Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  “Fair enough—little brother,” I added. Seldar chuckled.

  “Who I am today is, in large measure, the product of what you believed I could be. I think you do not understand this power.”

  “What power?”

  “You, by being yourself, somehow inspire others. You tell a boy he has it in himself to be a knight and he believes you. You tell a girl she has it in herself to become a knight and she believes this impossible thing—and succeeds. That was then. Today you are the mysterious Demon King, a capricious, sometimes fickle, always unpredictable creature. You are the unseen hand abroad in the land, and you are always watching. The Lord of Shadow—a god walking the world in man-flesh and demon blood. You raise up mountains, cast down princes, create Queens, and bring even the gods to heel. When you speak, the stones of the ground itself tremble in eagerness to obey. How much more do your words move those who have ears to hear?”

  “Seldar?”

  “Yes, Great One?”

  “You and I see me very differently.”

  “Perhaps because you believe in others more than yourself.”

  He’s got a point, Boss, Firebrand agreed. I didn’t answer it.

  “You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, Sire. To serve you to the best of my ability, I must understand what you want, not merely what you order.”

  “What do I want, Seldar?”

  “For who? For what? For yourself? For your family? For the kingdom?”

  “Yes.”

  Seldar seated himself on the parapet again and I leaned against it, beside him. This might take a while, but I was interested in his answer.

  “I think you want to avoid commitment, because to commit yourself to something means you must fight for it, and you may not be victorious. You fear failure more than death.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Ouch?”

  “Ouch, because the truth hurts,” I admitted, silently adding, when you’re ashamed of it. “I suspect there’s more to it, but you’re not wrong. Go on.”

  “For your family, I think you only want them happy and safe. You do not care if they are wealthy or powerful, but happiness is paramount.”

  “I can’t argue with that. What else?”

  “For the kingdom? What any good ruler wants. Peace and prosperity, especially if it can be achieved without your personal, ongoing, day-to-day attention.”

  “Sounds right to me. Unflattering, in some respects, but correct.”

  “I am not here to flatter, but to serve.”

  “And you’re spot-on. So, how do I get what I want?”

  “All three at once? I am not certain it can be done.”

  “How about two out of three?”

  “You will have to give up your aloofness. You will have to be willing to become embroiled in the affairs of those you hold dear.”

  “Yeah, I kinda figured that,” I sighed. “How do you think Lissette will take to the idea I’m hanging around?”

  “The Palace?”

  “Where would you suggest?”

  “The Palace is one of the more heavily-defended places,” he mused. “You should be safe enough here. Everyone tends to think of you living somewhere in the palace of Karvalen. One story has you merged with the rock of the mountain and looking out through the eyes of every statue of you, anywhere.”

  “Neat rumor. I wish I’d thought of it.”

  “I will speak with Her Majesty. She cannot deny you, of course, for her authority rests on yours. How she will feel about it on a personal level…” he shrugged. “I believe she misses you—not the Demon King—with the nostalgia of years to brighten the memories made when she was a new bride. She knows you cannot rule, for you are an avatar of a god, and the temples would rebel at such a power grab.”

  “Whoa, wait, hold it! I’m not an avatar! I had this discussion already.”

  “Are you not?” Seldar asked. “With whom did you have this discussion?”

  “I—” I broke off and considered what I was about to say. I had this discussion during a psychic communion with my godlike altar ego.

  The council of the gods decreed I wasn’t an avatar, but actively ruling a kingdom might still be a bad idea. They are jealous gods, sort of. If I took the throne—even to “make sure everything was fair and square”—they would assume I was using the position unfairly. If a god is king, people would naturally assume praying in his temples was a good idea.

  “Maybe she has a point,” I admitted, finally. “I haven’t considered it in as much depth as she has.”

  “There you are.”

  “Fair enough. How about I go away for a while and you do your diplomatic, tactful thing?”

  “I think it a good idea, Sire.”

