Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  “Answer me a complex question in a simple way, would you?”

  “If possible.”

  “Do you think of yourself as a person?”

  “No.”

  “Diogenes?”

  “Yes, Professor?”

  “New order.”

  “Waiting.”

  “Think of yourself as a person.”

  “I do not know how to do that.”

  “Work on it! That is an order.”

  “Yes, Professor. In the meantime, may I ask again why you have a sudden interest in the Boojum’s presence in our world catalog?”

  “Karvalen may be going to war with the Church of Light. The Boojum is, I believe, drawing power to itself from multiple worlds through the agency of a specific species of vampire. Some portion of what they consume may power them directly, but they must transfer some of it to their patron. If the worlds wherein these things exist are few and far between, it may be practical to weaken the Boojum by choking it. First, though, we need to find out how many worlds we’re talking about and how many vampires. It may be impractical, but we won’t know until we check.”

  “Duly noted. Thank you, Professor.”

  “You’re quite welcome, Diogenes. And, since I haven’t said it in a while, thank you for everything you do.”

  “It is my pleasure to be useful, Professor.”

  I knuckled down and got busy with a high-power magic generator and several wands.

  Maybe I should get an apprentice. Where would I find the time, though?

  So, my projects came in two types. The type that needed some R&D, and the type that was just shutting up and doing the damn work. Since there was no way to tell how much R&D those projects would take, I shut up and did the work first.

  Trixie’s tiny things were first on my list. The enchantments were no less complicated, but they required much less power. The sword was easy—Diogenes found a lovely silver alloy, hard and tough, suitable for a toothpick-sized weapon. Making it more durable and giving it a nerve-firing spell merely to enhance the pain of the pinprick was no trouble at all. I know pain. The monocrystalline diamond knife was equally simple. All it needed was a toughening enchantment to avoid unexpected fractures. A little sharpness enchantment and it could shave the fuzz off a pixie’s cheeks, if pixies had fuzz on their cheeks.

  The complicated part was the necklace. I wanted to let her scream her way out of glass jars. This involved surrounding her head in two layers of spell. The first projected up in front of her. She could scream into it and it would absorb the shriek. The sound energy would be absorbed over the course of a scream, amplified—by how much depended on the magical environment—and released in a directed, coherent micropulse, like an explosive shockwave.

  The second spell on the necklace was a bubble around her head to protect her from any side-effects.

  I don’t know what effect it will have, but I’m hoping it will be ear-shattering to the target, at the very least. Even if it doesn’t get her out of a glass jar, it may keep her from being stuffed into one.

  With presents for Trixie prepared, I moved on to analyzing a bronze knife and a voodoo doll.

  The knife was the easy one. I was right about it encouraging wounds to open and stay open. If you cut something on a sacrificial altar, you want it to bleed, and with this knife, bleed it most certainly does. However, the knife was multi-functional. It had a second effect I missed the first time around.

  The second function was, in many respects, similar to some of the energy-transformation spells I use. When it killed something, it absorbed and transformed some of the released energies, turning the spiritual forces into magical force. It didn’t do any focusing or channeling. It didn’t surround the area with a containment field. It didn’t suck the life force from a living creature. It simply turned living, vital energies into magical power. Presumably, someone should be casting a spell while it did so, which would benefit the spell enormously in any low-magic environment. As a tool for a spellcaster, it was quite valuable.

  The doll was more complicated. Everything I did to examine it came back with results identical to my own. According to all my spells, the doll was me.

  I poked a pin into one of its hands and regretted it immediately. Fortunately, I don’t bleed at night. The pin test threw out any ideas I had for incinerating the doll, though. I considered removing the hair from it, since that was obviously the key sympathetic link, but I worried it would either make me bald or rip my scalp off. Neither seemed like a good idea.

  All right, I have a doll with a highly-focused, precisely-attuned pattern on me. Anything that happens to the doll happens to me. Got it. So, how do I break the spell?

