The Darker Lord

by Jack Heckel

  I peered about to make sure we were alone—yes, eventually I learn—and affected my sternest expression. “Before we go any farther, we have to set some ground rules.” They nodded. “First, you do exactly what I say, even if I say to run!” They nodded again. “Second, no doing anything crazy . . . without my permission. I refuse to risk any of your lives or academic careers. Understood?” This time there was a long hesitation before they agreed. “Finally, no more Sirs, or Professor Stewarts. From now on it’s Avery.”

  Of all my proposed rules, they looked most uncomfortable with this one, but eventually Susan said, “Yes, Professor . . . I mean, Avery.”

  “Right.” I clapped my hands and immediately regretted it as the sharp sound echoed through the hush of the vaulted lobby. A number of people standing in the long line waiting for a turn at the counter turned to look. I waved weakly in apology. Lowering my voice, I whispered, “Susan, you worked here before. Where would Eldrin and Dawn go to find records on new students?”

  She tapped at her chin with a green-tinted nail. “Probably sub-basement 23. That’s where records for most incoming students are stored.”

  “Great . . .”

  “Although they recently did a reorganization to group all active students by the world of their residency. Trelari, being a new innerworld, would probably be in one of the annexes. Maybe double-Q? That is the newest portion of the building.”

  “Okay, so—”

  “Having said that, if the Financial Aid office is reviewing them, then those records are held in the E-wing.”

  This time I paused to to make sure she was actually done. She absentmindedly twirled a strand of her hair around her index finger as she thought. “I think that’s it.”

  I let out the sigh of relief. “In that case—”

  “Although . . .” she began anew.

  Susan continued to throw out possibilities, and I began to realize what a daunting task we had before us. Let me explain. Mysterium University has a very simple retention policy when it comes to records: Keep everything. Forever. Period. Millenniums of history, and every detail was meticulously stored somewhere in this building. Imagine the sheer amount of space you would need to hold that volume of information—information still kept on some form of tangible medium, given that most of the mages setting university policy are technophobes. It boggles the mind.

  Of course, Mysterium has the advantage of being able to use magic to help solve its most insolvable problems, and Student Records is no exception. As with most university buildings, Student Records is much bigger on the inside than its outer dimensions would strictly allow. However, even with magic, the task of creating room for the ever-growing catalog of records is daunting, and there are limits to spatial manipulation. Like a bubble, if you keep expanding one point of reality, at some point it will pop. You risk creating a Juster Paradox and having records getting lost and wandering about aimlessly in unstable subworlds. Some people say this is exactly what happened to the Athletic Department. You might ask, What Athletic Department, Avery? To which I would respond, Exactly!

  As far as I know, there is no Athletic Department at Mysterium University, but there is an enormous trophy case filled with all sorts of absurd medals and awards that pops up on occasion in random locations. The story goes that at some point there had been some cheating involving a game between Mysterium University and the main Cthulhoid University, and all of Mysterium’s records needed to be vacated. Unfortunately, something went awry with the ritual to remove the records, and everything was lost. After several committee investigations, the Administration decided it would be easier to pretend there had never been an Athletic Department than reconstruct the history and all the statistics.

  The point being, to prevent extradimensional leaks, which no one likes, particularly the Administration, the Student Records building is constantly growing. The massive building resembles what you would get if a Renaissance architect tried to construct a Mayan temple. And, in a way, Student Records was a temple—a temple to paperwork. And since no building on campus is allowed to be taller than the Provost’s Tower, for several centuries now the Administration has been digging basements, sub-basements, sub-sub-basements, and so on. By now, the visible portion of the Student Records building is little more than a lobby/help desk sitting atop hundreds of levels of dungeons and annexes and wings, and any number of other holes, hollows, and halls, and all of them are stuffed to the gills with papers.

  “By the gods,” I murmured. “They could be any one of a million places.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Only about a dozen,” Susan said with irritating calmness as she counted on her fingers. The rest of us stared at her. “Certainly not more than fourteen.”

