Daktari made his way through the streets of Sultan’s Oasis. Throngs of people crowded the stalls. Merchants haggled with customers. The stink of livestock and unwashed men filled the air. All the noise and life set the purple-robed sorcerer’s teeth on edge. How he longed to summon an acid fog to dissolve the flesh from their bones.
He forced the thought away. Always the demon’s corruption tried to push him to violence. Unnecessary death and destruction was its way, not his. While he had no compunction about killing, he found mindless slaughter pointless and a waste of magic.
Grimacing, he pulled the cowl of his robe down lower over his eyes. Almost as unbearable as the people was the bright sun beating down on him. The heat didn’t faze him, a simple frost aura kept it at bay. The light troubled him more. High sun would arrive soon and Daktari’s eyes, accustomed as they were to the shadows of his underground home, complained with bitter tears of hate.
The miserable setting combined with the demon’s influence almost pushed Daktari into a true rage. And when the shadow sorcerer was enraged, even demons steered clear.
He could easily have teleported directly to the palace. He’d been there several times and the feeble wards guarding it were no barrier to him. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do so without alerting everyone inside and that would make his task more difficult. So Daktari endured and pushed his way through the crowd. The White Palace and his prize beckoned.
Near the end of the market he shoved a large man aside. The fellow stank of ale and vomit. No doubt that was from the stain on the front of his filthy tunic. Disgusting savages, the lot of them.
Before the sorcerer had taken two steps he felt a large hand clamp around his shoulder. The big man spun him around. “You’d best watch who you’re shoving, little man.”
That was more insult than Daktari would bear. He summoned a wisp of shadow magic into his right index finger and tapped the oaf between his beady eyes.
His head exploded in a red mist.
People ran screaming in every direction. Daktari let out a little sigh as the corruption and bloodlust that constantly haunted him backed off a fraction. It would be back of course. Like an addict, this fix would only keep the cursed feelings away for so long.
He hurried on toward the palace, no longer bothered by the unwashed masses.
The gates of the palace stood open and unguarded. Court day was the one day each month people could enter and leave the palace grounds at will, lucky for the guards—he was so close to completing his pact that any delay was apt to send him flying off the handle.
With barely a glance at the gardens surrounding the palace or the young lovers strolling through it, the sorcerer strode right toward the palace doors. Two guards dressed in leather armor and carrying spears stood on either side of the entrance. As Daktari approached they crossed their spears in front of him.
“Sorry, sir, court’s closed after ten,” the man on the right said, pointing toward a sundial sitting beside the steps.
Daktari’s scowl twisted his lips. He didn’t have time for this. “You’re not going to let me in?”
“Orders,” the man agreed.
“Pity for you.”
Before the confused guards could figure out what he meant, Daktari pointed at the guard that had spoken, drew the ether around his extended hand, and infused it with shadow magic. A purple aura surrounded the guard and lifted him off the ground.
With a flick of his wrist Daktari sent the man streaking through the air.
The guard came to a sudden stop when he struck the palace wall. His body left a crimson streak down the white marble as it slid to the ground.
He turned back to find the second guard already had the door open. As he passed by he heard the fellow mutter, “Never wanted to be a guard anyway.”
Daktari chuckled. The violence combined with his amusement to fully stabilize his mental state.
Once inside and out of the murderous light he let out a soft breath. The beautiful white floor and walls weren’t really to his taste, but the shadows, at least, were welcoming.
He walked down the main hall. Along each side, a row of twenty pillars supported a high domed ceiling. Intricate carvings showed scenes from the daily life of the natives before the sultan’s ancestors had conquered them. Daktari had no interest in any of this. He could sense his quarry straight ahead.
A pair of stone soldiers stood beside wooden double doors inlaid with gold. Daktari approached and flung the doors open with a gesture.
The court bore few decorations. A double row of ten benches ran three-quarters of the length of the room. At the front two chairs faced the sultan where he sat on a gold throne carved to look like he was sitting in the mouth of a cobra. Behind the sultan stood the remaining eighteen stone soldiers.
