by E. G. Foley
Especially Wyvern’s.
No matter. Zolond did not lack for options regarding his response to this brazen challenge to his authority. But there wasn’t a moment to lose.
His holiday was officially over.
It was time to take back control of the Black Fortress.
With that, he pulled on his simple black jacket, placed his bowler hat calmly on his head, and picked up his scepter, which now took the form of a walking stick.
The Master’s Ring on his finger glowed an angry shade of lime-green, tiny tendrils of ominous purple magic already wafting up from the stone.
Zolond turned toward the door to call in his reptilians, but it suddenly occurred to him that if, indeed, Wyvern meant to make a play for his throne, then Zolond’s own successor, his great-great grandson, Victor—the Black Prince—could also be in serious danger.
I should warn the boy. Take measures for his protection.
Zolond sighed. He did not speak to his headstrong grandson often. The Dark Master was hardly the sentimental type.
But there was more to it than that. The truth was, he didn’t like the way the boy was being raised, in isolation, in a state of constant pressure and training. Alas, it had been necessary to keep the Black Prince hidden and apart from the world; indeed, both worlds—the magical and the human one.
There were too many people out there to whom he was a threat. Victor’s parents had died years ago because of that very fact.
For his part, Zolond had done his best to give the boy every possible advantage. Shadowedge Manor was practically a palace out in the English countryside, with elaborate gardens and opulent chambers. He had supplied Victor with an army of servitors and had given him the best possible tutor/bodyguard that he could find…
Whisking aside a lingering flicker of guilt, Zolond reached for his black calling candle.
The Dark Master wasn’t much for family, but he could not deny having a certain soft spot for his grandson.
In truth, Victor reminded him just a bit of himself, long, long ago, back when he used to be mere Geoffrey de Lacey.
Then Zolond lit the calling candle and waited for the secure communication channel to connect…
CHAPTER 4
Heir of Darkness
Victor de Lacey was annoyed.
It was past midnight, and he had just fallen asleep, when his sensei, the samurai-wizard Master Nagai, had barged into his chamber and dragged him out of bed for another, random, middle-of-the-night training challenge.
“You must be ready at all times, Your Highness. Do you imagine your enemies will give you warning?”
Such was the life of the Black Prince.
So now here he was, out on the torch-lit training ground behind Shadowedge Manor, dodging javelins being hurled at him by Nagai’s helpers, a trio of tusked Noxu half-trolls.
While knocking their spears aside with his telekinesis, Victor simultaneously maintained the illusion of a charging war elephant he had conjured off to his left, and continued walloping his assigned target—a pile of enchanted bricks—with crackling bolts of energy from his alderwood wand.
His three-fold challenge was to avoid getting skewered by the spears, keep the elephant illusion convincing enough to fool an enemy, and smash that vexing pile of bricks down to rubble.
So far, the elephant was holding steady, thanks to the spell that Victor whispered now and then under his breath.
That part was relatively easy.
Victor had always been good at illusions. It was the first magical talent that had shown itself when he was only five.
Large as life, the big bull elephant swung its gray trunk back and forth, flapped its ears, and trumpeted angrily as it stood at the edge of the garden, looking as real as you please.
The Noxu’s stray javelins flew right through the figment.
Deflecting their spears was not too difficult for him either, although doing both at once when he was still half-asleep was a bit of challenge.
The brick pile, though, that was another story.
Sitting there stubbornly some thirty feet away, this part of his teacher’s latest midnight challenge was giving him the most trouble—as usual.
“Concentrate!” Nagai barked.
Victor pursed his lips, gripped his wand tighter, and redoubled his efforts to destroy the brick pile, flashing out a lightning bolt of energy that struck another chunk off the side.
“Not good enough! Again!”
Victor gritted his teeth. It was not simply that earth had always been his weakness, out of the four classical elements.
It was that, frankly, those enchanted bricks were not just stubborn. They were downright obnoxious, and their taunts were starting to get under his skin.
When not in use as a training tool, the enchanted bricks looked like ordinary building materials, neatly stacked up in a square sort of tower, four feet wide and ten feet high.
But when activated—when Nagai woke them from their slumber—the bricks opened their eyes, peered out into the night with little faces, and promptly began taunting him.
“Nice try! Missed me!”
“Ha, ha! You loser!”
“Weak!”
“Ach, you’re ugly!”
“What are you, stupid?”
“You’re never going to succeed, you dolt. Why don’t you just give up?”
The rude little bricks mocked and jeered, blew raspberries at him, pulled faces, and stuck out their tongues.
“Missed again! Too bad, so sad!”
“Get your eyes checked, mate. You need spectacles.”
Victor glowered at them. Nobody spoke to the Black Prince that way!
Except those insufferable bricks.
He wanted to kill them.
But that was the whole point.
Master Nagai expected the future Dark Master to keep a cool head at all times. To remain unflappable, unemotional, detached.
The way the future head of all evil on Earth ought to be.
It wasn’t easy when one was being insulted by inanimate objects.
Unfortunately, the more Victor let those niggling little voices get to him, the less control he had over his magic.
Thus the lesson.
Meanwhile, all Victor really wanted was to go back to bed.
