Nightlord: Orb (117 page)

I ignored this; if he wanted to monologue, that was fine by me.  I finished my second shielding spell and a third while he was trying to be a witty villain.

When he didn’t get a response—I didn’t even turn around—he tried to transport me.  My guess is he wanted to put me somewhere more easily controlled.  His second attempt, a blast of mental energy to stun me, met one of my other shields and fizzled.  His third try was electricity-based, directing a high-voltage surge toward me.  No doubt it was the magical version of an electrical stun weapon.  He was too late, though.  The electrical discharge hit another of my defensive spells and grounded out.  None of it touched me.

“My turn,” I whispered.

I turned away from the wall and planted a foot against it.  I pushed off, half-leaping, half-running at him.  The wall cracked beneath my foot.  The air tried to rip my face off as I shot toward him, claws outstretched.

Johann didn’t even have time to look surprised before I was closing taloned hands around his throat.

Whatever else he might be, he wasn’t unprepared.  He disappeared an instant, an
inch
, before my outstretched claws touched him.  He didn’t have time to concentrate on leaving; I moved too fast over too short a distance for human reflexes to react.  No doubt a defensive measure of his own went off with the proximity, triggering an automatic teleport.  I wasn’t really paying attention to his spells.  All I wanted was to get my claws in him.

I screamed in rage as he escaped, then occupied myself with hitting the far wall without damaging myself.  I slowed a little on the way, absorbed some of the shock with my arms, and managed not to break anything, wall included.

He got away.  Somewhere in a high-magic environment, a mage who can teleport at will was avoiding me.

Well, fine.  Let’s see about forcing him to come to me.

The crystal wall was still intact.  I walked over to it and hit it straight with my right fist.  It didn’t shatter, but it did crack nicely.  A second punch cleared an opening large enough to drive a tank through.  I left the abattoir and entered the relatively clean torture chamber to rescue Juliet.

If I could free her, get out, and open up some additional power centers, the kids and grandkids could keep Granddad occupied.  I would be free to find him and beat him to death with his own spine.

Getting her loose was tricky.  At the moment, she was strapped to a table rather than chained.  The chains were still attached to the table, though, which made approaching it while wearing shielding spells problematic.  I downshifted out of overdrive to talk to her.

“Are you awake?” I asked.  Since she was strapped down, not chained, she could be under a spell.  When she did not respond, I checked; something was on her head, probably altering the structure of her dreams and keeping her unconscious.  That was unfortunate.  I couldn’t reach past the
orichalcum
chains around the table without ending my own spells.  I couldn’t even affect the spell on her; the chains would ground out magical attempts to reach past it.  Yet, I needed her.  She was the only person I had who could show me where another nexus point might be.

All right.  I could enclose everything inside a shield—the whole room.  If I made a large Ascension Sphere… Yes, that could work.  The chains, being completely inside, wouldn’t have anywhere to ground out
to
. They would exist entirely within a higher-potential magical environment.  The Sphere would act as a defense against remote spells and a spell inside the Sphere could prevent teleportation. Then I could help Juliet, raise my defensive spells again, and we could, hopefully, get out of here before Johann figured out a way to get to us.

I set about doing so.  Fortunately, I had more power surrounding me than I’m used to.  It was more power than any other time I can remember, except for my wake-up call in the base of my statue.  I wasn’t sure how long I might have, so I worked quickly, trying to hit a balance between personal energies expended versus time.  It helped that I had several sharp objects with which to scratch symbols on the walls.  While I walked around the torture chamber and scribbled-scratched, I tried to ignore the depth of the corpses in the abattoir.

The air crackled as the Ascension Sphere activated, surrounding the room, bulging out farther than the walls themselves as it stabilized into a sphere to contain the whole chamber.  For a moment, the interior of the Sphere seemed dull and dim, but power radiated from its inner surface, filling the space rapidly to higher and higher levels.

