Nineteen: Contact
Networking is a vitally important part of the
consultant’s craft. Never lose touch with former clients or colleagues.
The Consultants’ Handbook
Danny swore a particularly sulfurous oath just as Moira walked into the programmers’ workroom.
“I’m sorry, My Lords,” she said and turned to go.
Jerry looked up. “Oh, hi Moira. No, that’s all right. We weren’t swearing at you. We were swearing at the system.”
“More problems?” she asked in the resigned voice Jerry and Danny had come to know all too well since the search for Wiz started.
“I’m afraid so. We’ve been checking the sites on that wacko routing path of Wiz’s and checking them regularly. But now we keep pinging and we keep getting nonsense.”
Danny went over the routing list item by item. Then he stopped dead. “Wait a minute! According to this he’s going through shark.vax.”
“That’s the North Australia Oceanographic Institute. So?”
“So shark.vax is down. They had a typhoon or something. There was a message about it on the net.”
“Let me see that!” Jerry grabbed the tablet from Danny’s hand. He traced down it and frowned. The frown grew deeper as he compared the tablet to the screen.
“Ping shark.vax.” Danny nodded and typed frantically.
“What is it?” Moira demanded, pressing close.
“I think . . .” Jerry began, but Danny cut him off. “See. shark.vax isn’t there. But how is he using it if it’s not there?”
“Magic?” Moira suggested.
Jerry slammed his hand down on the table so hard a pile of manuscripts slid onto the floor. “No, a gimmicked router table! He got into one of those routers and redid the table.”
“Slick. No wonder we couldn’t find him.”
“Does this help?”
“Yes, it helps a lot. All we’ve got to do now is find the router he tricked and see where the entries in the table really lead. With that we can find the switch he’s using and from there we can trace him back to this world.”
“But not quickly?”
Jerry forced a smile. “Oh, it’s not automatic, but we’ll find him. He can’t keep hiding like this for much longer.”
Twenty: The Prancing Pig
Good advice is where you find it.
The Consultants’ Handbook
I can’t keep going on like this, Wiz Zumwalt thought wearily. It wasn’t just that he had lost another solitaire game. He was stuck on the project and stuck fast. Even if he could keep a lid on things with the town council, which was doubtful, he still hadn’t made any real progress on protecting humans from dragons.
In fact, he realized, a lot of what he had done since he came here was in the nature of avoiding work on the problem hoping something would bubble up from his subconscious. But his subconscious was as flat as an open can of Coke left on a programmer’s desk over the weekend.
Maybe his subconscious didn’t have enough to work on. The truth of the matter was that he didn’t know much about dragons and he hadn’t really learned much about them since he came here.
“Hey, Malkin,” he called over his shoulder, at the same time he clicked his mouse to deal another game.
“What?” came a voice in his ear.
Wiz jumped. There was Malkin at his shoulder.
“I wish you wouldn’t sneak up on me like that when I’m working.”
The tall thief shrugged. “I’m not sneaking. It’s my normal way of walking.
Kind of a professional asset, you might say.”
“You might say sneaking, too,” Wiz retorted. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you about dragons.”
“Why ask me? You’re supposed to be the expert.”
“Yeah, but I’ve noticed the people around here don’t talk much about dragons, or even seem to know very much about them.”
“They don’t know because they don’t want to know. As far as most folks hereabouts are concerned the time you learn anything about dragons is usually when someone gets eaten.”
“Still, there must be someone.”
“Well now, since you mention it, there is one fellow who probably knows more than most.”
“I wonder if I can talk to him.”
Malkin shrugged. “Easy enough. If you’re up for a little walk.”
When they left the house they turned away from the main square and the town hall and headed downhill, toward the river. Wiz, who hadn’t been this way much, looked around with interest.
“There’s a lot I don’t understand about the way humans and dragons relate to each other here,” he told her.
“It’s simple enough. Dragons eat humans when they feel like it.”
“Yeah, but beyond that. For instance why haven’t the dragons attacked the town?”
In answer Malkin pointed to a stretch of the street before them. The paving bricks were rougher, darker and shinier. Vitrified, Wiz saw, as if fired at too high a heat. Looking further he realized there was more than one such patch on the street or on the sides of buildings.
“Folks salvage what they can when they rebuild,” Malkin told him. “Usually there’s only bricks and not too many of them.”
The tall woman led him further down into the city. Soon he could smell the river and the mud flats that lined it. They must be almost to the end of the town, Wiz thought.
The river flowed under the bridge between mud banks that took up most of the bed. In spring it must be a torrent, but now, in late summer, there was only enough water to fill a narrow channel.
In the failing light Wiz could see that the earth the town sat on wasn’t ordinary dirt at all. It was heavily mixed with bits of brick, old paving stones and rubble. Here and there vitrified pieces glinted dully in the light of the setting sun.