Well, that wasn’t actually true. He wanted, oh, many things. To meet a few girls would be nice. Not that he had any idea how to talk to them.
Mainly he just wanted to get out of this place once in a while. For, stately as it was, luxurious in every room, Shadowedge Manor was but a gilded cage.
This place was so boring. All there was to do was train, train, train, study, study, study, and listen to Master Nagai saying blah, blah, blah.
Warlock royalty? Ha.
Victor was a prisoner here, plain and simple. His whole existence boiled down to two basic rules: stay put and do as you’re told.
All by myself.
The elephant began to flicker as Victor fumed and his attention wandered.
“Focus!” Nagai snapped his black metallic war fan shut into its wand form and lobbed a fireball at Victor.
He jumped back, then glared at his teacher, while the smoke from the singed grass by his feet filled his nostrils.
“You don’t have to blow me up!”
“Tsk, tsk! The elephant is fading! I can see right through it.” Nagai swept a graceful gesture toward the illusion, then flipped his samurai battle fan open again and continued fanning himself impatiently with it.
He was an imposing figure, the wizard warrior-monk, with his piercing eyes, his partly shaved head, the rest of his long, graying hair slicked back into a tight topknot.
His long black samurai robes, the kamishimo, swirled around his lean body as he paced, ready to scold, correct, or criticize at any moment.
Victor heaved a sigh, then mumbled, “Yes, sensei.”
What choice did he have?
He dutifully fixed the elephant with a firmer repeat of the spel
l, but harrumphed. The ronin was indeed a harsh taskmaster, but that was not surprising. Nagai’s life had made him what he was.
His father had headed a Buddhist temple shrine in Japan, where young Nagai had been raised and trained by deadly warrior monks. After spending his entire childhood under their discipline, he left the monastery and eventually made his way to Edo Castle, where he entered the service of the shogun as a samurai.
There, Nagai had been fascinated by the tezuma magic of the court magicians as they performed their theatrical illusions. A stranger in a new place, the lonely young samurai had sought these men out and persuaded them to teach him the tricks of “hand lightning,” as it was called.
But the playful illusions and artful sleights-of-hand these low-level conjurers performed to entertain the shogun and his court soon led Nagai’s curious mind down darker paths…toward real magic.
Somewhere along the way, he encountered a traveling sorcerer, who was impressed enough by the young samurai to begin initiating him to learn the ways of dark magic.
But when the superstitious shogun discovered Nagai’s new hobby, he was outraged. Such dabbling in the dark arts would bring down a curse upon the whole palace, he claimed. Nagai was thus disgraced, and the shogun declared that ritual suicide was the only remedy.
Nagai had declined that honor.
So, the shogun ordered the other samurais to kill him, but they could not. His magic, combined with his fighting skills, made him too strong.
It was only his prior training at his father’s temple that prevented him from slaughtering his former colleagues. He restrained himself for the sake of his family’s honor and accepted banishment as his fate instead. He left the shogun’s castle for the last time, and then sailed away from Japan.
For years, Nagai had wandered the world as a ronin, challenging wizards and warriors alike on his journeys, and ever increasing his powers.
Eventually, he heard about the Dark Druids, and then came looking for Grandfather.
That was how Dark Master Zolond had first found him. When Nagai discovered he could not defeat the ancient English warlock, losing to the Dark Master again and again, the ronin finally became a true samurai once more, choosing Zolond as his new overlord.
He had been devoted to the old Englishman ever since—almost as much as Grandfather’s royal reptilians.
Given Nagai’s wide knowledge of magic, martial arts, court etiquette, and the world at large, Zolond had put him in charge of molding Prince Victor in the same strict spirit that the warrior monks had once trained him.
All of which meant there was no use arguing with this particular teacher.
Nagai could crush Victor if he chose.
Of course, the ex-ronin wouldn’t really hurt him; he wasn’t allowed. He was probably tempted to, though, from time to time, Victor mused.
The sourpuss Japanese wizard never really saw the humor in his only student’s pranks.
Ah well. A boy of nearly fourteen had to amuse himself somehow.
In truth, the only time that Victor felt real fear of Master Nagai was when he donned his full samurai armor (especially his horned helmet and blank ebony mask) and unsheathed his katana.
Then the tolerant teacher became fairly terrifying.
Little did Victor know that such an episode was about to unfold.
At that moment, he heard a familiar voice some distance behind him.
“Your Highness! Your Highness!”
He could barely hear his imp servant calling him over the constant mockery of the bricks, the trumpeting of the elephant, and the garbled snuffles of the Noxu.
But it was enough to break his concentration; Magpen sounded truly alarmed. The war elephant vanished. In the nick of time, from the corner of his eye, Victor saw a spear flying at him and caught it midair in his hand.
Nagai quickly made the Noxu pause their next volley, and held up his hand to silence the bricks.
Victor turned around to see his servant come bursting out of the mansion’s back doors and race across the elegant stone terrace, waving both hands in the air to get his attention.
“Y’ Highness, come quick!”
“What is it, Mags?”
Magpen skidded to a halt at the top of the stone stairs, his red frock coat askew.
