Thirteen: AIR ATTACK

Glandurg put his hands on his hips and surveyed the results of his men’s labors. The forest clearing had been converted into an impromptu woodworking shop as dwarves dragged felled trees into position, rived them into billets and shaped the billets according to his direction.

His original idea had been to have the griffins fly them into the castle, but the griffins had flatly refused. Well, so be it. This would work just as well and in truth he had more confidence in dwarvish craftsmanship than he did in griffins.

Already four frames lay scattered about under the cover of the trees, complete except for their covering. The covering had arrived this morning, borne by griffins from the hold of the Mid-Northeastern Dwarves of the Southern Forest Range. The bolts of spider silk had been accompanied by a letter from King Tosig complaining about the expense, but Glandurg had barely glanced at that. It was just like his quasi-uncle to be preoccupied with such trifling details.

Glandurg moved among his companions, instructing them, pointing out defects and in general making a nuisance of himself as the other dwarves fitted and tied the pieces together. He paused to inspect the hide glue soaking in a cooking pot off to one side of the clearing and for the twentieth time that morning congratulated himself on his plan.

“Brilliant,” he said to no one in particular. “They will never expect us to attack from the air!”

“Bloody good reason for that,” muttered one of the dwarves as he bound a rib to a wing spar. The leader glared at him but he did not raise his head to meet Glandurg’s eyes.

For several hours after their return, Wiz and Moira moped about their apartment. It was like going on a picnic and being rained out, Wiz thought glumly.

“Look at this,” Moira said ruefully, “I have stains on my gown.”

She held the garment up for Wiz to see. Sure enough, the back and one of the sleeves were stained with the red wine that had slopped out of her goblet.

“Looks like a job for a cleaning spell,” Wiz said.

“Alas, the gown itself is magical.”

“I wondered how that thing stayed up.”

She smiled roguishly. “Men are supposed to wonder, my Lord.” Then she looked down and sighed. “But the magic of this gown interferes with the spells we use to clean clothes. My Lord, do you know any cleaning spells?”

Wiz considered. For the mightiest wizard in all the world his repertoire of magic was rather limited. He could think of a dozen ways to incinerate the gown, but offhand he didn’t know a single one to clean it.

“Well, I haven’t been looking for one.” He stopped and snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute, I know what you need. A detergent!”

“What does it deter?” Moira asked blankly.

“Not a deterrent, a detergent. Something that will lock onto the particles of stain and bind them to water so they will rinse away. I’ll need to talk to Danny and Jerry. But we should be able to whip something up.”

In a few minutes of quick conversation and some scribbles on the ever-present slates the three programmers had worked out a spell to make a detergent.

“We need something to mix it in.” Wiz started toward the kitchen.

“You are not experimenting in one of my pots,” Moira said, stepping in front of him.

“How about a bucket?” Danny suggested. “There’s one out in the hall.”

“One of the maids must have left it there,” Moira said. “Honestly, I think they become more slovenly every day.”

“In this case it’s a good thing,” Wiz said as he made for the door.

The bucket was half-full of dirty water, but that didn’t bother Wiz.  “After all, when we get done with the spell it won’t be water,” he explained to the others.

A few quickly done spells, a quick call for an Emac and the spell was under way.

“You know, this gets easier all the time,” Jerry said. “I don’t ever remember being able to whip up programs this fast back in California.”

Wiz shrugged. “Superior tools.”

Jerry looked unconvinced.

“I think the system is actually helping us,” Danny said. “Sometimes when I’m putting a spell together it’s like the magic is reading my mind.”

“In your case that’s scary,” Wiz said. “Whoops. Here’s the operating demon.”

The demon was small but muscular. It was clad in a white T-shirt and tight-fitting pants. Its eyebrows were white, its head was shaved and a gold earring dangled from one pointed ear.

“This is like watching old television commercials,” Jerry said.

“Just be glad it wasn’t a big arm punching out of the bucket,” Wiz said.

The demon nodded at them and dived into the bucket. There was a trace of a splash and suddenly the dirty water had turned to something clear and viscous. There was no sign of the demon and the stuff looked like machine oil and smelled like nothing in particular.

“That’s it?” Moira asked.

“I guess so.”

Danny dipped his forefinger into the liquid. He tried to force his thumb and forefinger together and they slid over each other quickly and silently.

“Boy,” Danny said admiringly, “that stuff’s slicker than greased owl shit.”

“Detergents generally are,” Jerry said.

“So we use this in place of water?” Moira asked.

“Good grief no! You’ll only need a dear little bit of it, maybe a few drops, in a whole bucket of water.”

Moira frowned. “At that rate, I think we have enough to clean the entire castle for the next year.”

“Oh,” Wiz looked abashed. “That’s not a problem, is it?”

“Not really. I will get a bottle from the stillroom tomorrow and for now we will leave the bucket in the alcove with the mops and brooms.” She nodded to a tapestry hanging in the corridor near their apartment door.  Such hangings were used to conceal this World’s equivalent of broom closets. “It will be safe there on the shelf.”

“It’s simple, you see,” Glandurg said, gesturing to the newly completed wing. “We’ll just fly over the walls of the castle, as easy as birds.”

“We’re not birds,” said Thorfin.

“Anyway we don’t know how to fly them,” Snorri added.

“You built them, didn’t you? You can fly them.”

“I built a cradle once,” another dwarf said. “That doesn’t mean I know how to have a baby.”

“All right then,” said Glandurg in disgust. “We’ll practice until you do know how to fly them.”

All the dwarves looked expectantly at their leader and Glandurg realized he had just backed himself into a corner.

“Here we are,” he said with more confidence than he felt. “You pick it up like this, grab the holding bar like this and you maneuver by shifting your weight or twisting the bar. Now what could be simpler?”

“Telling isn’t showing,” Thorfin said dubiously.

“Well, keep watching,” Glandurg snapped. He hoisted the wing, ran forward and leapt into the air.

The result was a sort of grotesque hop that carried him perhaps two feet up and six feet forward. He barely got his feet down in time and half-stumbled on landing.

“Not much flying there,” said Snorri.

“Well, I didn’t get going fast enough. Here, let me show you again.”

This time Glandurg went to the far end of the clearing and came pounding across the open space at a dead run. He reached the top of a small hillock and again jumped into the air. The result was a flight of perhaps a dozen feet.

“There, you see,” he puffed triumphantly as he came back to join his followers.

“Not very well,” Snorri said. “Can you do it again?”

Glandurg glared at him. “I will not. You do it.”

“Don’t know how,” Snorri replied.

Glandurg glared at him. “Not enough, is it? Very well. I’ll show you some flying.” He turned and made for the largest tree at the edge of the clearing. “Come along,” he flung over his shoulder. “You’ll see right enough.”

When he reached the base of the tree he started to climb. With a lot of grunting and heaving he managed to reach the branches about thirty feet up. From there he swarmed upward until he was nearly a hundred feet above his fellows.

“Pass the wing up,” he shouted down.

“How?” Thorfin shouted back.

Glandurg bridled. “Don’t be insubordinate.”

Finally, with the aid of a line thrown to Glandurg, they were able to get the wing up to him. The others watched as Glandurg wormed his way into the contraption while balancing precariously on a branch.

“Watch,” he commanded, and launched himself out into empty air.

Considering he had never flown in his life, it wasn’t too bad. He dived too steeply and had to pull back sharply to keep from ploughing into the ground. He overcorrected and soared up again, slipping off to the right as he lost longitudinal control. He managed to bank sharply left, thereby avoiding the trees at the edge of the clearing and he was still turning when the ground came up to meet him. He moved further back to bleed off more airspeed, brought the nose up too far and came down in something that was more a poorly controlled stall than a landing.

The shock rattled Glandurg’s teeth and drove him to his knees. It also snapped the left wing spar just outboard of his left shoulder.

“You see?” Glandurg said as he staggered to meet the pack of dwarves running toward him. “You see how easy it is.

“Here now,” he said to Thorfin. “You try it.”

“Will not.”

“What?”

“I ain’t going,” Thorfin said stubbornly.

Glandurg marched over and stuck his face in Thorfin’s. “I’m the leader here and I say you bloody are going!” he roared.

“You can be the leader all you want and I’m bloody not going,” Thorfin said in the same unyielding tone. “No way I could handle one of them things. I’m scared of heights.”

“ ‘S truth,” Gimli said. “I watched him on the flight here. Fair like to mess his pants, he was.”

Thorfin glared at the purveyor of this unsought bit of support, but he stood firm. “I ain’t going up in one of them things. Not even for practice.”

“You would betray your oath?” Glandurg heaped scorn into his words.

“I ain’t going back on my oath, but the oath didn’t say anything about playing at being a bird.”

Glandurg sensed that he was facing his first command crisis. He decided to resort to his ultimate threat.

“You will or you’ll be sorry.”

“You can’t make me sorrier than I would be if I took one of those things.  What could you do to me that’s worse?” The other dwarves shifted uneasily and one or two murmured support for Thorfin.

Glandurg considered the question. It dawned on him there really wasn’t anything he could do. The members of his band were sworn to kill the wizard, but Glandurg had not sworn them to obey him-in part because he doubted they would take such an oath.

However a successful commander remains flexible in the face of unexpected opposition.

“All right then, you won’t have to fly. You and anyone else who feels the way you do can create a diversion by attacking the castle from below.  There won’t be as much glory in it, of course.” He let the scorn drip from his voice. “But when the attack starts you can swim the river and climb the castle walls.”

Thorfin nodded. “That suits,” he said stolidly.

In the event two other dwarves decided they’d rather swim and climb than fly. That left Glandurg and eight others to practice gliding out of trees.

By the end of the day each dwarf had made five flights. It was a most successful training session, Glandurg decided. They were all alive and they still had half the wings undamaged. They could even land in the general direction of their target most of the time.

They needed more training. But meanwhile they could continue to practice with the remaining gliders and work on repairing the damaged wings.

It wasn’t the woods, or even the streets of the Capital outside the castle, but there was solitude in this place, and a lovely view.

Well, Wiz thought to himself, at least I’m safe up here.

Glandurg shifted uneasily and grasped his holding bar even tighter. This had seemed like a brilliant inspiration when he had both feet on the ground. Now, dangling hundreds of feet above the river he was less certain.

The wind whipped loose a strand of hair from under his hood and slapped it across his eyes. Instinctively he reached to push it away and for a heart-stopping instant he nearly lost his grip. He clutched the holding bar and squeezed his eyes tightly shut to blot out the scenery passing below him. Above him the griffin flew on, oblivious to his cargo’s antics.

I am the leader, Glandurg reminded himself. I must see where I am going.  He forced his eyes open. The castle was coming up fast. Carefully he reached into his shirt and removed the indicator. The glowing arrow inside the crystal sphere pointed straight at the battlements. Glandurg squinted through the wind. Yes, there was a lone figure high on the castle walls.

For an instant the dwarf was so exhilarated he forgot to be afraid. The Sparrow himself and out in the open! Truly this was his lucky day.

“Release the wings,” the dwarf commanded.

* * *

Off to the west Wiz saw a flock of pigeons or turkeys or some other kind of heavy-bodied birds. As they came closer to the castle he could see they were too large to be pigeons. Turkeys then.

Hey, wait a minute! There aren’t any turkeys in this World! Not only that, but each one seemed to have two sets of wings. Biplane birds?

Then each of the birds seemed to split in two and half of each bird dove toward Wiz.

The dwarves had taken good care to build their wings strong and light.  They had taken less care to learn how they reacted in flight and no care at all to understand the mass of thermals, updrafts and cross currents that swirled around the castle on a warm autumn afternoon.

Nine dwarves aimed themselves straight at the lone figure on the parapet without hesitation or thought for consequences. So naturally the nine dwarves went everywhere but to their target.

In his eagerness to reach his prey Glandurg had dived too steeply. He came in fast and low, headed straight for the castle wall. Frantically he pulled back on his control bar in an effort to avoid smashing into the stone. His wing swooped up, lost airspeed and teetered on the verge of a stall as it approached Wiz. Then Glandurg hit the updraft along the face of the wall, rose like an elevator and sailed majestically over the wall a good twenty feet above his gaping prey to drop into the courtyard behind.

Ragnar took a lesson from his leader’s approach and set his height correctly. But his griffin had been well behind Glandurg’s and he had to turn to the right in order to come in on Wiz. The turn brought him into the turbulence in the lee of one of the wall towers and he was tossed like a leaf to land nearly a hundred yards further down the wall, almost at the feet of an astonished guardsman.

By the time Ragnar had untangled himself from the wreckage of his wing the guardsman had drawn his sword. The dwarf scampered off with the guard in hot pursuit.

Meanwhile the other flying dwarves had arrived. Some went left, some right and some high. One or two threatened to smash into the wall and had to abort, hauling their wings around in tight turns and then dropping away into the valley.

The Wizard’s Keep was boiling like an overturned anthill. Alarm horns rang out from the towers along the walls, guardsmen raced frantically to their stations, dragon cavalry poured out of their cave aeries and Wiz was surrounded by guards and wizards and hustled away to safety.

Off in the distance the griffins circled in a tight knot, watching intently and making noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

Thorfin wrinkled his nose in disgust. The wind must have shifted and now he would have to breathe dragon stink all the rest of the way up the cliff.

Nasty beasts! No one but a mortal would think of keeping them. And as for riding them . . . He shivered involuntarily. Still, the dragons were all in their caves and his target was above him.

He levered himself up onto the outcrop and found himself nose to nose with a dragon.

It was not a very large dragon, but then Thorfin was not a very large dwarf. More to the point, the dragon was safely resting on a ledge and Thorfin was clinging to the cliff face by his toes and fingers. His sword was strapped across his back in a position more picturesque than practical and the blade wasn’t designed for dragon slaying anyway. All things considered, the dwarf was at a serious disadvantage.

Thorfin did the best thing he could think of. He squinched his eyes tightly shut, turned his head away and pressed himself as tight against the cliff as he could manage.

Because they are both greedy for treasure, dwarves and dragons are natural enemies. However like cats and dogs, this is learned behavior. Thorfin had enough experience to know about dwarves and dragons. The Little Red Dragon had never even seen a dwarf before. It divided its time between roaming the programmers’ quarters of the castle and sunning itself on the ledges on the cliff beneath the castle walls.

The dragon nudged the black-clad figure experimentally. It went “whoof” in a satisfying fashion.

Little Red Dragon nudged harder. This time he was met by a louder “whoof” and a string of interesting words.

This was more fun than annoying the castle cats! The dragon braced all four feet against the rock and pushed with all his strength.

Under the impact of the head butt Thorfin lost his grip on the rock and went hurtling down toward the river, screaming curses as he fell.

“We chased six of the little buggers out of the castle, Lord,” the guard captain told Wiz as they made their way back to his quarters that evening.  “Plus a couple more that never made it over the walls. That was all of them, we think.”

“You think?”

“That’s why we are here, Lord.”

“This is weird,” Wiz said. “I’ve never even met a dwarf, I mean socially, and now there are a bunch of them trying to kill me. Why?”

