by Garon Whited
So, why am I thinking of Tort?
Not all the time, of course. While Lissette and I are being intimate, I’m pretty focused on what I’m doing. But afterward—or in between—I’m lying there with Lissette and wishing she was Tort.
Yeah, yeah, yeah… “You’re in love with her, stupid!” I don’t feel “in love” with her. I love Tort, yes, no question. I miss her, too. But she’s not My One True Love or anything like that.
Maybe I just don’t love Lissette. I mean, I like her, yes; it would be hard for me not to like her. There are things about her I could wish were different—she’s barely literate, doesn’t understand my objections to slavery, and I suspect Tianna multiplies better than she does, just as examples—but Lissette is still a wonderful person. She’s open-minded insofar as she isn’t entrenched in her opinions, is willing to learn, and will try anything once (twice, if it doesn’t kill her the first time). She’s had it drilled into her that she’s Queen, and that means “second in command to the King,” a profoundly liberal attitude in Rethvan culture. She still addresses everyone politely, regardless of station, and asks instead of orders.
It hurts me that I miss Tort when I’m holding Lissette in my arms. It seems unfair to Lissette, but what can I do? Heart surgery? It’s an arranged marriage, for crying out loud!
I’m trying to hide it by being attentive, solicitous, and as agreeable as possible.
Is that guilt? It feels like guilt. But what do I have to feel guilty about?
Lissette kissed me goodnight when the sunset started and settled in to sleep. I left her to it and rolled into a vampire burrito. It’s unlikely anyone will disturb me in the tent, but you never know. I always take precautions, even in full armor.
Once cleaned, dressed, and armed, I mounted Bronze and we were away into the night. I made sure to wear my old armor; it was less conspicuous. If things went well, I might want to be sneaky.
For practice, I wrapped Bronze’s hooves in a muffling spell, one that would damp the shockwaves in the air and ground. It didn’t make her silent, but she was eerily quiet. I liked it. Unfortunately, there was really nothing to be done about her breathing fire. That’s just part and parcel of her exerting herself.
Hmm. On the other hand, I could probably work out a spectrum-shifting spell to make the flames non-luminous in the visible range. Invisible fires!
Oh, dear. With enough work, I could upshift the heat and light into the gamma range. The total output wouldn’t be immediately lethal, though, and not useful as a weapon. On the other hand, she could be the source of heat and light for most versions of an Archimedes Ray spell. It wouldn’t be overwhelmingly powerful, but if I could get the focus down to a pinpoint it could be quite damaging. I might even mount such a spell on her, directly, so she could choose to breathe fire on something half a mile away—a horse with a built-in laser gun!
I’m not sure if constantly thinking up new wrinkles on how to kill people is a good quality or not.
We whisked along the road, racing up toward Loret. It wasn’t a long trip, but we slowed well short of it, not wanting to be a fiery beacon to any scouts. When Bronze cooled enough, we proceeded at a walk. I made sure to work a disguise spell for her, darkening her appearance against moonlight gleams and mottling it to break up her outline. She didn’t much care for it and I agreed with her.
On the other hand, we spotted the scouts before they spotted us, so I can’t say it was wasted effort.
I killed and ate them while Bronze led the horses farther down the road; we would bring them back with us later. I just didn’t want a relief party to find them wandering and instantly know something was wrong. With the scouts simply missing, the alarm would take longer.
We crept up, shadowed and silent, alert for anything that might give us away. We found two more watchposts, apparently dropped off rather than mounted. I killed them and tossed their dismembered, bloodless remains into the woods.
Byrne’s camp was fairly well laid out. The central sections were orderly, at least, with tents in neat rows. Only about a third of the force was in tents, I estimated. The rest were sprawled wherever they pleased, forming an unwitting but effective barrier between any threat and the camp proper. At a guess, the militia, draftees, and conscripts were sleeping on the ground; professional soldiers and officers were in the better quarters. Several low fires illuminated the area around a trio of much larger tents, probably the remains of cooking fires near the commanders’ tents.
