started back toward the castle. “Come on. We must help them.”
“How?”
She looked over her shoulder. “We will think of something, now come if you
are coming.” She trotted off with Stigi humping along beside her. Gilligan
had to run to catch up.
Thorfin looked at his leader’s boot soles and scowled. It seemed as if
they had been climbing for hours. First up the steep outer wall, then in
through a gun port and finally up through the castle’s ventilation ducts.
There was plenty of room, but the wind was almost strong enough to pluck a
dwarf from the wall and every few hundred yards they had to unfasten a
grating that blocked the duct. Twice they had narrowly avoided the
whirling blades of huge ventilation fans that threatened to turn the whole
expedition into dwarf tartare. And still they climbed onward. Glandurg
stopped every few minutes to check his locating talisman, but it always
told them the Sparrow was above them.
I never realized glory was such hard work, Thorfin thought as Glandurg
missed a foothold and kicked him in the face.
* * *
“Look,” said Jerry. “Do you have any idea where we are?”
The four of them were standing at the crossing of four identical
corridors. There were no floor numbers, room numbers or anything else to
give them a clue.
“One of the upper floors of the castle,” Wiz told him.
“In other words we’re lost, right?”
“No, I know where we are. I just don’t know where the computer is.”
Jerry growled. “Okay, let’s do this systematically. Lannach says the
computer is in the room where you met Craig and Mikey, right?” Wiz nodded.
“We know the room has an outside wall because it had a big window, right?”
Again the nod.
“So let’s go to the outside wall, put our left hands against it and follow
it around, checking every door as we go. Eventually we’ve got to find the
right room.”
“There are hundreds of rooms on this floor,” Danny protested.
“All the more reason we need a system.”
“Okay,” Wiz said. “There’s the outside wall. Let’s do it.”
All four of them put their left hands on the wall and started walking
single file. The first room they came to was empty. The second held a mass
of machinery that was obviously not the computer.
“This looks more like it,” said Wiz as they came to the third door. It was
wider than the others and almost as high as the corridor.
Wiz opened the door and looked inside. Ranked along the walls in the dark
were a dozen heavily armed robots, all motionless. Suddenly the lights
came on, the robots jerked erect and a dozen metal heads swiveled toward
the door.
The programmers didn’t wait for the rest. Wiz threw fireballs, Danny threw
lightning bolts and Jerry hit them with some kind of spell that made them
crumble to powder. A couple of laser beams flashed over their heads and
left burning furrows in the wall behind them. The heat activated the fire
sprinklers, drenching all four of them with water.
June looked up at the rain magically coming from the ceiling and laughed
at the wonder of it all. Wiz choked on the smell of fried, electrocuted,
powdered robot and shook his head to get the water out of his eyes.
He glared up at Jerry. “You and your system.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the system. It’s just that if you follow it
you are certain to find everything on this floor.”
“Most of which we don’t want to find. Okay, we’ll keep following the wall,
but from now on we don’t open any doors unless they look really
promising.”
Karin stopped so quickly Mick almost ran into her. She turned, put her
finger to her lips and gestured around the corner. Cautiously Mick peeked
around. There was a door there, set at the end of a narrow corridor back
into the wall. There were also six things out of someone’s nightmare
guarding it. They were big, ugly, armored, and armed to the teeth.
He ducked back and looked at Karin. Go the other way? he pantomimed and