Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  Degas accepted the spirit’s power and became a vampire. In his desperate circumstances, why not? He already had his revenge on his former master, and now he would live forever. As an undead, he still had his training in a shamanic tradition, and since his new, undead mental processes tended toward existing habits, he continued with some brand of his religious practices. Now, though, he could feel the power of the dark spirit within himself, focus it, and use it to call up a manifestation. His voodoo practice became much more real, much more effective, once he had a full-time patron spirit.

  With some guidance from his dark mentor, he was soon a full-fledged bokor, albeit one of limited scope. He grew in influence and power by manufacturing poppets— “voodoo dolls”—of more and more influential and powerful people. Including other vampires.

  Now he’s got a whole cabinet of them, including dolls for LeSange, the vampiric palace guard in the hotel, dozens of human authorities, and others. He had LeSange by the short hairs, so to speak, so when the previous Master of Las Vegas suffered a peculiar and inexplicable spontaneous combustion—Degas threw his doll on the ceremonial fire—LeSange agreed, reluctantly, to be the front man and rule the city.

  When I asked about myself and Mary, Degas’ lip curled.

  “Why us?” I asked. “Why did we get called in?”

  “Because I had people watching you. Listening to you. Tracking you. Your movements were unpredictable, strange. Sometimes you could simply not be located, as though you ceased to exist. None of the dark gifts could be relied upon, no matter what they tried. Yet, we heard enough to know you went to distant lands, struggled with strange foes. There was much I could infer, but my slaves could not see or hear enough for me the know, regardless of how I punished them!”

  “Frustrating,” I agreed.

  “Yet you are a being of power, presumably a vampire of immense age. If I could control you, I could learn your secrets, obtain some of your power for myself.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  “You mock me.”

  “Damn right. Now, tell me how to un-poppet myself.”

  “There is no way to break the link,” Degas sneered. “It is a part of you, just as you are a part of it. To destroy the doll is to destroy yourself.”

  “Well, if you’re not going to help, I’ll have to figure it out on my own.”

  “What you ask is impossible.”

  “You know what magic is?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Magic. Do you know what it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Define it.”

  “It is the occult art, using the powers of the divine and the infernal to—”

  “Nope.”

  “Nope?”

  “Magic is knowing something the other guy doesn’t. I’ll destroy this doll, there’s no question about it. It might take me some time, but I deal in fundamental forces. You deal in hand-waving and hope. More immediate, however, is figuring out what I’m doing with you.”

  As I spoke, I felt the tingling of sunrise beginning. Degas smiled at me.

  “You fool,” he stated. “You have taken my bait and fallen into my trap.”

  “Oh? It’s a trap?”

  “Can you not feel it? The lethargy? The slowing? The weakness? The Sun is rising, and all who are blessed with the power of darkness in their blood must fall into the little death as the First Word is spoken anew.”

  “First Word?” I repeated.

  “Yehi’or,” Degas supplied. “Now you are trapped here, and when my mortal servants come down in the day to seek me, they will find your helpless bodies at their mercy!”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  I stood over him, grinning and starting to sweat. The tingling was growing much more intense, like a coat of needle-legged insects crawling on my skin. Degas peered up at me, blinking hard, trying to stay focused.

  “Feeling tired, Degas?” I asked, still standing. “You look as though you’re having a hard time keeping awake.”

  “What… what sorcery… is this? How do you resist the sunrise?”

  “The darkness in me is not the darkness in you,” I replied, kicking him away from the table so he lay flat on his back. He grunted slightly, shaking his head and trying to resist the thing he called the “little death.” I let him try. A man should see it coming. What he saw coming was me, leaping high in the air and landing with both heels together, squarely in the middle of his forehead. Crunch. A few well-placed stomps to make sure, and I got to watch the crumble-to-dust phenomenon again.

  Mary applauded. I bowed.

  “What now?” Mary asked.

  “I think,” I said, slowly, “we find the elevator key, wait out the sunrise, and go up to the parking garage.”

  Mary drew out a ring of keys and jingled them.

  “I was referring,” she corrected, “to what we’re going to do about the vampires of Vegas.”

  “That’s a good question. They’re power-conduits for the Lord of Light—well, whoever it is replacing him. I’m told the original Lord of Light is still around, somewhere. We need a new name for the impostor.”

  “Can I name him?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Nothing off the top of my head. How about… Clyde?”

  “Hmm. The deific entity trying to take over the world of Karvalen is Clyde, opportunistic god of deception. Does that have the right ring to it?”

  “Maybe you have a point,” she conceded. “I’ll think about it.”

  We discussed alternative names for the so-called Lord of Light while the sun came up. When the tingling subsided and our mortal flesh was offended by our reeking stench, I fired off a stored cleaning spell.

  Being cautious of leaving behind anything useful in ritual magic, we then piled flammables on top of the stinking remains, set fire to it, and summoned the elevator.

  Bronze was waiting for us on the lowest parking level, neatly placed between two lines as though we’d parked her there ourselves. We climbed in and she rumbled her way around and up and out.

