The Dark Lord

by Jack Heckel

  “But—” he began.

  “No,” I said firmly. “Not this time. If you won’t stay clear of it, then I am going straight to Gristle’s office and turn myself in.”

  A sinister smile crept over his face. “You forget I am already in it.” He waved the spare closet key at me. “I had to check this out. They will know I went to your closet.”

  I shook my head. “No dice. You know as well as I do that the storeroom guys give those things out to anyone that will slip them a cold beer. All you have to say is that you were playing a prank on me. I am going alone.”

  He frowned deeply. “You are committed to this?”

  “Yes, and if you don’t mind I’d like to get started. I only have—” I glanced at the ticking clock “—crap, less than fifteen days now.”

  “All right,” he said reluctantly, “but I want you to take something with you.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin made of a silvery metal that seemed to be simultaneously dull and shiny depending on how the light fell on it. On one side it had a silhouette of a face in profile, and on the other a magical circle of immense complexity inscribed in minute detail.

  “What’s this?” I asked impatiently.

  “It’s a transtemporal subworld communicator,” he said with a look of immense satisfaction. “I’ve been working on it for months now. I was going to test it next time you went subworld hopping.”

  “What the hell is a trans . . . that?” I asked, pointing at the coin.

  “Well . . .” he began.

  However Eldrin might have explained the device he never got the chance, because at that moment we heard the heavy tread of hard-soled boots coming along a side passage. This would have been frightening enough, but my blood froze as I heard the unmistakable muttering of Magus Eustace Griswald, and the wheezing of his imp. Eyes wide, I looked at Eldrin. If I were as pale as he was, we must have looked like a pair of ghosts standing there.

  Eldrin moved first, thrusting the coin into my hand and shoving me through the door. “Start modifying the circle,” he hissed. “I’ll hold the old man off as long as I can. Oh, and, Avery, good luck and come back safe.”

  With that he pulled the door shut and twisted the key in the lock. The sound of the bolt falling into place seemed final and dreadful. For a moment I stood there dumb, but then I heard Eldrin’s voice raised to an unnatural volume. “Magus Griswald, what an unexpected surprise.”

  I could not hear what my mentor said in response, but Eldrin replied, “What am I doing here? Well, you see, sir . . . That is to say . . . What I was doing was just . . . checking on his progress.”

  Gristle must have moved a little closer, because now I could hear the indistinct baritone rumble of his voice filtering through the door. When Eldrin answered whatever Gristle had asked, his voice was alarmingly high-pitched. “The other key has been checked out, you say? Yes, I have it.”

  Knowing that Eldrin was only a few feet away talking to the one magus in all Mysterium I wanted to have nothing to do with drove me into a flurry of action. I ripped the paper with Eldrin’s diagram from my pocket, grabbed a stick of fazestone chalk from the desk, and bent to the circle. As I drew, I reflected that this type of subterfuge was not a strength of Eldrin’s, and that that I probably didn’t have long before Gristle got annoyed enough to demand the key. I needed time. The modifications were essential or when I returned I would materialize on the Dark Lord’s old throne, which would be both awkward and potentially fatal as I had designed my stronghold to turn to dust and scatter itself with the wind on the dawn after my defeat.

  Outside, Gristle barked something sharp and short to which Eldrin replied, “Into the room, sir? Did I go in? Well . . .”

  Keep it together, Eldrin.

  I was working in a clockwise direction, adding a rune here and altering a mystic symbol there. Under normal circumstances the changes would not have been that difficult to make. They were subtle and intricate, but well within my skill. However, these were anything but normal circumstances. My heart was beating so hard that I feared it might seize up altogether. Plus, hearing Eldrin’s one-sided conversation with Gristle had my nerves in such a heightened state that my hand kept trembling. I was having to use my off-hand to steady it.

  At that point Gristle must have stepped right up to the door, because I could make out what the old man was saying. “You wouldn’t be here to play a prank, would you, Mr. Leightner?”

