Nightlord: Shadows (43 page)

“Thanks.”

She turned sideways to me so I could mount. I bounced up onto her back and she set out at a walk. If I wanted to talk about it, she would be happy to listen.

“It’s more than one thing,” I told her. “It’s that I’ll miss Tamara, sure. That’s a big thing. For me, it’s like we were just settling in about a month ago. Now she’s aged, died, and left behind a grown daughter and a granddaughter. I’m not adjusted to that yet, and the thing with Amber is just awkward and weird.”

Bronze understood. Chalk it up to being a piece of me on four legs.

“Then there’s my conversation with the Grey Lady.”

That was news to her. She perked up her ears to tell me to go on.

“The implications are staggering. She as much as told me that I was doing my job. My job as a Lord of Night.”

That was very interesting, of course.

“Now, I’m wondering. Why am I here? The place is getting on fine without me. Sure, maybe I can help, but they don’t need me, not like a boatload of emigrants did when I took them out of Rethven. I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, I really should go home.”

Whatever I wanted to do would be fine with her. But wasn’t this place home?

“I don’t know. With Tamara gone… with almost everybody I knew gone… it doesn’t feel like home. I mean, it’s fun to redesign a city and improve the local technology and play with assassins—sort of—but I miss being able to send out for pizza, call friends up on the phone, surf the internet, order things online, all that stuff. Medieval is nice, in a retro sort of way, but I also miss my technological society.”

Of course, Bronze had never encountered a technological society, but if I liked it, it had to be good.

“I just came here to get a bunch of unpleasant jerks off my back, avenge Sasha, stop the repeated attempts on my life, that sort of thing. And I have, I guess. At least, I don’t think anyone here will come after me across dimensional barriers, so if I go home, that should end it.”

That was for me to judge, but Bronze would happily test it with me, if I wanted.

“I just… I don’t know. Maybe I should look into a way to go back.”

If I wanted to, that was what we would do.

“But I still think I could do some good here.”

That’s true. I could do that and go back when I was done.

“Plus, I did promise to be as good a king as I can manage.”

She agreed that keeping one’s word is important, yes.

“I didn’t promise to stay, though. I could just get things on a good track and let them all just carry on, couldn’t I?”

If that was what I wanted, Bronze was behind me all the way.

“Maybe I will. I’ll think about it.”

I went on for a while and she walked us all over town while I did, avoiding people as she did so. She’s an excellent listener, but not much of a talker.

“No real advice for me, hmm?”

Naturally not, but she would happily listen to my troubles and stomp, kick, or torch anything that would make my life easier for being stomped, kicked, or torched.

Oddly enough, that did make me feel better.

Back at Tort’s, the place was quiet. Tort had gone to bed, the servants were asleep, and my three knights were passed out in exhaustion.

I clucked to myself at their state and made sure their spells were fresh and running well. I could see the flowing life inside them and the ways their bodies were changing. It all looked pretty good…

I had an idea. If I can copy-and-paste a mirror image of Tort’s foot for her body to grow a new one, can I copy-and-paste the pattern of my muscle fibers into someone else for their body to grow into?

Maybe. If their own cells are growing it, there’s no rejection issue, as with a transplant…

I’m not doing that until I can explain it to someone and get their informed consent. I suspect I’ll get volunteers for any project I want to try, though. Still, I want to experiment a little before potentially risking someone’s disfigurement or death with my wild idea.

Instead, I made a few minor adjustments for bone and muscle density, tendon strength and mountings, and some improved lung function. Added to it, a little encouragement to develop their voluntary nervous systems could add a bit of speed to their reflexes, maybe even their rate of learning for physical skills. They were coming along nicely.

Tort left out for me a rather awful map and a number of handwritten notes.

Maps around here aren’t artistic things with accurate representations of features in scale; they’re lines on parchment that are more like directions done in icons rather than words. I mean, a line for your route of travel, a few triangles for mountains, some curves for hills, a square for a town, and some wavy lines for the river you have to cross—maybe with a couple of lines parallel to the road for a bridge—and absolutely no idea of how long it will take to go that far. That’s not what I call a map.

