Nightlord: Sunset

by Garon Whited

  I sat back down on Bronze and started working on a shielding spell I recalled from my first grimoires. It was designed for arrows and slings, and I’d started work on modifying it for bullets—how long ago? I felt pretty confident I could avoid being shot.

  That done, we continued at a walk toward the encampment. I shaded my eyes and sat up in the saddle, looking the place over.

  Yes, it was a nice spot to camp. One of the broader rises of ground provided enough space for about thirty tents; these were scattered along a small stream. People—dark haired, well tanned, and wearing minimal clothing; maybe winter didn’t hit so hard this side of the range—were at their business around the camp, cooking, cleaning, skinning, crafting. I saw horses nearby, grazing. Bronze and I just sat there, waiting. I didn’t want to just ride into camp and surprise everyone.

  We were noticed quickly. A shout went up and a lot of men mounted up on the horses. No saddles, no bridles, just bareback and apparently comfortable with that. I noticed they carried bows. I congratulated myself on my foresight. We waited for them.

  In short order I had maybe twenty men surrounding me, riding in a circle with me at the center.

  Decisions, decisions. I doubted telepathic spells would be too welcome. Never clear your throat in someone’s mind when they have a weapon pointed at you; they’re likely to be surprised. And I don’t like doing that; it smacks of messing with people’s heads. Even if it’s just to talk to them… I don’t like it much. With the sea-people, I didn’t see much choice. Here, I wasn’t out of options.

  I got down off Bronze and stepped forward, letting her rest her chin on my shoulder. I stroked her jaw and waited.

  Somebody let fly. It missed me. That was the nature of the spell. It simply deflected incoming projectiles slightly. Of course, the faster the projectile, the harder it has to work. That’s why the idea of testing it with bullets bothered me a bit. Even if it hadn’t worked, I was still wearing my vest. No trouble.

  But the arrow, while it missed me, hit Bronze. The arrowhead—flint, bone, or obsidian?—shattered.

  This caused some consternation. They began a low chant that sounded less than friendly. Not exactly threatening, but not friendly. They also slowed and stopped, still in a circle, still aiming at me.

  If they all let fly—and Bronze knelt down—could they kill each other in one volley, I wondered? No, I was on the ground, they were on horseback. They would be aiming downward. Ah, well.

  Finally, one guy put his bow away and got out what looked like a spiked club. He rode forward and pointed at me with it. Then he said something and I had no idea what he meant.

  “I do not understand what you say,” I tried. He shook his head. I pointed at my mouth and ear and wiggled my fingers in a mockery of spellcasting, then pointed at him. He nodded. Well, that was different, if he was willing. I re-cast the communication spell I had used with the fish-men.

  “Did you just agree to have a translating spell worked on you?” I asked.

  “No!” he said, nudging his horse to back away. I know I looked surprised.

  “I’m sorry, what did you just agree to?” I asked.

  “Our wise man would do it!” he replied, from a safer distance. “Are you a wise man?” The word he used was bahara, which really meant “one beloved of wisdom,” but “wise man” is close enough. The concept behind it was something between a priest and a magician. Maybe a shaman.

  “No, I just know some magic. I hope to be wise if I live long enough.”

  He thought about that one for a second. “Come with us to the wise man. He will ask you things.”

  “Okay.”

  So I mounted up on Bronze again while he explained events to his friends. There was ugly muttering about me. I got the sense my translator felt I was something strange and maybe dangerous, but possibly beyond a warrior’s ability to deal with. Maybe he was right, too. I caught the word nekelae, which meant, to his mind, one who plays with spirits. Something like a shaman, but colder; a nekelae ordered spirits about, much like a higher-ranking spirit might order lesser spirits. Possibly a nekelae was some sort of spirit that could take on a form of flesh, or possess someone. It wasn’t too clear to me and I wasn’t going to ask.

  We rode into the camp at a walk. Several people glowered at me, others just watched curiously. I saw no sign of Shada or any of the others.

  “Dismount.”

  I did so. So did four of them. These four escorted me into a largish tent; it was dome-like, and I had to stoop to go in. Inside, there was only room to stand in the center; everywhere else required a sort of crouch or that one be seated.

  The wise man wasn’t old enough for the job. Well, maybe. He looked to be about forty; he was the oldest person I’d seen in the camp. Wearing nothing but a loincloth, he was still a smooth, wiry guy. I know people who work out and don’t have that kind of muscle definition. He gestured for us to sit and we did, my escorts holding spiked clubs as they sat around me. My translator explained to the wise man; the part about the metal horse impressed him. Well, that’s fair; she impresses me, too—and I made her.

  I felt the tendrils of power being woven around me and recognized something very similar to my own translation spell. I didn’t argue with it, no matter how much I disliked it. I figured it was only fair.

  First sign of any actual tampering, though, and they were going to see how fast I could crack skulls together.

  “Do you understand me now?” he asked. I did, sort of; his version made his words seem to be actual speech. It was a much more refined spell than my own kludged-together crap. I looked at it and tried to memorize the structure of it while I spoke to him. It didn’t give concepts behind the words, it just put the concepts into the closest words. Very neat.

