Knightfall: Book Four of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

So take one. Find some universe with mobs of mangy rat-men and cut them to pieces until you feel better.

  “I was thinking more in terms of sandy beaches, slow music, and air conditioning.”

  Fine! Let me stay with Bob while you go goof off. He’ll kill things, at least, while you’re recovering from being an emotional shipwreck. Give my regards to Johann, by the way, when he finally sucks you through a gate.

  “Damn. I forgot. It’s been a while since he tried it.”

  Here. How long has it been over there? Oh, and how long will you be on this vacation? Ten seconds? Or ten thousand years?

  “There are times when I hate your reptilian bluntness.”

  Draconic, Firebrand corrected. Reptile-like, but far superior.

  “More intelligent, certainly.”

  Sometimes even smarter than you, Boss.

  “So I’ve noticed.” I thumped the back of my head against the floor and ground the heels of my hands into my eyes. I growled.

  So? What do you want to do?

  “I’m thinking about it. Give me a minute.”

  I stepped into my headspace.

  My mental study was its usual mess. I circled the desk and sat down. I had serious thinking and emotional housekeeping to do.

  Everything in my mental study is a representation of an idea. A feeling, a memory, a fact, an opinion, whatever. These are treated as physical objects by the larger construct of my study. While I’m in my study, I can search my memory, sort my feelings, even wad things up and throw them away.

  The hatch leading down to the basement is the exception, obviously. The things living in my unconscious mind are not to be trifled with, but that’s fair. I’m not to be trifled with, either. I’m still not opening the thing.

  I wonder. Should I build an airlock? Can I let a few of the things up into my consciousness, deal with them, recover from the fight, and then handle a few more? Is it possible to work out some of my mental problems that way? Or would consciously destroying my mental demons drive me insane? For many people, motivation comes from the things we fear or hate or regret. If we didn’t fear, didn’t hate, didn’t regret, would we still be ourselves? Would we still have the drive to accomplish, the will to do?

  There’s a project for later. I had enough to do with the things lying around the room.

  Step one: clear a shelf for Tort. While all these memories—happy and sad—are lying around the room, the place is too cluttered to get anything done. If I put the memories in order, stack them neatly, and shelve them, I still have them, but they’re not on my mind, as it were.

  Is this what happens in normal people? You lose someone important to you and it affects you deeply. A week later, it’s still on your mind. But a year later, five years later…? Am I doing consciously and quickly what everyone does unconsciously and slowly?

  Hmm. Papers on Lissette, too. And Johann. And all those children of the Demon King. And— well, lots of things. I’m a mess.

  So it’s time to do some filing.

  I keep thinking someday I’ll cross-index everything in my head and be able to remember anything, everything, with just a moment’s thought.

  Nice fantasy. Unless I wire Diogenes into my brain and let him do the sorting and filing, I’ll be a little old vampire in the necromantic final rest home by the time I’m sorted out. A brain is a messy thing to fool with, or one I’m a fool to mess with, depending.

  There are pros and cons of manually filing your own memories.

  Pros. They get sorted out and dealt with immediately. All the time you waste being depressed and mopey and distracted goes away. You get back to your life in a hurry. The memories are always there, whenever you want to pull down the metaphorical scrapbook and flip through it, but they don’t obtrude and invade, making you miserable by forcing themselves into your thoughts. They stay on the shelf instead of littering the desk.

  Cons. It’s a scrapbook. The memories are just that, memories. They’re flat, actual accounts of what you remember, with the vivid colors of your feelings faded to pastels. You fish out a memory and all the emotions you felt at the time, all the associations, all the linkages to everything else that made it a valuable memory are lost.

  If you don’t think that last part is a con, let me give you a for instance.

  I recall a time when a little girl met me at the gate of my castle as I was leaving. I promised her I would be back. She wore a blue dress, had her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, and looked sad. I spoke with her for a bit, promised I would return, and went about my business.

  See? Now it’s nothing more than a memory, a playback of events. Facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts.

  There has got to be a better way. Damned if I know what it is. Damned anyway, for all I know.

