Nightlord: Sunset (43 page)

As we passed over the rocky rills and flows of coral, I spotted something that made the laugh aloud, a peculiar sound underwater.  Bronze was headed across that difficult terrain like a mountain goat, gouts of steam bubbling from her nostrils.  Forcing herself through the water at that speed had to be hard work.

I called to her and she stopped, looked up at me.  I shouted, “Head for shore!  No rush!” and she tossed her head—possibly in acknowledgement, possibly in irritation, as if to say,
I run like the devil, thinking I might have to save your skin, and you tell me it’s for nothing?

I made a note to try to figure out something to do for her she might like.  Which provided a nice distraction and kept my mind fruitlessly occupied for the rest of the trip.

They put me down in water no deeper than I was tall.

At the ship, when the upper light dims?

“Yes,” I agreed.  “I will be there then, or soon after.”

Then we will wait.

And they swam back out and down.

I slogged ashore through the rolling surf.  I was feeling fine, if waterlogged.  I exhaled and spouted water.  Oh, yeah; I was going to hang upside-down for a while, taking deep breaths.

I did that first.  I found a handy rock, laid face-down over the side, and spouted water for a while.  If I haven’t drowned, I thought, then I’d hate to drown.  Eventually, I quit spitting salt water; I kept on for another couple minutes, hacking and coughing, just to be safe.  Then I got up and started looking around for a place to hide from the sun.

Switched if I didn’t remember, right then, that Bronze had my body bags.  And I’d said not to rush.

I looked at the sky; it was cloudy and dim, but I saw the moonglow through the clouds.  Nowhere near dawn.  Maybe four hours, if I was lucky… but I knew how likely
that
was.  So I walked up the beach—a very nice beach, I might add; a good spot for a resort—until I was well above the high-tide line.  There I dug a shallow grave.  Deep enough to block out the sun, shallow enough I could burst out of it if I was really alive.

It was something I tried not to think about.  Being dead.  Really dead.  I knew I wasn’t
all
dead, not so long as I was moving and thinking, but I’m ridiculously attached to the daytime.  Odd for a man who spent a lot of his life hating sunburns and sneezing in the spring to think about missing the sun.  But I would.  And I didn’t want to think about it until I had to.  If I had to.

I sat down next to the hole and waited, using my powers to clean and dry my pistol.  It didn’t look hurt, but the ammunition casings were crumpled from the water pressure.  I threw the bullets away, hoping the shells in Bronze’s saddlebags hadn’t reached a crush depth.  In the meantime, I’d have to do without a gun.

I started wondering where Shada was.  Hell, where the rest of the survivors were, come to that.  Did a ship set sail in pursuit to catch them?  Was I over here alone?  Or were they just over the next rise?  Did they even make it in to shore, yet?

Slowly, the eastern sky began to lighten.

I laid down in my hole and started scooping sand in, burying my feet first, my legs, and then my lower torso.  I folded my hands over my nose and mouth and closed my eyes, sweeping the rest of the sand over me with a few enspelled tendrils.  I was buried eighteen inches or so below the surface; I hoped, really hard, I was about to rise from a very shallow grave.

The tingling started, and it hurt like hell.  Well, I’d been breathing salt water for a while and had been deeper than most people would ever dream.  And it got worse.  Each grain of sand became a hot coal, searing into my flesh, and then they started to bore in.  I restrained myself from screaming on the principle it would just be a waste of breath.  I ground my teeth together and I know I was rigid as an iron bar; I think I vibrated slightly.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I gave off a note like a tuning fork.

The pain started to diminish.  I could feel it ebbing away with every heartbeat.

Heartbeat?

Yes!

I think if I went down with the ship and woke up in a hospital bed, my relief would have been
less.
  I’d had a long time to anticipate and to worry.  As it was…

I punched upward through the sand and started clearing it away so I could breathe.  It was difficult; it
wanted to flow back down into the depression I made.  But I got my head up eventually and started flinging sand in earnest.  I was salty, sandy, dead broke, and alone—but alive.

There was something I could do about two of those, at least.  I stripped down and waded into the surf to scrub sand off and to shake it out of my clothes.  A quick spell flash-dried them—taking the salt with the water, to avoid unnecessary itch; I’d used the same technique on a smaller scale to clean the pistol—and a similar improvisation gave me the equivalent of a brisk toweling-off.  I was pulling on my boots when Bronze’s head broke the surface with a hiss of steam.

She came ashore at a walk, sinking hoof-deep in the wet sand and paused right next to me.  I stood up and stroked her nose.

“Thank you for the effort,” I said.  Her nose was still hot to the touch despite the water cooling.  “I appreciate it.  I don’t know what I would do without you.”

