“We could hardly expect to keep ourselves secret forever,” she sighed. “Still, it will be inconvenient to have to be much on our guard. I think it would be best if you discontinued your walks in the Woods, Sparrow.”
“I was thinking the same thing myself, Lady,” Wiz said fervently from the stool in front of the fire where he huddled. Save for a clean cloak he was naked and the fire beat ruddy and hot on his pale skin as he held the garment open to catch as much warmth as possible.
“Uh, Lady . . . I thought we were supposed to be protected against attacks like that.”
Shiara frowned. “Sparrow, in the Wild Wood there is no absolute safety. Even with all the powers of the North arrayed about us we would not be completely safe. With Bal-Simba’s protection we are fairly immune to magic attack and the forest folk will warn of any large non-magical party that approaches. But a single non-magical creature can slip through our watchers and wards all too easily.”
“What about a single magical creature?” Wiz asked.
Shiara smiled thinly, her lips pressed together in a tight line. “Believe me, Sparrow, I would know instantly of the approach of any magic.”
From the corner where he had been listening, Kenneth snorted. “If all they can send against us are single non-magical beings then they stand a poor chance of getting either of you.” He tugged the string of his great bow significantly. “Lady, I own the fault today was mine. I was not properly alert. But rest assured it will not happen again!”
“It would be well if it were so,” Shiara said. “But I am not certain they expected to get anyone in today’s attack.”
“They came darned close,” Wiz said.
“Oh, had they killed or injured one of us the League would have been happy indeed, but I think they had little real expectation of it.”
“Then what is the point?” asked Kenneth.
“In a duel of magics you seek at first to unbalance your opponent. To break his concentration and unsettle his mind and so lay him open to failure. I think the League’s purpose in such attacks is to upset us and hinder our work.”
“Then they failed twice over,” Wiz said firmly and stood up. “I’m dry enough and I’ve got work to do tonight. Kenneth, will you hand me my tunic?”
Another day, near evening this time, and Wiz had another creation to demonstrate to Shiara.
“Here, let me show you.” Wiz made a quick pass and a foot-tall homunculus popped into existence. It eyed Wiz speculatively and then started to gabble in a high, squeaky voice. “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890,”
the creature got out before Wiz could raise his hand again. At the second gesture it froze, mouth open.
“What good is that thing?” Shiara asked.
“You told me wizards protect their inner secrets with passwords? Well, this is a password guesser. When it gets up to speed it can run through thousands of combinations a second.” He frowned. “I’m going to have to do some code tweaking to get the speed up, I think.”
“What makes you think you can guess a password even with such a thing as that?” Shiara said.
Wiz grinned. “Because humans are creatures of habit. That includes wizards. The thing doesn’t guess at random. It uses the most likely words and syllables.”
“Ricidulous,” Shiara snorted. “A competent wizard chooses passwords to be hard to guess.”
“I’ll bet even good wizards get careless. You remember I told you we used passwords on computer accounts back home? There was a list of about 100 of them which were so common they could get you into nearly any computer and the chances were at least one person had used one of them.
“Look, a password has to be remembered. I mean no one but an idiot writes one down, right?” Shiara nodded reluctantly. “And you have to be able to say them, don’t you?” Again Shiara nodded.
“Well then, those are major limits right there. You need combinations of consonants and vowels that are pronounceable and easy to remember. You also can’t make them too long and you probably don’t want to make them too short. Right? Okay, this little baby,” he gestured to the demon on the table, “has been given a bunch of rules that help guess passwords. It’s not a random search.”