Nightlord: Sunset

by Garon Whited

  That’s okay. It isn’t just the Shadow who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. I went hunting for meals and tried to do my job as a good bloodsucking fiend of the night.

  In a town this size, I discovered very few people who actually wished to die. Not just the “I wish I was dead!” lament, but truly, really, longed for it. Both of them, unsurprisingly I suppose, were chained to oars in trading ships. The life of a galley-slave isn’t good; the two I found were murderers with death sentences. They were just being put to work in the meantime.

  Trust me, the lowest level of a prison galley is not a hygienic place. They don’t unchain you to go to the toilet; you stay right where you are. Think about it. Or, if you can avoid thinking about it, even better.

  I was glad I didn’t have to breathe. I was also pleased I could reach into a ship with my tendrils and not even leave the wharf. Once I’d done my job, I was happy enough to let the blood stay right where it was. I got off the dock and back onto solid ground. I don’t like the water these days, and I doubted the emaciated, half-starved wretches would have had much blood in them. Not to mention the filth.

  Enough. I don’t want to think about it any more.

  I did find a few amusing moments, though, during what I lovingly think of as Hell Week in Wizard School.

  Jon had a fondness for the delight of children. The old ham loved to do little tricks to make people—yes, especially children, but he never scorned the wonder of adults—stare and go “Oooooo!”

  We were walking along, staffs thunking the cobbles regularly, and he was going on about drainage and drying. I mentioned the silt and soil from the river pipe ought to be exceptionally fertile if it could be gotten off the sludging chains and into the fields; we were trying to figure out a practical way to do it. In the middle of this, a little boy, I don’t know, maybe four years old, came running up at full tilt and ran smack into Jon’s legs.

  I thought he was going to topple over, but a wizard’s staff is apparently more than just a magical prop.

  Jon tried to peel the kid off his leg and eyed the dozen or so children arrayed about us. They’d appeared out of nowhere, like spectators at a traffic accident.

  “Well? What’s all this fuss, then?”

  “You’re the wizard!” the one sticking to Jon’s leg piped. The rest agreed this was true.

  “So?”

  “Wanna see magic!” the sticky one declared. This was chorused and amplified.

  “SO?” Jon roared. “Just because you want to see it,” he lifted his staff and it radiated a pale blue light, “doesn’t mean I’ll do this!” He gestured, and a bolt of what looked like lightning forked up into the clear sky. “Or that!” Then it started to rain flower petals. “Or that!” And the flower petals turned to butterflies. “Or that!” The butterflies turned into little glowing fairies, which darted away on the wind, scattering. “Or that! Now scram, you little beggars!”

  They scrammed, chasing after the glowing, winged creatures.

  He scowled after them, but I caught him smiling when he didn’t think I was looking.

  The local church is pretty decent. The head priest has services twice a week and a lot of people show up, mainly people already in town; country folks don’t seem to have a taste for it. Jon dragged me along to one. Since it was daytime, it all worked out okay, but it made me nervous as a cat in a kennel to be there. Psychosomatic, maybe? Maybe. I got to meet the priest, though, and I don’t think he was making a special effort to greet the wizards. I shook his hand, discovered I liked him. His name is Ander.

  “Isn’t that a gata name?” I asked.

  “It is, but all are welcome in the light.”

  I didn’t go on with it. I doubted they would let me see the light other than as a blazing fist of wrath. No sense in antagonizing an influential man I just met and rather liked. He was a well-meaning and earnest sort, without being, what’s the word… pushy. Perfectly willing to just lead by example and answer any questions you might have—without dragging you into the temple to pray over you.

  I found the ceremonies to be instructive, though. The priests lead the congregation in prayers and singing, then reads from one of their holy works—I get the impression there are several, but I didn’t ask—and follows that with a sermon. The sermon I sat through was about the importance of obedience to authority, with a clear implication that those Guided By God were in authority. After the sermon, the sacrifices were brought out.

  Watching them pour wine on an altar was nothing major; it was when they laid a live lamb on the rock and got out the knife. The ritual was fairly short, direct, and just as lethal to the animal as anything I might do. But instead of using the power thus released, it was directed at the statue of the god.

  If the statue was the real target of such power, it should have been blazing with energy. It wasn’t. The power entered the statue and went somewhere else.

  The god accepted the sacrifice.

  Jon also took me to a somewhat less-than-kosher meeting with, as it turned out, some of the local pagans. Or protestants. Or heretics. Take your pick. We had to take a ride well out of town to do it; this was where non-city-dwellers found religion.

  They had a bonfire in the middle of the day. Their religion centers around fire and the sun as the primary source of all life. The sun is the Mother, strangely enough. All sun-worshiping religions with which I am familiar think of the earth as a mother-figure while the sun is a father figure. But this one regards the sun as the Mother of All Fire; within everyone, there is a spark of the Divine Fire—it takes a father and a mother to spark it, but only in a woman can that fire be nurtured into a child.

  That’s one reason. The other reason is the priestess.

  Only women can be clergy in this religion. Even then, she has to be a redhead. Apparently, the two are inseparable; if you’re a lady with red hair, you’re a priestess—like it or not. Here, a woman has red hair only because she has enough of Mother’s Fire within her to make it so.

