Nightlord: Shadows

by Garon Whited

  “CrysTal.”

  “Crys-TAHHHL.”

  “Crystal.”

  “Crystal.”

  “That’s it. As for what’s been going on, that’s going to take a while. You want to keep walking around and moving while I do the talking?”

  “I think so. Yes, I do.”

  So, while he continued to bend, stretch, flex, walk, and so forth, I told him about everything that was going on since I woke up. He looked at me oddly a few times, but just waved for me to continue when I asked what was wrong. Eventually, I caught up to the present.

  “And there you have it,” I finished. “Any questions?”

  “Tort hasn’t tried to kill you?”

  And I was having such a good day, I thought.

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” I told him. “Why would she?”

  “She’s been hectoring me to tell her where you were for sixty years,” he replied. “Two people should know, she said, so if anything happened to me, she could take over. I remember the last time, when magicians gathered together to steal your blood and try to make themselves immortal. It was a disaster.”

  “Well, I didn’t enjoy it,” I admitted, “but I’d hardly call it a disaster.”

  “I’m not talking about your part of it,” he snapped. “I’m talking about what they did with the blood they took from you.”

  Strange. My stomach just dropped a few fathoms.

  “What did they do with it?” I asked, suppressing visions of a plague of undead swarming over cities.

  “They were trying to distill an elixir of immortality from it, avoiding the whole problem of being an undead.”

  “I know. Did they?”

  “No. Most of them were slain by the idiot who went to work for the Hand, remember?”

  “Melloch. I remember.”

  “That’s him. The few who escaped him managed to work with your blood for a bit, experimenting and failing. One of their experiments certainly produced an immortal, but it was a mindless, hungry thing that killed, drank blood, and moved on to kill and drink again. It was immensely strong and almost impossible to put down. Fortunately, it had no tolerance for sunlight, and not enough intelligence to predict that it would need shelter. It was lured into a large, open area near dawn, and that was the end of it.”

  “How is that a disaster? A mess, certainly—” He cut me off.

  “The disaster,” he said, tight-lipped, “was the city of Terma. That… that thing went through it like a fire.” He sighed and sat down. “We don’t know if it was infectious or not, but with thousands of corpses lying in the streets, we didn’t have much of a choice; we had to burn the city to be sure. Nothing survived.”

  Well, he was right. That was a disaster. Would I have done the same? Yes, probably. I’m all too aware of the danger of the unrestricted spread of blood-drinking monsters.

  I accept the necessity. I don’t have to like it, and I don’t.

  “I take it someone had words with these idiots?” I asked.

  “Yes. I’m pretty sure the Magician’s Council in Arondael summoned them. They were forced to turn over the rest of your blood for destruction. I don’t know if it really was destroyed, but that was what was supposed to happen. Then the idiots went off on their merry way again—”

  “Hold it. That’s it? No punishment? No restitution? Just, ‘Hand it over and get out’?”

  T’yl raked his lower lip with his teeth, thinking. I’d seen that mannerism before; it looked odd on the elf-face.

  “How much do you know about Arondael?” he asked, finally.

  “I know it’s there,” I replied, “and it’s a city of magicians.”

  “Yes and no. Many magicians live there, but that’s not quite the same. Arondael has a lot of enchantments and glamours laid on it from a lot of magician residents over the past few centuries, and people who want to study the Art—at least, on this side of this continent—tend to wind up there to find a teacher. It’s not the center of the world for magicians, though.”

  “Oh. Then I’ve been mistaken. Do continue.”

  “Arondael has two things that really matter to magicians: the library, and the Council.

  “The library is a collection of spells, obviously. Some magicians spend their whole lives studying spells there; others learn a lot of them—all the ones they think they’ll need—and come back when they find something that needs a spell they don’t know. Sometimes, a researcher will add something to the library.

  “The Council is a group of magicians appointed to be responsible for the running of the city and for… hmm.” He paused to think. “Magicians sometimes work for various causes. Religious, political, financial. Arondael itself is never involved. Arondael stays out of the political skirmishing. A magician, or a cabal of them, may involve themselves with this baron or that count, this duke or that king, but Arondael doesn’t take sides. It’s a survival thing. The qualities of peace and quiet prosperity would go into the midden if Arondael became a power piece on the political gameboard.

  “The Council really sees to it that this state of affairs continues. As long as Arondael is left alone, the Council encourages magicians to mind their own business. That doesn’t stop you from hiring one, of course,” he added. “If your political enemies have a magician on their side, you go to Arondael and the Council won’t interfere with you hiring one for your side. The Council just discourages participation in worldly affairs, which just reduces the number of magicians who will serve a cause, really. It can make you more than a little unwelcome in the library, or even just the city.”

  “Okay.”

  “The Council also, supposedly, acts to oppose magic gone bad. If you have a glowing rock that’s slowly melting its way down toward the underworld, and nobody can stop it, the Council will appoint a committee, who will investigate, make recommendations, and possibly outline a course of action.”

  “By which time, there’s a hole through to the underworld,” I guessed.

