"That’s exactly what I wanted. Now let’s let it steep some more and get back to work."
Bal-Simba’s guardsmen showed up the next day. They were a matched set: Dark-haired, blue eyed and tough enough to bite the heads off nails for breakfast. Kenneth, the taller of the pair, carried a six-foot bow everywhere he went and Donal, the shorter, less morose one, was never far from his two-handed sword. In another world Wiz would have crossed the street to avoid either of them, but here they were very comforting to have around.
With their help Wiz moved his things out of the old stable and into one of the buildings in the compound. The accommodations were not much of an improvement, but it was closer to the huts where they now lived and Shiara could come to it more easily to advise him.
"What do you think of this Sparrow?" Donal asked Kenneth one night in the hut they shared. Kenneth looked up from the boot knife he was whetting. "I think he’s going to get us all killed or worse."
"The Lady trusts him."
"The Lady, honor to her name, hasn’t been right in the head since Cormac died," Kenneth said. "That’s why she’s been living out here. Even for a magician she’s odd."
"Not half as odd as the sparrow," said Donal. "I don’t think he’s slept in three days. He sits in there swilling that foul brew and muttering to himself."
"He’s a wizard," pronounced Kenneth as if that explained everything. "All wizards are cracked."
"They say he’s not a wizard," said Donal. "They say he’s something else."
"That’s all the world needs," Kenneth said. "Something else that works magic. I say he’s a wizard and I’ll be damned surprised if we come out of this one whole."
"Well," said Donal as he stretched out on the straw tick. "At least he keeps things interesting."
"So does plague, pox and an infestation of trolls," said Kenneth, replacing the knife in his boot.
Toth-Set-Ra sat on his raised seat in the League’s chantry and heard the reports of his underlings. The great mullioned windows let in the weak winter’s light to puddle on the floor. Magical lanterns hung from the walls provided most of the light that glinted off apparatus on the workbenches. Seated at a long table at his feet were the dozen most powerful sorcerers of the Dark League. Atros sat at his right. The Keeper of the Sea of Scrying was just finishing his report.
"And what else?" asked Toth-Set-Ra.
"Lord, there are signs of magical activity at Heart’s Ease. It is possible the Shadow Warriors missed the magician."
Atros scowled at the man. The Shadow Warriors were his special preserve.
"Our magic detectors are excellent," Toth-Set-Ra said. "If there was another magician there, we would have found him."
"As you will, Lord. But we still show signs of magic in what was once a dead zone."
"Strong magic? Like before?"
The black robe shrugged. "Not strong, Lord, but the taste is much like before. The magician is… odd."
A thrill went down Toth-Set-Ra’s spine as he remembered the demon’s words.
"Perhaps our magician had an apprentice who was absent when the attack came," Atros suggested.
"You say not as strong as before?" Toth-Set-Ra asked. The black-robed one nodded. "Then watch closely," he ordered. "I wish to know all which happens at that place."
"Thy will, Lord," the black robe replied. "But it will not be easy. The northerners are screening it and we cannot get clear readings."
"Keep trying," he snapped.
"Thy will, Lord. Perhaps however the Shadow Warriors should return."
Toth-Set-Ra shook his head. "No, that is a trick which only works once. Bal-Simba—may the fat melt from his miserable bones!—will not be caught napping again." He frowned and sunk his head to his chest for a moment. "But I am not without resources in this matter. I will see what my other servants can do."
Night and day, Wiz drove himself mercilessly. Writing, thinking, rewriting and conducting occasional experiments—usually in the forest with only Donal or Kenneth for company. He slept little and only when exhaustion forced him to. Twice he nearly slipped because of fatigue. After that he made a point of getting a little rest before trying an experiment.
The blackmoss tea numbed his tongue and made his bowels run, but it kept him awake, so he kept drinking it by the mugful.
Wiz wasn’t the only one getting little or no sleep. Shiara wasn’t sleeping much either and there was no blackmoss tea to ease her. Wiz passed her hut late at night and heard her sobbing softly from pain. The lines in her face etched themselves deep around her mouth and down her forehead, but she never complained.
"Lady, you are suffering from all this magic," Wiz said to her one afternoon as they waited for a spell to finish setting up.
"I have suffered for years, Sparrow."
"Do you need a rest?"
A haggard ghost of a smile flitted across her face. "Would you rest, Sparrow?"
"You know the answer to that, Lady."
"Well then," she said and returned to her work.
And the work seemed to go so slowly. Often Wiz would get well into a spell only to have to divert to build a new tool or modify the interpreter. It was like writing a C compiler from scratch, libraries and all, when all you wanted was an application. Once he had to stop work on the spells entirely for three precious days while he tore apart a goodly chunk of the interpreter and rewrote it from the ground up. He knew the result would be more efficient and faster, but he gritted his teeth and swore at the delay.
Wiz took to talking to the guards, one of whom was with him constantly when he worked. Neither Kenneth or Donal said much as he favored them with his stream of chatter. Donal just leaned on his two-handed sword and watched and Kenneth simply watched.
Worst of all, he had to be painstakingly careful in constructing his spells. A bug here wouldn’t just crash a program, it could kill him.
There was no one to help him. Shiara had no aptitude for the sort of thinking programming demanded and there was no time to teach her. Besides, even being around this much magic was an agony for her. Actually trying to work some, even second-hand might kill her.
But somehow, slowly, agonizingly, the work got done.
"Behold, my first project," Wiz said with a flourish. He had been without sleep so long he was giddy and the effects of the tea had his eyes propped open and his brain wired. Consciously he knew that he desperately needed sleep, but his body was reinforcing the tea with an adrenaline rush and it would be some time before he could make himself crash.
Shiara held out her hand toward the silky transparent thing on the table. It moved uneasily like a very fine handkerchief on a zephyr.
"What is it?"
"It’s a detector. You can send it over an area and it will detect magic and report back what it, uh, senses. ’Sees’ would be too strong a word. It doesn’t really see, it just senses and it sends back a signal." He realized he was speed-rapping and shut up.
Shiara moved her fingers through the thing’s substance, feeling for the magic. The detector continued to flutter undisturbed by the intrusion in to its body. "That is not much use," she said doubtfully. "It sees so little and can tell so little of what it sees." She drew her hand back sharply and the gesture reminded Wiz how much it cost her to have anything to do with magic.
"One of them is almost no good at all. But I’m going to produce them by the hundreds. I’ll flood the Freshened Sea with them. I’ll even send them over the League lands—who knows?—perhaps the City of Night itself."
Shiara frowned even more deeply. "How long did it take you to produce this ’detector’?"
"Separate from the tools? I don’t know. Maybe three days."