Nightlord: Orb (77 page)

Monday, January 26
th

T’yl still hasn’t called.  I sent Amber a message spell; she’s in Mochara and not behind the mountain’s defenses.  It was a reminder to poke T’yl.  I would have included a reply function, but it would have involved programming a location into it.  Anyone who got a good look at the spell could use it to backtrack to me.  I don’t feel ready for that.

The gate is going well, though.  Mary takes the ideogram I want, carves it into the wall, and invests it with power.  I’m doing the same thing, which moves us along almost twice as fast.  I still have to tie the ideogram into the larger spell structure and make it part of the overall whole, but it’s enormously helpful to have it pre-made and waiting for me when I get to it.

“How do you target the destination?” she asked, between ideograms.  “Is it part of the inscription?”

“No, this is the basic warp-a-hole-in-space spell.  Targeting is trickier.  The usual method—the one we’ll use here—is to visualize where you’re going and lay your will on the spell.  I have some ideas for improved controls on targeting, and your thought—putting the destination address into the structure of the spell—has merit.  But I don’t want to leave examples lying around where anyone could find them.”

“Got it.  So you’re going to picture the mouth of the boat-barn and hope it locks on?”

“It should.  It’ll seek out something at the other end with some level of correspondence to the opening at this end.”

“That’s why you squared off the hole?  To make the shape resemble the shape of the boat-barn opening?”

“Yep.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to use a mirror?”

I moved a couple of rocks I was using for stepping-stones and sat down, puzzled.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well, it seems to me if you had a mirror big enough to go through, you could use it to scry wherever you want, right?  Then, when you’ve got your point of view right—as though it was already an open gate—then you could actually open the gate and go through.  Couldn’t you?  Or would it break the mirror?”

“It’s a good thing I already sat down.”

“Why?”

“I’m dumbfounded.  That’s brilliant.  My brain must be stiffening up from disuse.”

“So, it won’t break the mirror?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe.  Who cares?  I can put a mirror back together.  I can even create a temporary one with a spell.  In fact, we could cast a series of spells to define an area for the scrying, actually scry through it, link it to a gate, fire up a gate spell…” I trailed off.  Mary was obviously pleased.

“Don’t feel bad.  You’re old and stodgy,” she teased, playfully.

“Are you
sure
you’re a natural blonde?” I countered.

“Yes.  Imagine what I could do with hair dye.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“I suspect you’re already smarter than me.”

“I suspect we think differently, that’s all.”  She came over and kissed the top of my head and ran her fingertips over the hair on my face.  “Does it always grow so fast?  You’ve only been at it two days; this is going to need a trim, soon.”

“Spell,” I told her.  “Variation on a healing spell.  Instead of telling my body to fix a problem, I told it to devote its energies to growing hair.  It’s not all that good a spell, though—it’s like using a desktop computer for a hand calculator.  I can probably get a much faster growth rate if I—”

“Stop,” Mary interrupted.  “It’s working fine as it is, and the beard is coming in nicely.  I’ll give it a bit of a attention tomorrow to even it out and you’ll look all dashing and romantic.”

“And get burned at the stake, probably.”

“What?” she asked.  “Why?”

“Because making me look dashing and romantic would clearly involve a pact with the Devil.”

“I’ll risk it.  Now, what’s the next thing I need to carve?  And can you sharpen this chisel?  My fingernails aren’t as brutal as yours.”

“Thank God,” I muttered.

“I heard that.”

“Chisel.  Right.  On it.”

Tuesday, January 27
th

Still no word from T’yl.  I’m wondering how hard it can be to find a way to smuggle me into a mountain.  If it’s really that much of an issue, maybe I should walk in boldly and damn the consequences.

Come to that, how would that go over?  What if I walked in, went up the road to the upper courtyard, and quietly went to my rooms?  No fuss, no fanfare, but no sneaking, either.  What if I calmly and quietly went home?  Would people scream and run?  Would there be panic in the streets?  Riots?  Would Bad Guys come out of the woodwork to take potshots at me?

I don’t know.  And I’m starting to be annoyed by that.

The gate is pretty much finished.  Mary and I scribed ideograms all around the inside of the hole in the grain silo, then she pushed power at me while I finished tying everything together.  It’s not a true enchantment, not from the standpoint of a permanently-functional magical item.  Instead, it’s an inscribed spell, built to be used over and over again without the need for a spellcaster to build the spell structure.  It’s much more fragile, and it won’t last forever.  If it’s left alone, it could be there for centuries.  But if it’s ever fully discharged—say, someone fires it up, goes through, and doesn’t shut it off—it’ll burn itself up and cease to be.

Of course, most people won’t have enough power on hand to activate it; that’s beyond even a magician.  But Mary and I, together, over several hours this morning, managed to gather and channel enough magic to make it functional.  With enough power stored in it, anyone with basic magical training should be able to operate it.

