Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  I repeated my suggestion to his wide-eyed face and added, “I will not play your sick little game where you intervene in the lives of children for the purposes of ‘testing’ my worthiness for a minimal amount of aid. If you know the road to Hell, go visit. If not, stay the hell out of my path.”

  Valan rose to his feet. A shining radiance spread behind him. For some reason, it reminded me of unfolding wings. I could see why people might refer to his kind as ‘angels.’ Come to that, they might be angels. Or the things people saw and then decided to call ‘angels.’ Chicken or egg, again.

  “I will not endure your insults,” he stated.

  I spoke three words, setting off the summoning and binding spell I worked so hard on. Valan exclaimed in surprise, then groaned as his otherworldly shape distorted. I don’t think he was expecting me to activate the spells while he was standing in front of me. The glowing aura behind him rippled toward the warehouse area and he leaned the other way, as though struggling against a hurricane. It lasted for only a moment before he was swept aside, crashing bodily through the wall, tumbling into and through the intake region of the colossal spell laid out on the floor beyond. The lines and sigils on the floor were alive with light, like burning paint, and a sound like cracking crystal filled the air.

  Everything took a moment to fade, to settle.

  I waved a hand to clear some dust and smoke from the air before stepping through the hole in the wall. He was lying on the floor at the far end of the room, inside the binding circle, arms and legs stretched out like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. The binding circle glowed with a blue-white radiance. The rest of the diagrams were ashes and smoke.

  Was it wrong of me to think, “Thank God that worked”?

  Crouching next to the circle, and with some concern, I discovered the binding circle giving off a faint burning odor. The inner edge of the ring was slowly eroding away, gradually thinning the containment line.

  This is not supposed to happen. Whatever was in the circle should be stuck inside the circle, not slowly eating through it. Gauging the rate of decay, it wouldn’t hold him for more than an hour, two at the outside, if I didn’t reinforce it.

  Important safety tip: carve these diagrams, don’t paint them.

  I regarded the captive entity. He glared at me, side-eye. He couldn’t even move his head. At least it worked thoroughly, if not permanently. I tried to act nonchalant.

  “Now, which would you prefer?” I asked. “I can either ask you questions and you answer them, or I can start experimenting on how angels are put together by taking one apart. If you prefer the first one, close your eyes. If you prefer the second, stare at me in a childish, angry manner. Oh, and far be it from me to lecture you on the seven deadly sins, but pride and wrath are two of them. What’ll it be, glitterboy?”

  He continued to glare at me in a childish, angry manner. I shrugged and fetched my magical toolkit. While most of the wands in the toolkit are specialty tools for my magical work, a hammer is a hammer no matter what it hits.

  Flintridge, Saturday, September 27th, 1969

  I considered the corpse on the floor and wondered what to do with it. It was in surprisingly good shape. I couldn’t even determine a cause of death. Of course, it’s a lot easier to tell when you watch it stop functioning, but, technically, it already did its dying before I got hold of it. Valan simply wasn’t inside to keep it animated. I left it alone for the moment. He might want it again, assuming.

  Valan was much more interesting. Analyzing the structure of an energy-state being is no easy thing. They’re complicated, as I ought to know, having been one. Valan’s sort, however, was much more mechanistic. Powerful, yes, but limited in many ways. They don’t adapt well to changing circumstances, unlike the gods of Karvalen. Their structure has a sort of symmetry, a pattern to their being. I may be seeing a higher-order intent where there isn’t one, but they strike me as something built, or at least assembled. There’s a certain logical order to them, a structured connectivity to how they exist. I’m not qualified to analyze their functions in detail, but I can get the general idea.

  Moving him was tricky, to say the least. I did all the heavy lifting at night, casting the major spells, but it still took a big chunk of daylight—and a wide paintbrush—once I started. The way I figure it, dragging an outraged angelic entity, no matter how minor, out of his human suit and stuffing him into a bottle is not something I need to do while undead. I still haven’t tested whether a celestial being outside its meat suit counts as sunlight. I don’t plan to, either—not by choice, anyway. I’m just going to assume it’s bad for me and avoid it on principle.

