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Post By The Hooded Hood returns with a double-sized special packed with lots of extra doom and death. Enjoy. Thu Aug 19, 2004 at 03:27:32 pm EDT |
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#166: Untold Tales of the Xander the Improbable: Fall of the Sorcerer Supreme | |
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| #166: Untold Tales of the Xander the Improbable: Fall of the Sorcerer Supreme The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse Warning note: Another gruesome-nasty-things-happening caution on this chapter.  Xander by Dancer As always, Joe Pepper approached Xander’s Plumbing and Watch Repair Emporium cautiously. He tried to think of any occasion when he’d not regretted coming to the sanctum of the Parodyverse’s sorcerer supreme, but nothing came to mind. “Look on the bright side,” Knifey, ManMan’s talking knife comforted him. “We might end up fighting loathsome elder demons but at least we don’t have to grout Mrs Zmwjski’s bathroom.” “True,” Joe brightened. Then he paused and frowned at Xander’s storefront. “I never noticed this place had security shutters before.” Manman cautiously pushed open the door. Xander’s various improvised doorbells had a tendency to be prophetic, but also to randomly explode or open dimensional rifts. But there was no doorbell, only the screwholes where it had been removed and packed away. The shop was filled with packing crates and boxes. The eccentric display of uncollected timepieces and obscure plumbing components was tidied away and the shelves were bare. “Oh, hi Manny,” called Dancer, appearing through the bead curtain to the back rooms with a duster in her hand and a kerchief tying back her long black hair. “You got here just in time for the heavy lifting.” “Of course I did,” sighed ManMan. “What’s going on here? Is Xander moving out?” “Oh right, like he explained what he was doing to me,” scorned Sarah Shepherdson. “I just got a call to come and help out, since I owed him a favour.” “Who doesn’t?” asked Joe. “Although I admit I can’t remember ever asking him for anything to get me in debt.” “That’s why one of you is the master of the mystic crafts,” Knifey pointed out, “and the other one is building caretaker in cockroach central.” The promising start to another ManMan/Knifey bickering session was cut short by the appearance of Xander himself, sweeping in through the stockroom door, his faded red robes swirling behind him. “Ah, you’ve arrived at last,” he noted, glancing at ManMan. “Where are your suitcases?” “Suitcases?” Joe blinked. “Why would I need suitcases?” “Because going to Brazil with only the Elvis jumpsuit on your back is going to get rather pungent,” the sorcerer supreme suggested. “And we have enough problems without that sweaty leather aura.” “Brazil?” ManMan blinked. “Who said anything about going to Brazil.” “He did,” Knifey pointed out. “I suppose you can buy a toothbrush when you get there.” “We’re going to Brazil?” Dancer puzzled. “No,” Xander told her. “Mr Pepper and I are going to Brazil, to address a rather nasty bit of black arts chicanery. It’s difficult and dangerous and insanely stupid, so I naturally thought of ManMan.” “Er…” Manny tried to object. Xander ignored him and went on. “All I need from you, Dancer, is to keep this cardboard box and its contents safe. Take it home, put it in your bathroom cabinet. Use your probability powers to make sure that if anyone comes looking for it they unaccountably don’t think to look there.” “What is it?” Sarah wondered. “It’s one of those things that man was not meant to know. Just look after it, please.” The mage looked around him one last time. “We’ll have to rush to catch out flight,” he noted. “Sarah, could you lock up please? Post the keys through the letterbox when you go out.” “How will you get back in?” Dancer wondered. Xander didn’t answer her. Sarah lasted almost half an hour back in her apartment over the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar before her curiosity got the better of her. “He said man wasn’t meant to know,” she told herself, “but he never said anything about women.” She carefully unsealed the brown tape that held the Heinz beans box shut and looked to see what artefact Xander had entrusted to her care. There was no artefact. There were some faded old photographs, some in sepia tint. There was a dog-eared edition of The Once and Future King. There was a pressed flower and a yellowed charcoal sketch of a woman who looked a lot like Sorceress. And there was Harry. Sarah frowned as she looked at Xander’s petrified familiar. He never went anywhere without the stone hamster. Even though Harry’s abilities as scout, sorcerer’s aid, and mystical go-between were severely curtailed after his encounter with a medusa he still managed to put in good service as a blunt instrument when all other means of winning failed. “That’s not good at all,” Dancer told herself. There was a note at the bottom of the box, addressed to her. ‘As you can see, there is nothing of use in this box,” Xander had written to her. ‘But there are things of importance. Take very good care of them. And next time be more careful, because there might as easily have been a Grimpenghast or Shadowleech concealed within. X.’ It was a crisp clear night, and though the ground was patterned with frost the moon made the whole land glitter beneath a sky full of stars. The lonely pool was a black mirror, cool and inviting. The graceful swan glided down to a perfect landing that hardly rippled the surface. She sang quietly as she swam, but the sweet music echoed all the way to the snow-capped mountain that loomed to the north and across the ice-rimed forest. Eventually the swan glided to the shore, stepped from the water, and changed. Where once had been a graceful white bird now there was a graceful woman, wrapped warm in a cloak of white down feathers. Her long silver hair tumbled down over the mantle to below her knees. Cleone sniffed the night air and smiled. Carefully she unlaced the cloak and laid it on the ground. She was nude beneath it, but she padded back out into the icy water without flinching and plunged beneath it with the same grace she possessed as a bird. She knew secret midnight bathing was a cliché for her kind, but sometimes one just had to surrender to tradition. Then her senses alerted her. She was not alone. She scrambled up, looking around to spot the danger. Yet she had sensed no evil before, so either she was mistaken or she was in very grave danger from a foe that could mask itself from her. She raced out of the water to reach her cloak. Count Morbo shed his invisibility and planted one heavy, muddy boot on it before she could snatch it up. “Mine,” he told her. Cleone froze, horrified. She knew what it meant to lose her cloak. She was bound to mortal form, shackled to the mortal world. And if her enemy knew the right lore he could enslave her to him forever. “Please let me have my mantle,” she asked. “It is not kind of you to harm it so.” Baron Morbo picked it up and tore it in two. Cleone screamed in agony and toppled to the ground. “Help!” cried ManMan. “Can I get out now?” “We are at twelve thousand feet,” Knifey pointed out. “It’s quite a step.” “It’ll be safer than staying in this contraption!” argued Joe Pepper. “Why are we flying DeathTrapAir anyway?” “Oh, calm down,” Xander advised the Elvis impersonator. “Fitz the Barnstorming Monkey owed me a favour, and who else is going to be reckless enough to fly through a hurricane to get us to Alegra?” “Fitz the Barnstorming Monkey? What kind of nickname is that for a pilot?” Joe demanded. Xander wisely didn’t answer. Joe was nervous enough without seeing who was in the cockpit. “This Fitz is doing okay,” Knifey assured Joe. “I haven’t seen flying like this since I was with your grandmother.” “You were with my grandmother?” ManMan asked. “No,” Knifey said, and clammed up. ManMan rubbed his forehead and reached for the airsickness bag. “So why exactly am I on a suicide flight to Brazil?” he asked Xander. “I don’t really want to know, but it gives me a different horrible death to look forward to.” “There’s a rather nasty business being run out of abandoned seminary there that needs shutting down,” the master of the mystic crafts told him. “I know you try to bury your heroic tendencies deep, but as I recall you have some strong feelings about the slavery business.” Joe Pepper frowned. “Slavers,” he growled. “Oh yeah, I’ll have a few things to say to them.” “Since when does the sorcerer supreme get involved in stopping the flesh trade?” Knifey asked. “Since the malefactor behind it is a wizard of the first order, and since it is supernatural creatures he is summoning and enslaving,” Xander answered. “A wizard?” ManMan worried. “As in casting killer spells and stuff? Like you don’t?” “Baron Morbo,” the mage informed him. “A human-demon hybrid, or a human alien hybrid, nobody’s quite sure. Eight feet tall, fingers like talons, and a brain-pan the size of beachball. And one of the nastiest workers of black magics this side of Morgosa le Fey.” “But you can take him, right?” ManMan checked. “You have a plan to outsmart him, like usual.” “I brought you along,” the master of the mystic crafts answered. The weeping woke Cleone up. The swanmay dragged herself up off the dirty straw floor, but the cold iron fetters held her down. She could feel their chill searing into her. Already her fingers were numbing. The sobbing came from a pallid sprite with faded butterfly wings who was chained on the opposite wall. It was too dark to see everyone in the crowded cell, but Cleone could make out at least a dozen silhouettes. “Are you all right?” she called to the sprite, although Cleone needed comfort herself. “Hello?” “She won’t answer you,” a dark-haired girl with almost translucent white skin answered her. “That one’s mind has already gone. She’s been here the longest. I don’t think she’ll fetch much of a price.” “A price?” The details of Cleone’s capture came back to her. “There was a creature, a half-human conjuror…!” “Baron Morbo,” the girl who had spoken supplied. “He summons and binds spirits whose form pleases him, then auctions them to others for their pleasure.” The swanmay shuddered. “Everyone here is his captive?” She looked more closely at her cellmate. “You’re a selkie,” she recognised, “A seal woman.” “Yes,” the prisoner