Nightlord: Sunset

by Garon Whited

  Sitting beside the bed was a portly, older fellow, perhaps in his fifties—fairly old for this place. The lady on the bed was perhaps ten years his junior, equally chubby, and very pale.

  As I moved to the opposite side of the bed to check her pulse and breathing, I asked, “How long has she been ill?”

  “Master wizard, I do not know what to do! My wife is ill—dying! Tell me that you can save her!” Her breathing was shallow and slow, her pulse faint but steady.

  “How long has she been ill?” I repeated.

  “About two days,” the servant answered. “Last night she rose and called for water, then fell in a heap and has not roused since.”

  “Thank you. What did she say was wrong with her before that?”

  “She complained of numbness, lord.”

  The master of the house added, “Her left arm and leg had no feeling. She spoke of it to me, though she could move them.”

  I pulled back the covers slightly and regarded my patient. A few wrinkles made tracks around her eyes, but they looked like smile-wrinkles to me. To all intents, she seemed asleep. I touched her forehead and wrists but felt no fever. I then peeled back an eyelid without response.

  “Bring me a small mirror or something polished.” This was done and I reflected the firelight into her open eye; the pupil did not change size.

  “Well,” I said, “I know what is wrong, but not if it can be cured.”

  “I will pay whatever you require if you will save her, lord wizard. I swear it!”

  “Then you won’t have to worry about being poor. Calm down. If I can, I will; if I can’t, not all your fortune will change it. So abandon that line of thinking.

  “What I think has happened,” I continued, slipping into the local speech pattern again, “is a vessel within her head has burst. It has harmed the brain within her head, robbing her of movement and sense. There are spells that can help this, possibly even cure it, but they are difficult and not quick to cast. There is much I must do here immediately, then I must go to my workshop and prepare mightier spells. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he said, desperate and miserable.

  “Now, leave the room, everyone. Let no one within until I come out. To have spectators may well ruin the workings I am about to attempt. But fetch me a dove in a cage and a knife made of silver; knock once upon the door when you have them and wait for me.”

  He nodded feverishly and shooed his servant out, then slammed the door behind him.

  Personally, I was wondering what I was going to do with a dove and a silver knife, but it gave him something to do. Oh, well. If nothing else, it would make a good sacrifice and a bloody snack, later—if I could keep it quiet. The locals don’t like the idea of slaughtering anything for magical purposes; it smacks of dark arts and evil to them. Considering it’s probably a method invented and used by nightlords, way back in the beginning of time, I can’t say I blame them especially. Of course, slaughtering an animal for the greater glory of their god is a completely different thing.

  I regarded my charge for a minute or four, thinking. She was alive, in the biological sense of the word. The question was really whether or not anyone was still in there.

  I’ve never really read someone’s mind. I’ve only looked on the…patterns, the changes in the ripples of their spirits. Even when Sasha and I had communed in the hospital, it wasn’t with words, it was with feelings and concepts. It’s not the same as reading a book. Of course, I can get everything that someone once was by devouring them… but that’s rather counterproductive when I’m trying to preserve their life! So I worked a spell that would let me see her spirit, much like my night-eyes would; that would do for now.

  It’s a difficult spell, according to Jon. I seem to have a talent for it. Go figure. Might be because I know what it should do—like having the box-top picture for a jigsaw puzzle. I know the answer, so putting the pieces together is easier.

  She was in there. Not at all quiet, either; rather hysterical and terrified was my guess, judging from the chaotic, shifting patterns of color.

  “Aha,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  Judging by the sudden shifting in her aura, she did. She was trying desperately to tell me so but her body just wasn’t obeying.

  “Yes, yes. Do calm down, please. If you’ve been listening, you know help is here. I can’t hear you, but I can see that you hear me. I’m going to do everything I can to help you. It might not be enough to fix you, but I promise you won’t be a prisoner in your own body for the rest of your life. Just calm down and wait for a bit; I’m working as fast as I can—and a lot of that you won’t be able to see or feel, so be patient.”