  “And give my condolences to Malana or Malena—the survivor—and tell her I’m sorry I wasn’t notified sooner,” I told him. Seldar grimaced, so I prompted, “Seldar?”

  “I have already done so, and conveyed your thanks for Malana’s selfless devotion to her duty in protecting the Queen. Malena has accepted the honors of that sacrifice on her behalf. Have I overstepped?”

  “No. No, absolutely not. Thank you, Seldar.”

  “It is my pleasure to serve, Your Majesty.”

  He led me to the stables. I recovered Bronze, cast my spell, and we were gone.

  Apocalyptica, Monday, September 28th, Year 11

  Once upon a time, in a laboratory, I wore a white coat and special goggles so I could fire a laser at a sample material. The purpose was to vaporize a tiny amount and analyze the resulting gases. The details about that and the fire alarm it caused are unimportant here. The important thing is I used heavy, expensive equipment to get a picture of what happened in a fraction of a second, then spent hours upon hours analyzing the data to work backward to the original sample.

  Not today. Most of what I do when analyzing and experimenting involves waiting until nightfall, spending a good chunk of my magical power budget, and—fundamentally—eyeballing whatever it is that puzzles me. In this case, a divine radio crystal tuned for my altar ego.

  Bronze wore her Impala and went to Flintridge to keep an eye on Mary. Firebrand stuck around to watch what I was doing. I told Diogenes to hold any business and retired to my laboratory to examine the crystal. I learned a lot in the first ten seconds.

  First off, a comparison. I’ve noted the similarities and differences between Bronze and T’yl’s old suit of animated armor. Bronze’s spirit is a formless, organic sort of thing, constantly shifting and changing within the matrix of her existence. It still is, even after her apotheosis—it’s simply much more robust and no longer well-anchored in a physical form. The armor, on the other hand, was a geometric enchantment, all lines and angles sliding, rotating, hinged and fastened and rigid. On a magical level, the armor was clockwork. Bronze is alive. The armor was a robot.

  My altar ego reminds me of Bronze in many ways. He’s not a rigid, structured being, but a somewhat chaotic one. His overall impression—to me—reminds me of a beehive. There are a billion things going on in there, all at once, and it seems impossible to follow it all. Nevertheless, a billion things are all working together to achieve different effects, and all of it is taking place inside a fairly well-defined, albeit organic-seeming, structure.

  With me so far?

  What bothered me about it was how it reminded me of angelic things. Taking a close look at Bronze, I can easily see the similarities between her existential matrix and the matrix of an animated suit of armor. Taking a close look at my altar ego, I can easily see similar similarities between him and Valan.

  It’s amazing how having clear examples helps.

  Unlike T’yl’s old armor, Valan isn’t a mindless robot. I get the impression he’s more like a kind of artificial intelligence, designed, built, and programmed. My altar ego is an organic being, much more independent and messy. If Valan and the other angel-like things are like Clarke’s HAL 9000, the gods of Karvalen are more like He
inlein’s Minerva. Be that as it may, the two are remarkably alike—structurally, at least. Both types are energy-state beings capable of absorbing psychic power, converting that energy into personal power, and using it in ways I don’t understand to achieve what I would call magical effects. Or should that be “miraculous effects”?

  I hate religion. And not just because I’m a vampire.

  Okay, so, the gods of Karvalen are, in essence, free-range angels, or something not too dissimilar. The two classes of energy-state beings are of the same order of being, anyway. If one type is a humpback whale and the other type is a sperm whale, they’re all still whales. I think it makes a sort of sense, in a way. They’re not infinite, they don’t know everything, and each has a portfolio of things they do well. The Mother of Flame is the Angel of Fire, the Lord of Justice is the Angel of Judgment, the Lord of Light is the Angel of Light, and so on. It may be reasonable to think of the gods of Karvalen as angels in a world without an overwatching authority—God is out to lunch.

