The Dark Lord Read online

  The question had been more for myself than Eldrin, but he answered anyway. “Does it matter? Whether she did it on purpose or because she didn’t want to carry the thing around, the point is that it’s here—somewhere.”

  He was right, but it was easier to argue about Vivian’s motivations than it was to contemplate the consequences of what I’d done. I simply didn’t want to believe I could have screwed up this badly or that Quantum Magicks was that important a subject, much less that I had the sort of power necessary to create a new innerworld. Plus, I saw one flaw in Eldrin’s theory. “Look, Eldrin, even if I did create something akin to one of the Mysterium innerworld crystals, which I’m not granting because I’m not that good, there isn’t a second one here in Trelari to complete the chain and trigger the Palantir Effect.”

  “I never said that you created the second item,” he answered cagily.

  “So, who created it? I hope you’re not suggesting that Vivian did, because that is impossible,” I said firmly. “It took me months of research in Mysterium and years of excruciating work in Trelari to make Death Slasher. Vivian is an acolyte, and her major area of study is divination. There’s no way she has that kind of ability.”

  “That’s what makes what’s happening so amazing and incredible,” Eldrin said, still geeking out at the coolness of the magic. “If I’m right she didn’t have to.”

  I still had no idea what he was talking about, and had a feeling that at this rate I wouldn’t know for several more hours. An idea struck me. “Does Dawn understand what you’re talking about?”

  “I think so.”

  “Can you put her on for a second?”

  “Okay?” he answered uncertainly.

  “Yes,” came Dawn’s voice after a brief pause.

  “Can you explain what Eldrin is talking about?” I asked.

  She hesitated and then said, “As I understand it, you rebuilt subworld 2A7C’s reality around this battle-axe.”

  “Sort of,” I reluctantly agreed.

  “So, when you removed the battle-axe you ‘sort of’ removed the core of the world’s reality.”

  “I’m not sure if I would go that far,” I hedged, but a chill passed through me as I began to spin out the implications.

  “Eldrin would,” she said dryly.

  “But I never intended for the battle-axe to remain in Trelari,” I said, and knew I was being defensive. “My plan was to remove it and let the subworld replace it with a new kernel formed from its own reality.”

  “Good idea, but what if the world had a plan of its own? One you’d already engraved into its pattern using your spell?” she asked.

  “Let’s say you’re right,” I said, rubbing my temples and thinking it through. “Let’s say the reality matrix my spell created was somehow robust enough to form a kernel object like Death Slasher of its own accord, which I’m not granting because that sounds crazy. Even if that were true, Death Slasher is a hybrid of subworld and Mysterium reality. To make something like it, the matrix would need some Mysterium reality to work with, which isn’t exactly thick on the ground here. Where did the spell get the stuff it needs?”

  Before she could respond, the answer hit me. “Oh, gods! Vivian!” I gasped.

  Dawn gave me time enough to recover before saying, “We don’t know if she knew the full consequences of what she was doing, but Eldrin thinks her presence gave the spell the raw material to make a twin kernel. He says that it would only take a small piece of Mysterium reality—anything really. The spell might even have taken it from her without her noticing.”

  “The Weasel,” I murmured.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Thanks for explaining. I really screwed this up.”

  “Basically,” she agreed.

  I deserved that, and I also owed Dawn some reassurance. “I know how little you must trust my judgment right now,” I acknowledged, “but I promise that I will do everything I can to bring Vivian out of this safely.”

  “I know you will,” she said, “but don’t kid yourself—she put herself in danger. Vivian is very good at divination, so she either knew what she was doing, or she should have known better.”

  Dawn meant it to be comforting, but there was another possibility that I was unable to ignore: What if Vivian had intended this all along? I pushed the frightful thought from my mind as she passed me back to Eldrin.

  I needed him to believe that I still had full confidence in the plan, because I knew the moment he thought I was wavering he would insist on doing something dramatic and noble and dangerous. When I got back on, I was all business. “Tell me what I need to do.”