admitted. “There are few of us now. Soon there will be none.” She looked back at Cleone. “And you were a swan maiden. I heard Morbo talking. He expects a very high price for you. I can see why.” “He won’t get one,” Cleone scowled. “There has to be a way to escape.” The selkie pointed to the iron fetters they all wore. “We are bound, by iron and magic. You will not escape.” “I will not give up. There has to be a way to get out.” “If you try to get away you will be punished. Morbo is not kind.” Cleone shuddered again. “All the same, we will escape.” “We?” the selkie puzzled. “I thought it was you who sought freedom.” “Why yes,” the swanmay agreed, “but how could I escape if I left all of you in captivity?” Porto Alegre was unseasonably hot, and the humidity seemed to have drained the life from the city. The riverside cranes stood motionless, the warehouses empty. The people seemed tired too, and few paid much attention to two more tourists no matter how strangely dressed they were for the dusty cart-filled streets. It was just getting dark when Xander hailed a taxi to take them downtown. Here smog-stained high rises of stucco, tile, and glass shone neon light over streets packed with shops and night-time shoppers. ManMan had blurred impressions if men hauling bundles of recycled cans, of horse-drawn carts carrying waste paper, of people peddling batteries and bus tokens, shoeshines and sex. Then the taxi turned from the gaudy main road beneath an old arch, and beyond the bright lights of the downtown strip was an old crumbling seminary, dark and formidable behind its high walls topped with broken bottles. “This is the place,” Xander noted as he paid off the cab driver. “No, don’t wait thank you.” “And the plan is we go in, beat the mega-wizard and all his henchmen, then free all the prisoners and go home?” ManMan winced. “Is it too late for me to try and get Donar’s cellphone number?” “There’s something strange here,” Knifey noted as they approached the gate. “Some kind of prohibition.” “Very perceptive,” congratulated the sorcerer supreme. “This is the auction house where Morbo sells off his merchandise. Since there are rather a lot of unpleasant mystical types all gathered together under one roof there’s a general pact of truce here. By entering we subject ourselves to the geas not to use magics or weapons.” “That’s what I’m feeling,” Knifey admitted. “Pretty powerful stuff.” “So we’re going in there but you can’t use magic and I can’t use Knifey!” Joe Pepper wailed. “I said it was pretty powerful,” his talking knife noted. “I didn’t say I couldn’t overcome it.” “Why do you think I brought you along?” Xander smirked. “There are very few weapons able to shred through the wardings here, very few powers at all. You’re carrying one of them.” “Oh,” sighed ManMan. “Like he wasn’t big headed enough already.” “I’m quite impressed,” Baron Morbo admitted as he watched Cleone writhe in agony on the muddy floor. He didn’t want to mark her flesh and spoil her price at auction, so he was using a ritual of wracking to sear spasms of pain throughout her body. It felt like she was being whipped, burned, flayed, but there would be no scars to mar her beauty. “Nobody has ever had the willpower to overcome the obedience geas before.” Cleone stifled a whimper. She refused to plead or to scream. It was the last defiance she could muster. “Mr Flayross tells me that if I hadn’t also bound you through the ancient forms by taking your mantle you might even have succeeded in your escape. He thinks you were trying to get the master-key for the cells, and that was why you returned to the dungeon.” The swanmay curled into a tight ball of agony as the punishment ritual reached its climax. “You couldn’t have escaped, of course, but you very nearly freed the others. That’s why I’m administering this timely reminder that I am you master. I could have simply commanded you not to do it – you know you are now compelled to obey me in all things – but I think you need to learn a lesson about your new status.” Cleone gasped for breath as the pain faded, leaving her aching all over. “Your… unwilling… captive,” she hissed. “My slave,” Baron Morbo corrected her. “You know, I’m so tempted to keep you for myself, just to have the joy of despoiling you; but you will bring me great wealth and power on the sale block, a price of many souls. I’m going to set a high reserve for you though, and if you don’t make the price…” The bulbous-headed conjurer leered, “Well then I think I’ll indulge myself.” “You are an evil man and you will come to an evil end,” Cleone foretold. “Do not cling to hopes of escape or rescue, swan maiden,” her master told her. “In the House of Morbo there is none.” Flayross was an ogre in a tux. He wore a diamond pin and his cufflinks were solid gold. “Well, this is an honour,” he declared as he noticed Xander the Improbable amongst the buyers milling around the stock pens in the vast former chapel. “We haven’t had the pleasure of a sorcerer supreme at one of our little gatherings before.” “I trust I can make up for my former absences before I depart,” Xander told him. And there were flecks of ice in his eyes as he looked at Flayross, because the mage had seen the