Dark Lord of Derkholm

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Above the valley Kit screamed even more dreadfully and lurched in the air. Two black stalks were sticking out of his chest. Another black stalk was slantwise into one wing. As Derk stared, scarcely able to credit this, the shadowy figure vanished from Kit’s back and the mighty black illusion shrank. Kit was suddenly a black griffin half the size, tumbling and shrieking and turning in the air. One wing was flailing uselessly, whirling Kit upside down. Then he fell like a stone and plunged out of sight beyond the opposite trees. Only some big black flight feathers were left, twirling above the hill. All around, the soldiers cheered and shouted their hatred and joy. They had been out to kill Kit, and they had.

  Beside Derk, Callette spread her wings. “Stay where you are!” Derk snapped. “And you, Don.”

  He translocated himself, messily, and so jerkily that half of him seemed to be still in the valley for a second, among a battle that was breaking up into chaos. His own side was fighting itself. The werewolves, the monsters, and King Luther’s men threw themselves upon the soldiers in black. Groups of Pilgrims, cheering lustily at what they took to be the death of the Dark Lord, raced across the valley to join in, while the legions and most of the dwarfs and mercenaries hung back, bewildered by this. It was not part of the plan. They only moved when the fanatics stormed out of the woods and began attacking everyone impartially. As Derk arrived among the trees at the top of the opposite hill, the valley became full of a seething free-for-all. He knew he should have told Don and Callette to get to safety. They were going to be killed, too.

  But the lake was below him, long and blue-brown. He was in time to see the reflections of trees in it tossing and breaking in the great ring of waves where Kit had gone down. Bubbles came out of the center for a moment and then stopped. By the time Don and Callette arrived, Derk was staring at the very last ripples lapping the shore.

  “I told you—” he began. Then he gave up. “What’s the use? Did either of you see Prince Talithan?”

  “He went into that green haze,” Don said. “All the elves did when the fanatics came out.”

  “Barnabas went, too,” Callette said sourly. “He knew I was going to pull his head off.”

  Derk looked at her and saw blood on her beak and her talons. But it did not seem to be her own blood, so he did not let it worry him. His mind seemed to have closed down into a very small space. There was only one thing in it. “Follow me back to camp, both of you,” he said, and translocated again.

  In the camp, he collected the dogs, the pigs, and the Friendly Cows into a huddle and called Talithan. As Callette and Don landed by the river, the green haze swung and Talithan stood on the shale beside them. He was pale and breathing heavily, but he bowed politely to Derk. “You have need of me, Lord?”

  “Yes. Come over here,” Derk called to the griffins. “Talithan, do one more thing for me. Then you can collect Pretty from the Horselady and I won’t trouble you again.”

  Talithan looked puzzled. “But, Lord—”

  “The Horselady had no business to take Pretty,” Derk said. “Tell her from me that he’s yours. What I want you to do is to put all of us here into your green haze and move us back to Derkholm.”

  Talithan’s eyes moved dubiously from Derk in his huddle of animals to the two griffins. “So many,” he murmured.

  “Can’t it be done?” Derk asked.

  Talithan looked at his face. His manner changed. “I was merely thinking,” he said gently, “that very few have ever walked through our country. Of course it can be done. I shall take you through my own lands, Lord, all of you.”

  When King Luther and the Emperor Titus panted into the camp half an hour later, blood-spattered, exasperated, and wanting an explanation, they found the place deserted.

  TWENTY-THREE

  IT WAS A BIG MISTAKE, Blade discovered, to translocate in among a troop of galloping horsemen. It would have been a mistake by daylight. In the dark he was lucky not to be killed. Sukey’s kidnappers did not even know Blade was there. They simply galloped on. Reville, pounding up on foot around dawn, found Blade lying in the clump of gorse he had been kicked into some hours before.

  “Are you all right?” said Reville.

  “No!” said Blade.

