The Dark Lord Read online

  “Does that mean we’ll have to talk like that?” I spluttered.

  “Nah,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The greeter is just here to add some color and get a little extra coin for the town from the tourists.”

  “They are crazy about gold in this village,” Seamus agreed.

  “Thank goodness we have Avery here to bankroll us,” Rook said, and fixed me with one of his single-eyed stares.

  There was hearty agreement from all around at this. On that ominous note, we entered Hamlet. And as we rode down the hill into the town proper, there was much discussion as to how people were going to spend my money in the taverns (Rook and Drake and Seamus seemed eager to get hammered), and at the armorers (much to my dismay Valdara said she needed to repair several very attractive tears and holes the trolls had made in her leather and metal shirt), and bookbinders (need I say anything but Sam), and cloth dyers (Paul and the new members of the NPC crowd wanted to see if dyeing their tunics a color other than red would improve their chances of survival), and hatters (the two to three gnomes that remained seemed to think they needed black tasseled caps to mourn the deaths of their one to two friends), and we would need lodging and stables for the horses, and apparently I needed to pay Seamus back for all the equipment he’d bought back in Blightsbury, and so on.

  I lingered in the back, trying to figure out how to delay as long as possible the very awkward conversation I was going to have to have with the rest of the company about the fact that I was literally penniless.

  Chapter 17

  THE MONEY PARADOX

  The Company of the Fellowship had dissolved, at least temporarily. Members of the group scattered through the village. I sat on my horse in the middle of the town square taking in the scene. There was activity everywhere as adventurers of all stripes loaded horses and packs, picked fights with each other, and, if they were on their own, wandered about trying to get hired into a group. There were many shouts of “LFG!” which I learned later meant Looking for Group. Valdara was right; it was unnatural and disturbing.

  Also unnatural was the sheer number of people on the street. If this volume of traffic was indicative of “normal,” I could see why everything cost so much here. Hamlet was the only town within a hundred leagues. They had a captive audience, and as anyone that’s ever been to a movie theater will attest, captives are always subject to ransom.

  I began to wonder what I should be doing, and how doing whatever it was I should be doing would result in me becoming instantly very wealthy. I tried to contact Eldrin, which wasn’t going to make me rich, but would make me feel less alone in not being rich, but either it didn’t work or he wouldn’t answer. I seemed to be at an impasse, an impasse that would not last much longer, because eventually people would start returning from their shopping adventures and want some of my nonexistent money. The music in my head became contemplative, which actually helped me focus on the problem at hand.

  Oddly, my first coherent thought was, What would the Dark Lord do?

  This is not as mad as it sounds. The Dark Lord had a rather large army to support and heaps of coin to support it with, because trust me, if there is one thing blood orcs like more than drums, it’s gold. I recalled with fondness the vast vaults under the Fortress of Despair where I’d stored the mountains of gold coins and jewels and other wonderful objects of great value that I’d accumulated. The problem was that I had used the reality key to make all that lovely money last time and, as Valdara had reminded me, it was well and truly gone.

  In fact, as the Dark Lord, I had relied rather heavily on the key for fulfilling my most exotic needs, like mountains of gold and thrones of skulls and whatnot. As getting the key was the entire point of my presence on this world and would have made every other question and problem moot, this was not a very helpful observation. Nor was my second observation, which was that the Dark Lord probably wouldn’t have even bothered with mundane matters like getting sacks of gold, but would have delegated that to the dread necromancers of the Circle of Nine, my most trusted underlings. This observation was useless for at least two reasons: first I was no longer the Dark Lord, and second I’d atomized the Circle of Nine in a volcanic eruption about a week before the final battle.

  Nevertheless, this very meandering train of thought led me to the conclusion that the answer to my dilemma lay in the appropriate application of magic. Now, having observed my work on Sam you may think that conjuring a little gold would be a trivial matter. It is not. In fact, it is devilishly hard to use Mysterium magic to make things appear out of thin air, and back home in the Mysterium’s heightened reality field it is virtually impossible unless you have access to something like the Hexagramical Reality Collider, which is a magical pentagram about thirteen miles long on a side that was built at great expense to determine once and for all whether a god was a particle.

  The reason that pure conjuration is so hard for Mysterium mages is that Mysterium magic is based on reason. And as anyone that has ever stared at the place where they know they put their keys down last night will tell you, having something appear out of nowhere, no matter how badly you want it to appear, is simply not reasonable.

  If I had known the local magic, with all its wishy-washy mysticism, I might have been able to do it. After hearing Sam’s description of how his sleep spell worked, I had become convinced that anything, no matter how ridiculous, might be possible. Unfortunately, while the DMG I’d written was chock-full of detailed explanations for the theoretical practice of Trelarian magic, I had never studied how you actually cast the spells. Besides, I’d probably need to have something to make it work like a bat’s eye or a frog’s hair.

