Dark Lord of Derkholm

  The fisherman shifted his rod carefully into his left hand and pointed with his right at the khaki saddle of hill above them. “Up there. You’ll find somewhere on the other side of that.” He smiled, obviously feeling for the dismay on Blade’s face. “It’s the only way really. I’m sorry.”

  Blade looked up along his pointing hand. It was not so far to that lower part of the hill, though it looked steep. He looked back at the fisherman.

  He was not there. There was not even a ripple in the water or a footprint from his waders. Whoever the man was, he was clearly a very powerful magic user. Blade had not even felt the power it must have taken to vanish like that. Meanwhile Reville was towing Sukey along the lakeshore to the spit. Both of them were pink and happy and full of energy. “Up there to that low part then?” Reville said to Blade.

  “Did you see anyone?” Blade asked.

  “No,” said Sukey. “But that’s where you were pointing, wasn’t it? You know, you look a lot younger without your beard.”

  She and Reville set off at a joyous run up the hill. Blade plodded after, still wondering about that fisherman. But before long he was thinking more about the energy being in love seemed to give to Sukey and Reville. The hill was not only steep but covered with the kind of mountain grass that is nearly as slippery as ice, but they were at the top before Blade was two-thirds of the way up. He was thinking that being in love might just be worth trying when Reville threw himself flat and made urgent motions to Sukey to do the same. Blade came up the rest of the way on his hands and knees.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Reville motioned him to stop talking and crawl to look over the top of the hill. Blade wormed his way there, expecting to find the road again and the kidnappers standing in it, waiting.

  He saw the road, certainly. It curled around beneath him and led into a messy sort of hole in the mountainside, below and to the right. He saw men in black armor, too, but not the ones who had carried off Sukey. These had on armor so old that it had mostly gone back to brownish black leather. Blade only recognized it as soldier wear from the style. These men—ten or so of them—had nasty-looking whips with which they were threatening three groups of ragged, skinny people who were bowed down and straining to push three large covered metal trucks along three lengths of metal rails. Each set of rails came out of one of three more messy holes in the mountain, then ran for a hundred yards before it just stopped. Blade puzzled about this. He also puzzled about why the struggling people did not just turn on the men with whips, until he saw they were chained.

  As he saw the chains, the puzzle about the rails was solved, too. Each truck had now struggled its way to the very end of the rails and stopped. A cheerful figure in a billowing robe sauntered up to stand level with them, ran a hand through his gray curls, and then made the sort of weary, practiced gesture that Blade knew rather well. Three curious slits appeared in front of each truck. They seemed to be slits in the very nature of things, because they ran through the moors, mountains, and the road and yet seemed to float on top of the landscape at the same time. The slits writhed about a bit, settled, and became openings into somewhere else. Blade peered, but all he could see beyond the openings were more metal rails continuing the ones the trucks were on. The men in old-soldier armor shouted and cracked the whips. The bowed people in chains heaved. And the trucks ran through into somewhere else. The openings vanished, and the overseers urged the prisoners back to the mountain again, where, if Blade craned, he could see three more trucks waiting.

  He did not wait to watch anymore. He slithered down the hillside to join Sukey and Reville on a sort of ledge. They stared at one another. “That was Barnabas!” said Blade.

  “I know. Does Querida know?” Reville said. “That’s quite an important question, because it could be that everyone at the University is in on this. In that case, where’s the money going?”

  “What money? What do you mean?” Sukey and Blade asked, almost together.

  “That’s a mine, more or less inside this hill we’re sitting on,” Reville explained, “and it’s run nice and cheaply on kidnapped slave labor. Whatever they mine is going offworld. By the ton truck. Someone is making money out of it, and I don’t think it’s only Wizard Barnabas.” He dived around on Sukey. “What’s in those trucks? Any idea? What does your world get?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” she said. Her eyes were wide and worried among her tangled curls. She suddenly looked older and shrewder and more like Reville. “And I want to know,” she added.

