Dark Lord of Derkholm

  “Not at all,” Derk said vaguely, as all the other Pilgrims flopped down, too. Most of them thankfully hauled their boots off. Geoffrey took his socks off as well and ruefully showed Shona some very well-developed blisters. So he’s not totally perfect! Derk thought with some relief. He wondered who the small blond girl was and the rather ragged young man, and why they did not seem as footsore as the rest. He watched these two help themselves to a sandwich each and come over to him.

  The young man bowed. “Lady Mara, Wizard Derk. I am Reville, and this is Sukey. We’ve got some rather unpleasant news for you, I’m afraid. Your son Blade was with us when we discovered that Mr. Chesney was stealing magic by mining earth here and taking it into his own world. Wizard Barnabas was in charge of the mining, and I’m afraid he caught Blade.”

  “Barnabas!” said Derk.

  “Are you sure?” said Mara.

  “I saw him myself,” said Reville. “Sukey and I tracked them all the way down to Costamaret—”

  Sukey smiled adoringly at Reville. “He learned to translocate. He took us both.”

  “With a few side trips,” Reville said. “I haven’t got it perfect yet. That’s part of the reason we were a bit slow getting here. The other reason is that Costamaret has a Thieves Guild—”

  “What’s all this? What is this about?” Querida cried out, leaning down from her apparent wall. “You did say Barnabas, did you—Regin, isn’t it?”

  Reville bowed. “I didn’t see you there, ma’am. It’s Reville really. Thieves Guild policy is to give a false name for all public meetings.”

  Querida disregarded this and hissed at him to say, say, say. The dwarfs handed them all sandwiches and mugs of beer and stood by listening while Reville and Sukey gave the history of their adventures in the mine. Querida shot Derk a quizzical look when they mentioned the demon, but she did not interrupt until Reville was saying, “And Thieves Guild in Costamaret was very sorry about it, but they say the arena is protected by magic and there’s nothing they could do for Blade—”

  “So that’s why magic was draining away!” Querida interrupted. “What we must do—”

  Reville interrupted her. “No need to do anything, ma’am. Stealing is the business of my guild. We deal with nonguild thieving. Costamaret Guild has gone in to close the mines down—they’re doing it at this moment. Sukey planned the operation. She’s a wonderful planner.” He put his arm around Sukey’s blue silk shoulders and squeezed proudly. “I don’t think anyone will get away.”

  “But I insist on dealing with that traitor Barnabas myself!” Querida said, loudly, because Mara was saying to Derk, “No, I know Blade’s all right. Scales—”

  “No,” Derk said grimly, around Mara. “Whether Blade’s all right or not, I’m the one who’s going to deal with Barnabas.” He put his head up and bellowed, “Talithan!”

  Silvery music swept across the terrace. Several dwarfs carrying plates backed hastily away from the greenish haze that was opening by the front door. When Talithan stepped out of it, he was evidently in the middle of some kind of celebration. His clothes were gorgeous even for an elf prince. He had a harp on one arm and the other arm draped over Pretty. Pretty gave everyone a coy look and bent his neck to nuzzle Talithan. “You called, Lord?” Talithan asked.

  The Pilgrims stared at him yearningly. Mother Poole was in tears, sobbing, “But he’s so beautiful!” while Professor Ledbury got up and stood staring.

  “Sit down, Eldred,” said Miss Ledbury. “Finish your sandwich.”

  “Sorry,” Derk apologized. “Caught you at a bad moment, Prince.”

  Talithan smiled. “Merely that the Horselady has given me Pretty, Lord, after some negotiation. I take pleasure in seeing you look better than erstwhile. What is it I can do?”

  “Find Barnabas, wherever he is, and bring him here, if you would be so good,” Derk said.

  “Ah,” said Talithan. “Then you noticed the man deliberately botched the magics on the unpleasant soldiery? I had been wondering if I should inform you of it.”

  “Er—that was on my orders,” Querida admitted. “The man was on both sides.”

  “Just bring him,” Derk insisted.

  Prince Talithan bowed and swept Pretty and himself away inside the magic haze. Everything at once felt drearier. The Pilgrims sighed. Shona said angrily, “He’s welcome to Pretty! Silly, fickle little horse!” and then burst into tears.

