Nightlord: Orb (64 page)

“Aww.  It’s so
difficult
, being a blood-drinking creature of the night, isn’t it?”  She made a sympathy noise.  “Poor widdle vampire.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.  I understand your aversion to being arrested; I share it, in fact.  It’s one of the reasons I try to avoid having anything to do with the police, myself.  I’ve always found running preferable to fighting, but sometimes you have to fight your way out before you can run.  I didn’t think
you
were too worried about it, but I see your logic.”

“Thank goodness.  I think we get by so well only because we stay off the radar.  If law enforcement gets our descriptions and we get pulled over—which may be exactly what was about to happen back there, if not for your nap—we could be in serious trouble.  Using violence on the police may, sometimes, in exceptional circumstances, be necessary, but in the long run it’s going to bite you.  Policemen get annoyed by that sort of thing and tend to shoot you forty-nine times while you’re resisting arrest.”

“It’s not like they have bullets that can kill us.  At least, not at night,” she pointed out.

“True.  Now, let us add in a bunch of magic-working idiots and some vampire morons who may be using the police for their own purposes.”

“Hmm.”

“I predict if we’re ever arrested during the day, we’ll either find ourselves in westward-facing cells or bailed out by sympathizers—that is, people who want something from us.  Considering the drone I swatted down was loaded with explosives, I’m going to guess the odds of which is which to be around fifty-fifty.”

“You may be right.  I’ve been avoiding police for decades, and I’m always careful not to leave any traces leading back to me.  With the inevitable trouble vampire hunters and hunting vampires bring to the table, let’s say that’s going to trip us up.  You still have the ball of basic badness to find.”

“And that’s a problem,” I agreed.  “That thing is trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with B and that stands for Ball.”

“I feel as though you’re quoting something again, but I have no idea what.”

“I’m misquoting,” I informed her.  “But the ball can wait.  If it’s been broken—which might account for me not being able to find it—then the damage is done and I’ll deal with it.  If it’s still whole, then it can’t be broken by the forces available here and I’ll find it eventually.  Provided,” I stressed, “I’m not locked up in a prison or secret government laboratory.”

“Or conjuring circle.  Or staked in a coffin.  Or—”

“I see you get the idea,” I interrupted, drily.  “I think we need to disappear for a while.”

“All right.  You have a plan.  What is it?”

“First, get back to Karvalen.  I’m still probably
persona non grata
, but I’ll have access to enough magic to make it worthwhile.  We can hide there while I get updates from T’yl, Amber, Lissette—all the people who might not want to kill me immediately.  More important, I can also finish refining my gate spell and do some searching.  When I find a likely-looking universe, we move our base of operations there.  Then I can start planning in earnest.”

“So, move from fire to frying pan, then see about jumping to the countertop?”

“In essence, yes.”

Mary drove for a bit, looking thoughtful.  I kept an eye out for anyone following us.  I didn’t see them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

“Question.”

“Shoot.”

“Couldn’t we kill all the vampires in this world?  I mean, you have magic.  You know spells that can open holes in space.  You can set fire to a finger and make the original owner scream.  If we turn the tables and start hunting them, it would take a while before they caught on.  By then we might have some leads on how the Elders live, as well as where.  It might be fun, being a vampire-hunting vampire.  What do you think?”

I thought about it for a minute.  If I was going to go on a genocidal campaign, how would I do it?  Offhandedly, I’d want a vampire of each tribe, a night with no moon, and a specially-prepared obsidian knife—unless I could grow a diamond large enough to use as a knife, then enchant.  It might not kill all vampires, but it would kill most of them and severely inconvenience the rest.

Or, for a more long-term attack, some sort of self-propagating spell that could spread through the human population.  Either to let them see a dark aura around all undead, or add a curse to their blood to affect whoever drank it.  No, that wouldn’t work in this magic-poor world.  Or, rather, it would take too many centuries to spread to everyone.  And the magi would certainly notice it—would they stop it?  Or would they spread it?

