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The Darker Lord

Page 22

by Jack Heckel


  “The key!” Rook shouted. “Do you think it’s any different in Mysterium? Do you think there aren’t magical constructs in place to keep things ordered the way the Administration wants?” He waved a dismissive hand, and mumbled bitterly, “They don’t teach you anythin’ at that school. Nothin’ of importance. You’re all fools. Powerful, but fools.”

  His critique of my education reminded me of Harold’s words to me: ignorance was the true evil. The problem was, I didn’t know how to fight it. Every time I learned something new, it only led to more questions. I sat back in my seat, at least as far as the constantly shifting walls of the cube would allow. “If the Mysterians aren’t the answer, then why bring the three of us to that bloody coffee shop in the first place?” I asked. “What was the point, and where, exactly, are you taking us?”

  “I thought I’d already explained,” he said impatiently. “I’m not takin’ you anywhere, the cube is takin’ you—”

  “I know, I know,” I said, nearly slamming my fist into the wall. “The cube is taking us where it thinks we need to be to get to where we want to go.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But where is that?”

  “Back to the Mysterians, of course,” he said as though I was daft for even asking.

  “You just said your race was defeated! You said you didn’t have the power to break the Administration’s hold on things! You said we would find no answers in the Mysterians of today!” I punctuated each of these points by thrusting an accusing finger at him.

  “You’re catchin’ on fast, laddie. We are, we don’t, and you won’t,” he said with a big grin. “But we were and we did. I needed you to see what we’ve become so you don’t do anythin’ hasty before we can become what we were again.”

  I never got the chance to tell him how daft I thought all that sounded, because an alarm started blaring. Rook turned back to his control panel with a curse. “Dammit! I should’ve been flyin’ instead of talkin’ to you. Now we’re off course!”

  He was staring at the little green screen and furiously manipulating two levers and a couple of pedals. I glanced over his shoulder and saw the display was filled by swirling shifting green blobs, kind of like a dynamic Rorschach’s test. Either he was seeing something in its shifting shapes I couldn’t, or we were flying toward two rhinos waltzing with a giraffe.

  “How can we be off course when you said you couldn’t control how the thing took us to wherever it was you wanted to go?” Valdara shouted over the alarm.

  “Because . . .” he said, shouted a few more curse words as he wrestled with the levers, and then bellowed, “Shut up and brace yourselves.”

  I have, thankfully, never been in a plane crash, but from what I’ve seen of them in disaster movies there are a lot of cues to let you know you’re crashing. Usually, the plane is rattling and the engines are howling and you’re being jostled and thrown about. In the hypocube, all was calm. Well, almost everything. There was the blaring klaxon of the alarm, and Rook, who was cursing and shouting, but other than those indicators we might have been sitting down to tea. At least, that was true until Rook shouted one last expletive, and the hypocube gave a shuddering lurch and began tumbling end over end, sending us rattling about from wall to ceiling to wall to floor. It was like getting stuck in the spin cycle of a washing machine, which isn’t as much fun as it looks in all those videos college students post.

  For a few seconds, it seemed like the rolling and turning would last forever, but it didn’t. The cube began to slow, hung on its edge, which was the worst because it meant we were all sent crashing into a battered pile along on the floor, then teetered and fell onto its side. We lay sprawled on the roof of the craft. All of us that is, except Rook, who, being strapped into the pilot’s chair was hanging upside down, his bright orange beard flapping in his face like a veil.

  “Before anyone asks anythin’, I have two things to say,” he barked. “No, that isn’t supposed to happen, and I want everybody to close their eyes at once.”

  I did, but only after taking a mental picture of the dwarf I hoped would last a lifetime. I listened as he counted down from thirty. When I opened my eyes again the hypocube had realigned itself with the orientation of our new reality. Rook and his chair and the controls and the benches and the door and everything else was right-side-up again, although the three of us were still jumbled together on the floor.

  “What happened? Where are we?” Drake groaned from the bottom of the pile.

