Nightlord: Shadows (81 page)

When people could see again, it was just a matter of finding unoccupied footprints. Oh, he tried hopping up on the table, but Seldar thought of that before the assassin did. Seldar took off one of his legs with a blurringly-fast forehand and backhand double stroke. The first one whiffed; the second one connected and blood fountained.

As far as the would-be assassin was concerned, things then went from awful to catastrophic. With the door closed and no new footprints of invisible people—just a body-shape and a lot of spurting blood—Kammen and Torvil closed in with Seldar. They looked
angry
.

The twins, much to their credit, stayed next to me, swords out, watching for new footprints and weaving a razor-steel net around and over me.

I didn’t watch the whole thing. I decided that falling forward might be a good idea. As a result, I lay facedown in the sand as gently as I could and thought hard about keeping my heart beating. I recall hearing a brief series of meaty chopping noises, then felt a sense of being surrounded. My ears were starting to ring, so I didn’t make out what they were saying.

Nobody tried to move me. I don’t know how long I lay there, but it seemed like quite a while before other people started to impress themselves on my awareness, gathering around me.

Someone started pulling the knife out, very slowly. I agreed, in principle, with the idea; unfortunately, it hurt one hell of a lot more coming out than it did going in.

Mom was right again: just do it fast so it hurts less.

However, since it was hurting a lot, I decided to step into my headspace.

I walked into my mental study and shut the door. Things improved markedly once I was slightly out of touch with my body. The lights in my mental study were dimmed, almost reduced to mood lighting, but that’s only to be expected. Reduced blood flow to the brain and all that. My lights weren’t out, but I wasn’t really up to full consciousness.

The rules are different in here.

On the other hand, I couldn’t really feel my body, either. How badly was I hurt? What was being done to fix it? Offhand, I didn’t know. I looked around for ideas on how to find out.

The wall behind my desk drew my eye. Normally, it looks like a very nice, wood-panel job, done in something dark with a fine grain. After throwing a bit more light on it, I could see it was decorated with a number of differently-colored sticky notes. I took a moment to read a few of the notes:

“I’m so tired.”

“I’ll never finish this in time.”

“Please watch over my son.”

“Find my Dad.”

“Don’t work me so hard.”

“Come get me; I’m ready to go.”

“Could I please have a mother?”

“Hurray for the King!”

I wondered what they were and why they were here. Manifestations of my psychicness? Messages from people, directed at me, but only registering below my conscious level? Or would I notice these messages if I bothered to pause and listen?

Still, leaving me a note is a good way to be sure I’ll get the message. If you aren’t in a hurry.

Sadly, I was in a bit of a hurry, myself. I needed to figure out what was going on with my wound and if there was anything I could do about it.

Time for visualization exercises.

I looked at the top of my desk and concentrated. The glass top lit up like a screen, showing a large map of my upper torso. Yes, there was the foreign body. It was a good shot, right through the heart. It was a blade with a triangular cross-section, not really edged at all; it was a thrusting weapon designed for maximum penetration. Maybe he thought he would need to get through mail or something.

Then again, with a weapon like that, you want to jerk it right back out as quickly as possible, not leave it in. Leaving it in makes it a blockage, like a cork, reducing blood loss. Yanking it out causes only minimal damage, but it opens the wound channel and allows blood to flow.

He should have removed it. It should have been a quick in-out movement, not a single thrust.

It was still in the process of being removed. Someone had paid close attention to my lecture on flesh welding, it seemed. Several spells were active around the area; most of them were types of scrying spells, presumably to get a look at the injury. Only one was a flesh welding spell, and someone was using a minor manipulation spell—call it a low-powered telekinesis spell—to seal thin layers of tissue around the point of the weapon.

Hmm. Half a dozen other manipulation spells are running. What are they… oh, I see. The blade tapers to a point. As it gets drawn back, it creates a gap between itself and the surrounding flesh. They’re holding the heart muscle closed around the blade to reduce blood loss.