Wiz realized the entire hill the town sat on was composed of the remains of earlier towns, like ancient Troy. Except here it wasn’t earthquakes and human enemies who had laid down layer after layer of debris to serve as the base for the builders, it was dragons.
“Malkin, look at that.”
“What?”
“The river banks. That’s not dirt. That’s rubble from older towns.”
“So?”
“So this place has been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times.”
Malkin shrugged and kept walking, unconcerned by her hometown’s history.
How many times had the town been destroyed by dragon fire? Wiz wondered as they proceeded across the bridge. How many times had the survivors returned to try to rebuild?
Yet Malkin didn’t seem to care. To her it was just a fact of life, even though it could happen again at any time.
That, Wiz decided, was the scariest thing of all.
The stone bridge was wide enough for two wagons abreast, and well-maintained. The town on the other side of it wasn’t. Almost as soon as they stepped off the bridge the streets narrowed into muddy lanes and began to twist like the tracks of a herd of drunken cows. The aroma told Wiz they weren’t cleaned regularly either. The smell of sun-warmed garbage and ripe raw sewage held a compost-like overtone that suggested they hadn’t ever been cleaned.
“Bog Side,” Malkin explained as Wiz tried to shut off direct communication between his nose and his gorge. “It’s the place to come for entertainment.”
The tall tumbledown houses and maze of narrow garbage-strewn byways didn’t look like Wiz’s definition of Disneyland. The characters who swaggered or skulked or slunk along the streets didn’t remind him much of Mickey and Snow White either. In fact, they made the inhabitants of North Beach and Sunset Strip seem innocuous. Wiz found himself pressing close to Malkin for protection.
Malkin swaggered along, ignoring the others or shouldering them out of her way like so many gawking tourists in a shopping mall. A couple of the more flashily dressed women eyed Wiz and a few of the larger men looked him up and down speculatively, but either Wiz’s reputation as a powerful wizard had preceded him or they knew Malkin too well to try anything. Except for an occasional hand lightly brushing his belt for the pouch that wasn’t there, no one interfered with them.
Malkin led him deeper into the twisty maze of lanes and alleys, between houses that sagged out over the street to support each other like staggering drunks, down alleys over piles of garbage and through open spaces where buildings had collapsed into heaps of broken brick and rotted timbers. Once they passed a long row of substantial brick buildings, sturdy and windowless but stained with time and marred by graffiti and abuse.
“Almost there,” Malkin said as she turned into an alley even narrower and more noisome than the last. Wiz was utterly lost, but from the overtone of mud and long-dead fish permeating the general stench, he thought they had doubled back toward the river.
The alley suddenly opened out into a square facing the river and Wiz blinked as he stepped from the gloom into the mellow light of the setting sun. Not that the view was much of an improvement. The open space was small and piled more than head-high with rubble and garbage. The buildings on either side leaned alarmingly and one of them had already slumped down into a pile of brick spilling out into the square. The opposite side was formed by the burned-out shell of another of the windowless brick buildings. Looking at the blackened brick and fire-damaged mortar Wiz wondered how much longer it would stay standing.
Halfway down the square, Malkin turned suddenly and ducked into a low doorway. Hanging out over the door was a carved wooden sign depicting a rampant and wildly concupiscent pig, its head turned sideways and its tongue thrust out. The hooves, tongue and other parts were picked out in gold leaf, now faded to a mellow brown. Whether through lack of skill or excess of it, the sign carver had turned the conventional heraldic pose into a gesture of pornographic defiance.
Wiz ducked through the doorway and nearly fell headfirst down the short flight of uneven stone stairs that led into the room.
The place was long, narrow and mostly dark. The reek of old beer and stale urine told Wiz it was a tavern even before his eyes adjusted well enough to see the barrels stacked along one wall. A few mutton-tallow lamps added more stench than light to the scene, and here and there the fading rays of the sun peeked through cracks in the bricks. The three or four patrons scattered around at the rough tables and benches all possessed a mien that did not encourage casual acquaintance and a manner that made Wiz want to stay as far away from them as possible. The only one who paid any attention to the newcomers was the barkeep, a big man in a dirty white smock who looked them up and down and then went back to picking his teeth with a double-edged dagger.
It was definitely not the kind of drinking establishment Wiz was used to. There wasn’t a fern in sight, although Wiz thought he detected a smear of moss growing out of a seep of moisture on one wall.
Malkin put her hands on her hips, looked around and breathed a deep, contented sigh. She plopped herself down on the nearest bench and bellowed for the barkeep.
“Hi, Cully! Jacks of your best for me and the wizard here.” The big man grunted acknowledgement and turned to his barrels. It seemed Malkin was known, if not welcomed, in this place.