About a hundred people sat staring at Daktari as he entered. Vilos laid a hand on the hilt of his sword. Beside him, his daughter stared in apparent amazement that anyone would dare enter her father’s court without permission. She looked beautiful in a conservative blue gown and silver tiara, so young and full of life.
Daktari smiled. At last he could complete the pact and free himself of the demon’s malign influence.
“Court is closed,” Daktari said. “Anyone who wishes to see tomorrow’s dawn, get out.”
No one moved.
They all stared at him, dumbstruck.
His recently sated rage came roaring back. He blasted the flesh from a fancily dressed man near the door. When the skeleton hit the floor it crumbled to pieces.
That had the desired effect.
People ran screaming past Daktari and out into the palace.
When the throne room had emptied of all save the sultan and his daughter, Daktari walked forward and sat in one of the chairs facing the sultan.
“Hello, Vilos. It’s been too long.”
“Twenty years. I thought you’d forgotten me. Until last night.”
“No such luck.” Daktari’s lip curled into a serpent’s smile. “I’ve come to claim my due.”
He looked knowingly at the princess.
Shara started and Daktari laughed. “You never told her. My dear, you were promised to me before your birth.”
The princess looked at her father. “Father? This madman is lying, isn’t he?”
“Not now.” Vilos stood up and faced Daktari. “I’m not the same weak boy you bargained with those many years ago. I am sultan now and I declare our contract void.”
Daktari raised an eyebrow. “You declare?”
“As sultan my word is law. Now get out of my palace.”
Daktari rose, eyes narrowed. “You presume much to speak so to me. Your word may be law, but only if you can enforce it.”
Vilos looked at the nearest golem. “Stone soldier, throw this man out of the palace.” The golem didn’t flinch. He pointed at a different golem and repeated the order.
Nothing.
“You thought to use my own golems against me? Foolish.”
“They’ve never failed me before,” Vilos said.
“That’s because I wasn’t here to counter your orders.”
“I have two hundred men on the palace grounds and five thousand in the city. You won’t escape with my daughter.”
Daktari shrugged. “Call them. They won’t last long against my stone soldiers.”
Vilos collapsed back onto his throne. Daktari had him and he knew it. The sorcerer had waited twenty years for this moment. Soon he would be free of the demon’s yoke.
Vilos leaned over and whispered something in his daughter’s ear, no doubt explaining that she’d have to go with him. With the princess in his possession, he could complete the ritual and complete the contract that bound him to his master. No longer having his body and soul linked to that lurking darkness would be welcome.
The girl fiddled with her ring and then she vanished.
No!
Daktari sent out a psychic probe.
He found nothing.
The girl wasn’t cowering, invisible in some corner, she was gone.
He restrained a wave of murderous rage by the narrowest of margins. “What have you done?”
“I sent her away,” Vilos said, triumph in his voice. “I knew this day would come, so I hired a wizard to enchant her ring. You’ll never find her now.”
“Fool!” Daktari screamed. “Ten minutes with a crystal ball and I’ll have her.”
“No. Once activated, the ring shields the wearer from magical scrutiny.”
Daktari’s eyes began to glow. “I’ll rip her location from your mind.”
Vilos grinned. “Go ahead. I have no idea where she’s gone.”
Red beams shot from the sorcerer’s eyes and struck Vilos in the head.
The sultan screamed and tore at his hair.
Daktari riffled through his mind, shredding the feeble mental walls Vilos raised.
In less than a minute the light faded. He took slow, deep breaths. Killing Vilos wouldn’t get him what he wanted, but the sultan may be of some use to him later.
“You hired Silvermane to send her to a safe location hidden even from you. Clever, I suppose. I’ll just have to get Silvermane to tell me where she’s gone.”
Vilos had fallen to his knees but now forced himself to stand. “Good luck. Silvermane is the most powerful wizard in the High Kingdom. Binding, energize!”
The doors to the court slammed shut. Glowing runes appeared on every surface of the room.
