The Dark Lord Page 21

  “Really?” Rook asked. “How could you tell?”

  “Because there are two of them now,” Sam answered seriously.

  Rook slapped a hand across his forehead and opened his mouth to say something else, but Valdara cut him off. “Leave it, Rook.”

  “Remind me later to work with you on sarcasm,” I whispered to Sam while the others were debating our next move.

  Thud. Squish. Thud. Squish. They kept relentlessly impacting the opening. We were trapped.

  “What are we going to do?” Luke wailed.

  “Maybe we could use fire,” Seamus suggested.

  “Are you mad?” asked Valdara. “Fire is for slimes, not gelatinous polyhedrons. You hit that thing with fire and it’ll swell up at least twice its size. We’re going to have to get physical with it.” She tried to draw her sword, but there was no room in the tight confine of the crevice.

  “Won’t work,” Drake muttered. “It’ll just suck in our weapons or split into more pieces.”

  “Can someone cast a spell that isn’t lightning or fire?” asked Valdara.

  “Possibly,” I said, not sure if I could in my weakened condition, or safely do so with all these people around. If my concentration slipped for even a second, I might erase one of them right out of existence. “Before I do anything though, I need to know what that thing is—exactly.”

  “It’s a gelatinous polyhedron,” Rook barked. “We established that already.”

  “What kind?” I asked sharply. “It matters.”

  Sadly this was true. It made no sense, but it was true. This whole time I had been desperately trying to remember what I had written in the DMG about these creatures. Please understand that the whole section on slimes, molds, oozes, and whatnots with all their different colors and shapes was a confusing mess. Most gelatins were tetrahedrons or at most cubes. They moved slowly. All you needed to do was not walk into them. Unfortunately, we were dealing with higher order polyhedrons, which were significantly more dangerous. They were fast and unpredictable, and these also seemed angry, which, given that they had been split in two, I could understand.

  Rook squinted between Sam’s legs and through the opening as the gelatins continued their assault. “They could be octahedrons. They have pointy bits here and there.”

  Thud. Squish. Thud. Squish.

  “Now who’s being ridiculous,” I shouted at him. “They at least have more sides than a pentagonal trapezohedra, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to roll that fast.”

  “I still say they’re dodecahedrons,” Sam said, peering through the crack.

  “That would make sense,” I replied. “I thought initially that the creature looked like an icosahedron before you split it in half, but it could easily have had twenty-four sides, which would naturally mean that it would form two dodecahedrons when split.”

  “Naturally,” Sam agreed.

  “The real question is,” I said, rubbing my chin, “was it a tetrakis hecahedron or a deltoidal icositetrahedron?”

  “Would that matter now?” Sam asked.

  I looked at him seriously. “I have no idea.”

  Thud. Squish. Thud. Squish.

  Did I mention that they were very determined?

  “All right!” Valdara shouted. “So it’s a dodeca . . . whatever. What does that mean? What do we need to use?”

  “Cold,” I said calmly as my memory finally recalled the table.

  “Cold?” Valdara asked. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded.

  There was a sickening slurping noise as the gelatins abandoned their attempts to batter their way to us and instead began to squeeze their bodies into the crack.

  “They are getting really close,” Sam squeaked, and inched backward, packing us more tightly together.

  I saw the bladed tip of Drake’s staff pass over my head and poke at the thing. It squealed at the touch and pulled back out of the crevice.

  “What the hell was that, Drake?” Valdara asked with obvious sharpness.

  “Later,” he growled. “It didn’t work anyway.”

  He was right. Whatever was on Drake’s blade may have stung the thing, but that had only served to make both the gelatins angrier. Now they were slamming into the wall of the cave with terrifying ferocity.

  “Do any of our wizards know a cold spell?” Valdara asked.

  “No,” said Sam, “and even if I did I’d need one of Rook’s long rests to learn it.”