  “Probably,” he agreed. “It’s often easier to get forgiveness than permission. If you see the disaster approaching and do something about it—a real disaster, not a political upheaval or massive financial loss—then the Council will probably just pat you on the head and send you on your way.

  “Which, I might add,” he added, “is what happened at the Edge of the World. Enough of us were watching so that when it became clear what was going on, some of us had the guts to actually do something about it.” He chuckled. “Saving the world is a good excuse for violating the unwritten rules,” he added.

  “Turns out, when I hid you away, the Council was very understanding and more than a little helpful in keeping other magicians off my back about it. They foresaw disastrous possibilities if I was pressured. So I shouldn’t mock them too much for being a fat load of useless old cowards.”

  “Obviously,” I agreed. “Are we getting to the part about the idiots and my blood and the punishing?”

  “Yes. I needed to explain a bit about the Council, though. They don’t actually punish, usually, unless it’s something likely to affect something important—the Council, for example. If the undead thing the idiots had created had spread—if we hadn’t contained it by burning the city—then they’d have been called in for it and probably had their magic broken. As it was, they were just told not to do that. Now they have something of a black mark by their name; they won’t be given much leniency the next time they foul something up.” He looked at my expression and asked, “What?”

  “Um. Is there a simple way to explain about someone’s magic being broken?”

  “The short form is that they have their ability to work magic damaged to the point they can’t do much with it. Imagine breaking an archer’s fingers and hands and setting the bones improperly.” He eyed me. “I thought you, of all people would know about that.”

  “I don’t,” I assured him. “I don’t think I’d even know how to begin.”

  “Really? Then why is Keria so angry wit
h you?”

  “Back up,” I suggested. “You’re generating more questions than you’re answering. One thing at a time. First, Tort wants to kill me. Now Keria is angry with me. And there are idiots who want more of my blood, I assume. Let’s tackle this in order: Tort first.”

  “Very well.”

  “Aside from pestering you about where I was, is there anything else that makes you think she wants to kill me?”

  “Well, she’s a woman. They aren’t trustworthy, you know. They’re treacherous schemers.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I admitted, thinking of Tort telling me about Kamshasa, and the matriarchy. T’yl might not be the most impartial source of information. “If they’re so treacherous, why did you teach her?”

  “Why?” he asked, looking surprised. “Raeth asked me to, and she was one of your personal favorites, was she not? How could I refuse?”

  “And it let you keep a close eye on her?” I suggested.

  “You do have to keep your eye on them,” he agreed. “After all, you were well and truly out, despite all the ghosts and the moving stone in the mountain. Anyone could have just walked up to you and cut your head off. I couldn’t be too careful.”

  “And I thank you for it.”

  “Tort’s also working on that immortality problem, extending her life.”

  “I got the impression all magicians did that,” I said.

  “Well, yes. I do it myself,” he said, and glanced down at his new body. “Perhaps not so much anymore.

  “But she started early,” he continued, “which tells me she’s more interested than most. If so, she’s going to be interested in your blood; it holds the key to true immortality—no, let me put that another way. It holds the key to avoiding growing old, which, really, is all anyone wants. I don’t want Tort to have access to it; she’s only a mediocre magician, and has far too much wizardry in her thinking. She would make a complete hash of it by trying anything that sprang to mind, rather than carefully and methodically taking small, safe steps in developing her magical process.”

  “I see.” That also told me a lot about how magicians created new spells: much the same way scientists create new biowarfare agents. Very, very carefully. And, of course, slowly.

  “I think,” he went on, “I can’t prove it—that she really doesn’t want to experiment with your blood. I think she wants to use it to become like you. Maybe her plan is to then find a way to keep the immortality and overcome the undead part. She thinks backwards like that, sometimes.”

  “I see,” I repeated. I thought of it as thinking outside the box, myself. If you get the immortality, you then have time to fix the rest of the problems. I suspect T’yl misread her motives. If she was interested early in staying young, it was probably because she had no idea how long I would be away. Just my guess, of course, but it also fit with what I knew of Tort.

  “So, is Keria angry with me because she’s a woman? Or is there something more to it than that?”

  “She doesn’t need another reason,” T’yl admitted. “Aside from being a woman, she’s out to kill you because you stripped her of her magic when you made her a Lady of Night.”

  “I don’t recall that part,” I admitted. “The stripping her of magic, I mean. I remember making a nightlord—nightlady?—of her.”

  “Well, you did. At least, she can’t cast spells, and she’s been more than a little bitchy about it.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Remember the idiots working on immortality through an enchantment using nightlord blood?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, they couldn’t get any more of yours…” he trailed off.

  I put my face in my hands.

  “Yep,” T’yl said. “There are three survivors of Melloch’s little nightlord-kidnapping cabal. They’re hanging around with the fourth not-exactly-survivor.”

  “And I really was having such a good day,” I muttered.

  I left T’yl with a guard, not entirely to guard him, but also to assist him. T’yl kept practicing with his new body while I went up to the conference room to check on the progress and to think.

  Think about what? A lot of things. Tort, Amber, Tianna, T’yl, Keria, Sparky… okay, think about a lot of people.

