Nightlord: Shadows

by Garon Whited

  “I shall… Father.”

  “That’s my girl. Speaking of… where’s Tianna?”

  “Out finding things to multiply. She is quite proud of her numbers.”

  “She should be. Is her skyrocket spell still holding up?”

  “I am assured by Blythe—the wizard you told to monitor it—that the spell is intact and should be ‘efficacious in the extreme, albeit temporarily.’ I take that to mean it’s fine.”

  “Sounds like.”

  “While I have you in the mirror… if you have a chance, could you look at your new road?”

  “Problem?”

  “Not with the road,” she told me. “We are expecting representatives from Baret, Wexbry, and Philemon, but they have not yet arrived.”

  “Want me to see how far they’ve got to go so you can prepare a reception?” I guessed.

  “No. Yes. Really, we were expecting them by now, and none of the wizards here knows the road well enough to look anywhere along it. I’m told they could… ‘walk it’ in spirit, if I insist, but that such a thing is dangerous to the wizard.”

  “Yeah, it is. All right. I’ll see what I can find out. How is everything else?”

  Everything else was fine, and the new mill, over the new waterwheel, was working, albeit slowly. I promised to provide a little more water and to get someone down there with the design for the windmill that powered our irrigation. Amber obviously didn’t know what I was talking about, but agreed anyway.

  After our goodbyes, I went to see about my latest visitor.

  The visitor was a bar code. No, he was merely in a black and white striped robe. No, he had a long garment on that looked like a robe but was more like a long coat, open at the front. His trousers and shirt were also of the same black-and-white pattern of vertical stripes. It made him look quite tall and thin, but I didn’t think he needed the help. He was easily two inches taller than I, had a light build, and was on the skinny side. He brought to mind the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the schoolteacher… what was his name? Ichabod Crane, that was it.

  I received him in a lesser dining room—one for more intimate meals than the evening supper, but not so informal as to be in my own chambers. He stood up as I walked in and I moved to take a seat.

  He presented an amulet. It was a stylized eye, reminding me of the Eye of Horus, and set in a square frame, the whole thing done in polished steel.

  I looked at it. Then I looked at him.

  “It’s nice. Good workmanship,” I observed. I took it from his hand and turned it over a few times, looking for magic. It seemed mundane enough.

  He seemed to sag, almost deflate.

  “Something the matter?” I asked.

  He sat down, staring at the amulet, face working. I thought he was going to cry.

  I’ll comfort a weeping child, even a grown woman. I don’t know what to do when a grown man breaks down into tears. I poured some brandy in a goblet and pushed it toward him. He slugged it back like a trooper. I think he was expecting wine; he lost color in his face, made a terrible gasping sound, and started breathing slowly and deeply.

  Well, at least he wasn’t about to cry. I slid the amulet along the table to him and waited.

  When he got his color back and looked as though he might be able to talk, I asked him again if there was anything wrong.

  “My god has forsaken me,” he said, miserably. “I no longer have the favor of the Lord of Law.”

  My first impulse was a snappy answer about his wardrobe choices not finding favor, but I suppressed it. It was probably the Holy Vestments Of The Church Of The Law. That, or the Holy Order of the Zebra. Possibly the Generic Cleric Outfit.

  See? I didn’t say any of that.

  “I see,” I said, instead, although I didn’t. “Um. Look, I don’t mean to be unfeeling or rude, but I do have stuff I need to be doing. Could we move this to the part where you explain why you needed an audience with the King of Karvalen? Sorry to rush you, you understand, but…”

  “No, you’re quite right, Your Majesty. I apologize. I… I needed to test my faith, you see.”

  “No, I don’t. Or, I don’t think so.”

  “Are you not a creature that drinks the blood of the innocent, devours the flesh of the righteous, profanes the temples of light and good, only to bring death, shadow, and darkness over all the world?”

  I blinked at him for a bit. Someone, at least, wasn’t listening to Linnaeus’ propaganda pieces. I had mixed feelings about that.

  “Only technically,” I agreed. “It’s daytime. You want to try that after the sun goes down. I try not to drink the blood of the innocent, just the guilty. And I definitely don’t devour the flesh of the righteous; it doesn’t agree with me. While I do profane the temples of light and good, it’s only when they come after me. Otherwise, I leave them alone.

  “I take it that you were trying to direct the power of your god to smite my evil?” I finished.

  He nodded miserably. I sighed and took pity on him.

  “That generally doesn’t work during the day. Try it again this evening, okay? It might work, then.”

  “Really?” he asked, brightening.

  “Really,” I assured him. “It’s complicated. I take it you’ve been having something of a crisis of faith?”

  “Yes. I’ve been trying to understand the nature of the Law, and why the Lord of Law doesn’t… well, doesn’t seem to have any of His own. The scrolls don’t really tell us much about how we’re supposed to live our lives.”

  “That is a little odd,” I admitted. “Most gods have a lot to say about how their followers are supposed to live their lives, don’t they?”

