Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

  Bronze has also been practicing her “mechanical” gait. It’s awkward to ride, but it looks “robotic.” I think we can stand another layer of inspection without too much trouble. Even a nosy neighbor who pokes around in my barn will have a hard time accepting she isn’t a robot. Someone will really have to be suspicious and determined to blow her cover.

  And clever. I’ve already had to smack a couple of toy camera-drones with my mental movement trick. It’s like daytime tendrils, which strikes me as problematic. My tendrils are spiritual extensions, psychic fingers. They’re part and parcel of being a creature of darkness. They shouldn’t manifest in sunlight. Yet, it feels like they’re still there when I try to move things during the day. Is that because it’s a sensation I’m used to? I think of telekinesis in tendril-terms, so that’s how my mind perceives it? That’s not an unreasonable theory, given that I didn’t have funky mind-powers before catching vampirism.

  Anybody got a manual on vampires?

  Anyway, toy camera-drones. The local kids want to look at Bronze and spy on the new neighbor, it seems. I grab them when I spot them spying and stick them in a drawer. I don’t damage them; I’m a nice guy. If the owner comes up to the door and asks for their drone back, I hand it over. Until then, the drones remain incarcerated for espionage.

  I don’t have dragon teeth in my hedge, yet, but I did drive some heavy, metal fenceposts into the ground. About four feet of steel are aboveground, hidden in the hedge—the hedge is under six feet high when properly trimmed. The posts won’t stop a big truck, but anything else is in for an ugly surprise. I may never need them, but I feel better knowing it’s not a straight, unobstructed run down the street and into my living room!

  Someone might clean out the mailbox by the curb, but the hedge is full of surprises.

  Larry has the ladder. It was hanging on the side of the barn and I’m not likely to use it. Besides, he’s always returned it to the Ardents; we’ll see if he gives it back to me. He also gave me a discount (he says) when I bought a couch and other living room stuff. If I’m going to have guests, I should have a room where they belong. All the interior doors now have doorknobs for exterior doors; they have locks and keys. This will help enforce a lack of wandering and increase my feeling of personal security.

  I have a new doorbell. It’s really multiple doorbells and doorbell systems. One is in the house and one in the barn; one button makes them both ring. They’re bell-chimes, not buzzers, and much more pleasant. I also have a second system of doorbells tied to the front gate. Those go off when someone opens either the truck-gate or the people-gate in the hedge. Fewer surprises that way. Plus, having an extra thirty seconds to get incriminating evidence tucked away could be vital.

  I’ve been all over this house and I think I’m enjoying it at lot. I see all sorts of things I want to do to it. The attic is darn large—I could floor it and insulate it. It would make an awkward but useful room. It wouldn’t be part of the air conditioning of the house, but it might make a good storage space or hideout.

  The walls are pretty decent, but I think they could stand some more blow-in insulation. There were some vermin of various sorts living in the walls, but one night with a life-drinking monster in the house took care of that. Anything that didn’t flee at the spiritual touch of the undead master of the house didn’t get a chance to flee afterward. Then there are a bunch of little gaps that need sealing; they make a foam for that. And I want to take out the wall between the dining room and the kitchen to make it more of an open countertop arrangement…

  I’m enjoying being a homeowner. It’s the little things, I think, that make immortality tolerable.

  Being a rancher, on the other hand, is impossible. The paperwork is ridiculous. Sasha must have had people for that. I never saw any signs of health inspections, vaccination records, and so on. And, to be clear, I never want to. There’s enough paperwork and bureaucracy involved to give a horse colic—or fuel Bronze for a week.

  So… trees. They’re low maintenance. I like that. I can swipe a trick I learned from Timon, too: make an unfired clay cup, fill it with dirt, and start a sapling. When it’s pushing the cup apart, it’s time to move it to the ground, so bury the cup. Since I have a walnut tree on the east side of the house, I presume I can gather them from the ground and go from there. True, trees are a long-term project, but that means I’m not out messing with crops and harvesting and other farm function stuff all the time.

  The basement has come along splendidly. I have basic magic-gathering spells on four walls and a floor. The ones on the walls act sort of like fans, “blowing” magic toward the Ascension Sphere in the middle of the room. It’s still not too impressive, but it’s helping. Maybe I’ll start working on a better version of my energy-converter spell once the Sphere has a decent charge built up. We can see how much my electric bill goes up.

  I’m not entirely pleased with the spells I’m using, though. I keep thinking there should be more effect. I put quite a bit of effort into casting them—attention, focus, personal power, even using my own blood to draw the symbols—and they don’t seem to have the drive they should. A lot of that is because of the magic-starved environment, sure, but they should work better than this. I keep thinking the symbols and ideograms I’m drawing look strange. I’m not sure why.

  As for my overall goal of finding other worlds—maybe even one where people won’t hunt me down and kill me, if there is such a place—I’m doing some reading on the local science. I started with “my” articles on wormholes and quantum foam. That led me to other sources. I don’t understand what I’m talking about, yet, but I will. Eventually.

  Maybe I should see if I can get me to coach me? Or would I give myself a heart attack?

