The Wrong Magic Word

The Writer’s Cramp for 05/01/2012
Contest prompt: “The wrong magic word”
989 words

***

The ruffian who stepped inside the captured wizard tower wore thick leather armor that was scratched and burnt and sewn back together. The same could be whispered about his countenance as he appeared to be well acquainted with the mistress of war and her little sister of bar brawls.

He dropped the beat-up leather case full of tools and a small wooden stool once he saw who was inside to quickly kneel. He bowed his head and said in a scratchy voice, “Your majesty! My humblest apologies as I did not expect you here.”

“You need not take a knee here, siege engineer,” the king declared, smirking proudly at his own little rhyme. “I may expect such courtesy in the great hall, but out in the field we are all men of equal stature.”

“Very well, sir,” he responded as he stood up. “Montgomery is the name, at your service. What would you like sieged today?”

The king waved his arm at a long downward moving escalator.

“A mechanical stairway?” Montgomery mused, examining it with a closer eye. “So how do we get up it?”

The king frowned. “That is why we invited you here, to figure that out. The dark wizard himself is at the top of these accursed steps and must meet justice with the utmost haste.”

“Of course, of course,” the engineer muttered. He rubbed his scarred chin for a long moment and pointed. “Did you trying running up them?” he asked, wiggling two fingers as if they were climbing the steps themselves.

“Of course we did,” the king snapped. “But bearing heavy armor, carrying shields to ward off the dark wizard’s fireballs, and clutching weapons make for a cumbersome climb. Look how rapidly the steps descend upon us!”

The siege engineer stepped to the bottom of the escalator, ran up a few steps and then stopped, gliding down to the bottom. He shook the arm rails and felt how sturdy they were.

He walked over to where he dropped his bag of tools and flipped over the little wooden stool on its three legs and sat down, watching the escalator intently. After dwelling on the challenge and becoming mesmerized by the smooth motion of the metallic stairs for a time, Montgomery stood up, snapping his fat fingers and pointing. “We will construct a platform and place it on top of those moving handrails,” he said.

“But your platforms will just be conveyed back down to the bottom floor here,” the king argued.

“These platforms will have rollers underneath that span both handrails and guards on the end to hold them in place. We will build a ramp here and feed the platforms onto the hand rails in sections, pushing them up the escalator rails. When it nears the top, your knights may run up the platforms as if it was a hillside.”

“At which time we will indeed face the dark wizard,” the king proclaimed. “Excellent, brilliant work, Montgomery. Put your men to work. Conscript any carpenters in the kingdom to hasten your construction.”

***

The platforms were in place days later, rolling noisily on top of the rubber hand rails. Mechanical parts of a catapult were scavenged to push the rolling platforms up the incline, and the king felt empowered by the ramp before him. He nodded at the siege engineer with respect before he slapped down the faceplate of his helm and shouted at his knights, “With me!”

Holding a kite shield that bore the coat of arms of his fathers, he charged up the wooden ramp. The armor of the king and the knights behind him rattled and clanged and their heavy footsteps thumped like a stampede. The king leapt off the final platform and rolled to his feet, facing the dark wizard who immediately launched a fireball at his head, standing before his self-fashioned throne of doom.

The king blocked the fireball with his shield as other knights jumped off the platform and reinforced his position. The wizard threw several more fireballs at them, but they exploded harmlessly against their magically-augmented shields.

The dark wizard gave up, and fell back into his throne, kicking a leg over the armrest. “So you have outwitted the escalator, bravo to you all,” he groaned, clapping his decrepitly old hands several times which made nearly no noise.

“You may have caught up to me but you have hardly defeated me,” he declared quietly. Standing back up, he shouted, “I am the master of portals. I can escape anywhere! The Pillars of Endoria are nice this time of year.”

He pointed his hands behind him and incanted a strange word. A fluttering portal appeared showing the blurry desert of a faraway world.

“My portals can be long-lived or short-lived preventing your brave knights from pursuing me,” he explained as he paced in his long black robe. “I will rebuild my legion of dragons and orcs you have destroyed and imbue them with magic your mages cannot neutralize. We shall burn your villages and farms until I bend you all to my will. This country will be ruled to me or it shall be scorched earth!”
“Goodbye you fools, until we meet again, which will be sooner than you think!” the dark wizard shouted, cackling his evil and irritating laugh as he turned and stepped into the portal behind him. But the portal had vanished during his rant and he walked right into the wall with a sickening thud and bounced off, spun around, a fell right onto his magical backside.

He looked up and saw sabatans and greaves lined up in front of him. He looked up further to see the knights surrounding him, pointing their swords down at his neck. The dark wizard chuckled awkwardly and shrugged. “That portal should have waited for me to pass through before it dematerialized. I think that was the wrong magic word,” he sighed. “Can I have a do-over?”