  She wasn’t reassured, really, but she was a lot more comfortable knowing somebody was doing something. I suppose I’d have felt the same.

  So I sat and thought. Brain injuries don’t normally heal; the brain doesn’t have cellular reproduction. What I did with Shada was an elementary thing, not something on this massive scale. Still, I applied all four of the healing spells I knew by rote; by definition, they couldn’t hurt. I also improvised, much like I did for Shada, and wrapped them around and in the lady’s head.

  Why do my damsels in distress always have head wounds? Because they have to be crazy to ask me for help? I dunno.

  There was a single, sharp knock at the door. I waited for a bit, then went to it and opened it. The husband—Keldun was his name; the wife was Geva—was sitting in a chair outside.

  “Will she live?” he asked, instantly.

  “She is alive; she is in there and is aware, but she cannot move. I’m still working on it. Don’t give up until I do, okay?”

  “As you say, lord wizard. Thank you.”

  I brought the knife and the bird inside and shut the door. I set the bird down on the nightstand next to the bed and had the idea.

  The bird was alive; it was constantly producing living energy. Normally, when I feed on someone, they get tired if I only take a little, but they produce more energy and stop being tired. Of course, when I take it all, they die. In many ways, when I snack on someone, it’s like they do work—the work of keeping me alive and strong.

  Why not try to bind the bird’s life to the spells acting to encourage Geva’s healing? Not with such a drain that the bird died, but just enough to tire it? I had done something similar with the baron and his guards—but there I had just done mainly what a vampire does. I stole energy from the guards and used a spell to tie it down inside the baron. But this idea was, essentially, building a conduit between one spirit and another to make an ongoing power link—a small, steady trickle, rather than a thrown bucket. Would that work?

  I could almost hear Jon in the back of my head, saying, How will you ever know?

  So I tried it. I deliberately set the drain on the bird very low, simply because it was only a bird. I don’t think I could kill a human with such a spell; the spell just doesn’t have the same draw I do at night. But a bird doesn’t have the same vital wattage, if you will. Once the spell was in place, the bird stayed settled in its cage and didn’t stir. It stopped its annoying cooing, though; that was something. Yes, I could see a faint trickle of energy flowing from the bird to Geva, directed into the places where she was damaged.

  I sat back and watched to make sure everything was going well. The bird seemed to be in no danger of immediately expiring; Geva didn’t stir.

  Fine. Time to pretend to make preparations in my workshop. I wanted to look this over with vampire eyes and vampire tendrils—much more precise and sensitive than anything I could conjure.

  At present. Time and practice… someday.

  I told Keldun I was going to fetch some things and I had certain preliminary spells to work on and I would be back in a few hours, possibly that evening—and not to touch the bird or move Geva. I also reassured him again that I was fairly sure I could help.

  Bronze is good at city navigation; she hurdled a beer wagon full of barrels and ran straight over a small chil
d in the street—without laying a hoof on him, I hasten to add. Good drama. Let the citizens see a wizard in a hurry to help. Nice publicity.

  Shada, when I told her about the situation, brought up a good point.

  “Surely you know that Ander will pray over her.” That gave me distinct pause. “What if he is there, tonight?” she went on. “He may well be chanting a litany over her when you walk in the door.”

  “Shada?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have I mentioned lately that you are smart, sexy, helpful, and possibly the most important person in this world to me?”

  She turned away to pick up a book and put it back on the shelf, but not before I saw her blush.

  “No.”

  “Shada, you are all those things. I’m glad you’re here to do my thinking for me.”

  “A wife’s duty,” she replied, “is to bring her husband back down to earth when his head is up… in the clouds.”

  “I’m not going to ask if you changed that in mid-thought,” I chuckled. “I’m glad you do. Thank you.”

  “You are welcome.”

