Nightlord: Shadows (69 page)

“Well, that’s to be expected. I’ll come up with something different when that happens.”

“You say that casually, my angel.”

“Am I not also an angel of invention?” I offered, jokingly.

“Oh. I had not thought of it.” She looked thoughtful for several seconds. “Indeed you are,” she agreed, seriously, and went back to her food.

I silently cursed myself for adding yet
another
thing to the list.

Dinner went through sunset, which was hard on Tianna. Sundown is the usual bedtime for people; the adults were going to be up late, tonight, but she had to go to bed. I would have let her stay up late, but this was her first time getting to visit and I wanted her mother to allow another one. We excused ourselves to much rising and bowing and curtseying.

This was not met with an overabundance of enthusiasm on Tianna’s part. Bedtime in the middle of a party is never welcome. She restrained any pyrotechnic disappointment, however. She’s a surprisingly responsible little girl. Maybe growing up knowing that you can incinerate people teaches responsibility; I don’t know.

We went to my chambers where I promptly headed for the bathroom—sunset just started. After soaking in a hot tub for the change, I dressed in my new, freshly-repaired armor. It fit nicely; I couldn’t find anything that needed adjusting. I also noticed that someone had stitched slits for my talons in the fingertips of the gauntlets. Someone was due some points for initiative, there.

That same someone—Tort, I believe—had also furnished my chambers. I hadn’t really thought about it in advance of inviting Tianna to stay over. I was just going to improvise. Camping isn’t a bad call for someone her age, for example. Still, I was just as glad to put her in what passed for a real bed: a bed-sized niche in the wall.

Why Tort bothered to put bedding on that stone shelf, I don’t know. It’s not like I sleep. Well, not often. I suppose it’s better to have it and not need it…

All of the furniture was obviously imported—there wasn’t time to
make
all of it at that level of refinement in Karvalen. There were two wardrobes—one of them for armor, the other for softer garments—and a rack for swords and daggers. The rack had a spot for my current sword and a spot for something considerably larger and heavier. That was a nice touch.

There was also a desk and a sort of filing cabinet. The cabinet was a set of drawers, six wide and six high, each drawer about a foot across and four inches high. It might be useful if the paper mill ever got going; I already had them collecting old rags for making the paper pulp. I just needed a waterwheel to power the pulping machine…

The receiving room had a few rugs thrown about, another heavy chair for me, and a pair of couch-like things—padded benches with backs. Pews, perhaps.

My terrace also had a couple of fragile-looking metal chairs and one hefty wooden one, set around a wire-mesh table. I wondered how Tort got the door open. Probably just a polite request; she’s good at that. I also wondered who she got to make the metal furniture; I didn’t think anyone had time for that sort of thing. Or did she just buy it off someone?

I decided that Mochara needed some help when it came to furniture-making. It all looked durable, but I had doubts about its comfort. Tianna didn’t have any complaints about the bed, though. I wondered what her room looked like. Did she even have a room of her own?

All this was a quick once-over as I put her to bed. She insisted on a lullaby, though, so I sat beside her on the bed and did my best. She likes “Molly Malone” and “The Gypsy Rover,” despite the fact I didn’t have time to translate them. When she was satisfied with my attempt, I kissed her forehead and hurried down to see T’yl.

The elf-body lay on a slab someone padded with blankets as a makeshift bed. Several ropes and an armed guard were also involved. It was
probably
T’yl in there, but if he was having identity issues with an elven brain, we didn’t want him wandering about.

I sat down next to the bed and dismissed the guard to the hallway. Then I looked him over. The body was functioning perfectly, aside from being hungry. As for the internal connections, T’yl’s soul was definitely in there. The patterns and movement of his soul were also running, although I did notice that everything was rather sluggish. Maybe being contained in a crystal, in stasis, took a while to shake off? Was he just having trouble getting up to operating speeds? Or was he going through a hard reboot and still doing his POST?

