Nightlord: Shadows (131 page)

The city was settling in for the night, winding down after sunset. The streets weren’t quite deserted, but things were very quiet and growing moreso. I consulted with Firebrand; it agreed that everything it could “hear” was consistent with a city going to bed.

We might manage a lot more stealth than I thought
, I thought.

And that’s a good thing, Boss?

It’s a thing that makes it more likely we’ll get close to the palace without sounding alarms.

And that’s a good thing, Boss?

I’d rather kill the people in
the palace than the people wandering the streets.

Oh. That makes sense.

I’m so glad you approve.

I said it made sense,
Firebrand corrected. I didn’t bother to reply.

I walked out into the early night, trying to appear casual and nonthreatening so as not to overtax my Somebody-Else’s-Problem spell. Later, I’d activate the invisibility spell. For now, I just needed to avoid attracting attention. That was easy; there weren’t many people out and most of them seemed intent on getting home. I wondered if there was a curfew in effect.

The idea came to me to find a tavern, settle down in a corner, and just listen to the local gossip. If a curfew kept people at home, that wouldn’t work. At least I could find out if there was a curfew. And if there wasn’t, I might pick up some gossip on where the Prince might be.

First, find a tavern and see, hopefully without being noticed by the local constabulary. I played ninja vampire for a bit, damping my light reflection to turn myself into a shadow—a shadow that was also hard to notice—and damping the sounds of my own movements.

That’s how vampires are so sneaky. We
cheat
.

The first tavern I found was a Pig On Horseback—or, at least, that’s was the picture on the sign. Maybe they called it the Pork On Horse, or Hogging the Mare. Still, I looked it over and decided it was closed up for the night, rather than closed up permanently. I could see lives inside, moving around, but it looked as though the family that owned and operated it was settling down for bed.

Ditto for the second tavern, the Overflowing Tankard (The Abundant Foam? The Spilled Mead?), and the third, the Spitted Rabbit (various other names; nevermind).

Do I have any taverns or inns in Karvalen? There’s not much call for inns, not with all those empty buildings. But taverns? I probably should. Maybe I do. I should check. Mental note.

The streets continued to clear as I searched. Aside from guard patrols—generally groups of three or four—the streets were deserted.

I said something vulgar and quiet. Definitely a curfew. Ah, well.

At least I could get a look at the palace proper and see what sort of magical defenses were on it. I ghosted my way over to it, dodging patrols.

The palace was a well-fortified structure with a serious outer wall. From the look of it, someone had confiscated a chunk of city around the original manor and started building a wall. I wasn’t sure how thick it was, but it towered at least fifty feet high! Judging by the architecture, it was still being built onto and improved.

I recalled the aerial views of the place. The inner face of the wall was really steep, stepped angle, rather than a flat face. At a guess, they just kept widening the base as they kept building it higher, kind of like building half of a steep pyramid.

The only way in was through a pair of big, heavy doors, presently closed. The passageway Tort and I had viewed on the sand table angled off to the right, rather than going straight in. It made a section of courtyard on the right of it into a small cul-de-sac, but it still preserved a lot of open ground around the manor itself.

Once through the passageway, could cross the courtyard with relative ease—presumably taking arrow and crossbow fire from the palace walls—and start to work on one of the doors. The nearest, of course, was the front door, but there were smaller doors for other purposes. No windows on the ground floor, though.

If I put a binding spell on the lesser doors of the palace proper, Bronze and I could smash down the front doors and leave them in a burning heap. That would help block the front entry while we were busy chasing down and killing everyone in the palace. Of course, first we would have to get past the wall…

I wanted a look down that tunnel.

The spells that prevented it were well-built. Rather than conceal the whole of the palace to magical vision, several spells each concealed a chunk of it. It was like a mass of soap bubbles, all lapping and overlapping each other. One bubble could pop and a piece of the palace would be visible, but not the whole thing.

Maintenance on that must have been a nightmare. Or, no—they could all be controlled and powered from a central location easily enough. Setting it up would be the complicated part. Re-casting the occasional old spell would also be a constant pain, like constantly getting a ladder out and replacing low-quality light bulbs. It was better than casting a single spell over the whole of the palace, though. That would be heavily power-intensive and would mean that if it went down, the whole palace would be exposed.

Come to think of it, I probably ought to put some effort into backup defenses on the mountain. Certainly some independent blocking around restricted areas. Talk to Tort and T’yl about it. Mental note.

