"Forgive me, my Lords, my Lady," the tall blonde lady said as she entered the room. "Are you occupied?"
Wiz turned toward the door. "Occupied, but not super busy. What’s up?"
"Bal-Simba sent me to request your presence."
"Sure. In his office?"
"At Oak Island off the south coast. A strange thing has washed ashore at the village. Bal-Simba asks that you examine it."
Wiz looked over at the pile of scrolls and the shimmering letters hanging above his desk and paused. A summons to meet Bal-Simba here was one thing. A jaunt to a distant village to look at something was another matter. Even walking the Wizard’s Way, such a trip would probably eat the rest of the day.
"Can’t we just send one of our searching units?" he asked. "We do have to get this stuff done before-"
Arianne hesitated. "Lord, I think you had better see this personally."
"What is it?"
"We do not know. But from the description I think it owes more to your world than ours."
Wiz smelled salt and mud. They were in a hollow between two sand dunes. Gray-green sand grasses and little twisted shrubs grew here and there around them and even in this sheltered spot a breeze ruffled the vegetation and their clothing.
There was a man waiting for them, a rough, grizzled fellow dressed in the bulky knit sweater and canvas trousers favored by the folk who made their living upon the Freshened Sea.
"My Lords, welcome," he said, bowing perfunctorily, as if unused to the exercise. "I am Weinrich, the mayor of Oak Island."
Moira curtsied and the rest bowed. "Well met, Lord. I am Moira and these are the wizards Sparrow, Jerry and Danny."
Weinrich’s face cleared, as if a burden had been lifted from him.
"Ah, well met indeed. They said you might come."
"Well, we’re here," Wiz said a trace sharply. "Let’s see the thing that’s causing all the fuss."
With the growing importance of Wiz’s new magic, and the spreading word that he was from beyond the World, there was a growing tendency to ascribe anything out of the ordinary to the new magic. Normally Arianne and Bal-Simba did not take the villagers’ reports this seriously, still…
As they climbed the dune Wiz saw four dragons flying complex figure eight patterns off the beach, obviously on guard.
"If this is another piece of driftwood," he muttered to Jerry as they toiled up the sand dune, "I’ll…"
Then he came over the rise and saw what was down on the beach.
The villagers had dragged it further up the beach, above the tide line. Now they clustered in knots at a respectful distance.
Off to one side the village hedge witch conferred nervously with a blue-robed wizard of the Mighty. Occasionally he would look over at the thing as if to make certain it had not moved under its own power.
It was worth looking at, Wiz had to admit. To the fisherfolk of this isolated island it must have seemed strange beyond all imagining.
One wing was crumpled under it and the other canted into the air. The front of the body was stove in, apparently from hitting the water. As they got closer Wiz could smell the sharp chemical reek of gasoline.
"An airplane," Danny said.
"Perhaps, but there is magic here as well," Moira said.
Wiz didn’t have his wife’s nose for magic, so he fished out the magic detector he carried in his pouch. The crystal glowed a strong green as he pointed it at the craft.
Magic all right. But gasoline as well. He felt the hair begin to rise on his neck. Whatever this thing was, it was very, very wrong.
"Moira, you and the others stay back. Jerry and I will go in for a closer look."
Moira nodded. "Be careful, love."
"Very careful."
Wiz and Jerry half-stumbled, half-slid down the seaward face of the dune, oblivious to the sand that was trickling into their shoes. As they got onto the beach, they split up. Wiz approached from the tail and Jerry eased toward the crushed nose. There was no sign of movement.
The sea breeze swished through the grasses at the edge of the beach, drowning out the villagers’ whispers and dulling the wizards’ conversation to an unintelligible murmur.
"Look at this!" Jerry called. "It’s got a gasoline engine."
As Wiz ducked under the wing of the plane to join him, Jerry reached out and gave the cowling fasteners an expert twist. Then he flipped the cowling back to expose the power plant.
"High output two-stroke," he said looking it over. "That thing probably puts out ninety horses in spite of its size." He looked further. "No muffler. If that thing was a two-stroke the villagers should have heard it coming for miles."
"It had to be running," Wiz said. "But that’s impossible."
"Maybe not," Jerry pointed to the front of the plane. "Look at the prop. Only one blade bent. That means it wasn’t turning when it went in."
Wiz knelt down beside the propeller. "If it crashed here it’s not surprising. That engine couldn’t possibly run in this World."
"Do you think it was sucked through from our world?"
Wiz shrugged. "Maybe, but how? And why? Anyway, the thing’s obviously not dangerous now. Let’s get the others down here."
Moira and Danny quickly joined them at the wreck. The other wizards kept their distance.
"It’s our technology, all right," Wiz said as the others came up. "No cockpit, so it was a drone of some kind."
"What about the magic?" Moira asked.
Wiz looked at his magic detector. "That seems to be concentrated in the boxes in the mid-section."
"If I didn’t know better I’d say that was an instrument bay," Jerry said, ducking under the up-tilted wing and squatting down beside it.
"Don’t be too sure you know better."
Jerry popped the fasteners and lifted the covering. Inside was a wild tangle of wires and printed circuit boards leading back to several oddly carved lumps of pearl-gray material.
"Cute," Jerry said at last. "Some of this stuff is obviously electronic, but the guts of it," he pointed to the pearl-gray lumps, "are obviously magical."
"We can probably untangle the electronics, but the magic?" He looked over at Moira.
"That is likely to be difficult, my Lord. We do not know who made those things or what they are supposed to do." She frowned and concentrated. "I can tell you that the spells are most powerful, however."
"So the magic’s fine," Jerry summed up. "It’s the engine that doesn’t work."
"Of course the engine doesn’t work," Wiz said irritably. "It couldn’t work here. The whole thing’s impossible."
"Oh yeah?" Danny retorted. "Take a look at those exhaust pipes."