Drusilla Morgan walked wearily into the GalaxyCom building, facing her night shift with a sense of dread. Another eight mindless, endless hours at a keyboard, entering data. This was not her idea of a career.
No, her idea was to paint. But her paintings weren’t selling for much more than they cost in materials, and she still needed to eat, and needed a roof over her head. Someday, she promised herself, things would change. She wouldn’t need to work the graveyard shift so she could paint by day in natural light. In fact, she wouldn’t have to do anything at all except paint.
Someday.
Someday looked a long way away right now. Her ordinarily irrepressible high spirits were seriously repressed tonight.
In the lobby, just ahead of her in the line to pass security, she saw that tech geek from the eighth floor. The cute one. He didn’t look like most of the moles who did his kind of work, holed up for most of their lives in a climate-controlled room without windows, talking to computers through keyboards as if they were living beings.
No, he looked as if he spent his days outside doing something athletic. Not geekish at all. He was maybe…what? Twenty-eight? Thirty?
Dark hair, dark eyes, neatly dressed in an environment that tolerated anything, including cutoffs and T-shirts with beer slogans.
And powerful. She’d heard he was the head honcho upstairs on the supercomputers, a man who, if she made the wrong keystrokes, could have her fired for slowing down the system or causing a problem. She always felt a little apprehensive when she saw him, knowing he was for all intents and purposes the czar of the graveyard shift.
On the other hand, just looking at him gave her a little thrill, as if the mere sight of him satisfied some deep, unrecognized yearning in her.
He passed through security and vanished toward the elevator. He had enough status to use the elevator that needed a key. The rest of them had to crowd on the regular elevators.
Drusilla passed security and squeezed into an elevator with the other cube-farm slaves. It was, she sometimes fancied, like working in the mines of Moria. Endless labor in the dark, a computer watchdog keeping track of every keystroke, timing her input to make sure she wasn’t slacking off, waiting to pounce on any out-of-normal entry.
But, she reminded herself, it was the price she paid for her art. Besides, since it didn’t challenge her mentally, she had plenty of time to daydream.
She got off the elevator with the others, and they scattered to their various cubicles, passing one another with smiles and nods but little verve. Tonight it was as if they all shared her reluctance to be here.
The coffee urns were full and fresh as usual, and she waited briefly in line to fill her mug.
Then it was back to her cube, a place that would have been utterly sterile except for her highly prized Boris Vallejo calendar from 1974 and the little pewter dragons holding variously colored crystal balls that she took out of her purse every night and set beside her monitor.
It wasn’t even her personal cube. She was merely one of three shifts that worked at this same desk. Apparently her predecessor had left early. A coffee splash on the desk was all that marked his passing.
Sighing, Drusilla sat down, reached for the stack of papers in the In box and logged into the system. At precisely 11:00, she began to make entries.
At precisely 11:05, her fingers warmed up now, she allowed her mind to drift into a fantasy far, far away from the unwinking screen before her and the watching security cameras all around.
On the floor directly above her, Miles Kennedy sat at his gray desk, the supercomputers all quietly humming around him. Well, their fans were humming. Computers themselves really made very little noise, compared to the old days.
He ran a quick system check and found that everything was as it should be. The earlier shift had noted a performance discrepancy that had disappeared on its own.
A lot of things could cause that, most of them actually minor. On the other hand…
He leaned back in his chair and scanned the Behemoths—as he thought of his computers—that surrounded him. Coffee? Nah, he decided. Not yet. He was still feeling invigorated from his nightly five-mile run, a run that woke him up enough to do this benighted job.
He wondered if tonight would be one of those nights when all hell broke loose, a night when he worked his butt off, matching wits with microchips, processors and infinitesimal transistors, not to mention cranky programs that had somehow dropped a few bits. Would it be a night when he’d have to call for reinforcements?
Or would it be a night when he could safely doze with one eye open? A night when he could follow his own pursuits on the Behemoths that right now were barely stretching, let alone using, all their muscle.
He waited awhile, but nothing changed. Nobody downstairs messed up. No program dropped a bit. No transistor failed.
So he turned to the system monitors in front of him and tapped in his secret code, opening a private file only he knew existed. A file that would be invisible to even the most experienced prying eyes.
