Wizards At War

The King waved away the handmaidens servicing him; they scuttled away into the shadows behind the dais. “And after that, you will have an honor guard to accompany you on your road into the dark from which there is no return. But, no, of course, I forget.” It looked around at Nita and Kit and the others. “Obedient to the Other’s brainwashing, you have all deluded yourselves into thinking that the darkness is actually light. ‘Timeheart.’” It chuckled. “Little consolation that place will be to you, even if you manage to reach it; for there you’ll sit outside of time, waiting for the sufferings of everyone you’ve ever known to end. And I need not do anything further to bring that fate about, for the Pullulus has already doomed all your worlds.”

It turned Its head just enough to look over at Carmela, who was standing there with her hands on her hips, looking scornful. “And to your ignorance you’ve now added folly,” the King said, “for you’ve gone so far as to bring with you someone who doesn’t even have any of the Other’s vile power. Whatever possessed you to do something so foolishly arrogant, so sheerly useless?” Then It laughed. “Well, I suppose that in the long run, probably I did. You, alien thing, come over here.”

To Nita’s absolute horror, Carmela’s arms suddenly flopped away from her body, jerking like the arms of a puppet on strings. Carmela wobbled, her balance lost, and her face went slack with shock as she took a step toward those nastily working jaws. Then she scowled, dug in her heels, and stopped again.

“Oh, resistance,” the King said. “How amusing. But you have no more power against me than that. Now come here.”

Carmela struggled, but it was no use. Nita watched with horror as she put one foot in front of the other, clumsy, stiff—and with each step she was able to resist less, and her face went still and empty. “No!” Kit yelled, and started forward, but the warriors who had been lingering nearby now grabbed him roughly from behind. They did the same with Nita and Roshaun and Ronan when they tried to move.

“This has all been just a game for you, hasn’t it?” the King said. “But you see now how wrong you were. Maybe it would be amusing to do to you what we do to the handmaidens. Wall you up in an incubatorium, without food or water, and see how long it takes before you beg to be fed what the grubs are fed. Or perhaps even feed you to the grubs. There are always some whose first meal isn’t big enough.”

There was no sign of struggle left in Carmela, none at all; Nita got just a glimpse of the blank look of her eyes as she stepped closer and closer to the King, as if sleepwalking, helpless. Kit threw himself again in the King’s direction, but the warriors held him fast. “No!” he shouted. “Do it to me if you want, not her!”

The King’s regard slid in Kit’s direction. “We will do it to you soon enough, I think,” It said. “But first we will let her bleed a little. Just a nip here… a nip there.” It lazily stretched out Its claws. “She will feel every moment of it, but not be able to move a muscle. It should be a learning experience for one so spirited.”

Carmela stepped closer, and closer. Another step or two would bring her within range of those cruel claws; they were stretching toward her, one of them would be close enough with the next step to brush her cheek—”NO!” Nita screamed, struggling in the grip of the claws that held her.

“But wait. What might this be that I perceive there?” said the King’s soft, oily voice. “A weapon of some kind? And how cunningly hidden under that body-covering. But though you might have been clever about hiding it, it makes no difference if the mind that hid it is helpless to hide its own thoughts. Bring it out.”

Carmela stopped, and slowly reached inside the light vest she was wearing, bringing out the curling iron. Very softly the King said, “Perhaps blood would be the wrong approach after all. What delicious irony if one who lives by such a weapon should die by it, and be unable even to—”

The terrible blast of fire in that dim place blinded everybody and knocked them staggering. The force of the explosion shoved Nita into the warrior that was holding her; she found her footing again just before it let go of her and went down, crashing to the floor with a horrible, thin, shrilling scream. An awful singed-hair stink of burning bug came billowing out from the dais through waves of greasy black smoke, and it was some seconds before this cleared enough for Nita to see that the King’s entire front half had been blown away. Its rear half was now a smoking, bubbling, sagging bag of grossness, the sight of which made Nita simply bend over double and retch, mutely grateful that the soda she’d drunk was now too far along in her system to come back up. When she straightened up again, she saw through the smoke that Carmela was standing in front of the King’s smoking remains with the curling iron in her hand.

“Oops,” Carmela said… and, very slowly, smiled.