Nightlord: Shadows

by Garon Whited

  We really need another good smith. So much of what I want to do involves metalwork.

  Maybe I could go home for just a little while and pick up a few reference manuals. Something like a handbook of materials and a few textbooks on mechanical engineering. Possibly a few sample items to copy. Maybe even some books on the history of technology. Maybe an actual plow from an old barn, somewhere.

  Other worries are less science and more art. I try to spend an hour or so every day out in the market square, just so people can see me, get injuries and diseases fixed, and make appointments if they—or someone close to them—is planning to die. I get a lot of nice thank-you’s from various people I’ve helped, as well. The gentleman who grew a new eyeball—his name is Danvon—came by to show it off and put his forehead on my boot, much to my inward embarrassment.

  I also get quite a number of young ladies with chest complaints. Usually, it’s a breathing problem, but they have no trouble taking deep breaths when I ask them to. Strangely enough, I’ve only found one of them, ever, to have an actual chest cold. Still, I check to be sure before sending them on their way.

  Yeah, I know what they’re doing. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested or, in some cases, tempted. But I’m busy, and I don’t feel like having additional complexity added to my life right now.

  I miss Tamara. I miss Sasha and Shada, too, come to that. But Tamara I miss the most, because I just lost her. I’m not in the mood for a relationship. That part of my life is… quiet. It needs time to be quiet and still, all by itself, while the rest of me goes off and does other things and gives it space.

  I’m trying.

  People are also asking me to lay down the law. People are coming to me for resolutions of disputes, settlements of arguments, and decisions on public or national policy. They want Royal Edicts to require or forbid things that can be outright weird.

  One lady thinks it ought to be illegal to wander the streets at night. Claims she can’t sleep knowing that strangers might be just outside her house. I wondered if that should include watchmen, nightsoil collectors, and similar non-daytime occupations.

  A guy complained there ought to be a law against distilled alcohol—everyone should drink beer. We produce a lot of beer around here, but not a lot of hard alcohol, so it wasn’t incredibly unreasonable. It takes a lot more determination to get blind-staggering-drunk on beer. On the other hand, I recall other experiments in abolishing hard liquor. It also turns out he’s a brewer, and his shop is next to a distillery. I suspect he may have an ulterior motive for his request.

  Another guy wanted me to make it illegal to let women contradict or argue with men. I think that might be hard to enforce even if I was stupid enough to try it. It might also be more likely to get me killed than anything I’ve ever done, and there’s stiff competition for the number-one spot. No.

  There was also a guy wanting to establish laws about marriage, and he had a long, long list. Only opposite-sex marriage. No bride or groom under the age of fourteen. (In Rethven, it was legal for a father to allow a daughter to marry at the age of ten!) Some means of independent support required for a married couple. Ceremonies requiring witnesses and written records. Brides must be pregnant by the groom beforehand. Special colors for those hair-bag things to denote how many children the couple have. No re-marriage in case of divorce, but allowed for widows or widowers.

  That last made me think that murders would be the preferred method of divorce.

  I listened politely to his marriage ideas while killing off a nasty infection. I promised to think about it. I didn’t say I’d think about it and shudder in horror, but I could have.

  Funny thing. The requests for royal edicts seemed bent more toward changing what other people could or could not do, rather than things that affected the people making the request. None of it was “Please make it a law so I’ll stop doing something I know I shouldn’t.” It was all “Please make other people stop doing things I don’t like them doing.”

  So far, most of it seems to be king stuff. There has been very little god stuff. Well, some of it has been borderline; I gather it’s traditional to get the King to bless newborns, marriages, and so forth. I’m not sure if that’s an example of the Divine Right of Kings or direct religious belief. I’m prepared to play along with the Divine Right part, considering the alternative is much worse.

  They don’t seem to have a lot of direct requests for miracles, though. Maybe it’s hard to walk right up to someone they might think of as a deity and ask for favors. Could be the less religious are the ones asking the king for things, while the more religious are just praying and hoping I’ll listen.

  I do know people are praying. How do I know? When the sun goes down, I can hear them.

  This is another example of how weird my life can get.

  It’s at least an hour after sundown. I’m looking over a copy of the spell Tort uses to distribute her aging among several subjects, and I think I see a way to make it work with plants. I have an advantage in this sort of thing normal mortals don’t, obviously. While the aging process won’t be distributed on a straight division scale, she can have a garden, greenhouse, or whole stretch of forest. Trees, for example, should last much longer than dazhu.

  In the midst of my studies, I have a nasty feeling, like something awful is about to happen. I’m anxious and worried, and I have no idea why.

  No assassins anywhere around that I can detect, and it’s damned hard to hide from me when I’m alert and actively looking.

  What’s bothering me? I have no idea.

  Then it hits me. It’s not my anxiety; it belongs to someone nearby. I can feel someone’s terror.

  Boom. Out the door, down the street, zipping through the night like a streak of dark. Right into a really nice part of town, actually. I knock on the door, repeat the process, and finally give up on anyone answering. I know exactly where the terrified person is—no, where the terrified people are—and I can see the shuttered window above me.