Then he began to type.
In Drusilla’s dream, she was a princess. Not one of those flighty girls in satins and silks who needed to be rescued by a hot-lipped prince, but a warrior princess. The kind of princess who could rule a realm and bring a powerful man to his knees.
The only silks and satins she wore were underwear to protect her royal skin from the roughness of her uniform. She carried a shield and a sword, wore a crested helmet and rode a horse better than any man.
But there was a problem in Drusilla’s realm. The Key of Morgania was missing, the key to the ancient secrets of the wizards, secrets desperately needed to save her people from the onslaught of approaching hordes.
And her father, the King, despaired of finding it after these many years of searching.
King Cedrick was elderly, and Drusilla was his only child. She had been born late in his life, when he’d taken time away from other matters to marry and start a family. His wife, however, hadn’t survived Drusilla’s birth.
Once she no longer required a wet nurse, Drusilla had spent her time hanging around the stables and guards’ barracks. At first they’d treated her warily, knowing that any mistake they made would reach her father’s ears. Slowly they’d realized she wasn’t going to stay away and begun to teach her the basic skills she needed to be safe around horses, weapons and strangers. Eventually they’d accepted her as one of their own and taught her the finer points of riding and fencing. And, when they were sure her father wouldn’t hear of it, the finer points of gambling, drinking and singing bawdy ballads of lust and adventure.
Now she was as mighty a warrior as any of them, and the only hope of Morgania, her father’s kingdom. It was time to put her skills to use.
But Cedrick was reluctant to send his only child on such a quest, a quest he himself had failed at repeatedly.
“You’re needed here, my dear,” he told her. “My health is failing and no one but you can replace me.”
“It won’t do any good to replace you if Morgania is overrun by invaders,” she argued. “We need the key. Without it, we’re all doomed.”
“I searched thirty years for that key,” he reminded her.
“I know.”
“So what makes you think you can find it?”
Cedrick had never been short on ego, but Drusilla wasn’t short on chutzpah, at least in her daydreams. “Well, I have a leg up on the problem, Dad,” she pointed out. “I don’t need to look anywhere you did.”
He laughed, a coughing, wheezing sound, then said, “Go ahead, Druse. But you better be back before the snow falls. I’m not going to make it through another winter, and it will be up to you to keep Lord Hedgehog in line. He has his eyes on the throne and he won’t surrender it once he’s had a chance to sit here. You can’t let him have it. Ever.”
“Want a cup of coffee, Drusilla?”
Startled out of her thoughts, Drusilla felt her fingers skitter on the keys. A warning flashed on her screen.
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” said Cal Osten, the occupant of the next cube. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Coffee?”
“Sure.” She passed him her mug, wishing him to the devil as she stared at the blinking warning and tried to figure out how to fix it. And why couldn’t Cal get it through his head that she wasn’t interested in him? It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with him, but he just wasn’t interested in most of the same things she was. A Boris Vallejo calendar did not a life-long relationship make.
Upstairs, Miles stirred out of his preoccupation as a warning flashed red on a neighboring screen. It was one he was familiar with. The Behemoth was hiccuping because someone had hit the F1 key and the U key at the same time.
With a few quick keystrokes he corrected the problem, then returned to his other activities.
Downstairs, Drusilla heaved a sigh of relief as the warning flash disappeared and the screen once again indicated that the computer was ready to receive data. She waited, however, until Cal returned with her coffee. When he seemed disposed to linger, she said, “Cal, I’m sorry, but I’ve lost time because of the error. I’ve got to catch up.”
“Sure,” he said, looking disappointed. “Maybe at meal break?”
“I’m not taking one. I need to leave early.”
“Oh, okay.” He drifted away.
Then her fingers, and her mind, began to fly.
Darkness filled the Forest of Nurn. She had been on her quest for some days now, tracking an old rumor that the key had been snatched by a beast everyone called Behemoth. But no one knew if Behemoth really existed or, if he did, where he might be. Or why he would have wanted the key. Or anything else useful.
In fact, she realized as she rode her horse slowly through the dark forest, two soldiers behind her, if she were reading this in a book, she would be bored. Well, it was her dream, dammit. She ought to be able to make something exciting happen.
