Nightlord: Orb (23 page)

“We are.”

“It is a pleasure doing business with you, sir,” he declared, and climbed to his feet.  I stood with him, as did Thomas and Reginald.  I wondered if they ever spoke in his presence.

“It is my honor to have you as a business agent,” I replied.  “Thank you for coming.”

After some more polite phrases, we made our farewells and I went downstairs to put my Ascension Sphere back in order.  As I did, I noticed something.  The power-fans I had placed on the walls were “blowing” magical potential into the room.  It raised the local ambient magic without the trouble of an Ascension Sphere.  That is, the local power rose slightly, like the air pressure in a room with fans in all the windows, blowing inward.  Simply walking away wouldn’t destroy any spells, though.

Would it be possible to set up something like a Venturi tunnel?  Or something more like a jet engine?  If magic can be both a “fuel” for the spell as well as what’s being pumped, would it be worthwhile to set up several such spells so the front one took in a large area, sent it to a smaller one for further compression and added velocity, and so on down until the last one blasted a high-pressure jet of raw magical power at me?

I need to experiment some more.  So much to discover!

Thursday, October 21
st

Mark seems to be recovering well.  He’s also looking for work.  He got out of the house and canvassed the neighborhood about their lawn care plans.  I don’t know who else agreed to his new business, but he’s got all my yard work:  a big damn hedge to keep trimmed, that long front walk to keep edged, and the whole front lawn.  I asked him what he thought the job was worth and simply agreed to his price.

When I saw him mowing with that toy he called a lawnmower, I couldn’t stand it.  It’s a small, electric gadget, suitable for a tiny front yard.  It’s not a lawn mower; it’s a lawn clipper.

I made him an offer.  I buy a mower, edger, blower, rake, and suchlike.  He pays me ten percent of his daily take—not counting expenses, like grass seed, fertilizer, lubricants, replacement power packs, and a Google Vans bill—until he’s paid me ten percent over the cost of the equipment.  It makes a hundred-dollar power edger cost him a hundred and ten, but he gets to use it immediately.  It’s also not a fixed monthly payment—only ten percent of his net, not the gross.  He went for it and he even shook my hand.

Gary drew up a flyer; I printed him a hundred or so copies.  I also posted it online to various free cybersites.  It’s not a good time of year to start a lawn service, but we’ll see what else develops while he’s working at that.

I still feed all the Fabulous Four when they come over, usually after they’ve finished making musical-sounding noise in the hayloft/studio.  Some eat more than others; some accept my offer to take snacks home.  Well… one.

Luke is doing much better at reining in his language.  Patricia has my permission to smack him on the back of the head when he goofs.  He’s a quick study.

Gary wanted to know if the rest of the property needed any work done.  I’m not sure what needs to be done, really; the place is in good shape and I can’t see mowing all that acreage like a big yard.  I’ve tentatively got the Fabulous Four making clay cups for the tree farm.  It’s piecework; they’re paid to produce.  They spent a good portion of this afternoon doing that.

Oddly enough, they didn’t come in to collect.  They sent Gary.

I
like
these kids.

Saturday, October 24
th

My experiments seem to be going well.

While it is possible to build a “jet engine” for magical force, it’s time-consuming and tiring.  The thing takes hours to draw properly—with much of the base diagram actually copied from a jet engine—and the whole thing needs a charge from my Ascension Sphere to start it.  And that’s the prototype!

Still, it’s only a proof of concept.  It can be done.  It can be streamlined and improved, I’m sure.  For now, anytime I care to invest that much time and effort, I can have a roaring fountain of high-pressure power.  I wonder what sort of reaction
that
would get from the local ley-line sniffers.  Maybe I’ll build a full-scale one later.  Right now, the working model is in the basement, helping to refill the house’s main Ascension Sphere.

I’ve also established there is a relationship between some of the paramagnetic metals and magical energy.  The two that seem to react are ruthenium and iridium, although I have no idea why.  It appears, at least to my spells, that using ruthenium as a core material in what would normally be considered an electromagnet causes a change in the… hmm.  What do I call it?  Magical flux?  Put electricity through it and it makes a magical field instead of a magnetic one.

Iridium doesn’t do anything special when I use it as an electromagnet core.  On the other hand, when I put it in a highly-charged magical field, I can detect a faint ripple in the fabric of spacetime.  This ripple seems to happen in sync with a multicolored surface effect.  Iridium was named for Iris, the goddess of the rainbow in Greek mythology, because of the many colors it displays in its salts.  Apparently, the pure metal—normally a silver-white color—will also change colors while acting as a conductor for magical energy.  It looks almost like the rainbow effect of an oil slick in a puddle, except it moves quickly along the surface of the metal and has a broad array of intense colors.

Prime gate material?  Maybe.  Still experimenting with it, though.

I’m still thinking about my magic box idea, too.  Maybe my conceptual model on gates isn’t quite right.  I think my biggest area of confusion with gate spells is the difference between versions.  I have a basic understanding from studying gates, but I also have memories from the magicians in Rethven, especially those I ate who worked for the Hand.  This is often contradictory or confusing because I also have the ghosts of magicians from Zirafel.

