Nightlord: Shadows

by Garon Whited

  Somehow, I didn’t think she was interested in taking a walk with the Grey Lady. Personally, I didn’t want her to, either. Tianna needs her mother, and I don’t want to lose my daughter. If she’s got a body I can put her back into, I decided, she’s going back into it.

  “You go over by Bronze,” I shouted, pointing. “You wait right there!”

  “I want to help!”

  “Good!” I shouted at her. “Concentrate really hard on not letting Grandpa catch on fire!”

  Tianna looked at me with an expression of surprise and something like fear.

  “You can’t burn, Grandpa!”

  “I hope not, but help me, okay?”

  “Okay!”

  She’s a good kid. She screwed up her face in an expression of intense concentration and I hoped that whatever she was doing would help. I jogged over to Sparky’s statue and looked up at it.

  “Do you give a damn?” I asked.

  Without waiting for an answer, I went back into the fire to find Amber.

  Her body was, of course, lying in the exact center of the flaming pillar, half-sunk in the molten floor. I still couldn’t see anything, but I could touch her. There was no heartbeat, and certainly no breathing. Still, I checked for stab wounds with my fingertips, searching for anything that might have hit a vital organ. If it was something I could weld together, maybe I could restart her body and put her back into it.

  Nothing here, nothing there, nothing in the other place… and then I tracked up her spine, felt the hole at the base of her skull. It was made by something with a long, narrow blade, much like the one that got me; the difference was that it penetrated her upper spine and probably went into her brain.

  And now her spirit was loose. She was definitely dead. Just… not quite gone.

  Oh, this is so not going to go well.

  I shouted for her, backing it with my mind and will, careful to keep the majority of my concentration on being not-burning.

  “Amber!”

  She screamed at me, clearly not quite herself. I felt buffeted and rocked by the writhing currents of fire as she looked at me, swirled and flowed around me. There was no sense of additional heat, just the buffeting. It knocked me down, rolled me through the molten floor, swept me around in the pillar of fire. I sank my hands into the glowing rock and scooped, set my toes into the floor and held. Eventually, I slid to a halt and could concentrate on other matters.

  If her spirit was still here, maybe it could be stabilized enough to talk to. It might be the only way to calm her plasma-ghost down enough to do anything constructive.

  Is this normal for a dying fire-witch? I’ve only ever seen Tamara, and she wasn’t exactly a fire-witch at the time. Does this sort of display happen every time a fire-witch dies? It would help explain why they were generally poorly-tolerated in most communities. Or is it only when they die by violence? Or did splashing Amber’s soul with the spirit-blood of Sparky have something to do with it? Or is it a combination of things?

  I don’t know. Maybe I never will. Add it to the list.

  I focused entirely on that peculiar portion of my sight that allowed me to see the soul. Eyes open or closed really didn’t matter. It’s not really seeing that reveals a soul. It’s not feeling it, nor tasting it. It’s simply there, and that knowledge comes to me in a fashion my brain most often interprets as seeing.

  She was there, cut loose from everything, like a kite with a hundred strings loose in a whirlwind.

  The image of her struck me forcibly. That’s what I look like when I have a cloud of dark tendrils surrounding me. More of them, yes, and dark rather than light, but the image was so similar… Is there some sort of relationship? Or is it just a coincidence that it looks a lot alike?

  Again, not the time. I grabbed strings, tying them off and tying them together. I didn’t have a living body for her; even if we weren’t dealing with a burning pillar of fire, I couldn’t put her body back into working order. Well, maybe, with time to experiment, but not right now.

  The loose anchor points of her soul were, one at a time, simple things to handle. Grabbing one, I could wrap it around and around, tie it off, and stabilize it. I already did something like that with my chlorine curse…

  Amber’s soul was considerably more complicated than a shark spirit, of course, but at least I had the principles down. I wrapped her around and throughout her fiery pillar, squeezed it smaller, and bound it tightly. Then I took another anchor point, another aspect of her soul, and wrapped another portion of it around and through that seething, pyrotechnic hell. I repeated it again, and again, and again; one strand at a time, one link, one channel, one anchor, each bound around and though and back into it all again.

