The Dark Lord of Derkholm

“I’ll talk to you when I come back!” Derk shouted up at the lump. “If I have to get on a ladder to do it!”

Kit gave no sign that he had heard. Derk gave up on him and led Querida across the terrace and round to the back of the house. She remarked as they went, “Dealing with an adolescent griffin must be even worse than dealing with an adolescent human.”

“Hm,” said Derk, Remembering some of the things Blade had said to him yesterday, he was not sure that was true. But there was no doubt that Kit had been very difficult lately. He sighed, because he had sudden piercing, overwhelming memories of Kit when he was first hatched, memories of a small, scrawny, golden bundle of down and fine fur; of his own pride in his very first successfully hatched griffin; of himself and Mara lovingly bundling Kit from one to the other; of two-year-old Shona and Kit rolling on the floor together, rubbing beak to nose and laughing. Kit had been so small and thin and fluffy that they had called him their Kitten. No one had expected him to grow so very big. Or so difficult.

They came round the back of the house where the pens and plantations stretched away uphill. “What a lot of space you have here!” Querida exclaimed.

“The whole end of the valley,” Derk said.

The animals knew Derk was there. Most of them came rushing towards the ends of their pens to meet him. Derk fed Big Hen a corncob – she was about the size of an ostrich and he had used the shells of her eggs as eggs for the griffins – and then suffered himself to be slobbered on and gazed at by the Friendly Cows. He began to feel soothed. Bother ants! he thought. He had done bees after all. What he needed was an animal that no one had thought of before.

“Cows?” asked Querida, looking up at the big sticky noses and the great moony eyes.

“Er – sort of,” Derk admitted. “I bred them to be very stupid. Animals know, you see – you saw the pigs’ opinion of that blood – and I wanted a cow that wouldn’t know when we needed her for the griffins to eat. But they turned out so very friendly that it’s quite difficult at times.”

“Indeed.” Querida moved on to the next pen, full of very small sheep. “What’s your opinion of the great Mr Chesney?”

“If I ever bred a piranha with a hyena, I’d call it a Chesney,” Derk said.

“That’s right,” said Querida. “We’re just like your Friendly Cows to him, you know.”

“I know,” said Derk.

“And he means every word he says. You did understand that, did you?”

“I understood,” Derk said sombrely. If he ever bred a Chesney, he thought, it would have to have gills and be amphibious.

“Good,” said Querida. “You aren’t a fool, whatever else you are. Did you know those sheep eat meat? There’s one over there munching a sparrow.”

“They do,” Derk admitted. “I got them a bit wrong somewhere.”

They moved on to the next enclosure, whose occupants stood in a row with their long necks stretched, honking sarcastically. “It sounds just as if those geese are jeering,” said Querida.

“They are.” Derk sighed. “I bred them for intelligence and I hoped they’d talk – and I think they may talk, but they do it in their own language.”

“Hm. I think your geese are safe from the University,” said Querida, moving on. What she wanted was a griffin. She knew which one, too. But she was prepared to go about it quite slowly and very cunningly. “Why is this cage empty? The pigs?”

“No, the pigs are free-range. That should be cats,” Derk told her. “I think the ones still in there are invisible, but most of them got out through the walls somehow.”

Querida gave a hissing chuckle. “That’s cats for you! Mine do that too, and as far as I know they’re just ordinary cats. What were you breeding them for?”

“Colour,” said Derk. “I was hoping for red or blue, but they didn’t like the idea and it didn’t work. But they took to invisibility. And the old female cat who’s dead now was very proud of the fact that I took some of her cells for Elda. She used to spend hours washing Elda when Elda first hatched.”

They walked past giant guinea pigs and inch-high monkeys sporting in tiny trees Derk had grown for them. “Did you use cats to make all your griffins?” Querida asked curiously, as they came to the daylight owls.

“Goodness, no.” Derk unlatched the pen and let two large snowy owls hop out on to his shoulders, where they sat staring at Querida as unblinkingly as she stared up at them. “I found an old lioness who’d been wounded and left behind by the pride. I got her well again and she obliged me with cells for all the griffins before she left. And some of the other cells were from that eagle Barnabas used to have. But I used cells from myself and from Mara too. I wanted the griffins to be people, you see – but I didn’t expect Kit or Callette to grow so big. I think Lydda and Don are going to turn out a more reasonable size, but I wouldn’t bet on it. That’s why I used some cat for Elda. She’s definitely smaller, you may have noticed.” He stroked the owls’ heads and strolled on. There were always problems with the griffins. He had hoped Kit and Callette would make a breeding pair, but Kit despised Callette and Callette hated Kit. And now Kit had put on that extraordinary act with Mr Chesney – Derk wondered how he was going to pay a fine of a hundred gold without selling off half the animals.

They rounded the experimental beehives – Derk was glad Querida did not ask about those – and strolled on through the coffee plantation, where the owls left his shoulders and went ghosting off to hunt. He did not mind Querida asking about the coffee. He was prepared to tell her quite frankly that Barnabas had taken some of his Pilgrim pay in coffee some years back. Derk had begged a few beans and was now growing coffee you did not need to roast. But there were other things over towards the stables and in the vats in his workshed he had no intention of telling Querida about.

Querida did not ask. She sniffed the rich smell rising from the bushes and wondered how many other things from Mr Chesney’s world Derk was secretly growing here. Tea? Exotic vegetables like potatoes and tomatoes? Antibiotics? That stuff they made the T-shirts from that the younger wizards liked so much? – cotton, that was its name. When she finally extorted the University dues from him, she would ask for all those if he wouldn’t give her a griffin. And she wondered why he was letting her know some of his secrets. There must be something he badly wanted to ask from her.