I took stock.  I wasn’t hungry yet and I was physically intact.  I was in no sense tired; the abundance of energy here helped enormously.  Good.  My mental shield had taken a beating, though.  Something tried to alter my thinking processes while I was paying attention to other things.  I reinforced it and built a second one for safety.  Then a quick barrier to bar transportation through spaces other than the usual three…

I turned my attention to Juliet.  The spell on her head was definitely a dream-inducer—probably some sort of nightmare, judging by her heart rate and the wild, panicked colors in her spirit.  I ran fingernails across the straps and sliced right through them.

Then I dismantled the spell around her head.  When the spell fell apart, she opened her eyes and sat bolt upright, screaming, hands flailing, the works.  I stepped back and let her get her bearings.  It took a minute.  After a few days of torturous destruction and magical reconstruction, I couldn’t blame her, but I was in kind of a hurry.

“Get a grip,” I told her, not unkindly.  “You’re free, and we need to move.  Focus!”

She took her sweet time about it, in my opinion.  Her eyes were wild and she gripped the edges of the table with white-knuckled hands, breathing hard and fast.  I kept my impatience in check.  I don’t do so well when I’m rudely awakened, either.  I counted to ten under my breath and addressed her again.

“Got your bearings?  Know where you are?”

“I… yes.  I’m in Grandfather’s torture chamber.”

“Thinks of everything, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he does.”

“Can you stand?  Can you walk?  I need your advice on how to get out of here and get to a nexus point.”

“I can stand.”  She swung her feet off the table and I helped her to stand.  “I don’t know where we are, though.”

“You just said we were in his torture chamber.”

“Yes, but I don’t know where he keeps it, just that he has one!”  She paused and cocked her head.  “I can feel we’re in some sort of large shielding spell and I can’t detect anything outside it.”  As she spoke, she ran her hands through her hair, re-forming her hairdo.  Her hands then stroked down her sides and a short, skirted garment manifested to cover her.

“Great.  Could you help me out in the men’s clothing department?”  She nodded and gestured my chiton outfit back onto me.  “Thanks.  Now, put your fingers in your ears.”

“Put my…?”

“Do it!” I barked.

She did so, looking puzzled.  Since I couldn’t use a locator spell through the Ascension Sphere, I produced a powerful sonic pulse to generate echoes.

Yes, I shrieked and listened.  Like a bat.  I can be a stereotype if I want to.  It’s in my contract.

My primitive echolocation didn’t tell me where I was, but it did tell me I wasn’t underground.  We might be high up a tower or sitting on the third floor, but there were open spaces beyond each wall.  That much I could tell.

“Do you have spells to hide us and transport us?” I asked.

“I can conjure such things, but Grandfather’s power is such he will penetrate my spells if he is looking for us, and I assure you, all his attention is on this room.”  She kept her eyes fixed on me as she spoke, deliberately not looking at the abattoir.  I didn’t blame her.

“How quickly will he overcome your spells?  We only need a few minutes.”

“I think I can do that.”

“Good.  Fire them up and get ready to teleport us if we can’t escape by other means.”

“Do we have anything resembling a plan?”

“Yes.  Now do as I say!” I half-snarled.

“Yes, sir,” she replied, flinching.  I suppose I can be a little frightening when I’m in that sort of mood.

She started her spellcasting and I started mine.  I wanted better shields against a variety of effects—even if an anti-zappy shield only stopped one magical taser hit, it was one magical taser hit that didn’t drop me instantly.  Mental attacks were also on my mind, as well as teleportation into unpleasant places, fireballs, and similar nastiness.  I also cranked up my inertia-shedding spell on the theory people tend to expect normal movement.  It might be helpful to change direction, accelerate to full speed, or stop nearly instantly.  It was a heavy outlay of power, but I
had
power, more power on hand than I really knew what to do with.

Yeah, I might have gone a little overboard on my protections.  Sue me.  I wasn’t feeling at all safe.

