To reject women is difficult enough, but to have women reject me was too much. I felt for the first time a dreadful need for strong drink. However, I took a deep breath inside me, and thought for a moment: should I drink of alcohol, I might lose my Overlordship. No more would I be able to lord over puny beings lost in their own selfish stupidities.
Then again, I thought, what if I spoke with Dinny Divort! Surely some kind of arrangement might be made to allow a god a little sport with wine and women. A small thing surely for one with Divine Powers.
I went to the desk where first we saw Cordinia. It was empty. I explored associated chambers again. I felt as though Cordinia might indeed know where Dinny was, and so inquired after her personal quarters. Fortunately, the evil upon my face was growing less ugly as time passed, and my questions were met with answers: upstairs, I was told.
Would I had not ascended those steps!
However, I did, and upon the topmost I heard Divort’s rolling tones, singing some silly song.
“Divort!” I cried, bursting into a room. “We must have words!”
Well, upon viewing that scene before me, I indeed needed words, because words were stolen from my throat.
There, lying upon a vast bed of amber pillows and ivory sheets lay naked none other than Dinny Divort and Cordinia. The scent of after-coupling hovered in the air like spring, and both sported huge crystal tumblers of wine, from which they were drinking.
“Zounds, Whiteviper! Have you insufficent courtesy to knock first?”
I stood there for a moment, aghast at what lay before me. For her part, Cordinia looked no less upset.
“Please, if you insist on staying, do close the door.”
I ignored her. “You blackguard! You bounder! What about our pledge?”
“Your pledge, dear boy! Never said I would have to swear off the fun bits of life! I say though, you are looking a bit piqued. Perhaps you should go back and have a nap.”
I reached down and grabbed him by the neck and started shaking him. “I am the Dark Overlord!” I shrieked. “No one goes unpunished who betrays me!”
“Trifle melodramatic, don’t you think, old boy?” choked out Divort.
I tossed him back into his bed of sin and stepped back, overwhelmed by vexation. Seized by an apoplexy, I could not speak. However, events proved I did not have to speak, for who should enter the room through the door I’d opened but Ygor. He carried this very sword I wave now.
“Cordinia? My love. Why?” He turned on Dinny Divort. “Bastard! I strike thee for this adultery!”
Thus saying, he struck at Divort, thusly-and with such force lopped off his head! Oh, the look upon that bouncing head! The body itself geysered blood messily onto the sheets and then tilted forward.
Both Ygor and Cordinia looked aghast upon this occurrence.
“This was no god!” said Cordinia “I wondered as much.”
She turned to me. “And you are no god either, but a partner in this trickery. Ygor-the sword!”
In truth, that was almost the end of me. Fortunately I finally found words, and Ygor remembered that for all my humanity, I’d been the best damned Dark Overlord they could have wanted. However, with my lack of godhood, I was now considered unfit. And so I was banished, with two mementos of my time there in OverEye.
You see the first now, the sword I have been waving, given to me only because it had been tainted with Dinny Divort’s human blood.
And look now, Rotvole-here’s the other memento at my feet. I lift it up by its scraggly hair. A bodiless head. The head of Dinny Divort and-
Oops! Dear Rotvole! Hah hah. The Evil Overlord strikes one more time for posterity! Dinny’s still in the basket under the chair. My swinging, drunken sword lost its way.
I’m holding you!
ENSURING THE SUCCESSION by Jody Lynn Nye
The tropical island was a bright green and tan dot in the middle of an endless aqua sea under an equally endless vivid blue sky. Rainbow-colored birds emitted their raucous cries and were answered by the shrieks and honks of the tree-dwelling wildlife. All was still, but for a gentle rustling in the bushes caused by a body perceptible only to the watcher viewing the scene through a remote infrared camera.
The pristine vista was suddenly marred a tiny black, elongated dot that approached rapidly from the eastern horizon, accompanied by the loud humming of engines that quickly swallowed up the natural sounds. The rocket-copter steadily descended until the wash from its steering rotors stirred up a miniature maelstrom in the waters of the peaceful cove. It landed inside a twelve-foot circle marked out by basketball-sized stones above the high-tide line.
Two men climbed out of the chopper, one from either side. They wore dark glasses and black boiler suits with red cuffs and collars, with the insignia of a knife piercing a tilted ring on each shoulder. The first man, a tall, hefty individual with very dark skin, flipped up the latch on the hold behind the passenger compartment. The pair began to unload the cargo: large, gray-painted crates stamped with the same blood-colored dagger-and-ring logo.
The moment they turned their backs, a young man burst out of the undergrowth. His long, light brown hair was wild, and his bright blue eyes burned in a tanned face. He moved with such silent deliberation that he was upon the large, dark-skinned man before the man could turn around. The youth pulled the gun out of the pilot’s holster and shot him in the throat with it. The man fell. The youth leaped into the pilot’s seat, entered a code in the keypad on the navigational computer, and strapped in as the rotors began turning. He hauled back hard on the stick and lofted the copter up out of the reach of the other man, who jumped up and tried to hang onto the landing gear. He missed. The aircraft was out of reach in seconds, and, as the jets kicked in barely ten feet above the treetops, out of sight over the horizon in minutes.
The watcher, a thousand miles away in an underground bunker, the communications center for Alkirin Empires, Inc., turned from the first screen to a second and touched a red button beneath it. The image of a man’s craggy face with bright blue eyes and bushy black eyebrows in vivid contrast to his shock of white hair appeared.
“He did it. He’s on his way, sir.”
“Thank you,” the older man said. “Out.”
Vaslov Alkirin closed the connection and swung away from the console. How satisfying to know that years of planning were about to come to fruition. He had hoped, but hope was less than one percent of how things came to be.
He looked up at the map that adorned the far marble wall of his “office.” Others had referred to the thirty-meter-square chamber as a throne room. If his employees suspected that he could hear them at all times and in all places they never let on. Alkirin assumed that they did not. They believed he trusted them. He did, and didn’t. Only a fool trusts all of the time, he thought, surveying the boundaries of his empire. Or never.
His was not a country as the historians thought of one; rather, it consisted of large parts of several traditional nations that he had conquered through economic ploys and other means, plus other nonadjacent territories that belonged to him as outright purchases or gifts from the former owners. The continents in the sea of slate-blue marble were of silver. The lands that he controlled were covered in a layer of gold. Ashoki, for example, there on the eastern continent, was almost totally under his domination-except for two flipperlike provinces at the eastern edge of the oval country, and those two were dependent upon his holdings for vital resources. Soon they must fall under his command for mere survival’s sake. He was ready to accept their capitulation. Only the stupidly proud premier was holding back on giving consent. Alkirin was content to wait. That consent could not be long in coming, not with the drought that had dessicated the country for the last five years, and Alkirin’s water reservoirs the only nearby source, the only reasonably priced source.