The Kingdoms of Evil (13 page)

"Yeah," said Istain. "Nothing you told me is a good reason for me to
ever
visit the place. Burning libraries, it's a nation ruled by sexually-repressed teenage girls!"

"The High Maiden Kadene a'Meaduedia is two centuries old, Istain," Madene mumbled from under her hair.

"And if you could find out how she managed to live that long," the Proctor told Madene, "we'd award you tenure tomorrow."

"Woah, Madene's
right
?" said Istain, "But how can she possibly be that old?"

"We have no idea, Mr. Scander, except it involves something called the Virgin Rebirth."

"Huh," Istain dismissed the problem. "So as to my earlier question…"

Clanat cocked and eye at Lucan, who nodded. Gas light flashed across his eye lenses as the junior Proctor leaned forward. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible above the hiss of steam and the rattling of the iron wheels below them. Istain and Madene both strained to hear. "We're preparing to invade the Kingdoms of Evil."

***

Freetrick opened his eyes. There were two tiny pops of electrical discharge.

Freetrick was in Skrea. He was in Castle Clouds-Gather. And he was in a bed.

The bed was large and round, the size and shape of a wealthy Rationalist's Jacuzzi. The cushions were either not alive or thoroughly sedated.

Nevertheless, Freetrick got up very carefully.

A quick look down confirmed he was still in his Skrean mummy-wrappings. His skin was still as white and waxy as ever. Freetrick squinted. His eyes still didn't work right, and the room's only lighting a dim red glow, cast from far up the shaft-like walls. Freetrick eventually found the room's corners, a washbasin, and a clawed wooden bed-post by walking into them.

He nearly walked into the door, too, before someone knocked on the other side.

The door led to a thickly carpeted room with a desk and a lot of what he hoped was only very bad statuary. Freetrick squinted briefly at the dark looming shapes.

"Who's there?" Freetrick called out, his own voice sounding weirdly harsh in the echoing stone chamber. "Don't come in here!" True words, what were they going to do to him now?

There was a cough from behind the door---discrete, mannered, and as bloodless and cold as a caveman's corpse.

"Ah, Mr. Skree!" Freetrick had never thought he would be happy to see the dangling vampire, but relief washed through him at the sound of that sepulchral voice. Surely it was too soon for Stockholm syndrome to be setting in?

"I trust the Lash of the Innocent has found His apartments to be the match of the dark desires that cloud the hearts of the powerful?" asked Mr. Skree through the door.

Freetrick had to stand there staring at the closed door for a moment before he decoded that one. "Yes, the rooms are fine. Um. Mr. Skree." Freetrick put his hand on the door's knob, shaped like a screaming skull, of course, and pushed. "What do you…oh. Hello?"

Two figures stood in the doorway. Or maybe "stood" wasn't the right word. One hung, and the other…the other
loomed.

Mr. Skree coughed subserviently. "Horrendous morrow, Fiend. Allow this sub-standard slug to introduce his Malevolence to…" The chamberlain extended a wing in presentation, "…The Duke his Vileness Milielan DeMacabre, Castigator of the Lower Waters, Torturer of the Wallowers, Oppressor of the Highest Slaves, Keeper of the Clot of Torture, Lord of the Sarcophagus at Macabre, Arch Chancellor of the Villainous Council, and Minister of Heart-Squeezing for the Kingdoms of Evil."

"Horrendous morrow, my lord!" The loomer, the Duke DeMacabre, exuded dark glee in a voice like a highly educated eel. "How absolutely
phantasmagorical
to finally make your acquaintance." The duke swept off a tall stove-pipe hat and dipped low in an oily bow. "My heart is bloodily penetrated to meet you, my lord."

The Duke rose from the bow and extended a hand. It looked like a skinned bat, and the illusion didn't fade when Freetrick shook it.

There was an awkward silence. This odious man wanted him to say something. Then the connection zapped across the abused gear-work of Freetrick's brain, and pressed a lever on some automatic polite machinery. "It was a pleasure to meet your daughter."

The dead bat twitched between his fingers, "Pleasure? A
pleasure
? Please
excuse
me, my lord. I hope that is not the case, for if it were, I would perforce apologize for my daughter's
unseemly
behavior," DeMacabre withdrew his hand and straightened, dark and terrible. "Oh, but she will be castigated, my lord,
castigated
indeed—"

Freetrick leapt to stop the train wreck this conversation was becoming. "No, Mr. Duke. DeMacabre, that was just an expression. I mean, I enjoyed meeting…uh…it…was really… horrible meeting your daughter. She was…absolutely terrifying."

DeMacabre paused mid-loom, "Indeed, my lord?"

"Oh yeah, like no woman I've met before," Freetrick said with utter sincerity, "I was terrified the whole trip."

"Ah
ha
?" The oil returned to DeMacabre's voice like the scum on a polluted lake. "
Indeed
! Oh la, my lord, may I say it was my privilege, yes,
privilege,
my lord, to sire my lord's fiancée, the most poisonous blossom in this entire cursed garden of Clouds-Gather, if I may be permitted so to boast."

"Uh … great." Freetrick wondered when the man would leave.