  I paced around the stone table in the conference room, running my fingers through the sand in the middle, leaving trails. Someday, when I got the scrying spells sorted out, the sand table would make a good display for whatever they saw.

  Easy thinking first, as a warm-up.

  Tianna. I like having a granddaughter. It’s a little odd, since I didn’t go through the normal process of raising a daughter first, but I’m getting used to it. I’ve—ha!—warmed up to the idea pretty well. I think she’s going to be fun.

  Keria. Yes, I made her a vampire, at her demand and insistence. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn’t do anything special, though—just ran through the fangs-and-blood routine to start the transformation and left it at that. I didn’t do anything to make her… to stop her from using magic. I don’t see what went wrong. I mean, I didn’t use magic, wasn’t even aware of it, until after I became a nightlord. I’m not sure how it could have affected her differently, unless being a magician had something to do with it. Given that she’s had decades to stew over this, she probably isn’t going to believe anything I have to say about it, but I should probably find a way to talk to her about it. If this is all just a big misunderstanding, I’m willing to say that eating her invasion force makes us even.

  If she’s not going to be reasonable about this, I might have to get unreasonable with her. I still want Firebrand back. I may have to expedite that; Firebrand might not be too happy in its current position. Especially since someone is trying to keep me out of contact with both it and with Bob. I should look into that, preferably by cutting a hole in something.

  T’yl. He’s an ancient and somewhat reasonable magician, albeit with an obvious misogynistic bent. Tort mentioned something about that, and it’s pretty apparent. Does the fact that he’s prejudiced have anything to do with his facts? Well, yes; what he thinks of as facts are often just his opinions. But he’s a decent sort, overall, and I think he’s mostly trustworthy. As far as I know, he hasn’t tried to use undead blood for immortality experiments, and he had all the opportunity in the world—literally. Also, he seems to have enjoyed being the master magician of Mochara. He even suppressed his distrust of women well enough to teach Tort.

  Now that he’s immortal—well, he’s in an elf-body, which should be immortal—will he have to find other things to occupy his time, rather than searching for immortality spells? Will he want to be the official magician of Karvalen, or will he be content to let Tort do it? I’ll have to talk to Tort about that, I think, before I discuss it with T’yl.

  Is immortality itself a problem for magicians? Is T’yl still going to be able to work with magic now that he’s in an immortal body? I’ll have to ask.

  Tort. She’s a ninety-something magician with what I would call a hefty crush or a moderate obsession with me. With T’yl’s input, I suppose that I could believe that she’s trying to get on my good side to become undead, or quasi-dead, or whatever it is that I am. Become like me. That’s it. But I have a hard time stretching my head enough to believe that. At night, I can see right through the flesh and into the souls of people. I haven’t pored over hers like a lost explorer consulting a map, but I think I would have noticed if she had any sort of unpleasantness for me.

  She really likes me. Maybe that’s a holdover from the child-rescuer she remembers from her youth, or I may well be the only good father figure she ever had. Maybe she’s inflated me in her head over all the years she’s missed me. Maybe she’s just lived her life in a place where I’m an idealized hero, like King Arthur. Maybe it’s a little bit of each.

  What it comes down to is that I trust her, regardless of what sorts of worms T’yl lets out of the can. Maybe I should say that I trust her more than I trust
T’yl.

  Although, to be fair, it’s hard to trust him much at the moment. I look at T’yl and I see and hear an elf that was trying to kill me. That could influence a person’s thinking. I’m trying to ignore it.

  Amber. Having a grown daughter is more difficult than most other things. We’re still not on the same page about being related, to say nothing of our relationship. It’s awkward, it’s going to be awkward, and I don’t know how my present relationship with Sparky is going to interfere with my developing relationship with my daughter. But Amber seems to be trying to get along with me, which I count as a major victory. I intend to do everything I can to facilitate that.

  And then there’s the political mess of putting Amber—or leaving Amber—in charge of Mochara. I’ve no objections to Amber running the place; she’s been doing it for a while. I just object to her running the place for Sparky. I’d much rather Amber didn’t have an unavoidable advisor hanging around in the back of her head. But I don’t want to give Amber the idea that I have anything against her ruling the place. How do I differentiate between the Princess of Karvalen and the priestess of the Mother of Flame? Hats? Fireproof hats?

  And, of course, Sparky.

  That whole incident with the gods is like a dream. I remember the dream, but a lot of the details are hazy. Do I need to talk to her and find out how she feels? Or do I need to just stay away from her and let her sort things out? I’m torn on that. If I stay out of it, will she calm down, or will Father Sky encourage her to be angry? If I talk to her, will we come to an arrangement, or will she be upset at having to talk to me?

  I kind of see T’yl’s point, at least as regards female gods.

  I continued to pace around the table, thinking.

  What can I do about any of this right now? Should I wake people up and start questioning them? Obviously not. How about I just keep on moving in the same direction? Everyone can make up their own mind about what he/she/it wants and how to get it. If I’m open enough about my willingness to be reasonable, maybe they’ll consider asking me for help, rather than trying to use me for their own ends. Or they’ll use me for their own ends without bothering to ask, assuming I’d help them anyway, despite how much that’s likely to piss me off.