Nightlord: Shadows

by Garon Whited

  How do I get it out of there and into something else? Now that’s a good question. I have some ideas; I’ve never really had the opportunity to study a soul independent of a body, before. Well, ghosts, yes, but they’re a different type of free-roaming soul. They usually degrade over time. A soul in some sort of stasis, on the other hand, that doesn’t seem to be going bad… that’s very interesting and instructive.

  Maybe I should go to Arondael, the city of magicians, and study at the Academy. I might learn an awful lot. Then again, I might also get kidnapped for my blood again.

  Slightly after dawn, at breakfast, Tort came in wearing a much more elaborate gown, rather than the typical working robes of a magician; I thought she looked quite nice. She was very pleased to report that her shin was growing on toward ankle, and that her appetite was ravenous. I double-checked the spells involved and throttled them back just a hair, simply because I’m cautious. My warriors three watched with interest, curiosity, or fascination, depending on which one you looked at.

  Kammen was eyeballing Tort in a less than professional fashion. Well, Tort is rather pretty and he’s a teenager. I felt slightly annoyed and quashed the feeling.

  “Your Majesty?” Kammen asked.

  “We’re in private,” I told him. “You can call me by name. Or by nickname. You can call me ‘Hey, you,’ if you like. As a member of my personal guard, you have that privilege.” I noticed the look on his face and added, “If you can’t manage that, you can call me ‘Sire’.”

  “Uh. All right. Um. So. We’re gonna be training again today?”

  “Yes. Is that a problem?”

  “Not a bit, Sire. I just wonder if we’re gonna get to see our families or… anybody. You know.”

  “Ah. Yes, of course. Well, today we’re going to really get exhausted,” I told them, “but we’ll probably cut back a bit tomorrow. You should get time to yourselves in the afternoons and evenings.”

  Torvil and Kammen grinned at Seldar; Seldar blushed. I had no idea why.

  Pilea came in and whispered in Tort’s ear while I was speaking. Tort pursed her lips, nodded.

  “Send in the man with the appointment. Tell the rest that he should be out in a stripe or two.”

  That’s right. They don’t tell time with clocks; they use small, flat candles, kind of like tea lights. They stack them so they burn through into the next candle. With alternate colors, time is measured in bands or stripes.

  The maid disappeared. Tort turned to me. “I trust you have enjoyed breakfast?”

  “Very much,” I lied. The flavors were good and the hole in my midsection was filled, but I can’t honestly enjoy food anymore.

  Sadly, the only flavor I can still fully enjoy is blood. Undead problems. Ah, well.

  “Good. You have a man who was supposed to see you this morning about a cure?”

  “Oh, yes. A follow-up to the cure from last night. It was tricky.”

  “He is here.”

  “That’s good. Okay. Excuse me.”

  “Go be an angel,” she said, smiling, using arhia. She looked at Torvil, Kammen, and Seldar; they were getting ready to get up. “You three, finish eating.”

  “But—” Torvil started.

  “Don’t argue with the King’s Magician,” I told them. “She has seniority, and it’s her house.” Tort smiled indulgently at them, maybe mixed with a trifle of smugness.

  “Yes, Sire,” they chorused.

  “Plus,” I added, “it’s going to be a long day. She knows what she’s talking about. You need to eat.” They needed no more urging, but started shoveling.

  I visited with my patient in the living room and examined him magically. I didn’t find anything particularly wrong, but there were signs that something might be going wrong. The tumor I’d killed was now a large, dead mass, and his body was having trouble with a big, dead lump. Well, it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

  I called for Tort and explained that this was going to require a little surgery. She looked interested and my patient—Wallin, his name was—looked a little terrified.

  “You are in the finest hands in the world,” she assured him. “It may sting, but you have nothing to worry about. I promise.” He seemed somewhat reassured.

  “Tort, could I invite you into my mental study for a bit? I need to have some discussion and planning, and I’m in kind of a hurry.”

