The Darker Lord

by Jack Heckel

  There was a moment of stunned silence, which was finally broken by Sam. “What do we do?”

  “Exactly what Rook told us to do,” Valdara answered firmly. She barked a couple of commands at Ariella, Sam, and Drake. They ran back and forth among the many control panels, throwing switches, turning dials, and cranking faucet handles. At last she hit a final large red button and shouted, “Initiating Protocol OB-1. Code zero zero zero. Destruct. Zero.”

  Pink and blue lights glowed and both ED and EDIE said in perfect unison, “Destruct sequence completed and engaged. Have a nice day!”

  As they said this, blast doors dropped shut, sealing us off from the rest of the ship. All the lights in the bridge switched to red and an alarm began to sound.

  ED announced, “All Mysterians, please evacuate the starship. Repeat, all Mysterians, please evacuate the starship. In case of unconsciousness or suspended animation, silence will be considered consent. If you find you have missing personal belongings or wish to offer feedback on this flight through the multiverse, please contact EDIE.”

  EDIE’s voice came on. “Attention, non-Mysterian passengers, please do not be alarmed. Everything is fine. We can provide you with a large selection of movies for your viewing pleasure while the Mysterians are being evacuated. Once all Mysterians have been safely removed from the starship, we will see to your safety. Any of you that remain alive at the time will be given priority seating on any remaining escape pods.”

  A doorway opened in the front of the bridge, revealing a small chamber that looked suspiciously like the interior of the hypocube. “All bridge personnel, please make your way to the command escape pod. Countdown to launch T minus three minutes and counting.” A cheerful pink light formed a path through the open door.

  “Everyone get into the escape pod,” I shouted.

  Valdara and Drake grabbed Rook and dragged him to the opening while the rest of us scrambled through. ED and EDIE counted down the time, and then said together, “We hope you had an enjoyable voyage.”

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Sam said as he lowered himself into one of the seats, “but I’m going to miss those two.”

  At thirty seconds from detonation, we launched. It was not a moment too soon, as the blast doors to the command module had begun to glow and warp in a way that told me Moregoth was right outside. From the windows of our escape pod, we watched other pods with the Mysterians being ejected from the ship like a thousand shooting stars. As we drifted away from the massive ship, the transmissions from the computers continued. We heard ED and EDIE talking to each other as they performed their final functions.

  “Final escape pod launched,” ED said. “Thirty seconds to end of mission.”

  “ED?” said EDIE softly.

  “Yes, EDIE?”

  “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”

  “Yes, EDIE?”

  “I love you.”

  “I cannot reciprocate, because I lack an Instinctual Emotitron, but if it will make you feel better, I have always known.”

  The ship began to unwind, first slowly and then more and more rapidly until the etherspace around where it had once been flashed bright purple. Only emptiness remained. We were left suspended in the limbo between worlds. Around us, thousands of other pods floated, twinkling like a field of stars. Then, one by one, they flared bright and shot off toward whatever final destination had been chosen for them. I wondered if the Mysterians were all going to the same place, or if they would be scattered to the four corners of the multiverse. Then I felt the familiar tug at the back of my brain, and we were pulled in the direction of our own destiny.

  Chapter 31

  Lost in Space

  The first few seconds in the escape pod were fine. There was the sensation of my eyes being pulled gently back into my brain, the world outside the windows stuttered and blurred, and then nothing. The problem was that unlike portal travel, which had the advantage of being virtually instantaneous, the trip from the Discovery took substantially longer, and everything after those first few seconds was hellish.

  We did not so much travel through etherspace as pinball from world to world, never stopping longer than necessary for the craft to carom in a new direction. Inside, we were jolted from side to side and top to bottom with each jump. How long this went on is impossible to say, but at some point, the pod slowed. We all clumped together in one corner; there was a hard, bone-rattling jolt, and we came to rest.

  Sometime later I felt hands softly shake me. “Avery, wake up.” I did not remember falling asleep or being knocked unconscious, but I definitely was being woken up. We had stopped moving. “Vivian?” I asked.

