Soon I could set about ruling Thaler’s Bridge in earnest, reordering the village to make it prosperous and strong without much outward show. I’d have my own spies, to report to me daily of any strangers, and every little village incident. It would be tiresome tedium for the most part, but I wanted them to know they were being ruled, with daily reminders—for what good is villainy unappreciated?
Then would come the time to recruit capable villagers to be my agents, to go and slay Wyrmcloaks in suitably painful ways.
Ah, starting over. A lot of sly work ahead, but then...that’s life.
5
The nights were noticeably cooler; winter was coming. It was finally time. As my second summer in Thaler’s Bridge since the breaking of my body headed swiftly towards the cold to come, my rule was at last nigh complete.
Which meant I no longer needed Flaer, my oh-so-attentive servant. My attentive Wyrmcloaks spy.
She was emptying my chamberpot right now, her face as calm and unreadable as ever as she went past. Not knowing her doom.
They would be here soon. Ten-and-six daughters of the village, assembling at my silent mind-bidding this bright morning, coming here with their knives and cleavers to slice and pickle harvested thuldoons and peppers for winter storage in my cellar.
It would be messy, but—
Cheerful chatter outside, laughter, and the bang of our warped front door. The first were here.
Six of them, brisk and noisy and bustling all about, peering into the crocks I’d had Flaer wash and put ready, turning to the sacks of thuldoons as the seventh and eighth came in to join them, and Flaer slipped back into the room. Into their midst.
Here hail the ninth, then four more all in a bunch, chuckling over some shared jest. Enough to do the deed.
Surround her now, not obviously, but get you over here and you there and you there, so as to have her from all sides.
Ah, I’ll miss you, Flaer, but—
But nothing. Back away from me, all of you. Blades DOWN.
The retreat to the walls is a scrambling rush, faces as pale and wide-eyed in surprise as I know mine must be.
My mind is caught in a dark grip, risen out of nowhere to tighten hard.
I am more astonished than afraid as her face turns to me. Two fires burn deep in her eyes, the rest of her face the usual serene mask.
Marl Glardrim ably controls many. Is he truly so blind that he cannot see that someone can as easily control HIM?
Well, so I must be. Have been. And—
Flaer’s face never changed, and she barely lifted a finger, but the spell that lashed into me then flung me into worse shrieking agony than I’d ever known before.
This was it at last, my slaying stroke...
Out of red writhing I slid, slowly but then faster, plunging helplessly down, down into...the waiting cold darkness.
5
I came awake.
Well, that was a surprise.
I’d never expected to awaken, ever again.
My agony was gone, and the young women of the village, too. I was still in the same room, facing Flaer’s serene face, the two of us in almost the same positions.
Almost. Fresh astonishment: I was floating.
In midair, a few feet off the ground, with a cane in my hand.
“Push at the floor with that,” Flaer told me calmly, “and so propel yourself along.”
“To where?”
“Down the room, and back. Practice.”
I obeyed, straining as I did to feel her mind lurking in my own, but finding nothing. Yet I’d not felt her before, when she must have been there...
The knack of pushing with the stick to move myself along was a simple one, and I was at the far wall already. It seemed I could “walk” without functioning legs.
Back, she’d said. I turned around and returned to where I’d been, staring at her unreadable face as I came.
“Why have you spared me?”
That brought a steely smile.
“Do you know me not, Marl?”
I stared hard at her. There was something about her eyes...I’d gazed into them before Flaer, but...
“Who are you, lady?”
“You spared a sorceress, once.”
“Ieira Ahmruth?”
She nodded. “Henceforth, your new master. Who will work with you to hurl down the Wyrmcloaks, and return to Duskgard.”
I gaped at her.
For a long time.
Too long, it seemed. She sighed. “No gratitude? Or are you too much the dazed dullard to appreciate my mercy, my forbearance in these years since the cart ride that came so close to killing you?”
