Void: Book Five of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  It made a disturbing amount of sense for them to simply wait until Lissette got tired of it and ordered her men back to Karvalen. I didn’t like it and expressed myself in private.

  Diogenes pointed out I wasn’t supposed to use that sort of language. I shut up and settled in to brood some more.

  Apocalyptica, Monday, November 10th, Year 11

  I’ve been watching the progress of troop movements through Diogenes and the sand table. They finished deploying from the ships, established themselves on the beach, sorted out their people and gear, and immediately headed west along the coast road. If I didn’t have the larger view, I’d say they were marching along some tropical island. It was a beautiful strip of countryside, I must say.

  They hit a little fishing village like a Sledge-O-Matic™ hits a watermelon.

  My guess is they sent their greenest troops into that fight. They didn’t kill as many people as they could have. They sent most of them running away. I’m not sure about the wisdom of this, although I applaud the gentle sensibility of it. The survivors would flee west, spreading word of the army, resulting in either the fortified defense of towns and villages, or the virtual abandonment of them. Given the Church of Light had to know we were coming already—and didn’t prepare defenses—it seemed reasonable the people would flee rather than fight.

  Meanwhile, the army sacked the village for every bit of food, set fire to it and the fishing boats, and continued west.

  Apocalyptica, Tuesday, November 11th, Year 11

  Liam isn’t in a hurry. I say Liam isn’t in a hurry because Liam is nominally in charge. I see something of Torvil in the way they advance.

  The troops are on the march, but they’re proceeding at a cautious pace. He’s got wizards scrying far ahead, scouts for closer in, and everyone is armed as though about to be attacked. In the mornings, farmers with weapons are drilled for an hour while the camp is struck by the real soldiers. In the evenings, they’re drilled again before the final meal of the day. If the war goes on long enough, they’ll be soldiers. Right now, they’re so green they turn to face the sun. Maybe they won’t be completely useless.

  Their wizards aren’t even trying to hide the army. It’s too big, too spread out. They’re doing a decent job of concealing Liam, though, as well as shielding his war councils. I haven’t tried to penetrate their workings, but I’ve examined the shielding. Not bad.

  I’ve been looking ahead, along the road—such as it is—and thinking about how I would try to stop them. I’ve got lots of ideas. Destroy bridges, dig holes in the road—

  Let me add, here, that there are roads all along the outer continent, many of which are paved with stone and in good condition. The Empire built roads to last, and they knew what they were doing. But not all the old roads were left alone when the locals wanted stone to build with, nor were all the roads leading to places they still wanted to go. Many of the roads are now hard-packed dirt with lots of wagon-ruts, and probably a nightmare after a good rain.

  Anyway, I could see a dozen low-cost ways to slow down or temporarily stop the troops. The local citizens did some of them. Miles ahead, in a wooded area, some adventurous woodcutters felled trees, dug up the area to partially bury them, and left them as makeshift barricades on the road. True, clearing them was simple enough, but it took time.

  More directly, someone gathered several archers together—hunters, by the look of them, rather than soldiers—and at least one wizard. They found themselves a good ambush site along a rocky piece of land, cloaked themselves, set up camouflage against scrying, and waited. As the army tromped by, they loosed shaft after shaft from their position near the top of the hill. They quit when the return fire started. They withdrew immediately, falling back over the irregular terrain and running for it. But the whole army stopped for a while as they sorted themselves out, tended to wounded, and the like.

  I kept expecting an army to come marching the other way to meet them. No such luck. Salacia, the major coastal city in Praeteyn, simply sat there like a big, fat target, welcoming refugees inside its walls.

  Was that the idea? Have them march all this way only to be stopped at the walls? If the city was Karvalen, it would be a good strategy. The place is a fortress. I’m not so sure I’d trust Salacia’s walls against an army, but they knew their city better than I did. Maybe they were more confident.

  Apocalyptica, Wednesday, November 12th, Year 11

  More of the same. They camp, drill, march, drill, camp. They’ve got another few days on the so-called road at this rate, but I don’t see anything stopping them from reaching Salacia.

  Mary came in with an armload of leather-bound folios and watched the holographic map with me for a bit.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “I’m guessing they’ll arrive Saturday or Sunday.”

  “Our Saturday or their Saturday?”

  “Ours.”

  “I see.” She considered the disposition of the troops. “And you’re going to sit here and watch over them like a dark and terrible god? Or sit here and watch over them like an anxious hen?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “Well, the psychic you does better at the dark and terrible god bit, so you’re likely to take the role of chicken. How about you let Diogenes do what he does best while we do other things?”

  “I’m concerned about how this plays out.”

  “Yes, but you’re not doing anything. You’re watching and worrying. That’s not helping them and it’s not helping me and it’s definitely not helping you.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “Of course.”

  I sat back from the hologram and frowned at her.

  “All right, I’ll bite. What is it? Does it have something to do with the papers you’re carrying?”

  “These? No. These are a present.” She put them on the table and spread them out.

  “What are they?” I asked, opening one carefully. It was ancient.