  “You need to find this new battle-axe,” he answered, and I heard him flipping pages. “Give me a second.”

  “Are you looking through that stupid DMG again?” I asked in exasperation.

  “Yes, but I’ve begun to index it. It’s actually not bad. There’s a lot of great information in here if you can find it. There’s a section on artifacts, oddly on the same page as a detailed description of different types of footwear. Anyway, it says that if there is an artifact it will invariably have some strange legend behind it, usually connected with an odd name like Secna or Vaxx or, and I’m not making this up, Snaz-Furb’luu.”

  “Got it,” I said with way more confidence than I felt. “So we go around asking about a weapon . . .”

  “A battle-axe,” he corrected.

  “A battle-axe,” I echoed, “that has a weird name.”

  “Yup,” he answered brightly. “In the meantime, Dawn and I will be scouring Mysterium for Death Slasher.”

  “Sounds good, but how is any of this going to help me find Vivian or get the key back?”

  “It won’t, but if we don’t stop your subworld from careening toward Mysterium soon, other people will begin to notice, and when that happens all hell will break loose. I’ve taken certain steps to protect your transport circle, but I can’t guarantee that my solution, clever as I think it is, will stand up to the combined scrutiny of the faculty. If they erase your circle or, worse, modify it to destabilize your subworld . . .”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” I said.

  “I know,” he replied without a hint of conceit.

  I didn’t respond, because I didn’t know how. I wanted him to know how much I appreciated everything he was doing for me, but I don’t have that kind of eloquence. At last I took a deep breath and said, “Eldrin, I . . . I just wanted to . . . well, I want to—”

  “You know you don’t have to say anything,” he said in his most musical voice.

  “Yes, I do,” I insisted.

  I started to say something profound that would have embarrassed both of us when there was a knock at the door. I flicked the curtain aside and looked outside again. It was still dark.

  Leaning back against the headboard of my bed, I groaned. “Doesn’t anyone sleep anymore?”

  Chapter 11

  ANOTHER UNEXPECTED PARTY

  “Is that someone at the door?” Eldrin asked.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter,” I said, and it didn’t, because even though I had a sudden strong urge to be away on my quest, this conversation was way more important to me than anything or anybody that could be standing out in the hall. “Stay on the line. I’ll get rid of them.”

  The knock came again and more urgently. “I heard that,” he said with a laugh. “Someone needs you and having me in your ear is never going to work. I won’t be able to stop myself from talking, and you won’t be able to help yourself responding, and you’ll come away looking like a madman.”

  “No, wait!” I pleaded.

  “Goodbye, Avery.”

  The connection broke with that now familiar pop. It was good that it did, because the next knock, actually a boot, was so ferocious that the door burst open. Rook stood there wearing a toothy smile. He stormed in, slamming the door behind him.

  “Laddie, the group’s waitin’ and daylight’s fadin’
,” he said in his distinctive rasp.

  If it had not been for Eldrin’s call, I’m not sure how I would have reacted to Rook’s waking me up. Probably badly. As it was, I took a moment to close one eye and studied his profile.

  It is a well-known phenomenon that the farther a subworld is from Mysterium, the vaguer everything can seem to be. If it was true that Trelari was moving closer to Mysterium, then everything should appear more real, including Rook. Theoretically, I might be able to tell how far the world had moved by how fuzzy he was around the edges. It was probably my pessimistic nature, but his outline looked very sharp this morning. Then again, my only comparison point was last night, which I’d spent in a smoke-filled inn . . . tavern, drinking.

  I continued to stare until I realized that he was staring back, mirroring my single-eyed gaze with one of his own. In the end, the only conclusion I came to was that I should never get into a staring contest with a dwarf. Intense doesn’t begin to cover it.

  I blinked and Rook relaxed. “Interestin’ way of looking at the world, laddie,” he wheezed. “Clarifies things, don’t it.”