Is the lack of any sort of compass partly to blame for the lack of cartographic art? They can navigate by the stars, but without a compass to provide a steady bearing, does that change how they perceive—or fail to perceive—the geography? North is vaguely that direction, west is toward the sunset… if they don’t have a way, or don’t have a desire, to nail down directions more precisely,
can
they make accurate maps?

The map I looked at implied they couldn’t.

I flipped through the notes, reading. One note told me Wallin came by and Tort checked him over; he was doing well. My cancer patient’s worst complaint was about his sinuses. I’m going to call that a win and feel good about it.

I also read a bit about the trade between Mochara, Baret, and a couple of the other coastal cities. Baret was the one we traded with the most, since it was easily the closest. Our boats could make port there without much travel and with no customs troubles. Other cities occasionally had merchants come to us when those cities weren’t trying to do something militaristic and unpleasant to us.

Our main exports are food, magic, and education, all of which generally required other people to come here to make a deal. Our other exports were varied. One of our crops was a flax-type plant, and we made a lot of linen cloth; we make good underwear, apparently.
Dazhu
furs were also very popular, but we bartered for the majority of those from the plains tribes, which raised the export price. A spicy pepper plant grew on this side of the Eastrange, but very sparsely; the ground-up powder was amazingly popular. We also produced the highest quality steel available, even if it wasn’t in any great quantity. We also have an excellent dark beer. To my surprise, we didn’t export much of the beer. It went bad rather quickly, so shipping it was a problem. I recalled something about bottled beer being pasteurized, or something, and resolved to check my memory banks for more details.

To my surprise, we did not have a deal with the magicians’ academy in Arondael. They didn’t like the idea of a bunch of tinkering madmen being “educated” to pull at loose threads in the fabric of reality, much less such people being sent to study with them. Magicians memorize highly efficient, carefully-worked-out spells that will do exactly what they want and nothing else. Wizards make things up as they go along, hopefully remember how they did it, and occasionally get unexpected side effects.

Magicians think that’s dangerous, and I certainly see their point. It’s particularly dangerous, in fact, with the power levels at which magicians can operate. Explosions aren’t so bad; that at least eliminates the idiot responsible. Blowing holes in the barrier between the world and the Things that live in the darkness outside the world… well, that also eliminates the idiot responsible, but it has some rather more far-reaching effects.

Arondael doesn’t particularly like us because there’s nothing worse than a lot of wizards trying to unweave the world without regard to how to put it back together. Luckily, we do have a pair of full-time magicians—now one magician—keeping a lid on a town full of those irresponsible, crazy wizards. At least, that’s Arondael’s overall viewpoint.

It’s also possible that they don’t really want a sudden influx of muddy boots in their great library. They have a good thing going in their highly-enchanted city; adding a lot of beginner magicians could upset the status quo.

I paged through the notes slowly, not really hurrying. It was a good night and a sad one, all at once, and I was feeling decidedly ambivalent about even being in it. When I finished, I sighed—no need to breathe, but sighing is still necessary—and decided to check on the progress of the sorting in my headspace.

The place was still a mess, but a mess of stacks, rather than a simple sea of papers.

“You’ve got a lot done,” I observed.

“Indeed, sir,” he replied. “Your nap the other night was most helpful.”

“It was?”

“It eliminated distractions.”

I didn’t want to consider what my brain was doing while my soul was out. The fact that it apparently continued doing anything at all was disturbing enough. If I hadn’t come back, would my body have eventually gotten up? What would be driving it? Would there be anything inside at all?

“Ah. I see. I think I see. More processor cycles to run the sort.”

“Something like that, sir, yes.”

“Can I help?”

“Certainly, sir. Parallel processing will go much more quickly.”

I started shuffling through piles. It was tedious, but needed doing. I hated it; the part of me that tackles that kind of job was already on it. The rest of me disliked it.