But for some reason, nothing did. It was as if her daydream had slipped somehow from her control. The forest remained dark, the only sounds the quiet thud of the horses’ hooves on thick carpets of pine needles and the dripping of water left by a recent rain.
The air felt damp and chill to her skin, and with each passing minute the forest grew darker and more oppressive.
Her artist’s eye picked out a hundred deep shades of green and brown, and envisioned the brush-and knife-strokes she would need to capture the images she was slowly moving through. But a painting would need a focal point. Herself and her guardsmen?
“M’lady?”
She recognized the voice of Zeke, sergeant of her personal guard, one of the two she had trusted enough and respected enough to bring with her.
She reined in her mount lightly and waited for Zeke to catch up. “What is it?”
“M’lady…we’ve passed this spot before.”
She turned her head sharply toward him. “I know it all looks the same.”
He shook his head. “M’lady, I recognize that sapling yonder. I remember the strange way it’s forked. And then I looked down…”
She looked down, too, and saw what he meant. The marks of horse’s hooves were ahead of them now, as well as behind them.
The back of her neck prickled. “We’re going in circles.”
“So it seems.” Zeke looked around them. “It’s growing darker, but the day can’t be that far along.”
“We need to find a stream.”
“But it’s hard to hear running water with all the trees dripping.”
“Just don’t tell me you’ve seen stick figures and piles of rock like in that movie.”
“M’lady?”
Of course, he wouldn’t have seen that movie. There were no movies in this world of hers. “Never mind. There must be a wizard around somewhere.”
“My thought exactly.”
“So the question becomes whether this is merely a spell for the wizard’s protection or whether it’s directed at us specifically.”
Zeke nodded again. “But how do we determine that, m’lady?”
“Well, we travel at a right angle to our present course.” At least it sounded like a good idea. “We’ll either get out of range of the spell or run into a wizard.” She didn’t mention the possibility that they might still run in circles. Nor did she want to think about the fact that she’d never been magically gifted.
Oh, she’d had mages try to teach her; after all, she would someday be the ruler of Morgania. But she’d been a hapless student, more likely to blow things up than to counter spells, much less cast spells of her own.
But hadn’t there been something about seeing through a spell?
Chin tucked to her chest, she led the way to the right and tried to remember. Magic hadn’t seemed very important to her back then, because she’d been more interested in learning the art of war. Now she wished she’d paid better attention, however inept she’d been.
Wrapped in a wizard’s web. That was what they were. Caught like flies. The back of her neck prickled again and she had to fight the urge to look around. After all, there were two excellent soldiers guarding her back.
Just as she was about to conclude that she had chosen the wrong direction and that the spell was lessening not at all, she suddenly remembered something a magus had told her when she was very young.
Beware the Forest of Nurn, my lady. It will turn you around.
She drew to a sharp halt and the two guards came up on either side of her.
“What’s wrong, m’lady?” Zeke and Tertio asked the question at the same instant.
“It’s not a wizard. It’s the forest.”
“The forest?” Zeke looked as if he’d been made to swallow something utterly unpalatable.
“The forest,” she repeated. “It’s the old magic.”
Zeke scanned the area uneasily. “I recall hearing that at one time the forest was alive.”
“It’s still alive.” And meanwhile, part of her brain was wondering why she couldn’t do any better than this. She seemed to be stuck in clichés tonight for some reason. Of course, the whole search for the key was a cliché, so what the hell…
“Well,” she said, considering the problem since it appeared that it wasn’t going to go away. But as she sat there thinking, her steed quiet beneath her, she heard something else. A steady, quiet thudding.
“Someone’s coming,” Zeke said, stating the obvious. Why had she never before noticed how often he stated the obvious?
“Yes.”
She drew her sword, pulling it silently from its leather scabbard. Her two guards followed suit, arranging themselves to back her up.
The steady thud-thud drew closer, even as the forest seemed to grow misty, transforming slowly into another world.
Then horse and rider emerged from the mist, a tall white stallion mounted by a well-built, handsome man she recognized.
“Hi,” he said, looking rather startled at the sight of their swords. “I’m Miles, the Behemoth Tamer. Are you lost, too?”