  “Of course, my angel.” We sat down. As far as Wallin was concerned, we closed our eyes for a minute, then opened them again and got to work.

  What really happened was that Tort and I connected our mental study areas—those imaginary constructs where we can go “inside” to think and remember and practice—and I opened the door to let her into mine.

  She came in, walking perfectly on her mental image of her own two feet. She paused to look at the décor, the neat stacks of paper, the stairs leading down, the butler…

  Her eyes widened and she pointed a finger as though about to shoot him with it.

  “What the hell is that!?” she demanded.

  “It’s my assistant!” I snapped, and put my hand in front of her finger, thinking, She’s a magician; it might be loaded. “He’s fine! No blasting in my study!”

  The butler looked at her, unperturbed. He had on a white apron and his sleeves were rolled up. He had appropriated a shelf on one of the bookcases and had a dozen stacks of paper neatly arranged along it. A pile of paper rested in the crook of his left arm; his right hand still held the upper portion of the papers open at the place where he was interrupted in his sorting.

  “Am I unwelcome?” he asked. “I will, of course, be happy to be not-present if the two of you—”

  “Silence, thing!” she snapped. He blinked, surprised, but kept quiet. Tort turned to me. “That is not supposed to be here! You are not supposed to be more than one person!”

  “I’m also supposed to be alive or dead,” I replied, “not sometimes a little of each!”

  That didn’t exactly calm her down, but it did force her to rethink.

  “Now,” I added, “if you’d like to explain why you think this is so awful, I’ll listen. In the meantime, you can watch and see if it really is as awful as you think.” I waved at the butler and he went back to sorting. Tort watched him through narrowed eyes.

  “Everyone who has tried to be in two places at once has gone mad,” she said. “That is you, is it not?”

  “Well… technically, yes.”

  “Then dismiss the spell that has created it, I beg of you, before your mind breaks!”

  “Sit down,” I said, nodding toward the now-visible couch. She pointed at the butler again and was about to say something, but I gently put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Sit. Down.” I added, “Please.”

  She lowered her finger, slowly, and sat down on the couch. I sat down with her and held her hands while I explained the problem of trying to digest a few hundred thousand ghosts.

  “See, it’s not that I’m going crazy,” I said, “it’s that I’m still trying to work through an overwhelmingly large meal. I’ve been at it for decades, apparently. While I may have the soul-stuff dealt with, the bits and pieces of memory they left behind are a problem. In the normal course of things, one or two or a dozen people, that’s okay; it gets integrated pretty quickly and easily. But this,” I waved at the piles of paper, “was a sea of loose pages, scattered everywhere. Impossible to make any sort of sense about.

  “Now, that,” I nodded to the butler, “is a mental construct. It’s an embodiment, a personification, of a part of my personality. I’m not saying that you’re wrong. If I let it go long enough, maybe I will go crazy. But going a little crazy now is better than going completely crazy later.” I paused for a moment while she thought that one over.

  “These other people,” I asked, “when they tried it, were they doing it just inside, or really trying to do bilocation?”

  “It started with creating two selves inside the mental study.”

  “How l
ong did it take before they started to make grinding noises in the mental gearbox?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How long before they started to go mad?”

  “I am uncertain,” she admitted. “A day? A week?”

  “Hey, butler!”

  “Yes, sir?” he asked, suddenly standing by my arm of the couch. “How may I be of service?”

  “Are you a separated consciousness, or are you still part of my regular thinking processes?”

  “I—if I may use the pronoun, sir—believe that I am one facet of your consciousness, currently focused on the task in hand, sir.”

  “So, you’re a manifestation of my thinking. This pile of paperwork is the problem, and it’s constantly on my mind, even while I’m doing something else. You’re the personification, here, of that focus.”

  “In my opinion—or, in this case, yours, sir—that is correct. This sorting problem is taking place here, but the processes that operate to do so are not conscious processes. It is something that is, quite literally, on your mind even when you are not actually devoting any mental attention to it.”

