Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  He has to repeat the process until the water level reaches a certain mark. He also has one turning of a sand-glass—about an hour and a half for the glass in question—to do it.

  “Okay, slightly bad.”

  If he falls off, he fails the test entirely and has to try again later.

  “All right, maybe it is a difficult test. To what end?”

  Any man who can dance back and forth on a balance beam, carrying one drop of water at a time, for an hour and a half is a man with magnificent balance, excellent coordination, outstanding physical fitness, and an ability to focus on getting the job done no matter how stupid the job seems. It would be a lot easier to pick up the glass and pour the water, but that’s not the task at hand. Sometimes it’s important to do things the way you were told to do them.

  “Huh. I can see that. All right. And what’s the circle of shadow-skin?

  I couldn’t exactly tell the guys their armor was made of laminated carbon compounds, could I? It’s too light to be steel, so they decided it was a skin made of shadow. They call that spell in the basement the Circle of Shadow-Skin and it’s one of the last rites of passage for a knight-candidate.

  “I ought to make the thing an enchantment instead of a spell.”

  I wouldn’t worry about it.

  “No?”

  No. It’s been there long enough to be a divine artifact.

  “I don’t understand.”

  It was a spell, originally. It’s routinely used in conjunction with a holy ceremony, and it’s been the target of hopes and dreams and reverence. If the spell were to fail today, I could still keep it going as a manifestation of “divine will.” Most of the other guys up here have to get a whole cadre of priests together and slam a fistful of power into the physical plane to make something like that. Our method built it and got it running up front, allowing the worshippers to do most of the work over time.

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  Different perspectives.

  “No kidding. So, how’s the war effort?”

  The Lord of Light is playing his cards close to the vest. He’s keeping quiet, but his followers are still killing off rebels and resistance in H’zhad’Eyn. It shouldn’t be long before it’s fully run by a civilian government instead of martial law. Well, a theocratic one. A non-military, if somewhat militant theocracy. H’zhad’Eyn is currently his main source of sacrifices.

  “Why’s he want so many sacrifices, anyway? Is it just a god-thing? You’re the one with the energy-plane perspective.”

  It’s hard to tell. It’s intimately related to his worship and it happens on his holy ground. It’s kind of like the deity-to-avatar connection. It’s a secure channel, a private one. I can tell he’s doing it, but I don’t know what he’s doing it for. The thought-voice paused for several seconds, marshaling itself. I can see the physical realm, but I can’t see the energies in his personal domain. I’m not sure if he’s simply accepting the power of human sacrifice as personal power, strengthening himself, or if he’s got his followers directing that power into something else—say, ritual pleasure ceremonies, or into a super-special holy altar where he can manifest a new avatar.

  “How would we find out?”

  Go look.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that. How about I investigate more? Intelligence analysis sounds like the way to go.”

  How? Send spies to be converted to pleasure-addicts? They can’t exactly refuse to partake, you know.

  “Oh, I don’t know. A shield around the brain to absorb and ground out the ritual spell’s charge shouldn’t be too hard, provided we can learn enough about the ritual. Come to that, I think Stomald is still in the Palace. Maybe we should quiz him more.”

  No doubt. You’ll have to do it, though. If I put in a request through Beltar, the Lord of Light might overhear me.

  “But… wait. I thought to Deiphone was a secure channel?”

  It is, but consider he probably has spies in Karvalen or Carrillon. If the Church of Shadow asks for the former Priest of Light, it’ll cause talk.

  “Okay. I can accept that more easily than quasi-divine multidimensional thermodynamic energy transfer.”

  No kidding. I still don’t understand it too well!

  “You have my sympathies. Any news on Lissette’s troop movements?”

  Still assembling. It’s not like calling up the National Guard. No trains, no buses, no motor cars. The majority have to walk. The water traffic helps, but most of that is for supplies and gear.