  In fact, he was only very badly bruised. In the days that followed, he kept finding new black horseshoe shapes on new, unlikely parts of his body. But no bones were broken. Reville assured him of that. It seemed that all Thieves Guild members learned quite a bit about healing. And about making other people do what they wanted, Blade discovered. As soon as Blade was sitting up, moaning, Reville said, “Good. Now translocate us both to where those riders are.”

  Blade shuddered. “No. I can’t. I’m not going to get ridden over again.”

  “Just take us to a hundred yards behind them,” Reville said. “You can do that.”

  “Why?” said Blade.

  “Because I want to catch up with them before they do anything to Sukey, of course,” Reville said.

  “But there’s about half a hundred of them. What can we do?” Blade protested.

  “Only twenty or so. I’ll think of something,” Reville replied. “Come on. Think of Sukey.”

  Sukey, in Blade’s opinion, was not worth thinking about. He had only gone after her because, what with the dark, and the way she was screaming, he had woken up and thought it was still that morning when the soldiers tried to escape from the dome. Sukey’s screams had been very like Shona’s. He had realized it was Sukey and not Shona while twenty horses—only twenty? Well, that made eighty hooves—were each individually treading all over him. Now he did not want to move. But Blade was low and aching and feeble, while Reville was well and strong and worrying about Sukey. Reville won.

  They translocated. A hundred yards ahead, a tight little group of horsemen trotted over the moor away from them. All of them were in black except for one rider in the midst of them who was in pale blue. Blade’s heart sank. He knew who these were. Escaped soldiers. They could be the same group who had ambushed the bandits. Reville was right to be worried about Sukey. “There’s nothing we can do!” Blade moaned.

  “We keep following. They have to stop sometime,” Reville said.

  Blade could still hardly walk. He let the riders get well ahead and then translocated himself and Reville again. They did that all day until, finally, in the evening, the group stopped and made camp. Blade sat in an exhausted, aching heap and let Reville creep away to investigate.

  Reville was gone nearly an hour. “This isn’t going to be easy,” he said, arriving back suddenly in the twilight. Loaves, pieces of cheese, and a wine bottle thudded down in the heather beside Blade. “They’re keeping Sukey right in the middle. They’ve got ropes tied to her ankles and her wrists, and each rope is around a man’s wrist the other end. But they don’t seem to be hurting her. They seem to be arguing with her most of the time. I got close enough to hear her telling them all the bad things that would happen to them if they didn’t let her go, but that was all. Lucky they don’t keep any kind of a guard on their provisions. Let’s have supper and think.”

  Blade ate ravenously. Reville ate dutifully to keep his strength up. He really was wretchedly worried about Sukey, Blade realized. “Are you in love with her or something?” he asked Reville incredulously.

  “Don’t sound so astonished. She’s wonderful,” said Reville. “Yes, I am in love with her, if you must know. I never thought I could be before this. Ice cool, I used to call myself. Cynical. I was all set to marry an heiress for her money. But now I’m going to marry Sukey or die.”

  “She’s a tourist!” said Blade.

  “So?” said Reville. “I don’t hold it against her. And she’s promised to stay here with me.”

  Blade found this hard to believe. He thought Sukey must have been leading Reville on. It would be like her. So, the sooner they got Sukey back from those soldiers, the sooner she could disillusion Reville and the sooner Reville could return to sanity. “What are you planning to do?” he
said.

  “Go in there as soon as they’re asleep and cut the ropes,” Reville said. “Obviously. I’ll do it alone. You’re like a dragon with corns. I suppose it’s those bruises. You wait here.”

  “For transport,” Blade said bitterly. “Thanks.”

  But Reville’s plan did not work. He came back disgustedly at dawn with more food. “One of the four is on watch all the time,” he said, moodily tossing Blade a loaf. “I think they may have spotted us following them. Try keeping us further back today.”

