Shadow Knight

by O. J. Lowe

  Because, as the saying should go, just because they’ve created something terrible yesterday, it doesn’t mean they can’t invent something that’ll save your life tomorrow. Better to have them creating than dead and doing nothing. Most of them took a small retainer from the Conclave not to do anything that disrupted the status quo, at least not without talking to an appointed scientific advisor anyway. I’m not saying the system is perfect, but at least there’s some measure of control in it.

  Magic I can deal with, mad science is just a whole other kettle of fish I’d rather not have any part of. What I don’t know about can’t upset me. Maybe I’m old-school, maybe too many of these guys are so far removed from me, I might as well be another species entirely. Doubtless they thought someone like me a dinosaur, a relic of a time long past which should have been permitted to go extinct. Maybe one day, people like me would, people like them would take the Novisarium, maybe we’d cease to be human or shifter or vampire or fallen god, we’d all be scions of a technological revolution, more machine than animal.

  Either way, that’s speculation for the future. I doubted it’d truly come to pass, at least I didn’t think it would in any of our lifetimes. Suffice to say, none of them could help me. German Girl offered me use of the soul transference machine, but I couldn’t see Carla going along with that. Even if she survived, she’d be pissed. And it meant offering up someone else to suffer in her stead as her body died.

  A last resort, maybe. Not while other possible options existed. Doing this would be the easy way out, a chance for her to have a brand-new life, to extend it indefinitely. When her new body aged to almost the point of death, she could simply start over. And what would that cost me? My job, for starters. No way I’d survive something like that. She’d be pissed with me for even considering it. I wanted Carla to live, true. Doing something like this would keep her alive, but she’d be so incandescent with rage, the consequences would outweigh the rewards.

  I wasn’t so far gone I was willing to do whatever it took, not yet anyway. But I was close. If science couldn’t fix her either, the batshit crazy sort, then once again, I’d need to find another solution.

  All of this, I hadn’t failed to note, was time I could have spent at her bedside, trying to console her unconscious form. Part of me wanted to believe she wasn’t in pain, that if I spoke to her, some part of her would hear me and feel better. The part of me that was a realist held no such belief.

  Comforting lies are never better than hard truths. I told myself I was chasing for a cure so hard because I wasn’t willing to let her go. I think the truth was that part of me had already accepting she was going to go; I just didn’t want to sit there and watch it. Despite what I might proclaim, I’m a weak man when it comes to the affairs of the heart. Never have I wished to see someone suffer.

  I’d gotten the access to my magic back, however he’d blocked it from me before, and I’m not going to lie, the next few rooms I cut loose with it as we advanced, first into a ring shaped hallway that appeared empty until you advanced through it and heard the rustling, so much rustling of a thousand legs covered in brittle little hairs, looked up to the sight of countless jewel-like eyes staring down, emotionless and unseeing, fat hairy bodies falling to the tiled floor. I’m no stranger to being attacked by something with fangs, but mandibles took the piss. Venom dripped to the floor beneath them as they bore down on myself and Moulton, I threw out a hand and forced my willpower into the flames, roasted them where they advanced, the bemusing scent of burning arachnid filling the narrow hall. I wasn’t going to lie, I’ve never experienced an odour like it before and quite frankly, I hoped never to again.

  Moulton’s power didn’t have the same obvious flare to it, but rather more subtle, tendrils of black energy lashing from his fingertips, grabbing the bodies of those hideous things which escaped the flames, crushing them into the ground. Seeing a spider that was the same size as an average sized dog would trouble even the hardiest of minds. We stepped past them, tried not to think about charred guts staining our clothes, hardened juices lathered thick across fabric and leather.

  The next room, we found filled with empty suits of armour, or at least I hoped they were anyway, the idea something was at home within them troubled me beyond measure, but regardless, they didn’t move to attack as we headed for the entrance across the other side of the room. A plinth sat dead centre in the room, both of us resisted the urge to look at it, even with the little voices calling us to, a siren song of temptation. I think we’d both been around the block long enough to realise that if something called to us like that, it was inevitably bad for our health. Ignoring it was easy, I simply had to shut my mind to it, to remind myself of why I was doing this. Either way, we perhaps hadn’t made the wrong choice, for the door ahead opened in front of us, locked behind us with an audible click.

