"If you win you have nothing to fear from him. If you lose-" again the "shrug" "-he will probably not bother with the town."
"Great. And if I do beat him, I’ll still have to best every single other dragon in order to get them to leave the people alone?"
Wurm paused, as if considering. "Probably not. I imagine that after you have slain forty or fifty dragons most of the rest will decide humans are not worth bothering with." He cocked his head. "It would be an effective strategy, were you able to carry it out."
"There’s gotta be a better way," Wiz muttered.
"If there is I would suggest you endeavor to find it," Wurm said. "It would be best if you found it ere dawn tomorrow."
"I’m working on it," Wiz told the dragon and turned to start down the canyon.
"Oh, and Wizard…" Wurm’s "voice" rang in his head.
Wiz turned back to the dragon.
"Do not count on your ring of protection. Even a hatchling could defeat that spell."
"Thanks," Wiz mumbled, and turned his face again toward town.
Twenty-four: Net Gains
The essence of successful consulting is knowing when to bail out.
Wiz spent most of the night staring at the screen and doodling meaningless bits of code. He knew he should be coming up with some dynamite dragon-killing spell, but instead he kept reviewing the spells he did have.
Let’s see. I’ve got lightning bolts… probably not much good against a dragon… suck energy… maybe that would do something… frictionless surface… nope, not against a flying creature… attract fleas… I wonder if dragons get fleas? Occasionally he would compound something out of the spells at his command, combining the old spells to be called in sequence or simultaneously by a single code word. He spent rather more time working on a fire-protection spell that looked pretty good. But mostly he just sat at the terminal and stared into space.
Time and again his fingers would stretch to the keyboard and he would start the sequence to reach the Wizard’s Keep over the Internet. Time and again he hesitated and his hands dropped away. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly but trying to think more clearly only made things less clear. Like trying to squeeze a handful of jelly, he thought morosely.
Anna spent the night sleeping the sleep of the completely unworried-or the really stupid, which may have been the same thing in her case. Bobo spent the night doing tomcat things. No one knew how Widder Hackett spent the night except that she wasn’t talking to Wiz.
The only really active one in the house was Malkin. She spent most of the hours before first light gathering up the booty she had secreted about the place. Even though she’d turned most of it to gold coins through One-Eyed Nicolai it still made a substantial load.
Live for some time on that, she thought as she swept the last of the gold into a leather sack. Time to move on anyway. I was tired of this town. The prospect wasn’t very satisfying somehow and Malkin realized it wasn’t just because this was where she had been born. With a sigh of frustration she dropped the bag on the table. It toppled and spilled a cascade of coins onto the tabletop. Malkin didn’t bother to sweep them back into the bag.
Restless, she wandered down to the kitchen to get something to eat. Once she descended the narrow steps she found she wasn’t hungry. Maybe a cup of hot mulled wine would help her sleep.
She busied herself blowing up the fire and drawing wine from the small cask on the sideboard. She took down a lovingly polished saucepan and put in the wine with cinnamon, cloves and other spices to steep over the still barely glowing coals.
"Smells good," came a voice behind her. "Can I have some?"
Malkin whirled and there was Wiz, dressed for traveling with cloak and staff.
"Startled me," the tall girl said. "But yeah, there’s plenty."
"On second thought I’d better not. I’ll need a clear head this morning." He didn’t sound at all confident.
Malkin ladled out a cup of the hot, spiced wine. "Getting an early start eh?"
"No sense in postponing things." Malkin just nodded and sat down at the table.
For several minutes neither of them said anything or moved, Malkin drinking her wine at the table and Wiz standing on the stairs.
"Look," he said at last. "I’m not much good at these things, but I just wanted you to know that you’ve really helped me here. And I wanted to thank you for that."
Malkin only nodded, not trusting her voice.
Wiz sighed heavily. "Well, I’d better get going if I’m going to make the spot by sunup. Thanks again."
"Good luck Wizard. And thank you." Then she stared down into her wine cup so Wiz couldn’t see her tears.
Wiz went back up the stairs. A moment later she heard the front door open and close.
Well, she thought to herself, that’s that. It was possible Wiz would beat the dragon, of course. But in Malkin’s world winning a fight with a dragon was a near-impossibility. Besides, the wizard hadn’t sounded nearly as confident as he had when he’d been tackling human foes.
She sighed and drained the last of the wine. She still wasn’t sleepy so she poured the rest of it into her cup and headed back upstairs with it. She still had packing to do.
Wiz had left the workroom door ajar and his workstation on. The colored light from the screen saver pattern streamed onto the floor in rainbow patterns of cold fire. Malkin paused at the door, intrigued. A combination of thief’s caution and a certain sense of honor had kept her away from Wiz’s work table so far, but now Wiz was gone and she was going as well. She no longer felt bound and the thing had always intrigued her.
A glance out the window showed the sky just turning pink, so she had a while. She spoke the word that turned off the guardian demon. Then she slipped into the chair, set the wine cup on the desk and started to experiment.
Unlike most of the non-magicians in her world, Malkin could read. Literacy is a handy skill for a thief who wants to know what she is stealing. Thus the keyboard on Wiz’s workstation wasn’t completely alien to her. Further, burglary is as much a matter of attitude as technical skills. Malkin knew nothing about computers and security, but she had seen Wiz type his log-on sequence repeatedly and she had memorized it.
Unfortunately her memory wasn’t that good. The keys were small and fairly close together. What’s more, Wiz’s program didn’t echo the password on the screen and to top it off, Malkin’s typing technique was primitive. Twice she blew the password and she was hesitating with her index finger hovering over the keyboard when Widder Hackett took a hand.
"Not that one dummy!" the Widow Hackett screamed in her ear. Malkin didn’t hear of course, but Bobo jumped up on the desk and walked across the keyboard, placing his paws very deliberately.
Malkin sneezed as the cat’s tail brushed under her nose and when she opened her eyes she was in.
The fiery letters above the desk formed a list of items, each with a number after them. At the top of the list, blinking in and out of existence, was a tiny black demon with a spindly tail and long nose wearing red shorts with two big white buttons in front. When she moved the steel mouse on the table the demon moved. Obviously it was what Wiz called a "mouse," although it looked like no mouse she had ever encountered.