by Garon Whited
That must have been a surprise. While I wondered what they would do about it—and they would, if Melloch was in there; anyone who worries constantly about growing old is very concerned about keeping a whole skin—I aimed the wand at the hole, letting a charge build up. I couldn’t sense the level of power involved, not now, not at night, but I let it build for a slow ten-count. By then, the fine hairs on my body were standing up; the way the hair on my head was crackling was making me nervous. When sparks started to dance along my scaled shirt, I slashed toward the clouds again, drawing lightning up from the earth to meet the clouds.
This blast was more impressive. It looked like a blue-white highway from earth to heaven. The thunderclap was deafening, even this far outside the city walls. The bolt had launched roughly from where I’d intended, up from the same hole opened by the first. Fires gouted out along with the lightning. I could see the blocks of the wall shift unsteadily and several cracks ran through the structure.
The second bolt was worse than I’d expected. I gritted my teeth, ignoring the idea of innocent bystanders. It’s a military structure, not a hotel. But, if I was lucky, people had started running after the first bolt of lightning—I hoped so; I couldn’t see the base of the keep.
I took aim at the cathedral next to the keep. I had one bolt of lightning hit the rear peak of the roof, right over the altar area. I waited perhaps half a minute for people to get away from the falling debris while I kept the wand pointed at the clouds—building another heavy charge.
Heaven’s artillery, indeed. Another massive bolt lanced through the demolished temple roof and made all the windows glare bright as noon for an instant, then explode outward in glassy shards, whipped away by the storm-winds.
The heavens are pissed at the Hand. Take that, Linnaeus, and see what you can do with it!
I tucked the wand in my belt and kicked Bronze. We headed downhill at full tilt with Bronze trying to go faster with every step.
There were two main obstacles we wanted to get through. The inner city’s wall was sizable, but if I could hurdle it, I was confident that Bronze could do so. I was right, and she did. Nobody got to see it but me. There were no sentries in this weather; they wouldn’t have been able to see the ground, much less anything approaching.
The second obstacle was the curtain wall around the Hand compound itself. This proved to be even less trouble. All three gates were open and people were streaming out. The sound of the main keep was a steady grinding of stone on stone as the wind battered at the structure. In the dark and the rain, nobody paid much attention to me—they were much more interested in getting somewhere far away from a building that was going to come down. And maybe in getting away from the wrath of god. I shudder to think what it must have looked and felt like up close!
The rain cut down on my vision a little, but the darkness, of course, was no handicap. We did a turn around the whole compound, searching. I didn’t see any sign of Melloch. I’d have to go in and look for him.
“I don’t want to bring the building down yet,” I shouted into Bronze’s ear. “I’m sorry, but you’re heavy. You’ll have to stay out here.”
She twitched that ear and stopped beside a door. She kicked it with one forefoot and sent it into the keep in a shower of splinters. I got the impression she wasn’t happy at the idea of staying outside. I dismounted and went in.
The interior was dark as the inside of a rock. This didn’t bother me, but the few people still groping their way out were having a tough time. The wind somehow found a way inside and made it devilishly hard to strike a light. Obviously, none of these people were magicians.
I found a wooden part of the wall and poked it with Firebrand. It caught. The flames were whipped wildly and struggled to keep alive, but it was a good fight; I thought the wood would keep burning for a while.
“This way!” I shouted. “Door over here!”
I kept going in, occasionally poking a fallen bit of timber to make a new light. The building cleared out quickly. There were some strange looks sent my way, but the majority were just too happy to be getting out of the ominously-creaking structure to care who I was.
I didn’t see Melloch until I reached the room with the door.
My lightning had broken through the roof and upper floors. Rain poured in; the whole ceiling was open to the sky. The floor was mostly covered in broken timber and shattered stone. What books had been present were gone—probably burned by lightning and scattered by wind.
But what I noticed first was someone lying facedown, halfway between where the operations circle would be and the doorway. Whoever it was had taken a good hit from the lightning. Even with all the rain and wind, I could smell burned hair and meat.
What I noticed second was the doorway was open. Through it, I saw an open courtyard, filled with tilted and irregular paving blocks. All around were crumbling, ancient buildings.
There was a man in Hand vestments hurrying away, a naked woman draped over one shoulder like a sack of flour. Hurrying fast, faster even than an unburdened man should run.
I shouted, “TOBIAS!” Walls that merely creaked in the storm rattled with that shout. I took a step forward, meaning to hurtle through the Door and across the tumbled stones of the courtyard to put Firebrand’s edge through his skull—starting from his balls.
He heard me. He spun around at a speed I found starkly incredible—I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. Not me, not Sasha, not even Davad. As he spun, he drew a black-glass knife, slashed the air with it in my direction…
The doorway closed.
Vision through the doorway seemed to be cut. A rent opened in the image and the whole thing rippled, almost peeled back from the rent, leaving only blackness behind.
The blackness had eyes and laughter.
Then there was only the stone of the wall behind the doorway.
With a curse, I turned to the body on the floor. I looked and saw there was some life left in him, but not much. His energies were like a guttering candle.
I sheathed Firebrand. I crouched next to him in the rubble and rolled him over.