  I had begun to climb out of bed, but his words (hewing so close to my own thoughts) made me misstep, and I tumbled onto the floor. “What?”

  He shrugged. “When you’re bleary-eyed from drinkin’, closin’ one of them eliminates half the bleariness.”

  “Oh,” I said, rubbing my head from where I’d bumped it. “Where are Valdara and Drake and—” I realized I remembered no one else’s name “—everyone else?”

  “They are gatherin’ on the outskirts of town for equipment inspection.”

  “Who told them to do that, and at this hour?” I asked, certain that at least Valdara and Drake would never take orders from anyone, and certainly not Rook.

  He shrugged. “No one told them. They all said they felt it was time to go. I was standin’ out in the street with everyone else when I noticed you were missin’. Didn’t you know it was time to go?”

  I shook my head, but then remembered the sudden urgency I’d felt to leave on my quest now. Had I not known, or had I known and not listened? My thoughts from the previous evening about the shifting world, how the spell might work to influence my own behavior, and whether those pulls would always be obvious or easy to resist, came flooding back, and I forgot that Rook was standing there waiting for an answer.

  He cleared his throat, snapping me back to the present. “Well, you’re goin’ to set a pretty bad example if you don’t start gettin’ with the program, laddie.”

  He was more right than he knew. If the matrix spell was going to be guiding the actions and behaviors of those around me, I had to be sure that I was sensitive to the direction it was taking; otherwise I might inadvertently interfere with its course. The weave of the spell’s pattern was strong, but not indestructible. I looked back on my behavior last night and winced. Absent Rook’s intervention, I might have seriously screwed up the formation of the group.

  “You’re right, Rook,” I agreed in what I hoped was a chastened tone. “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted,” he said, and added sternly, “You have to have some discipline when you’ve got a group as large as ours.”

  “Have you determined how many people are in our group?” I asked, remembering that he was fairly vague on the subject last night.

  “Have you determined where we’re goin’?” he asked in reply.

  “Yes,” I said, standing and beginning to get into my clothes. “There is a weapon of great power we need to recover before facing down Viv . . . the Dark Lord.”

  He rolled his eyes and grunted in disgust. “I think you mean the Dark Queen, laddie. It would be wise to get your villains straight when you’re talkin’ to the others. And why would we be needin’ this weapon?”

  I blushed at my slip, but counted my blessings that I’d managed to cover the much larger blunder of knowing the Dark Queen on a first name basis.

  “Laddie?”

  “We just do!” I snapped. “Now, out of my room. How can I be expected to answer all these questions while I’m getting dressed?”

  “Aye,” he said hoarsely as he walked out. “I’ve heard walkin’ and chewin’ gum is hard for some people also.”

  Despite Rook’s insistence that I was holding everything up, the first rays of dawn were only beginning to filter over the tops of the trees when I made it to the edge of town. I was surprised to see over a dozen people milling about, most of whom I would have sworn never to have met before.

  I recognized Valdara and Drake, of course. I saw Rook’s companion dwarf, Seamus, busily checking people’s horses and packs and shouting exceedingly confusing instructions about encumbrance of pack animals and movement rates. There were a few other nameless faces I vaguely remembered talking to in the tavern, but the rest might as well have been strangers. I looked about for Rook to ask him why there were so many, and where they’d come from, but he was nowhere to be found. Wanting someone to confirm my memory on who we’d hired the night before, I made my way over to Valdara and Drake. They were sitting atop their mounts, watching the chaos with tired expressions.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Seamus is trying to arrange the equipment,” Valdara answered with a yawn. “As usual it’s taking forever.”

  “The ten-foot poles and fifty-foot coils of rope are always devilishly hard to strap onto the horses,” Drake growled in voice that sounded like he was still recovering from last night’s drink.