  “Excuse me, please; I want to review some of Jon’s notes before tonight.”

  “Of course. I’ll bring you dinner in the workroom; it sounds like you anticipate a busy night.”

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27TH

  Ander wasn’t in Geva’s bedchamber; he was in the hall. Keldun wouldn’t let anyone in for fear of disturbing something. But the door was open and Ander was gallantly praying and gesturing in Geva’s direction.

  Oddly enough, this didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was expecting to feel a blaze of agonizing, fiery energy radiating off a priest in the performance of his duties, but Ander wasn’t anything like that. Oh, he was doing something, that was obvious. The power of his faith might not move mountains, but it was at least a good field-plowing and a couple of irrigation ditches. It wasn’t bothering me a bit to be in line of sight—and, as I carefully moved closer, pretending to be cautious of Ander’s ritual liturgy, I found being within arm’s length brought no change in my comfort level. Well, that’s not quite true. I think I actually felt better with him praying close at hand.

  While he was speaking, I noticed he occasionally paused in thought. From the sound of him, he was done with the ritual portion and was just praying, spontaneously, from the heart. He meant it when he expressed his hope that the Light of All Life would heal Geva. He wasn’t just reciting words. I wonder which was more effective, the ritual or the heartfelt asking?

  Ander finished praying and turned to me.

  “I’m told that nothing was to be touched,” he said, half-smiling. “As you can see, I have not; I have prayed for her healing from here.”

  I recalled the story of Jesus and the centurion’s servant.

  “Not a problem, Ander. If your faith is strong enough to heal her, it won’t matter if you pray over her here or from as far away as the temple—and I don’t doubt you’ve helped her. Thank you for your consideration and caution, though.”

  “I cannot say that I wholly approve of wizarding her sickness away; I often feel that there is some sort of price to be paid for such healing—indeed, anything at all that is gained through wizardry. But these are, I hope, baseless fears; if there be a price, mayhap it will be small enough to pay.”

  I nodded. “I hope so. But there is a cost. It is mainly in time and energy and work, as well as study and practice, practice, practice. A musician pays for every tune he plays, Ander. He pays in the aching of his hands and the time spent in trying, until he gets it right.”

  Ander nodded. “May that be all the price one pays. Will it disturb you to have me watch you work?”

  “I’m sorry, but yes. The thoughts and feelings of observers, especially when—no offense—they do not understand what is happening can make small ripples that have major consequences. That’s one reason wizards often work alone.”

  “Ah, I see. I never knew that.”

  “I learn something new every day. Usually by falling flat on my face when I try it.”

  Ander chuckled. “Do we ever truly learn any other way?”

  “Come to think of it—no.”

  I crossed over to sit next to Geva. Her condition seemed unchanged, but brain injuries don’t always have gradual stages of recovery.

  “I’ll leave you to your work, wizard,” Ander said, and made the sign of his faith toward me in blessing. “God speed to you to your work.”

  That was odd. I’ve never felt a blessing before. I was expecting to flinch. I was expecting to have to suppress a scream of agony. But it didn’t hurt; it was actually quite… hmm. It’s hard to describe. I felt blessed. A blessed vampire?

  Weird. Nice, but weird. Obviously, I don’t understand the rules governing vampires and religion.

  Ander closed the door and I turned my attention—and my supernatural senses—to Geva. While coiling tendrils into her and through her, I got a much better picture of what was going on. It looked like a stroke, after a fashion. Bits of brain were under pressure from a burst blood vessel; the leakage was stopped by the healing spell and maybe a prayer. Likewise, I doubted there was any serious harm to the brain itself. The pressure was still there, making sections unusable, much like a hand or foot might go to sleep if you keep it under pressure for a long time. Sort of numb.

  The only real problem I could see was the excess blood. There was no real way for it to drain away anywhere.

  Easy enough.