“Ask us after we capture one. But by tomorrow this castle will be dwarf proof.”

Wiz knew that Jerry, Danny and several of the Mighty were already erecting a dwarf-repellent spell around the Wizard’s Keep. “I just hope it works,” he said as they came up the back stairs and into the hall that led to his apartment. “I’ve been jumped, poisoned and attacked from the air-or they’ve tried to do all that anyway. I’m getting tired of it.”

Fear not, mortal, thought Ragnar as he watched the party approach from the curtained alcove where he lay hidden. You will not be tired of anything much longer.

With so many mortal soldiers about there was no hope of fighting his way clear. So be it. He would fulfill his band’s vow at the cost of his own heart’s blood. They could kill him but not even twice that number of mortal warriors could protect the strange wizard from a pantherlike spring from his hiding place.

Ragnar crouched and drew his sword with a flourish that knocked a bucket off the shelf above him. The humans started at the noise, but Ragnar, oblivious to the liquid that drenched him, leapt forward with his sword brandished above his head. The guardsmen went for their weapons, but the dwarf was already in their midst and his blade was flashing toward his sworn foe.

His blade was still flashing when his feet shot out from under him and he went scooting between the startled guardsmen flat on his back with his arms and legs waving in all directions. His sword made glancing contact with one guardsman’s mailed thigh and then he was through them and sliding down the corridor, his passage lubricated by the super-detergent that had soaked him and his clothes.

Wiz watched stunned as the dwarf whisked down the corridor, trailing curses, until he reached the stairs, where his cries ended in a bump bump bump.

One of the guardsmen moved to follow and immediately went to his knees in the trail of detergent Ragnar had left behind. Two others went more cautiously, hugging the walls of the corridor. Four others pushed Wiz back against the wall and stood shoulder to shoulder around him, protecting him with a wall of living flesh.

“It seems there were seven dwarves, my Lord,” the guard captain said sheepishly. “Perhaps we had better stay with you until the wizards finish their spell.”

“Yeah,” Wiz said shakily. “Perhaps you had better.”

It was a battered, dispirited group of dwarves that met in the clearing that night. Ragnar was the last to return, stripped to his loincloth to rid himself of the effects of the super-detergent and undwarvishly clean from swimming the river with traces of it on his body. While he dried himself by the fire and swilled down a mug of steaming soup, his companions considered what their next move should be.

“We learned much today,” Glandurg said as he paced up and down before the fire.

“We learned dwarves are not meant to fly,” came a voice from the edge of the circle.

“We learned the plan of the castle and of our enemy’s defenses,” Glandurg shot back, determined to put the best possible face on the day’s events.  “If we did not accomplish our objective, at least we gathered valuable knowledge.”

“And how do we use that knowledge?” asked one of the other dwarves.

“We will find a way, but first we need a new strategy.”

“We need a new leader,” Snorri muttered.

Glandurg reddened. “Someone who attacks with poison and kills the cup no doubt.”

It was Snorri’s turn to redden.

“Can’t we just say we tried and go home?” asked Gimli, the youngest of the dwarves.

“No!” Glandurg roared. “We are sworn to this quest. Our honor and the honor of all dwarfdom rests with us. Others may turn and run, but I will pursue our pledge to the bitter end.”

“Bitter it is likely to be,” said Thorfin sourly, nursing an arm in a sling.

“That is as it is,” Glandurg said loftily. “The important thing is how we may fulfill our vow.”

“Well, we’re not going to fly in,” Ragnar said from the fire.

“The human wizards have been busy,” Thorfin said. “Now the whole castle is closed to us.”

“Unlikely it is that this Sparrow will venture beyond the walls,” Snorri added.

“We must think,” Glandurg said. “We must await our opportunity and think in the meanwhile.” He dropped down on a stump and ostentatiously rested his chin on his fist in a pose meant to suggest to all deep thought. In their own ways all of his followers imitated him.

It was a very imposing sight, but none of them had the faintest idea what to do next.

Fourteen: VIRTUAL UN-REALITY

“This is hopeless,” Wiz said finally. “We’ve just got to have more information.”

The dusty smell of hay and cattle still clung to the programmers’ workroom, legacy of its days as a cow barn. Most of the stalls along the walls were no longer used as programmers’ cubicles and the people who were left could have fitted into a room inside the keep proper, but the programming team kept the Bull Pen, partly because it was easier than moving and partly because of the aptness of the name. In a little while they were settled around the long plank table down the center. “We can’t very well go knocking on the gate,” Wiz said.

“Perhaps we can do exactly that,” Moira said slowly. She turned down the table to Arianne. “Lady, does magic work within that castle?”

Arianne’s brow furrowed as she considered. “As best we can tell. We cannot see through their barriers, but they seem to use magic within it.”

“Then perhaps someone can go knocking at the gate of the castle. Or at least the semblance of someone.”

Arianne’s jaw dropped. Then she beamed and nodded. “Of course! Yes, Lady, I think that would work very nicely.”

* * *

“When I proposed this, I did not have you in mind,” Moira grumbled as she watched the preparations. She, Wiz and Arianne were jammed into Arianne’s workroom off the main courtyard of the keep.

As one of the Mighty, Arianne rated a tower to herself, but as Bal-Simba’s assistant she spent most of her time doing administrative work and she preferred a place closer to the meeting halls of the main keep.

“Come on, darling, you said yourself this isn’t dangerous,” Wiz said from the stool in the middle of the room.

“She said no such thing,” Arianne said sharply, looking up from her work table. “She said you cannot be harmed physically. But there will be a psychic link between you and the simulacrum.”

“Not like a video game, huh?”

“Not a game of any sort,” Arianne repeated firmly. “So be very careful and pull out at the first sign of trouble.”

“That’s right about now.”

“There are many others who could go.”

Wiz shook his head. “Nope. We need someone who knows enough programming to understand what he sees. That’s me or Jerry. I’m higher ranking so they’re more likely to talk to me.”

Arianne nodded. She reached under the workbench and produced a bag of black velvet.

“Put this over your head.”

Wiz looked at the hood dubiously.

“Is this necessary?”

“Not absolutely. But it will help you concentrate.”

“Let’s do without it then. That looks too much like what they put on someone before they hang him.”

Arianne shrugged. “Your choice, Lord. But I will leave it around your shoulders should you want it.”

She stretched to reach a shelf above her workbench and took down a carved wooden box about the size of a cigar box. Opening it, she hesitated over the contents before reaching in and removing a gnarled, forked root about the size of her hand.

“I have never seen one so large,” Moira said as she came from her place by the door to get a closer look.

“Plucked from the earth by the full moon of mid-Winter,” Arianne told her proudly. “It is the best I have.”

“The bigger the root, the better, eh?” Wiz said from his stool.

“There are other factors, but basically yes. Now, if everyone is ready?”

Wiz nodded, Moira stepped back to the door and Arianne laid the root on the stone floor. Then she produced an ebony wand decorated with silver leaves and jeweled flowers.

Suddenly she spun and jabbed the wand at Wiz. He started and flinched at the unexpected move. Slowly and carefully she brought the wand away from Wiz and pointed it at the mandrake root, all the while keeping it perfectly level as if balancing an egg on the end.

Wiz looked down at the root. It seemed the same, but he felt dizzy and lightheaded, as if he hadn’t eaten all day. He thought about trying to clear his head and decided against it.

Again Arianne turned and jabbed the wand at Wiz. Again a wave of lightheadedness rose up in him. As she turned bark toward the root he could hear the spell she was muttering more clearly, although she had not raised her voice.

A third time she jabbed and pointed at the root. Wiz felt as if he was dividing like an amoeba. He saw the workroom from two perspectives at once, as if his vision had doubled. He closed his eyes, but both sets of eyes closed and he was completely in the dark. For a moment he felt nauseated and he took two deep breaths at once to try to settle his stomach.

With his eyes kept tightly shut, he reached up with all four of his hands and groped for the hood. He pulled it over his head and opened his eyes to darkness and to light.

He turned and faced himself and the two women.

“This is sooo weird,” he said wonderingly in reverb duet.

“You will get used to it,” Arianne said. “Concentrate on the simulacrum and try to ignore your body.”

Wiz tried to move around the workroom to get the feel of his new body. At first both his standing body and his body on the stool tried to move together. He concentrated fiercely on the standing body and bit by bit his other body relaxed. Finally his “vision” fused completely into his new body. Distantly and dimly he could feel himself sitting on the stool and his breath sucking through the black velvet hood but he had to concentrate to feel it.

It wasn’t a perfect illusion. His sense of touch worked very poorly and his sense of smell seemed to work not at all. But he could see and hear perfectly and his balance was good enough.

He faced his audience and spread his arms.

“Ta-DAH,” Wiz said. He made a low bow and instantly regretted it as a wave of dizziness washed over him. He barely managed to avoid falling on his face.

“Can you move all right?” Arianne asked.

“I’m still kind of clumsy.” He took another turn around the room, more confidently this time. “Okay, let’s do it.”

With Arianne and Moira trailing, he stepped out into the bright sunshine of the courtyard. He was particularly proud that he didn’t trip over the raised sill of the workroom.

Jerry was waiting in the chantry with Bal-Simba and a couple of other blue-robed wizards. They had decided to have someone else send the simulacrum to the castle because Wiz was afraid he might transport himself instead of his image if he tried to walk the Wizard’s Way unaided.

As “Wiz” and the others came into the room Jerry squinted at him.

“Gee, it really isn’t you, is it? I can’t tell even this close.”

“Let us hope no one else can either.”

Bal-Simba reached out and clapped the image on the shoulder. Then he grinned broadly at Arianne, showing all his pointed teeth.

“It even feels right! A work of art, Lady.”

The usually unemotional wizardess dimpled and dropped a curtsey in return.

One of the other blue robes, a lean man with thinning dark hair named Juvian, bustled forward. “Everything you see and hear will be recorded.” He tapped the glowing blue sphere he held in his palm. “It will not be necessary to stare or to overtly memorize anything. Keep your eyes moving and try to see as much as you possibly can.”

Arianne stepped up beside him. “You know the recall signal. Use it at any sign of danger. We will be watching and if we see anything we will pull you back.” She laid a hand on his shoulder and her brown eyes bored into his.

“Remember Sparrow, even though your body remains here you can be hurt. Do not become careless.”

Wiz gulped and nodded.

A flash of darkness and Wiz found “himself” standing in front of the huge gate of the castle.

The doors were gigantic. Throwing his head back and squinting up, Wiz estimated they were at least a hundred feet high. They were made of some greenish metal with a zig-zag crack down the center where they met. The portal they were set in was made of some smooth pale blue substance with softly rounded forms and no joints anywhere, as if it and the walls of the castle had been cast in a single piece. The whole thing reminded Wiz of something out of a 1930s’ comic strip.

There was no sign of a knocker or a doorbell. He thought about knocking, but if the thing was as thick as it looked he doubted he would be heard inside.

Well, nothing ventured . . .

He stepped up to the door and pounded three times with his fist. The door boomed and rang from the blows in a way that made Wiz’s whole body shiver.

For a minute nothing happened. Then he stepped back from the door and a motion on the portal caught his attention.

What he had taken as parts of the rounded decoration were futuristic gun turrets. The barrels poking out of the turrets were equally futuristic, with cooling fins and streamlined muzzle brakes. There were at least six of them and all of them were pointing directly at him.

Okay, so now they know I’m here. He decided the best thing to do was to act nonchalant, as if he went calling on strange castles every day. He thought about trying to whistle, but he wasn’t sure he could. So he settled for folding his arms and looking around.

Around him the red sand desert stretched away in gentle folds. The landscape was dotted here and there with dark green spindly bushes and an occasional clump of something that looked like it might have been cactus if it had known what a cactus was supposed to be. The sun was high in the sky and the reflection off the greenish metal of the gates was enough to make him squint.

Oddly, when you got this close to it the castle wasn’t very impressive.  Standing next to it was like standing next to a mountain instead of something manmade. Even the gate was huge and impersonal. Somehow that made it less imposing, not more.

Well, it’s not their taste in architecture I’m concerned about.

Wiz couldn’t sense temperature very well through the simulacrum, but the glare of the sun and the bright reflection off the gate told him it had to be hot out here. He wondered if he was sweating.

Then the door started to move. Wiz opened his mouth and nearly choked on his carefully prepared greeting when he saw what was behind it.

The robot was eight feet tall with glowing red eyes and a glossy black skin. It was human-shaped, but it wasn’t what Wiz would call reassuring.

“You rannggg?” it asked in a voice like the bell of doom. It would have been even more impressive if the robot had been talking to the visitor instead of the gatepost.

Wiz dredged up the last of his nonchalance. “Yeah. I’m Wiz Zumwalt and I’m here to see the boss.”

The robot paused as if considering the information. A crackling blue nimbus played over its head and down its right shoulder.

“Commeee,” it commanded.

The head cocked to one side and jerked upright. The arms jerked up, elbows bent, bringing the hands to shoulder level. The robot spun on its heel, nearly lunged into the gate, recovered and strode off, weaving from side to side like a drunken sailor.

“Lead on, Lurch,” Wiz said to the robot’s departing back, then hurried after him. The guns tried to track him even inside the portal.

The hall beyond the gate was so gargantuan that Wiz couldn’t make out the other end. High above shafts of sunlight washed down through the haze that hid the ceiling.

A rather thick haze, Wiz noticed as he strode along after his jerking, zig-zagging guide. It wasn’t just that the place was big, it needed a good vacuuming. He noticed that both he and the robot were leaving footprints in the film of reddish dust on the marble tiled floor.

After a few hundred yards they turned off into a side corridor. Its proportions were more to human scale, but it was round and a trickle of water down the center made the going harder. The robot splashed along unconcerned, but Wiz tried to keep his feet dry by staying to the side. He had to hurry even more to keep up with the robot.

Even though Wiz’s temperature sense didn’t work very well, it was so cold he shivered a bit. The metal walls of the tunnel were filmed with condensation which trickled down and accumulated at the bottom of the corridor.

That’s where the water comes from, he thought. They need a little work on their climate control system. He looked down at the water in the center of the tunnel and saw it was slimed with green algae.

Not to mention their housekeeping.

A short way down the corridor was a door, round and massive like a bank vault’s. The robot stopped short and waited as Wiz came up beside him.

Just as Wiz reached the robot the door popped open and clanged against the corridor wall. Wiz jumped back to keep from being crushed. His guide remained impassive even though the door missed him by a fraction of an inch.

A few other little things they need work on, too. As he set off in pursuit of the robot he wondered if that was supposed to have been an automated door opener or a man trap.

Another few hundred feet brought them to a bank of elevators that looked like something out of a New York office building-if you ignored the remote-controlled machine guns covering the lobby and the gargoyles perched over the elevator doors.

After a brief wait one set of doors banged open and Wiz and the robot stepped into an elevator-more accurately, they stepped down into an elevator, since the car had stopped about a foot below the floor.

