Dark Lord of Derkholm (17 page)

“That was just a joke,” Mara said irritably. “He's here for the animals while Derk's ill. Now I really must go and look at that dragon.” She handed Shona her reins and hurried away to the side valley. Shona looked exasperated.

“Wasted lover indeed!” Fran said, following them up the drive in the crowd of pigs. “Don't you let Old George hear you say that. It's bad enough being like a stick person without people passing rude remarks. We're only like this to oblige your father, Shona.”

“I know, I know,” Shona said hurriedly. “I apologize. It was Mum's joke.”

Everyone was in a hurry to see how Derk was. Blade handed the horses over to Old George and dashed upstairs after the others. Even Kit and Callette made the journey to Derk's bedroom, cautiously crawling up one side of the creaking magic-supported stairs and squeezing through the doorway to stare down at Derk's bed. Derk still looked terrible. His breathing rattled as he slept. It was most discouraging.

“And Mum hasn't even been to
look!
” Shona said. “She's gone to look at the dragon instead.” She was angry enough to ask, sweetly and dangerously, over supper, “And how is the poor dear dragon, Mother?”

“Oh, I think he's going to be all right,” Mara said, quite failing to notice Shona's sarcasm. “He's just slept himself nearly dead, poor creature. The healer stitched the worst of his wings and told him to rest and eat once a day for the next few weeks, and I can see she was right. He's a better color already.”

“More than Dad is,” Blade said.

“Lucky your father met that dragon when it was half dead, I say,” said Fran. “If it had been able to breathe fire, he'd be a crisp by now. They say the fire gets into your lungs and burns you up from inside. You can go about for weeks and then suddenly drop dead.”

“Wonderful!” said Lydda, sitting with her beak poised over a plate of stew which she had, for a wonder, scarcely touched. But then the stew had been cooked by Fran and was far from godlike.

“Dragons
are
wonderful,” Old George observed. “They can will you into being dead. Did you know that?”

“Or they can see into your mind and twist it,” added Fran. “It worries me that your poor father may have looked it in the eye. If he did, then there's no knowing what it might have done to him.”

“Sometimes they can take up a wizard's own magic and use it against him,” Old George said, ladling himself a third bowlful of stew. His skeletal condition made him very hungry.

“They do that by singing, you know,” Fran put in. “You didn't let this dragon sing to your father at all, did you?”

“There wasn't much any of us could stop it doing,” Don said.

“None of this was in the dragonlore I learned at the University,” Mara said firmly.

But this failed to stop Fran and Old George remembering a host of other things that were not in University dragonlore either. Most of it suggested Derk was as good as dead, and it upset Elda badly. After supper she raced upstairs and opened all the bedroom windows. The pigs flew eagerly in, followed by the owls. Elda spent the night huddled on Derk's bedroom carpet among the entire herd, anxiously listening to Derk's difficult breathing, while the owls sat in a row on Derk's bedhead.

Blade had a miserable night, too. When he was not dreaming, over and over, of the dragon blasting smoke at Derk—which Blade knew how to stop, except that in the dream he had forgotten how—he was dreaming of being inside the magical camp full of men in shiny black. Everyone in there was trying to kill everyone else. When Blade tried to stop them, they came for him with their swords. For once, he was quite grateful when Shona woke him early and told him to exercise the dogs.

Later that morning Kit called a council in his shed. Kit had been very busy. Strewn on the cushions of his bed were the pink pamphlet, the green one, the yellow one, the tour map, Derk's black book, Blade's black book, and piles and piles of Derk's untidy, hectic notes. On the floor was spread a large map of the continent with the routes of the various Pilgrim Parties carefully marked on it, and pinned on the wall was an even bigger timetable, in seven colors. Kit had done the map and the timetable himself in that beautiful clear penmanship which only griffins seemed to be capable of. Blade thought Kit must have worked most of the night.

“I wondered where that was!” Blade said, spotting his black book.

