by Garon Whited
Heads cracked against heads, walls, my fist, my feet… I was the whirlwind in the darkness. Black lines of power whipped around me, lashing at everything like a jellyfish in a blender. It was hard, so hard, to pull my punches, to not kill everything I touched. I managed it. Well, mostly.
When everything was down and unmoving, I produced my salvaged magic rope, looped it around ankles or wrists, and dragged my unconscious prey along the smooth stone floors down to the gate room.
I don’t have actual gates in there, of course. I just have openings that could become gates.
I’ve seen the Great Arch in Zirafel. I also remember things about it from the people who worked with it, studied it, and maintained it. Building the basic design of the gate enchantment is a complicated thing, but I knew how to do it. I could enchant the arch in the wall, in theory, but I needed a dozen magicians to help supply power to the enchantment spell.
All those living, breathing, sapient souls fed me; I fed that power into the fundamental structure of that enchantment. I ripped the lives right out of their bodies, shredded them through my dark and hungry spirit, and burned away what I didn’t want as though smelting ore into metal. I hammered that energy, forged it, shaped it into lines of power. Chalk on the stone glowed white. My voice echoed down corridors of living stone and in ethereal planes. Every gesture sizzled with energy, leaving flickering afterimages behind. I cared nothing for the power reserves of my new enchantment, only for the strength, the solidity, the structure of it. I meant it to be a portal between worlds, and I built it for that purpose.
Chalk diagrams burned. Smoke drew itself into sharp-edged lines of power, expanding and unfolding, larger and more intricate by the moment. Lightning-like flashes of rainbow color rippled across the arch, first along the actual arch, then across the open space. Prismatic light shone from the structure, illuminating the room in a rippling coruscation of colors.
The archway seemed to deepen, the area within fading like fog. Beyond were a thousand, a million scenes, all mixed, jumbled, fragmentary. A mile-high spire of dark stone. A grassy lawn. A forest with a tiny unicorn. A crack in the earth, balefire red glowing from below. Stars in the dark. A bustling cityscape amid towers of glass. Images from anywhere, everywhere, and gone.
The shining, polychromatic light writhed faster, blurred into a brilliant white. Like a liquid, it seemed to swirl about the room, draining into the arch. The arch took on a gleaming aspect as the light sank into it. And then the light was gone, leaving only an arch of shining, intertwined lines in the stone.
Now I have a gate.
I sat down on the raised lip of the pool and took a moment. It’s not every day I put on my demigod hat to burn souls like magical fuel to make something ridiculously powerful. It doesn’t exactly wear me out, as such. It’s hard to describe. I think it’s more of an emotional thing than anything else. I’ve just done something impressive and it’s time to sit down and evaluate myself and what I’ve done.
Everything seemed in order. Good.
With that sorted out, I went back up and started working through the rest of the rooms.
I captured all the elves—fourteen of them—and turned them into elf-sausages like the first one. Along with the elf-sausage, I wired all fifteen of them together down in the gate room to feed more power into my new gate. I also kept two dozen orku and thirty galgar alive, all of whom joined the elves at hard labor in the concrete wall. The enchantment was done, and built as solidly as I could make it. It still needed a lot of energy to charge it before it would be functional.
Everything else died.
A dozen in this room. A trapped pair in another. One group of eighty, armed and organized, saw me open the door and threw themselves on their faces, begging for their miserable lives. I dragged lines of force with me as I moved through the room, dark tendrils of power that lashed through flesh and spirit to make souls bleed. I would enter a room, tendrils lashing, sword slicing, freeing blood and souls to feed me and my magic. Those with amulets—a small fraction—found that a monomolecular edge goes right through armor, flesh, bone, and stone with a startling lack of resistance.