I think the magicians in Rethven tried to duplicate the art of magical gates from what they could glean from Zirafel.  The result works, but it’s not the same thing.  It’s like being a mechanic and having to switch from gasoline to diesel engines.  The principle of the internal combustion engine is basically the same, but the details are so drastically different!

As a result I’ve been looking over what I know, or think I know, of the gate spell.  It’s a lot of work, making one by hand.  If I had enough power, I could visualize the whole thing and slap it onto an opening in a matter of seconds.  But that would require some major storage batteries and six or seven years to charge them—this place is no fun, magically speaking.

Still, after checking it against the local magical laws, and I’m wondering about some peculiarities of its effects and functions.  I think of it as a wormhole connecting two distant points.  For places in the same universe, with the same laws, that may be true.  But when connecting different universes, with the potential for wildly-differing laws of nature, it doesn’t hold up so well.  For that, I need a new theory.

Maybe it’s not so much a doorway as a transformation.

I’m not sure I can explain that.  At least, not yet.  It’s the beginning of an idea.

At any rate, now I have to build a bench model of a gate inside the field of an iridium warp magnet and see if it’s any easier.  I would also like to spend time experimenting with alloys of ruthenium to see if one of them can create a more efficient electromagical transformer, but I have enough on my plate already.  I’ll stick with the pure metal in my bench model.  Besides, I already have power-gathering spells.  They should do for now.

On the upside, Sir Sebastian called and says he has a commission for me.  A family out in California would like a one-shot nexus—that’s how he describes an Ascension Sphere—set up in their garden.  I’ll catch an early flight on Monday.

On the downside, it’s almost noon on Saturday, and I have a lunch to go to.

Susan met me at her front door, all smiles and warm welcome.  Edgar accompanied her, delighted to have me over.

“Vlad!” Susan exclaimed.  “May I call you ‘Vlad’?  Come in, come in!  Don’t mind the mess.  The little one has been tearing through the house all morning.”

I stepped inside and back a hundred years.  The inside of the house reminded me of the things I saw on TV as a kid for the “house of the future” from the 1950’s.  “Space Age” furniture, streamlined and smooth, bright colors, all that.  The décor was right, but there were functional changes.  The TV was a flat-screen built into the wall, for example, instead of a console unit.  The style was what I thought of as old; the technology was all modern.

“Vlad, this is Olivia.”  Susan introduced me to the toddler.  Olivia was probably about two, pushing three, and came right up to me.  She grabbed my knee and looked straight up the cliff of Mount Vladimir, giggling at me.  I handed Edgar the bottles of soda I brought and sat down on the floor to say hello to Olivia.  Olivia found this hilarious, so I tickled her carefully.

I file down my fingernail talons as part of my morning routine.  They grow somewhat faster than I like, but the real problem is they grow sharp.  They spontaneously develop an edge.  They try to grow out to points, too, which is, I think, disturbing.  Maybe I’m biased.  But I paid special attention to my manicure this morning in anticipation of close contact with people.  I have an electric die grinder just for my nails.  After all, doesn’t everyone pay close attention to hygiene before going to a party?

By the time we made it into the back yard, Olivia had managed to squirm her way onto my shoulders.  I didn’t mind; she didn’t weigh anything to me.  While we went out on the slab that served as a patio, Edgar eagerly told me about how his Dad made a huge fireball on the grill.  I lifted Olivia down and she ran/toddled around the back yard, grabbing toys to bring back and show me.

Larry grinned at me and touched his paper chef’s hat with his spatula in salute.  He had good reason to be friendly; he’d made a monthly quota off my furniture needs alone.

“Pull up a piece of picnic table,” he encouraged.  “Do you like it freshly killed or dead a few days?”

“Any of the above.  I’ll take a bite out of it before it stops moving,” I told him, honestly.  He served up a faux-meat soyburger thing almost instantly.  I took it and added some cheese and salad.  A bowl of chips was already in the center of the table.  I sat down, carefully, directly over one of the supports in the built-in bench seating—explaining about my weight problem was not on the menu.

Little Olivia somehow wound up eating most of my French fries and wearing an impressive amount of ketchup on her face.  I have no idea how that happened.  It’s like they leaped at her mouth whenever I wasn’t watching.  That must be it.

Altogether, it was a pretty pleasant afternoon.  Susan played a little footsie with me under the table, which surprised me enormously.  She was discrete about it, but… Was Larry okay with it?  I had no idea.  Modern customs and mores might be much more… liberal?... but how would I find out?  I can’t go up to people and ask them what they think about extramarital affairs.  Or can I?  Should I Google “What’s acceptable for having an affair?”

That’s the trouble with a whole new world.  Things that look similar may not be similar at all.

I was into my third burger—I could tell it definitely wasn’t meat, but it was moderately bland and required no special effort to eat it—when Myrna arrived, drawing Fred along in her wake.  Larry had a momentary expression of annoyance, but it vanished quickly, replaced by his Professional Smile.  His is much better than mine.