Now that I was reasonably close and could simply look at the spells on the front gate, I saw the spells were there to prevent extra-dimensional transit and scrying—the two are fairly closely related, usually. They weren’t designed to detect or break spells being carried in or out, so I could walk in without setting off alarms or getting stripped. The defenses would, however, set off alarms if they were broken by a scrying portal or a gate. Kind of like having frosted glass for a window; if you spend enough effort to see in, you can, but you have to break the glass, and that annoys people.

On the other hand, the inner defenses might be less preventative and more alarm-based. Getting past the outer wall shouldn’t be a real problem. The wall itself didn’t have anything warding it. It was just a gigantic barrier. Fair enough. I could fly over it; I might even be able to just climb it, what with the vampire fingernail-talons and inhuman strength.

I picked my spot based on the position of the moon and the apparent attention of the sentries. My rippling distortion flickered across open ground to the moonshadow of the wall, then slowly worked its way up and to one side. Before long, I was looking over the edge of the wall between two sentries. I held completely still—motion make the distortion more noticeable—as a patrolling sentry made his rounds, passing a few words with each man as he did so.

The wall was ten or twelve feet thick at the top. That meant it was closer to fifteen or twenty at the base. No, even Bronze wasn’t bashing through that anytime soon. It would resist cannon fire for a good while, too.

I checked, with the utmost delicacy I could manage, on the sentries’ protections. Dark tendrils of my spirit uncoiled and slithered along the stonework, gently brushing through the leather of boots to flick the flesh beneath. Nothing reacted; no power flared. Good. If they weren’t armoring their sentries against that sort of thing, they either didn’t have the magic to waste on it or didn’t think I was around. I siphoned off a little vitality from each, making them just a bit more tired.

Moments later, one yawned. The other one shifted from foot to foot, then sat on a raised crenellation.

My helper, Fatigue, assisted me in slipping like a wraith between them and down onto the stepped inner face of the wall.

No alarms. Even better.

Senses turned up to full, I slipped sideways along the wall to the killing ground passageway. I discovered that it was actually three passageways: the main one in the middle, with hallways along either side for soldiers to use in defending it. I noted a number of winch-like devices, probably for portcullises or gates. Up top, under a the wooden roof, there were also kettles over prepared fires, unlit and cold. Projectiles in their bins rested next to firing ports.

No, going down that tunnel was a bad idea for anything mortal, at least when the defenders were prepared. Bronze and I could get away with it, though, provided the inner gates weren’t any more sturdy than the outer ones.

I checked. The heavy doors at the far end of the killing ground were identical to the outer doors: two-foot-thick wood, bound in brass and iron, barred with two great beams. If Bronze couldn’t go through them, Firebrand certainly could. I might even have a blasting spell or two prepared just to be certain.

That’s our entry point.

Since the passageway angled into the courtyard, we would come out and take a hard left to head for the palace proper. At the moment, it also meant I had to cross over a hundred feet of open space with about as much cover and concealment as a typical baseball diamond. I could
probably
get away with it—humans don’t see very well at night—but I wanted to absolutely avoid being detected. If they knew I was here—or that someone was—they would assume a more fully-defensive posture, a higher state of alert. Avoiding that was a priority.

I checked the weather. I could really use a good bit of cloud cover, but Father Sky didn’t seem to like me. Jerk.

I sat in the moonshadow of the wall and looked across the intervening distance. Most wizards or magicians would need to get closer to their work to conduct an analysis of spells. I, on the other hand, have supernaturally-keen vision and psychic tendrils. I peered at the palace structure and let spirit-tendrils snake their way across the flagstones.

On the palace itself, the defensive spells took on a slightly different tone. They still blocked travel and senses, but they also had a sensory component of their own. An alarm? Or just a way to detect every entry and exit into the palace? Or was it more subtle than that? Could it tell if someone moving through it wasn’t human? Or just detect the difference between the living and the dead? I couldn’t tell at this distance; I’m not sure I could tell at all without triggering the sensory portion of it. That’s the trouble with spells that detect something; looking at them might set them off, if that’s what they are designed to detect!

On the other hand, I didn’t find anything that would actually cause a problem, as such. If Bronze and I took the frontal approach, an alarm that warned people I was entering the palace was a bit redundant. It was effective at keeping me from sneaking in, but it wasn’t really a barrier to fighting my way in. Apparently being counter-assassinated was one of Prince Parrin’s worries.

I had a terrible thought. Rakal summons demonic Things. He’s a magician. Magicians like to live longer and have the power to do something about that. Could I be misjudging Prince Parrin? Could Rakal be behind it all? With a demon-Thing inhabiting the body of the Prince, Rakal could have Byrne under a puppet rule. A war with Karvalen would give Rakal a chance to… what? Switch sides and hope I would be generous? Or betray his “master” at a vital moment and turn the tide of the war to win my goodwill?