Blood poured from the bodies, flowed rapidly to me and over me, sheathed me in delicious crimson life faster than it could sink into my flesh. It swirled, almost impatiently, and vapors of crimson mist leaped into the air, following the dark lines of power into my body. Souls drained from the bodies, whirled briefly through my darkness, vanished into my spirit. Misty streamers of blood surrounded me, orbiting close and swirling into my flesh; bright stars of souls whirled through the darkness and sank into the void at the center.
My left hand was back before the night was well-started. But I still remembered the way fire blew out of Bronze’s ribcage, the way she desperately wobbled and weaved and clanked her way up the city road on four mismatched legs, and the line of destruction that came within a finger’s width of her eye.
Say what you like about me. I’m a creature of the night. I’m a blood-sucking parasite on humanity. I’m a monster of necromantic, even hellish nature. I’m a predator, or an abomination, or whatever. Fine; you’re entitled to your opinion.
But also say that I don’t want to hurt you; I don’t even want to bother you. Leave me alone and I’ll do my best to leave you alone. And, just in case there was any doubt, yes, I am capable of love. I don’t express it well, and most of the time I don’t even realize that I do love, nor how much. It’s a failing I have, and I know it.
Hurting the things I love also hurts me. Hurt me through the ones I love and I will hurt you until I don’t feel it anymore.
Yes, I know. I should learn to forgive. I try. I really do try to just let things roll off me and ignore them. But some things I can’t ignore. Some lines should not be crossed. My patience and my tolerance are, I like to think, pretty decent… but they have limits.
I’m not proud of what I did that night. At least, not without some caveats. I’m proud of my ability to do it, sort of, but I’m not proud of the rage that let me do it. I’m proud that I can love someone—yes, my horse, Bronze—enough to be moved to such extremes on her behalf. I’m not proud of what I actually did.
Deep down, I’m a nice guy, I think. At least, I want to believe that. But I know for a fact that I’m also an incredibly vicious and deadly thing. Make of that what you will.
I worked most of the night, carving steadily through twelve thousand lives. Not all at once, as in the sudden flood in Zirafel, but bit by bit, a dozen here, a dozen there, like taking drink after drink, rather than downing a whole bottle in one go. Blood poured and flooded room after room, sometimes ankle-deep. Even the last few drops from a dismembered corpse would flee the flesh, bead on the floor, and roll after me as though afraid to be left behind, all alone. I waded through it, lakes and rivers of it, and it drained into me, sucked away into I know not where.
Where does it go? Nearly twelve thousand bodies, each pouring out four or five quarts of blood. That’s around twelve thousand gallons. That’s sixteen hundred cubic feet—between five and six hundred times as much volume as my whole body. Am I just bigger on the inside? It’s a physical substance; it has mass and volume. It can’t just vanish! Or is there some sort of magical conversion that goes on? Do I digest blood into something else?
Where does it go? That’s going to bother me.
When all was said and done, the night was almost gone, but I felt… less angry. Maybe somewhat satisfied. Was the killing of these thousands enough? No, not at all. They were tools: used like tools and smashed like tools. I wanted the one who used the tools, the hand behind them. But, now, perhaps, I didn’t need to go rushing off to find that hand.
Once again, the hand is my enemy. Ha.
I did take some satisfaction in one fact. Somewhere, someone was wondering what happened.
Twelve thousand troops marched off to kill Bronze and to kill me. It vanished utterly, gone into caverns that should have been their preferred fighting ground. They went in
with a clear mission and more than enough force to accomplish it.
They were never heard from again.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, you will never know why or how. How much comfort will that bring you in the long, silent hours of the night?
The empty halls echoed with my laughter.
Tuesday, May 18th
A little after sunup, I sent a message to Tort about Our Glorious Victory. I also asked her to bring herself, T’yl’s soul-crystal, and a bunch of other things to Karvalen.
The mountain is doing a wonderful job of putting the internal caverns back in order. It’s a big job, but it’s coming along very well. We’ve added a little more height to the tunnels—mainly for Bronze’s convenience; I want her able to move around in here—and the doors are balanced properly again.
