"Enough!" Freetrick held up his hands, pushed...and blackness congealed out of the air around the head of the ax. It stuck there, embedded immovably in a miniature Maelstrom.
Now Freetrick pulled, and another patch of black mist wrapped about Yorinhart's middle and dragged him toward Freetrick. Who raised his razor-tipped gauntlets.
"Finish him!" Someone bellowed.
Freetrick blinked, the lightning flared across his eyes and went out. "No." He said, "wait."
He brought down his hands and looked up into the face of his enemy. "There's no need for either of us to die."
"Foul beast!" snarled the king. Spit flew from his mouth as he wrenched himself about in Freetrick's necromantic bindings. "I will kill you for what you did."
"I didn't do anything!" Freetrick shouted.
"Death!" from the audience.
"Shut up! Look," Freetrick said, more quietly, to the king held prisoner in front of him. "They kidnapped me the same way they did you. I'm not Skrean. They just put me in charge here."
"Truely?" Yorinhart's strange, sky-colored eyes squinted at Freetrick's face, as if seeing him for the first time. "Shining heavens, you are but a boy."
"Just calm down for a second while I sort this out," Freetrick said, darting glanced to left and right. People were approaching now, the audience closing in the ring around them.
"And yet I see upon you the mantle of the Evil One." Yorinhart whispered. "The night-dark eyes, the moon-white skin."
"Yeah, well they put this mantle on me."
The king's eyes narrowed as he hefted his axe. "And you clearly command the powers of death and the forces of the Maelstrom."
"You mean those guys?" Freetrick jerked a thumb back at his minions. "I can't command them to do crap. Do you know how hard it was for me just to get an edible breakfast out of them? Look." He held out his hands. "Just put the axe down, and we'll get your…political situation sorted out and I'll happily send you back to wherever you came from."
"Vaingloria."
"Right. I've got no problem with Vaingloria," said Freetrick. "It sounds lovely."
"It was," said the king, "before you invaded."
"Well," said Freetrick, "there's a new king now. Or there will be after this ceremony is over. And I'd like to…uh…start a new chapter of Skrean/Vainglorious relations." He held out his hand. "What do you say?"
Yorinhart looked at the hand, then back up at Freetrick. "What mummery is this?" He said, "I can never trust you, fiend."
"Yes you can," Freetrick insisted, "I'm one of the good guys."
The king looked at him then. He was, Freetrick realized, a rather old man. The other Skreans were all around them now, reaching out.
Yorinhart, son of Thorinhart, shook his maned head. "Then I pity you, boy. I pity you."
Something wrenched at Freetrick's necromantic senses. Someone else pushed, hard, against the king of lost Vaingloria. Then again.
And Freetrick, who had only absorbed the death of one small goblin, could not resist the pressure.
The king's blue eyes stayed locked on his as the man slid sideways. And into the pit at the center of the platform.
"Put your hand out!" someone bellowed, "to cast your shadow and catch the death …blast it!"
The king's eyes followed Freetrick as he toppled into the shaft, and fell.
"Why?" Freetrick whirled around. Pale, evil faces grinned or glowered at him from all directions. All directions except the direction of the opening into the volcano, of course. "Why did you do that? There was no need!" Lightning lit across Freetrick's black eyes as a wind reached down from the Maelstrom above to claw at his white hair. The red light streaming upward from the volcano pulsed and flared in time with his racing heart. "No need!" Screamed Freetrick. "What is wrong with you people?"
He saw that his court was grinning at him.
Then they reached out, as one, with hands and with necromancy, and shoved Freetrick backward, into the hole.
Chapter the Ninth
In which the Ultimate Fiend loses his Temper
Madene flew.
Maidencraft carried her through the air in long horizontal leaps, as fast as an arrow through the pine savanna of eastern Virgin Soil.
Madene could not smile against the cold wind that buffeted her face, but her heart soared with joy as the fallen leaves flashed by under her. The air that rushed around her was chill and pure, scented by the ponderosa pines that stood black and proud against the sky, piercingly blue and wide enough to fall into forever.