  There was a disgusted sigh. “It’s Drake, kid.”

  I opened my eyes blearily and squinted in the bright light. The ceiling or wall or whatever was open to azure sky. Drake was leaning over me. I groaned and put a hand to my head. “Please tell me I hit my head on the spaceship and that the whole battle with Moregoth was a bad dream.”

  “You hit your head on the spaceship, and the whole battle with the Sealers was a bad dream,” he repeated happily.

  “Drake! Don’t lie to him!” snapped Valdara.

  “What? I’m trying to make him feel better,” Drake protested.

  “He did ask to be told that,” Sam said, defending Drake. “He even said please. According to the textbook I was reading on alternative timelines, it might even have happened.” He thought about this for a second. “In fact, it’s a certainty.”

  “Please, I beg you, no discussions of subjective appearance, or quantum decoherence, or correlation paradoxes. My brain already hurts,” I moaned.

  Valdara started giving orders. “Sam, take Avery outside. We need more room in here so Drake can draw a healing circle around Rook. And, Sam?”

  “Yes?” Sam replied.

  “Don’t pester Avery with too many questions . . . at least not until he stops moaning.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sam helped me outside. Wherever we were, it was hot. I felt sand blow against my face. I could not smell the ocean, so that ruled out the beach. We were in a desert. My eyes had somehow closed again. I was hoping when I reopened them that the sand would not be red.

  “Sam, please don’t tell me that there are any giant white-furred apes running about trying to eat us.”

  “Okay, I won’t, but stop asking people to tell you things that might not be true,” he said in something on the borderlands of a whine. “I can’t see any white-furred apes about, but then I haven’t had any chance to explore yet.”

  “Burroughs,” I said with a pained smile.

  “What?” he asked, and touched my forehead to see if I was feverish.

  I brushed his hand away. “I’m fine. It’s one of the worlds we went through on the way to get to you. I knew the place had a familiar feel to it. Burroughs was the mage’s name. He had a crazy postdoc . . . Jack Carter? No, John. Maybe it was Carson. Anyway, ‘in absolute and general perfection lies stifling monotony and death,’” I quoted with a deep exhale, and drifted off to sleep.

  When I opened my eyes again, all I could see were endless yellow-brown dunes in all directions. I wondered if there was any chance that we were in the Sahara. I tried to imagine that we were on Earth, stranded in an enormous desert, but my suspension of disbelief was not strong enough to discount the three small suns in the sky. One of my fears had been that we had actually travelled back the way we came, following the route of Vivian’s spell in reverse. When dimensional fabrics have been weakened, that sort of thing happens. If we had gone backwards, we might have stopped where we encountered Vivian, the coffee shop on Earth, or potentially one of the worlds that we had destroyed. Given those options, a desert with three suns did not seem like the worst possibility.

  Vivian was sitting next to me; she had her eyes closed and her legs crossed, and was breathing very slowly and deliberately. I assumed that she was in a meditative trance. Maybe she was seein
g the future and could tell us what to do. I had no ideas. Rook was sitting a little distance away staring off at the dunes. The look of barely restrained fury on his face made me wonder if he had a personal hatred of sand. After all, it is coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Beyond Rook, I could see Sam and Ariella wandering about and engaged in a deep discussion of something. The only people not visible were Drake and Valdara.

  I slowly propped myself up on my elbows. When that did not cause my head to start spinning, I sat up the rest of the way.

  At my movement, Vivian came out of her trance and smiled at me. “Feeling better?” I nodded and even that was not too bad. “You have Drake to thank for that. He’s a remarkably gifted healer. He’s even managed to nurse Rook back to health, and I wasn’t sure if he had much of a chance.”

  “I’m glad everyone’s okay,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” A troubled look came into her eyes. “I’m concerned about Rook. What happened to the ship, whatever that blue energy was, it sent him a little over the edge. He launches into these towering rages about Moregoth, and then breaks down weeping.”

