The Kingdoms of Evil (45 page)

"Uhhh!" Freetrick stammered in terror. "Someone…stop!" Then, as he remembered his bodyguard of terrifying monsters, "Skystarke!"

But his captain of guards was already bellowing orders. "
Mon
-stahs! With all your mortality protect the Ultimate Fiend!"

Ogres lurched out of the gloom at the edges of the hall. The howling assassin was occluded by a huge, lumbering body as one of the guards got between him and Freetrick. But the monster didn't close with the attacker. Instead, it stepped backward, closer to Freetrick.

"What the hell are---" Freetrick's voice cut off as a tentacle of blackness snaked out of the air and jabbed against his forehead.

Freetrick's mind washed white with new terror as he slapped his hand against the hot spot on his head. A necromancer! Black mist bloomed as the defenses Feerix had taught him to cast responded to the pressure of an attack against his brain. The assassin was trying to kill him! Twice! Despite all his preparation, Freetrick froze.

The ogre was still backpedaling. Now, it was almost on top of him, and the assassin's arm swung up. His dagger glittered there, the pale-glassy blade shining in the darkness like the last hope of an oppressed minority.

"Prepare to take the life, Fiend!" Skystarke screeched at him as another questing tentacle of black energy slapped against Freetrick's shield.

"For my father! For my people!" Even as the assassin wielded his necromancy against Freetrick, he ducked and dodged under the ogre's reaching arms, thrusting with his mystic dagger.

The air around Freetrick filled with thrashing coils of darkness. He felt his defenses tremble, bend metaphorically inward. His stores of life energy, never very great, were rapidly vanishing under the onslaught. Why had he made that ridiculous demonstration in the Audience Pit?

"May the Moral Blade cleanse your corruption from his world!" The glowing dagger emerged from under the monster's right armpit as the assassin tried to dart around Freetrick's defender and, paralyzed, Freetrick could only watch.

Another attack against his brain followed questing jabs at his heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, the great blood vessels in his thighs and neck.

The blade darted toward him, glowing with hot and holy light.

The ogre, now a looming mountain of flesh less than six inches in front of Freetrick's nose, gave a grunt of frustration and threw itself onto the blade.

With all his power, Freetrick reached out with his new death energy and
pushed.

It wasn't like writing a Rationalist spell. Even simple word-magic spells took a few moments of concentration, of
control
. Necromancy was the opposite. Lashing out with necromancy was a release of control, like giving in to a sickening urge.

The air snapped, suddenly cold, and Freetrick's ears popped. The invisible tentacles prodding at Freetrick's defenses now tore away as the assassin, caught mid-leap by Freetrick's wall of air, shot backward. There was a cry and crack as the pressure smashed him against the opposite wall of the corridor.

Freetrick sighed, and let go of the power.

"Well---" he managed to say, before the sudden release of several hundred cubic feet of compressed air smacked him to the ground.

Freetrick screamed, but couldn't hear his own voice. He blinked, but couldn't see. There was a horrible feeling in Freetrick's nose and ears, and his head rang with the echoes of the furiously displaced air.

Frost billowed from Freetrick as pushed himself off the floor. He gasped in the icy air and peered past the frosted lenses of his pince-nez into air gone suddenly opaque, transformed into a vile-tasting miasma of gray dust, white water vapor, and black necromancy. He couldn't see much past the misty clouds of his own breath, condensing in the freezing air.

Why the hell was it so cold? Groaning, Freetrick lifted himself to his knees and called into the frigid fog. "Hello?"

"My lord," Freetrick saw the plume of breath in the air before he made out DeMacabre's ghastly outline. "Are you unhurt?"

"Yes," said Freetrick, standing, "just knocked off my feet. How about you? Where's Bloodbyrn?"

"The same, I believe." The shadowy figure came closer, and Freetrick saw the Duke twist the point of his little athame into the flesh of his thumb. The smear of blood he produced gave off heat and a sullen red glow. Further out in the mist, other red sparks flared to life.

"I am here, my lord," Bloodbyrn's eyes shone yellow in the glow of her athame as she waved mist away from herself.

"And may each of us tremble in our unworthiness," DeMacabre spoke into the fog and dust, "for the Grasper of the Bolt has demonstrated his great and terrible mastery of the Power of Death! We may thank whatever wicked constellations guide the twisted paths of our lives that the Fiend's mighty wrath was not directed at
us
. And now…"

Bloodbyrn started forward as he father nodded to her. The cadaverous old reprobate was grinning at Freetrick as if he thought he could just pick up his shotgun wedding where he had left off.

Not a chance. "Bring to me the one who dared attack me!" Freetrick bellowed.

"Fiend," a tall, thin figure crouched and darted away. Skystarke. Freetrick shivered again and backed away from the advancing Bloodbyrn. He waved his hand in front of his face. The mist had cleared enough for Freetrick to see several shapes move past him further down the hall, following his orders.

"My lord…" his fiancée's voice slid through the mist toward him.

"Not now," Freetrick said, then in a louder voice. "Hey! Everyone! I want to know…I mean I demand to know if everyone is alright."

Most proved to be. The shock of depressurizing air had knocked his subjects off their feet, but the results had been mostly confined to bruises and confusion. Luckily, no one had been standing in front of him but the assassin and the poor, self-sacrificing ogre. There was a lord Wroth-something who had probably broken a wrist, and Freetrick was trying to finagle medical aid out of another necromancer when his scouts returned.

"Look, just think of healing as the opposite of torture…yes?"

"Malevolence," Skystarke was back, his face carefully back on, kneeling low. "We have
found
the ass-
ass
-in." Objects in the guard's gauntleted hands shed a shimmering, milky light. "He carried a sacred
dagg
-ah and a crystal chalice of enchanted spring
wa
-tah to stop the black heart of the Ultimate Fiend."