I’m also making some changes to the outer wall, mainly by changing gates and bridges. We’re adding—the mountain is adding—three new bridges across the moat, in between the mouths of the canals. Three new gates go with the bridges, but each of the outer gates will face a cardinal direction, directly in front of the canals, just to deter battering rams. Sure, it’s a traffic annoyance, but a huge improvement over having only one gate. This should allow traffic to come and go fairly easily while retaining a fair amount of security.
Another change is the type of gate. They will still all be massive pivot-doors, but they will pivot vertically instead of horizontally. At rest, the upper portion will be another part of the city wall, just with a deep pit in front of the gate itself. We’ll get some winches so we can pull the upper portion down into the city, where it will fit into a depression in the entry courtyard behind it. The bottom section will come level with the road outside, forming the actual road and enabling surface traffic. Locked in place, it will look like just another section of road. Pull the locking pins and it will slowly swing upward to become a section of wall with a pit directly in front of it again.
It’ll be a while before all that gets sorted out. The mountain is busier than ever before, and it’s working on a new road, too. It’s delighted to have something to do, though. Every time I touch the stone and try to listen to it, I can hear what I think is a sort of joyous humming.
It find it strangely touching that I can make it so happy.
I’ve also repurposed one of the caverns for use as a compost pile—a mammoth, gigantic, humongous compost pile. We should have several professional farmers here soon, along with the body-grinding machine I wanted. Once we have the equipment and the manpower, we can start on making actual compost. For now, it’s just a place to stack the corpses.
Along with other civic improvements, the mountain is starting wellsprings somewhere high up, near the upper courtyard. Four lines of rooftops, zig-zagging down the mountain, are growing longer gutters and slowly forming a series of channels where we can put waterwheels. We’ll actually have to build the wheels, and the gearing to use them, but at least we’ll have ready-made places to mount them.
How much of the water will be used to drive waterwheels, and how much of it will go to sanitation, water gardens, and the like? Can we put the waterwheels up high, then let the downstream portion be used as drinking and washing water? Or should one of the four aqueduct channels be devoted to industry?
Great. I have to think about these things, now. What I need is a civil engineer and a city planner.
I’ve also repurposed a series of deep tunnels in the undermountain for farming. I’ll make sure they have adequate magical lighting by the time we finish putting a layer of dirt in them. Well, at worst I’ll have it done by the time we have sufficient compost to make it worth planting anything. Why? Because I don’t want to have the outer fields burned during a war and discover we’re running out of food. I also don’t want to find someone’s figured out a way to seal the mountain and suffocate us all.
I can’t imagine why that would be on my mind.
Kelvin has come back with almost everyone on the barge. A few people decided that living in Mochara might be preferable and walked the rest of the way. I can’t say I blame them. I did have a few words with Kelvin about why he continued on when everyone else wanted to come back.
“I understand my duty, Sire,” he said, obviously surprised at the question.
“Maybe I don’t,” I admitted. “What do you see as your duty?”
“I’m a soldier in your service, Sire. You give orders and I obey them. It is not my place to judge those orders nor to interpret Your Majesty’s intent. You said to see to the safety of the people. It was my purpose, duty, and pleasure to do as you commanded.”
“Good for you,” I told him. “Now, go get my personal guard and spread the word. I want everybody in the great hall the day after tomorrow, at noon.”
“Sire,” he said. He saluted and hurried off.
My cadet knights seemed very subdued this morning. Dragging several thousand corpses—surprisingly light and very dry corpses, to be sure, but corpses nonetheless—down through the tunnels and stacking them for later dismemberment seems to have a sobering effect on people. I’m guessing, of course, but I think they’re realizing just how awful a monster I am.
I accept the repercussions. The bastards who hurt Bronze are dead. I regret nothing. In fact, I intend to go further and have words—possibly Words of Power—with the people who sent them. Not immediately, no; I’m over the worst of my temper. Bronze is recovering, and as she does, my temper improves.