  “Then we’ll go and find out.” Reville stood up, looking very determined.

  “Why?” Blade objected. It was unexpectedly warm on the hillside ledge. He wanted to sit there and rest.

  But Reville turned to him in a way that surprised Blade, because it was like Titus or King Luther when they were being royal. “Someone,” said Reville, “is robbing my world. I want to know who, why, and what. Because it’s illegal. I’m the only person around here who’s allowed to steal stuff. Guild rules. So how do we best get a look at what they’re stealing? Ideas?”

  Blade stared at him, feeling glad that he had not happened to tell Reville about the dwarfs. Sukey looked around thoughtfully. Then she pointed behind Reville. “There may be an opening up there. We could sneak in that way.”

  As Reville swung around to look, it occurred to Blade that Reville and Sukey were a good match for one another. Sukey looked—and was—a girlish sort of girl. Yet she had hardly turned a hair at being kidnapped, and now she was as cool and collected as Reville, and far cooler than Blade was, at the idea of sneaking into a mine full of illegal robbers with whips.

  “Yes. A sort of cave, maybe,” Reville said, and set off for the dark dent in the hill that Sukey was pointing to. Sukey scampered with him. Blade slithered reluctantly after.

  There was a hole in the mountainside there. It was hard to tell if it was natural or someone’s early attempt to dig a mine. It was rocky and earthy, and it led away inward in a passage high enough for them all to walk upright. Before it grew too dark to see, Reville snapped his fingers and, to Blade’s envy, caused a blue tuft of witchlight to sprout from his left hand. He held it up to guide them.

  “Reville, you’re marvelous!” Sukey sighed.

  “Just go carefully,” Reville whispered. “I can feel a big drop somewhere ahead.”

  The drop was simply a hole in the earthy floor. Beyond it the passage came to an end. Reville knelt down and shone his left-handed light into the hole. There was an insecure-looking old ladder bolted to the near side.

  “Old mine shaft,” Reville whispered. “Excellent.” He swung himself onto the ladder. It creaked like a dead tree in a gale. “One at a time,” he said warningly. “It won’t carry three.”

  Blade had to wait in the dark while Sukey followed Reville down. After that there was no question in Blade’s mind where he was going. He was going with Reville and the light if it killed them all. He arrived at the bottom of the rasping, swaying ladder with his teeth chattering. Just the cold, he told himself. Just the cold in here. He turned thankfully toward the blue light.

  It was bigger than he had thought. He could see Sukey and Reville through the sheet of blueness, on the other side of it, staring as if they had been put under a stasis spell. There were three eyes in the blueness, all of them watching Blade sarcastically. He understood why he had been feeling as if he had been plunged into a bath of icy acid.

  “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

  Me, agreed the demon. I said we would meet again. Why are you here? Have you come to steal demon food like the other humans?

  “Demon food?” said Blade.

  They dig it out of the mountain, and they take it out of the world, the demon told him. And they set the place around with wards and demon traps. Take just one ward off for me. I will make you rich.

  “I—I’m afraid I don’t know how to,” Blade said.

  Or I could kill you if you don’t, the demon suggested.
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  “But that wouldn’t help you,” Blade answered through clenched teeth.

  Then what reward would persuade you? wondered the demon. Let me see. Blade felt it pressing all over his mind, sickeningly. He could not think of any way to stop it. He just had to stand there, shaking all over, until the demon seemed to have finished. Then he felt its laughter pulsing through him. He wants Deucalion to teach him magic! I could arrange that.

  But the White Oracle said Deucalion would teach me anyway, Blade thought. That was a comforting thought, until Blade realized that the Oracle had not said how it would be arranged. Sweat came popping out all over Blade at the idea that Deucalion actually might be a demon. He opened his mouth to protest again that he had no idea how to take demon wards off. And he realized the demon had gone. Strange.

  “Phew!” said Reville. “That was nasty! What is demon food?”

  “I really don’t know,” Blade said.

