Nightlord: Shadows (62 page)

“You
have
been busy,” she observed, looking around the place. I saw her look long and hard at the archway, then her lips thinned as she looked over the not-exactly-alive prisoners.

“Yeah, I suppose I have,” I agreed.

“I do not think I understand some of these spells.”

“You’re not alone.”

I explained about draining the vitality out of living prisoners to add more power to the scrying shield and to the gate.

“It’s like putting them to work at hard labor—they may as well be useful,” I finished.

“Indeed. This is nightlord magic, I take it?” she asked, leaning close to a semi-entombed subject.

“I’d have to say the spell is, yes. I guess you could argue that the mountain is, too.”

“And this one is unconscious because he is too weakened to be otherwise?”

“That’s right.”

“Very good. Your technique with structure is improving.”

“Why, thank you,” I said, and meant it. I think she referred to the chalked symbols of the original spellcasting; Jon had a lot to say about my awful penmanship, but if it was improving, so much the better. “I have your example to follow.”

“And what is the purpose of these?” she asked, indicating some of my other experiments.

“I decided to get a little more detailed on the how and what of being a nightlord,” I explained. “I’ve tried turning several living things and several dead things into nightlords, as well as seeing what happens when living nightlords become dead ones.”

“Oh?”

“Yep. Apparently, you can turn a live someone into a nightlord without much trouble. If they get killed during the day, they pick up and keep going at night. Dead people don’t seem to react at all if you try to transform them. But if you kill a live subject that hasn’t completed its transformation, it’ll still animate at night, but the spirit that moves it is of a different order.

“What I think happens,” I went on, “is that you get a shadow of the original occupant—basically, a flawed copy, left over as an imprint on the brain. If the subject dies after the first few hours, this is good enough to make it walk and snarl and feed—at least, it will try to bite, but not much else. The longer you wait, the closer the process is to complete, the better the copy.”

I morosely regarded a pile of twitching heads. Jaws worked; eyes rolled and blinked.

“It also means that what I was taught was wrong,” I added.

“Wrong about what?”

“If you die as a nightlord—well, during the day—it appears that you’re actually
dead
. What gets up at night doesn’t have a soul; it’s just a copy of your personality and memories, sustained by feeding. Whoever was in there gets evicted and whatever is left just carries on. I can see how it would be hard to tell, though, especially if it’s been alive for a long time. The copy gets better with age.”

“My angel,” Tort began, hesitantly. She placed a tentative hand on my forearm. “May I ask… why did you do this? Why the interest in this particular subject? Why now?”

I patted her hand reassuringly.

“I wondered if I could create a variation in my species of vampire, one I could control,” I admitted. “Back home, there are legends about vampires that have some sort of power over the ones they create. Some sort of supernatural, occult, mystical thing that forces their… progeny?... to submit to the will of their creator. They could be summoned, for example, across great distances, or forbidden to pursue some course of action. I wanted to see if I could exert that kind of influence over one.”

“…why?”

I moved over to the raised rim of the central pool and sat down on it. Tort stood next to me and put her hands on my shoulder.

“I don’t… My thinking isn’t usually about war,” I explained. She waited, silently. “I think about other things. I don’t like to think about dragging a few thousand people off to kill or be killed just because… well, just because I say so. It’s just that I want to kill something, maybe a lot of somethings, while still not wanting to drag other people into it.

“That’s what it comes down to, I think. I want to hit something until it breaks, or kill until there’s nobody left. I’m
angry
, Tort.”

“I know,” she said, softly, and stroked my hair. If she was in any way afraid, she didn’t show it. “I know. Who is it that deserves this anger?”

“I think it’s Keria, the so-called Dark Queen of Vathula and Empress of the Undermountains. I’m pretty sure she sent an army to kill me—but that doesn’t really
offend
me, as such. It’s kind of par for the course, really, even if I don’t know why she did it. I suspect she just wants to be Queen and is afraid I’ll show up and take over.

“What pisses me off is that she planned this for a while, and she deliberately planned to hurt Bronze. She didn’t just attack me, she attacked someone I love. Deliberately. With malice and intent.

“I have a problem with that,” I admitted. “So I started thinking about what could be done about it. I don’t know of anything, besides killing her and everyone who had anything to do with it and anyone who might possibly be loyal to her. If I don’t, she’ll just keep trying.”

“But I can’t just order everybody in Mochara and Karvalen to take up arms and follow me into her city. This is a personal matter. I don’t want a war; I just want her to pick up her marbles and go play somewhere else. Failing that, I want to frighten her so badly that she’ll never even think of risking my wrath. And, if I can’t do that, maybe find a way to
force
her to go away… and, as a last option, just kill her outright and be done with it.”

I gestured toward the pile of heads.

“I wanted a weapon. I didn’t find it. So I have to come up with another idea.”

“What was the plan?” Tort asked. “Assuming you could make these things and control them, what could you do with them?”

“I was thinking that if I sent a dozen or a hundred of them under the mountains to kill everything they came across, they would be, well, not
unstoppable
, but certainly a force to fear. If I could then mentally recall them, I could destroy them, but keep the threat of doing it again in reserve. Sort of a big ‘leave me alone’ sign, if you get what I mean.” I chuckled, darkly.

“It struck me as appropriate, in a way,” I added. “She sent soldiers to kill me, so I would send them back as weapons against her. At least, that was the idea. It won’t work, though.”

“I see they are still moving,” Tort noted. “Surely, they are difficult to kill?”

“Oh, certainly. I could easily create a mob of quasi-mindless killing machines, but they wouldn’t be smart enough to avoid being captured, nor would they necessarily stay in the mountains. I couldn’t exercise any real control over them, either, so I couldn’t summon them home. I thought I might be able to exert my will over them, as creations of my blood and spirit. Instead, I’d have to use spells, and under the mountains there’s no telling what they’d encounter. They might get loose from that sort of control.” I shook my head.