Madene spun round thrust off again in a shallow arc that would propel her another hundred yards through the air.
Madene had only been there a week, but she already knew she wanted to stay in Virgin Soil forever. She loved the wide open sky, she loved the smell of the air after rain, when the ponderosas released their resin. She loved her sisters, who treated her with respect and taught her the Craft of a Warrior Maiden. Nowhere else, and at no other time, had Madene felt so cherished, nor had she ever felt the purpose she had here, as a novice in the order of Deusca Maw.
The tall slim brush of a pine rose ahead of her and, as she had been taught, Madene spread her arms and banked, the fingers of her right hand brushing between clumps of bunchgrass as she swooped in an arc around the tree. As her body slid past the trunk, she planted her feet against it. The rough, jig-saw puzzle of the bark surface pressed into the soles of her moccasins as she kicked and she shot off like an arrow.
Quick bounces off two more trees corrected her course, shaking cones down from their branches and disturbing flocks of waxwings that rose and swirled, then settled back to their perches. Madene touched down, leapt up, then spun in the air to watch the elegant little birds before gravity overcame her Craft and she began to drift downward.
How many times had she wanted to do something like this in The Rationalist Union? To observe nature from a perspective other than that of a plodding hiker?
Madene glared at the blurring grass before her eyes. Why had her grandmother left this place? Why leave behind such power, such inner peace, such beauty? It was a question Madene would likely never be able to answer.
Ahoo ahoo. The bright tone of a Maiden’s horn snapped Madene out of her reverie. Two notes...danger! A call for aid! And the call came from the southeast, right where Istain and Selene were supposed to be. Madene fumbled in the leather bandolier that crossed over her chest. There, in the pocket near her hip, was a silver-plated conch shell the size of her hand. She kicked off the ground, rising as she grasped the shell and brought it to her lips to answer.
Ahooo—The bugle rang off the land below. Selene and Istain would hear it and respond. Unless whatever trouble they had found made answering impossible. But the answer came, and Madene looked down as she fell to see the trail she had to follow. Madene stooped, dove, and in truth flubbed the kick off the ground pretty badly. But a bounce off a tree gave her back her speed and sent her off in the right direction.
The path rushing under Madene was a crude one, more substantial than a game trail only because of the deep tracks left by the horses that travelled over it and the little bridges set over the occasional raspberry-choked stream. This far east, Madene couldn’t expect much more.
As the forests had thinned, so had human presence on the land, until only a few crumbling piles of stone stood to remind the traveler that anyone had ever lived here. It was to one such ruined fortress that High Maiden Kadene marched, from there to strike into the heart of The Kingdoms of Evil and push the Shadow out of these lands entirely.
Another bugle call-and-response took Madene across another stream—or perhaps it was the same one, looping around. She bounced over the reaching raspberry canes and swam through the crackling branches of cottonwoods and aspens. Whenever the road forked, Madene would spy-hop, leaping up to treetop level and bugling for Selene and Istain.
Madene made her way deeper into the border land between Virgin Soil and the Shadow of the Kingdoms of Evil. The land cha
nged as she did, the spaces between trees widening. That in itself was unsurprising—Madene was, after all, moving steadily deeper into the rain shadow of the mountains —but something was wrong. The bunch grass, which should have grown thickly with no trees to shade it, was still patchy and short, leaving ever larger areas of scabby, mostly bare earth.
Madene frowned at the ground as she flew over it. She had seen burned areas coming down from the mountains, but these were different: the tracks of earth urchins.
She didn’t see any of the animals themselves. She was after all looking for Selene and Istain, and they had been sent out here to hunt the vermin. Even so, the bare tracks the little monsters had chewed into the soil made her nervous. Madene bugled.
She waited, hanging in the air, but no reply came. Madene bugled again, more stridently, and although another bugle answered from somewhere back in the direction she had come, she heard nothing from Selene.
Madene’s lips moved in a soundless curse, and she stooped to the ground. In her haste, she came down wrong and fell onto her hands and knees, but soon she was running, then leaping, then flying again. What was keeping Selene from answering? Was she lying poisoned by an urchin? Or had she run afoul of some monster from the Kingdoms of Evil? Maybe Istain had taken away her bugle?