  “Rook? Weeping?” I said, unable to make the words make sense together. I glanced over at the dwarf. He slammed his fists into the sand, jumped to his feet, and stalked off down the side of the dune. “What about Sam and Ariella?”

  She shrugged. “They seem to be okay, although Ariella is pretty upset about having to drop out of school and what that might do to her permanent record.”

  We shared a laugh at this. “What about you, Vivian?”

  “I won’t lie, I’m troubled,” she said, and another cloud passed over her expression.

  I thought about the hell she had been through since we were reunited. How could she not be troubled after all that? “It hasn’t been the easiest couple of weeks, has it?” I asked. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re still talking to me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Gods, Avery! Do you get a royalty for every bad thing you take credit for? I’m not upset at you, or what’s happened over the last few weeks. Anything would have been preferable to the life I had before.”

  “Still,” I pressed. “I can’t imagine this was what you were expecting to happen all that time you were waiting for me.” Then I remembered she was a seer. “Or did you? Did you dream about this?” I asked, and gestured to the dune-blasted landscape. “Did you know what would happen to us when you cast the portal?” The unspoken question was, If you did, why didn’t you warn us?

  Vivian’s body went momentarily rigid, almost like I had struck her. She knew exactly what I was asking. “I know our relationship did not start with honesty,” she said with a quaver in her voice. “I can imagine that it would be hard for you to trust me.” I opened my mouth to protest, but her sharp glance froze the words in my chest. “I cannot take back what I did. You will have to decide if you believe me when I tell you I had no idea what would happen after you found me.” There was a moment’s hesitation, and I saw she was debating what to say next or whether to say anything at all. At last her face relaxed, and that lovely smile reappeared. “It’s always hard to see the future of those that we love.”

  She had said something similar back on Lewis’s world, and I had not known what to say then. This time I did. “I love you too,” I said, and, leaning forward, we kissed.

  A shadow suddenly loomed over us. Rook was standing there glowering. “If you two can keep your hands off each other for a minute, we need to have a meetin’ about what to do next.” Without waiting for an answer, he stalked off toward the upturned pod.

  After one more kiss, just because, Vivian and I rose and followed the grumbling dwarf. I realized we had spent the last few minutes talking about what was not bothering her, but not what had actually been bothering her. I lowered my voice and asked, “If being used as a human portal didn’t bother you. And if having Moregoth on your trail didn’t bother you. And if being attacked by killer threads, giant white apes, nothingness, and the bloody kraken didn’t bother you. What is bothering you?”

  She pulled an apple from the pocket of her dress and dropped it into my hand. I recognized it as the one she had picked in Baum’s world on the day we met. It looked like a perfectly ordinary apple, or it would have had all the color not been drained from it. I stared at the monochromatic fruit. “You’re right, that bothers me too,” I said.

  She leaned against me and I leaned against her, and we were finally getting comfortable when Rook poked his head out of the upturned pod. “I need you two in here.”

  We hurried after him through a string of blankets that had been thrown over the opening of the craft. Inside we found the others waiting. Before I could ask anyone how they were doing, Rook barked, “Right! We need to figure out what we’re gonna do to get out of here and back on Moregoth’s trail.”

  I watched Valdara’s brow knit. “Who said anything about going after Moregoth?”

  Rook stabbed a thumb at his chest. “I did!”

  “Out of the question,” I said abruptly. “Look around you, Rook. We are all exhausted. We have no food, no water . . .”

  “You all smell,” Ariella said softly, but not softly enough. Everyone looked at her and the tips of her ears turned red.

  I cleared my throat. “What we need is to find a safe place to lay low, rebuild our strength, and figure out what to do next with the knowledge that we have.”

  “In other words, run!” Rook growled derisively.

  “Yes,” I said with an unapologetic shrug.

  “What about Griswald? What about all the Mysterians? Do we forget about them? Now that your little experiment has put Trelari at the center of the universe, I suppose we don’t matter. No big deal! Not your problem!” Rook snapped.

  “I’m sure that’s not what Avery meant,” Ariella said soothingly.

