Bob the Mage, ch. 15.

[Author's note: Fiction Friday! is here, and we are on the penultimate chapter of our thrilling fantasy adventure, Bob the Mage. Be grateful that it's more of a novella than a novel. I wrote Bob in my misspent youth -- the only fantasy-world book I ever completed -- and am editing and refreshing it and posting it here. At the end of chapter 14, incompetent wizard Bob and his friend Astercam the Academic had stormed Big Evil Island to rescue the Princess Suzy and slay the evil wizard Mormor, accompanied by Bourbon the Barbarian and the crew of the evil-wizard-killing ship Badass. Things went completely off the rails before they even broke into Mormor's fortress, and now the crew of the ship has been captured. Bob and Astercam are left free to go and face their wicked former captor, Mormor....

Sounds like the climax of the book! If you want to get up to speed with your friends and neighbors, here are the links: 
chapter 14, chapter 13, chapter 12, chapter 11,

chapter 10, chapter 9, chapter 8, chapter 7, chapter 6,
chapter 5, chapter 4, chapter 3, chapter 2, chapter 1

And remember, if you're enjoying the book, tell someone! Put it on Facebook! Promise Mark Zuckerberg than any resemblance between him and Mormor is purely coincidental!]

Bob the Mage

by Frederick Key

Chapter 15

This time I did not enter a banquet hall. Mormor had actually rearranged the rooms in his castle for our benefit. Gracious, eh? Astercam and I emerged on a balcony overlooking an enormous circular chamber. In the middle of the room floated Suzy, about thirty feet in the air and hollering her lungs out. (Those of you who thought Suzy would wind up having been in league with Mormor can just forget it. So there.) Suzy was wearing a torn and mud-splattered gown of sickly green, with matching veil, like she’d been caught in desperate flight wearing a gown woven from solid nausea. On the floor, surrounded by a ring of blood-red flame, was my old pal Zippy.

“About time,” he said, looking up at us. “I was losing hope that you would make it. I feared you might be so incompetent that you would trip and break your skulls.” I gripped my staff threateningly, like a big brave boy. He shook his head in disgust. Then he snapped his fingers, and Astercam and I were aloft. We drifted over to Suzy, not quite close enough to touch. She had stopped screaming, but looked at us with horror in her eyes.

“You should have stayed away,” she croaked.

“I couldn’t,” I said.

Mormor, who this time was wearing spotless black robes covered in runes, gestured again, and the ring of flame tightened around him. It lit him from beneath, scattering his visage with shadows, making him look scarier than ever.

My staff clattered to the floor next to him.

“Nuts!” I said.

He looked up. “That’s all you have, Bobby? You threw your useless stick at me?”

I shrugged. Even if I was good at staff throwing, hitting him in the head would have been a million-to-one shot.

He chuckled. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby,” he said. “I don’t know how for a moment you thought you could foil my plans. Better men than you have tried, and they’d have failed with a hundred ships and a hundred anti-magic artifacts. But I’m so glad you gave it a whirl. After all, you destroyed my dungeons, and they need to be replenished. That is why you’re alive now; I needed you to bring me more subjects. And here they are!”

Every man from the ship appeared then, lining the walls and roof of that hellish amphitheater. They were pinned in place by the arms that had captured them, like paper dolls tacked to a child’s walls. They looked far more terrified than sailors and pirates ever let on. Bugsby was blubbering; Karkill looked stunned, like he was in a nightmare and could not awaken. Sanford stared, muttering what might have been a prayer over and over. Chokolost was aghast in shock, and even Bourbon, that tower of strength, was wailing. Hell, most of them were wailing. They had lost all hope.

I had led them to this. After killing every victim in Mormor’s dungeons with a bomb, a dark but merciful sin, I had just brought him more. If I’d let them kill me on the ship they wouldn’t be here. I was used to being useless and incompetent, but it was new to feel so horribly wrong.

“Before I put your little friends in storage for later,” said Mormor, “I want them to see something so horrifying that the shock of seeing it will torture them all their days. You see, Bob, Astercam, you two know me to be the foremost authority of torture in the world, and that is correct. But there are other worlds.”

