"Just be careful doing nothing," Moira’s voice admonished them. "That place is not safe."
"No kidding," Wiz said, thinking of the close calls he had when he was a fugitive in the city.
"They’re spreading out fast," Jerry said, craning his neck and shielding his eyes with his hands to try to follow the searchers’ progress.
All the things in the sack were variants of the system of searching demons which had been one of Wiz’s first projects with his new magic. The smaller searchers had almost no intelligence or volition. They were passive receptors which passed information back to the bath towel things for concentration and interpretation. They in turn passed the information back to the crystal object which did the final evaluation.
Unlike Wiz’s original system, this one was tuned to look for only one object, the heart of Bale-Zur. The demons had been trained on similar demon hearts held in the vaults beneath the Capital. When they found a demon heart they would report back to the humans.
Danny poked at the rubble with his staff. "What does the heart of a demon look like anyway?"
"It’s a cloudy sphere about as big as your head," Wiz told him. "Anyway, that’s how it was described to me."
"Do not worry about identifying it," Moira’s voice came inside their heads. "Your searching demons will know it when they see it."
"If it still exists, it should be somewhere in Toth-Set-Ra’s old palace," Moira’s voice told them. "That is," she paused for a second while she translated what the Watcher’s crystal was showing her into their coordinate system, "almost straight behind you."
"I hope it is there," Wiz said. "It will make our job a lot easier."
He motioned toward the palace and all three of them gathered up their magical paraphernalia and set off.
Four: COMA
"Hi. Uh, I’d like to see Judith Conally."
The nurse looked up from her paperwork and flashed a professional smile. "Are you a relative?"
"No, I’m a friend."
"I’m sorry, but only relatives are allowed to visit patients in the neurological unit."
"She doesn’t have any relatives out here. I’m her best friend. Can’t I please see her?"
The nurse looked him over. He wasn’t much more than twenty. A pale and soft youth with brown hair and a complexion that bore a trace of adolescent acne. He was wearing an old flight jacket with several felt-tip pens in the left sleeve pocket and a T-shirt with a picture of a warrior in a horned helmet air-brushed on it.
He had laid a three-ring notebook on the counter with a couple of library books on top.
A student, she decided. Harmless and very earnest.
The nurse glanced at the chart. The visiting rule wasn’t rigidly enforced in the neurological unit unless the doctor requested it and there was nothing on the chart about that. The patient hadn’t had a visitor in a while.
She smiled again, a little less professionally. "I suppose it would be all right, but you’ll have to be very quiet."
The searchers found the heart of the demon before Wiz and his friends reached the palace.
As they got close to the former seat of the Dark League’s power the destruction got worse and the going got harder. In some places it was hard to tell the streets from the flattened houses and in a couple of instances it was easier to avoid the street and go over the remains of the buildings. Once they came to a place where the stone had melted into glassy slag with razor-sharp edges everywhere. Another time seeping water in deep shadows had formed a waterfall of ice nearly ten feet tall.
They saw no signs of life, but once they heard something scrabbling over the rubble as if fleeing their approach.
"Boy, what a mess," Jerry panted as they pulled themselves to the top of the latest obstacle.
Wiz shaded his eyes and looked ahead, trying to find the easiest route. "I don’t remember it being this bad. On the other hand, I stayed away from this part of town as much as I could."
Danny consulted the crystal device. "It’s over that way, in that big black pile of rubble."
Jerry scanned the horizon. "Which big black pile of rubble?"
"That one," Wiz pointed. "Let’s go."
Another fifteen minutes of hard travel brought them through the shattered black gates of the palace. The going was easier here because there had been just one building set in an extensive courtyard. None of the roof remained and everything had collapsed in on itself, but enough of the walls still stood that you could pick out the general outlines of the floor plan.
"This guy sure had lousy taste," Jerry said, eyeing the remains of a strangely twisted mosaic on a partly standing wall.
"I think some of it’s kind of neat," Danny said as he looked over a doorway shaped like the gaping mouth of a monster. He reached out and stroked the door jamb admiringly.
The door growled and Danny jumped back, landing sprawled on the rubble.
"I told you not to touch stuff," Wiz said.
"Yeah." He consulted the locator to hide his embarrassment. "Uh, what we want is down this way."
Another couple of hundred yards and the trio came to an archway that was still mostly standing. Through it they saw five or six searchers hovering around like a patch of smog, pulsing weakly as they sensed their quarry.
"I guess it’s down there," Danny said.
"Great," Wiz said, eyeing the remains of the room. "The debris is only about ten feet deep in there. I don’t suppose you guys brought shovels?"
Jerry looked down at the equipment festooned about him. "No. We’ve got enough stuff here to flatten this place in an eyeblink, but we don’t have anything that will let us move the rubble."
"I could send shovels to you," Moira’s voice said in Wiz’s ear.
Wiz considered. "Let’s try it bare-handed first. Where’s Bale-Zur?"
"The Watchers say it is down by the harbor."
"Moving this way?"
"Not yet. We will let you know."
"Well, come on," Wiz said to his companions. "Maybe the heart is close to the top."
"Maybe pigs will grow wings," Danny said, eyeing the rubble.
"Around this place you never know," Wiz said as he cast the first stone.
As he followed the nurse down the hall, Craig felt like the place was closing in on him. Everything was hushed, like sound didn’t carry here. The lighting was all indirect and the colors were all neutral browns or dark greens. It was like your senses didn’t work right.
He didn’t like hospitals anyway. They reminded him of the time he had spent in corridors, rooms and visitors’ lounges waiting for his mother to die. But even for a hospital this place was spooky. It was visiting hours, but most of the room doors were closed. Only once did he catch a glimpse of someone sitting at a bedside, a dark form outlined in the flickering glow of a TV screen.