At least, I think we did.  Once we had it charged, I decided to cheat.  I set up a small power-jet; a miniature version of the high-intensity thing I had down in the basement of my house.  A little magic ran the thing; the rest streamed into the gate spell.  The gate doesn’t have a way to charge itself, after all, so anything the jet pumped into it was all to the good.

Should I leave the power jet running when we leave?  If I do, it will charge the spell over time.  If I come back next week and have to run through it, this gate spell might be charged enough to simply activate.  But the power-jet seems to distort the flow of magic in the local area.  This could draw attention to this ruined granary.  I think I’ll let it charge until we leave, then set the jet to eat itself after charging the gate spell for a while—say, a day or two.

As for our recording of the sunset, we decided not to watch it at night.  It’s a safety thing.  When we finished work on the gate, we went back to our rooms, had a big meal, and settled down on something like a double-wide lounging chair to watch some television.  I played back the diamond on the big mirror to watch the sun go down.

Somewhere a little below the edge—I’d say about the time the uppermost arc of the solar disk dipped below the level of the surface of the world—the sun winked out.

No thunderclap.  Not even a
poof
.  No puff of smoke.  It was gone.

Sometimes, I really hate this place.

“I don’t suppose you saw where it went?” Mary asked.

“Nope.”

“Any ideas?”

“Nope.”

“Do you suppose your sun-goddess friend would tell you?”

“First, she’s not my friend.  Second, nope.”

“Well, that pretty much closes the issue, doesn’t it?” Mary asked.

“Give me a minute.  I want to play this back again in slow motion.”

“You can do that?”

“Sort of.  It doesn’t work frame by frame; the recording is more of an analog medium than a discrete digital one.  But I can play around with the information it stores.”

“Show me.”

We re-ran the diamond’s images and I demonstrated how to alter the playback.  It’s not part of the original spell.  It’s more like wiring a rheostat into the drive motor of a tape player.  You can dial down the power to the speed control while leaving everything else the same.

At low speeds, magical video gets fuzzy.  I’m not sure why.  Slowing it down costs you focus, and slowing it down a lot turns it into smears of color.  This strikes me as odd, since I’ve see magical snapshots in perfect focus.  Different spells, obviously.  Maybe I should work on a spell to take hundreds or thousands of snapshots per second if I want to play it back in slow motion.  Or, better yet, I should find an expert in video recording and ask how it works before kludging together something.

Still, slowing down the playback let us watch the bright, fuzzy ball descend.  It approached the vanishing point and promptly disappeared.

“Did you see it?” Mary asked.

“I did.  I think I did.  A fuzzy brightness between the sun and the Edge?”

“Yes.  At least, I think that’s what I saw.”

I fiddled with the image for a bit until Mary brushed me aside.  She may not be the best spellcaster in the world, but she’s got a deft touch with delicate things.  Did that develop from being a professional thief, or did the talent encourage her to be a thief?  Chicken or egg?

Mary tickled the playback for a while and froze the image at the instant the sun vanished.

With only one angle on it, depth was hard to judge.  What appeared to happen was the sun reached a certain point in its descent, compressed from a sphere into a plane, narrowed to a line, and shot into the westernmost point of the Dragonspine Range, or Mountains of the Sun.

Maybe there really is a West Pole and the sun disappeared into it.  Does it recharge on its way through the Mountains of the Sun and get spat out in about twelve hours at the East Pole?  A naturally-occurring mineral, perhaps, that acts some sort of conductor?  No, that’s silly.  A fusion reaction would…

…would fry the whole world, if it was a sun as I understand a sun.  Maybe the rules here permit
tiny
suns, only a few miles across?

According to the elves, the world was designed and built by some ancient Thing called a Heru—specifically, one named Rendu.  These Heru then retired from the world to watch it as part of some sort of complicated game.  Okay.  To my mind, this implies the world has internally self-consistent rules.  It’s operated this long without supervision and despite the best efforts of the residents to screw it up.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Mary offered.

“It’s discount day.  Get two for the price of one.”

“Even better.  I’ll take them.”

“I’m frustrated with the silliness of a magical universe.  A have to question my assumptions about the nature of the sun—solar fusion, hydrogen turning to helium, gravity, all that.  I also have to deal with the knowledge that, no matter how stupid is looks, it
works
, which means I’m the one who’s stupid.  If I want to actually figure this out, I need to go to the Mountains of the Sun, park a research station on the East and West Poles, and gather data.  None of which I have time for, which frustrates and annoys me to a probably-unhealthy degree.”

I rolled my head to pop my neck and slouched to rub my temples.  A headache was coming on.

“It’s been a bad day,” I sighed.  “If someone wants to investigate astronomical phenomena in a magical world, by all means, let them.  I can’t stand to think about it anymore.  I’m mystically and spiritually worn out and I want to go home.”

“How about a nap?”

“I would, but I hate sleeping.”

