Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  At night, my weight doesn’t change, but my strength goes up drastically. Whatever it is that energizes my flesh—dark powers, chaos energy, primal soup from the void between worlds—it backs up the physical flesh with a terrible strength. I think it’s a variation on my psychic tendrils. Lines of power run through the fibers of my body, amplifying the already-disturbing undead muscles and nerves.

  I was well into my hyperdrive movement and still accelerating. I took a step back, hard, as I brute-forced my arms toward each other, dragging my captors along. My captors, intent on keeping me contained, had good, solid grips, so smacking them together worked surprisingly well. One took it better than the other; he held on. The other let go and staggered back from the impact. The one who still held my arm moved with faster-than-human speed. He shifted his grip, placing my wrist in his armpit, locking the arm in place with a forearm under my elbow, and punched me in the face.

  It was a good hit. It snapped my head to the side. It might have broken a mortal neck. I dismissed my standard human disguise illusions and snarled at him. He wasn’t prepared for the feral expression. His eyes widened and he hesitated.

  Since I had a hand trapped under his arm, I grabbed him with it—and with my talons. I grabbed a handful of flesh and bone, lifted him, and hurled him halfway across the room. He smacked into a concrete wall with a cracking noise, slid down it, and crunched into a table full of hopefully-irreplaceable spell components.

  My other vampire was already rising, his own hands open, fingernails lengthened into weapons, ready to slash. On his way up, I grabbed him, swinging taloned fingers underhand. Two fingers went in each eye, palm up, and I curled them to scrape talons on the inside of his skull. He gave one massive convulsion and quit moving. Doubtless, his regeneration would fix him eventually—I didn’t have a good gauge on how fast this species of undead regenerated. It wouldn’t be quick enough to be useful. I turned, still holding him, and sent him skidding down the hall and out of my way like tossing a bowling ball.

  The one I threw across the room was slightly hindered by the table and the paraphernalia tangling him up. I glanced aside in time to see Mary jam a decorative hair-thing—it’s a piece of jewelry women sometimes wear in their hair; I have no idea what they’re called—in the side of one guy’s neck as her other hand drew a knife.

  I saw her draw the thing. I’m still not sure where from. Somewhere near her hip or thigh, I’m sure, but where did she keep it? A sheath, yes, hidden somewhere, but where? How does she do that? There are times I wonder if she’s got some sort of special power. I would spot a spell.

  The one with the stabbed neck touched the thing and winced, then gripped it, preparatory to pulling it out, which set it off. The jewelry was mostly plastic, but the plastic was an advanced explosive and the jewels, once activated, were pressure-triggers. The blast destroyed his hand, his neck, and most of his head and shoulder, as well as temporarily deafening everyone in the room. It also put him down, maybe for a while, maybe forever. This left Mary with one vampire—the one she kicked in the knee and apparently punched in the face while I wasn’t watching—and she drew a second knife.

  The woman is a combination of sexy cat-burglar, stage magician, and cutlery shop. She obviously didn’t need my help. I wasn’t sure what I could do that would be more dangerous than what she was already doing.

  About this point, Degas, recognizing his peril, snatched up his bronze knife again and kept his eyes on me. He seemed more defensive than aggressive, so I ignored him in favor of the vampire flunky. The cloud, seething with impotent rage, also kept its eyes on me.

  I charged the guy regaining his feet, careful not to cross the containment lines. Every footstep in slow motion, tendrils flashing out through my feet, seizing concrete, making every step planted, solid, and immovable as I accelerated. I played pinball, passing by him at high speed, ramming my fist into his head and continuing so his head hit the wall shortly before my fist did. Pinned between the two, his head reacted like a watermelon to a Sledge-O-Matic. The wall was not pleased, but my target didn’t have enough of an expression left for me to gauge how he felt about it. Bits of table, string, bone, glass, and other miscellany scattered wildly as I charged through it.

