The Wizardry Consulted (Wiz, #4)(8)

The hedge witch rounded on Jerry. “You swore to me that the spell could follow him anywhere. No matter what.”

Jerry spread his hands helplessly “It should. I don’t understand it.”

“I do, I fear,” Bal-Simba rumbled. “The dragon is shielding Wiz’s location from us.”

Moira clenched her fists and hissed something very unladylike under her breath.

“I suspect he had no intention of attacking us at all,” the giant wizard went on slowly. “That was simply a ruse to distract us while he made off with Wiz. And while we prepared for the attack which would never come the dragon wove his spell masking their whereabouts.” He scowled fiercely. “As Wiz would say, we have been slurped.”

“That’s suckered,” Danny corrected.

“What it is does not matter,” Moira snapped. “We have to find him.”

Bal-Simba shrugged. “Easier said than done, I fear.”

Danny twisted the ring on his finger. “I thought these things could punch through any counter-magic.”

“Any human magic,” Bal-Simba said. “Dragon magic is different and of a very high order. This Wurm is extremely powerful even for a dragon, I think.”

“What do you think he wants with Wiz?” Danny asked.

Bal-Simba only shrugged. “Who knows the mind of a dragon?” Then he caught Moira’s expression. “But I do not think he intends to kill him,” he added quickly, “or even harm him, necessarily. Beyond that? I would not venture to guess.”

“Wait a minute,” Jerry said. “Can’t Wiz contact us?”

“He can if he is unconstrained,” Bal-Simba said.

They all fell silent. Everyone in the room knew what it took to constrain a wizard from communicating.

“Well, how do we find him?”

“The Watchers are being alerted now,” the giant black wizard said. He turned to Jerry. “My Lord, can you release the recon demons?”

“I’ll get on it immediately. It will take a while to extend their coverage though.”

“As quickly as you can, then. Now if you will excuse me . . .” He turned and hurried from the room.





Four: Misdirection for the Directionless


Sometimes the problem you’re hired to solve is not the real problem.

The Consultants’ Handbook



Okay, Wiz admitted and he leaned against the bars of his cell, maybe it wasn’t my best opening line.

At least they hadn’t killed him. On the other hand, there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t kill him. And considering the way they’d acted that was a definite possibility. In fact that option had strong minority support in the mob. What had passed for cooler heads had held out for “The Rock,” whatever that was. Wiz had a suspicion he’d find out soon enough and an even stronger suspicion he wouldn’t like it.

After a brief argument over his fate, they had hustled him back to town with a pitchfork in his back. Now he was on the second floor of a fairly substantial building. More precisely, he was in jail.

Wiz had never seen one of this world’s jails before but he had no doubt that he was in one now. There were bars running from floor to ceiling on three sides and a windowless stone wall on the fourth. There was a narrow bunk bolted to the wall and a chamberpot underneath. The layout reminded Wiz vaguely of a Western movie set, but the substantial bars were no stage props. The cells to either side of him were empty. The place was clean enough, but smelled faintly of must and dust, as if it wasn’t swept regularly.

From the glimpses he had gotten as the mob frog-marched him through town, the place was larger than it had appeared. In fact it was a good-sized town or even a small city, enclosed in stone walls. Most of the buildings were built of a combination of timber and stone, but a few of the more imposing ones were all stone. That included this very imposing jail off the main square of the town.

There were offices of some sort down on the ground floor and every so often someone would mount the narrow staircase to peek in. Somewhat less frequently the jailer, a thin, sour-looking man with jug ears and a big nose, would come all the way into the room to check on him. He was careful not to get too close, Wiz noticed, and if he had the keys he wasn’t carrying them.

Wiz toyed with the idea of creating a spell to unlock the door but he decided the best thing to do was to wait and see. If he was going to solve these people’s problem he needed more information and he wasn’t likely to get that as a fugitive from justice.

Still, it wasn’t a very comfortable situation. Wiz sat on the edge of the bunk and wondered how he had gotten into this mess.

Let’s see, he thought. A dragon wants me to protect these people from dragons. The people who live here want to string me up because I’m working for a dragon-only I’m not working for a dragon, I just agreed to find out what the dragon wanted. Except the people still want to string me up for associating with dragons and I’m still not sure what the dragon really wants and . . .” And he was getting a headache.

For some reason he remembered visiting a psych major buddy in her lab long ago and far away. Sybil had been running rats through mazes as part of some kind of project and while they talked she kept a stopwatch on the rat and its frantic efforts to escape. It had been a long time ago and Wiz found he couldn’t remember what Sybil looked like very well, but he had a crystal-sharp memory of the expression on the rat’s face.