I considered a page and the information on it. In here, it was a physical object—sure, it’s just an objectified piece of memory, but I could treat it like a physical object. Could I use a spell on it as though it really was a physical object? Nothing leaped out of my extended memory to say it was a bad idea, but it was possible nobody had ever tried it before.

After reading the page and picking out some key words and phrases, I set about crafting a seeking spell. It didn’t need to reach beyond the confines of my headspace, of course, but I wanted it to register multiple hits, and to fetch to me, headspace-physically, all the hits it got.

I warned my sorting butler about what I was doing. He provided me with a large stack of papers. I focused on that alone, rather than the whole room.

Okay. Everything involving “Erensian wine.” Come here.

The stack barely moved. Four pages lit up, slid out of the stack, and fluttered into my hand.

“Butler?” I said, slowly.

“Yes, sir?”

“We are going to make a lot of progress tonight.”

Tuesday, May 4
th

It’s been a few days and my headspace is much clearer. The sorting process went a lot faster after we—that is, I—added automated tools. It’s a good question whether I was using some other functions of my brain in the search-and-sort technique, but I think the spell was doing the actual work. I’ve already got a lot of my brain processing old data. The spells I came up with are, I think, independent of the processing power of my brain. Very limited, yes, but very useful.

I feel a lot better, and I remember things without having major cognitive dissonance, now. I still don’t know what I know, if you follow me, but at least when I realize I know it, I just know it, and then I know I know it.

Well, that was clear. I need a better vocabulary.

Tort’s foot is almost done. The foot has grown almost to the toes, but we’ve had to slow the process down a bit. She cracked a bone in her hand by banging it on something. Her existing bones are losing some of their strength as they supply calcium to the new ones. We mended her hand easily enough, but if her bones are that fragile, she needs time to build them up again. She’s not happy about it, but is philosophical. Regrowing a foot at all is a miracle; to wait another week is nothing compared to never.

She can stand. She can walk. Her balance is still shot; toes are important, as is practice. But it’s working. The first time she took a few steps on her new foot, I had to hold her hand for balance, then hold her while she cried. I don’t think I’ve ever made her happier, which makes me happy; she makes me think I might be a decent person after all.

I’m also pretty pleased with my knights and would-be knights. We have, counting my three, one hundred and eighty-one people still in the training group. I’m pleased to say that the female twins—Malana and Malena, descendants of either Caeron or Caedwil; accounts differ due to some excusable confusion—have managed to keep in the running through grit, determination, and a dogged persistence.

After their secret got out, however, they did run into a bit of a snag with the male chauvinist attitude. It is still a rather patriarchal society, I’m afraid, and no one liked the idea of females with weapons, armor, and training. Women aren’t property, as such, but they’re still not far from it. Daughters aren’t exactly sold, for example, but it is still the custom to give an expensive gift to the father of the bride.

More specifically, for my would-be knights, fighting has always been a man’s job; it’s not for weak and vaporish women. It’s just not done.

It is around here, dammit. I put my foot down. Or, rather, lifted someone’s foot up. I held him by an ankle and lifted him off the ground while I yelled at him.

He started it. Don’t yell in my face, that’s all I can say. It makes me grumpy. So does spouting your prejudices as though they were cosmic truths. While I agreed with him
in principle
that women should not be fighting, I’m not going to make it a law. If they want to, they should have—correct that; they
do
have—the right to try.

Not only am I the quasi-human monster, I’m the King. I got my way.

I think I made it clear that there is no different term for male or female knights. There isn’t a knight and a knight-ette. Any woman that qualifies as a knight will be treated as a knight, and anybody who has a problem with that can quit right now and run really, really fast down to the docks, because he will need to catch a ship immediately. Why? Because if he was still in town after sunset, I was going to find him and take a long, hard look at his soul.

Strangely enough, that seemed to terrify people a lot more than any threat of violence.

After that, I let the former loudmouth up, announced that he had a royal pardon, put a healing spell on him, and did my best to be a jolly chap and encourage everyone to just pretend the girls—excuse me, these two cadets—were any other candidates.