  “Thank you. Please continue.” He returned to his sorting and filing. I turned back to Tort.

  “Is that better?”

  “I… am not sure,” she replied. “You do not seem to suffer.”

  “Well, keep an eye on me.”

  “I shall, my angel. And if I detect what I believe may be madness?”

  “You probably ought to let me know,” I said. She nodded enthusiastically.

  “Was this what you wished to show me?”

  “Oh. No. This is just a side issue,” I said. I would have let go of her hand, but she kept mine. I didn’t mind. “I have a couple of things, actually. First, the surgery. Second, preparing the mountain for immigrants. Third, some equipment and tools…”

  I explained what I wanted in each case. She listened and asked questions. For the surgery, we made sure she was prepared to assist me. For the rest, we discussed how to accomplish goals and nailed down some processes. I built imaginary versions of the tools I wanted so she could see exactly what I meant. It took a while, but, unlike communing with a mountain, talking in one’s headspace happens at the speed of thought. Human thought, not rock thought.

  Once Tort and I were sure we understood each other, I showed her out through the new door that connected to her headspace, watched it vanish, and exited through my own door.

  I opened my eyes and stood up.

  “Okay, I need to check a couple of things,” I told Wallin. “Lie down. This is going to sting, like she says, but that should go away after a bit and turn numb. All right?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” He lay down and I put a hand over the area I was going to affect. All the nerve impulses under my hand slowed to a crawl, sort of a local anesthetic. I poked him with a fingernail and he didn’t flinch. Good enough.

  My flesh-welding spell makes it possible to treat flesh more like clay. In this case, it pushed the flesh out of the way without tearing it. I did this until I had a tiny hole into his body, all the way to the dead tumor. A little pull, and the dead flesh flowed outward through the hole, drawing the open space it occupied—in the middle of his liver, I think it was—closed behind it, until it was entirely out of his body. I closed the last of the open space, sealed up the hole from the interior to the surface of his body, and added a fairly standard spell to encourage his body to heal any residual damage.

  I lifted the numbing spell without breaking it, kept it ready to slap it back on if he screamed. He blinked at me as sensation returned, looked down at the mess on the floor beside him.

  “That was inside me?”

  “Yep. Aren’t you glad it’s out?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty!”

  “Good. Take it easy for today, please. You might want to stop by again sometime tomorrow, just to make sure we got it all.”

  “I’ll do that, Your Majesty!”

  “Tort? Can he rest here for a bit, until he can make it home on his own?”

  “I will see him safely to his home,” Tort offered.

  “There you go,” I told him. “I think you’re going to be fine.”

  “And now,” Tort said, “you have kept your knights waiting.”

  “Are they done with breakfast already?”

  “Those three are, yes. It is the rest of them that still await you, out front.”

  “Oh, them. Right.” I wasn’t filled with enthusiasm. “Well, I guess I’ll get on that.” I checked with my three, gathered them up, and went outside.

  Upwards of three hundred, possibly as many as five hundred men were waiting for us. A lot of them were in armor. Some wore swords, more wore sashes, either red or grey. Most of the rest wore plain clothes of varying cut and quality. A few wore what can only be described as rags.

  I really need to get my guys sashes of a special color, I thought, regarding the crowd and trying not to be dismayed. Hats and helmets were still coming off. People were dropping to one knee in a wave, spreading outward.

  I crooked a finger at a tall, gangly fellow near the front. He rose and approached.

  “What are all these people doing here?” I asked.

  “Why, Your Majesty said that anyone who wanted to be a knight should be here this morning to be trained. Leastaways, that’s what I was told.” He looked worried. “It was a rumor, Your Majesty, but everyone agreed about it, told the same, rather than a dozen diff’rent stories…”

  “No, I said it, or something close enough,” I admitted. I didn’t have the heart to tell them to all go home. I really just wanted to help my three guys get some training and see what the orders of knighthood had on tap. I didn’t want to have open tryouts for professional combat monsters.