  Valdara cocked her head to one side and said, “I never noticed before, but everytime I’ve started a quest everyone feels compelled to bring a ten-foot pole and a fifty-foot length of rope. How much rope can we possibly need, and what use has anyone ever made of a ten-foot pole?”

  Drake said something in response, but I missed it because as he was talking the rays of the rising sun caught in Valdara’s braid and the red of her hair blazed to life, framing her face and adding a counterpoint to her glittering eyes. She was startlingly beautiful.

  Unfortunately, she caught me gawking. I averted my gaze and tried to cover my embarrassment by blurting, “Poles? Ropes? Very strange.”

  Although it wasn’t, at least not to me, because all of this was written into the initial conditions of my spell. There was a table of starting equipment on some page of the DMG, and everything that was happening now was being dictated by its rows and columns. A good sign that we were on track, but disturbing to witness in real life.

  At last my brain caught up to my mouth, and I remembered what I had wanted to ask. “Putting the equipment aside, which looks impossible given the sheer volume of it, who are all these people? I thought we would have eight or nine to start with. Is everyone here part of the group?”

  “Group?” said a guy in a red tunic who happened to be passing by. “I was told we were a party.”

  “No, no, we’re a fellowship,” responded someone else I didn’t recognize.

  “Fellowship?” said a third unidentifiable someone. “A fellowship would have to have nine members. We’re a company.”

  There was a lot of grumbling and arguing over the correct term to use for the . . . for us. Words like league, order, society, guild and club were thrown about and discarded. The discord was broken by a sharp whistle. Rook was standing on the back of a wagon, holding up his hands for silence. “It’s okay, everyone. We are a fellowship with a few extras.”

  This was met by an uncomfortable silence that was filled with many covert glances from this person to that one, and from that person to this one, as everyone tried to size up who might be one of the dreaded “extras.” I turned to Valdara and Drake with a questioning look. “Are you okay with the idea of taking along ‘extras’? Doesn’t it seem a bit morbid?”

  Valdara smirked at me and said, “It’s your party, or should I say fellowship, handsome. That means it’s your responsibility to see that all these ‘extras’ make it to the Dark Queen. This time around, I’m just along for the ride.”


  Drake nodded in agreement. “If you don’t like it I’d talk to Rook, kid. He seems to be in charge, if anyone is.”

  I wanted to say something about the “kid” and the “handsome,” but I had way too many other things to worry about. I left them still watching the scene and approached Rook and Seamus. They were busy handing out equipment and instructing people on how to transfer items between their packs and saddlebags in accordance with a system of weight measurement that I’m sure I had dictated at one point but which I had utterly forgotten.

  “Can I talk to you for a moment, Rook?” I asked.

  “Of course, laddie,” he said, folding up a sheaf of parchment papers he’d been consulting and putting them into his pouch. “Seamus, why don’t you finish up here? Make sure everyone’s got their tinder boxes and mess kits.”

  “Sure thing,” Seamus responded. “What do I do with the little bag of sand and the small knife?”

  “Sam gets those, of course,” he answered as though Seamus’s reasonable question was idiotic. “It goes with the ink and the paper.”

  “Right,” Seamus said, and took an armful of items over to a skinny fellow in a billowing robe who I suppose might have been the young wizard I’d met the night before.

  “Rook,” I said with a warning tone in my voice. “Why are there all these extra people? And why are you holding a bell, a loop of string, and a bag full of metal marbles?”

  “First,” he said, holding up his thumb, “you and I both know that there are terrible dangers ahead. So I’ve brought on some spares to ensure that the core group survives to the end. For example, over there we have Nigel, Paul, and Cameron, or as I like to call them, our NPC crowd.”

  I studied the three men; they had on nearly identical outfits, which made them hard to tell apart. “Why are they all wearing the same thing?” I asked. “Did they come as a team? Are they friends?”

  Rook shook his head and coughed out, “I put them in those matchin’ red tunics, because red don’t stain, laddie.”