Nightlord: Shadows (5 page)

Good god
, I thought.
I really
am
a monster!

Other
dazhu
had no bite marks, just claw marks—long gashes where flesh was ripped open. Probably by something with sharp bits on the ends of its fingers and an inhuman strength. Obviously, I hadn’t drawn my sword in my hungry state, but, equally obviously, I hadn’t needed to.

I wondered what the Hunter would say about that. I decided not to bother it. If it had anything to say about it, I’d be happy to listen.

On the plus side, I felt excellent. Everything that was wrong was now righted. I was healthy—if that’s the word for it—and strong again. I felt I could leap to the mountaintop.

Instead, I managed to exercise a little restraint. The first thing I did was find my sword; as I filled up on blood and filled out my flesh, my swordbelt tore apart. I guess I was too busy with dinner to pay attention to minor details like belt buckles and such. The baldric still hung over my shoulder, but the belt parted and the scabbard slid off. Once I found it, I had to spend a minute or two telling the leather to knit itself back together before I could wear it properly again. Then, of course, I had to hunt around in the tall grass to find my missing gauntlets…

Bronze was right there with me through it all. At first, she kept an eye on me in case I needed to be herded back toward something more acceptably edible. She also kept track of where things had fallen, making it much easier to put my stuff back together. I can barely imagine being without her and really don’t want to.

I mounted and we cantered up the road on the west side of the canal. The rhythm of her hooves reminded me of a song from ancient Zirafel, and I sang as we spiraled up and in. It didn’t occur to me until the second verse that I never heard the song before, that I
couldn’t
have heard it. Yet, I remembered it, until I remembered that I couldn’t. At that point, I forgot what came next.

Centipede’s dilemma? Similar, certainly. I didn’t like it.

To distract myself from the problem, I looked at the mountain, really seeing it from the outside. It was lower than I remembered, or, no… it was an illusion brought about by being broader. The thing is still a mile high or so; the base is now about four miles across. It looks almost flat, at least until it gets closer to the center. Then it gets steeper, until one road winds its lone way up and around a near-vertical face to reach the pivot-door in the upper courtyard’s outer wall.

I can’t help thinking it was taller when it was narrow enough to fit in the Eastrange.

Bronze took me over the bridge and around to the main gate, on the northeast. Then, inside the city, we went up and around in a great spiral to the upper courtyard, on around the central peak to the north side, and in through the main door.

I reflected again that this was great against invaders, but possibly a bit too involved for routine use in a city. Well, if I had anything to do with the layout—and, like remembering a dream, I believe I did—then I probably wasn’t thinking in terms of city planning so much as I was in terms of fortress planning. Maybe I could ask the mountain for some changes.

We halted in the throne room/great hall/whatever it was. One could probably ride a normal horse down a hallway from there, if one took care to stay low in the saddle. While Bronze might fit through most of the passages within the mountain, she would have to keep her head down; I might even be able to stay on, if I laid flat and didn’t inhale. On the other hand, the corridors were wide enough for five people abreast, so turning wouldn’t be a problem. Still, she didn’t like the idea of walking through a tunnel with a low ceiling. She preferred to wait. I went on to greet my three new friends.

They opened the door when I called their names. When I saw them, I realized even more how much I had changed. I saw their flesh as a translucent medium—organs, bones, the works. The important parts, though, were the three things that made them alive. First was the plumbing; all the vessels for the movement of blood around and through their bodies. Second, the lines of living light that marked the wires of their flesh; all the filaments of their nervous systems glowed and sparkled like the lines of a city of light gleaming into the darkness of space. And, third, the diffuse glow of something immaterial. It permeated their flesh, flowed with the blood, sparkled and glittered with every firing of every nerve. I can only call it their souls, multicolored and quicksilver quick, roiling through them like ink in water.

Immediately, they each dropped to one knee, bowed their heads, and laid their swords at my feet.