The blue-skinned imp, as a species, was not normally inclined to wear more than a loincloth.
If that.
Fortunately, Victor had trained the imp to dress like a proper servant in any noble household. They’d had a set of red-and-white footman’s livery made for the little fellow to match that of the two dozen human-seeming servitors that Grandfather had conjured to work at Shadowedge Manor from an extra set of silverware.
At least Magpen was real. Victor didn’t have a dog or a cat or even a turtle, but he supposed his imp servant was the next best thing to a pet. The creature was useful, and, though he was often annoying, Victor found him amusing at times.
Magpen had grown to love his little clothes, each set specially tailored to fit his diminutive size.
Like most imps, he was only about three feet tall, with spindly arms and legs and, in his case, a plump belly. Most imps were thin—the lowly, kicked dogs of the evil hierarchy—but in the service of the Black Prince, this one ate well.
Victor made sure of that.
Magpen had thin tufts of bristly gold hair that sprouted from the tops of his pointy ears. They matched the fancy gold trim around the lapels of his livery coat.
He was bald across the top of his flattish head, like any imp, which was why he so delighted in wearing one of those white powdered wigs on formal occasions at the manor, like all the other footmen.
He thought he looked so grand with that thing on his head that it was hard to drag him away from a mirror.
In any case, something had clearly put the imp in an agitated state. He hopped down the stone steps from the terrace onto the lawn that served as a training ground.
“What’s going on?” Victor inquired.
Magpen leaped onto the grass. “It’s the Dark Master, Your Highness! H-he’s come through for you on a candle-call!”
“What? Now?” Victor’s eyes widened.
Magpen bobbed his head, pointing to the house. “He’s waiting, sir! He wants to talk to you!”
“Go.” Nagai nodded.
Victor was suddenly so excited that he nearly missed his sheath entirely with his wand. Sliding it into place, he sprinted across the grass and bounded up the stone terrace steps.
“Which candle?” he asked as Magpen followed him into the house.
“Your bedchamber, Highness.” The imp’s bare feet pattered across the polished marble floor behind him as he shadowed Victor down the hallway. (He refused to wear shoes. That was where even Magpen drew the line. Only when there was a blizzard would he accept snow boots.)
Victor strode down the hallway, passing marble statues in niches and large oil paintings on the walls.
“I wonder what he wants!” He swung around the newel post, then paused so abruptly that Magpen ran into his leg. “I’ll bet he’s called to ask me what I want for my birthday!”
It was coming up at the end of the month: October thirty-first. Samhain, or, Hallowe’en, as outsiders called it.
Magpen clapped his hands eagerly. “Yes, that must be it, sir, I’m sure!”
After all, the sorcerer-king was a very busy man. The great warlock only called two or three times a year.
“Do you know what you’re going to ask for this year, sir?” Magpen said eagerly.
Victor laughed. “You’d better believe it!”
Magpen had no trouble keeping up as Victor pounded up the grand staircase. Imps were good leapers, a bit clumsy, but nimble.
Birthday presents could be pretty outrageous when they came from the most powerful wizard in the world.
Last year, Grandfather had given him a Galileo Spyglass. Forget the twenty-times refracting telescope that its inventor, the great astronomer had told the pu
blic (and the Pope) that he’d used to trace the stars and view the distant planets. The truth was, Galileo’s secret, full-strength telescope, touched with magic (just as the Inquisition had suspected!) could reveal the busy worlds going on about their business in distant galaxies.
Victor had largely tired of it after a week.
The year before that, Grandfather had sent him a Bauble-nut Tree, which grew jewels instead of fruit. Protected indoors year-round in its big clay pot, the little tree had yielded its first crop this past summer. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and an emerald or two.
Why, Magpen himself had been a gift several years ago to keep Victor company and serve as his unwitting court jester.
But the best part of Grandfather’s annual gifts—or as occasional rewards whenever Master Nagai gave him an especially good report—were the spells that Zolond magically imparted into Victor’s personal grimoire.
Any conscientious mage took careful notes on everything he learned, from hexes to curses, incantations to potion recipes.
Victor kept his growing collection of knowledge in a little black spell book. Each year on his birthday, a new spell appeared on one of the blank pages straight from Grandfather’s mind: a gift from the Dark Master to his heir apparent. And, Hades, that old warlock knew some good spells.
“Well, sir?” Magpen prompted as they reached the top of the stairs. “What are you going to ask for, mighty prince? Or is it a secret?”
“No, it’s not a secret.” Victor paused outside his chamber door, then he lowered his voice in case Grandfather could hear him inside. “I’m going to tell him I want to go to London for a while. I’m so sick of being here! No offense,” he added hastily when Magpen’s face fell.
The imp looked wounded, as though Victor had merely tired of his company.
“It’s not you, Mags. I just want to see more of the world. People. Girls. I want…a life!”
“Oh.” Magpen gazed up mournfully at him, then heaved a sigh, lowered his head, and stepped back. “Yes, master.”
Victor frowned. Great. Now he felt guilty. “Stay out,” he ordered Magpen, quickly remembering he was the scion of all evil. “I’m sure this won’t take long.”