Nightlord: Shadows (56 page)

Then, with a hole in space established, I could direct something particularly nasty through it. With any luck, I might even kill the caster on the other end. Later, I’ll concoct something truly vicious, so if this isn’t a sufficient deterrent, the next one will be.

First things first.

I wrapped my spell around the living victim, bit his throat, and sucked the blood out of him in one long, sudden surge. I folded his spirit—his soul, if you like—in a web of dark tendrils and caught it, compressed it, pureed it, and pumped it into the spell. It’s a nasty, evil thing, this sacrificial magic technique; it was outlawed in Zirafel and is still outlawed in every kingdom of the world that I know of.

The technique is supposed to take a piece of the user’s soul along with it whenever it’s used. There’s some debate as to whether or not that applies to bloodsucking fiends, though. At night, it’s an open question as to whether or not I qualify to
have
a soul. And, if I do, do I keep adding to it whenever I eat someone else’s?

It was a risk I was prepared to take. I didn’t have a choice.

Opening any gate, even a small one, even a simple, space-folding one, is something no one does lightly; even professional magicians spend a lot of time and effort in preparations. I, on the other hand, have an uncanny ability to take all the power of a living being, yank it out, and shovel it into a spell like coal into a steam engine.

With my tiny gate spell built and charged—but not yet activated—I worked on the second portion of my plan. The firepits in the great hall were all lit and burning brightly. That made four sizable fires for me to use. I visited three of them; I wanted at least one left alone for a later portion of my overall plan.

I ripped bracers off some of the
orku
corpses, then set one plate of metal on the edge of each firepit. Each bracer became the focus of a spell to gather and contain the energy of the fires. Each firepit would charge the magical capacitor with heat—all the heat put out by the firepit, concentrated and stored. Later, when I released the spell, all that energy would be dumped instantly throughout the steel.

Assuming the spells could hold it all. If they overloaded, they would fail. But a safety cutoff would take time to develop… later, later. I’d over-build the structure of the spells and take the risk.

That done, I started fanning the flames, urging the air to move down one side of the firepit and up the other, making the wood blaze brighter and hotter. The more burning that got done, the more energy would be stored—again, assuming nothing blew up prematurely. In for a penny…

Outside, Bronze started up the final leg of the road, the long stretch above the last intersection, leading up to the inner courtyard gate. This street ran against the flat cliff face of the central peak of the city. Invaders were still crawling their way up the city streets. The main gate was now open; elven riders had reached it and actually tried to open it, rather than waiting for someone inside to do it. Oh, well. They’d already proven they weren’t stupid. Unwise, perhaps, but not stupid.

Back inside, I had a nasty thought and immediately set to work on it.

I built a magical matrix around each of my armor-bombs. This plucked oxygen out of the air and held it in a three-dimensional, crystal-like lattice, forming layers over the surface of the steel bracers. When all that thermal energy vaporized the steel plates, the expanding cloud of vaporized, superheated metal would have a lot of concentrated oxygen to mix with. With a little luck, I would have the first use of steel as an explosive, or at least an incendiary device.

While that started sucking in oxygen, I went out to greet Bronze. I opened the courtyard gate as she made the final leg of the trip, swung it shut behind her, and used a couple of the daggers from the corpses to wedge it. Not that it needed wedging; we were well ahead of the pursuit. I just wanted everyone coming this way to think I was desperately trying anything to keep them out.

I got my shoulder under her head and lifted. I walked forward, supporting her front, while her one good leg, in the rear, hopped along. We went inside and I lowered her gently down to her shortened forelegs.

She eyed the living prisoners, but didn’t set them on fire. I’m not sure I would have had that much restraint. I know I wouldn’t have tried to stop her if she chose to torch them, or just crush them. But Bronze is a nicer person than I am.

Okay, time to do things I didn’t want observed. Therefore, time to end the observer.

I gathered up the plates, now covered in what looked like a pale blue glass, and headed for the door again. The flames in those three firepits had burned up most of their fuel, reducing them to little more than glowing beds of coals. I have no idea how many joules are stored in wood, but several pounds of wood provided heat for each metal plate. I was confident that the concentration would be sufficient.

For the next bit, I stood under the balcony and therefore not in visual range of the scrying sensor. I cast another gravity-altering spell to make sure I could make the leap. I nested the curved metal plates together, prepared everything else for immediate use, and made my move.

I stepped out from under the balcony, jumped straight up, and activated my gate spell. A crackling ring of distortion, blackness, and flickering rainbow lightning appeared, overwhelming the scrying sensor as the hole in space opened. It was about ten or eleven inches in diameter and revealed a youngish-looking man, brown hair, white eyes, wearing dark blue robes. He looked familiar; I wondered where I had seen him before. He barely had time to look startled—he didn’t have time to look terrified—before I slam-dunked three metal plates through the opening, bashing him in the face and knocking him down. As I started falling, I simultaneously jerked the containment spells loose and slammed the portal.

I landed lightly, hoping the bright white light I’d glimpsed not only flash-fried him, but set fire to the room. If I was lucky, maybe it also blew out any windows.

Any more scrying windows? No, not a one to be seen. Good.

I kicked swords and daggers under the door, wedging it thoroughly. Then I grabbed the living bodies and lined them up, side by side. Spell latticework surrounded them; black lines of soul-draining tendrils connected to energy points in their bodies. While they lived, power would flow from them into the spell; while they lived, they were generators, putting more power into a holding spell while I prepared the main one.

Some rules of science still work when applied to magic. For example, there’s a direct correlation between area affected and power requirements: the larger the volume, the more power it takes.

