“That is not a thought,” Wiz said firmly.
Again everyone at the table fell silent. The little red dragon whuffed in his sleep and scuffled the papers beneath him with tiny running motions as he chased a dream mouse.
“Okay,” Cindy said slowly. “What about making them not want to go beyond a certain point?”
“A geas?” Moira shook her head. “You cannot lay geas on an entire people, including ones you have never seen.”
“But ddt does essentially that for magical creatures,” Cindy said.
“That isn’t a geas,” Wiz told her. That’s a repulsion spell. Different animal.”
“Well, how about a repulsion spell then?”
“Repulsion spells attach to specific objects,” Moira explained. “You would have to put the spell on every rock, every tree and every finger-length of soil along the line.”
“That’s not a problem—in theory,” Jerry said. “We can write a program that will do it. It would take a lot of demons . . . No, wait a minute! We could use the principle of similarity. Mark the line on a map.”
“Yeah, fine,” said Nancy. “Where are we going to get a map accurate enough to make a spell like that stick? Have you seen what these people call a map?”
“Okay, so we make our own map,” Wiz said.
“How are we going to do that?” asked Karl. “You can’t just sketch it from dragon back.”
“If we have to mark everything individually, it will take years to get the barrier up,” Jerry said. “I don’t think we’ve got years.”
“We will be fortunate if we have weeks,” Moira told him
“Wait a minute!” Wiz put in. “We can use a modified version of my searching spell. Generate thousands of mapping units. We’ll have our data in a couple of days.”
“Searching spell? You mean that R-squared D-squared thing?”
“No, the three-layer search system. You’ve used it, haven’t you?”
“That is the spell I was telling you about, Lord,” Moira said to Jerry. “The one we could not find.”
Wiz frowned. “There was a copy in my notes. Well, it doesn’t matter. It won’t take long to rewrite it and I’d want to translate it to run under the latest version of the compiler anyway.”
Wiz made another mark on his slate.
“That’s it then. Okay people, split into your teams and let’s get cracking. We’ve got a lot of work to do here.”
“Are you sure this will work?” Bal-Simba asked dubiously as Wiz, Jerry and Moira showed him the team’s latest creation.
“It will if they try to use demon_debug on it,” Wiz assured him. “The basic spell is a modification of the one I used to create the watchers against the Dark League.”
“And it will harm no one?” the giant black sorcerer pressed.
“It can’t do physical damage to anyone, Lord,” Jerry said confidently. Of course, what it can do to their mental state . . .
“Amazing,” Bal-Simba said as he studied the creature on the table before him. “Where did you get the idea for these things?”
“Where I get all my best ideas,” Wiz said jauntily. “I stole it.”
Twenty-Four : Demons Go Home
Customer support is an art, not a science.
—marketing saying
So are most other forms of torture.
—programmers’ response
“Lady, Lady come quickly!” Mayor Andrew pounded frantically on the door and looked fearfully over his shoulder toward the village square. “We are beset!”
“Unnugh?” Alaina rolled over in her bed and tried to shake the mead fumes from her head. She threw the dirty bedclothes aside and stumbled to the door, cursing as she banged into an overturned stool.
“Not so loud,” she grumbled, fumbling with the bar. “Not so bleeding loud.” She threw open the door and glared at Andrew. “Now what is it?”
In answer he pointed back into the village. Pale translucent shapes floated here and there over the houses, flitting down the streets and hovering before windows. Now and again a bone-chilling shriek broke the night’s silence.
Alaina gathered herself. “Magic, eh? Well we’ll see about that.” She snatched a grubby cloak from the hook beside the door and threw it over her night dress. Barefoot and with her hair in disarray she marched toward the square with the mayor trailing close behind.