The Dark Lord

by Jack Heckel

  Thinking back on my time as the Dark Lord, I did recall that there had been an omnipresent rumbling and rather oppressive rhythmic noise, but I had attributed that to the blood orcs and their drums. Mad about drums, they were.

  “It can potentially be useful,” Eldrin continued. “Because it should give you a rough sense of how the matrix is influencing your local reality. For example, if the music is upbeat and happy you probably don’t have much to worry about.”

  “What if it gets spooky?”

  “Run?” he suggested.

  “Fair enough, but why am I the only one that can hear it?”

  “Because your core reality is significantly more substantial than that of your surroundings, so rather than affecting your behavior, you experience the resonance as a simple sensory input. If the subworld continues to shift inward, you may stop hearing the music.”

  “That would be great,” I said with a chuckle. “This tune is crazy annoying.”

  “No, it wouldn’t, Avery. If that happens, if you stop being able to hear the music, even for a moment, you have to call me immediately.” He sounded deadly serious.

  “Why?”

  “Because at that point you will be approaching reality equality with the subworld. It means that you will be just as vulnerable and weak as any other subworlder. The reality matrix will be affecting your behaviors and decisions just like anyone else. You may no longer be in control of your actions.”

  I heard Dawn calling to him again. I yearned to be back there with him . . . them stepping out for the evening.

  “I need to go, Avery.”

  “Yeah,” I said as evenly as I could. “Thanks for the information, Eldrin.”

  “We will get you out of there.”

  “I know you will. I better go too. The others are looking for me,” I lied.

  “Where are you heading?”

  “Toward the Vaporous Mountains, I think.”

  “May I make a recommendation? The Village of Hamlet is in the foothills of that range and seems to be a good spot. From my mapping I think it may be near a reality nexus of some sort . . . something odd. There’s a good chance an object like your battle-axe would be drawn to it. Strange name. You know a village and a hamlet are the same thing?” Dawn saw something in the background. “Anyway, gotta go,” he concluded briskly and broke the connection.

  After he was gone, I whispered, “I know that a village is a hamlet. I know that the town might as well be called the Village of Village. I know that it makes no sense. I’m beginning to think nothing in this world makes sense.”

  Chapter 13

  WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

  We rode for several more days before the trees gave way to a wide plain of deep green called the Sea of Grass, which stretched toward a distant line of blue mountains. I had stopped placing myself into a trance for fear that I would miss something significant but subtle, like the music disappearing or Eldrin calling.

  And the music had changed. After we left the forest, the happy springtime song had been replaced by something sweepingly grand, like the plains before us. At first I was happy for the change, but this new tune kept building day after day as if toward some climax, and it was keeping me on edge.

  The downside to taking myself out of the trance was that I experienced the full monotony of our journey. The routine was as invariable as it was awful. We awoke before dawn every day, a constant source of irritation for me and malicious joy for the dwarfs. We rode all day, stopping for lunch and little else. I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one that ever needed to go to the bathroom. We ended our ride at dusk and Ariella sang songs or recited indecipherable poetry, Sam read his book, Rook and Seamus played chess, Valdara and Drake brooded, and Nigel, Paul, Cameron and the many other random people in the company did . . . whatever they did. As for me, I spent the evenings counting my new blisters. There were blisters on parts of me that had no business getting blisters.

  On a positive note, I at last got introduced to my companions in the Company of the Fellowship. But in another oddity that I assumed was my spell at work again (perhaps ensuring that each of us knew of the other’s strengths and weaknesses) each member introduced themselves to me in a one-on-one instructional briefing as if they had a secret schedule that they’d worked out between them, which given Seamus’s mania for organization they might. Ariella sought me out first.

  “Wizard Avery? Do you have a moment? I’d like to show you something,” she said one evening with a bright smile.

  “Sure,” I replied, not having much better in the way of a response.

  I followed her about a hundred paces away from the evening’s camp. She surveyed the area. “This should be good. Do you see that squirrel beside that tree over there?”

  I squinted and thought I saw a small shape some distance off. It might be a squirrel, or a rat with a fluffy tail, which is the same thing, I suppose. “Yes, I guess so,” I answered.

  “Excellent.” With that, she drew her bow, nocked an arrow, and fired in one fluid motion.

  I gasped, but then I saw the creature run beneath a branch. “You missed!”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said with a smug expression. “I wasn’t shooting at the squirrel. I’m a vegan. I hit the acorn on the branch above his head.”

  Sure enough, the fluffy rat seemed to be eating. At least, I thought it was.

  “How could you see the acorn, and how did you know it was a he?”

  “Elven vision. I can see five or six times as well as most humans, although I’m not entirely elven. I’m really a mix . . . I can tell you the whole story if you have several hours. I don’t need much sleep either . . .”

  Elves.

  Similar performances followed for each of the company. Seamus put on a combination axe throwing, juggling, and drinking display that would have made a great stage act at a renaissance faire, all while explaining that he had been driven from his mountain home by either a dragon or a terrible orc horde—that part of the story being somewhat garbled since he was trying to simultaneously eat two turkey legs and an apple while they were flipping through the air.

