Nightlord: Orb (76 page)

“That doesn’t sound like Her.”

“Not to you, maybe.  I know half a million souls who swear to it.”

“I’ll bring it up the next time we talk,” Amber promised.  “Thank you for being patient with Her.”

“You and Tianna are the only ones who could get me to do that.  I’m still suspicious of Sp—the Mother of Flame manipulating you into doing it for her own nefarious purposes.”

“Well, I didn’t expect you to trust Her,” Amber admitted.  “I do.  My trust alone is not enough to calm things down between you two.  I’ll work on it.”

“Take your time.  Speaking of working on things,” I changed the subject, “what’s going on with Tort?  T’yl says she’s been missing ever since I left.”

“I don’t know.  He hasn’t come to me about it.”

“Does Tianna know anything?”

“She would have said something to me.  I think.”  Amber shrugged, a ripple of fire.  “You know how children can be.  You were a teacher.”

“Yeah.  Can I get her on a fire-call?”

“Not as easily, but I believe so.”

“Huh.  No, I’ll see her in person, soon.  If you would, ask her and T’yl what they know about Tort.  They can look into it before I get there rather than be blindsided by the question.”

“Happy to help.”

“Thank you.  Now, if you don’t mind, I think I need to find a place to sit quietly and brood.”

“I understand, Dread Lord.”  Amber’s smile flickered into life and gleamed.

“I’m surrounded by comediennes,” I noted.  The fire flared brighter for a moment, then subsided to glowing coals.

Saturday, January 24
th

Everyone was good about giving me the rest of the night to brood darkly at the Edge of the World.  I’m not pleasant company while I’m depressed.  Bronze was about the only person I could tolerate; she left me alone, too, and encouraged Mary and Firebrand to do the same.

As for my thoughts on the Edge, they’re mine.  Not coherent, possibly not even comprehensible at the time, they flowed like tumbling river rapids.  Sparky, Beryl, Amber, Tianna, gods, kings, good, evil, life, and death.  Lots of death.  All of these, swirled around and mixed, re-mixed, reduced, combined, scattered, gathered, and sorted.

Well, maybe not sorted.  Swept into neat piles.  Neater piles.  Okay, kicked into the corners.

When the prickling sensation of sunrise started, I rose from the Edge and my meditations on the abyss. 

What would I see if I were on the other Edge, in Tamaril?  Does the sun come out of a hole in space?  Or does it simply flare into being and start to rise?  More important, do I really want to know?  It’s not going to make sense to me anyway.

The interior of the Theatre of the Sun—the tunnels and halls under the seating, within the structure itself—was more than adequate as a dark place.  I waited out the dawn, cleaned up, and walked back to our camp.

Actually, something so opulent doesn’t seem like a camp.  Headquarters?  Base of operations?  House?  Residence?  I need a thesaurus, or some other dinosaur familiar with words.

Mary met me at the door to our chambers, kissed me quickly but thoroughly, and led me to breakfast.  She didn’t say anything as she made sure I was as comfortable and well-fed as possible.  It was like some sort of TV sitcom—the man comes home in a foul mood and the lady has his martini and slippers ready for him.  Weird.  Not exactly suspicious or unwelcome, but definitely weird.  A good weird, I grant you.

And effective.  Under the influence of warmth, food, comfort, and more than a few hugs and kisses, my mood lightened.  I guess I’m not cut out to be a darkly tragic figure living alone in some decaying mountaintop castle.  This shoots down all my plans to be a stereotype.

Sitting on my lap and dressed to kill—literally; she was in her form-fitting tactical wear—Mary popped something she fried for breakfast into my mouth.  While I chewed, she scratched at my almost-beard and ruffled the fluff on my head.

“It’s going to be magnificent when it grows out,” she decided.

“I’ll see about hurrying it along.”

“I’m looking forward to it.  More?” she asked, holding up a fork.

“No, thanks.  I’ve had enough for breakfast.”

“Okay.  What do we do now?  Wait for Amber or T’yl to call back?”

“We probably should.”

“Ooo, I heard a ‘probably’ in there,” she squealed, sitting up straight.  “Does this mean we might do something else?”