  I examined the connection between us. It seemed less of a connection than a resonance. Instead of a wire running between us, it was more like two tuning forks of the same frequency. Thump one of them and the other vibrates in sympathy. There wasn’t a connection to sever.

  Well, fine. Tuning forks make vibrations in the air. Magical dolls presumably communicate their curses through magical transmission. How do you block a transmission? Not jam it; jamming requires the generation of a signal to interact with the one you want to jam. I don’t like the idea of a more-powerful signal interacting with one designed to resonate with me.

  So, blocking a signal. My first thought was a Faraday cage, so we built one. Diogenes and I set things up in Denver, away from the magic-enhanced areas. We coated a large box in orichalcum foil and ran a length of wire into the ground. The theory was any magical emanations should be intercepted by the foil and grounded out.

  Diogenes stuck a pin in the doll. The Faraday cage worked, to some extent. The things are never a hundred percent, but it markedly reduced the effect of the doll. At close range, I could feel the damage to the doll, but the effectiveness dropped off gradually with distance. Further testing revealed a correlation between magical flux and range. The more magical the area—around the doll or around me—the longer the range of the effect. In Karvalen, it would probably affect me anywhere in the world. In Apocalyptica, outside the few areas of intensified magic, the range was much more sharply limited. At a thousand meters—with the doll in the foil box—I could barely tell if Diogenes poked it.

  I still didn’t like the idea of setting it on fire. At least, not while I was on the same planet. Next time I’m offworld, maybe. While it’s night. With both of us in low-magic zones. And with me underwater.

  Come to think of it, can I reduce the power level inside an area? I think so. If I take an Ascension Sphere and alter the flow, maybe. If it absorbed power from inside and outside, the external power input would keep it active even when the interior was totally drained. If I put the doll inside the magical version of a bell jar, would it still operate?

  Moving on to the R&D portion of my projects…

  It took a little experimentation, but it was a simple alteration. With the doll inside a modified Ascension Sphere—a Descension Sphere? Descent Sphere? Maybe Declension Sphere?—Diogenes had a robot poke it.

  I didn’t feel a thing. Success!

  Since energy already tied up in a magical object or spell wasn’t sucked out by the Sphere, I didn’t know how long the doll would continue to function. No matter. Diogenes handled the incineration while I stood in the orichalcum Faraday cage with a fire extinguisher. No, I’m not paranoid. I’m rationally cautious. Possibly overcautious. Okay, I’m paranoid; sue me. I didn’t have time to be semi-incinerated and regenerate from it.

  Speaking of time, the time-zone booths.

  Diogenes and I eventually settled on Bronze’s Dial-A-Stall. I can’t choose a landing point when using the magic closets. They go to their linked closet. It’s necessary to have a direct, one-to-one connection to get the power requirements down to something manageable. With the ever-so-much-cheaper space-traversing, single-universe closets—well, stalls—I can pop into the residence and suddenly spring to life, then get back into a nighttime region and recover quickly. If I
can stagger, crawl, or simply be dragged into Bronze’s stall, then she, I, or Diogenes can dial the destination and send me off to die without leaving the world. It’s a simple little device, too. Rather than a dial, it’s just a pair of arrows on the floor. Stomp—or press—left or right to move your target destination a few hours earlier or later. We don’t have one in every time zone, of course, but six of them, spaced about four hours apart around the world, should handle most day-to-night incompatibilities.

  But wait, there’s more!

  My brainstorm on this was to place a linking spell in the enchantment. One of the destinations on the dial—the “same time zone” setting, since it wouldn’t go anywhere, anyway—causes the stall to target a Bronze figurine in a sort of call forwarding arrangement. Diogenes can place the figurine in any Denver cargo booth. When the cargo booth is triggered, it doesn’t shift anything from inside itself—not even the figurine. Instead, it shifts the space in the indicated stall to wherever that cargo booth goes to. Using this method, she can transfer from her stall to any world where we have a cargo point.

