The Kingdoms of Evil

by Daniel Bensen

  "May the Moral Blade cleanse your corruption from his world!" The glowing dagger emerged from under the monster's right armpit as the assassin tried to dart around Freetrick's defender and, paralyzed, Freetrick could only watch.

  Another attack against his brain followed questing jabs at his heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, the great blood vessels in his thighs and neck.

  The blade darted toward him, glowing with hot and holy light.

  The ogre, now a looming mountain of flesh less than six inches in front of Freetrick's nose, gave a grunt of frustration and threw itself onto the blade.

  Its death blew into Freetrick like the wind from a thunderstorm.

  Another bolt of force slammed against his defenses as the assassin gave a strangled, despairing cry, and leapt on him.

  There was no space in the terror to plan, and no time either. Freetrick could only act on the first impulse that came to him.

  With all his power, Freetrick reached out with his new death energy and pushed.

  It wasn't like writing a Rationalist spell. Even simple word-magic spells took a few moments of concentration, of control. Necromancy was the opposite. Lashing out with necromancy was a release of control, like giving in to a sickening urge.

  The air snapped, suddenly cold, and Freetrick's ears popped. The invisible tentacles prodding at Freetrick's defenses now tore away as the assassin, caught mid-leap by Freetrick's wall of air, shot backward. There was a cry and crack as the pressure smashed him against the opposite wall of the corridor.

  Freetrick sighed, and let go of the power.

  "Well---" he managed to say, before the sudden release of several hundred cubic feet of compressed air smacked him to the ground.

  Freetrick screamed, but couldn't hear his own voice. He blinked, but couldn't see. There was a horrible feeling in Freetrick's nose and ears, and his head rang with the echoes of the furiously displaced air.

  Frost billowed from Freetrick as pushed himself off the floor. He gasped in the icy air and peered past the frosted lenses of his pince-nez into air gone suddenly opaque, transformed into a vile-tasting miasma of gray dust, white water vapor, and black necromancy. He couldn't see much past the misty clouds of his own breath, condensing in the freezing air.

  Why the hell was it so cold? Groaning, Freetrick lifted himself to his knees and called into the frigid fog. "Hello?"

  "My lord," Freetrick saw the plume of breath in the air before he made out DeMacabre's ghastly outline. "Are you unhurt?"

  "Yes," said Freetrick, standing, "just knocked off my feet. How about you? Where's Bloodbyrn?"

  "The same, I believe." The shadowy figure came closer, and Freetrick saw the Duke twist the point of his little athame into the flesh of his thumb. The smear of blood he produced gave off heat and a sullen red glow. Further out in the mist, other red sparks flared to life.

  "I am here, my lord," Bloodbyrn's eyes shone yellow in the glow of her athame as she waved mist away from herself.

  "And may each of us tremble in our unworthiness," DeMacabre spoke into the fog and dust, "for the Grasper of the Bolt has demonstrated his great and terrible mastery of the Power of Death! We may thank whatever wicked constellations guide the twisted paths of our lives that the Fiend's mighty wrath was not directed at us. And now…"

  Bloodbyrn started forward as he father nodded to her. The cadaverous old reprobate was grinning at Freetrick as if he thought he could just pick up his shotgun wedding where he had left off.

  Not a chance. "Bring to me the one who dared attack me!" Freetrick bellowed.

  "Fiend," a tall, thin figure crouched and darted away. Skystarke. Freetrick shivered again and backed away from the advancing Bloodbyrn. He waved his hand in front of his face. The mist had cleared enough for Freetrick to see several shapes move past him further down the hall, following his orders.

  "My lord…" his fiancée's voice slid through the mist toward him.

  "Not now," Freetrick said, then in a louder voice. "Hey! Everyone! I want to know…I mean I demand to know if everyone is alright."

  Most proved to be. The shock of depressurizing air had knocked his subjects off their feet, but the results had been mostly confined to bruises and confusion. Luckily, no one had been standing in front of him but the assassin and the poor, self-sacrificing ogre. There was a lord Wroth-something who had probably broken a wrist, and Freetrick was trying to finagle medical aid out of another necromancer when his scouts returned.

  "Look, just think of healing as the opposite of torture…yes?"

  "Malevolence," Skystarke was back, his face carefully back on, kneeling low. "We have found the ass-ass-in." Objects in the guard's gauntleted hands shed a shimmering, milky light. "He carried a sacred dagg-ah and a crystal chalice of enchanted spring wa-tah to stop the black heart of the Ultimate Fiend."