“Look, it’s a Royal Edict. I say so. Got it?”

They got it, and that ended all argument. At least I made my point on this very clear. I’m no chauvinist (usually), nor all that fond of feminists (usually). I’m an equalitarian; if you can do it and you want to, that’s your business.

I’m sure there’s a word for what I am. Actually, there are lots of words for what I am. I just don’t care for the ones most people use.

I made a mental note: If I use the Royal Prerogative of “Because I Say So,” they’ll take it as gospel and go on, and I should avoid using it. Being able to punch through an oak door is one thing; being obeyed is power. It should never be taken lightly, nor abused. Ideally, I shouldn’t even get used to it, because that way leads to abusing it…

Anyway, I knew it would take a little while to file off the rough edges of equality. It’s not as easy as it sounds, treating someone as an equal when all your cultural mores say otherwise. There were some bobbles while we sorted that out, but nobody died. That’s the main thing.

I also put people in categories: resistant to the idea, neutral, and gallant. I have a spreadsheet, now; I drew it up while I was in my headspace. It’s a big poster, more of a chart, really, but it works. I’m getting more of a feel for who meets what qualifications. Maybe it won’t do me any good, but I feel better having the information laid out in an organized way.

Since Amber and Tianna keep coming by to watch and heal people, they got to hear my lecture on gender equality. Amber seemed surprised at my attitude. Tianna stuck out her tongue at the fellow who was so upset at the idea of a female knight. She instantly wanted to learn how to use a sword, which took both Amber and myself to explain that she had more important things to study.

Amber was not pleased that I promised to show Tianna the basics later, if she was a good girl and listened to her mother. Fortunately, we’ve already had the argument about whether or not looks can kill and she didn’t choose to rekindle it.

Someone also raised a question about money. I learned that the two Orders of Knighthood—technically, just one, the Order of the Sword of Karvalen; the Order of Shadow is a subset of the Order of the Sword and closer to a cult than I really care for—were supported by the State. That is, Amber paid them as the only full-time, professional military. Amber was still paying them, despite my political position. The new knights-in-training, however, were not being paid.

I spoke to Amber about it. She agreed, cautiously, to see to it the new guys also got a stipend. I don’t think she liked the idea that I could impose new expenses on her government. Or, rather, she didn’t like the idea that I could waltz in and spend money like it was
my
government. I can, and it is, but she doesn’t want to hear that.

We’re going to have to have a political discussion one of these days. Not looking forward to it.

The trainees are also expanding their repertoire. Kelvin runs them through their paces every morning, but afternoons are spent beating on each other. It’s easy to tell who the former knights are; they mow through everyone else. I’ve reinstated the rank of “Sergeant,” promoted Kelvin to it, and left everyone else at “cadet.” Kelvin’s just too useful to have no formal acknowledgement of his contributions, so now he carries a
sharmi
—a short sword, kind of like a Roman gladius—and I’ve got him a black half-cloak, edged in silver, as symbols of his rank.

I’m considering making the
sharmi
and spear the standard weapons of the infantry. The Romans used gladius and pilum to good effect for a thousand years; why not here? Of course, that’ll throw off the whole idea that a sword is a symbol of rank, but it might be worth it. We can use other symbols, maybe—plumes on helmets, colored cloaks, stuff like that. Things you can see on a battlefield.

On the other hand, my three, Torvil, Kammen, and Seldar, are more than holding their own. They’ve were well-trained in the first place, and now their physiques… well, I’ve had to buy them new clothes. “Teenager growth spurt” just doesn’t do it justice.

I’m hoping they can be examples for everyone; they’re human. I’m the Monster King and nobody should have any expectations about keeping up with the unnatural creature of darkness. But they can look at Kammen as he runs along an obstacle course and think, “If he can do it, I can do it!”

I also note that Torvil is the one with something to prove; he’s constantly trying to outdo everyone, including himself. He’s never happy with his progress; he always wants to be stronger, faster, better than the other guy. Kammen doesn’t much care about being the best at anything; his source of happiness is being in the thickest part of the fight. And Seldar, well… if he were the biggest one, I’d call him the big brother of the three. He looks after both of them, tries to keep them from doing anything obviously stupid, and doesn’t judge them while he’s helping to put them back together.