  “There, there, my love,” Geoffrey said with his arm around her. “I’ve heard this is the way elves make you feel, that’s all it is.”

  “Right. Oh, right!” agreed Professor Ledbury. “As if one had lost something precious.”

  I have, Derk thought. I’ve still lost Kit.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  KIT, TO HIS SHAME, could not keep up with the dragons or Lydda. There was nothing wrong with his new pinions as far as Blade, sitting wrapped in his thick coat waiting to translocate, could see, but he was making no speed at all. When even the daylight owls passed him, Kit landed and howled with misery. Blade ran after him.

  “It’s all right, you fool. You’re just terribly out of condition.”

  “I feel weak and small and useless!” Kit groaned.

  “I’m like that all the time,” Blade pointed out. “Look, would you let me sit on your back? I can move us both in stages then, I think.”

  “Anything!” Kit said abjectly.

  Blade climbed astride him, clamped his knees on Kit’s great wing muscles, and shoved off toward Derkholm. He managed to move them about ten miles.

  Kit dug his talons into the wintery grass. “You’re going in the wrong direction,” he said. But at that moment, Scales and the mauve dragon, with Lydda winging hard to keep up, went sailing over about half a mile to their left. “I let you off,” said Kit. He let go of the grass, and Blade took them another ten miles or so. “I could have sworn—!” said Kit. “You know, I think you go in zigzags, like that blue demon did.” He became very interested in the process of translocation after that and nearly forgot his misery. They arrived on the hillside above Derkholm well ahead of Lydda and the dragons.

  Below them, Derkholm and its grounds were covered with a dome of magic so thick and strong that it looked milky white. Frost had formed on it, making it wink in the slanting autumn sunlight. In the valley in front of Derkholm was an extremely large crowd of people, most of whom seemed to be angry. Blade could see fists being shaken and placards being pitched this way and that. DOWN WITH CHESNEY, he saw, just before somebody threw it down and jumped on it. There was angry tussling around THIS IS OUR WORLD and BAN PILGRIMS, and someone was hitting someone else with UNITE AGAINST THE TOURS. Those not brawling were chanting. Blade could hear, “Why are we waiting?” counterpointed against “Go home, Pilgrims!” He climbed off Kit and put his hands over his ears.

  “Help!” Kit muttered.

  The dragons on the hills had been sitting so still that Blade had vaguely taken them for piles of rock. But as soon as he moved, huge dragon heads swung their way. Enormous green or yellow eyes inspected them disdainfully.

  Kit cleared his throat and trumpeted across at the nearest dragon. “Excuse us. We’re on our way home. Do you know if it’s possible to get in there?”

  “People have been coming and going through a little hole at the back,” the dragon sang back, and yawned. Smoky breath poured down the hillside around them.

  Blade and Kit hurried downhill out of the smoke, coughing. “The back gate must be open then,” Blade said.

  “I hope I can fit through it,” said Kit.

  The hole in the dome was a very tight fit indeed. Kit stuck in it at first, until Blade prodded Kit’s straining hindquarters and yelped, “Hurry! There’s a dragon after us!” Kit shot inside as if the hole were suddenly greased and glared at Blade when Blade popped through after him. “Well, you’d have been all day if I hadn’t said it,” Blade said.

  Kit muttered, and muttered some more when they passed his shed and found it stacked full of ba
skets with golden goblets and crowns spilling out of them, but Blade could tell that Kit was too glad to be home to be truly annoyed. They came around to the terrace steps, where they stopped and stared at the patchwork of house and shredding Citadel. They came up the steps into a crowd of dwarfs and Pilgrims, who were all gazing at Prince Talithan, towering out of a blue-green haze near the front door and looking surprisingly grim. Talithan had one long elfin hand clamped on the shoulder of Barnabas.

  Inside his ring of gray curls, Barnabas’s face was an unhealthy blue-red. He was shaking. “You must see how it is, Derk,” he was saying. “You have to understand. I have a drink habit to support. And the mines don’t do any harm. We only export earth.”

  “Secretly, without anyone getting paid for it except you,” Querida said from her seat on what looked like a ruined black wall. “And the earth you export happens to be full of magic.”