  The bottle I selected was one of the larger examples of Erlenmeyer flask. When I prepared it, I scratched spell work all over the thing, then sprayed a rubberized coating over it for non-slip properties—I left a small window in the rubber so we could see each other and converse. The stopper was orichalcum, machined to fit precisely, with the Seal of Solomon carved into it and fixed in place with both a containment spell and a more mundane epoxy. I could drop an anvil on the whole arrangement and the anvil would bounce.

  Genie bottles got nothing on me.

  I spent a while in my headspace, thinking of ways this could go wrong. I think I got all the obvious ones. I must have, since I’m still doing a diary.

  A little after noon, with everything recast, reinforced, and recharged, I set off the spells. Valan resisted for only a moment. He was forcibly sucked into the bottle. I put the stopper in place and waited. Nothing exploded. A white light shone through the little window. I took off my goggles, peeled off my gauntlets, and put the bottle inside the containment diagram freshly carved into the kitchen table.

  “Now,” I went on, settling into a chair, “let’s try this again. Are we going to talk like rational beings, or am I going to take you apart like the Peking Duck as the local Chinese place? I can always summon another one and repeat the process. I’ll either find someone who will be civil or I’ll run out of you guys. Which do you think is more likely?”

  “You have earned our wrath,” he stated. It was hard to tell whether the bottle vibrated to produce his voice or if it simply trembled at his psychic projection. Regardless, it held. I was pleased.

  “Wrath of all your kind? Or the royal ‘we’ wrath of Valan, the humiliated captive?”

  “Very well,” he spat, “you have my enmity, wizard.”

  “Yeah. Vampire. Kind of in the boat already, so why not sail in it? Now, which will serve your ends better? Being informative and helpful, or expiring out of stubborn idiocy?”

  The bottle was silent, but the light seemed hostile.

  “Okay, look. We have not gotten off on a good foot. I admit it. Maybe we can come to an accord.”

  “I will not.”

  “Why not?”

  “You dare to hold an angel prisoner for your fiendish ends!”

  “Oh, so now you’re an angel? Interesting. Before, you were all about how that’s what ‘my kind’ would call you, implying a mere human wouldn’t understand. Now you’re claiming angelic rights and privileges. Very interesting, indeed.

  “And I dare to hold an energy-state being prisoner—and, at the moment, unharmed—because you encouraged humans to kill me. You saw me being crucified and you gloated over me. You ran me through your little tests. You condescended to answer three questions, grudgingly and with terrible manners. You have been hostile, overbearing, and rude—not exactly the picture of perfection I was led to expect from a real angel. Care to explain why?”

  “You are a vampire,” he stated.

  “So what? Why is this a problem? Is it my kind of vampire, or just blood-sucking in general that earns your ire?”

  “Your type of vampire is an infection from the chaos outside the realms of order. Our mandate is to keep chaos from entering, to defend the realms of order from all that would corrupt it. The fact you exist at all is a testament to our failure in our duty.”

  “So, why not just smite
me out of hand?” I asked. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to know, but he was talking. As long as I could keep him talking, I might steer him to something useful, or at least interesting. During our previous encounter, he did tend to chatter on. He just needed a little encouragement.

  “Because you are human! You carry chaos in your blood, but your soul lives!”

  “Why should it matter? Don’t you guys kill people?”

  “It is not part of our mandate,” he stated, flatly.

  “Which is why you whisper to other humans to do it for you. Right, I remember, now. But I’ve seen the local vampires. They’re not like me.”

  “They belong here, as part of the scheme of things.”

  “Are you kidding me? Those things are soulless evil! I’ve seen them!”

  “Some of them are, yes,” he replied. I could hear the condescending sneer in his voice. “The ones to which you refer are conduits, hungry pathways into darkness, not agents of the outer void!”