  “Notebooks from another big brain. Leonardo da Vinci’s. I thought you might appreciate them.”

  “Where did you get these?”

  “One of the worlds with a British Museum. They were on display for a while, but when it came time to pack them up, they somehow got lost.”

  “These are fantastic!”

  “I’m glad you like them. So, do you want to look through them or do some work?”

  “I’d happily do work if I had some to do. The war is going surprisingly well without me.”

  “True,” she agreed. “On the other hand, you could be finding a way to cut off the vampire-siphons in other universes.”

  “That’s… a very good point,” I admitted, looking up from a folio. “I don’t think it’s going to be too much of a problem.”

  Mary sat up straight and lost her amused expression.

  “It isn’t? What have you got in mind?”

  “I’ve given some thought to the nature of the connection between the Boojum. The conduit between any specific Boojum-class vampire and the Boojum, itself, has to have an extradimensional component. Energy is leaving one universe for another. Since it’s a connection to an entity on the energy plane, this transfer has to be one-way, through some sort of mystical equivalent of a diode or check valve.”

  “If it’s one-way, how do those vampires have any powers?”

  “From what I’ve seen, they consume part of the power they take in and send the rest on. This makes them more hungry than us. Remember how they don’t do well on animal blood for long? And the way Stan was eager to drink everything that came his way?”

  “All right, I can see that.”

  “So, my ideas are two. First and most obvious, cut off the supply from these vampires. Kill them, contain them, or cast a spell on them to prevent the outflow of power, whatever. Just as long as they can’t send energy on to their patron. The second idea is more complicated but probably more likely to be useful.”

  “I already like the first one.”

&nbs
p; So do I, Firebrand interjected.

  “The second idea,” I went on, ignoring them, “is to break through the check-valve in the energy circuit and suck energy out of the Boojum, grounding it out into whatever universe the vampire is in.”

  Mary blinked at me, expressionless.

  “Did you just suggest opening a fallen angel’s artery and letting him bleed to death?”

  “Not exactly, but it’s not a bad analogy.”

  “That’s a lot of arteries.”

  “Given the amount of energy we’re talking about, there’s a lot of bleeding to be done.”

  “My point,” she went on, “is there are some unreasonably large number of vampires to handle. Do you have a spell to hit them all?”

  “No. I don’t have a spell for it. At least, not yet. I see some ways it might be done.”

  “Ah. But you’re sure it can be done?”

  “Well… yes, sort of.”

  “Sort of?” she pressed. She laced her fingers together and leaned forward, smiling. “Let me guess. You don’t know how, but if you had another vampire to examine, you could do it?”

  “Maybe. I think so. I’m sure it’s possible to do it, I’m just not sure exactly how. Nor if it will be practical.”

  “Why didn’t you check for this when we had one?” she asked.

  “Because I didn’t think of it then! I had my hands full just imprinting a detection matrix so I could identify them. If the local maniacs hadn’t interfered, I’m sure I could have extracted even more information.”

  “So we go somewhere, grab a vampire, stuff him in a missile silo, and you experiment on him until he melts.”

  “I don’t want them in Apocalyptica.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s an inter-universal energy connection. My concern is the Boojum will be able to follow it back to Apocalyptica and us. I have no doubt it can hunt us down if it wants to exert itself, but I’d rather it had to exert itself. I don’t want to give it a free anything, much less lunch when any of us might be on the menu.”

  “Your point is well-taken. All right. So, are we kidnapping another bloodsucker, or can you do this without strapping them to a table?”

  “I—” began, and paused. “I’m not sure. I haven’t tried it. I have spell research to do before I can even begin to analyze the connection. I’ll probably need help from my altar ego.”

  Did someone mention Me?

  Mary jumped. So did I.

  “I hate it when you do that,” she observed.

  Sorry.

  “Please build him a telephone,” Mary requested. “This divine voice thing is…”

  “Disturbing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll handle it. In the meantime, could you please focus your conversation on me?”

  Done.

  “Better?” I asked. Mary nodded.

  “Do you two want to be alone? I have other things to do.”

  “Sure. But please remain available.”

  “I know, dear. You have a war on. I’m not starting anything I can’t drop at a moment’s notice.” She kissed the top of my head and breezed out through the hatch.

  Do you want My help in building a communications brazier? Or do you want to go Boojum-hunting?

  “Boojum-hunting will take time.” I closed and stacked all the folios, anticipating a long day of slow, careful reading. “I don’t know how long it’ll take to analyze their connection. I don’t know how long I’ll have, either, before someone might notice me. All I’m looking for right now is a distraction until the main event in Karvalen.”

  You mean Karvalen-the-world, not Karvalen-the-kingdom? Because the army is marching through Praeteyn.

  “Dammit, we need more specific names!”

  Like what? Flatland?

  “Mr. A. Square doesn’t live there.”

  Discworld?

  “It’s not a disc, and I doubt it’s on top of elephants.”

  True. It’s not on top of anything. It just floats there.