Maybe a self-propagating spell, spread from human to human, but only activated when a vampire drank from them?  A parasitic spell fueled by the power in vampire blood, like an infection, with humans as carriers.  Causing… what?  Maybe it didn’t need to do anything but drain power from the vampiric essence.  It could easily cause the local sort of vampire to become exhausted, maybe even comatose, regardless of day or night.

On the other hand, if I had a sample vampire from each of the three tribes, I didn’t have to kill them as ritual sacrifices.  With access to sufficient power, I could use them for sympathetic magic and give vampires the world over severe problems.  Later, after everyone was heavily weakened by repeated assaults,
then
I could use the subjects as sacrificial tokens… I’d probably want several members of each tribe.  I might need to go through more than one in softening them all up for the killing stroke.

Then again, who says I need to tackle all three at once?  Start by grabbing some random Phrygian and go to work on his tribe.  When it’s eradicated, find a Constantine and repeat the process.  If the Thessaloniki still don’t want to play nice, wash, rinse, and repeat.  Or, in this case, chant, stab, and burn.

That last one could work.  It was unlikely any of the local vampires were prepared to defend themselves against a high-grade magical attack.  In Karvalen, where magic was much stronger, it wouldn’t work; the target would feel it coming and resist.  Magical forces abound there, often used instinctively by natives to that environment to offer some resistance to its effects.  Around here, it would sneak up like a thief in the night.

On the other hand, using any given vampire would be problematic.  While all the members of a tribe share a common ancestor, the sympathetic effects would be felt most strongly in direct line.  Progenitor to progenitor, progeny to progeny, up and down the bloodline.  But brothers and sisters—that is, down branches of the vampire family tree—vampires that only shared a common progenitor would be harder to affect.  It could still work, but it would take much more power.  The spell wouldn’t really be much more complicated, but it would definitely need more oomph behind it.

On yet another hand, a spell that worked on one vampire at a time might be exactly the right thing.  It could incinerate my captive, leap to his progenitor, incinerate him, and keep going up the chain.  That could clean out the Elders.  The power required would still be enormous, but, since I would be affecting the magically inept, maybe there was a way to draw some of the spell’s energy from the power inherent in the blood of the vampire it was affecting.  If so, the spell could, theoretically, get stronger with every vampire it destroyed on its way up the chain—

“You’re thinking a lot,” Mary observed.  “Should I be scared?  I ask because I
am
scared.  Not that I don’t enjoy a little excitement—”

“Or a lot of excitement.”

“—or a lot of excitement,” she agreed, “but long, thoughtful silences from you make me less excited and more nervous.  I wonder what you’re thinking.  I think you’re thinking about killing off all the vampires in the world.  Am I right?”

“Yes.  But none of the ways I’ve thought up are easy.”

“Oh, good.  That makes me feel
so
much better.”

“Your sarcasm is noted.”

“Beat me for it later,” she suggested.  “What did you decide?”

“Not to do it.”

“Okay, that
does
make me feel better.”

“Me, too.”  I didn’t mention to her how much it bothers me that I might actually be able to.  The only problem was the usual one: getting enough power together.  It’s always something… and maybe that’s a good thing.  Genocide shouldn’t be easy.  Easy would make it seem like something casual.  Most of the vampires present in the world may be perfectly decent people, trying to live their immortal lives without rocking the boat for humanity.  True, some of them seem to be jerks bent on killing me off or drinking my blood, but what about the others?

“I’m still thinking,” I went on, “of going back to Karvalen.  You did say you wanted to visit.”

“Yes, I did.  It sounds like a nice place.”

“So, are we good to go?”

“As long as we’re coming back again, yes.  Despite the recent troubles, I like it here.”

“Oh, we’ll be back,” I assured her.  “I’m going to find the Icon of Infinite Evil.  And I’m going to find who took it.  And then I’m going to be angry at them.”

