“Confine yourself to answering my questions,” Dzhir Kar said.
“A searching spell,” Pryddian gasped out. “It can search the whole World in a single day.”
Dzhir Kar thought quickly. This just might be the answer to his problem. A host of demons could search the City of Night far better than his wizards could. He had a limited ability to train his demon to ignore specific instances of Sparrow’s magic. If it could be trained to ignore these demons, then the combination of the Sparrow’s own magic and his demon could do in a single day what his wizards had been unable to do in a matter of weeks.
He waved his hands and the guards released Pryddian and stood away. The ex-apprentice slumped to the floor, his legs unable to support him.
“Very well,” Dzhir Kar said. “It amuses me to use the Sparrow’s magic to track him down. If you can produce these demons as you say then I will give you your life. Moreover, if they can find the Sparrow, you will be accepted as a novice by the Dark League.
“If you cannot do these things, I will see to it that you suffer for your presumption.” He looked up at the wizards. “Take him away.”
He nodded to the guards and they half-carried, half-dragged Pryddian out.
They gave Pryddian a cell just off the main workroom and he set out to duplicate Wiz’s searching system. It was not a simple matter for an untutored ex-apprentice to unravel the notes he had stolen. Nor was it easy to cast the spells once he learned them. The Sparrow seemed to delight in alternate choices at every step of the spell and the wrong choices did little or nothing. But Pryddian worked until he dropped. His black-robed jailers saw to that with their pain spells.
It might have amused him to know he was not the only person having trouble with the Sparrow’s spells.
“This guy was a real hacker,” Mike said, leaning over his wife’s shoulder to study their latest task.
Nancy nodded and looked back at the code above her desk. “You don’t have to tell me that. Jesus! I’ve seen better commented programs in BASIC.” She took another look at the runes glowing blue before her. “And I’ve seen clearer comments in the London Times crossword puzzle!” She jabbed her finger at one line.
“What the hell is this monstrosity? And why the hell did he name it corned__beef?”
“Jerry says the name is probably some kind of rotten pun. What does it do?”
“Basically it takes the value of the characters of a demon’s name, multiplies them by a number, adds another number and then divides the result by 65,353. Then it uses that result as a subscript in some kind of an array.” She shook her head again. “Why 65,353? Jesus! You know, if this guy doesn’t come back we may never understand some of this stuff.”
The man sighed. “Well, let’s get to it. This is going to take a while.” He nodded to Wiz’s book of notes on his magic compiler. “Hand me the Dragon Book, will you?”
Ghost-gray and insubstantial, the searching demons began to pour from the ruined tower and blanket the City of Night.
Each demon had very little power. It could only absorb impressions from the world around it and forward them to a larger demon which would catalog them. The final step in the process was a demon formed like a weird crystal construct that perched atop the tower. It did the final sorting and alerted the wizards if it found anything that looked worthwhile.
Wiz had endowed the demons with all the mortal senses, but no magical ones. Of those senses, sight was the most important to an airborne creature. Since Wiz wore his tarncape constantly there was little visible sign of him. Demons by the thousands searched every nook and cranny of the city, but they saw nothing of Wiz.
Dzhir Kar ground his teeth in fury at the news and ordered Pryddian beaten to make him fix the spell. But Pryddian could not repair what he did not understand and in spite of the demons Wiz eluded the Dark League.