  The gnomes also had a story about being forced from their village in the mushroom forest. Did I mention that there were one to five gnomes in the party? I didn’t? That’s because to this day I’m not sure if they were real or a hallucination. They seemed to appear and disappear at random, and Rook denied having hired them. “Distrustful little beggars,” I think he called them.

  Even Nigel, Paul, and Cameron told me, well, I don’t remember what they said . . . The point stands that they all did it, other than Drake and Valdara, who apparently felt that they needed no exhibition or introduction. Although everyone insisted on showing off their abilities, Sam had the greatest impact on me, and not for the right reasons.

  In my last incarnation I had always been too busy to do an in-depth study on what passed for magic in Trelari. I knew it was a bit quirky, but with the reality key in hand I’d never had to pay attention to the mechanics. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell Sam this so he was always asking technical questions about my magic. “What school did you study under? Do you smoke a pipe? Do you think a staff or an orb makes a better magical focus? Do you principally perform invocations or abjurations?”

  Had I been in my trance, I probably would have grunted or given typical wizardly answers, such as: “All things are education for a wizard,” or “One must discover true magic for oneself,” and even “I do what needs to be done.” Out of my trance, I had a harder time known what to tell him.

  Still, I managed to avoid any awkwardness until one day he cornered me after dinner and asked, “Wizard Avery, what is magic?”

  I wasn’t sure where this was heading, but I gave him the standard definition of magic taught in novice-level magical theory courses at the university. “Magic is magic. It is the invocation of extradimensional power and the channeling of that invoked essence into a form suitable to rewrite reality to one’s satisfaction.”

/>   “So, you’re an invoker!” he said, excited to have a label for me. “Did you know that my old master might have been an invoker?” Sam proceeded to discuss how he had been an apprentice/scullery boy for a great wizard who had been sucked into a maelstrom or something, leaving Sam on his own. “Anyway, that’s the first part of my life, really the introduction as it were,” he said, “but there’s a lot more.”

  “Maybe you could just demonstrate some of your spells?”

  What can I say, I was tired that night. Besides, that was the pattern these conversations followed. The person would talk about their backgrounds and then demonstrate their skills.

  He nodded at my request and pulled out his incredibly thick spell book and studied it. I’m not sure whether he had the memory of a goldfish, or if this was the way magic worked in Trelari, but he couldn’t remember a spell for more than one day even if he’d read it a hundred times.

  Finally, he said brightly, “I can cast a spell to make people fall asleep.”

  “Well, that could be useful,” I replied, trying to be encouraging. I wasn’t sure how he was going to demonstrate that, but I decided to roll with it. As I looked around the camp at the others and wondered who would make a good test subject, I asked, “Can it work on anyone?”

  “Yes,” he said, and then thought a bit more and qualified his answer. “As long as they aren’t too powerful.”

  “Well, how powerful is too powerful?”

  “It’s simple,” he said, running a finger along a line of his book. “I cause a comatose slumber to come upon one or more creatures (other than undead and certain other creatures specifically excluded from the spell’s effects). All creatures to be affected must be within thirty feet of each other. The number of creatures that can be affected is a function of their power level. The least powerful creatures are affected first, and partial effects are ineffective.”

  “That’s simple?” I said, flabbergasted. “Say we were being attacked by a gibberling or a blood orc, could you put them to sleep?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, and then added proudly, “Not only that, I could affect eight gibberlings and two blood orcs or one ogre.”

  I thought about this for a moment. “So, if we were attacked by four gibberlings, one blood orc and an ogre? The four gibberlings and the blood orc would fall asleep, but the ogre would be left standing?”

  “Exactly,” he said happily, and then closed his book and started to put it back in his pack.

  “But what if you wanted to affect only the ogre?” I asked. “Could you focus the effect so it ignored the gibberlings entirely?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” he said with a shake of his head. “It always affects the least powerful creatures first.”

  I was still confused. “How does the spell know to go after the gibberlings first?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me what you do to cast it. Maybe there’s a clue in the mechanics.”

  “I move my fingers like this.” He held a hand out and wiggled the tips of his fingers. “Then I hold up either fine sand, rose petals, or a cricket, and say the magic words, which I won’t do now because if I did I wouldn’t be able to cast it again until I rest.”

  The emerging magus in me was entirely unsatisfied with this answer and I loosed my frustration on Sam. “That doesn’t make any sense. How can a combination of words and gestures alter reality, and if that’s all it takes, why do you have to study so hard and for so long? And what in the gods’ names do fine sand, rose petals, and a cricket have in common? Have no experiments been done on the differential effectiveness of the component parts of the spell? Where are your standards?”

  As my rant subsided, I could see that I had gone too far. His head hung and his shoulders had collapsed in on themselves so that it looked like he’d withered to half his former size. I felt terrible.

  “I’m . . . I’m getting tired, Wizard Avery,” he stammered, and got to his feet. “I . . . I think I’ll go to bed.”