Susan welcomed the pair with all evidence of warmth and pleasure, but I wished it was after dark.  I suspected a peek into her true feelings might show something else.  Edgar tried to keep it off his face, but I was pretty sure he doesn’t like Myrna.  That’s okay.  I don’t, either. 

There was the usual invitation to join us, the token resistance, the reluctant acceptance.  I noticed Fred’s “reluctance to intrude” didn’t give him any problems with wolfing down two burgers in nothing flat.  Edgar got permission to go inside and practice his piano.  I wished I could, too, and I don’t play the piano.  At least, I don’t think I do.  There was an instrument a little like a harpsichord in Zirafel…

“Oh, Mister Smith,” Myrna called, turning the spotlight of her attention to me.  She and Susan had nattered on at each other with only occasional sorties to the husbands for affirmations or confirmations.  “You simply must come by tomorrow!  Fred will be giving his pre-Halloween sermon in the morning.”

I chewed slowly; having a mouthful of food buys time to think.  Sermon?  Pre-Halloween?  Fred was a preacher?  I didn’t know that.  My own fault for not spying on my neighbors, I suppose.  Perhaps I should be more nosy.

“I’m sorry I’ll miss it,” I offered, after swallowing.  “I’ve got to be elsewhere.”

“Oh, that’s a shame.  I hope you don’t miss church too often.  Where do you attend, Mister Smith?”

Nosy bitch
, I thought.  Distantly, I heard Firebrand’s psychic agreement.

Okay, maybe that was uncharitable of me, but I was the one being pinned down by a paper plate and interrogated.  From the look on Susan’s face, she wasn’t best pleased about the situation, either.  I’m sure she hadn’t intended to have Myrna over at all.

“In the city, Ma’am.  I’ll be overnighting there, tonight.  And, Fred,” I added, turning to him, “where do you give your sermons?”

Fred and I chatted about his congregation and his duties as a minister, but Myrna wasn’t about to be left out of the conversation.

“Oh, Fred is wonderful, especially around this time of year when so many people are glorifying the supernatural.  You really should make time to hear him exhort the faithful to vigilance against the corruption of children!”

“I’m certain Fred does a marvelous job of it,” I told her, straight-faced, as someone corrupted Olivia with another ketchup-smeared French fry. It’s like some supernatural force was feeding them to her.  She was sitting on my lap; surely I would have noticed anything like that.  “The terrors of the ungodly should not be visited upon the innocent.”

“Say, that’s a nice phrase,” Fred piped up.  “Mind if I use that?’

“Feel free.”

“And,” Myrna added, “perhaps you might remind those little scamps who hang around your place they should be thinking more about the Lord and less about their pagan-holiday loot.”

“You mean Patricia, Luke, Edgar, and Gary?”

“Yes, those four.  What do they do all afternoon in your barn, Mister Smith?  Or were you aware they seem to regard it as their hideout?”

“I’m aware they’re trespassing, if that’s what you mean.  I can hear them playing, sometimes.”  I shrugged.  “I don’t mind, as long as they’re careful and don’t break anything—themselves included.  Besides, sometimes they’re helpful.  We hung a new screen door not long ago.  Having a couple of spare hands about the place can be a good thing.”

“Oh, yes; you live all alone in that big house, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I stated, and stopped talking.  Myrna smiled at me with an attitude of expectation, as though I should continue.  I simply kept my lips closed and smiled back.  Fred rescued the conversation.

“Are you at all religious, Mister Smith?  I mean, are you a lay minister or some such?”

“Please, Fred.  Call me ‘Vladimir.’  Or ‘Vlad.’  I’ve been calling you ‘Fred’ all through lunch.”

“Surely, Vlad.”

“And no, I don’t have any formal qualifications as a minister,” I told him, thinking,
Only as a couple of sorts of angel and a
de facto
deity, all against my better judgment.
  “I’ve had some difficulties with various brands of religion.  You could say I haven’t really found my spiritual home, yet.  But I keep looking.”

Sometimes the art of conversation is knowing what not to say.

“Oh, of course you will!” Myrna interjected, yanking the conversation back to her.  “Do come to our church, Vlad.  I’m sure you’ll find it a warm and friendly place.”

I refrained from any comments about how warm temples could be.

“Probably so,” I replied, instead.  “I’ll do my best to visit at some point, I’m sure, but I can’t promise.  Business keeps dragging me away unpredictably.”

“That’s so sad,” Myrna sympathized.  “What, exactly, do you do?”

“Well, after the inheritance, I’m modestly wealthy.  I’ve started a little artistic thing.  Mostly geometric patterns—that sort of style.  Fortunately, I know an agent who knows people willing to pay for that sort of thing.”

“Really!” Susan chirped, perking up.  “May I see some of your work, sometime?”

“Of course.  I’ll get something ready for viewing and I’ll let you know.”

“That’s wonderful.  I always thought I’d like to be an artist.”