Moira’s hand moved in a warding gesture at the mention of the League, but Patrius caught her wrist and shook his head.
“Softly, softly,” he admonished. “We must do nothing to attract attention, eh?
“We need help, Moira,” he went on. “The people of the North need help badly and there are none in the World who can help us. So I must go beyond the World to find aid.”
He sighed again. “It was a long search, my child, long and hard. But I have finally located someone of great power who can help us, both against the League and against the World. Now the time is ripe and I propose to Summon him.”
“But won’t this alien wizard be angry at being brought here so rudely?”
“I did not say he was a wizard,” Patrius said with a little shake of his head. “No, I did not say that at all.”
“Who but a wizard can deal in magic?”
“Who indeed? Patrius responded. “Who indeed?”
It was Moira’s turn to sigh, inwardly at least. Patrius had obviously told her as much of this mad venture as he intended to.
“What will you of me, Lord?” asked Moira.
“Just your aid as lector,” the old wizard said. “Your aid and a drop of your blood.”
“Willingly, Lord.” Moira was relieved it wasn’t more. Often great spells required great sacrifices.
“Well then,” said the Wizard, picking up his staff and rising. “Let us begin. You’ll have to memorize the chant, of course.”
Patrius cut a straight branch from a nearby tree, stripped it of its leaves and stuck it upright in the clearing. Its shadow stretched perhaps four handsbreadths from its base, shortening imperceptibly as the sun climbed higher.
“When the shadow disappears it will be time,” he told her. “Now, here is what you must say. . . .”
The words Moira had to speak were simple, but they sent shivers down her spine. Patrius repeated them to her several times, speaking every other word on each repetition so magic would not be made prematurely. As a trained witch Moira easily put the words in the right order and fixed them in her mind.
While the hedge witch worked on the spells, Patrius walked the clearing, carefully aligning the positions where they both would stand and scratching runes into the earth.
Moira looked up from her memorization. “Lord,” she said dubiously, “aren’t you forgetting the pentagram?”
“Eh? No girl, I’m not forgetting. We only need a pentagram to contain the Summoned should it prove dangerous.”
“And this one is not dangerous?” Moira frowned.
Patrius chuckled. “No, he is not dangerous.”
Moira wanted to ask how someone could be powerful enough to aid the Mighty and still not be dangerous even when Summoned, but Patrius motioned her to silence, gestured her to her place and, as the stick’s shadow shortened to nothing, began his part of the chant.
“Aaagggh!”
William Irving Zumwalt growled at the screen. Without taking his eyes off the fragment of code, he grabbed the can of cola balanced precariously on the mound of printouts and hamburger wrappers littering his desk.
“Found something, Wiz?” his cubicle mate asked, looking up from his terminal.
“Only the bug that’s been screwing up the sort module.”
William Irving Zumwalt—Wiz to one and all—leaned back and took a healthy swig of cola. It was warm and flat from sitting for hours, but he barely noticed. “Here. Take a look at this.”
Jerry Andrews shifted his whale-like bulk and swiveled his chair to look over Wiz’s shoulder. “Yeah? So?”
Wiz ran a long, thin hand through his shock of dark hair. “Don’t you see? This cretinous barfbag usessizeof to return the size of the array.”
“So how else do you get the size?”
“Right. But C doesn’t have an array data type. When you call an array you’re actually passing a pointer to the array. That works fine from the main program, but sometimes this thing usessizeof from a subroutine. And guess what it gets then?”
Jerry clapped a meaty hand to his forehead. “The size of the pointer! Of course.”
“Right,” Wiz said smugly. “No matter how big the array, the damn code returns a value of two.”