She tossed her head and nuzzled me in the chest.  I hugged her neck for a moment, which made me look at her anew.  Her lines were slightly different.  Stronger, thicker.  More like a draft horse.

“Get a good workout?” I asked.  She tossed her head in a nod and pawed the sand.  Someday, when I have more time—always ‘when I have more time’—Bronze is going to get a good going-over.  What, exactly, have I done with my improvised enchantment?  Created a golem, yes… an animate metal statue.  But this was almost a horse of living metal, not a magical robot.  Someday, someday…

I fished in the saddlebags and brought out one of the spare pistol magazines.  It seemed okay, so I dried everything out and reloaded the pistol.  I wondered where I would get gun oil, though.  Grease, maybe?  I don’t know enough about guns to tell what needs to be oiled and what doesn’t.  Flintlocks are more my technical speed.

“Ready to go find Shada?  I’m hoping they washed up on the beach, somewhere.”  Bronze flicked an ear with what I might call disdain, as if to say,
It will take more than running all night on the bottom of an ocean to tire me out.

I mounted up and turned her head west, toward the mountains.  It wasn’t too far, and I could finish that stretch off quickly.  Then I could turn my full attention to the eastward direction without wondering if I was too far down the beach already.

No dice.  Right up to the Eastrange (now the Westrange?) with no signs of a landing anywhere.  I gave up when the beach slowly turned into cliffs with small stretches of beach below.  It reminded me of Dover.  Nobody was going to land and stay here.  Ergo, they must have gone farther east.  We turned and headed back to my grave at high speed.  Then we slowed again to watch more carefully for signs of coming ashore. 

It was nearly noon—we were about four miles
farther east—when we came across the boat.  It had been dragged up out of the water and now rested on its side.  Many footprints surrounded it, but I’m no tracker; I just knew it was a lot of people.

We turned inland and started following.  Unfortunately, as I said, I am not a tracker; the tracks led uphill, through the sand, into a rocky stretch of the same color, then into open grassland.

It must have been a while since they passed through.  I couldn’t see anything to follow in the waving sea of amber, green, and brown.  The terrain wasn’t perfectly flat.  There were lots of low hills; they looked like the surface of a rolling sea, frozen and covered with a layer of dirt, prairie grasses, and a few isolated pockets of trees.  I rode up on one of the higher rises of ground and looked around.  I didn’t even see smoke.

Fine.  First I’d get my glass… no, it was broken.  All right.  First, I would keep my promise and work out underwater fire. 
Then
I would go hunting for Shada and the remainder of the crew.  Preferably at night, when things would be ever so much simpler.

Maybe it was just a desire to not do much during the day.  I felt vulnerable, hungry, and weak, and recently, all too easy to kill.  That could be it.  Whatever it was, I was taking the day off from adventures and such.

Bronze and I camped by my grave and I ate the last of my MRE rations.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5
TH

A
fter hiding my non-waterproof stuff under some bushes, I rode Bronze down to the ship; she moved much more quickly than I.  I just hung on and tried to avoid being peeled off by the rushing water.

I am morally certain she was getting faster underwater, too.  And stronger.

The fish-men, I discovered, called themselves “people.”  Why not?  There weren’t any other intelligent races in the world—which, to them, was under the sea.  The strange, alien things that sometimes fell from beyond the upper boundary of the world were curiosities, nothing more.  They didn’t have a name for themselves; you don’t need a name for something unique.  It just
is
. 

But, unlike humans, they also didn’t have names for any sub-races among themselves.  You were either people or you were a fish.  The walrus-things were a magically mutated type of sea lion, changed into servant creatures a long, long time ago by ancient and forgotten sorceries—and therefore a fish, not a person.

All this I learned while talking with the people and teaching them about fire.  Some things burned, some things melted, some things behaved oddly in fire.  I explained how to magically take hydrogen and oxygen from the water and to combine them again to make flame; they loved that.  Fire from water into water.  Under water, no less.  That was the tough way to make fire.  They could also just go up to the edge of the world and take some of the air, bind it like a genie into a bottle, and take it back down with them with which to make fire.  The really easy way was to just apply heat without flame; simple and effective.

I found them to be quite intelligent, if not imaginative.  Brilliant at remembering, lousy at coming up with applications.  Any one of them has a better memory than I do, that’s certain; I made the mistake of asking one if he had been listening and he started quoting me from the point I started talking.  But other questions stumped them: “And that would mean… ?” always earned me a blank look.  They did a lot of thinking and trilling and never answered.  I pretty much gave up on asking leading questions.

I went on to explain about metal and how to forge it.  Finding ore and digging it out, melting it to get the metal, getting rid of the dross and slag, and so on.  The main problem was being underwater; they could create an “empty” bubble, but there were problems with that, too.  I recommended a furnace in shallow water to minimize the pressure problems and warned them about metal’s tendency to rust.  But they appreciated the idea of something better than a sharp rock or piece of bone.