  We went through more and more rooms, so many so that gradually they became a blur, one test after another, a meld together of trials boiling on the easily mundane to the fiendishly difficult. One trial offered us three cups and another riddle, challenging us to drink from the one which wouldn’t kill us, while another simply had us watch a figure place a ball beneath a shell and move three of them around, challenging us to work out which one held the prize, a popular attraction amongst conmen and game sharks in this Novisarium. I’d simply taken my silverthorn and smashed its arm so it couldn’t move them, I knew more than a few things about cheating the rules. When retrieved, the ball acted as a key for the next door, sliding it into a groove opened it and we were through. The next room we found filled with bats, huge bastards that stared at us as we approached. I’d beckoned to Moulton to keep silent, a finger to my lips and we’d done our best to cross the room without waking them. I didn’t want to take death by a thousand rabid bites, the drool flecking from the corners of the mouths of several of the dirty little creatures, pooling on the ground beneath them. At one point, I’d nearly slipped, a several foul curses dying on my tongue as I frantically grabbed for Moulton’s shoulder to keep my balance, like clutching a side of unyielding meat. He merely gave me a bemused glance, as if he desired nothing more than for me to let go of him but too focused on his own survival to speak the words. As I righted myself, he gently pushed my hand away.

  The room after that took us past a chorus of chittering imps, each singing in a higher and higher pitched voice that hurt my ears at first, by the time we got past them to the other end of the room, I was sure a dull trickle of blood had started running down my face at the oncoming assault. Moulton appeared to be taking the worst of it, worse than I was, no doubt due to his enhanced senses.

  See, there are benefits to being mortal after all.

  The more we went through, the more we had to fight, it turned out. I don’t know if merely we’d lost patience, or we had belief in our own abilities or if we simply went looking for it, all with the aim of having to strike out at someone for putting us in this predicament, but I didn’t shy away from it. I’ve never been blessed with a predilection for violence, I’ve always tried to avoid it wherever possible, it causes more problems than it solves. One such puzzle involved shrunken heads rising after a few seconds from a piece of wood with several holes, each needing to be destroyed as they rose. I’d transformed my silverthorn into a hammer and played this demented game of whack-a-mole, the urge to shake my own head increasing by the second.

  What sort of madman came up with something like this, what kind of mind capable of it? More than that, I found myself starting to wonder about the power needed to pull it off. I’ve met men and gods and monsters through my life, none of them should have had the capabilities to pull off something like this. Some of this came across as magic on a higher level than anything I’d ever experienced. As a master wizard, I found that troubling.

  Perhaps not at all strangely, Moulton took to the violence with gusto, one room contained a pair of trolls and I found myself happy to hang back while he went at them with an iron bar, the iron sizzling
against their filthy skin as he hit them hard, superhumanly so. As a breed, trolls were big, ugly and none too bright, covered in little more than loincloths beneath pendulous bellies, but the fledgling vampire didn’t care. Maybe they were young, I told myself, not fully grown. The Moonlight Court used trolls as guards for their exclusive night club, Lumiere, those buggers were about as nasty as it came and didn’t particularly give a shit whether you found their presence offensive or not. In a strange way, I thought, the presence of something that should have sullied an exclusive establishment made it all the more special, the people who arrived knew they were heavily protected.

  I didn’t bother myself with the trolls, or the kappa in the next room, if someone had injected it with enough steroids to kill a horse. I’d always found the kappa to be a small, squat creatures barely more than waist height at their biggest, so coming across one that towered over either of us was more than a little troubling. Moulton hurled magic at it, inky black strands pulling from the ground, securing the beast in place before he sprang into the air from a running start, drove its skull hard into the ground, spilling the water from the groove in its head everywhere. Those dull yellow eyes flickered, some of the light stuttered in them and it looked like the easiest thing in the world for Moulton to flip it onto its back, draining the last of the water from within. To add insult to injury, he even snapped its spine for good measure.

  How much more of this? How much more could either of us truly take? I’d tried to ignore it, force the feelings away, but the exertions were catching up with me, my limbs leaden and my mind going foggy. How long since I’d slept? It could have been months in here for all I knew, it certainly felt like it. Moulton had no such issue with the time, he was going to live forever after all, barring death by all the usual vampire weaknesses, stakes, fire, decapitation. To paraphrase Rod Stewart, time was on his side.

  Even more, I had to wonder about what this place might be doing to both of us mentally. Neither of us had hesitated when the killing had first started, now it had simply become a means to an end. We’d see a threat, we’d move to exterminate it before it could capitalise on that status, do something to harm us. More than anything, it felt like psychological conditioning, as if we were being groomed into something we weren’t.

  Now that, that I truly found troubling. I like my mind to be my own.

  Nine.

  The clue had come, eventually, from a man named Caddis, a small and unassuming figure with a truly majestic beard. For those of you whom follow the stereotypes of wizards, we should all be blessed with such a beard. Rumour had it he’d started growing it when he was fourteen years old and after several false starts, he’d had to start tying it up at his waist. Another rumour said he was the best customer of beard oil in the Novisarium, though I’ve always found that tale a little irrelevant where the man was concerned. Caddis wasn’t one thing or another, the sort of man with a foot in a dozen different worlds but never particularly bright about any of them.

