by Garon Whited
“It has come to my attention the worship of this being causes an intense and overwhelming pleasure. I believe it to be a subtle form of control rather than a blessing. This is uncharacteristic of the Lord of Light, but does seem to follow the new mode since the upheaval within that religion.”
“Do you mean the first switch, when the Devourer ate the original? Or the second switch, when I killed the Devourer and some opportunistic being took over the Lord of Light’s position?”
“The second, Na’irethed zarad’na.” I noted the change in address. It probably had something to do with god-slaying and other theological matters.
“Then yes, I’ve heard. Do we have a way to cure someone of this divinely-inspired pleasure addiction?”
“Cure?” Bob asked, legitimately puzzled. “The final physician seems effective. Few, if any, wish to be cured of religious ecstacy. There is only one cure for fanaticism.”
“Ah. I see. Do they give good sport in the arenas?”
“A few,” he agreed. “If they can be convinced their only hope of being allowed a priest to attend them is to be victorious, they fight like wild things—savage and unrelenting. Most fall into despair and will not even hope. I believe the one Her Majesty has is one of the latter sort.”
“Lissette has a Light-worshipper as a captive?”
“In a manner of speaking. He came to the Palace in disguise, bearing messages from the deveas of the Church of Light, or so he claimed. In truth, he seems to be a rebel priest, but my sources in the Palace are somewhat compromised by having other spies crowd them.”
“How about I simply ask Lissette?”
“That is likely to be more effective, Dread Lord.”
“Good.” I stood up and he stood with me.
“May I impose upon you, Dread Lord?”
“For…?”
“Since you are here, would it be inconvenient to ask for your personal blessing upon the games?”
“I’m listening.” I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it, but I was listening.
“As you may know, those who show cowardice in the arena or attempt to escape are sentenced to death by burning. It would be a much-welcomed sign if you would consent but once to kill them yourself, after the evening ceremonies.”
I thought about it. Criminals sentenced to the fighting pits being executed? I didn’t particularly care for it, but I’ve done things I don’t particularly care for. I agreed, reluctantly, because of compelling reasons. First, Bob was my guy, my chosen agent, and he thought this would help him out. Second… well, I can be quick and painless. Burning to death is neither. And third, the Lord of Shadow was tired, having labored on my behalf. If I stood in front of a wildly-cheering crowd of thousands upon thousands, absorbing the energies they directed at me, channeling them…
I rummaged around in my headspace and found my Demon King hat. Sadly, it still fit.
The sun went down, magical lights came up—
Huh. I just realized. The sun over Karvalen is a magical light. It’s more disturbing to think of it that way than as an ongoing fusion bomb a few thousand miles away. I guess everything is strange if you’re used to something else.
—and I went out to meet the meat.
Standing at the bottom of the giant well that was the arena, I realized my error. The crowd was easily a hundred thousand strong, probably more. It was an unnerving experience.
The crowd had just finished watching a bloody event of some sort—the sunset performance. A human, an orku, and a galgar were chained together at the waist, in a triangle, giving each of them about three feet of space. There were several teams of these composite combatants in a large free-for-all. I don’t know the rules and I probably don’t want to. It was bloody, though, and fresh enough to crawl through the sand to me.
When I walked onto the sand through the door beneath the Royal Box, the crowd cheered even louder. I’m not sure they recognized me. All they saw was a man in black armor and black cloak, carrying a big sword.
It was interesting to see how various races and cultures didn’t seem to care too much about who was sitting next to them. Judging by the clothes, a small group of viksagi sat between an ogre and a family of galgar. They all ignored each other in favor of the events.
There’s nothing like bloodshed and slaughter for bringing people together.
The floor of the arena had possibly a hundred doors, all leading to something different. Whether the staff dumped a hundred men into the area or a pair of monsters, the underground setup let them do it with a minimum risk and a maximum of drama. The area behind each door had a second door, airlock fashion. If the competitor—or victim—didn’t care to go into the arena, he could stand there in his own little cul-de-sac until someone got around to him. If the staff didn’t like the delay, there were murder holes through the tunnel-side door, presumably for spears and other encouragements.
