The Wizardry Consulted (Wiz, #4)(21)

“You all right?” Malkin asked in a voice that showed more curiosity than compassion.

“Yeah, fine. But if I’m going to get anything done around here I’m going to have to hire a housekeeper.”

Malkin crossed her arms over her chest. “Good luck. Not many as will want to work for a strange wizard in a haunted house.”

“Well put an ad in the paper will you? Or have the town crier announce it or whatever you do here.”

“I’ll take the news to the market.” She looked over at the rapidly scrolling letters of golden fire above his desk under the window. “Meanwhile, what’s that?”

“It’s a workstation. I just built it.”

Malkin looked at the gray box and keyboard sitting on the table and the letters of golden fire hanging above it.

“Built it out of what?”

“Well, actually it’s a program, a spell you’d call it. See, we’ve found that in this world a sufficiently complex program, or spell, produces a physical manifestation, what you’d call a demon.”

Malkin regarded the things on the desk. “Don’t look like no demon I’ve ever heard tell of,” she said. “But you’re the wizard. What’s it good for?”

“Well, what you see here is really just a user interface. It virtualizes what I was used to in my world and that makes it easier for me to relate to.”

“Seems to me any relations you had with a demon would have to be illegitimate,” the tall thief said. “But what’s it good for?”

“Just about anything I want it to be. Right now I’m setting up an Internet connection so I can talk to my friends.”

“More magic, eh?”

“No, it’s technology. I need a machine on the other side,” Wiz explained to the uncomprehending but fascinated woman. “So I’ve created a little dialer demon to troll the net for systems I can set up accounts on.”

Malkin cocked an eye at him. “I see. So it’s demons and trolls but it’s not magic.”

“No, it’s . . . Okay, have it your way. It’s magic.”

Just then the system emitted a bell-like tone. “Boy there’s luck. Less than five minutes and I’ve found one. Uh, excuse me will you?” With that he turned back to the console.

“Now what are you doing?” Malkin asked. “Magic aside.”

“I guess the easiest way to explain it is to say I’m breaking into something that’s locked. Something a good ways from here.”

For once the tall thief seemed impressed. “Burglary without being there,” Malkin said wonderingly. “Wizard, I think I’d like this world of yours.”

Wiz thought about Malkin as a computer criminal. Then he shuddered and turned his attention back to the computer.

Exploiting a hole in the system’s security was easy. In a matter of minutes Wiz had two new accounts set up. The final wrinkle was a simple little shell script to take messages from one account and pass them to the other. Anyone who tried to trace him back could only follow him as far as this machine.

“There, that’ll give me more protection,” he told Malkin as he leaned back from the keyboard. Not a lot, he admitted to himself. But until he got Widder Hackett off his back he wasn’t going to be able to do much better.

“Protection from who?”

“From anyone at the Wizard’s Keep who might want to find me.”

His erstwhile assistant regarded him with a look Wiz was coming to know all too well. “These folks are your friends, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then I’d think you’d be yelling to them for help instead of hiding from them.”

“I can’t,” Wiz said miserably. “I can’t let them find me.”

Malkin muttered something about “wizards” and left the room.

The first order of business, Wiz decided, was to tell everyone he was all right. He quickly composed an e-mail message and sent it over the net to thekeep.org, the Wizard’s Keep’s Internet node.

He typed furiously for several minutes, stopping frequently to erase a revealing phrase or to re-read his work to make sure he wasn’t giving too much away. Then he spent some time planning the exact path the message would take to reach its destination. At last he hit the final “enter” to send the message on its way and settled back in his chair with a sigh of contentment.

He was promptly jerked erect by Widder Hackett’s screech at air-raid-siren intensity.

“Loafing again, are you? The house falling down about your ears and you lolling at your ease. Wizard or not, you are the laziest, most good-for-nothing layabout I have ever seen in all my days.”

There was a lot more in that vein.

Over the course of the day Wiz discovered that the person who said you can get used to anything had never met Widder Hackett. The combination of her awful voice and her complaining nearly drove Wiz to distraction. If she had been there all the time he might have gotten used to her. But she would vanish for five or ten or fifteen minutes only to reappear with more demands just as Wiz was settling in to concentrate on what he was doing.

And there was nothing he could do to satisfy her. Even an attempt to sweep and dust the front parlor ended with the ghost shrieking that he was a useless ninny and all he was doing was moving the dirt from one corner of the room to another. Meanwhile, he not only wasn’t getting anything done, he wasn’t even able to think seriously about what he wanted to do. Worst of all, Wiz discovered that the exorcism spells that laid demons to rest had no effect at all on ghosts.