It took a long, long time to reach the top. Wiz wasn’t sure whether that was because they were going so high or because the elevator worked about as well as the robot guide. They jerked, lurched, sputtered, speeded up and slowed down until Wiz lost all sense of how far they had come. He wasn’t even too sure they had gone straight up.

At last the doors flew open and they stepped out into another corridor.  This one was broad and clean, at least. The floor was tiled in jade-green material, the walls were malachite and the ceilings and wall decorations were in polished gold. It was like being inside a Faberge Easter egg and it removed any last lingering doubts Wiz might have had about his hosts’ taste.

The robot lurched drunkenly down the corridor and caromed off the wall, knocking off chips of malachite and bending a golden wall sconce.

At the end of the hall was a bronze portal. The robot stopped before it and made a motioning gesture with its arm that nearly took Wiz’s head off.  Then it froze.

Wiz recovered from the accidental assault, realized his guide had signaled him through the door, saw that the robot wasn’t likely to make any other dangerous moves, and stepped past.

The room was as out-of-scale as everything else in the castle. One whole side and half the ceiling was picture-window-size panes of glass giving a panoramic eagle’s-eye view of red desert and sere mountains. The place was fitted out like a laboratory, or perhaps a control room, with panels of dials and switches everywhere, the odd arc of electricity here and there and huge pieces of unidentifiable apparatus scattered about. The whole room reeked of electricity and danger.

There were two humans waiting for him there.

The younger one reminded Wiz a little of the way Danny had looked when they first met, kind of soft and unformed. The other one was a few years older, harder and leaner. He was sitting on one of the control consoles with his legs dangling. Even though he was relaxed, there was something predatory in the way he looked at Wiz.

For a minute no one said anything.

“Uh, hi. I’m Wiz Zumwalt. From Cupertino.” His voice was almost lost in the huge room.

“We know who you are,” the older one said. He reached behind him, picked up a beer bottle and took a swig. No one made a move to offer Wiz a drink.

“Lurch there is really something,” Wiz said brightly.

“He’s an early model,” the younger one said. “The ones we build now are a lot better.”

His companion grinned nastily. “Much better.”

“Very impressive.”

The silence stretched on.

“I’m Craig Scott,” the young one said at last. “This is Mikey Baker.”

“Craig talks too much,” Mikey said conversationally. “Don’t you, Craig?”

Craig wilted.

“Pleased to meet you,” Wiz said.

“Yeah?”

Again the silence stretched out.

“Anyway, I thought we should meet, you know, talk.”

“So talk.”

“You know you upset a lot of people when you showed up.”

Mikey smiled. A not at all pleasant smile. “No shit? Well, we’re going to upset a lot more people, aren’t we Craig?”

“We sure are.”

“What are you going to do? What do you want?”

“We’re going to build a whole new order,” Craig said. “We’re going to combine magic and technology into a system that really works for mankind.  When we get done things will be better than they have ever been.”

“Only you won’t be around to see it, man,” Mikey said.

“We’re going to . . .”

“You talk too much, Craig,” Mikey repeated without heat. “Now shut up and let the grownups talk, will you?”

He took another pull on his beer.

“You see, you’re squatting on a prime piece of real estate, you and your friends. Now it so happens we need that place. So in just a little while we’re going to come over and take it.”

Wiz went cold. “Hey look, we can negotiate . . .” But Mikey cut him off with a sharp bark of laughter.

“What’s to negotiate?” he said, sliding off the table and stalking over to Wiz. “We’re here and you’re history.” He jammed his face into Wiz’s, so close Wiz could see the pores on his skin. “We’re gonna get your whole flicking world before we’re through, baby, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

“The hell there isn’t,” Wiz flared back. “Technology doesn’t work over there, remember? And we’ve got magic the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

Mikey smiled. “Wanna bet?”

Then his expression softened. “But maybe you’re right. Maybe we should negotiate this thing like adults.” He smiled again, a more relaxed, gentle smile. “After all, there’s plenty for both of us. Two whole worlds, right?”

“Well . . .” Wiz didn’t want to break the moment, but he didn’t like the idea of giving away half the World. “I’m not empowered to negotiate directly, but I can take an offer back to the Council of the North.”

Mike nodded and his smile grew wider, almost radiant. “Of course. So here’s the offer I want you to take back to your Council.”

He flicked his hand up and a wave of fire washed over Wiz.

Wiz screamed as the flames hit him. He dropped to his knees and then fell to the floor, the center of a white-hot ball haloed in orange. Thick black smoke roiled off the body and disappeared.

Then the inferno vanished and nothing remained but a tiny blackened thing lying on the laboratory floor.

Craig was white with shock at what his friend had done. “It wasn’t him,” he said dully. “He wasn’t really here after all.”

“Shit!” Mikey picked up the charred bit of root and threw it against the wall. “Shit, shit, shit!”

Fifteen: FIRE WITH FIRE

Reverse engineering is the sincerest form of flattery.

Engineers’ saying in Silicon Valley

Wiz screamed.

His very eyes were on fire. Heat singed his hair and beat on his brain through his skull. The flesh melted and ran off his face. The palms of his hands and the soles of his feet throbbed with pain as the awful, searing heat destroyed the nerve endings.

Somewhere far beyond the wall of terrible pain he was aware of Arianne gesturing wildly. Then waves of coolness washed over his body.

“Oh my God,” Wiz moaned. “Oh my God.”

Arianne held him in a way that combined professionalism and compassion.

“You will be all right, my Lord,” she said soothingly. “Try to relax.”

Wiz relaxed one tiny, knotted muscle. The expected flare of pain did not come. He relaxed a few more muscles and still no pain.

“Jesus,” he breathed out raggedly. Arianne released him to another’s arms.

Moira. Instinctively he reached out to touch her hair.

“I warned you that the psychic effects could be painful,” Arianne said.

“Yeah, but . . .” He gasped for breath again. “ . . . my God.” Moira hugged him to her and he felt her tears on his cheek.

“I’m all right now, darling,” he said with a smile he did not feel.

“They will not be if ever we meet,” his wife said fiercely.

“I am sorry we did not get you out sooner, my Lord,” Arianne told him, “but we did not realize what was happening.”

Wiz sucked another racking breath. “Sucker punched. That son-of-a-bitch sucker punched me.”

The tall blonde sorceress shrugged. “Name it as you like. They have no honor.”

Wiz was still shaking a few minutes later when the programmers and such of the Mighty as were in the castle assembled hastily in the chambers of the Council of the North. They took their places haphazardly around the long oak table without regard for the carefully established rules of place and precedence. That alone told Wiz how seriously the wizards took this.

“They’re programmers, all right,” he told the group. “From our world or one very much like it.”

“Do your people make war against us?” demanded Juvian.

“Definitely not. I could tell that much just by looking. But they’re trained in the same discipline we are.”

“That’s bad,” Jerry said.

“Worse than you know, perhaps,” Bal-Simba rumbled. “They have some powerful magical force behind them.”

“The Dark League again?”

Bal-Simba snorted. “Much more powerful than that. Non-human I think, and mighty even for non-humans.”

“Elves?”

“Perhaps.”

“That must be what they’ve been up to,” Danny said. “They’ve been stalling the negotiations while they got this thing set up.”

Wiz frowned. “I don’t know. There was magic all over the place, but it didn’t feel like elf magic.”

“May I remind you, Sparrow,” Bal-Simba said, “that you have not met many elves?” Then he shook his head. “But you are correct. Elves can make time and space run strangely, but I have never heard of them creating a whole new World.”

“Well, whoever it is has found themselves a couple of people who understand programming. They seem to be pretty good at it.”

“They are,” Danny said.

“You know them?” Wiz demanded.

“One of them. Mikey Baker. Well, I didn’t really know him but I used to see him around on the nets. His handle was ‘Panda,’ you know?”

“No, we don’t know. Tell us.”

“Well, he was into hacking and phreaking-system breaking and shit like that.”

“Don’t call it hacking,” Wiz said sharply. “People like that aren’t ‘hackers,’ they’re worms.”

Danny shrugged. Unlike Wiz and Jerry he didn’t have the true hackers’ deep contempt for computer vandals who used their skills to break into computer systems. Nor was he offended that the media insisted on calling those criminals “hackers.”

“Whatever. Anyway, no one liked him much.”

“I can see why. But was he any good?”

“Oh, I guess so. But he was like nasty-nice, you know? Real sweet and easy-going on the surface and just rotten underneath.”

“He sure as hell wasn’t sweet to me!”

“He wasn’t like that before. It seems like he’s changed a lot.”

“Well, what else do you know about him?”

“Not a lot. The people I knew didn’t like him so I steered clear of him.

There’s a rumor he had something to do with the Jesse James Virus.”

Wiz looked puzzled. “The Jesse James Virus?”

“That was after you left.” Jerry shook his head. “A variation on the Panama Virus. Very sophisticated and real nasty. If this guy was behind it, he’s got talent.”

“I’d say there’s a lot of talent behind that place,” Wiz said. “Face it.  We’re not unique. There are a lot of competent programmers who could do pretty much what we’ve done if they knew about this place and how to get here.”

“Yeah,” Danny said, “but how did they find out about this world?”

“Perhaps they did not,” Moira said. “Perhaps they were brought here as the wizard Patrius brought you here.”

“Mikey told me they came here voluntarily.”

“I wouldn’t trust anything that guy said,” Danny put in.

“Maybe, but someone turned them on to magic programming and our magic compiler. They didn’t pick that up on their own.”

No one said anything for a minute.

“There’s only one place they could have gotten the compiler,” Wiz said at last. “It had to come from here.”

Bal-Simba frowned like a thundercloud. “A traitor?”

“Not exactly,” Jerry said. “I’ve been studying the code from that recon drone we found. The compiler they’re using isn’t exactly our compiler. It doesn’t have the extensions we’ve added in the last year and it’s got a couple of features we don’t.”

“So they got an earlier version of the code and they’ve been working on it independently,” Wiz said. “Can you tell roughly when they got their version?”

“No ‘roughly’ about it. I know exactly when. They’re working with the last version the full programming team worked on.”

“One of the programmers after all,” Wiz said. “But we’d ruled that out.”

“I fail to see how,” Bal-Simba said. “That-ah-‘nondisclosure agreement’ you had them sign is not enforceable in your world.”

“Meaning we can’t sic that demon named Guido on them,” Wiz agreed. “But we thought of this before and we checked.”

“Between Worlds?” Bal-Simba looked skeptical.

“Even in our world there are ways of checking, although they aren’t absolutely accurate.”

“We had to make a couple of phone calls,” Danny said.

Arianne looked at him strangely but said nothing.

“And you checked everyone?”

“Not everyone. One person, Judith Conally, is very ill. She was hurt in an accident a few months back and she’s still in a coma.”

“She’s out then,” Wiz said. “People in comas don’t talk.”

“That’s not true, you know,” Bronwyn said from where she sat at the end of the table.

“Huh?”

“People in comas can sometimes talk. It is not common, but . . .” She shrugged.

“If she talked,” Moira said slowly, “there might have been ears to hear.”

“Well, we pretty well know that no one else did,” Jerry said.

“I think,” Bal-Simba said, “it is time for another Great Summoning from your world.”

Sixteen: RESCUE

Three A.M. is a bad time in hospitals. Normal life processes are at their lowest ebb. If it is busy it is because things have gone to hell and if it’s quiet it’s hard to stay alert. Fortunately things were quiet on Neuro, so the nursing supervisor was having trouble staying awake when Sheila came up to the station.

“We’ve lost Conally.” Sheila’s voice was so low and tight the supervisor had trouble understanding her.

The super looked up from her charts. “What?”

“Conally, the patient in 314. We’ve lost her.”

The supervisor looked sharply at the young nurse. She seemed to be taking this one very hard.

“Too bad,” the supervisor said sympathetically, reaching for the phone.

“I’ll get a resident up here to pronounce and then we’ll . . .”

Sheila shook her head. “You don’t understand. She’s not dead, she’s gone!

Not in her room.”

It was the supervisor’s turn to go white.

The bed was in place, the bedclothes rumpled but not thrown back and the bed was empty.

“Did you check the other rooms?”

“I’ve looked everywhere in the ward. I can’t find her.”

It wasn’t unknown for Neuro patients to get out of bed and wander around.  That was why the unit was built secure. Except for emergency exits with alarms, the only way in or out was past the nurse’s station and the door could not be opened from the inside unless someone at the nurse’s station buzzed you out.

“Well, search again.”

“I’ve already got Doreen and Lupe doing that.”

“We’d better alert security to search the rest of the hospital,” the supervisor said at last.

As she turned away from the empty bed she thought regretfully of the cigarettes she had left in her locker. This was going to be a bitch of a night.

Bronwyn looked up from the still form, her lips pressed into a tight bloodless line. “What have those damned barbarians done to her?” she demanded.

“How should I know?” Wiz said. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Neither are any of them by the look of it. They kept her clean and fed, but they did nothing to heal the damage to her brain.”

“I don’t think we can,” Wiz said. “Head injuries are hard for us to handle.”

“Barbarians,” Bronwyn repeated and motioned her assistant to her. “Now leave us. And don’t expect to talk to this one for a couple of days at least.”

In the event, it was three days before Bronwyn would let Wiz and Moira in to see her patient.

Judith was lying in bed propped up with pillows. She still looked terrible, but she was conscious.

“Hi, Judith. How are you feeling?”

“Wiz, Moira,” she said weakly. “I dreamed about you.” Then she frowned. “I feel funny. Arms and legs don’t move right and my eyes don’t wanna focus.”

“That is normal,” Bronwyn said. “Magic can only do so much safely. You must heal the rest of the way naturally. That will take time and work on your part.”

“Not complaining,” Judith said muzzily.

“You said you dreamed about us,” Moira said gently.

“Dreamed about this place a lot. I think.”

“Do you remember answering questions about this World?”

Judith’s eyes flicked from side to side, as if searching. “I, I might have. It seems like I went over and over things about this place.”

“She will never have complete memory of that time,” Bronwyn whispered in Wiz’s ear. “There was too much damage.”

“Did you have any notes about our system of magic?” Wiz asked.

“Notes?” Judith seemed confused. Then she pressed her fingers to her forehead in an effort to think. “Yes, I did make some notes after I got back, but I didn’t show them to anybody. They’re in my apartment.”

“We’ll check on that,” Wiz said.

“What’s wrong?” Judith asked.

“We think you talked while you were in the hospital,” Wiz told her. “We think someone got most of the system of magic out of you. I’ll bet we won’t find those notes in your apartment either. Do you know a guy named Mikey Baker?”

“No.”

“What about Craig Scott?”

“Yes,” Judith said hoarsely. “He’s a friend of mine. We furp together all the time.”

“Furp?” Moira asked.

“FRP-fantasy role playing games,” Wiz explained absently.

“What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

“Craig and this Mikey character are here. They’re raising all kinds of hell.”

Judith went even whiter. “No! I couldn’t have!”

“That is enough,” Bronwyn said firmly. “She needs to rest.”

“Right,” Wiz said. “Listen, you just concentrate on getting well and don’t worry, okay.” He patted her hand and left.