  I needed some time to think and a place to rest my aching blisters. Fortunately, there were four inns in the town, each basically identical, and each identified by a sign emblazoned with a dragon: one painted red (the Red Dragon Inn), one that had been impaled on a spear (the Dead Dragon Inn), one that was roaring and spitting fire (the Dread Dragon Inn), and one that looked like an oddly shaped baguette (the Bread Dragon Inn). Unfortunately, when I inquired at each they all required a deposit. Apparently, the innkeepers of Hamlet had long ago learned that giving credit to adventurers on their way to explore diabolically dangerous dungeons and fight absurdly vicious monsters was not the best way to stay in business. I couldn’t blame them.

  Having found no shelter at the inns, I pulled my horse into a small grassy alley between a weaver and a blacksmith’s shop. There was a low branched oak tree here, and I slipped into the shadows beneath it so I could think. It was only after I’d made myself comfortable among the roots that I discovered that I was not alone.

  “Sam!” I cried out in surprise.

  A short distance away the young wizard was sitting cross-legged with his precious spell book closed on his lap. His red-rimmed eyes told me that he had been crying. “Oh hi, Wizard Avery,” he said, wiping his face with the sleeve of his robe.

  I began to rise, saying, “Sorry, Sam. I didn’t know you were studying here. I wouldn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Please stay,” he said with a shuddering sigh. “I was working up the courage to come talk to you anyway.”

  For a few seconds I hovered in an awkward crouch somewhere between standing and sitting, trying to decide if I should continue my exit or stay. Looking into his thin young face and sad brown eyes, I knew I couldn’t leave without giving him a chance to unburden himself. I took a deep breath and sat. “Sure, Sam. What’s up?”

  He gulped and closed his eyes. “I have decided to leave the company.”

  Okay, I hadn’t known what to expect him to say, but among the options I’d been turning over, that had not been one of them. I asked the obvious question. Why?

  A little voice in my head answered that this was the pattern at work, trying to correct my interference from when I’d saved him. I begged it to shut the hell up. Meanwhile, Sam threw his book to the ground beside him, shrugged, and said in a low, ragged voice, “Bec
ause I’m a burden on the company. Had anyone been depending on me last night they might have been killed. The magic I know is worthless, and I’m not even good at it.”

  You know that empty feeling you get in your heart when the consequences of your actions come home to roost. Add to it the fact that the music had suddenly dropped into a depressing minor key and I felt terrible.

  I began to say something lame and untrue like, “You are a really great wizard, Sam,” when the resolution to both my problem and Sam’s attack of self-doubt came to me in a flash of inspiration.

  I picked up the acorn that had just fallen from the tree onto my head and said, “I’m broke, Sam.”

  Like my surprise at his decision to leave the company, it was clear that however he had thought I might respond to his revelation this was not it. “What?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a coin to my name,” I said, rolling the acorn around in the palm of my hand.

  “But . . . but . . .” he stuttered. “You’re a great wizard.”

  I shook my head. “Obviously, I’m either not a great wizard, or great wizards are not inherently rich, or both.”

  He spun as the full import of what I was saying struck him. “But the rest of the company is out buying equipment and supplies,” he said, wide-eyed with horror. “What will we do? I have a little coin, but—”

  “You’ve resigned from the company,” I pointed out before he could complete the thought. “So, technically this isn’t your problem.”

  “I suppose so,” he said, but his brow was furrowed with concern.

  We sat in silence for a minute or so and I let the tension build. Finally, I gave a dramatic sigh. “It’s really too bad,” I said. “I might have been able to conjure the money, but my spell requires two wizards to work.”

  Sam’s eyes widened at this. “You can conjure money? My old master could conjure water and food, but he never conjured anything of value.”

  I almost pointed out that in almost all cases being able to create food and water out of nothing would be far more useful than creating bits of metal or crystalized minerals, but I managed to stop myself. Instead, I waved a finger at him. “But I can’t conjure the money, at least not by myself.”

  “I don’t understand how I can help. I don’t know how to conjure anything. I’m useless!” he said with a cry as he slumped back against the tree.

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Because it’s true,” he wailed, pulling at his stringy brown hair. “You said yourself that my magic makes ‘no sense’ and is ‘hokey.’”

  I flinched as he threw my words back at me, but I let it pass and said calmly, “Just because I don’t understand your magic doesn’t make it worthless. It simply means that I’m ignorant. There are plenty of things that my magic can’t do that your magic can, and there are plenty of things about my style of magic that are just as absurd as your crickets and daisy petals.”

  “Rose petals,” he corrected.

  “Forgive me, rose petals,” I said, managing to keep a straight face.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said bitterly. “You brought me back to life. With that kind of power, you could do anything. Name one thing that a wizard like me could do that you can’t.”

  “I can’t create food and water out of thin air. In fact, I can’t create even the smallest grain of sand out of nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you.” I noted that this was said with a much reduced level of sulkiness.

  “I’m being perfectly frank with you, Sam.” And for once I was. “True conjuration, the creation of something from nothing, a task that your master could so easily accomplish with food and drink, is impossible for wizards of my order. In fact, the impossibility of performing conjuration is a well-known limitation of my type of magic. We call it the Adams Paradox. Would you like to hear about it?”