  “Oh, I get it. They’re part of the realm of order—they belong. Got it. I’m infected with a dose of chaos from outside. It’s not your job to deal with the hungry darkness, because it’s part of the blueprint. Your job is to keep back the chaos, not the dark.”

  “It can be taught,” Valan sneered.

  “The thing I don’t get,” I went on, “is the way these planned vampires work. They suck up blood and souls for Arioch, but who is he?”

  “King Arioch is long-dead and has nothing to do with this.”

  I kept my mouth shut. That wasn’t the Arioch I meant.

  “The vampires of which you speak are the dark reflections of the mortal form, corruptions of the flesh brought into being. They create nothing, but consume the essence of creation to feed the one who made them.”

  “They’re his hungry mouths, feeding on everything?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And who are they feeding?”

  Valan was silent.

  “Hello?”

  “I will speak no more.”

  Crap. Either it was a sensitive topic or he caught on.

  “Okay. One last question. What should I do with you?”

  The bottle did not answer.

  “I’m asking your opinion. If you were in my place, what would be the wisest course? Toss you into the void beyond the world? Drop you to the bottom of the sea? Launch you into intergalactic space? Dump you into a black hole? Hide you under some church’s altar stone? Or just stick you on a shelf between the sex toys and the porn?”

  I had the distinct feeling Valan grew even more upset with me, but he didn’t reply. Is it appropriate to say a small window of light glared at me?

  “I think…” I began, pausing for effect. “I think you realize the wisest course of action would be to put you somewhere safe and as permanent as possible,” I mused. “You could be trapped in that bottle for ten thousand years. An eyeblink, as far as eternity goes, but damned annoying on a day-by-day basis. I haven’t hit my first ten thousand years and I have enough trouble keeping occupied outside a bottle.”

  The hostile feeling intensified, but I still didn’t get a reply. I pretended to sit back and ponder, but I focused on analyzing the emanations from the bottle. I don’t know how useful it will be to have an idea what a grumpy aura on an energy-being looks like, but at least I do know. If I see such a thing outside a genie bottle, I plan to run.

  “So, I’ve decided. I know exactly what to do with you.”

  I picked up the bottle and walked out into the warehouse area. I put my goggles back on before I applied solvent to the epoxy, pulled the stopper, and dumped a river of white light onto an empty body. This flood of radiance bathed the flesh in luminescence, sank into it, soaked it, permeated it, vanished into it.

  I put the stopper back and set the bottle on the floor. Valan, once more in his human suit, sat up as I lowered my goggles again. He regarded me with an expression of anger and puzzlement. His hands clenched and unclenched as he continued to stare at me. Slowly, he climbed to his feet and faced me. I stood there and waited for him to say something.

  “I should smite you into ash,” he said, softly.

  “Is that kosher?” I asked. “I mean, leaving aside the whole question of your mandate not to harm humans, is it the proper response to an act of mercy? You pissed me off. I could have dissected you like a frog in a biology classroom. I could have left you imprisoned. I’m clever. There are comets that won’t finish melting for billions of years. It would take work, but I could have buried you on one of them. Instead, I chose—free will, remember?—to let you go.”

  “You locked me in a cage!”

  “Yes, and you used me!” I shouted, stepping forward and shoving a finger in his face. He took a step back in surprise. “You manipulated me with your little tests. You scrooged out with your I’ll-only-answer-three-questions bullshit. You brought harm, misery, and fear to innocent people for no better reason than to test me!”

  He backhanded me. It lifted me off the floor, sailed me several feet through the air, and sent me skidding through dust and ashes to fetch up against one of the nearer walls.

  Note to self: These guys are stronger than they look.

  I coughed, spat dust, and climbed to my feet. He didn’t break anything, but I wasn’t sure at the time. It felt like my jaw was going to come off and my head with it. My neck wasn’t feeling to wonderful, either. I glared at him while he stared at me in horror.

  “Broke a rule?” I asked. He didn’t reply, only stared at me and at his hand.

