“If they move outside the influence of Drak, they will revert to their natural personalities,” Quillsmith agreed.
“Nonsense,” said Ladybird, smiling fixedly. “The Cloak travelled to Cluft without incident, before the Drak borders spread that far.”
“Only for a short while,” said Lord Kloakor, staring at her. “I felt his control slipping after only ten minutes outside of Drak, and that was only because the cloak itself gave him some protection.”
“It’s all part of my plan,” she blustered.
“No, it isn’t,” said Quillsmith, gazing thoughtfully at the viewing-window. “You are not controlling Kassa at all. Kassa is deceiving the Hero personalities into believing she is their leader.”
“We have to do something,” said Lord Invisiblus.
“Way ahead of you,” said Quillsmith.
***
The Cloak assisted Invisiblo and Dream Girl to carry Lord Sinistre across the skybridge. The Penman hung back, walking alongside Queenbeetle. Quietly, so as not to draw attention to them, he took hold of her sleeve. “I know what you’re doing, Kassa Daggersharp,” he said in a low voice.
She glanced at him, her golden eyes calm. “Hello, Quillsmith. Decided to join your friends in their takeover bid, did you?”
He shrugged, unable to explain his true motives with the other Light Lords listening to every word. “They’re my people, you’re not. If I don’t lead them, Ladybird will, and I hate to think what might happen. It’s about survival.”
“Funny,” said Kassa. “I thought it was about invasion.”
He eyed the other Heroes of Justice as they manhandled the bound and chaired Lord Sinistre down the slippery far side of the skybridge. “I manipulate these characters on a daily basis. I invented these characters. Do you think I can’t convince them that you are a villain?”
“I’m sure you could,” agreed Kassa, placing her other hand over his.
Light flashed behind Quillsmith’s eyeballs. Slowly, he keeled over and fell flat on the bridge, unconscious.
“Oh, Cloak, sweetie!” Kassa called out. “The Penman seems to have fainted. Could you help me carry him into the light?”
***
The draklight covered all of Cluft and quite a bit of the surrounding land. Silver sand was underfoot. The grass was gone, and whole trees had disappeared or been transformed into statues of trees. Since Cluft spread out on both sides of the Great Mocklore Highway, part of the road was also affected by the draklight, although this made little difference since roads are usually black and shiny anyway.
The Heroes of Justice stood on the highway, looking at the road as it stretched out to the west. Up ahead, there was a glimmer of daylight.
“Into the light,” announced Kassa/Queenbeetle, pointing imperiously, and dropping one of the Penman’s legs as she did so (the Cloak was holding the Penman’s arms).
“Into the light!” the others chorused joyfully.
The road was far from empty as they marched along it, Dream Girl and Invisiblo carrying the tyrant on his chair. Various citizens from Dreadnought, the nearest city, wandered purposefully towards the draklight, which transformed them into good little citizens of Drak as soon as they stepped across the border. Drak must be summoning them, Kassa guessed, luring them into its web as it had the people of Cluft. She turned to look behind her, and saw several shepherds from the Teatime Mountain and many bearded, braided Axgaardians approaching Cluft from the other direction.
If the lure of Drak had reached as far as Axgaard, they were in real trouble. The draklight would keep spreading. Nowhere was safe. “Let’s hurry it up, sweeties,” Kassa said in her Ladybird voice.
Finally, they reached the edge of the draklight. The Heroes of Justice exchanged gleeful looks, certain that their quest was complete, that the Reign of Darkness would be Ended and the tyrant’s downfall brought about.
Lord Sinistre, the tyrant in question, managed to look an extra bit anxious.
Kassa had never been so pleased by the sight of sunlight. It wasn’t that bright, since it should be nearly the end of the day. That didn’t matter. It was light enough for her purposes. She was looking forward to giving her brain a rest from the relentless draklight — not to mention shedding the candy-striped costume. She sped up a bit, and the Cloak moved faster to keep up with her. The limp body of the Penman swung between them.
Dream Girl and Invisiblo increased their pace as well, despite the heavy load of Lord Sinistre and his chair.