  They tried that for the next two days. Blade’s bruises hurt more, and Reville became almost too tired to steal food. The evening of that third day Blade pointed out that, amazing as it was, no one had tried to hurt Sukey yet and the two of them were not going to be much use to her as they were. He explained that he could catch up with the soldiers, even carrying Reville along, from anywhere up to fifty miles away, and he suggested that they have a day’s rest. Reville did not agree. He and Blade had a nasty argument. It only ended when Blade burst into tears, tore his beard off, and threw it at Reville.

  “Oh,” said Reville, staring at him. “I was forgetting you’re only young. And I tell you, it wouldn’t take much to make me cry, too. All right. A day’s rest. We move in when we’re fresh.”

  That was the evening the Horselady called in all the horses.

  This time it was Reville who got trampled. After the argument, both of them fell asleep, close together for warmth, with heather piled on them for further warmth. The last thing Blade heard was Reville demanding to know who the stupid fool was who decided that the tours always started in autumn, until even from a deep sleep, Blade heard and recognized the drumming of eighty hooves. He translocated without properly waking up, and settled down to sleep again a hundred yards away. He found Reville in the morning by the groans.

  “Gods!” Reville howled. “I tried to get up and run! A mistake.” After a long pause he added, “You know, I don’t think I was sympathetic enough when this happened to you.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Blade said. “The kidnappers are walking now.”

  Unfortunately Sukey’s captors seemed to have decided that someone had stolen their horses. For the next few days they were so watchful that Reville did not dare limp too near them. They sprang up at the least noise and stabbed their swords into bushes. And they guarded Sukey as if she were the most valuable thing in the world. If they had not been forced to abandon quite a heap of provisions when the horses left, Blade and Reville would have starved as they hobbled along behind. As it was, they had more stale bread than they could carry.

  The kidnappers were clearly going somewhere. They crossed the moors in a steady, straight line and eventually struck a road, a well-used-looking road with high bushy banks and wheel marks on its stony surface. Blade and Reville pursued mostly by letting the group get out of sight and then translocating to where they could see them again. In between, Reville was too bruised to do much except sit and look gloomily at the ruined wristwatches on his arm and worry about Sukey. He thought there must be an outlaw stronghold that the men were making for. He told Blade that the Thieves Guild knew of hundreds of people who had been kidnapped for no apparent reason, over in the east, and that nobody ever found where they had been taken. “We must rescue her before they get wherever they’re going,” he kept saying.

  The road made things a little easier. The soldiers seemed to relax once they were on it, and Blade found that the high banks made it possible to get quite close to them. Whenever the trudging group stopped, Blade took hold of Reville’s skinny, muscular arm and brought them behind a clump of gorse or some small trees on the bank, where they lay flat and listened to Sukey’s high voice, arguing.

  “This is not going to do any of you the slightest good, you know. Where do you think I’m going to run to, anyway? You’ve all got great long legs. You could catch me at once if I ran away.”

  None of the men seemed to attend much to Sukey. They treated her more like a valuable animal than anything else. But during the second day of sneaking after them along the road, Reville nudged Blade as they lay behind some dead blackberry bushes, and pointed. Blade saw that Sukey now had only one rope on her, around her waist. It was also clear that the men had expected to get wherever they were going before this and were running out of food.

  “We can manage one more day, with luck,” one of them said. “How far is it now?”

  “Take us at least two days more,” replied another, who had a tattered map. “More like two and a half at the rate she walks.”

  Blade felt he had known these two men for a long time. He had first seen both of them when he and his family had helped Barnabas get the newly arrived army to the camp near Derkholm. He had pushed past them on Nancy Cobber and noticed that they seemed less drugged than the rest. Meanwhile Reville was plucking at Blade’s sleeve in an alarmed way. After the party had heaved to its feet again, cursing and grumbling, and hauled the arguing Sukey off down the road, Reville said, “We’re running out of time. As soon as they get to their hideout, we’ll have no chance.”

  This was certainly true. “What do you suggest?” Blade asked.

