by Garon Whited
“Percel? Liet? And is this Beltar the same Sir Beltar I knew?”
“Percel is the local high priest of the Lord of Justice. Liet is the high priestess to the Grey Lady.” She paused and stared off into space for a moment. “Hmm. That reminds me—I have a meeting with her before the changing of the candle.” Tianna turned her attention back to me and grinned mischievously. “Sir Beltar is your high priest of all high priests, the deveas of your faith.”
I sank under the water with a bubbling groan. A hand reached down and tugged at my hair, so I resurfaced.
“Quit being melodramatic,” Tianna advised. “You’ve been a god for almost a century.”
“I gave it up for Lent!”
“Cry me a river of bloody tears,” she advised. “You don’t have to show up. Your clergy won’t even come up to you and make pests of themselves. The Demon King didn’t like them.”
“Really? Why not?”
“It’s an established religion with certain values, most of which he disagreed with? That’s only my guess, you understand. For all I know, he might have been worried about the presence of a divine being in his place of power—you might have risen up and defeated him if he ever gave you the chance. As a priestess, I think it possible. From his perspective, though, I think he was more likely to be afraid of being found out by them.”
“Huh.” That made a certain sense. I was afraid of the same thing. “Wait, what values?”
“Mercy, kindness, courtesy, nobility,” she counted off on her fingers. “There’s also some sort of thing about honorable conduct, or so I’ve heard. They do keep going on about it. You know. Stuff like that. The virtues of knighthood thing you kept prattling on about? They took your blathering seriously.”
“Now you’re just teasing your old grandfather.”
“Yes. But please don’t go disbanding them or laying down new doctrine. They’ve had a difficult time of it while your darker nature was in control.”
“Oh?”
“He was hardly a model avatar. They’ve had some backlash from other faiths about worshipping dark gods. It’s why you’ll generally only find actual temples in a few places—Carrillon, Baret, Vathula, Plains-Port, Mochara, and here. There may be others, but those I’m sure of.”
“Isn’t it a little odd for you to be advocating tolerance for another church?” I asked. “I mean, it’s a rival organization, and Sparky isn’t big on religious freedom.”
“I spoke to Her about that. She says you’re not so bad and I should try and get along with your priests.”
“You’re kidding!”
“She didn’t say to spread the word. Only to get along with them. She doesn’t agree with everything about your church, but She’s not necessarily against you, either. It’s the idiots who worship darker powers She finds offensive.”
“I’m not a dark power?”
“Yes, but you’re a shadow, not a blackness. A shadow is a place where light doesn’t shine; blackness is the opposite of light. You require light to exist.”
“I’m going to pretend I understood that.”
“Good Grandpa.” She leaned over and kissed my forehead. “With age comes wisdom—a little slower for some people than others. With that in mind, I probably should start back down. Anything you want me to say to the inevitable questions?”
“I defer to your priestessly wisdom. I’m not looking for trouble.”
“Someone stole Tort and maybe T’yl, and you’re not looking for trouble?” she asked, sitting up in the bath and wringing out her hair.
“Okay, I’m not looking for other trouble.”
“That’s fair.” A wash of fire flowed over her as she stepped up out of the bath; steam rose up and out through small holes in the wall, up near the ceiling. She dressed as she spoke.
“I’ll go out through the lower door, if that’s all right with you. You might want to arrange a signal or something, though. I’ll call ahead on the mirror, but I don’t think I’d like to come in and wander around, looking for you.”
“I’ll build a doorbell,” I assured her. I climbed out and she flicked a gesture at me, drying me instantly. I nodded my thanks and dressed. “Anything else?”
“Come to think of it, yes. As long as Bronze has her grey-and-black color scheme, can I borrow her?”
Teenagers. They always want the car.
“I have no objection, as long as it’s okay with Bronze.”
“She’ll love this.”
“Will I?”
“I think so.”
“What is it?”
“A surprise.”
I grumbled, but let it go.
I showed her to the great hall so she could talk with Bronze before I got busy on a doorbell. It’s not hard to make a magical chime, but it is difficult to make it loud enough to be heard anywhere in the palace area—it would need to be on the order of an air-raid siren. I could make multiple sound-sources within the area, like having a doorbell chime in several different rooms, but that would take much more work.
A psychic alarm, on the other hand, need be only moderately loud; it wouldn’t have to echo down corridors and would even travel through heavy stone doors. If I defined the area of effect as a cone with its base at the level of the courtyard…
I was sitting by the courtyard gate—rather, the head of the ramp that was the Kingsway—working on my spell. Tianna came up, saw I was busy, kissed the top of my head, and departed. If she’d waited two minutes, I’d have hugged her and escorted her to the downstairs door. Ah, well.
With the upper gate finished, I put a similar spell on the lower door, down inside—the front door, not the Kingsway private entrance. Now, if anyone crossed either threshold, I’d know it. I put more spells in the circular chamber with the double ramps; these would not only notify me, but also tell the intruder to depart. No doorbell, though. If some random schmo wanted to drop by, they could take the Kingsway. Nobody is going to take the Kingsway casually. If they come up that way, they think it’s vital.