  “Of course not, sir,” Eldrin squeaked.

  “I wasn’t always a magus, Mr. Leightner, and I have never been a fool,” he said, this time in a growl that contained significantly more menace. “Open the door.”

  My hand froze for a second at his request, and then I returned to the last figure. It was a fiddly thing, like a bisected spiral. I took a deep breath to steady myself and began.

  “Yes, sir!” Eldrin said.

  I heard the key fumble against the lock and then a metallic clatter as it fell to the ground. Gristle gave a muffled curse. “Dammit, Leightner, that was my foot. Just stand still. I’ll get it.”

  I was done. I dropped the chalk and stood. Normally I would have examined the new markings to make sure I’d done everything correctly, but there was no time. I stepped into the circle as the key went into the lock. I felt the familiar but never pleasant sensation of my insides briefly exiting my body, and then nothing. For better or for worse, I was gone, and all Griswald would find was an empty circle closet. I thanked most of the gods most profusely.

  When I materialized it was not triumphantly on the steppes of the Plains of Drek as I had planned, but with a splash in a mire of mud and manure in a nondescript stable yard somewhere in Trelari. I let loose with a most profound blasphemy.

  “Amen,” a ragged voice said from my right.

  Chapter 6

  SERIOUSLY WRONG

  I looked around, trying to figure out what was going on. It was night. The stable yard I’d landed in was narrow and surrounded by high walls that cast everything in deep shadows. Once my head stopped swimming from the transport spell and my eyes adjusted to the dark, I peered at the disheveled heap that had spoken. I use the word heap advisedly, because the speaker was so covered in filth that it took me a moment to realize that it was a man at all. He was propped against a nearby wall surrounded by a half circle of empty bottles, and even over the stomach-churning stench of the place, the miasma of bad wine that clung to him made my head spin.

  I started to ask the man who he was and where we were, but at that moment the moon came out from behind a cloud and bathed the stable in light. I stared into the face of the beggar and my mouth fell open. There was no mistaking that long, aquiline nose, or the coal-black hair, dark eyes, and dramatically arched eyebrows. Dirty and degenerate as he was, this man was St. Drake, one of the Heroes of the Ages, and the most pious man in all of Trelari.

  He seemed to recognize me also, because for a second his eyes cleared and went wide; he extended a shaking finger toward me, and gasped, “The Dark One has returned!”

  He started to topple backward and I grabbed the front of his robes to keep him upright. “What are you talking about? The Dark Lord was destroyed. You helped destroy him. Don’t you remember?”

  St. Drake stared at me for a moment, then his mouth split open into a rictus grin and he began to laugh hysterically. It was hideous, and I was relieved when his eyelids fluttered shut and he began snoring. I stood there, dripping mud, staring at the passed-out-drunk man in disbelief.

  This was St. Drake, the Unselfish.

  On their way to confront me, the Heroes had been forced to march for two weeks over the Wasteland of Grolm. My spies, which were many, informed me that St. Drake had refused all food because the Weasel claimed he need extra nourishment to fight off a bout of hypothermia he’d been suffering. Hypothermia? On a burning waste?

  This was St. Drake, the Pure.

  The rumor making the rounds with the gibberlings back in the day was that he allowe
d nothing to pass his lips that had not been sanctified in a purity ritual (of his own devising) that took about a day and a half to complete. This explained why the Heroes needed nearly two weeks to cross across the Plains of Despair, which were, at most, thirty miles wide.

  The point is, this wreck of a man snoring at my feet was St. Drake. His presence in this place and in this condition violated everything I knew about him and everything that was supposed to be true about Trelari. Something was wrong.

  As if to affirm this fact, my name suddenly began reverberating through my brain. “Avery . . . very . . . very . . . very . . . very?”

  Fortunately, I recognized the voice. “Eldrin? Why does it sound like you’re shouting into a cave?”