In this case, they sent in the condemned, a dozen or so of various races. Nobody hung back, so the staff shut the doors behind them.
I extended tendrils like an invisible cloud of death. I didn’t feed on the crowd, but the cheering slowly died.
Interesting. Did the wizards in the crowd see it? Or is it something people can instinctively sense? Or…
I turned to look behind me. Yes, my shadow was larger than it should be and seemed to have huge, sweeping wings. My cloak was also spreading out, growing larger.
Don’t ask me how they do that.
It did give me an idea, though. My cloak can obviously change shape and size. To a much more limited extent, it can change color, ranging from empty nothingness to more regular shades of black. Okay, so it doesn’t change color so much as it changes texture, maybe. The point being, if it can grow in size, how large can it get?
It flowed downward, pooled at my feet, and spread outward behind me. It touched the wall at the edge of the combat area and started filling in the area of floor behind me. I frowned, counting seconds. Was it gaining area at about a square meter a second? Maybe two? I did a crude eyeball estimate. If the arena floor is a hundred meters across—it’s larger than that, but I’m doing napkin-level calculations—it’ll take an hour, possibly two, to cover it.
Regardless of how large the arena floor is, covering it in cloak isn’t practical. If I ever need to drop a hundred-meter-wide thing into oblivion, we can do it, but we’ll need hours and hours of warning. As things were, it would be so slow as to be boring, and it doesn’t do to bore the crowd.
We walked forward, me and my shadows, and the condemned scattered, desperate to stay out of reach.
Well, crap. Did I want to chase them? Is it dignified to chase after them? I mean, if I do the whole supernatural speed thing, that’s gut-wrenching and terrifying for the victim, but what about spectators? Image is important when you’re a quasi-deity, and he needed a boost.
All right, let’s see if we can get away with not running.
I gestured at the nearest, aiming for a leg. My tendrils writhed together into a tentacle of invisible darkness and snapped like a whip at my target. I knocked his leg out from under him and seized him by the ankle. He screamed as I made a pulling gesture, dragging him to me across the sand. The crowd resumed cheering. He clawed at the ground, leaving furrows the whole way.
I considered him with some interest. He was a human male, possibly thirty, with a nasty cut across his chest—probably the wound that made him think he could play dead to get out of serving his sentence. His soul was a typical soul, stained here and there, except for a few extra-rotten spots. I’m not sure what he did, but between my examination and the knowledge of how the court of divine enlightenment works, I was willing to agree he didn’t need to be in the world.
I focused on the Lord of Shadow, my other, psychic self. He acknowledged he heard me, and I killed the man as quickly as I could. Thereafter, for show, I was considerably more messy in ripping the body apart and the cheering doubled. Blood followed me over the sand as I walked toward the next condemned criminal.
The energy of the death, the power of his life, even the trembling eagerness of the crowd flowed through me to my altar ego.
Walking, always walking, was the right choice, I decided. It was dignified, yes, but it also gave the whole thing an air of inevitability, of timelessness. Running was futile. There was nowhere to hide, no way to resist, and running simply meant they would die tired. I kept lashing invisible tendrils of darkness around, flicking them through the future corpses. Bit by bit, this sapped their strength and slowed them. It helped even more that my shadow and my cloak, acting on their own, tended to fall in odd directions, as though attempting to cut off those who would run around me.
One galgar ran over the dark spread of my cloak, in sheer desperation. The darkness opened up like a yawning chasm and the galgar, screaming, disappeared into it. The crowd shrieked louder.
On the other side, my shadow seized a human, wrapped around him like a winged thing, engulfed him in a pillar of misty grey something, and released his corpse to fall to the sands. Surprisingly, I felt the energies of his life flow into me. Is my shadow some sort of manifestation of my tendrils? It could be related, somehow. Interesting.