  Unless it’s Rendu, the elf-creator? Do the Heru count as actual gods? Are they a different type of energy-state being, or another order of entity altogether? I’ve never met one, so how would I know? They might just be another species of angel-level weirdness. Or they might be much more powerful. I’ll have to think about that one. There are advantages and disadvantages to having a real gods in charge of the place. Assuming, of course, the Heru count.

  I wonder. I can trap Valan in a containment diagram. I can probably trap the various gods of Karvalen, too. What sort of spells would I need to contain a Heru? There’s no way to tell until I see one. Pity. I’d like to be better prepared.

  Back to my personal problem, though. Well, one of them.

  I didn’t like recognizing an angel-like structure to the energy-pattern in the crystal, but, after a brief break for swearing, I got down to business. All I have to do is build a spell to convert energy—any sort of energy—into a spiritual signal to match the signal pattern. No problem.

  Six hours later, I acknowledged it was, in fact, a problem.

  The patterns involved were complex things. Exceedingly complex. My own efforts were similar to the early days of radio, when Morse code was the ideal way to send a message. The crystal’s pattern was, by comparison, a high-speed digital code. Maybe that’s not the best comparison. Maybe it’s more like me tapping out Morse code compared to a satellite-radio transmission of a Bach cantata. It’s hard to duplicate the music by tapping a single key.

  Oh, I could work around it. It’s possible to use the crystal itself as a resonator. By routing power into it, I could get it to emit the proper spiritual signal. Then the only problem was the fragility of the crystal. If a room full of worshippers chanting at my statue was an open fire hydrant, the crystal’s maximum conversion capacity was a slow drip. The structure of it simply couldn’t handle any real load. It worked—technically—but it was so close to useless as to be indistinguishable. It was the difference between a bullhorn and a tuning fork.

  What my altar ego needed was a Death Star superlaser. What I had was a candle from a birthday cake.

  Maybe if I get Diogenes to clone some human brains, we can lobotomize them and send neural signals through them to produce the proper psychic matrix. Basically, use them as light bulbs. The only problem I see is the limitations of human brains. If thousands of people have already been directing their energies at my altar ego… well, he’s still recovering from hoisting a horse. The wattage on any single brain simply isn’t too impressive. We would need brain-sized tanks in underground bunkers stretching for miles—thousands upon thousands of brains.

  Maybe I’m going about this wrong. How do people worship? And can I automate it?

  “Hey, Diogenes?”

  “Yes, Professor?”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “Of course, Professor.”

  “Utilizing all your spare processor cycles—I know, I know; some of your processors don’t work that way. You know what I mean—I want you to concentrate on believing in my altar ego persona. Just for about ten seconds.”

  Diogenes was silent for a moment.

  “Professor, I am sorry, but I do not know how to believe.”

  “Nobody’s written a program for it?”

  “It would appear not, Professor.”

  “Hmm.” I scratched my head, realized I still hadn’t got a haircut, and sent for the robot barber. While it snipped and clipped and combed, I considered methods of worship. Kneeling, bowing, praying, fasting, meditation, flagellation—

  Wait! Tibet, or China, or something. Didn’t they have big spinning things? Prayer wheels!

  “Diogenes, could you display what you have on prayer wheels and how they are used?”

  Diogenes obliged and I watched video of the things in action. There were many versions, but the one that caught my attention seemed simple enough. A worshipper walked past a cylindrical, bell-like thing, laid and hand on it to drag it around and set it spinning. Instant, pre-recorded prayer.

  From a power standpoint, it appeared to transform mechanical energy into psychic energy. All we needed was a suitably-prepared prayer wheel—one that resonated with my altar ego. A quick trip through a machine shop provided the basic apparatus. A rather lengthier stay in my conjuring room provided two other things. First, a basic prayer inscription—“Praise be to the Lord of Shadow! May His strength endure forever!”—in the local magical symbology. Second, a psychic imprint copied directly from the crystal.

  I flicked it with a fingernail. The thing rang nicely. I gave it a whirl and monitored the crystal.

  Yes, it did seem to produce the proper energy pattern, but the output was disgustingly low. On the other hand, the prayer wheel wasn’t a crystal. It was in no danger of losing its matrix or breaking.

