The Darker Lord

by Jack Heckel

  I did. It was comfortable, and we had done all this before. I had been lying here and she had pulled up a chair and . . .

  She pulled a wooden chair across the room and placed it so she could see me. Then she retrieved a small pad of paper and a pen out of the mass of slithering reptiles on her head. “Now, where were we,” she asked, flipping through the pages in her notebook. “Ah, yes, tell me, when did you first begin to have fantasies about killing your father?”

  “What?” Even to my ears, I sounded drowsy or drunk or both.

  She laughed. “Just a little therapist humor, Avery. Do you remember me yet?”

  The snakes studied me seriously, and I found it impossible not to stare back. I also found it impossible not to answer. “You are the counselor.”

  “Correct.” She had a delightful smile. She put on a pair of glasses. “Do you remember our previous session, Avery?”

  “No.”

  She frowned and made a note. “Do you remember any of our previous sessions?”

  “No.”

  The snakes flicked their tongues in irritation and her frown deepened, which was not nearly as pleasant as her smile. “That’s not supposed to happen. I wonder if I’m using too many snakes.”

  She wrote furiously in her notebook, and muttered technical-sounding phrases about hypno-REMs and anterograde amnesia, dissociative fugue, and Corwin’s syndrome. I understood none of it, but knew that my memory loss was making the counselor unhappy. I was both alarmed by the turn of events and relaxed to be back on the couch talking to her. One of those feelings was my real emotion, and the other was what she wanted me to feel. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell which was which.

  As she continued to consult her notes, my mind sank deeper into unconsciousness. That’s when the buzzing in my wrist returned. I tried to ignore it—wanted to ignore it—but it was distracting me from what I knew was going to be a very pleasant dream. And the pain only continued to grow. At last, I sat up and shook my head to clear it. The counselor was so intent on studying her notes that, for a moment, she didn’t notice. I believe it was the first time I’d had a chance to study her in a semi-unaltered state. She was a Gorgon, in her late twenties, with high cheeks and luminous yellow eyes. She was wearing a dark green, knee-length dress that accentuated her sinuous curves and complemented the complexion of her scales to perfection. She also had legs, instead of the lower body of a snake, and she terrified me.

  I was still fighting my way free of her head-spinning charm when the snakes atop her head gave a hiss of alarm. The counselor’s head shot up. She pulled off her glasses, and her own luminous eyes swirled hypnotically as they locked on to mine. “Avery, why don’t you lie back down?”

  I couldn’t look away. I lay back down and began to fall asleep. All was peacefulness and bliss, except for this burning sensation in my arm. I tried to ignore it, but it kept getting worse. I began to twitch and thrash. “Why are you fighting me, Avery?” the counselor asked as she put her glasses back on.

  I felt compelled to tell the truth. “It hurts.”

  “Interesting.” I heard her pen scratching away at her notebook. “What hurts?”

  I started to say my arm, but only got as far as, “My arrrr . . .” before the pain became so overwhelming that it felt as though someone was holding a blowtorch to my wrist. I sat up and clawed at the sleeve of my robe. The counselor was still scribbling her notes as I read a new tattooed message exactly where the earlier one had been: Don’t tell her, you idiot!

  “Your what?” She looked up expectantly.

  I crossed my arms across my chest to hide the message. “You are hurting me.”

  “How?” The multitude of snakes stopped writhing to stare.

  “Because you are messing with my mind,” I spit with a venom I didn’t fully understand, but knew came from a real place.

  “It’s called therapy,” she said in the same voice you might use to soothe a child. “And the anger you’re feeling toward me is called ‘transference.’ It is perfectly natural. It arises because we are tapping into events and feelings you have suppressed and are finding painful to deal with.”

  I rose to my feet and began pacing back and forth across the office, trying to formulate a plan through the muddle of pain and confusion. I decided the best way of avoiding further snaking was to stay on the offensive. I continued my tirade, giving in fully to my well-developed id. “The anger I’m feeling is called ‘anger,’ and it arises because you and your snaky pals there—” I pointed an accusing finger “—keep making me forget bits and pieces of my life!”

