The Dark Lord's Handbook (14 page)

He left his horse loose to graze the short grass. It was well trained and would not wander. With his ridiculous disguise on, he proceeded into the tower, a legacy of past glories, a folly perhaps, but tall and well built. The stairs spiralled up the inner side of the tower wall, with rooms off landings filling the centre. The marble of the stair had been worn smooth over millennia of footfalls. For a man less fit than the Count the steps would have been tiring.

Eventually the stairs opened out between two pillars into the circular room that covered the top of the tower. The worst of winter was over since his last visit and through the arched windows the Count could see the forest had a full canopy of green. Across the room was the archway that led to a final small stair that went onto the roof itself from which Black Orchid normally made her entrance.

The Count half expected to see his fellow ‘flowers’ arranged around – he was late after all – but did not expect to see Black Orchid standing alone, waiting.

“Ah, Count,” said Black Orchid in a frighteningly genial manner. “Glad you could make it.”

The Count was unsure what to do. A bow seemed appropriate.

“I am most sorry for my tardiness, my Lady,” he said as he dipped his head and flourished his arm in what he thought was a courtly manner.

“How sweet,” said Black Orchid. “Less of the formalities, Count.”

The Count straightened and walked to his prescribed position in what should have been a circle of co-conspirators. This brought a peel of disturbing laughter from Black Orchid. Then it registered. She had called him Count. Twice. Not Hemlock. He tugged the hood from his head.

“Bravo, Count. Bravo. I see you understand,” said Black Orchid.

“There has been…” started the Count.

“Some weeding in the flowerbed,” finished Black Orchid. “They served their purpose.”

Indeed, the Count had heard of the unfortunate demise of the Countess of Umbria. It had been covered up, of course. They had circulated the story that Edwin had indeed slain an ancient evil that had risen from the lake, which served a secondary purpose of bolstering his status as a hero. Unfortunately, Edwin had not followed through and had stayed put in Wellow, in love with some young strumpet. The Count had assumed that the meeting was to discuss how best to direct him, preferably in a way that would not be fatal.

These thoughts were interrupted by Black Orchid pulling back her own hood.

The Count had seen beautiful women of all shapes, colours, sizes and dress sense. Black Orchid was not one of these women. Those women had been human. Black Orchid was most definitely not human. She was also not beautiful, she was riveting. Her skin was smooth, almost translucent, and black, like polished obsidian. She had a thin face, with high cheeks and eyes that were yellow slits. She had no hair, but what looked like a crest that ran back over the top of her head.

She smiled to reveal a set of teeth that looked like a rows of ivory needles.

“Do you know who I am, Count?” asked Black Orchid.

The Count felt a lump form in his throat. He had no inkling at all who this woman (for that sake of a better description) was at all. No myth, nor legend, suggested itself.

“In truth, my Lady, I have no idea,” managed the Count.

Black Orchid held his eyes for a moment, as though she were trying to read his mind, perhaps for truth? She didn’t blink. The Count began to wonder whether he was going to be the last flower to be deadheaded in Black Orchid’s garden. Again she smiled, and it didn’t help matters.

“I am Lady Deathwing,” she said. “You may have heard of us? The Deathwings?”

Until this moment, the Count had never understood the expression: paralysed by fear. At least not in men. Men who were afraid tended to drop everything and run in exactly the opposite direction to what they were afraid of and hide. Now he understood. When there was no possibility of escape, when there was nowhere to run to, or any place to hide, when the fate you faced was as terrible as your highly imaginative mind could conjure – and the Count had seen many a bad end to understand how bad they could be – then indeed being paralysed by fear was very real. The Count was sure that if he wanted to he could not even twitch his itching nose, let alone raise a hand to scratch it.

“I see that you have,” continued Lady Deathwing. “I’m so glad there’s no need for any kind of lesson or demonstration.”

The Deathwings: the legendary leaders of Zoon the Reviled’s Black Dragon Flight. They had so scarred the world that the fear of them was inbred. The Count had seen strong men cry and piss themselves with fear and never quite understood. He had been fearful but not as close to losing all control as he was now. With a terrible realisation he knew that this conspiracy was not some cunning plan to start a war of convenience but the beginnings of something that could lay ruin across the world.

Lady Deathwing was standing there, enjoying his terror. But then she would. She was an evil, black-hearted dragon. This womanly guise was merely a convenient form.

“I thought you were…” started the Count.

“All dead?”

The Count nodded.

“Guess who thought wrong?” said Lady Deathwing with a smile that if it was intended to relax the Count failed miserably. “Let’s say it has been convenient for us to let the world think that we had all fallen, and in truth there aren’t many of us left.”

Though truth and anything Lady Deathwing said were likely only loosely acquainted, the Count hoped that this was the case. Then an odd thought occurred, one of those thoughts that ought to best be left to rattle around and not be voiced, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

“Forgive me for asking but…” The Count swallowed. He felt like he was standing on the edge of cliff and vertigo was whispering in his ear to jump. “…aren’t you on the wrong side?”

“The wrong side?”

“What I mean is, my Lady, with no disrespect, aren’t you meant to be on the Other Side?”

“The Other Side?” asked Lady Deathwing, taking a step towards the Count.

It took all of the Count’s will not to turn and leap from one of the many windows. A short fall and splat, it would be all over.

“The Evil Side?”

Lady Deathwing stopped and let her head fall back laughing. If there had been glass in the arches, it surely would have shattered. As it was, the Count was convinced his ears were bleeding.

“My dear Count, what a darling you are. There is no Good Side or Evil Side.”

“There isn’t?”

