The Dark Lord

by Jack Heckel

  With a shake of his head, the small man responded. “That is already taken. You would have needed to get here before dawn to get a license for a quest like that.”

  While Rook was glaring at me for the crime of wanting a full night’s rest, Sam bent forward and asked, “Is the Hidden Tower of Loch—”

  “Taken.”

  Seamus asked, “What about the legendary tunnels under Castle Grayfalcon? I think Valdara and Drake have been through there before . . .”

  “Off-limits for restock and repairs,” the little man barked, and then turned that into a cough when we all looked at him blankly. “I’m jesting, of course. We don’t repair or restock the local dungeons. That would be preposterous.”

  The slip may have gone unnoticed by the others, but it confirmed for me Valdara’s suspicions that something was rotten in Hamlet. While I was considering the question of how this strange adventuring ecosystem might have evolved out of the pattern of my spell, the others in the group were calling out names of other places: the Shrine of Tuo-Kua, the Temple of the Toad, the Ghost Tower of Inertness . . . Each time the Master had a reason we couldn’t go there.

  Finally, Rook banged his hands down on the table for silence. Everyone jumped, even the Master. “Pray, Sir, what do you have left?” he asked.

  “Hmm,” the Master said, peering at something behind the screen. “I have a set of mines. The Mines of—”

  “Mines? You call them mines?” Seamus snorted. “I’ll have you know dwarfs made those into a palace. That was a grand place.”

  The Master cleared his throat. “The Mines of Maria.”

  “Oh,” said Seamus. “I thought you were talking about those other mines . . .”

  “Taken this morning,” the Master said, “but if history holds it will be available within the week. You could wait.”

  Rook and Seamus looked at me hopefully. I didn’t want to spend another day in this crazy place, but I was also in no mood to go crawling about in a mine if it wasn’t going to get us closer to the Dark Queen. “Do the Mines of Maria have any connection with the ancient weapon Justice Cleaver?” I asked.

  The Master’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly at me as I stepped forward. “Do I know you?”

  “This is the Great and Powerful Wizard Avery,” Sam said enthusiastically before I could put a hand over his mouth to stop him.

  “He is, is he?” the Master asked, and the twinkle that came into them meant that the name meant something to him. “Well, Great and Powerful Avery, your name precedes you.”

  “It does?” I asked, and was proud that my voice didn’t break.

  There was no reason that the Master should know me, but my palms began to sweat nevertheless. Could he suspect enough to expose me as the former Dark Lord? I began to worry that I was a few moments away from being hacked to bits by my own company.

  “Yes,” he said with a confirming nod. “There are riders on the Sea of Grass seeking a wizard by that name.”

  Not sure what else to say I stuck with, “Okay?”

  “Hooded riders,” he added significantly.

  Everyone around me gave a gasp. I looked about uncertainly. Why did it matter to everyone that they wore hoods? I mean, pretty much everyone who wore a cloak had a hood. I had a hooded cloak on right now. I put the hood up whenever it rained. I suppose someone seeing me on the road might also call me a hooded rider. Was this some message from the reality matrix that I was missing?

  Instead of mentioning any of these questions, I said, “Thanks for the warning.” See, I was getting smarter.

  “Don’t mention it,” the Master said, and pushed the license across the table toward me. “I think the Mines of Maria will serve your purposes, Wizard Avery.” He smiled at me again, but it lacked some of its earlier warmth.

  I purchased the license for the Mines of Maria for fifty gold, two electrum, and three copper pieces. For the record, I’m not exactly sure anyone knows what electrum really is, but apparently it is slightly more valuable than silver and slightly less valuable than gold. It didn’t matter; the pouch had exactly what we needed.

  The other began arguing about what order the company should use when marching through the mines, but I wasn’t in the mood to listen. I was brooding over a new thought I’d just had. When I was the Dark Lord, I’d had my Circle of Nine necromancers that I’d sent out on my most important missions. They had worn deeply cowled robes so no one could see that I’d not put in the effort to give them faces. If these “Hooded Riders” were Vivian’s version of those guys, then we had more to worry about than the mines or the Master.