“Don’t you mean ‘angry with them’?”

“I’m already angry with them,” I corrected.  “I’m going to be angry
at
them.”

“Ah, I see.  It’s in the sense of ‘aimed at them.’  I get it.  But first, we vacation in the kingdom of the living stone, right?”

“Yes.  And for that, we drive.  No more goofing off and stopping everywhere.  Find me a highway and hit it.  We need to collect power like never before.  I’m going to put the power circle back up and spend the rest of the day working on more layers in my spells to convert road power into magic.  We’ve really got to stoke up if we’re going to do this.”

“Is there a highway running along one of those magic line things?” she asked.  I stopped, halfway risen from the chair, and settled back into it.

“That,” I said, slowly, “is a thought.  A good thought.  I should have had that thought, that’s how much I like it.”

“Thank you, thank you.  Don’t applaud; just throw money.”

“I don’t suppose you have another stolen phone?”

“Sorry.”

“So much for cybersearching for a ley line map.  I’ll have to do this the hard way.  While I’m doing that, you keep thinking creatively.  I need all the help I can get.”

I don’t know how magi find ley lines, but I went about it in the simplest, most direct way I could.  There may be better, more sophisticated ways, but I’m not terribly sophisticated around this neck of the multiverse.

When we stopped briefly for Mary to get food—you don’t go through the drive-through lane with a vehicle like that, especially not with a trailer—I sat down at a picnic table and used my hand mirror.  The scrying spell gave me a point of view from about a thousand miles up.  A little filtering and some visual tuning gave me a view like a satellite image of the Earth, but in the magical spectrum.  Hundreds of spots showed up, some bright, some dim, scattered all over the face of the world.  It reminded me of a starry night sky.  They were all connected by fine, pulsing lines—narrow threads of pale light flaring to brightness wherever they crossed.  Where two crossed, it was a pinprick of light; were several crossed, it was a beacon.

Was there a road that happened to run along one of those lines?  No.  Of course not.  We couldn’t get that lucky.  Which left other power questions.  Could we make use of any of the nexi-whatevers?  Intersections.

The bright beacons of multiple-line intersections were all probably occupied.  Of course, those were relatively few and far between.

On the other hand, a simple two-way cross might be useful.  If we could find one, park on it, and basically drill down to the power center, maybe I could get enough of a charge to gate back to Karvalen. 

It’s been five months or so.  I wonder if anyone will immediately try to kill me.  I doubt anyone could arrange for continuous coverage of the whole kingdom with a detection spell.  It’s more likely anyone who wants to kill me keeps watch on my friends and favorite places.  I’ll have to arrive somewhere else and phone ahead.

Anyway, after poring over a digital map screen and comparing landmarks, I think I’ve got a couple of minor spots that might work.  One seems to be fairly close, only three or four miles southwest of Sheffield, Pennsylvania.  Another is somewhat farther away, in Toano, Virginia.  Another is a little bit outside Junction City, Ohio.  There are a number of other spots, but they’re all three or four-line nexusesii, or whatever the plural of “nexus” is.  The bigger ones are probably occupied.

I think I like the one outside Sheffield.  It’s in the Allegheny National Forest, well away from any real roads, and seems isolated enough we might be undetected and undisturbed for a while.

The one in Toano is a little more problematic.  It’s hard to tell for sure, but it looks as though it might be in the truck yard for a shipping company.  Putting up an arch and chanting at it for a couple of hours might not go over well, especially if they’re a twenty-four-hour place.  If not, we might get away with it at night… maybe.

The one outside Junction City seems pretty doable, though, if we have to.  It’s in someone’s back yard in much the same way I might have a tree in my back yard.  It’s a big field.  We might be able to talk the owner into letting us use it for our “stargazing” or our “art project” or something.  Money will probably change hands.  The drawback, of course, is if anyone unpleasant shows up, they have a perfect line of sight on us.  Of course, that works the other way, too.  If they can see us, we can probably see them.