The rest of the condemned avoided my dark wings as hard as they avoided me.
One man and a pair of orku did try to gang up on me, so points for bravery there. They had no weapons, of course, but they charged together. I respected that. It’s not often I’ve ever seen humans and orku getting along. They sit in the stands together without much trouble and, apparently, will fight together if their lives are at stake. I took it as a good sign while I killed them.
When the three came at me, I lashed tendrils at the two behind the big orku. I wasn’t going for their vitality, but for their knees. My tendrils can cut like wire, and when one wraps around a knee and slices to the bone, running ceases to be an option.
The orku leading the charge, on the other hand, I seized by an outstretched hand, turned, pulled, and swung around. He roared in fury and fear until I slammed him down, hard, and ripped him open with my claws.
It’s hard to get the spine out of a humanoid. I wanted to get the goggle-eyed head on the end of a meaty spinal column, but I’ll have to get more practice. Figuring it out in the arena didn’t seem like a good time. All I got was a couple of vertebrae from the lumbar region. There’s a lot of muscle connected to the spine, along with those always-inconvenient ribs. Still, a fistful of vertebrae came out along with his life.
The other two, limping badly, scrambled away. One screamed as I seized him with my tendril-tentacle and drew him back toward me. The other screamed and scrambled faster.
It takes a little while to tendril-touch the vitality out of someone. There are variables such as how much focus I can muster, how much force I’m willing to use, and how far away they are. Chasing people around an arena is not considered ideal conditions. Still, a little bit here, a little bit there, and a little bit more all adds up over the course of several minutes. When one fell, I walked up to him as he gasped and crawled and inched away, pulled out the last of his living essence, and gave the crowd a show. The crowd didn’t need to know I was ripping apart a dead man. I tried to make each one suitably gory and impressive. The crowd cheered at every dismemberment, so I guess I succeeded.
All in all, the executions were, I think, far more interesting than immolations. Firebrand seemed to think so, since nobody got up to leave.
They do that to me, sometimes, it admitted. I don’t get it. There are fires! Sure, it’s the last part of the show, but is that any excuse to slide out early?
Some people have no manners, I pointed out. It grumbled but had no reply. I refocused my attention as the last of the sand gave up its crimson cargo.
Are you up there? I asked.
Yes. Yes, I am. And I am utterly amazed at how helpful this… this… this has been. The roar of the crowd is good. Excellent, in fact, since they’re directing their energies at you, and therefore into me. This whole human sacrifice thing, too—I may have to get into that.
You are kidding, right?
Yes. Yes, I am. But it’s interesting to encounter the phenomenon. I’m not sure why human, rather than animal sacrifice, has such an energizing effect. I still won’t be doing any major miracles, but, tentatively, I should be able to answer prayers.
Happy to help. Does this mean I can expect you to give the mountains the old celestial eyeball?
I’ll have something for you by the time you finish experimenting with my tuned crystal.
That’s fair.
I did a victory lap around the arena, hands raised, followed by cloak and shadow, maximizing the celestial input of the crowd. I exited through the door under the Royal Box.
It’s weird to feel… I don’t know. Popular.
Bronze was all for running to Carrillon, but, with the sun already set and the delay of some rather drawn-out executions, I was in more of a hurry. I could have spent the night in Stadius, but I announced my presence. Anyone looking for the Demon King, or just for a nightlord, would already be eyeballing Stadius.
Let’s be honest. I’m a coward. There are people out there who love danger, live for thrills, and delight in combat. Mary springs to mind, the lovable little weirdo. I don’t.
I didn’t have a gate on hand, but the undercity of Stadius has lots of unenchanted doorways. From a power standpoint, going from Stadius to Carrillon was possible, but exhausting. Oddly enough, it made more sense to backtrack to the mountain. A makeshift gateway connecting to a random doorway in Carrillon power-intensive. A makeshift gate connecting to one of my primary gates in Karvalen would draw mostly on the power reserves there. Then opening a new gate to Carrillon would be easy.