  I jump, boing, straight up. Second floor. A quick twist of tendrils, the latches come undone, the shutters open, and I’m inside.

  It was a very upscale neighborhood. The kids were sharing an actual bed, rather than on pallets on the floor. They were hiding under the covers. They were all scared.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked. There were muffled screams. One of them, the oldest, looked out. I obligingly held up a hand and provided some light.

  “It’s the King,” he whispered. Covers flew aside. Three kids, aged four, six, and seven, all goggled at me. The two younger ones looked skeptical.

  “He’s not very big,” said the middle child. The youngest nodded.

  “I’ve been on a diet,” I replied.

  “You are the King, aren’t you?” asked the oldest

  “Yep. And you’re scared of something. What is it?”

  The youngest, a girl, said, “There’s monsters under the bed.”

  I looked under the bed. It was the underside of a bed. Unless the mess under there concealed vorpal dust bunnies, it didn’t look dangerous.

  “I don’t see any,” I admitted.

  “They don’t come out in the light,” said the eldest.

  “Okay. Stay right there.” I doused my illumination spell and looked under the bed again.

  Eyes looked back at me. A lot of them.

  I lowered the blanket for a moment and thought about what I just saw. It was dark under there, and a lot of various sorts of eyes gleamed in that dark. Normally, I don’t see darkness; it just rolls away as night falls, leaving me in a shadowless, colorless existence. Yet, it was still dark under the bed.

  I looked under the bed again. Yep, the same eyes. Several blinked at me.

  I didn’t know what to say. Total loss for words.

  At first, all I knew was that someone was desperately afraid. I saw no reason I couldn’t fix that by pummeling the cause into non-terrifying jelly.

  When the problem turned out to be a “mons
ter under the bed,” I planned to fix the problem by convincing the children that the “monster” was gone. The idea was the same, but relied on pretending to pummel, rather than actually committing an act of violence in their defense. If I slid under the bed, made banging and thumping noises, and the bed lurched a bit, the kids would assume it was a nasty fight. Then I could slide back out, dust my hands together, and say, “So much for that!”

  There really is a monster under the bed. Even for me, that’s weird.

  I currently live in a magical universe. Could a creature evolve to exist under the beds of frightened children? I suppose anything is possible, but this seems silly. What the hell kind of ecology could it have under there? Are there really dust bunnies twitching their little dusty noses as they hop about, looking for dust carrots and dust cabbages?

  I looked at the eyes. They looked back. At a guess, they were as nonplussed as I was.

  Could it be that the thing was simply created, rather than a product of evolution? One dark night, some precocious young wizard’s apprentice was afraid of strange noises and invented it? Or maybe the belief of millions of frightened children acted on the magical nature of this world to form it out of their collective fears?

  “Are you the monster under the bed?” I finally managed to ask.

  “Who wants to know?” It was one of those gravelly voices, deep and raspy, with strange clickings at random points, like mandibles. It almost sounded like a chorus of voices, somehow. Maybe it was more than one monster answering at once.

  “I’m the monster that isn’t under the bed,” I said, trying to be reasonable. The eyes blinked a lot and several of them narrowed. I don’t think it liked my answer.

  “…yeah. I am.”

  “Problem?”

  “You’re not supposed to see me,” it said. “You’re too old.”

  “Speaking monster to monster?”

  “…I see your point.”

  “I’m going to suggest that you go away.”

  “And when I don’t?” it asked, belligerently.

  “I’m going to come in there and kill you.”

  The eyes widened. There was a long pause.

  “What kind of monster are you?” it asked.

  “The one that owns the place. I’m the King. And what kind of monster are you?”

  “Are you stupid?” it asked.

  “Call me stupid again,” I advised it. “Go ahead. Call me stupid, and refuse to answer my question. Go on,” I urged. “Do it.”

  It muttered something incomprehensible.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I’m the monster under the bed,” it said.

  “I thought so,” I agreed. “Now beat it. This is my territory.”

  “You can’t expect me not to hunt anywhere in your whole kingdom.”

  I really didn’t like that. I’m a little intolerant where the welfare of children are concerned. And the word hunt doesn’t make me a happy vampire in that respect.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  I drew my sword. I flicked it with a fingernail and it chimed beautifully. The glowing eyes under the bed widened.

  “You’re not serious!” it said.

  “Have you ever had to fight anything that wasn’t a child?” I asked, coldly.

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  I really don’t understand why anyone uses that phrase.

  I slid under the bed. It was a lot roomier than I expected; I landed on my feet. It seemed to be a much larger space—like moving through a doorway instead of stepping into a closet. The whole place was shadowy, grey, indistinct, but now I could see. I immediately realized this was a strange space, not just a strange place, and I had crossed a border by sliding under the bed.

  This answered some of my ecology questions, but raised several more. How many sub-realms does a magical universe have? How many pocket dimensions? Sub specie spatia? Whatever you want to call them? Are they connected pockets on the primary universe, or independent universes all their own, with bridges connecting to major universes, or to each other? How are they connected? What rules apply in them, and how drastically can those differ from a universe they touch?

