Nightlord: Shadows (44 page)

We also need an extra-large jumbo grinder. Days in the sun have made the corpses of my initial
dazhu
breakfast somewhat less than pleasant. A grinder could help turn the wastage into compost. I’ve got Kavel working on it.

Add to that some dead mountain cats. While they will scavenge, they obviously prefer fresh meat; I think the mass of dead animals lured several down from the Eastrange. They reminded me of
tuva
, at least superficially—they had striped markings like a tiger, but mostly in dark brown and tan. They were also longer than I would have thought, with bodies more adapted to springing than to chasing.

I didn’t think they would pay any attention to me, not with that much meat lying around. While I was inspecting the mess I’d made, one of them sprang at me; Bronze put a hoof through its face. The rest stopped eating and stared at us, their tails were held low and the fur was all bushy. They seemed less than happy to see us. Bronze snorted fire at them and they bolted for the mountains.

I don’t think cats like us.

On a happier note, Kavel’s going to have to get more help. There’s so much for him to build!

His gearing on the new blower for the forge is wonderful. It works extremely well with one of his kids cranking it. With the heat-transfer spell to preheat the air going in, as well as a heat-reflecting spell inside it, the thing easily melts steel. He doesn’t even need the ceramic jars! I’ve never seen a smith so happy. Just wait until I work out the details on a spell to filter out some of the nitrogen from the air as he cranks the blower; that will increase the percentage of oxygen, making the furnace even hotter.

I gave him some suggestions on alloying, as well as a pile of unknown metal lumps from the mountain. If I remember properly, some alloys involve some extremely small amounts of added metals. We’ve got a methodical process for testing combinations of metals. I expect most of them to be wasted effort in the sense of producing something new and useful, but worth the experiment just to eliminate that particular recipe. Like Edison and the first light bulb, we’re just going to keep trying new combinations. Just wait until next year and we’ll have a dozen sorts of specialized steels.

We really need another good smith. So much of what I want to do involves metalwork.

Maybe I could go home for just a little while and pick up a few reference manuals. Something like a handbook of materials and a few textbooks on mechanical engineering. Possibly a few sample items to copy. Maybe even some books on the history of technology. Maybe an actual plow from an old barn, somewhere.

Other worries are less science and more art. I try to spend an hour or so every day out in the market square, just so people can see me, get injuries and diseases fixed, and make appointments if they—or someone close to them—is planning to die. I get a lot of nice thank-you’s from various people I’ve helped, as well. The gentleman who grew a new eyeball—his name is Danvon—came by to show it off and put his forehead on my boot, much to my inward embarrassment.

I also get quite a number of young ladies with chest complaints. Usually, it’s a breathing problem, but they have no trouble taking deep breaths when I ask them to. Strangely enough, I’ve only found one of them, ever, to have an actual chest cold. Still, I check to be sure before sending them on their way.

Yeah, I know what they’re doing. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested or, in some cases, tempted. But I’m busy, and I don’t feel like having additional complexity added to my life right now.

I miss Tamara. I miss Sasha and Shada, too, come to that. But Tamara I miss the most, because I just lost her. I’m not in the mood for a relationship. That part of my life is… quiet. It needs time to be quiet and still, all by itself, while the rest of me goes off and does other things and gives it space.

I’m trying.

People are also asking me to lay down the law. People are coming to me for resolutions of disputes, settlements of arguments, and decisions on public or national policy. They want Royal Edicts to require or forbid things that can be outright weird.

One lady thinks it ought to be illegal to wander the streets at night. Claims she can’t sleep knowing that strangers might be just outside her house. I wondered if that should include watchmen, nightsoil collectors, and similar non-daytime occupations.

A guy complained there ought to be a law against distilled alcohol—everyone should drink beer. We produce a lot of beer around here, but not a lot of hard alcohol, so it wasn’t incredibly unreasonable. It takes a lot more determination to get blind-staggering-drunk on beer. On the other hand, I recall other experiments in abolishing hard liquor. It also turns out he’s a brewer, and his shop is next to a distillery. I suspect he may have an ulterior motive for his request.

Another guy wanted me to make it illegal to let women contradict or argue with men. I think that might be hard to enforce even if I was stupid enough to try it. It might also be more likely to get me killed than anything I’ve ever done, and there’s stiff competition for the number-one spot. No.

There was also a guy wanting to establish laws about marriage, and he had a long, long list. Only opposite-sex marriage. No bride or groom under the age of fourteen. (In Rethven, it was legal for a father to allow a daughter to marry at the age of ten!) Some means of independent support required for a married couple. Ceremonies requiring witnesses and written records. Brides must be pregnant by the groom beforehand. Special colors for those hair-bag things to denote how many children the couple have. No re-marriage in case of divorce, but allowed for widows or widowers.

That last made me think that murders would be the preferred method of divorce.

I listened politely to his marriage ideas while killing off a nasty infection. I promised to think about it. I didn’t say I’d think about it and shudder in horror, but I could have.

Funny thing. The requests for royal edicts seemed bent more toward changing what other people could or could not do, rather than things that affected the people making the request. None of it was “Please make it a law so I’ll stop doing something I know I shouldn’t.” It was all “Please make other people stop doing things I don’t like them doing.”

So far, most of it seems to be king stuff. There has been very little god stuff. Well, some of it has been borderline; I gather it’s traditional to get the King to bless newborns, marriages, and so forth. I’m not sure if that’s an example of the Divine Right of Kings or direct religious belief. I’m prepared to play along with the Divine Right part, considering the alternative is much worse.