Then Madene saw the horse. It was tied to a half-bare aspen at the edge of another small stream, and Madene had to leap up far past the tree’s tip to bleed off her momentum. She waited, furious, for several long seconds while she slowly drifted down low enough to get a good look at the animal. And yes, there, was a large leather sack, and there was a long trident, urchin hunting equipment. Selene and Istain had been here.
Madene leapt into the air again, not so high this time, and bugled again for her friends. There was no answer, but there was a commotion in the uppermost branches of another aspen upstream. Was that the sound of raised voices? Madene grabbed the tree nearest her and swung herself through the air in that direction.
With nothing solid to push against, Madene couldn’t make distance across the treetops as fast as she could over ground, but she still moved faster than a running man could have. She half-jumped-half-swam toward the source of the noises she heard.
Madene’s ears strained as she swung and jumped and scrambled through the branches. There were raised voices, shouting, and over that, a kind of chittering, yowling, like angry cats. Then something streaked across Madene’s vision and she reflexively reached out to grab the nearest branch and stop herself.
Something large, furry, and shrieking scrabbled at her hand. Madene yelped in surprise as the creature swarmed up her arm, and then cried out in terror as a tiny, yowling, human face thrust itself at her. She had a blurred impression of yellow, furious eyes, black skin wrinkled and tiny white teeth bared in hate, a little fist raised to strike—
Madene’s eyes squeezed shut involuntarily, but her ears heard the woosh and the hairs on her skin rippled in the parting air. Something hot and wet splashed across her face.
Madene fell.
***
Freetrick fell upward through the column of red light. Under him, light from the magma shaft of Castle Clouds-Gather shone through a hole in the black stone platform like an angry and sinister sun.
The red lake of lava was boiling now, directly under Freetrick's dangling feet. The light it cast outlined Freetrick's body, casting his shadow onto the whirling Maelstrom above. That was the hole Freetrick had been pushed into, he remembered. He should have fallen to his death, like the poor exiled king. But instead the red light had pushed him upward and Freetrick had become the Ultimate Fiend. Freetrick wondered if falling into the lava might not be preferable. It would, at least, be quick.
His subjects were standing now in a circle around him, about twenty feet away and another ten downwards. There were DeMacabre, Feerix, and his bodyguard, Skystarke, looking respectively calculating, murderous, and nightmarish. I can't trust any of them, thought Freetrick, they'd kill me in a heartbeat. Bloodbyrn?
There she was, standing in the middle of a retinue of other women, women in revealing leather and metal, all gleaming spikes, straps, and bulging pale flesh. The sight worried him much more than the blood that dripped from Feerix's hands, and DeMacabre's mouth.
"Mr. Skree?" Freetrick called, but when he opened his mouth there was a clap of thunder and the words were lost. "Mr. Skree!" He called again, "Where are you?"
"Are you afraid of falling, my lord?"
Freetrick turned in the air. "Bloodbyrn!"
She stood at his side, staring at him with those wide, amber eyes. "Would you stare so, my lord?" She said, and for the first time, Freetrick realized that Bloodbyrn was topless. "Beware, oh king, of those who follow." Her breasts felt very soft when he reached out to stroke them.
Freetrick groaned. Bloodbyrn was reaching between his legs, and when her mouth came open, he saw it was full of silver fangs. "And the Center of the Storm is the Sword," she whispered as her fingers closed around him.
"Oh," said Freetrick, "I'm totally dreaming."
***
Electricity crackled as black eyes opened and the twelfth Ultimate Fiend of the Kingdoms of Evil awoke in his black, lava-hearted citadel. Far above his apartments, thunder crashed.
"Strike it out," mumbled Freetrick. He felt under his ear. There was an inkwell down there and a parchment glued to his cheek.
Freetrick moaned and closed his eyes. After a moment of internal debate he placed a hand beside his head and peeled his face off the surface of his desk.
It had been eight days since his coronation and the striking crazy-ass ritual still was still giving him nightmares. That and Bloodbyrn, of course, but what had that last part been about? Something about a sword?