  “Right, right. I keep forgetting. I should have spent more time building an actual canal network.”

  Tricky surveying prospects, unless you want the mountain to slither under the whole kingdom and level it out.

  “That’s silly. It would take… Oh, my stars and garters. It could, couldn’t it?”

  I was kidding.

  “But it could.” I waited a few seconds. I could feel him thinking.

  I… yes. Yes, I suppose it could. I don’t know how long it would take.

  “See, this is another reason I don’t sleep.”

  How do you figure?

  “Because I dreamed the thing into existence. Well, the power source keeping it alive. If I hadn’t, it would have settled back into being just another mountain long ago. As it is, it could spread to the whole world, making it a world of living stone.”

  I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

  “Me, either. What I am sure of is it scares me.”

  I suspect the reactor will require a good deal more conversion spells before it can handle that kind of vitality load.

  “Uh… have you looked at it recently?”

  No… Should I?

  “I reconfigured the primary reactor node. Now it has four nodes where matter turns to energy—those bright spots between the stalactite and stalagmite, where the conical parts almost touch. I also included a new subroutine in the conversion layers. It can make more as needed. I figured, since it was constantly expanding outward through the canals and roads…”

  How is it possible that you manage to worry me?

  “Is it an axiom or a deep truth or a fundamental thing of some sort that any conversation with a quasi-angelic semi-deity is going to always have some element of ‘I am not comforted by this thought’?”

  Which one are you?

  “You’re the energy-state being. You tell me.”

  Dunno. I only come here for lunch. I don’t work here.

  “And I should get back to work, too. You’ll be watching over people for me, right?”

  You’re the Guardian Demon. I do much better as Guardian Angel.

  “I’ll take that as an affirmative.”

  Go. I’ll watch over them.

  “That’s better.”

  I left the Lunchroom of Divinity and headed down the hall, thinking about who watched over me. Angels? Doubtful. I don’t get along well with angels. They don’t seem to be willing to come down and get into a fight with me, but they don’t like me, either. Some other extraplanar entity? Possibly. If so, it’s doing a bang-up job of not showing it.

  As I thought about it, it occurred to me to check in on—okay, okay, spy on—a few other people. I brought a mirror and a power crystal with me to the garage in Flintridge and poked my nose into their business.

  Ted and his family were in the process of moving, as evidenced by the big truck, boxes, and guys in coveralls. I was pleased to see Edgar running around, helping. Nice to know he was happy. The rest of the family was some variant of happy, annoyed, tired, or frustrated. Even when a move goes perfectly, it’s still a pain. It would be weeks before they had their new house in order.

  Over in the Long Beach area, the young girl and her dad-guardian-mentor-whatever, the pair who tried to rob the building with the old cargo-shifter in Flintridge, were doing all right. There were no changes I could see, though. They still lived in the same campsite, wore mostly the same
clothes—new shoes, but that’s hardly a surprise—and still cooked over an open fire.

  What kind of life is that? If you enjoy that sort of thing, a happy one. I’ve lived like that, off and on, and it’s not to my taste. Did they want to remain as-is? Were they afraid of making a change? Was there a reason this sort of life appealed to them?

  I recited my mantra. Not my circus, not my monkeys, not my problem. Repeat as needed.

  I also checked in on the Lady Luck, the hotel-casino of the Black King, Lord of Las Vegas.

  Business was as brisk as ever. People came, people went, and there wasn’t a vampire in sight. Of course not; it was daytime. Silly me. But I probed beyond the surface, checking out the vampire lounge—closed for the day—and the Plantation Suite. There was a charm on the top floor, probably a leftover from when Degas was there. I went to some effort to map it out, looking for weaknesses. It wasn’t a sophisticated piece of work, but it was powerful and effective. It might even block my Boojum-signature scanner.

  Would that be a problem in scanning other worlds? Probably not. You can hide a Boojum bloodsucker, but you can’t hide them all, and certainly not all the time. Still, I might have to caution Ted about the possibility. Or maybe not. His usual job was a magical object identification specialist. He would figure it out.