  Important note for mob bosses, vampire overlords, and any other ruler who might want to do nasty things to prisoners. Spend the money to train your goons. Thugs are fine for intimidating people, cracking some kneecaps, and general tough-guy crap. When you have a dangerous prisoner, though, you want people with skills. I don’t care how much of a tough guy your favorite thug is, send him to school. Judo. Aikido. Ju-Jitsu. Something. Make them go three times a week, every week, forever. Don’t skimp by making them take a semester of self-defense classes. Think of it as an investment in saving their lives and, indirectly, saving yours.

  I rebounded from the wall, spraying bits of table and vampire, and headed straight for Degas. Degas was already in motion. He saw what happened to his thug and wanted nothing to do with a physical confrontation. He ran around the diagram and sprinted for the hallway out. I rebounded from a wall again to hasten my circuit around the diagram as I ran after him. I caught up quickly and tackled him from behind. We both went down, skidding along the concrete floor like skateboarders after a collision.

  Degas, regardless of his other powers or abilities, was damn fast with his bronze knife. Before we could even skid into the far wall, he stabbed me squarely in the head. It shut me down like throwing a switch.

  I opened my eyes. The floor was flat and solid and everything seemed quiet. No dark cloud with fiery eyes. No screaming, either. I wasn’t tied, up or down. All things considered, a fading headache was acceptable.

  Mary sat next to me, idly flipping one of her slightly-curved ceramic knives. She smiled as I sat up.

  “Feeling better?”

  “I had a stabbing headache, but it’s gone.”

  “No doubt.” She handed me a stuffed doll with surprisingly lifelike hair. “This is yours, I think.”

  “I’m not sure what to do with it,” I admitted, turning it over in my hands. “I never studied poppets and voodoo dolls and whatnot. The basics of sympathetic magic, sure, but I have only vague ideas how this thing works.”

  “Well, figure it out.”

  “Where’s Degas?” I asked, looking around. I needn’t have asked. He wore an agonized expression on his face and a wooden table leg through his chest. “Oh,” I noted.

  “Yeah, he didn’t want to shut up and sit quietly. He was all for cutting your head off, I think. I’m conversational in French, but his native dialect is hard to follow.”

  “I saw your hairpiece go off, earlier. Did the other thug give you any trouble?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “He tried to reach for a gun—a headshot seems to put the local vampires down for a while—and I taught him not to reach for a gun during a knife-fight.”

  “If the lesson ends in death, he doesn’t learn anything.”

  “Maybe in his next life.”

  “I’ll concede the possibility. I don’t see much in the way of corpses.”

  “Degas is the only survivor, if that’s the word. The others crumbled to dust after decapitation. It’s not instantaneous, by the way. They lose cohesion over the course of a minute or so. You can see it for yourself with Degas.”

  “Mmm. I guess passing a fist through a head counts as decapitation. Bullets might not do enough structural damage. If they’re animated by some sort of connection to an energy-state being, they might be similar to occupied human suits, like the guy in the junkyard.”

  “Could be,” she allowed. “Maybe finger puppets instead of a meat suit?”

  “Also possible. Want to tell me how things went down after I did?”

  “I broke the neck of my remaining boneheaded thug and dropped him. Degas wanted to get past me to the elevator. I didn’t let him. Unlike Bonehead, Degas wasn’t concerned about getting cut—I think Bonehead had some morta
l reflexes he hadn’t overcome.”

  “Pesky things,” I agreed.

  “Degas also did not anticipate needing things like tendons or a brain. Once he was lying down and screaming epithets in French, I cut his throat to shut him up, took his knife out of you—he left it there, presumably to keep you from killing him—and planted it in his head. Seemed fair. Then I took a quick look at the others to make sure they were down and staying that way.

  “At that point,” she went on, “your spiritual cloud of unhappy eyeballs started raising Cain. He’s not a nice person, but he was also manifesting through a piddly-poor conjuring spell. I didn’t want to find out what happens when a vampire voodoo priest gets possessed by the evil spirit of a multidimensional deity.”