That covered the alarms. Now, for a real doorbell.
Since I didn’t have a handy bell-pull, or a bell, for that matter, I closed the door to the great hall and used one finger to trace letters—with the help of the stone, itself. What it read, roughly, was “Beyond this door, only my rules apply. Enter uninvited and you will never leave. Place your hand in the hole and wait for an invitation to enter.” To one side of the door, I put a hole about the size of my fist and forearm-deep. Ringing the doorbell should now be suitably intimidating to keep casual interruptions to a minimum.
And, with that thought, I realized I needed some more work on the circular entry room. It’s easy to get to and from. Maybe a few more spells? Something to identify who entered, possibly even intimidate or deter people poking their noses in… I probably need to come up with some sort of lock. Should I include attack spells? Active defenses? No, not yet. Maybe later, though. But the spells needed to recognize Tianna, Mary, Bronze, Firebrand, and me, in order to accept guests. If none of us were present in the room, the spells would encourage people to leave under their own power and at high speed.
It was a good day’s work. It felt wonderful to be doing heavy magical work again. Spellcasting in a low-energy world isn’t satisfying, somehow. Good practice, yes; satisfying, no.
I wonder. If magic is a scarce resource… no, back up. If magic is a common resource, does it encourage a sloppiness in spells? After all, why bother finding a more efficient way to do something if the way you have works perfectly? Would it be worthwhile to train wizards by sending them to another world, one where they can practice magic in a magic-poor environment? Or maybe build something like a reversed Ascension Sphere—a leaky one—to create a low-magic room? Could I put a hole in an Ascension Sphere so the gathered energy inside vented out through a pipe?
Well, crap. All that work to develop and build complicated power jets and the simple solution might have been staring me the face the whole time. I’m going to have to lo
ok into this.
Back to my point about magical background radiation. What are the effects on life in differing universes? Do creatures evolve to use magic if they live in a high-magic area? Or, in such a universe, are they simply created out of hand? Do people develop the capacity to use magic in a magical environment? Or is the capacity inherent in humanity? Does growing up in a magical world make it easier to work with large quantities of the stuff?
Someone find me an evolutionary biologist.
Since I was on a spellcasting roll, I put in a request to the mountain for a sand table. Where my old one went, I have no idea, but I needed a new one. Fortunately, rebuilding it would be quick and easy compared to inventing the thing. While the mountain put the material parts of the table together, I started putting together some power batteries—turbofans blowing into power circles. Later, I’d transfer power into gems and use them in my spells.
Can I automate that? Maybe if I build some sort of pump, it could take the output of a turbofan and start filling the spell matrix in a gem. I did something like that in the RV, but around here, the input power is much greater. There’s a real risk of overcharging. I’d need a safety switch to detect when the gem was nearing capacity; the things are dangerous if they let go. The automation would save a lot of time and effort, though. Cramming the contents of a power circle into a gem is hard work, the magical equivalent of operating a pump by hand. I’ll have to look into it.
Right now, I have a workroom, magical energy, and time. I can’t search a whole world by hand. What I can do is put together a search algorithm and build a computer to run it. Sort of. If I can find Tort or T’yl that way, I will. If I can’t… well, that will tell me something else.
I went through sunset in the waterfall-shower. While I rinsed, I knew Bronze was going down to meet Tianna. I could feel her telling me so; I acknowledged. It was good to know where she was off to in case I developed a sudden need for several tons of fire-breathing metal.
After the shower, it was back to work for me. The mountain did a fine job on the sand table, probably because it remembered the old one. Once it finished shaping the table and filling the upper portion with fine sand, it separated the table from the floor to make it an independent object—and therefore something I could enchant.
From experience, I know the mountain isn’t smart. On the other hand, it seems to have a fantastic memory.
For the next half-hour, I set up most of the preliminary magical matrices inside the table. Not really enchantments, but spells to act as placeholders for other effects that would be enchantments. Scaffolding, if you like. It was going nicely when the Kingsway gate chimed in my head. It wasn’t disruptive to my concentration. The psychic chime was no worse than a regular doorbell.
I was glad of the warning. It let me put things in order, tack some things in place, tie off some others, and reach a point of stability. I headed for the great hall and entered it about the same time someone put a hand in the hole. Since the hole was in the wall, not the door, I pushed on the other side and stepped back while it swung open.
Mary craned her neck to look in.
“Do I have an invitation?”
“You have a standing invitation,” I told her. “My casa essu casa.”
“I think that’s ‘Mi casa es su casa,’ actually.”
“You speak Spanish?”
“Of course. How else do you expect to deal with Mexican drug cartels?”
“Badly?”
“I’ll say. And they taste terrible.”
“I am so not going there.”
“I wish I hadn’t,” she sighed. “Pushy, chauvinistic bastards. Is there something that passes for a bathroom in this pile of rock?”
“Right this way.” I pushed the door closed and showed her to the bathroom. She looked around the bathchamber with an expression of delight.
“Say, this is actually pretty nice!”
“I thank you on behalf of the mountain.”
