The Dark Lord

by Jack Heckel

  We walked in silence for a time. I was enjoying wearing jeans and soft-soled shoes, and not thinking about my research project. I was so wrapped in the thrill of these pleasures that it took Eldrin two tries to get my attention.

  “Avery? Are you there?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your research. It worked? You were actually able to create a self-perpetuating construct that operates to stabilize your subworld’s reality matrix permanently?”

  Sorry, but Eldrin talks like that sometimes. Forgive him, because if you don’t I certainly never will.

  “I suppose,” I answered without much enthusiasm. This was exactly what I hadn’t wanted to do: rehash my time in Trelari. I decided to keep the conversation theoretical. “I proved that the spell I wove into the pattern of the world was able to generate sufficient force from within the subworld itself to prevent a collapse. I wouldn’t go much farther than that though. The ‘self-perpetuating’ aspect relies on a sociological construct, based on the mythological archetype of the Dark Lord and the continuing threat of his rise. One day someone will need to go back and make sure the spell is capable of addressing future reality collapses with no additional intervention.”

  “Someone?” Eldrin asked in surprise. “I thought you wanted to handle the follow-up work. A project like that could easily justify a half-dozen multiyear research grants. Your own lab. Your own army of adepts to do all the grunt work. You’d be set for life, or at least past your thirties, which is pretty much the same thing.”

  I shrugged away the question, and to his credit he didn’t press me. The truth of it was, he was right. How many times had he patiently listened to me late at night laying out my master plan to become the next Magus Griswald. Using the spell construct I’d developed for Trelari, I would travel the universe experimenting on a dozen different subworlds, varying and refining my technique until I became a legend. That had always been the dream, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  I hadn’t lost faith in the magic. I was certain that absent my spell the strain on Trelari’s reality would have fractured the world in another century or so. Now it would be stable for millennia. The magic worked, what I had begun to doubt was whether I had what it took to be a true subworld magus.

  Eldrin remained silent and let me wander through these thoughts at my leisure. He is very sensitive to ruminating and daydreaming, because he is prone to those practices himself. It was one of the things I liked best about him.

  After a time and apropos of nothing he said, “Still, it’s a little disturbing.”

  I was familiar enough with Eldrin’s convoluted thought processes to know that there would be a logical connection if I gave him enough time to reveal it. Today I was in no hurry. “What is disturbing?” I asked.

  He glanced at me and I watched the moonlight trace crazy patterns in the flickering spots of silver in his eyes. “The results of your study,” he said. “If it’s possible to stabilize subworlds using sociological constructs, then half the theories about how and why subworlds work are wrong.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but Eldrin had the bit in his teeth, and there was no stopping him.

  “For years there have been two schools of thought,” he explained, ticking them off on his fingers. “The deterministic school, which is supported by etherspace physicists like myself, that says subworld creation and collapse can be understood in simple physical terms in accordance with fundamental principles that can be expressed mathematically, and the organic school, supported by arcana geneticists and other cranks, that says subworlds are like cells or organisms that have natural, if unpredictable, life cycles. If you’re right, wouldn’t it seem to indicate that the societies and even individual beings on those worlds decide their own fates?” He flung his arms wide. “There would be no meaning to . . . to anything.”

  I dismissed his concerns with a chuckle. “Trust you to find deep water in shallow pools. I’ve only studied one subworld. That’s hardly proof of a universal truth, much less a scientific law. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  His eyebrows drew down close around his eyes, and he bit his bottom lip. “I don’t know. Your theory verges awfully close to Jordanian creationism. What about the Van Dorn Apocalyptic Postulate? Does your theory explain why subworlds become unstable in the first place?”

  “No,” I confessed. “Like everyone else, I know the symptoms that lead to subworld collapse, but not the cause. It’s like . . . gravity. It is easy to see how it affects things, but wrapping your head around the fact that it curves space either requires an enormous quantity of mind-altering drugs or being Einstein.”

  He snorted at my analogy. Eldrin had never been impressed with the state of science on Earth. “What does Griswald say?” he asked.

  His mention of my mentor brought me up short. He walked a few paces more, and then, noticing I had stopped, turned back to me. We were in one of the many parks on campus, and the path we were following was meandering its way uncertainly through a thick grove of trees. The world was quiet and dark.

  “Where were you thinking of going tonight?” I asked as nonchalantly as possible.

  “To the Cove, of course,” he said in a puzzled tone. “Why?”

  Covenant House, the Cove for short, was the place to go for faculty and students of the Subworld Studies Department. If I showed my face there it would be sure to get back to Gristle would be sure to hear about it, and then my little subterfuge about when I got back would come out. He would crucify me. I shivered again, but this time it had nothing to do with the cold.

  “Um,” I started uncertainly, “let’s go someplace else tonight.”

  “But we’re almost there.”

  “I know, but . . . I don’t feel like going there tonight.”

  “Why?” he pressed. “I thought you’d be all keyed up to tell everyone about your brilliant success.”