  “I don’t have a clue,” Rook answered. “Why don’t we find out?”

  He pushed a couple of switches and the door slid open. The compartment was flooded with a brilliant light. When at last we blinked away the shadows, we saw three men, about Rook’s height, standing in the door peering in at us. They were wearing matching blue hats and blue coats. “Who the hell are you?” Rook asked.

  “We represent the Policeman’s Guild,” they said in unison.

  “We’re here to welcome you to Munchkinland,” the first man said happily.

  “And cite you for illegally parking in a house-crashing zone,” the second man added just as cheerily, and handed me a yellow slip of paper.

  I gave it to Rook at once. “Your cube, your ticket.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?” he growled. “All it says is, ‘You missed.’”

  A taller shadow moved in front of the open door. The three little men glanced nervously over their shoulders and scattered. A woman’s voice said, “No, the joke is that I’m supposed to be Dorothy. If I click my heels three times will you take me back home to Kansas?”

  I knew that voice. “Vivian?!” I shouted.

  She leaned her head through the door. “Hey, Avery. Nice of you to join me.”

  My heart leapt in my chest, and I leapt to my feet. This was unfortunate, because the hypocube chose that moment to lower itself three feet. My forehead smashed into the ceiling. I saw stars and a primly dressed woman riding a bicycle through a cyclone as the world rolled over and went black.

  Chapter 22

  When Monkeys Fly

  I woke to sweet air, birdsong, and Technicolor skies. I was lying on soft grass beneath the overhanging branches of an apple tree, my head was resting on something soft and warm, and I had a killer headache. I had no idea where I was, and only a vague inclination as to how I had gotten there.

  A hand pressed a cool cloth to my forehead and I followed the slender arm up to see Vivian smiling down at me with those fantastical gold-ringed green eyes of hers. “Hello.”

  “Vivian?” I murmured, then realized what I was saying and tried to sit up with a shouted, “Vivian!”

  I got about halfway there before the pain in my head forced me back down. I gave a pitiful groan. “What happened?”

  She shot me an impish smile. “Apparently, you were so excited to see me you tried to exit the hypocube headfirst, which would have been fine, but you also decided to skip the door and go straight through one of the walls. I’ve heard of people losing their heads with excitement, but I didn’t think that expression was meant to be taken so literally.”

  “Ha ha . . .” I mumbled as little electric jolts of pain shot through my right eye. I closed my eyes again. “Is this a dream or are you real?”

  “Can’t it be both?”

  I half opened one eye and shot her a bleary glare. She adopted an expression of exaggerated innocence. “Since you are intent on being so serious, we are seriously in Baum’s world, or a reflection of it, and Valdara, Drake, and Rook are all seriously here.” She wrung out her cloth and gestured behind her. “They’re down the road trying to get that traveling cabinet of Rook’s working again.”

  “And you’re Dorothy?” I asked with a chuckle. “Don’t tell me you have a little dog too.”

  This provoked a snort of exaggerated disgust. “Idiot.”

  “Yes, I am.” I carefully sat up. “And I was starting to worry I would never have a chance to tell you how much of an idiot I am, and how sorry I am
about what happened to you on Trelari and after we returned. I should never have left you alone.”

  She laughed, a lovely sound that sparked memories of our brief time together, both in Mysterium and Trelari. “You’re apologizing to me? I’m the one that seduced you, stole from you, and then nearly got you killed. If anyone should be apologizing—”

  “Seduced me?” I interrupted. “I like the sound of that. I was seduced. I was seduced.” I gave her my cheekiest smile. “Nice.”

  This earned an eye roll. “Really? I’m baring my soul, and that’s what you choose to focus on?”

  I thought about it for a half second. “Yes.”

  “Men,” she muttered, but somehow it came out sounding an awful lot like idiot.

  I drew an invisible halo atop my head. “I will try to be good, but only if you promise not to apologize. Without you, I never would have questioned what I did in Trelari. I would be living, quite contentedly, certain in the knowledge that I was justified in being the center of the universe.”