“Come here often?” Wiz asked casually.
“Often enough. The Prancing Pig’s the place to be if you want to meet folks in the Bog Side.”
Glancing around, Wiz couldn’t imagine going up to anyone in this place and asking him his sign.
Cully slapped down two leather mugs before them. From the stuff that slopped on the table Wiz could see the contents were beer. He picked his up and took a sip. It was thick, potent and flavored with some kind of bitter herb besides hops. The pine pitch used to seal the leather gave it a resiny aftertaste. Wiz was no judge of beer, but the stuff wasn’t bad.
“This is the real city,” Malkin said. “The folks down here don’t put on airs and there’s none of that social scramble and bicker, bicker, bicker you get on the other side of the bridge. Folks in the Bog Side stick together.”
“When they’re not slitting each others’ throats you mean.”
Malkin shrugged. “That’s in the way of business.” She took a long pull on her mug and slapped it down with a lusty sigh.
Wiz followed with a smaller pull on his tankard. “That reminds me. Those big buildings on this side of the river. Are those warehouses?”
Malkin shrugged. “Some were. A long time ago. Farmers’d bring in wool. Some of it would be spun and woven here and more would be traded downriver as it was.”
“What happened?”
Malkin looked at him as if he was a touch slow. “Dragons is what happened. You can’t grow much wool when there’s dragons using your flocks as a lunch counter, not to mention snapping up the crew of a riverboat or two. The farmers still graze sheep, but there’s not so much wool as there used to be. Not so many come to buy, either.”
It made sense, Wiz thought as he took another pull on the oddly flavored beer. Dragons matured slowly and few survived to adulthood. But in a place with little natural magic there was nothing to threaten an adult dragon and they lived a very long time. Over the centuries there would be a slow, steady increase in population and that would mean more dragons to bedevil their human neighbors.
“It couldn’t have all been one-sided, though. Otherwise people would never have gotten established in the valley. You had to have ways of fighting back.”
Malkin snorted into her mug. “Buying peace, more like. Used to be the council would make a deal with dragons. So many sheep, or cattle, or maidens a year and the dragons would leave the rest alone-mostly.”
“But that doesn’t work any more?”
“Seems like there’s a different dragon every year.”
Population pressure again, Wiz thought. Somehow Malthusian economics looked different when you were part of the consumable resource instead of the expanding population. Pretty clearly buying off the dragons wasn’t the answer. All that got you was more dragons exploiting the resource.
“You must have had other ways of fighting back.”
Malkin thumped down her now-empty mug and considered. “There’s children’s tales of heroes who could kill dragons. I suppose they’re true because there used to be statues to them in half the squares in town.”
“Used to be?”
“Dragons didn’t like it. They’d swoop down and melt the statues where they stood. Burn down a lot of the town in the process.” Again the shrug. “That was a long time ago, too.”
It didn’t feel like a solution to Wiz, but he persisted. “Still, you could kill dragons.”
“A hero could. Had to be a hero who would face a dragon in single combat. Sometimes the dragon’d win and burn the town. Sometimes the human would win and we’d be free of dragons for a bit. But heroing ain’t what it used to be. Not so many of them any more and there’s more dragons, seems like.”
“I understand why you have more dragons, but why aren’t there more heroes?”
“ ‘Cause win or lose most of them are only good for one fight.” She jerked her head back toward the bar. “Cully here. He’s the only one around now.”
“Cully fought a dragon?”
Malkin nodded. “He’s the one I want you to meet. Hey, Cully,” she called over her shoulder. “The wizard here wants to meet you. And bring us a couple more while you’re at it.”
As the bartender made his way over with a pitcher of beer Wiz looked at him closely. He was a big man, run to fat now in late middle age and his skin blotchy from sampling too much of his wares. He moved with a pronounced limp with his withered left arm pressed close to his side. For all that he must have been formidable in his youth.
“So you’re the wizard, eh?” Cully said as he plopped the pitcher of beer down on the table. Wiz saw he had brought a jack for himself.
“More a consultant just now,” Wiz said. “I’m working with the council on their dragon problem.”
“Scared a dragon right out of the Baggot Place,” Malkin put in.
“Frightened him so bad he flew away without harming anyone.”
Cully looked Wiz up and down. “So I heard,” he said in a tone that wasn’t quite a challenge.
“It’s a skill,” Wiz shrugged. “But you actually fought a dragon and won.”
Cully filled his own jack and passed the pitcher to Malkin. “Aye. It’s a dragon’s treasure that got me this place. And as for winning-“ He shrugged his good arm. “Well, I’m here and the dragon ain’t.”
Wiz leaned forward. “Did you have some kind of special weapon?”
“What’s the matter, Wizard? Your own methods not good enough?”