  I spotted one guy wearing rags and a determined expression. If he had boots, he’d be trying to haul himself up by the bootstraps. Could I tell him to buzz off when he obviously hoped to turn his fortunes around?

  Damned squishy red pumping thing. Too soft, that’s what it is.

  “Gentlemen—and, regardless of your station, you are all gentlemen at the moment—we are about to begin a difficult, grueling, exhausting regimen. You are about to be tested in ways you will not enjoy, and for qualities and powers you may not know you possess. If, at any time, you decide that being a knight is not for you, you may walk away as though nothing happened. Go back to your lives, and thank your luck that you do not have to endure more of what is about to come.

  “Make no mistake: What you are about to endure will be unpleasant, perhaps even unkind, possibly even cruel. But there is purpose behind everything that we are about to do, even though you may not know—may never know—what my purpose is.”

  I looked around at them all.

  “Anyone who wishes to go, please stay right here until the rest of us leave. For those of you who are determined to be knights in service to Karvalen and the King… follow me!” I clanked forward through the crowd and they parted rapidly for me. Moments later, I had a mob behind me, jogging along, trying to keep up.

  We ran all the way to the western edge of Mochara, out through one of the gates, then around the northern arc of the city, back in through the north gate, out through an eastern gate over the canal, and down to the place where Timon had delivered my lumber. It was in the canal, waterlogged from floating all night. We lost several people in the process, dropouts who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—run that far.

  I gave instructions to the exhausted legion—or is that a cohort? I think it’s a cohort. A legion needs a lot more men—to fish out the wood.

  While they got the wood out, I took a moment to set up an ongoing cleaning spell for myself. This was going to be a hot, dirty day, and being a king is at least partly about image. I also added a spell to draw heat out of me; if I stayed cooler, I wouldn’t sweat as much, and that would help.

  The branches were no trouble; the wet logs were a problem. There was no good way to pull a wet, green log up a couple of fee
t out of the canal. I picked two dozen men at random and got into the water. They followed me in and we lifted, rolling the logs over the lip of the canal and onto the east-side road.

  We set up a makeshift training ground right there. I sliced pieces of log to form giant stakes. Others dug holes to affix these pieces upright. Branches were further trimmed and shaped. Those with helmets paired them with sets of heavy sticks.

  Snapshots:

  A dozen men, a log across their chests, did sit-ups in unison. A line of men held another log overhead as they marched in lockstep from the southern canal outlet to the northern edge of the town’s wall. Others did push-ups, their hands and toes on wooden supports so their bodies never touched the ground. A line of men ran or jumped along an irregular course composed of logs of varying height and thickness, set upright in the ground. A trio of men stood on a log in the canal, making it roll in the water. Runners ran into town to find and recover items we needed for further obstacles. People with long sticks—branches turned into poles between eight and ten feet long—wielded them one-handed, trying to hit a post on one side, swing the pole up and over in a circle to hit the other side, and repeat as rapidly as possible. Others crawled, ankles tied together, dragging themselves along by rolling their forearms over and over. A few practiced their sword techniques with wooden weapons.

  When someone was exhausted, he switched to something else and continued.

  As we worked, a few of the runners we lost in the initial jog caught up. There weren’t many, though, but I admire perseverance. They joined in and I let them. One particularly skinny guy—the raggedy fellow I’d noticed in the crowd at Tort’s front door—staggered over, fell/dove into the canal, and started to climb out; he didn’t quite make it, but he kept trying to haul himself up over the edge. One of the guys doing the logrolling fell in, boosted the skinny guy up, then got back on the log. I made a mental note of both of them.

  “Majesty?” a man in armor gasped, sweat matting his hair flat to his head. He was next to me while we were doing sit-ups as a team, under a log. I participated, rather than watched, and for the same reasons as when I went running with Torvil, Kammen, and Seldar.