“Moira?” Judith said weakly as the hedge witch turned to go.

“Yes, my Lady?”

“I screwed up, didn’t I? I really screwed up.”

Moira smiled and patted her shoulder. “It is all right,” she told her. “It doesn’t really matter.”

Then she turned away so Judith would not see how much that statement cost her.

Seventeen: A NEW ALLY

Wiz was in the middle of analyzing a module from the crashed recon drone when Bal-Simba found him in the Bull Pen.

“My Lord, you have a visitor.”

There was something in the way he said it that made Wiz snap around, the intricacies of the code forgotten.

“Who?”

“Duke Aelric.”

Wiz’s jaw dropped. Only once before had the elf duke sent his image into the Wizard’s Keep. The times Wiz had met him it had been in his own elf hill. No mortal understood how the elf hierarchy worked, but Aelric was called “duke” and stood high among the elves. Whatever this was, it had to be important.

Without another word Wiz left his code and hurried out the door of the Bull Pen, but when he turned toward the main keep and the Watcher’s Hall, Bal-Simba placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Not there. The main gate.”

“Why did he send his image there?”

Bal-Simba looked at him strangely.

“He did not send his image, my Lord. He is here in person.”

* * *

There was no room in the Wizard’s Keep deemed grand enough for receiving an elf, but the Wizard’s Day Room was quickly put right, Malus was awakened from his afternoon nap and shooed out, and Wiz and Duke Aelric retired there.

Even in leather breeches, boots and a simple tunic of dark blue velvet brocaded in silver, Duke Aelric was as out of place as a president in a pig sty. But he contrived to put Wiz so much at his ease in the short walk from the main gate that Wiz didn’t notice-almost.

“What can we do for you, my Lord?” Wiz asked after his guest had been seated and refused refreshment.

“It is more a question of what I can do for you, Sparrow,” Duke Aelric said. “Or perhaps what we can do for each other.”

“Oh?” was all Wiz could think of to say.

“You have already met the new arrivals from your world?”

“Mikey and Craig?” Wiz said grimly. “Yeah, I’ve met them.”

“Then you agree they must be dealt with?”

“Yeah. That’s what you might call at the top of my to-do list.”

“I also want to see them dealt with. And what is behind them. Better to work together on this, do you not agree?”

“I’d be honored, Lord. But why . . . ?”

Aelric cocked a silvery eyebrow. “Why am I interested? Because what you are doing is important. And because I think you will need my help. In fact, you will need all the help you can get.”

The way he said it made Wiz’s blood run cold. He knew the business with Craig and Mikey was serious, but if Duke Aelric was interested it had to be even more serious than he imagined.

You will meet your greatest challenge, Lisella had said. He forced the rest of the prophecy out of his mind.

“Okay, what do you suggest?”

“First, I think, we must pool our knowledge. There are things I can tell you which will help and other things I wish to learn from you.”

“Sure.” Wiz reached for the silver bell to summon a servant. “Let me get the rest of the team in here.”

Duke Aelric made small talk while they waited. Wiz was too astonished by the whole situation to do more than respond half-heartedly. He was very glad when Jerry burst into the room.

“They said you wanted to . . .” He stopped short and goggled at the guest.  Duke Aelric rose and bowed exquisitely, obviously amused by Jerry’s reaction.

“This is, uh, Duke Aelric,” Wiz said lamely. “I’ve told you about him.”

“Honored.”

“Ye . . . yeah,” Jerry replied weakly. “Uh, forgive me. They didn’t tell me . . . I mean, they just said Wiz wanted to see me.”

The door opened behind him and Danny came in with June beside him.

“And this is Danny . . .” Wiz began, but he was cut short by June’s shriek. She shrank back against Danny, white and open-mouthed.

Aelric bowed again. “My Lord, my Lady.”

June turned away and buried her face in Danny’s shoulder.

“Uh, Danny, why don’t you take June back to your room?” Wiz said desperately. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?” Danny threw Aelric a venomous glance and led his shaking wife out.

“Now then,” Wiz said, turning back to Duke Aelric, “here’s what we know so far.”

It was several hours later when Wiz hunted up Moira.

“How is our guest?” she asked as soon as he came into their apartment.

Wiz kissed her perfunctorily. “You heard, huh?”

Moira looked at him. “Not much of a greeting, my Lord.”

“I’ve got a problem. You know June saw Aelric and nearly went into hysterics?”

Moira nodded. “So I had heard.”

“It’s the same thing that happened the last time she met an elf,” Wiz went on. “At the time I thought it was just Lisella. The way she popped up was enough to scare anyone and June’s easy to frighten. But Aelric was just sitting there and she’s more afraid of him than she was of Lisella.”

Moira nodded. “Certainly she is terrified of elves. But you are concerned about more than June’s feelings, I think.”

“I’m concerned about making this thing work. Right now Danny wants to tear Aelric’s heart out because of the effect he has on June. We can’t build a team with something like that going on.”

“What can I do to help you, love?”

“You’re closer to June than anyone. Do you have any idea why she’s so afraid of Aelric?”

“Nothing specific,” the hedge witch said slowly. “June is afraid of many things.” She smiled ruefully. She is hardly what you would call normal in the best of circumstances.”

“Amen to that!”

“But still . . .” Moira trailed off and stared away. Then she looked up at her husband. “You know her history. She was found wandering on the Fringe of the Wild Wood a few years ago, much as she is now. No one knew her or whence she came and she cannot, or will not, tell us.”

“So?”

“She is terribly afraid of elves. Perhaps she has had dealings with them before.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Elves don’t deal with humans.”

“They deal with you.”

“So I’ve got an elf magnet in my pocket. June sure doesn’t.”

“There is one case where elves do deal with humans regularly. They take human children to act as bond servants within elf hills.”

“And you think June . . .”

“Time passes strangely under an elf hill. It seems like a season or two but when the servants have fulfilled their bond and are released centuries have passed. Their family, their friends, even their village are dust and gone.”

“It makes sense,” Wiz said at last. “It would explain where she comes from and a lot about why she is so strange.”

Moira said nothing.

“What else? There’s something you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?”

“My Lord, I do not know any of this. It is all surmise.”

“But you suspect something. Out with it.”

Moira stared into her lap. Wiz waited. “Do you know why June needs Shauna to help nurse Ian?” she asked at last.

“I never really thought about it.”

“Because she does not produce enough milk.”

“As flat-chested as she is, I can believe it, but so what?”

Moira snorted. “My Lord, contrary to what lechers like you believe, the size of a woman’s breasts has little to do with her ability to feed an infant. No, June does not produce enough milk because her breasts are damaged. There are scars around both her nipples. Many little scars, as if she had been bitten repeatedly.”

Wiz went cold. “Meaning what?”

“You recall I once told you elves prefer human nursemaids for their infants? It is said that elf babies are born with all their teeth.”

Moira looked at him levelly, green eyes intent and serious. “It is also said those teeth are sharp enough to draw blood.”

Duke Aelric was on the castle wall, watching the setting sun turn the clouds orange and the hills purple. In his own unearthly way he was as magnificent as the sunset and Wiz watched both for several minutes before he got up the courage to approach him.

“My Lord, I need to talk to you.”

Aelric turned from the sunset and inclined his head. “Of course, Sparrow.”

“It’s about June, Danny’s wife.”

A graceful frown knitted the elf duke’s brow. “Ah, the one who was so upset? Forgive me, I thought she was a servant.”

“Was she?” Wiz asked harshly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Was she one of your servants?”

Duke Aelric made a throw-away gesture. “I really do not know, Sparrow.

There have been so many.”

“She was some elf’s servant. Now she’s terrified of elves because of something that happened to her.”

Duke Aelric said nothing.

“Doesn’t that bother you at all?” Wiz demanded.

The elf duke raised a silvery eyebrow. “Why should it? If she did serve the ever-living I can assure you she was not deliberately mistreated. If she was a servant it was because she was offered a bargain and she accepted. I assure you the bargain was kept.” He cocked his head. “Forgive me, but I do not see the relevance of an old bargain with one mortal-if bargain there was. Nor do I understand why you are so concerned about it.”

“Some bargain,” Wiz said bitterly. “Parents would ‘foster’ their children into elf hills in return for the protection they needed to survive.”

“Nonetheless, she would have entered our domains as all mortals enter them. Of her own will.”

“And came out to find that centuries had passed.”

Aelric cocked his head and said nothing.

Wiz could only stare. When they had met before Duke Aelric had been gracious, even charming, if somewhat frightening. Wiz knew that elves could be cold and cruel, but this was the first time he had ever seen it in Aelric.

And the worst of it was, Wiz realized, he wasn’t being cruel at all. He honestly did not understand why what had happened to June should be any of his concern. He began to appreciate, vaguely, just how un-human elves really were.

“Now she’s terrified of you and her husband would just as soon murder you as look at you and I’ve got to work with both of you.”

The elf turned to Wiz and gave him a look that rooted him where he stood.

“Her husband cannot find the necessity one-tenth as distasteful as I do.” Aelric’s fine features drew up in a sneer. “Sparrow, do you think I like coming here; associating with mortals?”

“Then why did you come?”

“Sparrow, listen to me. There are things in this World that are not of it.  Ancient things whose very nature you cannot comprehend.” His eyes bored into Wiz. “I told you once that you had upset a very delicate balance.  Even after all that has happened I still do not think you understand what you have done.

“Magic in the hands of mortals is dangerous, Sparrow. Unlike the ever-living, you are not inherently magical. You do not really understand magic.

“But your new magic is very powerful. That arouses certain-things-“ He trailed off, as if thinking. Then he resumed briskly. “Now those things must be dealt with. For this we will both need to bend all the powers we possess to the task.”

He was afraid, Wiz realized. Duke Aelric was actually afraid of whatever it was they were facing! Something cold and hard grew in Wiz’s stomach.

It was fully dark by the time Wiz went to visit Danny. He was alone in his room, Shauna having taken June and Ian off someplace to try to calm her down.

“Has he gone yet?” Danny demanded sullenly.

“No, and he’s not going.”

Danny bounced up off the bed. “Fuck that shit! He’s going if I have to throw him out of here on his goddamn ass!”

Wiz moved in front of the door. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to sit down and we’re going to talk.”

“Fuck that.” Danny tried to force his way past Wiz, but Wiz grabbed him and pushed him back into the room.

“Listen to me. This is a war, not a popularity contest. Right now we need all the help we can get and he’s about the most potent help we’re likely to find.

“Maybe something happened between June and Aelric once. But that’s over.  Now we need each other. That means if you’re going to be part of the team you’re going to have to work with him.” He looked hard at Danny. “Right now Aelric is a lot more valuable to this project than you are. If you can’t handle it, I’ll have to replace you.”

“With who?” Danny sneered.

“With one of the wizards we’ve been training. Malus, maybe. He may not be as talented as you are, but he can get along with Aelric.”

Danny didn’t say anything.

“Well?”

“I still don’t like him,” Danny said sullenly.

“You don’t have to like him. You have to work with him. Now, can you do that?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Just keep him the hell away from June.”

Wiz released Danny’s shoulders. “He doesn’t have to come anywhere near June.”

“Okay then,” Danny said. “Anything else?”

“Not now. We’ll have a staff meeting at noon tomorrow to figure out approaches.”

Duke Aelric did not stay the night in the Wizard’s Keep but he returned early the next morning. Again they met in the Wizard’s Day Room: Wiz, Jerry, a sullen but cooperative Danny, and Bal-Simba as the head of the Council of the North. The huge wizard said little and Aelric generally ignored him.

Yesterday Wiz and Jerry had done most of the talking as they filled Duke Aelric in. Today it was the elf duke who dominated.

“Lord, it sounds as if the simplest approach would be to close off the gate into our World somehow,” Jerry said when Aelric had finished.

“Simple indeed,” Aelric said with a trace of amusement, “if we but had the key.”

“Is there a key?”

In response Aelric lifted a finger and an elaborate, convoluted shape blossomed in the center of the table.

“That is a simple representation,” he told them. “There are actually eleven directions, not just three. The narrow part at the top represents the situation when the gate was first opened. Here at the bottom,” he gestured at the wildly intertwined strands that seemed to grow out of the table top, “is the situation as it is now. If I knew the total shape, it would be possible to construct the key and so close the door beyond opening again. But . . .” He smiled slightly and shrugged.

“Wait a minute!” Jerry said thinking hard. He scribbled frantically on a slate while the others watched in silence. “That’s a fractal!”

“I do not know that word,” Aelric said.

“It’s a self-similar figure with fractional dimensions.”

Aelric arched an eyebrow.

“Just a minute,” Wiz put in. “Are you sure that’s a fractal?”

“Pretty sure. Look.” He passed the tablet over to Wiz.

“Yeah,” Wiz said slowly. Then he looked back at the elf. “Look, when you say ‘know the shape,’ do you mean ‘describe mathematically’?”

Aelric frowned. “I do not understand you, Sparrow. When I say ‘know the shape,’ I use the words as mortal magicians do, I think.”

Wiz turned to Bal-Simba. “Lord . . .”

“If the Sparrow means what I believe he means, then yes. A mathematical description is sufficiently precise.”

Aelric turned back to Wiz. “Can you do this?”

Wiz nodded. “Fractals have another characteristic. They are generated by iteratively applying a function-that means applying the function over and over-and a lot of those functions are pretty simple.”

“There are image compression systems that use fractals,” Jerry said.  “Rather than store the actual image they store functions that generate fractals to mimic each part of the picture and then combine them. You can compress an image ten thousand to one or more that way.”

“Show me,” Aelric commanded.

The elf was leaning forward looking at them so intently Wiz almost thought he was going to spring at them like a lion at an antelope.

Slowly and carefully Jerry and Wiz led Aelric through the process that would yield the solution. Although mathematics was an alien language to the elf, parts of it he grasped intuitively. Other parts had to be broken into tiny pieces and gone over and over.

At last his face split into a broad smile. “Brilliant. A whole new way of looking at such things. Thank you both.” Then he sobered. “Yes, I think this,” he tapped the slate, “is a fair representation of the problem of closing that door. But if I understand you, it is a problem almost beyond solution.”

“Almost isn’t the same as impossible,” Jerry said. “There are ways you can simplify something like that. In principle it is solvable. It is just a matter of putting enough computer power to work on it.”

“Now that’s something we can do,” Wiz said. “Our spell compiler isn’t adapted to solving mathematical problems but demons can be made to calculate as well as work magic.”

Danny shook his head. “I dunno. This isn’t going to be easy.” It was the first thing he had said all morning and he looked at the glowing model rather than Aelric when he said it.

“So it’s not easy,” Wiz told him. “We can do it anyway.”

* * *

“Okay,” Wiz said three days later, “I was wrong.”

The same group, less Aelric and with the addition of Moira and Arianne, was assembled in the Bull Pen to review the project. After the initial flurry of writing code, things had settled down to running the program. It had been running day and night for the last two days and as they met the Emac controlling it sat on Wiz’s desk in a stall behind them, scribbling away furiously at line after line of glowing “printout.”