  “We could ask for help,” Trevor or Tanner suggested. He pointed to the front desk.

  It being the nightshift, the place was swarming with undead. Zombies moaned and shuffled papers while a skeleton checked student IDs. I recalled a time when as a prank someone put a dead body behind a desk in the Financial Aid office, but never animated it. People stayed in line for hours waiting. Oddly, the fact that the corpse was inanimate wasn’t noticed for days. I really didn’t want to stand in that line. “Susan, how long would it take us to visit all the possible places on your list?”

  She thought about it far too long. “By my count twenty . . .”

  “Minutes?”

  She gave a grim laugh. “Hours. And that’s assuming we split up, and no one gets lost.” From the way her eyes darted to Tanner and Trevor when she said this, I knew she thought the odds of them not getting lost were effectively zero.

  We were never going to find Dawn, Eldrin, or the records on Ariella and Sam if we didn’t talk to someone. We got in line. After five minutes, we had moved about five feet toward our destination. I calculated we would reach the desk in about an hour at this rate. I was still doing the math when I noticed Trevor and Tanner were arguing about something, and apparently engaged in an epic best of fifteen rock-paper-scissors contest. When they started nudging each other and pointing, I could take it no longer.

  “Can I help you two with something?” They both looked at each other nervously, but said nothing. That’s when I saw they were both holding copies of The Dark Lord. A sudden and bizarre thought struck me. “Do you two want my autograph?”

  Harold, who had been sleeping since shortly after the kebab stand, let out a sigh and groaned, “I can’t believe you asked them that.”

  Trevor and Tanner looked at each other. One of them said, “No, we had a question of an academic nature, but if you would be willing to sign our books that would be great!”

  “It gets worse and worse,” Harold sighed, and flapped off to sit on the sharply chiseled nose of one of the statuesque columns.

  Trevor and Tanner thrust their copies of The Dark Lord forward. I waved them away. “Maybe later, guys. What was your question?”

  They both looked a little crestfallen, but then Tanner pushed Trevor forward, or Trevor pushed Tanner forward. Whichever. I was really struggling to keep their names straight. Anyway, one of the T’s said, “We had a question about the book.” He flipped through the pages to get to the place. “In Chapter 21—”

  “‘Polygon Madness,’” the other supplied.

  “You and the Fellowship—” the first T started to say, but was interrupted as the second T interjected, “I think you’ll find it was not a ‘fellowship,’ but a ‘company.’”

  “Wrong!” the first T shouted. “In Chapter 11, Rook clearly states they are a ‘fellowship with extras.’”

  The second T rolled his eyes and affected a superior expression. “Of course he did, but later in the same chapter, Avery himself says they would later become known as the ‘Company of the Fellowship.’”

  “The keyword there being later meaning not now!” First T punctuated his rebuttal by pantomiming a mic drop.

  I saw a shadow of uncertainty pass over second T’s face, but then he rallied with the always eru
dite rejoinder, “You’re an idiot!”

  I will spare you the next five minutes of Pythonesque argument, and only say in the end they agreed to disagree. At least, that’s what I charitably assume happened when first T called second T a nerf herder, and second T asked first T the age-old question, “I know you are, but what am I?”

  Susan stepped in. “You are both being embarrassments. If you don’t stop acting like children, you are leaving. Understand?” They both nodded.

  We made another six feet in relative peace. Finally, first T, who I will assume from now on is Tanner based solely on the fact that it comes first alphabetically, made another try. “Anyway, Professor . . . I mean, Avery . . .” He cleared his throat to cover the slip and muttered under his breath, “Come on, Tanner, you can do this . . .”

  “Relax,” I said. “Just ask your question. I probably won’t be able to answer anyway. My memory of events on Trelari is a little muddled.”

