Villains by Necessity (v1.1)

by Eve Forward

  He sat back, shaking his tingling fingertips as Valerie radiated impatience.

  “It’s no use,” he whispered. “If only we had Arcie here...”

  “’Allo ‘allo, did I hear someone asking after me?” piped a familiar voice. Sam and Valerie turned to see Arcie, followed by Kaylana, turn the corner and approach.

  “Great vanished Hruul, Arcie, I’m almost glad to see you,” Sam exclaimed in a soft whisper. “Got a lock that needs your attention.”

  “Oho, does it now?” chortled the Barigan softly.

  “Let’s have at it.” He shook out a couple of picks from his sleeves and went to work. For whatever reason, the blue sparks seemed to leave him alone.

  Valerie turned to Kaylana. “How did you find us?” she asked. The Druid shrugged, her composure returning now that she was away from the crowded lower halls.

  “We asked someone.”

  Robin and Blackmail had drifted to the far gates closest to the Castle. Here a circle of musicians and dancers sang and danced around a roaring bonfire, while smaller fires around the perimeter roasted chickens and suckling pigs.

  Apples peeled coated in brown sugar and cinnamon, and baked in the coals, were handed out freely to children, and Robin managed to obtain one from a cheerful gentleman who was impressed by the novelty of a centaur in the city. He bit gingerly at the hot confection and carefully watched Blackmail. The preoccupied knight was staring up at the Castle, his hand on his sword. Robin looked around. Crowds, noise, smoke from the fires ... perfect. Slowly he stepped back into the crowds, letting a marching parade of drunken singers stagger between him and the knight. Then he bolted. When Blackmail looked around, searching, there was no sign of the centaur.

  Robin ducked behind a stall selling festive scarves and wasted no time in pressing the two gems on his bracelet.

  The magic of the talisman would transport him immediately to within a few yards of Mizzamir’s presence. He could only hope that immediately would be soon enough.

  As the sickening feeling of strange transport faded, it was replaced by a rush of warm, stuffy air, and the droning of voices. Robin found himself in a darkened room with many other people, at the edge of many rows of seats. His hindquarters brushed tapestries on a wall. Mizzamir was seated at the center of a table of mages in front of the audience. One of the other mages was explaining something. A few of the mages seated near where Robin had materialized turned to look in surprise. Attracted by the change, Mizzamir looked up suddenly, and saw

  Robin standing in the shadows, twisting his hat nervously.

  The Arch-Mage excused himself and came down from the panel, taking Robin aside.

  “I trust this is important?” he inquired gently, as soon as they were out of earshot of the others. Robin nodded so violently that his mane flopped.

  “Sir, the villains are here! In your castle, sir! They plan to enter the Silver Tower!”

  “The Silver Tower?” exclaimed Mizzamir. “Whatever for?” But before the centaur could reply, he continued, “No matter. Assuming they have found the way there, I can make it extremely difficult for them to leave. Much as their escapades have proved interesting, this is too good an opportunity to end the matter without bloodshed.”

  Meanwhile, Arcie pushed the door open and stepped back with a flourish. “There ya be, all in a night’s work for Arcie Macrory, Guildmaster of Bistort and too likely the rest of yon world as well. Best burglar in existence.”

  “And the most modest,” came from Sam. He noticed Kaylana was looking nervous; it was strange to see her composure shaken. He wondered, as he so often had, if there was anything he could do to help her, to comfort her...

  “We had better get back down to the lower levels,”

  Kaylana said, looking around. “We are too conspicuous in this large group.”

  “The bunny-hugger is right,” Valerie said coldly. “The assassin and I will continue from here ... you two had better return.”

  “Right enough,” agreed Arcie with a sigh. “Well and it seems we always be missing the exciting parts ... Come along, lassie.” He and Kaylana started for the hall, while Sam and Valerie slipped into the opened stairwell and up the well-worn spiral steps beyond.

  “You must return to whence you came, minstrel,” cautioned Mizzamir, “Lest the dark knight suspect. I shall deal with these.”

