"But you will not help us find Wiz."
Again the chilling, haughty gaze. "Child, do you presume to instruct me?"
"No, Lord."
"Then guard your tongue more carefully." Duke Aelric softened slightly. "Besides, I cannot find him."
He smiled frostily. "That surprises you? It surprises me as well—and tells me that others besides mortals had a hand in this." He motioned fluidly, as if brushing away a fly. "However that is my concern, not yours."
"But you know who kidnapped him?"
"That too is my concern. Little one, among the ever-living revenge is artifice most carefully constructed and sprung only at the proper moment. These ones have offended me and they shall feel the weight of my displeasure at the proper time."
With a sinking feeling Moira realized that to an elf, "the proper time" could mean years—or centuries.
"Now if you will excuse me." He sketched a bow and Moira dropped a curtsey. When she looked up she was alone in the clearing.
Dzhir Kar eyed the man in front of him skeptically.
"So you bring us the Sparrow’s magic?" he said coldly.
"Yes, Lord," Pryddian said. One of the wizards holding him jabbed him sharply in the kidney with his staff. Pryddian gasped and jerked under the influence of the pain spell.
"Yes, master," he corrected himself. "I stole it from the Sparrow himself."
Pryddian was very much the worse for wear. Once he had been passed on to the Dark League’s hidden lair he had been questioned. Since the questioning had been merely "rigorous" rather than "severe" he still had all his body parts and could still function. But his back was bruised and bloody, one eye was swollen shut and he was missing a few teeth. It had taken nearly three days before the wizards who had remained behind were convinced he was worth passing on to their master. His trip south had been expeditious rather than comfortable. Now he waited in the arms of his captors for the misshapen creature before him to decide his fate.
Dzhir Kar considered. It was not unknown for apprentices to decide the Dark League offered them more scope than the Northern wizards—rare, but not unheard of. Still, this was neither the time nor the place to add apprentices, especially ones so recently allied with the North. A quiet dagger between the ribs would have been the normal response to such presumption.
But still, a spell of the Sparrow’s…
"What is this thing?" he asked, flipping through the parchments.
"It is a searching spell. The Sparrow used it to scan the world. It involves three kinds of demons, you see, and…" Pryddian gasped again as the wizard prodded him with the pain spell.
"Confine yourself to answering my questions," Dzhir Kar said.
"A searching spell," Pryddian gasped out. "It can search the whole World in a single day."
Dzhir Kar thought quickly. This just might be the answer to his problem. A host of demons could search the City of Night far better than his wizards could. He had a limited ability to train his demon to ignore specific instances of Sparrow’s magic. If it could be trained to ignore these demons, then the combination of the Sparrow’s own magic and his demon could do in a single day what his wizards had been unable to do in a matter of weeks.
He waved his hands and the guards released Pryddian and stood away. The ex-apprentice slumped to the floor, his legs unable to support him.
"Very well," Dzhir Kar said. "It amuses me to use the Sparrow’s magic to track him down. If you can produce these demons as you say then I will give you your life. Moreover, if they can find the Sparrow, you will be accepted as a novice by the Dark League.
"If you cannot do these things, I will see to it that you suffer for your presumption." He looked up at the wizards. "Take him away."
He nodded to the guards and they half-carried, half-dragged Pryddian out.
They gave Pryddian a cell just off the main workroom and he set out to duplicate Wiz’s searching system. It was not a simple matter for an untutored ex-apprentice to unravel the notes he had stolen. Nor was it easy to cast the spells once he learned them. The Sparrow seemed to delight in alternate choices at every step of the spell and the wrong choices did little or nothing. But Pryddian worked until he dropped. His black-robed jailers saw to that with their pain spells.
It might have amused him to know he was not the only person having trouble with the Sparrow’s spells.
"This guy was a real hacker," Mike said, leaning over his wife’s shoulder to study their latest task.
Nancy nodded and looked back at the code above her desk. "You don’t have to tell me that. Jesus! I’ve seen better commented programs in BASIC." She took another look at the runes glowing blue before her. "And I’ve seen clearer comments in the London Times crossword puzzle!" She jabbed her finger at one line.
"What the hell is this monstrosity? And why the hell did he name it corned__beef?"
"Jerry says the name is probably some kind of rotten pun. What does it do?"
"Basically it takes the value of the characters of a demon’s name, multiplies them by a number, adds another number and then divides the result by 65,353. Then it uses that result as a subscript in some kind of an array." She shook her head again. "Why 65,353? Jesus! You know, if this guy doesn’t come back we may never understand some of this stuff."
The man sighed. "Well, let’s get to it. This is going to take a while." He nodded to Wiz’s book of notes on his magic compiler. "Hand me the Dragon Book, will you?"
Ghost-gray and insubstantial, the searching demons began to pour from the ruined tower and blanket the City of Night.
Each demon had very little power. It could only absorb impressions from the world around it and forward them to a larger demon which would catalog them. The final step in the process was a demon formed like a weird crystal construct that perched atop the tower. It did the final sorting and alerted the wizards if it found anything that looked worthwhile.
Wiz had endowed the demons with all the mortal senses, but no magical ones. Of those senses, sight was the most important to an airborne creature. Since Wiz wore his tarncape constantly there was little visible sign of him. Demons by the thousands searched every nook and cranny of the city, but they saw nothing of Wiz.
Dzhir Kar ground his teeth in fury at the news and ordered Pryddian beaten to make him fix the spell. But Pryddian could not repair what he did not understand and in spite of the demons Wiz eluded the Dark League.
Sixteen: Trouble in the North
You can’t unscramble an egg.
You can if you’re powerful enough.
Dragon Leader looked back over the flight in satisfaction. They weren’t parade-perfect, but their spacing was good. Even his wingman was keeping his proper distance and holding position on the turns.
As he moved in easy rhythm with his mount’s wing beats, he surveyed the forest below. The trees were dark green in their late summer foliage and the pattern was broken here and there by the lighter green of a natural meadow or the twisting channel of a brown stream wandering among the trees. This far north there were a lot of streams because the land got a lot of rain.