“Too risky. I don’t dare try it. But I had to find out everything I could to determine if it was even possible.” I shrugged. “It was an idea, and if it had worked, the whole undermountain would stop being a problem. As it is… I guess I’ll have to come up with something else.”

“I see.” She sat next to me and squeezed my arm. “I am sorry you are sometimes an idiot.”

“So am I,” I replied, automatically. Then I realized what she said. “Wait, what?”

“I said that you are an idiot.”

“Um. Okay. I provisionally agree with your assessment. Could you, maybe, justify your opinion?”

“You are the King, yes?”

“Yes.”

“What happened on the night of the attack? Did forces from another nation march on the capitol?”

“Um. Yes, I suppose they did. They were after me, though, not the city, not really. It was a personal matter.”

“Then, you say that a foreign power tried to kill the King of Karvalen?”

“Yeah…”

“And you have the ego to think it is a
personal
matter, not a political one? You think that the kingdom as a whole will not want to counter-invade and wrest satisfaction from them for such insult?” Tort asked.

“I wouldn’t think they’d really want to risk their lives for me,” I pointed out. “I’m the blood-sucking monster that sits on the throne, you know. I’m only King because I founded the place.”

“You know,” Tort said, thoughtfully, “you do not look stupid. Is it the armor, perhaps? Does it slow the thinking processes? Or did Firebrand do all your thinking for you? Perhaps you are so used to seeing with supernatural vision that your heart is blind? Could that be it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You are quite amazingly correct.”

“So, dragging a bunch of people off to defend the royal monster—”

“Correct,” she interrupted, “in that you truly do
not
understand!”

I stared at her. She looked annoyed. Her eyes were glowing from within, a faint crimson light. I remembered, then, that a magician sometimes has little signs like that when highly emotional.

And, remembering, I did
not
have a headache. Excellent!

“Um,” I said, helpfully.

“Did you not listen when I spoke of your role in the kingdom? Or did you not believe?” Her look softened, then, and the crimson glow vanished. “Or are you incapable of believing it?” she asked. “You are the King. Any of your knights would fight to defend you; most of your people would, as well. Many would die to defend you, or offer themselves in your place.”

“Then why are they all so formal and standoffish? They don’t act like people who care about me. They act like they’re fragile, and afraid I’ll accidentally break them!”

“You are the King,” Tort reminded me, gently. “Yes, you are the monster—but you are
their
monster. If you were a dragon that lived atop this mountain and acted as their guardian and protector, they would love you no less.

“You are also their King. You brought their ancestors out of a crumbling kingdom, through darkness, fire, and water.

“You are a Hero, and those are rare—and an
old
Hero, which is almost unheard-of.”

She sighed, laid her head on my shoulder and squeezed my arm.

“I do not know how I can convince you,” she said. “I will give it thought. But, for the nonce, please take my word: I swear to you, my King and my angel, that you
are
loved, more than you can possibly imagine.”

I sat there for a while, thinking. Tort seemed quite content to stay right there all night, if necessary.

Could she be right?
I wondered.
Could they just not know how to talk to me? Or do they think that being formal
is
the way to talk to their King? Is it a case of hero worship and kingship that makes them awkward and uncomfortable around me?

Is
that
why my personal guard are so scared of failing as knights? If
I
have a problem I can’t deal with, are they afraid that
they
will be expected to deal with it?

Maybe not everyone is afraid of me. Well, not just afraid of me. Could they really be… what’s the word I want? Amazed? Intimidated? Overawed?

I’m not sure I believe it. I’m not sure I
can
believe it.

Why do I have so much trouble believing it? Because… because if it’s true, then they really are looking up to me, trying to live up to my example. And I’m not cut out to be King.

Good reminder: I had better bloody well try.

“Okay,” I finally said. “I can try to… I dunno. I’m not sure what this means to me, but it means something, and I’m going to have to let it process for a while. It’s a lot to take in. Being your angel is easy; being a king is not.” I paused for a second. “How am I doing at being your angel, anyway?”

Tort squeezed my arm and stretched up to kiss my cheek.

“You do very well, my angel. And, as for my King, I will be here to help you.”

“And let me know when I’m being an idiot?”

“Indeed. No one else is likely to do so.”

“You make a very good point.”

“I should hope so.”

“All right, now that I’ve had a lovely time getting my self-image put through the wringer, I’d like to be distracted by something a bit more intellectual than talking about those
feelings
thingies.”

“Naturally.”

“When I started connecting living things to spells, basically using them as magical power-gathering nodes, I realized that their souls are tied into the flesh in particular ways…”

Our discussion moved into technical realms, but the gist of it is that there are a lot of physical places in a body where a soul has to be connected, kind of like installing a computer network in a building. You have to have power connections, data connections, routers, switches, personal computers (with attendant monitors, keyboards, and so on), and a server. All of that has to be tied together and balanced—the power can’t be spiking or browning out, the data cables can’t be run next to power cables, and so on—before the computers will work together and the building network be on-line.

In a human or humanoid body, there appear to be about a hundred and eight vital tie-in points for a soul. Thirty-six of them are major connections—call those the power plugs. The other seventy-two are less power-intensive, so call those the data connections. You could argue it the other way around, I suppose, but that’s just how I think of it. Then there are a bunch more little connections, most of which seem to manage a spontaneous linkage as long as the main links are established.

The transfer process works a lot like a transplant operation. Once you get the soul out of a body without killing the body—for most magic-workers, this is problematic; for me, it’s just tricky—you can then start removing the soul from another body (or other receptacle) to place it in the empty one.