  “What about the demonstration?” I asked, trying to repair the conversation. “I was looking forward to seeing your spell in action.”

  “I don’t think you’d be impressed,” he said in a small voice before wandering away.

  I watched him go, and then smacked my leg a stinging blow. Great job, Avery. How can you want to be a magus at a university and have so little skill with students? And who are you to talk about magical standards when you regularly violate your own?

  There was a lot more I wanted to say to myself, but before I could get very far into an examination of my many, many flaws, Rook shouted, “Let’s set a watch.”

  Let me explain this ritual. Every night there would be a long debate about who was going on watch with whom, what time of night they were going to take watch, and so on. It took forever, no one was happy with the result, and thus far it had been an enormous waste of effort. Every morning everyone in the company woke up a little sleep-deprived from this “watching,” but no one ever managed to do any “seeing” of anything.

  Fortunately, Sam’s incessant need to study his spell book had given me the perfect out. “Sadly, Sam and I must rest to restore our powers for tomorrow,” I called out.

  “But neither of you cast a single spell all day,” Nigel or Paul or maybe Crispin complained. Although I’m not sure we had a Crispin. Could it be Charlie? I was pretty sure it started with a C . . .

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said confidently. “Wizards must refresh themselves every day even if they haven’t cast a spell, because . . .” I thought fast, because it still made no sense to me. “Because if they don’t they will . . . will lose their connection to the mystical forces and won’t be able to cast spells at all.”

  “So, why am I not exempt?” asked Ariella.

  “Because . . .” I started, and realized that I had never seen her study magic, and yet she could probably cast as well as, if not better than, Sam. I made up another something on the spot. “You said you were a sorceress, correct?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  Trying my best to project a level of surety I did not feel, I said, “Well, everyone knows that the way sorcerers and sorceresses connect with magic is entirely different from wizards.”

  “They do?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said with a superior nod of the head. “You don’t have a spell book, do you?”

  “No.”

  “There you go,” I said as though that made everything self-evident.

  “But you don’t have a spell book either,” Sam pointed out.

  I opened my mouth to argue, realized I couldn’t, and said instead, “Why are we arguing about watches anyway? Take a look around.” I gestured to the flat barren plain, which surrounded us in all directions. I could literally see for miles. “Why exactly are we keeping watch when there is obviously no one here but us? Why don’t we all get a good night’s sleep for once?”

  “But . . . but . . .” Seamus stuttered in disbelief. “We always keep a watch.”

  “It’s what they do,” agreed Rook significantly.

  “And there’s a good reason for that,” Valdara said, stepping forward. “Most of you haven’t traveled these plains, but I have.” She pulled out one of her daggers and began digging furrows in the ground with it. “It may look flat and featureless, but running down from the mountains are a chain of hidden chasms. There are ravines in these grasses deep enough to hide a giant, or swallow the unaware, and they snake all around us.”

  Everyone, including myself, began glancing nervously at the tall grasses bordering the campsite.

  “Did you all really think the only thing we had to fear on our journey was the Dark Queen?” Valdara asked derisively. “We lost three members of our original group before the Dark Lord even became aware of our existence. “During our last trip we lost one of our wizards to a band of gnolls that prowled close to this spot. It will be a miracle if we all make it across this plain alive.”

  “Gnolls?”
I asked. “Aren’t they doglike creatures? How bad could they be?”

  “You want to find out?” she said with menace in her voice.

  “All right, lads and lassies!” Rook said, stepping between us. “Who wants first watch?”

  No one said anything. Valdara gave a grunt of disgust and said, “I’ll take first watch.”

  “Okay,” Seamus said. “Who’s on watch with Valdara?”

  Half of the group volunteered. I did not, but it wasn’t because Valdara’s story hadn’t impacted me. I stood up and walked toward the edge of the camp. “Eldrin!”

  Thank the gods he answered immediately.

  “Avery? I’m in the middle of something fairly delicate right now. Can it wait?”

  “No.”

  I heard him sigh. “Fine, we have five minutes—tops. After that my silence spell will fail and I’ll have a hell of a time trying to explain why I’m stalking around the faculty lounge.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Dawn and I have a theory about Vivian and where she might have hidden Death Slasher,” he said in a voice that was way too calm for my liking.

  “It had better be a good theory,” I said, more nervous for him and his continued academic career than I was for my own chances against gnolls.

  “Man, is it ever!” he said with a chuckle. “If I’m right—”

  “Normally I’d love to hear your conspiracy theory, Eldrin,” I cut in, “but I only have four minutes, and I need to know whether or not you calculated the odds of us running into any monsters in the Sea of Grass.”

  “Yes,” he answered. “And before you ask, very, very high. Almost a certainty.”

  “They’re talking about gnolls, but aren’t those the hybrid human-hyena sort of things? I don’t see them as much of a threat.”

  “Not what my simulation indicated, but not out of the realm of possibility, I suppose,” he said thoughtfully. “Regardless, don’t underestimate gnolls, Avery. They’re nasty creatures when in their natural surroundings, which before you ask are grassy plains. Stay away from them.”