Shona arrived last, meaningly carrying her violin. “What's all this about?”

Kit's tail slashed. He was crouched in a vast black hump in the corner beyond his map. “I've been trying to work out what we ought to be doing,” he said, “and who needs to be where, and when. We've got to reckon on Dad being laid up for at least two weeks, and not too well for a month after that. It would be nice if we could have everything running smoothly for him when he's better. Don't you agree?”

“Yes,” Shona said, looking soberly down at the map. “I do.”

Everyone else sighed with relief. Confrontations between Kit and Shona could be terrible. Lydda quietly helped herself to a pen and some of the stack of paper Derk had made for Kit, ready to take notes.

“Right,” said Kit. “Three Pilgrim Parties come through today, three tomorrow, and three the next day, and so on for the next six weeks. They each have their first confrontation with the Forces of Dark five days later—”

“Leathery-winged avians,” Elda said, checking the timetable with one careful talon.

“That's right,” said Kit. “And the Wild Hunt three days after that. They pick up their first clue a day later. Does anyone know whether Dad planted the clues?”

Faces and beaks turned anxiously this way and that, mostly toward Elda, who usually knew what Derk was doing. “He did some,” said Elda, “but I don't think he'd finished.”

“He hasn't finished,” said Callette. “He said my gizmos needed a different set of clues for each one, and he was going to rack his brains.”

“We'd better check on that,” Kit said.

While Lydda wrote it down in large and beautiful script: “Clues. 126 × 10,” Don looked over her wing and exclaimed, “But that's one thousand, two hundred, and sixty clues! That's an
awful
job!”

“In thirty different places,” said Callette. “I'll do it.”

“Then I'll invent clues,” said Shona. “It seems a proper bardic activity. What else is urgent, Kit?”

“Most of it. We're going to be really busy,” Kit said somberly. “At three tours a day, by the end of three weeks there are going to be sixty-two parties of offworlders—”

“Sixty-three,” Don corrected him.

“Sixty-three then,” said Kit, “spread out over most of the continent, all needing to have adventures with the Dark Lord at least once a week, and a week after that, some of them might even be coming up for their Final Encounters. We may find ourselves having to provide a Dark Lord for the first ones to kill, depending on how Dad is. But the two most urgent things to work out are: How are we going to provide all the right adventures on time? and How do we get Derkholm converted into a Citadel? There's no way Dad's going to be fit enough to transform the house.”

“Yeeps!” Don said.

“Can't Barnabas do the house?” Blade asked.

“Yes, if you want him to know Dad can't,” Shona said crushingly. “Kit, Mum can change the house. She's been loving converting Aunt's house. We should have asked her before she went back there.”

“She'd only have time if she did it right now,” Kit pointed out. “Look at the timetable. She gets a party through her Lair every day after this first week. Lydda, make a note to fetch her back.”

“She won't come,” Callette said.

“She'll have to,” Kit insisted. “Even if Blade or I could do it, we'd be trying to be in three places at once while we do. Can anyone see how we can get to all the places the adventures are supposed to be or do things like the Wild Hunt without Dad's magic? I can't.”

Shona giggled. “Only if we dash across the country chasing Pilgrims with the dogs and the Friendly Cows!”

It was an obvious joke. Kit snapped his beak angrily at Shona. Then his beak came open again, and his head swiveled to stare at the map. “I think you've got it!” he said. “If we arrange to have the dogs and the Cows somewhere central, not at Derkholm, so that we can keep crossing the paths of the tours—”

“Hang on,” said Lydda. “That means us camping out somewhere. I'm going to stay
here.
”

Kit's head swiveled at Lydda. “You are not. We need everyone. And if Callette's going to be flying about planting clues—”

“I'll commute,” Callette said, entirely disregarding the fact that half the clues were over on the east coast, hundreds of miles away. Everyone except Lydda and Kit looked at the map and wondered how Callette thought she could do it.