  “That’s been my trouble,” he said, miserably. “I’ve prayed about it, but He does not deign to answer. I thought if I could do something notable, He might favor me with an inspiration.” He fiddled with the amulet, then put hung it about his neck again. “But, as you see, nothing happened.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything,” I assured him. “I’m pretty much just a normal man in that respect when the sun is up. If you try it after nightfall; you’ll certainly get better results.”

  “I can do that,” he said, then he slumped again. “But now that you know, you won’t permit it.”

  “Sure I will. Hang on.” I stepped out of the room, beckoned to someone, gave instructions for the care and maintenance of the guest, and came back in with the guy I’d snagged.

  “Here you go,” I told him. “This is Perrel; he’s going to show you around. I’m sorry, but I didn’t get your name?”

  “Brother Terrany, Your Majesty.”

  “Very good. Perrel will show you to quarters, if you’d like to stay, and be your guide. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. After sunset, I’ll send for you and you can try again. How’s that?”

  “Should I expect a cell?” he asked, perhaps not unreasonably.

  “Perrel,” I said, “please take over, here. I’ve got things to do before being blasted into oblivion by the power of Brother Terrany’s god. Treat him like Sir Sedrick, okay?”

  “Of course, Your Majesty,” he said, grinning.

  I left it to him, hearing “You have no idea how lucky you are…” as I walked away.

  I sauntered back down to the room with the mirrors and the sand table, thinking.

  Am I going to get more people like this? Neither Sedrick nor Terrany seem all that terribly bright, but they’re very forthright and direct. They spotted the biggest monster in the world and went after it. While I can’t fault their courage, I might have something to say about their wisdom. Are these kinds of people going to keep showing up every so often?

  Come to that, I do have moderately-smarter assassins trying to kill me, too. Maybe this is just a different layer of the same thing.

  Would a public relations campaign help at all? Maybe. I’ll have to think about that.

  I shut the door to my sand table room and considered the thing. The sand table was a project to create a three-di
mensional display. The spell on the table affected the sand, allowing the table to reshape the sand into any form. If I wanted it to look like something, I just had to visualize what I wanted and the sand would become a sand sculpture of my visualization. Great; that part was easy.

  I also wanted to use a scrying spell to provide that visualization. That was trickier, but it sort of worked. The scrying spell, linked to the sand table, could make the sand change its form and shape to match whatever the scrying spell “saw.” The problem was a complete lack of depth. What you saw in the sand was a sand sculpture of a picture. It was a fantastic sand sculpture, and I was proud of that, but it was a much lower-resolution image than just looking through the scrying spell. On the plus side, it did allow for a lot of spectators.

  The really complicated bit was using multiple scrying spells at the same time. Three of them, looking at the same place from three different angles, should make the sand stand up in a full, three-dimensional representation.

  That part wasn’t working so well.

  I could get it to work, after a fashion, but it required a lot of finicky calibration every time I cast the scrying spells. They had to be in an exact alignment and orientation or the focus went all to hell. If two of them were aimed at, say, a particular rock in a field and the other one was only a little bit off from that rock, it ruined the whole image. Instead of grass, you had fuzzy sand. Instead of a tree, you had a cloud of sand. Instead of two men fighting beside the tree, you had a whirling mass of sand.

  It was disheartening, at least until I had my idea.

  What I was trying to develop was a single spell, albeit one more complicated than a normal scrying spell. Instead of opening one scrying portal, it opened three, pre-aligned, so there was no finicky focusing issue. The only problem was adjusting the controls of the spell to place the scrying sensors along the three axes from the focal point.

  See, if I want to look at a… a house, for example, I can cast the three-dee spell and a sensor appears at each point of a triangle around and above the house. The sand table produces a real-time model of the house and grounds. It doesn’t matter that I can’t actually see the focal point; the sensors are all aligned at an imaginary point inside the house.

  Now, if I want to zoom out, each of the sensors has to be moved back an exactly identical distance along that line from the focal point to the sensor, retaining that precise orientation on that focal point. It makes zooming in or out a royal pain. But, if I can get it to do that, I can zoom in or zoom out with my Sand Table of Scrying and use it to display a whole city in real time. We can walk around the thing, examine it from every angle, and so on.

  Now for the really hard part. Changing focus.

  Say I want to zoom out from just looking at the house. Then, seeing something interesting come into view, I want to zoom in on that. This involves moving everything, while keeping it in precise alignment and orientation. It’s kind of like holding a pair of mirrors and walking around a room while keeping the light reflected from the mirrors focused on a point on the floor.

  Now strap a third mirror to your forehead and still keep all the reflections aligned. Good luck.

  It can be done. I just haven’t hammered out a spell that will do it, yet. I thought it would be extremely useful to have such a thing working if I was going to look all along the road from Mochara to Baret, so I got to work on it.

  Sunset caught me still working on it. I worked out a way to get two of them to sync up, but adding a third kept causing catastrophic interference and disintegrating the spells. There’s a fundamental flaw in my spell algorithm, somewhere; I just don’t know what it is, yet. I will find it. I’m immortal. I’ll get it eventually.

  But sunset reminded me that I had other things to do.

  One good thing about being King. When I post a note of Do Not Disturb on the door, people don’t disturb me. I can work on a project in peace without email, text messages, or personal visits. Even better, I have friends who not only are authorized to do stuff for me, but are willing to handle things that I don’t need to and shouldn’t have to.