“This isn’t going to work,” Wiz said tiredly. “We can’t do the calculations fast enough. The problem with the magical compiler is it’s slow. We’re getting maybe 200 MOPS, absolute tops.”

“MOPS?” Moira asked.

“Magical Operations Per Second.”

“Two hundred spells a second does not sound slow to me,” Bal-Simba said.

“It is for this kind of work. What we’re doing here isn’t so much spell casting as it is mathematical analysis and that takes a lot of computing power, magic or no.”

He sighed. “Back home I used to work on machines that could do five or six million instructions per second and we had access to some that could do two hundred million.”

“That is a great deal of calculation,” Bal-Simba said.

“The fractal resembles a Mandelbrot set in some respects, although it’s defined by a completely different function,” Wiz told him. “What that means is there is not an analytic equation which will give us the boundary-which is what I was hoping for. What we do have is a procedure for calculating whether a given point is inside or outside the set.”

“I will take your word for it,” Bal-Simba said.

Wiz sighed. “What it comes down to is that we can find the shape of the key to any desired degree of precision, but we have to do it by calculating one point at a time. That takes computing power.”

“Wait a minute!” Jerry said. “What about parallelism? Each of those points is calculated independently of the others, right? So why don’t we get a bunch of copies of the program working on the problem simultaneously and feeding results to each other?”

“Well, machine resources are essentially free,” Wiz said. “But it would mean rewriting part of the compiler to handle the parallelism.”

Jerry nodded. “That’s doable. But before we do that we can test it with just a few copies active and one copy acting as supervisor. Kind of like running multiple virtual machines.”

“Virtual machines?” asked Moira, catching a phrase in the mass of technobabble that almost sounded familiar.

“That’s like a computer that isn’t there,” Jerry said helpfully.

“It’s something that acts like a computer only it isn’t,” Wiz added.

Moira regarded both of them coldly. “I see. Like your explanations.”

Wiz shook his head. “No, our explanations are real. A virtual explanation would be something that acted like an explanation, but wasn’t.”

Moira nodded. “I rest my case. Well, never mind. Just tell me what you will need to make this machine that is not a machine and I will see about getting it for you.”

Wiz looked at the setup and nodded. This wasn’t going to be pretty, but it was strictly a proof-of-principal device.

Ranked in front of him were twenty-one Emacs, all sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Bull Pen. All of them had their quill pens out and poised expectantly.

“This will take a while,” he told Jerry and Danny quite unnecessarily.  “We’ve only got twenty processors here and that key is a twelfth-order function. On the other hand, our algorithm will converge on that function.  We’ll start seeing a representation almost immediately, but it will be real fuzzy.”

“And the more processing time we put on the sharper the image will get,” Danny interjected. “We helped you write the damn thing, remember?”

Wiz blushed, nodded, and raised his staff.

“You know . . .” Jerry said slowly.

“What?”

“I don’t know. I have a feeling about this. Like the one I got in the City of Night just before we used the digging spell.”

Wiz lowered his arms. “What is it that bothers you?”

“I can’t put my finger on it. But there is something about this whole business.” He thought hard and then shook his head. “No, I guess not. Go on with the spell.”

Wiz looked around for a convenient cover in case he needed it. Then he raised his staff again.

“backslash,” he proclaimed.

“?” responded the first Emac.

“fractal_find exe,” Wiz said. The Emac on the far left turned to the others and began to gabble at them. The other twenty Emacs bent to their tasks immediately.

The air above the Emacs began to thicken and take on a bluish tinge. It grew denser and bluer until a neon blue cloud hung over their heads.

“It’s working!” Danny said.

Wiz just stared at the slowly coalescing shape and wondered why everything the Emacs turned out was in such violent colors.

As the cloud solidified it began to show hazy lumps and hollows. It wasn’t even solid enough to be called a shape yet, but already Wiz could see similarities between it and the thing Duke Aelric had called up on the conference table. The process was slowing as the algorithm had to work harder and harder to discover which points were part of the shape and which were not.

The form began to pulse and Wiz realized he was getting a headache. He looked away, but the afterimage remained burned in his retinas. His vision grew dark around the periphery and everything seemed fuzzy. He shook his head to try to clear it but that only made things worse.

“Do you guys feel all right?” Wiz asked.

“I feel fine,” said a large Saint Bernard dog with Jerry’s voice. To his left a six-foot-tall cockroach waved its feelers in agreement.

“Well, I don’t,” Wiz sang with two of his mouths, creating a bell-like harmony. Vaguely he realized they were standing not in the Bull Pen but under an enormous crystal canopy that shimmered with pastel highlights.  And wasn’t he supposed to have only two arms and one body segment?

As he watched, dog, cockroach and canopy all began to melt and run together. He felt his own body grow indistinct at the edges and begin to flow.

“SIGTERM!!” Wiz screamed.

The universe, canopy, cockroach and dog all froze in a half-melted state.

“UNDO!” he commanded. Instantly Wiz, Jerry and Danny were standing in the Bull Pen again.

“My God,” Danny said shakily. “I mean, well, my God!”

“I think we have a problem here,” Jerry said. His voice was calm but he was white and breathing in long, deep gulps.

“I think we just got closer to being inside a system crash than I ever wanted to be,” Wiz replied, collapsing onto a bench before his legs gave out.

“You know,” Jerry said, “this may not work after all.”

Danny collapsed on the bench next to Wiz. “Right now, I’m just glad everything’s back to normal.”

“Oh yeah?” Jerry said, “look.”

Wiz followed his pointing finger. Where the Emacs had been stood twenty mice, all dressed in blue-and-red band uniforms, complete with frogged jackets and plumed shakos, and carrying musical instruments. The twenty-first mouse, wearing a tall bearskin hat, raised his baton. The mouse bass drummer struck three quick, sharp beats and the entire mouse marching band charged into song.

Who’s the leader of the club . . .

“UNDO!” Wiz, Jerry and Danny yelled simultaneously.

It was afternoon the next day when a tired, dispirited team of programmers met with Moira, Bal-Simba and Duke Aelric.

“ . . . and we still don’t know what happened,” Wiz concluded. “One minute everything is fine and the next minute the world goes crazy.”

Aelric looked at him strangely. “You honestly do not know?”

Suddenly Wiz had the feeling they had missed something very obvious.

The elf duke sighed. “Forgive me, Sparrow. I had forgotten I was dealing with mortals and I simply assumed . . .”

“What did happen?” Jerry asked.

Aelric paused, weighing his words. “The object we call the key is in some sense a representation not only of the gate, but of this World as well. As your spell moved closer and closer to producing the shape of the key it began to have an ever-stronger effect because it became an ever-more exact replica of the World.”

“And by the Law of Similarity, like things affect each other,” Wiz said.

“So it began to affect the universe.”

“That is-ah-a not incorrect way of putting it. Quite frankly I wondered how you would deal with the problem. It never occurred to me you had not realized what would happen.”

“Why didn’t the shape have any effect when you showed it to us?”

“What I showed you is powerful enough, believe me, Sparrow. But it was incomplete; only the part between the Bubble World’s creation and that moment. I did not attempt to reproduce the entire shape of the key.”

“I told you guys it was a hardware bug,” Danny said, running his hand through his disheveled hair.

“The question is, how do we fix it?” Jerry said.

“I know of no way to fix it,” Aelric said. “Any spell which can produce that shape must inevitably affect the World in a chaotic fashion.”

For a minute no one said anything.

“You know,” Jerry said finally. “This thing acts like some kind of quantum effect at a macro level.”

“So maybe we need a quantum mechanic,” Wiz said. Jerry groaned, Danny scowled and Moira and Bal-Simba looked blank.

“Just trying to lighten the mood a little. Sorry.”

“You should be,” Jerry told him.

“Sparrow, there are times I think it is a blessing I do not always understand you,” Bal-Simba rumbled. “But I take it that this approach is not practical?”

“I guess not,” Wiz said. “Damn! And it looked so perfect.”

“Just a minute,” Jerry said. “You say that it is the spell which affects the World?”

Aelric inclined his head. “Just so.”

“Well, suppose we did it without using a spell?”

Aelric thought hard. “You mean using no magic at all? Yes, I suppose that would be possible.”

“The calculations could be done by hand,” Jerry said.

Danny snorted. “Man, there isn’t that much time in the universe. What we need is a Cray or something.”

“Computers won’t work here,” Wiz protested. “Nothing high-tech works in this world.”

“Craig and Mikey seem to be doing all right.”

“Yeah, but they’re not in this world, they’re in that bubble universe.”

Danny shrugged. “So we get ourselves a supercomputer and we set it up in our own bubble universe.”

“Do you know how to create such a thing?” Bal-Simba asked.

“No,” admitted Danny.

“Nor do I,” said Bal-Simba.

Everyone turned to look at Aelric.

“It, ah, would not be practical for us to do it either.”

“Whoever is helping those two is powerful indeed,” Bal-Simba said.

“Well, there’s gotta be a way,” Danny said a bit sullenly.

“Maybe there is,” Jerry said. “Suppose we help ourselves to a corner of their universe?”

Wiz, Moira and Bal-Simba stared hard at Jerry.

“My Lord, how long has it been since you slept?” Moira asked.

“Twenty-eight hours or so, but what’s that got to do with it?”

“If you get a good night’s sleep, I suspect the connection will occur to you,” the hedge witch said tartly.

There was a lull in the conversation while everyone considered.

“Well, it does seem to be a pretty big place,” Wiz said at last. “Lots of islands and no one in most of it.”

“We’ve been able to set up scout bases for our dragon patrols,” Danny pointed out. “Why can’t we just take over one of the deserted islands?”

“You can’t be serious!” Moira snapped. “You mean hide like a mouse in the corner while you do your work?”

“Hey, it’s there and they’re not using all of it,” Danny said. “Why not?”

“For a beginning you could all get killed. None of you know what lurks in that place nor how it is guarded.”

“I do not believe it is guarded at all,” Bal-Simba said. “Our scouts have found no sign of watchers or guardian spells. Indeed, their biggest problem seems to be to keep from straying into that universe unintentionally.”

The hedge witch’s mouth dropped open. “You are actually serious! My Lord, I cannot believe that you are actually considering this.”

“My Lady,” Bal-Simba said gravely. “In times like these we must consider many things we would rather not.”

She turned to Aelric in mute appeal, but the elf only shrugged. “It does seem to present a solution, Lady.”

“There’s another little problem,” Wiz said. “Where are we going to get a supercomputer?”

“We can’t just issue a purchase order, can we?” Jerry said finally.

“I don’t think Dun and Bradstreet has a current report on us.”

“I take it,” Bal-Simba said, “we cannot simply pay for this in gold, as we paid the programmers?”

“Not that simple,” Wiz told him. “First, I don’t think they’d take gold.  Second, these things are built to order and most manufacturers have backlogs. Third, they’re still under export controls and there is a lot of paperwork you have to fill out before you can buy one.”

“Well,” Jerry said slowly, “the regulations have gotten a lot looser since you left. Anyway, legally we are entitled to an export license. We’re not on the list of proscribed countries, after all.”

Wiz looked at him. “You want to fill out the application? And then explain it to the State Department?”

“Just a thought.”

Danny shrugged. “So we swipe one.”

“I don’t think so. At five million a copy, people would talk.”

“So what? The Russians do it all the time.”

“We’re not . . .” Wiz started and then stopped. “You know, you may have something there, in a backhanded sort of way.” He stared off into space for a minute and chewed on his lower lip.

“Assuming we can make our searching demons operate . . . yeah.”

“We’re gonna swipe one?” Danny asked eagerly.

“If we can find the right one,” Wiz told him. “After all, a fair robbery is no exchange-or something like that.”

“And then you are just going to walk into this bubble universe and set it up,” Moira said disgustedly. She picked up the jug of fruit juice and sniffed it. “Are you sure you did not turn this into something stronger when I was not looking?”

Eighteen: INTERNATIONAL COMPLICATIONS

Generals are not known for their sunny dispositions. Just now this general’s disposition was as frigid as the Alaskan snowbanks lining the runways outside. His staff didn’t look like they were having much fun either.

“Okay, so whatever these things are, we haven’t been able to get good radar signatures on them. Are we even sure they are real?”

The other officers in the room shifted uncomfortably. At last the intelligence officer spoke up.

“Sir, we’re not sure. But they act like they are.”

“Analysis shows there’s about an eighty-five percent chance they are real,” said the officer responsible for the base’s powerful radar chain.

The general glared as if he wanted to kill someone. Now.

“Well, if they’re real why the hell can’t our pilots find them?”

“By the time we can get there they are always gone,” the intelligence officer said. “Besides, that whole area is a fog bank.”

“That’s unusual in itself, isn’t it?”

“No, sir, not exactly,” the base weather officer put in. “As you know fog’s not unusual in that part of the Bering Sea. More like the normal thing.”

“Is it normal for the same patch of ocean to stay fogged in for weeks?”

The weather officer shrugged. “Not quite so far north, no. But it’s not unheard of either.”

“What’s causing that?”

“Cold air moving over warm water. Telemetry shows the water’s somewhat warmer there than in the surrounding parts of the ocean.”

“Why?”

Again the shrug. “We don’t understand the weather patterns in this part of the world that well. An upwelling current, a vortex breaking off one of the regular warm currents, we just don’t know.”

“And you don’t know what’s playing hide-and-seek with our radar?”

“Whatever it is, it’s not meteorological.”

The general turned to his radar officer.

“And you don’t know either?”

“No, sir. I can tell you something is showing up intermittently and whatever it is is probably not an artifact of the equipment, but that’s all I can say.”

“And patrols through that show nothing?”

“Nothing but fog. Sometimes our equipment works perfectly. Sometimes everything goes to hell. Radar, radios. I even had one case where the inertial navigation systems started acting up.”

He scowled at the thought. This far north compasses were unreliable. If the INS failed, the pilot was reduced to dead reckoning and quite possibly a very chilly bath.

The general nodded again. In peacetime the base only kept one pair of F-15s sitting as CAP-combat air patrol-and they were not launched except at definite targets. They were well positioned to intercept something coming in to the Alaskan mainland, but not to go chasing things out over the Bering Sea.

He looked over at his intelligence officer, who merely shook his head. “It doesn’t match anything we know of.”

The general thought hard. “Thank you, gentlemen.” The officers rose to go, but the general motioned his intelligence officer back into his chair.  “Matt, stay behind for a minute, will you?”

“Now,” the general said when the others had filed out and closed the door behind them. “What do you think this thing is?”

The intelligence officer frowned and shook his head.

“I don’t have the faintest idea. If it is Soviet, it’s stealthed well beyond what we thought they could do and it’s carrying one holy hell of an electronic counter-measures suite. I don’t know anything that could produce returns like that, or the kind of interference that’s coming out of that area.” He paused significantly. The northern border was so sensitive that if the intelligence officer at this base didn’t know, no one in the Air Force knew.

