Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  “Could be fun,” she admitted.

  “I’ll talk to Diogenes about some gadgets.”

  “No, let me. I know what I want.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Mary activated her Diogephone—it’s a bracelet, which means it’s on speaker by default. For more private conversations, she removes two of the bead-like things. One goes in an ear, the other she holds like a microphone. Mary spoke with Diogenes about the types of bugs and taps and other electronic gadgetry she needed.

  Me, I still use a cigarette-case flip-phone. James Bond I am not, but Diogenes is an excellent quartermaster.

  “Mary?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I have a question.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Why bother with Lorenzo?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, puzzled.

  “I mean, why are we bothering with Lorenzo at all? I had the idea of stopping our trade with the criminal element, but we could go even further. Liquidate our holdings here, take the commodities Diogenes most needs, and never come back.”

  “Yes, of course we could,” Mary replied. She stared into the distance, thinking. “It would be… oh, at most? Six weeks to liquidate everything and, say, a week longer to allow for the unexpected. Seven weeks and we’re gone. Which, I might add, will be no fun whatsoever. It would also make me sad because I’d have to spend all my time making it happen, rather than giving Salvatore a jalapeño enema.”

  “A jalapeño what?”

  “Setting aside my personal hobbies of thievery and adrenalin, I haven’t forgotten about being staked, sweetie,” she replied, eyes narrow and voice low. “Maybe I’m taking it a bit personally, but it’s a very personal thing to have a wooden stake driven through your heart. And to be buried at a crossroads. I want him to understand my pain and to share it.”

  “Ah. Of course. Forget I said anything. I’ll go buy a shovel.”

  “A shovel?”

  “So I can help you dig the hole.”

  “You may be the sweetest man I’ve ever met.”

  “Only when dusted with powdered sugar.”

  “There’s no point to that before dawn. Let’s stay in and do something unimaginative.”

  Flintridge, Sunday, September 21st, 1969

  I think Mary is confused on the meaning of the word “unimaginative.” Then again, it was a motel room, not a dungeon. We improvised.

  I still don’t get why she likes being tied up. It’s not something I have ever enjoyed, even before Johann and his collection of sharp objects. I don’t truly understand being on either end, but I do my best. Mary loves it when I put on my Evil Overlord hat and whisper cruel nothings in her ear. To each her own, I guess. It may not be my cup of tea, but, as far as tea goes, it’s not bad.

  I still have to be careful with my teeth, though. When I nibble, it’s like being attacked by a toddler with scissors. It’s a good thing Mary’s teeth are mostly normal. She bites, but during daytime mostly just leaves bruises. She has better claw and fang control than I do.

  After our lovely morning, we called Diogenes. He had a number of gadgets produced for Mary. Without a shift-box on both ends, we were stuck with opening a gate. Diogenes packed the gadgets for us and readied them. We held a hoop of wire over the bed and used it as a gate focus. A quick transfer of the Diogephone’s communications micro-gate, some rippling… When the opening stabilized, Diogenes dropped the packages through and triggered the transfer back to the communications rings.

  I’m so glad I enchanted some robot controls for him. Someday, when I get that far in my research, I’ll investigate making computer circuit boards with orichalcum instead of copper. If I make magical motherboards, can I make Diogenes a wizard? Or, at least give him a more versatile peripheral for operating magical devices? As it is, he has idiot controls—the controls are part of the enchantment. Flip a switch, it does its thing. But can I wire a magical device into something so he can use it like a human being? Or, rather, can I give him the capacity to detect and manipulate magical energy like a human?

  There’s only one way to find out. All I need is a hundred years and, apparently, a supply of antidepressants.

  Strangely, though, I do seem to be in a better mood, today.