“Yeah, about that?”
“Yes?”
“I get the impression from things you’ve said,” she began, stripping down for the waterfall, “the mountain is alive and can rearrange itself.”
“That’s correct.”
“And it… what? Walked away from the mountain range and grew a city?”
“I suspect it was responding to my dreams while I was sleeping in it, but yes. It took eighty-seven years, you know.”
“So, it made a city, canals, another city’s walls, and thousands of miles of roads?” she asked, scrubbing in the falling water.
“Yes,” I agreed, uncomfortably. “Why?”
“Did you ever consider how dangerous this mountain of yours could be?”
“I ate an army in here, remember?”
“Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Yes, that’s one example, but I mean… well, consider the city walls around Mochara.”
“Okay.”
“What happens if you tell the mountain to lower them?”
“They’ll shrink down. My guess is they’ll shrink about one to three inches an hour, but I haven’t measured it; that’s a ballpark figure.”
“So, in one day—dawn to dawn—they’ll drop between two and six feet? It’ll take days to make them disappear entirely?”
“Yes. The mountain is a huge pet rock. It’s the fastest pet rock I know of, but it’s still, fundamentally, geography, not biology.”
“Okay. I feel a little better. But your pet rock could… could close off roads to slow down armies, dam or divert rivers, bridge rivers, cover farmland in a giant parking lot, even grow a dome of stone over a city and seal everyone inside. Couldn’t it?”
“Yes. It could,” I agreed. I know the secrets of the mountain; it’s a powerful, even dangerous thing. It could flow over the whole world and flatten it all, bury everything under a layer of stone a mile deep and crush all life on the planet. Flat world. Plate. Gigantic dinner plate, if it wanted.
“However,” I added, “there are other factors which come into play. It’s not invulnerable. There are ways to stop it, even kill it.”
“Like what? It’s a rock. How do you kill a rock? Gigantic hammers? Meteor strikes?”
“I’d rather not say. It’s a risky course of action and could, if done incorrectly, destroy the world.”
Mary stepped out of the waterfall and into the hot section of the bath.
“How do you mean that? End civilization as we know it, destroy all life on the planet, or literally destroy the planet?”
“Done properly, I don’t see why it couldn’t turn the whole world into a seething ball of energy expanding as the speed of light.”
“You know what? I don’t want to know. Forget I asked.”
“Oh?”
“I actively try to avoid anything that could destroy the world. Bio-weapons, nuclear launch codes, all that stuff—I won’t steal it, I won’t sell it, and I strongly prefer to have nothing to do with any of it. I’ll stick to gold, jewels, cash, and similar sorts of valuables, if that’s all right with you.”
“I am in total agreement.”
“Soap?”
“Huh? Oh. Not that I’ve seen.”
“I’ll get by. This transformation thing still stinks. Judging by you, I assume it doesn’t get any better with age?”
“Why do you think I like showers so much?” I asked. She made a face. Then the Kingsgate alarm went off again. Her expression underwent a rapid series of changes.
“What did I…?”
“That’s my gate alarm. Someone’s come through the gate at the top of the Kingsway.”
“I thought I saw a rider on the bridge or road or whatever it is,” she admitted. “I was busy climbing the wall, rather than walking up like a target. By the way, did you ask it to change the long road-thing? The Kingsway.”
“I did. Stairs down at the bottom?”
“That’s probably what it was doing,” she agreed. “It wasn’t finished, obviously, but something was hap
pening. People were coming by to watch it grow.”
“Fair enough. I’ll go answer the door.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, I’ll get it. Later, I’ll show you the lower door,” I promised, and headed for the great hall again. Whoever it was took their time about getting to the main door. Maybe I should include a psychic image along with the alarm so I’ll have some idea what—or who—to expect.
The door signaled and I opened it. Outside, Bronze stood well back, beyond the outward swing of the door. Closer, an old man leaned on the wall beside the door. I could see his death around him like a cloud.
“Hello?” he whispered/wheezed, peering sightlessly into the hall. I forgot the room was as dark as a cave. The whole palace area is. At night, I don’t notice. During the day, I conjure magical lights. Whatever happened to my undermountain lighting system, I wonder? Maybe it’s just in the public areas, lower down.
“I’m here,” I told him, a whisper from the darkness.
“As am I.” He leaned more heavily against the wall and slid slowly down to seat himself. I wasn’t sure it was voluntary. I glanced at Bronze. She shook her mane and flicked an ear. Someone had helped him up onto her back at Tianna’s urging.
Tianna and I were going to have a talk.
“You’ve come a long way,” I observed.
“One last journey,” he coughed. “That’s what I’ve got before me.”
“Indeed. Tell me, are you ready to go?”
“I don’t have much choice. It’s either this, or take the long road to the edge of the world.”
“I understand. Most people, I’d help them go in their sleep. You’re still awake; you can talk. You have to ask.”
“Riding the death-steed up the Kingsway wasn’t enough?” he asked. He coughed again and spat. I saw his point, but he added, “All right. I’m done. Help me go, please.”
“I’m sorry for making you say it.”