  I didn’t hurry, but I did work quickly. How long until dawn? Long enough? Maybe. Maybe not. I have no idea how much time I took, or what would happen if I was interrupted before I finished. Could I stop and finish after sunrise? Could I do anything like this during the day? It seems unlikely; many of my powers only work at night.

  No time wasted. That was the rule. Concentrate on denying the flames and take one strand at a time.

  Somewhere along the process, Amber started to talk to me.

  Father?

  Yes. Hush. Working.

  What’s going on?

  Talk to Firebrand, I snapped, my concentration teetering. Busy!

  I was vaguely aware of her and Firebrand holding a conversation, but I had no attention to spare.

  At last, I finished tacking the final thread into the woven pattern of her fiery matrix. A lady of flame—a real Lady of Flame—stood on the molten floor of what was once a stone building. Slumped walls of smoking rock slowly solidified around us and I realized I was more than knee-deep in goo. Hot, smoking, slowly-solidifying goo.

  With some effort, I managed to extricate myself. Amber, meanwhile, stood there, brilliantly bright and rippling, holding up her hands and examining them.

  I touched Firebrand to the floor; heat surged through the floor and up into the blade as Firebrand absorbed it. The floor solidified, darkened, cooled. I toed it cautiously and it felt solid. I tried to let go of my concentration on flame-negation but found that some portion of my mind seemed locked into that role. It was like trying to not think about something… no, it was exactly like that, because that’s what I was. I decided to not worry about it; I’d notice if anything started to scorch.

  “All right,” I said, looking at my flaming daughter, “tell me what happened.”

  “I… I’m not sure,” she said. Her voice sounded familiar, but there was a rushing sound as an undertone, a cross between a throaty whisper and the sound of air being sucked into a furnace. “I don’t… I don’t feel well at all…”

  “I’m not surprised. I’ve never done this with an actual soul. I probably need to do some fine-tuning on your linkage points.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve done something I don’t know how to do; I may not have it completely right. But you’re better and I’ll work on making sure you’re perfect. In the meantime, what’s the last thing you remember?”

  “A man came to see me… pounded on the door, said it was an emergency… I let him in… he talked about a Thing that attacked his daughter… I started to go back upstairs to dress… A pain went through my head like the worst headache in the world… I fell across a bench. Tianna screamed, and I tried to get up, but nothing worked. I couldn’t feel anything but the headache, and then I… I felt myself… I couldn’t feel my body, but I could see it, and I couldn’t get into it…”

  “Yeah, I have some idea how that feels. I’d hug you, but you’re not too terribly solid. Sorry about that.” Now that I was no longer concentrating so hard, I could take the time to consider what happened and start to feel angry. Amber had a head start on that, but I suspected I might be about to close the gap.

  “What did you do?” she asked, her shining face showing the first signs of alarm.

  “I’ll explain
in a flicker. What happened to the guy who stabbed you?”

  “I don’t know. I was stabbed?”

  I examined her body. Dammit, she was half-buried in the now-solidified floor. Still, it was facedown; the stab wound was quite plain. She knelt by the body—her body—with me and looked at it. . Getting it out of the floor, later, was going to be tricky. I don’t know why it didn’t burn in the fiery display; Amber wasn’t in it to defend it. Or was her body immune to her own soul-fires? No, then the molten floor should have burned it anyway. Another thing to wonder about.

  “Who did this?” she asked, and her voice sounded as though someone was going to burn for it. I agreed in principle, if not in detail.

  “I have no idea, but I would bet money that he died after doing it. This is a fatal wound and almost instant. If you blew up as quickly as I’d guess you did, he didn’t get away. Do all fire-witches blow up like that?”

  “No. I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”

  “There you go, being exceptional again. Good work, daughter mine.”