"Mmm…bluh," Freetrick tried to shake the remaining images of topless Bloodbyrn out of his head, then winced as he felt all the vertebrae in his neck crackle together.
He had been practicing Necromancy with Feerix all week, a combination of drilling the forms and studying that had left him aching in body and mind. And it didn't help that he couldn't work any magic here without wracking moral anguish. Or tell anyone he wouldn't kill anyone without looking like a sissy. In their last practice, even the sacrificial victim had felt sorry for him. It had been an exhausting and humiliating three hours of mock-battle, after which Freetrick had stumbled back to his apartments and passed out onto his paperwork. And thinking of which...
Freetrick looked down at the document he had peeled off his face.
"Vile Council Speech. Version 9."
He swore.
The parchment was blotched with arrows, X's, crossings-out, and increasingly frantic notations as Freetrick's research through Skrea's records had progressed. Notes like where do we get our income at the top of the page became how the hell are these laws enforced as Freetrick read tax records, then does ANYONE do their job?? and monsters eat WHAT?
There were circles with phrases in them like "no useful production," arrows leading to other boxes like "no food" and "no taxes," with other arrows that eventually led to a large triangle sketched around the single word "COLLAPSE." There were an awful lot of arrows leading to that triangle. The ones that weren't pointed to another triangle, in which he had written "INVASION."
The newly blooded and consecrated Ultimate Fiend of the Kingdoms of Evil sat before his mighty flowchart, and he brooded.
There was a cough from behind the door.
"Enter," said Freetrick, and this time he did a good job of not wincing when the hinges of the door screeched.
"A horrendous morrow, oh Dictator of Furious Punishments."
"Horrendous morrow, Mr. Skree." Freetrick didn't look up. He needed to get this speech finished so he could practice before the council sessions. If he couldn't overhaul his government, geopolitics would kill him before Skrean nobles even had the chance. Now there was an incentive for cooperation. Freetrick groaned aloud.
Mr. Skree's attenuated fingers and toes scuffled across the
ceiling. "What worry so creases the face of the Master of Despair?"
Freetrick scowled up at his chamberlain. "I've been getting ready for the Vile Council meeting. Reading reports from the magistrates. Have you read this gibberish?" He slapped at the pile of skins with his free hand, "every possible decision it's possible to make wrong, the dark nobility has somehow made even worse! It's almost uncanny!"
"Indeed, fiend."
"Mr. Skree, there isn't a province…I mean an um...despotate in this kingdom that hasn't experienced a violent uprising in the past five years. How the hell am I supposed to control these people?"
"May the thews and sinews be stripped from this most lowly invertebrate for daring to cast this suggestion upon the tumultuous waters of the mind of the Ultimate Fiend, but the power of necromancy is vast and terrible indeed."
Freetrick snorted. "Necromancy. Don't talk to me about necromancy. Look." He strode to his desk and shuffled through the parchments there. "Look at this!" He thrust the parchment up so Mr. Skree's toenail-colored eyes could run across it.
"'Daily consumption report of the First Citadel of Mortality,'" he read, "'Agonday, 4 Skullmoon Year of the Rein of His Malevolence Despot Feerborg 1:
'Peasants murdered that their mortal energies might feed engines of darkness and shattered dreams: twice thirteen.
'Peasants murdered that their mortal energies might raise the Stones of Doom and unlock the Beast that sleeps at the bottom of the Abject Pit: thirteen and two.
'Peasants murdered that their mortal energies might power the Apparatus of Pinballs and Fear in the rec room: twice thirteen and ten.
'Peasants murdered that their mortal energies might feed the engines of darkness and shattered dreams, before someone told Blogrog we already did that this morning: twice thirteen.'"
Mr. Skree's eyes rose to Freetrick. "May this pitiful pile presume to order more slaves for the First Citadel of Mortality?"
"What? No!" Yelled Freetrick, "this is exactly the sort of thing-" he stopped, and squinted up at his chamberlain, "where would you order them from?"
The Kingdoms of Evil Page 21