  And boy, can they ever do some neat tricks with it!

  A fire-witch—as the more patriarchal Church calls them, when they aren’t calling them “heretics,” and “blasphemers”—cannot be burned by any normal flame. She can drown in a river of molten lava, but she won’t even scorch until after she’s drowned. Even magical fires are blunted; there are stories of a fire-witch and a magician slugging it out. The magician needs to use something besides the handy bolt of flame to be effective; lightning works a lot better, apparently. But it’s still a pretty even match as the fire-witch tends to be able to generate fires of hellish intensity. Legends tell of a priestess awakening a mountain and making it roar in fury.

  Volcanic temper? I don’t know. I don’t want to find out the hard way.

  The local priestess—Tamara—is actually a very pleasant lady. She stays out of sight a lot since the Church is pretty down on this “heretical” belief in a sun-goddess… and therefore redheads in general. It’s not that a solar priestess is arrested on sight—that’s relatively suicidal—but they are definitely persecuted.

  It’s hard to vaporize a crossbow bolt when shot from behind.

  Tamara strikes me as being a bit young for the job. She can’t be more than twenty or so. Maybe I’m just getting cynical in my immortality, but I would’ve thought she needed to be a bit older to be a full priestess. Then again, it’s also a fertility goddess we’re talking about. Maybe it makes a sort of sense.

  The way they lit the bonfire was really startling. I have a fire-breathing metal horse to light my campfires and a sometimes-flaming sword if it feels like it, but this was interesting.

  Tamara and all the celebrants—Jon and I spectated; we’re not part of the Mysteries—surrounded the heaped-up pile of brush and branches. They joined hands in a big ring around it and Tamara recited a prayer. Her hair got longer. It was already loose and down over her shoulders, but it lengthened, started to glow, and turned a more orange-like color as it did. By the time it reached
her feet, it was also flickering.

  Her hair looked like a curtain of fire, enveloping her completely, except for her outstretched arms and her face. I could see the ground at her feet smoking, but the people on either side of her, holding her hands, didn’t seem to be discomfited. She looked at the pile of brush and it lit.

  Not like someone tossed at match in it, either; flames bloomed from the pile. It was like someone had piled all the wood on top of a big gas stove burner and Tamara touched off the pilot light. There was even a whoomph of displaced air.

  The disturbing thing to watch was when they all kept their hands clasped in a ring, but stepped forward, close to the fire, arms coming down, until they were standing in the outer edges of the bonfire, actually in the flames, hands still joined, shoulder to shoulder.

  Nice trick. I wondered if it worked with flamethrowers.

  I’m also wondering if Tamara likes me—I mean, more than just as a polite-hello-type of likes me.

  The ceremony was over and the celebrants took off for their various points of the horizon—no grouping up; I liked that. Members of a persecuted religion don’t need to draw attention to themselves—and Tamara came to Jon and me. Jon made introductions.

  “This is my apprentice and probably my successor,” he noted, gesturing at me. “He goes by the name of Halar.”

  Tamara looked me up and down. She smiled.

  “He’s bright.”

  Jon shrugged. “He’s young,” he answered, then said to me, “Halar, this is Tamara.”

  I held out my hand. “How do you do, Tamara?”

  She swarmed into my arms, hugged me hard, and kissed me! I was so surprised I just stood there like a fool, hand still outstretched, while she went on kissing me. I’m not used to strange, beautiful women throwing themselves into my arms. This is decidedly unusual. Nice, but unusual.

  Finally, I put my arms around her and kissed back. I have to admit she kisses well.

  She finally pulled back and looked me over again, still embraced. Jon looked on, amused. Tamara cocked her head to the side, as though listening.

  “She says he’ll do.”

  Jon nodded. “Good.” Tamara pecked me on the cheek and stepped away.

  “’She’?” I asked, feeling stupid.

  “Mother,” Tamara answered, as though that was all I needed to know.

  “Your mother?” I asked, wondering if she was talking about a ghost.

  “Not entirely,” she said. “Mother. The Mother.” She pointed at the sun.

  “Oh.” It was all I could think of to say. She was listening to the voice of a goddess? One that approved of me? That was a switch. I thought for sure a solar deity would be against me.

  Another thing distracted me. I’d do… for what?

  While my head whirled, she pecked Jon on the cheek and said, “Welcome, both of you. Will you come with me to share my afternoon meal?”

  “No, thank you,” Jon demurred. “I’m just introducing the boy around.”

  “As you will. Will you join us for the autumn feast?”

  Jon looked startled. “I doubt it. I plan to be dead.”

  I tried not to smirk. Not the politest way to tell someone “no,” but it gets the point across.

  Tamara turned to me and looked me squarely in the eye. “Will you attend? Please?”

  “I… uh, sure. If I can get away. I don’t know how busy I’ll be, with Jon dead and all…”

  “Quite understandable.” She smiled again. I like her smile. “I will hope that you can join us.”

  Jon insisted we had a lot to do—him to teach, I to learn—and we made our exit.

  Let me see, now. What else happened this week?

