by Matt Forbeck
“So why didn’t you?” Archie could feel the Undead massing behind him now, and he relished the way they made Walda squirm with unease.
“Because we’re Illagers. We don’t have that sort of luxury. Thord was a better Illager than you by almost every means of measure. So when it came down to having to choose between the two of you, I went with Thord.”
She braced herself as she waited for Archie’s reaction.
She made a mistake. You should make her pay.
He found himself steaming with anger over the way Walda had treated him—and over the fact that she’d taken over Highblock Keep the instant it seemed like he might be dead. He stared hard at her and wondered what he should do with her.
“I’m sorry,” she added in a surprisingly meek voice.
Archie accepted her apology with a sharp nod. “I’ll forgive your transgressions—for now,” he told her. “But don’t get any ideas about replacing me. As you can see, I’m a lot harder to defeat than you might have guessed. You serve here in Highblock Keep at my pleasure. Never forget that.”
Excellent.
Walda’s shoulders tensed in fear, and Archie relished the look on her face. She was learning to fear him the way he’d once feared her.
“As for Thord…”
Walda tensed up once more. The two of them had a long history together as the leaders of their Illagers. While she was in charge of the full tribe, no one had contested Thord being in charge of the raiding parties for as long as Archie could remember.
“He’s a good leader too,” she said. “If you need people on the field of battle, you can’t do better.”
“The last two times he ran a raiding party didn’t go so well,” Archie pointed out. He knew he wasn’t being fair. The first time, no one could have predicted that Smacker would ruin everything, and the second time, well, Archie had actually been in charge. If anyone was to blame for that disastrous assault on the village, it was him.
Of course, Smacker had ruined that too.
Archie thought he was starting to see the real problem. Smacker had been a thorn in the Illagers’ collective side for far too long.
Walda waffled. “Well, you can’t do better among Illagers, at least.”
Archie gave Walda a condescending pat on the arm. “We need to do better. And we will.”
With that, he turned and raised his staff. The Undead mobs all stared at it as if they were aware he could kill any of them with it in an instant. “Remain here!” he ordered them. “Protect the entrance to the keep.”
He had no idea if any of them really understood anything he was saying. The Orb demanded their attention, though, and got it. Uncertain if they would obey him without its direct threat still pointed at them, he turned and led Walda across the drawbridge and back into Highblock Keep.
Halfway across the bridge, he turned around to see the husks and skeletons milling about there. They might not have been following his orders enthusiastically, but he’d never really been able to understand what motivated them in the first place.
“I cannot wait to see the look on the others’ faces,” Walda said as they walked into the keep. “They’re going to be even more shocked than I was.”
“I take it they haven’t been behaving themselves?” Archie said. “Our Illagers require a strong hand.”
Walda tried to ignore the jab at her leadership. Instead, she glanced over her shoulder at the Undead mobs and asked Archie a nervous question. “Are you sure they’re not just going to invite themselves in?”
Archie hefted his staff. “I have complete control over them. They won’t hurt us. Not as long as I’m in charge.”
Walda grunted with grudging respect. “Yet another reason to leave your leadership unchallenged then.”
Archie glared at her. Perhaps he’d been too lenient with her after all. “Did you have designs on that?”
“Me? Of course not.”
He didn’t believe her for a second. The fact that she pointedly didn’t speak for the rest of the Illagers—and not for Thord particularly—did not escape Archie.
The army you have assembled is still not enough.
Archie had worried about that the entire way back to Highblock Keep. The Illagers hadn’t been enough to help him take the village, or to protect him from the Undead army—which, now that he thought about it, had clearly followed them to the village and waited until the worst moment to attack just so the Nameless One could get Archie alone.
Now that he had the Nameless One as an ally, he shouldn’t have to worry about trouble from that quarter in the future—barring a terrible betrayal. Sure, a roaming cluster of Undead mobs might randomly attack, but they wouldn’t have enough force behind them to be a real threat.
The Undead were never the real threat. It’s the heroes you need to worry about the most.
That made sense. The Undead had certainly disrupted the attack on the village, but once again, it had been Smacker who’d started turning everything wrong.
There are others too.
Archie groaned inwardly. Smacker had been the only hero in the village the night they’d attacked, but now that the Illagers had failed in their first attempt, they might not find the place so poorly defended in the future. At the very least, Archie and his army might have to contend with beefed-up defenses, but there was also a good chance that the Villagers would beg every hero in the land—and maybe even beyond—to come to their aid.
That was the last thing Archie needed.
He’d thought that his redstone golems might be enough to handle his hero problem, but that hadn’t been the case. Smacker had dismantled the first redstone golem he ran into like it was little more than a pile of rocks. Bringing the Undead along to attack the village would help, but the heroes would make quick work of them if Archie couldn’t stop them directly.
Would having more redstone golems help? It would be a good start, for sure. None of the Villagers or even their iron golems could stand up against the creatures. If Smacker’s success against that first one was any indication, though, Archie would need dozens of them to be sure they could prevail against even a handful of heroes.