  “And now?” she asked.

  I thought about everything I had been through and learned since I followed her back to Trelari. How differently I viewed the worlds beyond the boundaries of Mysterium after being forced to live with the people there, and to watch them die. I had no idea how to put any of it into words. I did my best and, as usual, my best was not great. “You changed everything. It’s all more . . . complicated and . . . painful.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. As usual, I’m saying what I think I want to say, but it isn’t translating well. What I mean is . . .”

  I looked around, trying to find inspiration. We were sitting on a slight rise in the shade of a grove of apple trees. Nearby, a stream babbled its way under a bridge. A road paved in bright yellow bricks ran up to, over, and then away from the bridge. The colors were so much brighter than in Mysterium. The sky was a perfect blue, the grass brilliantly green, and the little flowers that dotted the hillside were an incandescent orange. It was all so lovely. Taking a deep breath, I spread my arms to embrace the scene. “Before you, I never would have noticed this place. It would not have occurred to me that a world this far from Mysterium could be worth my notice. Before you, the rest of the multiverse was a place of shadows and half-lives, only worthwhile as far as it could advance my magic.” I caught her eyes with mine and smiled. “I suppose what I’m saying is, thank you.”

  She smiled briefly, and then began an intense study of the hem of her dress. “I don’t think Valdara and Drake feel the same.”

  I hadn’t thought about that, and when I did, I worried at the reception they’d given her. The fact that she was here alone, and they were wherever they were, gave me some answers as to how they’d treated her. “I’m sorry if they weren’t . . . welcoming.”

  She shrugged, a motion that drew her body away from me. “It isn’t their fault.”

  “That may be, but if they accepted me I’m sure they’ll do the same for you. Maybe I should talk to them.”

  “Please don’t.”

  I thought about arguing, but said nothing. We went back to silently contemplating the view. Eventually, I struck up the courage to ask the one question that had been nagging at me since the night we returned from Trelari. “You can tell me it’s none of my business, but I have to ask—how did you get here? I put you to bed, and the next day you were gone. What happened between then and now?”

  There was a long pause. I could see she didn’t want to answer. Her whole body stiffened at the question, but then she took a deep breath and answered anyway. “The Administration came that night. They . . . they took me away somewhere and questioned me. They . . .” Vivian wrapped her arms around her body and shivered.

  “I can imagine.”

  “No, Avery,” she whispered. “You can’t.”

  I thought about my experiences beneath the Student Records building, and wondered what other terrors might be waiting in even darker corners of the university. “You’re right. Did they banish you out here?”

  She shook her head back and forth like someone coming out of a trance. “No. I think they would have kept me forever. They were fascinated by the pattern of my reality. They had a machine . . .” Her voice broke at the memory. “A machine that could unspool me, record me, and put me back together. They did it over and over again, day after day.”

  I knew exactly what she was describing. The machine was called a Pattern Deconstructor. As far as I knew, it was only used on nonliving or animal “specimens” from subworlds after researchers were done with every other test. It was invariably painful, and often fatal. I swallowed. I had no words to express the mixture of anger and pity I was feeling, and having given and extracted the promise not to apologize anymore, I tried to draw the conversation away from the horrors of Vivian’s capture. “But you managed to get free of them. How?”

  “I can’t explain it, Avery. They were holding me in a shielded cell. I could feel no spark of magic. I knew there was no use even trying to cast, but then one night I had a vision I would escape.”

  She paused in her story, as though waiting for a reaction, but I didn’t understand the significance. I pursed my lips and said hesitantly, “And so you knew you were going to escape, because you divined that you were going to escape?”

  “No. No.” She shook her head. “Don’t you see? My premonitions are not natural. I need a source of magical energy to access my divination powers. The visions meant I was tapping into a hidden source of magical energy. After realizing I had access to magic, I focused on the images I was receiving in my visions. It took me a while to decipher them, but in the end, I figured out they were showing me how to travel.”

  “It was a pattern for a portal circle?”