  Mary and I went to Lorenzo’s place—the Cosmo—as tourists. We didn’t do anything particularly sneaky or covert. All Mary wanted was to look the place over and plan what we would do later. We had lunch, wandered around, lost some money, watched a show, lost some more money, had dinner, lost yet more money, and were gone well before seven o’clock. Daylight couldn’t make it into the casino proper, but the effects of a sunset aren’t subtle. People do notice and, at best, assume we’re horribly ill. It’s the sweating and the stink, I think.

  Mary gathered up her stuff and drove off in her Toronado—she’d recovered it from where she parked it prior to Salvatore’s unpleasant reaction. I spent most of the rest of the day and part of the evening catching up on television. Wild Kingdom was a lot more interesting than I recalled from watching re-runs as a child.

  Mary came in well after sunset, looking pleased with herself.

  “I take it things went well?”

  “I’d say so, but there are restricted areas I’ll need help to get to,” she told me. I got to my feet.

  “Show me the way.”

  “I would, but I’m a little peckish. When was the last time you ate?”

  “I…” I thought about it. “Dinner at the Cosmo?”

  “I mean, when was the last time you drank you dinner?”

  “Oh. Um. Diogenes drove a tanker robot up to me a while ago…”

  “So, tonight you take me out for a drink. Tomorrow, we go out to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Tomorrow night, you and I go to the Cosmo and look around some more with vampire eyes, see what sort of hunting setup they have, check out their mystical protections, all that stuff. And you reach deep into places with your extremely well-endowed psychic tendrils.”

  “How do you make that sound dirty?” I asked.

  “It’s my eyes,” she replied, grinning, “and the throaty, breathless tone,” she added, shifting into it again.

  “You may be right. Okay. But remember, we’re not supposed to do anything to the tourists.”

  “I remember. We can go to a butcher shop for take-out.”

  Flintridge, Monday, September 22nd, 1969

  Spying on a hotel casino owned by a crime lord who hunts vampires is probably a job for mortals. Since we don’t have a bunch of mortals to do it for us, we went in disguise. It doesn’t do for a pair of vampires, at night, to wander around like sharks in the koi pond. It upsets the staff.

  For the most part, our nighttime visit was a replay of our daytime visit. We played at the tables, lost some money—although I did hit one on the roulette table, I lost it all again by betting on red—saw a show, all the usual stuff. Mary had some places she wanted to get into. I helped. She picked locks while I dealt with security cameras and guards, mostly. I don’t show up on cameras, but she does. Don’t ask me why. There’s a lot about the various species of vampire—my own included—I don’t comprehend.

  What I found most interesting was the feel of the place.

  Plying invisible tendrils of psychic darkness around me like a cloud, I can usually choose whether to touch the spirit of a living creature. Once upon a time, my tendrils passed through them harmlessly by default. These days, I have to concentrate to avoid leeching a bit of vitality from them on contact. It’s like a pool of water and a sponge. If I don’t keep the sponge squeezed, it absorbs vitality. Following a similar metaphor, actively trying to drain vitality is like a pumper truck sucking up everything in reach. I can still reach through wood, steel, and concrete with no trouble, since they’re not alive.

  The lobby, the restaurant, the casino floor—all the ground-floor spaces were perfectly normal. Ditto for everything in the hotel proper. Get off the elevator, go down the hall, look confused, go back the other w
ay, consult a key tag, get back on the elevator… drunk or lost, some guests just wander around. It made my scan of the building less conspicuous or suspicious. I doubted anyone would spot me on security footage, but I wanted to avoid awkward questions from people eyeballing me.

  The exception was the top floor. The floor above the top guest floor, I should say. To go higher required a key for the elevator or a chainsaw. I reached upward to feel around the place via the psychic braille method and detected a spell.

  Well, crap. At least it wasn’t religious.

  A quick examination of the spell showed me it was one of the low-magic, region-specific things. A charm, rather than a spell.

  How to explain those?

  Most of what I do is like having wire and a power socket. I can make transformers, condensers, magnets, you name it. With work, I can produce motors, high-voltage arcs, and so on. Think of it as vacuum-tube technology in a magical environment. If Tesla or Edison could build it, I could build it.