  "But…" Freetrick closed his teeth over the words I felt a necromancer. There were clearly questions that needed answering. "Is the assassin still alive?"

  Skystarke could not exactly blink, but his face trembled like the skin of a distressed flan. "…no, Fiend."

  "Excellent," said Bloodbyrn.

  Freetrick thought of the force he had used the throw the man against the wall. "I think I need to see him."

  The man was indeed dead, the rage in his face still clearly visible under a rime of hoarfrost. Freetrick bent to examine him."Does he have…gold eyebrows?"

  "Indeed, Fiend," said Skystarke.

  "Ah," said DeMacabre, coming up from out of the mist behind them, "We had been wondering where the Prince of Vaingloria had got to. How enlightening."

  Freetrick turned a narrow-eyed stare on the Duke. "You lost a prisoner?"

  DeMacabre made a repulsive and elegant shrug. "It happens, my lord. Either the ogres escorting a victim to his doom accidentally eat each other, or the lizard-men are distracted by a shiny object, or human guards embrace their evil and enter into a vicious duel or set free the prisoner to bring down retribution on their overlords. You know how it is

  "Because no-one in the Kingdom of Evil is smart enough to follow orders." Freetrick said, mostly as a reminder to himself.

  "Oh, my lord jests, surely. Who could follow orders when sweet Chaos sings her siren song." DeMacabre said, "I believe the girl from the Audience Pit escaped the same way. Oh! Direct not your black gaze upon me, my lord, for I am sure she will turn up." He put a hand on Freetrick's shoulder. "When the time comes for her to leap from a shadow and attempt to slice the jugulars of the Ultimate Fiend, why, then you shall have the opportunity to do what you will with her." He winked.

  Freetrick closed his eyes, and decided he could not afford the time it would take to solve this problem. There were greater issues at stake here than just being the castle's assassination lightning rod. "Where did this guy come from?"

  "Vaingloria, my lord," said the Duke, primly, "my lord will remember he killed the prince's father during his ascension ceremony."

  "Oh," said Freetrick, "that Vaingloria. Another oppressed nation." His eyes sparked at the dark lords gathered around him. "Another source of unrest and rebellion. Another source of assassins I will have to defeat in single combat, since apparently I have a castle full of minions who can't escort a prisoner across a hall way without screwing it up. This is the sort of thing I was talking about, people!"

  "Well, my lord, he is dead now." DeMacabre said, soothingly.

  "Which doesn't help me much." Freetrick remembered the black tentacles of necromancy oozing over his defenses. "Was this an isolated malcontent, or was he part of a larger plot?" He gestured at the smashed, decompressed, and frozen corpse, "But I can't very well question him now, can I?" He saw the expressions around him, "um…can I?"

  "Welllll," DeMacabre drew out the syllable judiciously, "my lord is aware that he is a necromancer and king of necromancers, yes?"

  "Oh." Freetrick thought back to the city watch records he had read. He had assumed all the stuff about 'slaughtering first and asking questions second' wa
s metaphorical. "Well. Um. How?"

  "Lord Wrothgrinn, my lord?"

  "Wrothgrinn?" Freetrick knew from the 'wroth' part that this man was part of the royal family and a member of his father's generation—so an uncle of some sort. He hadn't heard the name before, though.

  "Well, what does he do? Can he help me with this?" Freetrick nudged the corpse with a foot.

  DeMacabre exchanged a glance with Bloodbyrn, who said. "He is a life-twister, my lord."

  Freetrick's eyes narrowed, thinking of his research. "He makes monsters? How is that useful right now?"

  Bloodbyrn blinked. Was that color rising in her cheeks? "He is a practitioner of the oldest form of necromancy, my lord."

  "Well, let's get him over here." Said Freetrick, looking around"Where is he?"

  "Not here, my lord." DeMacabre looked uncomfortable. "His Fiendishness the Dark Prince Wrothgrinn rarely comes to council sessions."

  Skystarke stared uneasily down at his own feet.

  Freetrick tried to be patient. "And why is that?"

  "His presence tends to unsettle the dark lords and ladies. The Dark Prince Wrothginn is a man of…peculiar proclivities."

  ***

  "They call me MAD! AH ha ha ha!" The Life-twister raised his hands against the lightning-split sky and howled with maniacal laughter. "They said it could not be done, the fools! The blind FOOLS! How DARE they mock me? How DARE they ridicule these! My unholy CRE-YAY-TIONS!" Thunder crashed and monsters squealed. "NOW, my minions! Now, while the energies are STR~RONGEST!"