“I’ll tell you something else,” he went on at last. “From what I’m hearing, I don’t think the spooks know what those things are either. CIA and NSA don’t tell us everything, but the reactions I’m getting tell me they’re in the dark and they’re plenty worried.”

It was the general’s turn to frown. “Why so?”

“The arms control talks. If the Soviets can produce something that good without our having an inkling of it, then our ‘national technical means of verification’ aren’t worth a damn. If we can’t catch them with our satellites and spy planes then we can’t make sure they aren’t cheating.” He made a throw-away gesture. “Poof, no treaty.”

The general didn’t say anything for a long, long time.

“Would they really blow a treaty over some anomalous returns?”

“It sure as hell wouldn’t help.”

“But why the hell would the Soviets take something like that out over the ocean? Haven’t they got enough places to test it where it would be secure?”

The intelligence officer shrugged. “Ask me another one. But don’t be surprised if we get some company before long. Important company.”

The general cracked the knuckles in one fist and then the other, like a man preparing for a fight. Then he smacked his right fist into his left palm and stared out into space.

“All right,” he said finally, “what you’re telling me is that it’s vital to the security of the United States that we find out what the hell these things are?”

The IO chewed that over for a minute and then nodded. “Not ‘vital’ maybe, but damned important. Yessir, that’s my assessment.”

The general slammed his palm down on the desk. “Then we’re by damn going to find out, and soon! I want some F-15s prepared with long-range ferry tanks and recon gear up the wazoo. Damn, I wish I had some EF-111s!” He looked over at his intelligence officer.

“The next time that thing shows its nose we’re going to be ready. We’re going to find out what this sucker is and we’re going to nail him!”

Nineteen: MOUSEHOLE

“Behold, the Mousehole!” Wiz Zumwalt said, standing in the lobby of his new secret headquarters and gesturing grandly. Moira, who was standing beside him, only sniffed.

The Mousehole-no one could remember who came up with the name-was a one-story complex of glass and stone raised overnight by magic. It meandered beneath the trees in a small valley like a giant’s game of dominoes. In addition to the labs and workshops, the complex included wings of private quarters for the programmers, wizards and their servants and helpers, storerooms and, most importantly of all, a room for their soon-to-be-acquired computer.

Wiz put his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene. With its airy spaces, hidden fluorescent lighting and non-static carpeting, the complex would not have looked out of place in a Silicon Valley industrial park. Of course, it did have a few features most Silicon Valley complexes lacked-such as windows that opened and the smokeless torches in brackets along the walls because the electricity wasn’t hooked up yet.

“You know,” Wiz said, “the Wizard’s Keep has a lot of atmosphere, but this is still pretty neat.”

“This is still madness,” Moira responded grimly. “I just hope we do not all live to regret this.”

“You mean you hope we do live to regret it.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean!” the hedge witch snapped. “And here on this island, of all places!” She growled in frustration, crossed her arms and turned away.

Wiz came up behind her and put his arms around her. “I don’t like it either, darling. But we’ve got to be able to use a computer and that means taking risks.”

He felt her stance begin to soften. “And they don’t patrol this island regularly. So we’re safer here than anywhere else. Besides, we’ve taken precautions.”

In fact the precautions had taken more time than the buildings. Not only was the glass carefully dulled to avoid any hint of reflection and the stone colored to match the surrounding rock, but powerful blocking spells had been erected over the place. From the air the valley appeared as simply another hill. Magical emanations were blocked. Even infrared, UV and radar signatures were tightly controlled.

Moira sighed. “Oh, I know, love. But on the same island as our enemies!”

“It’s a big island. We’re nearly a hundred miles away from them. As long as we don’t have dragons flying in and out of here or something we’ll be safe enough.”

“I suppose,” Moira said in a tone that suggested she supposed nothing of the sort. But she relaxed and turned back toward Wiz.

He smiled down at her. “Besides, look at the bright side. In this world there are no dwarves trying to kill me.”

Glandurg was bent over his locating talisman. For two days there had been no sign of the Sparrow even on his searching device. Now he was attempting a difficult spell to increase its power temporarily.

His followers were crowded around the stump where he sat, watching as he poured all the magical energy he could muster into the device. The sweat was running down Glandurg’s brow and even Gimli was uncharacteristically quiet.

The device pulsed, flickered and then lit with a faint blue glow. Within it a shadowy arrow pointed south.

Glandurg jumped up off the stump so quickly he almost knocked Ragnar over.

“South! The alien wizard has gone south.” His face split in a wide smile.  “Excellent. We have driven him from his hole and now we can follow him. He will not be so well protected in his new lair.” He jumped up on the stump and struck a heroic pose.

“This time we shall not fail!” he proclaimed in ringing tones.

The other dwarves listened politely, but with a notable lack of enthusiasm.

“This means the griffins again, doesn’t it?” Thorfin asked glumly.

“I don’t see why we don’t just grab the thing now,” Danny complained as he and Wiz made their way back to their quarters. “It’s been nearly a week since we got here and we can’t do anything until we get that computer.”

It was well past midnight and the halls were deserted. The support staff was small and was not on duty around the clock. Even Jerry had turned in an hour ago, leaving Wiz and Danny to finish reviewing the results of their search for a “candidate” computer system.

“Because it’s still legal,” Wiz told him. “They haven’t done anything they aren’t supposed to yet.”

“But we know they’re going to.”

“But they haven’t. So we don’t touch it.”

“Like, the KGB is really going to use a supercomputer in the United States.”

“It’s the GRU-military intelligence-and they’re still legal.”

“Bullshit!”

“Maybe,” Wiz said firmly. “But that’s the way we’re going to play it.”

They walked on in silence. Their feet made no noise on the carpeted floor and the dim light from the ceiling panels had a bluish cast that made it seem even dimmer.

As they came around a corner, they saw movement ahead. Instinctively they both froze. Then Wiz realized it was June.

June was always cat-quiet when she moved, edging along the walls of a room as if she was afraid something would grab her. Now she was moving even more stealthily. She kept her back to the wall and stepped sideways with large cross-body steps that carried her along utterly without sound.

Danny moved to say something, but Wiz put a cautionary hand on his arm. As silently as she had come, June disappeared down the cross-corridor.

“What’s June doing sneaking around like that?”

“She’s not sneaking!” Danny fired back.

“All right, she’s not sneaking. What’s she doing?”

Danny dropped his eyes and didn’t say anything.

“Danny . . .” Wiz began dangerously.

“She’s . . .” He took a deep breath. “Well, she’s watching.”

“Watching who?”

“That elf dude. She doesn’t trust him.”

“That’s obvious. Any special reason?”

“Because he’s dangerous. Because he doesn’t belong here.”

“He’s our ally.”

“How do we know that? Because he says so?”

“Because he is,” Wiz told him with a lot more firmness than he felt.

“Look man, June knows elves. She lived with them for hundreds of years, right? She doesn’t trust him and that’s good enough for me.”

“He’s saved my life a couple of times and that’s good enough for me,” Wiz retorted. “Look, I told you once before you don’t have to like him, but you’re going to have to work with him. If you or June can’t handle that, I’ll have to send you back to the Capital.”

Danny just snorted and turned away.

The only thing worse than flying over the ocean, Glandurg decided, was flying over the ocean at night. It was bad enough to look down and see nothing but water beneath you, but it was worse to look down and not see the water you knew was there.

This whole trip was worse than anything he had imagined. He was cramped and sore after hours of hanging from a griffin’s talons. He was mortally tired, but he could not get any sleep. He was chilled nearly to the marrow from the night cold and wind. He was still half-airsick from the terrible fog bank they had gone through a while ago where everything was suddenly wrong. Now the griffin that bore him was laboring and wheezing as if from exhaustion.

Well, at least Thorfin had stopped moaning and Gimli wasn’t retching any more. The next time I make a journey like this I will insist on a flying carpet, he declared to himself. It costs more, but the extra comfort is worth it.

The truth of the matter, he admitted to himself, was that he didn’t want to make a journey like this. Not ever again. Not even the quest was worth this misery. He would have gladly ordered the griffins to turn around and take them home if it didn’t mean flying for hours and hours more.

A sudden move by the griffin jerked him out of his misery and sent a new thrill of terror through him. The griffin had banked and seemed to be losing altitude. Glandurg’s heart jumped into his throat at the thought of going down in the ocean.

Then his dwarvishly keen nose caught a new smell mingled with the iodine-and-salt odor of the ocean. A smell of mud and decay that was like perfume to him. Land! There was land ahead.

Glandurg fumbled with half-numb fingers for the thong around his throat.  The talisman was glowing brightly and the arrow pointed sharp and clear straight ahead of them.

“We have got to do something about June,” Wiz told his wife the next morning over breakfast. “Now she’s taken to sneaking around after Duke Aelric.”

“I know,” Moira said calmly.

“Huh?”

Moira laid down her slice of bread. “Love, not everyone is as oblivious to what goes on around them as you are. And more importantly, Duke Aelric knows as well.”

“He said something?”

“He is an elf. He knows.”

“Great!” Wiz sighed. “All we need to do is insult Aelric.”

“Has he told you he is insulted?”

“No, but you know how touchy he is.”

Moira reached for the jam. “Just so. If he were insulted, you would know it. I take it he has said nothing?” She cocked her head. “No? Then it does not concern him and should not concern you.”

Wiz grunted. “Anyway I’m going to send June back to the Capital.”

“Danny will not like that.”

“Then Danny can go back too. Dammit, she’s not supposed to be here in the first place!”

Moira looked amused. “Perhaps not. But do you seriously think you can keep her and Danny apart?”

Wiz considered that. “With a moat full of crocodiles, maybe.”

“I would bet on June over the crocodiles. No, love, I am not sure even death could separate those two.”

“So I send them both back.”

“Wiz, I do not mean to tell you how to mind your business,” his wife said in a tone indicating she was about to do exactly that, “but I think that would be unwise for two reasons.”

Wiz started to say something, but Moira held up her hand to stop him.

“First, what can Danny accomplish back at the Capital? He needs to be with you and Jerry to be effective, does he not?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“And second, do you think anyone at the Capital can control him?”

Wiz thought about that. “Right. He doesn’t listen to anyone except Jerry and me and half the time he doesn’t listen to us.” He sighed. “Okay, he stays and that means June stays. But for Pete’s sake will you use whatever influence you have with her to get her to lay off Aelric?”

“I have already spoken to her and I will do so again. But I fear she is even more resistant to direction than Danny. Besides, in this case she has a very strong motive for following Aelric.”

“Danny says it’s because she doesn’t trust him.”

“I am sure that is true. But I think there is more to it. She spies on him because she fears him.”

“And that’s why she doesn’t trust him.”

Moira shook her head. “Again, I think that is true in part. But mostly I think she follows him because it is a way to rise above her fear. She somewhat controls the thing she fears, you see.”

“Not exactly, no.”

“Nevertheless it is so.”

“Sheesh! I dunno. This whole thing used to be so simple. There were good guys and bad guys and it was easy to tell the difference. Now . . .” He shrugged.

Moira reached out and took his hand. “You have managed well enough so far.”

“Yeah, but you’d think this saving the world business would get easier with practice. It just seems to get harder and more complicated every time.”

“Let us hope this is the final time, love.”

“Yeah,” Wiz said fervently and squeezed her hand.

“Besides,” Moira went on brightly. “There is a positive side to this, you know. You said we needed to do something about June. June is doing something about herself. It is helping to heal her.”

“That’s something, I guess.”

They ate in silence for a while.

“Moira?” Wiz said at last.

“Yes, love?”

“Do you trust Duke Aelric?”

The redheaded witch considered. “Not trust, exactly. I think that as he says, his goals and ours run together on this thing. Besides, Bal-Simba says he is worthy in this and I trust Bal-Simba.”

Wiz hesitated. “You really don’t like him, do you? Aelric, I mean.”

Moira paused. “Nooo,” she said at last. “I do not like him.”

“You seemed to like him well enough when we met him in the Wild Wood.”

“He saved our lives in the Wild Wood.”

“But you never said anything that indicated you don’t like him.”

Moira sighed and bit into her bread and jam. “Liking or not liking an elf is like liking or not-liking a mountain,” she said around the mouthful of food. “An elf or a mountain simply is and you must accept that.”

“Well, I like him,” Wiz said firmly. “And I trust him too.”

He turned back to his own breakfast. Just maybe not as much as I used to, he thought as he reached for the butter.

* * *

Even for humans, the place was strange looking, Glandurg thought as he crouched on the hill looking down on his enemy’s new lair. It was only one story, even if it did run out in all directions. The stone of the walls looked solid enough, but the place had windows as big as doors! Not a moat or a crenelation to be seen.

Not even a log palisade. He snorted silently. The place was defenseless.

There was a tiny noise in the bushes and Ragnar slithered back into view.

Glandurg and the others crowded around him.

“Dwarf-proof!” he said disgustedly. “Whole bloody place is spelled against us.”

Glandurg wanted to beat his fist in the dirt in frustration. But it would not do to lose control in front of his followers. “Then we will wait and watch,” he said between gritted teeth. “The wizard cannot stay within forever.”

Twenty: MEETING BY MOONLIGHT

Unlike the Wizard’s Keep, the small staff at the Mousehole did not work around the clock. By nine P.M. the hallways were deserted and by midnight the place was as silent as a tomb.

It was well past midnight when a shadow slipped into the lobby and paused at the main door. A remarkably well-dressed shadow.

Aelric’s cloak was blue at the shoulders fading to purple and finally to black at the hem. Here and there upon it gems sparkled like stars in fading twilight. As he turned June saw his tunic was dove gray and his hose pure white. He turned fully and she caught her breath and shrank back into the shadow. But his face remained as serene as always and he gave no hint that he knew she was there.

Then liquidly, noiselessly, he opened the door and slipped out into the night. June waited for a moment and then followed, not nearly so graceful but just as soundlessly.

Aelric did not sneak, but nonetheless he moved quickly and gracefully in an odd twisting fashion that was hard for a human eye to follow.

About a half mile from headquarters the path wound through a thick patch of ferns and then dropped into an open glade. June hesitated for a moment and when Aelric did not emerge on the path that came out of the depression, she dropped to her hands and knees and crept forward.

She knew the glade well enough. By day it was a pleasant spot and once or twice she and Danny had come this way to picnic and make love. Under the full moon their pleasant little picnic spot was transformed into something completely different.

Through a break in the lacy foliage June caught a glimpse of movement in the glade. Oblivious to the damage to her dress, she pressed herself flat to the earth and slowly wormed her way forward through the overhanging ferns.

The moon was high and its silvery light poured into the clearing. Duke Aelric stood in the middle of the open space and he was not alone. There was another cloaked figure beside him, nearly as tall as he was. Then Aelric moved and June saw it was Lisella.

She was near as pale as the moonlight itself and her hair cascaded down her back dark as the forest shadows. Like Aelric she was wearing a cloak with the hood thrown back. To a normal mortal she would have been heartbreakingly beautiful, but June dug her fingers into the soil and pressed herself flatter at the sight.