  Chapter 19

  THE MINES OF MARIA

  We stabled our horses in the village and made our way to the mines on foot. A day and a few hours later, we found ourselves at the entrance to the mine, which the others kept calling a dungeon. I’d asked enough questions on the journey to know that when they said dungeon, what they meant was an underground complex of hallways and rooms, not a prison in the classic sense of the word. In any case, the mines certainly didn’t look like a mine. There was no sign of mine carts, or slag heaps, or waste containment ponds, or anything else one would need to mine ore. I couldn’t tell you what purpose this complex could possibly have served, or why this Maria would have wanted to construct such a place. However, everyone took it as perfectly natural that someone—they all conjectured an ancient wizard—would have built such a thing at some point in the distant past.

  “It’s time to make the tough choices,” shouted Rook. “We need a marchin’ order.”

  “And who’s going to keep a map so we don’t get lost,” added Seamus.

  The arguing, which had never really relented since leaving Hamlet, increased in fervor. I couldn’t understand why some people insisted on being in the front and others demanded to be in the rear. No one wanted Ariella in the back because of her reputation as a rogue, although thus far she was the least roguish rogue I’d ever met. I rubbed my right temple with two fingers and stepped away as the debate continued, the volume and pitch increasing so that soon we were making enough noise to warn every monster in the place of our intentions, strengths, weaknesses, and stratagems. Actually, considering the violence of the debate, I decided that if I were a monster, I’d probably run.

  I was doubly irritated because I suspected that I had a map of the mines in my DMG, but hadn’t been able to get into contact with Eldrin since before Hamlet. This had been the longest time between our check-ins, and I was growing more and more anxious that something had happened to him. An anxiety that was only compounded by my absolute inability to do anything about it.

  “Enough,” I said sharply. “Here’s what we are going to do. Ariella’s going to be the mapmaker, since she has experience writing and on the move.” It was true that if she wasn’t singing-saying songs, she was writing poetry. “And as for the group order—” I pointed at two of the people in red tunics (still red because although they had dyed them, the dye had only seemed to deepen the redness of the red), but I realized I didn’t know their names. Paul could have been one of them, but I wasn’t positive he hadn’t died already “—you two go in front. Everyone else start lining up behind those two.”

  I spent the next half hour lining people up leaving only Valdara and Drake to their own devices. They shuffled to the back and seemed to have no intention of going anywhere else.

  “All right,” I announced from the middle of the line just in front of Drake and Valdara, and just behind Sam and Ariella. “Let’s move out.”

  We moved down the staircase toward a heavy iron door. The background music became quieter and more somber, even a little eerie. As Paul or whoever it was in front got to the foot of the stair, the shadows to the right of him shifted and a woman with long dark hair held in a high, tight ponytail emerged. She wore dark silvery armor made of multiple plates that fitted like a second skin. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a member of our company.

  Paul shouted in alarm and made a swing at her with
his sword. She parried it with her bracer-covered arm and backhanded him. Paul slumped to the ground and the other members of the red tunic brigade backed away.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. My group is camped nearby, and I was wondering . . .”

  Rook stepped forward, brandishing our license, his eyebrows crashed together as he furrowed his forehead. “Listen, lady,” he interrupted. “We’ve got the license for these mines. If you don’t want the Hamlet town guards to get involved, you’ll move along.”

  She held up her hands in a gesture of peace as Paul, I’m pretty sure it was Paul, moaned at her feet. “I’m not looking for trouble, and certainly not with town guards.” An odd comment given that my initial impression of her was that she should be able to mop the floor with any two-bit hireling the Village of Hamlet might have at its disposal.

