Nightlord: Orb (118 page)
Authors: Garon Whited
I drank from the fountain, power pulsing down the million-stranded tentacle of tendrils like a throat swallowing. I drank, and never felt full; I took it in and it poured through my spirit like blood through my flesh. I could have stood there for a thousand years, but I had promises to keep. I stepped out of the power surge.
Viewed from the outside, it was even more impressive. It reminded me of Amber’s assassination, with magic fountaining a mile into the sky like a pillar of coruscating, prismatic fire, splashing on the shimmering, heat-haze dome of power. Brilliant and volatile, yet visible only to those with the eyes to see it. I wondered what Sparky would think if she could look at it.
“I’ve alerted my allies,” Juliet informed me, shading her eyes from the brilliant column of force. “Do you want to try for another one before Grandfather catches on to why you’re opening them?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s already noticed this and is looking intently at it; I’m blocking us from his vision, but I can’t hide
that
. If he thinks we’re doing this to gain access to power, he won’t expect us to open another one. In fact, if he comes here to cap it and tap it, he’ll be too busy to stop us from opening several.”
“I
like
this plan. Let’s go!”
The world blinked again.
We repeated the process twice more with results varying with the power of the nexus. Juliet assured me someone took control of them after we left.
“Someone we like?” I asked, standing over another nexus and reaching downward.
“It must be. Even Grandfather can’t seal and control two erupting nexus points at once. If he’s gaining control of any of them, it’s the first one we opened—the others are simply too much to handle at the same time.”
“Is there any way to contact your relatives and see if they’re on top of things?”
“Not without risking a distraction at a crucial moment,” she admitted.
I tapped into another nexus point and power erupted, blasting upward like a column of magma. I stepped out of the soul-searing glare as the opening widened to its maximum. I could see her point about not distracting anybody. Humans aren’t built for this sort of power surge. During the day,
I’m
not built for this sort of power surge.
As I finished this, the third opening of the evening, Juliet stepped into the flood of energies as I stepped out. She let it flow upward through her body and I tried not to interfere. My urge was to tackle her, get her out of the deadly stream of power, but she was a professional magus and, presumably, knew what she was doing.
“This one is mine,” she thundered. Her voice boomed and echoed, as though in a large room, despite the open area.
I could see her spirit’s pain at the contact with the rocket-blast of energy, but she seemed to welcome the sensation, like the burning feeling in muscles after an intense workout. A good pain, possibly—or one endured in the knowledge it was worth it. Her aura—the radiant field that surrounds all living things—interacted with the silent, invisible fountain of power. I could see her aura change, creating a bright nimbus of light around her. The colors of it, seething and swirling, washed out and faded, merging with the fountain of power. The colors turned to the scintillant brilliance of magic, colorless and bright.
I didn’t like it. Humans aren’t able to cope with this level of raw energy. They can use spells to cap the gusher off and feed power to other spells, but to stand in it? To absorb it? No. Even to channel it is laughable. It would be like standing in the path of a river when they blow up the dam. You don’t deflect it with your hands. You don’t deflect it at all. If you stand in it, it washes you away.
Much as the colors washed away. As her living aura washed away. Almost as though the colors were burned out of it, until it resembled Johann’s soul—monochrome, undifferentiated, the pattern of a soul inscribed on magic, without the actual person.
So that’s what having your soul set on fire looks like,
I thought. It reminded me of some test subjects in my vampirism experiments. In a dim, dark way, the empty, soulless undead looked much like the soulless thing before me.
“If you say so,” I hedged. “Now, where’s your grandfather? We need to see about dealing with him.”
“That will not be a problem,” she laughed, raising her hands to regard them, flex them. She laughed aloud and the sound set my teeth on edge. It made me think of amused Things from the primal chaos. Was madness a side effect of this process? A little megalomania to go with your infinite cosmic power, maybe?
“Don’t get overconfident. You’re bathed in power, but power isn’t everything,” I cautioned.
“My confidence is fully justified,” she assured me.
“Okay, I’m listening. What’s your plan from here?”
“Our plan,” she corrected, and three glowing forms appeared. They were projections, illusions, of three people in similar circumstances—standing in opened fountains of wild, unfettered power. One of them bore a striking resemblance to Johann. All of them had the same bright auras, leeched of color, scintillating with nothing but seething magical forces.
“We did not think you could be so easily persuaded to open up so many,” Juliet added. “Now we do not need to open them ourselves. Each of us has a nexus of our own.”
Weirdly, I felt a strange sensation, as though watching the whole tableaux from a distant point. It was a sensation I remembered all too well. Pieces clicked together like tumblers in a lock, opening the door of memory. And then it was all clear to me.