All six of them stepped out of the unreal darkness and into the fading sunlight of the afternoon.
Chapter 13 — Drak Side of the Light
Kassa kept moving for as many steps as she could manage, out in the normal daylight. She was worried that the draklight would expand in another leap and swallow them before they had a chance to shake off its effects. Finally she collapsed by the side of the road, dropping Egg (no longer the Penman or Quillsmith) on a grassy bank.
The Cloak pulled off his cloak, casting it aside as if he never wanted to see it again.
“Not ready to talk to you yet,” said Kassa, enjoying the feel of the last of the afternoon’s sun on her face.
“Fair enough,” said Aragon Silversword, sitting on the other side of Egg’s unconscious body.
They were quite a way out of Cluft now, in a relatively normal part of the countryside. To their left were Drak and Cluft, both cities shrouded beneath a dome of dark, menacing draklight. The green and swampy Middens lay behind them, the brightly coloured Skullcap Mountains loomed to their right and they could see a hint of the ocean straight ahead, peeping through the distant trees.
All this will be gone too, if Drak has its way.
Kassa raised herself up on her elbows, looking across at Lord Sinistre. “Still here, then? I was half-expecting you to vanish. You are a fictional character, after all.”
Still bound to his chair and gagged, lying sideways in the road where Clio and Sean had dumped him, Lord Sinistre looked much the same as he had within Drak; still garbed in a fancy black costume with another of those towering dark coronets pinned precariously to his head. Outside Drak, the outfit looked just a bit silly.
Sean and Clio had changed. Their Dream Girl and Invisiblo costumes vanished as soon as they crossed over (as had Egg’s, apart from the gold mask), leaving them dressed normally but with a sudden, horrible gap in their memories.
“Have I been kissing you again?” Clio asked in distaste.
“I’m sure I’d have the teeth marks,” Sean shot back.
They both sat down near Kassa on the bank, managing to do so without sitting anywhere near each other.
Egg woke up in a sudden rush. “Yah!” he exclaimed, staring around.
Kassa leaned over and plucked the gold mask from his face. “How are you doing, kiddo?”
“My mouth hurts,” he said, staring at the sky. “Is that daylight?”
“Yep,” said Kassa.
“Is it all over? You fixed it? Everything’s okay?”
“Nope,” said Kassa, drawing his attention to the seething dark dome which covered Drak, Cluft and quite a bit of the space between both of them.
“Oh,” said Egg. “Why does my mouth hurt?”
“I had to stun you,” said Kassa. “The chap who possessed your body was getting a bit too good at it. I might have overdone the zap a bit, sorry. It’s not something I do very often.”
“Right.” Egg looked at the gold mask she was holding between her fingers. His shoulders sagged slowly. “I wasn’t the Penman, was I?”
“You were.”
Egg was appalled. “He wasn’t even a serious character! I never finished drawing him because I couldn’t figure out if he was a hero or a villain.”
“He decided for you,” said Kassa. “What was Queenbeetle, hero or villain?”
“Oh, a villain,” said Egg. “The stories seemed to try and make her one of the heroes, but I wasn’t fooled. She was one of those nasty types.”
K
assa smiled faintly. “That she was.”
Egg glanced over at Clio. “Are you all right?”
“Mostly,” she muttered.
“Good.” He looked back at Kassa. “What about Singespitter?”
“He was supposed to come on ahead,” she said. “I’m not sure where he is.”
“May I ask a question?” asked Aragon.
Kassa sighed, wishing it didn’t feel so right to hear his familiar, dry voice interjecting. “If you must.”
“What are you wearing?”
She looked down at herself, to see that the pink candy-striped dress and hair were still firmly in place. “Oh, that’s horrible!”
“That’s what I thought,” agreed Aragon.