  I had been trying to remember my elemental control spells. If I could manage the power drain, I thought I could make an attempt to drop their temperature and freeze them, but they would have to agree to hold still so I could draw a circle around them, and given the way they were still rolling about I doubted they would be amenable. “No,” was all I said.

  Ariella sighed, “Wizards!” Then she waved her hands and gestured. I shivered as the world went cold and blue light swirled around the gelatins. In an instant they grew more opaque and then froze solid. The next time they hit the wall, both of them shattered into thousands of frozen pieces. There was a mad scramble to get out of the crack and back into the open.

  We all stood for a moment looking at the fragments of the creatures and trying to catch our collective breath. There was no sign of the gnomes or their bodies.

  “Poor Spryspindle and Berrycrank,” I murmured.

  “Who?” asked Rook.

  “The gnomes,” I said, surprised as I had thought I was the only one that hadn’t known everyone’s name.

  “We should say something,” Ariella said, gesturing at the scattered remains.

  “What’s the point?” Valdara asked bitterly. “There’s nothing left to say words over.”

  “Excellent point,” Rook said brightly and rubbed his hands together. “No use standin’ around. The treasure will be somewhere in all these bits. Let’s see what we got for all our trouble.”

  Ariella shot the dwarf a side-long glare, which he ignored as he began picking through the frozen pieces of the gelatins. After an awkward pause the others joined in.

  There were fragments all about and many of them held things that had been sucked up in the thing’s body over the years: coins, a sword, a ring, but it was obvious that Rook and Seamus were looking for something bigger. Eventually, amid a pile of debris, Sam found a small locked chest. We gathered around as Ariella tried to pick open the lock.

  After watching her fumble for a few minutes, Rook muttered, “Have you ever done this before, lassie?”

  “No,” she said and began humming a little tune as she twisted a small piece of metal in the keyhole.

  The dwarf grunted, “Do you have any idea of what you’re doin’?”

  “Not a bit.” She smiled. “But I’m a quick study.”

  After this confession we did the only sensible thing, and smashed it open with a rock. In the remains of the chest was a rolled-up piece of parchment.

  “One scroll! That’s it!” Rook shouted. “What a rip-off.”

  “Maybe it’s a map,” suggested Ariella. “It could lead to a bigger treasure.”

  “What does it say?” asked Drake.

  Sam’s hands were shaking, and his face was white as a sheet as he read, “‘It has come to our attention that License No. 05309 to the Mines of Maria was purchased using conjured gold. The bearer of this scroll is ordered to return to the Village of Hamlet, there to present himself to the Master of Dungeons for judgment.’”

  Every eye turned to me.

  “Avery!” shouted Valdara.

  I briefly considered concocting a lie about how I must have grabbed the wrong bag, or that they must have confused our payment with someone else’s. Sam scuttled those plans. He fell to his knees, the scroll forgotten in his hand. “It’s not his fault. I did it.”

  “Sam!” Valdara shouted again, but with less venom. “I expect that behavior from Avery, but not from you! I have never been more disappointed . . .” There were tears in the wizard’s eyes as she berated him.

  I a
m a lot of things. I like to cut corners, like using Mysterium magic to create the core element of the reality matrix for my spell, and that sometimes leads to complications, like Death Slasher. I sometimes bend the rules, like taking my world’s key with me on a night out, and that sometimes comes back to haunt me, like Vivian becoming the Dark Queen. But one thing I will say for myself, and I know it isn’t much, when I cut corners and bend rules and it hurts my friends, I always come clean.

  “It isn’t his fault,” I said, stepping between Valdara and Sam. The murderous look she gave me did give me second thoughts about whether it was wise to do what I was about to do, but I did it anyway. “Sam thought we were using real gold that we had transformed from acorns. He didn’t know it was conjured.”

  In a smooth, lightning-fast motion, Valdara drew her sword and swung it at my throat. I have no idea if she would have followed through with that blow or not, and thank the gods I never had to find out, because halfway between her and me the blade ran into Drake’s extended staff. Blue and white sparks flew as the weapons connected. Their eyes met and the intensity in that gaze was enough to know that they were in love, although not what they felt about being in love.