  “I suppose so,” he said uncertainly.

  “I will take that as an enthusiastic ‘yes,’” I said, and, picking up five acorns, began juggling them.

  “Magus Adams,” I began as I wove the acorns into a series of interconnecting loops, “was one of the most famous wizards of my order, and his principal area of focus was true conjuration—”

  “But you said that conjuration is impossible!” Sam protested.

  “Are you going to interrupt me or let me tell the story?” I asked with a mild glare.

  “Sorry,” he said, and pinched his lips together.

  I changed the pattern of the acorns into a single large circle and continued. “As I was saying, Adams was studying conjuration, which is the magic of creating objects from nothing. He worked on the problem for hundreds of years, but never could get it to work. His continued failure to conjure even the smallest somethings made him a bit of a joke among the other wizards in the School of Conjuration, each of whom conjured a number of somethings on a regular basis—”

  “But how could there be a School of Conjuration if . . .” Sam started to say, but then stopped himself and put a hand over his mouth.

  I raised an eyebrow and picked up the thread of my story again. “Adams, being as pompous as any other mage and so knowing that most if not all of his colleagues were far less talented than he was, began trying to reproduce their experiments and discovered that the mages in the School of Conjuration were not conjurers at all, but instead very talented subconscious teleportationists who had been unknowingly stealing items from other people for years.

  “When his findings were released,” I said, now juggling the acorns in a complicated figure eight pattern, “the other mages of my order came to believe that anything that had ever gone missing in their lives could probably be put down to a thieving conjurer somewhere and so demanded that the School of Conjuration be disbanded and replaced by something useful, like a bar. It was while sitting in this bar that a now unemployed Adams came up with his theory of the conjuration paradox, and simultaneously solved our problem of how to get gold for the company.”

  I glanced at Sam and saw that he was sitting up on his knees, hanging on to my every word. He was hooked. More importantly, the enthusiasm of the young mage I’d first met in Blightsbury had returned.

  With a swipe of my hands I collected the flying acorns into my cupped palms. “The story goes that he was staring at his empty glass of beer, and trying to convince the bartender to serve him another even though he had no money, when one of the other patrons, who also happened to be an ex-colleague of his, shouted that in the old days they might have just conjured another pint. After the grumbles of agreement died down—the bar, you understand, had become the regular haunt of former mages from the former School of Conjuration—he explained that he could prove logically that it was, always had been, and always would be impossible to make something out of nothing. Needless to say, this got everyone’s attention.”

  “I’ll say,” Sam agreed with a wag of his head.

  “Legend has it that he walked behind the bar holding up his empty beer glass—” I pantomimed “—and asked if everyone could agree that to conjure something from nothing you must replace the nothing with the something.”

  “Makes sense,” said Sam.

  “I’m glad you approve,” I said dryly. “As you say, Sam, this initial statement seemed noncontroversial so everyone agreed, and he took the opportunity to fill his glass. He then drained it and, gesturing at the again empty glass, pointed out that nothing obviously takes up no space, it being, at its core, nothing. Moreover, because it takes up no space, nothing is without a doubt infinitely small. This everyone also agreed must be the case.”

  “What’s ‘infinite’ mean?” Sam asked.

  “Without end,” I answered. “He was saying that the ‘nothing’ is so small that no matter how small you think it is, it is smaller than that. Another way of saying this is to say that the smallness of nothing is without end.”

  The young man cocked his head to the side and thought about this.

  “Adams then filled his glass again. Once it wa
s full to the brim he asked if they would also agree that something, no matter how big, must take up only a finite, which means fixed, amount of space, else it would consume the universe. This also seemed to be a safe statement and so there was general agreement on it. He then drained his glass yet again and said, ‘And there’s the paradox.’”

  Sam looked confused, which is funny because in the story that was also the reaction of the other patrons, well, confusion and anger from the barkeep, who was beginning to suspect that the entire lecture was a ploy to get free beer off of him, which it was.

  “Seeing that his logic had confused everyone, Adams explained that if the smallness of nothing is inherently infinite, and if the space of any something is inherently finite, it would by necessity take an infinite number of somethings to fill any nothing, and thus no matter how many somethings you try to conjure you always need at least one more something before the nothing is full enough for the something to replace the nothing; ergo it is impossible to conjure something from nothing.”

  “That makes no sense!” Sam blurted suddenly.

  He was right it was utter gibberish, but that didn’t make it any less true.

  “Why not?” I asked, eyes-wide in feigned alarm.

  “It’s nonsense,” he complained.

  “Not at all,” I argued, and began to pour the acorns back and forth from one hand to the other. “If I had an empty room of endless dimension (which we will take as the nothing), and I tried to fill it with acorns (which we will take as the finite somethings we are trying to conjure), it would take an endless number of acorns to fill the room.”

  “No, no, no!” he shouted, and, standing, began to pace about under the tree. “Nothing isn’t an endless space. It is something fleetingly small, like a grain of the finest sand. So, any finite something should be able to instantly fill it. There is no paradox.”