Lydda raised her beak at Kit's swiveled glare. Most unusually, the crest on her head came up too, golden and fierce. “Dad needs a proper nurse,” she said, “not stupid Fran. I'm going to look after him. I want to be a healer, anyway.”

She and Kit glared at one another, and the crest on Kit's head slowly rose to match Lydda's, black and spiky and twice the size. Elda gobbled and said timidly, “I want to stay here, too.”

“After the other night,” Shona said, “no one's going to let you camp out, Elda.”

Blade had gone on staring across the map, ignoring the rest of them. It seemed to him that Kit had not mentioned the one thing that seemed most important. “I know what we need to do most,” he said, “and that's get those soldiers along to the base camp in Umru's country, now, before they kill one another or anyone else. Dad's not going to be well enough to get them there before the first battle anyway. Can't we do that as well?”

“Oh, gods! More stupid suggestions!”
Kit screamed.

“It makes sense, you know, Kit,” Don said, leaning over the map. “We can't be in sixty-three places at once. But if we take the army and the animals and keep going north from here, we'll be able to devastate the country
and
cut across the paths of the tours to do their adventures from wherever we happen to be.”

“That's right!” said Shona, rather surprised about it.

“Trust Don to find the lazy way,” Kit snarled. But his beak turned toward the map, and his crest slowly lowered as he saw that the idea could actually work. “I'd been wondering what Dad meant to do about the soldiers,” he confessed. “And this could be how he planned to work it.”

“And I promise to fly out to you from here,” Lydda put in, “whenever you really need me.”

“Huh!” said Kit. “I can just see you! Emergency on King Luther's borders, we send for Lydda, Lydda sets out. We cope with the emergency. Three days later here comes Lydda, smack, plomp, exhausted, useless. Too late, anyway. You'd better start getting some flying practice for once.”

“Leave her alone, can't you!” said Callette.

Everyone relaxed. The difficulty seemed to be over, and Kit was squabbling normally.

F
IVE DAYS LATER EVERYONE
was wishing that the dragon had never been born, or that it had fallen out of the sky on its way to Derkholm, or that there had been some other way to help Derk.

“Like sending a message to Mr. Chesney to say the tours were canceled this year,” Don suggested, irritably ruffling his neck feathers against the rain. “He couldn't have killed us, after all, and this might.”

Their great straggling procession had only got halfway to the base camp, a whole day behind Kit's schedule, and they had had every kind of difficulty on the way. Barnabas had set up the camps for the soldiers what he considered a day's march apart. Blade and Don were still wondering how anyone made men—even men who wanted to—walk that fast. They had been many miles short of the camp the first night anyway, because of setting off late in the morning after Kit's council, and had to park the horde of soldiers in a bare field near a large village. But the villagers were not helpful. They barricaded themselves into their houses and refused to let Blade have more than one cartload of bread, and they demanded cash for it. Luckily Shona had brought every scrap of money she could find in the house. The villagers took all of it, on the fairly reasonable grounds that the soldiers had trampled over their fields, and claimed that Blade and Shona owed them for the bread. It took all Shona's bardic powers of persuasion to make them let Blade enter the debt on his machine with buttons.

“And now we simply have to get to the next camp tomorrow,” Shona said as they returned to the field with Nancy Cobber harnessed to the cart.

Kit meanwhile had worked away with what he hoped was the correct magic to keep the soldiers safely confined in the field. Probably, as Kit ruefully admitted the next morning, he was more successful with the sixty or so large campfires he had made to keep the men warm. At any rate, they had to leave the lot still burning merrily when they set off again, and there seemed no reason why the fires would ever go out. But the worst of it was that they had not bothered to count the soldiers the night before. They were doing that all the time now. That first morning it was clear that nearly a quarter of the men were gone. Blade kept guiltily thinking of all the horrible things those missing men were probably doing now, but they had no one to spare to go and look for them. They just had to keep slogging on with the rest of the horrible mob. They had the tour schedule to keep to.