“We beseech thee, our King,” they recited, in unison, “to our petition, that you deign to bless with the might of thy hand this sword with which thy servant desires to be girded, that it may be a defense for those who cannot defend themselves, that it may be the terror and dread of all who would act against the realm, and that it may be just and right in both attack and defense.”

Ah, yes. Their swords. This was their night of vigil and ritual. Tonight, they were to be marked, to leave behind their boyhood to become men.

And here they were, and here I was, and wasn’t I supposed to be a king? I’m not good at being an authority figure, to say nothing of a role model. Teaching college freshmen doesn’t really prepare one for that. All I had to do as an almost-professor was work on their academic qualifications, not their moral or ethical codes. And being a bloodthirsty monster really isn’t recommended for role modeling.

But I have a nasty streak of responsibility. They obviously regarded me as a king—
their
King. Technically speaking, I guess I am. If it would make them happy… well, I guess I could try to act like one.

While I might not know the proper ritual, I could remember a round dozen and probably fake my way through it. Besides, anyone who could come to a haunted mountain for an overnight vigil, meet a vampire, and still not have to change their underwear deserved a little in the way of theatrics. Besides, if I made it
look
good, they would probably be happy with it.

How much of my life is about keeping up appearances?

I took their swords and—since I was living in a bubble of power that would presumably kill mortal magicians—gave some attention to what to do with them. I held the first one in a net of dark, invisible tendrils, feeling it with my mind and spirit, staring into the metal. Then I peered deeper, with the eye of the mind and magic. I swam in a sea of atoms, tiny glints in balls of fog, floating, diving, swirling. Too many held in rigid alignment; free those. Crack the bonds that held them fixed. Mix the scattered atoms more evenly so the crystalline alignment smoothed into an amorphous, glassine structure. Augment the lines of force between them, make them more potent and more flexible by far.

Swim to the cutting edge and work along it, teasing the flow of atoms into a different sort of rigidity—locked in place, a perfect lattice, a million millions of atoms thick, tapering to a single line of carbon backed by iron, layered in and out in a rigid structure. Let the magic flow through the gaps in the lattice, filling it like water fills a cup full of pebbles, freezing the structure, remembering the shape of it, bringing it to life and giving it the power to heal itself as quickly as it shatters…

Step back, swim out, surface from the depths of steel into the open air. Take up the next, and dive into it, working more quickly, now that I know what I want to do. And the third.

Look at the blades. The same swords, just darker, lacking their original metallic luster. Weapons of quality, certainly, but still just swords, lifeless pieces of metal, crammed full of power, but dead things nonetheless.

“Hold out your hands,” I told them. They did so, without otherwise moving. One by one, I cut their palms with exquisite care, drawing a line of blood down the edge of each blade. None of them cried out, although Torvil shivered.

As I did so, I drew a tendril of darkness down each weapon, from pommel to point, buried inside the steel, and drew a small piece of each boy’s essence into the fabric of the blade. I laid my will on each sword, on each tendril, on the blood and soul within, and bound them together in thick, heavy lines of magic, taking the time to do it right. Not mere spells, these, but enchantments, as complex as all enchantments are, but identical to each other, and each filled with a lavish expenditure of power until the circuit-lines of each one blazed bright as lonely stars in an empty sky.

Once I finished packing in the enchantments, I eyed the Ascension Sphere suspiciously. If I passed an enchanted item through it, would that rip the fabric of the spell structure and put the power right back into the sphere? The more I looked at it, the more likely it seemed.

Wait. It had no effect on Bronze. To be fair, her enchantment was older and much more powerful than this thing. Or maybe she counted as a living thing, instead of an enchanted object. Or maybe she was enough a part of me that the sphere reacted to her differently. The point could be debated, I suppose, but I didn’t see a way to actually conduct formal testing without risking her survival. It was enough for me that she could pass through the sphere without being harmed.