  “I think the poor thing was hungry,” Sukey said. “It wasn’t going to do anything to Blade. It was just letting him know they were stealing its food.”

  “Poor thing—nothing!” said Reville. “Don’t ever get sorry for a demon, love. It will eat you.”

  “Then are people demon food?” Sukey asked. “It’s not people in those trucks, is it?”

  “No, they just eat souls usually,” Reville said. “We must get a look in those trucks.”

  They hurried along the earthy gallery the ladder had brought them to. Shortly there was another hole and another ladder, this one in much better repair, with dim light shining from below. Reville dismissed his tuft of witchlight, and they all clambered quietly down. Halfway to the next earthy floor the demon wards began, strung across the shaft like cobwebs made of nearly nothing. At least most of them were warding against demons, but Blade saw others that seemed to be warding the mine against being found by other people. Sukey found all of them fascinating. She stretched a hand out to the nearest.

  “Don’t touch them!” Reville and Blade whispered, both at once.

  Sukey snatched her hand back and climbed on down, looking chastened. Reville went very cautiously from then on, because the ladder brought them down into what was clearly a side passage in the main mines. At the end of the passage trucks were being pushed past in a much wider space that was properly lit by electric lights in wire cages. Chains clinked. Ragged people grunted and strained, and the lighted part was filled with the rumble, rumble, squeak of heavy wheels moving on metal tracks. After one cautious look Reville led them along the passage the other way.

  “Too many overseers out that way,” he said. Blade lost touch with where they were after that. As Shona had pointed out, his sense of direction was not the same as other people’s. He simply went where Reville went. He thought they might have gone parallel with the main part, until they came to a slanting place, where smaller trucks were squealing slowly downhill under a raw-looking ceiling propped up by girders and beams. To Reville’s delight, these trucks were not covered. Each one seemed to be heaped up with earth and broken rocks.

  “What is it?” Reville wondered. “Some kind of ore?”

  He and Sukey both took a handful and went upslope to the nearest wire-caged light. The place where it hung was probably weaker than the rest. The walls and ceiling here were entirely lined with iron girders, making it rather narrower than the rest of the sloping track. When Blade squeezed up beside them, Reville and Sukey were sorting knowledgeably through their handfuls of dirt. Sukey seemed to know as much about minerals as Reville did. But they were both puzzled.

  “Bit of iron ore, shale, limestone—a lot of nothing really,” Sukey was saying.

  “Not even gold-bearing,” Reville agreed. “Not volcanic. So no diamonds.”

  “It could be some kind of valuable chemical,” Sukey was suggesting when they all heard the squealing rumble of another truck coming. They pressed themselves against the iron wall to let it go past, and Sukey said, still inspecting her handful, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was just what it looks like—any old earth and stones.”

  “It must be something valuable,” Reville said as the truck came rumbling past.

  Blade understood then. Sukey was right, right about the demon and right about the stuff in the trucks. The demon had been trying to tell them, in its demonic way, and no demon could ever do anything without threats or laughter. But he never would have realized what it had been trying to say if they had not been standing inside the narrow place surrounded by iron. As the truck came through, rumbling the walls and the tracks, with its pile of cold earth almost brushing Blade’s face, he found himself receiving a blast of solid magic—magic that seemed like part of the very smell of the heaped-up earth and stones. And he remembered that iron insulated magic. “Got it!” he said. “It is just earth and stones, and it is valuable! Our whole world’s magic. The magic’s part of the earth. That’s what they’re stealing—magic!”

  Reville gave a little whistle. “So demons eat magic!”

  “They must do,” Blade was saying when Reville’s whistle seemed to be taken up from further down the passage, loud and shrill. Someone along there shouted.

  “I see them! Intruders in shaft twenty! Up there in the arch!”

