"Protection spells. Really heavy-duty protection spells. You know, like force fields in the science fiction movies."
Danny’s eyes lit up. "Hey, cool!"
"Do you think that would work?" Jerry asked.
"It might. At least it would be better than nothing."
"Such spells are powerful magic that stands out strongly," Moira said dubiously.
"They stand out strongly in your World," Wiz said. "But magical senses don’t work as well here. Besides, Craig and Mikey don’t use magical detectors the way your people do."
"We hope," Moira corrected. "And in any event, where do you propose to get the time to create such a spell?"
"Oh, I’ve got most of the groundwork done already," Wiz said. "I’ve been working on it off and on ever since I was rescued from the City of Night. Believe me, there is nothing like being nearly killed a dozen times over to make you think about ways to protect yourself."
"Voila!" Wiz proclaimed and placed five rings on the table like a handful of jacks.
"They look like something out of a Crackerjack box," Danny said dubiously.
"Well, as a matter of fact…" Wiz began. "Never mind. It isn’t what they look like, it is what they do."
"They are certainly charged with magic," Moira said, eyeing the pile of trinkets. "Even in this place they have powerful auras."
"They’ve got more than that," Wiz said smugly. "This is a truly tasty hack, if I do say so myself."
Danny reached out and poked one of the rings with his forefinger. "So what do they do, shoot lightning bolts?"
"Nope, they generate a stasis field. Basically the spell is an amplified variation of that spell we used to stretch out a night and get more programming time while we were working on the magic compiler. Except instead of stretching nights out two-to-one, this spell stretches time out sagans to one."
"Sagans?" asked Jerry.
"Yeah, you know. Like ’SAY-guns and SAY-guns of light years.’ "
"Oh, right," Jerry said, catching the imitation of the famous astronomer.
Moira frowned. "One moment. You say this spell slows down time enormously?"
"Yep."
"Then how can you move when the spell is active?"
"You can’t. It freezes you solid. But nothing can hurt you."
"Still, the spell can be broken, can it not?"
"It automatically shuts off when malevolent magic goes away. Kind of like the protective spell I used against those dwarves."
"So at the first sign of trouble you slip on the ring and turn into a statue?"
"Well, no. We wear the rings all the time. They activate automatically when you’re under direct attack and they stay active as long as you’re in danger. The rest of the time they’re inert."
"These things are like bullet-proof vests?" asked Jerry.
"More like an airbag in a car. Nothing happens until you need it."
Wiz passed the rings around and each of them slipped one on. Then Danny turned and held one out to June. But she hissed and shrank away as if Danny had offered her a scorpion.
"June, please." But June’s face was white and she refused to touch the ring.
"It is not like the enchantment in the elf hill," Moira said, coming over to her and laying a hand on her arm. "It will serve only to protect you." Still June shook her head and turned away.
Danny held up his hand to display the ring he was wearing. "Look, if I wear this and you don’t, we’ll be separated if something happens. But if we both wear one we’ll always be together. Please darling, wear it for me."
Hesitantly June reached out a shaking hand and clutched the ring Danny extended to her. With a sudden move she jammed the ring onto her finger and then jerked her hands back into the folds of her skirt. Danny grabbed her and hugged her to him.
"Oh yeah, I almost forgot," Wiz said a shade too brightly. "There’s another way to turn the ring on and off."
He held up his hand and mimed twisting the stone. "If you want you can activate the spell by turning the stone in the ring a quarter turn to the right. You can deactivate the spell in the presence of danger by having someone turn the stone a quarter turn to the left."
"What kind of a moron would want to turn off the spell when he’s in danger?" Danny asked.
Wiz stopped short. "You know, I never thought of that."
"Feeping creatureism," Jerry said.
"What kind of creature?" Moira asked.
"A feeping one," Danny explained. "That’s one that has too feeping many…"
"What it means is that I’ve added features just to add features," Wiz interrupted. "It’s a spoonerism on featurism."
"If you expect me to ask you about spoons, my Lord, you will be sorely disappointed. Nevertheless I understand the idea."
"Yeah," Wiz said sadly, "and that took more work than all the rest of the spell put together."
"So now we can continue to work even under the strongest magical attack?" Moira asked, eager to get the conversation back to something that halfway made sense.
"Not under actual attack, but right up to the minute it begins."
Moira looked down at the ring on her finger. "I hope it works."
"I hope we never find out," Jerry said fervently.
Forty: RAID
The drone had come so far south only by accident, cut off from its base by a line of strong thunderstorms and blown well past the point where it should have turned for home. Nevertheless it kept recording what its sensors recorded and transmitting it back to the castle.
There wasn’t much. This part of the island was mostly low hills covered with open forest. It had been hours since the drone had seen anything even as interesting as a herd of animals. Just the occasional bird, a motion in the branches that might be an animal and the mixture of trees and grassy clearings.
The sun was almost to the horizon and the shadows had lengthened and begun to blend together into the beginnings of dusk. The drone was a already headed north, back toward its home when its infrared sensor recorded a patch of anomalous heat off to the right. True to its programming, it turned away to investigate.
A quick scan found nothing in the visual band to account for the heat, no sign of sun-heated rocks or hot springs. The machine was too simple-minded to be puzzled, but it did have contingency programming for something like this. It shut down its engine, switched on its full sensor array and turned to glide over the hot spot.