"Well." DeMacabre clapped with the sound of two cave- spiders violently mating. "I see my lord has been treated well. And," he reached into a breast pocket and withdrew a blurry something, which he held before his eyes, "I see too that you have been presented with the black power of the First God. How propitious. And, may I say, how
well
it looks on you, my lord. My lord is a veritable
nightmare
made flesh!"

"The first—?"
Ohhh
"You mean my uh…?" Freetrick gestured down at himself with his alabaster hands.

"Ah, yes, my lord. My lord has assimilated the Blood of the First God, and manifests his divinity for all. Is it not as the verses say?" DeMacabre raised a pale hand, "The moon…the moon…" he snapped. More spiders. "…shines? Ah! Mr. Skree?"

"
The moon shines on bone: His skin,
" Mr. Skree quoted, "
The Maelstrom below the night: His eyes
.
The curse of all men: His soul.
"

"Quite," said DeMacabre. "
All your works we shall oppose
and all that."

"Oh." Freetrick sighed. "Uh, thanks?"

"It is nothing," said DeMacabre, "the pleasure is entirely mine, to see my lord's face and
hear his uncanny voice. Tempest take me if it does not!"

"Yes…" Freetrick had no idea how he should respond to this man. He tried to review every meeting-the-in-laws scene of every book he had read and movie he had watched, but nothing really applied. "What was it you…wanted?" Aside from torturing him, of course.

Mr. Skree coughed discretely.

"This insignificant pustule will duly accept any punishment, be it ever so horrific, that the Master of Torment or the Keeper of the Clot sees fit to inflict upon his unworthy head for the interruption of the Fiend's sinister machinations…"

"Yes?" Freetrick said. DeMacabre seemed happy to wait until the vampire ran out of breath, but Freetrick was hoping that these people would leave soon, or maybe get him some breakfast.

"It occurred to this sub-human wreckage that he might act, in a small way, to ease the life of his most Terrible Master, and of course, duty must compel one to act in such circumstances, even though the life of the servant be forfeit for his audacity," said Mr. Skree.

DeMacabre nodded judiciously.

Freetrick was wondering whether to bother trying to translate this sentence when Mr. Skree shifted and swung to the side. Freetrick could hear his suckered hands and feet popping on what must have been a low ceiling on the other side of the door.

The vampire's dangling wings shifted, revealing a third…person? No. Yes? Something two-legged, anyway, but its blurred outline was terribly wrong. It moved forward in a slovenly shuffle that made Freetrick sick to his stomach.

The shuffling thing held something up toward Freetrick. A box.

Freetrick made no move to pick it up. "What is it?"

"For your eyes, my lord," DeMacabre said, which in no way comforted Freetrick.

"To sharpen the eagle glare of the Master of Miseries," said Mr. Skree, "that He may rain down His diverse torments upon—"

"Eye lenses?" Freetrick cut in. Now he did reach down to the box.

"Specifically, my lord, pince-nez." DeMacabre gestured toward his own face as Freetrick lifted the box out of the hands (paws?) of the little creature at his feet.

Freetrick brought the pince-nez to his face. It was a simple enough object, just two wire loops that held round sections of slightly curved crystal. There was some sort of clamp between the two lenses. Freetrick tried to stick his nose into the clamp, which pinched painfully. "Ow! How do I make it…"

Freetrick's words trailed off as he blinked and his vision snapped into focus. Suddenly he could see Mr. Skree's face, and that was actually a good thing! He could see the shuffling servant, something between a dwarfish human and a beaded lizard. It waggled its tongue at him, but that was okay too!

"Mr. Skree, this is amazing!" Freetrick looked around, "Thank…ew!" Freetrick said, having finally found something that made him regret the lenses.

DeMacabre was grinning at him.

It wasn't that the Duke looked like a corpse. So did Mr. Skree. But where Mr. Skree's face looked like the mummified remains of a high mountain king, DeMacabre was...juicier, a week old, at most. Exhumed because the murders hadn't stopped and the constabulary wanted to make sure the body was still dead.

Above a twisty, toothy grin and a sharp-tipped, crooked nose, a pair of smoked amber eyes looked at Freetrick like their owner was measuring how many pairs of shoes his skin might make.

"I'm—I'm very happy I can see again," Freetrick tore his eyes away from the DeMacabre's slightly parted teeth and inclined his head to Mr. Skree and the little goblin-creature. "So, yeah, good job Mr. Skree." He coughed."Well. Was that all you wanted to, uh, see me about?"

"Oh not at all, my lord," DeMacabre oozed, "I of course wanted to greet my lord upon his arising, but important matters of state rest upon the shoulders of the Soon-to-be Ultimate Fiend and, sadly, they wait for no man's convenience."

"Matters of what now?"

DeMacabre's eyes became, if possible, more crazed. "I refer of course to my lord's un-marriage! Most of the preparations have been accomplished—the blood cauldrons filled, the priest's teeth filed—worry yourself not over those details, my lord, but some final arrangements, most notably the fitting of my lord's robes..."

"What!?"
Marriage
? To
Bloodbyrn
? To
night
? Freetrick couldn't get
married
! He was in college! Had DeMacabre said 'blood cauldrons?' "Sweet Words, No!"