  “Yes, well, I believe Mr. Chesney does sell it for quite a lot on the other side,” Barnabas conceded, “but that’s nothing to do with me. I can explain—”

  “There’s no possible explanation that can satisfy me,” Reville said. He was leaning beside Querida with his arms folded, looking as grim and lordly as Talithan. “You were stealing, and you are not a member of my guild. Wizards, I demand that this man is handed over to Thieves Guild for trial. By our law, he should have both hands cut off.”

  Barnabas shuddered and looked piteously toward Derk. “Derk, you’re my friend!”

  “Not anymore,” Derk said from beside Mara. Kit and Blade exchanged glances. They had never seen Derk look so stern. “Why did you take the spells off the soldiers?” Derk asked.

  “I had to,” Barnabas explained. “Fifty of them were under contract to the mines. Last year’s overseers were getting impatient, because they couldn’t go home until the new ones arrived, you see. They were pressuring me. And the new overseers were all stuck in the camp having to fight a battle every week.”

  “Some of them weren’t,” Reville said. “They kidnapped Sukey.”

  As Reville said this, an acid-bath chill began to wash across Blade’s mind. It was a feeling he had had twice before. He looked to see where it was coming from this time and saw blueness swelling up from the cracks around the paving stones where Barnabas was standing, cunningly mixing with Talithan’s haze. Blade wondered whether to shout.

  Be silent or I shall eat you, too, the demon told him.

  “Well, how was I to know that?” Barnabas demanded. “All I knew was that they hadn’t—”

  The blueness rose up around him. Barnabas’s voice became a long, thin, bubbling noise. Talithan jumped backward as the demon began to spin. Its blueness spun faster and faster, and Barnabas became a twisted dark swirl, spinning inside it. The swirl grew longer and thinner as it spun and shreds threw off it, but Barnabas did not stop screaming until the darkness had faded into the blueness completely. It seemed to take a century, though it only lasted for seconds. So that’s how demons eat, Blade thought, swallowing hard and very queasy. Everyone was pale and still as they watched the blueness sink back into the terrace again.

  “Yik!” said Kit.

  Geoffrey stood up barefoot beside Shona, looking as if he was trying not to be sick. “I want to know more about those mines.”

  “So do I, young man,” said Miss Ledbury.

  Elda looked toward the Pilgrims and saw Blade and Kit standing behind them. She sprang across the terrace, shrieking, bouncing from one pair of feet to the other in the spaces between dwarfs and Pilgrims. “Mum! Dad!” she shrieked. “Blade’s back! Kit’s here!”

  Dwarfs had to scramble out of the way as Mara, Derk, Shona, Don, and Callette surged after Elda. Blade found himself in the middle of a happier reunion than he would have believed possible that morning. Shona kissed him, kissed Kit. Derk barged Shona aside to hug him and then collided with Mara, who was in the middle of turning from hugging Kit to hugging Blade and crying out, “Oh, Blade! These clothes I sent you are too small!”

  “I started to grow,” Blade told her, as well as he could from under Callette’s massive wing and being bumped about between Elda and Don, who were trying to griffin-dance with him in spite of Derk, who was now trying to hug Blade and Kit at once. Beaks stroked Blade’s face and clacked on Kit’s beak. Three sets of arms tried to fold on them. Feathers swiped and caressed them. And I used to think we had no family feeling! Blade thought. He wished Lydda was here to share in it, too.

  And Lydda was there, almost as Blade thought this, dropping neatly from above on a truly magnificent wingspread, screaming to join in. “Oh, thank the gods—I was so worried!” Derk said, and Callette said, “That’s good. Now it’s everyone.”

  Blade glanced upward to see where Lydda had come from. He was in time to see the tip of one of Scales’s huge claws slicing through the rest of the magic dome. For an instant or so Scales could be seen as a mighty shadow above the milkiness. Then Derk’s defenses crumpled away and folded downward, letting in a burst of extra light from under Scales, who wheeled about and landed on most of the garden monsters. He sat up, rearing higher than the dome had been.

  “Forgive the intrusion,” he rumbled at Derk. “We need to talk.”

  Scales was wearing the battered coronet. At least, Blade realized, it was the coronet that had seemed to be battered, until you noticed that a coronet had to be a strange, irregular shape in order to fit the head of a dragon. Now it looked more like a crown. And what everyone had thought of as the broken gold chain was hooked to the spikes of Scales’s neck to dangle gleaming and complete on his chest.