I wish I hadn’t. He was charred. I had a vivid memory of Sasha leap to the forefront of my mind and I shuddered. He was also old. I’ve never seen anyone so withered and ancient. It was a wonder he was alive at all.
Over the rain and wind I shouted, “Tell me! Tell me where that doorway went!”
He smiled, horribly. His skin crackled and bled as it stretched. There were no teeth left in his mouth.
“Tell me!” I shrieked, lifting him half-off the floor by my grip on his robes. “Tell me!”
My unnaturally acute hearing distinctly heard him whisper, “Life.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“Life,” he wheezed. “Give… life.”
I stared at him in confusion for all of three seconds. Then I realized what he was saying. He wanted me to make him a nightlord.
“You’ll be dead before the change can take place!” I shouted. “It takes three days! You won’t live long enough for it! So just tell me where they’ve gone!”
His smile widened and his lower lip split like it had been cut. “Life,” he whispered again, and he died right there in my hands.
I screamed at him and jerked him up to my mouth. If there was anything left of him in that husk, I meant to have it. Blood, yes; magician’s blood. Faint traces of a complicated and unusual spirit. Nothing more than that. No hint of where the Door had gone.
I dropped the husk and thought furiously. Tobias, thirty feet away—if the Door were open!
I tossed the body up and out of the room, giving it to the storm. Then I started clearing away debris from the floor, pitching it casually up over my shoulders to be whipped away by the wind. The floor cleared rapidly as my hands flew back and forth, faster than the raindrops around them. I found the diagrams in the floor, cleared them, and looked them over. They looked intact, which was simply amazing. I can only conclude that Melloch must have had
a powerful shielding spell running when I hit the keep with that second stroke. Just not quite powerful enough.
One of the locks had a key in it.
I had no idea if I needed to be able to work magic for the keys to operate. But what would I lose by trying? I got the keys out and fit them into the next six locks—I left the original key alone on the theory it ought to keep the last setting it had, wherever it went.
In my heart, I knew where it would go. There were two other Doors in this world. One was in the Academy—and that ruined place I’d seen didn’t look like a working school. The other Door…
I turned the keys, one after the other. The locks clicked smoothly; I felt them, rather than heard them over the howling of the wind.
Yes. The doorway opened. The courtyard was there, the stones askew as before, but there was no Tobias. Only a trail of water from rain-soaked robes.
Fine. I’d find him.
I drew the wand out of my belt and pointed it straight up. I started turning it, as though I were stirring, faster and faster. The clouds above me began to turn, slowly at first, but they gained speed rapidly. In less than a minute, a funnel started to form directly above, whirling lower, screaming like a freight train. It twisted and writhed, reaching down for the main keep of the Hand. As the leading edge of the funnel cloud touched the top of the keep, the floor beneath my feet shuddered. I could feel the floor start to slide.
I stepped through the Door.
If I’d done it right, my tornado would waver around all through the inner courtyard, battering at the keep and the cathedral until the weather spell wore out. With luck, there wouldn’t be anything left but foundations. If that.
Behind me, through an ornate, metallic arch, I could still hear the screaming of the wind, feel the driven rain and spray. The occasional flash of lightning glared as through a window, throwing light and shadow beyond me onto the ground. Yet for all the raging of the storm at my back, I was standing on stable ground with not even a vibration in the stone.
Through the open door, I heard a shrieking and cracking. I watched the far wall of the room tilt away, cracking apart and crumbling as it did so. The floor followed it. A moment later, the viewpoint started to shudder and sway before the opening winked out, leaving behind only a metal arch.
Silence, broken only by my dripping on the stones. I stood in the pool of rainwater driven through the door.
I looked around for footprints. Yes, there they were, leading away, surrounded by the drippings of a man soaked to the skin. Tobias had been caught in the rain, as well; I had blasted the roof away, after all. His robes held water at least as well as my cloak.
I drew Firebrand and stalked after him.
The trail of water led me through a ruined city, past collapsed buildings and crumbling monuments. The city, even ruined, was magnificent; the crumbling buildings near at hand were huge. Between them, there were open spaces of barren earth, perhaps parks. In my mind’s eye, I could picture a place of white stone and climbing gardens; now there was no trace of any sort of life whatsoever. There was only cracking rock, weathered stone, scattered sand, and dust.
I hurried, because the water was evaporating quickly in the dry air. The trail turned a corner and headed straight down a major boulevard. Once, there had been monuments, giant statues, lining the roadway. Now, most of them were weathered down to unidentifiability; a few others had fallen from their massive pedestals, like toppled kings from ancient thrones, cast down into ruin. Men or women or both, perhaps, represented for eternity in these stones. No more. Now they were as faceless as the fallen pillars.
A faint glow hovered over the trail, in my way. In my vision, it was like seeing the dim outline of a human’s life, but without the flesh to give it form. A ghost.
It took on clearer form as I approached, becoming more human-like. I went around it, or tried to, but it always hovered in front of me, forcing me to stop or run straight through it. I looked past it; the trail ran on down the boulevard and up to the front door of a huge, coliseum-like structure. Momentarily content with that knowledge, I paused to consider the ghost. I’ve never seen a ghost before.