  At any rate, I eventually picked my point of attack and took down the charm. I don’t know if anyone noticed. With Degas dead, there might not be anyone who even knew it was there to begin with. It all depended on whether or not he had any apprentices.

  Flying my scrying sensor through the place, I found a number of interesting things—fire extinguishers, guns, that sort of thing—as well as a few shared bedrooms for the willing snacks, two dungeon rooms with restraints and unwilling snacks, a secret exit, and a panic room. The secret exit was a narrow tube, suitable for sliding down into the lower levels of the parking garage. The panic room was more like an interior bedroom, but the walls were solid, the door heavy, and the outer face of the door disguised to resemble the end of the hall. It didn’t even open with a doorknob. It required a magnet to slide back an internal bolt. It also had a number of hand-operated bolts on the inside.

  Under the big, four-poster bed was a box. It was steel, bolted to the floor, airtight, and insulated with asbestos. My guess is a daytime fire would only result in the box being at ground level amid the ashes and cinders. The occupant wouldn’t be happy, but I doubt it would kill a corpse.

  Someone was immortal and meant to stay that way.

  LeSange was on the bed, however, artfully arrayed. Presumably, the vampire fire-safe was only for use when there was unrest in his domain. I don’t know.

  I went on to search the hidden laboratory Degas used, as well as do some virtual wandering through the hotel and the hotel walls. I didn’t find any signs of ongoing voodoo hoodoo or other magical experimentation, which suited me just fine.

  Then, with a lack of other excuses, I got back to Apocalyptica to work on my Boojum-detector spell and the probe gates. The spell wasn’t a difficult project, but it required finicky, precision work. I did it, of course, but it was a pain in the forebrain and required several trips out of my headspace for testing. The spell worked by scanning a volume of space—a sizable volume of space—and checking to see if it resonated with the master copy crystal.

  Think of it like this. A tuning fork vibrates at a specific frequency. If we have a box of the proper shape and size to amplify only that frequency, when we press the tuning fork to the box, you hear the note loud and clear. If you press any other tuning fork to the box, all you hear is the faint hum of the tuning fork, unamplified.

  That’s not exactly how it works—for the spell or for the tuning forks—but you get the idea.

  Once I got the thing to work, I tested it in Apocalyptica and in Flintridge. I got major hits in Flintridge, but only the faintest, generalized hiss in Apocalyptica. I presume the Boojum has been to Apocalyptica, but doesn’t have anything actively awful going on at the moment—that is, no bloodsuckers or other horribleness wandering around. The hiss, I think, is the background hum of a previous presence.

  Worked for me. I was happy with it.

  Then I realized I would have to enchant the same spell into a thousand or so probes, one for each probe gate.

  I didn’t cry. I didn’t. I might have sniffled a little.

  I hate mass production.

  No, I take that back. Mass production is one of the pillars of civilization. I hate having to hand-craft insane numbers of things. I hate having to do the mass production.

  It’s not the exhausting effort. I don’t mind exerting myself for something I want to accomplish. I suppose I’m not lazy, not the real couch-potato lazy, as such. It’s more like I have too much personal inertia. Getting me moving is the hard part. At rest, I tend to stay at rest. Once in motion, I tend to stay in motion. Of course, once I am in motion, that has its own hazards.

  What annoys me about producing a thousand or so probe-gate rings is the endless monotony. It’s boring. And it goes on and on and on and on… Place an unenchanted ring in the spell diagram. Gather power. Fire the spell and watch it weave itself into the structure of the inscribed runes. Adjust, tweak, tug, and twist, like fitting a garment to a mannequin. Stitch where necessary, hem where raveled, smooth out wrinkles. Check it to make sure everything is in order. Seal it, send it off, and place another ring.