Nonsense. If he wanted to get on my good side, all he had to do was show up and ask for a job. Magicians willing to work for a living are scarce.

But if he wanted vampire blood… well, under certain laboratory conditions, I might be talked into some immortality research. Not quickly, and not without supervision and oversight. Of course, he probably didn’t know that.

Could this be his way of trying to lure me out of Karvalen? If he could hand me a serious military defeat, he might even capture the King. If that was the plan, then things were going seriously wrong for him—army scattered, secret weapons captured, enemy forces marching on the seat of his power.

The worst thing about not being acquainted with your enemies is never knowing why they do stuff.

In the end, did it matter if it was Rakal pulling the strings? Or Prince Parrin? Or even someone behind both of them? I planned to chew on the souls of both Rakal and Parrin, as well as anyone who seemed too keen on interfering. If they worked for someone, I would at least know that. If I had time, I would extract the information from them by more thorough means—but killing them was definitely going to happen. Ultimately, it didn’t matter which one of them was in charge or if they were working for someone else; killing them was a step in the right direction.

See? I didn’t totally ignore Tobias’ lesson.

I slithered back out, stealthy creature that I am.

I gained lots of good intelligence on the place and I was glad to have it. The one thing I absolutely needed to know, though, still eluded me. Was Prince Parrin—and now, was Rakal—in there or not?

Tomorrow night, early, I would put the arm on a lot of the local guards, interrogate them with Firebrand’s help, and apologize for doing it. I hate having to probe people’s minds, but I just didn’t see any other way to get the truth and get it
fast
.

I made it out of the palace grounds the same way I went in. The invisibility was still running, as was the flight spell; I made the most of them and returned to the abandoned stable without incident.

I called Tort and instantly walked home.

I wonder, sometimes, if anyone else has ever had the communications and information systems I do. Zirafel didn’t. They relied on spies and scrying portals. They conveyed messages using spells, surely, but they were on the order of sending a letter; the spells they used didn’t lend themselves to conversation. Modern wizards and magicians have improved on that sort of thing, but only by refining it—it’s gone from sending a letter to the magical equivalent of texting. There hasn’t been a real communications breakthrough in a thousand years.

That tells me something about the cultures of the world. They don’t really encourage innovation or creativity. All their eyes are turned to the past, to learn from it and to copy it. It’s as though the old Empire has a mystical, mythological quality to it—a Golden Age, perhaps, that people want to study and duplicate. They’ve spent centuries in reaching for ancient glories rather than seeking after glories of their own.

On the other hand, Tort is also aware of this. Not in so many words, I think, but in her studies of
me
. For most of her life, she’s been the Chair of Vampire Studies and the foremost expert on the lore of the nightlords—with a specialty in me. She noticed that a lot of the things I did had absolutely no parallels or historical basis in the Empire, which caused her to have what T’yl once called “entirely too much wizard in her thinking.”

That wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t wizard in her thinking. It was a deliberate effort to have different thinking. She’s aware of the box, even if she doesn’t know it’s a box, and she’s trying to think outside it. She’s not very good at it, but she’s a lot better than anyone else I’ve met in this world.

Take, for example, her conceptual leap with the voodoo dolls.

Technically, a “voodoo doll” is called a poppet. It’s a rough approximation of a humanoid—wood, cloth, paper, whatever—with something like hair, nail clippings, or a personal possession of the target stuffed inside it. This allows it to represent, through correspondence, the actual person. Sympathetic magic.

Once the link is established, you can do things to the representation to heal or harm the subject. It’s similar in some ways to a quantum entanglement; when something happens locally, the effect is duplicated somewhere else. Except it’s on a macro-scale, rather than on an ultramicroscopically tiny scale.

Tort took this a step further.

She used my sand table to make amazingly accurate and “lifelike” models of whole cities. These models are much more realistic than any ever been made before. With the “city poppet” made, she then added the bits I’d taken from the various city walls, giving the models a sort of identity as the “real thing”.

At least, that’s how Tort explained it to me. If I haven’t explained it well it’s because I may not fully understand it. But I get the idea.

She’s been working on them when she’s not whizzing around virtually or sleeping. Now, little paper flags mark every building in the model cities, stuck in the roofs. These flags were Byrne’s—blue on the left, red on the right, with a golden, long-armed, four-pointed star in the center. Every day, sometimes twice a day, Tort does a walkthrough past each model, concentrating her power on them and using them. She sets fire to one of the tiny little marker flags and watches it burn, trying to erode the hold of Byrne over that city.