The ring of flame rose slowly until it was about fifteen feet in the air. In its place on the ground was a perfect circle of gold. That’s when I realized what was going to happen. I could tell by his gasp that Astercam did, too.

In order to summon a really powerful demon, it’s not enough to draw a circle. To control such a being the circle must be completely perfect, and itself created by powerful magic. Mormor was going to invite a guest.

And as many times as people had told me to go to hell, I had never expected to actually go there.

Mormor spoke with a voice of doom. “For disobeying me, Astercam, and attempting to flee, and being a bloody boring old fool, I sentence you!”

Astercam squeaked.

“For resisting my advances, helping my foes to escape, and stealing my toys, Suzette, I sentence you!”

Suzy sobbed.

If I hadn’t come along, maybe she would not have wound up with this psychopath. Maybe she’d be dead on the bottom of the ocean, where we’d all be better off. Or maybe she’d have surrendered to him, and at least she wouldn’t be in this fix with me.

“And you, Bob,” said Mormor, smiling, “for escaping, leading a revolt against me, ruining my dungeons, and being so unutterably pathetic, I sentence you! You shall all taste the pain of eternal torment!”

Then, with a wave of his arms that caused great gusts of sulfur and ash to spray us, and all manner and color of fire to blaze about the room, he summoned forth with an unholy chant one of the most horrifying apparitions in hell.

The room shook as the twenty-foot monster rose from the ground, oozing acid and brimstone. Its dozens of arms ended in all sorts of mutated hands, its thirty mouths (some on stalks) wheezed and fumed. Its body was covered in a mockery of living, pulsating organs. It turned its hundred eyes of varying sizes this way and that about the amphitheater, then settled all of them on Mormor.

“Take these three you see above you to your plane,” commanded Mormor, “and do with them what you will.”

The beast seems displeased by the command. “I shall have you, Mormor!” it screeched, in voices high enough to rattle my teeth, low enough to loosen my bowels, probably some inaudible to human ears.

“Never, my slave of the pit!” cried Mormor, enjoying himself. “I shall endure beyond time, and you shall never catch me in your claws. Take what scraps I give you and be grateful!”

The demon’s eyes turned back toward us. Thus compelled, it had to obey Mormor to the letter. Freed, it could do as it pleased.

Freed?

What if…?

But then, what if…?

A monstrous arm reached toward Astercam.

Oh, what’s the difference at this point?

And so, saying to the gods above, Please, just once more, I fired with trembling fingers another heat spell directly at the ring of gold. It was a great shot, I must say, hitting that sucker from thirty feet away.

But the gold stayed solid.

And yet, the demon stopped.

“Do not delay!” cried Mormor. “You have your orders!”

“Orders I may deny!” cried the monster. “The circle is broken!” And it made some bizarre mélange of horrible noises I think was laugher. If everyone you’d ever heard laugh was insane, and they all laughed at once, it would have sounded like that.

“Liar!” sneered Mormor. “You mean Bobby’s little toe-burner? That couldn’t melt butter. Quit stalling.”

“I tell you, it is broken! This scrap you call Bobby melted it a few particles from its perfect form, Mormor, enough to snap your command!”

Mormor stared at the creature, horror dawning on his face. He waved his arms and began to chant the circle spell again, but it was too late. With one arm the demon grabbed Mormor around the waist, and with a mouth on a stalk bit one of the mage’s leg clean off. Mormor started screaming like—well, like a man on his way to hell.

A hundred eyes then turned on me, examining me with penetrating evil, and I thought, Here we go, my turn.

And then fifty of the eyes… winked?

And with a clap of deafening thunder, they were gone.

😈💥🔥

[Close call for our heroes! Next week we'll have the epilogue that will wrap everything up. Will Bob win the hand of the fair maiden? Will Bugsby or Karkill or Chokolost try to kill Bob? Will Bob and Astercam and Suzy plummet to their deaths from where they're floating in the air? All this and more will be revealed next Friday!]