The Dark Lord

by Jack Heckel

  “Next!”

  There was a guy who had grown up working in a kitchen on a farm until he discovered that his aunt was a great sorceress. The dwarfs weren’t impressed.

  “If your aunt was here that would be one thing, as it is we aren’t interested,” said Rook.

  “Next!”

  An ex-blacksmith’s apprentice showed enormous potential, and we’d almost agreed to let him join, but he kept going on and on and on and on about a wheel that kept turning, and ages that kept coming, and so forth.

  “Next!” both of the dwarfs shouted.

  A goatherd turned magician was rejected because, in Rook’s words, “The smell alone will drive you mad.”

  It seemed like a fair point.

  “Next!” shouted Seamus.

  And so it went. After a couple of hours my head was spinning. “No more. We have enough people,” I finally said, though I had no earthly idea exactly how many people had joined.

  Rook, as I had resigned myself to calling him, cleared his throat. “So, Wizard Avery, who really needs to work on his name, now that you have a group, we need to know where you’re takin’ us?”

  Great question. I looked over to see if Valdara was still about so I could ask her, but she was gone—probably already in bed. I had to admit, I was exhausted. I yawned. Rook and Seamus waited patiently for an answer. I hadn’t the courage to tell them that there wasn’t going to be one.

  We stared at each other for a time and then Seamus said, “We hope you understand that normally we would have demanded a briefing with detailed maps and contracts before taking on a job like this, but with Valdara behind you we decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. Still, if we are going to provision a party as large as this one we will need to have some idea about where we’re going and how long it’ll take.”

  “How large is the group?” I asked, suddenly worried that I had missed more than I suspected.

  “Eight, ten, twenty,” Rook said with a shrug. “The specifics don’t matter, laddie,” he answered with an impressive bristling of his brow.

  “I think they do,” I said sternly.

  “What do we do tomorrow?” he asked, ignoring the implied question and my glare.

  “Yes, well, tomorrow at first light we are off on our quest,” I answered vaguely.

  “Yes,” he pressed, “but where exactly are we goin’?”

  “We are off to defeat the Dark Queen.”

  “Yes,” agreed Seamus, “but what exactly will that entail? Where will we go to do that?”

  “I will tell you in the morning,” I said, and stood up so I could loom over them.

  Not surprisingly, the dwarfs were used to people looming and just shifted their gazes up a few notches and kept waiting.

  “In the morning!” I said gruffly.

  They walked away muttering.

  I understood their frustration; the problem was that I had no idea what we were supposed to do next. I knew we couldn’t march off and face Vivian straightaway, and even if we tried we wouldn’t reach her, because that’s not the way the spell worked. It required time and the occurrence of specific events to build up its energy. We would need to quest, find treasure (perhaps an enchanted item or two), gain allies, have members of the party die (it seemed a certainty that at least one of the dwarfs wouldn’t make it), and so on.

  I couldn’t tell them that. I couldn’t tell them that, on some level, the most important decision—the only decision—had already been made: we had all resolved to go after the Dark Queen. From here on the weave of the spell would be our guide. It would encourage us when we chose to follow its path, and it would try and thwart every attempt to diverge from its plan. Nor would we be alone in our quest against the Dark Queen. There would be other groups. The spell would use all of us, building and tightening the strength of its weave as we progressed. It would discard those that fell behind, and push those that succeeded forward. All my spell cared about was getting to the end game with the tools it felt gave it the highest probability to destroy the threat to Trelari. It had no conscience, because its creator had not been worried about the what and the when.

  Drake was the perfect reflection of the paradox my spell presented. How much of his current condition was the result of all the pushing and pulling it had done to him over the years? Perhaps Drake’s excessive drinking was his attempt to rebel against a force that as a spiritually attuned being he could feel and hate, but not resist. If so, then my pulling him back into the spell’s path was a horrible cruelty. But there was another possibility that was even more terrible. What if the spell was trying to push him out of its weave, to discard him like you would a tool that has lost its edge? In that case, coming on the quest was his only hope. The problem was it was impossible to know what was right. That was the sinister elegance of my spell.