They don’t seem to have a lot of direct requests for miracles, though. Maybe it’s hard to walk right up to someone they might think of as a deity and ask for favors. Could be the less religious are the ones asking the king for things, while the more religious are just praying and hoping I’ll listen.

I do know people are praying. How do I know? When the sun goes down, I can hear them.

This is another example of how weird my life can get.

It’s at least an hour after sundown. I’m looking over a copy of the spell Tort uses to distribute her aging among several subjects, and I think I see a way to make it work with plants. I have an advantage in this sort of thing normal mortals don’t, obviously. While the aging process won’t be distributed on a straight division scale, she can have a garden, greenhouse, or whole stretch of forest. Trees, for example, should last much longer than
dazhu
.

In the midst of my studies, I have a nasty feeling, like something awful is about to happen. I’m anxious and worried, and I have no idea why.

No assassins anywhere around that I can detect, and it’s damned hard to hide from me when I’m alert and actively looking.

What’s bothering me? I have no idea.

Then it hits me. It’s not
my
anxiety; it belongs to someone nearby. I can feel someone’s terror.

Boom. Out the door, down the street, zipping through the night like a streak of dark. Right into a really nice part of town, actually. I knock on the door, repeat the process, and finally give up on anyone answering. I know exactly where the terrified person is—no, where the terrified
people
are—and I can see the shuttered window above me.

I jump,
boing
, straight up. Second floor. A quick twist of tendrils, the latches come undone, the shutters open, and I’m inside.

It was a very upscale neighborhood. The kids were sharing an actual bed, rather than on pallets on the floor. They were hiding under the covers. They were all scared.

“What’s the problem?” I asked. There were muffled screams. One of them, the oldest, looked out. I obligingly held up a hand and provided some light.

“It’s the King,” he whispered. Covers flew aside. Three kids, aged four, six, and seven, all goggled at me. The two younger ones looked skeptical.

“He’s not very big,” said the middle child. The youngest nodded.

“I’ve been on a diet,” I replied.

“You are the King, aren’t you?” asked the oldest

“Yep. And you’re scared of something. What is it?”

The youngest, a girl, said, “There’s monsters under the bed.”

I looked under the bed. It was the underside of a bed. Unless the mess under there concealed vorpal dust bunnies, it didn’t look dangerous.

“I don’t see any,” I admitted.

“They don’t come out in the light,” said the eldest.

“Okay. Stay right there.” I doused my illumination spell and looked under the bed again.

Eyes looked back at me. A lot of them.

I lowered the blanket for a moment and thought about what I just saw. It was dark under there, and a lot of various sorts of eyes gleamed in that dark. Normally, I don’t see darkness; it just rolls away as night falls, leaving me in a shadowless, colorless existence. Yet, it was still dark under the bed.

I looked under the bed again. Yep, the same eyes. Several blinked at me.

I didn’t know what to say. Total loss for words.

At first, all I knew was that someone was desperately afraid. I saw no reason I couldn’t fix that by pummeling the cause into non-terrifying jelly.

When the problem turned out to be a “monster under the bed,” I planned to fix the problem by convincing the children that the “monster” was gone. The idea was the same, but relied on pretending to pummel, rather than actually committing an act of violence in their defense. If I slid under the bed, made banging and thumping noises, and the bed lurched a bit, the kids would assume it was a nasty fight. Then I could slide back out, dust my hands together, and say, “So much for that!”

There really is a monster under the bed. Even for me, that’s weird.

I currently live in a magical universe. Could a creature evolve to exist under the beds of frightened children? I suppose anything is possible, but this seems silly. What the hell kind of ecology could it have under there? Are there really dust bunnies twitching their little dusty noses as they hop about, looking for dust carrots and dust cabbages?

I looked at the eyes. They looked back. At a guess, they were as nonplussed as I was.

Could it be that the thing was simply created, rather than a product of evolution? One dark night, some precocious young wizard’s apprentice was afraid of strange noises and invented it? Or maybe the belief of millions of frightened children acted on the magical nature of this world to form it out of their collective fears?

“Are you the monster under the bed?” I finally managed to ask.

“Who wants to know?” It was one of those gravelly voices, deep and raspy, with strange clickings at random points, like mandibles. It almost sounded like a chorus of voices, somehow. Maybe it was more than one monster answering at once.

“I’m the monster that
isn’t
under the bed,” I said, trying to be reasonable. The eyes blinked a lot and several of them narrowed. I don’t think it liked my answer.

“…yeah. I am.”

“Problem?”

“You’re not supposed to see me,” it said. “You’re too old.”

“Speaking monster to monster?”

“…I see your point.”

“I’m going to suggest that you go away.”

“And when I don’t?” it asked, belligerently.

“I’m going to come in there and kill you.”

The eyes widened. There was a long pause.

“What kind of monster are you?” it asked.

“The one that owns the place. I’m the King. And what kind of monster are you?”

“Are you stupid?” it asked.

“Call me stupid again,” I advised it. “Go ahead. Call me stupid, and refuse to answer my question. Go on,” I urged. “Do it.”

It muttered something incomprehensible.

“Well?” I asked.

“I’m the monster under the bed,” it said.

“I thought so,” I agreed. “Now beat it. This is my territory.”

“You can’t expect me not to hunt anywhere in your whole kingdom.”

I really didn’t like that. I’m a little intolerant where the welfare of children are concerned. And the word
hunt
doesn’t make me a happy vampire in that respect.