“I’m not sure. I want to see you do it.”
“Very well.”
Malus picked up the wooden strips, arranged them on a small table and then spoke the command.
Instead of brightening, the magic glow lamps in the Day Room flickered, dimmed, brightened and then dropped to a febrile glimmer.
Jerry and Taj looked at each other in the sudden gloom.
“Let me try,” Jerry said.
This time the spell worked perfectly.
“That doesn’t make…”
“Wait a minute!” Taj cut him off. “Do you each have physically separate copies of the compiler or are they all just instantations of the same compiler?”
Jerry looked at him. “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
“Might be interesting to find out,” Taj said.
“My Lord,” Jerry said to the little wizard, “will you list out the compiler for me?”
It was Malus’ turn to frown. “Very well. “Emac.”
Instantly a little demon with a green eyeshade popped into existence. Jerry noticed it was rounder than the ones he was used to. In fact it looked a lot like Malus himself.
“?” the demon said.
“list compiler exe,” Malus pronounced, and the demon removed a quill pen from behind a large bat-like ear and began to scribble lines of fiery letters in the air.
The compiler was big and took a while. By now several other wizards, had gathered around to watch.
“Shall I list out the libraries and include files as well, My Lord?” Malus asked when the Emac at last completed its task.
“No, this is fine for now,” Jerry told him. “Emac.” he commanded, and proceeded to order the demon to list out the compiler again. Taj watched closely, but aside from the fact that Malus’ Emac wrote in letters of golden fire and Jerry’s preferred electric blue he couldn’t see any difference.
“Now,” he said, as the second demon finished.
“Emac.”
The blue fire superimposed itself on the yellow. Suddenly several sections of the code stood out in brilliant green.
“Your version of the spell compiler. It’s different.” Jerry checked the changed sections against Malus’ spell. “Your spell didn’t work because something messed with your copy of the compiler. The program was fine but the tool was broken.”
“But, My Lord, I can assure you I have done nothing to change it!”
“I believe you,” Jerry said. And, he didn’t add aloud, that’s what scares me.
A quick check of the other wizards present in the day room showed that two of them had compilers which had suffered minor changes, but none so great as Malus’.
“I wonder how many other broken copies of the compiler are loose around the castle? Or broken anything else?” Jerry said as the last wizard in the group checked out clean. “I think we’d better start a sweep of the software.”
“You go ahead,” Taj told him. “I’ve got some stuff I want to check up on.”
Jerry was so engrossed in the problem he only nodded, forgetting his objections to Taj going out on his own.
“Well,” Jerry said tiredly a few hours later, “we were lucky. So far we’ve only turned up a half-dozen infected programs.” He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Maybe more than lucky. We didn’t exactly build the spells to be virus-proof but we were real conservative in our design. There’s an error-correcting code built into every spell and if the check sums and such don’t match it won’t execute. Plus the critical stuff uses triple redundancy.”
“I noticed,” Taj said. “Is there any pattern to what’s been attacked?”
“Not that I can find. There’s a lot of stuff here that’s been nibbled around the edges but aside from Malus’ copy of the compiler nothing else serious is really broken. Damn! I wish Wiz and Danny were here.”
“Need some more insights, eh?”
“That’s part of it. But now I’m going to have to go through and design anti-virus software to protect every spell we’ve got. It would be easier if there were three of us doing it.”
Taj looked at the changed code again. “Who’s writing these puppies?”
Jerry shrugged. “If I had to guess I’d say it’s our enemy in the City of Night.”