Keeping observation out of an area the size of a city is a titanic job. To the best of my knowledge, blocking out scrying spells through a volume of space as large as a whole city has never been done. And that’s just a temporary spell; I didn’t have the time or power to make such a thing an enchantment. A barrier spell would need a massive charge to work even once. Every scrying attempt would peck away at it, costing the barrier an equal amount of energy to block it until it dropped below the critical level and the barrier failed.

But I didn’t intend to make a barrier. I intended to create interference. Instead of blocking the view, this would transmit an image of my choosing, much brighter and stronger than a picture of the darkened interior of a mountain. That would cost almost nothing as it blocked scrying attempts. It would also save power in that it simply piggybacked on the channel of the scrying spell and jammed it with another image.

As for what image to send, I didn’t have any good ideas. I mean, a picture of a rude gesture is hardly in keeping with my image as a hero, king, nightlord, or angel. I had a bad moment or two while I struggled to think of something. A mushroom cloud? Nobody would understand it. An accretion disk around a black hole? Ditto. Something out of a porn movie? Distracting, but probably not a deterrent. A simple, bright, white light? Someone would notice the under-image; something as simple as sunglasses would bypass it.

I finally settled on a flaming eye. It was vivid, intimidating, and could easily be made to “look around,” as though it was looking back at the viewer.

More important, it was the only thing I could think of that didn’t seem stupid. Cliché, yes; stupid, no. It was a busy night, I was still injured, and I’d just recovered from shrapnel in the forebrain. Don’t judge me.

Once I had the mountain-city defined in terms of space, I could draw a magical sphere around it all. That would be the border of the spell’s effect. I would hook that into the image-transmission spell and dump power into the whole thing to bring it on-line.

Then I sat down on a nostril of the dragon throne and waited. The longer it took the attackers to get up here, the more living energy would be siphoned out of the prisoners and into the spell. I also had time to take stock of our damage.

It was a good thing I’d managed to drink dinner. Closing wounds is one thing; regrowing lost body parts is another. My left forearm was regrowing, but slowly. It already projected farther than the remains of the elbow armor. At that rate, I should have a hand again sometime tomorrow night. If things went very well, I might be able to speed that up… but not right now. I might need every bit of magical force I possessed.

Bronze clanged over, awkwardly, to put her head in my lap. She laid it there carefully, so the open, missing section was upper most and didn’t leak flames onto my leg. I tried not to cry; it would be a waste of blood. I stroked her nose and talked to her.

“You were superb,” I told her. She flicked her remaining ear in agreement and nosed at my shortened arm in sympathy. I tried harder not to cry and noticed that bloody tears weren’t wasted; they just soaked into the skin of my cheeks.

In one respect, our injuries were similar. We weren’t in pain, just annoyed at the loss of functionality. I’m not sure I could have taken it if she was actually hurting. I was more than a little upset that she was damaged—more upset at her damage than my own, certainly. For my part, I was annoyed. On her behalf, I was
enraged.

“I’m going to kill them all,” I whispered into her remaining ear, “and then I’m going to get you a whole lot of molten copper and tin. Any parts we can find out there are going into the vat. I’ll put you back together if I have to build a furnace big enough for you to stand in. If I thought it would do you good, I’d bathe you in their boiling blood.”

She knew that. Never doubted it. She was in no hurry, and I should get on with everything else that needed doing. She would wait as long as necessary.

My horse is a better person than I am.

I was still working hard at ignoring a twisting, burning rage in my middle. Someone was going to pay for this, and pay dearly. “And wherein Rome hath done you any scathe, let him make treble satisfaction…” Treble? Seven-fold. Maybe exponents should be involved. Scientific notation. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do to whoever was responsible that would hurt this much.

Whoever was responsible? Who am I kidding? Keria. Queen Keria of Vathula.

While we waited, I spent a little power to make sure we were both wrapped in Tort’s disruption spell. While I hoped the mountain was about to be shielded from direct observation, it was very important that directional spells, things that could locate us like a compass locates north, should not work. They only had to last until the next sunset, but I still overbuilt them a bit. Safety first.

It took the invaders quite a while to get through the city and up the mountain. Maybe they were concerned about being ambushed, or they paused to regroup before attacking the upper courtyard. It was past midnight before I heard the pounding and scraping at the courtyard gate. They would be through that in a minute, then another few minutes to reach the inner door and ready their assault…

Bronze lifted her head and I stood up. At my nod, she scrambled off to the metals room. I set to work on shielding the mountain.

The base spell was pretty well charged. I disconnected the elf from the matrix; I had another use for him—maybe more than one, come to think of it. Then I gathered up power of my own, forced it into the spell, and, one by one, bit and fed on each of the
orku
. I drained their blood, drank them dry, and drew their living essence from them. As quickly as I consumed them, I poured the power of their lives into the spell.

This is different from sacrificing a life directly into a spell. When I drain something living, I gain something in terms of a power reserve. It’s much less effective than sacrificial magic, but it’s also less morally questionable.

The spell surrounded me, expanded, moved outward in an invisible sphere, passing through stone and steel and flesh. It would take even more power to shape it to the mountain, so I let it expand in a sphere, lowering it into the floor, moving the center down, deeper and deeper, as it expanded outward. Street by street, building by building, it grew like a soap bubble; less material than that; more powerful than a wall of iron. Vital force made it grow. Living souls, transformed through me into magical energy, pumped it up, strengthened it. It flowed outward, rippled, solidified at the outer wall, hardened, surrounded the mountain, cloaked it in power, hid it from prying eyes from the highest peak to the darkest depths.