condition of the creatures in the cages. “You’re not here to make trouble are you, mageling?” the ogre asked. “Because there’s a truce here. Nobody uses magic.” He blew on his gnarled knuckles. “Of course, some people don’t need weapons.” “That’s very true,” agreed Xander precisely. “Some people use their brains, and others keep ogres.” “Ooh, that’s a good one,” Flayross mocked. “Let me write that down.” Xander looked around. “I don’t see anyone who can help you with the spelling,” he noted. With a few more snarled courtesies mage and ogre parted. ManMan relaxed and moved his hand away from his waistband where Knifey was stowed. “Quietly carve me a tiny chip off the door lintel,” Xander told his companion. “Slip it in my pocket.” “Why?” “Because pockets are quite useful places to keep things,” the master of the mystic crafts explained uselessly. “I don’t like this place,” Joe Pepper scowled as he returned from his mission. He looked around the auction, scowling. “I don’t like these people. Look at how they leer at the girls in the cages.” “They’re not actually girls, most of them,” Xander answered. “They’re female, but most of them are nymphs of one class or another. Dryads, oreads, naiads, sylphs, selkies, lots of faerie creatures. Morbo summons and binds them, then sells them off to his clients. They end up as concubines or sacrifices or spell components.” ManMan was about to object to how calmly the sorcerer supreme was taking this, until he caught just one fraction of a moment when Xander’s mask slipped; and suddenly he was glad that he was on the same side as the little man in the dusty red robes. “Why haven’t you stopped this before?” Joe Pepper asked. “Because in the magical sense there is no law against conjuring faerie creatures, no prohibition against binding them. That’s ancient magic. But recently Baron Morbo accidentally brought in a Saiitaii manifestation from the outer rim, then turned it loose when it proved of no use to him. That’s put him on my radar screen. I’m here to reprimand him.” “Reprimand him?” ManMan objected, staring at the frightened hopeless faces of the captives. “Yes. Reprimand him a new ass,” Xander said. “If I can.” “I can see you are connoisseurs, gentlemen,” the slimy salesman smarmed at them. He clearly didn’t know he was pitching to the sorcerer supreme and his sidekick. “You have no interest in these vapid wisps. Cheap, transient things, they are. Most of them will fade and die away from their tress or mountains, good only for a little vicious pleasure and then gone to nothingness.” ManMan’s hand closed into a fist. The salesman continued. “But this…” he told them, pawing Xander’s arm and leading him towards a curtained off booth in the very centre of the room, “this is something special.” Xander allowed himself to be pulled inside the tapestry. ManMan followed cautiously. Trapped in a silver cage, shackled with iron, Cleone knelt and waited for her fate. “Exquisite, isn’t she?” the saleman purred. “Newly captured, a genuine swanmay, one of the daughters of the King Under the Mountain.” He leaned forward and whispered into Xander’s ear. “Totally pure. And completely bound.” Cleone watched the salesman with murderous eyes. Her irises were the same silver as the hair that was her only covering. “Whoever buys this one will have a rare prize indeed,” the salesman pitched. “A swanmay’s kiss, her first kiss, it has a special power…” “Yes,” interrupted Xander impatiently. “It binds her body and soul to her lover and bestows upon him a wish, whatsoever he desires. I know all that. What’s to stop her father burying Morbo and half of Brazil to get her back?” “She was bound in the proper forms,” the salesman promised. “It is legitimate. All legitimate.” He rubbed his hands together. “I can see sir is rather taken with the wench, but I have to warn you that we already have a reserve bid from the Slimy Slaver Lovetoad. I imagine this little piece will fetch the master a considerable price in power or souls.” “You can imagine that,” agreed Xander. He turned round and knelt down to look at Cleone. “I want to talk to her.” “She is spellbound, and cannot speak to anyone,” the salesman declared. “It is forbidden.” The master of the mystic crafts rose again. “Let me tell you something,” he said to the clammy sweaty salesman. He put his mouth close to the man’s ear and whispered something. The salesman’s eyes went wide and his lips trembled, then he made a terrible gasping sound and fled the booth. Xander smiled nastily. “What did you say?” ManMan asked. “Do you really want to know?” the mage asked him. He turned back to Cleone. “Can you hear me?” he asked her. “If I set you free, can you call to your father? Can you call him to release the other captives?” “Her father?” ManMan puzzled. “Imagine what would happen if this was Troia captured here and the Hooded Hood found out,” Xander suggested. “This lady’s father is the Mountain King. He’s mythologically significant. When he comes down on you like a ton of bricks it’s not an analogy.” Cleone was watching Xander very closely. Her eyes seemed to focus strangely as she gazed at him. “Have Knifey slice through those chains that are binding her,” Xander told ManMan. “They’re mystically toughened and ensorcelled. It’s about time he had a challenge.” “Still better than grouting,” Knifey noted as Joe sawed at the shackles. Then with a sound like a wine glass shattering the chains fractured to fragments. “Oh!” said Cleone. “That’s unexpected. Nobody is supposed to be able to do that.” “I try to excel,” Knifey told her smugly. Once the shackles were gone the silver cage was easy to dismantle. “Step out here,” Xander called to her. “Can you call your father so we can save the others?” A single tear trickled down Cleone’s cheek. “I can’t,” she confessed. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. Baron Morbo destroyed my cloak. I’m almost powerless, and I can never return home. I have no way of communicating with the King Under the Mountain.” Xander drew in a breath. “Ah,” he sighed. “Damn. In that case, you’d better stand behind me.” Before Cleone could ask why, Xander had stepped forward just as the curtain was ripped asunder and Flayross the Ogre growled down at him. “I knew you couldn’t keep out of trouble!” the enforcer snarled at the mage he towered over. “Trying to steal Baron Morbo’s merchandise! Now I can rip out your throat.” “Excuse me,” Xander noted, “but you will notice that this young lady is no longer bound to Baron Morbo. Therefore she does not belong to him. Therefore I cannot be stealing her from him. Therefore I have not breached the rules of the auction in any way.” “You set her free!” thundered the ogre. “On the contrary,” argued Xander. “I bound her to me. She is now my property.” “You what?” shrieked Cleone. “What she said,” agreed ManMan. “Xander…” “Xander?” the swanmay recognised the name. “The sorcerer supreme?” “If Cleone was free, Baron Morbo might of course seek to recapture her and bind her once again,” Xander pointed out to Flayross. “But since she’s already my property, well that’s clearly against the rules of the truce.” The ogre seemed ready to rip Xander’s head off then and there, just as soon as he worked out exactly how the master of the mystic crafts had woven such a complicated and fallacious plot. But suddenly the growing crowd parted as the bulbous-headed master of ceremonies, Count Morbo himself, strode into the fray. “Xander the Implausible,” he snorted, looked down at the shabbily-robed mage. “I should have known. Seedy tricks, desperate plays, and a shallow veneer of synchronicity. It reeks of you.” “As opposed to the stench of prancing pimp, shallow shaman, and blustering bully that clings to you,” Xander snapped back. “You’re a mighty magician indeed when you’re entrapping helpless nymphs. Or when you’re hiding behind a truce geas.” A nasty smile split Morbo’s blotchy face. “You’re challenging me, little mage? You want to go the distance with Baron Morbo?” “Actually I want to pop your head like a pimple and save the universe from having you pollute it,” Xander told him. “But I’m the sorcerer supreme. You might have got a memo about it. So I’m here to command you to release these captives, to send your sleazy scum buyers back under the rocks they crawled out from, and to surrender to my justice.” “Technically he can command that,” Flayross admitted to Morbo. “Only while he’s sorcerer supreme,” the conjurer answered slyly. “And everyone knows this sorcerer supreme is a real lame duck.” He stared back at Xander. “So I’m challenging now for the title, the rank. I claim the role. You’re not fit to do it, Xander the Incomprehensible. Now it’s time for Baron Morbo to take the prize!” “Baron Morbo is very powerful,” Cleone said. She stalked around the suite that had been assigned to Xander for his preparation for the dawn duel. “Are you able to defeat him?” “That depends,” the master of the mystic crafts replied. “He’s more powerful than you?” ManMan frowned. “Then how come you’re the sorcerer supreme?” “Being the sorcerer supreme isn’t about power,” Xander told him. “It’s about winning.” “So you can beat him?” Joe checked. Xander shrugged. “Maybe,” he answered. “It depends how good a trap Morbo has set for me.” “A trap?” ManMan asked. “Oh sure,” reasoned Knifey. “That stuff in Paradopolis with the Saiitaii, that had to be pure provocation. And then letting Xander in to a slave auction, and then taunting him…” Xander nodded. “Yes. Morbo is hardly being subtle in his ambitions.” “He seeks to be the sorcerer supreme,” realised Cleone. “He is unworthy.” She considered this for a moment. “On the morrow you must beat him,” she commanded Xander. “Good plan,” agreed the shabby mage. “I’ll try and do that then.” “Er, a better plan would be, um, better,” ManMan suggested. “Like maybe I go get help?” “They wouldn’t let you leave,” Xander warned him. “Besides, our guy has a plan, right?” Knifey suggested. “That chip of lintel you had me carve off? That’s got a bit of the anti-magical-fighting geas on it, hasn’t it? Tomorrow when you meet Morbo in the courtyard he won’t be expecting you to be protected by his own spell.” “Right,” admitted the master of the mystic crafts. “But you will be unable to use magic either,” objected Cleone. “I was thinking of perhaps kicking him between the legs and then hitting him with a heavy object,” suggested Xander. ManMan approved of any