Knightfall: Book Four of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  I think our legal customs are off to a good start. At least, I think my changes to the existing legal system are off to a good start. Hopefully, someone will come along who knows what they’re doing and fix all my mistakes.

  Dammit, Jim, I’m a computer scientist, not a lawyer!

  Come to think of it, maybe that’s a good thing.

  I’ve also had some replies to my “invitations” to attend a Grand Council of Nobles. Apparently, dropping a magical iron spear into someone’s foyer and blasting the Royal Command to Appear at high volume is persuasive. Don’t ask me why. We have RSVPs from everyone. I’m sort of pleased.

  The three Banners I sent to Arondael also reported via their mini-mirrors. They’ve seen T’yl; he’s alive and well, just… not permitted to leave. The Magicians’ Council of Arondael has been apprised of his situation and is willing to offer a formal apology for the actions of the magicians responsible for kidnapping my trusted advisor, done without the consent or knowledge of the Council, rogue elements taking it upon themselves, yadda-yadda-yadda.

  Bottom line, T’yl is no longer a prisoner and can come home as soon as he likes. I’ve got the Banners sticking close to him in the meantime. He’ll probably spend a few more days in Arondael, though. He says it’s a very pleasant place when you’re allowed out of your rooms. I look forward to seeing him and making sure he’s who he says he is, he’s unharmed, and hearing his side of things.

  On those fronts, things are going pretty well.

  I also had an elf delivery. I half-expected Salishar; she seemed pretty feminine. But no, it was two I’d never met. It’s possible Bob deliberately chose not to send elves I’ve had prior dealings with. Most of those wound up embedded in the walls and might be afraid of ending up the same way. I can’t say I fault his reasoning, if that’s what it is.

  Their short-form names are Alliasian (ahl-ee-AH-see-an) and Filiathes (fill-I-ah-theez). Their long-form names are shorter than I expected, but it turns out they’re both under a thousand years old—almost children by elf standards. Alliasian was the female and looked decidedly female—curvy in all the right ways. Filiathes was much more masculine, about as masculine as an elf ever gets. He had a stronger jaw than you might expect, broad shoulders, and thicker arms and legs. Still no trace of facial hair and only a minimal amount of body hair.

  They whisked in, wearing their black outfits, walking like dancers to an unheard tune.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I wanted you,” I started, while they were still kneeling and doing the hands-across-the-face thing. They bent forward like grass swaying on the prairie, bowing until their palms touched the floor.

  “Yes, Dread Lord,” they chimed.

  “First off, sit in the chairs and stop doing the hand thing. It wastes my time.” They blew into chairs like fog into a forest. “Second,” I continued, “ask questions. I want your understanding so you can actively assist me.”

  “As you command, Dread Lord,” Alliasian agreed.

  “As I understand it,” I went on, “elves have some trouble reproducing. They steal pregnant human women and work magic on their unborn children to change them into elves. Do you know how to do that?”

  “No, Dread Lord,” Filiathes replied. “We are products of the First Elves and were created by their process. We have not yet been taught to do these things.”

  “Hold it. You’re elves altered from unborn humans?”

  “Yes, Dread Lord.”

  I thought about it for a bit. My original idea was to analyze elves and see if there was a way to artificially cross two elf cells. If I could induce cell division in such a situation, I might be able to provoke a pregnancy response in a female elf’s body by implanting the beginning zygote. Like in vitro fertilization, I suppose, but I’m not a geneticist. Diogenes confirmed the idea could work, at least, but lacks the detailed data I’m trying to get.

  But did I want to work on copies of elves? They started life as humans and were altered. How much were they altered?

  “I seem to have miscommunicated to Bob,” I reflected. “I need First Elves.”

  “Bob is the only First Elf in the undermountains, Dread Lord,” Alliasian pointed out.

  “The only one? Why?”

  “The rest of the First Elves have their own places to hide from the ravages of the world, Dread Lord. In and around the Eastrange, for thousands of years, Bob has produced us, his children.”