I regarded the wall.  It appeared to be mortared stone, suitable for most castle dungeons.  It cracked like a stone wall, too, when I kicked it.  I kicked it again, cracking the mortar, dislodging head-sized stones, sending dust and stone chips into the air.  I stuck my head out.  A high, cold wind whistled by and ruffled my hair as I watched a block tumble down the side of the tower and crash into a crystalline dome, shattering it.  The lights within flickered and died as glassy shards collapsed inward.

We were not on the ground floor.  I could survive the fall, since it was night, but I’d want several minutes and several
dazhu. 
Mortal flesh and bone would probably splat, rather than crunch, assuming the shards of the dome didn’t slice it into hamburger.

“Okay, so much for running away,” I observed, loud enough to be heard over the wind.  “I don’t do well with sprinting at altitude.  Are you ready to whisk us away?”

“Yes, but what are we doing?”

“You’re teleporting us to a nexus.  Directly.  I’m going to open it as fast as inhumanly possible.  Once that happens, you might want to notify anyone interested to come occupy it, because we’re going to be in a fight with your grandfather.  We’ll probably need all the help we can get.”

“But with only one nexus—”

I rounded on her.  She jumped and backed away from me.  It’s the eyes that cause that reaction, I think.  Of course, my hair was still burned off and my ears were visible, too.  I suspect my fangs were out.  It was that sort of night. 

“You still want to take him alive?” I demanded.  “That’s still your plan?  Fine!  You do it, if you can.  I’m sure he’ll appreciate your kindness and respond by only trying to capture you.  That’s what you want, right?  A magical duel where nobody gets hurt?  Just captured and interrogated and tortured?”

She shuddered and turned away.

“All right,” she whispered.  “You’re right.  He has to be stopped.”

“I’m so glad we’re in agreement.  Are you ready?”

“Yes.”  She straightened and turned back to me with a grim look.  “Yes, I’m ready.”

“I’ll give it a one-two-three and then we go.  One.  Two.  Three!”

I sucked up the power in the Ascension Sphere, draining it.  Spells sparked and crackled around us on my shields and on Juliet’s.  Then the world blinked and we were in a forest.  Blink.  An abandoned building.  Blink.  A ring of standing stones.  I waited for a moment, but we didn’t blink out again.  The place was Stonehenge Mark Two, apparently.  I had a sudden burst of nostalgia, remembering Tamara and the ring of stones she used as a place of worship…

“We’re undetected,” Juliet whispered.  “I think.”

“What’s with the multiple blinking?”

“He would track us if we came straight here.  By bouncing from point to point, we should be ahead of his gaze.  By the time he could track our teleport to the woods, we should have left.  To be safe, I took a second detour.”

“Good work.”

“Thank you.  Now hurry; he may begin probing nexus points at any moment.  If he probes this one, I will not be able to deceive him for long.”

“Do your best.”

I stood in the center of the nexus and stabbed downward.

My previous attempt at tapping deep powers was a slow, careful thing.  I drilled down with caution, knowing there was power, but uncertain about the quantity involved and how violently it would come flooding out.  I had a legitimate concern about suddenly being the lightning rod when the bolt hit.

This time, I hammered the spike of my tendrils down into the nexus.  Spell-driven in this charged environment, it was like driving a railroad spike with a railgun.  The nexus responded as expected:  The magic within the nexus erupted upward in a bright column, spearing into the sky.  It crackled over me and through me, sizzling along the thing I think of as my soul.  It hurt, but I’ve been hurt far worse, and recently.  My decades in an Ascension Sphere served me well, here.  The power surge could sizzle and sting, it could burn along the channels of my spirit, but it didn’t stand a chance of setting my soul on fire.

For a creature of darkness, I’m surprisingly resistant to combustion.

Juliet stepped back, eyes and mouth forming three circles of wonder.  As well she might; it was a geyser of power fit to boil lakes and move mountains.  Invisible to the untrained eye, it cast no shadows, threw no illumination, but it was a palpable, physical presence in the ether.  Waves of it rippled outward, expanding through the countryside like a meteor strike in the ocean.