You cannot wait forever to build your army. If you do, the heroes will find their way here to take care of you before you can muster enough strength to attack them.
Archie had no idea what he could do to prevent that from happening. Their loss at the village had set certain wheels in motion, and he didn’t know how to stop them. Perhaps there was a way to get them pointed in a different direction at least.
You need more muscle. Something that can equal the heroes in might.
Archie stared at the Orb of Dominance. Wasn’t this powerful artifact supposed to be the thing that gave him the edge he needed? Maybe it wasn’t as omnipotent as he’d hoped.
He supposed he couldn’t feel bad about that though. The Orb had hauled him up from the most miserable point of his life and given him more power than he’d ever dreamed of wielding. He couldn’t be disappointed because it didn’t hand him the entire land on a platter. He would just have to take the tools it had given him and work for it.
There is more you might be able to do with the power of the Fiery Forge.
That idea intrigued Archie. The forge had already given him the redstone golems. What other powerful aid might it be able to supply?
Besides which, Archie needed to visit the Fiery Forge again to make even more redstone golems to supplement his forces. After all, they weren’t going to spring to life and wander off to Highblock Keep on their own. Before he headed out, though, he had a few other things to do. He decided to head to the Obsidian Pinnacle and at least check up on the place.
Archie dismissed Walda and then started the climb toward the top of the Obsidian Pinnacle. He met a few other Illagers along the way, each of them working on different tasks to which Walda,
presumably, had set them. To a person, they greeted him with shocked delight.
Apparently, to them at least, he was immortal. As he climbed, his legend grew.
Archie’s thoughts wandered toward what he might do to improve his forces, and one idea kept coming back to him over and over again. If the redstone golems weren’t powerful enough, perhaps the answer wasn’t to make more of them. Instead, what if he made something bigger.
That’s it. Exactly.
An image of a gigantic creature sprang into his mind, something like a redstone golem but much larger. It would require a bigger mold and much more diamond and redstone, but if he could pull it off—if the Orb could animate it—he thought it would be worth it.
I like the way you think.
Archie smiled at that, pleased with himself. If he wondered whether the idea had come from him or had been planted in his mind by the Orb, he didn’t let it bother him for more than an instant.
By the time Archie reached the chair at the top of the pinnacle, he was feeling pretty good about himself and his Illagers. He’d gone from being banished to becoming their champion, and that was a position that he vowed he would never surrender. To his mind, the only one he had to worry about in that respect was Thord, but even thoughts of that bully couldn’t bring him down at the moment.
As he had done before, Archie set the Orb of Dominance’s staff into the hole drilled in front of the chair. Then he sat down and peered into the shifting colors of the Orb’s glowing surface.
The outside of the Orb slowly shimmered away, and an image of the Fiery Forge—or at least the lava-drenched volcanoes that spilled into it—appeared before Archie. As before, he seemed to be watching from a bird’s altitude, and it took him a moment to manage to maneuver his viewpoint down into the underground complex of caverns where he could spot the Fiery Forge itself.
He zoomed down into it and saw the golem mold there was filled with cooling redstone. The creature there was ready to be imbued with life. All it needed was some help from the Orb.
Archie realized then that he didn’t see the redstone golem that he’d set to watch over the Fiery Forge. It should have been standing right next to its sibling-to-be, but it seemed to have wandered off.
The little Illager pulled his viewpoint back out again and scanned the cavern for the missing redstone golem. The other Illagers he’d stationed there still remained, working away at their jobs as he’d ordered them. They were mining the walls, building tracks and carts to carry the precious ore about, and generally doing a fine job.
He wondered if any of them had even heard that he was supposed to be dead. Probably they were unaware or they might have abandoned their posts. Had the redstone golem somehow figured that out and gone rogue?
After many panicked moments of panning around and maneuvering his viewpoint throughout the cavern complex, Archie finally spotted what he was hunting for. The redstone golem had moved farther into the cavern that housed the Fiery Forge, much deeper than Archie had ever ventured. And it had someone riding on its shoulders.
Even as Archie zoomed in, he knew whom he would see there, and he was right. Thord stood perched on the shoulders of the golem, which had apparently carried him to their current location. The golem seemed to be dragging a makeshift sled filled with diamond and redstone, a fortune in raw materials, and it was heading toward another exit from the place, one that Archie had never seen before.
Thord was robbing the Fiery Forge.
You need to defeat him. Now.
Archie had figured that out already. Thord was simply too much of a threat to his authority to be allowed to continue. The only question was whether Archie needed to march out to the Fiery Forge to take care of that task or whether he could wait for Thord to return to Highblock Keep instead. After all, Thord didn’t know he was alive, so it was possible that he would walk right back into Archie’s grasp.
