Unlike Wiz’s original system, this one was tuned to look for only one
object, the heart of Bale-Zur. The demons had been trained on similar
demon hearts held in the vaults beneath the Capital. When they found a
demon heart they would report back to the humans.
Danny poked at the rubble with his staff. “What does the heart of a demon
look like anyway?”
“It’s a cloudy sphere about as big as your head,” Wiz told him. “Anyway,
that’s how it was described to me.”
“Do not worry about identifying it,” Moira’s voice came inside their
heads. “Your searching demons will know it when they see it.”
“If it still exists, it should be somewhere in Toth-Set-Ra’s old palace,”
Moira’s voice told them. “That is,” she paused for a second while she
translated what the Watcher’s crystal was showing her into their
coordinate system, “almost straight behind you.”
“I hope it is there,” Wiz said. “It will make our job a lot easier.”
He motioned toward the palace and all three of them gathered up their
magical paraphernalia and set off.
Four: COMA
“Hi. Uh, I’d like to see Judith Conally.”
The nurse looked up from her paperwork and flashed a professional smile.
“Are you a relative?”
“No, I’m a friend.”
“I’m sorry, but only relatives are allowed to visit patients in the
neurological unit.”
“She doesn’t have any relatives out here. I’m her best friend. Can’t I
please see her?”
The nurse looked him over. He wasn’t much more than twenty. A pale and
soft youth with brown hair and a complexion that bore a trace of
adolescent acne. He was wearing an old flight jacket with several felt-tip
pens in the left sleeve pocket and a T-shirt with a picture of a warrior
in a horned helmet air-brushed on it.
He had laid a three-ring notebook on the counter with a couple of library
books on top.
A student, she decided. Harmless and very earnest.
The nurse glanced at the chart. The visiting rule wasn’t rigidly enforced
in the neurological unit unless the doctor requested it and there was
nothing on the chart about that. The patient hadn’t had a visitor in a
while.
She smiled again, a little less professionally. “I suppose it would be all
right, but you’ll have to be very quiet.”
The searchers found the heart of the demon before Wiz and his friends
reached the palace.
As they got close to the former seat of the Dark League’s power the
destruction got worse and the going got harder. In some places it was hard
to tell the streets from the flattened houses and in a couple of instances
it was easier to avoid the street and go over the remains of the
buildings. Once they came to a place where the stone had melted into
glassy slag with razor-sharp edges everywhere. Another time seeping water
in deep shadows had formed a waterfall of ice nearly ten feet tall.
They saw no signs of life, but once they heard something scrabbling over
the rubble as if fleeing their approach.
“Boy, what a mess,” Jerry panted as they pulled themselves to the top of
the latest obstacle.
Wiz shaded his eyes and looked ahead, trying to find the easiest route. “I
don’t remember it being this bad. On the other hand, I stayed away from
this part of town as much as I could.”
Danny consulted the crystal device. “It’s over that way, in that big black
pile of rubble.”
Jerry scanned the horizon. “Which big black pile of rubble?”
“That one,” Wiz pointed. “Let’s go.”
Another fifteen minutes of hard travel brought them through the shattered
black gates of the palace. The going was easier here because there had
been just one building set in an extensive courtyard. None of the roof
remained and everything had collapsed in on itself, but enough of the
walls still stood that you could pick out the general outlines of the
floor plan.
“This guy sure had lousy taste,” Jerry said, eyeing the remains of a
strangely twisted mosaic on a partly standing wall.
“I think some of it’s kind of neat,” Danny said as he looked over a