“Oh, my methodology for dragon abatement is perfectly adequate. But like any practitioner I seek to add to my knowledge base.”
The big man digested that while he drained most of his tankard.
“Oh, aye, there’s all kinds of lore on killing dragons.” Cully grinned. Since half his face was a mass of burn scars the result was not only lopsided, it was something to terrify small children. “Thing is, most of it don’t work.” He twitched his bad arm and Wiz saw the skin was mostly scar tissue. “That’s how I got like this, following some of that advice.”
Wiz wondered if the dragons exchanged tips on fighting humans.
“Still, you beat a dragon in a single combat.”
Cully’s grin grew even more lopsided. “I never said it was a straight-up fight. That’s not in the rules, you see.”
“There are rules?”
“Of a sort. If you don’t follow them the dragon won’t fight you. It’s his choice, you know, seeing as how he can fly and you can’t.”
“What are the rules?”
“Only show up at the appointed place at the appointed time, all by yourself. After that anything goes.”
“How’d you do it?”
“How do you do it, Wizard?” Cully shot back.
“I do what any good consultant does. Mostly I talk them to death.”
Cully considered. “That’s a new one anyway. I wish you the luck of it.” He paused. “As for me, I started by hiding in some rocks and braining him with a boulder. Then?” The big man shrugged. “Then it was just one hell of a fight.” He looked over Wiz’s shoulder as if seeing something miles away. “One hell of a fight.”
The mood held for a long minute as Wiz considered the implications.
“And no one’s done it since you?”
Cully’s eyes focused back on Wiz. “Not for more than forty years. There’s some as have tried. But none with any luck, you see.”
“Are the dragons getting smarter?”
“There’s them as says that,” Cully admitted. “Or maybe those would-be dragon slayers is getting dumber. Or softer.” He let out a gusty sigh and drained the last of his beer. “I’ll tell you one thing, Wizard. Dragon slaying ain’t what it used to be.” Then he grinned again. “But then neither’s much else.”
Again silence as both men sat lost in thought, Cully in his memories and Wiz in the implications of what he had learned. He needed to absorb all this and the heavy beer was going to his head.
“Well,” he said, pushing his end of the bench back from the table, “thanks a lot Cully. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
The big man grinned his terrifying grin. “Any time you need advice on killing dragons, come and see me.”
“Thanks, Cully.” Wiz turned to go but the tavern keeper cleared his throat.
“You forgot to pay for the beer.”
In a sinking instant Wiz realized he didn’t have any money with him. But Malkin reached into her belt pouch and flipped a silver coin down on the table.
Cully scooped up the coin, bit it, and nodded. “He’s got you paying for him, eh?”
“Wizards don’t use money,” Malkin said carelessly.
“Yeah?” the big man said skeptically. “What do they use then?”
“Plastic,” Wiz blurted. “Ah, little cards, like so,” he opened his fingers. “When you want something you just show them your plastic.”
Cully looked at him with eyes narrowed and Wiz felt foolish.
“And they take this plastic stuff? Just like that?”
“Well,” said Wiz, remembering the times he had gone over his limit, “mostly.”
For the first time the big man’s face showed respect. “You must be a mighty wizard indeed.”
“Where’d you get that silver?” Wiz asked as he and Malkin emerged into the cool evening air.
“One of those pickpockets back at the bridge wasn’t as good as he thought he was,” Malkin said with a radiant smile. “He had money in his pouch too.”
“You picked a pickpocket’s pocket while he was trying to pick your pocket?”
“It was a challenge.”
Wiz just sighed and followed his guide back down the alley, his head full of beer fumes and his mind full of dragons.
So the dragons were getting harder to kill, eh? That made sense too, in a way. The older, more powerful dragons staked out their territories in the center of the Dragon Lands and forced the younger ones to the periphery. That meant that the dragons the humans faced were less powerful and less experienced-less intelligent too, if Griswold was any example. But as population pressure increased bigger, smarter and more dangerous dragons were trying to grab territory on the edge. They’d be harder for human warriors to beat.
He nearly stumbled into a sewage pit and he had to rush to keep up with Malkin.
“Cully is the last of the dragon slayers, huh?”
Malkin nodded. “Far as anyone knows.” Her tone changed slightly. “He may be my father too. Big enough anyway.”
“You didn’t know your father?”
“Nah,” Malkin said. “Left or died or something before I was born.”
“Didn’t your mother tell you anything about him?”
A snort of laughter in the dark. “Barely knew my mother. I was too young to ask questions like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what? She ‘prenticed me to Mother Massiter when I was bare old enough to walk. I was a slavey there for a few years. Then I came into some growth, discovered my talent and I’ve been on my own ever since.”
“But don’t you ever wonder . . .”