  If there are other things living in them, is there a Closet Monster, too? Or are they just different locations for the same type of monster in the same continuum? Maybe there’s a Darkened Hallway Monster, and a Wardrobe Monster, a Creepy Basement Monster, and an Attic Monster. Did the Sock Croc lurk in laundry basins, hoping to snatch an unwary sock and drag it down under the soapy water to feed on it?

  I had a monster in front of me.

  It was about the size of pony, but it looked more like a sea urchin composed entirely of arms, with eyes and mouths everywhere in between. It had insect eyes and mandibles, gleaming cats’ eyes, red wolf eyes, drooling animal mouths, and, of course, a huge variety of ugly arms. Some of the arms were hairy, muscular, almost-human arms; others were more monstrous, including crablike claws, taloned arms, scaly ones, tentacles with suckers, and the whole variety of unpleasant monster hands.

  It grabbed at me and I stepped back, thrusting, stabbing holes in three different hands… err, claws… um… three extremities before it could blink. It obviously didn’t face anything but children; it didn’t know how to deal with an actual combatant. Something oozed from the wounds as it jerked back its… well, I’m going to call them “hands.” The ooze was dark brown and smelled a bit like musty socks. It screamed and more of its hands clutched at the bleeding holes in the wounded ones. Distantly, I could hear the kids screaming, too. The monster sounded agonized; the kids sounded scared.

  “I mean it,” I began, and it interrupted me by springing at me. I moved aside as though it were in slow motion, grabbed one of the nearer appendages, and added considerably to its momentum. It landed with a heavy thud and rolled, arms flailing everywhere—and when something with that many arms flails, it flails really well.

  When it came to rest, one of its eyes looked at the point of my sword at a range of about half an inch. I was aiming at a large, compound eye, so it could see the sword from up close and multiple angles all at once. It froze, staring at the point. A black tendril of my power rippled down the length of the blade, like a blood-groove. I exerted a little effort and it fairly radiated darkness, becoming visible even to normal sight.

  While we stood there, I tried to get a grip on myself.

  “Now, look,” I told it, “I don’t want to kill you. I don’t even want to be unreasonable. But I cannot allow you to terrorize and eat children in my kingdom. I absolutely will not stand for it, and I will kill you.”

  “But… but… but I don’t eat children,” it whined. That sounded promising. I could see why it sounded so strange; it spoke with multiple mouths at once.

  “What, exactly, do you eat?”

  “Fear, of course! What, you think I actually eat the little twerps?”

  “You don’t actually grab children and drag them under the bed to eat them?”

  “Of course not!” It sounded offended. “That’s stupid!” It checked itself and added, nervously, eyeing either my blade or the tendril on it. “That is, the idea is stupid. Not you.”

  “Understood. Go on.”

  “Well, I don’t eat people. They wouldn’t be afraid after that, just dead. I gotta scare them. That’s what I do.”

  “Hmm. You cause people to be afraid, and you feed on them being afraid?”

  “Well, yeah. What else would I do?” It shrugged. That’s a lot of shrugging.

  “Can you feed on any other emotion?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s the way I am. Frustration tastes nice, too, but you can’t live on it.”

  “Does it have to be children?”

  “They’re the only ones afraid of me.” It seemed more than a little accusatory when it added, “Usually, they’re the only ones who can see me. The frustration is usually from the parents, see?”r />
  “Also hmm. But, if a grown-up was afraid, you could feed on that?”

  “Well… yeah, I guess. I don’t see why not. But they can’t see me. They don’t believe in me.”

  I lowered my sword. It relaxed a little.

  “All right. Are there more of you? Or are you the only one?”

  “I’m the only one, so far as I know.” It waved a few hands, airily. “There are other things like me, yeah, but I’m the monster under the bed.”

  “Okay. Do you have a name?”

  “What for?” it asked.

  “If there’s only one of you, I guess that’s a good point. Do you talk to other things, like closet monsters?”

  “Not usually. He lives in closets and wardrobes. We don’t really see each other much.”

  “Look, I’ll feel better if I can call you something besides the-monster-under-the-bed. That’s a description, not a name.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “How about I call you ‘Fred’? Not because you look like a Fred, but because it’s shorter.”

  It shrugged again. It was still impressive.

  “Okay by me.”

  “So, if you’re the only one, do you appear under lots of beds at once?”

  “How? There’s only one of me.”

  I didn’t feel like getting into a discussion on bilocation, so I skipped it.

  “Silly question. Forget it. So, how many beds will you visit in one night?”

  “Six? Ten? Depends.”

  “That gives me an idea about how much you need to eat. I think we can work something out, if you’re willing to eat the fears of adults. Can you do that?”

  “If it’s scared, I can probably get by,” it agreed, cautiously. “But I already told you, adults don’t see me; they don’t believe in me. They only believe in what they can see, and they don’t see me.”

  “Sometimes, that’s even scarier.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no fear like the fear of the unknown,” I pointed out.