Daktari snarled. He should have checked for hidden magic.
Vilos smiled. “I also paid her to build a magical trap. Now it’s just you and me, and even if you kill me, the wards will keep you trapped in this room.”
Oh how very wrong he was. Ether gathered around him and he charged it with shadow magic. As the power grew too great to fully contain, purple lightning flickered off Daktari’s body. The jagged bolts of energy struck at random, sparking off the wards.
“If you think the old hag’s magic can hold me, then you are sadly mistaken.”
“We’ll see.” Vilos drew Heat’s Bane.
The gleaming mithril glittered with a pale-blue aura. The temperature of the room dropped to near freezing.
Vilos raised the shamshir over his head and took two steps.
Daktari snapped his fingers and the blue aura vanished.
Another gesture and the blade slammed into the floor.
Vilos struggled until the cords on his neck stood out, but he couldn’t budge his weapon.
“Did you learn nothing from my demonstration with the golems?” Daktari asked. “None of my weapons can harm me.”
Vilos roared and charged the sorcerer.
Moron. Daktari was tempted to kill him simply to rid the world of his stupidity.
A tiny fraction of the gathered energy wrapped Vilos in a purple aura and lifted him off the ground.
Vilos hung upside down facing the sorcerer.
“You’ve accomplished nothing.” Daktari had the beginnings of a plan now. That always helped keep the rage under control. “You only delay the inevitable. Now let me show you what I think of Silvermane’s magic.”
Daktari stepped to the center of the room. Purple energy grew so thick around him that it tinted everything. Daktari drew power from tiny portals linked to Heaven and Hell, weaving the antithetical power sources into a single whole through the ether. Few sorcerers could manage the subtle balance of light and dark, which was why shadow magic was the rarest and most powerful of all the fields of sorcery.
Like a storm building, more and more purple light filled the room.
Random blasts struck the wards and exploded like purple fireworks.
When the air thrummed with power, Daktari released it with a roar of anger.
Magic screamed in every direction.
The roof disintegrated.
Walls burst outward.
When the magic faded Daktari stood in a foot-deep crater. The court no longer existed as a distinct room. Rubble lay scattered around like a child’s building blocks after a tantrum.
Overhead the noonday sun shone down, revealing the damage for all to see.
Daktari smiled at Vilos. The purple aura had protected the sultan from any harm. “So much for your trap.”
“Just kill me and get it over with,” Vilos said.
“I’m not going to kill you. No, I’m going to let you watch as your precious kingdom is torn apart. We had a deal, Vilos. When it comes to magic, there is only one unbreakable rule: never break a deal.”
Daktari picked up Heat’s Bane and held it up for Vilos’s inspection. “This goes to Nord. He commands a small army to the north. It shouldn’t be much trouble to set him against you. The stone soldiers will go to Kent.”
“No, it will be the Crown War all over again,” Vilos said.
“Correct,” Daktari said. “Do you remember that conversation we had so long ago, when you came crawling to me, begging for a way to end the war? I gave you everything you needed and all you had to do was turn over your firstborn daughter when I came for her. How quickly you agreed that day. You’ll throw away twenty years of peace and prosperity, the life of heaven knows how many innocents, all to save one girl.”
“She’s my daughter,” Vilos replied as if that made an adequate explanation.
Perhaps it did, to him. Daktari despised children in general and certainly had none of his own. People did insane, irrational things for their children. Clearly the irony that many other people’s children were going to die thanks to his efforts to save his own was lost on the man.
Vilos’s glare held a mixture of rage and desperation. Both emotions as empty and powerless as the declaration that he’d betrayed Daktari for his daughter.
He levitated toward the opening he’d blown in the ceiling followed a moment later by the stone soldiers.
The sorcerer paused a moment beside Vilos. “You should have given me the girl.” He rose up a few more feet then called down, “I’ll send you Silvermane’s head when I finish with her.”
Daktari flew over the city. It looked like most of the soldiers had gathered around the palace. He stayed high enough to avoid arrows. He could have shielded himself easily enough, but saw no reason to waste the magic.
