Nightlord: Sunset (82 page)

“It appears you are a wizard after all,” Tamara noted, eyeing the mess.

I flicked a hand at one of the pottery shards; it jumped obediently into hand.

“I don’t understand,” I said, turning the shard over and over.  “Last night, I couldn’t levitate a leaf.”  I snapped my fingers at a candle; the Fabulous Firestarter spell worked perfectly.  “I can work magic again!”

“Then let us count ourselves fortunate.  Mayhap your powers return but slowly.”

“Maybe,” I agreed.  I gathered up some moisture into a mist and played with it like a ball, passing it from hand to hand.  “I’m just relieved to be able to spell again.”

She smiled as she ate.  “Go help your patient,” she suggested.  “If there is a need, summon me and I will help.”

I let the ball dissipate and kissed her cheek.  “I’ll bear that in mind.  But this wizardry problem has me worried.”

“You will be fine,” she answered.  “Go on.  I will be with Raeth, preparing to head south.”

So I did.  It really wasn’t that hard to fix his problem; a little encouragement to a muscle or two to grow stronger… that was all it took.  But he was as good as his word; we trooped over to the stage and he presented me with the end of Muldo’s chain and the key to the collar.  He even let Muldo keep the skin or rug or whatever it was.  We parted company and I took Muldo back to the shack. 

“All right,” I began.  “I suppose you’re wondering what your new duties are.”

“Yes, master,” he answered, looking down.

I gritted my teeth.  “First of all, you’re not to call me that.  Call me anything you like as long as it’s polite.  But this whole ‘master’ business ends now.”

“As you say, m— my lord?”

“That’ll do.  Second, your main duties aren’t aimed at me; you’ll be answering to my lady.”

“Your lady?  —my lord?”

“You’ve seen the red-haired woman?”

“Oh!  The fire-witch.  I never thought I would see one!  Yes, sir!”

“She’s working on growing a pair of children.  You’ll be seeing to it she is as comfortable and cared-for as you can.  If you do it well, you’ll have your freedom when the children are born—and you can stay on as a paid helper.  Room and board and some pocket change.  Understand me?”

He looked at me like I’d just handed him the keys to the castle treasury.  “Yes, sir!  Thank you, sir!”

“All right.  Can you ride a horse?”

“I have never tried, sir.”

“Right.  Then let’s get you something warm to wear and see if we can find you a seat on a wagon.  Am I going to need to keep that chain on you?”

“No, sir,” he said, and I could see he meant it.  “I’ll not try to run.”

I took the chain in hand and touched the last link of it, where it joined the iron collar.  A spell drew out the heat of it, chilling it until it had cold vapor rolling off it in a cloudy waterfall.  I held the collar in one hand, the chain in the other, and twisted the link sharply; it jarred Muldo a bit, but the super-cooled link shattered.

“I’ll take the collar off with my own hands, Muldo.  That much I promise you.  Let’s go.”

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28
TH

W
hen Raeth, Bouger, and I were traveling north to Crag Keep, I thought we were going slower than a greased turtle on tranquilizers.  I was wrong.  We’re making headway southward, but it’s slow. 
Slow
.  Bloody damn slow.  Marching men and creaking wagons can’t make time like cavalry.

The only bright spot is that there isn’t any mud; it’s too cold for that.  And we don’t get rained on; we get snowed on.

I used to like snow.  I used to like it a lot.  I liked watching it fall, liked watching a cold, crisp morning unfold, liked the pristine whiteness of a snowy field, and liked making snowballs and snow forts and snowmen.  I liked looking at it through a window while sitting in a warm room.  I liked playing in it, and then going inside to have a hot drink.

That was before I had to travel in it.  Constantly.

I’m learning to hate being cold.  Whoever thought of calling snow a blanket?  A blanket is warm.  A blanket of snow is a recipe for frostbite.  That metaphor seems completely stupid—now!

Let me see, what else is there to note?

Oh, I’ve fiddled and experimented with magic.  I can cast spells during the day; once my mortality wears off, I lose the magic.  I can
see
magic at night; that doesn’t appear to be affected.  But I can’t
touch
it.  It’s maddening.  If I want to do anything as a wizard, it’s got to be as a purely mortal wizard.  So a magical disguise has to be readied in the evening, before sunset; I can’t just go wandering around as pale as a sheet of paper without causing talk.  Just in case, I’ve taken to wearing gloves, a hood, and a scarf; at least it’s winter and I can get away with that.

Maybe I burned something out?  As a nightlord, I can pump a lot of power out.  Could be I strained something.  Or maybe it’s that illness after the demon’s bite.  I don’t know how I can tell, nor what I can do about it if I ever do find out.

The good news is that my tendrils and my telekinesis—if they aren’t just aspects of the same thing—seem to be more recovered.  I can lift and tote with my mind, day or night, which gives me hope I may make a full recovery someday.  In the meantime, I’m otherwise cut off from doing anything magical while I’m dead.