Now that I could eyeball the forces directly, the spells that clouded scrying were useless to them. Whoever was in charge of cloaking the cannon from detection obviously didn’t think it worth the effort of hiding them from purely visual detection. And why should he? Anyone who made it into line-of-sight was about to be a target, anyway. In theory.
There were ten bronze cannon, each about six feet long, with a bore diameter of four or five inches. It bothered me immensely that the cannons and their carriages resembled Napoleon twelve-pounder guns. I saw a gunner’s quadrant sticking out of the one visible muzzle. The carriages had two wheels and a pair of trails with spades. They would be towed backward to their position by a team of horses hitched to the trails, then turned around to face the enemy.
Altogether, it looked like an incredible breakthrough in gunpowder technology. I was immediately suspicious. Weapons like these didn’t just spring into being without a lot of basic research, expensive development, and battlefield experimentation. Black powder, all by itself, was a major undertaking to get exactly right—and believe me, if you don’t get it exactly right, you just get a lot of smoke.
I had to take a closer look.
Jon taught me a spell to avoid notice. It’s really just a spell to influence the way someone thinks. Anyone in range will have the idea that you belong there and you can go about your business. He called it a Don’t Mind Me spell. I always thought of it as a Somebody Else’s Problem spell—the wearer of the spell was somebody else’s problem and could be safely ignored.
It has its good points. As long as you don’t do anything weird, people within range just ignore you. It’s better than invisibility in some ways; you can walk through a crowd and nobody screams. In this case, I could walk through a lot of sleepers and probably not even wake anyone.
The drawback was that it affected the minds of those in the area. While it’s hard to notice that sort of thing when it’s happening to you, any wakeful wizards would almost certainly become aware of the mental influence after it was withdrawn. Which meant that, if I made it to the cannon, my departure would have to be at high speed and probably with a variety of spells and projectiles chasing me.
Assuming.
Well, I run faster than most people can see, I’m in magical armor, and it’s hard to kill a dead man. It was worth a shot. I fired up my silencing spell and the Don’t Mind Me spell and started in, picking my way between sprawled sleepers. I wondered how many of them were going to get stepped on if I had to hurry out. There was really a fair amount of space between them, but they were scattered haphazardly.
Nobody sounded an alarm. I’m not sure anybody even looked at me. Admittedly, I was a shadowy figure walking carefully through the camp, but I almost expected something more than being ignored. Is that my ego talking, or my pessimism? Or am I just forgetful of how poorly humans see in the dark? I do forget, sometimes. Night falls and the world becomes a shadowless monochrome for me. I see better at night, albeit without the usual colors.
I take that back. I do see colors, but only the colors of energy—spells and souls, mostly. Everything mortal or material fades to grey.
Still, the real trick to sneaking in was getting past the guards around the cannon. There were three of them, mostly standing still and sort of keeping a lookout. Judging by their relaxed attitudes, I don’t think they took their job seriously. Still, I approached one, angling my path so as to be headed past the cannon, not at them; his gaze moved over me and he didn’t even nod as he dismissed me from consider
ation.
At my point of closest approach, I planted a foot in the trampled ground, leaned, and moved. There was a very quiet, spell-muffled thud of metal armor on brigandine, a faint rustle of cracking bones as I hit him across the throat with my forearm, and no sound at all as I laid him down between two pieces of artillery.
I paused, stretching my ears and listening for the alarm. That move wasn’t something people would ignore. If anyone had been looking in the right direction, and if the moonlight was enough to see by…
Maybe the firelight from the center of the camp helped me by reducing the night vision of any observer. Then again, there were no fires at all near the cannon. I think I just got lucky.
I slithered under a canvas tarp, followed by a writhing trail of blood from the dead man.