  “Leave the kid alone, Valdara,” said Drake. “He did what he thought he had to do. We need to go back and see what we can do to make it right.”

  “People died,” insisted Valdara. “For nothing.”

  Drake shrugged. “As you’ve pointed out before, there was a risk we weren’t going to survive from the moment each of us decided to join this quest.”

  A look filled with conflicting emotions passed between them. Valdara’s body slumped; her arms went slack. She sheathed her weapon. “Seamus, see how much we can get from the gelatins. Maybe it’ll be enough to pay what we owe.”

  The others, who had been struck motionless with shock as the struggle between Valdara and Drake played out, now bent to the task of gathering and sorting through the things we’d gathered from the slain gelatins. It took some time, but finally Seamus announced, “Thirty-seven gold pieces, sixty-two silver, and eighty-five copper, a semiprecious gem worth about twenty-seven gold, a few bits of string, and . . .” He paused dramatically and held something small and gleaming up to the light. “. . . a gold tooth.”

  “If we can strike a good bargain with Zania, it may be enough,” Drake said.

  Valdara shrugged and walked back the way we came without a word. The rest of the party followed after her. Nobody acknowledged my existence except Rook, who marched up and kicked me in the shin.

  “Ow!”

  He waited until the rest of the company was well out of earshot and then drew his ax. “You deserved that, laddie, for lyin’ to me.” He ran a finger along its edge. “In the future you’d best remember to tell me if you deviate from the pattern. Right?”

  I nodded and continued to nod until he was out of sight. I had to figure out who Rook was, and why he seemed to lie outside the rules of Trelari, or at least to be aware of the contours of those rules. As usual, now was not the time. I scurried after the others, chasing their light as the shadows closed in around me.

  Following Ariella’s map and the bloody remnants of our passage, we made it safely back to the entrance chamber. There was Barth, just as I had left him. A glowing white aura surrounded him that no one, not even me, could approach.

  “Can you undo the spell so we can get him out of here?” Valdara asked after several unsuccessful attempts were made to extract the man.

  The answer, of course, was no. If I’d made it possible for me to undo it, then it would have been possible for Vivian to undo it, and at the time I hadn’t been thinking about what happened after we were done exploring the mines. This is because I wasn’t thinking at all at the time. I said none of this, sticking with a simple: “No.”

  “So, instead of us being able to take him with us, you’ve trapped him in this forsaken mine, potentially forever. Is that about it?” she asked savagely.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  Drake very kindly and incorrectly explained that I had placed him into a suspended animation, because he was close to death, and that I thought this would be the only way to keep him alive until a better healer could be brought back to revive him. I don’t know if anyone bought the story. However, whether they did or didn’t mattered little. This new revelation changed nothing. Valdara looked at me in disgust and walked away, and the rest of the company took their lead from her. No one had been speaking to me before, and no one spoke to me now.

  It was the deep of night when we emerged from the mine. Our first order of business was to find Zania and present her with the tooth. I prayed she was still around, and that she had been serious in her offer so some reward would come of this mess.

  We soon found what we assumed was Zania’s camp nearby. The group’s bedrolls and backpacks were still lying arranged around the dying embers of their campfire, but there was no sign of them. Valdara tried to look for tracks that would indicate where they might have gone, but the ground had been trampled by a troop of horses. The only thing she could discern in the confused muddle of hoofprints was an ominous patch of discolored dirt.

  She dropped to the ground, ran her finger through the stained earth, and brought it to her lips. She spat. “It’s blood.”

  Silently, Valdara signaled for us to form a defensive perimeter around the remains of the fire. Then she and Drake disappeared into the darkness. Despite the horrors we’d faced in the mine, I had never been more scared. There was something eerie about how quiet the woods around us were. Nothing moved or made a sound, not even the wind in the trees. The minutes ticked by and a bead of sweat dripped from my brow. Finally, Drake and Valdara returned.