  I was suddenly glad I didn’t kill all the invading elves out of hand. If they were Bob’s surrogate children, it might have annoyed him dreadfully. When Keria—or the Thing inside her—sent them to attack Karvalen and kill me, Bob must have been more badly torn than I realized. No wonder Bob was unhappy with Keria’s rule. That’s a lot of work potentially gone to waste. Which, come to think of it, might be part of the reason she locked him up.

  “I see. Very well. I’ll send for Bob again. In the meantime, I intend to examine you both—painlessly, I believe—in order to better understand how to produce elves. Preferably without failing nine out of ten times.”

  “So we were told,” Filiathes agreed, nodding. “We are prepared to endure your scrutiny.”

  So I did. I didn’t find anything overwhelmingly different. Their anatomy and—as far as I could see—biology were pretty much the same as a human’s. Oh, there were things I didn’t recognize, but when I got a couple of humans in to help me out, I compared everyone and came up with only minor differences.

  Elves—well, altered human copies of elves—have the same gross anatomy with some minor alterations. They do have a couple of glands, one up under the brain and one in the chest, just below the throat, which don’t exist in a human. Their sexual characteristics are minimized, much smaller than they should be—reasonable, since they don’t reproduce. Their muscle and nerve fibers are better than a human’s, and the structure of their eyes is almost identical—more rods and cones, more densely packed, but otherwise the same. They have smaller hearts, but the blood vessels in the chest have layers of cardiac muscle surrounding them, with the whole system acting in a sort of swallowing motion, rather than a pumping action.

  Looking much more closely, I watched cells multiply, still hoping to spot differences. Their cells multiply more quickly than a human’s, but also seem to have more steps in the process. After observing for some time, I think their process has more error-checking and a much more stringent fault tolerance. A cell undergoing division is either a perfect replica of the first one, or secondary processes within the cell rip it apart. So their cells replicate more quickly, but the ones that aren’t perfect copies self-destruct. So they heal injuries at about the same speed as a human, but they heal perfectly. I’m not sure if they regenerate lost pieces or not, but they very well might.

  This could be the key to elven immortality. I don’t understand the processes, but I think I’ve figured out what Rendu did to make them immortal. Not how he did it, of course, but if I could find a competent gene-cutter and molecular biologist…

  Something else I noticed—something I feel more qualified to actually have an opinion on—was the spirit inside each elf. They were the complicated, ever-shifting patterns I’ve always seen in elves, but now I know most of them—all of them, except for Bob, apparently—started their existence as human embryos, not as elves.

  Is this what human souls look like when they reach a certain mortal age? Do they become… I don’t know. Do they grow deeper and more complex with time? If you make a man immortal, is this the natural progression of an ancient, embodied soul? Are elven spirits actually souls grown old?

  And have they aged like fine wine? Or like milk? Are they deeper, richer, and wiser? Or are they jaded, callous, and rotten? Until I watch one for a thousand years, I may never know. Metaphysics problems.

  As for the biology problems, all I need to do is compare all these results to Bob, one of the originals, and see how this all fits together. I’ve got examples of humans and human-elf hybrids. Now I need to look at
an elf. A First Elf.

  I wonder how Bob is going to feel about this.

  Friday, March 5th

  Nobody is trying to kill me.

  This makes me nervous.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve enjoyed having time to myself. I’ve caught up on the local death row, sorted out the city geography, reluctantly approved the designs on new coins, argued heatedly about using a decimal money system—nobody seems to appreciate decimal currency. I had to insist, but we worked out a compromise. A hundred years from now, their children will thank me when they don’t have to remember some weird non-system.

  As for converting from one coinage to another, we decided to do it in the most congenial way possible. All new coinage is in the new, decimal system. The Royal Treasury only pays in decimal coinage. We accept any coinage—old system, decimal system, ancient Imperial coins, whatever—but once we have those older coins in our grubby mitts, we melt them down and turn them into the new decimal currency.