So, how to hand back a trio of freshly-enchanted swords without getting them turned into freshly disenchanted swords? Obvious answer: take down the Ascension Sphere. But to do that, the whole thing had to be drained to the point of failure, and, despite my lavish, almost wasteful expenditure, the thing wasn’t even close to drained. What else could I do with the remaining power? The swords were pretty much as solid as I could make them.

Ah. My own sword, and maybe my armor.

I checked my current sword. The sharpening enchantment looked good, but it didn’t work based on a knowledge of atomic structure. Ditto the spell to reinforce and strengthen the metal. My armor also had an enchantment to bind it together so that it resisted blows more readily, and even a repair function so that it would slowly heal itself—very thoughtful of whoever built it. It looked like very good work. But I might as well use a little power to improve the atomic arrangement of the metal, moving from crystalline to amorphous to give it more flex and less breakage… then revise that sharpening enchantment—much easier than starting from scratch… now let’s see how much power I can stuff into the existing enchantments…

Damn. It wasn’t enough. Four swords and a suit of armor, stuffed nearly to bursting with power, and the Sphere was still there. What else could I dump power into? I had nothing leap to mind. I could tear down and rebuild an enchantment or two, but I already built and rebuilt them about as heavily as I could.

Power. I’m in a bottle of power that won’t let power out.

It won’t let
magical
power out.

I could expend the power by having it produce other forms of energy—light, heat, sound. A light spell is nothing but a way to convert magical power into energy in the visible spectrum. I could use it up that way and melt rocks, irradiate a chunk of sky, or otherwise generate some unreasonable amount of electromagnetic radiation. That would get rid of it, waste it into the environment.

On the other hand, I don’t have to convert it to electromagnetic radiation. I can, with difficulty, transmute magical energy into a form of life energy—simple vitality, not the stuff of souls. From a nightlord’s perspective, it’s like wringing water out of something that you wouldn’t ordinarily drink from. I could consume that power and add it to the storehouse of vitality I had already gained that night. But I didn’t need it; I was well-fed, at least for now.

Bronze could absorb some of that, certainly, as could the mountain. Something told me, though, that my pet rock was not at all hungry. The last time it was fed was when Tamara poured power into it, and it had been busy since then. Judging by the sculpted city, very busy. Yet… it wasn’t at all interested. That seemed odd, but not something to worry about right that second. For now, Bronze would get the lion’s—or the horse’s—share of it.

I told the three of them to sit tight; they sat down and waited, looking as though they were prepared to wait all night, if necessary. I went back up to the great hall and sat down in front of Bronze; she laid her head over my shoulder from behind, as though to watch what I was doing.

First, I laid the swords around me, close enough to avoid having all my work undone. Then I started work on the conversion spell, taking care to overbuild it; I expected it to have to carry quite a load. The conversion isn’t something most wizards can do. Even those that can still don’t do it well. It isn’t very efficient even when I do it, except in extremely low-power applications—trickles, rather than rivers of power. Even I can’t build an efficient, large-scale conversion spell and I have some natural—well, unnatural—advantages.

Once assembled, I opened up the flow, and let the contents of the Ascension Sphere ground out through it, dumping pure vitality into the living metal of my horse. She seemed to glow to my nighteyes, and I realized something. She isn’t really made of bronze anymore. She started out as bronze, but she’s eaten so many other metals, been transmuted and transformed by magic… I’m not sure what she’s made of, now. She’s more golden-colored than normal bronze, but not brassy. I don’t know what to call that metal.

It took a while, and the spell matrix started to visibly glow to the untrained eye, an unintended byproduct of the amount of energy in conversion. That’s not supposed to happen in an ideal circuit, but some of the inefficiencies were in the visible range. I kept a close eye on it, trying to judge whether I should dial it down a little to lower the strain, or if it would finish before it failed. It held together long enough to finish and collapsed in on itself, as spells tend to do when their power is exhausted. The Ascension Sphere evaporated with it, leaving me in a normal-magic environment for the first time in ages.