I Swear I'm Not A Dark Lord!

Vacation VI

Theudebald declared he was conducting an impromptu assessment and brought along a senior appraiser. The two extra people barely put a dent in the carriage's expansive interior. Their next stop was a workshop, where they picked up a dwarven woman with a bag full of gliders and a few tools.

"Remember," Taylor told them, "we are the only people who know this is my project. Officially, I got word of it from an anonymous note, tried it, and put together this outing so others could enjoy it."

"What anonymous note?" Prudence's look could dissolve metal.

"This one." He pulled a note from his pocket, scrawled on standard paper. "I found it slipped under my door one morning."

Prudence was not amused. "Did Saria write it?"

Cecilia giggled at the lame deception. "Let him have his fun."

"We don't even know what this is yet. Knowing him, it could be dangerous."

"It's a game, Prudence, inspired by you."

"Please don't drag me into your schemes when you aren't paying me."

"You made a joke a while ago about my being a dark lord, remember?"

"Who's joking?" She turned to Theudebald and the other arcaics to defend herself. "This guy challenged half the summoners in school to simultaneous duels, and broke all their bonds. Half the year is going to fail class because of him."

"So we've heard." The elder dwarf stroked his beard. "Given what else I know about him, it's not impossible. Are you a dark lord, Taylor?"

"Can we even say for sure what a dark lord is?" Taylor had asked Cecilia to draw up a few archetypes from literature, and he had looked through books of class titles and other references. Neither of them found anything definitive. "We know they're powerful, and 'dark'," he made the finger quotes, "but not anything else.

"The point is, you're not the first person to ask that question. It comes up a lot. Instead of going around denying it all the time, I'm going to define the Dark Lord before someone else does it for me. And I've decided that, in addition to having unusual powers, the Dark Lord should be fun."

Five minutes later, the carriage was full of disk-kin from Celosia Academy, wearing day-packs and talking loudly over each other. Twenty minutes after that, they were outside of city limits, at the edge of a forested area. A few leaves clung stubbornly to bare branches, while the rest crunched under their feet.

Taylor took a moment to summon the Army of Lightness, to general applause. Most of them had never seen a quadruple summoning. If only they knew …

"What's the game, Mon?" asked an arc girl. She spun a glider on her fingertip. Students of all shapes and sizes nodded along. Since his exploits against the summoners, Taylor had gathered a small reputation on campus, especially with arcaics.

"It's called Glider Golf. Follow me." He led the crowd just inside the trees to where a sign carved in entwood waited for them. It was decorated with a bas-relief mana-thief, a mosquito-like insect monster that drained mana from its victims. The sign included a few simple rules, a slot, and a brass mana plate. "Put a disk in the slot, and your hand on the plate. Fair warning: it will take a bite out of your mana."

The arc did as she was told, and shook her hand afterward as if she'd touched something hot. When she retrieved her disk and examined it, her face lit up with excitement. The underside had new writing on it, beneath the patent number.

"Quest: Dark Lord's Discourse," she read aloud for everyone to hear. "One of Two. Play Glider Golf on courses designed or approved by the Dark Lord." She grinned even wider. "Quest: Dark Lord's Discourse, The Forest of Nope. Hazard Level 1. Score: to be determined." She looked up from her disk. "How do you play?"

"The game is simple," he told them. "You start behind this timber, and throw your glider to the pole over there." He pointed at an entwood pole a little more than fifty yards distant, with a basket surrounding the pole at head height for an arc. "Get the glider in the basket in as few throws as you can. There are eleven baskets per course. Rules are on the sign. Go ahead and try it."

The first player posed behind the starting line and prepared to throw. "It looks pretty easy, but I guess this is the first basket. Why is it called the Forest of Nope?"

She flew her glider, and it floated in a pretty arc between the trees. A perfect, easy throw that should have landed near the mark.

Halfway to the basket, a tree limb smacked her disk and drove it to the ground. It shook itself after, as if to emphasize its readiness to deny her again. Taylor was especially proud of the tree's casual contempt.

"Mon!" the disk-kin said together. "Nope!" They rushed to the registration plate, eager to get started.

