“Have you been able to get a line on the spell?”
Danny turned toward him and made a face. This thing is real cute. First, you were right. It was done with something based more or less on our magic compiler.”
“Which version?”
“I said more or less. It’s been hacked, moby hacked. There’s stuff in there I’ve never seen and I’ve got no idea what it does. There’s other stuff that goes back to your original quick-and-dirty interpreter, in a couple of cases stuff we took out of the later versions because it wasn’t stable. Then there’s stuff that’s just been fine-tuned.”
He gestured and another screen opened, showing another listing. Here and there lines of code stood out in brighter fire.
Those things we met in the square are very loosely based, maybe ‘inspired’ is closer, on our searcher system. The highlighted parts were probably lifted verbatim. But each of the things in the square is considerably more complex than our searchers—and a lot more lethal.”
“How do they work?”
I’m not quite sure. What they do is to suck the Me force out of their victim, like a bunch of magical vampires. But there’s more to it than that and I’m not sure what. Lake I say, some of this stuff is just real strange. Some of it is beautifully tuned, some of it is damn crude and a lot of it doesn’t look like it does anything at all.” He paused. “You know, I think I saw something like this once on the net. A guy kept posting stuff to alt.c.sources. He was a really good programmer only he was going psycho and in his last articles before they took him away he had this same kind of mix of off-the-wall brilliant and just plain off the wall.”
“This guy’s too strong just to be crazy. Where’s this stuff coming from?”
Danny shrugged. “Bal-Simba and some of the others are working on that. I’ve been concentrating on trying to understand what we’re up against.”
Wiz was still looking at the code when the door banged open and Malkin strode in.
The tall thief looked like grim death. Her lips were pressed into a hard bloodless line and her dark eyes glinted dangerously. Clearly she wanted to kill someone. Wiz could sympathize.
“Word reached me at Heart’s Ease,” she said by way of greeting.
“Jerry’s in your apartment…” Wiz began.
“I know. I have already seen him, much good that it did me. Now I want some answers. Then I want someone’s head.”
“I bet you think those are original ideas,” Wiz said bitterly.
Malkin softened. “I know they are not, My Lord Your loss is much greater than mine and I am truly, deeply sorry.” Then her jaw clenched and her eyes flashed again. “And it gives me one more reason to want this one’s head on a pike.”
Even through his own misery Wiz was impressed, and a little awed. Normally Malkin was almost obsessively cheery, even in the face of utter disaster. He had never seen her this angry before—not, he thought, that she’d ever had this kind of reason before—and the effect was definitely impressive. More accurately, it was downright scary.
Malkin let out a sigh through her teeth and seemed to relax through a sheer effort of will. “Now then, tell me what happened at the fair this day.”
Talking in shifts and interrupting each other, Wiz and Danny filled her in on the attack.
“So,” Malkin said as the programmers wound down, “does this thing come to us or do we winkle it out of its hole?”
Danny and Wiz looked at each other. Neither of them had gone that far in their thinking.
“I think we need more information,” Wiz said. “We don’t know where this thing is from, how many of them there are, how their magic works or even much about how they operate.”
“What he means is we’re still in the fact-gathering phase on this one,” Danny said. “We gotta get our information together and work out a strategy.”
Malkin snorted. “And once you have done all that? What then?”
“Then,” Wiz said grimly, “we are going to lack some serious magical butt.”