  Oh, other notes on the baron; apparently, he does a lot of the actual governing on his own, rather than farming it out to subordinates. He’s got a sizable staff, but he’s a very hands-on ruler. He saddles up and goes on tour, sometimes for a day or two, just so people can see him and talk to him.

  Okay, he’s still often an arrogant overlord, by my standards. People, even peasants, aren’t something to be scraped off your boots, even if a lot of them smell like it. But he’s a noble and they aren’t. At least he isn’t using them for jousting targets or keeping them up at night to scare off noisy frogs so he can sleep. I think he’s actually, for his environment, a pretty decent guy.

  I just realized something. I don’t have a qualm in the world about nibbling on the living essence of a dozen people at a time, but I get all offended when the baron is rude to them. I think I’ll shut up now.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24TH

  Jon died today. It was a quiet thing. We were in his workroom and he was making me re-draw some of the symbols, just for practice. I was down on the floor and he was watching. He went to his chair after a bit and sat down slowly, as old men are wont to do. I ignored this and kept sketching, keeping in mind the significance of each symbol, one by one.

  As an aside, anybody can just draw the pretty pictures. It’s the way you focus power into the symbol, not the symbol itself, that gives it significance. It’s easier to do when the symbol means something to you. If you think of wavy lines as an air symbol, use that in your weather magic. If the wavy lines mean “water” to you, then use that in your spell to purify a well. It’s what you put into it that makes it potent, not the actual design. It helps a lot, though, to have symbols everyone feels the same about if you’re going to have more than one person doing spells with the same diagram! If a symbol means “fire” to one person and “earth” to another, then there’s going to be some ugly harmonics in that magic.

  Jon told me there are written symbols for the language of creation—ones that have significance to the universe, as opposed to significance to people. Sort of like the magical equivalents of math symbols for universal constants back home. Pi. Avogadro’s Number. Planck’s constant. The speed of light. That sort of thing. He taught me—as well as he could!—the few symbols he knew of the Language. They’re hard to understand. Understanding the Language reminds me of Westerners trying to translate Chinese; each symbol means something precise and unique, and we don’t really understand the context surrounding it. He also cautioned me about ever using them; they attract Attention From On High.

  Bad idea, especially for me.

  Ironically, the Language is entirely written; no one knows how to pronounce it. Jon was of the opinion it couldn’t be pronounced, for much the same reason a man can’t do brain surgery on himself. He might be right.

  Anyway, I finished going around the circle after about an hour or so. It was a simple circle, mainly for “the gathering of power from all the corners of the world,” as Jon put it. Sort of an amplifier for whatever spell you want to cast from inside the circle. All it does is gather and concentrate magical energy so a wizard can focus more of it, but it’s handy when there aren’t a lot of cows around.

  I stood up and regarded the thing.

  “Okay, it looks good to me.”

  Jon didn’t answer. He was slouched down in his chair, eyes closed. I sighed; he kept dropping off to nap while I did the more time-consuming exercises. I nudged his ankle with the toe of my boot. He didn’t stir. When I took his wrist, it was cool. I checked both pulse and breathing, but he was entirely too quiet for either.

  He’s laid out in the church right now. Ander recited a long litany over him, the baron gave a speech, and I had to get up there and address everyone at the funeral and tell them what a great guy my predecessor was.

  I barely knew the man. He was a grouchy smartass with a nasty wit and a relentless, ruthless attitude, as well as having something of a contempt—usually well-concealed—for anyone who had to take off shoes to count above ten. He despised magicians as rote learners without creative thought. He considered religion to be a fool’s game. He loved the wonder of children; I think he liked children, period. And he liked cabbage and bean soup—mainly because it gave him gas, and that amused him. I’ll never understand why.

  I thi
nk he was my friend. I wish I could have had longer to find out.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25TH

  Jon had a second funeral this morning. The fire-worshippers built a pyre just for him; Tamara asked me to acquire the body. It wasn’t that hard. As Jon’s apprentice, I was expected to bury him myself, so I did. After everyone was gone, I just dug him back up again. Tiring, but not difficult.

  Tamara held the ceremony at noon—and I should add that she kissed me hello again. She kissed everyone hello, usually a quick peck on the cheek, but I got the full treatment. It beat the heck out of having old folks welcome me to church with a handshake. Maybe she wants me to join her religion. It can’t be because she likes me that much; she doesn’t even know me!

  I got to join in the ceremony this time. It was just a ring of people, holding hands and watching a pyre. We didn’t step into the flames—those were reserved for the guest of honor. The bonfire flared up just like before and Tamara’s hair did that flowing firefall effect again. But the fires of this bonfire kept getting brighter and hotter. I could feel it getting hotter, but it didn’t seem to be hurting any, if that makes any sense. It just felt… I don’t know how to describe it. Warmer, maybe.

  Tamara’s fire-hair started shading over into yellow, and then yellow-white, and then white.

  So did the bonfire.

  It took about three minutes or so before the entire bonfire was gone. Hot ashes and smoke were all that was left of a half-ton of brush, branches, green logs, and a bony old body. The dirt where it had been was melted and fused—which, of course, reminded me of another death.