  “Right.” He took a deep breath. “The question is actually about the title of Chapter 21. In the text of the chapter the creatures are clearly referred to as ‘gelatinous polyhedrons,’ the only debate being what type . . .”

  Trevor, who had been doing a great job of keeping his mouth shut, apparently could not help inserting himself at the mention of this topic. “Although I wonder why you never thought the creature might be a ditrigonal dodeca-dodecahedron or simply a dodeca-dodecahedron, both of which also have twenty-four faces.”

  I opened my mouth to admit complete ignorance as to what he was talking about, but Tanner slapped Trevor on the back of the head and said, “He didn’t think of it because it’s ridiculous. No one could possible mistake a Catalan Solid for a star polyhedron.”

  “Besides,” Susan interjected, “had it been a star polyhedron, cold wouldn’t have worked. They would have needed to melt the thing with acid.”

  If they hadn’t already been before, I think both young men fell in love with Susan at that moment. She seemed to realize she’d exposed the fact that she was at least as geeky as they were, and quickly went back to studying the pattern of tiles on the floor. I drew their attention back to me by asking, “And your question was?”

  “Right!” Tanner said, and shot Trevor a murderous look. “The question is, whether this is a mistake or, as many of us believe, a clue.”

  “One of many,” Trevor offered, and he held his book out to me so I could see all the folded-down pages where passages had been highlighted and annotated.

  “A clue to what?” I asked.

  They both looked at each other and said, “The revelation, of course.”

  “You see,” Trevor said, taking over the narrative. “We have a theory that the revelation is about the nature of the reality of Mysterium itself. We think what you are trying to tell us is there is a higher dimension to the universe. In the book, the word polyhedron has been replaced by polygon as a signal that Mysterium mages are thinking too two-dimensionally about magic.”

  Tanner began to explain how, if you take the first word (not including articles) from each of the chapters divisible into or a multiple of the mystical number seven, that there is a message to Mysterium wizards. He read the message aloud. “Mysterium wizard trolls polygon not.”

  “That sentence doesn’t make any sense,” I protested.

  “It makes perfect sense, if you are ‘trolling’ the ‘Mysterium” over its ‘polygon’ or ‘two-dimensional’ view of the world,” Trevor explained, but he used so many air quotes that I had trouble following.

  “What about the ‘not,’” I asked. “Wouldn’t that negate everything else?”

  Apparently not, but I hesitate to reconstruct their argument for you here because it implicates over a dozen logical fallacies, including every one of the formal syllogistic fallacies, which should be impossible. Anyway, it was only one small part of a larger theory they were working on called the “Khan Fallacy.” While their thesis was silly, something about their conclusion struck me as very near the truth. It’s like the feeling you get when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle and you’ve been staring at this jumble of shapes without finding any matches, and then suddenly you see the subtle variations in color and pattern. Your hand reaches out and unerringly links two pieces together. It is only the beginning of a long process, but after that the end is inevitable.

  “Tell me more about this Khan Fallacy. It’s . . . interesting.”

  “It is?” Tanner asked.

  “Seriously?” Trevor added.

  Susan put a hand on my arm. “Please, Avery, don’t encourage them,” she pleaded. There was a certain desperation in her eyes.

  Trevor and Tanner ignored her. “We knew we were onto something,” they said together. To my horror and wonder, they both pulled back their cloaks to reveal matching T-shirts with the word KHAAAAAAAAAN written across their fronts in a bold typeface.

  Trevor began. “We see the Khan Fallacy as a metric for evaluating magical research—”

  Tanner cut off his friend to add, “It’s an extension of a theory Professor Roddenberry first came up with to explain why so much mystical research is fatally flawed—”

  “And refers to a thought-experiment he published in his first article on the subject.” Trevor seized back the floor. “He gives the example of a Terran naval captain suddenly thrust into a battle in space, and how his past experience and learned perspective would cause him to entirely miss the fact that, with no gravity or landmass constraining your movement, there is an extra dimension to the tactics you could employ.”

