Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  “All right. What brings you back to Karvalen?”

  “You two, of course. And some minor tasks. T’yl has issues with the immortality customers, mostly. Lissette still hasn’t sent for me, so I guess things are going well for her. I hear Bob is doing well, but I should see if I can do anything to help him with his project.”

  “What project?”

  “Oh, he wants to find a way to go back to the moon. He also wants to see if the god of the elves is asleep or something. He’s supposed to find out more about the second one. I’m supposed to work on the first one.”

  “The elves have their own gods?”

  “Just one, or so I’m told. Rendu, if I recall correctly. Rendu created the moons and the elves. Supposedly, Rendu created the world, too, as a playground for the others of his kind. Heru. I think that’s what Bob called them. According to the elves, the Heru are sitting back and watching their racial armies march all over the world, waiting for one race to be victorious.”

  “It seems a bit callous.”

  “It does. Especially since—again, according to Bob—they’re not stopping the sun’s wobble.”

  “Wobble?” she asked, brows drawing together. “The sun ‘wobbles’?”

  “Well, not exactly. It used to run in a perfect arc from east to west and there were no seasons. Now it varies, north and south. Bob says it’s getting more pronounced. But you could ask the Mother. She’s something of a solar deity. She would probably know.”

  “I will,” Tianna assured me. I suspected it would be less a prayer for revelation and more a case of “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “In the meantime, I just wanted to say hello on my way through… and viciously tickle Tymara!” I seized her, pulled her around to my lap, and tickled her, yes, viciously. I also caught the doll and set it aside when it toppled. Tymara squealed and laughed and fought with me, giggling the while. Her hair lit up like a small campfire with a cup of gasoline. I exercised a little caution. Even retracted, my fingernails are overdue for a manicure.

  “Grandfather,” Tianna chided.

  “What? She’s not hurting anything,” I pointed out, still tickle-fighting despite the flames.

  “She needs to learn more control, not keep losing it.”

  “You learn more from failures than you do from success. She needs challenges that require work to overcome, not a string of easy victories.” I stopped tickling Tymara and sat her on my lap again. She laughed breathlessly and hugged me, trying to tickle my ribs and set my shirt on fire. The shirt survived perfectly. I knew this was coming.

  “I’m not sure we can afford to let her burn things indiscriminately.”

  “I never said anything about indiscriminately. But can you afford to let her be less capable of self-discipline than you or Amber?” I held up a hand to stop her reply. “I know. She’s your daughter. You’ll raise her as you see fit. The ancient ancestor from the dawn of time is still going to give you his opinion. Disregard it completely if it suits you.”

  “Thank you, Grandfather.”

  “I’ll still enjoy playing with Tymara,” I added, and tickled her some more, causing another flare of fire.

  Me and my Shadows went strolling down the avenue to the palace area. I cleaned up my usual sunset sweat, checked my messages box, and worked through some letters. Most of it was trash. I don’t answer anything to do with the business of the kingdom. Lissette is in charge. No one is going to circumvent her by appealing to the King. If Lissette wants anything from me, she knows how to reach me directly.

  It surprises me, at least a little, that she hasn’t had to send for me. Then again, I played the role of the Demon King diabolically well when I put her on the throne. Maybe it’s not so surprising.

  The two things I did answer were of a more personal nature. One was a thank-you note from Rogis about sending the Temple of Shadow guys to deal with his son. It was stiffly formal, but that was to be expected. I never did get around to personally fixing his son’s burn scars; all I did was tell Beltar to go help. I still feel bad about the long delay, though.

  The other note was from Jorgen. It wasn’t exactly a thank-you, but more of an update. His daughter, Nina, was doing very well. Apparently, I got her brain repairs right on the second try. I’m still going to kick myself over that whenever I think about it, and Jorgen appears to be willing to help. I can’t say I blame him, but I wish he’d stop sending letters along the lines of “She’s doing quite well, now that you’ve corrected your mistake. Pity it only took a few years out of her childhood while you didn’t notice or care.”