  “All right,” I said, more calmly. “You tried to have me killed. You gloated as I was crucified and waited for me to die. In return, I imprisoned you. I made my point and let you go without risking your existence. I don’t intend to be your enemy as long as you manage to avoid being mine. So, we can keep going round and round on this—you get even with me, I get even with you, so you get even with me, and on and on—or we can call it quits, turn the other cheek, and be done. What do you think? Are we done?”

  Valan thought about it. I hadn’t expected him to. I expected him to either hit me again or flap off in a huff. Maybe he’s more rational than I give him credit for. Maybe the turn-the-other-cheek reference struck a chord.

  “No,” he said, finally, thoughtfully. “No, I do not think we are.”

  I sighed and took another step back, raising my hands and centering myself, preparing for a fight. There are good points and bad points to fighting beings of light during the day. I’m drastically weaker and slower than at night, but I also don’t crisp as easily.

  “All right. Let’s do this.”

  “No. You let me go. I…” he trailed off, perplexed. “You are blood of chaos, not of evil. Yet, all there is was formed out of chaos.” He continued to muse aloud. “You spoke of free will. You would not be here if there was no part for you to play.”

  “Okay. So, go ask the Almighty and see.”

  “That is beyond my power, but I will… consult with those of greater wisdom.”

  “How can you not be able to—” I began, but there was a wing-like whoosh noise and Valan was gone.

  I’m starting to think I don’t like these guys. I shouldn’t judge them all on the basis of one, but I don’t see a host of others rushing to my defense, either. They remind me strongly of the gods of Karvalen by being troublesome, nosy, and meddlesome. Maybe the rest of them are decent sorts, busily guarding and guiding people who need their help. Somehow, I doubt it. I get the impression the ones like Valan are more like roving handymen, always looking for cracks in the dam holding back the chaos. Firmament repairmen, maybe. I wonder if I should have asked about the Firmament. He might have had some insights.

  Despite my questions, my first order of business was a healing spell. Some of my molars felt loose and my neck still hurt. Once it took effect, I slowly cleaned up the remains of the diagrams in the warehouse area, scraped together some power for a repair spell, and played jigsaw-puzzle with the broken wall. If I ma
naged to put enough power into the spell, in a day or so, you’d never know anything untoward happened. I might have to cast it a couple more times to finish the repairs, but at least it was holding together.

  With that in progress, I sat down heavily in a reinforced chair, took some aspirin, drank some ice water, and applied an ice pack to the side of my face. It was a busy damned day and I was tired. Somebody in the Bible wrestled with an angel for a day or three or some such. I just barely build spells to contain them. It’s exhausting even if I don’t break a sweat. Frankly, I don’t see how any mortal gets into a wrestling match with these jokers without getting limbs torn off.

  After some water and a lengthy rest, I considered what to do next.

  Let’s see. Angelic interview? Check. Moon-people? Avoiding them. Vampire hunters? Ditto. Mary? Investigating stuff. Bob? I could go visit Bob. He’s waiting. I think I’ll wait until my otherself has something to say about the Dragonspine Range—the Mountains of the Sun—and the Sunspire of Rendu, or whatever it is. I’m in no hurry to talk to Bob. Maybe some more research on the Firmament around the world of Karvalen? Or exploration of some of the new, magical worlds Diogenes has found? I could do any number of things… but I’m still mystically pooped and a little sore. Tonight, I’ll also be even hungrier than I am now.

  Day off?

  Day off. I’m going back to Apocalyptica for about three octagonal meals, then to the Manor and pretend I have a quiet, uneventful life.

  The Manor, Thursday, October 26th, 1939

  It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve been here, but time is something of a variable between universes. They’ve made decent progress, I must admit. Hammond hired replacements for his usual workforce, all of whom are either too young for the army or too old, but it’s working out. I’m surprised at how well they’re doing. The old men are all skilled, while the youngsters are energetic. It seems to be some sort of apprenticeship arrangement, but I haven’t asked.