Wiz pointed. "Let's go."
Another fifteen minutes of hard travel brought them through the shattered black gates of the palace. The going was easier here because there had been just one building set in an extensive courtyard. None of the roof remained and everything had collapsed in on itself, but enough of the walls still stood that you could pick out the general outlines of the floor plan.
"This guy sure had lousy taste," Jerry said, eyeing the remains of a strangely twisted mosaic on a partly standing wall.
"I think some of it's kind of neat," Danny said as he looked over a doorway shaped like the gaping mouth of a monster. He reached out and stroked the door jamb admiringly.
The door growled and Danny jumped back, landing sprawled on the rubble.
"I told you not to touch stuff," Wiz said.
"Yeah." He consulted the locator to hide his embarrassment. "Uh, what we want is down this way."
Another couple of hundred yards and the trio came to an archway that was still mostly standing. Through it they saw five or six searchers hovering around like a patch of smog, pulsing weakly as they sensed their quarry.
"I guess it's down there," Danny said.
"Great," Wiz said, eyeing the remains of the room. "The debris is only about ten feet deep in there. I don't suppose you guys brought shovels?"
Jerry looked down at the equipment festooned about him. "No. We've got enough stuff here to flatten this place in an eyeblink, but we don't have anything that will let us move the rubble."
"I could send shovels to you," Moira's voice said in Wiz's ear.
Wiz considered. "Let's try it bare-handed first. Where's Bale-Zur?"
"The Watchers say it is down by the harbor."
"Moving this way?"
"Not yet. We will let you know."
"Well, come on," Wiz said to his companions. "Maybe the heart is close to the top."
"Maybe pigs will grow wings," Danny said, eyeing the rubble.
"Around this place you never know," Wiz said as he cast the first stone.
As he followed the nurse down the hall, Craig felt like the place was closing in on him. Everything was hushed, like sound didn't carry here. The lighting was all indirect and the colors were all neutral browns or dark greens. It was like your senses didn't work right.
He didn't like hospitals anyway. They reminded him of the time he had spent in corridors, rooms and visitors' lounges waiting for his mother to die. But even for a hospital this place was spooky. It was visiting hours, but most of the room doors were closed. Only once did he catch a glimpse of someone sitting at a bedside, a dark form outlined in the flickering glow of a TV screen.
The nurse stopped before one of the too-wide doors, gently pushed it open and then motioned him to follow her in.
At first he thought Judith was someone else. She was wizened and shrunken down into the immaculate white sheets of the hospital bed. They had cut her hair short and shaved part of one side of her head. There was a tube in her nose and another one running from her arm to a bottle of clear liquid hanging by the bed.
Craig looked dubiously at the nurse.
"Can she hear me?" he whispered.
"Perhaps," the nurse said gently. "Try talking to her. You don't have to whisper."
"Thank . . ." Craig started to whisper and caught himself. "Thank you."
"I'll be at the nurse's station."
As she went out the door the nurse felt a flash of pity. The young accident victims were about the worst, second only to the little kids who had nearly drowned. Maybe the visitor would do the patient good, but she doubted it. After six years on Neuro she had a feel for the patients and this one probably wasn't ever going to come out of it.
At first the programmers didn't have too much trouble digging through the rubble. The pieces were about the size of Wiz's head; small enough to handle easily and big enough to make obvious progress. The stone was freezing cold, but their sturdy gloves protected their hands and kept their fingers warm.
The heart wasn't under the first layer of rubble, or the next. By now the job was getting harder. They started to run into pieces that took two or all three of them to shift. More and more of the pieces were locked together like jackstraws and could only be moved in order. Soon all three of them were sweating in spite of the cold and panting from the effort.
"You know," Jerry said as they took a breather, "logically the heart should be all the way at the bottom of this pile."
Danny picked up a pebble and chucked it against the wall. It bounced off with a metallic clang. "It'll take us days to dig down that far, even with picks and shovels."
"Well, we can't bring anyone through to do our digging for us," Wiz said. "We're the only ones the demon won't harm."
Jerry rubbed his thumb where he had mashed it between two stones. "This seems to be an ideal job for magic. We could use a summoning spell and just call the heart to the surface."
"We could also summon Bale-Zur right on top of us. No thanks."
"So?" Danny interjected. "He won't hurt us."
Wiz thought of the huge black demon with the yard-wide mouth and glowing red eyes. "You seriously do not want to meet this guy. I still have nightmares about what he did to those Dark League wizards. Anyway, we can't conduct the next phase of the operation with him right on top of us."
"May I make a suggestion?" Moira's voice spoke in his ear.
"Sure darling, go ahead."
Danny started and then realized Wiz wasn't talking to him.
"Jerry is right. Could you use magic to do your digging?"
"Won't that attract Bale-Zur?"
There was muffled noise over the crystal as Moira conferred with other wizards.
"Perhaps, but it is imperative we complete this before nightfall. Unless you want to spend the night there."
Wiz remembered some of the things that inhabited the City of Night after dark and he shuddered again. "No thanks."
"Besides, should worse come to worst we can lay the demon elsewhere."
Wiz weighed that. "Okay. We'll give it a try." He turned to his companions. "Now does anyone have any good ideas for a digging spell?"
As the nurse left, Craig pulled a chair close to the bed, wincing at the slight scraping sound.
"Hi, Judith. Can you hear me?" Always Judith. She hated to be called Judy and she had pinned his ears back when he slipped the first time they met.
The figure in the bed did not respond. There was not a flicker from the eyelids and the rhythm of breathing continued uninterrupted.
Craig wanted to bolt. This was too much like his mother had been, before she'd wake up and start screaming for her shot. The only thing that kept him in the chair was knowing he'd have to pass the nurse and she'd know he couldn't take it. He had to stay for a few minutes anyway.
He felt like an idiot for coming. None of the others had, not since Judith was transferred out of ICU. So he'd said he would at the last gaming session and then he was committed.
"Everybody misses you on Friday nights," he said brightly.
"Bill and Sheri are taking your place in the campaign, but they're really not very good."
Still no response from the bed.
"We had a really good game last Friday. Joe was dungeon master and he set up a really nasty scenario. You had all these flocks of dragonlets in a crystal cave and they'd just swarm the party from all directions. But you had to be careful what spells you used because a lot of the crystals were Reflect Magic and you could get the spell thrown right back in your face." His grin made him look even younger. "Boy, you should have seen it! Dragons diving on us everywhere. They'd make flame attacks and then swoop down with claws and tail, ssshhhewww." He imitated the motion with his hands.
Judith tossed restlessly and mumbled.
"Anyway we were up to our asses in dragons. Then Howard's mage figured out you could use the Reflect Magic crystals for bank shots and he started bouncing stuff off the walls and hitting the dragons from behind! Hey, did you say something?"
" . . . real dragons ugly," Judith mumbled. "Smell like snakes . . . ride over the castle."
She was talking! For an instant Craig thought about ringing for the nurse, but then he realized she probably wouldn't give a shit.
" . . . tie into the saddle . . ." Judith went on. " . . . takes years to learn to ride. No fun, anyway . . . better dragons imagine . . ."
"Yeah, dragons are neat all right."
"Real," Judith said very distinctly.
"Huh?"
"Real dragons. Saw them myself come over the Wizard's Keep first morning we were there. Real dragons . . ." She settled back and trailed off into incomprehensibility.
Craig hunched closer to the bed.
"Tell me more, Judith. What about the dragons?"