  He phrases it more politely, of course, but it’s what I hear and feel whenever I read them. I don’t know if he wants an apology or expects a good husband to marry her off to. Maybe I should mention it to Lissette.

  I had a scribe write out replies and sent him off to make them go places. I had the perfect opportunity to go back to Apocalyptica… and decided not to. I did promise Bob I’d look into ways to get him and his elf-relatives off this rock and up to the local moon. The last time I was here, I skipped it, choosing instead to slide down to the mountain’s reactor room—and it’s a long, long way down.

  The heart of the mountain is a scary place, but I try to make it less scary however I can. Having four reaction points instead of one gives us more redundancy. Adding a spell subroutine to add more conversion layers as needed is another. Adding some containment spells to shut down any or all of the reaction points is also a way to improve my peace of mind.

  Technical problems I can handle. It’s the social ones that give me hives.

  Yeah, I care more about my pet rock than I do about Bob and his whole race of elves. I’m a bad person. I admit it. Still, maybe it was time I got around to doing something about my promise.

  The gate farther down in the subterranean reaches of my pet rock opened onto the Great Arch of Zirafel. I sent my Shadows back to the temple, stepped through, closed it behind me, and regarded the Plaza of the Arch. By and large, it was unchanged. More grass grew between the stones, more stones were tilting from leafy invaders, but the walls were still there and the buildings still mostly standing. The ruins were transitioning from dusty, desert ruins to temperate, possibly jungle ruins.

  Last time I was here, about three years ago—local time—I brought a small sculpture with me. The mountain set it up as a seed for something larger. I left it at the Edge of the World and let it grow.

  The Edge of the World is, at least around Zirafel, sharply defined. There’s a wall, mostly for pedestrian safety, but it marks the edge of the cliff over the infinite void. After the mountain’s seedling finished its work, I had a workspace/experimental platform.

  The Edge now has a long trench carved perpendicular to it, a recessed ramp of missing rock, like a ship’s drydock. Perfect for building a void-sailing vessel. If it winds up being patterned after a typical sailing ship, it can roll right down into the void and, hopefully, sail right back up into it. If not, I’ll figure something else out.

  On either side of the drydock, thick bridges of stone arch out into space, touching the mystic barrier of the Firmament. This invisible shield over the world keeps the creatures of the Outer Darkness at bay once the sun vanishes for the night.

  The fact the sun does that still annoys the hell out of me.

  Anyway, the Firmament is the true dividing line between the world and the not-world—the dark void of chaos beyond. It generally doesn’t touch the world, as far as I know, so it’s moderately difficult, or at least inconvenient, to walk up to it and study it.

  Now I can.

  So I did. I put those bridges in place for that exact reason, after all. I walked out to the end of one, sat down, cast multiple sensory spells, and got down to business like a Chinese army captain training new recruits.

  Hours later, I had considerably more information about the fundamental nature of the Firmament.

  It’s not only a shield against demonic invasion. It’s vital to the survi
val of everyone in the world in more immediate ways.

  Take the sun, for instance. The thing isn’t as big as the one I’m familiar with. It’s created every morning in the miracle of the dawn, in a very literal sense. It arcs up and over the world, finally sinking below the level of the world and vanishing in, I presume, the cataclysm of the sunset, if that’s the opposite of a miracle. The Mountains of the Sun lie generally under its path, with the Burning Desert running alongside them, with a gradual cooling of the climate as you get farther away from the equatorial mountain range.

  Environmentally, the Firmament traps heat, keeping it inside the world. It also acts as a sort of radiator, spreading the heat more evenly. The Firmament—if you can get to it—is warmer than the surrounding air.