  Numismatists everywhere just screamed at me about a government policy obliterating historically significant artifacts. Fortunately, I’m deaf in that range.

  To be fair, the former coinage does try to make sense. Coins had a number of sides corresponding, somehow, to their value. A silver coin with eight sides is larger and thicker than one with six sides, for example, and is therefore worth eight instead of six. It’s a little strange to have no denomination below three, but they used lower-value coins for that. People are used to it, so we stuck with it, sort of. That’s where the compromise comes in.

  For example, one gold trixus is a three-sided coin. It’s worth, effectively, three “gold pieces.” That’s what people are used to. The difference is the thickness and size. Now it’s worth thirty “silver pieces,” or three silver dectates—the largest silver denomination. A quarton is a square and can be traded evenly for four silver dectates, and so on.

  This denominational thing gets impractical with too many sides, though, so we stopped at ten. There are nine-sided coins, but the ten-unit coins are circular. Anything higher really shouldn’t be a coin; they start getting thick, too, since the amount of metal in them is also the value of the coin.

  Money and trade are vital to an economy. Hopefully, in the long run, this will help.

  Among other things that will help, I’ve had time to set up a real gate in my old gate room, the one with the pool. The mountain extruded an archway for me; I thought it only polite to make use of it. While I was down there, I also mentioned to it how I’d like some other sizes, spaced around the room.

  I’m pleased with the arch, though. It’s an actual enchantment, not just a spell with extra batteries. This thing can be used until the charge runs out completely without damaging it. Put power in it and it will fire right back up. I incorporated a mirror for targeting purposes, as well, complete with palace scryshield attunement and similar security features.

  I should look into making a mirror to scry outside the universe. It would help a lot to see where I’m going before I actually open a gate.

  Something I did not expect was the mountain taking initiative. My old gate room—not the one upstairs we used for moving troops to Mochara—is circular, with vertical walls for ten or twelve feet, before it arches into a hemispherical dome. The shape of the place hasn’t changed, but the décor is altering. I noticed bright, twinkly lights in the dome of the ceiling, then looked more closely. The points of crystals—I don’t know what sort—are starting to poke out of the stone. They’re most pronounced at the very top and less so as they descend, but there are hundreds or thousands of the things already visible. It’s like the mountain is turning my old gate room into the inside of a geode.

  Which, come to think of it, might not be a bad idea.

  Did the mountain see what I was doing in the upper gate room and start replicating it? Or, rather, provide for me to keep doing what it saw me doing? I don’t think it can actually understand what’s happening on and around and inside it. I never get a sense of intelligence when I merge my consciousness with it. But, since I do occasionally mind-meld with my pet rock, does it have some leftover patterns from my consciousness, like echoes of my intentions, helping to determine what it does or does not do?

  As far as I know, it doesn’t create piles of coal, iron, gold or anything else when random people ask it to. I know I don’t want it to, and maybe it knows that—or, rather, that prohibition is part of its nature, now.

  Things like these worry me, and I’ve got enough worries as it is.

  As for the rapidly-becoming-a-geode room, I probably ought to put some diagrams on the floor, not only for power, but for tuning. Something like the thing the Hand did, back in Telen. Maybe, if I can bring back some artifacts of any world I visit, I can plug them into the diagram—well, place them in containment circles—so the gate can pick up the signature of the correct universe from them. Or I could go all-out and make a while actually in a universe I want to revisit. The shape of the key is merely symbolic, but symbols are important in magic. Imprinting the signature of the universe it represents might make it that much easier to use the gate.

  It bothers me, a little, to think of doing things the way the Hand did it. It shouldn’t, but it does. Just because the bad guys were using a particular technique doesn’t mean it’s a bad technique. But the idea still bothers me.

  On a brighter note, I’ve done a lot more work on my inertia-shedding spell, too—all the revisions and reengineering go much more quickly in my mental study. I think I’ve got it sorted out and pretty darn slick. I’ve also had a chance to practice with it a bit. I needed the practice, because if I dial it up all the way, I fall over.

