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 mΓ©lange 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.
ππ₯π₯
