Myth Alliances

"That's a nasty one," she remarked. "I'll have to remember that trick." We'd barely straightened up when I heard another crackle from behind me. I spun around just in time to see the column of blue light collapse and vanish. The Pervect Ten were calling their safeguard spell home.

"A very sophisticated use of magik," Zol Icty agreed, leading us back to the table. Montgomery, our host, brought us a tray full of food and beer. I fell on the food as though I'd been starved for weeks. Tananda served herself more daintily, but she filled her plate as high as I did mine. Being terrified and nearly incinerated did help us work up an appetite. "We are up against very intelligent opponents. You say they had a computer in the room?"

"Yes," I affirmed, washing down a mouthful of cheese with a swig of beer. "The little one was reading from an almost infinite scroll. I think it would be the longest scroll in the history of the world, but I couldn't see where it was rolled up."

"It's in virtual space," Zol explained, smiling. "A kind of magik. I could teach you, but that is not the best use of our time now. Can you get me in there?"

We looked at Wensley. He writhed uneasily.

"They're in there all the time except when they eat or sleep or come to supervise us."

"Tonight is time enough," Zol assured us. "I am awake a good deal of the night anyhow."

"You don't want to go back again?" Wensley squawked, aghast.

"How do you want us to figure out what they're doing?" I demanded. "Ask them?"

The Wuhs had no answer to that.

Once again we found ourselves sneaking into the great room of the castle. The Wuhses on what anywhere else would have been guard duty carefully looked the other way as we passed, with all the subtlety of a child counting to 100 in a game of Hide and Seek.

Apparently it had not made the Pervect Ten suspicious that their security spell had been stolen that afternoon. The gleaming blue cage was back in place, this time tethered with lines of force to the walls of the castle, preventing it from moving again. That didn't worry me, because now we knew how to pass in and out of it without being killed.

The little flames were pointing inward when we reached the room, a sign that the Ten were not in it. Very carefully I used a tendril of magik to ease open the door wide enough to peer through. As I hoped, the room was dark and silent. I signaled to the others. We tiptoed in.

I had left Gleep at the head of the corridor curled up under a couch set in an alcove. If he saw any Pervects heading towards us he had instructions to cry out. At the sound of "Gleep!" we were to run into the anteroom and pop back to the inn. He would meet us there as soon as he could get away from them. They'd be unlikely to suspect an innocent-looking baby dragon of subterfuge. I hoped.

"Now, Pervect code is very hard to break," Zol explained, as he sat down in the child's chair and flexed his long fingers. I noticed with surprise that he fit into the seat fairly well. "They tend to like permutations of complex numbers as their secure logarithm."

Bunny sat on the desk beside her hero, watching him raptly. I felt a twinge of jealousy, wondering what I would have to do for anyone to admire me like that. Tananda came up and wrapped her arm around me.

"Don't worry, hot stuff," she told me, with a little smile. "She'll snap out of it. She likes you just the way you are."

I flushed. Bunny was my friend. I wasn't trying to im- press her. Was I? Embarrassed, I moved off to take a look out the door. I hoped none of the Pervect Ten was going to get up in the middle of the night to work on their plans for conquest. The hall was empty. My breathing was the loudest thing at this end of the room.

Zol wasn't doing so well. Using all his fingers and thumbs he was pushing the buttons on the board so fast they chattered. I noticed that there was a small symbol in the center of each button. Since I had seen written and printed Pervish I knew they stood for letters of their alphabet, though I couldn't read them. In the screen images and words flashed. I couldn't tell what any of them meant, but one kept coming up time and time again: a big X.

"What's that mean?" I said, pointing.