  See, people keep their balance by sensing the beginnings of a tilt and correcting it. We drift a little bit off vertical and adjust to compensate, constantly. Without inertia, I don’t just start to drift; I accelerate instantly to maximum speed. There’s no such thing as “starting to lean.” It’s always “plummeting that direction” at my terminal velocity in this air density. Even if I catch myself with speed-of-dark reflexes, I can’t simply push myself upright no matter how hard I shove. With no tendency to continue moving, I can only extend my arms—and stop. I have to get my feet under me, stand straight up, and preferably lean on a wall. As soon as I try to walk, the floor flips up and I’m lying down again.

  I can’t hop, jump, or do anything else if it doesn’t involve actually pushing on something or dragging along with friction. I’m not sure if I look stupid, clumsy, or drunk, but the best I can do is a slow, careful shuffle, keeping my center of gravity directly over my feet. It doesn’t last long, either. The moment I lose it, down I go.

  It's worse than wearing roller skates on an icy driveway ankle-deep in lube.

  On the other hand, hitting the floor doesn’t hurt. I simply stop. Without inertia, there’s no tendency to keep moving, so there’s no force to the impact. Momentum doesn’t exist, so I wind up simply lying there with an opportunity to contemplate the error of reducing a fundamental factor of motion to zero, or close enough to be imperceptible.

  Full inertialess is a royal problem. Fortunately, I don’t think I need the full-power version. Ten percent of normal is usually enough so I can corner effectively—meaning, at high speed without falling over. It messes with my reflexes, though. As with so many other physical things I’d like to look cool doing, I need to practice, practice, practice, then do that thing where you practice. Maybe I should practice, too. Between practices. And I should find time to get some experience, to boot.

  I’ve also had to expand the spell a little, forming a layer around the subject to include some air. Without it, a too-rapid movement can break the sound barrier and create a whipcrack of noise. Low-inertia air molecules zip around my hand or sword much faster than they’re supposed to, filling in the empty space more rapidly and preventing sonic booms.

  It’s also kind of weird to attack a target while low on inertia. Firebrand relies on being a big, heavy object
with an edge. It hacks and chops, relying—at least in part—on momentum to damage the target. When Firebrand hits with all the force of cardboard wrapping-paper tube, it gets frustrated. I’ve had to practice more piercing and slashing techniques with it—not always easy with a straight blade. The trick is to hit the target and drag the edge along, still pressing into it. This cuts using strength and pressure, not momentum.

  Firebrand is also working on focusing a line of superheated air along the edge, making it more of a plasma cutter than a sword. It’s a tiring technique for Firebrand, but if it feels better by doing it, I’m not going to discourage it.

  Bronze also has some upgrades. I got her silencing bracelets revamped—haha—and now they include a sort of traction enhancement. Think of it as magical, intangible spikes. They won’t hurt anything, just sort of temporarily grab everything. Her hoof comes down, intangible magical spikes shoot in all directions to get a grip on whatever she’s walking on, and then vanish as she starts to lift her hoof. That’s a little bit wrong, but a good way to think about it. It actually defines a locus on contact with a surface and tries to hold the hoof in relative proximity within the reference frame. Pick whichever explanation makes more sense to you.

  It’s not strong enough to go up a wall, but it should help with things like mud, slick pavement, steep inclines, and my personal bane, cornering. Maybe I should make some boots.

  Yes, I’m distracting myself. I’m waiting for several things to happen, but mostly I’m antsy about Sedrick’s report on Kamshasa and Tort.

  Tort.

  She’s down there somewhere. I don’t want to show up in a foreign country and start randomly bothering people. I don’t know the language, the customs, or my way around. Sedrick seems good at that stuff—at least, he knows more about Kamshasa than I do.

  I called him today. He’s still looking, but hopeful he’ll have something to report in a day or two.