“I really do need to take a look and see if I can find Tort.  I’m suspicious and unhappy about her being missing.”

“Okay.”

“No comments about being overly attached to my pets?” I asked.  She kissed the tip of my nose.

“We’ve been through that.  Besides, if I lost a pet, posting notices and driving around the neighborhood wouldn’t be out of place.  And caring so much about a pet tells me quite a bit about you.”

“Like what?  No,” I contradicted, “I changed my mind.  Don’t tell me.”

“As you wish.  Do we do this here?”

“No, I don’t think so.  I want access to a variety of things which require an active civilization to manufacture.  I think we need to go to my mountain, first.”

“Fine by me.  I’ve been looking forward to seeing the magical kingdom.  What does going to this mountain entail?”

“I’m not sure.  Getting there shouldn’t be a real problem.  A day or two to find and prepare a doorway or arch somewhere around here, some scrying to pick an arrival point in Mochara…” I shrugged.  “Call it three days and we’ll be riding into Karvalen.”

“I thought Karvalen was one of the kingdoms?”

“Karvalen is the kingdom of the living stone, so yes.  Rethven is an old kingdom that fell apart.  Since then, Karvalen has re-conquered the bits and pieces of Rethven and united it.  The original mountain, however, was named Karvalen.”

“Karvalen is a mountain and a kingdom.  Got it.  How do you tell which is which?”

“Context.  Or you ask.  That’s what I do.”

“Right.  We go through a magic door to the mountain of Karvalen, talk to T’yl, find Tort, and avoid being killed.”

“That last part is kind of a default,” I pointed out.

“But it’s always relevant.”

“True.  I’m not sure we can easily gate into Karvalen, though.  It has extensive defenses, and generating a spatial gate through them could be tricky.  It’s no big deal to go to another universe—that sort of gateway doesn’t cross the three-dimensional plane of the wards—but point-to-point within a single space would have to breach—”

“Hold it,” Mary interrupted.  “Can you simplify that, Professor?”

“Going through the wards with a gate is hard and may be fatal to people passing through it.  However, you can go around the wards by going to another universe and bypassing them from there.”

“Still not too clear on that.”

“One end of a gate in this world, with the other end in Karvalen.  Picture that.”

“Got it.”

“Now, draw an imaginary line between the two on a map—a circle around one of them.  The line will pass through a big circle of force surrounding the city.  With me so far?”

“Yes.  The circle of force will interact with the line and try to stop you from traveling through it.”

“Correct.  Now, pretend we’re back at the nexus point where we opened our gate to Zirafel.”

“Okay.”

“Now, open a gate there, with the other end in Karvalen.  As far as this world is concerned, does the line cross anything?”

“I… no, I guess not.  I can’t quite picture it.”

“If we’re visualizing a map, imagine the inter-universal gate is a hole in the page from one page to another.  The hole doesn’t touch the circle.  It appears inside it, and you can climb from one page to the other without ever encountering the circle.”

“Okay, I get that.  So it’s actually easier to go around by using two inter-universal gates?”

“Well, there’s less active resistance,” I admitted.  “It may not actually be easier.  The easiest thing to do is go to Mochara—there are sure to be places there we can drop the other end of a gate.  Then we ride north, maybe take a canal boat.”

“Huh.  So we take a plane to a city, then get a cab?”

“Pretty much, yes.  I think you’ve got it.  Want to do some scrying for our drop point while I build a gate?”

“Apprentices are always happy to assist, aren’t they?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Possibly.  Well, this sure beats being bored.”

“I agree.  Get off my lap and we’ll get started.”

“Can it wait about an hour?”

“We’re not exactly in a rush.  I suppose it could wait a bit.  Why?”

She kissed me in answer.  An hour or two wasn’t all that long a delay.

Sunday, January 25
th

We’ve been working and planning toward a trip to the mountain.  I keep casting scrying spells with Mary; she’s pretty much got the hang of them.  Another day of this and she’ll be casting them on her own to scout out where we should arrive.  She’s looking over Mochara, down on the coast, since it’s practically impossible to get a good look at Karvalen.

We’re also continuing with language lessons.  Mary and I can’t hold much of a conversation in Rethvenian or whatever it should be called, but practice is important.  We try.  I think she’s making fantastic progress, considering the real-world time involved.