  “Damn . . . amn . . . amn! Let . . . let . . . let me . . . me . . . me adjust . . . ust . . . ust the . . . the . . . the gain . . . ain . . . ain.” There was a short, sharp crack that nearly ruptured my eardrums, and he said, “Is that any better?”

  “Much,” I answered, and yawned around the pain in my head.

  “It works!” came the unmistakable voice of my roommate. “This is so cool! Can you believe that we are communicating across subworld space and we have chronal calibration?”

  “Yes, it’s great and normally I would celebrate another one of your achievements, but we have problems. The transport didn’t work right. I’m standing in what smells like a pigsty next to one of my Heroes, and he is in a state that defies every standard of decency.”

  He didn’t answer for a few seconds and I tapped at my ear and asked, “Is this thing still working?”

  “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “I need to confirm. Are you telling me that you just appeared in the subworld this very moment?”

  “Of course, what did you expect? You must have called me immediately after I left.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said in a voice like the one a doctor would use to tell you that you have terminal cancer. “It took me two hours to get away from Griswald and back to our room to make the call.”

  I heard the words, but they didn’t make any sense. Eventually I said, “That’s impossible. With the time dilation factor between Trelari and Mysterium I should have been here a couple of days at least.”

  “Try nearly a week,” he corrected.

  We both fell silent. I shifted in the mud, too afraid to ponder the meaning of this discovery. At last I asked the question I was dreading the answer to. “What’s going on, Eldrin?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered in a stunned whisper.

  That’s when I got scared. It took me a few moments to be able to focus on his words again. When I did, he was muttering to himself and, from the sounds in the background, emptying his shelves of his extensive personal library volume by volume.

  “There’s got to be an explanation,” he mumbled. “Maybe there’s something in Adams’s Observations on Galactic Improbabilities? No . . . besides all his proofs collapse down to the same value.” There was a loud thud as a book hit the ground. “Asprin’s treatise on dimensional transactions is interesting at a general level, but the deveel is in the details . . .”

  In between Eldrin’s mutterings I had a flash of inspiration. Eldrin was not an expert on this world, nor was Adams or Asprin. I was the world’s greatest expert on Trelari, and there was a several hundred-page guide on the shelf above my desk that might have an answer as to why the transport spell had gone so badly off target and even an explanation of the strange time jump I’d experienced. As a bonus, I had written it.

  “I may have the answer.”

  He was reading books, so of course he ignored me. “Baum? No, and besides where would we get ruby shoes?”

  I began massaging my temples. It wasn’t that I had a headache, but knowing how my roommate reacted in these sorts of situations, I knew it was an inevitability. I said a bit louder, “I know what we need to do.”

  “Lewis is just as useless,” he groused, still oblivious. “Who goes subworld traveling with a full-sized wardrobe anymore?”

  “Eldrin! Listen to me!” I yelled.

  “Why are you shouting at me?” he asked in hurt tones.

  I opened my mouth to say something snide and thought better of it. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “What is it?”

  “Look on the shelf above my desk—right-hand side.”

  “Your collection of graphic novels?”

  The headache had arrived. I rubbed at my throbbing forehead. “I meant left-hand side, and don’t touch my graphic novels—those are first editions. On the left, you should find the Dimensional Macrocosm Guide I wrote for subworld 2A7C.”

  “Your DMG?” he asked in a voice high enough to seriously imperil any nearby windows. “Don’t make me look in there.”

  “How do you think I feel Eldrin?” I asked. “I’m literally standing in a shit-hole, and if I don’t get out of here soon I’m going to pass out. But unless you have a better idea, can you please consult the only book ever specifically written for this world?”

  I heard the unmistakable sound of flipping pages, and he groaned.

  Now, before I go on, let me explain our dismay. A DMG is a manual of sorts (in official parlance a detailed log of experimental requirements, parameters, and procedures) that has to be written by every Mysterium researcher that wants to conduct an experiment on a subworld. In theory, nearly any question about the world (its people, geography, religion, climate, etc.) can be found in the researcher’s DMG. However, the comprehensive nature of the document means that its utility is almost entirely dependent on how well it is organized (how thoughtful the table of contents is and how thorough the index). I wrote those key portions of my DMG in a mad rush about twenty-four hours before I was due to start my experiment, a fact Eldrin was keenly aware of.