  “I think,” said Reville, “that I’ve got the hang of this translocating now.” Blade stared at him. Reville grinned. Despite the big yellow and green bruise on his face, it was almost his usual jaunty smile. “I’m a magic user,” he told Blade. “Most thieves have to be. I’ve been watching fairly closely what it is you do when you translocate. And if I can do it, too, then we can both jump in among them, cut that rope, grab Sukey before any of them can stop us, and jump out again with her. Mind if we practice a bit?”

  They spent the rest of that day practicing. At first Reville could only move himself a few feet and his direction was unpredictable. Blade got used to dodging fast. But Reville’s face set in stern, determined lines. “It’ll come,” he panted. “I was like this over picking pockets, and now I’m up with the best. I’ll fetch up by that rock over there by this evening, you’ll see.” And he did. Blade was impressed.

  At sunset Blade took himself to the bank above the place where the kidnappers were camping in the road. After a pause Reville arrived, too, muddy down one side. “Slight mistake. Ditch,” he explained. “Where is she?”

  To their disgust, Sukey was once more attached to four ropes for the night. They waited anxiously for daybreak. At dawn they shared a hard, greasy end of cheese and watched the kidnappers share much the same between themselves and Sukey. Then someone tied a rope to her waist, and the band moved off.

  “Thank Wiksil!” whispered Reville.

  “Who’s Wiksil?” Blade asked.

  “God of thieves. Are you ready?” said Reville. Blade supposed he was. “Then go!” Reville cried out.

  He went. Blade went a scared instant later and found himself in among black armor, sweaty smells, and startled, unpleasant faces. Sukey was partly behind him. He grabbed her by her travel-stained blue silk and, as his fingers met in it, he heard Reville shout, “And go!” So he took off again. After that it was highly confusing. Sukey screamed all the time, which made it even more confusing. Blade rather thought that he tried to translocate in one direction while Reville went in another. However it happened, they went in a set of wild zigzags. Blade saw moor, mountainside, different moor, a sucking marshy place, and—for one terrifying instant—the men in black all around him in the road again. He and Reville leaped frantically away from that—road, bank, more bank, another stretch of road—bundling and wrenching the screaming Sukey between them. And at this point Blade sorted out that it was no good expecting Reville to get it right and tried pushing the next time Reville pulled. He pushed hard, to get as far away as possible.

  They ended up staggering and splashing in the edges of a barren little mountain lake, high in a cup of khaki-colored hills somewhere. Blade realized he had hold of Sukey by the seat of her trousers and let go quickly. Sukey stopped screaming and flung herself on Reville.

  �
��Oh, Reville, darling! I knew you’d rescue me!”

  “I was behind you all the way, my love,” Reville said. “Now I’ll never let you go.”

  The two of them stood kissing passionately in the water, regardless of wet boots.

  Well, well, thought Blade. Perhaps she wasn’t just leading him on after all. Feeling rather let down, he waded and squelched among spiky rushes until he reached drier turf, where he stood and looked around the barren lake for some clue to where they might be.

  It was not so totally deserted as he had first thought. A low green spit prodded out into the water just below a place where the mountains formed a kind of saddle. There was someone fishing from the end of the spit. He must have been very much engrossed in his fishing because he had not even turned around to see what the screaming and splashing had been about. Blade squelched along the lakeside toward him. It was, he found, one of those confusing landscapes where everything is smaller than you think. He reached the spit of land quite quickly, and the mountain rearing above was only a hill really.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  The man fishing turned around with an inquiring smile. He was wearing huge wading boots and clothes the color of the hills surrounding them. He seemed young and good-natured. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “Can I help?”

  “We’re a bit lost,” Blade explained. “Can you tell us the best way to go?”

  “The nearest big place is Costamaret,” the fisherman said. “It’s more than a hundred miles southeast of here.”

  “Oh,” said Blade. He thought about translocating there and realized, just by thinking about it, that his ability to translocate had been completely drained for the moment by the mad zigzag struggle with Reville. “Is there anywhere nearer than that?”