  Every cell is alive, in a miniscule, faint way. Tuning down my vision to finer and finer levels, individual sparks became visible. I say that casually; at the time it was not a casual thing. I must have sat there for an hour, just doing a zoom-in on the area through a dozen tendrils. But once I was down to that level, I ate the spark in every single cell. Once they were lifeless, I started shredding their physical housing. After reducing them to sub-cellular bits, I got to the tricky part. I opened a few tiny holes in a vein and started pumping the shredded crap back down into her bloodstream until it was gone, then healed over the vein. Maybe I could have pumped the intact blood cells and platelets and the rest back in without the shredding, but I wasn’t about to open a vein in her head again without being reasonably sure the hole didn’t solve more problems than it caused; the remains needed only a few truly microscopic hole to drain into. Needless caution? Maybe. But neurosciences were not high on my list of studies!

  Still, that’s not as simple as I just made it sound. There was a lot of, well… telekinetic work involved, as well as a couple of small spells to isolate and contain and filter. It’s like saying, “I opened up his chest and put a patch on his heart.” It’s complicated and intricate and a whole lot of other words that oppose “simple.” By the time it was done, my own little grey cells were aching from all the pushing.

  But I’m still willing to bet I could get a job as a surgeon’s assistant; we don’t make tools that can do what I did. Score one positive karma point for the bloodsucking fiend of darkness!

  I ran my vision backward through the size spectrum until I was looking at her brain again. The pressure was gone, the tissues seemed intact, and the blood was moving through the old channels… one of which was slightly reinforced. Everything looked as good as I could make it.

  I pulled my tendrils out and blinked. Geva was looking at me.

  “Good evening.”

  She nodded. “Good evening,” she whispered. “You are?”

  “I’m Halar, the baron’s wizard.”

  “You are the voice I heard in my mind?”

  “That would be me, yes.”

  “And the other voice? The… bright one?”

  “That would be Ander, I’m guessing. He was praying over you earlier.”

  She nodded. “That is likely. The two of you freed me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and slept.

  Well, I didn’t blame her. I was tired, too. It’s not that it was terribly
exerting, but it was a lot fine, finicky, detail work and extremely stressful.

  I freed the bird from the energy drain and turned it loose through the window.

  I rode back to the baron’s manor and snacked as I went. I had assembled a spell like a pair of large, netlike wings, a framework for my vampire spirit-tendrils to flow over. These stretched out behind and to the sides, reaching forty feet or so. Whenever they brushed over someone—mainly people indoors, asleep—they drained a tiny fraction of their vitality. A portable smorgasbord, Sasha would have called it. So long as I kept moving, no one would even notice. If I stopped with someone intersecting the webwork, however, they would eventually be drained completely.

  We made good time to the manor; I didn’t want a whole street of people to wake up with headaches. Causes talk. By the time I was home I was feeling pretty good. I let the spell-wings dissolve back into normal tendrils and the ambient magic I had used to hold them rigid.

  Shada was asleep when I entered the bedchamber. Watching her, there in the darkness, I wondered.

  I still can’t say I love her. I like her. I’m pretty sure if I crawled into bed one morning wearing nothing but a smile, she would smile back. But that’s the deal, apparently. I’m the one with the job and the position; she can stay my de-facto wife or leave, as she pleases… with the note she has nowhere to go.

  Am I an idiot for not taking advantage of the situation? Maybe. Then again, I don’t really want a new wife. I don’t really want this job. What I want is to burn Cardinal Tobias of Telen alive. Preferably over a slow fire. After flaying. I think.

  That’s another thing. Sometimes, I just want to mount up, grab Firebrand, ride to Telen, and hack until there’s nothing left to carve. It’s a powerful urge, and it always hits unexpectedly. I hide it well. One may smile and smile and be a villain, I think it is. It doesn’t change the fact I want to hurt this man. I don’t know if I really want to kill him—I’m not sure I can kill a man in cold blood—but I do so want to make him suffer!