It’s causing problems though, as it restricts the heart movement. It’s times like these I could really stand to have a secondary heart. I may have to look into that, not only for me, but possibly for my knights, too. Their battlefield survivability would improve, and I’m all for having zero fatalities on my side.

Still, blood is flowing through me, albeit slower than normal. I manipulated the map on my desk like a giant touch-screen, zooming out to look at my whole body. There’s the reason: someone was working on my femoral artery, slowly pulsing along it to move blood through it, like squeezing water through a hose. As I watched, someone started doing the same thing with the other femoral artery. It was a slow, alternating, rhythmic pulse, and a gentle one, for which I was duly grateful. They didn’t need to shred the arteries and make things even worse.

I felt the pangs, distantly, as they continued to work on my heart, so I zoomed in again. Yes, my heart was stopped, but that was okay; they had reached the point of sealing up the holes in it.

Have I ever mentioned how important it is to avoid air bubbles? I’m pretty sure I did. Well, here’s where we discover if they learned that lesson.

Once they patched the layers of my heart, they pulled the blade the rest of the way out. A bit of lung, a bit of skin, some cartilage—nothing major, at least by comparison. Then a healing spell… good. And a connection, then another, and another… people piling on, joining in with a wound-sharing spell. There’s a point of diminishing returns with those things, but I suspect that’s not even on the list of things they care about.

My heart beat, once. It hurt, but it did it. Then it stopped again.

I frowned. That should be doing better.

Well, I was inside my own head, really. I ought to be able to consciously control some of my autonomic functions… if I can just find the proper metaphor.

I looked at the map for a long moment, considering my heart. Then I touched the map of my torso and reached into it, my hand sliding through the surface of the desk as through the surface of a liquid. I wrapped fingers around my heart and squeezed, gently, rhythmically. Beat. Beat. Beat.

It got the message and started, haltingly, to do it on its own. The healing spell and the flood of vitality from everyone else also encouraged it. It hurt less with each beat, it seemed.

The spells on my femoral arteries quit; I noticed an ache in each leg. That spell might need some refinement.

My heart handled the load by itself. It beat, and kept beating.

I sat there at my desk and watched it for a while. My other choice was to try and come out, and I wasn’t sure I’d be conscious if I did that. The lights in my study were brighter, but still subdued. I decided to wait until things improved.

It gave me time to think a bit.

Sometimes, I get wrapped up in doing things. There are good points to taking some time and just sitting and thinking. I don’t do that enough. I should probably schedule at least one day a week where I don’t
do
anything but sit back, put my feet up, and do some Big Picture thinking. I’ve had this thought before, but I still keep ignoring it…

Maybe I should schedule a day where I have an afternoon nap, too. Admittedly, I don’t need to sleep, but I’m psychic, and I have dreams.

While I sat in my mental study, the place where a wizard does most of his serious thinking, I put my feet up on the desk—careful of my internal organs—and thought about assassinations and other attempts on my so-called life.

My enemies aren’t idiots. Whoever they
are, they seem to
act
like idiots, sometimes, but they can’t really be that dumb. Which makes me wonder… this guy, the invisible one. He has the perfect implement to kill me, utter surprise, and an ideal shot at me from behind. And, against all odds, he
fails
. He plants the dagger in my heart and leaves it there. Why not a quick in-and-out movement? Better still, why the heart? Why not a quick upward thrust at the base of the skull? That would get the upper spine, possibly, but certainly the brain, and then I am well and truly screwed.

Could the invisible assassin be someone who isn’t a professional? A thug, covered in invisibility, and sent inside to find me and kill me? Why? If you’re going to go to all the effort to put invisibility on someone, why not put it on someone
competent
? You don’t spend millions on the best fighter plane in the world and hand it over to the guy who barely has a license to fly. You get the best.

They didn’t. Why not?