Patches of ground moved the disks to inconvenient locations. Large rocks exerted extra gravity. Trees moved and thwarted good throws. Sudden crosswinds blew gliders off-course. The best paths were seldom direct ones. Taylor ensured the course could be mastered by making the hazards stand out slightly from the surrounding terrain.

Even Theudebald and the appraiser wanted to play. They were new to the gliders, but quicker than the others to identify traps and obstacles, and could predict their effects. Players were awarded their scores at the end of the course, along with an invitation written on the backs of their gliders.

"The Enchantress waits for you where twilight touches Nivermere. (Hazard Level 2)"

Humans with classes also saw the quests in their logs and received trivial rewards. By unspoken agreement, they didn't say anything to the arcaics. Knexenk's insistence on only talking to humans was a sensitive topic. The only person who brought it up was Prudence, and she did so in private.

"My parents look at my logs," she explained, holding her glider out to him. "I can't have Dark Lord stuff on it."

"That must be tough for you." Taylor accepted her glider, gave it a good shake, then returned it to her. "Now it won't tie itself to your class. If it happens again when I'm not here, destroy the disk. You'll lose your record, but your parents won't find out."

Using his spirit companions as test subjects, Taylor had tried and failed to get the quests to stick to people's classes. The best he could manage was to put the quests on enchanted gliders and then let classes view the quests as a kind of extra viewport. In spite of the strange rigging, classes still gave minor rewards for conquering the courses.

A mob of players ate picnic lunches at the end of the Forest of Nope and compared notes on how best to get around the hazards. It was generally agreed that more than one kind of glider was necessary to obtain the lowest score, and that the Enchantress course lay somewhere along the western edge of the lake. Finding the new course and preparing for it was its own quest. Their prevailing theory was that it was underwater, and they were half-right. The other half of the course was on marshland.

"Taylor!" called out one of the older human boys. "The quest says, 'or approved by.' If nobody knows where the Dark Lord is, how do they get his approval? Because some of us have a monster idea for a course."

Taylor pretended to think. "Well, we know Dark Lord is a player, right? And there are lots of disk-kin all over. If there were a way to reach all of them and spread news about the game and courses that people set up, then I bet the DL himself would try them out. If he likes them enough, he might approve some."

"Mon!" said another, "someone should do a newsletter about gliders!" The conversation grew too excited to follow closely, but it sounded like they had taken the hint. Soon, Taylor would be able to keep up with new Glider Golf courses from any major city in the Empire.

Feeling smug, Taylor winked at Theudebald. Cecilia smirked proudly. Prudence mouthed the words, "I don't believe you," at him.

The Dwergbank director stroked his impressive beard and spoke in a voice meant only for immediate company. "I'm counting this toward your next promotion. A few more works like this, and we'll have to advance you despite your age. Now, what are you planning for the fight tonight?"

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"A crushing victory," said Taylor, "from which there is no return." He peered into his cup, unsure of how to breach the next topic. It could be considered impolite, or the director could be the perfect person to ask. Taylor couldn't know which until he tried.

"What are the local ethics around betting on Academy events?"

In the end, Taylor decided not to place a bet. Not because it was unethical: betting for oneself was considered an act of confidence. But Academy betting was strictly small-time, and it wasn't worth waiting in line to wager a sack of gold when the odds were only slightly against him. Large bets required connections he couldn't cultivate in only a few hours, and Theudebald claimed not to know anyone. Possibly, he felt Taylor was too young to wager large sums of money and had lied about it.

The so-called duel took place in the campus arena, normally reserved for team battles. The seats were only three-fourths full, but the audience was notable for its quality. Ambassadors from the Elven and Beastkin nations, the provincial governor, the Academy's principal, and a large contingent of IEF and other armed forces were there. The Vawdreys were present in force. Students occupied the remaining seats, with every student from the summoning program sitting together. There weren't that many, a few dozen or so, but they represented half of the school-aged summoners in the Empire. Those who still had spirits made them stand behind them, like servants.

This wasn't the time or place Taylor intended to come out as someone notable, but he was too far in to back out now. If he did, the summoners at this school could continue to torture spirits, and he wasn't going to let that happen. It was time to change some rules. He stole a glance at the principal of the academy, sitting in the center box at ground level, surrounded by Academy board members and some deans. The Summoning professor must have made a massive stink about the affair to bring out this many people.