  The laboratory chamber was an immense, open-topped, stone cylinder. Its walls, ringed with scrawled diagrams, sparking machinery, and ominously rattling cages, enclosed a donut-shaped platform about three paces wide, which formed the walkway around the iron-barred mouth of a pit. It was over this pit that the thin, hunched form of the Life-twister Wrothgrinn reared against Maelstrom above, shrieking in unholy glee. "THR~ROW the levers! GA-R~RIND the gears! Impale the CHIKEN!"

  "Bawk!"

  "Now!!" The Life-twister raised his arms aloft, vortices of unspeakable energies curdling the air around his fingers. "Now! Arise, my creations, A-R~RISE!"

  Dark engines moaned under diabolical stresses, belching arcs of blinding energy into the pit at the center of the chamber. The artificial lightning struck again, and again as titanic shapes reared and lurched in the pit. Sparks flashed off scaled skin as it stretched taught over swelling muscle and warping bone. Low heads swung, beady eyes glared, and long, forked tongues flickered in the charged air. Claws gripped the bars of the pit's mouth and wrenched as disturbingly human voices cried out in torment. And over it all, Wronthgrinn's maniacal laughter rang.

  There was some more shouting and flashing, and by the time Freetrick could see and hear again, the show was apparently over. A crew of goblins in stained smocks were cranking winches and closing metal plates over the ceiling. The lightning-machines were popping and ticking as they cooled. The Life-twister, standing in the center of the room like a ring-master in a circus, dusted off his hands and wiped a spatter of blood off his forehead.

  Bloodbyrn cleared her throat at him.

  Wrothgrinn's spun to face them. "Who? Who! WHO dares disturb the sanctity of my solitude!"

  "Free—" began Freetrick.

  "Feerborg," Bloodbyrn interrupted. "Wrothgrinn, maintain a civil tongue if you would keep it in your skull, for you stand in the shadow of his Malevolence Feerborg, the Ultimate Fiend."

  "The Ultimate…FIEND?" In the pause between word two and word three, the Wrothgrinn scuttled forward. He loomed over them, his long, crooked back bent so Freetrick looked up into the lunatic face hanging almost vertically above his. Wrothgrinn had pale, tangled hair and a pair of enormous spectacles that made his eyes look huge and insectile. He also had terrible breath.

  "Hm-mmm hmm."

  Freetrick tried not cringe back as, with an audible popping of stressed vertebrae, the face ratcheted closer. A pair of pale, long-fingered hands framed Wrothgrinn's face, each with three lenses like jeweler's loops held in the spaces between the digits.

  "In-teresting!" Glass and metal clinked together as the Life-twister peered through the lenses between his fingers, first with one, then another, then, overlapping hands, two at once.

  With each change, Freetrick saw the man's right eye magnified larger.

  "Um," Freetrick, his neck bent nearly double, tried to smile at the eye looking down on him: vast, cold, and unsympathetic. "Hello," he extended a hand upward, "nice to meet—"

  The Life-twister reeled backward, shrieking, "Not my incorruptible flesh! Do not touch my FLESH!"

  "Oh!Uh, sorry!" Freetrick said, "Are you, uh…" he tried to complete the sentence as Wrothgrinn examined his right hand through the lenses held in his left, "The Life-twister?"

  The man drew himself up and stepped back in one smooth movement. Freetrick was reminded of a spider. "Yes! It is I, WR~ROTHGR~RINN!" Wrothgrinn thrust a hand into the air as he shouted his name, and a lightning bolt crashed across the ceiling. "They call me MAD, you know!" he shouted over the thunderclap, "but that is only because they fail to recognize my," he squealed, "GENIUS! Bwah Ha ha ha! But soon," Wrothgrinn's voice dropped to a whisper, then rose to a fanatic howl, "my day will come! And all of them will PAY!" Another bolt of artificial lightning.

  "Really?" said Freetrick, removing his fingers from his ears, "Well. I'm, uh, sure they will really appreciate the, uh," his eyes flicked to iron bars over the pit in the floor. They shuddered as the creatures inside lunged against them. "…giant lizards you made."

  "Giant lizards?" Wrothgrinn's eyes were wide with indignation behind his round spectacles, "Those conformist hack-works? Those COMMISIONS? Bah!"