plan where it wasn’t him that got kicked in the crotch. The Brazilian night was wearing thin, and the sounds of the last revellers on the distant streets had passed. The old mission was in darkness save for a few torches and lanterns in the courtyard below and the pale glimmer of the defensive ghosts set by Morbo to prevent anyone entering or leaving. Joe Pepper had finally given up advising Xander on the best way to incapacitate a surprised foe and had staggered to his own guest room. Cleone remained sat by the window, wrapped in the white cotton bedsheet Xander had given her. “You don’t have to fear me,” he assured her. “I mean you no harm. Claiming mastery over you was only a ploy.” “I know,” the swanmay said simply. “I can sense evil. You are not evil.” “You don’t know me very well then,” answered the master of the mystic crafts. “I know you will not harm me, nor exploit me, not suffer me to be hurt if you can prevent it. I know you carry a burden of responsibility, and must make hard choices every day that few can understand let alone decide.” She looked up suddenly with those fascinating silver eyes. “I know you are very frightened,” she added. Xander shifted uneasily, He was unaccustomed to being read so easily. “Baron Morbo is a dangerous foe.” “And yet you are here,” Cleone noted. “Sometimes being a master of the mystic crafts, and especially being sorcerer supreme, requires some dancing on the edge,” the mage admitted. “I prefer to not be there when it happens, but Morbo has bent his will to prevent that.” “You think he might win,” the maiden realised. “You’ve made preparations for it. Preparations to die.” “I’ve made some arrangements,” admitted Xander. “I can’t foresee how this one will turn out. There’s more going on than there arrears to be. Eddies. Secret tides. Ramifications.” “You didn’t expect to encounter me.” “No, but I needed some excuse to provoke Morbo as he wanted, and you needed some assistance, so rescuing you seemed like a good idea at the time.” The master of the mystic crafts looked away. “I’m sorry now. I think I may have made things worse for you. I wish I could have spent some time with you where we weren’t in mortal danger, where we could just talk and maybe have a pot of tea.” “I would have liked that,” confessed Cleone. Xander looked at the smudge of sunrise on the horizon. “Almost dawn,” he said. “That’s when its always darkest.” “Can you keep the fight going for a while?” Cleone wondered. “Keep everyone watching you? While they’re all distracted I could try and free the captives.” Xander grinned and laughed. “Yes, that’s an excellent idea,” he admitted. “Here’s what you need to do…” It was the day of the auction, but the sale of living merchandise was delayed by common consent to watch the rare spectacle that was unfolding in the seminary courtyard. The bidders and guards ringed the open square, being careful to stay beneath the arched colonnade where they were still protected by the anti-magic geas. On the open flagstones Baron Morbo strutted in his high-collared robes and waited for Xander the Improbable to enter the killing ground. “Let the so-called sorcerer supreme come forth!” the challenger boomed in his buzzing alien voice. “Let him be revealed for the charlatan he is before all those here present.” There was a murmur from the crowd as Xander shuffled forward, his shabby robe flopping around him. He was still carrying the china cup and saucer from which he was sipping his tea. “Sorry,” he declared. “Almost slept in. Good job the loud braying woke me.” Morbo glared down at the rumpled mage. “I challenge you by the ancient forms for the right to be sorcerer supreme. I invoke this by the names of…” “Yes, yes, let’s take that bit as read,” Xander suggested. “Let’s get on to the part where we try to kill each other. I have quite a lot to do today.” “Very well,” Morbo sneered. “if you are so eager to die, then die!” The threefold spell of matter shredding boiled towards Xander’s heart, then sprayed away back towards its originator as the chip of anti-spell column in Xander’s pocket did its work. Morbo reeled and conjured hasty defences against his own magics. His robes hissed and steamed as parts of the curse broke through and seared his flesh. Xander threw the hot tea he was drinking into Morbo’s eyes then kicked him in the groin. Morbo howled in anger and agony and doubled over. Xander brought his knee up to catch the challenger’s nose. Then he slammed the anti-magic chip onto the wizard’s chest to sunder all the other pre-prepared conjurings Morbo had wrapped around him. They detonated all at once. Xander was thrown backwards as Baron Morbo was surrounded by a spray of conflicting magics. “It’s not the size of your enchantments,” the master of the mystic crafts explained. “It’s what you do with them.” Morbo howled again and burned away the spell-fragments that tormented him with a burst of occult power that drew gasps from the crowd. The second explosion caught Xander off-guard and before the mage could recover Morbo had his throat in a pincer-grip. “Now,” hissed the challenger, “let’s get to it.” The golem guards set to protect the slave pens were confused. There was nothing in their chem