Wiz licked his lips and took a firmer grip on the broken halberd shaft. The rat eyed him hungrily and moved all the way into the room, its naked tail still trailing out into the corridor.
Wiz stepped to one side, hoping the rat would follow and leave him room for a dash to the door. But the rat wasn’t fooled. It lowered its head and squealed like a piglet caught in a fence. Then it charged.
In spite of his disinclination to exercise, Wiz had naturally fast reflexes. Moreover, his two years in the World had hardened his muscles and increased his wind. He was far from being the self-described "pencil-necked geek" he had been when he had arrived here, but he was even further from being a warrior.
The monster closed in squealing. Wiz swung wildly with his rusty axe. The giant rat ducked under the blade and leaped for his throat.
Against a halfway competent swordsman the tactic would have worked. But Wiz wasn’t even halfway competent. He had swung blindly and he brought his weapon back equally blindly, backhand along the same path.
The spike on the back of the axe caught the rat just below the ear. Any guardsman on the drill field would have winced at such a puny blow, but the spike concentrated the force on a single spot. Wiz felt a "crunch" as the spike penetrated bone. The rat squealed, jerked convulsively and fell in a twitching heap at Wiz’s feet.
Wiz’s first instinct was to turn and run. But he checked himself. Think he told himself sternly, you’ve got to think. Running wouldn’t solve anything. There was nowhere to run to and running burned calories he could ill-afford to lose. Panic wouldn’t get him the food he so desperately needed.
Well, he thought, looking down at the gray-furred corpse, maybe I can use one problem to solve another.
Kneeling over the body, he set to work with his halberd.
Wiz emerged from the room a while later wiping his mouth on a bit of more or less clean rag.
Rat sashimi, Wiz decided, wasn’t half bad—if you used lots of wasabe. He didn’t have any wasabe, but it still wasn’t half bad.
While the rest of the team broke for lunch, Jerry, Karl and Moira went back to the apartment to start sorting through Wiz’s papers.
"A barn!" Moira said angrily. "I cannot believe they would do that to you."
"Hey, it’s dry and it looks like it can be made fairly comfortable," Karl said. "Besides, it’s already divided up into cubicles."
"Well, I can assure you, My Lords…" Moira began as she started to open the door.
There was a low moan and the sound of scuffling from the apartment.
Moira threw open the door.
"Danny!" Jerry yelled.
The young programmer was rocking back and forth, his body slamming first forward almost to the desk and then back so forcefully the chair teetered.
"Something’s wrong! He’s having a stroke or something."
"Stay away from him!" Moira ordered. "He is caught in a spell."
"Stop it."
"I do not know how. The command should be in the book.
Jerry edged around the still-thrashing Danny and hooked the Dragon Book off the desk. The dragon demon ignored him, watching Danny the way a cat watches a new and particularly interesting toy.
"Damn, no index!"
"Try the table of contents," Karl suggested.
"No table of contents, either!" He paged frantically through the book and muttered something about hackers under his breath.
"Here it is." He read hurriedly. "reset!" he commanded.
Danny continued to jerk back and forward.
"Exe, My Lord," Moira said frantically. "You must end with exe."
"Oh, right. reset exe!"
Suddenly Danny flopped forward and hit the table with a thump.
Moira and Jerry gently raised him up and leaned him back in the chair.
"Are you okay?" Jerry asked as the teenaged programmer gasped for breath.
" ’s alright," he slurred as he lifted his head off his chest. "I’ll be alright." Jerry saw he was white and shaking but he was breathing more normally.
"What happened?" Danny mumbled.
Moira pressed a cup of wine into his hands.
"You were entrapped by the spell you created, My Lord," she told him. "The spell repeated endlessly and you could not get out."
"In other words you were stuck in a DO loop," Jerry explained.
Danny raised the cup in both hands and drained it in a gulp.
"Jesus. I was in there and it started and it just kept going over and over. Like a live wire you can’t let go." He lowered the cup and it slipped from his numbed grasp to clatter on the table. "Jesus!"
"Tell us what happened."
"Well, I was flipping through the manual and I figured I’d try it out. So I set up a simple little hack, only when it started it just kept going. I didn’t think I’d ever get out."
"That was a dumb-ass stunt," Jerry told him. "You’re lucky it wasn’t worse."
"How the hell was I supposed to know?" Danny snapped. "I didn’t think…"
"You sure as hell didn’t," Jerry cut him off. "And you’d better start thinking before you do a damn fool thing like that again!"
Danny muttered something but Jerry ignored him.
"Okay," Jerry said. "From now on nobody practices this stuff alone."
Wiz was feeling almost jaunty as he made his way up the street with the broken halberd over his shoulder. He was still cold, but on a day as bright as this he could almost ignore that. Besides, the cold was easier to bear when you weren’t hungry all the time.
The halberd made a big difference in Wiz’s standard of living. There turned out to be a lot more food left in the City of Night than he had realized. But almost all of what remained was locked behind doors or in cupboards or chests. In the last few days he had gotten very good at using the halberd’s axe blade and the heavy spike behind to pry, chop and smash things open. Finding food was a full-time job, but it wasn’t quite the hopeless one it had been.
Today he was well-fed on magically preserved meat and bread so dry and brick-like he had to soak it in water before he could eat it. The meat had an odd taste and the water he soaked the bread in hadn’t been very clean, but his stomach was still pleasantly full.
And now this neighborhood looked promising. The street was lined with smaller buildings, two and three stories. A number of small buildings, shops or houses, were more likely to yield food than a few big ones. Best of all, the doors and window shutters on nearly every house on the street were intact. That meant they had not been systematically looted and larger scavengers had been kept out.
The weather added to his mood. There was not a trace of the clouds that usually hung low and gray over the Southern Lands. The only thing in the pale-blue sky was the sun and it was almost at its zenith. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in it, but there was a certain amount of cheer.
A motion above the buildings caught his eye. Wiz turned his head just in time to see a black-robed wizard drift lazily over the rooftops. The man’s robe fluttered about his ankles and his head moved constantly as he scanned the city.
Wiz shrank back against the wall. But he knew he stood out sharply against the dark volcanic rock of the street and buildings. There wasn’t even a shadow to hide in and the wizard was floating in his direction. He was as exposed as an ant on a griddle and he would be fried like one as soon as the wizard spotted him.