  “You jest. But I am still… angry. Upset. Disturbed. I am… not entirely… me.”

  “You’re you,” I assured her. “I know you; I bound your soul into a pillar of divine fire so that you could shape it into your new body. You are entirely yourself. My main concern, right now, is finding the ghost of an assassin, if I can, before dawn.”

  “You have very little time,” she offered. “Dawn will be here shortly.”

  “How do—nevermind. Thank you for the warning. Excuse me.”

  I unwrapped tendrils with considerable malicious intent. If I had done so before, would they have been incinerated as quickly as I could spread them? Or would they have survived because of my defenses? Regardless, I could use them now, hunting for whatever might remain of an oxidized assassin. There was nothing to be found in the immediate area, though. Could Amber have blasted him into oblivion, both body and soul? It was a quasi-divine manifestation of power, so it was possible. I hoped not. I wanted to have a very brief vampire-to-prey talk with him.

  We walked out of the ruin of the building. All around us, the town was smoking slightly, but everything that was burning had stopped.

  Firebrand?

  Wasn’t me, Boss. I can only put out fires by making things burn faster and eating it.

  I spotted Tianna. She was sitting on Bronze, wrapped in my cloak, and looking smug. Her face broke into a huge smile when Amber’s flaming form drifted into view behind me, pretending to walk.

  “Mom!”

  Bronze, at Tianna’s urging, walked toward us. Amber held out her fiery hands and clasped Tianna’s.

  “You’re not solid,” Tianna complained.

  “It was the best I could do,” I explained. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Grandpa. She’s pretty.”

  I’m sure every mother wants to hear that a radical change in her physical form is “pretty.”

  “Good. I’ll be right back.” While they talked, I hurried in a circles, spiraling outward, tendrils fanning rapidly outward, sweeping through walls, people, wood, stone, metal…

  There you are!

  Tendrils grabbed, seized, and dragged. The wandering spirit was suddenly bound in dark lines of power and suspended directly before me. I stood in the street and glared at a confused and panicky ghost. Exhausted and sooty people spared enough energy to look at me curiously. They only saw me, standing in the street, illuminated only by a few wizard-lights and scattered lanterns.

  I then realized I was still naked. Fine. Let them watch; I was in a hurry. My victim’s spiritual cohesion was already degrading. Unlike Amber, he was still coming apart. Also unlike Amber, he wasn’t about to get any help.

  “Who sent you?” I demanded.

  “Sent me? I was in the dungeon… I don’t know how I got here.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” I snapped, but I could see he was telling the truth. He believed what he was saying.

  “I’m not lying. I just don’t… I wasn’t here. I was in a dungeon, on a table, and there was a dark thing that touched me, and it was cold…”

  “Yes? And then what?”

  “There was something cold inside me,” he said, shuddering. “It was so cold, and I couldn’t keep awake. I fell asleep, I think, even though I was afraid I was freezing to death, but I couldn’t care, it was so cold… and there was something moving inside me, making me even colder.”

  I nodded. Someone had summoned a Thing from beyond the edge of the world, one without a physical form, and sent it into this poor guy’s body.

  Keria! That black mist that burst from her! That’s what that was; a Thing that inhabited her, possibly controlled her! It might even have destroyed her in the process of leaving her flesh—that dark-looking fire-effect that consumed her. Was that deliberate, to keep her from being free, or from talking to me, or just a result of the Thing leaving her?

  And the assassin who stabbed me; he was possessed by a Thing, as well.

  Even I can see a pattern, here.

  That magician, Rakal, was the professional demon-summoner. I wanted to talk to him at some length. He had a lot to answer for. I might not feel justified in venting on this poor sucker in my tendrils, but Rakal was another story.

  I had a flashback to Tobias. This was different; trying to kill Amber or Tianna makes it personal. Rakal was asking to die. I was in a mood to oblige him.

  “Where were you?” I demanded, just as the itching, tingling feeling of a sunrise started.

  “It was a dungeon, with candles and strange—”

  “No! What city?” I asked, shaking the ghost a trifle.