I learn languages surprisingly quickly, but only because I drink my dinner.  If I actually studied linguistics—the science of how languages are put together—would it be easier to absorb one?  Or would it matter at all?

In keeping with her job as my intelligence-gathering assistant, Mary suggested we record a sunset from the Edge.  Since we can’t actually watch one without catching fire, a recording would be a good first step toward understanding it.  I agreed with her and set up a diamond—it was the clearest crystal I had, and that’s important when recording a visual.  It should give us a good look later tonight.

She keeps coming up with good ideas.  I may have to keep her.

Neither Amber nor T’yl has called back, yet.  I’m being patient.

While waiting, I conducted a more thorough and methodical search through Zirafel.  What I wanted was a smaller gate—something besides the Great Arch.  I can’t place an outgoing call on the Great Arch, but if they had other gateways, maybe some less public or less used, they might be able to go anywhere.  True, the idea didn’t ring any bells with my digested memories, but such lesser gates might not have been common knowledge, either.  So I searched by spell, tendril, and eyeball.

Nope.  So much for that idea.  Why didn’t Zirafel have other gates?  The only thing I can think of is a safety measure.  They have one Great Arch; it connects to Tamaril.  Having others in the same city might risk disrupting the permanently-open portal.  Re-opening it, if it closed, might also risk a cross-connection.  It seemed like a good reason, but apparently not enough people in Zirafel knew the practical considerations to be useful to me.

Now I’m working on an archway in the ruin of one of the grain exchanges—inside a broken grain silo, in fact.  I would put it in the Palace, but the anti-entropy golems would erase it as graffiti.  Or would they?  Do they leave magical writing alone?  Good question, and not one I’ll answer today.

I’m taking my time with the process because I want it to stick around for a while.  I might need to run to Zirafel to gain time to run somewhere else.  If I duck through a gate to Zirafel and vanish, anyone chasing me will be stuck here—at least, until they find my lesser gate, make their own, or travel in some more mundane fashion.  They may choose not to risk it, or, at least, hesitate before chasing me through a choke point.

Is it cowardice to plan on running away?  Or prudent strategy?

Mary insisted on a break after sunset.  We’re not on a tight schedule; we’re not on a schedule at all, really.  Besides, I’m learning to like using a small swimming pool for a bathtub.  So, after sunset, we went out and caught breakfast.

Mary also wanted me to demonstrate my blood-drinking technique.  I don’t really have one, other than to let it all out and wait until it finishes soaking into me.  Still, for the actual bite-and-drink method, I bite a
dazhu
and take a bloody chunk out of it.  My tongue can then burrow into the wound and force its way down into the body.  It does seem to soak up blood much more quickly than my skin.  Usually, my tongue hits an artery in the throat and writhes down through the neck, headed for the heart.  A full-grown bull
dazhu
—think of a buffalo with curling ram-horns and longer legs—can turn into a dried-up carcass in about eleven seconds.

Eleven
seconds
.  A human body can be drained of blood in eight-point-six seconds with an adequate vacuuming system, or so I’m told.  Something the size of a cow should take longer.  I suppose it does.  About two-point-four seconds longer.  Apparently my tongue qualifies as an “adequate vacuuming system.”  Maybe I should start a carpet-cleaning business.  I said as much to Mary, who clapped both hands over her mouth and laughed until bloody tears ran down her face.

I still don’t see what was so funny.

For now, though, I think we’ll stick to double-teaming our dinner.  She bites it, drinks from it, then guts it.  Any blood left in the body slithers out and slurps its way over to me.

While I sat on a
dazhu
corpse, waiting for what little blood Mary left behind to find its way out, Mary started carving off fresh meat for the morning.  It hastened the draining process, too.

“New questions,” she warned.

“I do not fear your questions,” I pontificated pompously.  “They only provide me with fresh opportunities to once again prove the magnitude of my ignorance.”

“I’ve got a couple of spots we could use in this Mochara place of yours, but neither of them is ideal.  Still looking.  But when we get there, what then?  Do we clomp along to the mountain?  Do we take a boat ride in the canal?  And who are we?  Do we try to make up new identities, or turn invisible?  I ask because I don’t want the local magi and priests to get all bent out of shape at your return.  Some of them are trying to kill you, right?”