  “Good, Avery. We are having a real breakthrough here.” Her eyes flared to hypnotic life. “Come back to the couch and lie down, and let’s explore these feelings.”

  A few seconds earlier she would have had me, but this time I was ready. In an instant, I spun a reflection pattern in the air between us. The counselor momentarily shuddered and then was frozen along with her serpentine locks by the power of her own gaze. I moved behind her so that she could see me in the mirror pattern’s reflection, and leaned down to rasp in my most menacing Dark Lord voice, “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

  Her body may have been frozen, but she still managed to roll her eyes. “Because you are not a murderer.”

  “But isn’t that what you were going to do to me once you’d gotten all the information your masters wanted?”

  “No, never!” she said too quickly.

  I pounced on the half answer. “So, you admit you were sent here to interrogate me. By who?”

  “Whom.”

  “What?”

  “The correct way of asking that question is: By whom?”

  My initial worry was that she was somehow resisting her own hypnosis powers, or perhaps that the reflection was not “true” enough. I checked the pattern I’d cast, but there was nothing wrong with the spell. There was another possibility: this was the counselor’s actual personality. She might think she was doing the right thing.

  I smiled gently at her reflection. “You’re an authoritarian grammatical prescriptionist. How illuminating,” I said, mimicking the well-intentioned but condescending tone she had used with me. “You probably also object to words like alright as being grammatically incorrect despite their near-universal usage, or prefer phrases like ‘It is I’ over ‘It’s me’ on the spurious grounds that in Latin predicative complements take the nominative case, even though English grammar allows for a great deal of variability in choice of cases for predicative complement noun phrases.”

  I let that bit of hard-won Oxford English knowledge sink in, and sat on the couch, being very careful not to meet her direct gaze. “You read The Dark Lord. Didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What did you think of the Avery Stewart in the book?” I asked.

  “That he needs help.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you believe you’re the Dark Lord, Avery. You have convinced yourself that you’re evil, and you’re not,” she said, but now her tone wasn’t aggressive or defensive. “You have trouble telling the difference between what is real and what isn’t, between this world and those other worlds. This is probably because of the trauma you suffered in Trelari, and I believe hypnotherapy might reduce the confusion you’re feeling. Avery, you were ready to die for shadows.”

  Her answer made me feel sad and tired. She didn’t believe subworlders were real people. “What did you think about The Dark Lord’s epilogue?”

  “There is no epilogue, except in the version that appeared on your home world, Earth, which, I will add, wasn’t written by you.”

  At this point, I probably should have realized that she was answering with unusual clarity for someone under hypnosis. However, I wasn’t in the best mental state. I rose from the couch and walked over to my desk. Unlocking it, I pulled one of my copies of the Heckel book from a drawer. I studied the cover as I asked my next question. “What’s your name, Counselor?”
r />   “My name is Stheno.” She sighed. “Avery, can we—?”

  “Theno?” I responded.

  “Close enough. It is a traditional Gorgon name. If you can’t hiss, it’s hard to make the leading s sound. I am trying to help you, Avery. My hypnosis can be a very powerful tool. If you would embrace it instead of fighting me, I’m sure we’d have a breakthrough. Despite the events of today, I know we could—”

  “Who sent you?” I interrupted.

  “Human Resources.”

  “Who told them to send you?” I nearly shouted. I saw her eyes dart toward the large window in the far wall. She was staring at the administration tower—its many windows, like never-blinking eyes, glowing a sinister red through the hazy night. I sighed, walked over, and dropped my book into her lap. “I see.”

  “Good. Now, can you drop the reflection pattern? I’d like to take my glasses off.”

  “Your glasses?”

  “They prevent me from being hypnotized by my own snakes. It’s a safety measure when doing therapy with a magus.”

  “You weren’t hypnotized?”