One of the counterintuitive things about gates is how going the long way around is often the cheapest way to get there.
Getting to Karvalen, as I expected, wasn’t too difficult. Getting to the Palace in Carrillon was more troublesome. I know all about the shielding and defensive measures around the palace in Karvalen, so I know how to bypass them—I know the combinations for the locks, if you like. The magical defenses around the Palace of Carrillon, however, aren’t my creations and I haven’t examined them in detail. I don’t know them or how to slide by them. I had to fumble around for a while, hunting for someplace outside their scryshields, blocking spells, and whatever else.
Finally, I locked on to a stable—the same one we used before, I think—and Bronze and I stepped through as though stepping out of the building. We didn’t even disturb the horses. Bronze stayed in her stealth mode and we took a short run to the palace.
Hogarth wasn’t on the night shift for door duty. Well, it’s been close to a decade since I last passed the portals. I guess I have to expect things to change. The new guy was Rannel, a smooth-voiced, well-mannered fellow with a helpful air. I liked him. He didn’t ooze smarmy obsequiousness. I also didn’t get the feeling he would sell me out to any handshake with a coin in it.
I never cared much for Hogarth, in case you missed it.
Bronze elected to visit the stables. The Palace floors would probably hold her, but finding even one weak spot was not on her list of things to do. I advised the boy to bring her wood, not hay. He gazed at the heights of Mount Bronze and agreed without argument. I hung my helmet on her saddlehorn but tucked my gauntlets into my belt.
Rannel showed me inside, led me to the Royal Chambers and departed to announce my arrival to the Queen. I sat quietly in the receiving room and meditated on the wisdom of showing up when normal people were awake.
I noticed Rannel didn’t offer me refreshment. Then again, on this side of the Eastrange, I’m known as the Demon King for bloody and disturbing reasons. Offering a snack to the Demon King is kind of like… like running screaming through the tiger enclosure at the zoo, throwing raw hamburger at them. Don’t try this at home. It’ll annoy whoever does the cleaning. And don’t try this at the zoo. It’ll annoy the lawyers and, to some extent, the tigers.
On second thought
, if you’re the type who needs to be told not to try this, go ahead and do it. Evolution in action.
Lissette came in, flanked by one of the twins and by Kammen. Eight years of ruling took its toll on everyone. Malana or Malena, whichever it was, merely seemed older, more mature, but Lissette’s hair was flecked and streaked with grey. She seemed not only older, but worn, like a statue in the elements. From the elaborate way she dressed, I hadn’t woken her. I wasn’t sure if the sword was a regular part of her wardrobe, though. I stood as she entered the room.
“Good evening,” I offered. She nodded and took a seat. I sat when she sat.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t really want anything,” I admitted, startled and somewhat taken aback. “I’m in the area and I haven’t heard from you in quite some time. I thought I’d stop in, say hello, see how things are, check in, all that sort of thing. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Eager to destroy the enemies of the State?”
“Not so much, no. If you wanted anything of that nature, you’d have told me so. I thought I’d pay a social call and see if there was anything else I might do for you.”
“No, I don’t think you can do anything for me.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Uh… okay.”
There was a long, awkward pause.
“So,” I said, to fill the silence, “how are the kids?”
“Fine.”
One-word answers are never a good sign. I’ve done something. I’ve not done something. There’s something, that’s for sure. Lissette didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t need to see it in her spirit.
“All right. I’m only in town for a little bit, and only to help out however I might. If there’s nothing, I’ll stop in on a couple of other friends, then I’ll be on my way.”
“Fine.”
With her awkward blessing, I stood up, inclined my head in a slight bow, and left the room. I moved down a few rooms, found an open one, and closed the door behind me. I leaned against the stone wall, slid down it, and sat. I was surprised at how much it affected me to have such a cold, steely-eyed reception.