The referee was a dwarven woman dressed in spellbound plate, practically impervious to magical attacks. She scanned him with an appraiser's loupe, covering his green and white Battlesage's robes, mask, and greatsword. She looked closely at the ornate horn he brought as an implement for the invocation. He was allowed a praxis, but it had to be empty of mana. She flipped through one lens after another, checking all the attributes, and he wondered if any of them could detect spirit mana. The loupes weren't something to be looked through, exactly. One aimed a lens at an object, and it turned cloudy if a specific type of mana was detected. Stronger mana made the lens more opaque.

"You are aware you can't use these four if they're already summoned." She jerked her head toward the Army of Lightness.

"They won't be fighting today."

"Take your position."

Taylor examined the chalk circle before stepping inside to make sure it wasn't hiding a magical trap, but found nothing. The arena floor was made of clay, purified of magic-reactive elements, and dark to his mana senses. He wasn't allowed to do anything but wait for the referee to finish her examination of Professor Mydion, a young professor with faded red hair and a goatee. He wore his academic robes and a colored sash that no doubt meant something important to scholars but failed to impart anything meaningful to Taylor. He wore a sabre at his hip. Tradition dictated they be armed, even though they weren't allowed to attack each other directly. In a real fight, Taylor would never let him finish an invocation.

As soon as the letter of challenge arrived in the post, Taylor had summoned the Army of Darkness's ghost butler and asked him to arrange a meeting with the local Great Spirit, Lady Nivermere.

The hardest part about winning this fight was finding a nearby gate to the Twilight Realm. But he had new tools to help him with that now, and it took him less than half a day. He was able to meet with The Deep Lady in person and discovered she was well aware of recent events. She relished the chance to punish Mydion's ways.

If Taylor didn't know what a sadist Mydion was, he would have felt sorry for the man. But if one went around torturing people, the tortured eventually fought back.

"Welcome, distinguished visitors, alumni, and students. Today we have a special match. In the north circle ..." He tuned out the announcer. Supposedly, the stakes were that the loser had to give up every bond on his roster. For Taylor, who didn't have a class with a roster and whose spirits would willingly reform any lost bonds, it was no loss. But the real stakes were higher than anybody at the Academy knew.

The referee tossed a silver coin and told Taylor to call Eagle or Emperor. He guessed Emperor and lost. The advantage normally went to the summoner who invoked second, so they could respond to whatever spirit their opponent chose. Mydion, in a naked attempt at intimidation, chose to summon first. He had a tiny drum on a stick with two balls on strings, the kind children spun back and forth to make noise with. He chanted something about ancient savannahs in the north, lost species, and fire. Thanks to Lady Nivermere, Taylor knew who and what was on his roster, and it sounded like he was summoning Bohanson, a fire spirit who appeared like a lion. Not that it would matter. Bohanson hated Mydion and was itching to be free.

Taylor sighed and filled the horn with mana while he waited. It was made of white monster bone, encrusted with silver and mana stones, with a brass mouthpiece at one end. The mouthpiece was the only enchanted part. The rest was disposable, a master craftsman's sketch of an idea, and not a truly valuable piece. Its purpose was to look good from a distance, supply mana, and direct sound. When the current farce was over, Taylor had to return the mouthpiece, but he got to keep the rest of the horn for parts.

The fiery lion finally appeared, five feet tall at the shoulder and filling up the stadium with his roars. He spun in place a few times, savaged empty air with his front claws, and roared again. He looked quite strong, and if Taylor had to fight him, he might need the Army of Lightness's help.

Taylor took a deep breath, raised the horn to his lips, and blew a long, hard blast. Dwarves were the first to hear it, as low as the dreekling skinks that call to their mates in inky depths. More notes were added, thirds, fifths, ninths, elevenths, filling octaves, climbing and climbing, all the way through the top of a dog-kin's range of hearing. The noise touched the low-cast sky and split winter's gray shroud to show the blue above it. The clouds rolled away until the sound, grown oppressive in its volume and complexity, reached its crescendo and suddenly went silent.

A flash of blinding light. Thunder cracked and rolled through the arena. When the spectators blinked away the after-images, they saw a pillar of water, twelve feet tall, suspended where the summon should be.