  (As an aside, I suspect the magicians of Arondael have things bordering on the magical equivalent of integrated-circuit chip technology, but they don’t understand it, they just use it. This makes me wonder how they developed some of their spells. It appears to be a process involving mostly trial and error, with the occasional “Eureka! I have found it! Now, what have I found?” moment. They don’t know why it works, necessarily, but they know what works, which is good enough for them. Don’t take my word as gospel, though; I’m not a magician and don’t truly understand them.)

  Some practitioners of the arcane arts improve on the vacuum-tube level of magical theory by utilizing physical objects having some sort of magical significance. They can’t manufacture the equivalent of a tube (or chip) for what they want, but they can plug one in. So, when they burn an owl’s feather and look for omens of the future in the shape of the smoke, it’s because the owl’s feather is symbolic for wisdom and has magical significance. When they wrap the severed hand of a murderer around the neck of a doll—with the appropriate picture pasted on the face of the doll, of course—the victim chokes to death partly because of the mystical significance of the killer’s hand.

  I prefer to do things without all the messy bits, but they do make certain spells much easier. I even managed a flying spell, once, and went for a swoop around the sky. Not doing it again. If vampires were meant to fly, we’d transform into bats.

  What I felt on the upper floor was magic of the basic, primitive sort—a charm. Instead of drawing lines in a careful diagram and placing special components at each primary juncture—a spell—someone used what I call “messy bits” to create a field of interacting forces. There’s no wiring here, only a collection of magnets, if you follow the mixed-up metaphor.

  Every world has stuff like this, even the low-magic ones. Superstitions, charms, hexes, whatever you want to call them. When Granny gives you a little bag of knucklebones and tells you it’s good luck, half the time it is. The other half of the time she’s got it wrong, but only because her granny forgot to mention it has to be done under the full moon, or the new moon, or whatever. This is why some powders will keep a ghost at bay, or why cold iron hurts faerie folk, or even why stuffing salt in the mouth of a zombie keeps it from getting up.

  Holy water and vampires? I think that’s another story. I believe it’s someone’s religious faith invested into water. Ditto for the holy symbol. Whatever religion you are, present it strongly and your faith—faith, not just desperation!—focused through the symbol will drive back the bloodsucking monster. If you don’t have faith, you can’t channel divine power, so it doesn’t work. If it’s not divine power and it’s just a charm, you still need a certain level of internal focus to direct your own energies into it. I don’t have first-hand experience on the operational side, so I can’t say for sure. It may vary from person to person for all I know.

  I presume it also works on werewolves, demons, possessed people, and a variety of other “evil” monsters, but I haven’t had the wherewithal to test it.

  This can give vampire hunters ulcers. Imagine your priest is only going through the motions and doesn’t truly believe anymore. Now imagine you find out by throwing not-so-holy water on the vampire. That’s fine against a species of vampire with a sensitivity to water, but those are rare. The rest only get wet and possibly annoyed.

  Anyway, in the casino-hotel, up on the top floor, in the penthouse, someone went to the trouble to assemble a collection of stuff to keep supernatural entities out. It was particularly effective on vampires, but it lacked the specificity I would expect from a formal spell. It wouldn’t react to a human, but it ought to react to the part of anything that wasn’t human—the vampire part, certainly, but possibly also the werewolf, zombie, or other parts. Would it react to a ghost? Possibly, but a ghost might still qualify as human for the charm. Ghosts aren’t human plus something else, but a human minus some bits. Interesting.

  I was pretty sure I could break it, but only as a wizard, not as a vampire. Simply walking in was completely out of the question. I suspected I wouldn’t be able to get off the elevator. There was also a very real possibility I might be pinned to the floor of the elevator—or forced through it—as it rose to the penthouse level.