  Eventually he stopped flipping pages. “Did you know that, according to you, on your subworld a long sword has the potential to do ‘eight damage’ against small and medium creatures, but up to twelve against large creatures? What does that even mean? What scale are you using? This book makes no sense.”

  “Eldrin, focus.”

  “I mean, why should the damage of a sword increase by fifty percent simply because the creature is larger? A sword is a sword—”

  “ELDRIN!”

  “This may take a while,” he said. “There are dozens of important tables in here on the subworld’s cosmology and what not, but they are strewn haphazardly through the book. And it’s like that with everything.”

  “It’s a first edition. I was meaning to do something more concise later. Why not look in the table of contents or the index for ‘time dilation’ or ‘transport failure’?”

  “The table of contents?” he asked incredulously. “The table of contents you drafted gives no idea of what each section is about, and the index only seems to catalog the least important terms in the book. There are entries in here for different poisons and exotic diseases, locations for charts on weight limits and travel times. You even obsessively indexed the treasure possessed by various mystical creatures that are probably all extinct, not to mention the weather and terrain in dozens of different ecozones. Is there a single reference to the Dark Lord?”

  “Yes?” I said weakly.

  “No!” he shouted.

  I began muttering a dozen curses to the sky, with several rather clever invectives directed specifically at myself.

  “This is not my fault,” he protested.

  “I’m not cursing at you. I’m cursing at me,” I said in disgust, and began pacing back and forth across the stable yard. “Do you honestly think that I don’t understand how profoundly I’ve screwed things up? Why didn’t I take the time to write up a better DMG? Because I’m lazy. Why didn’t I close out the circle and return the reality key when my experiment was complete? Because I’m irresponsible. Why did I take an unknown girl into my still-running circle closet?”

  This last question stopped me in my tracks. My immediate thought was that the answer
was obvious and had more to do with libido and psychology, but I knew that those weren’t the real reasons. “Why did I need that night and her so badly?” I whispered.

  There was a long silence.

  “Um,” came Eldrin’s voice. “I didn’t catch that last part. I think you may be cutting out. Which reminds me, I should probably warn you that this communication link will only work while we have direct etherspace line of sight between the subworld and Mysterium.”

  “Good to know,” I said, still distracted by the question of Vivian. “How much time do we have left?”

  “Let me see.” I could hear the scratch of his pencil on paper as he made the calculation. “Five minutes.”

  “Five minutes!” I exploded. “For the love of . . . never mind. Let’s discard the question of transport and time for the moment. It would be great to know how much time has passed, but I can probably get that from St. Drake—if he ever wakes up. For now, I am here, for better or worse, so I might as well get on with finding Vivian. Please tell me you have some idea about what I’m supposed to do next. Does the DMG say anything helpful about how I can find and stop her?”

  “How could it?” Eldrin replied. “Not to state the obvious,” he said, stating the obvious, “but you are off the map, my friend. I’m checking the DMG for rules about how you can blend in with the natives. You know, local dress, dining habits, trade and commerce, that sort of thing.”

  “For the love of light!” I said in a near shout, and then remembered that Eldrin was only trying to help and I should be thankful he was willing to do that given my behavior the last few days. I took a deep breath and said in a more measured voice, “Thanks, Eldrin, but I did live in Trelari for years.”

  “As the Dark Lord,” he said under his breath.

  “Good point,” I acknowledged. “But I don’t think you can teach me enough in the next three minutes to make it a useful exercise.”

  He was silent and I heard the drumming of his fingers on the cover of the book, which was always a bad sign. “Nope, I’ve got nothing,” he said. “Your DMG is written specifically for your experiment. Without a dark lord, it is worse than useless.”