  She shrugged. “The snakes are, but I’m not. Avery, I’m trying to help you. As far as these memory losses, that’s not what’s supposed to be happening. I think there are forces that might be working through me, but together we could figure out the who and why of that.”

  It was actually a tempting offer, but I could never accept it. If the Administration were using her as an unwitting agent, then I would be putting yet another innocent in harm’s way. I lay back on the couch, exhausted, and closed my eyes. With a thought, I dropped the reflection pattern and heard the snakes hiss their curses at me.

  “Avery?”

  “Stheno,” I said wearily, but somehow managed to hiss. “I admit that I may not be the Dark Lord, but this is not the time for us to explore the issue. I’m exhausted, and I’m annoyed that you’ve been entrancing me without my permission. We will have to start again, at another time.”

  “I understand,” she said with a dozen hissed sighs. “But there is one thing I think I should tell you. My supervisor was talking to the head of Student Records and—”

  The door flew open with a loud bang. “Get away from him, you snake!” a voice shouted. I opened my eyes in time to see something fly across the room and hit Stheno in the head. She fell onto the floor. A heavy-treaded boot lay next to her. I turned to the door in shock. It was Rook!

  I opened and closed my mouth in stunned surprise. The dwarf came over and peered into my eyes. “You all right, laddie?” He held up a finger and two thumbs. “How many ears do I have?”

  “Rook?”

  “Yes, it’s me, lad.” He moved over to the counselor’s body and nudged her with the toe of his unclad foot.

  “Is she dead?” I asked.

  “What, from a shoe?” he said with a snort. “Gorgons are a lot tougher than that. She’ll be fine, although she and two or three of her little pets will have some pretty hellacious shiners in the mornin’.”

  I was still struggling to come to grips with his presence, and so asked, “Why are you here?”

  He scratched his beard. “That’s a kind of existential question, lad. Am I here because I have purpose, or do I have purpose because I’m here? Not sure I’m qualified to answer that. Besides, we don’t have time to get into a philosophical discussion. We have to get out of here and fast! The Administration agents are bound to have bugged your office. They could be here any moment.”

  “I see your tendency for sophistry hasn’t improved over the time,” wheezed Harold as he flapped from his perch to my shoulder.

  “Oh. Hello, Harold,” Rook said.

  “Hello, Rook,” the imp sighed.

  “You know each other?” I asked. They shared a look and shrugged. Somehow, finding out Rook and Harold knew each other well enough to trade good-natured insults irritated me more than Stheno’s hypnosis. I picked the imp off of my shoulder and held him out in front of me, shaking an accusing finger. “What else do you know?”

  “How can I possibly answer that?”

  Before I could tell him exactly how he might, Stheno gave a groan and her hair began to stir restlessly. Harold looked down. “What did I miss?”

  “Only all the danger, as usual,” I said in annoyance.

  “No time for a lovers’ quarrel, you two,” Rook grunted.

  “I’m not sure that she wasn’t trying to help.”

  Rook shook his head. “Lad, all I know is that she’s on the Administration’s side, and that’s all I need to know. Now, let’s get out of here before she wakes up!”

  He dragged Harold and I (oh, wait, Harold and me, sorry, Stheno) out of the office. As the door shut behind us, I wondered if Stheno had been right. Maybe I did need therapy, because this was madness.

  Chapter 13

  Rooked

  Twenty minutes later, the three of us were seated at a table in a courtyard near the edge of the university renowned for two things: its view and the kebab stand that tended to materialize there in the evenings. The kebab stand lived up to its hype and the courtyard was packed with young beings of all sorts. They were all in that giddy state of excitement that precedes a night of partying. As for the view? I suppose watching a river pour off the rim of the world into etherspace has a certain eerie beauty to it, but I found the crowd it drew irritating.

  Rook took a long draft of his beer. This was his third tankard, and he had so many kebab spears stacked on his plate it looked like he was playing a game of pickup sticks. Even Harold was enjoying himself, or at least I thought he was. Smiling didn’t come naturally to the imp, and when he did, it gave him a constipated look. I threw my own denuded kebab down and leaned back patting my stomach. “What do you think of my plan now?”

