The Dark Lord
Page 33
EKG
P.P.S. Make sure you open the top left drawer only!
EKG
P.P.P.S. I know that you may not have particularly fond feelings for her at this moment, but please look in on Vivian. She’s a good egg and this could cause her no end of trouble.
EKG
I read the letter twice through, and then folded it up and put it in my pocket next to the box and the note. By all rights I should have been happy. A faculty position at The Mysterium University was not something that came along every day. In fact, since the professors had a tendency to live for hundreds if not thousands of years they came along exactly never. But I looked at Griswald’s empty chair and would have given anything at that moment to have him back, puffing on his pipe, and growling at me again.
The room was a little dusty and my eyes were tearing, but I was absolutely not crying. I walked across to Harold, still blinking. He was staring blankly across the room at the blackboard.
“Sorry about this, old ch-chum,” I said, my voice catching . . . from all the dust of course. “I know I’m a poor substitute, but if you’ll have me I can assure you that you’ll not want for trouble.”
I held out my arm to him like I’d seen Griswald do so many countless times. The imp stared up at me somberly, gave a great wheezing sigh, and climbed from his perch across my arm to sit on my shoulder. I walked to the door of the office, took one last look around. Through the open window I could hear the sound of the novice and acolytes celebrating the last day of exams. I smiled and pulled the door closed.
Epilogue
After I got Griswald’s letter I ran back to Vivian’s place. She was gone. She has been gone ever since. Eldrin has tried his scrying spell with no luck. He says that if she’s in Mysterium, she’s in a place that’s impenetrable to detection, which he doesn’t think is possible. I have a tendency to agree.
Vivian’s disappearance, following so quickly on the heels of Griswald’s own departure, made me more than a little paranoid. (I took to hiding in the defective void space in our room whenever someone knocked on the door.) Every day I expected the jackbooted thugs of Mysterium security, or at least the weaselly dean of students to bring the hammer down on me for what happened. But nothing ever did.
I was put up for Griswald’s old faculty position and was accepted after an interview that, admittedly, bordered on the inquisitorial, but was no more intrusive that I’d been expecting. Even Eldrin escaped his extracurricular activities undetected and unscathed, except that he and Dawn had a knockdown about whether his sabotage of this guy Johnson’s experiment was ethical or not. They eventually made up, but Eldrin mooned about and wrote bad poetry for a week or so before she forgave him.
With the “big” bucks I was making as a very junior professor, and the extra money Eldrin picked up fixing the subworld observatory, which I will remind you he was responsible for breaking, we were finally able to move out of the dorms. We picked the East Village in New York, because the Indian food is great, we couldn’t afford London, and even Eldrin admitted that Hylar would be way too frolicky for us. It turns out I kind of like my old home world, although visiting family is still a tribulation. There’s even a convenient door to Mysterium near NYU in the old Fire Patrol No 2 building, right across the street from what is left of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s many former homes. The only downside to moving out of the dorm is that, as expected, we lost our deposit.
First day in my new office, which by tradition was Griswald’s old office, I was visited by the chair of the Subworld Studies Department. He informed me that Trelari (he referred to it as 2A7C, of course) was off-limits. This was not surprising. I did protest, but only because I felt like he would expect me to. The fact is, I know better than anyone how off-limits Trelari really is to me and everyone else in Mysterium. He also gave me my teaching schedule, which as the most junior member of the faculty was . . . what’s the word I’m looking for . . . HELLISH!
After several months working on lesson plans and lectures I began to wonder when all this wonderful free time Griswald had talked about was going to show up. And then it happened. One day Harold and I found ourselves at the far edge of campus sitting on a bench in the summer sun staring down a little path that disappeared into the shadows beneath an avenue of ancient-looking oak trees. Our being here was not all that random. I came here often to think and fiddle with Griswald’s little box. (Eldrin had not been able to open it. A source of near constant frustration for him.) Nor was my choice of this bench as my regular place of repose random, because at the end of the little path, somewhere beneath those ancient trees lies the entrance to Trelari.
As an explanation, because of all the shifting Trelari now sits directly on the border with Mysterium. It has not been officially recognized as an innerworld, but only because no one from Mysterium can get into it. A fact that really, really annoys the otherwise all-powerful magi.
The funny thing about the path is that if you walk down to the end you find yourself right back at the beginning. In fact, some undergraduates had begun using it as a convenient jogging trail, because apparently it is exactly a quarter of a mile long.
Anyway, there we sat, me staring down the path at the mists that always swirled among the trees and wondering what and how Valdara and Drake and all the rest were doing, when a jogger came by. At first was not paying much attention except that I had a vague sense that something about him was odd. I glanced up from the box and saw that the fellow was short, really short, dwarf short. And he had a shock of bright orange hair.