The gold ornaments I saw were not their craft; they were the remains of wrecks.

Finally, having experimented with some of their magical capabilities, I showed them how to heat things far higher than they had ever tried before.  It was simpler than making flame, and just as good—better, in fact—for a lot of processes they might someday discover.

A lot of their magic was community magic.  Just about every one of them could do some sort of magic.  Individually, they were terribly weak at magic.  But they shone at working together, combining their efforts in a synergy, making the result far greater than the sum of its parts.  That was how they had built their framework for the coral, and made the coral domes grow.  A few dozen of them together could, with a little guidance, heat a cooking pot until it melted—and hold the heat
inside
the molten iron so it didn’t boil the surrounding water.  It had never occurred to them to apply heat like that.

I was impressed.  They didn’t even need to kill something and channel it to achieve quite powerful effects.  Good trick, that.  Now, if only I had a dozen helpers with whom to practice that trick…

When I left, they were unhappy to see me go but thrilled to have discovered (or been shown) fire.  I wondered as I rode back up—carrying gifts of pearls, sunken gold, and the like—how this might change their society, and whether or not I’d just done a good thing.

I also chuckled in the current, thinking that Prometheus might have wondered that very thing.  Then I
stopped
chuckling as I remembered what happened to
him
.

Back on shore I wasn’t exactly smiling.  I was torn between the idea of taking off immediately to hunt for Shada and finding a good spot to go to ground before dawn.  I compromised by heading east to the abandoned boat and overturning it—with me under it.  I wriggled into my body bag and waited for the dawn.

Yes, salt water is bad for you.  Dawn was unkind to me as I made my transformation.  Apparently I did a lot of regenerating from pressure or something, and my night-to-day transformation was reflecting that.

I say that casually; it was nasty to go through.  My first order of business was a bath.

Now I find I’m hesitant to go chasing off into the grass after them.  Am I afraid?  I guess I am.  I’ve never come so close to dying as I did on the
Prosperina
.  Sure, I got set on fire by nutjobs with bazookas—but I regenerate.  So what?  It hurt, I’m better, it’s over.

There’s the difference; I wasn’t helpless.  On the
Prosperina
I was going to fry from sunset or I was going to drown.  No real options.  I think I have the miracle of hypothermia to thank for keeping me in my skin full-time.  It’s not dying I fear so much as I fear being unable to
do something
about it.  Being helpless.  That’s it.

I’m afraid I’ll wind up in some situation that won’t have any options.

It takes a while to master fear.  First I have to figure out what I’m afraid of—did that—and then I have to screw my courage down until it sticks.  That can be a while.

But I did.  What finally did it was the idea I could simply flake out and go my own way.  I could tell myself it wasn’t my problem and I could just walk away.  I did the best I could and now Shada’s lost, somewhere in the great grasslands.  Oh, well.  I can just crawl into a hole, build a hermitage, and hide.

True.  I could.  It was possible to do that.

The fact I even thought of it brought color to my cheeks and a twist to my stomach.  While I had the physical ability to abandon her, I didn’t have the emotional ability.  I rescued her from a Hand attack on her
gata.
  I rescued her from rapists.  I rescued her from the Hand Inquisitors.  She agreed to pose as my wife—and I felt bad about that; she’d been over a barrel.

More to the point, she rescued me.  She overcame her innate fear of nightlords and became my friend—and of all the things I’ve needed in this world, a friend is the most important.

I’ll damned before I just leave her.  If I’m not already, of course.

I know Shada.  I’m familiar with her.  I rummaged in my saddlebags for my signal mirror before I remembered it was still in my workshop in Baret.  Crap.

Rather than try to scry on her, since I lacked appropriate tools, I pulled out my survival knife.  It was a fairly standard thing found in pawnshops and soldier-of-fortune magazines.  Compartment in the hilt for matches and fishline and such.  Saw-backed blade, bottle-opener/can-opener crossguard, compass capping the pommel.

I worked with the compass.  It might be broken as far as magnetic north was concerned, but I impressed upon it my sense of Shada, telling it to align on
her
, instead of trying to align with the planet’s piddly magnetic field.

It worked.  I wasn’t sure it would.  Half the time I do something magical, I’m not sure it’ll work; usually I’m improvising.  I have horrible visions of screwing up a new spell someday and getting sucked into yet another alternate dimension—an even more unpleasant one.  So I pay a lot of attention to my improvisations, much like a man might pay attention to his footing when walking a tightrope—but, sticking to the metaphor, it’s really a plank and I’m just being overcautious.  I can still fall off, but it’s not as bad as I make it out to be.