  I had a waterfall-shower before Tort, Thomen, and Kelvin gave me a quick rundown of the day. There were the usual minor things—scuffles, a bit of thievery, changes in guard rotation, progress of different knights-in-training, nominations for the next in line for knighting, that sort of thing.

  Tort’s body language was so pronounced, I actually noticed it. She sat with Kelvin between her and Thomen. She still leaned away from him, even tried not to look at him except when she had to.

  Her aura, or her spirit, or her soul—the lights inside her that make up who she is—were still glowing with a gentle, peaceful, even a serene glow, completely at odds with her behavior. That made me suspicious and, sure enough, when I looked for a spell, there it was. It was a clever thing, disguising her inner self. I decided not to comment on it.

  Thomen, for his part, seemed perfectly calm and collected, even cold. Inside, though, he was a bundle of seething energy just looking for someone and an excuse to unload on them. This is not a good situation for a wizard. It can cause unpredictable results.

  We finished our business quickly and I asked the King’s Wizard to attend me for a moment. Tort looked curious, but left with Kelvin.

  I didn’t waste breath on pleasantries.

  “Out with it.”

  “My King?” he asked.

  “You’ve been on edge and upset for most of the time I’ve known you. Are you just naturally an angry man? Or is something bothering you?”

  He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers, thinking. I let him. I’m immortal. I can afford to wait. Besides, if his posture was a ploy to indicate calm, it failed; his fingertips were pressed together so hard they were white around the edges.

  “Has Your Majesty, perhaps, discussed this matter with the King’s Magician?” he asked, finally.

  “No, and I don’t plan to. Why? Does it have something to do with her? Some sort of friction between the wizard’s guild and the magicians?”

  “No, no; not that. Not exactly.”

  I put my feet up on the table, crossed my ankles. Since the chair had a low back, I laced my fingers behind my neck and leaned back a bit. It wasn’t actually at all comfortable, but as long as it looked as though I was settled in…

  “I can wait.”

  “May I ask Your Majesty if the Lady Tort has mentioned me?”

  “You can always ask me stuff. But no, she hasn’t. Not in any personal sense; we’ve talked about you in regard to your position as the King’s Wizard of Karvalen and Master of the Guild, of course. I’m very pleased with you and she agrees that you are the perfect man for the job.”

  “She would,” he muttered.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “She would agree with you if you told her the sky was orange, Sire.”

  “I doubt that,” I replied, but thought about it. “For the record, she suggested to me that you were the perfect man for the Court Wizard position. I agreed with her recommendation,” I told him. “As far as agreeing with me about the sky, though… She might believe me that I saw it as orange, then try to figure out why I saw it that way.”

  “Perhaps. Yes, I suppose you are correct. I did not state that well, I now see.”

  “But you find her agreement with me to be disturbing?”

  “No, it’s… that is…” he trailed off.

  I waited while he thought about it some more.

  “Majesty, may I ask a personal question?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you feel… that is, what is your relationship with Tort? With the King’s Magician, I mean.”

  “She’s one of my oldest friends. Briefly, she was like a daughter to me. Now, all grown up, she’s one of my most trusted advisors. Why?”

  “Perhaps Your Majesty is aware of my former relationship with her?”

  “Not in so many words, no. I got the impression there was one, but nobody ever came out and t
old me about the two of you. Were you two together?”

  “Not ‘together,’ at least, not as most would mean it,” he admitted. “She and I had a… physical relationship. We enjoyed each other’s company, and companionship, and intimacy.”

  I put my feet down and sat up. My neck thanked me.

  “That’s not normally a problem.”

  “I suspect, my King, that I felt something she did not.”

  “Ah. And she’s not… all that accommodating, now?”

  “That could be one way to phrase it, yes.”

  “Why do you suppose that is?”

  He looked at me with the sharpest glance I’ve seen in a while. It didn’t actually cut me, but he took another shot at it with his tone.

  “Does Your Majesty jest?”

  “Often. Nobody gets my jokes, though. Cultural context, I think.”

  “What?”

  “Exactly. But no, I’m not kidding. If there’s a problem between you and Tort, I want to know what it is.”

  “Very well,” he said, frostily. “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think my relationship with Tort precludes her having a relationship with you?”

  “She explained it quite clearly.”

  “Oh? What did she say? —I’m not doubting you, but sometimes when women talk, they say one thing and we hear another. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s just the way we are.” That made Thomen pause and actually think about it. That sort of thing does happen with depressing regularity, and he knew it.

  “She told me in no uncertain terms that, while she was fond of me and generally pleased with me, she felt that, with your return to Karvalen, that she would best serve her King by devoting all her attention to him. To you.” He sounded bleak. He looked bleak. His insides looked bleak.

  “I see.” I thought I saw. “Tell you what… try to think of me as her father, Thomen. I rescued her when she was a little girl and saw to it that she would have a life, so I have a strong interest in her well-being. What are your intentions toward my adopted daughter?”

  His mouth opened and closed a few times before he answered.

  “I love her,” he said, finally.