Before I tried jump-starting him with extra energy, I decided to reexamine all the connections. That took a while, especially since I was going over the seams of each connection with some attention to detail. He wasn’t leaking anywhere that I could discover. The connections seemed to have merged nicely into the flesh. Everything seemed in order. I was encouraged by the number of minor connections that had found their own anchor points; he was obviously settling in well and making himself at home. It was just happening very slowly—much more slowly than I expected from my previous experiments.

Very gently, I nudged him with a little bit of vitality, on the order of a cup of coffee. I accompanied this with a message:
Hey, T’yl. Wake up.

There was a definite uptick in the movement of his energy patterns, but no response. It occurred to me that he might also be pretty depleted from being held in stasis; most forms of energy have some sort of movement to them. If he was diminished enough so that the crystal only held his pattern, rather than the full power of his soul, he might be in the spiritual equivalent of a coma, but maybe one I could deal with.

Hmm
, thought I.

I could see two good ways to deal with the problem, if that really was the problem. First, I could just ask Tianna to push vital energy into him until he woke up. The only trouble with that was that Tianna might not quite have the hang of dealing with the difference between vitality, spiritual energy, and the stuff of souls. She’s human, and that doesn’t seem to be something humans deal with at all readily.

The other option was to get one of my
galgar
prisoners, rip the soul out of him, shred it until the patterns were obliterated, and then pour the pureed remains into T’yl’s energy system. If I shredded it thoroughly enough, it shouldn’t have any
galgar
remnants to interfere with T’yl’s self. As a bonus, it pretty much guaranteed that I wouldn’t pour too much energy into his system and accidentally overload it. That should be hard to do with any magician—that Rite of Ascension really gives them a workout—but I don’t have any concrete numbers to go by.

I’m going to fix that, someday.

I called in the guard, wandered down to prisoner storage, shredded T’yl’s breakfast, gathered it up in tendrils much like gathering up handfuls of sugar, and strolled back up to T’yl’s room. I let my tendrils loosen a bit, dribbling soul-stuff into one of the lesser connections that hadn’t quite found a spot, yet. Very slowly—which was exactly what I wanted—the energy dripped into his pattern. I watched it drip in, spread throughout, and brighten it. When I was done, I found a good attachment point for that connection and bound it into the body as well.

T’yl. It’s me. Are you in there?

Something stirred in answer. It wasn’t a coherent answer, more like a formless grunt rather than words. But it was clearly a response, which encouraged me enormously.

I tried getting him familiar with his new body for a bit. I moved him through his range of motion, bent all his joints, from fingertips to knees and hips, rolled him over a few times, sat him up, laid him back down, even pried open his eyelids, and let him look at me.

He started to respond. Once he was strong enough to be aware, he just needed to figure out how everything worked. I was quite pleased when he sat up on his own. He tried talking, but it was nothing but gurgles and gibberish.

“It’s a new body,” I told him. “You’re learning to drive it. It’ll take a while to get used to it.” I hesitated, watching him roll his head around on his shoulders. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Reach out and take my hand if you understand.”

He waved his hand toward me, thumping my hand with his. Close enough. I took his hand and held on to it.

“Okay. Squeeze if your name is T’yl.”

Squeeze.

“Squeeze twice if you know who I am.”

Squeeze. Squeeze.

“How many is three minus two?”

Squeeze.

“Okay, you’re in there. Here’s what happened.”

I explained about my goof with the
dazhu
herd and apologized. I went on to explain how I’d got him an elf body; I also gave him the short version of how I put him in it.

He took it well. At least, he didn’t scream. He just nodded and kept practicing at moving and talking.

“Hungry?”

“Hngkhhee,” he agreed. I thought that was excellent progress for an hour-old newborn. I stuck my head out into the hall and sent the guard off for food. T’yl tried to stand up, wobbled a lot, and sat back down.

Together, we managed to get him on his feet so he could practice putting one foot in front of the other. It was more than a little weird. I’d told this elf that I was going to interrogate him, then did so. Now this was my friend and I was helping him learn to walk. Of course, now it was T’yl inside, but it still felt weird.

