The Dark Lord

by Jack Heckel

  “I’m not sure it’s entirely within my control,” I said, pointing out what I hoped was the obvious.

  “We’re almost out of time,” Eldrin said rapidly. “Listen to me. Stay safe. Put extra people on watch, and contact me when you get to the village tomorrow so I know you made it.”

  The connection went dead. I stood for a few minutes listening to the wind blow through the grass accompanied by the increasingly ominous chords of the music. The plains were looking more and more threatening with every passing moment.

  I walked back to camp. Everyone except Sam, who always turned in early to study his books, was gathered close around the campfire. If Valdara’s story had been calculated to increase comradery through fear, it had worked. Even one to three of the gnomes were there. I could tell by the silhouettes of their pointy tasseled hats. I knew that I should sit down with the group and “bond,” but I was thinking about Eldrin and hoping that he wouldn’t be expelled come morning and feeling guilty about both him and Sam. I went into my tent.

  I rolled into my blanket and closed my eyes. I shifted onto my right side, and after a time I shifted back to my left. I couldn’t shut my mind off. The look on Sam’s face accompanied with Eldrin’s warnings kept replaying and echoing in my head.

  I’m not sure how long I laid awake listening to the muted conversation of the others around the campfire and brooding, but most of them had drifted off to their tents and I was finally fading into a restless sleep when the music changed into a downright sinister key and then began to build to a terrible crescendo. My eyes shot open. I knew—I mean, I knew—what was going to happen. I gasped out, “Trolls!”

  Chapter 14

  TROLLS AROUND A CAMPFIRE

  I threw off my blanket and scrambled toward the tent flap. Trolls were bad news. They were massive brutal blocks of sinewy muscle, mostly orange, with nasty crunching teeth and eyes like lanterns. There wasn’t anything a troll wouldn’t eat. They were worse even than goats. Pr Eldrin at the end of the semester.

  “Trolls!” I shouted as I tried to clamber out of my tent. The music swelled dramatically at my warning. “Armor up! Draw your weapons! Ready your spells!”

  One of the red shirts, who may have been Nigel, rose from where he had apparently been tending the fire with a stick. He looked at me dumbly. “What?”

  “Trolls!” I responded.

  A second red-shirted man, who I’ll call Cameron, stepped out of the high grass on the edge of camp. “What are you talking about? We haven’t seen any—”

  “Surprise!” boomed a deep voice as a large warty orange hand reached up from the grasses and clamped onto Cameron’s head.

  The troll stood up, revealing his colossal height. He was close to ten feet tall and just as wide. While keeping one hand locked onto Cameron and lifting him slightly off the ground, he swung an enormous spiked club into the middle of the man. I turned away as Cameron’s screams were cut short by a nauseating meaty squishing sound.

  As I was processing this first horror, a second troll emerged from the grasses on the other side of our camp and charged toward a still-unmoving Nigel—his arms outstretched. The monster leered and licked his lips, showing off pointed yellow teeth. “Ha, ha! We get to attack first! Pound them to mincemeat!”

  A third troll with a higher voice, who we would later identify as a female, also rushed forward, screaming, “Leave a few of them whole for roasting!”

  It was only now that faces began to appear at tent openings, blinking in bewilderment. It looked for a moment like our party was going to get slaughtered before it had a chance to wake up. And then Valdara arrived.

  She sprung from her sleep, somehow fully armored and brandishing a sword in one hand and a wicked curved dagger in the other. She gave a high-pitched battle cry that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and rushed at the troll that was holding Cameron’s remains. Possibly inspired by her example, Seamus and Drake, still only half-dressed, charged out of their tents. I saw that Seamus had only managed one boot so he was running a little lopsided.

  The dwarf raised his axe high and screamed, “For all the clans! Fight, lads and lasses! No mercy!”

  I managed to pull myself free of my tent as Valdara vaulted onto the back of the troll with the great spiked club. She drove her blade into its back. The monstrous beast thrashed its arms about in a desperate attempt to dislodge her before dropping its club, staggering forward, and falling face-first into the campfire with a dying bellow. Valdara leapt from its back as a shower of flames and sparks enveloped the body.