“Out of the way,” I told it. It continued to gain form and substance and I felt it regard me. When it replied, it was faint, very faint, lower than a whisper. I’m still not sure if I heard it in my ears or my head. I suppose it doesn’t really matter; I heard it.
“You are a nightlord,” it said—no, she said; its form was coalescing into a woman’s. “You have come through the Gate.”
“You could say that,” I answered. “I’m sorry, but I’m a bit busy just now; I’m after the guy who just came through here. If you’ll excuse me?”
“Wait. Please.” She stayed in my way and held out her hands to me. I noticed she didn’t touch the ground.
“All right, but make it quick. What do you want?”
“I want—what we all want—is to be free.”
“Free?” I echoed. “Free of what? And what do you mean, ‘we all want’?”
“I am Queen Flarima, last ruler of Zirafel, City of the Western Edge. I and my people have died, yet we are bound here, forbidden to move on to the next cycle of existence. We number half a million—you understand this number?”
“I understand a million,” I agreed.
“That is good. We are cursed to remain here, captives of deific ire, unable to escape the confines of the City or the ever-more-cruel constraint of sanity. Ghosts cannot go mad; we cannot find comfort even in that. We must endure the passing of the ages amid the ruins of what was once our home, now our prison.”
“So where are the rest?” I asked, interested despite myself.
“They are here, all about us. I alone have the power to manifest that mortal eyes might see me.”
I looked around, deliberately looking for them. Yes, there was a faint shimmer of energies surrounding us, filling the ruined avenue as far as I could see. I doubted anyone except a well-prepared magician could have detected them. Then again, there may be spells specifically for that—I wouldn’t know.
“I see. All this is good to know, but what do you want from me?”
“You live on the threshold of one plane of existence and another. You are a nightlord, a doorway between life—yea, even unlife—and death. Open the way for us and let us know peace again, I beg you.”
I blinked.
“You want me to… to consume a city full of ghosts?”
“Yes. Release us. Let us flee to whatever awaits us in the next cycle of existence.”
I thought about it. It was, as far as I could tell, the reason for nightlords in the first place…
“What did you do to get stuck like this?” I asked.
“The offense is mine,” she said, “and mine alone. I sought a balance of forces between light and darkness, that one should not dominate wholly over the other. This was unacceptable, and so I was condemned to this fate—and my people with me.”
“Most unfair,” I agreed. “All right, if the darkness bound you here, it’s only fair that—”
“It was not the darkness,” she interrupted. “It was the Mother of Flame that cursed us so.”
I shut up and stared at her.
The Mother locked their spirits here? For wanting to achieve a balance of light and dark? No, She locked them here for their Queen wanting such a balance. I don’t see why She would object to a balance, and I certainly don’t see why She would punish innocent civilians for the actions of their monarch.
“Why would She do such a thing?” I asked.
Flarima shrugged. “The gods are jealous—and intolerant of disobedience. I defied Her. She smote my city and my people for it. The Guide cannot reach us, nor may we depart.”
I rubbed my jaw and thought about it. I wasn’t too sure I wanted to court deific ire, myself—at least, not any more of it, and especially not from the one that appeared to be on my side. Still, a whole city of people, condemned for something they didn’t even do…
/> I’m not a god. Maybe I can’t see it the way it ought to be seen. It struck me as unjust in the extreme. I expected better of the Mother of Flame, in whatever aspect She was using.
Time was running, too. Tobias had Shada in there, whatever that building was, and was doing maybe-the-gods-knew-what. Make a decision, Eric. Make it and get busy!
“How long have you been here?”
“Long,” she replied. “Centuries. How many I do not know, for we have lost count.”
I uncoiled tendrils and spread them as wide as my outstretched arms. I wove the strands thickly, ready to draw strong and hard on anything that touched them.
“Come to me,” I said, and they did. The sea of faint ghosts surged toward me, a barely-discernable mob. As they poured toward me, crowding into each other to escape from their eternity of—what? Boredom?—they funneled themselves into my being. I absorbed one, ten, a hundred. More came, and faster, until each spark of their existence merged into a steady, searing blaze, grounding into my own spirit. Dying sparks by the thousands, feeding my power and filling my being.
It was unlike the rush of power that comes with the drinking of a living person. Most of that is the energy of the body, the day-to-day power everyone expends in moving, thinking, and living. What hit my tendrils and was that last piece, the part that made a person more than merely animate flesh—the vital spark of a life, perhaps the soul.
How long it took, I don’t know. It wasn’t long, I know that. Ghosts can move more quickly than a man in flesh, and they can overlap. They poured forward into me without pause until only Flarima remained. I was dizzy and a little shaky, as though my whole body had been asleep. A pins-and-needles sensation danced not only in my skin but deeper, in every organ and vessel—even in my bones. I could feel it in everything. Everything. And in my heart there were tens of thousands of voices, each vying with each other for direction and purpose and attention. A small piece of each person remained with me, but clamored, unquiet and noisy.
“You have defied a goddess,” she observed.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I guess I have.”
She came close, swayed toward me and away. “Will you close your portal for a moment?” she asked.