  Sukey and Reville threw down their handfuls of earth, and they all three ran. And ran, and ran, with whistles and shouts urging them on to dodge around corners, whisk up side passages, or double back the other way, stumbling on stones, splashing through at least one underground river, stubbing toes on iron tracks, tripping over spades, and racing bent over behind rows of big metal trucks. Reville was good at this. He was trained for it, Blade thought, struggling to keep up, with his robe flapping around his knees and getting in his way. Deeper and deeper into the mines they went. They pelted through wet yellow mud in front of rows of chained people, who all leaned on their spades to watch them.

  “Tried that. Been there,” Blade heard as he splatted past. “Bet you my next meal they’ll be caught in gallery five.”

  And Blade was. He was not sure if it was actually gallery five or somewhere else. He only knew that he somehow lost Reville and Sukey, turned down the way he thought they had run, and ran full tilt into a pair of overseers. He was grabbed in an instant, and his arms were twisted behind him. Blade struggled and fought and tried to translocate, but his ability to do that was still not there. All he could do was put his cold spell on them, but they were used to the chill of the mines and hardly seemed to notice. They ran him along the wide earthy tunnel to a metal door and shoved him into a small room like an office. The door clanged shut behind him. Blade, half dazzled by the much brighter light in there, found himself blinking at Barnabas.

  Barnabas was blinking, too, and breathing heavily. “You can’t be allowed to leave, you know,” he said, in his usual jolly way. “Sorry about this, but this is a highly secret operation, Blade. It beats me how you ever got inside the secrecy spells over this area. They were some of my best.”

  The only thing Blade could think of was to play stupid. “I don’t understand,” he panted. “What are you doing here?”

  “Mr. Chesney had to have an agent this side,” Barnabas said, “and he chose me. Or did you mean the earth mining?”

  “That,” gasped Blade. “Just earth. I mean—”

  “It’s full of magic,” Barnabas said. “Everything in this world is.” And while Blade was thinking, I was right! Barnabas went on, “But it doesn’t endure very long in the world it goes to. It does marvels while it does last, of course. I believe they market it as the new superfuel and use it to run all their machines, but they have to keep getting more.”

  “Don’t they pay for it at all?” Blade asked.

  “Why should they? It’s just earth,” Barnabas said. “They pay me and the overseers rather well for our help, naturally, but who else would they pay?”

  “Then why do you keep it secret?” Blade demanded.

  “Patriotic people like Querida or your father would be b
ound to object,” said Barnabas. “I suppose there may even come a time when this world gets short of magic, but that won’t be in our time. It won’t be for hundreds of years. Meanwhile you wouldn’t deny Mr. Chesney and his world all the obvious benefits of massive amounts of cheap power, would you?”

  Why is he explaining to me like this? Blade wondered. As he wondered, he realized that Barnabas was keeping his jolly, crinkled, bloodshot eyes entirely on Blade’s face. As if Barnabas was carefully not looking at something behind Blade. Blade whirled around. But it was too late. The overseer behind him reached around with a long arm and jammed a pad with something smelly on it against Blade’s nose and mouth. Then he held Blade’s head hard against his chest until Blade was forced to breathe the smelly stuff in. Blade did not even manage to put his cold spell on Barnabas, although he tried.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  WHEN PRINCE TALITHAN’s green haze swung outward and let Derk and his companions out into the garden of Derkholm, Derk almost understood how it was done. At any other time he would have been fascinated, but now, when Talithan asked gravely, “Do you require anything more, Lord?” Derk said, “Only to be left completely alone, thank you.” Prince Talithan understood and stepped away into the haze again.

  Derk had only vague memories of what he did for some while after that. He supposed he must have put the dogs, the pigs, and the Friendly Cows in the right places and given them food. But maybe Old George did that. Derk recalled Old George jogging beside him like a skeleton out for a run, protesting, while Derk was sealing Derkholm off from the rest of the world, but Derk was putting out his full power to do that, and he had no attention to spare just then, even for Don, who galloped anxiously at his other side, saying, “Won’t you even let Mum in then?”

  “She won’t be coming here,” Derk said, and almost lost his magics in the terrible, bitter grief at the way Mara had left him. “Go away, Don.”