  Guilt found its way into my heart and squatted there. I tried to fight it as I always had. I told myself that if I had done nothing, if I did nothing now, Trelari would eventually be reduced to nothing more than random shards of etherspace rubble. On the other hand, the suffering of people like Drake and Valadar would be over. Which was the greater good, and which the greater evil? It was moments like this that the magi warned against: paralysis by compassion. The thing to do was to make a decision based on the facts available and act. But, not tonight.

  I rubbed my tired eyes and started up the stairs, but stopped. Drake was still perched in his chair snoring. The way his neck was bent at such an odd angle looked terribly uncomfortable. I made a decision. I came back down the stairs and lifted him in my arms. He seemed a little heavier than he had before, but the burden was not too great.

  I carried him up to the second floor and deposited him in one of the rooms that had been set aside for us. Then made my way down the hall to my own room. It was small and smelled of alcohol. I didn’t mind. It reminded me a bit of my dorm room, except the door worked and the walls were solid. I threw myself onto the thin and vile-smelling straw mattress and felt a terrible fatigue wash over me.

  “Tomorrow I will know what to do,” I said to myself as I fell asleep.

  Chapter 10

  AN UNEXPECTED PARTY

  The dream was a good one, but like all good dreams my memory of it disappeared the moment I woke up. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with Vivianor a really excellent club sandwich. I have a thing for club sandwiches. The point was it had been good, and Eldrin ruined it.

  “Avery? Are you there?” he asked as though he’d been asking for some time.

  I was instantly awake (at least from my perspective) and instantly regretted it. I may not have drunk as much as Drake or Valdara or the dwarfs or anyone else at the Boiled Badger the night before, but the pain in my head and the dryness of my mouth were telling me that I had drunk quite enough. Adding to these miseries was a general queasiness that told me it was far too early to be awake. I flicked back the curtain and looked outside. It was still dark.

  I would have cursed, but Eldrin said, “I think he’s asleep.”

  His voice had a sort of echoing quality that made me think he was talking to someone else. This was disturbing given the whole “secret” nature of my mission, and was instantly confirmed when I heard a muffled voice say something indistinguishable in the background.

  “How should I know that?” Eldrin replied irritably to whoever he was talking to.

  The background voice said something sharp in response.

  “Well, that’s your opinion,” Eldrin grumped.

  I felt like it was time for me to enter the conversational fray, if for no other reason than to tell Eldrin that I was still asleep. “Eldrin, do you know what time it is?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t!” he shouted. “As I was explaining to Dawn, calculating the actual time of day in a subworld is exceedingly tricky.”

  Dawn was with him? I sat up with a start.

  He continued to rant. “There aren’t more than three mages in Mysterium that could do it. That I happen t
o be one of them is beside the point. The information you get simply doesn’t justify the effort involved . . .”

  Dawn knew what was happening?

  “. . . You spend two days setting up the equations,” he babbled on, “and another day sitting in the basement of the Quantum Magicks building, which is always freezing by the way, running the equation through the Hyperdimensional Aperiodic Logistan, and what do you get? A single temporally aligned chronological time for a subworld that may or may not exist in a week or so.”

  Who was Dawn? Why did I have the feeling that I should know her name?

  My earlier fogginess was gone, replaced by the unnerving sense that something else must have gone horribly wrong. “If you are quite finished,” I said, cutting short his diatribe on the increasingly irrelevant question of what time it was.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  I took a breath to keep the rising panic I was feeling out of my voice, and said, “So we are not alone, by which I mean you are not alone, by which I mean whatever happened to keeping my little problem between the two of us?”

  “I told you he wouldn’t be happy,” he said in response, but not to me. “No, I will not explain. You explain.”