  “We couldn’t find any trace of them,” Valdara said. “There are hoofprints coming in from the west and riding off to the east, but there are too many for this group.”

  “They might have been attacked by orcs or something else that came out of the mines while we were down there,” Drake suggested. “Whatever it was is probably long gone by now.”

  Valdara considered this for a moment. “Possibly,” she said, but didn’t sound convinced. “Whatever happened I don’t think they’re coming back. Let’s search their gear and take what we can use, and then let’s get out of here. Whether it is orcs or brigands, I don’t like the feel of these woods.”

  I was in total agreement with her. The company made quick work of the search. Soon a mound of gold, silver, and copper coins, gems, jewelry, books, scrolls, and potions was laid out on the ground. The sight of all the treasure was unnerving.

  “Not brigands, then,” Rook growled.

  “Nor orcs, nor kobolds,” Seamus added in his own low grumble.

  Valdara stared at the pile of glittering objects like she might divine the tale of what happened if she studied it long enough. The muscles in her jaw clenched and unclenched. “Everyone take a portion and let’s get on the road. I want miles between us and this accursed place before morning.”

  I was never happier to hear that I would be marching through the night.

  Chapter 22

  RULES LAWYERS

  Our journey back from the Mines of Maria was uneventful and lonely. The company’s collective opinion of me did not improve the day after our flight from the mines nor the day after that. No one spoke to me except Drake, but I wasn’t sure if that was because he counted me a friend, or didn’t care enough to be angry with me. Only Sam showed any sign of regret about my treatment, just not enough to do anything about it.

  I had hoped things might improve when we got back to town, but if news travels fast, bad news must fly on wings of eagles, because when we arrived at the gates of Hamlet, every merchant we’d paid using the fake gold was waiting for us. They wouldn’t let us pass until we’d squared our bills, plus interest. I won’t say what the rate was that they charged, because this is a family book and it was indecent.

  When we settled our accounts with the town merchants, the crowd melted
away, but still our way was blocked. Not by angry citizens or merchants, but by two stone-faced nightmares dressed in gaudy costumes. I recognized them at once as golems, yet another of my creations. They were enormous, at least eight feet high and almost the same length wide. If you ignored their size, they might have passed for misshapen men except for their faces. Expressionless doesn’t do them justice. Their features, rough as they were, were frozen into permanent glares. I had brought them into existence during the early part of my time in Trelari to guard me and frighten away anyone that might have tried to meddle in my affairs. I thought they’d been destroyed.

  The thought came to me that Vivian might have reanimated them. The background music changed, becoming more sinister. Has she found me at last?

  I ran forward and put my body between the golems and the rest of the company. Whatever happened here, I was not about to let my companions suffer from another one of my mistakes. “Don’t touch them,” I shouted, and began to pull energy from the ground beneath my feet for whatever was going to come next. I swayed at the effort, but managed not to collapse.

  I felt a pull on my arm. Valdara was beside me. “What are you doing, Avery?”

  “Stay back, Valdara. I know how to handle these monsters.” I tried to push her behind me, but she didn’t budge.

  “Those monsters are the town guards,” she said in a low voice, “and I’d advise you not to antagonize them.”

  “She’s right, kid,” Drake said, pulling at my other arm. “Fighting monsters in dungeons is one thing, but no one picks a fight with the Hamlet town guards.”

  “The what?” I asked, looking between the two of them. “Those are the Hamlet town guards?”

  They both nodded. I looked back to the creatures. Their dreadful, unblinking gazes were directed at me now. “You tried to trick the Master,” they both said in monotone voices. “You must come with us.”

  It was bewildering to be standing in this quaint if weird little town with these nightmares. It wasn’t right. I had to get these things away from the company, and then I needed to talk to Eldrin. None of this was right.