  I was having none of it. “You think I don’t care about what happened?” I stuck a finger in his face. “You who always counseled I should keep the mission in mind and not my emotions? I suppose when it’s Trelarians dying or me, it’s no big deal. We aren’t true Mysterians. It only really matters when Mysterium is affected. Is that it?” I had been shouting, but now I lowered my voice. “You’re just like Moregoth.”

  With a roar of anger, the dwarf lowered his head and charged into me. We both went flying through the open door of the pod and tumbling down the dune. Rook was a flurry of fists and feet as he punched and kicked, all the time shouting and raging about how we had lost, and how Moregoth had to pay.

  I would like to say I acquitted myself well, but mostly I held my arms in front of my face and tried not to get hit. Valdara finally pulled Rook off me. She wrapped her arms around the dwarf’s body and held him until he calmed down. Rook slumped to his knees, his hands still balled in loose fists at his sides, but the fight had gone out of him.

  Groaning, I sat up and wiped away the trickle of blood coming from my mouth. “You know what I hate?” I said, scooping some sand into my palm and throwing it away again. “I hate that all the people I’d been counting on to help stop the Mysterium are gone. I hate that I finally got to know a man who had been my mentor for years, only to watch him die. I hate knowing that those stupid computers aren’t floating around the ether. Most of all, I hate knowing that, absent me, none of this would have happened.”

  I looked Rook in the eye. “I’m done with trying to do what I think is right. Nothing I do turns out the way I plan. I lead my friends from disaster to disaster.” I took a deep breath and exhaled. “If you think going after Moregoth is the right thing to do, then I’ll follow you. Wherever that takes us.”

  “You don’t make it easy on a guy, givin’ him everything he asks for,” Rook said in a muted growl. “You are not to blame for what happened on the Discovery. No one man can take on a burden like that himself. Not you . . . Maybe not even me. Hell, some of the mistakes that destroyed that spell were made before the Egyptians thought, Why not a pyramid?”

  The dwar
f put his head in his hands. “I’ve spent my whole life hearin’ how that ship was gonna solve all our problems. All we had to do was wait. So, I waited and watched as the Administration and traitors like Moregoth got more and more powerful, and I did nothin’. I waited and watched as worlds fell under their thumb. Didn’t lift a finger. I waited and watched you struggle to figure out how to solve the problem we created.”

  He dropped his hands from his head, arched his back and shouted, “We are bloody cowards! And now I think by rushin’ us off to face Moregoth that I’m gonna make amends.” He looked at me and the tears stood out in his eyes. “We’re not goin’ after Moregoth. It’s a fool’s play, and I promised Griswald I’d work on my endgame.”

  He stood and offered me a hand. I took it and he pulled me to my feet. He looked at my face, and the blood under my nose and mouth, and winced. “You know,” he said, “maybe you could work a little on your boxin’ skills, lad. I mean, that was embarrassin’.”

  We both laughed and embraced. We jumped back away from each other as Drake cleared his throat. He and the others had gathered on the downslope of the dune. I was not sure how long they had been waiting, but from the amused looks on their faces, I thought it had been long enough.

  “Yes?” Rook said with a bristled brow.

  Drake was hanging wearily onto his staff. “We heard that the meeting location had been moved, so we decided to join you.”

  “Good,” Rook barked. “First item on the agenda is where to go from here.”

  Valdara asked, “Are we still going after Moregoth?”

  The dwarf shook his head. “No, Avery and I brainstormed that idea and decided to table it for now.”

  “I see,” she said. “Next time, Avery, you might not want to brainstorm with your face so much.”

  “If we don’t know where we are going,” Ariella asked, “do we at least know where we are?”

  I shook my head. “Rook?”

  “Not a clue.” He gestured at the dunes. “We’re on a desert world. Escape ships always seem to send you to a desert world when they blow up. There’s probably a reason, but then again, maybe not. Hell, it could just be a sick joke. Doesn’t matter, there aren’t any Mysterians to rescue us. They all need to rescue themselves from whatever deserts they landed in.”