“Gratitude?” I dared to say, as bitterness flooded up to nigh choke me. “So from being a crawling cripple, I am now a floating cripple?”
I slammed the cane against the table, making all the crocks rattle. “I ask again, why have you spared me? Is this your notion of prolonged punishment?”
Flaer—Ieira Ahmruth—shrugged.
“By all the gods, I hated you,” she whispered. “Yet for all your ruthlessness, your driving need to control everything and smash everyone and everything you couldn’t control, you were the best ruler Duskember—nay, all Aglirta—ever had. You ended the petty wars of the princes, the endless butchery that bled kingdoms dry and left us all scratching for frozen turnips in deep winter, amid the yawning skulls of the fallen. Glardrim, you are a sly serpent and a right vicious prowling beast—but you are useful. To me, if no one else. And our aims ride together: to destroy the Wyrmcloaks.”
She came closer. “You have been the greatest tyrant the world has ever known. Trusting no one, always alone.”
She smiled again, friendly this time, almost entreating. “You can again be the greatest tyrant the world has ever known, trusting no one—but no longer alone. I’ve spent my life alone, and am heartily sick of it. We need not trust each other, but I ask you: is it not better, as the years pass and find us older, not to be alone?”
I was gaping at her again, but thinking hard.
And she waited in silence, thank the gods, giving me time to ponder.
It was some time before I dared use the cane to approach her, to reach out my hand to her.
“I find myself persuaded,” I told her, and meant it. “Use me.”
Slowly, Ieira Ahmruth took my hand.
It occurred to me then that I could use my arraul to slay her. Somewhat to my surprise, I found I really didn’t want to.
5
It had been a hard winter, but we’d kept ourselves from freezing by much sly and distant night-work against the Wyrmcloaks, harming those who served them and the King.
Carefully, always carefully, never doing anything that would bring down fierce suspicion on a crippled husk of a man out in the countryside. We mind-smote men halfway across Duskember when they were precariously balanced on bridges or leaning out high windows or riding in perilous weather, and let long falls do our slaying for us.
Patience was something I and the lady who now ruled me had both mastered very well.
As the days passed, and the unseen Wyrmcloaks far away at the glittering heart of the realm reached out into me again and again, as they’d been doing since they’d shattered me. Reaching to shift spell after spell from anchors in me to their control.
Those nauseating movements in my innards came more slowly these days, for the swift and easy magics were long done and only the harder, more complicated ones were left. Here came another, a roiling no less painful for its slow unfolding, a—
From out of the depths of my mind into that firming grip on the spell lashed a mind-blade swift and terrible, sliding deep even as it rose into fire that cooked a distant wind so suddenly that—
Hamreth barely had time to try to shout.
His mind went a
bruptly silent while the echo of his straining mind-shout was still rolling through our linked minds.
Unless one of Hamreth’s fellow Wyrmcloaks had been sitting with him, they’d not have time enough to trace who’d slain him, and would find only a mind-melted corpse, drooling his own brains out into his lap. His own reaching out had left him unguarded before the waiting Ieira Ahmruth.
Who now blazed ruby-red in my trembling mind, aglow with satisfaction, the heat of her deadly bolt still washing through me. I was spasming helplessly, the cane cracking off a distant wall, my maimed limbs vainly and frantically flailing the air—
My right hand struck something, slashing into flesh, rolling me over in midair to—
Stare at Ieira Ahmruth, aghast.
Her fingers had darted to a slice on her arm. The work of my poisoned fingernail.
“Milady Summertide,” I blurted, still struggling to speak as new spasms seized me, “I never meant to—”
“I know,” she replied briskly. “I’ve watched you, this winter, thinking of meaning to, several times, then refraining. Be not upset, for I am unharmed. Arraul works not on dragons.”
“On...dragons?”
She gave me the thinnest of smiles. “Where did you think I got dragonsblood, dolt?”