Then I realized:  Oh, crap.  It worked.  I’d forgotten to work a bypass for the cloaking spell I put on her.  That meant the cloaking spell had worn off.  I hoped nobody
else
was looking for her.

Double crap.  I checked on my own spell, as well as the one on Bronze.  I’d invested a lot more energy into mine, initially, so it was still holding up well.  The one on Bronze was holding up fairly well, despite being less powerful than my own—maybe because she was a magical construct?  I spent a few minutes doing some maintenance on both of them; like mending a sweater that’s trying to come unraveled, I tied off bits and pieces to preserve its structure.  I would remember to maintain both of them in the future!  Then I turned my attention back to the ensorcelled compass.

Now that I had a direction, I mounted up on Bronze and we headed that way.  Our course was roughly northward, bearing slightly to the east.  We kept the new-risen sun on our right and the mountains on our left.

Bronze wanted to run, so I let her; I like roller-coasters and other such rides.  Going over the low hills and rills in the ground was a lot like that.  She could run up the side of a large rise, jump like she was coming off a ramp, and land on the downside of the next one.  Following her is easy; she leaves a couple tons of really big hoofprints and tramples a path right through chest-high grass.  But her hoofprints just stop at the top of a hill, as does the gap she makes… it looks like she ran right up into the sky.

The fact her hoofprints resume on the next hill, headed down, isn’t necessarily going to help anyone’s peace of mind.

I did have a few sharp words with her—mainly “Ow!  Watch it!”—about rough landings; she got better at hitting the slope of the next rise instead of the peak.  That worked out much better and spared me some fang-jarring impacts.  Most of the time, though, we just ran, keeping it slow enough that she didn’t start grass-fires; the leaps were useful for getting a better view, not for covering ground.

I’m not sure how much distance we covered.  It was a while, but the grassland looked endless; there were no landmarks I could spot aside from the Eastrange.  But at the top of one jump, I spied something distant and reined in once we landed.  We proceeded more slowly, sticking mainly to the lower areas while closing in.  We crested a few hills, cautiously, and once or twice I stood up on Bronze’s back to get more height.

Yes.  There was definitely a collection of some sort of tents camped along a creek.  Not teepees or wigwams, but more like yurts. 

Mongols?  Or just the same design?  I wondered how they made the dome shape.  I recalled some tall, springy plants that reminded me of bamboo, but they looked too thin to be useful.  Regardless, they probably had archers, or at least slingers.  They were in line with the compass line to Shada… if nothing else, they might be friendly enough to tell me about what happened to her and the crew.  If they weren’t friendly… well, at least I’d still have some idea of what happened to Shada and the crew.

I sat back down on Bronze and started working on a shielding spell I recalled from my first grimoires.  It was designed for arrows and slings, and I’d started work on modifying it for bullets—how long ago?  I felt pretty confident I could avoid being shot.

That done, we continued at a walk toward the encampment.  I shaded my eyes and sat up in the saddle, looking the place over.

Yes, it was a nice spot to camp.  One of the broader rises of ground provided enough space for about thirty tents; these were scattered along a small stream.  People—dark haired, well tanned, and wearing minimal clothing; maybe winter didn’t hit so hard this side of the range—were at their business around the camp, cooking, cleaning, skinning, crafting.  I saw horses nearby, grazing.  Bronze and I just sat there, waiting.  I didn’t want to just ride into camp and surprise everyone.

We were noticed quickly.  A shout went up and a lot of men mounted up on the horses.  No saddles, no bridles, just bareback and apparently comfortable with that.  I noticed they carried bows.  I congratulated myself on my foresight.  We waited for them.

In short order I had maybe twenty men surrounding me, riding in a circle with me at the center.

Decisions, decisions.  I doubted telepathic spells would be too welcome.  Never clear your throat in someone’s mind when they have a weapon pointed at you; they’re likely to be surprised.  And I don’t
like
doing that; it smacks of messing with people’s heads.  Even if it’s just to talk to them… I don’t like it much.  With the sea-people, I didn’t see much choice.  Here, I wasn’t out of options.

I got down off Bronze and stepped forward, letting her rest her chin on my shoulder.  I stroked her jaw and waited.

Somebody let fly.  It missed me.  That was the nature of the spell.  It simply deflected incoming projectiles slightly.  Of course, the faster the projectile, the harder it has to work.  That’s why the idea of testing it with bullets bothered me a bit.  Even if it hadn’t worked, I was still wearing my vest.  No trouble.

But the arrow, while it missed me, hit Bronze.  The arrowhead—flint, bone, or obsidian?—shattered.

This caused some consternation.  They began a low chant that sounded less than friendly.  Not exactly threatening, but not friendly.  They also slowed and stopped, still in a circle, still aiming at me.