Yes, this was amazingly like a brass cannon from the nineteenth century. I didn’t like it one bit. A screw-thread device at the back allowed for precise elevation changes. The firing mechanism was a spring-powered wheel pressed against a piece of flint—a wheellock cannon!
Someone had brought cannon technology over from some other universe. Possibly my own, but certainly one where such technology was already well-developed. The cannon themselves might actually be the product of another world, brought across into this. Unlikely as that was, it was possible.
If I had to guess, I would say that the Church of Light had tucked away various bits of information, possibly even various bits of technology. They didn’t strike me as the sort to actually use any of the Foreign Devil Magic, but maybe someone had finally gone through the ruins of their hidden vaults and dragged some of the plunder out into the light.
That thought gave me chills. There were Things down in the Church vaults that were on my better-left-alone list. Then again, if cannon was the worst of the things recovered…
If. These were in Byrne’s army. What did the Prince of Byrne have tucked away under his house? Another vampire fork? Another Devourer in a glass ball? Or something worse?
I’m going to have to find the Church vaults, I thought, and I’m going to have to carry on their work of hiding the damned things! Firebrand chuckled at my thought.
It’d be fun to fight some of them, Boss. We could pick and choose. And some of them are bound to be things you can use, but mortals can’t.
You raise good points. Do you think the Church included instruction manuals and hazard labels? Or are they just random items of magical horror that we’ll have to fumble with until we discover how they work?
You love puzzles.
But I don’t love random button-pushing until something explodes. Especially when I’m holding it!
Hmm. Good point.
If I can find their version of Area 51, I’m going to pump concrete into it and hope for the best.
I sighed. Someday. Always someday. Everything has to be done and too much should have been done yesterday. Do all immortal creatures feel a time crunch?
Okay. Job at hand. Cannon.
While I’m here, what can I get away with?
The cannon are big, solid, and a pain to try and move. Do I try and find the powder and shot? They’re in a tent, that’s certain; they’ll want to keep them dry at all costs. Or do I want to just take a fast run through the important-looking tents and kill anything I can reach before running for it? Or do I want to go for a walk through the professional soldiers’ tents, sticking my head into each tent and something sharp into each man?
Well, I don’t much care for the idea of calmly sticking a sword through sleeping soldiers’ heads. It’s not that I think it’s the wrong plan; it might be the most effective thing I can do. I’d be willing to bet no one would notice me until and unless one of the sleepers screamed as I stabbed him—I can’t put a silencing spell on everyone before I stick them, and the one I’m wearing doesn’t have much of a radius of action. No, the problem with that plan is my aversion to killing people who aren’t trying to kill me. For all I know, they don’t like the idea of this war any more than I do.
I could hunt for the magazine tent and the powder. A cannon without ammunition is a poor ram, nothing more. But that would involve searching, and every tent I search will increase my chances of being noticed.
I’m really tempted to hit the wizards. My magical forces outnumber and probably out-power them by an order of magnitude or more; the only reason the enemy wizards are effective at blocking us is the range at which we operate. If the enemy lacked wizards entirely—or magicians; there might be one here—then the magical side of the fight will be pretty one-sided. But a competent commander would recognize that and might even decide to march home for reinforcements.
But the commanders… That might be best. I’ve had enough assassins and demons and armies coming after me, personally, that I’m more than a little irritated. True, that kind of thing is only to be expected, but the reverse is true, as well! They go for the jugular, I go for the jugular. It seems… fair.
I donned the tabard of my fallen guard, picked up his spear, and pretended I’d been standing there all the time. Just another guy standing guard, that’s me—hard to see, hard to make out, but a guy with a spear, standing guard in camp, doesn’t command attention.
Looking over the center of the encampment, I noted the wizards’ tents; they had spells for personal comfort. Air conditioning and sound damping, mostly, as well as bug-repelling and water-repelling spells, plus one tent with a spell specifically to keep snakes out. Can’t say I blame him; a lot of people have an aversion to snakes.