  “As I said,” she continued, “we are camped nearby. We are looking for an orc with a gold molar that is supposed to be in the mines. We’ve bought thirteen different licenses for the mines and haven’t encountered him once. We need that molar so we can forge our paladin his mystic weapon.” She gazed up and down our line. “I’m sure it wouldn’t do you any good. It doesn’t look like you have holy men of any stripe,” she said as her eyes swept over Drake. “Anyway, we’d pay very well for it if you retrieve it for us, or if you’d be willing to sell us the license . . .”

  I wanted to ask so many questions. If they needed gold, why not simply get some gold instead of prying a molar from an orc? Why would an orc have such a tooth? I’d seen plenty of the monsters in my time as Dark Lord and none of them were particularly interested in oral hygiene, or hygiene of any other kind for that matter.

  As usual, Rook acted before I could reveal my ignorance. “Thanks,” he said, “but we have this, lassie. We’ll let you know if we see a beastie with a gold molar.”

  She stalked up the stairs toward the dwarf. “Wonderful. And the name’s Zania.”

  Rook waited until she was out of sight and shouted, “Let’s move out!”

  “Halt!” called Seamus.

  We all managed to stop without crashing into each other. “What?” Rook asked, bristling with irritation.

  “Light sources. Torches or lanterns?” Seamus asked.

  The entire group sighed. I’ll save you from the debate that ensued, but in the end we used a combination of lanterns and light spells. I was rather pleased at how quickly we came to the decision, or at least as pleased as I could be considering we had been standing in front of the bloody door to the bloody place for what felt like an hour. At last, we descended into the depths.

  “The stairway goes down to a room that is a thirty-foot square. We enter in the middle of the north wall. Directly across from the stair is a wooden door, which upon closer observation, shows multiple signs of attempts at being forced, including being chopped, burned, and possibly bitten,” announced Sam. “We notice a few bits of bone in the northeast corner, along with something foul, but in the southwest corner, you see some bits of string.”

  Ariella scribbled hastily on her vellum, and then called out, “Got it!”

  I started to ask Sam why he was describing the room in such detail when we could all look around and see it for ourselves, but before I could get the words out, Seamus announced, “We should search for secret doors.”

  The other members of the company began tapping on the walls and rapping on the floor. I wasn’t exactly sure how to react. I moved next to Valdara and asked, “Why are they doing this when there is a perfectly obvious door right in front of us?”

  “New groups always do this,” she said with a shrug. “They’ll tire of it by the third or fourth room.”

  “Did your last group do this also?”

  Her face darkened at my question and she mumbled, “Yes, and there will also be death and sorrow and there is nothing I can do about that either.” She brushed past me into the center of the room. “Everyone be careful,” she announced. “The door into the dungeon is probably trapped.”

  “I’ll handle it,” declared a large fellow in a red tunic who I had put up near the front.

  He looked like a barbarian of some sort. Rook had taken to calling him Red Four, and the other new member of the red tunic brigade Red Five. I don’t know why, but they accepted the monikers without complaint. Anyway, Red Four gave the door a hard kick.

  It didn’t budge, and his face flushed red. “That’s okay,” he said, taking a few deep breaths. “Like my priest says, ‘If you don’t succeed, try again without head-butting anything.’”

  He kicked it again. The sound of the impact echoed through the room. It still didn’t budge. This time his face turned red and his mouth drew back exposing huge sharpened teeth. “I . . . am . . . in . . . control . . . of . . . my . . . anger. My . . . anger . . . doesn’t . . . control . . . me,” he said, grunting while kicking the door with each word.

  Nothing. The door might have been solid stone. Red Four’s face turned purple and veins bulged in his neck. He gave a bloodcurdling scream. “Head-butt time!”

  With a terrifying noise, his unhelmed head smashed into the door. When it didn’t give way immediately, he tried again, shouting, “Head-butt! Head-butt!” as over and over he slammed his head into the door. As long as I live, I doubt that I shall ever see anything so pointlessly violent.

  We all sprung forward to pull him away from the door, but were too late. He fell backward, blood streaming from his forehead. He was out cold, knocked unconscious by the force of his assault. The group fell silent. I’m not sure anyone knew what to say.