I thought back to the demonic creature in the moat around the mountain. It really wasn’t a deadly threat, especially with Bronze handy. Yet, summoning it was a huge expenditure of power. There was no one there to help it, no backup for it at all. In fact, all the effort it took to summon something that big would have been better spent summoning a couple of dozen smaller—maybe ogre-sized?—and definitely smarter Things. Having one big monster on which to focus means it gets all the damage; a group of smaller Things would last longer, attack more often, from multiple directions, and do more damage in coordinated assaults.

Thugs and a magician showed up in Mochara to jump me. They never really stood a chance of killing me, but they were certainly powerful irritants.
They
had magical weaponry, albeit of a single sort. It was enough to make them think they could pull it off—at least, convince the magician; the thugs might not have known what they were going after.

A magician tried to dream me to death, and that might actually have worked… but I survived it, partly through Bronze’s help, partly through a background of geekdom, and partly through the magician’s own mistakes. But does a professional magician make that kind of mistake? Sure, the real plan was to occupy me until either his goons or the sunset could terminate me… but would a binding spell like that have such an obvious weakness? It
might
be a simple case of unfamiliarity; nightlords were extinct for a long time. We’re still quite uncommon. I would think a professional magician would be more careful, but it could be just a case of overconfidence.

Behind that, though… who sent all these things? Who set them on me? Who paid to have them kill me—or
try
to kill me? Is it several different people or organizations who want me dead? Or are these they pawns of a singular entity? An offshoot of the Hand? A whole religion? Or just someone with an axe to grind in preparation for my beheading?

Whoever it is doesn’t seem to seriously want to kill me; this most recent attack could easily have killed me if the guy with the knife knew what he was doing. Could it be that killing me is sufficient, but not preferred? Is capturing me ideal, but murdering me is acceptable?

For what purpose? Or are there multiple purposes here and I’m only starting to see one of them?

I’m a nightlord. My blood is valuable. Oh, there might be some other reason, but nightlord blood can make someone immortal. They don’t
need
another reason. I’m not sure there’s a better reason. That’s certainly one possible motivation for capturing me. But what about this apparent unconcern with killing me by accident? Or is that, as I suspect, simply acceptable rather than preferred?

Keria isn’t my first suspect, even though she leaps to mind. She sent an army of unpleasant creatures after me and they weren’t kidding around. They were trying to outright kill me, and kill Bronze. That wasn’t an annoyance to convince me to come after her; that was a straight attempt at ending my existence. She would have got away with it, too, if not for my home ground advantage.

Who did that leave? Magicians, like the cabal that once kidnapped me? Some sort of religious sect that wants to sacrifice me—or use my blood in dark rituals? Or some twisted cult that wants a nightlord… I don’t know. Frozen in a block of ice so they can use me as an idol? Or is it the Prince of Byrne, as all the circumstantial evidence suggests? That seems too obvious. Paying thugs in Byrne currency is so obvious that it almost has to be a ploy.

I don’t like being hunted. I don’t like being baited, either.

Frowning, I took my feet down off the desk and examined my condition. The schematic showed that everything was working. I fiddled with the map, adjusting things a trifle, encouraging everything back into its regular shape again. According to the dialog boxes on the map, my body still needed to re-balance some blood chemistry and deal with the byproducts of a trauma, but there was nothing structurally wrong with me now… and the lights in my study, while not at full brightness, are at least all on…

All right. Let’s see if I’m capable of consciousness.

I muttered something about this being a habit and sat up. Tort sat beside me, holding my hand and monitoring the spells. Torvil and Kammen were by the door, keeping it closed, while Seldar stood next to me, opposite Tort. Seldar still wore the spray of blood across his chest and shoulder from where he severed the assassin’s leg. Malana and Malena stood on opposite sides of the room, ready to spring into action. All three of my personal guard had their weapons drawn and a shield on the other arm, ready for trouble. Everyone else in the room was lying down in the bloody sand, unconscious.

A little experimental movement revealed that it hurt. I was glued together and it would be a few days before I was up to speed. Well, under mortal circumstances. In my case, I’d be back to full speed after my evening yuck was washed away.