  Rook loosed an impressive belch. “You’ve never had a better one.”

  “Genius,” Harold wheezed as he plucked the last roasted mouse off his kebab.

  What can I say? It is a kebab cart on Mysterium. Their official slogan is, If it can be impaled by a stick, it should be impaled by a stick and grilled.

  The dwarf took another drink and pointed to the imp with his tankard. “You remember that shawarma place that used to be in the basement of the ether-astrology building?”

  “Sirius Shawarma?” Harold slurped down the mouse’s tail. “Great place. They used to do a fantastic roast capybara.”

  Rook nodded and smiled, and the two began to share increasingly absurd stories of other places I had never heard of from years ago. I had brought us to this spot because until Eldrin and Dawn returned from their mission, I didn’t have any better ideas and, as I might have mentioned, I was starving. But watching Rook and Harold reminisce about places I knew for a fact predated me by a century or more reminded me how many unanswered questions I had for them. I decided to check a few off. “How long have the two of you known each other?” I asked over the rim of my mug.

  They looked at each other. The imp shrugged and Rook said, “Time can be difficult, lad.”

  “It can’t be that complicated,” I said, doing a quick calculation. “I mean, it must have been sometime in the last two centuries. Griswald was only a professor for a hundred and fifty years or so.” Rook and Harold both laughed. “What?!” I asked.

  “We’re not laughin’ at you,” Rook said, still chuckling a little.

  “Well, we are, but not in a mean way,” Harold clarified.

  I glared at them both.

  “Lad, it’s simple. I’ve known Harold through . . . four mages?” the dwarf asked the imp.

  “Five,” Harold corrected, and pointed his empty kebab stick at me.

  Rook raised his tankard to me. “I stand corrected. Five.”

  I had never considered that Harold might have been familiar to other mages over the years. “How long do imps live?” I asked. Harold shrugged. For some reason it irritated me more than usual. “You always shrug off my questions,” I snapped.

  “Because you like to ask que
stions that can’t be answered.”

  “All of them?” I asked, banging my fist on the table and rattling our plates and cups.

  “Lad . . .” Rook said in a voice I think he meant to be soothing.

  The frustration I’d been feeling for the last few months at the gaps in my memory boiled over. “No. For once I want a straight answer. I’ve been sitting here the last five minutes listening to two people I thought I knew pretty well tell stories about each other stretching back to centuries before my birth.” I pointed an accusing finger at Rook. “I traveled for months with you while you pretended to be from a subworld when you were actually a Mysterium-trained mage. Do you know how useful it might have been to be able to talk to you about what was going on?

  “And as for you,” I said, turning on the imp, “you’ve been living in my room for the past six months and never thought to say a word to me. You had to know what kind of hell I was going through. I’ve been miserable with worry about Griswald and Trelari and what I was supposed to do next. Why didn’t you help me?” This last was said in a sort of gasp.

  I felt the imp’s weight settle on my shoulder. He put a hand atop my head and stroked my hair. “I thought you needed time,” he wheezed. “Maybe I was wrong. I don’t have all the answers, Avery. I don’t know what you should do next. I don’t know a great many things.” With a shuddering sigh, he sat down on my shoulder so that his legs dangled down across my chest. “You asked how long I can live? I don’t know. I feel old, but I don’t know if age even has meaning for my kind. I follow magic.”

  “You said you chose me.”

  “I did. When my old mage dies or passes me on, I have a choice. If the magic of a wizard calls to me I stick around.”

  I considered this in silence and then asked, “What happens if the magic doesn’t call to you?”

  He took another ragged and rattling breath. “That’s like me asking you what heaven is like. We only get to know the answer at the end.”

  “Unless you’re a Jellicle,” Rook said, banging his tankard down on the table.

  Harold coughed and pulled his hand away from my head. “One could argue that their afterlife only really happens after number nine.”