Kassa sang a single note, running her hands over the dress. The pink and white illusion vanished, leaving her in the dark red lace gown she had worn in Drak. She frowned. “That’s not right. That one should have vanished as soon as we left.” She tried again with a different note and different hand-gestures, and ended up in a wide-skirted denim dress with white petticoats and black boots. She couldn’t make any jewellery appear no matter how loudly she sang, so she gave up on it. Her belt was there at least, a reassuring strap of leather with useful pouches, knives and other trinkets hanging from it.
“Your hair’s still pink,” said Aragon.
“Shut up.” Kassa transformed her hair with another note. “Don’t look at me like that,” she added to Egg, who had been watching her various transformations with narrow eyes. “Some situations are emergencies because they are.” She looked down at her new clothes. “This will have to do.”
A shape flew over them. It was Singespitter, his white fluffy sheep body and bright green wings fully restored. He gave Egg an affectionate head-butt on the forehead, then jumped straight into Kassa’s arms.
She hugged him hard. “At least your wings weren’t damaged.” She felt for the familiar pouches which hung from her belt again, as it should be. “Shall I fix you up?”
Singespitter, whose face was badly bruised from his fight with the Heroes of Justice, nodded.
Kassa rummaged in various pouches, pulling out powders and potions which she tossed in Singespitter’s face and rubbed on his legs. Within a few minutes, he looked quite normal.
“Should we untie the Lordling?” Clio asked. The various Mocklore citizens who were still being lured into the draklight were having to step over or around Lord Sinistre in order to reach their destination.
“Shouldn’t we stop them?” Sean countered, pointing at the citizens. “They’ll give Drak even more power.”
“Don’t ask me these things,” said Kassa. “I need a nap.”
Aragon stood up and went over to the fallen Lordling. In one swift movement, he lifted Lord Sinistre up and sat him upright on his chair, then ripped the gag from around his mouth. He then headed back to the grassy bank and sat down, leaving Lord Sinistre still stranded in the middle of the road.
“Chamberlain,” Lord Sinistre commanded. “Untie me at once!”
“I don’t think so,” said Aragon. “Not until we know which side you’re on.”
“Which side are we on?” asked Egg.
“Also something we should establish,” Aragon said calmly.
“We have to stop Harmony,” said Kassa. “They’re responsible for all this. That Ladybird bitch most of all. If we can shut down their operation we might have half a chance of squeezing Drak out of our dimension and back where it belongs.”
They all stared at her. “Who are Harmony?” Clio asked in a small voice.
“Who’s Ladybird?” asked Egg.
“Where does Drak come from?” asked a subdued Lord Sinistre.
Kassa sighed. “I suppose I had better explain a few things.”
***
“I refuse to believe you,” said Lord Sinistre, as Kassa’s tale about her adventures in the bright white city of Harmony came to an end. “Drak is a real city, not some storybook construct. We have a history going back a hundred years!”
“He does,” Aragon confirmed. “I looked it up in the library one afternoon.”
“Exactly a hundred years?” said Kassa. “That’s suspicious for a start.”
“My father ruled the city before me, and his father before him,” Sinistre insisted.
“I’ve seen the portraits,” said Aragon.
“So have I,” scoffed Kassa. “They both look like him with different beards stuck on.”
“Also, the Chamberlain’s father was Chamberlain before him, and his before him,” Lord Sinistre continued.
“Ah,” said Aragon. “I’m afraid that’s where our versions of reality differ, my lord. My father was a knight errant named Howard Blackblade, and his father was a dragon farmer called Pludd. I’m a citizen of Mocklore, not Drak.”
“Which raises an interesting question,” said Kassa. “How exactly did you get to Drak in the first place, Silversword?”
He looked directly at her, his grey eyes calm. “I was hoping you’d tell me that, Daggersharp. Sooner or later.”
“Uh oh,” murmured Egg. He extricated himself from between the two of them and began to back slowly away. Clio, Sean and Singespitter all had a similar idea, moving along the bank. Even Lord Sinistre was to be attempting to sidle away, although his tied-to-chair predicament made this difficult.
“Are you implying,” said Kassa, “that I had something to do with your little inter-dimensional jaunt?”
“Are you suggesting you are incapable of such a feat?” replied Aragon.
