"Zol," I called, seeing the author sitting at a table chatting quietly to a couple of Wuhses. Bunny peered around the side of the booth and smiled with relief. Gleep, curled on the floor beside them, raised his head from the floor. His eyes widened with joy, and he sprang to his feet.
"Gleep!" he cried, charging over to greet me.
"No, Gleep!" I shouted. "Stop! Go back! Don't touch the…"
There was a blinding flash of light as he galloped through the spell's boundary. When my sight returned I dropped to my knees beside my poor, fallen pet. I cradled his head in my lap. He had probably been charred to death by the incineration spell. He… he was still green. The mustache under his long nose was still white. And his eyes…
"Gleep!" he exclaimed. His eyes flew open. He tilted his head back so he could lick my face with his long, forked tongue.
His eyes were still blue. He was all right! I hugged him, and he slurped my face again. I gagged. His breath was as stinky as Pervish cooking.
Zol and Bunny hurried over to us with Wensley scurrying nervously behind.
"What has happened?" the author asked.
"Don't come any closer!" I yelled.
"Yes," Zol pondered, throwing out an arm to prevent Wensley from stepping right into the edge of the spell. "I see it now. My goodness, where did you find that?"
Now that we were safely around the corner of the inn facing away from the castle, I plunged the bulk of the spell down into the earth. Tananda and I sat down, and I told the others what we had seen. "And once they let go of the power all of these active spells began working again, including this one. Now we can't get out until the Ten turn it off and take it home."
"Yes, you can," Zol agreed, peering at it closely. "Mistress Tananda was right about the way the spell is constructed. It is a case of polarity. You were inside when it resumed operating, and the Pervect Ten left the room. If you had gone with them, you wouldn't have felt a thing. If you examine the individual tongues of flame that make up the walls, you would see that they have a blunt end and a pointed end. The pointed end is the dangerous one. When you arrived back just now, they were pointing in. This kind of spell works like a door on a two-way hinge. First it swings out, then it swings in."
"Oh!" I exclaimed, as enlightenment dawned. "And Gleep swung it in. So the points are facing away from us?"
"That's right! So now all of you can come out."
Very nervously, Tananda and I rose to our feet. I bent down and looked Gleep in the eye.
"You jump out at the same time we do," I ordered, sternly.
"Gleep," he stated blandly, but I noticed his eyebrow ridges rise. He understood me. I wrapped my arm around his neck.
"One, two, THREE!"
We bounded out. Another brilliant flash of light blinded us for a moment. I could feel my hair crackle on my head, but no blaze of fire tried to consume me. When we let go of one another I patted myself down to make sure nothing was burning. Gleep's long neck snaked all around me as he looked to make sure I was all right. Tananda brushed her hair back, and pulled her tunic down so her decolletage returned to its normal buoyancy.
"That's a nasty one," she remarked. "I'll have to remember that trick." We'd barely straightened up when I heard another crackle from behind me. I spun around just in time to see the column of blue light collapse and vanish. The Pervect Ten were calling their safeguard spell home.
"A very sophisticated use of magik," Zol Icty agreed, leading us back to the table. Montgomery, our host, brought us a tray full of food and beer. I fell on the food as though I'd been starved for weeks. Tananda served herself more daintily, but she filled her plate as high as I did mine. Being terrified and nearly incinerated did help us work up an appetite. "We are up against very intelligent opponents. You say they had a computer in the room?"
"Yes," I affirmed, washing down a mouthful of cheese with a swig of beer. "The little one was reading from an almost infinite scroll. I think it would be the longest scroll in the history of the world, but I couldn't see where it was rolled up."
"It's in virtual space," Zol explained, smiling. "A kind of magik. I could teach you, but that is not the best use of our time now. Can you get me in there?"
We looked at Wensley. He writhed uneasily.
"They're in there all the time except when they eat or sleep or come to supervise us."
"Tonight is time enough," Zol assured us. "I am awake a good deal of the night anyhow."
"You don't want to go back again?" Wensley squawked, aghast.
"How do you want us to figure out what they're doing?" I demanded. "Ask them?"
The Wuhs had no answer to that.
Once again we found ourselves sneaking into the great room of the castle. The Wuhses on what anywhere else would have been guard duty carefully looked the other way as we passed, with all the subtlety of a child counting to 100 in a game of Hide and Seek.
Apparently it had not made the Pervect Ten suspicious that their security spell had been stolen that afternoon. The gleaming blue cage was back in place, this time tethered with lines of force to the walls of the castle, preventing it from moving again. That didn't worry me, because now we knew how to pass in and out of it without being killed.
The little flames were pointing inward when we reached the room, a sign that the Ten were not in it. Very carefully I used a tendril of magik to ease open the door wide enough to peer through. As I hoped, the room was dark and silent. I signaled to the others. We tiptoed in.
I had left Gleep at the head of the corridor curled up under a couch set in an alcove. If he saw any Pervects heading towards us he had instructions to cry out. At the sound of "Gleep!" we were to run into the anteroom and pop back to the inn. He would meet us there as soon as he could get away from them. They'd be unlikely to suspect an innocent-looking baby dragon of subterfuge. I hoped.
"Now, Pervect code is very hard to break," Zol explained, as he sat down in the child's chair and flexed his long fingers. I noticed with surprise that he fit into the seat fairly well. "They tend to like permutations of complex numbers as their secure logarithm."
Bunny sat on the desk beside her hero, watching him raptly. I felt a twinge of jealousy, wondering what I would have to do for anyone to admire me like that. Tananda came up and wrapped her arm around me.
"Don't worry, hot stuff," she told me, with a little smile. "She'll snap out of it. She likes you just the way you are."
I flushed. Bunny was my friend. I wasn't trying to im- press her. Was I? Embarrassed, I moved off to take a look out the door. I hoped none of the Pervect Ten was going to get up in the middle of the night to work on their plans for conquest. The hall was empty. My breathing was the loudest thing at this end of the room.
Zol wasn't doing so well. Using all his fingers and thumbs he was pushing the buttons on the board so fast they chattered. I noticed that there was a small symbol in the center of each button. Since I had seen written and printed Pervish I knew they stood for letters of their alphabet, though I couldn't read them. In the screen images and words flashed. I couldn't tell what any of them meant, but one kept coming up time and time again: a big X.
"What's that mean?" I said, pointing.
"Well, in some languages it means do not enter," Zol began, his fingers dancing along. "In Pervish and a few others it is an archaic way of writing 'ten,' which in this case would be appropriate, but I believe it also has the added meaning of 'the unknown variable,' this being the key to the library of documents locked within this computer. There are quite a lot of them. That is one of the few facts I can glean. The rest is protected by the password, which the X indicates. Since I don't know it I have been putting in my guesses as to possible keywords. I've tried over a thousand words in every combination of capital and small-case letters, plus permutations and combinations of profit/loss formulae, which are familiar to every Pervish college graduate, but I've been unlucky so far. Still, there's hope. I'm bounded only by the number of keys here on the keyboard, and there's a finite number of combinations…"