"And you will make hundreds of them? In your spare time, perhaps. Impractical, Sparrow. Or do you plan to teach the craft to a corps of apprentices?"
"Oh, no. When I say three days, I mean the time it took me to write the program to make them. Once I run some tests and make sure it’s up to spec, I’ll start cranking them out automatically."
"You will not need to watch them made? Isn’t that dangerous?"
Wiz shook his head. "Not if I do it right. That’s the whole point of the interpreter, you see. It lets you spawn child processes and controls their output."
It was Shiara’s turn to shake her head. "Magic without a magician. A true wonder, Sparrow."
"Yeah," said Wiz uncomfortably, "well, let’s make sure it works."
Silent, dumb and near invisible as a smear of smoke, the thing floated above the Freshened Sea. Sunlight poured down upon it. Waves glittered and danced below. Occasionally birds and other flying creatures wheeled or dove above the tops of the waves within its view. Once a splash bloomed white as a sea creature leaped to snare a skimming seabird.
A human might have been entranced by the beauty, oppressed by the bleakness or bored to inattention by the unchanging panorama below. The wisp of near-nothingness was none of these things. It saw all and understood nothing. It soaked in the impressions and sent them to a bigger and more solid thing riding the air currents further north. That thing, a dirty brown blanket perhaps large enough for a child, flapped and quivered in the sea winds as it sucked up sense messages from the wisp and hundreds of its fellows. Mindlessly it concentrated them, sorted them by content and squirted them back to a crag overlooking the Freshened Sea where three gargoyles crouched, staring constantly south.
The gargoyles too soaked in the messages. But unlike the things lower in the hierarchy and further south, they understood what they saw. Or at least they were capable of interpreting the images, sounds and smells, sorting according to the criteria they had been given and acting on the results.
Most of what came their way, the sun on the waves, the fish-and-mud smell of the sea, the wheel of the seabirds, they simply discarded. Some, such as the splash and foam of a leaping predator, they stored for further correlation. A very few events they forwarded immediately to a glittering thing atop a ruined tower in a charred stockade deep in the Wild Wood.
Thus it was that a certain small fishing boat seemed bound to pass beneath the cloud of wisps which was gradually blanketing the Freshened Sea. But no net is perfect and no weave is perfectly fine. Scant hours before the last of the insubstantial detectors wafted into position in that area, the boat sailed placidly through the unseen gap in the unsensed net.
Her name was the Tiger Moth. Her sails and rigging were neat and well cared for but not new. Her hull was weathered but sturdy with lines of dark tar along the weatherbeaten planks where she had been caulked for the winter’s work. In every way and to every appearance she was a typical small fisher, plying a risky trade on the stormy winter waters of the Freshened Sea. If you looked you could find perhaps a hundred such boats upon the length and breadth of the sea at this season.
On the deck of the Tiger Moth, the captain of the Shadow Warriors looked at the clouds and scowled. There was another storm in the offing and naturally it would come from the south, blowing the vessel and its precious cargo away from League waters and safety. One more delay in a long series of delays. The Shadow Captain swore to himself.
His orders were strict. Bring the captured magician back at all costs. Do not fly. Use no magic which might attract attention, not even the sort of simple weather spells a fisherman with a mite of magical ability could be reasonably expected to possess.
When the flying beasts brought the raiders back to their seashore camp, he had bundled his captive aboard the waiting boat and set out at once for the League’s citadel in the City of Night. The other raiders had rested the day and then flown off on their great gray steeds after sunset. They had been back at the City of Night for days now, while the Shadow Captain and his crew of disguised fishermen faced more days of sailing to reach the same destination. It was much safer to sneak his prize south like this at the pace of an arthritic snail, but it tried even the legendary patience of a Shadow Warrior.
The sea was against them. That was to be expected at this time of the year, when what winds there were blew up from the south and the frequent storms came from the south as well. It was not a time for swift travel upon the Freshened Sea.
The Shadow Captain knew too that the Council was searching strongly for him and his prisoner. Several patrols of dragon riders had flapped overhead, gliding down to mast-top height to check him and his boat. The Shadow Captain had stood on the poop and waved to them as any good Northerner would, never hinting that what the dragon riders sought lay in a secret cubby in the bow of his vessel.
For two days his ship had been trailed by an albatross which floated lazily just off the wavetops as if searching for fish in the Tiger Moth’s wake. It had not escaped the Shadow Captain’s notice that the bird never came within bowshot.
While the albatross was with them, the Shadow Warriors had acted the part of fishermen, casting their nets and pulling in a reasonable catch, which they gutted and salted down on the deck. Thus they kept their cover, but it slowed them even more.
And now a storm, the Shadow Captain thought, Fortuna!
The object quivered gossamer and insubstantial in the magic field which held it, fluttering weakly against the invisible walls.
"What is it?" Atros asked.
"We do not know, Lord," the apprentice told him. "One of our fliers found it in the air above the city."
"What does it do?"
"We do not know."
"Well, what do you know?" the magician snapped.
"Only that we have never seen its like before," the apprentice said hastily.
"Hmmm," Atros rubbed his chin. "Might it be neutral?"
The apprentice shrugged. "Quite possibly, Lord. Or perhaps the work of a hedge magician. No wizard would waste his substance making such a bagatelle."
The magician regarded the caged thing on the table again. He extended his senses and found only a slight magic—passive magic at that. "Very well. Return to your watch. Inform me if any more of these are found."
"Thy will, Lord. But they are very hard to find or see."
"Wretch! If I need instruction from apprentices I will ask for it. Now begone before I give you duty in the dung pits."
"What does this do?" Shiara asked, tracing the slick surface of Wiz’s latest creation dubiously.
"It’s a Rapid Reconnaissance Directional Demon—R-squared D-squared for short." He grinned.
"Eh?"
"It’s an automatic searcher. It transports to a place, searches for objects which match the pattern it’s been given and if it doesn’t find such an object, it transports again. When it does find the object, it reports back. It has a tree-traversing algorithm to find the most efficient search pattern."
"I doubt you’ll find what you want in a tree," Shiara said doubtfully.
"No, that’s just an expression. It’s a way of searching. You see, you pick a point as the root and…"
"Enough, Sparrow, enough," said Shiara holding up her hand. "I will trust you in this." She frowned. "But why did you make it in this shape?"
"To match its name," Wiz grinned.
"You see, Kenneth, names are very important," Wiz said seriously. "Picking the right ones is vital."
Wiz sucked another lungful of cold clear air and exhaled a breath that was almost visible. Overhead the sun shone wanly in a cloudless pale blue sky. The weak winter’s light gave the unsullied snow a golden tinge.