Neither of the elves spared a glance for their surroundings. They were deep in conversation. The liquid tones of elf speech did not carry well, but June could see clearly enough.

Lisella was speaking quickly, her eyes focused on Duke Aelric’s face.  Aelric heard her out without changing expression and then said something with a half-smile that made her draw back and bite out a retort.

From her hiding place June watched intently. Normally elves were impassive or half-mocking when they spoke to each other. She had never seen them talk together like this.

Lisella faced Aelric square on and said something. Aelric half-nodded, as if agreeing with her, and then responded calmly. Lisella seemed to have trouble controlling her temper. She said something short and sharp.

Aelric made a chopping motion with his hand and turned away, as if to leave. Lisella’s voice caught and held him. He turned back to her. Without moving closer he spoke firmly to her. She looked at him closely and then shrugged.

Lisella cocked her head and said something with a mocking little smile.

Aelric nodded.

She arched an eyebrow slightly but he said nothing and stood firm. At last she nodded and spoke. He bowed formally and she responded with a half-curtsey. Then she turned and swept out of the clearing. Aelric stood watching her for a moment and then took the moonlit path back toward headquarters.

June remained flat on her belly under the ferns for a long time before she rose cautiously and slipped back to the fortress.

Wiz got an early start the next morning and by the time Danny arrived in the lab he was deep in his latest project.

“You know your buddy, the elf dude?” the young programmer said as soon as he stepped into the room.

“It’s elf duke,” Wiz said without looking up from the code he was debugging.

“Whatever. Anyway you know Lisella, the one you said was trying to kill you?”

Wiz looked up cautiously. “Yeah?”

“Did you know Aelric’s meeting her here?”

“What? How do you know that?”

“June saw them out in the forest last night. She says it looked like they were arguing about something.”

“So June’s still following Aelric.”

“You ought to be glad someone is,” Danny snapped. “Didn’t you hear what I said? He’s meeting with the one who’s trying to kill you!”

“She’s not trying to kill me anymore.”

“She sure wasn’t trying to do you any good when she showed up at the City of Night.”

Wiz laid down the scroll he was holding. “Look, I don’t know why Aelric’s meeting Lisella. But right now we can’t afford to alienate him. So tell June to lay off, will you?”

Danny stared at him, hard. “Man, you’re goddamn blind! You just don’t want to see, do you?” With that he turned on his heel and stomped out of the lab.

* * *

In the next hour Wiz got maybe two lines of code written. Finally he gave it up and went to find Moira.

Moira was in the storeroom, overseeing the stocking of a load of supplies which had been brought over the Wizard’s Way that morning. While the servants bustled about, Wiz took her off in a corner and told her June’s tale.

“A human spying on elves?” she said when Wiz had finished. “It seems unlikely. They can pass unseen by mortals as easily as they breathe.”

“Yeah, but if anyone could do it, it would be June. Besides, magic doesn’t work as well here, remember?”

The hedge witch wrinkled her brow. “To be sure it is an unlikely tale for her to concoct. Well, if it is true, then we must be even more careful with our elf duke.”

“I thought you trusted him, more or less.”

“Less now than before.”

“I don’t know, though. If he wanted to harm us there are a lot easier ways to do it. Why go through all this rigamarole of pretending to ally with us?”

“Well,” Moira said, “it is said that elves are tricksome and strange.”

Twenty-one: THE GREAT PLANE ROBBERY

Ivan Semonovich Kuznetsov, major in the GRU, snapped awake and sought groggily for the thing that had awakened him.

The four big Ivchenko turboprop engines on the wings of the AN 12 transport beat steadily as the plane bore east and a little north toward Leningrad. His cheek was slightly numb from the cold and vibration where it had rested against the metal side of the cabin.

But there had been something . . .

He shook it off. Too much vodka last night, that was all. Truly it was a terrible thing to grow old. Not that thirty-three was old, but he could no longer drink the night away and rise fresh with the dawn.

But this dawn there was cause enough for celebration. Snug in the belly of the aircraft was the newest, fastest graphics supercomputer the Americans made. In a few hours it would be in Leningrad and Major Ivan Kuznetsov could expect to share in the rewards of a job well done.

The computer had traveled a long and shifty path from the factory in Texas. It had originally been ordered for a research institute in England, but by a carefully staged “coincidence” it had been diverted to Austria and from there on to what had been East Germany where the Soviet intelligence service still had friends. Kuznetsov had some small part in all of that. Now he was accompanying it on the last leg of its trip to the Soviet Union.

Where it would go once it reached Soviet soil he did not know and would never have dreamed to ask. There were many important projects in the motherland that required computers which were beyond the current abilities of the socialist nations to build. Since the Americans still would not sell such computers openly, the nation relied on the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Red Army, to acquire them in other ways.

“Comrade Major . . .” Kuznetsov jerked fully awake. Whenever one of his subordinates addressed him as “comrade” he knew something had gone wrong.

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“The computer . . .” Vasily began. In a flash the GRU major was out of his seat, thrusting the man out of the way and diving headlong through the door into the cargo compartment.

“It’s gone,” the sergeant’s voice echoed after him.

Kuznetsov didn’t need Vasily to tell him that. The webbing that had bound the computer tightly in place was a tangled limp mass on the floor. The wooden pallets were exactly as they had been, but the crates were gone.

“Yo momma!”

Like a wild beast Kuznetsov spun and sprang for the cockpit door. His sergeant pressed against the bulkhead to let him pass as he squeezed into the cockpit. Before the pilot could turn to him he grabbed the man’s shoulder and tried to twist him around in his seat.

“The cargo door,” he demanded. “When did it open?”

“It didn’t open,” the pilot, Volkov, protested. “There’s an indicator . .

.”

“The devil take your fucking indicator,” the GRU man roared. “When did that door open?”

“It didn’t! We would have felt it in the controls. Comrade Major, I swear to you on my mother’s grave that door did not open.”

“Don’t lie to me! That door opened. Now when?” He took a deep breath, pulled his pistol from its holster and pressed it against Volkov’s head, just in front of his earphones. “If you do not tell me the truth immediately I will blow your brains all over this cabin.”

The co-pilot and flight engineer had their eyes studiously glued to their instrument panels. The pilot looked at the pistol out of the corner of his eye and Kuznetsov jammed the gun against his head even harder.

“Major,” Captain Volkov said with quiet dignity, “you may arrest me. You may shoot me here and now. But that door did not open. It could not have.”

“Very well,” Kuznetsov said softly, so softly he was almost inaudible over the roar of the engines. “Very well, the door did not open.” He took the gun from the pilot’s head. “Then would you please tell me where is the fucking cargo?” His voice dropped again to a near whisper. “That is all I want to know.”

Volkov blanched and started out of the pilot’s seat. Kuznetsov moved to block him and then thought better of it. He nodded curtly. “Sergeant, accompany him.”

As the two scrambled aft Kuznetsov stared moodily at the cloudscape below him. They were somewhere over Estonia, he knew, and the Estonians were notorious through the USSR as the biggest thieves of state property in all the republics. The Georgians were bigger black marketers and the Azerbijaniis were more violent, but over the years the Estonians had stolen everything from a freight train to an entire fleet of fishing trawlers. “Well, this time those damned Estonians have gone too far,” he muttered to himself.

“Sir?” asked the co-pilot. Then he withered under the GRU man’s glare.

“Sir, should I radio Leningrad and declare an emergency?”

“No, you idiot! The last thing we need is to have Leningrad Center shouting questions at us.”

Although the questions would come soon enough, he realized. Chill fear clutched at his stomach as he thought what those questions would be like.

Just then the intercom squawked. “Major,” Vasily’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Major, I think you’d better come down here and take a look at this.”

Kuznetsov looked down at the co-pilot and flight engineer and decided he was not going to leave them alone in the cockpit to do God-knows-what.

“Come with me,” he commanded. The co-pilot opened his mouth to protest and Kuznetsov touched his holster. “Now,” he ordered, “immediately.” Wordlessly the men slid out of their seats and preceded the major down to the cargo deck.

Volkov and Vasily were squatting over the heap of webbing where the computer had been, staring intently at one of the pallets. As Kuznetsov made his way back to them, bracing with one hand against the side of the plane, he saw there was a small pile of something shiny and metallic in among the straps and buckles.

“When we looked closely we found this,” Vasily shouted to make himself heard over the din of the engines. He handed Kuznetsov an object off the stack, an object that glinted like summer sunlight even in the gloom of the aircraft deck.

Kuznetsov had never seen gold before, but no one had to tell him this was gold.

“But where did it come from?” Volkov asked, bewildered.

“That is a very good question,” Kuznetsov said, kneeling down to study the pile of gold bars. They were surprisingly tiny, each one fitting neatly in the palm of his hand and weighing about two kilograms. There were no identifying marks of the kind usually found on bar gold, not even assayer’s marks.

“How much do you suppose it is worth?” asked the co-pilot.

“If I had to guess, I would say perhaps ten million American dollars. That was the value of our cargo.”

“What was our cargo, anyway?” the pilot asked.

The GRU man glared at him. “That is none of your concern.”

Volkov did not flinch. “If my career is to be ruined I would at least like to know what over.”

Kuznetsov considered and then nodded. “Very well. It was an American supercomputer. The latest model of supercomputer and one that took us nearly two years to acquire.”

The pilot’s mouth dropped as he realized the enormity of the loss.

“Boishemoi!” he breathed.

The GRU man nodded curtly. “Just so.”

“What I don’t understand,” the co-pilot said, “is why go to the trouble of leaving the gold after stealing the computer?”

“That too is a very good question,” Kuznetsov said sourly as he braced himself against the plane’s gentle bank to the right. “Does anyone have any more good questions?”

“Just one,” Vasily said hesitantly as the craft began to bank more steeply. “Who is flying the plane?”

Volkov and Semelov gaped at each other and both dashed for the cockpit.

“Well,” Wiz said at last for want of anything better to say, “there it is.”

Sitting under the lights on the concrete floor were two dozen boxes full of computer and supporting equipment, all cocooned in foam and cardboard, wrapped around with clear plastic and bound with metal straps.

Moira followed the programmers’ admiring looks and tried to be enthusiastic, but it all looked so ordinary. The way Wiz and the others had been talking she expected a nimbus of power around the boxes, or lightning bolts or something.

None of the programmers noticed her disappointment. They were too busy swarming over the pile, touching cabinets and opening boxes.

“I hope the installation instructions are complete,” Danny said dubiously.

“I’ve never installed anything bigger than a 386 PC.”

“Voila!” Wiz stood up from a newly opened box waving a black oblong. “A complete installation course on video tape. Just sit ourselves down with some popcorn and get educated.”

“Wiz.”

“Yeah, Jerry?”

“Where are we going to get a VCR?”

“Lift one out of a store the same way we lifted the computer,” Danny said.

Wiz frowned. “I dunno. That would be stealing.”

“Wiz.”

“Yeah, Jerry?”

Jerry gestured at the $10 million pile of crates. “What do you call this?”

“Well,” Major Ivan Kuznetsov said, hefting the bar of gold absently, “what do we do now?”

The occupants of the cockpit looked at one another and no one said anything. By now it was painfully obvious they would all share the same fate.

“Think, comrades,” Kuznetsov urged. “Think as if your lives depended on it.” As they well may, he didn’t have to add. “What could have possibly happened to that computer?”

“It was fine when we loaded it aboard,” Vasily said. “I checked and rechecked it myself.”

“And I also,” Semelov put in. “The webbing was secure and there was nothing unusual about it.”

The pilot and the major nodded. They had also checked the cargo and the mountings before takeoff and Kuznetsov and Vasily had been on the cargo deck for takeoff.

“And there was nothing out of the ordinary when you left to go to the latrine?” Kuznetsov asked Vasily.

“Not the least little thing.”

Kuznetsov said nothing. Technically both he and the sergeant were supposed to have been on the cargo deck at all times. But rank has privileges and he had chosen to ride up front where it was warmer and quieter.  Abstractedly he realized that would be seen as dereliction of duty by his interrogators, but he did not think it would matter much. He turned to the pilot.

“And you are sure the cargo doors did not open in flight?”

“Major, I swear to you on my mother’s grave that none of the aircraft doors opened after we left the ground,” Volkov said. “For that matter the load did not even shift. We would have felt the alteration in the center of gravity.”

Kuznetsov looked at him with contempt. “So one moment it was there and the next it vanished like winter fog?”

Volkov shrugged and spread his hands helplessly.

“It was there when I left and gone when I returned, not two minutes later,” Vasily said.

“Where does that leave us?” asked the co-pilot.

“As traitors to the Motherland,” Kuznetsov snapped. He furrowed his brow and grimly, desperately, tried to think.

“What are our options?” Volkov asked.

“We should call Leningrad Center and report this immediately,” Vasily said when no one else spoke up. “It will go harder on us the longer we delay.”

Kuznetsov shook his head. “Report what, Sergeant? That our cargo seems to be missing and we have acquired a pile of gold instead? Perhaps we had better consider the situation first.”

Besides, Kuznetsov thought, it can’t go any harder on us than it will already.

“At least we have the gold,” Semelov pointed out.

Kuznetsov snorted. “Leningrad Center isn’t expecting gold. It is expecting a computer. May I remind you, comrades, computers such as this you cannot buy at a hard currency store?”

“I don’t suppose there is any chance they will believe us?” Volkov asked tentatively.

Kuznetsov snorted again. “Would you? Besides, it makes no difference. The computer was in our care. We lost it. We are responsible.”

Volkov licked his lips. “What do you think they will do to us?”

For a moment there was only the roar and vibration of the engines. “I doubt they will shoot us,” he said at last. “Not when we give them the gold. But we will undoubtedly be interrogated-rigorously.” He paused, remembering the courses he had had on interrogation techniques. Then he tried to shove those images out of his mind.

“They will doubtless conclude we sold the computer for gold. Nothing we could say or do will convince them otherwise. Then they will want to know who we sold it to. Eventually we will tell them.”

“But we haven’t sold the computer!” Volkov protested.

Kuznetsov grinned mirthlessly. “My friend, you do not appreciate scientific socialist interrogation. By the time they get done with us we will have confessed anyway-over and over again. Eventually we will come up with a confession they will choose to believe.”

“And then?”

“Then we will spend the rest of our lives at hard labor in a prison camp.  I understand that under Perestroika conditions in even the severe regimen camps have improved greatly. Now the average prisoner lives as long as seven years.”

No one said anything.

“I have a wife . . .” the co-pilot began.

“She is disgraced,” Kuznetsov cut him off. “She will doubtless be arrested and interrogated as well, probably sentenced to prison.” He thought of his own Yelena and tried not to.

“Comrade Major . . .” Vasily began.

“Yes?”

“Sir, I . . .” He stopped, licked his lips and took a deep breath. Then the words came with a rush. “Sir, they do not imprison the families of defectors do they?”

All five men froze, not even breathing. Then their eyes darted around to the faces of the others, seeking some sign of their thoughts. Finally the other four looked straight at Kuznetsov.

“No,” the GRU man said slowly. “They are disgraced and interrogated, but not rigorously. They are not imprisoned.”