His home waited about fifty miles north of the city. Even flying it would take most of an hour to get there. Eager as he was to give the sultan’s brothers their gifts, he had more pressing matters to attend.
The girl hadn’t just disappeared off the face of the planet. She went somewhere and someone would find her. Daktari just had to make certain whoever did so brought her to him, unharmed. Should she be otherwise, he shuddered to think what his benefactor would do.
Daktari and the golems landed in the Chaos Hills outside the entrance of a cave. One of the few truly wild places left in the High Kingdom, the Chaos Hills deserved their name. Ogres, fire drakes, and worse called the hills home.
Daktari smiled. He was by far the worst. Just inside the cave, red glyphs writhed on the wall. A new skull lay on the floor, the remains of a goblin foolish enough to ignore his magic.
“Stay here. Kill anything that tries to enter the cave,” Daktari told the golems.
Satisfied that nothing would disturb him, Daktari dispelled his wards with a wave of his hand. The burning in his eyes stopped the moment he entered the dim cave. He sighed in relief and descended deeper into the darkness. His lab waited about a quarter mile below.
As Daktari walked through the shadows, he had time to ponder his situation. For a hundred and sixty years he had languished under a cloud, waiting for his benefactor, the imprisoned elder demon Balthis, to name the task he needed to perform to fulfill their bargain. For all those years, this link between them poisoned Daktari’s ageless body with demonic corruption, filling him with the rage and desire to destroy that defined the demon race. Freeing himself from that corruption was his highest priority.
The archangels had imprisoned Balthis several millennia ago for the crime of murdering a planet. They could have destroyed him. Even an elder demon was no match for an angry archangel.
But of course the angels knew that he would simply be reborn in Hell by the will of whichever demon lord created him in the first place. And once he was reborn, there was always the possibility that some other insane cult could summon him again to destroy a second world.
So instead, they trapped Balthis in a prison of stone reinforced by divine magic and set him adrift in the endless darkness between stars.
Balthis had drifted, forgotten, for millennia, until the day Daktari had contacted him.
The elder demon had been quite surprised when Daktari’s sending reached him, though no more so than Daktari himself. It wasn’t like he was seeking the imprisoned demon. The goal of that spell had been simply to see how far he could push out a sending.
Still, the chance to speak with a being of such knowledge and power wasn’t one Daktari could cast away lightly. For a year they had conversed thus. Until finally a bargain was struck. Daktari would be told the location of an ancient book of magic, the Tome of Shadows, in exchange for a future task named by Balthis.
Not an ideal situation by any means. It was generally best to know the price before sealing a bargain, but after a decade of fruitless searching, he’d been desperate to find the tome.
The elder demon had kept his word and told Daktari where the tome lay hidden. It had taken the sorcerer over a year to find it as the landscape had changed a great deal in thousands of years. When Daktari had asked what he had to do in exchange, Balthis said he’d let him know.
Twenty-five years ago Balthis finally decided. Daktari had seen an image in his dreams of a blond-haired youth. Balthis explained that this young man would one day have a daughter that would be the key to his escape from his divine prison. The knowledge of the proper ritual had appeared in his mind.
Collect the girl and perform the ritual after her eighteenth birthday. Simple enough. Or so he’d thought at the time.
Daktari cared little if Balthis escaped or not. Certainly he was no demon worshipper. In fact, for the good of the mortal world, he’d prefer the elder demon remain imprisoned. But, as he told Vilos, a bargain was a bargain, and he had no intention of breaking his word.
Balthis wouldn’t be pleased that Daktari had let the girl slip through his fingers, not that he planned to share that particular bit of information. He would find her again. It was only a matter of time.
Daktari sighed as he entered his lab. It was the only place in the entire world he truly felt at home.
Six tables decorated the sorcerer’s lab. Two were covered with bubbling beakers and retorts. A sick-looking, viscous liquid dripped into a small vial. Daktari checked the progress of his work. The vial wasn’t even half full. It would take at least a day before he had enough poison to foul the unprotected oases. That would certainly drive the nomads to attack the High Kingdom’s cities, especially when his minion planted evidence that the sultan’s soldiers had done the poisoning.