  Drake, leaning heavily on his staff, was facing off against the troll that had attacked Nigel. On the ground between them lay the man’s mangled body. Seeing the unnatural way his limbs and head had been twisted, I hoped for his sake he was already dead. The creature roared defiantly and advanced. Drake made no move to retreat. Instead, he drew himself up and held his staff aloft.

  “I defy you, foul creature,” he intoned grimly. “Know that I am St. Drake, Vessel of the Seven Gods, and I call upon them to grant me the power to return you to the foul places from which you spawned!”

  He struck the staff on the ground at his feet. For a moment it blazed with a pure, blinding radiance. The troll lurched backward, eyes wide with a fear that was matched only by Drake’s own surprise. Then the priest’s hand wavered; the light dimmed, flickered and went out. Evil laughter roiled the air.

  Drake’s eyes narrowed and his mouth twisted into a self-mocking sneer. “Never mind,” he grunted, and in a motion as sudden as it was violent he thrust the tip of his staff into the monster’s chest.

  The blow seemed little more than a touch and the troll began to laugh again, but then a spasm of pain wracked its body. Wide-eyed, it tore at the staff, even as a blackness spread like a stain across its chest. The monster choked and yellow foam erupted from its mouth. It shuddered again and fell. The creature was dead before it hit the ground. As Drake withdrew his staff from the thing’s body I saw the glint of a very thin blade withdrawing back into the wood. Whatever had killed the troll had nothing to do with blessings or gods.

  All this went on around me while I stood rooted to the spot, unable to move. I admit, I was totally overwhelmed by the situation. Everywhere I looked there was blood and gore, and the intermingled bits and pieces of trolls and my former companions. It was only when Ariella and Sam rushed by that I realized how useless I was being. And it was not until Rook literally kicked me in the butt that I did anything.

  With the dwarf shouting, “Do somethin’, Avery!” I silently cursed my cowardice and took a few faltering steps toward the clearing where the remainder of the company (even one or two of the gnomes) had the last troll surrounded.

  Although this one was not as big as the brute that Valdara had dispatched or as foul as Drake’s foe, its desperation had made it all the more dangerous. The creature was cursing and lashing out with its long black talons looking for a way to escape. As it spun about, it kicked two of the three to five gnomes I could currently see deep into the dark grass.

  Ariella screamed what sounded like, “Puddlestripe! Fizzwhistle!”

  Without pausing, she drew back her bow and let loose an arrow into the crowded melee. Unfortunately, the bolt glanced off of Seamus’s axe as he brought it high. I think Ariella muttered something about dwarfs as she nocked another arrow. The next shot struck the troll, but it only seemed to enrage the creature.

  With a roar of pain and anger the troll charged through the chaotic melee toward Sam, who was wiggling his fingers and gesturing at the monster with a cricket. Whatever power level the troll was in Sam’s magical system of accounting, it was too much for his spell, because the monster never broke stride. Knocking the wizard aside with a casual backhand, it rushed into the darkness of the night, Valdara at its heel.

  The clamor of their passage faded. Nobody moved. With a start, I realized that Valdara was alone in the dark with an angry troll. I started to run after them, but Drake grabbed my arm.
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  “Valdara’s alone,” I shouted. “We’ve got to help!”

  “She’s going to be fine,” he said, “but we have wounded and dying here.”

  I spun about and saw that Rook, Seamus, and Ariella were gathered in a solemn circle around someone. I rushed to their side. Sam lay on the ground in a twisted heap. His arm was thrust under his body at an unnatural angle, and a line of ragged bloody gashes ran down from his neck to below his ribs.

  I turned back to Drake and asked, “What do you expect me to do? You’re the healer! You’re the holy man!”

