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.
There was a stirring in a corner of the room off behind the stairs. Wiz looked again and someone stepped out of the shadows. Someone tall, slender and wearing a jerkin and tight trousers. Then she took another step out into the full light and Wiz saw it was a woman. A young woman, actually, he amended, with dark hair down to her shoulders, dark eyes and fair skin. She strode lightly across the room with the easy grace he associated with gymnasts or dancers. Somehow Wiz didn’t think she was either of those things.
She stopped several paces from the bars and put her hands on her hips. “So you’re the wizard, eh?”
Wiz nodded. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Malkin. I’m here for stealing. What’d you do?”
“Not much of anything, actually. My name’s Wiz.”
“You came here riding a dragon, didn’t you? That’s enough.”
“Well, if you knew why did you ask?”
Malkin shrugged.
“And,” he added, “if you’re a prisoner too, how come you’re on the outside?”
Malkin grinned and held up a key ring. “Like I said, I steal things.”
“And you’re still hanging around here?”
His new acquaintance grinned. “Jail’s as good a place as any to doss,” she said lightly. “Besides, listening is more fun than escaping. They’re arguing about you in the sheriff’s office.”
“What are they saying about me?”
“They want to take you to The Rock.”
“What’s The Rock?”
“That’s where they chain out the condemned for the dragons to eat,” Malkin told him. “Supposed to keep the dragons satisfied so they don’t eat anyone important.”
“Does it work?”
“Nah. But the dummies keep doing it anyway.” She shrugged. “You’re an outsider, so you’re natural.”
“Not much tourist business here, is there?” Wiz asked sourly.
Malkin shrugged again. “Anyhow, the folks who brought you want to take you to The Rock right away and the sheriff doesn’t want to until the mayor and council have a chance to see you. So far the sheriff’s winning. That means you’ve got a few hours because it will take them that long to get most of the council together.”
“Does the sheriff think the mayor won’t want to see me killed?” Wiz asked hopefully.
“Nah. But ol’ Droopy’s a stickler for protocol. If he isn’t consulted he’ll make the sheriff’s life miserable for weeks. So it’s better for the sheriff to wait.”
Wiz opened his mouth to reply but Malkin faded soundlessly back into the shadows. An instant later the jailer poked his head up the stairwell.
“Who are you talking to?” he demanded.
“Myself,” Wiz said brightly. “I often have long conversations with myself. I find I’m excellent company. I play bridge with myself, too. You don’t happen to have a deck of cards, do you?”
The jailer looked at him oddly and ducked back down the stairs.
Wiz lay down on his bunk and thought hard. Unless these people had some very powerful magicians, something he had seen no sign of, he could get out of here any time he wanted to. But that wouldn’t help solve his problem. Given a little time to prepare spells, his magic would probably let him beat a dragon-provided it wasn’t too big or too powerful. But he didn’t think that he could take on all the dragons in the Dragon Lands alone and win. That obviously wasn’t the answer.
He might be here to help these people but they felt he had a higher and better purpose as dragon bait. They didn’t want help, they wanted a sacrificial goat they could hang all their trouble on. Yet he had to help them! It was imperative that he solve their problem.
Wiz chased the problem round and round in his mind without finding even the beginnings of a solution. He did, however, find an increasing sympathy for that long-ago rat in the nearly forgotten psych lab. He wondered if the rat had ever found the solution to its problem. Then he wondered what constituted a “solution” to a psych maze from the rat’s point of view. The patch of sunlight from the window in the side wall finished its journey up the wall and gradually dimmed out at dusk. Outside the street noises quieted and died as the city settled into sleep. Eventually Wiz did the same.
Gently, soundlessly, the searcher floated north into the graying dawn. Physically it looked like a smear of smoke or a wisp of gray silk about the size of a handkerchief. Magically it was nearly as uncomplicated. All it did was gather sense impressions and pass them on to a slightly larger, somewhat more substantial entity floating along well behind it. It had only limited mobility and moved mostly by floating on the wind.
By itself it wasn’t much, but the searching spell cranked them out by the tens of thousands. The searchers fed back into hundreds of the larger concentrators and they fed into dozens of high-level analysis demons. Given time they could find anything in the World that was in the open and unmasked. Slowly, inexorably, the net of magical watchers was spreading over the face of the World.
The rising sun tinted the underside of the clouds orange but the mountains below were still in deep shadow. Soon the sun would break above the horizon and bathe the mountain peaks in fire. It would be a glorious sunrise but the searcher was incapable of knowing or caring. It floated where the wind took it, working generally north on the air currents.
The searcher saw the speck detach itself from a peak and waft into the air, but it attached no more significance to it than to the pinkened clouds or the dark valleys. Analysis was for the higher echelons. So it faithfully recorded the speck’s growth and resolution into a dragon, climbing to just below the bottom of the clouds. It watched without apprehension as the dragon approached, its great wings cleaving the air in mighty beats. It felt no fear as the dragon swooped down with its wings slightly folded to increase the speed of the dive, and no terror as a gout of dragon fire blotted out its existence. All of this it simply recorded and transmitted back to the collector, neither knowing nor caring that another dragon had flamed the collector minutes before.
Its killer, a young female only recently sentient, felt a pang of fierce joy at having destroyed the intruder. She gloried in her strength and prowess as she climbed toward the clouds to begin her day’s hunting-and to kill any more of the strange creatures who invaded her territory.
Back at the Wizard’s Keep, Jerry Andrews studied the results on his display and frowned.
“A problem?” Arianne asked mildly. Bal-Simba had been up late and his assistant had taken the early watch. Jerry had been up all night and probably wouldn’t crash for a few more hours.
“Something’s happening to the searchers.” He took a long pull on the mug of blackmoss tea on his workbench and swiveled to face the tall blond woman. “We’ve got good coverage on the lands of man and the Wild Wood, but when we move outside that territory we start losing them.”
“Losing them?”
“The search demons. Mostly they’re being destroyed. Some we’re just losing contact with. I think those are local magical effects. But a lot of them are being attacked by dragons.”
It was Arianne’s turn to frown. “That could be natural. Dragons are common beyond the borders of the lands of man and they do not like other flying objects in their air.” She paused.
“Do you think it’s natural?”
“I do not know,” the wizardess said slowly. “I would not count on it.”
“Wurm’s doing?”
“It may be. However, dragons are solitary creatures. It takes a great cause to get them to cooperate, even slightly.”
“Which means that kidnapping Wiz is a very big deal for the dragons.”
“What it means, I think, is a problem for Bal-Simba when he awakens, and possibly the Council of the North. It is far beyond my abilities to decipher. What does this do to your search?”
“Complicates the hell out of it.” Jerry swiveled back to the columns of glowing letters above his bench. “We’re not getting any searchers more than a couple of hundred leagues beyond the borders of the known world. Unless we can change that we’re going to be limited in where we can look.” He took another pull on his tea mug. “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to find Wiz in the known world.”