  Normally he’d be right, but I actually wasn’t, and not only because I was playing truant. Rather than try and tease out the many threads of my jumbled emotions with Eldrin right then, I decided to lie. I mumbled, “It’s nothing. I just don’t feel like going there tonight.”

  He tilted his head to one side as he studied me. “What have you done?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  “Come on, out with it,” he pressed. “What is it that makes you so keen to avoid a place where people might know you?”

  I sighed with the realization that I would have to confess—at least partially. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just that—technically—I’m not back yet.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You aren’t experimenting with split-worlding, are you? That is really dangerous. I knew a guy that tried it once so he could moonlight as a bartender in an off-world pocket reality during the semester, and he ended up losing half his small intestine.”

  I shook my head. “It’s nothing like that. Hell, I wouldn’t know how to do that if I wanted to. I just didn’t log my return.”

  “So your circle is still going?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said in the hopes of staving off the more difficult questions he might ask.

  Without another word, I set off down a side path that would take us away from Covenant House. He fell into step beside me. A moment of silence passed and I almost relaxed, but then I heard a sharp intake of breath from him.

  “Wait. You don’t still have 2A7C’s reality key with you?”

  I ignored the question and kept walking, but he grabbed my arm and turned me around to face him. His eyes were wide with alarm. I decided blunt honesty was the best course. “Of course I have the key, Eldrin. I couldn’t check it in, could I? The bastards in the storeroom would have immediately logged me back into Mysterium.”

  He was staring at me like I had sprouted a second head, not that such a thing was entirely out of the question in Mysterium, but you get the point. I pulled out of his grasp and started walking again. “It isn’t that big a deal,” I said.

  He lurched into a half jog to keep up
with me. “Not a big deal!” he shouted, and then lowered his voice as he heard his words echo back to him across the empty campus. “You literally have the key to a reality in your pocket. If you were to lose it—”

  “I won’t,” I said, cutting him off. “It’s perfectly safe.” I patted the chain around my neck to reassure him. “I want one night of freedom before I report to Gristle. You know that once he and his imp get their claws into me, it’ll be two solid weeks of working around the clock before I see the sun again. And Harold hates me. He’s always trying to bite me when Gristle isn’t looking.”

  “But . . . think of the risk. If he finds out he’ll throw a fit.”

  “Who, the imp?”

  “No, Griswald!” he hissed. “And quite trying to change the subject. What are you going to do about the key?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and set off again. “Tomorrow morning I’ll officially return, but tonight I am going to have a little fun. I’d advise you to do the same.”

  By this point we had reached the object of our journey, a little hole in the wall frequented by members of the School of Magical Ethics and Mystical Literature. (I mean, literally there was a round hole in an otherwise featureless wall with a lamp hanging next to it illuminating a sign that read arda hall.) From what I’d heard, the beer was supposed to be good and the girls cute. It was perfect for tonight, because I could almost guarantee that no one else from Subworld Studies would be there.

  “Arda Hall?” Eldrin said at my heel. “Why are we going here? It’s full of ethics majors. They’ll be talking Tolkienian philosophy all night, and you know I can’t stand dualists.”

  “Stop whining, Eldrin,” I said. “We are here to have a few drinks and maybe, if we are lucky and you don’t start going on about post-Donaldson relativism, meet a girl or two.”

  He sighed in resignation. “All right, at least the food is supposed to be good.”

  “That’s the spirit.” I pushed him through the hole.

  Arda Hall looked a bit like an Oxford pub on the inside, with a low beamed ceiling, a broad stone hearth set with a crackling fire, and a long polished bar that stretched along one wall. Sprinkled here and there were tables and a couple of secluded booths. The place was full, but not crowded. In the far back they had cleared a space for a stage on which a quasi-Celtic singer, backed by a fiddle, a flute, and a bodhrán, was going on about losing her true love in a meadow or something.

  I don’t know that I believe in love at first sight, but I can say that the moment I slipped through that hole in the wall, my eyes fixed on one woman, and I couldn’t tear them away.

  She was sitting at a table near the fire talking with a dark-haired girl who had her back to me. I know it’s cheesy, but it was her eyes that first got my attention. They were almond shaped and of an extraordinary aquamarine blue shot through and ringed in gold.

  It is cliché that you can tell a lot about a person from their eyes, but for a magus it happens to be true. Magic always leaves a mark on the caster, and for Mysterium mages, the mark is left in the eyes. Eldrin’s eyes are silver speckled because he works in deep etherspace; my once bright blue eyes have faded nearly to gray from spending so much time travelling in subworlds. Gold rings meant she was a seer, or more likely a student in the Department of Divination and Prognostication, or something like that—it’s a mouthful. What ever she was, it was fascinating to wonder whether she saw something in my future that made me so interesting to her, because she had been staring at me since I came in.