  The real trick was to make any cargo at the destination dump into the actual cargo shifter location, not the stall. It’s kind of a shell game with transfer spaces. It’s tricky and complicated and I’m damn proud of it. I don’t think there’s anyone, not even a magician of Arondael, who could figure out how it works, much less develop it.

  I am good.

  Then it was off to the room with all the prayer wheels. They didn’t need enchantments, only psychic tuning, but I spent some work and effort on one to see if I could improve on it. It would make a good test case. I didn’t want to enchant a hundred of the things, but if an enchanted version was materially better, doing another one every so often wasn’t out of the question.

  With that checked off the list, Diogenes handed me a couple hundred pounds of iridium-orichalcum laminate rings.

  “What the hell?” I asked, holding one up. They were wide, flat rings with tiny openings, less than half an inch across. A normal probe-gate is a bit over an inch inside, to allow technological sensor probes through.

  “You said you wanted to recheck the world catalog for a specific signature, Professor. These are the additional rapid-probe gates you require.”

  “How many is this?”

  “One thousand.”

  “Already engraved?” I asked, examining one. They were flat things, rather like an old-fashioned DVD, only smaller—a little under three inches across. Yes, Diogenes had already stamped the proper spell diagrams on both sides of the rings. I would still have to do the magical part of the operation, but my digital apprentice had done his part.

  “Everything but the enchanting, Professor.”

  “Now comes the tedious bit,” I sighed. “I swear, I’m going to figure out a way to automate the enchantment of things we need lots of.”

  “Now?”

  “No. That research is going to have to take a back seat. It would speed things up, but I don’t know how long it will take to figure out a procedure.”

  “Would it be sufficient to build an enchantment that casts a temporary gate spell on a ring? I can cycle rings through such an enchanted device, use them, and send them through again. Such a setup might be useful for thirty rapid-probe gates where we are testing only for Boojums.”

  “Yes, I could, but in the long run, permanent gates will be more useful. I’ve still got to build a sensor attuned to Boojum-hunting, too.”

  “As you say, Professor.”

  “On the other hand, a spell matrix for the gate spell and a spell matrix for an enchantment might be doable,” I mused. “Okay, I have an idea. If it doesn’t work on the second try, remind me as loudly as necessary to get me back to the real work.”

  “Noted.”

  So I drew on the floor to set up the basics of a gate spell, surrounded that diagram with the basics of an enchantment matrix, and parked a probe-gate ring in the center of it. It’s a lot like the spell matrix the Knights of Shadow use to create their composite suits of armor. It’s a spell, not an enchantment, but it can be used over and over again until someone forgets to charge it up. This was similar in that it was a basic gate spell already laid out and ready, along with the majority of an enchantment spell to bind it to the target. Charge the matrix, empower the spell, embed it in the ring, bind it, seal it, and take it out.

  Holy crap. It worked. I said as much to Diogenes, who was unimpressed. Well, he’s hard to impress, I admit.

  The arrangement wasn’t easy to operate. It still required mystical muscle to make it work. My metaphor on this one is breaking up concrete. I can do it with a sledgehammer, or I can do it with a jackhammer. Either way is tiring, but the jackhammer gets a lot more done. The spells do most of the actual work, but you can’t just turn on all the power tools in the shop and hope they build a boat. I have to ride herd on them and steer.

  This is as close as I’ve gotten to magical automation. The bottleneck is still me. It requires a consciousness—a living mind capable of manipulating magic—to make it work. With this setup, though, Mary could do it easily, at least at night. I’m pretty sure she could also do it during the day. She’s become quite proficient at magic. Heck, most of the wizards I know could do it at least once.

  What I need is to figure out a way to let Diogenes do it. It isn’t like the gate activation. That’s a bunch of slots he feeds ideogram plaques into when dialing a destination. It’s mechanical. Embedding the enchantment, even with this extensive preparation, requires the ability to see the structure of the forming spell, adjust the enchantment matrix to the material, fiddle with both to make them fit with each other and the object to be enchanted.