  “I remember seeing a world with five elephants and a turtle.”

  Yeah, but not this one. This one is an irregular shape, has a flattened dome for a Firmament, and drifts in the void.

  “Nice to know, I guess. So, what do we call the stupid thing?”

  We could call it the world of Rethven, the kingdom of Karvalen, the city of stone, and the Living Mountain.

  “Or it could be the city of living stone and we could call the mountain ‘Arthur’.”

  Why Arthur?

  “I don’t know. It just popped into mind. It’s more than a mountain. Maybe it deserves a proper name?”

  Okay, yeah, I get that, but… Arthur?

  “What’s wrong with Arthur?”

  It’s a mountain, not a king.

  “All right, you come up with a name!”

  Uh…

  I waited. He didn’t answer.

  Drawing a blank here, he finally admitted.

  “Fine. Then the mountain shall now and henceforth and forevermore be known by the kingly name of ‘Arthur.’ I have spoken.”

  You know people are going to call it “Mount Karvalen” or something, right?

  “It’s my pet rock. I can name it whatever I want!”

  Melodramatic, aren’t we?

  “Yes. Now, you want to help me build a vox dei?”

  I guess. You can take it with you wherever you go?

  “If we do it right, yes.”

  You know I won’t be able to do much in worlds where they don’t know me.

  “The point of the exercise is to keep me occupied for a couple of days, all right? Besides, Mary may want to talk to you without having to go to the Temple in Karv—the Temple in the city of living stone.”

  Ah. Got it. Although I think we need to name the city something proper, too. After all, “Karvalen” does mean—

  “I know!” I grumbled to myself for a moment, trying to think of something to name the city.

  Philadelphia, he suggested.

  “No.”

  Quebec?

  “No.”

  Come on! You named the mountain.

  “Fine, but no existing city names. The idea is to decrease confusion.”

  Hmm. How about “Vios?” It’s Greek for “life.”

  “That’s… not half bad. Arthur, the living mountain, is the center of Vios, the living city, in the kingdom of Karvalen, on the world of Rethven.”

  Wow. That sounds pretty good. Aside from the name “Arthur.”

  “Don’t start again. Diogenes, note the nomenclature for future reference.”

  “So noted, Professor.”

  “Now, let’s build the Voice of God.”

  Could you say “Holy telephone, vamp-man! To the temple lab!” please?

  “It’s my lab, which makes you the sidekick. Come along.”

  Spoilsport.

  This kept me occupied for hours. About six of them. I took a break for sunset and let Diogenes do some software work, calibrating it to the psychic signals through the I/O interface.

  It went surprisingly smoothly. I already built the smoke-face brazier. Enchanting a smartphone-like device to process signals from my altar ego was merely building on that base. The key element was nothing more than a specialized alloy for the antenna, enchanted to receive the proper psychic wavelengths and turn them into electrical signals. My altar ego and Diogenes had to learn how to talk to each other, of course, but with some added software and rendered video from Diogenes, he even had a face and voice.

  “This is weird,” he said, now a face—my face—on a screen.

  “How so?” I asked, looking into the phone. “It’s weird for me because it feels even more like talking to myself. How is it weird for you?”

  “Looking at you through the camera isn’t like looking at you normally.”

  “Normal for a person with eyes, or normal for an incorporeal entity on another plane of existence?”

  “Shut up.”

 
“Just trying to clarify. You’ll have to get used to the signals this thing sends out. It’s like a baby has to get used to hearing and seeing. You’ve got a head start since you’re not having to generate most of the actual talking and video. The software is an expert system and is learning with you to communicate. It can’t help much with interpreting the signals the phone sends to you.”

  “It’s doing pretty well at duplicating anything I say and repeating it back to me. Diogenes is one smart computer.”

  “Don’t get him started,” I advised.

  “Can you mount the thing on a robot and have it wander around? I’d like to get a feel for shapes and spaces. My visual cortex—or what passes for one—isn’t used to this.”

  Diogenes was kind enough to help out. My altar ego-phone rode around on a drone while I turned my attention to the army.

  Nope, still on their way. Nothing new, nothing different.

  You’d think a war would be more exciting. Apparently, war consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by bouts of terror. We haven’t got to the terror parts, yet.

  So, what do I do?

  I collected a pile of stuff, loaded it all up on Bronze, and we took the variable gate to Zirafel. I put an expanding gate through the existing ring-gate so we could transport bigger things to the moon of Rethven. To wit, I dumped through a weather balloon with a micro-gate communicator.

  The telemetry cut off the instant they crossed the lunar firmament, of course. I swore in several languages.

  “Get me a basic radio transmitter. Maybe they can broadcast a signal beyond the Firmament. We can put a receiver outside and get telemetry that way.”

  So we tried dropping a radio and listening for it. It didn’t work. Whatever the barrier around Rendu’s favorite moon, it wasn’t cooperating.

  Fine. Wormholes can’t cross the barrier. Radio and microwave transmissions can’t, either. Visible light can, though. Laser communications, maybe?