Recently, she’s started sticking an occasional new flag into buildings—one with my device on it. It might not cause rebellion and uprisings in Byrne’s territories, but it should make people more sympathetic to the idea of being governed by a liberator, rather than by the iron-fisted tyrant of Byrne. If it opens up the possibility of negotiating a surrender, rather than the outright sacking of a city, I’m for it.

It’s also possible that the decreased population of Byrne—the city, itself—might be partially due to her efforts. On the other hand, citizens might have just run for it in anticipation of the siege to come, or decided to emigrate from Byrne to Karvalen. There’s no easy way to tell how much of an effect she’s had with this technique. That’s the problem with some of the more subtle spells; it’s hard to quantify their effects. We don’t know how things would have gone, so there’s no way to gauge the change.

I watched as she worked on the cities, observing the process and the way the spells seemed to reach inward into the cities, as though the models were the cities themselves. It certainly looked like macroscale entanglement to me.

Is that what magic is? Do magical universes allow for quantum effects to manifest not just on a micro level, but in a macroscale system? That can’t be right, can it? Then again, on the level of the so-called gods, they might not have anything resembling matter—could they be purely quantum-effect beings, existing only because they perceive themselves (or humans perceive them, or they perceive each other) as existing? If more people perceive them as powerful—or
believe
they are—then does that make it true?

And the energy of that universe… it trickles down to this one, or ones like it. At least, that’s what I’m told. Is a continuation of that effect what allows the apparent violations of thermodynamics? The magical energy—or quantum potential?—gets used up by being shunted out of this universe and into a lower-energy-state universe? That would permit a thermodynamic balance by presuming an individual universe isn’t a closed system. Instead, the system is a group of universes at different energy states.

Somewhere, is there a universe at the bottom where all the potential energy collects, a sort of final ground state of all magic? Or, no… humans’ belief in the energy-beings as gods pumps some of that energy back up into their universe, where, presumably, they use it and it drains back down to us again.

I want a word with Reason, but I don’t think I’m going to get it. Still, I can’t help but wonder.

Aside from watching Tort work, I also kept in touch with Kelvin. That is, Lord Kelvin, Duke of Karvalen. He deserves it, which is more than I can say for most nobility.

Most of my time, today, was spent sorting out what I wanted done if I didn’t come back. Not that I’m worried about it, exactly, but it’s good to have a last will and testament before doing anything stupid. Plus… someday, I want to abdicate. Or, at least, take an extended leave of absence from being a king. A generation or four, maybe, to see how the place copes, then maybe come back and make a few suggestions. If I keep that up, in a thousand years I might have evolved an ethical government.

As I thought that, Firebrand cackled into my head. I had to threaten to stick it in an ice giant before it managed to calm down.

I had a lot of last night and most of today with government on my mind. There are a lot of things I want to do to make this kingdom a better place and not all of them are technological. Most of them deal with human nature and the tendency to develop a bunch of backstabbing political bastards in the halls of power.

How do you set up a government that will run itself? Should it have provisions for automatically shooting unethical, immoral, or stupid people who try to run the place? Forget about keeping them from getting into office; they’ll always find a way. How do you set it up so it’s appropriate, acceptable, and maybe even encouraged to kill a politician who just wants power for its own sake?

If anything happens to me, this is not a trivial concern.
I
can pin someone down under my soul-searching gaze and see just what kind of person he is. A dozen generations from now, though… will those people still understand what their rulers need to be like and why? I don’t know. I mean, look at what happened in the United States in just a little over two hundred years.

I’m thinking like a king again, I know. I can’t seem to help it. As long as I have the job, I have to do it to the best of my admittedly-feeble ability. I don’t know how to be irresponsible. Well, I don’t know how to be less responsible than I know how to be. I suspect being a kid at heart makes me pretty irresponsible as it is. Another reason I’m such a lousy king.

Could I simply quit the whole king business? Could I walk away from it all, explore the world, hide from my own kingdom and never come back?

Maybe. But I’d have to bring Tort with me. Roses will grow on ice giants before she lets me go off like that without her. Which, come to think of it, is probably better than I deserve.

Tort and I took the afternoon off to prepare.

Okay, we took the afternoon off; we
also
prepared for my counter-assassination attack. Tort had her own ideas on what we were going to do with the last few hours before sunset. I cooperated with enthusiasm.

I also discovered that I’m even worse, as a human being, than I thought.