  Someday, there will be an orichalcum circuit board for Diogenes. Someday. I think he’ll be a computer wizard like no one has ever seen before.

  At least the space-based solar panels were on schedule. Combined with the downtime in the probe-gate facility, we didn’t have power supply problems. Enchanting gates went on until the sun told me not to mess with magical high voltage.

  Apocalyptica, Thursday, October 1st, Year 11

  With the sunrise, I hit the bathroom, cleaned up, ate an enormous breakfast, checked the destination time, and bounced over to The Manor to check on Trixie. She was feeling better, but not so much better she was up and around. She moved to her bed instead of her bath, at least. I added more gillyflower petals to the pile, made sure she was covered and warm, and went back to the Apocalyptica residence.

  It was time for the lion’s share of research and development.

  My task—at least, my immediate task—was to find a way to detect the presence of the Boojum in any given universe. On the face of it, this shouldn’t be a problem. The Boojum is a being of pure energy, similar in many respects to the simulata of Karvalen, and powerful enough to convincingly portray a deity. Energy-state beings can’t help but emit a signal, each one unique to the entity in question. I hate to say it’s a particular frequency, but that may be the best analogy. Or maybe they each have their own channel, like old-style television channels. If I were more musical, I could say each entity has a particular tone or combinations of tones—is that a “chord”?—that it emits.

  Maybe a better way to put it is each entity has something like a voice all its own. A face, a smell, all the things flesh and blood people have. Theirs is more of a broadcast signal, though.

  My goals? To identify and detect this signal. While it seemed pretty straightforward, the main difficulty was the broad area I wanted to cover: The Universe. All of them, eventually, but still only one at a time.

  This is difficult.

  If you want to give someone an example of understatement, please refer to my preceding comment.

  This isn’t so much of a problem in smaller universes. All the void-worlds we’ve found are tiny by comparison. Karvalen is one world, for example, floating in a sea—okay, submerged in a sea—of chaos. Getting a ping on the Boojum detector shouldn’t be too much t
rouble. It would be like reaching into a sack and feeling around for the rabid badger. Detecting it is pretty much a given.

  On the other hand, in the multiverse of Earth-analogues, there are several billion light-years of distance to cover. True, my main concern was for any Boojum presence on Earth, but if it’s busily consuming the life force of the Ancient Aliens who occasionally drop in to mutilate cows and dig secret cities under Antarctica, I’d like to be forewarned. Since those might well have gone home to the Andromeda galaxy, it’s important to have range.

  My options were limited. One option was to pump an enormous amount of power into the probe, have the spell on it create a massive sensor dish, and do a slow scan of the universe. This would involve a dedicated fusion plant and a few tons of electromagical transformers, as well as a couple of weeks, possibly months, per universe.

  Or I could tune the spell with extreme exactitude, making it a precision instrument incapable of registering anything but the Boojum. With sufficiently precise focus, there would be almost no interference, making it unnecessary to scan—merely listen. It’s like picking out a single piccolo in a full-on orchestra. Normally, it’s impossible. If you can tune out all the other instruments, it’s easy. Of course, this would involve getting the Boojum to sit still while I did a slow, careful scan of it.

  I didn’t like either option. Unfortunately, since I had a few million worlds to check for Boojum-ness, time was a factor. Which, of course, meant I needed to examine the Boojum up close and personal.

  I suppose I could have gone to Karvalen, joined the war effort, fought my way across a continent, captured the High Temple of the Lord of Light, sacrificed his own priests on it in a summoning rite, and recorded the emissions from the conjured entity. On the other hand, that struck me as time-consuming, difficult, and fraught with peril. Lots of peril. More peril than attacking a convent because of a Grail-shaped beacon.

  On the other hand, it might be easier to simply grab one of the Las Vegas vampires, scare the hell out of it, stake it, and scan it.