  “I do.”

  “Good. What do you want?”

  “I am looking for a woman.”

  “If we give you one of ours, you will go away?” he asked, expressionless.

  “Wha—? No! I don’t want one of yours; I’m looking for one particular woman.” I went on to describe Shada. “She should be in the company of men, sailors from the other side of the mountains.”

  “We have not seen her,” he replied, shaking his head. “We have seen strange men.”

  “Strange men? That could be the group. What sort of men?”

  “Killers,” he said, coldly. “They attacked some of my family and slew all but two.”

  “I see. Where are these killers?”

  “They took the horses and ran away.”

  I felt an inward rush of relief; that would mean that Shada was probably all right. At least, I thought so at the time; perhaps she was lying in the long grass, dying. But if the crew was well enough to attack someone and win, then the horses might have been necessary to carry wounded—and Shada was not in great shape. Still, the natives did not seem unduly unfriendly… if you didn’t try to kill them.

  I rubbed my jaw in thought and realized I needed to find a razor.

  “Why should they kill your people?” I asked. “You would not attack defenseless people, would you?”

  He shrugged. “Why do any of the barbarians from beyond the teeth-of-the-world’s-edge need an excuse to kill?” I wasn’t happy with his non-answer.

  “Because killing for the sake of killing is wrong,” I told him. “It needs a reason.”

  “If it brings pleasure, this is a reason.”

  I shook my head. “Not to me.”

  He smiled at me, briefly. “Then you will not be harmed by us. Go your way.”

  “Wait… What of these men? Where are they? Where did they go?”

  “They journeyed west and north, for the hole in the edge of the world.”

  “You didn’t chase them?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “What would we gain by it? They will return and tell how weak we seem to them, and more will come through the hole to take our herds, steal our women, and kill us. But we will be ready for them and we will fight. So it was in the time
of my grandfather, and it may be so in the time of my sons.”

  “I see,” I replied slowly, thinking. It was a long time ago that anyone bothered to come through the pass of the Eastrange…

  “I can hear some of your thought,” he said, frowning. “You want our help.”

  “I think I do.”

  He shook his head. “We have no help for ourselves.”

  “I will help you first.”

  “How?”

  I suppressed a giggle. How, white man! They did remind me strongly of the Native Americans. Then again, similar environments... I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

  “Sorry. A joke I just remembered. But helping you… long ago, your grandfather—or others from this side of the teeth-of-the-world’s-edge—went around on the water and raided there. What things did you take?”

  “The ringing stones, and the clear or colored ones.”

  “The what?”

  “The ringing stone, like that of the weapons you bear. And the clear ones; they are like flint, and very sharp. The colored ones are like the clear ones, but smaller and brighter.”

  Metal, glass, and jewelry. Right. Valuable commodities in this world.

  “I will go through the… hole in the world’s edge… and bring back ringing stone—we call it metal—if you will help me.”

  There was a lot of silence in the tent.

  “What is it that you want?” he asked, quietly.

  “Someplace to go,” I said. “I have no home, and many enemies. I would hide from my enemies among friends.”

  He looked at my dagger and my sword, thinking.

  “They will follow you,” he stated.

  “They will not be able to find me.”

  “Perhaps that is true. They will still seek you.”

  “And if they find me, I will leave. You will still have the ringing stone.”

  He gestured to my escorts. “Go with them. I must think of this.”

  I went.

  I had my own tent. Yurt. Whatever they are. Apparently, it belonged to a hunter that died at the hands of the ship’s crew. Offhandedly, I wondered how many of the crew died. These people did not look soft. And upon reflection, I decided the crew must have attacked from either fear or for a desire for horses. Either one would have done it, probably, but my bet was on the horses. Then again, the “savages” had a reputation for being bloodthirsty—fear might have played a part. They didn’t seem unreasonable, but things could have gone badly if I had been.

  Yep, the bamboo-stuff was the main framework material. Tougher than I thought, obviously.

  I sat down on the ground and waited. Bronze was standing outside, near the flap. I hadn’t ordered her to follow, she just did. This impressed and worried everyone over the age of ten. Those younger tended to be fascinated, even going so far as to come close and look at her. One was bold enough to try and touch her, but one of my guards grabbed her hand and sent her off.

  Oh yes, I still had guards. I felt reasonably safe, though; they were just keeping an eye on me. Lucky for them I’d found the slaughterhouse in Baret. I was pretty well-fed. I’d hate to think of them trying to keep me inside if I got hungry.

  Stretching out on the floor, I rested and waited—and cast a couple of spells. First, a little work in examining the telepathic translation spell, then some time building up a good charge in a missile deflector.

  Side notes on casting spells. There are three main factors in determining how much energy it takes to cast a spell. First is the effect you want; lighting a candle takes less power than lighting a bonfire.

  Second, there’s how skillful you are at that spell. Like a professional carpenter compared to a talented amateur, the professional gets the job done with a minimum of wasted energy. The amateur is continually measuring again, cutting again, and sometimes taking down and re-doing sections.