  I’m going to have to do it all again with the Boojum-detector spells, too.

  This goes a lot better with Mary around to help. I wish she was here.

  Apocalyptica, Saturday, October 11th, Year 11

  Mary made great strides in getting Diogenes materials from Flintridge. Rather than have things delivered to the lair and the garage, she rented a full-sized warehouse. Stuff is stacking up there. Anyone watching—LeSange, Ted, religious zealot number four, whoever—can keep right on watching. She’s planning to move it all with a jumbo-sized portable shift-tent—which, I might add, she had me enchant for her. She said I needed a break in the monotony. With the warehouse locked up tight, we’ll activate the tent and have it spring up inside the warehouse. A horde of robots will trundle back and forth through the tent and empty the place in a matter of hours, and not many of those. Everything will simply vanish. She’s delighted with her plan and is insufferably pleased with herself.

  I, on the other hand, am still stomping my way along, enchanting probe-gates for my damn Boojum hunt.

  This idea is holding less and less appeal for me. I might compare it to splitting wood with a dull axe. Don’t I have enough of these things already? What’s another hundred going to do?

  It’s going to make the process go that much faster, that’s what it’s going to do. Each one I enchant is going to check one more universe every time the process cycles. Each one should manage between one and three thousand universes every day, depending on scanning conditions.

  I do not enjoy being the bottleneck in production.

  On the plus side, I did figure out a workaround on my Boojum-detection spell. Instead of enchanting a thousand Boojum-hunting probes, we’re using a spell.

  The crystal holding the detailed imprint of the Lord of Light is the key component to the spell, of course. I have one spell on the crystal to read the impression and act as a sort of buffer. Nothing directly affects the crystal—I don’t want the imprint contaminated by repeated handling. The bracket holding the crystal has the master “reading” spell. Tied into this mounting bracket are a bunch of orichalcum wires. These are strung all around to the wand-like attachments we push through the probe-gates. They also have switches Diogenes can open or close.

  So, the process is to open tiny gates, feed through the detector wands, and see if we get a hit. If we do, it could be from any of the open gates, so Diogenes flips switches on each wand to make sure he knows which worlds are registering hits. He catalogues them and repeats the process. We’ve already got it going with the existing gates.

 
; This only works because the spell is only doing one thing in each world—hunting Boojum signatures. The probe-gates are all doing similar-but-different things. They’re dialing up universes, but always different universes, so they have to be independent of each other. The Boojum detector simply needs to go “ding!” when there’s stuff.

  I also got a brief respite when I redirected the output of the solar conversion panels. Running that many probe gates—even when they’re the smaller ones, strictly Boojum-hunting—ain’t cheap.

  Sadly, as much as I wanted a good excuse to do something else, nobody obliged me by having a crisis. The ungrateful jerks had happy, uneventful lives and minded their own business, leaving me stuck in an underground enchanting chamber, constantly stamping out magical miniature probe-gates like some workhouse orphan on a treadmill.

  On the plus side, it got results. I finished the project. I finished it! One thousand of the ugly, shiny, metallic little bastards! One thousand!

  I took the last one to Niagara by hand, placed it in the dialing cradle, and tied the designated probe-wand into the master pattern spell.

  “Why,” I asked Diogenes, once I’d finished the setting-up, “are you playing the victory march from Star Wars?”

  “It seemed appropriate, Professor.”

  “Objectively, I suspect it isn’t, but it sure feels right. Good call.”

  “Always happy to help, Professor.”

  “Where do we stand on the other projects?”

  “The Boojum Hunt is underway and has been since the first detection spell went on-line. We are now scanning for the specified energy signature in the worlds already catalogued. Our present rate is in excess of two million universes a day. Project completion is slated for early Monday.”

  “Wait, what?” I demanded. “Monday?”

  “I have been scanning and searching while you worked, Professor. Incorporating each new gate has increased the rate at which we progress through the catalog.”