  Mara went to the edge of the terrace with her arm over Lydda, still smiling from the reunion, and turned the smile up to Scales. “Forgive me, I only realized who you were awhile ago. You’re Deucalion, who was once king of the dragons, aren’t you?”

  “I hope I still am!” Scales rumbled. He raised his crowned head to look at the other dragons crouching along the hills over Derkholm. “How say you, dragons?”

  The other dragons lifted their heads in reply and hailed their king in a musical roar, each dragon crying a different note in a massive bugling chord. A number of the dwarfs crouched down and covered their ears. The house, the ground, the terrace, and the whole valley shook. Blade thought, deafened and astonished, The Oracle said a dragon would teach me magic! Why?

  Meanwhile the angry Pilgrims outside and the extremely irritated wizards with them had seen the dome collapse and surged toward the gates. They stopped short when Scales landed, started to surge forward again, and stopped once more when the dragons roared on the hills. Nobody could move during a sound like that. But as soon as the great cry stopped, the Pilgrims in front began edging on, through the gate, and into the space by Deucalion’s great right wing. Most of them were shouting that they were going to kill that Dark Lord, but they stopped yet again and all backed into one another when the demon rose high on its three legs in front of the terrace.

  Scales rose up to meet it. “Tripos!” he growled. “Demon king. Go!”

  If you exorcise me, you’ll regret it, Deucalion, the demon replied. You need me.

  The bleach burn of its talk was enough to cause utter silence, except for a woman Pilgrim near the gate who said, “Is that the Dark Lord? But I thought—” and stopped with a gulp when one of the demon’s three eyes turned to look at her. Or maybe it was the thunder of Scales’s answer.

  “Need YOU?” the dragon roared.

  The demon, rather slyly, untwisted its tail from around its three legs. The tail went snaking out across the terrace and stabbed the air with its wormy blue tip, somewhere between Querida’s wall and Prince Talithan’s magic haze. The air there writhed about and split apart with a pop. The split became a neat arched opening.

  Mr. Chesney stood in the arched space, staring around the terrace with his mouth set into a grim upside-down smile. He nodded at what he saw there, as if it was even worse than he had expected.

  “Ah, I see,” said Scales. “You were hol
ding it shut.” And he added, most unwillingly, “Thank you.”

  Mr. Chesney shot Scales an irritated glance for speaking out of turn. He did not notice the demon towering nebulously behind him. His eyes traveled stonily from Querida on her wall, with Elda now crouching at her feet and Reville leaning beside her, on to Mara, Lydda, Callette, Don, across forty dwarfs or so, to Blade and Kit, and stopped at Derk.

  “Wizard Derk,” he said in his flat voice, “you are facing a great deal more than bankruptcy for this.”

  Derk could only manage a shrug. Mr. Chesney was having the same effect on him as he had had before. Derk so hated the man that all he seemed to be able to think of was ideas for new and fantastic animals. They came pouring through his mind: the carrier pigeons—easy—and vegetarian eagles with pouches for messages, centaurs, talking elephants, manticores, kangaroos with hands and human faces, chimeras, walking mushrooms, winged goats. Or how about creating a unicorn?

  Luckily Mr. Chesney did not seem to expect an answer. His eyes traveled coldly on, across the Pilgrims, over more dwarfs, on to Talithan, and then, with a jerk, back to the Pilgrims. “You two,” he said. “Come here.”

  Miss Ledbury stood up. So did Dad and Mother Poole. The Pooles sat diffidently down again when Mr. Chesney snapped, “I didn’t mean you.”

  Miss Ledbury stayed standing up. “But I mean to talk to you,” she announced. “I am a plainclothes detective attached to the Police Bureau, Missing Persons and Unsolved Murder departments. I was sent to investigate the reason why so many people who go on your Pilgrim Parties never come back.”

  “Do you think I haven’t taken legal advice?” Mr. Chesney asked her, flatly unconcerned. “Anything that happens on this world is outside the jurisdiction of your bureau. But you can arrest Wizard Derk if you like. He was the one who closed the portal here, not me. Speak to my lawyers. You’ll find I’ve done nothing illegal.”