Moira wasn’t fancy. She just threw the three worst death spells Wiz and his friends had taught her. She topped it off with the worst spell in the old magic she remembered from her days as a hedge witch-a spell guaranteed to give the victim a case of hives.
Danny’s spell was probably the most ingenious. It took all the random molecular motion in the dragon’s body and pointed it in one way-toward the highest gravity potential. What was left of Ralfnir didn’t just drop out of the sky, he hurtled with ever-increasing speed. In the space of a few hundred feet the dragon went from zero to Mach eight. Straight down.
Where he hit, Ralfnir literally left a smoking hole in the ground.
Wiz sagged against his staff and stared dumbly at the hole where the dragon had been. Then he stared at his friends coming across the meadow to him. Neither event registered very strongly.
“You shouldn’t have come,” Wiz mumbled as Bal-Simba reached him slightly ahead of the others. “You weren’t supposed to come. I didn’t want you here. You’ve ruined everything.”
He was still mumbling when Bal-Simba laid a huge hand on his shoulder. “Sparrow look at me,” he commanded. Wiz met his eyes and his mouth dropped open. He shuddered, staggered and would have fallen if Bal-Simba had not taken his arm.
“Wha . . . what . . . ?”
“A geas,” Bal-Simba said. “A magical compulsion. Laid on you, I have no doubt, by a certain dragon.”
Wiz’s jaw dropped again. “Oh,” he said. “So that’s . . .” He didn’t get a chance to finish. Moira was in his arms, kissing him and crying and all he wanted to do was hold her close forever and ever.
“Hey, Wiz,” Danny said after an appropriate interval.
Wiz raised his face from Moira’s mane of copper hair. “Thanks guys. I think you just saved my life.”
The giant wizard made a throw-away gesture. “It was a piece of pastry.”
“That’s ‘piece of cake,’ “ Danny corrected.
“Whatever.”
“Come on love,” Moira murmured in his ear, “let us leave this place.
Wiz shook his head without taking his nose out of his wife’s hair. “I can’t just yet. There are a couple of loose ends I need to tie up here.”
Moira looked over Wiz’s shoulder at Bal-Simba.
“No geas,” he told her. “Only a sense of responsibility.”
“Responsibility to whom?” Moira asked.
“The town council,” Wiz told her.
“The town council?”
“Yeah, I’m a consultant to them on dragon problems.”
“Sparrow,” the giant black wizard rumbled, “I am almost afraid to ask what you have been doing.”
“Well,” Wiz admitted, “it’s kind of complicated.”
Bal-Simba eyed his friend. “Now I am afraid to ask.”
“I’ll explain it to you when we get back to town,” he said. “It’s really not that bad.” Then he stopped. “At least it seemed like a good idea at the time. But it’s not dangerous.” He stopped again. “Well, okay, there are these three thugs who were trying to kill me and a couple of people on the council who want my hide. And I guess Pieter, the guy in the cement overcoat who’s standing in the town square, is going to come looking for me once he gets unfrozen. But it’s really not that bad.” He realized all four of his companions were staring at him, hard. “Honest,” he finished lamely.
“You had best tell us about it when we get back to town,” Bal-Simba said.
“Uh, I’ve got to make a kind of a detour first.” Wiz looked over his shoulder at the trickle of smoke coming from the fresh crater in the sod. He took a deep breath.
“Okay, now for the hard part.”
Twenty-six: Dragon Decisions
History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells “Can’t you remember anything I told you?” and lets fly with a club.
John W. Campbell
Again Wiz Zumwalt faced the assembled dragons. This time he had arrived under his own power along the Wizard’s Way. He had come alone, but Bal-Simba and the others were watching him closely.
This meeting being called on short notice, there weren’t as many dragons along the walls of the canyon as there had been the day before. But there were still a satisfying number.