  He spun and kicked the bars over the pit. A taloned hand came up and barely missed removing his foot at the ankle. "They are for Strakhblargle," he explained, "and typical of the man. I ask you, fiend, HOW can an artist exercise his talents on such small-minded, such PEDESTRIAN orders? As if I had not made a hundred, a thousand, giant lizards in my long career."

  Wrothgrinn grumbled as he rubbed at a dark stain on his smock. " Small-minded. Pedestrian! Might as well ask for ogres, or Tempest help me, WENDIGOS!"

  "Oh," said Freetrick, wondering about Skrean social niceties. He was here to ask the Life-twister for a favor. Maybe he should show interest in the man's work? "Um, have you? Made a lot of giant lizards, I mean?"

  Wrothgrinn nodded tiredly. "Giant lizards, giant bats, giant spiders. All dull, conventional!" He raised his fists, "CLICHE!" Lightning flashed again. "Even the giant chinchillas were but a variation on the same tired old themes, although" he winked, "they were the talk of the castle for weeks after they started breeding."

  "I bet…they were," Freetrick said. "Were all of them work for Strakhblargle?"

  "My lord," hissed Bloodbyrn, but Wrothgrinn was already answering.

  "Oh not at all. My work is admired THROUGHOUT the Vile Halls!" Wrothgrinn nodded to himself."Yes, indeed. Why, just yesterday I was commissioned for…what was it?" He tapped a fingernail pensively against his teeth, "two thirteens of maggot men? Three?" He sighed elaborately, "not as if it matters. Maggot men are hardly Mad at all these days."

  "My lord," said Bloodbyrn in a slightly louder voice, "did you not have some specific business to accomplish here?"

  "Maggot men?" Wrothgrinn continued, "They have been done, I said. They are passé, I said, but do they listen? Fools!" He shook his head and stared gloomily at the cages quivering on the wall. "The talent, the GENIUS of one such as myself is wasted in this conservative milieu."

  "Actually," said Freetrick, "I did have something I wanted to—"

  "Yes, yes," Wrothgrinn waved his hands impatiently, "re-animating the assassin, of course. Your faceless servant was admirably specific in relaying my lord's instructions. But first, my lord, let me show you the truest works of my art."

  Before Freetrick could protest, the Life-twister had slid across the floor, and was beckoning Free
trick and Bloodbyrn toward a squat, dark cage. "Closer, my lord, come closer, and you will see my greatest work to date. Yes, my GR~REATEST WORK!" One emaciated hand rested on the catch of its lid. "I! WR~ROTHGR~RINN! The last of the great Life-twisters! The man who has attached bat wings to octopuses, who has put eyes in places no eyes should go, and whose work with tentacles…" he inhaled rapturously through his nose, "well, my tentacles need no praise from me. They stand on their own merits."

  Or sort of coil slimily around their own merits? Freetrick nodded and smiled.

  "I have sinned against nature," Wrothgrinn sighed, "in so many ways, but those efforts were but PLAY, practice for this, my greatest work to date." His hand on the lid of the cage tightened. "Now, BR~RACE yourselves for a most disturbing sight. Are you braced?"

  Freetrick looked at Bloodbyrn, who rolled her eyes.

  "BEHOLD." Wrothgrinn lifted the lid. Freetrick closed his eyes.

  "They are…oh they are horrible." Squeaked Bloodbyrn.

  "They are ART!" Wrothgrinn insisted.

  Freetrick opened his eyes. "They're…kittens," Freetrick reached down and stroked one of the tiny ginger cats. It rolled over and captured his hand in its tiny paws.

  "My lord, stop that!" Bloodbyrn cried, backing away. "It is wrong, it is unbecoming, it is…" she shut her eyes tight and shuddered.

  "Yes…" murmured Wrothgrinn. "A perfect reaction."

  "Don't be silly, Bloodbyrn," said Freetrick, "they're just kittens." The one he was playing with went miw.

  A look of pain crossed Bloodbyrn's face. "They are abominations. Counter to everything the Kingdoms of Evil stand for. If someone were to see us—you, my lord playing with them, stroking them, " she struggled for words, "fondling them…my lord, they would lose any respect for your villainy."

  Freetrick opened his mouth to reply, but Wrothgrinn interrupted, "there! You see? That is the sort of conventional, narrow-minded, philistine attitudes I must contend with! But you, my lord," a smile split his face as the Life-twister looked down at Freetrick, whose hand still covered the kitten, " a man of your worldly sophistication can appreciate the irony, the iconoclasm of my work."