  He shook his head. “You saw what happened with the troll. We both know I can’t help him. Not anymore.” I started to protest, but he cut me off as, with a flick of his wrist, he extended the hidden blade in his staff. “Listen, kid, you are the leader of this group, and the leader is responsible for everyone, even a wizard he considers worthless like Sam. Now, you told Valdara and me that you were ‘better’ than any wizard we’d seen. Well, gods or no gods, holy or unholy, she and I have seen wizards that could work miracles. Now, work a miracle.”

  It was at this point that Valdara reemerged from the grass holding the head of the troll. She was breathing heavily, and her rent and torn armor was covered in blood, most of it not her own. There was something awe-inspiring and utterly terrifying about her. She threw the head on the fire next to the still burning body of the other troll and stomped over. “What’s happening?”

  Drake quickly retracted the staff’s blade. “The kid was going to heal Sam. Weren’t you, kid?”

  Everyone turned to look at me. I did the only thing I could do; I nodded and knelt down next to Sam.

  Classes in magical first aid are a mandatory part of the curriculum at The Mysterium University—of course, so is arcane algebra and at least one class in demonic cultures, so that doesn’t necessarily signify anything. Nevertheless, what I told Sam was true: magic is magic and power is power, and there is nothing fundamentally different about using it to warp the reality of an object so that it is heated sufficiently above its flash point to create fire, versus using it to warp the reality of a person to heal wounds or cure disease.

  This didn’t mean I was particularly good at magical healing or that I had done anything but practice on the most rudimentary types of ailments, but in theory there was a nonzero chance I could help. The question wasn’t Could I; the question was Should I.

  In the larger scheme, Sam’s death wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t that I wanted to see him or any of the others come to harm, but I knew that if I went back to Mysterium for a year or two, Sam and everyone else (except possibly Ariella with her elfin life span) would be dead. They were all ephemeral wisps, but Vivian was real, and if she made a mistake, that might be the end of Trelari. My goal, my only goal, had to be to build up enough power to stop her. The only way to do that was to follow the weave of the reality matrix spell to its conclusion. The question before me was whether Sam was meant to live or die.

  As these thoughts swirled through my mind, Sam’s eyes opened. “Sorry I failed you, Wizard, Avery. I guess I never really understood magic.”

  That helped make my decision. To hell with the spell, I thought.

  I leapt to my feet and shouted for everyone to clear a circle around him. “I need him on bare earth and I need something to make marks in the ground with,” I ordered.

  In less than a minute, the dwarfs had stripped the ground beneath and around him for several paces of every blade of grass, and Valdara was thrusting the burnt end of a stick from our fire into my hand. The time had given me a chance to remember the basics of a healing circle, and I began to sketch it. Every moment, Sam’s condition was growing worse. His eyes no longer opened, and his breathing now came in short, painful gasps. I was in a race against time, but the symbols had to be right, or the magic would kill him for sure.

  It took me five agonizing minutes to complete the circle. When at last I was done, Sam was stretched out and centered on an elaborate series of interlocking ellipses each inscribed with symbols representing the major organ systems of the body. I gathered the power I would need, stripping it from the world around me. I don’t think the others noticed, but the colors of things grew a bit duller and their edges less distinct. If I drew too much it was possible that things, objects, even people, might simply vanish—erased from existence. Thankfully, this was a relatively minor job.

  When I had enough power I drew a deep breath and then unleashed the energy into the circle. It glowed like flame in the night and the air above rippled as reality itself was torn asunder. Where the tracings of fire met Sam’s body, his flesh moved and was reshaped like soft clay. It was pretty ghastly to watch.

  The magic took only a few seconds. It was a fairly straightforward procedure in the end, although I’m pretty sure that I unintentionally removed Sam’s appendix in the process. I stepped out of the circle and felt my legs shaking with the effort. I frowned, because such a minor casting shouldn’t have affected me that much, but I had little time for reflection because the entire Company of the Fellowship, including all two to three of the remaining gnomes, were standing in a semicircle staring at me. I heard Sam stir.

  “He should be okay now,” I said, and then remembered about his spell book and added, “But he needs to rest until morning so he can relearn his spells.”

  This pronouncement was greeted with silence.

