“Well, if you’re closer it would strike faster. If you’re right next to this thing when you invoke the program it would get it right away.”
Jerry sighed. “Okay then. We’re going to have to get in there to make this work.”
“That will not be easy,” Bal-Simba told him.
“Wiz and the others did it.”
“I am afraid that way is blocked now,” Bal-Simba told him. “We cannot walk the Wizards Way and the city is ever-more-strongly guarded by the Enemy’s non-living servants.”
There’s another problem,” Taj pointed out. “This thing’s likely to react to your presence, right?”
“I would call that an understatement,” rumbled Bal-Simba.
“Well, understand, its going to take the lysing virus a while to work on anything that’s fairly complicated. If this thing has developed something like an immune system to keep it from being taken over by the competition, it may take a few hours, or even days.” He caught the others’ expressions. “Too long, huh?”
“For the main enemy, way too long. The first thing it will try to do is eat our lunch—and us with it. We can’t wait hours, we need to knock it down immediately.”
“How inorganic,” Taj sighed. “All right, let’s go back and take it from first principles again.”
They took special care to find a secure resting place that evening. Malkin seemed abstracted all through the dinner meal, but she didn’t say anything until they were finished.
“I have been thinking about what you said, about the monsters getting more dangerous as we come closer to our goal,” she said to Wiz as they cleaned the last of the dinner dishes.
“And?”
“Have the monsters been getting more dangerous?”
Wiz thought about it. “No, not really.”
“And have we encountered greater numbers of them?”
An ugly little prickle of his neck hair told Wiz he wasn’t going to like where this was going. “No,” he admitted.
“Then,” Malkin asked, “are we sure we are getting closer to our goal?”
“Well, the seeker says we’re going in the right direction.”
Malkin just looked at him.
“I’m really beginning to wonder about that seeker,” Danny said. “I know this place is big but we should be at least a little closer to Moira than when we started.”
“Maybe it’s been getting brighter so slowly we didn’t notice,” Wiz suggested.
Malkin reached out and tapped his shoulder. “The glow only extends out to this smudge on your right breast. That’s where it was yesterday and the day before.”
“Are you sure?”
“Trust me. In my profession you notice these things. You always hold the crystal in the same place, straight out from your breastbone to the length of the cord around your neck.”
Wiz thought about that. Then he looked down at the crystal. Then he thought about it some more. Not very pleasant thoughts.
“Let’s see something.”
“Emac.”
Instantly a two-foot-high demon with a big bald head, flapping ears, glasses and a green eyeshade appeared before him.
“?,” said the little demon.
“backslash list find_moira exe.”
The creature took a quill pen from behind one enormous ear and began to scribble fiery letters in the air. Wiz and his fellow adventurers were soon bathed in warm yellow light from the golden letters hanging before them.
“Wait a minute!” Danny said almost as soon as the Emac finished writing. “That doesn’t look right.” He pointed with his staff at a section of the code.
“It’s not,” Wiz said sourly. “Neither is that,” he added as his staff jabbed out, “that or that.”
“The spell’s been sabotaged!”
“Who?” demanded Glandurg. “Who has played such a foul trick upon us?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say the Enemy,” Wiz said. “Okay folks, gather around, it’s conference time.”
The party sat down on a convenient patch of rocks and all of them looked at Wiz expectantly. “Well,” he said to break the silence, “what are our options?”
No one wanted to mention the obvious one: Give up, try to make their way to the surface and wait for rescue.
“Dwarves can find their way underground,” Danny suggested. “Perhaps Glandurg can guide us?”
“I would have to know where we were going,” the dwarf said shortly. “Impractical.”