As he disappeared among the trees, I shouted, “Rook!”
He either didn’t hear me, or didn’t want to be caught, because he kept going. I dropped the box, jumped to my feet, and sprinted down the trail after him. Exactly a quarter of a mile later I found myself back at my bench. Harold was still there, sleeping. I did this three more times before I gave up.
This was probably (certainly) the most exercise I’d gotten in a month and so I was a bit winded. I sat down to catch my breath and wonder at what this all meant when I noticed that Harold was awake and had the box in his lap, and that the box was open and that the box was empty.
“How?” I asked.
Harold turned and stared at me with those rheumy eyes of his and wheezed, “Sorry, I got tired of watching you muck about with it. Here you go.”
He held up a key, not just any key, but a reality key. I took it and cradled it in my hand. I wondered what world it fitted to. Maybe the one Griswald’s note had referenced. Maybe even Trelari itself! My heart raced at the possibilities it represented.
I was on my feet and several steps under the trees before I knew what I was doing. I stopped and stared down the path and thought about Trelari and her people and my friends and everything that had happened. And that’s when I had my epiphany. I saw the flaw in Mysterium. The wrongness that hid in every crack and behind every shadow.
I laughed. I laughed at myself and all the other magi, but mostly at myself. Then I put the key in my pocket and turned about.
As I passed the bench I put my arm out and Harold scrambled back onto my shoulder. I gave him a hard candy from my pocket—butterscotch—and asked, “How long have you been able to talk?”
Acknowledgments
We’d like to thank everyone. Here is our best attempt.
Harry would like to thank Zu, Kayla, Cathy, Josh, and Andrew and everyone at Unboxed for the unending support. John would like to thank Oliver and Taba for reading this when it was not ready to be read, and to DCon, Aaron, Patrick, and all the other friends of fantasy he’s met and made in California.
We’d like to thank our fellow Harper Voyager authors, especially Bishop for being slightly taller than Rook and for listening to the original story at NYCC 2014.
We want to thank the staff at Harper Voyager, from the cover designers to the people we have never met who made this book happen. We’d especially like to thank Kelly and Rebecca for being the original editors, and Anna for being
with us at the end. Jessie is a phenomenal publicist, too! You are all amazing.
We’d like to acknowledge everyone who gamed with us at American University—you know who you are. And we hope you remember Justice Cleaver. He is the world’s greatest battle-axe.
Harry would like to thank his family in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina (yes, that means Butterworths!), Virginia, California, and New Jersey for their ongoing support, especially the Curatola clan who endured the family reunion weekend coinciding with edits. Andrea, I owe you. Kathy, thank you for the setup and the quiet room. Gary, your encouragement means the world to him. Mark, Michael, Tony, Betty, Eric, Lindsey, and Brad, you are all wonderful. And the kids are amazing.
John wants to give a special thanks to Bill and Susan for always being there for his two most precious things. Everything would be harder without your support and love. The rainbow-kitty-corn loves you, too!
Thanks to Evan for showing off the Legos and his map of Royaume. This is a different series, but your enthusiasm for Charming means the world to both of us.
To Kelly and the entire staff at Fountain Books—your store is something truly special. Thank you for all you do for authors. To the Hanover Writers Club and the Paragon City Writers, we appreciate all the feedback. To anyone that has visited our website at www.jackheckel.com or found us on Facebook, thank you! We especially appreciate our reviewers. You make us better.
Most of all, if you are holding this book in your hands or looking at it on your e-reader, you are why we write.
About the Author
JACK HECKEL is the name of the writing team of John Peck and Harry Heckel. College roommates and fellow gamers. One day they were reminiscing about late nights role-playing and debating their favorite authors, and decided to write books together. They are the authors of The Charming Tales series as well as The Dark Lord, and, given the chance, plan to write too many other novels to count. Harry lives in Virginia with his wife, daughter, and two cats. John lives in California with his wife and son and a menagerie of four-legged creatures and one snake. They both have other jobs and enjoy envisioning a day when they sell their movie rights and become full-time writers living somewhere like Kauai or Vermont. To find out more about their works, visit them at www.jackheckel.com.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
By Jack Heckel
The Dark Lord
The Pitchfork of Destiny
A Fairy-tale Ending
Happily Never After
Once Upon a Rhyme
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the dark lord. Copyright © 2016 by John Peck and Harry Heckel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Harper Voyager, the Harper Voyager logo, and Harper Voyager Impulse are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.
HarperCollins is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America and other countries.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780062359339
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062359346
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