Word of the chaos in the High Kingdom would spread quickly. Hopefully, when the princess learned her father was in danger, she would rush back to his side in a vain attempt to help.
If she did, he’d be waiting.
He’d set this particular backup plan in motion on the off chance he failed to collect his prize. Granted, he hadn’t considered that a particularly likely result of his visit to Sultan’s Oasis, but here he was, empty-handed.
“Master.” A black, bat-winged humanoid a little over a foot tall fluttered down from its roost near the ceiling to land on Daktari’s shoulder. “No girl?”
“I see nothing escapes the keen eyes of my homunculus. No, Bane, she vanished right before my eyes.”
“The demon won’t be happy.”
“No,” Daktari agreed. “But what he doesn’t know can’t hurt us.”
Daktari rubbed his homunculus between its wings. Soon it started to trill. The sound resembled a cat purring only more high pitched. The trill was unique to homunculi and Bane’s was the loudest he’d ever heard. Of course, everything about Bane was unique.
Any wizard worth the name could create a homunculus. The process involved some rare reagents and a blood sacrifice from the wizard. Once the material was gathered it took only a week of boiling and a few simple spells to produce the homunculus. The result was a pale-green humanoid about a foot tall connected to the wizard by a telepathic link. The creature couldn’t speak or move more than one hundred yards from its creator. Most wizards used them as spies or lab assistants—their telepathic link let them know whatever their creator knew.
Bane’s creation had taken almost a year.
Unsatisfied with the weak creations most wizards used, Daktari had infused Bane with shadow magic. The result was a stronger, tougher servant. Their link was strong enough that they could be half a world apart and still know what the other thought. Last, what pleased Daktari most was his creation’s ability to speak.
“The poison’s distillation is coming along well,” Daktari said.
“Slow,” Bane complained. “What will you do about the girl?”
“I’m going to put a bounty on her head.” Daktari went over to another table. This one held a crystal ball the size of his head sitting on a blackened silver tripod.
The sorcerer put his fingers against the crystal and it filled with purple mist. He pictured the princess as he’d last seen her, and then projected this image into the crystal ball. Next he attached a brief message with her name, a ten-thousand-gold-piece reward, and his location. Finally, he blasted the message through the ether with enough force to reach every magic user on the planet with a device capable of receiving it.
If the girl was out there, someone would find her. He cared not in the least if she returned on her own to help her father or trussed hand and foot in the possession of a bounty hunter. One way or another, he would claim her.
Vilos floated upside down watching the sorcerer fly away with his sword and golems. All the blood rushing to his head was making him dizzy. When the sorcerer had moved out of sight the purple aura started to fade. He just managed to tuck his head and roll through the fall as the magic ended.
Vilos staggered to his feet. His head still throbbed from the sorcerer’s mind search spell. Looking around, he took in the extent of the damage Daktari had caused. He could see clear through to the other side of the palace. It would take months to repair, not that Vilos expected to have the chance.
He sighed. He’d felt certain Silvermane’s wards would hold the sorcerer. The ease with which he’d torn through them only underscored how badly he’d underestimated his opponent. At least the ring had done its job. Wherever she was, it had to be better than here. Vilos only hoped there’d still be a High Kingdom for her to return home to one day.
A pair of guards poked their heads in what used to be the doorway. “Are you hurt, Majesty?” one asked.
“No,” Vilos said. “Was anyone injured in the blast?”
“Many, Majesty, but no deaths.”
“Thank heaven for that.” Vilos picked his way through the rubble to stand next to the guards. “Round up everyone you can find and start searching for anyone buried under the rubble. Also send messengers to all the nobles in the city, the princess’s party is cancelled.”
“Yes, Majesty. Um, where is the princess?”
A big believer in honesty, Vilos said, “I have no idea.”
He left the two guards behind and walked toward the garden. He needed to think.