By the light of the setting sun, and with Callette’s drawings anxiously in his hands, Derk concentrated on the house and garden then. The garden became a desolate forecourt with pitfalls and chained monsters in place of the flower beds. The bushes and trees were broken black pillars or mazes of evil black walls. For the house itself, Derk followed Callette’s design drawing for the completed Citadel and made it a tortured black facade, full of weird sharp angles, twisted arches, and impossibly jutting towers. It looked highly impressive against the sunset. But since it was only an inch thick, Derk could not have any Pilgrims going inside it to confront him. Fortunately Callette had left the enlarged terrace almost as it was. All the griffins liked it this way because it was so big. Derk added broken black archways along the front of it, twisted like the towers, and tormented low walls. Then to prevent anyone going in through the front door, he constructed a long trench of illusory balefire just in front of the doorstep. This looked surprisingly impressive, flickering white and wraithlike in the growing dark. Derk considered a moment and then added an impression of untold depth to the trench. Like that, it made the perfect place to be done to death in. The Pilgrims could think they were hurling the Dark Lord down into a bottomless pit.
Quite pleased with his evening’s work, Derk walked through the trench and entered the house, where the dwarfs were making rather appetizing smells. “What are you cooking?” he asked.
They looked just a little shifty. “Your walking skeleton kept giving us eggs as big as my head, and we got rather sick of them,” Dworkin explained. “So we—er—”
“Went foraging,” said Galadriel.
“He wouldn’t let us touch the pigs or the monkeys, and we don’t eat cat,” Simpse added. “But we found a herd of cows in that side valley and they didn’t seem to belong to anyone, so—”
“We’re roasting an ox,” Galadriel said, jutting his plaited beard aggressively.
“Ah, well.” Derk sighed. “I owe the mayor for twelve others, anyway.”
“You can have some, too,” Dworkin said politely. “And we’ve got eggs, of course, and we found the cabbage patch and the place with those round brown roots.”
“You mean my experimental bread-potatoes,” said Derk.
The dwarfs gave him wary looks. “They cook down just like dumplings,” Simpse said. “Aren’t they digestible then?”
“They were designed to be highly nutritious,” Derk said. “I hope you left some for seed.”
“We didn’t pick quite all of them,” Simpse said.
Derk sighed again and joined them for a filling supper of roast beef, roots, and huge slices of hard-boiled egg, after which he slept better than he had been doing lately. In the morning he went anxiously outside, munching a leftover slice of egg as he went, to see if his transformed Citadel looked convincing by daylight.
Not bad, he decided, as long as the dwarfs kept the Pilgrims too busy to look closely. It had a flimsy sort of look, if you stared at any of it for long. But he was a little startled by the flower bed monsters. He had not realized that a griffin’s notion of a monster would be something made up of bits of human being. Still, they were unusual. And they stirred their many misplaced legs and wagged their several shaggy heads in the breeze in a horribly lifelike way. The balefire looked a little pale by daylight. Derk strengthened it to a brighter white and added another wall or so in the way, so that the Pilgrims would not see it straightaway. Then he went into the kitchen to shake the dwarfs awake and turn them swart.
By the time he had done that, fed the animals, and induced Old George to wear the fluttering shreds of garments—“I’m not decent!” Old George protested, to which Derk replied, “No, you’re a walking corpse, and you’re beyond that!”—the first Pilgrim Party was actually making its way up the valley. Derk groaned. The valley was green, whitened by morning frost. He had forgotten to make it a waste of cinders. Well, it was too late now. He hurriedly assumed his disguise as Dark Lord and waited for them on the terrace.
There were sixteen tourists, led by Finn, men and women who all looked battered, grubby, and tired. They toiled their way up to the gates, which Callette had designed beautifully as a pair of great clawed hands, and stood looking through doubtfully. Finn stepped forward and threw a ball of witchfire at the gates. Derk obliged with a shower of sparks and allowed the clawed hands to swing apart. Finn urged the Pilgrims inside. None of them seemed keen on the idea. They hurried in and halted in a huddle, staring in extreme horror at the flower bed monsters. Finn urged them on again. Two steps later Old George crossed their path, uttering muted cries. It was not exactly wailing. It sounded more like “Ho, ho, ho!” The Pilgrims backed away from him. Finn shoved them forward.
Old George, pleased with the effect he was
having, stopped and faced them. “I was once a prince like you,” he announced.
“Oh, shut up and go away, George!” Derk murmured, pacing the terrace.
Finn obviously felt the same. “Avaunt!” he said, and threw witchfire at Old George.
Old George retreated, huffily muttering, “I was only doing it to oblige!”
Finn pushed the Pilgrims forward again. They got halfway up the garden, and then it was the turn of the dwarfs, who sprang gleefully out of hiding, shouting war cries and whirling their axes. They looked spectacular. Derk congratulated himself. As well as coloring them blue-black, he had had the idea of converting all their braids into writhing snakes. And this part, he was pleased to see, went with a swing. The Pilgrims were used to fighting by this stage in their tour. They drew swords and hacked at the dwarfs. The dwarfs, with great artistry and much enjoyment, hacked back. They swung and wove and menaced the Pilgrims, but allowed themselves to be slowly driven backward through the transformed garden, until, after about ten minutes of fierce and bloodless fighting, the Pilgrims had almost reached the terrace steps.
And those steps were a sudden zigzag of acid blue light.
With a noise like the sky splitting, a vast blue three-legged being loomed above the fighting. Its rattail toyed and slithered among Derk’s black archways. The blueness of it pulsed nastily, and the nearness of it scalded everyone’s mind like salt water on a fresh graze. Old George was suddenly wailing in earnest in the background. The dwarfs fled screaming, and the Pilgrims only stayed where they were because Finn slammed a quick immobility spell on them. In the distance Derk could hear the pigs shrilling. He was quite at a loss himself. He simply had not expected the demon to appear.
The demon had two eyes glaring greedily upon the transfixed Pilgrim Party, and the third swiveled to look sarcastically at Derk. He felt the bleachlike burn of it on his mind. That’s why I’m here. I warned you. I shall appear like this to every tour party.
But why? Derk wondered. Demons were never this obliging.
The demon’s laughter flooded against his brain, making him sick and dizzy. I have my reasons. Be sure I don’t do it to oblige you, little wizard.
And it was gone, in another zigzag of blue light, just as Finn, white as a sheet and shaking all over, had nerved himself to raise a hand and quaver, “Avaunt!”
How do I manage to follow an effect like that? Derk wondered irritably. It took him a second or so to pull himself together and muster his Dark Lord illusion again. Luckily it took Finn an equal time to remember to take the immobility spell off his party, and even when he had, the Pilgrims were slow to move. By the time they came hesitantly among the black arches, Derk was a vague black shadow with burning eyes, outlined against the flickering balefire of the trench.
The Pilgrims stopped dead again at the sight of him. Finn kicked the nearest one in the ankle. “We know your weakness,” the man said uncertainly. “Your time is up, Dark Lord.”