He might be here to help these people but they felt he had a higher and better purpose as dragon bait. They didn’t want help, they wanted a sacrificial goat they could hang all their trouble on. Yet he had to help them! It was imperative that he solve their problem.
Wiz chased the problem round and round in his mind without finding even the beginnings of a solution. He did, however, find an increasing sympathy for that long-ago rat in the nearly forgotten psych lab. He wondered if the rat had ever found the solution to its problem. Then he wondered what constituted a “solution” to a psych maze from the rat’s point of view. The patch of sunlight from the window in the side wall finished its journey up the wall and gradually dimmed out at dusk. Outside the street noises quieted and died as the city settled into sleep. Eventually Wiz did the same.
Gently, soundlessly, the searcher floated north into the graying dawn. Physically it looked like a smear of smoke or a wisp of gray silk about the size of a handkerchief. Magically it was nearly as uncomplicated. All it did was gather sense impressions and pass them on to a slightly larger, somewhat more substantial entity floating along well behind it. It had only limited mobility and moved mostly by floating on the wind.
By itself it wasn’t much, but the searching spell cranked them out by the tens of thousands. The searchers fed back into hundreds of the larger concentrators and they fed into dozens of high-level analysis demons. Given time they could find anything in the World that was in the open and unmasked. Slowly, inexorably, the net of magical watchers was spreading over the face of the World.
The rising sun tinted the underside of the clouds orange but the mountains below were still in deep shadow. Soon the sun would break above the horizon and bathe the mountain peaks in fire. It would be a glorious sunrise but the searcher was incapable of knowing or caring. It floated where the wind took it, working generally north on the air currents.
The searcher saw the speck detach itself from a peak and waft into the air, but it attached no more significance to it than to the pinkened clouds or the dark valleys. Analysis was for the higher echelons. So it faithfully recorded the speck’s growth and resolution into a dragon, climbing to just below the bottom of the clouds. It watched without apprehension as the dragon approached, its great wings cleaving the air in mighty beats. It felt no fear as the dragon swooped down with its wings slightly folded to increase the speed of the dive, and no terror as a gout of dragon fire blotted out its existence. All of this it simply recorded and transmitted back to the collector, neither knowing nor caring that another dragon had flamed the collector minutes before.
Its killer, a young female only recently sentient, felt a pang of fierce joy at having destroyed the intruder. She gloried in her strength and prowess as she climbed toward the clouds to begin her day’s hunting-and to kill any more of the strange creatures who invaded her territory.
Back at the Wizard’s Keep, Jerry Andrews studied the results on his display and frowned.
“A problem?” Arianne asked mildly. Bal-Simba had been up late and his assistant had taken the early watch. Jerry had been up all night and probably wouldn’t crash for a few more hours.
“Something’s happening to the searchers.” He took a long pull on the mug of blackmoss tea on his workbench and swiveled to face the tall blond woman. “We’ve got good coverage on the lands of man and the Wild Wood, but when we move outside that territory we start losing them.”
“Losing them?”
“The search demons. Mostly they’re being destroyed. Some we’re just losing contact with. I think those are local magical effects. But a lot of them are being attacked by dragons.”
It was Arianne’s turn to frown. “That could be natural. Dragons are common beyond the borders of the lands of man and they do not like other flying objects in their air.” She paused.