  Before Robin could utter a word of protest, the Arch Mage cast the spell that sent him snapping back like a rubber band to his point of departure. The whuff of the smoky night air and music swelled around him, and he stepped out just in time to catch Blackmail’s arm as the knight went marching rapidly past, looking for him. The knight gripped his shoulders, as if glad to see him, and then glanced up at the Silver Tower. Robin followed his gaze.

  Valerie and Sam went through the elaborately carved door at the top of the stairs without difficulty. The room they stepped out into seemed to Valerie to pulse softly with waves of magical goodness that nauseated her.

  Nightshade gurgled in sympathy. Sam, unaffected but still uneasy, scanned the room.

  It was like a typical mage’s study, only far richer.

  Somewhat oblong in shape, and made of silver-white marble, it held everything a mage would need, without being cluttered; a fine goldenwood desk at one end, racks of scrolls and shelves of books, as well as some tables with magical accoutrements arranged on them. But the focal point of the room was near the center, where the floor fanned out in a dais set with chips of semiprecious stones. Glittering and blinking softly in the center of this was a font, made of marble and decorated with cabochons of gemstones. The gemstones were lit up as if from the inside and sparkled like agitated stars.

  “Test, Test, where’s the blasted Test!?” exclaimed Valerie, looking frantically around the room. “Lead, light, and sand the Test define... Assassin! Search through the drawers in that desk for lead, sand, anything...”

  Sam wasn’t listening. Though the room was fairly dim, lit only by a diffuse glow without any visible source, he had noticed the windows. Stained-glass images, made eerie by their colors muted and darkened by the outside night, looked down at him. One in particular caught his attention and froze it; an image of Mizzamir, in all his silver robed glory, looking down at him, his expression mutated by the night into something old, slow, cold ... not darkness, but beyond it; a strange, uncaring expression that knew nothing of right or wrong, but only of good or evil...

  Valerie stopped her frantic scrambling among the tables to see what had stopped him. She followed his gaze, and then halted herself.

  A silent moment passed, then she whispered; “Of course. How could I have been so stupid? Lead and sand ... glass. Stained glass held in a lead matrix ...”

  Her voice tore Sam out of his reverie. “But it also required light, didn’t it? There’s no lamps in here... and it won’t be dawn for hours yet,” he whispered back.

  “And we can’t wait here until it is,” Valerie replied with determination. “We’ll just have to hope that isn’t important.”

  “You’re right... that has to be the Test... But how do you activate it?” Sam moved back toward the door, not from fear, but from caution; his danger sense was beginning to prickle, and the fire was starting to rush and burn in his blood. He could actually smell Mizzamir in the air of this room, a faint sickly smell like lavender and cedar.

  “Should be fairly obvious,” retorted Valerie. “Ancient magic’s brine. That font has to be at least as old as this tower, and the best liquid for scrying is a saline solution ... we used to collect the tears of tortured slaves, back in the Underrealm.”

  So saying, she grabbed a glass beaker off a handy table and plunged it into the font. The gemstones flashed painfully bright, and a crackle of familiar blue sparks exploded around her. Nightshade flew straight up, cawing.

  The sorceress, taken off guard, was unable to keep herself from flinging the brimming beaker up and away, sending it crashing, contents and all, over the suspected Test window.
>
  The noise was like the shattering of the ice-gates of doom. The lights on the font vanished, leaving the room full of dim shadows and ringing afterimages. Nightshade perched on a bookcase, wings trembling.

  It took a few seconds for them to recover. Then Valerie said, “Of course, many mages chose to guard their fonts with various spells. I admit to a lack of caution on my part.”

  “Nothing’s happening to the window,” reported Sam, “except that it’s wet.” Valerie came over and gently touched the glass. It was indeed wet and cold. But there was the faintest crackle of powerful magic under her fingertips ...

  “It’s the right window, the right actions ... it just needs something else ...” she said, frowning in concentration.

  “How about light?” suggested Sam. Then wished he hadn’t.

  The room exploded into brilliant white radiance.

  Sam’s assassin fires flared like lightning as sudden shock hit him. With a soft warm blast of displaced air, and a swirl of golden smoke, the Arch-Mage Mizzamir appeared in the center of the room, near the font. His ornate staff was shining like the sun, and in the brief conscious glance Sam had, before the fire filled his vision, he looked more upset than Sam had ever seen; which is to say, he looked mildly annoyed.

