“Thy will, Lord. But they are very hard to find or see.”
“Wretch! If I need instruction from apprentices I will ask for it. Now begone before I give you duty in the dung pits.”
“What does this do?” Shiara asked, tracing the slick surface of Wiz’s latest creation dubiously.
“It’s a Rapid Reconnaissance Directional Demon—R-squared D-squared for short.” He grinned.
“Eh?”
“It’s an automatic searcher. It transports to a place, searches for objects which match the pattern it’s been given and if it doesn’t find such an object, it transports again. When it does find the object, it reports back. It has a tree-traversing algorithm to find the most efficient search pattern.”
“I doubt you’ll find what you want in a tree,” Shiara said doubtfully.
“No, that’s just an expression. It’s a way of searching. You see, you pick a point as the root and . . .”
“Enough, Sparrow, enough,” said Shiara holding up her hand. “I will trust you in this.” She frowned. “But why did you make it in this shape?”
“To match its name,” Wiz grinned.
“You see, Kenneth, names are very important,” Wiz said seriously. “Picking the right ones is vital.”
Wiz sucked another lungful of cold clear air and exhaled a breath that was almost visible. Overhead the sun shone wanly in a cloudless pale blue sky. The weak winter’s light gave the unsullied snow a golden tinge.
“Yes, Lord,” replied Kenneth noncomittally from where he lounged against a tree, his long bow beside him.
Wiz paid no heed to the response. He continued to pace the little clearing as he talked, not really looking at Kenneth at all. The crusted snow crunched under his boots as he circled the open space among the leafless trees yet again.
“The wizards are right,” Wiz went on. “Names are critical. You need a name that you can remember, that you can pronounce easily and that you aren’t likely to use in conversation.” He smiled. “It wouldn’t do to ask someone to pass the salt and summon up a demon, would it?”
“No, Lord,” said Kenneth tonelessly
Wiz never stopped talking, even though Kenneth was behind him now. “And most importantly, Kenneth, most importantly I need names that easily distinguish the named routine, uh, demon. I can’t afford to get mixed up.”
“Yes, Lord.”
“It’s a common problem in programming. There’s a trick to naming routines meaningfully without violating the conventions for the language or getting things confused.” Wiz altered his stride slightly to avoid a spot where a dark rock had melted the snow into a dirty brown puddle. “Here I’m using a mixture of names of Unix utilities for routines that have cognates in Unix and made-up names for the entities that aren’t similar to anything. So I have to pick the names carefully.”
“Yes Lord.” Kenneth shifted slightly against the tree and squinted at the pale sun, which was almost touching the treetops. Fingers of shadow were reaching into the clearing, throwing a tangled net of blue across the golden snow and dirty slush alike.
“It’s especially important that I keep the difference in the similar routines straight,” Wiz said. “I have to remember that”find” doesn’t work like”find” in Unix. In Unix . . .”
“Lord . . .” said Kenneth craning his neck toward the lowering sun.
“ . . . the way you search a file is completely different. You . . .”
“Lord, get . . .”
A harsh metallic screech stopped Wiz in his tracks. He looked over his shoulder and glimpsed something huge and spiky outlined against the sun.
“Down!”
Wiz dropped into the dirty slush as the thing barrelled over him. The wind of its passing stirred his hair and one of its great hooked talons slashed the hem of his cloak.
Open-mouthed, he looked up from the freezing mud in time to see a scaly bat-winged form of glittering gold zooming up from the clearing, one wing dipping to turn again even as its momentum carried it upward.
From across the clearing Kenneth’s bowstring sang and a tiny patch of pale blue daylight appeared in the membrane of the thing’s left wing close to the body. The creature craned its snaky golden neck over its shoulder and hissed gape-fanged at its tormentor.