I love Tort, and I do my best to make her happy. I worry about her and how she feels. Whatever she wants, if I can give it, do it, or provide it, I do. She’s always on my mind, even if it’s just as the back, lurking.

So why was I thinking about Lissette while I was holding Tort? Fairness? I was thinking about Tort while holding Lissette, after all.

No, that’s not it. I like Lissette. I like her a lot.

Guilt, then? I feel I should be loyal to one or the other and wind up thinking about the one I’m not with? Am I comparing the two of them, trying to decide between them? I don’t have to decide; I can have both. But my upbringing may be interfering with that.

I love my concubine and like my wife. This could be difficult for me.
They
seem perfectly okay with it. So why should I have emotional issues? Am I just an unstable personality? Neurotic? Or just stupid?

Tort and Lissette are so different, but so alike. One is old, one is young; one is a magician, the other a fighter. But they both have a generally-cheerful disposition, have no compunction about killing someone who deserves it, and they both seem to think I’m worth their time—so, they have that insanity in common, too.

I have two pretty ladies who want to be with me, and who don’t mind sharing me with the other. For all I know, they’d be perfectly at home to a threesome. So why am I feeling guilty and preoccupied?

Maybe I need medication. Therapy, certainly. But what headshrinker could cope?

Tort and I enjoyed the afternoon and the evening together; nobody bothered us. We also cast a number of delayed-activation spells, rested, and did it again.

In case I haven’t mentioned it, a little note on delayed spells.

A spell is—at least, the way I do it—is a lot like an electrical circuit. That’s a lousy simile, but it’ll do for now. The point is, the spell structure, when it has power running through it, produces an effect. The difference is that if a spell doesn’t have power running through it, it consumes the power in its own structure and disintegrates.

A spell cast to go off later, however, is a fully-constructed spell and has a reserve of power invested in it, just as if the spell was cast normally. The difference in this case is that the reserve of power is throttled down to a minimum. A bare trickle of power flows through the spell, hopefully just enough to keep it stable without producing much, if any, effect.

The usefulness of this technique is that a single spellcaster can tie up a lot of power in a major spell, then rest for a while, then cast more spells. The result is that a lot more bang happens all at once; it just takes a lot of pre-bang work to get it to go boom.

The delayed spells will, however, run down eventually. There are a lot of factors involved, but usually it takes a few weeks or a few days, but can sometimes be as little as a few hours. It’s like hooking up a big battery to an incandescent bulb and a small LED light. The LED lets you know it’s all hooked up and working—all you have to do it turn on the big light. The longer you let it sit, the more power is wasted. Eventually, the battery runs down to the point it won’t light the bulb, or not for long.

Got that? Good. There will be a short quiz next period.

The sunset did its thing while I stood under a waterfall, slowly turning around under the water, rinsing. Tort smiled at me as she dried off; she always left me alone in the pool when I felt the sunset tingles start.

Once I finished with the usual rituals of becoming a dead guy that blends in, Tort kissed my cheek.

“What was that for?”

“Because.”

Good enough reason for me.

We detoured past the forges to pick up some special tools, then went down to the gate room. I put saddlebags on Bronze with my prepared tools and Tort finished setting up the last of my spells. This time, since Bronze was coming with me, flying was off the table. We kept all the previous defenses, as well as some stealth additions. Bronze was pre-silenced and dimmed to avoid giving off metallic glints; she was also wearing a nothing-to-see-here spell.

I didn’t see the point of that last one, but maybe it would cause someone to do a double-take, or simply cause a delay while he stared, unable to believe his eyes. Little things like that can be crucial.

Tort already scanned Byrne with the sand table and found us another disused stable. I wondered at the empty stables until I remembered that most of the horses would, of course, be with the army…

Tort counted us down. On her signal, Bronze and I headed for the gate at a trot. Tort opened it for us and snapped it shut as we crossed the threshold. Very quick; very economical. Also more dangerous than I liked, but we really needed to conserve power on the gate if we were going to get back to Karvalen. We’ve used it far too much, even with several wizards trying to charge it up today. The thing is expensive to run!

The stables were empty, as promised. A quick look outside helped me get my bearings. I put up silencing spells around several stalls in preparation, then slipped out into the night to find some people to question.

A quartet of tromping watchmen really isn’t a fair fight for a stealthed-up nightlord. The only problem I had was subduing them without killing them. I couldn’t just drain their vitality; I needed them awake to question. So it was time for head-knocking and healing spells. It’s trickier than you’d think, knocking someone out without doing serious or permanent damage. It’s even trickier doing it quickly and above all
quietly
.