  “So, when we read ‘gelatinous polygons’ where ‘polyhedrons’ should have been, we wondered if you weren’t giving your readers a hint that your work needs to be read with a . . . higher level of thought. We’ve applied to study the mathematical and logical implications of our Khan Fallacy with Professor Roddenberry. With your recommendation . . .” Tanner concluded, letting the implication hang in the air.

  I’m not sure what or if I responded to him. I had fallen back into my own thoughts, murmuring them under my breath. “It’s probably nothing. An overly tired author or a hiccup in the cross-ether translation, but the magical world is a multidimensional space. You can go forward, back, left, right, up, down, then, now, strong, weak . . .” Could it be that simple?

  No one spoke, which was fair because I was babbling. At least, the expressions on their faces told me I was making no sense. But, for me, things were becoming a little bit clearer, and a lot more disturbing.

  The one constant all Mysterium mages take for granted is that in a multiverse otherwise characterized by multidimensionality and giddy randomness, Mysterium is unchangeable. There is a straight line, a single vector of magical inertia, that decreases as you move outward and away from the university. It is so invariable that all Mysterium magic uses this fixedness as a reference point, and as a foundation for all castings. But why should it be so? It is, in fact, completely unnatural for there to be a place like Mysterium. A place so fixed and constant nobody has ever been able to discover its point of creation.

  The more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that I might have previously come to believe that Mysterium wasn’t the center of the universe, or at least that there shouldn’t be a center of the universe. That someone, or a group of someones, have had their thumb(s) on the scale of creation since recorded memory. In other words, that reality was rigged.

  I’m not sure how long I spun and twisted these thoughts in my mind. I know for several minutes Trevor and Tanner kept asking if they were right, and I didn’t answer them, and eventually they grew silent and sullen. I also know we kept creeping forward. Whether it took us ten seconds, ten minutes, or ten hours to get to the front of the line I have no clue. The next thing I do remember fully is Susan shaking me by the arm and telling me the yellowish skull floating above window number three was free. We were up.

  Chapter 15

  Hellp!

  The skull floated on a billowing blue cloud of nether energy, which smells
a bit like rotten eggs mixed with teriyaki sauce. As long as you don’t notice it, you are fine, and once you’ve been around it for a while, you go nose blind to it, but the first time you experience it can make you rethink your life choices. Also, its eye sockets contained glowing lights, like eerie embers, and looking directly at them was like staring into the maw of the abyss. Come to think of it, that is exactly what you’re doing. And people wonder why I dropped Necromancy as a major.

  The skull was a demi-lich. For those of you that have read The Dark Lord, I’ll start by telling you a demi-lich is different from a semi-lich, the being we faced down in the Tomb of Terrors. A semi-lich is an awesome amalgam of superpowered lich sorcery and pure vampire smolder. He’s also unique to my knowledge. By contrast, demi-liches are smelly, glowing, floating skulls that exist in alarmingly large numbers. This is because if you die owing money to Mysterium University, a ghoulish loan officer (and I mean that literally, most of the loan officers at Mysterium University are ghouls) will go out, dig up your corpse, take its head, animate it, and force you to work off your debt. When you finish, your head is mercifully reunited with your body and buried. Usually, but tragically not always, after they have deanimated it.

  With all that going for them, demi-liches are typically pretty depressed and bitter. In other words, you couldn’t pick a worse candidate to staff a help desk. Unless, as I have often suspected of the university, your goal is to make sure as little help as possible was provided . . . or sought.

  The skull raised its glowing eyes from the logbook where it was making an entry. (Did I mention that its gaze can sear flesh? And char paper?) “Hello!” it said. “My name is Gray. How can I help you?”

  The words were entirely appropriate, but its voice had the quality of a chorus of the damned or a bone saw cutting through someone’s flesh . . . while they were still alive. The contrast somehow made it all that more terrible, particularly since I got the impression Gray was trying very hard to be upbeat.