  I suspect the Edge of the World is habitable much farther north than the middle portions. With the Firmament close at hand, the weather must be warmer in those regions. It might not be enough in the extreme north, but the frost line might curve more than I thought. If we could change the shape of the Firmament, have it descend more sharply in the middle as it goes north, portions of the frozen reaches might be much more inviting. But, hey, nobody asked me when they designed it. Maybe there’s a good reason for its shape. Or maybe it was simply a plain geometric figure and the designer couldn’t be bothered about it.

  So, yes, it does act as a barrier against demonic entities from Beyond the World, although now I’m not entirely certain that’s its primary function.

  How it works—no, strike that—why it works is beyond me. This is not my sort of magic at all. Just by “monkey see, monkey do,” I’m pretty sure I can break it or fix it, at least at the local level. I’m even moderately confident I can make something to perform the same function. The difference is, my version will be a magical one, built in ways I understand, not like the original. Kind of like looking at a basic electric motor, most people can spot the melted wire and replace it without understanding magnets, electricity, and so forth. That’s the Firmament. I don’t understand how it works, but if the power goes out, I’ll have to build a waterwheel and a gear system to turn whatever the electric motor was turning.

  If I can work out the details of a magical version of the Firmament, it’s a long, helpful step toward a ship designed to successfully sail through the void.

  My next step was to examine the stuff of the void in more detail—another reason to have a bridge to nowhere, or to infinity, depending on how you look at it. I don’t think most mortals can see the Things out there, and few of them are foolish enough to want to. I need to know what’s outside the world if I expect to transport living elves through it. I can poke a stick through the Firmament and see what happens.

  Chaos beasties don’t like the sunlight, so they’re absent during the day. At night, on the other hand, I can watch them swim or fly or otherwise locomote themselves around out there. I scanned all around, carefully, before trying anything. There weren’t any in my immediate vicinity, so I did a little investigating of the void before something came by to investigate me.

  The void beyond the Firmament isn’t empty. It’s void of form, but there’s definitely something out there. I poked a stick through the Firmament and watched it slowly dissolve, changing shape and color as it did so. Yeah, an artificial firmament seemed like a good safety feature for any void-sailing vessel, now for two very good reasons. It could keep the vessel from being dissolved in the environment, and it could keep the occupants from being eaten by the Things living in the environment.

  As I sat there, on a bridge to infinity, examining the end of a chaos-dissolved stick, I finally noticed the world around me. There are drawbacks to being so tightly focused, sometimes. I detected the smell of smoke and, very faintly, even to my ears, what sounded like a baby crying.

  In Zirafel? The haunted city on the Edge of the World? The City of Bones? Who brings a baby into such a place? I understand adventurers—or archaeologists—go looking around ancient cities, but infants are notoriously uninterested in dusty ruins on the edge of nowhere. Ask any of them.

  I sighed, pointlessly, and climbed to my feet. I’m constitutionally unable to ignore these things.

  Finding the source of the wailing wasn’t too hard. The vines and grasses did a good job crawling over most of the city, softening the echoes from the stone, but I have good ears and Zirafel is an unusually quiet place. Following the sound was straightforward, if somewhat tedious. I tracked it for a couple of miles across the metropolitan ruins. The source was a hole in a wall. I glanced inside, carefully, not wanting to expose my face to crossbow bolts, magical blasts, or even thrown rocks.

  The interior was a space formed by toppled columns and masonry. I couldn’t call it a room. It made a good den, though, for the three children inside. An older girl, a younger boy, and an infant huddled together. The girl held and rocked the baby, trying to calm it. The boy was curled up, apparently asleep. All three were dirty and, if my vampire eyes were any judge, hungry, thirsty, and exhausted.

  I regarded the moon. A bit past midnight and too dark to see well… right. Disguise spells first, then a silent retreat to a safe distance. A light spell—wait. Before I start a light, why do I smell smoke? They don’t have a fire and they’re obviously somewhat distressed. Will my light attract unwelcome attention to the area?