"But…" Freetrick closed his teeth over the words
I felt a necromancer
. There were clearly questions that needed answering. "Is the assassin still alive?"

The man was indeed dead, the rage in his face still clearly visible under a rime of hoarfrost. Freetrick bent to examine him."Does he have…gold eyebrows?"

"Indeed, Fiend," said Skystarke.

"Ah," said DeMacabre, coming up from out of the mist behind them, "We had been wondering where the Prince of Vaingloria had got to. How enlightening."

Freetrick turned a narrow-eyed stare on the Duke. "You
lost
a prisoner?"

DeMacabre made a repulsive and elegant shrug. "It happens, my lord. Either the ogres escorting a victim to his doom accidentally eat each other, or the lizard-men are distracted by a shiny object, or human guards embrace their evil and enter into a vicious duel or set free the prisoner to bring down retribution on their overlords. You know how it is

"Because no-one in the Kingdom of Evil is smart enough to follow orders." Freetrick said, mostly as a reminder to himself.

"Oh, my lord jests, surely. Who could follow orders when sweet Chaos sings her siren song." DeMacabre said, "I believe the girl from the Audience Pit escaped the same way. Oh! Direct not your black gaze upon me, my lord, for I am sure she will turn up." He put a hand on Freetrick's shoulder. "When the time comes for her to leap from a shadow and attempt to slice the jugulars of the Ultimate Fiend, why, then you shall have the opportunity to do what you will with her." He winked.

Freetrick closed his eyes, and decided he could not afford the time it would take to solve this problem. There were greater issues at stake here than just being the castle's assassination lightning rod. "Where did this guy come from?"

"Vaingloria, my lord," said the Duke, primly, "my lord will remember he killed the prince's father during his ascension ceremony."

"Oh," said Freetrick, "
that
Vaingloria. Another oppressed nation." His eyes sparked at the dark lords gathered around him. "Another source of unrest and rebellion. Another source of assassins
I
will have to defeat in single combat, since apparently I have a castle full of minions who can't escort a prisoner across a hall way without screwing it up. This is the sort of thing I was talking about, people!"

"Well, my lord, he is dead now." DeMacabre said, soothingly.

"Which doesn't help me much." Freetrick remembered the black tentacles of necromancy oozing over his defenses. "Was this an isolated malcontent, or was he part of a larger plot?" He gestured at the smashed, decompressed, and frozen corpse, "But I can't very well question him now, can I?" He saw the expressions around him, "um…can I?"

"Welllll," DeMacabre drew out the syllable judiciously, "my lord is aware that he is a necromancer and
king
of necromancers, yes?"

"Oh." Freetrick thought back to the city watch records he had read. He had assumed all the stuff about 'slaughtering first and asking questions second' was metaphorical. "Well. Um. How?"

"Lord Wrothgrinn, my lord?"

"Wrothgrinn?" Freetrick knew from the 'wroth' part that this man was part of the royal family and a member of his father's generation—so an uncle of some sort. He hadn't heard the name before, though.

Bloodbyrn blinked. Was that color rising in her cheeks? "He is a practitioner of the oldest form of necromancy, my lord."

"Well, let's get him over here." Said Freetrick, looking around"Where is he?"

"Not here, my lord." DeMacabre looked uncomfortable. "His Fiendishness the Dark Prince Wrothgrinn rarely comes to council sessions."

Skystarke stared uneasily down at his own feet.

Freetrick tried to be patient. "And why is that?"

"His presence tends to unsettle the dark lords and ladies. The Dark Prince Wrothginn is a man of…peculiar proclivities."

***

"They call me
MAD
! AH ha ha ha!" The Life-twister raised his hands against the lightning-split sky and howled with maniacal laughter. "They said it could not be done, the
fools
! The blind
FOOLS
! How DARE they mock me? How
DARE
they ridicule these! My unholy CRE-
YAY
-TIONS!" Thunder crashed and monsters squealed. "NOW, my minions! Now, while the
energies
are STR~RONGEST!"

The laboratory chamber was an immense, open-topped, stone cylinder. Its walls, ringed with scrawled diagrams, sparking machinery, and ominously rattling cages, enclosed a donut-shaped platform about three paces wide, which formed the walkway around the iron-barred mouth of a pit. It was over this pit that the thin, hunched form of the Life-twister Wrothgrinn reared against Maelstrom above, shrieking in unholy glee. "THR~ROW the levers! GA-
R~RIND
the gears! Impale the CHIKEN!"

"
Bawk!
"

"
Now
!!" The Life-twister raised his arms aloft, vortices of unspeakable energies curdling the air around his fingers. "Now! Arise, my creations, A-
R~RISE
!"

Dark engines moaned under diabolical stresses, belching arcs of blinding energy into the pit at the center of the chamber. The artificial lightning struck again, and again as titanic shapes reared and lurched in the pit. Sparks flashed off scaled skin as it stretched taught over swelling muscle and warping bone. Low heads swung, beady eyes glared, and long, forked tongues flickered in the charged air. Claws gripped the bars of the pit's mouth and wrenched as disturbingly human voices cried out in torment. And over it all, Wronthgrinn's maniacal laughter rang.

There was some more shouting and flashing, and by the time Freetrick could see and hear again, the show was apparently over. A crew of goblins in stained smocks were cranking winches and closing metal plates over the ceiling. The lightning-machines were popping and ticking as they cooled. The Life-twister, standing in the center of the room like a ring-master in a circus, dusted off his hands and wiped a spatter of blood off his forehead.

Bloodbyrn cleared her throat at him.

Wrothgrinn's spun to face them. "Who?
Who!
WHO dares disturb the sanctity of my solitude!"