  Hoping to escape any questions, I said, truthfully I might add, “I’m a little tired now. I’m going to go lie down.”

  Without a word, the wall of people parted and I made my way back toward my tent. I was hoping that after a little breather the fatigue would lift, but my exhaustion seemed to be growing with every step. It was alarming actually. Something I definitely needed to talk to Eldrin about . . . in the morning . . . when I was fresher.

  I had reached my tent when I felt a hand on my arm. I feared it was Drake again with his spikey staff and his general spookiness, but instead it was Valdara, a sweaty and gore-soaked Valdara.

  “Nice job, handso—” She stopped herself. “Thanks, Avery. I have to be honest . . . I put you down as all talk. I thought I would join your group to get Drake out of that stinking bar before he drank himself to death, and then we would slip off before the Dark Queen made her first appearance. I’ll admit, I was wrong.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek and walked, in that lovely swaying way she had, back to the fire where the others were hefting the last troll onto the smoky pyre. Whether it was the magic I’d performed or the kiss or the fact that Valdara had left some entrails behind on my arm, my legs gave out. I collapsed to my knees and proceeded to vomit.

  In my defense, I had never seen this much death up close. Even as the Dark Lord, up until the very end, violence was a remote thing: lines on a map, or specks on a battlefield miles away or hundreds of feet below.

  After a few heaves, I crawled into my tent and felt Eldrin calling me. “Yes?” I said wearily.

  “Good news,” he said. “I managed to check out the teacher’s lounge and it’s clear, although there are certain signs Death Slasher was brought through there at one point. Also, Professor Bishop from the Department of Subworld Biology has some extremely disturbing eating habits. Oh, and I ran my simulation again. You are definitely going to encounter trolls.”

  I had just enough time to stick my head back out of the tent before I threw up again.

  Chapter 15

  A VERY BRIEF MEMORIAL

  We didn’t bury Nigel and Cameron until the morning, and we never could find one to two of the gnomes. Everyone was traumatized, but the deaths had hit a couple of the members of the company particularly hard. Ariella wept bitterly over the death of the gnomes, whom she saw as kindred spirits. In true elven fashion she recited a poem-song-thing she’d written the night before that might have been sad and touching except all the words were in elvish so no one understood what she was singing. Sam kept stumbling about saying, “I’m a terrible wizard,” whic
h even I could recognize wasn’t good for his self-confidence. The NPC crowd was down to Paul and two new guys that Rook drafted out of the last of the retainers and servants. He had even thrust them into red tunics, which I hoped weren’t the ones from Nigel and Cameron.

  And then there was Valdara, who, despite her earlier disclaimer of all responsibility, was clearly taking each death personally. It was she that insisted we dig proper graves and erect proper memorials and not “dump them in a ravine” as Rook had suggested. I had to admit that while I appreciated his mania for efficiency, sometimes Rook came off as a bit disinterested in the health and safety of the rest of the company. In any case, everyone took turns digging. Even I pitched in. I wanted to help honor the dead and all that, but I also didn’t feel I could refuse when Drake thrust a shovel in my hand and glowered at me meaningfully while tapping the end of his staff on the ground. At least, I didn’t think I could safely refuse. In other words, it seemed like the right thing to do on many levels.

  Another thing that was not helping with everyone’s mood was the choking smoke from our fire. As I mentioned before, we—or rather, other members of the group and not me—had set fire to the trolls because someone (likely Ariella) had said it would be cathartic, and someone else (definitely Valdara) had said if we didn’t the trolls might reanimate themselves. Whatever the reason, the bodies had gone into the fire where they continued to smolder through the night and into the morning. As a result, our camp was covered in a cloud of acrid smoke, the stench of which made it nearly impossible to breathe.

  We had finished laying the last of the night’s dead into the ground and my lungs were aching and my eyes watering from the smoke when Rook slapped me hard on the back. I bit my tongue to stop from yelping in pain as he said, “Laddie, you can’t let these losses affect you so much. It’s all part of the pattern.”