“I will try, Lady. I think he will also. But he is so weighted down with his work it will be difficult.”
“It sounds as if the Sparrow is trying to take all the weight of the world upon his shoulders,” Shiara said. “Like a certain hedge witch I once knew.”
Moira blushed.
“But Lady, there are none in the World who can help him and he has forbidden us to Summon another from his world.”
“Then you must give him the help he needs,” Shiara told her.
“But how, Lady? I have no talent at all for this new magic.”
“You are resourceful. You will find a way, I think. But that is not the worst of it, is it?”
“No,” Moira sighed. “He gets lost in his work and it is as if his soul were stolen away. His body is there, but Wiz is gone.”
“Then finally, you will have to train him to stop ignoring you. You must make him take time away from his work to spend with you.”
“But how do I do that?”
“Seduction is one way,” Shiara said judiciously. “More commonly, you simply must tell him when you feel slighted.”
Moira sniffed. “I would think that anyone would recognize the signs.”
Shiara sighed. “Anyone but a man.”
Wiz sleepwalked through the whole day. He couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t work and he knew his teaching was worse than usual. Even Malus noticed and approached him diffidently to ask what was wrong.
Bal-Simba hinted delicately that he was available if Wiz wanted to talk, but Wiz wasn’t in the mood. He liked the giant black wizard as much as he respected him, but for the first time since coming to the Capital it was borne on him that he really had no close friends here. He thought about Jerry Andrews, his old cubicle mate, and some of the other people he had known in Silicon Valley and missed them for the first time in months.
He broke off in mid-afternoon and raced back to the apartment, his mind full of all the things he wanted to say to Moira. But there was no one there when he arrived.
Wiz sat down heavily at his desk and tried to work. After shuffling things around for half an hour or so, he gave up even the pretense.
Then he moped about the apartment, trying to think and take his mind off things at the same time. With no stereo, television or movies, it was hard to kill time, he discovered. There weren’t even any books to read except a couple of grimores he had borrowed from the wizard’s library.
And they don’t have much of a plot, he thought sourly.
Finally he opened the sideboard and poured himself a large cup of mead from the small cask Moira kept there. Moira preferred the mead of the villages to the wines of the Capital and she liked to have a cup after supper. Wiz hadn’t eaten yet, but it looked to be about supper time to him.
Normally he didn’t care for mead, finding its sweetness cloying. But tonight it wasn’t half bad. He had a second cup and that wasn’t bad at all. The mead didn’t exactly make his thinking clearer, but it did seem to narrow down the problem and focus him on the major outlines.
“Priorities,” he said, hoisting his third cup to the dragon demon sitting atop his books. “I’ve got to start setting priorities.” He drained the cup in a single long draught and went to the cask to refill it again.
“Moira’s priority one,” he said waving the cup in the general direction of the demon. “I’ve gotta get Moira back.” He slopped a little mead from the cup and giggled. “Screw the wizards, scroo’m all. Moira’s what’s important.”
He poured half the contents of the cup down his throat in a single swallow.
“Then the compiler. Never mind the Council. They’re not important anyway. I finish the compiler and where’s the Council, hey? Poof. All gone. Don’t need them no more.”
It took him a while, but sometime early in the morning he finished the cask of mead.
Well, he thought muzzily as he staggered into the bedroom, it’s one way to pass the time.