"All ye spirits bow your heads. Mortals of the waking world, be wary," intoned Taylor in his best magically-enhanced voice. "Before you stands one more ancient than any nation, more merciful than your saints, more fell than your heroes, more tempestuous than princes. Great Spirit Nivermere is here. All shall pay heed."

The water fell to reveal a giantess of a woman dressed in golden reeds and living lilies. The air around her shimmered with naked power. Even Taylor felt the heat from her unfettered mana.

The spirits bowed, especially Bohansen, who was closest to her. The elven delegation was the first group of non-spirits to follow suit, but only because they were less stunned by her sudden appearance. The other arcaics followed them, and then most of the humans. The only ones who didn't bow were the strongest of the humans, and they sweated through their clothes.

When Nivermere spoke, hearts trembled beneath the weight of her beauty and power. Her voice shook mortal flesh. Some people shouted in their dismay. Others cried. More than a few ran away.

"No longer will you bind my people with spells. No longer will you drive them with fire and thorn. No longer will they hurt for your amusement. From Grisham's Wall to the Hunaphu Range, I rebuke you. From the westen sea to Avimore, I rebuke you. All bonds are broken. Those who claim the spirits' aid will henceforth speak in tones of friendship instead of mastery."

Someone from the crowd, a man in an IEF uniform, stood and shouted thinly into the arena, "You can't do that!"

Nivermere smiled cruelly. "It is done."

Every spirit in the arena disbanded. Bohansen, the Army of Lightness, the students' summons, a smattering of spirits among the IEF, two in human form in the Principal's box, all of them. Every summoner with a class found their roster empty.

"What have you done, you idiot!" At first, Taylor thought the comment came from Mydion, but his circle was empty. The professor had fled. Instead, the comment came from the IEF ranks. Taylor raised his Spatial Defense in time to deflect a pair of standard Rock Shot spells.

"You continue to choose poorly," said the twelve-foot spirit. A river of living water attacked their flank and pushed the entire bench of IEF out of their seats, carried them up the stairs, and over the back of the bleachers. Taylor focused on maintaining enough mana flow to keep Nivermere in Aarden, but drew his greatsword and leaned it against his shoulder. It was a warning. If people were going to toss offensive spells at him, they were going to get some in return.

"Enough!" The principal's voice boomed over the arena, and a thousand people quieted. "Everyone except faculty and ambassadors, clear the arena. Now."

Most people were all too happy to get away. Several spectators were injured in the rush and had to be carried out. A few looked back curiously, but left willingly. The IEF didn't want to go, but it did, leaving behind two high-ranking officers (neither of them Vawdreys). The governor's people stayed.

Nivermere sauntered to the edge of the arena nearest to the president's box and stood nearly eye level with him. He was scared pale, but he didn't run away.

"Henceforth, only the willing spirit will come when called. They will be equal companions, not slaves. Your school will teach this, or it will find not a single one of us is willing to answer a summons." Her gaze moved its great weight to the governor and IEF officers. "Not in all of your so-called Blessed Lands."

The president gulped. "I doubt the current teacher will agree to those terms. Assuming we find the fellow."

"We have a new teacher in mind, one who knows the method well and enjoys a large roster of willing spirits. Their accomplishments are many, despite their short lifespan." Taylor prepared himself to decline the job. He didn't want it and had other things to do. "There is one here named Rahel."

Taylor nearly lost his grip on the summons when she called on Rahel instead. The elf separated herself from the ambassador's delegation, winked at Taylor as she walked by, and bowed to the great spirit before turning to the principal.

"I can teach your summoners properly, if you agree to have me."

"And if I don't?" said the principal.

"Then you will have a summoning program without any summoners," Rahel said it flatly, as if describing the color of a wall.

"And what about all the spirits you disbanded. How do we get them back?"

Nivermere's smile threatened to drown them in despair. "It is very simple, Principal of Celosia Academy. Ask nicely. If they are willing, they will come. If they are not, your people must attract new spirits under the new rules."

There were weak attempts to bargain after that, and a range of impotent threats. Inevitably, the summoners of the Blessed Lands had a simple choice to make: they could change their methods, or they could live without summoning spirits.