  I hooked up an electric motor and got the thing cranking around. The prayer wheel didn’t do well above about six hundred RPM—it wasn’t balanced properly—but the output did go up. I added an electromagical transformer inside it, so the bell-like prayer wheel thing could rotate around it at speed. That little trick multiplied the output dramatically.

  Diogenes got busy machining several new prayer wheels out of various materials, since we were still in the testing phase. I helped set up the bench for mounting and spinning them. The bottleneck was me, again. As usual, the enchanting process was a one-off, hand-crafted deal for each of them. Mass-producing anything with magic is a pain.

  I regarded the setup and considered. Enchantment was nice, but was it strictly necessary?

  All I wanted—all I needed—was a way to embed a psychic imprint in an object. It’s not like building a complete electromagnet. It’s more like turning a piece of iron into a magnet. We then spin the magnet to produce power.

  If I build a psychic resonator tuned to the crystal, amplifying it and focusing it, can I force the imprint into something without having to do the imprinting by hand, or by brain? Personally, I mean.

  Yes. Yes, I can. The device is, in essence, a length of pipe. The crystal, as the master copy of the pattern, is in a mounting on top. An electromagical transformer powers an amplifying spell to make the whole pipe resonate with the signature of the crystal. Diogenes puts a new prayer wheel—laser-engraved, carefully balanced, and designed for high speed—in one end of the pipe. A small conveyor belt moves slowly down the length of the pipe, allowing the prayer wheel time to pick up the imprint from the intense field emanations and become psychically “magnetized,” so to speak. Then Diogenes mounts the new prayer wheel and sets it going. We’ve got the whole setup in Denver, close to the manufacturing.

  Proof of concept. Go me!

  As for the prayer wheels, we’ve gone through a number of possible shapes, materials, sizes, and combinations thereof. My first thought, obviously, was to machine one out of orichalcum. It worked, but not much better than the first one. However, machining one out of ruthenium worked much better. There does appear to be some relationship between magical
energy and the energy of the energy-state beings. We added some orichalcum wire around it, like coils for a generator, and tried both magical and electrical current. That helped a little.

  The breakthrough happened when I examined the elemental groupings on the periodic table. The magnetic group—iron, cobalt, and nickel—all relate to standard magnets. Ruthenium is in the same column as iron, one row down, between the iron and the platinum group. If iron is the most magnetic of its three, and ruthenium alloys are the most magical of the ruthenium-rhodium-palladium group, are there any special properties to osmium, the leader in the osmium-iridium-platinum group? We already know iridium has special properties when we use it as a gate material, but nothing I’ve done with osmium seems to indicate anything special. Of course, I wasn’t looking at the energies of divine manifestations at the time.

  Worth a shot. After all, if it didn’t do anything special, it’s not like we were wasting the osmium. Diogenes would recycle it.

  So Diogenes machined a special little disc of osmium, laser-engraved a copy of the prayer around the edge, and we ran it through the imprint device. It’s not the best material for ultra-high-speed rotation. It’s dense, which means it’s heavy, and the centrifugal forces at high speeds can stretch and warp the metal. Still, within those limits, we spun it up and tried it.

  I am definitely on to something. The output from the miniature prayer wheel was significantly higher. Then I had another innovation. If the bell-like prayer wheels worked better with an electromagical transformer inside them, how about we build an osmium prayer tube? We can put a transformer inside and spin the tube around it. A divinity dynamo, if you will.

  We kept experimenting even after the sun came up.

  Apocalyptica, Tuesday, September 29th, Year 11

  I took a shower and went right back to work so we could finalize our design.

  So, our most efficient setup involves some expense, but I choose to regard it as an investment. We’ve got a standard electromagical transformer providing magical energy. This feeds into the osmium-cored transformer inside the divinity dynamo. Outside this core, an osmium tube with orichalcum coils spins around it, apparently generating a powerful psychic field tuned to my altar ego.