shadow. He scraped his palm as he caught himself against the rough wall.
Then his vision cleared and the dizziness receded as he looked out over
desolation.
Even at its height the City of Night had not been attractive. Its
builders, the wizards of the Dark League, had cared much more for power
than for beauty. Most of the city had been crudely built out of the
volcanic stone of the Southern continent with no regard to appearance or
city planning.
But when the Dark League had ruled here at least there had been a kind of
sinister vitality to the place. In its ruin and abandonment the city was
simply ugly. The cobbled street fell away steeply and over the roofs of
the close-huddled buildings Wiz could see the steel-gray harbor merging at
the horizon into steel-gray sky. Behind him the volcano on whose flank the
city stood curled a thin plume of smoke to the leaden sky. Even the snow
that capped the mountain was dirty gray.
Studded here and there around the city were gaunt black towers, several of
them with their tops blown off. A few yards ahead of Wiz the street was
blocked by rubble where one of the buildings had collapsed. Many of the
buildings between him and the harbor were ruined, roofless or in a couple
of cases simply melted.
He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a tiny bit of blue crystal he
wore on a thong around his neck. “I’m here,” he said into the
communications crystal. “Start Operation 500-Pound Parakeet.”
Then he looked out over his handiwork again and shivered, not entirely
from the cold.
Directly or indirectly, Wiz was responsible for most of the destruction.
In his first great battle with the Dark League he had used his mixture of
computer programming and magic to rout the League and destroyed a good
part of the city in the process. In the second confrontation, he had been
kidnapped to this place by the remnants of the League. For weeks the enemy
wizards had hunted him through the freezing ruins of the City of Night
while a tracking demon waited to destroy him if he used the least of his
new magic.
He had been rescued after he had incited a magical battle between the
wizards and Bale-Zur, the invincible slaying demon who had once served
them. The effect of so much magic unleashed had attracted the attention of
the Council’s Watchers and brought a patrol of dragons south over the City
to his rescue.
However the battle had stirred up the slaying demon. Instead of staying in
one place and killing whatever came to him, the Watchers reported Bale-Zur
now roamed the City of Night ceaselessly looking for victims. Worse, it
had begun to range beyond the City itself. If this kept up it was sure to
use its powers to travel across the Freshened Sea to the lands of men.
Wiz knew he was safe enough, but he kept his back to the freezing wall
anyway. The communications crystal used the old magic of the Mighty, not
his new spell compiler that would activate the tracking demon. Even though
it needed eight powerful wizards and a complicated ceremony, Bal-Simba had
sent him along the Wizard’s Way by conventional magic so he did not have
to use his own spells.
Of all the mortals in the World only three were safe from Bale-Zur. The
demon would not touch Wiz, Jerry and Danny because their full names-their
true names-had never been spoken anywhere in the World. To Bale-Zur they
were no more prey than a rock.
However Bale-Zur was only half the problem. The other half was the hunting
demon the Dark League had created in their attempt to destroy Wiz. Unlike
Bale-Zur it could not range much beyond the Southern Continent. However it
was keyed to Wiz’s special brand of magic and would attack and destroy
anything that used it.
But spells built with the magic compiler were the only kind Wiz, Jerry and
Danny knew. If they tried to make magic the demon would be on them
instantly.
It presented a pretty problem. Wiz, Jerry and Danny were immune to