  “Me, either. Good call. So what did you do to prevent it?”

  “Well, I kept Degas out of the circle, for one thing, as well as unconscious. I also paid attention when Degas did his ritual. Un-casting it, reversing it, and shutting the door on the fiery eyes wasn’t too hard—just nerve-wracking.” She shivered. “It doesn’t like me either, just so you know.”

  “I suspect we’re going to be thorns in its metaphorical paw, side, and anything else sensitive for as long as we live.”

  “No doubt,” she agreed.

  “You know what gripes me?”

  “Being taken advantage of?”

  “Yes, but what else?”

  “Abused children.”

  “True. What I had in mind was the whole presence of the Lord of Light.”

  “I’m not fond of him either.”

  “It’s not just his presence. It’s the fact Sparky warned me he had influence outside of Rethven. She went to some lengths to make sure I knew. I’m terribly annoyed she gave me a heads-up and I ignored it.”

  “You don’t like her much, either.”

  “Yeah, but we have mutual family. I’m starting to think I should pay more attention to her.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “How the hell should I know?” I asked. “I’m not wise.”

  “Fair point.”

  “Back to the banishment, please.”

  “Sure. Once the big guy was gone, I did a better job on the zombies—they were still inchworming around, trying to bite. A little stomping took care of them. These heels aren’t just for show. Then I took the knife out of Degas and broke off a table leg.”

  “Don’t you have that in reverse order?”

  “No, I wanted to give him a chance to recover brain function. I wanted him to see it coming.”

  “Fair enough. How long was I out?”

  “Twenty minutes? Something like that. Your wound from the knife took a while to regenerate, too.”

  “Probably something about the knife’s enchantment. I’ll look at it later,” I decided. “What do you want to do with Degas?”

  “I thought I’d leave it up to you.”

  I stood up carefully. No dizziness, no balance issues. Good. I hate brain damage like I hate electric shock weapons.

  Degas was utterly frozen, immobile as a wood carving. His eyes didn’t track, he didn’t blink, nothing.

  “I wonder if you can see or hear me,” I told him, crouching to put my face in his line of vision. “I hope so. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to take out the stake. Mary is going to be somewhere behind you. Give me any trouble and she’ll take you down so fast you’ll think the bottom dropped out of your elevator. I’d say to blink if you understand, but I suspect you can’t.”

  I broke off another leg of the table Mary used, sharpened it, and handed it to her. With that done, I set what was left of the table up so it leaned at a steep angle and propped Degas against it. One foot on his chest, one hand on the stake, a sharp jerk…

  Degas arched backward for a moment, hands flailing to either side, legs kicking like a seizure victim, and suddenly relaxed. He blinked furiously and cast his gaze about wildly.

  “So, can you see and hear while you’re staked?” I asked. His response was to try to trip me, one foot behind my ankle, the other against my knee. It would have worked, too, except I hit him in the head with the table leg I was holding. I staggered a bit, recovered, and found May also hit him in the head from behind, somewhat harder.

  “I’ll take that as a negative,” I decided.

  Several minutes later, we were pulling a wooden stake out of Degas’ heart again. This time, however, we removed both arms and legs as a precaution. The magic in his knife didn’t help cut, but I suspect it was a sacrificial tool and not meant to be a weapon. A basic evaluation of the magic in the blade told me it was designed to prevent clotting, regeneration, all that stuff. Nick your victim in one finger and watch him bleed to death over the course of several hours. Things like that.

  Anyway, Degas McStumpy and his amputations. Separated from him, his body parts slowly crumbled to dust. It was interesting to watch, kind of like a sand sculpture drying out and crumbling in time-lapse. I propped what was left of Degas against the tilted table and pulled the stake again. His expression of horror and fear was worth it.

  “I’ve taken a dislike to you,” I observed. “I’m already unhappy about a number of things and you are not making me a more pleasant person.” I pointed a talon at his left eyeball and almost touched it. “I’ve killed two of your minions with this hand, and destroyed your zombies by an act of will. Your conjuring room is in a shambles, your spirit is dismissed, and I’m still here. Let that sink in for a moment, because I’m about to ask you to explain a few things.”