  “Now then, this has gone far enough,” he began ...

  But the light from his staff filled the room. It blasted the shadows away and rebounded, filling and spilling like liquid silver ... it lit up the windows bright as noonday, shining out through them and back inside so that they glowed like jewels aflame. Valerie, her hand resting on the window, barely had time to notice the sudden surge of magic under her hand before powerful forces swept her up and sent her spinning down inside a whirlpool of rainbow light.

  Mizzamir himself flinched from the sudden burst of light that exploded from the main window. And before he could look back again to see the Nathauan sorceress vanish, a dark, heavy shape had crashed into him, daggers flashing. Nightshade flew out the door, croaking at the top of his lungs.

  Down in the city, Robin and Blackmail, still looking up at the Tower, saw it explode with brilliant light. Several other people saw, and pointed and exclaimed in amazement.

  But Blackmail grabbed Robin’s arm and yanked him along, running at a clanking trot along toward the Castle. After a few paces, he stopped at a light two-horse carriage, near which was tethered a riding palfrey, saddled and bridled. He swung himself up on the palfrey and grabbed the leading reins of the carriage, and, beckoning Robin to follow, set off for the Castle at a brisk trot, the horse and carriage rumbling obediently alongside.

  Robin, not wanting to go but unsure if he could refuse, followed behind.

  Mizzamir had not gone into this confrontation unprepared.

  Sam’s daggers flashed but were repelled by a blast of force that sent him flying backward. He crashed into a wall, but staggered to his feet as he saw the mage begin to ready a spell. Suddenly, a thought sprang into his firestormed brain: Got to get him out of here! If Valerie returns successful he can take the Segment of the Key and then he’s won! The door was still open. He dodged a bolt of paralyzing blue energy, then faced Mizzamir.

  “You want me, wizard, you’ll have to catch me,” he hissed, and ran for it.

  Valerie found herself in a large cavern, lit with a dim green-purple light that made the true size of the vast echoing area impossible to determine. It might once have had pillars in it, for she saw piles of broken columns lying about in disarray on the floor. The stone, air, dim light, and craftsmanship were certainly not that of the Castle ... nor was the creature that raised itself up from behind a pile of broken stone.

  Valerie’s fine black eyebrows flew up in shock as she recognized a creature from the window panels of the Test, a strange beast that the wizard Mizzamir himself had fought and destroyed in the furthest depths of Putak-Azum, a battle matched only in fame by his confrontation, in the higher vaults of the same catacombs, with the Dark dragon Kazikuckla. Valerie felt she would far have preferred to meet a clean, simple dragon rather than the monstrosity which reared before her now.

  It was the Thur-Uisgie, a demon spawn from the early days of the world, a terrible, powerful creature. She could not recall if Mizzamir had fought the beast singlehandedly then, her mind wandering in distraction and shock. It obviously couldn’t be the same one... could it?

  It seemed horribly real. Even its smell, a stink like rotting corpses, was authentic enough to make even her Nathauan stomach retch.

  It had a dragon’s head, topping a human torso, and sprouted shriveled vestigial batwings from the shoulders.

  A mane of fine black quills hung down around its head, and its three red eyes gleamed as it saw her. Its mouth showed small sucking fangs, and its three spindly arms terminated in long thin fingers. It stood upright on hind legs like a horse’s, covered in fine scales. It had a scaly tail barbed with more quills, and it rattled these together now as it spoke in a hissing voice.

  “So, someone comes to take the Tessst?” Valerie stood her ground. Too often had a mage been overtaken in the preliminaries of battle by an illusion.

  “You can’t exist,” she stated firmly, forcing her voice to remain steady as she bent her will to believe what she was saying. “And even if you do, you don’t have any magic. You are evil, your magic would be evil... and I hold the last of the Darkportals.”

  The Thur snapped its fangs at her. “Excellent reasoning, small Nathauan ... but you forget I am now but a created creature in the service of Arch-Mage Mizzamir, and thus can draw my energy from the forces of Light ... which as you know out-powers your own consssiderably. Prepare to die!” Its mouth snapped suddenly, and it began weaving the air with its hands as it cast a spell.