instructions to prevent one of the captives re-entering the prison area carrying a large bunch of keys, nor to stop her unlocking the fetters that bound the other girls. “Cleone?” the selkie lass blinked as she realised she was unbound. “How…?” “Get out of here,” the silver-haired swanmay told her. “Take these keys and save the others too. Outside the walls of this place they should all be able to fade away home.” “Well yes,” agreed the seal maiden. “But… how do we get past those golem guards?” “I’ll deal with them. Listen, if you get back to the Mythlands… send word to my father, please. Tell him what happened to me. Tell him I’m sorry, and I’ll always miss him.” “You can come with us. You can return too!” the selkie argued. “My cloak is destroyed. I’m mortal now. And I have foreseen… “ Cleone swallowed hard. “I think I know what is to become of me. I won’t be going home.” The golems reacted quickly enough as the swan maiden danced past them and raced towards freedom. “Catch me if you can!” she challenged them. The twin golems accelerated themselves to pursue her. They could move as fast as they had to in order to recapture a prisoner. Then a rhinestone-cuffed arm was flung out from behind the archway Cleone had fled through, and the shining bowie knife that arm held stabbed right into the first golem’s brain pan. The animated clay shattered and the heavy lifeless statue toppled to the ground. The second golem turned to react to this new threat, but it wasn’t very intelligent. “Hey, I’m still escaping!” Cleone called to it. It swivelled its head to search for the prisoner and that gave ManMan and Knifey another opportunity to strike. The second golem collapsed into rubble too. “That’s the trouble with golems,” Knifey observed. “One is never enough.” Cleone hurried to urge the captives to run for freedom. “Hurry,” she said. “The sorcerer supreme can’t distract everybody forever.” A gnarled green hand caught the swanmay’s hair and swung her into the wall. “Well that’s true,” agreed Flayross. “Everybody back into their cages before I get mad. Or horny.” “I’ve gelded trolls before now, “ Knifey called back. “Joe, get me over there.” “A little human with a knife?” snorted the massive pinstripe-suited troll. “Weapons don’t work here.” “Hold still then,” ManMan advised him. “You have nothing to fear.” “Nah. I think I’ll pull your head off instead.” Joe Pepper ducked low as the troll grabbed at him, which brought him to a suggestive angle to implement Knifey’s plan. The howl of agonised monster echoed down the passage as the former slaves burst into the sunlight and freedom. “Any last words, Xander the Unremarkable?” sneered Baron Morbo. “Sometimes a sorcerer supreme has to die to get the job done,” answered the master of the mystic crafts. Morbo nodded and tightened his claws, snapping Xander’s wrists. Then he worked up the arms, breaking forearm and upper arm, then dislocating the shoulder sockets. He set to work on Xander’s legs next, crushing kneecaps and shattering his pelvis. “Not dead yet, I trust?” the new sorcerer supreme checked. He splintered his opponent’s collar bone then dropped him to the floor. He reached over and tore out Xander’s tongue, then slowly and gleefully pressed his thumbs into Xander’s eyeballs until there was a sudden squishing sound. Then he clutched his fingers to his victim’s skill. “Just let me check… no, you’ve not hidden your essence anywhere. Your soul is right here. So let’s see…” Xander could do nothing but bleed his life’s blood. Baron Morbo cast a complicated spell, and for a moment Xander’s broken flesh was suffused with a roiling black smoke. “Your spirit is bound to your body,” Morbo announced to his fallen enemy. “I wouldn’t want your soul wandering the farther realms causing more trouble, would I? Now you can rot in your broken corpse for all eternity.” There was an incoherent cry from the gateway and Joe Pepper rushed in, Knifey in hand. “You bastard!” Morbo flattened him with a simple invocation of agony. “Does anyone here believe I haven’t won my challenge?” he asked. There was no dissent. “And you?” Morbo demanded of the dark-suited figure that observed from the shadows. “You admit my claim?” “You are the sorcerer supreme,” agreed the Chronicler of Stories, and vanished. “Yessss!” hissed Baron Morbo, as he ripped out Xander’s heart and crushed it to pulp. Burning magics with no care of the consequences,. the new sorcerer supreme summoned a mystic portal to take him to Xander’s sanctum. He arrived outside the shuttered plumbing and watch repair shot and looked with disdain upon the humble building his predecessor had chosen as a base of operations. “I shall reign from a palace,” Baron Morbo promised himself. The lock on the shop door was already shattered. Morbo stalked inside. There were secrets and treasures here that he needed to make his own. “They are not here,” an old voice told him from the shadows. “They have been removed.” Morbo conjured witchfire to paint the shop in a hellfire glow. Four figures were waiting in the shadows. The one who had spoken was an emaciated bald undead with five inch fingernails. Beside him stood a spectacular woman in tight studded leather, and a vast bloated obesity