“Wizard Derk,” she said, “I’m sure you didn’t bring me all this way simply to sniff coffee and admire your beautiful owls. What were you wanting to say?”

Derk found he was going to have to work up to that thing. But there were plenty of others. “I didn’t understand that man Addis,” he said, “when he talked about expendable tourists. What did he mean?”

“Just what he said,” Querida answered. “I suspect that is where Mr Chesney really makes his money. A lot of people come on the tours who are either a trial to their families, or very rich, with poor relatives who wish to inherit their money, and so on. These families pay enormous fees to make sure the person doesn’t come back from the tour.”

Derk pushed out from among the coffee bushes and swung round to face Querida outside the dog pen. “But that’s vile! And we all go along with this?”

“And with the fact that the Pilgrim Parties kill an average of two hundred of our citizens each,” Querida retorted, dry as a snake in a desert. “Given that Mr Chesney has his wishes enforced by the demon, I don’t see how we don’t go along with it. Do you?”

“No.” Derk turned unhappily back to the dog run. Its door was open. The only dog still in there was the elderly houndbitch, Bertha. She came stiffly strutting out and scraped at his leg with one paw. Derk frowned as he bent to rub her ears. He knew the dogs had been shut in before the first wizard arrived. It looked as if Pretty really had learnt how to open doors, in which case damn! Pretty was one of the many things he did not want Querida to see. He could hear the other dogs in the distance, now he thought about it, barking and yelping over by the stables, and the pigs squealing over there too. Some game, by the sound of it. Fine, as long as they kept over there. “And how am I supposed to die one hundred and twenty-six times?” he asked distractedly.

“You have to fake that,” said Querida. “As Barnabas will tell you, it’s time-consuming more than anything, considering all the other things the Dark Lord has to do. Is that dog bred for something, or just a dog?”

“I was trying for wings,” Derk confessed, “but they always drop off when the puppies lose their milk teeth. See. Here’s where they were.” He showed Querida the two folds in the brindled fur by Bertha’s shoulder blades. Bertha turned and made an amiable effort to lick Querida’s face as Querida bent to look. Derk hastily distracted Bertha by walking on round the dog run to the paddock.

“You should have tried reducing the length of their tongues instead,” Querida said sourly, at which Bertha shot her a nervous look and moved to the other side of Derk. So he bred them for understanding too, Querida thought. “It’s all right, dog. I just hate my face wet. What are these? Horses?”

“The horses we keep for riding,” Derk said. He was nervous. He was going to have to say what he had brought Querida here to say to her soon.

Querida looked shrewdly from Derk to the horses trotting eagerly over to the fence. He messes about breeding monsters out of these animals, she thought, and they still all adore him. Then she remembered the sarcastic geese. Perhaps not all of them. And none of the horses seemed anything but normal, several solid thick-legged hacks, a couple of nice desert-breds, and one truly classy brood mare, who was in foal, to judge by her bulging sides. Querida watched Derk nervously fumbling for sugar and wondered what all the dogs were barking about in the distance. “Well, Wizard Derk?”

Derk could not get round to it yet. “Did Mr Chesney really mean it about wanting a god to manifest?” he asked instead.

“You heard the man,” said Querida. “And as none of the gods struck him dead, I conclude that his word is law with them too and you’re going to have to produce a god for him.”

“Me?” said Derk.

“Yes,” said Querida. “You. The Dark Lord always sees to the novelty.”

“But I can’t! No one can tell the gods what to do!” Derk protested, feeding sugar to horses in distracted handfuls.

“Except, of course, Mr Chesney,” Querida agreed. “This is something else you’re going to have to fake, I imagine. I think it would be safest to invent a god that doesn’t exist. It can be done with a simple illusion spell then. You do remember how to do illusions, do you?” Derk nodded, still distracted. Well, that’s something at least! Querida thought. But she was not sure she trusted the man to invent a suitable deity. “I’ll think up a plausible god for you and let you know what it looks like.”

“Thanks,” said Derk. The sugar was all gone. He had run out of other things to ask Querida. He wiped his hands on his velvet trousers, wondering how to say what he wanted.

“Out with it, Wizard Derk!” Querida snapped impatiently.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a bit difficult. I don’t like – I mean Mara’s a free woman and it’s not that I mind her dressing up and seducing tourists exactly—”

“I’ve done it for years,” said Querida. “It’s only more faking, if that’s what’s worrying you. At least Mara’s not a dried-up old snake like me and she won’t need to disguise herself with twenty different glamours—” Derk turned and looked her keenly in the face. Querida uneasily remembered that great black griffin of his staring at Mr Chesney. “It’s a shame she’s not being paid,” she said.

“No. There’s something else,” Derk said. “You and Mara are up to something, aren’t you? What’s going on?”

Querida, for once, had a little trouble controlling her face. It was something that had not happened to her for years. Mara did warn me, she thought. He’s not at all the farmerish fool he looks. Perhaps she ought to revise her plans and tell him, before he messed everything up trying to find out. “Now it’s interesting you should say that—” she began cautiously.

The yelling and baying of the dogs abruptly grew louder, mixed with squealing, grunting, sounds like hysterical laughter, and the hammering of paws, hooves and trotters. Before Querida could turn to see what was going on, or Derk could move, a confused crowd of excited animals swept round the corner of the paddock and galloped straight through the spot where Querida was standing.