  The third factor is how long you want to take. If you want to wind a spring, you can select a low gear ratio and crank all day, easily, and get a lot of power into that spring without wearing yourself out. If you select a higher gear ratio, you can put all that energy into the spring in a matter of moments—if you have that much, that is. Grabbing magical power costs you something of your own energy to shape it and move it; the more you grab at once, the more effort it takes. But the slow and steady method can get a lot more power into the spring than you can exert in an instant.

  For effects, I do a lot of things. Fiddling with gravity is one of my favorites, obviously; that can be pretty power-intensive. But shifting energy from one frequency to another, as in my Archimedes’ Ray—that’s not power-intensive at all; it takes almost no effort to do that. It would be another story to generate that kind of power, but to simply run it through a magical transformer? Much less work.

  As far as skill goes, a lot of what I do is improvised from basic principles—I’m the talented amateur. I’ve gotten pretty good with gravity, and I have an innate talent (surprise!) for manipulating life force, spirit, living energy, whatever you want to call it. I am actually pretty talented at some minor mental tricks, probably because consciousness and life are interrelated, somehow, but I have no idea why I seem to have a telekinetic power.

  So most of my magic is power-intensive. If I want to cast such spells quickly, I have to expend a lot of personal energy to grab existing magical forces. Fortunately I have a lot—compared to Jon, the only wizard I’ve ever studied with—and can use it all if I feel like it. And at night… well, I can have tons of it, oodles. And I can get a lot more in short order, provided there’s something living fairly close at hand—a dozen yards or so, unless I want to use a spell to extend that range or I spend considerable time reaching and latching on to my target.

  It is possible to mix and match these factors. If I have a lot of power coming in—say, my assistant keeps sacrificing virgins on the altar, for example—then I can take my time weaving the spell and get the best of both worlds. I can grab magical energy like a human whirlpool, expending most of my vitality to do it—and recharge that vitality immediately by drawing on the life force of the sacrifice in order to continue sucking in more magical energy. Now, if I’m an expert with that kind of spell, I would also get a lot more bang for the buck. Or cow. Or virgin. Or whatever.

  So I worked on a refinement of my missile deflection spell. I built it carefully; I wanted it to last for a while. I would be chasing down Shada and the rest of the sailors, and there was no telling how many other tribes they might offend before I caught up with them. This didn’t cost me a lot of energy. It just took some time to do it slowly and carefully. Another good metaphor would be building a brick wall. Instead of slapping a bunch of bricks and mortar together, I was laying careful courses and aligning everything.

  When I finished, it looked like a good, solid spell. So I went back out into the daylight—my guards didn’t stop me, but they kept close—found a rock, and tossed it up so it would hit me when it came down. It missed. I gathered several and kept trying; they never quite made contact.

  A child, maybe five or six years old, was watching me toss stones. He asked me something and I turned to him. I reached out with a spell. I told myself I wasn’t reading his mind, just understanding his words...

  “I’m sorry, what was the question?” I asked.

  “What did you do to the stones?” he repeated.

  “I asked them not to hurt me.”

  His eyes widened. “You talked to the stones? Are you a shaman?”

  Crap. I still had elements from my own hacked spell. I got concept bleed-through. I resolved to study the spell again when next I met with the wise man.

  Shaman is the closest thing I can think of. Literally, he asked if I was one who negotiates with the realm of spirits. I have no idea what his actual word was.

  “Of a sort,” I admitted.

  My guards were looking uneasy at my conversation; they understood the kid perfectly, of course. They did not understand me. So there was magic involved again and it made the
m edgy. One addressed the kid, and I could read the disappointment in his heart at being told to beat it.

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “Before you go.” I moved to Bronze and my guards shifted uneasily, looking ready to jump me. I rummaged in my pockets for a silver coin. Why I didn’t think of this earlier, when I was trying to scry on Shada… I put it on the ground and Bronze stomped on it, flattening it. I picked it up, rubbed it between my hands with a bit of power to polish it, and handed it to the kid.

  “There you are. It won’t show you spirits, but it will let you see yourself, if you will look.”

  He held it up in the light and stared into the silver. His face split in a huge smile, then he made faces for a bit.

  “How did I get in there?” he asked, finally.

  “It’s a kind of magic.”

  He looked woeful. “I don’t have anything to give you.”

  “All I wanted was a smile. It’s a gift you give without losing.” I can be so trite at times.

  “Sure?” he asked, looking doubtful.

  “I’m sure. Run along before my friends here get any more nervous.”

  He did, and I went back into the tent, much to the relief of my guards.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6TH

  I made one more trip outside for my body bags. Sunset came and went, and I waited.

  The wise man of the village—or group or tribe or whatever they were—came to me. Maybe it was politeness, or maybe he just didn’t want to risk having me wander around any more. He sat down across from me; the guards sat around the inner edge of the tent instead of behind me. He cast his spell again. I waited and watched it, noting things I’d missed before. It was more complicated and subtle than I’d thought.

  “Welcome,” I said, once he had finished.

  “I am pleased to be here.”

  “So am I. You have thought?”

  “For a long time.”

  “What have you decided?”