“And,” Volkov added eagerly, “if we landed someplace in the West, they would assume the Americans had reclaimed their computer and were lying about it not being aboard.”

Kuznetsov said nothing at all.

“There are even,” Volkov went on carefully, “places in, say, Sweden, where you can land an aircraft like this and not be discovered for, oh, long enough to hide something in the woods before anyone arrived.”

Kuznetsov hefted the gold bar thoughtfully.

“Comrades,” he said finally, “I understand Sweden is lovely at this time of the year.”

Volkov looked at Kuznetsov, Vasily looked at Semelov and the co-pilot looked at his charts. Then they all looked at the bar of gold in Kuznetsov’s hand.

Without another word, Volkov reached up and flipped off the radar transponder. Then he pushed the wheel hard forward and shoved on the rudder pedal, sending the plane diving for the deck and, as soon as they were below radar, turning north toward Sweden.

Twenty-two: INSTALLATION

“Hey Moira,” Jerry called. “Can you come in here and help me for a minute?”

“Of course,” Moira said. “But what are you doing?”

Because the room had no windows the only light came from a torch on the wall. Jerry was on his hands and knees with a string and a piece of chalk.  With exaggerated care he marked a tiny dot on the concrete.

“Did Wiz ever explain to you about 220-volt single-phase 60-cycle AC?”

“No.”

“Then I’m drawing on the floor. Anyway, I need to mark out a pentagram.  Can you stand in the center and hold the line exactly on this dot while I swing a circle?”

“Of course,” Moira said as she took the string and stooped to hold it on the point Jerry had marked, “but why do you need to be so precise?”

“This spell multiplies a mass times a length and divides it by time. I’ve got to get the units exactly right or we won’t get the output we need. So the pentagram has to be just the right diameter.”

“Forgive me, my Lord, but that is a circle, not a pentagram.”

“Special kind of pentagram,” Jerry grunted.

“It is not a pentagram. It is a circle.”

“A pentagram approaches a circle for sufficiently large values of five.

Now, step out of the way, will you? And don’t muss the lines.”

As Moira moved out of the way, he deftly sketched a shape in the center of his creation.

“That is not any kind of pentagram,” Moira insisted. “That is a circle with a sideways S in it.”

“It does the job of a pentagram,” Jerry said. “Stand back.” He turned to the Emac which was standing nearby.

“backslash,” he commanded. “power_up exe.”

A puff of bright blue smoke billowed into the diagram on the floor, coalesced, condensed and solidified. The demon was about two feet tall and looked like a stick figure. Except instead of straight lines, its arms, legs and body were composed of neon blue lightning bolts. Its nose was a 150-watt light bulb.

“bzzzzp bzzzzp ready,” it said in a buzzing voice.

Jerry nodded and flipped the switch on the wall. The fluorescents in the ceiling flickered and caught, bathing the room in a cold bluish glow.

“Okay. Douse the torch, will you? We’ve got power.”

“Of that I make no doubt,” Moira said, eyeing Jerry’s creation dubiously.

Twenty-three: GREMLINS

“Where does this go, Lord?” asked one particularly lanky guardsman as he and his fellows rolled a tan metal object through the opened double doors.

Wiz looked up from the sea of packing material, pallets and computer parts scattered across the floor of the computer room.

“Oh, that’s part of the air conditioning. It goes in that room over there.  And be careful of the stuff on the floor. There’s metal strapping all over the place.”

Moira looked over the slowly growing computer in the middle of all the litter. It still wasn’t very impressive. There were four tan metal cubes, each about waist high, that stood all in a row. Next to them were a couple of taller cabinets. At the other end was a large desk with a workstation sitting on it-the “console” the programmers called it, although what consolation it might be Moira couldn’t imagine. There were a half-dozen other workstations, a thing Wiz told her was a printer and some other equipment scattered around the room.

“Forgive me darling, but the problem with your world’s magic is that it just doesn’t look impressive.”

“It’s not supposed to,” Wiz told her. “If it looks impressive it scares the suits.”

Moira thought about that and then did what she usually did when the conversation lapsed into incomprehensibility. She changed the subject.

“What does that part do?” She nodded toward the box being maneuvered through the just-big-enough doorway.

“That’s the climate control system. It’s not really part of the computer at all. It just keeps the room at constant temperature and humidity. These things are picky that way.”

“This could be done by magic, you know.”

“I know, but the computer is designed to work with this system and as long as we have electric power, why not use it?”

“Magic would be more reliable,” Moira said dubiously.

“Magic doesn’t work as well here as it does at home. Besides, machinery can be just as reliable as magic.”

Moira arched an eyebrow skeptically, but she said nothing.

“Hey Wiz,” Danny called out. “I think I’ve got the cabling problem whipped. Come look at this.”

Danny had several sections of the raised floor up to expose one of the cable runs. “You know you said it would take us a couple of days to get all the cabling spliced right? Well, I found a way around it.”

“emac” he said, and one of the yard-tall editor demons appeared beside him.

“?” said the Emac.

He reached behind him on the floor and handed the demon the wiring manual and printout of the installation chart. The little demon staggered under the pile of paper nearly as tall as he was. Then Danny gestured down into the hole and commanded “backslash untangle exe.” A foot-tall demon wearing work clothes and a tool belt popped up in the cable run. The Emac flipped open the wiring chart and started to gabble furiously. The demon in the cable run whipped out his tools and began splicing wires so fast its hands were a blur.

Wiz shook his head in admiration. “Danny, that is a truly tasty bit of work.”

The younger programmer shrugged, but his face lit up at the compliment. “I figure it will take maybe a couple of hours to get the cabling done.”

“What does that do to the rest of the schedule?” Moira asked.

Wiz thought for a minute. “We should be able to hook up the climate control this evening. Once we turn it on that’s about all we can do tonight. We need to let the temperature and humidity stabilize before we try to bring the system up. That’ll take six or eight hours.”

The programmers were in fine fettle the next morning. They were days ahead of schedule and best of all, the hardware installation was almost done.  All of them were much more at home with software and they were looking forward to the next phase.

“Well,” Wiz was saying as they came down the hall, “if everything passes the hardware checks we should be able to start loading system software by this evening.”

“That’ll be a relief,” Danny said. “I’m getting sick of messing with hardware. What’s the matter?”

Wiz had stopped dead and was frowning off into space.

“Is it my imagination or is it humid in here?”

“Humid,” Moira said.

“Definitely,” Jerry said.

Wiz looked at the others. “Come on.” He wasn’t quite running as he headed toward the computer room, but he wasn’t far from it. The others were right behind him.

Smoke was pouring out of the computer room.

“What the hell?”

“The place is on fire!” Wiz shouted.

Danny ran forward as if to dash into the room. “That’s not smoke,” he exclaimed. “It’s cool and wet.”

“Fog,” Jerry said wonderingly. “The room’s full of fog.”

Wiz took a deep breath and charged into the computer room. The air was so clammy he could hardly breathe and the fog swirled around him like the special effects in a bad monster movie. Batting at the swirling mist he fought his way to the back of the room. Thick white clouds of vapor were pouring out of the air conditioning duct at the rear of the room.

“Shut off the climate control,” he yelled over his shoulder. “And get a fan in here to clear this stuff out.”

Almost instantly a wind rushed through the room, sucking the fog out faster than it could pour in through the vents. By the time Wiz reached the door again, the air in the room was clear. The relays clicked over and the air conditioning died.

Moira was standing in the doorway with her staff in her hand and the wind she had raised tugging at her skirt and tousling her coppery hair. As Wiz emerged she gestured and the winds died away instantly.

“My Lord,” the hedge witch said with a smug little smile and arched eyebrow, “explain to me again how reliable mechanical contrivances are.”

She looked so lovely with her hair in disarray Wiz forgave her.

It took the programmers and their helpers nearly two hours to get things under control. Water had to be vacuumed out of the soaked carpet, books and papers had to be spread out to dry and a dehumidifying spell was used to help dry out the equipment. Fortunately there wasn’t much damage, but there was a lot of work to be done.

“Okay, “ Wiz said grimly. “Somehow the air conditioner and the humidifier both got stuck on. The low temperature turned the high humidity to fog.”

“We’re lucky we didn’t take two days off,” Jerry said. “We probably would have had ice all over the equipment.”

“I’m damn glad we hadn’t powered up the computer,” Wiz replied. “That would have been a real mess.”

“Hey guys,” Danny called from the back of the room. “These things didn’t get stuck on. Someone reset the thermostat and the humidity thingie.”

Wiz and Jerry crowded around him quickly. Sure enough inside the clear plastic box covering the controls both dials were at their maximum positions.

“I could have sworn I set those properly,” Jerry said.

“You did,” Wiz told him. “I double-checked before I left the computer room last night.”

“Someone must have messed with them,” Danny said.

“Inside the locked cover? I don’t see how.”

“Magic,” the young programmer retorted.

“From where?” Wiz asked. “Moira, did you . . .”

“Certainly not!” the hedge witch said indignantly. “Nor did any of the other wizards here. Believe me, my Lord, if there is one thing any apprentice learns early it is not to tamper with another’s magic. Those who do not learn it do not live long enough to become magicians.”

Wiz put his hand on her arm. “Of course you didn’t darling, it’s just that . . .” Then he stopped as he caught sight of something over Moira’s shoulder.

A line of seven little figures marched across the top of the computer console, their arms swinging and their bodies swaying in time to the song they were bawling out at the top of their tiny lungs. Their voices were so shrill that the words were lost, but the tune came through clearly, as if hummed by a chorus of mosquitoes.

eee-eh, eee-eh

eee-eh heh heh heh heh

eee-eh heh heh, eee-eh heh heh

eee-eh-heh heh heh heh

As Wiz watched, the creatures disappeared through an open inspection panel into the guts of the computer. The last one, evidently realizing it was being watched, waved gaily to Wiz before it dived after its fellows.

“Uh, folks,” Wiz said just a shade too calmly. “I think we’ve found our problem.”

For a moment no one said anything. For a long moment.

“What in the World was that?” Jerry demanded finally.

“I have seen their like before,” Moira said. “The mill in my village had one. How the miller would curse when the thing played tricks on him! He had me down there nearly every new moon to try to rid the mill of it.”

“I take it you didn’t have much luck?”

“No. Sometimes it would quiet down after I came. Sometimes not. Once it dumped near a barrel of flour on the miller and me as we left the mill after the exorcism.”

She paused and shrugged. “I do not know what to call them. They are so rare they do not have a name.”

“Gremlins,” Wiz supplied. “We have gremlins in our computer. Wonderful.”

“Gremlins?” Moira asked.

“Little magical creatures that live in machinery and cause trouble.” He jerked a thumb at the infested computer. “You know, gremlins.”

Moira frowned in the especially pretty manner she had when she was confused. “Love, how is it you have names for these things if they do not exist in your world?”

“They didn’t exist so we had to make them up.”

Moira raised an eyebrow. “That makes less sense than most of what you say.”

“That’s because you’ve never worked around complicated equipment. Believe me, it’s enough to make you believe in gremlins even when you know they don’t exist.”

The hedge witch sighed. “I will take your word for it.”

“The real question is, how do we get rid of them?” Jerry asked.

“I do not know. I was not very successful with the one in the mill.

Perhaps one of the Mighty will know more.”

“What can you tell us about them?”

Moira pursed her lips and tried to think. “Not a great deal, I fear. They are very uncommon.”

“You said there was just one in the mill,” Wiz said, “I just saw seven of them go into the computer.”

“That is very unusual. I have never heard of more than one at any place.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have them around the Capital with all the magical apparatus there.”

“Only mechanical things attract them. Aside from that,” she shrugged, “I know only that they are somewhat like the other Little Folk, the ones you call Brownies.”

“Wait a minute,” Wiz said. “Do you think Brownies could give us some pointers on handling these pests?”

Moira considered. “I do not know. We have no Brownies here to ask.”

“No, but there are Brownies at Heart’s Ease. Lannach and his people, the ones I rescued in the Wild Wood.”

The hedge witch nodded. “They are in your debt then. It is worth a try, yes.”

The brownies arrived the next day, brought along the Wizard’s Way by Malus.

“We are here, Lord,” Lannach said, hopping down from Malus’s pack onto the table and bowing deeply.

Wiz bowed back to the little manlike creature. “Thanks, Lannach. If you can help us we’d really appreciate it.”

Behind Lannach, Breachean, Loaghaire and Fleagh jumped down to the table.  Then Meoan climbed out of the pack and Brechean and Fleagh helped her down.

Wiz’s eyebrows went up. “Meoan too?”

The little woman looked up. “Am I unwelcome then, Lord?”

“No, not at all. I just thought you’d stay at Heart’s Ease with your baby.”

“Lord,” Meoan said gravely, “we owe you our lives. Small we may be, and with scant powers. But we do not forget our debts.”

“Well, if you can keep these little bleeders under control you can consider the debt paid in full.”

“ ‘Twere best we were about it then,” Lannach said.

While Wiz and the others watched from across the computer room, Lannach knelt by a ventilation grill in the base of the console. He called out in a language that sounded like an excited mouse. Then he cocked his head and listened intently.

Although Wiz heard nothing, Lannach apparently got a reply. While Wiz and the other humans fidgeted Lannach conducted a long and seemingly involved conversation in mouse-squeak. Finally he stood up and dusted his hands on his moleskin breeches.

“Your device is inhabited, Lord,” he reported, hopping up on the table next to Wiz.

“We know that.”

“They thank you most gratefully. They say they have never seen a more fitting home for their kind.”

“So we’ve got seven of them living in there?”

The brownie’s tiny face creased in a frown. “Seven? Oh no, many more than that, I think.”

“We only saw seven.”

“Ah, well they are shy creatures so doubtless you did not see them all.

Besides, they multiply quickly when they are in a place to their liking.”

“Look, we don’t mind them living here, but we can’t have them interfering with our work. Is there any way to keep them in line?”

The little creature shook his head. “We can try, Lord. But they are flighty and chancy beings. They will not keep their word even if they can remember from one minute to the next what they have sworn to.”

“I don’t suppose a repulsion spell like ddt would do any good?” Wiz asked hopefully.

“Little, I fear,” Lannach said. “As you may know, Lord, non-mortals differ in their susceptibility to such things. These are especially resistant.  They are hard to dissuade and they would even be hard to kill by magic.”

“Great,” Wiz muttered.

“We can do this, Lord. If my kin and I work together we can probably dissuade them from their worst mischief.”

“That would be something anyway,” Wiz sighed. “Okay, Lannach. Do your best. Meanwhile Moira will show you your quarters and fix you up with something to eat.”

“We have a place for you in the kitchen,” Moira said as she led the gaggle of brownies out the door, “and bowls of milk for you all.”

“Wonderful,” Wiz said as the brownies left. “We got cockroaches.

Insecticide-resistant cockroaches.”

“Just think of it as working with beta version hardware,” Jerry said helpfully.

Wiz glared at him. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“No, it just puts the problem in perspective.”

Wiz groaned.