  A quick look around found the source of the smoke. Someone tried to settle in Zirafel. Some of the streets along the southeastern edge were cleared of vines and encroaching grasses. Buildings were either repaired or torn down and their stones recycled. At least, they were until someone came along, put dozens of people to the sword, and burned anything they didn’t take. Judging by the state of the fires, this probably happened earlier that day, possibly around the time I was talking to T’yl.

  I nudged the pile of burnt corpses, noting a mix of body parts, lots of broken bones, and a tiny, charred hand sticking out of the pile.

  Looking down the southern road, I could just make out a crowd of people shuffling slowly away. A hundred? Two hundred? It was hard to tell how many from my vantage, but I could see them well enough to note the chains. Two horsemen brought up the rear, encouraging them to continue shuffling, with several more paralleling the line. They were moving along at the captives’ best speed, as though in a hurry to get away from the City of Bones. Maybe they didn’t want to be near it at night or camp too close even during the day. It used to be pretty severely haunted.

  I swore. Repeatedly. I’m not in Linnaeus’ league, but I know more languages.

  All right. The three surviving children aren’t in any danger at the moment. The other guys appear to be slavers.

  I swore some more, simply because I felt like it. I also drew my sword, deactivated my disguise spells, and activated the combat-related magic in my amulet.

  Sprinting down an ancient road is so simple even I can do it. I caught up to the slow-moving train of people, veered silently to the side to make a steep approach from the right. I leaped up and over to decapitate one of the rearguards and carry on over him to take the other one neatly out of the saddle with a flying tackle. I did it so fast their horses didn’t even react to my presence. The one formerly under the tackled man simply snorted as his rider dismounted suddenly.

  As I suspected, neither of the beasts panicked at the smell of blood. They were accustomed to it.

  A quick crunching noise upon landing and I was on my feet again, racing up the line of prisoners. Most were uninjured, or at worst walking wounded. Presumably, anyone too hurt to walk was left on the pile and burned. The slave-chain was comprised of men and women, mostly, but a few children were also clinking along. They were universally too dejected to pay attention to anything more than where they put their feet, so my overlapping-shadows camouflage made me, for practical purposes, invisible in the night.

  Starting at the back and working my way forward, twelve more horsemen went the way of their pre-deceasors before I reached the head of the line. There were three wagons, two load
ed with provisions and equipment, and the third designed as a mobile home. I came up on them silently in the darkness and ran right up over the back of the rearmost supply wagon. The driver and his mate both died suddenly. I pulled the lever of the handbrake and gently tugged on both the reins and the vitality of the horses. They were willing to stop, which freed me to spring forward and race for the next supply wagon. Wash, rinse, repeat.

  However, this did not go completely unnoticed. The mobile home wagon had a driver and his mate facing forward, of course, but also had a guard sitting on top, facing the rear. He didn’t see much. The lights on his wagon were the only real lights in the entire troop. But when the wagon immediately behind droped back and stopped, it was hard to miss, even by moonlight, to say nothing of the whole of the slave caravan coming to a halt.

  He called to his driver and banged on the roof to wake the people within. I sprang up behind the wagon, punched him hard enough to break his nose, and sent him skidding across the roof and into the driver. Gravity drew me back down and I only waited a moment before someone inside opened the door. Up top, the driver and his mate cursed and shouted and argued while their injured fellow moaned in pain, coughing up blood.

  The instant the door cracked open, I yanked it the rest of the way, grabbed the guy opening it by the throat, and made a fist. He didn’t say anything, obviously, but he fell down and started thrashing. I ignored him and went in to use claws. Close quarters and all that. A sword is outstanding when you’ve got the room for it, but when you’re nose-to-nose with someone in a cramped space, you want something smaller. Mary likes her knives. I think my fingernails work beautifully for the personal touch.

  Afterward, there were two survivors. Both of them were naked women, bolted to the floor by their collars. Allow me to leave the rest to the imagination.

  The shouting from above intensified, demanding to know what the hell was going on, or something to that effect. They stopped the wagon to sort things out, but I was done with the interior before they even set the brake.