The guarded tents left me thoughtful. There were obvious alarm spells as well as guards. If I was very fast and encountered no problems, I might go through two tents before too many people were awake and hunting for the intruder. On the other hand, the alarms seemed tied to the tents; they detected physical intrusion and/or damage to the tents.
I don’t need to go through them physically, and there didn’t seem to be anything to keep me from reaching in with soul-sucking tendrils of darkness.
I gently slithered tendrils through my partners on cannon-watch. Slowly, they decided to lean on things, then sit. With them too tired to really care much about anyone outside their personal space, I stepped away, striding along with my spear over one shoulder, the very picture of a man going somewhere, but in no great hurry. I circled around a largish tent, brushing tendrils of my spirit through the cloth, into the space beyond, feeling out the flesh.
Yes, living bodies, mostly unprotected, all sleeping. As I paused and leaned on my spear, I drank the lives of the ones without protection, siphoning the vitality out of them gently, at first, to draw them deep into unconsciousness, then hard and sudden, ripping souls from the flesh and consuming them.
Mindless husks cannot command an army. At least, not well.
As I moved on to the next tent, I wondered why there were so few wards and protective devices. The forces of Vathula had dozens of the things, possibly hundreds. But here, only a dozen or so people wore any sort of protection. Did everyone else think me still in Karvalen, safely out of the way while my soldiers did my fighting? Or did they just not think I would invade their camp? Maybe some of them required activation, rather than running constantly? Or were some of them simply worn out by now?
Maybe it was all a trap?
(Why is it I get more nervous the more successful I am?)
Senses peeled, I continued on my rounds, suspicious and alert. I drained the vitality, the essence, the very souls from officer after officer, leader after leader. Some of great quality, others merely of high station, and all of them vanished from the face of the world until the day of their rebirth. Perhaps a dozen officers remained, shielded in their slumbers against the casual touch of my hungry darkness.
Could I have broken their protection and got at them, too? Maybe. But that would definitely have taken more effort than I could easily conceal. I would rather get what I could and get away cleanly.
Nothing attacked me. No spells, no subtle influences, not even the movem
ent of stealthy ambushers preparing their stroke. At least, not that I detected. If they were good enough to sneak up on a wary vampire in the middle of the night, though, they deserved to get the jump on me.
And yet, all was quiet save for the occasional snore, the crackle of low fires, the jingle of sentries about their rounds.
Eventually, I finished my own rounds and walked off along a lane between the lesser tents. I reached the end of it, laid my spear down alongside the last tent, and started picking my way back out through the sprawled mass of the conscripts.
Bronze greeted me with a nose against my cheek and a whuff of hot air.
“It was surprisingly easy,” I told her. “I don’t think they were expecting me. That’s the only explanation I can think of.”
She nudged me in the shoulder: You’re just modest.
“No, really. Their wizards must be focused entirely on keeping the cannon concealed. They didn’t even have alarms to detect undead, or my psychic tendrils, or even an alarm to go off when blood was spilled. I can’t bring myself to think they’re idiots, but then the only explanation is that they think they’re safe.”
Boss, Firebrand put in, are you sure it wasn’t a trap?
“No, I’m not, but I don’t see how it could be a trap. I’m not shot or skewered or on fire. If it’s a trap, I fail to see how it’s supposed to work.”
Me, too, Firebrand admitted, but can they really be that poorly protected? I mean, you’re a nightlord, Boss. No, strike that. You are the Lord of Night. You’d think they’d be a lot more concerned!
“I agree. It’s almost insulting. But what else can it be? If there’s some sort of advantage to be gained by this, it’s part of a really deep game and I don’t understand the rules.”
That’s not comforting, Boss.
“How do you think I feel about it?”
Good point.
“Come on. Let’s get back to camp and see if I can sneak in past our own guards. I suddenly feel paranoid.”