  I started to beg him not to do what I thought he was doing, but it was too late. “Fine, but you’re being a baby,” a woman’s voice said, but again not to me.

  “Dawn, who are you?”

  “Vivian’s friend from the bar,” she said.

  I may have had a heart attack or a stroke or something right then, because the next minute or so was a breathless blur of roaring noise and head-spinning, stomach-lurching nausea. If she said anything to me I didn’t hear it and have no memory of it to this day. When I recovered, I gasped, “Why?”

  “Why, what?”

  “I don’t know, Dawn,” I said, unable to conceal my bitterness. “Why are you in my room? Why are you talking to me? What could have possessed Eldrin to tell you what’s been happening? While we’re at it, why did Vivian steal my work? Why is she trying to ruin my life? Did you know she was going to do either or both? Did you help her? In short, why?”

  “I am here because Eldrin was of the belief that I had nothing to do with whatever Vivian is doing, and rightly guessed that when she never came back from her ‘date’ with you that I would go to Mysterium security, report her disappearance, and have them track you down as a deviant maniac, which I was on the verge of doing when he knocked on my door begging me to help his friend, who he swore was a good guy even if he had done something hideously irresponsible that had put his and Vivian’s lives, and possibly an entire subworld’s existence, at risk.”

  She stopped to take a breath, and I heard Eldrin mumble something to her. She sighed dramatically and added, “Oh, and he hoped Vivian might have given me something of yours to keep, which she hadn’t. That’s why.”

  I felt that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach again, the one that told me something I’d done had come back to haunt me. But before I could grapple with that, I first had to take my foot out of my mouth. “I’m sorry, Dawn. I shouldn’t have said that. I am pretty stressed. I trust Eldrin, and I’m grateful for whatever help he and you are willing to give me.” I took a deep breath and then asked the question I was dreading. “Did Eldrin happen to mention what sort of something he was looking for?”

  “No,” she said sharply. “But he did tell me that it would probably be something very magical that you swore in your DMG that you never made, and the very existence of which has been warping the fabric of reality between Mysterium and your subworld. Ring any bells?”

  “Can I talk to Eldrin again?”

  “Certainly.”

  Eldrin’s voice returned. “Avery, did you, by any chance, accidentally or, well, could you have, at least hypothetically . . .”

  “Just ask him!” Dawn shouted in the background.

  “I was,” he whined, and then asked quickly, “Avery, did you happen to use a kernel of Mysterium reality in forming the matrix pattern for your subworld stabilization spell? And then did you bring it to Mysterium with you when you returned?”

  Here is what I should have said: “Yes, Eldrin, I did. Was this a violation of Mysterium rules and scientific ethics? Yes, it was. Does the fact that I did this possibly invalidate everything I’ve worked on for the past five years? Yes, it might. In my defense, I worked for two years trying to form a reality matrix stabilizing spell purely out of subworld essence. Every time I would create what I thought was a stable spell pattern the essence would melt away, almost like it was being consumed by something. As far as I can tell it’s impossible, and it was driving me mad. So, I cheated. I took something utterly insignificant, a single fork from the university cafeteria, which in my opinion was lucky to escape the food they served there. I carried the implement to the subworld and used it to forge the battle-axe, Death Slasher. I then used the battle-axe as the kernel of my spell. Finding it was what identified Morgarr to me as the focus of evil in Trelari, and the battle-axe convinced Morgarr to summon, well, me. It was and still is my belief that there should be no need for the battle-axe to exist now that the matrix pattern of my spell is in place and stable. Proving that was going to be my life’s work.”

  What I actually said was, “Well . . .”

  That was as far as I got before Eldrin shouted, “Dammit, Avery! How could you? It violates every Mysterium rule, not to mention scientific ethics, and throws into question the validity of your entire research project.”

  I knew a drawn out “well” would convey everything I needed to say. “Yes, I know,” I replied. “But assuming I already know what a fraud I am, can you tell me why it matters?”