  Saturday, September 19th

  I got to meet three more neighbors, today. About noon, a large, indignant man pounded on my front door and jabbed the doorbell repeatedly. Since I was in the basement poring over spell diagrams, the interruption was not welcome. I came upstairs, locked the basement door behind me, and answered the front door.

  “Who do you think you are?” he demanded. No introduction. No greeting. Simply a loud voice and the smell of beer. No cigarette smell, though. Maybe the Surgeon General finally made some headway on that.

  “I think I’m the guy who owns the property,” I replied, levelly. “The property you’re standing on. Who are you?” I demanded. This seemed to faze him slightly. He was a big guy. Maybe we wasn’t used to that sort of response.

  “My kid says you’ve got his toy! Give it back!”

  “What toy?” I asked.

  “His flying drone! Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!” he half-shouted, and took a step forward.

  “Put a foot across that threshold and I will defend my home from an intruder,” I told him, calmly. While he blinked at me, trying to process that, I added, “I probably do have your kid’s toy drone. I’ve got a dozen. They keep flying into my barn and crashing. If you can tell me what it looks like or give me some way to identify it, I’ll go get it for you.”

  “He crashed it?”

  “I don’t know; I found it in the barn. It’s hard to maneuver through a barn. That’s why I’ve picked up several of them. I’m waiting for the pilots to come claim them, that’s all.”

  “He didn’t say he crashed it.”

  “He can have it back,” I assured him. “He needs to identify it, that’s all. I don’t want to give him the wrong one.”

  “Keep it,” he advised, and stomped off my porch. I watched him slam the gate as he left.

  “Well, someone’s in trouble,” I muttered, and closed the door. I went back down to the basement. About two hours later, my doorbells went off again. Grumbling, I went back upstairs.

  Two boys, in the eight-to-ten age range, stood on the porch. I opened the door.

  “Yes? How can I help you young men?”

  There was some nudging between them before the taller one spoke.

 
“We want our fliers back,” he said. He had an odd accent. I couldn’t place it. A speech impediment, maybe?

  “That’s nice,” I told him.

  We stood there and regarded each other for several seconds.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “You haven’t asked for anything,” I pointed out, speaking slowly and clearly in case his speech impediment indicated other linguistic problems. “You’ve told me you want something. I acknowledged. I want a ham sandwich and a glass of milk; I don’t expect you to do anything about it.”

  “Can I have my flier back?” he asked.

  “Probably. But I’m an old-fashioned sort. The correct way to ask is, ‘May I please have my flier back, sir?’ That works better.”

  “May I please have my flier back, sir?” he repeated.

  “Sure. What does it look like?”

  He described it. It was the circular mono with the counter-rotating props. I told them to wait, shut the door, and fetched it.

  Back on the porch, I handed it to him. He snatched at it, but I didn’t let go.

  “You’re supposed to say something when someone does something nice for you,” I prompted.

  “Thanks.”

  “Close.”

  “Thank you?”

  “Almost there.”

  “Thank you, sir?”

  I let go of the drone and he pelted off with it. He friend stood there silently.

  “Did you have a flier, too?” I asked, trying to be pleasant. He nodded. “Okay. Do you know what to do?”

  “May I have my flier please sir?”

  “Very good. What’s it look like?” We repeated the process and I handed him his drone. He held out both hands and I gave it to him.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Good job. What’s your name?”

  “Edgar.”

  “Nice to meet you, Edgar. I’m Vladimir Smith. You can call me ‘Mister Smith,’ for now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  He shook his head.

  “All right,” I said. “Thank you for being polite. If you need anything, feel free to stop by.”

  He nodded and remained standing there. I wondered how to tell him to buzz off without sounding unpleasant. I can be unpleasant; that doesn’t mean I always want to be.

  “Have a nice day, Edgar.” I stepped back and slowly closed the door. That did it; he took off down the walk and remembered to shut the gate behind him.

  Kids today.

  I was halfway to the kitchen before it hit me.

  Oh, my god. I’ve become that cranky old man down the street.

  There were some good points to the day. I figured out one part of my magical problems.

  Magic works. Given. But it doesn’t work in exactly the same ways between Rethven and here. While the larger systems work—the pentacle or the triangle-in-circle, for example, to define the locus of a spell—the smaller, more detailed bits are slightly different. When I draw zel, azi, or kas symbols around the perimeter of a containment diagram, they don’t seem to resonate perfectly with the magical environment. It’s like playing a tune in the wrong key, I suppose. You get the song, but it’s weird. Or, maybe it’s more like using tiny, off-color lightbulbs in a chandelier. The thing lights up, but it doesn’t look right and doesn’t shine the way it should.

  So how do I figure out the correct… well, for lack of a better term, the letters in this universe’s fundamental alphabet? On second thought, “alphabet” might not be the right word. They are symbols of… hmm. Magical constants? The symbols are like… runes? Ideograms? Each one is a concept, not a sound… although some of them have sounds associated with them, which is generally what gets recited or chanted during a full ritual spell. Still, how do I determine the right shape for the symbols I need here?