I badly underestimated the ancient and complex magic of Atlantis. They had an Ascension Sphere in California. I should know; I made it. And yet, when I cast my sensor spells, looking for the Orb, even the most powerful pulse did not encounter it. My sensor spells should have expanded out from me until reaching the power circle; on contact, the power circle should have sucked them in.
But they knew this. All they had to do was hide the Ascension Sphere.
Put the Evil Orb inside the Sphere and it would sit there indefinitely, even happily. The Thing inside the Orb would know intimately how to hurt me, as well as where to go for victims. It could tell them about Karvalen. It could tell them everything they needed to know to find me, how to set me up, and how to use me.
The Ball of Awful might even have thought to use Juliet, the damsel in distress, with her plea for my help. The noble purpose of rescuing dear old Grandpa from himself. The capture, the torture—was it real? Or merely an illusion in the glass wall?—the escape, and the release of powers they needed and only I could provide…
And no need for any of it, really, if they asked nicely. I could have been persuaded without all this. Of course, that wasn’t the point, not to the Black Ball. Doing it in a civilized, reasonable way wouldn’t have
hurt
.
The Orb might not be in charge, but it had influence. Whether supernatural influence over minds or the whispered promises of power, did it matter? It hated me even more than I hated it. Its cruelty, unlike mine, was without limit.
“You’ve got my Orb,” I accused, looking at the spirit-forms standing in a row.
“Indeed,” Johann replied, his glowing, immaterial smile like searchlight. “It has been most valuable in our quest to attain power. As have you.”
“Tell me something. Did you really want to learn how, or did you just want me to open the nexus points for you?”
“Why would I ever want to open one? My surviving children and grandchildren are the only ones who need such power. We have no need to open others.”
“And you used me to get it for them.”
“You were more useful than my wildest hopes. Alas, now that you have opened our power-points, your usefulness—”
I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid. I knew how the sentence had to end. People always start by saying something nice, then they add a qualifier. I started into hyperdrive at “alas” and kept my foot on the gas, so to speak.
A family of magi, all loaded for vampire and sitting on fountains of power? Not my first choice for adversaries. They weren’t even physically present, aside from Juliet. This couldn’t be a fight. It would be a slaughter and I was on the wrong end of it. If they were going to try and kill me—and they were—I’d rather they had the logistical troubles of reaching across universes.
No one living understands the intricacies of a gate spell like I do. I’ve studied it. I’ve used it. I’ve taken it apart and put it back together like a favorite jigsaw puzzle. I may not qualify as the ultimate master of the spell, but you can be damn sure I’m an expert.
An appalling amount of power still flowed all around me, waiting to be used. I had all the charge of a credit card on Black Friday. I grabbed the energy while I whipped tendrils around me, scored the ground in a circle. It wouldn’t be ideal, but the definition of a border was the important thing.
This really was not a good way to go about it, but speed was the only thing that mattered.
I dumped everything I had into my escape attempt. It seemed to me if I didn’t get away, holding on to a reserve wouldn’t help. Either I got off the line quicker than they did, or they would run right over me, squashing me into vampire paste in the process.
They reacted immediately, attacking. Energies of various sorts erupted in my direction.
I dropped into the swirling vortex before it was fully formed. Searing light and screaming colors exploded above me as I fell through the open whirlpool of twisted space, spinning in strange directions.
The vortex closed like thunder around me.
It’s cold.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been this cold.
The darkness visible is a formless thing, mixed of all the colors beyond the reach waof light, beautiful and terrible. It swims, it swirls, it flows like rivers of clouds and I am borne upon it as a leaf upon the waters. A mammoth current swirls around me, carries me in a direction I cannot fathom. Even so, I know where it takes me, feel my course through the void.
I see at last. The void is not empty, merely a place of things beyond the knowledge of man, for it is older than man. It existed before the first pinprick islands of light came to be, before worlds or life or thought, and still it remains. It is home to Things that love the light, hate it, hunger for it, or ignore it. There are the little ones, the big ones, and the great ones, all abroad within this realm and none of them concerned with me.
Do I belong here? Is this the place where the blood-drinking creature of the night might find a home? I sense a kinship with this place, a sense of homecoming and alienation and of loss, all intermingled... Are these kin to the spirit that makes me something other than a man? Or do the Things dwelling within the darkness visible simply have no interest in a half-breed mongrel scampering along the gutter?
Questions, questions, questions. All I ever have are questions. Life is questions with no promise of answers. Perhaps that is why religion is so popular. It promises ultimate answers, but only when life is over.
I spin through the ever-full void, slipping through the cracks between the worlds, tiny in the darkness, borne upon a river of twisted space, and I fall.
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