  It was he who suggested something, brought into life an option I’d considered but never dared vocalise on the grounds that once I did, there would be no going back. If keeping her alive wasn’t an option, then why not go the other way? Why this should make me so squeamish, I did not know. Maybe perhaps not even the whole way, I’d heard the tales of vampire blood and the miraculous healing properties it possessed in smaller doses after all.

  Everyone had. The problem, as always, lay in the acquisition. The older the vampire, the higher their status, the more potent the healing abilities of their blood. The oldest and the most powerful, two states of existence usually quite mutual, they were often leery as hell over their blood being let loose. Even when they did deign to give it up, it was often with a price most found crippling beyond belief. Getting in debt to someone who’ll likely outlive you and capable of rending you from limb to limb if you welch is never the smartest decision for a long and healthy life.

  A vampire of the Sunlight Court would do me no good at all, I knew that immediately, which is how I found myself stood outside the nightclub Lumiere, the stronghold of the De Lune family, of Queen Clare and her sisters. Not all the clientele were vampires, a place like this has a certain image you’d expect of it, all goths and moody-looking kids looking for a place to harm themselves in peace, maybe have a brush with danger in safe circumstances. Laws existed against vampires turning people without all manner of consent forms, they were strictly enforced, not just by the Vigilant but by vampire society itself across both courts. Accidents do happen, but generally not as often if there’s a zero-tolerance approach to it. At the very least, it ensures care is taken. Or that they get really good at covering it up. Living or dead though, this club had never been quiet whenever I’d come here, always plenty of people desperate to get in, people who wanted to be seen to be doing something. The drinks were expensive, the music loud and the doormen the sort who’d throw you out on your ear if you even thought about causing trouble. If you were a troublemaker, and an unlucky one at that, you’d want the trolls to get you, considering what a member of the court might do to you.

  Sometimes, a status can be a boon, a key to open any door. I strode straight to the front, made sure my silverthorn showed. If they thought about not letting me in, if they made even a single move to stop me, it’d be something they regretted. The best way to deal with predators is to let them know you’re not to be fucked with.

  One of them looked as if they’d like nothing more than to bar my way, I gave him a hard expression, my meaning all too clear and he relented, had more sense than I’d ever have given him for one of his kind. Until you saw for sure them without the glamour, it was hard to tell what they were, some said trolls, some said ogres. I didn’t particularly care. It didn’t matter, one of them was just as bad as the other, ill-tempered bastards that smelled like they’d rolled in something, beings who’d rather fight than talk about it like higher forms of intelligence. I’ve never like those who follow that path, they’re usually unreasonable and that inevitably leads to conflict.

  I did my best to ignore the music, despite the way it wanted to beat its way through my eardrums and leave me deaf, made a beeline for the door at the back of the room. Most of the regular patrons didn’t even notice it, they didn’t care. They wanted a good time or to get high off vampire blood, which ever it was, the two not exclusively unique I’d found. Some lower level fangers did enjoy the idea of getting punters hooked on them, trading that plasma for favours, whatever they wanted really. Those who didn’t have money inevitably wanted more, those who chased status always wanted the next little thing to get them ahead in the maze of predators the Moonlight Court had become over the centuries. That, I’d come to consider, was the true meaning of power. Some of these women had been alive longer than I could even imagine, they’d come from times when they had nothing, little more than property, something to be silenced and handed over to a husband as rapidly as possible. All that, a collective memory across a group bound by blood, it’d made them merciless.

  And if I dared to forget that, even for a second, it’d bury me. They’d bury me. For now, though, I had a queen to meet. And woe betide anyone who tried to stop me.

  Whatever it took, I would leave here with what I needed. Whatever it cost me, whatever I had to do, I’d pay the price. I owed Carla that much to try.

  Eventually we came to a room with no door beyond, just a simple entrance which slammed shut behind us, the floor dark, dirty stone devoid of anything notable. I couldn’t see the walls for the shadows crawling their way up them. The only remarkable thing I spotted protruded from the ground like a middle finger directing its ire towards up, a plinth fashioned of plain stone, grey and dull. Atop it sat a bowl, though not like any I’d ever seen, I realised that as we approached. It reminded me of a huge stone mixing bowl, the area on the outside completely smooth to the touch. Inside, it had been split into two sections, almost resembling a yin and yang symbol, half the water dark and murky, giving the impress
ion it swarmed with microbes. The other half I found to be the opposite, so crystal clear I could see my face in it. Dear me, I looked tired, barely recognised myself anymore. Too much hard work, I might once have been told, I think the doctors had long since given up trying to tell me how hard I was pushing myself. I’d defied them so far, right when they’d been predicting I’d find myself pushed into an early grave.

  “Well this looks promising,” Moulton said. “Want to bet this shit is poisoned and the trick is drinking it?”

  I said nothing, studied the bowl with casual interest. Something about it looked familiar, like an old story forgotten over time, the tale a distant memory but the moral lingering deep in the subconscious, hooked in so deep there was no rejecting it.