“Are you trying to weasel out of the undisputed fact that you left me?”
“Are you saying that you have never used your magic on me before, in revenge for whatever little thing happened to annoy you at the time?”
“Do you really think I would do this to you?” Kassa yelled.
“Am I supposed to believe that you didn’t?” Aragon yelled back. “I’ve been trapped in that damned city for months, Kassa. Who but you would do that to me?”
“Years,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“I woke up on Midsummer’s Day in the Year of the Mystical Lake and you were gone, Aragon. That was three years ago.”
“Clio,” he said abruptly, turning away. “How old did you say you were?”
“Seventeen, uncle.”
“No wonder that didn’t make sense,” he muttered.
A carriage rattled along the highway, packed with more wannabe immigrants for Drak. The horses swerved around Lord Sinistre and kept going until they plunged their passengers into the dark, seething mass of shadows.
The dome of draklight expanded just a little bit further.
Lord Sinistre was attempting to edge his chair in hopeful bumps and jumps towards the draklight.
“We need to stop people doing that,” said Kassa.
Aragon nodded. “Do you think there’s a way to cut Harmony entirely off from Drak? At least they then can’t interfere with what we do.”
“I don’t see how we can touch them,” said Kassa. “I don’t know where Harmony is, and the only route there has been cut off since I did whatever I did to the spiralling vortex.”
“You said they kept referring to us as the outsider world,” said Aragon. “I wonder what that means.”
“There must be something of Harmony in Drak,” Kassa agreed. “Some little trace, something we can hold on to.”
“Or do something nasty to,” he said with a twisted grin.
They looked at each other, surprised and slightly pleased, but trying not to show it.
“They’re good at this,” Clio whispered.
“Years of practice,” Egg whispered back.
“Does that mean they’re not going to kill each other now?” whispered Sean.
“Who can say?” Clio had her ‘isn’t it romantic?’ expression on, which meant Egg and Sean just had to exchange a ‘what is she on about?’ expression for the sake of male solidarity.
“What are you look
ing at?” demanded Lord Sinistre. Outside the influence of Drak, his voice had become rather high-pitched and whiny. “What do you think you are doing?”
Kassa and Aragon circled around him, examining him with interest. Of particular interest was the towering — now slightly lopsided — coronet that he wore. It was black and layered, with spiky bits around the lower layer, large blood-coloured jewels around the middle layer and a motif of engraved bats around the top layer. At the very top was the small, bright white jewel which appeared on all of his crowns and coronets, and was entirely un-Draklike.
“A piece of home?” Aragon suggested.
“I always thought that looked wrong,” Kassa agreed. She pulled a nasty pair of tweezers out of one of her medicinal pouches. “Now, Sinnie my love, be calm. This won’t hurt a bit.”
“You can’t do this!” said Lord Sinistre, outraged. “I’m the one who ties people to chairs! It’s my job! Just look at me! Would I be wearing this much tight-fitting black leather if I wasn’t a villain? I don’t think so! I have pockets full of unnameable torture devices and other villainous props. I am not going to take this lying down!”
It is an unfortunately fact of life that anyone who is naïve enough to use the phrase ‘I am not going to take this lying down’ will inevitably find themselves flat on their back within a moment. Lord Sinistre’s chair bounced back and forth as he attempted to back away from Kassa and the tweezers. Gravity entered the equation and the chair toppled backwards, crashing Lord Sinistre to the ground. His leather-clad legs kicked feebly.
Kassa took hold of the small, bright white sphere with the business end of her tweezers and plucked. The little gem came free. She balanced it on the palm of her hand, gazing at it. “I thought it was a pearl, but it’s not.”
Aragon came closer, looking it over. “It is a piece of Harmony, though?”
“Oh, yes. It has to be.” Aragon was close enough to touch, something Kassa was determined would not happen. She closed her hand over the white gem. “So what do we do with it?”
“Shouldn’t we find out before we do anything?” Aragon said sharply.
“Oh, I think that would make things needlessly complicated.”
***
Ink Black Magic Page 20