“Seriously?” Mary asked, sitting next to me on the couch.  She propped her head on her hand and put the other on my thigh.  “I thought you stayed awake so much because we were being chased.”

“No.”

“So, what’s wrong with sleeping?”

“The last time I slept, I didn’t wake up for eighty-seven years.  Besides… I dream,” I told her, darkly.

“Is that so bad?  I get flashes of the future and stuff like that in my dreams.  Don’t you?”

“With disturbing regularity.  The real problem is I have terrible things in my subconscious and the leftovers from over half a million souls.  Sleeping won’t go well.  I know it.  It scares me.”  I smiled, slightly.  “It keeps me up at night.”

“Ha.  But seriously, you don’t sleep?  Ever?”

“Not for a long time.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re not thinking outside the box, like me.”

“Hmm.”

“Everything needs sleep,” she persisted.  “You may not actually need it, but I bet you function better afterward.”

“I don’t think I want to risk it.”

“Come on.  Bronze is downstairs, Firebrand is right here, and I’ll stay awake to watch over you.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“Do you want a lullaby?”

“I want to drop it.”

“Okay,” she replied, and got up.  “You’re a grown-up.  You don’t have to take a nap if you don’t want to.  I will, though.  You can stand guard or join me; it’s up to you.”  She laid aside some weapons and rolled onto the bed, apparently ignoring me.

I stayed on the couch.  I really don’t like to sleep.  Besides, someone ought to stay awake and keep an eye on the world.  It is a silly place.  It can also be treacherous at the worst times.

Sunset woke Mary up.  She yawned, stretched, and started peeling out of her outfit.  I joined her in the bath room and set the tub to circulate fresh water in while we died.

“Any interesting dreams?” I asked, once we settled into the water.

“Interesting, yes,” she agreed.  “Obviously oracular, no.  The usual run of wizards and witches chasing after us as we ran down a lane between dark and sinister forces on the left, bright and angry forces on the right.”

“Sounds like a nightmare.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“You would.”

“That’s what you get for being old and tired.”

“Technically, I’m younger than you are.”

“But a gentleman would not mention a lady’s age,” she pointed out, sweetly.

“You have something, there,” I admitted, “kiddo.”

“That’s better—Daddy.”

“You
had
to make it weird, didn’t you?”

“Only because you’re such fun when I do.  So, when do we leave?”

“I want to call Amber one more time and see what she says.  If T’yl can’t get himself in gear, we’ll try being incognito.”

“In Mochara?”

“For a while.  I’m seriously thinking of moving back into my old home in the mountain and seeing who shows up to annoy me.”

“Seems fair.”

After our sunset routine, Bronze and I dashed out to the woodpile on the road.  Mary went to check on our gate and prepare disguises.

Fires flickered; sparks danced.  Amber manifested in the flames.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, Daughter.  How are things?”

“Fair.  But what is that on your face?”

“The beard?”

“I thought you were eating a hedgehog.”

“It could use a trim,” I admitted.

“It could use a brushfire.”

“Mary likes it.”

“She does?”  Amber’s fire-voice sounded surprised.

“She does.  She says she does.”

“She’s your consort?”

“Only if I’m still a king.  Maybe concubine.  Girlfriend, certainly.”

“And you’re humoring her with the thing on your face?  You must really like her.”

“I’m nicer than my reputation suggests.”

“That’s true.”

“Ouch.  I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

“Then I will rescue you, dear Father, by changing the subject.  I have spoken with the Mother about Zirafel.”

“As much as I want to hear about it, I’m a little more concerned with T’yl, at the moment.  He’s promised to find a way to smuggle me into the mountain without alerting everyone and their vampire death squads.  What’s the problem?”

“I do not know.  I have sent word to him every day, but he does not reply.”

“I’m getting frustrated with waiting.  He needs to get his lazy butt in gear or I’m going to show up unexpectedly whether he’s ready or not.”

“I will dispatch Tianna to find him.”

“Thank you.  I’ll call again tomorrow night.”

“Certainly.  Do you wish to discuss the curse of Zirafel?” she asked.  I hesitated.

“To tell the truth, no.  I’m still coping with the emotional aftermath of trying to forgive Sparky for the—what?  You winced.”

“Sparky?”

“Oh!  Right.  Sorry about that.  What I mean to say is I’m still not done processing the idea of forgiving the Mother of Flame for what happened with Beryl.  I’ve been carrying that around, wrapped up and boxed in, ever since I woke up in the mountain.  It’s going to be a while before it… I don’t know.  Scabs over and becomes a scar, maybe.”

“I understand, Dad,” she replied, sympathetically.  It’s odd to hear a voice made of rushing flames sound sympathetic.  Try it and see.

“If there is anything I can do,” she went on, “you have only to say so.”

“You’ve been immensely helpful already,” I assured her.  “If we don’t hear from T’yl by tomorrow night, though, Mary and I are liable to drop by Mochara a little after sunset.  Will that be a problem?”