  “Why it matters? Why it matters!” he exploded. “Did you sleep through your entire Quantum Magical Mechanics course?”

  “Yes,” I answered truthfully.

  “You’ve entangled Mysterium reality with the reality of the subworld.”

  “And that’s bad because . . . ?”

  “Do you remember your Mysterium history?” he asked.

  “Better than you do,” I said tartly. “You made me write all your essays.”

  He didn’t take the bait, instead asking, “How did the innerworlds come to be?”

  “Can you just tell me what I’ve done?” I asked, both fearing the answer and having grown tired of him being professorial.

  “How?” he repeated.

  “Fine, if you are going to insist,” I said, and then began reciting in a fast-paced monotone. “The original race of Mysterium, for reasons still unknown and unfathomable, sent thirteen mages to the nearest subworlds and hid in each a crystal orb that was one of a pair, the second of which, if you believe the story, is kept in the central tower of the university. The orbs created a link—”

  “The Palantir Effect,” Eldrin corrected.

  “. . . between Mysterium and . . .”

  I trailed off, finally realizing where Eldrin was going with this. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as he finished my incomplete narrative. “And the link drew the subworlds inward until they stood at the borders of Mysterium. Do you remember last time we talked and I told you that I didn’t know why time skipped during your first transport?” he asked.

  “Couldn’t forget that if I wanted to,” I answered. “Just the fact that you didn’t know something nearly scared me half to death.”

  “Well, let me finish the job,” he said acidly. “I’ve spent the last several hours in the subworld observatory and your subworld has shifted its orbital position around Mysterium.”

  I was silent as my brain tried to make the words I’d heard mean something else.

  “Avery? Are you still there?”

  “That’s impossible.” It seemed like I’d been saying that a lot the last few days.

  “Nevertheless,” he said calmly. “Subworld 2A7C has moved closer to Mysterium by about twelve parsecs.”

  Any shift in the location of a subworld would be unprecedented, but because I
didn’t want to acknowledge that, I found myself asking, “Is that a lot?”

  “Yes,” he said, the lack of any further explanation confirming the stupidity of the question. “What is more, 2A7C is spiraling in toward Mysterium. If my calculations are correct, and we know they are, at this rate your subworld will be parked at the gates of the university itself in seven to ten days.”

  “And all this because of a stupid battle-axe?” I asked, and stopped myself from adding that it was impossible, because I was definitely overusing the word at this point.

  “Yes . . .” he began, and then said excitedly, “Wait, your kernel is Death Slasher? Morgarr’s battle-axe? Man, I have to up the stats on that item in my simulation.”

  “Oh my God, shut up about that stupid game!” I heard Dawn shout in the background. I couldn’t have agreed more.

  “Can we get back to the point?” I asked as calmly as I could. “You were going to explain how the . . .” Damn! “. . . the impossible could be happening.”

  “Because it’s not impossible,” Eldrin said. “It’s amazing, it’s incredible, but it’s not impossible. You had the power of an entire subworld at your command when you created the battle-axe. Now that it’s back in Mysterium, it’s drawing your subworld to it like a magnet.”

  “How do you know it’s in Mysterium?” I asked, desperately trying to find a hole in his logic.

  “I know it’s back,” he answered, “because your subworld, after a lifetime of happily orbiting at an exceedingly far distance from Mysterium, has suddenly, and otherwise inexplicably, decided to plot a collision course with the place. What’s more, the larger portion of this movement happened in two lurches simultaneous with your initial and then second returns to Mysterium, probably corresponding with the transport of Death Slasher from back and forth between the worlds. These sudden movements are also almost certainly the reason that time between 2A7C and Mysterium has been so unpredictable. By the way, did you find out how long Vivian’s been on-world?”

  “At least five years,” I said in a stunned monotone, remembering Drake’s surprising revelation. “Why?” I moaned. “Why would Vivian leave it behind?”