It used to bother me a lot.  For
weeks
, I didn’t even feel like keeping my journal up-to-date, and I’m sorry about that.  I was snappish and depressed and generally less than convivial.  Raeth and Bouger put on their yes-sir-no-sir formal faces and did an even better job of keeping people from bothering me.  Tamara let me get away with it because she loves me—I think—and knew why I was upset.

You’d think I wouldn’t mind so much.  I could still work magic during the day, right?  Well, how would you feel if you could only see and hear during the day?  If you could only stand up and walk during the day?  Or if you could only speak while the sun was up?

Tamara is the sunshine in my life.  True, at night we’ve always been a little tense.  After all, I can only get it up during the day and I don’t retain body heat very well at night.  So it’s hard for her to completely forget that the person she’s cuddling in bed is a
corpse that hasn’t quit moving.
  Tamara tried.  She went to great lengths to make me feel appreciated, necessary, and loved.

Let me give you an example.  During the daylight hours, she insisted we have afternoon naps.  These were excuses to get some quite time to ourselves for physical enjoyment of each other.  She touched me and I touched her and we found pleasures of many sorts, intense, lingering, erotic, and romantic.  In the evenings, we went for long walks—“Taking her exercise,” she calls it—and talked about me:  My past, my old girlfriends, my time before coming to this world, my time
in
this world, Sasha, Shada, Jon, Baron Baret… Everything I’ve said or done or felt, she wanted to know.

She asked about me.  She insisted on knowing.  She
listened
.

Okay, I have to face it:  I love her.  Nobody else would have insisted I whine about my life like that for weeks on end.

On another note, Muldo has slipped right into my extended family.  He’s helpful, cheerful, and just plain nice.  I may have to tell him to get away from Tamara; I find I can’t even help her up onto a wagon—Muldo is
right there
.  I think he’s psychic.

Hellas
is still recovering from trying to feed herself to me; physically, she’s fine—it’s her essence that’s been bitten to the quick.  (And I still feel bad about that.  I know she volunteered… but that’s not the point.)  In order to have a chance at being alone with Tamara, I’ve had to give Muldo double duty, keeping Hellas fed and warm in the back of another wagon.  He even keeps track of Hellas’ boy, Esmun, while he’s caring for Hellas.  Muldo’s got more energy than a jackrabbit on speed. 

When I’m not with Tamara, I’ve been busily arranging for lectures, getting a head start on school—it’s a distraction from being magically half-crippled.  It’s amazing what you can learn while traveling; it keeps you from being bored out of your skull with watching the feet go up and down.  I’ve also had a pleasant surprise:  Bouger has a talent for math.  Everyone can now count, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.  We’re working on fractions, even the kids.

Yes, I said “count.”  Most of these followers had to take off clothes to count above ten.  And almost
no one
can read.  I never realized just how illiterate this society is.

There’s something just wrong about that.  If I hadn’t already decided to build a school, that would have done it.  Literacy is something I take for granted, or used to.  Ever since my worries about learning to read Rethven, I’ve been grateful for my ability to drink my way to an education, even if I’ve been hesitant to use it.  I consider it a beneficial side effect, but not a sufficient reason on its own.

So we’ve also been working on the alphabet.  The Rethven alphabet has thirty-one characters, but the alphabet song can be changed a bit to accommodate it.  I wonder if there’s ever been a troop of men marching to an alphabet cadence before.

We still have weapon practice every evening when we camp; we don’t always make it to a town before nightfall.  An hour or so before sunset, the combatants get out practice weapons and we all have a go at each other.  Fortunately, Tamara now has the time and energy to see to it that everyone recovers from minor injuries; we wouldn’t risk it without her.  We’d lose too much time to injuries; being clocked by a big stick isn’t a picnic—it’s just better than being sliced by an edge.  But everyone enjoys it; it’s like having all the guys over for a violent version of basketball every night.

Raeth is the most skilled of us all, so he does most of the teaching.  Bouger makes a good assistant instructor.  I make a good practice dummy.  It’s hard for me to gain skill in sparring; I beat people.  I spend a lot of time on drill, and they’ve started double-double-teaming me at practice—two teams of two men with practice weapons try to jump me at once, to teach them teamwork.

It’s working; I lose fairly regularly.  Before sundown, anyway.  I haven’t tried sparring with anyone at night.  I’m a little afraid to try; I’m stronger than I was before the dragon, as well as faster.  I don’t want to accidentally break anyone.

What else, what else…

I’m slowly rebuilding my accustomed size; I eat everything in sight during the day and drink the rest at night.  My trousers
don’t threaten to fall down if I don’t have a tight-cinched belt.  I’m disproportionally pleased with that.  Forever ago, when I was always alive, I was considering a diet to deal with a starter set of stomach.  Now I’m trying like hell to
gain
weight.  I should be more careful what I wish for.

