There was no one to help him. Shiara had no aptitude for the sort of thinking programming demanded and there was no time to teach her. Besides, even being around this much magic was an agony for her. Actually trying to work some, even second-hand might kill her.
But somehow, slowly, agonizingly, the work got done.
* * *
“Behold, my first project,” Wiz said with a flourish. He had been without sleep so long he was giddy and the effects of the tea had his eyes propped open and his brain wired. Consciously he knew that he desperately needed sleep, but his body was reinforcing the tea with an adrenaline rush and it would be some time before he could make himself crash.
Shiara held out her hand toward the silky transparent thing on the table. It moved uneasily like a very fine handkerchief on a zephyr.
“What is it?”
“It’s a detector. You can send it over an area and it will detect magic and report back what it, uh, senses. ‘Sees’ would be too strong a word. It doesn’t really see, it just senses and it sends back a signal.” He realized he was speed-rapping and shut up.
Shiara moved her fingers through the thing’s substance, feeling for the magic. The detector continued to flutter undisturbed by the intrusion in to its body. “That is not much use,” she said doubtfully. “It sees so little and can tell so little of what it sees.” She drew her hand back sharply and the gesture reminded Wiz how much it cost her to have anything to do with magic.
“One of them is almost no good at all. But I’m going to produce them by the hundreds. I’ll flood the Freshened Sea with them. I’ll even send them over the League lands—who knows?—perhaps the City of Night itself.”
Shiara frowned even more deeply. “How long did it take you to produce this ‘detector’?”
“Separate from the tools? I don’t know. Maybe three days.”
“And you will make hundreds of them? In your spare time, perhaps. Impractical, Sparrow. Or do you plan to teach the craft to a corps of apprentices?”
“Oh, no. When I say three days, I mean the time it took me to write the program to make them. Once I run some tests and make sure it’s up to spec, I’ll start cranking them out automatically.”
“You will not need to watch them made? Isn’t that dangerous?”
Wiz shook his head. “Not if I do it right. That’s the whole point of the interpreter, you see. It lets you spawn child processes and controls their output.”
It was Shiara’s turn to shake her head. “Magic without a magician. A true wonder, Sparrow.”
“Yeah,” said Wiz uncomfortably, “well, let’s make sure it works.”
Silent, dumb and near invisible as a smear of smoke, the thing floated above the Freshened Sea. Sunlight poured down upon it. Waves glittered and danced below. Occasionally birds and other flying creatures wheeled or dove above the tops of the waves within its view. Once a splash bloomed white as a sea creature leaped to snare a skimming seabird.
A human might have been entranced by the beauty, oppressed by the bleakness or bored to inattention by the unchanging panorama below. The wisp of near-nothingness was none of these things. It saw all and understood nothing. It soaked in the impressions and sent them to a bigger and more solid thing riding the air currents further north. That thing, a dirty brown blanket perhaps large enough for a child, flapped and quivered in the sea winds as it sucked up sense messages from the wisp and hundreds of its fellows. Mindlessly it concentrated them, sorted them by content and squirted them back to a crag overlooking the Freshened Sea where three gargoyles crouched, staring constantly south.
The gargoyles too soaked in the messages. But unlike the things lower in the hierarchy and further south, they understood what they saw. Or at least they were capable of interpreting the images, sounds and smells, sorting according to the criteria they had been given and acting on the results.
Most of what came their way, the sun on the waves, the fish-and-mud smell of the sea, the wheel of the seabirds, they simply discarded. Some, such as the splash and foam of a leaping predator, they stored for further correlation. A very few events they forwarded immediately to a glittering thing atop a ruined tower in a charred stockade deep in the Wild Wood.