When she’s fully recovered, will I still be angry? Or merely annoyed? Or will I care? I’m not sure.
On the nicer side of the king, however, most of the wounded are at least on light duty instead of bed rest. They get to stand guard and keep lookout, but no heavy lifting.
Beltar, on the other hand, is still recuperating on his back. He’s been moved to interior quarters—carried there by my order; he’s not allowed to walk. I’ve also ordered him to stay there, because he would get up and try to help if I hadn’t.
A dozen separate volunteers came to me, individually, to ask if they could be his healing buddy. That is, to be connected to him magically so their bodies could help his to heal faster. They all had the same reason, too. They didn’t pity him in the slightest; getting wounded is only to be expected. It’s part of the job.
No, they were impressed. He was never a knight, not even before I unwittingly opened up for tryouts. He was “just” a civilian, and a scrawny, skinny, weakling of a civilian, at that. Even so, he never hesitated, but chased down a bunch of enemies that were, as he viewed it, escaping. Not to kill them; not to gain the glory of defeating them; just to slow them down enough that people who could defeat them would catch up to them and kill them.
He knew it was likely to get him killed. He went anyway.
No, it definitely wasn’t pity. It was respect.
So I let them help. I handled the spells personally and set them at a pretty high level. They take hour-long shifts because it taxes their systems a lot more than a normal linkage. The connection is such that they are unconscious throughout, then wind up wrung out and exhausted by the end of their shift, but they seem pleased.
Beltar doesn’t. After I had Paranos connected and out cold, I asked Beltar what was wrong.
“They shouldn’t be doing this,” he told me. “I’m not worth all this trouble.”
“You know,” I lied, conversationally, “I’ve sentenced men to hard labor for the crime you just committed.”
“What?” he asked, shocked. “What did I—?”
“You just told me that I’m wasting my time and that I’m wrong to be doing this at all—helping them to help you. That’s insubordination at the very least. An argument could be made for treason.”
“I didn’t… I mean, I…” he stammered.
“Shut up,” I told him, not unkindly. “You’ve earned their respect, so you don’t get to decide if they’ll honor you for it. Learn to accept it with good grace.” I patted him on the shoulder and didn’t mention I had trou
ble with that very problem.
“Beltar, you demonstrated bravery to a degree even they think is exceptional, possibly bordering on stupid,” I told him. “You got the impression, back when you showed up that first day for tryouts, that they didn’t think you could be useful. Right?”
He nodded, silently. I pointed at the unconscious Paranos.
“What does he think?” I asked. Beltar had no answer. I went on. “If he thought the same thing today you thought back then, would he be lying there to help carry the load of healing of your wounds? No. He’s starting to see what I already know. So are all the rest of them.”
“What do you know, Sire?”
“Have you forgotten what I am?” I asked, quietly.
“No, Your Majesty.”
“Not a king,” I corrected. “Not a title. Do you remember what I am?”
“Yes,” he said, almost whispered. I smiled and nodded.
“Good. Remember that, because it means I can see your soul. I know the shape of it. I know the colors and the texture and the strength of it.” I smiled, careful to keep my teeth hidden. “It may be housed in a body as frail as my grandmother’s—well, not anymore; you’re coming along nicely—but that’s got nothing to do with the man inside. I know what you are.”
“Then, what am I?”
“Worthy.”
I got up, shifted the remains of my armor a bit more comfortably, and smiled at him. Tears were leaking from the corners of his eyes as he stared at the ceiling.
“Try to rest,” I told him. “You’ll need it. You have to live up to your potential.”
Bronze is feeling much better. While I don’t actually have a forge big enough for her to stand in, I don’t think it will actually come to that. The one we were using seems useful enough. She can’t climb inside, but she can stick any one of her legs into it. I’m afraid I’ve gone through our entire supply of charcoal, but the mountain is slowly squeezing out coal in another room. Bronze let me know that it’s quite good coal; delicious, in fact.