  “Nothing like that,” she chuckled grimly. “I’m afraid you’d find the method crude in the extreme. I focused my mind and wished to be somewhere else, and I was. More or less.”

  Two days ago, I would have called her story impossible. Now all I could think was it sounded very similar to the magic I’d been performing lately. But then, she had done it without Griswald’s key. How? There were a lot of things I didn’t know about Vivian, about where she came from, about how she came to study at Mysterium, about her connection to Griswald and the Triflers. Questions I had always intended to ask if I ever got the chance. Now that she was here, none of the answers seemed that important. “What do you mean, ‘more or less’?” I asked.

  She hesitated before answering. “The path hasn’t been . . . direct. There have been dozens of worlds between that first jump and here.”

  A sudden, horrible thought struck me. “Vivian, how far out into the subworld did you go?” She didn’t answer, but once again began fidgeting with the edge of her dress. I took her hand and pulled it away. She looked up. “Vivian? How long have you been away from Mysterium?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!” she shouted, and then in a weary voice, “It’s been a long time. I stopped keeping track when I passed the second century.”

  “Over two hundred years,” I murmured. Even for Mysterians that is a long time. The weight of it pressed against my chest. “And all that time you were traveling?”

  She nodded. “Sort of. I wasn’t in constant motion. Sometimes I stayed on worlds for decades, but I think all the time I was trying to reach this place.”

  “Why here?”

  She tilted her head to one side and studied me closely. “This is where I knew I had to wait.”

  I felt that sinking feeling in my stomach again. “Wait for what, Vivian?”

  She fixed her glittering eyes on me. “You.”

  There it was. She had been waiting for me to come for her for hundreds of years. Despite our mutual promise, I started to apologize, but she wasn’t having it. “Don’t, Avery. There was no way you could know I was out here, or that I was waiting for you.”

  I nodded, but felt nauseous anyway. I swallowed to keep from being sick, and leaned back against one of the
trees. Another silence descended. Eventually, Vivian gave a great sigh, and stood. She wandered about the top of the hill in aimless little circles for a time, and then raised herself on her toes and plucked an apple from a branch. She rejoined me, rolling the fruit back and forth in her hands. “What finally brought you here?” she asked.

  I’d been thinking about this while I watched her. I believed I had a pretty good idea, but if I was right it raised a number of other questions. I suppose you might say I was pleasantly troubled by my theory. “I could give you the simple answer,” I said. “Rook’s cube device brought us here. As far as I understand, unlike a portal spell that takes you where you want to go, the cube takes you to where you need to be. Somehow it decided we needed to find you. The question is, why?”

  “Not sure if I should be insulted or not,” she said with an arch of her eyebrow.

  “I . . . I didn’t mean it like that,” I stammered.

  She smiled and laughed, and this time it was a pure laugh, and it was wonderful. “I know, Avery. I was pulling, ever so gently, on your leg.”

  I stuck out my tongue. “You’re evil.” It was meant as a joke, but when I looked back at Vivian all the mirth had vanished. The lines of her face were grave and troubled. “I’m sorry, Vivian, that was meant as a joke.”

  She nodded mutely, but her smile didn’t return. Instead, she asked, “You agree this is Baum’s world?”

  “Yes, it seems to be. Or some close echo of it.”

  She held the apple up to the light and studied it. “I only know what I’ve read in Baum’s more popular books. Are they accurate?”

  I shook my head and immediately regretted it as my brain rattled about uncomfortably. I reached up and gave my temples a squeeze. “No . . . not entirely. Those books are mostly about Baum’s daughter, and the strange people and creatures she met here.”

  “He brought his daughter along with him on a research project?” she asked. “Isn’t that unusual?”

  It was exactly the sort of question I’d expect of a novice or an acolyte, which was, after all, what she had been when we met. “Not really,” I answered. “Before direct world-to-world transport was perfected, a lot of mages used Zelazny incremental-shift traveling. Back then it could take a couple of years of hopping here and there to get to a distant subworld. Mages often brought their families with them.”

 

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