  While it was interesting, it was also slightly off-putting. I discussed it with Mary and we decided not to test it. Since she was done breaking into the building’s phone exchange to hide bugs and wiretaps, we called it a night.

  Dinner was surprisingly complicated. I never thought it would be difficult to get assaulted in a major city. It made me wonder if a high vampire population was a good thing. Were there so few violent crimes because there were so few violent criminals left? Maybe. Or maybe the tourist industry dumped enough money into the place to keep unemployment down, so relatively few people were desperate enough to take up a life of petty crime. Someone find me a social scientist.

  I drove the rental car to an all-night butcher shop, bought blood, drove around to lose any tails, and turned in the car at the Las Vegas office of the rental company. Mary picked me up in the Toronado and we drove around some more, still watching for watchers.

  Either they aren’t as alert as they could be, or they don’t like it when their quarry is suspicious. No doubt we’ll find out which later.

  I insisted Mary drink her dinner. I planned to eat at home. Which is to say, I opened a gate to Apocalyptica. Mary elected to remain. Investigating vampire-hunting crime bosses is more fun than I am.

  Apocalyptica, Friday, September 18th, Year 11

  I spent a good portion of the day nagged by Diogenes.

  “You did tell me to remind you about the magical conversion panels.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Remind me again after sunset. I’m not shoving that much magical current through my naked human form. And set up the conjuring room, please—I’ll need enormous power to reach up and grab them all.”

  “Consider it done, Professor. On another note, how much modular housing did you want sent to The Manor?”

  “Last I checked, we had about fifty workmen on-site, but I told Hammond to hire more.” I brooded on it for a moment. “All the modular housing units are wood and whatnot, yes? No anachronistic materials?”

  “That is correct. I believe the styling is also congruent with the period.”

  “How much do we have on hand?”

  “I do not have stores, Professor. I am manufacturing it as needed.”

  “Oh. Uh, then keep sending more until there’s housing for five hundred. It’ll be nice to get everyone out of tents and possibly even empty out the main house. We can strip them out and use them for storage once the main buildings are finished. Damn!”

  “Professor?”

  “I just realized how much water we’re going to need. I don’t know if the house well is going to handle it. We’ll have to run a pipe from a spring. I’ll have to ask Trixie and Hammond about it. We probably need another water pump, too, if we’re going to have pressure in a hundred bathroo
ms.”

  “A non-anachronistic pump is now being built. I will remind you about the water supply.”

  “Thanks. Anything else?”

  “No, Professor.”

  “Nothing from the Loonies?”

  “I have not detected unusual activity. However, my skywatch capabilities are still limited. Do you still wish to proceed with the space elevator?”

  “Yes, please. If nothing else, it’ll provide a good way to meet the neighbors without subjecting them to our gravity well. Assuming they want to meet us.”

  “Indeed, Professor. I also have a new design for a steed. Mark Six in the Black series.”

  “Always improving the genetics?”

  “And the cybernetics,” Diogenes added. “New worlds, new technologies, new techniques.”

  “Of course. Thank you.”

  “It is my pleasure, Professor. I am also reminding you we have a considerable backlog of magical worlds for your examination.”

  “Look, how about you send through a remote drone with stealth capabilities and a micro-gate communicator? Give it a self-destruct, just in case. You can do a preliminary survey and we can narrow down which ones I want to examine.”

  “As you wish, Professor. Do you wish to enchant a second variable-aperture gate for the Niagara site?”

  “Not right now.”

  It doesn’t matter where I am when I’m at home on Apocalyptica. The residential level starts forty feet below the surface and goes down from there. Transforming is still a messy process, though, so I try to be disgusting only in a bathroom. I don’t know if Diogenes appreciates it, but I know I do. I don’t care to smell it even when I’m going through it, much less find the smell clinging to a chair.

  “This is your sunset reminder, Professor, to relocate the solar conversion panels to polar positions.”