When the food arrived, I helped him by sitting behind him and holding his hands, going through the motions. He dribbled a lot; his mouth wasn’t something I could really work for him. He learned the proper hand and arm motions very quickly; the chewing and swallowing took more time as he learned by trial and error. I put a spell on his tongue to help it heal quickly. It wasn’t actually damaged, but it must have hurt.

He finished eating and I waved a cleaning spell over him. Then we got down to talking. I started with the vowels, saying them and holding them, drawing them out: “Aaaaaaaaaa,” and he’d work through the variations of sounds until he hit on the one that sounded like the one I was using. Then we practiced other phonetics, since they’re the building blocks of words.

By midnight, he was talking reasonably well, but I’d hate to ask him to sing.

“What has been goink on sinz I was in the cryssal?” he asked, enunciating carefully.

“Going.”

“Goinkh.”

“Going.

“Going.”

“Good work. Now, ‘crystal’.”

“Cryssal?”

“CrysTal.”

“Crys-TAHHHL.”

“Crystal.”

“Crystal.”

“That’s it. As for what’s been going on, that’s going to take a while. You want to keep walking around and moving while I do the talking?”

“I think so. Yes, I do.”

So, while he continued to bend, stretch, flex, walk, and so forth, I told him about everything that was going on since I woke up. He looked at me oddly a few times, but just waved for me to continue when I asked what was wrong. Eventually, I caught up to the present.

“And there you have it,” I finished. “Any questions?”

“Tort hasn’t tried to kill you?”

And I was having
such
a good day,
I thought.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” I told him. “Why would she?”

“She’s been hectoring me to tell her where you were for sixty years,” he replied. “Two people should know, she said, so if anything happened to me, she could take over. I remember the last time, when magicians gathered together to steal your blood and try to make themselves immortal. It was a disaster.”

“Well, I didn’t enjoy it,” I admitted, “but I’d hardly call it a disaster.”

“I’m not talking about your part of it,” he snapped. “I’m talking about what they did with the blood they took from you.”

Strange. My stomach just dropped a few fathoms.

“What did they do with it?” I asked, suppressing visions of a plague of undead swarming over cities.

“They were trying to distill an elixir of immortality from it, avoiding the whole problem of being an undead.”

“I know. Did they?”

“No. Most of them were slain by the idiot who went to work for the Hand, remember?”

“Melloch. I remember.”

“That’s him. The few who escaped him managed to work with your blood for a bit, experimenting and failing. One of their experiments certainly produced an immortal, but it was a mindless, hungry thing that killed, drank blood, and moved on to kill and drink again. It was immensely strong and almost impossible to put down. Fortunately, it had no tolerance for sunlight, and not enough intelligence to predict that it would need shelter. It was lured into a large, open area near dawn, and that was the end of it.”

“How is that a disaster? A mess, certainly—” He cut me off.

“The disaster,” he said, tight-lipped, “was the city of Terma. That… that thing went through it like a fire.” He sighed and sat down. “We don’t know if it was infectious or not, but with thousands of corpses lying in the streets, we didn’t have much of a choice; we had to burn the city to be sure. Nothing survived.”

Well, he was right. That was a disaster. Would I have done the same? Yes, probably. I’m all too aware of the danger of the unrestricted spread of blood-drinking monsters.

I accept the necessity. I don’t have to like it, and I don’t.

“I take it someone had words with these idiots?” I asked.

“Yes. I’m pretty sure the Magician’s Council in Arondael summoned them. They were forced to turn over the rest of your blood for destruction. I don’t know if it really was destroyed, but that was what was supposed to happen. Then the idiots went off on their merry way again—”

“Hold it. That’s it? No punishment? No restitution? Just, ‘Hand it over and get out’?”

T’yl raked his lower lip with his teeth, thinking. I’d seen that mannerism before; it looked odd on the elf-face.

“How much do you know about Arondael?” he asked, finally.

“I know it’s there,” I replied, “and it’s a city of magicians.”