Just for a moment, her eyes held golden slits, her delicate nose flared horribly to snort out smoke, and she opened her mouth to show me an ocean of glittering fangs.
Still writhing and spasming, I tried to cower back, but already she was herself again, her smile warm and wry.
“Yet worry not, Marl Glardrim. For as all the world knows, you can always trust a dragon.”
I stared at her, my mouth as open as any fool’s—then started to laugh, great bellows that roared out of me. I couldn’t stop.
I was rolling over and over in midair from my own mirth by the time she joined in.
Ah, starting over. With a partner this time.
Which changed nothing. There remained a lot of sly work ahead.
But then...that’s life.
THE HEIR APPARENT
Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon
“One day, all this will be yours,” Dominic Verdigris III proclaimed solemnly, and gestured broadly with his right arm.
The short, burly man beside him removed an unlit cigar from his mouth, and snorted. “If you’re waiting for a Monty Python quote, you’re gonna be waiting a long time, Dom.”
Verd sighed. “Oh Rancor, you have no sense of humor.” He dropped his arm, and surveyed the weedy lot before him. It was approximately five acres in a shabby part of Memphis Tennessee, fenced in by eight foot chain-link with razor wire on the top, and a bent-up sign proclaiming “City Property — Keep Out” on its heavy welded-pipe gates. Inside that property was a three-story, square brick building, whose front façade proclaimed that it was “Rogers School.” Or rather, “Roger s School,” since the first “s” hung crooked.
“So,” the man that Verd had addressed as “Rancor” continued. “Obviously this dump isn’t what it looks like. And you’re the one that’s always going on about how much time equals money. We’re wasting time, which is money, ergo—”
“All right, all right.” Verd frowned. “You have no sense of drama either. Come on.”
He led the way around to the side of the building, where there was a much smaller gate, and pressed his thumb into the pipe just above the lock. The pipe clicked, the lock opened, and the gate swung freely. “After you,” said Verd.
Rancor examined the pipe before passing through. “Okay. Galvanic sensors. Now that impressed me.”
“Prepare to be amazed.” Verd adjusted the cuff on his linen suit, where his pajama top had bunched up for a moment, and mimed straightening a tie.
A hidden trigger switch at a boarded up side door won them into the interior of the building.
It looked inside like what it was outside; a long abandoned school building, probably constructed in the 1930s with WPA money, too big and drafty to heat and cool economically, and not on property desirable enough that the city could sell it. Light seeped in through the cracks around the plywood over the windows. Many of the windows were broken. The corridor they stood in was floored in split, worn-out linoleum. The walls were chipped white paint, with graffiti all over them where kids had broken in and added their personal touches. The stucco ceiling sagged and light fixtures hung precariously from wires.
But…something was slightly off….
Rancor moved close in to the nearest wall, and got a good look. There was something wrong with the graffiti…
He turned to look at Verd, accusingly. “No kid did this. This is from an airbrush, not a spray-paint can.”
Verd aimed a finger at him. “Well spotted. Not one person in a thousand would have noticed that.”
Rancor began examining everything else in the hallway as minutely, and as Verd knew he would, he clearly came to the conclusion that the air of decay was entirely artificial. Only the smell was right, that “school smell” of aged desks and books and old sneakers and too many cafeteria lunches.
He waved a hand at the hallway. “This is all fake.”
“Of course it is!” Verd gloated. “Even the black mold is painted on. Now, come along.”
He led the way up the stairs to the cafeteria, and watched as Rancor noted all the carefully placed signals that would reinforce to anyone else “nothing to see here, move along.” Rancor nudged open a door as they passed, surveyed the bolted-down desks, the blackboards, cracking and falling off the walls.
Perhaps the only thing that gave the game away was that, under all the creaking of thin, warped floorboards and the precarious look of dangling fixtures, everything was as structurally sound as a bunker. If you ignored the sound of walking, and concentrated on the feel, you’d realize that. It had been calculated not to scare away any fence-jumpers or county inspectors, but rather, to bore them, and give a vague sense of unease.