  “City?”

  “Yes. What city were you in? Whose dungeon?”

  “It was the magician’s dungeon,” he said, and I wanted to slap him. “It was in the city of Shaen. I was a soldier when Byrne attacked, and I was captured when they forced their entry—”

  “Yes, fine, great, thanks. Temple of the Grey Lady is that way,” I suggested, pointing. “Get going.”

  “Am I dead?” he asked. Just my luck, the guy was too confused even to get help. Well, I didn’t have time to escort him, but I did have time to eat him. I gulped him down in a hurry and he vanished into me. Then I ducked into the nearest quasi-intact building to hide from the sunrise.

  Thursday, July 22nd

  I cleaned up and came out of the shack that had sheltered me from the dawn. After a brief walk, I found Amber, Tianna, and Bronze. They had relocated to the now-empty area that had once been the equivalent of skid row. Wise, I thought; there wasn’t anything there for Amber’s new fire-flesh to burn. It also allowed Amber to address people from the vantage of Bronze’s broad rump. They remembered to bring my stuff; I decided to stand in the back and wait while Amber talked to the crowd.

  Bronze likes Amber, I think. Either that, or she’s very understanding about my father-ish tendencies toward her.

  Amber explained what happened to the gathered crowd. She went on about the wrath of the Lady of Flame at having her priestess killed, and then pointed at me.

  “But my father is a Lord of Night,” she said, “and he decided that I should not die.”

  A lane opened up like Moses pointing at the Red Sea. Wild, wide eyes stared at me for seconds, then people rippled downward to one knee, heads bowed, hands raised to hide their eyes.

  I wondered what the gesture meant. I guess I haven’t eaten enough modern locals to know. Maybe they just didn’t want to embarrass me by staring.

  I headed down the lane and rejoined my ladies.

  “Father? Did you find the ghost?”

  “I did. He was possessed by a demonic Thing, I think,” I told her. I also started getting dressed. “My guess is that the magician Rakal is responsible, at the behest of Byrne.” I gestured at the bowing crowd. “What’s going on?”

  “Gods made themselves manifest, last night,” she said, quietly. “They are frightened and in awe.”

  “Can’t say I
blame them,” I muttered. “I’ll talk to the stone about putting your house back together while it’s building the city hall. How do you feel?”

  “Aside from being a trifle incorporeal—I have more substance than a normal flame, but I am not solid—and all that seems to entail, I feel… I suppose a bit…” she made circling gestures with her hands, leaving faint trails of light. “Feverish?” she guessed. “Everything seems distant. Loose. Like I am watching myself do things. As though I’m not really here.”

  “Yeah, I mentioned there might be some bad connections. I’ll look at you again as soon as I can and see if I can figure out where I went wrong.”

  “I think I am pleased. I cannot tell.”

  “Hmm. That sounds like another symptom. If you notice any others, let me know.”

  “How? The mirror is destroyed.”

  “Crap. Okay, I’ll get you another one. Have you had a chance to see how Mochara is taking this?”

  “Scorched, but not seriously damaged,” Amber told me. “There is mostly exhaustion and some injuries, with a bit of property damage immediately adjacent. A few fires spread, but they were quenched by buckets and by Tianna. The buildings will be rebuilt. The burns will heal. I will see to it, if I last so long.”

  “Please do. But I need Bronze; I have to get back to the mountain.”

  “Of course. You have a war to plan.”

  “Possibly. That’s one of the things I need to discuss with my council, and maybe my knights.”

  Amber stepped off Bronze and drifted downward, about like a person sinking in water.

  “Go, Father. I will tend to these matters.”

  I helped Tianna down and held her for a moment, still wrapped in my cloak.

  “You did a fantastic job,” I told her. “Thank you. You helped me help your mother, and then you did what everyone in Mochara needed you to do. Best of all, you helped people without anyone needing to tell you. I’m very proud of you.”

  She stood very straight within my cloak and looked proud of herself.