  I finally spoke. “Drake, can you help him?”

  The priest coughed. “No, kid. There’s really no help for someone willing to slam their head into a door that many times. It would take years of counseling. All I can do is bind his wound.”

  As Drake knelt over the fallen barbarian, Ariella made a squeaking sound. “I figured it out. We need to pull the door open, not push it.”

  A quiet sense of embarrassment fell over the company. “Okay, everyone,” said Rook. “We never speak of this. What happens in the Mines of Maria stays in the Mines of Maria.” For once, the entire group agreed.

  After that, the door was opened without incident and Sam immediately began commentating again. “There’s a ten-foot-wide corridor beyond that extends south sixty feet to another door. Unlike the first door, this one is already open.”

  “Got it!” shouted Ariella, who was sketching again on her sheet of vellum.

  Sam’s weird need to describe everything was getting to me. “Sam, why are you—” I started to say.

  “On further inspection,” Sam shouted, cutting me off, his voice strained with fear, “you can see an orc staring at you with wide eyes!”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Orc!” shouted Rook.

  “Attack!” yelled someone in red (I’m pretty sure Red Five) who then charged down the hall, his sword slashing. Several people drew bows and started shooting arrows down the hall right at his back. I cringed, but by a miracle the shots missed the man. Unfortunately, they also missed the orc, who, showing remarkable cool under fire, simply shut the door.

  Heedless of marching order, or any other order, the rest of the group rushed after Red Five and smashed its way through the door into the room beyond. I found myself alone with Drake. Down the hall someone yelled, “More orcs! Kill them all!” Drake and I exchanged a glance and ran toward the mayhem.

  While I might not have agreed with all the tactics, or more accurately lack of tactics employed, I couldn’t disagree with the results. By the time Drake and I entered the room, six orcs lay sprawled on the ground, two with arrows in them, one with burns from a magical spell (I wondered if Sam had been holding out on me or if the multitalented Ariella had some undisclosed tricks up her sleeve), and the other three were cut into pieces (given the stains on Valdara’s sword and armor I suspected that was her doing). Everyone and every surface in the roo
m was covered in blood and bits of organ. The smell. Oh gods, the smell. No one else seemed to notice.

  “We got them!” yelled Paul or Red Five.

  “Yeah!” said Red Five or Paul. They high-fived, sending a spray of blood out across the room.

  Even Ariella seemed unaffected by the abattoir atmosphere. She was very calmly kneeling over the orcs’ bodies going through their pockets.

  “Can we get out of here?” I asked, swallowing the gorge rising up my throat.

  Sam nodded and cleared his throat. “The orcs are dead. You are standing in a twenty-by-twenty-one-foot room that—”

  “Wait!” shouted Seamus. “There’s something terribly wrong here.” He reached into a pocket on his kilt and pulled out a roll of string.

  He measured the room for five to ten minutes and then said, “Rook, look at this measurement: twenty-one feet.”

  “Ahh,” Rook said inscrutably, and nodded. “Yes, twenty-one feet.” His eyes shifted back and forth in confusion almost like he wasn’t certain how to react.

  “I put it down to shoddy construction,” grumbled Seamus.

  “What is it?” I asked, feeling that I was missing the significance of this one extra foot. “Does it mean that there’s a secret door or something?”

  Seamus stared at me as though he didn’t understand the question. At last he said, “No, secret doors could be anywhere.” The others looked about at the walls as though one of these doors might spring out at them. “It’s . . . it’s just eerie,” the dwarf continued. “Everyone knows that all dungeon rooms are built around ten-foot squares. Sometimes there’s a five-foot one, but that’s rare.”

  “I’m not even sure how to draw twenty-one feet,” said Ariella.

  A shiver went down my spine as I realized that the limitations of the graphing program I’d used to render all the maps for the important locations in Trelari might be responsible for this quirk. So many unintended consequences. I closed my eyes and sighed.