of a creature whose rolls of blubber wobbled down to the floor. But it was the bloody armoured knight wrapped in the shifting iron chains that caught his attention. “Who are you?” Morbo demanded. “Speak, for I am the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse!” “Ah,” breathed the dark-haired beauty. “That’s all we wanted to know.” A long thread of chain wrapped round Morbo’s neck and hurled him into the centre of the room. The cadaverous vampire was there to catch him and one swift slash severed the mage’s vocal chords. Morbo staggered back but was caught in the blubber of the fat greasy thing behind him. “We have come to destroy the sorcerer supreme,” proclaimed the Chain Knight. “But there’s no hurry,” admitted Phleglethor. “You can take your time dying.” “We’re only glad to help,” agreed Maladomina. But five hours later the Parodyverse required another sorcerer supreme. ManMan carried the corpse of Xander the Improbable out of the auction house. It didn’t seem like a suitable place to leave the sad wrecked flesh. He staggered over to a patch of scrubby turf and laid his burden down. Nobody prevented him leaving. There was too much chaos in the wake of Morbo’s ascension and sudden departure, argument about the vanished livestock and the slaughter of Mr Flayross. “What do I do now?” ManMan asked Knifey, at the end of his wits and the end of his strength. “I don’t know,” his sentient blade admitted. “Maybe we should call somebody. Sorceress? Hagatha?” They became aware they were being watched. Cleone glided over to them, her bedsheet trailing behind her in the wind like snowy wings. “So,” she wept, kneeling down beside Xander’s body. “They killed him.” “They killed him,” ManMan admitted. “That murdering bastard Morbo! When I get the Lair Legion…” “You won’t need them,” Cleone interrupted him. “Morbo is already a dead man. He just doesn’t know it yet. It is destiny that a sorcerer supreme will be murdered this day!” “One was,” Knifey pointed out. “Being sorcerer supreme sometimes means being on the very edge,” the swanmay answered. She brushed away her tears and pushed her silver hair from her face. “Now I know my doom.” “What?” ManMan asked. “What do you mean?” “She knows what her fate is now,” Knifey realised. “How her life is to end. Why she can never go home.” “Yes,” agreed the swan maiden. “I have to make a choice.” She shrugged off her bedsheet and leaned over Xander’s ruined form. “I choose him.” She leaned down and pressed her lips to Xander’s bloody mouth, and closed her eyes, and surrendered her future: a swanmay’s first kiss. “Hear me,” she told the fallen mage. “You wished it once, that you could spent some time with me where we weren’t in mortal danger, where we could just talk and maybe have a pot of tea. You wished it, and I grant it, with my life’s gift. My life is your life, my breath to yours. You who have no eyes, see with mine. You who have no voice, speak with mine. You who have no heart, love with mine, taking whatever you need from me, however you need it, now and for eternity. I give it, I grant it… so shall it be!” She shuddered once and collapsed across the mage. And Xander woke up. “Well,” he said sitting up painfully, bloody but whole, “this could have been worse.” He folded Cleone in his torn mantle and sat up. “What just happened?” ManMan asked. “The most extraordinary thing,” Xander admitted, stroking the hair of the unconscious maiden in his arms. “Cleone shared her life with me, brought me back. She’s bound herself to me altogether, of her own free will, to save me. How remarkable.” He looked bemused. “I hope Harry won’t be jealous of my new familiar.” “You planned this all along?” demanded Knifey. “Not Cleone,” the master of the mystic crafts replied, “but I did set some things in motion that I suppose led to where we are now. The important thing is that technically I’m dead according to the cosmic plan of things. An anomaly. Unaccounted for. Unexpected.” “And you wanted that?” ManMan wondered. “I needed it,” Xander answered. “So much that I had to risk everything. The sorcerer supreme gets murdered today, one way or another. Somebody has to deal with that.” He looked serious for a moment, and there was nothing of the ridiculous little clock-repairer at all in his countenance. “This war is only just beginning, and the enemy has made their first serious mistake.” “In leaving you alive?” Xander gently lifted Cleone and brushed his lips against her brow, and smiled. “In underestimating the power of love.” Next issue: What’s big, green ,draconic, and long overdue at the Lair Mansion? Yes, Finny’s back just in time for the Gothametropolis Mayoral election race, for the launch of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises, for the search for Lindy Wilson, and for the moment when Badripoor makes its move. Be there trying to keep up as poor old Finny tries to keep up in UT#167: The Return of Fin Fang Foom Again it’ll be a shocker! Those who want to revise the consequences of Baron Morbo’s experiment with the Saiitaai Manifestation are referred to Nitz the Bloody - the Stenching. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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