The cafeteria looked to have been stripped of anything useful, including the old walk-in cooler. There was just a hole in the wall where it once had been, and shocks of broken tile edging and chopped-through conduit. Verd led the way inside. Rancor followed him…carefully.
As soon as they were both in the space, Verd pushed the remote he had in his pocket, and the floor began descending.
Knocked out, splintering boards yielded to metal walls; a new “floor” slid in above them, and the LED lights embedded in it lit up the shaft. Rancor nodded.
“Okay. More impressed,” he said.
The metal walls continued for two stories below the level of the school basement. Then the elevator came to a slow and graceful stop. One of the walls slid aside to reveal a corridor that would not have been out of place in any one of Verd’s corporate labs. Lights in the ceiling came on at the touch of another button on the remote, sequencing away from them and then splitting down the adjoining corridors.
Verd sighed, and patted the wall. “My first lair,” he said, nostalgically. “Home sweet home. You never forget your first, you know. I wanted the United States and then the world, so I set up shop here. Central to everywhere. Drowsy locals. Good infrastructure for moving everything from lab equipment to superbombs by highway, river or rail. Convenience counts when you’re doing high-end crime.” Verd traced fingertips on the stainless steel trim. “I’ve had a lot of bases of operation, but there’s just something about returning to your first lair that always feels like coming home. I did some good business here. Good times. Come on, I’ll show you around.”
“How’d you get your hands on this place?” Rancor asked. “And how the hell do you keep the city from noticing the power drain?”
“Racketeer with a wrecking firm sold it to me, and got me rotating, no-questions illegal labor for the construction work. I installed my own power plant. My design, of course. I don’t use every isotope I g
et just for weapons, you know.” Verd chuckled. “Anyway, the racketeer didn’t know it was me, of course. It was one of my shell-personas. He hardly even had a chance to enjoy the payoff too, before his fatal stroke.” Verd shook his head sadly. “I kept telling him, lay off all that butter.”
Rancor snorted. He knew more than enough about Verd’s ventures into biological research to know that butter had very little to do with that fatal stroke…unless, of course, butter was the delivery system for some untraceable nanobot that had caused the stroke in the first place. Verd gave the stubby man a raised-eyebrow sideglance in response to that snort. Rancor was the first person Verd had found who could figure out nearly everything Verd was doing, even if he couldn’t deduce the means, or have invented them in the first place. But given a tool, he was an absolute genius at coming up with uses for it.
Verd opened the first door on the corridor, and as he did so, motion-activated lights came up inside. His hand caressed the doorframe as they entered. The room had been rigged out as a high-tech garage.
“Remember the Murdercycle?” Verdigris grinned. Of course Rancor would remember it. It had been one of his early favorite assassination tools. “This is where she was conceived, born, improved and repaired.” He had loved the Murdercycle. The only reason he had stopped using her was that ECHO had caught on to what he was doing with her, and not even the color-changing paint and shape-morphing bodywork was going to keep her and her rider from being tracked and caught.
“Now that was a sweet ride.” Rancor nodded, smiling slightly. He walked around the room, picking up a tool here, a spare part there, examining everything, while Verd leaned back against the doorway. “We could still use something like that, if we kept it to night rides and switched the venue to high speed, superhighway intercept with a capture vehicle down the road. Hit the target at 120-plus miles per hour.”
Huh. Clever. “I’ll put that idea on the list,” he promised. “We’d need a meta with enhanced reflexes to pull the job though, at those speeds.”
Rancor just shrugged. Obviously, such a person wouldn’t be him. He wasn’t a meta. So he claimed, anyway. Yet Verd thought he detected something in the man’s momentary scowl. Jealousy? Envy? Maybe a little anger? As much as Rancor was capable of loving anything, he had loved that bike. And Verd had just suggested he would not be the one to take her to the next dance.
When the Villian Comes Home Page 42