  “Thuckssisam maleestafn’wa... “

  Valerie was taken off guard, but the first few words of the spell were familiar, and she instantly began chanting the appropriate counterspell.

  “Kiliani marusha prethanus ... “

  Valerie had fought something similar to this wizards’ duel time and time again with young upstart sorcerers in the depths of the Underrealm. Her Darkportal, in fact, had been won from a higher sorceress whom Valerie had defeated, long, long ago. But circumstances had been different; the ranges had been closer, the spells had conflicted and interfered with each other so that each one had more or less bounced off the other as they manifested (a common problem in mages’ duels when both sides were using spells at close range, without room to dodge).

  But here, in this maze of pillars and rubble, facing the alien demon-thing, the battle would be different. Now it was spellcast and resist and counter, dodge and chase and retaliate. And what with this much rubble to interfere with full volley and this much distance to play with, the outcome was likely to be far from stalemate.

  Valerie barely finished her defense in time. In the moment before it manifested, a glowing golden dart shot from the Thur’s scaly fingertip. The bolt struck her in the shoulder, causing searing pain and blistering damage as it vanished, but the next seven hit and vanished against an invisible shield of magic force.

  “Haass ...” snarled the Thur. “So you do know some magic, then ... well, perhaps I shall crush you with my bare hands!” It began to cast once more, a personal spell, Valerie judged, from the gestures.

  “Maximus porenthus atalus...”

  She decided to attack while it was thus preoccupied.

  She chanted rapidly and fired a bolt of devastating redblack energy. It struck the monster full in the chest, causing it to keen in rage and tremble with sudden weakness, its spell of magical strength gone.

  Looks like I’m going to need a bit of a backup, Valerie thought. She took from her components pouch a pair of tiny representative items, and began to chant once more.

  The Thur hissed and began spellcasting as well.

  Valerie wasn’t hoping for much when she cast her summoning spell. The incantation would bring a few minor beings of this world to fight for her, regard
less of how they might feel; but with the world as it was there weren’t a whole lot of usefully dangerous things left.

  In fact, as the air in front of her shimmered, she was startled to see three red-robed apprentice wizards from the convention appear, holding stacks of notes. They gaped at her in blank astonishment, until the Thur completed its spell with a flourish and blew them away in a wash of gore. They screamed as they fell, oozing, then exploded.

  The blast knocked the sorceress behind a pillar, and she quickly began chanting an offensive spell while the Thur blinked. It licked the spattered gore away from its eyes and dispatched one of the still-squirming apprentices with a stomp of its heavy hoof. Valerie then jumped up from shelter and fired her spell.

  Sharp sparks began to pelt down upon the Thur, and it hissed in anger, fangs snapping as it shouted a counterspell.

  It seemed to burst into violet flames that formed a shield around it, smothering the sparks. Using this momentary protection, it cast a lethal spell with a snarling hiss. Valerie cursed as a cloud of billowing, poisonous yellow gas erupted from the monster’s hooves and began rolling toward her. An acrid stench began to fill the room as the flickering, fire-shielded Thur cackled in triumph. Valerie hastily muttered a spell.

  “Palonius teletrasin portula... “

  She knew of this magic, it was one that the Verdants had used to slay the Nathauan in their tunnels; the gas would not move back to its caster. She used a powerful shot of her energy to teleport herself behind the Thur.

  Then she immediately began an attack spell. The Thur startled at her vanishing, spun around, saw her, recognized the words she was chanting, and, panic stricken, spun a dome of shimmering light around itself to protect it from the spell. Valerie finished the spell, and instead of aiming the sudden beam of green light at the protected Thur, she aimed it at the creature’s feet. Her Darkportal throbbed against her neck, sending an icy burning through her bones as she drew dangerously powerful amounts of raw negative energy from it, to combine matter with its exact opposite ...

  The stone beneath the Thur suddenly vanished with an explosive roar, and the monster fell with a shriek and a clatter into a deep pit. A volley of sharp quills rattled up, but Valerie dodged behind a pillar and hid herself in the rubble.