Yesterday, I bought another wagon, specifically for Tamara and
Hellas; it’s a lot like a
gata
wagon.  Anyone who winds up on the binnacle list gets to ride, but this wagon is specifically for these two ladies—and me; I always wanted a mobile home.  Bronze is very understanding about hauling it.  We’ll get more horses as soon as we can.  Someday, I’ll get a great big chain and hitch all the wagons to it to let Bronze try and pull them all, like a locomotive hauling cars.  Someone will have to steer each wagon, I think, but it would free up the other horses for riders… we might make better time.

The scary thing is I think Bronze can do it.  So does she.

On another note, I had an idea about finding students and teachers and people who would generally love my school.  The Calling can be used to summon people who match whatever criteria I want to sort for.  Divining magic can be used to find individuals with certain qualities.  So I invented magical radar.  Low-powered radar, to be sure; I don’t want to spend more power than I have to.  Tossing big spells can attract attention.

Remember my rock-in-a-pond metaphor?  Well, the spell is a lot like that.  I use a Calling framework to define the qualities of the person I want—a deep-seated curiosity, a desire to know, and a general willingness to work well with others—and use it like a divination.  The “ripples” go out from me to cover a whole village or town; they pass through everyone and everything
except
for the people who match.  Those reflect the “ripples” and I see the person appear to glow in my vision.  Also, the spell attracts their attention toward
me
—people with these qualities can’t help but notice me.

With some modification, I think I have the makings of a good bug zapper.  But that’s another story.

I found Kerrin with my curiosity-radar.  He’s an older man with a distinct lack of hair and enough wrinkles to keep a dry cleaner busy for weeks.  He was dressed in rags and scribbling in the dirt of a town square when he wasn’t begging for food.

He used to be a merchant; he got lost in the math, though, and let business slip.  I never knew anyone could get addicted to numbers.

When I found him, he was trying to work out the relationships of the various sides of triangles.  He hadn’t reinvented trigonometry, but he was trying.  He
has
developed the Pythagorean Theorem all on his own; I’m not sure if that’s a product of genius or obsession.  Right now, he’s in the back of a wagon, hopefully eating something, and blissfully playing with an abacus.  It took me a while to remember how to make one, but it was worth it.  I don’t have charcoal marks all over every flat surface, now.

I must invest the time to re-invent the pencil and the slipstick.

There are a few others like him, but not as many as I might have hoped.  Curiosity seems to be at a low ebb around here.  Most of the curious ones don’t care to leave with a traveling troupe of strangers, no matter how appealing their charismatic and charming leader happens to be.  They prefer the security of the business/farm/job.  I can’t really blame them.  Getting The Next Meal is high on the list of priorities for any lowborn in this kind of society.  Altogether, our numbers have swelled by an overwhelming
eight
. 

Still, it hasn’t been that long.  We still have a long way to go.

Tamara is about four months along, now; we had a little crying session the other morning when she tried to wear a skirt and it wouldn’t fit around her middle.  It was sort of a mixed weeping, both in despair that she’s horribly fat and looks like a cow, and joy at the evidence that she’s going to have babies.  She believes me when I tell her she’s beautiful, but doesn’t believe it for long.  I keep telling her.

We have our cuddle and nuzzle in our wagon; I have a rule—and Raeth enforces it—we don’t stop for anything short of a busted wheel.  Tamara is going to add two more to our company in a few months; wherever we are, it better be a good spot.  We won’t be going anywhere for a while once she spawns.  I’d rather be at my mountain beforehand.

I think I am in love.  Tamara is intelligent, charming, tolerant, and understanding.  She’s also beautiful, especially so with a swelling belly—even if she doesn’t see it that way.  And she’s getting more beautiful.  She’s also frisky in bed; I’m wondering if that’s normal for a woman as far along as she is, or if it’s just her, or if all fire-witches are like that.

She’s also a priestess of a very apparent and powerful goddess, and everyone—I say again,
everyone
—in our expedition has converted.  Even me, although I have less of a devotion and more of an acknowledgement.  I don’t actively adore her goddess, but I do know She exists.  I met Her, after all.  Evidence doesn’t do much for faith, I’ve discovered.

Besides, a certain shape-shifting goddess has been on my mind.  I don’t even know her name.

Other notes…

I’m exceptionally pleased at Raeth and Bouger.  These two are competent officers and able lieutenants.  I shudder to think what sort of disaster this trip would be without them.  This is no time for on-the-job training; I’m just watching and learning.  Everyone in the group acknowledges me
as their lord.  Given.  But I’d be swamped with requests, questions, and pleas if it weren’t for these two.  I’ve heard them use a lot of phrases over and over:

“He’s not to be disturbed.”