  “Oscar?” Mary suggested. “We could call him Oscar.”

  “Reminds me of both a green fuzzy muppet and a talking space suit,” I replied. “I sympathize with the muppet and the space suit was probably my favorite space suit. Oscar’s out. How about Norbert?”

  “Suitably goofy-sounding, but it doesn’t really work for me,” she decided. “Maybe something more classical?”

  “Theo?”

  “Doesn’t that mean ‘god’?”

  “Yep. But it also sounds a little goofy as a name.”

  “Hmm. Maybe not classical. Literary? How about Melkor?”

  “Good Lord of the Rings reference,” I admitted. “Why not Morgoth?”

  “Melkor was the name when he was still one of the ascended choirboys, right? He didn’t become Melkor until later.”

  “Technically correct, but he was one of the Ainur until he descended to Arda. I’m uncomfortable calling him an ‘ascended choirboy’. I’d also feel uncomfortable calling him either name. We might be more correct than I like to think about.”

  “Too grim?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Goofy and lighthearted,” she mused. “How about Boojum?”

  “Ah, Wonderland references. Boojum.” I considered it. “Why not Snark?”

  “Because Snarks are well-described,” she pointed out. “They have ambition, they like bathing-machines, and they’re handy for striking a light. Boojums, on the other hand, are very dangerous indeed.”

  “Boojum it is, then. So, we have the Lord of Light, eaten and supplanted by the Devourer—maybe killed, but once the pattern of an entity is impressed on the energy planes, it’s hard to eradicate. Later, the Devourer was replaced by the Boojum, the current would-be deity acting as the focus for the original Lord of Light’s church. Yes, I think I can get behind that.”

  “Good. So, what are we going to do about the Boojum? Bef
ore it makes someone we like ‘softly and silently vanish away’?”

  “Well, he’s being a pest in Karvalen by assembling a horde of pleasure-addicted slaves for purposes of conquering the world. I’m thinking I should start with that.”

  Mary cocked her head at me. I raised my eyebrows encouragingly.

  “You know,” she said, finally, “I think I can finally put into words why asking you a question has risks. Rather, what the risks are of asking you anything.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. First, you can answer in detail, in which case I’ll get way too much information, get confused, and have to ask for a summary.”

  “It’s a hazard,” I agreed.

  “The second risk is you’ll give me a short, easy-to-understand, terrifying answer.”

  “I blame the fact the universes are all-too-often terrifying places.”

  “There’s some justice to your claim,” she agreed. “Fortunately, the rest of the time you have relatively normal conversational responses.”

  “Good. I was worried you were about to say those were the only two things I ever do.”

  “No, they’re just risks, not certainties. Besides, I like to roll the dice.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So, to continue with the discussion on the Boojum, what do you plan to do about it?”

  “Choke him to death.”

  “Interesting. Holy ball-gag?”

  “No. I doubt I can make one, much less get it on him. I think I can cut off his intake, though.”

  “How do you throttle a god?”

  “First, he’s not a god. He’s something akin to the mechanistic angels. By their very nature, they aren’t all that good at creative problem-solving. They’re… how to put this? They’re logical, methodical, and designed to perform their functions. They’re like old sci-fi robots. For example, take a hypothetical Unit Alpha perimeter defense robot. It’s excellent at shooting anything that comes into the fort, but if his gun breaks down, it’s unlikely he’ll make the appropriate logical connections to decide to fix it. He’s going to have almost as hard a time abandoning his post to seek out a new gun. There’s a good chance he’ll just keep trying to fire the broken weapon regardless of the effect.”

  “So, not very smart?”

  “I don’t know about smart,” I admitted. “That’s another story entirely. These beings may be incredibly smart, but their mechanistic nature forces them to be narrowly focused and almost radically hidebound.”

  “Which means the Boojum is, for an angel, an outside the box thinker? Or he’s been at it a long time, gradually adding on a new mechanical module when he has to handle new problems?”

  “Could be. I’m not sure they can do that, given their nature. I think it more likely he’s got a high priest somewhere who came up with a good idea.”

  “Got it. So, how do you throttle a narrowly-focused, hidebound, mechanistic energy-state being?”

  “Track down his mouths and close them forever.”

  “Oh, really?” she purred, grinning around her fangs. She rubbed her hands together. “Am I thinking what you’re thinking?”

  “That depends. Are you still thinking about ball gags?”

  “No. At least, not in this context.”

  “Good. Are you fond of these soulless monsters who give vampires a bad name?”

  “No. They remind me entirely too much of the Elders of the Tribes back on my world, Nexus.”

  “Thank you for the reminder. I’ll have to look in on them. And I think you’re thinking along the same lines of what I’m thinking. Probably with more destruction, violence, explosions, and burning, but along the same lines.”

  If it helps, Boss, I’m with her on the burning.

  “I rather thought you would be.”

  Apocalyptica, Wednesday, September 30th, Year 11

  We went back to our lair at maximum legal speeds. It was daytime, so burning past a snoozing cop wasn’t a good option. I didn’t want to get pulled over and go through the hassle. Darkness covers a multitude of sins.