I’m starting to understand them, I think, and the depth of their friendship.

Another change, to judge by the looks they get, it that the guys have become even more appealing to the unmarried ladies of Mochara. I notice a lot of young women with braids tend to appear wherever those three are. (Little girls wear their hair loose or tied back until they hit puberty; unmarried women wear a braid; married women wear those hair-bag-hat things.) This hasn’t bothered Torvil or Kammen in the slightest, but I think it bothers Seldar. He’s still either shy or awkward, and appears to be serious about his sort-of girlfriend.

Seldar has continued experimenting with the spells we worked out. He can’t handle massive power expenditures to make them last for days, but he can crank out one or two spells in the evenings to help whoever is doing the worst. Torvil and Kammen try to help him, mainly by supplying some of the power; they don’t know any of the spells well enough to be of real assistance, but they’re learning. The effort of helping Seldar also seems to count as exercise in the wizardly sense. The three also do some work on the… well, “wimpiest” people, first thing in the morning. It’s a weak version of the steroids spell, but it runs most of the day and seems to help.

Their example is heartwarming where it isn’t outright touching. They’re the only people on the field with sashes, so everyone else watches them intently, trying to figure out what it is about them that earned a knighthood. The fact that my three are actually
trying
to live up to some impossible ideal of being a knight is catching on, except that no one else realizes that the ideal knight is impossible.

I had to go off and have a moment by myself. I’m trying not to show tears in front of the men.

The usual attitude in this culture is more of a competition with each other than cooperation. While competition does help somewhat with building skills—they regularly fight each other with wooden weapons—it doesn’t help as much as
teaching each other
. The school of hard knocks has its place, but being beaten on shouldn’t be the only way to learn.

My guys are helping the trainees, and they’re showing initiative. I’m probably more proud of them than I should be. I can’t help it. Either they were raised right or I’m a better influence than I thought.

I also note that there are four men who seem to be acting as assistants to them. Three are much older, but all four have some resemblance to the person they salute. Apparently, having an actual rank is turning out more important than seniority; family comes to the rescue. I’m pleased that my personal guard have got themselves advisors. I’m even more pleased that my knighting them and promoting them to personal guards hasn’t caused a permanent problem with their family lives. Ever since the Usurper Incident, I’ve worried they might not be welcome at home.

On a similar note, I’m also pleased that not one of my personal guard has put in a good word for any relative. There hasn’t been any indication that “Hey, maybe my dad would make a good knight.” They’re keeping out of it and letting His Majesty make up his own mind. I appreciate that. And, since I’ve seen the results of how my three were raised, I think that their relatives are definitely on the short list despite some headstrong and hasty tendencies.

Tort found a dozen or so volunteers to start fields around Karvalen. Bronze and I hauled them out there, along with a lot of seed and hand tools. With our new four-bladed plow, we made short work of tilling a vast amount of land. With the four canals dividing the area around the mountain into quadrants, it seems reasonable to use a four-field rotation scheme, so we started on the southwest quadrant.

Bronze and I tractored all night to get things started; I’m glad I remembered to have the special moldboards for high-speed plowing. Without her, the volunteers hitch up a four-horse team and go for a walk. Compared to a conventional plow, they make a lot of progress.

Bronze is still amazingly smug; they haven’t yet done a third of what we did. I love my horse.

After testing the plow, though, I’ve got some ideas for an improvement or two in the prototype. That can wait until next year, I think. But if we put three plowshares on a frame in front, set for double-width furrows, then offset three more in the back, we could get six furrows without overloading the structure of the mountings! And I think the shape of the plowshares could stand some refinement, too; the things they’re using strike me as little better than curved knives. I must remember to sketch some ideas for Kavel (mental note again: paper!)… or, has he studied enough wizardry to have a headspace? Must inquire.