But Archie was no longer in the mood to wait for that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Archie set off for the Fiery Forge right away, bringing one of the redstone golems with him. He didn’t bother to check in with Walda or anyone else before he left. He wondered if she knew about what Thord was up to, but he figured that if she did know she’d just lie to him about it. And if she didn’t, then he didn’t want her to have that knowledge.
It was bad enough that Thord was trying to rob him. Archie didn’t want to let the other Illagers think the evoker actually had a chance of succeeding. If they did, they might start choosing sides, and Archie worried that would go poorly for him. He didn’t want to have to crush a full-on rebellion within his ranks.
On top of that, Archie was just as furious with Walda as he was with Thord. She’d been in charge of Highblock Keep when he’d been missing. That meant she had to know—at the very least—that Thord wasn’t there. She could have told him about that, but she hadn’t.
Which probably meant she knew what Thord was up to and supported it.
You cannot trust anyone but yourself.
That had become abundantly clear to Archie. He’d already known that, of course, from long before Walda had banished him from the tribe, but he realized that he’d harbored hopes that the situation might change with his rise to power. For most of his life, he’d felt terribly alone, but he’d thought that becoming the leader of the Illagers would mean he might finally have some real friends—or at least Illagers he could count on.
Instead, he found himself more isolated than ever. At least before, no one had tried to take anything from him, mostly because he hadn’t had anything to take. Once he had power, though, other people wanted it, and they were apparently willing to go to great lengths to get it.
Looking back at the attack on the village, Archie wondered if Thord had somehow been working with the heroes. Or perhaps with the Nameless One, hoping that the Undead ruler would kill him rather than strike a bargain with him.
He just couldn’t tell what might be true anymore.
The only person who’d shown him any real kindness and friendship was Yumi, and in his attempt to solidify his power, Archie had ruined that too. The look on her face when she realized that he’d led the attack on the village haunted him. He’d tried to save her, of course, but she hadn’t seen that—just that he and his army were trying to destroy everything she’d ever held dear.
She would never forgive him. He decided he could never forgive himself either. But that didn’t change what he had to do.
As Archie and his redstone golem tromped out of Highblock Keep, he saw his new army of Undead mobs clustered around the end of the drawbridge. He wondered if they might turn on the Illagers while he was gone. If so, maybe they deserved it.
Archie felt a pang of jealousy for the Nameless One. To know that the creatures under your command were always on your side, no matter what. How amazing would that be?
They are only tools.
Archie wasn’t sure what the Orb meant by that. He supposed the Nameless One would have to be lonely too—and had been for far longer than Archie had been alive. Sure, the Undead mobs did as they were told, but then they were only animated corpses, not real, living people.
That didn’t seem like a fair trade. But then, constantly worrying about traitors wasn’t much better.
Archie stopped at the end of the drawbridge and held up his staff. The husks and skeletons all turned to stare at him, ready for his orders.
For the barest instant, Archie considered sending them into Highblock Keep to destroy the other Illagers there. He could put the problems of having to deal with the living behind him. He could become another sort of Nameless One, commanding the Undead—perhaps even the remains of his fellow Illagers—to do his bidding.
He shuddered and shook that idea off.
“Stay here,” he told them. “Protect Highblock Keep until I return.”
He knew that
left a lot of room for interpretation, but he didn’t have the time or inclination to give each of them individual orders. He needed to get to the Fiery Forge and confront Thord before he got away.
The way there was easier than Archie remembered. It was a cloudy day, but none of the worst mobs were wandering about in the muted sunshine. Those creatures he spotted scattered immediately, not at the sight of him but at the redstone golem dogging his heels.
It was well past dark when Archie spotted the telltale glow of the lava flows rising red in the west. When he reached the lava river, he stormed across the bridge and then let the redstone golem carry him down the trail to the cavern wherein lay the Fiery Forge.
The Illagers working in the cavern glanced up when Archie and the redstone golem entered, but they just as quickly turned away. He suspected they knew what Thord was up to, but either way, he was glad to see them cower at his presence. If he could not be loved, he would settle for being feared.
The golem-to-be that Archie had spotted in the diamond mold still lay cooling there, ready to be called to service. The darker parts of the redstone still glowed a bit, but they were finally beginning to turn to the gray color through which the crimson part of the redstone shone. He considered stopping to use the Orb to get the new redstone golem moving, but he was too angry to think about that then.
Working from memory of his last viewing through the Orb from the Obsidian Pinnacle, Archie headed toward where he hoped to discover the traitor.
Even with guidance from the Orb of Dominance, it took him a few tries. He wasn’t sure if it was due to a faulty memory, the difficulty of the terrain, or the fact that Thord was moving about, perhaps in an effort to evade detection. Or possibly some combination of those things.
Archie located the exit he’d seen Thord using, and he followed a series of passages that led up, up, up until he finally reached the surface again. Once there, he found himself emerging from the side of a mountain, right near a cataract of lava that cascaded down from high above and splashed into a wide lake of lava that lit up the night. The land seemed peaceful enough—abandoned, really—but for the metallic rhythm of someone using a pick.