  “My lord,” Mary said, coming into Degas’ view and going to one knee. “Can we not take him back to our fortress and keep him there? I could have endless fun honing my skills as your inquisitor. He can have his flesh removed over and over again, with no fear of killing him until you command it.”

  I played along.

  “No. I want answers from him now. If he fails to answer, I shall bind his spirit into a doll of his own making and destroy his flesh. Now be silent.”

  Mary bowed her head as she rose and backed out of Degas line of sight. Behind him, she hefted her table leg and stood ready to club him with it again.

  I leaned close to Degas and bared my teeth, which is very different from smiling.

  “Who are you, Degas, and how did you come to power in this place?”

  Degas wasn’t a coward in any sense. On the other hand, he also wasn’t one of those stupidly brave people who seem to have spines made of steel and skulls of solid bone. He was a pragmatist. His only faint hope of a continued existence was to give me what I wanted and he was smart enough to see it. He didn’t give me any excuse to do more violence to his person. I suspect having his limbs removed was adequate warning of my ability and willingness, so further demonstration was not required.

  Degas struck me as a dangerously smart man. Not surprising, perhaps, of the true Black King of Las Vegas—or the power behind the throne.

  The short version of his story: A little before 1800, Degas and his mother—hereditary tribal shamans—were shipped from Africa to Louisiana and sold as agricultural equipment. Several years later, as a teen, Degas was re-sold. His new owner, being less kind than one might hope for, beat Degas regularly for being slow, for being stupid, for being lazy, or for no reason at all.

  This went on for years—thirty-nine of them—and, somewhere in the late 1830’s, Degas cut the man’s throat shortly after bringing him breakfast. This started a run for his life and culminated in collapsing on a small hillock in the middle of a swamp, dogs barking in the distance, the sun going down, and the alligators coming to investigate.

  At the end of his strength, about to be either eaten or captured—dead, either way—Degas used the blood from his scratched-up arms and legs to paint ritual symbols on his own chest, calling for a spirit of power to come into him.

  And one did.

  This particular species of vampire is comprised of soulless minions of evil. The person undergoing the transformation dies, the soul
being lost or eaten or whatever. What’s left is an infection of spiritual power. This animates the corpse, regenerates it, and runs the thinking programs left in the dead brain. It’s a hungry spirit, feeding on the blood of the living, of course, and incidentally draining the vitality from the victims.

  I suspect some of this feeds the vampire and some of it feeds the spirit—the main spirit, through the manifested connection. Vampires are, in some respects, extensions of the spirit, like a multitude of hungry mouths. It’s possible all of it goes through the channel of the feeding vampire and into the spirit, and the spirit constantly maintains the animated corpse. I haven’t seen a wiring diagram for this model.

  The spirit, of course, is what I think of as the Lord of Light. It certainly explains how he has power in other planes of existence. It’s not worship and belief in the traditional sense—he’s not drinking the milk from the cow. He’s slaughtering some of the herd for the meat. Of course, when you’re talking about a herd of billions, that’s not unreasonable, I suppose.

  In Karvalen, he manifests as a glowing man with a mace. He kind of has to, based on the role he’s adopted. Since he’s filling the shoes of the old Lord of Light, he has to maintain the fiction and follow the local rules to keep his followers and avoid the wrath of the gods. Here, in one of the Earth-analogues, he has to avoid the wrath of angels, so he can’t simply gather a hundred vampire acolytes and build an undead avatar. Well, I suppose he could, but it would be asking for direct and immediate intervention from lots of the local angel-like energy-state beings.

  Judging from his activities with Degas, he’s hard-pressed to simply speak to a summoner, possibly because the spells are so weak, but it may also be a safety thing, keeping the power dialed down to avoid notice from On High. But I digress from Degas’ story.