“True.  I’d like to avoid it, too,” I admitted.  “I’m not sure what T’yl will come up with for sneaking us into town, but hopefully he’ll have an idea before we finish our own preparations.”

“If he doesn’t?”

“Then he’s taking is sweet time about it,” I groused.  “I’ll call him, or try to, before we go to Mochara, but I’m not sitting here indefinitely.”

“I’ll get behind that.  So, back to my questions?”

“Right.  I’m tempted to try and sneak along, but you can give up on invisibility.  It’s a damned complicated spell.  Oh, we could do it,” I admitted.  “We have time to set them up and gather enough power for it, but we’d have to put one on each of us—four, total, for you, me, Bronze, and your horse.”

“Clomper.”

“Clomper?”

“It needed a name.  Since we’re not going through a desert, it may as well have a name.”

“Clomper, by all means.  Anyway, we could also work some silencing spells to go with the invisibility spells and be darn near undetectable.  Most invisibility spells aren’t perfect, though, so there are usually distortions or ripples.  The real problem is other people.  They don’t move out of the way.  They even tend to try to walk through you—you look like an open space.  It’s good for short-range things, yes, but usually it’s too much trouble to cast just to cross a courtyard, sneak across a room, that sort of thing.  Going through a city is just asking to be run over.”

“Could you put an invisibility spell on me?  I’ve always wanted to be invisible for a while.”

“Sure.  Now?”

“No, we can do this around other people.  It’s no fun to sneak around if there’s no one to fail to notice you.”

“A case of ‘if a thief goes invisible and there’s no one to see, is she still sneaking?’”

“Pretty much.”

“Okay.  Let’s go back and see what you’ve found for destination points.”

We went back to the rooms and Mary reactivated the mirror.  She left the spell intact but inactive, so we wouldn’t have to build it again.  Oh, but she’s a smart one.

The locations she had in mind were large openings, mostly for horses and carts.  One of her ideas, though, showed real out-of-the-box thinking.  While I was confined in the basement, the canal by Mochara developed offshoots—little dead-end branches for parking canal boats, mainly for loading and unloading.  A couple of these were covered over, like boat garages.  The openings formed by the surface of the water and the building over it would work quite well indeed for our purposes, especially since they were already outside the city wall.

“Perfect,” I told her.  She grinned and mimed a curtsey.

“Now that I’ve found us a place to go, what next?”

“Help me with the gate.”

“Am I qualified for that?”

“No.  But you’re overqualified for scratching individual symbols into the wall.  I’ll tie it all together, but extra hands—and another person stuffing magic into it—will make it go faster.”

“Huh,” she grunted, thinking, head cocked to the side.  “Are you going to put up a power sphere around it?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t it go faster?  Since we’re going to dump all the power from the sphere into it anyway?”

“You’d think that.  If I was going to make a gate in a hurry, I’d need a charged sphere already.  As it is, a sphere charges over time and it uses some of that charge to maintain itself.  In the short term, we can actually put more power into the project by hand.”

“But a sphere would let you cast the gate spell,
boom
, and be done with it?”

“Yep.  It’s a long-term tactic, though.”

“Couldn’t you build several, then drain them off when we’re ready to go?”

“Yes, but that would take time away from building the gate, itself.  There’s a point of diminishing returns on effort, you see.  It’s like… I can go rent a crane, do the rigging, hoist the engine block, carefully swing it over, and settle it into a specially-built cradle.  Or I can heave it up by hand, stagger two paces with it, and set it down.  The first one works and is, technically, less actual effort, but the second one also works and works right now.”

“Too much prep work for the project?”

“That’s all I had to say?”

“Exactly.”

“Fair enough.  Besides, the slow and sure method we’re using helps with the inscribing.  I want this thing to be a gate we can empower later, if we have to, not merely a one-shot spell.”

“Okay.  You’re the bossy wizard.”

“I think you mean ‘boss wizard’,” I corrected.

“I know what I meant.  Come on; I want to see what you’ve got.”