  No one was waiting for us at the lair, so that was to the good. My guess was there wasn’t much of an alarm, yet. Come sundown and the discovery of the wreckage in the so-called chapel, there would be an AVB—All-Vampire-Bulletin—out on us.

  For now, though, we had a head start.

  I went ahead to Apocalyptica. Mary, Bronze, and Firebrand went touring around the southwestern United States, doing legwork. Using a small shift-box, Diogenes delivered gadgets to them as they traveled. Mary installed them in telephone exchanges, up on telephone poles, even inside telephone booths—in 1969, they still had telephone booths! It’s important to be able to make inter-universal calls from multiple locations. You never know who’s trying to trace your number.

  Back on Apocalyptica, I took care of some of the enchantment work I’d been putting off, as well as some new work that needed doing.

  Trixie needed her necklace, knife, and sword. Diogenes needed new probe gates to replace the ones drawn from stores and the few we’d damaged. Bronze’s shift-booth stalls needed to be tied together. My portable, dial-a-time-zone shift booths needed enchanting. My altar ego needed work done on his prayer-wheel generators. My magical conversion panel migration needed monitoring and adjusting.

  I admit it. I’m lazy. I procrastinate. I’m immortal! There’s always time to do it later!

  Mea culpa. At least I did get around to doing it.

  During all this, I also found time to wonder what was going on with the people on the Moon. I think they were eyeballing Africa and the space elevator construction. I don’t know what they were thinking. With luck, they would stay shut up and leave us alone until multiple universes quieted down.

  The first thing I dealt with was Diogenes’ probe gates. He provided the physical structures, I provided the enchantment.

  “How’s your download on gravity manipulation coming along?” I asked, waving one hand and a wand over the metal ring on my workbench.

  “The theory is fully assimilated. The engineering specifications are not all public domain, however. There will be some research and development before a gravity drive is feasible for us.”

  “Good to know. By the way, I’m going to include a new sensor for the gate probe.”

  “Yes, Professor?”

  “We’re going to scan everything for a new signature, a magical one. In the future, I want to know in advance if the Boojum is present in that universe.”

  “Boojum, Professor?”

  So I had to explain how Mary and I agreed on the name, since the Lord of Light—the real Lord of Light—wasn’t the being responsible.

  “Duly noted, Professor. It will take some time to re-scan each of the worlds already in the catalogue.”

  “It’ll be quicker, though, if you only have to check for one thing, right?”

  “Yes. However, the process of opening a gate, deploying the probe, and closing down the system takes a fixed amount of time.”

  “Is there any way to speed up the process?”

  “We know the current dialing framework does not accurately reflect the true nature of interuniversal gate targeting. You could do more research and develop a more accurate theory, thus making it possible to use a more effective and efficient dialing method.”

  “And if the higher-order dialing setup takes longer to use?”

  “There is that possibility.”

  “I’ll think about it. What else can we do to speed up multiple universe probes?”

  “With the current state of the art, the only recourse is to build more probe gates.”

  I rubbed my forehead and grumbled.

  “All right,” I decided. “Building and powering more probe gates… Okay. We need more probe gates, as well as a secure facility to house them when they’re in use. Not all of your construction capacity can be redirected to that, correct?”

  “Correct. Many factories and robots are specialized enough to be relatively useless in suc
h construction. For example, there is no practical value in attempting to retask radioactive decontamination robots from the crater zones, since they are specialized for their functions and somewhat toxic from their exposure.”

  “I get it. Good example.”

  “There is also an optimal minimax for speed of construction. In human terms, ten men cannot work on installing one window and complete the project in one-tenth the time. Two is an optimax. Four will further decrease the time required, but with diminishing returns.”

  “Go for speed, not efficiency.”

  “Understood, Professor.”

  “Okay. Probe gate facilities. Refugees. Space elevator. High-tech downloads. Focus on these and the prerequisite systems—power plants, materials manufacturing, and so on. Go ahead and download whatever you get from the probe-gate connections and we’ll play catch-up on the technology front later. Right now, I want to look at several million universes and see how many have a Boojum presence.”

  “Recalculating now. Professor?”

  “Yes?”

  “May I ask why the sudden interest?”

  “I’m not sure you’ve ever asked me about my motives before, Diogenes.”

  “I infer something has changed, Professor. Given the nature of the Boojum, it is possible other measures may need to be taken, but your protein brain may not have reached that conclusion. By asking for the reason, I may be able to extrapolate future needs and be prepared to meet them.”

  I looked up at the nearest camera.

  “Diogenes, I know you have some programs to anticipate the needs of who you work for, but that’s just outside the realm of believability. I can’t see how an algorithm to anticipate which groceries to buy can be stretched to cover a potential war with a demigod.”

  “Professor, I utilize nineteen different types of computer processor architecture and forty-three programming languages. My program collective has expanded both through download of public domain software, purchased software, and the evolution of heuristic code. I am not an artificial intelligence. I may be, however, the most sophisticated highly-adaptive simulation of a true artificial intelligence ever assembled.”