  I stared unabashedly. She was willow thin and small-busted, and had a pretty face, slender and rounded with a creamy complexion that made me think of the pale light just before dawn. A wavy curtain of corn-silk blond hair fell down her back to just below her shoulders. I watched as she brushed a few loose strands back behind her ear. Then she leaned forward, briefly shifted her gaze to her friend, and whispered something. The other girl turned and looked at me. With a roll of her eyes she picked up her drink and headed toward the back of the pub. I barely paid any attention to her leaving, because those blue-gold eyes were back on me. I was mesmerized. I think I would have gone straight to her without a word to Eldrin had he not grabbed my arm.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Over there,” I said, not taking my eyes from her.

  “No, you’re not. I’m not going to let you abandon me to starve in this wretched dive so you can go hit on, and likely get rejected by, the first girl you see. You promised me an evening out, including dinner.”

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out some notes, and thrust them into his hand. “Here,” I said with a grunt.

  Eldrin started to say something, but after looking back and forth between the two of us he must have thought better of it. With a roll of his eyes and a shale of his head he let me know with perfect clarity the disdain he felt at that moment for the shallowness of humans. Without another word he wandered off to the bar.

  I took a couple of deep breaths to steady my nerves and walked over to her. On the way I came up with a dozen devastating lines, but when the moment came to say something all I could manage was “Hi, I’m . . . may I . . . um . . .”

  “Hello, Avery,” she said in a soft musical voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Chapter 4

  VIVIAN

  Only after I sat down across from her did the implications of what she said hit me. She knew my name and knew that I would be here even when I had not. A rush of warmth passed through me as I contemplated all the other things about me she might know.

  She raised a golden eyebrow and said, “Well, aren’t you going to say something?”

  My throat was suddenly dry, and my tongue didn’t want to work. Still, through a supreme effort I managed to force out, “Hi, uh, I’m . . . Avery?”

  She drew her lips together in an enigmatic smile and said, “Yes, I think we’ve established that. And I’m Vivian. Nice to meet you.”

  The barmaid put a beer down in front of me. Vivian smiled. “I hope you don’t mind, I ordered for you.”

  I sat down across from her and took a sip—a Hylar pilsner. “My favorite!”

  She laughed. “I know.”

  I nodded stupidly in reply and took a long drink to try and cover my continued inability to speak. To be fair to me, it is pretty intimidating to talk to a beautiful woman under any circumstances, but try it with one that seems to know what you’re thinking when you’re thinking it, and what you’re going to say before you say it.

  “I’m an acolyte in the School of Portents and Augury,” she volunteered, and when I still said nothing, she continued. “My specialty is future shaping. It’s based on the theory that, if one knows the future in sufficient detail, it should be possible to ‘shape’ that future by manipulating events in the present. For example, let’s imagine that I knew the barmaid was going to trip over the bodhrán player on her way back to the kitchen and drop her tray . . .” Wetting her finger in the condensation on the outside of her glass, Vivian drew a circle on the center of the wooden table with the moisture. “That would be the target event.”

  She had beautiful hands, long and tapered, with delicate nails that shone with a pearly glow in the firelight.

  “Are you paying attention, Avery?” she asked.

  I tore my eyes away from her delicate wrist. “Of course. Future shaping. Fascinating.”

  She pursed her lips, but continued. “Well, one could focus one’s mind on that event and try and trace back—” fishing an ice cube from her glass she used it to draw a series of ever smaller circles to the right of the first and interconnected them with arrows “—the cause to some event that could be altered, and then—” she drew a new arrow that bypassed the original circle “—shape the future to avoid the accident. It’s all part of some pioneering work by Magus Herbert. I’ve applied to join his group for my adept-level studies.”

  Vivian raised an arm and signaled to the barmaid. She had been about to take a tray of dirt
y glasses back to the kitchen, but instead put it down and came over. I started to order another beer, having surprisingly found that I had finished the first. Vivian stopped me and asked, “Can we get the check, please?”

  The barmaid looked between us and gave Vivian a knowing smile. “No problem,” she said, and went to retrieve the check.

  It took me a moment to realize what was going on. When I did I spluttered, “You’re leaving? I had hoped to . . . I mean, I was having such a good time.”

  She leaned across the table and dropped her voice. “I thought you might walk me back to my college. It’s late and, unlike you adepts, we acolytes have exams to take. Besides, it’s too loud and I want to hear all about you.” She dropped her hand onto mine. “Interested?”

  Rarely had I been as interested in anything as much as I was in her at that moment. I wanted to say something appropriately dashing in response, but as I have noted my brain was not properly engaged and all I managed was a stupid grin and a grunted, “Sounds great.”

  The barmaid came back and placed the check down on the table, then went back to the bar to pick up her tray. At that moment, there was a loud crash as the bodhrán player, who was clearly in his cups, toppled backward off the stage and slammed into the wall next to the kitchen door. A good-humored “Huzzah” erupted from the audience and several patrons rushed over to help push him back into place.

  I had the unshakable feeling that I was missing things, repeatedly, but Vivian was rising to go and there was no time to sort it out. I paid the bill and glanced about to see if I could find Eldrin. He was in a little booth beside the stage holding court with the dark-haired girl Vivian had been talking to when we entered. I pointed at them. “I see my roommate has met your friend—poor girl.”