“There is the Winning Side and the Losing Side. And I’m on the first.”

“The Winning Side?”

“There, you’ve got it. Now that’s settled, I have a job for you. My idiot husband has dipped his wick once too often and we have his mess to clean up.”

So there are at least two of them
, thought the Count. This was not good.

“It seems our hero…what’s his name?”

“Edwin.”

“Yes, Edwin. It seems our hero, Edwin, has his sword – thanks to the Countess – and has at last got himself a cause. The love of his life has absconded with a middle aged poet undergoing a mid-life crisis and Edwin is in hot pursuit.” Lady Deathwing sighed. “Men are such fools.”

“But if it’s the woman he loves?” said the Count. He knew he would have raised mountains if anyone had stolen his beloved wife.

“No, not Edwin, my dear Count. The poet. The poet is an idiot. If it’s not some young girl it’s a fast stallion. Fortunately, Edwin believes her to be abducted by a great evil and not some thirty something fool trying desperately to be young again. What I need you to do is to go and slow Edwin down. We don’t want him getting Griselda back too quickly. He’ll need an army, and that will take some arranging.”

The Count was trying his hardest to keep up but now he completely lost. “An army? To defeat a poet?”

“You should hear his poetry,” said Lady Deathwing, and she winced theatrically.

The Count forced a laugh.

“No, not the poet, Count. The great evil. That’s where my idiot husband comes in. Word from Bostokov is that an overzealous commander on a sting operation to catch woodland bandits instead got himself a black dragon. Needless to say, it was not I, nor my husband, so that left only one possible answer.”

Lady Deathwing paused. The Count was unsure what he was meant to say and just shrugged.

“A bastard, Count. A bastard. And we can’t have a bastard Deathwing running around now can we? But he could be useful. We need a great evil, a Dark Lord, and this bastard fits the bill.”

The Count shook his head. The thought that were two Deathwings running around was bad enough. Any number above two was incrementally worse.

“We need this other dragon – I think his name is Morden – to do his thing. We can’t save the world from the ravages of a Dark Lord unless he does some ravaging first, now can we?”

“I suppose not,” agreed the Count.

“Good. Good. I see you’ve got it. Now you’ll need to spend a lot of money so borrow as much as you can. But don’t worry, Count. I can see what you’re thinking. It’s not as though we are going to pay any of it back. If all goes well those filthy money grubbing middle class merchants and money lenders will all be dead, and if they are not, well, we’re called Deathwing for a good reason. And don’t worry about the poet and the girl, I’ll have my husband take care of them. He needs something useful to do. Now, run along.”

Chapter 19 Unpleasant History

Knowledge is power but it is swords that kill people.

The Dark Lord’s Handbook

The Chancellor’s archive was old. It had been gathered by a line of chancellors over the centuries, each one adding his particular field of expertise. It had been moved several times, mainly for reasons of security and size. The current housing was beneath the cellar of the Chancellor’s Firena residence, and was reached by a hidden stair behind the fake façade of a cask of Firena sherry.

Penbury ran his hand over the smooth wall as he wound his way down the spiral into the musty depths of the archive. After an unfortunate, but entirely predictable, accident with a candle many years ago, no flame was allowed in the archive, naked or covered. Instead he held a staff in his left hand that served the dual purpose of steadying his bulk on the steep stair and lighting his way by the means of the Azina gem clasped at the top of the staff.

It was one of the few items that some still thought magic. Though he was in no doubt that magic existed in the world, and all manner of strange creatures to boot, he was not as certain that the gem was magic but more likely it happened to have qualities that made it radiate light. It was probably as magical as a firefly. Nevertheless, its radiance was more than sufficient to guide him and allowed him to read without straining his eyes.

The foot of the stair opened immediately into the reading room, in which there was a large desk covered in writing materials, blank papers and an amusing puzzle ball that once disassembled was a bugger to put back together.

The Chancellor set the staff in a floor mounting where, by a cunning arrangement of mirrors and prisms, it illuminated the lines of shelves that stretched away into the rock.

The majority of the early writing was on scrolls, and kept safe from ageing by being secured within sealed earthenware tubes. The scroll contents were etched on the scroll casing and stacked on shelving carved into the bedrock. There were no wooden shelves to cut down on the potential flammables. The shelves themselves had dates chiselled into them to help searching. It was still hard work to find anything. Penbury thought that had he the time he should devise a system that would allow faster retrieval of vital information.

The information he sought would be among the oldest scrolls, going back five hundred years to the time of Zoon the Reviled, the last true Dark Lord. Fortunately, some two hundred years ago, the Chancellor of the time had re-housed the library and put all the materials in good cases. What concerned Penbury was that the scroll he sought was so old that it may well have perished regardless.

The shelves for that time had been subdivided into author and subject which helped a little. Most of the scrolls were political histories, religious rants, mediocre poetry and satire that had lost its bite. There were no books; they only started appearing a century or so later.

He was surprised that there was only one scroll on Zoon, apparently written by Krug Sharptooth. His heart sank. It was an orcish name which meant that whatever the scroll case contained was bound to be written in ancient Blood Rune, a language he had done miserably at in ancient studies at college. It was going to be a long day.

Luckily, he had had the foresight to deposit a small cask of sherry next to the reading desk for such occasions. He set the scroll case aside, poured himself a tipple and then recovered a snack pouch from one of his many pockets. One horseradish and beef sandwich later and he was ready for the runes.

The case was in reasonable condition, and its seal was intact. Using a letter opener, the Chancellor gently broke the wax seal around the lid before popping it off. A stale smell escaped the case. Using a set of tweezers, he pulled the scroll clear.