  I’m clever. I got a piece of window glass and a dry-erase board. I took them down to my basement Ascension Sphere and sat down to work.

  After drawing a symbol I knew from Rethven on a small dry-erase marker-board, I put the glass over it and bled a little. With a few drops on the glass, I concentrated on the function of the symbol in question. For the ara symbol, I lit a candle and concentrated on the fire. The blood formed up to almost match the symbol beneath. Then I re-drew the marker version to resemble the changed version I saw on the glass and repeated the process. Again, the blood moved to almost the same shape, with minor variations. After two or three iterations, the blood on the glass matched the symbol below. I had the correct ideogram for fire in this universe!

  Now I need to figure out how to pronounce it here. I doubt it’s called ara. It might sound similar; the final version of the symbol was similar. But how do I tell? Letters may look similar in different alphabets, but that’s no guarantee they sound at all alike. My spell-writing should be much better, but I’m probably going to sound like a German speaker reciting English poetry translated into Japanese.

  I suspect my alphabet-revealing technique only works because of my magic circle. I tried it outside the circle and the blood didn’t alter shape. It didn’t flow off the glass, either, so I presume it was still trying to do what I wanted. If I try this in a world with a high magical potential, I probably won’t need the circle. Which raises the question of how do people figure this stuff out without a head start? Do they try to draw pictograms of the idea and see what works? Do shamans and other less-technical spellcasters see shapes in the clouds, dust, and fire, then paint them on the cave walls? Or do the gods give them the runes, like in the myth about Odin?

  I have a head start with a magical alphabet that only needs some touching up and polishing. Of course, there are thousands of letters in that alphabet. Each one is a symbol for a concept, not actually a letter.

  To make things worse, each one is a process, not a simple one-shot spell. It takes a while to identify the sometimes-subtle alterations and repeat the process. It takes at least three or four iterations, sometimes as many as a dozen.

  It’s also a daytime-only project. I can’t do this after dark. It’s hard to get blood out of me at night—my mystical bloodsucking attraction seems dead-set against it. Even if I draw some out with a hypodermic or a spell, the instant it leaves the hypo, it crawls right back into me. This is not helpful.

  In a larger sense, though, I also wonder about the thing Jon called Language, with a capital “L.” From his description, he believed it to be the fundamental language of the universe. That is, if the universe was created by some entity, this was the language that it used to describe it. In computer terms, the code for the universal operating system.

  Does that mean I’m deciphering the written form of it here? I never thought of magical ideograms as being actual words in the Language, but… back to that pronunciation thing. Are the wizards and magicians of Rethven mispronouncing their spoken spells? Close enough to influence the world, perhaps, but not quite right for altering the fundamental fabric of reality? Or is it just a subset of shorthand commands, with spells being programs written in a more user-friendly form, rather than in raw code?

  Of course, it’s more than just the sounds. To properly use a word in the Language, one has to not only pronounce it correctly, but understand it. It’s like invoking the name of a specific entity to be summoned. You can’t merely read it aloud and expect it to work. You have to understand the nature of the Thing. So even if you find a book like a dictionary, with symbols and their definitions, you need a frame of reference to put it all into.

  How would I go about determining the proper way to pronounce things I already understand? Fire? Water? Space? Time? Getting a symbol was easy, almost intuitive. It’s a visual thing. But a sound? A pronunciation? What do I do for that? Enchant a harp? Or a stereo speaker system? That’s going to be a trifle more complicated than a glass plate and some blood.

  I have so much to do. Homeowner, magical researcher, high-energy physics student, and keeping up appearances… not to mention I’m starting to g
et hungry at night.

  I used to think holding down a day job and getting laundry done was difficult.

  Tuesday, October 13th

  Sorry for the long delay; I’ve been busy.

  For the first week or two, I was studying. Modern relativity, the Casimir effect, frame reference theories, conjectures on FTL travel, wormhole equations, spin foam, vortex foam, loop quantum cosmology...

  I used to be a physics teacher. Things have changed.

  I think I’m following most of it. My only advantage is I have a much better empirical understanding of the subject matter. I ate the souls of people who developed the spells for folding space in weird ways. I built an interdimensional-capable gateway. I understand it, sort of, from a magical perspective. The science-based perspective involves way more math, most of which has expanded beyond anything I ever studied in school.

  Arcane writing and mathematics are starting to look suspiciously similar to me. Is that weird? Or is that inevitable? Am I starting to get a grip on the math because of my magical background—like studying Latin and Spanish together—or am I closing in on the point where science makes sense of magic, and magic is another science?

  I hope I get the hang of this without making my head explode. I haven’t studied this hard since the final exam in Doctor Kramer’s class on quantum thermodynamics. My head hurt then, too.

  A couple of weeks ago, I decided the headache was from studying too hard. I was beating my head against the math and the math was winning. I needed to take a break. Living at home and doing nothing but talking to my computer and reading isn’t the right way to go about this. But I can’t sign up for a postgraduate course; my personal history doesn’t have the academic credentials for it. I have to hammer this out on my own… but keeping my nose to the grindstone is only going to flatten my face.