  One good thing came of it. I felt better. Some memories are better when they’re stripped down, cooled off, and put carefully away. It removed a lot of things I regretted or felt guilty about. The process also took some chunks out of things I loved, things I missed, and things I hoped, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Every happy thought I filed was mine to file, and took a dozen heart-lashing memories into the stacks with it. I think I quit before the point of diminishing returns.

  Net effect, I have far fewer unpleasant memories, slightly fewer happy ones, and a much higher happy-to-sad ratio.

  Mathematical psychology, anyone?

  I wondered again if I was slowly going insane by monkeying around with my own thinking machinery this way. I still don’t have an answer. I don’t feel insane, but maybe it’s a matter of degree. I’m already a little crazy, so what’s one more step along the road? I only hope I’ll notice when I pass Weirdsville and move into the suburbs of Neurosis City on the way to catch the Psycho train at Crazy Station. Maybe I’ll pick up a copy of the Daily Lunatic to read on the way.

  I wonder if I can find a telepathic psychoanalyst. I wonder what he’d make of my mental furniture.

  The place was still a mess, but I made a sizable dent in the disorder. I still have a lot of unresolved issues and they’re probably going to stay filed under “D” for “Denial” for a while.

  I exited my headspace.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell of scorched flesh. I opened my eyes and sat up.

  Three dead men lay in various states of crushed and burned. The door was closed and Bronze stood in front of it, holding it shut. Something had burned a hole in her chest, angled up and back, to emerge through the saddle area. Fire flickered fitfully from both openings. My first impulse was to attack someone, but she didn’t leave anything alive. I tried to speak calmly.

  “Problem?”

  Bronze snorted. I caught a whiff of anger amid the smoke.

  “Firebrand?”

  Three assassins, Firebrand reported. From what I heard in their heads, they’re Hand.

  “What’s the story with the hole in Bronze?” I asked. I thought I sounded calm. After all, she was only annoyed. The hole didn’t impair her functioning, aside from decreasing the fire pressure if she wanted to breathe it at someone. She wasn’t materially hurt.

  The only thought I caught was about the wand. The guy using it hoped it was worth the price.

  “Any thoughts on where he got it?”

  Some magician, I think. Nothing solid, so I doubt it was someone he actually knew. A business transaction.

  “Fair enough. What did it do?”

  Punched a hole in Bronze. It was intended to kill her so they could use the other wands on you.

  “Other wands?” I moved over to the remains and examined them without touching them. What was left was dog food and fertilizer. Nothing magical stood out, but I did find the crushed and burned remains of three wands among the meat. Sadly, there was no way to tell what spells they once held. “Any idea what they did?”

  One was supposed to strip all the protection off you. The other was to banish you back to the eternal void. That’s all they knew about them, Boss.

  “
Fair enough. How did they know I was here?”

  I don’t think they did. They’ve been in Karvalen for a while, looking for an opportunity. They came down here to check—I get the impression they do that when they think they can get away with it. It was just a matter of time before they ran into you, or you into them. They were pretty surprised when they opened the door and we were actually in here.

  “Did they have any idea how many more like them are wandering around?”

  No, but they’re certain they’re not the only ones.

  I moved to examine Bronze. It was a neat hole, about two inches across in front and a foot across in her back. The edges looked melted, but Bronze told me it didn’t hurt.

  “You’re going to be able to fix this?”

  Of course she could fix it. A couple of days, tops, and I wouldn’t be able to tell she was wounded.

  “All right.”

  I rummaged around in the remains again and found the Hand amulets. One of them was intact; the other two were either melted or crushed. One was enough for my purposes. These had the handsome, fatherly face found on the amulets of a typical Priest of the Light, but the back of the amulet had a clenched fist with stylized rays shooting out from it. I’d have checked for tattoos on their backs, but there probably wasn’t enough left to tell.

  These bastards tried to kill my horse. Admittedly, it was a pre-assassination thing, killing the guardian to get to the target, but this was irrelevant to me. They tried to kill Bronze. That’s what sane people call a bad idea. It pisses off the Guardian Demon.

  “Firebrand, correct me if I’m wrong, but these holy symbol amulet things… priests wear these, right?”

  All the ones I’ve seen, yes.

  “Ever see a random person wearing them? Some run of the mill follower?”

  No. I don’t think it works like that.

  “Good.”

  Boss?

  “Hmm?”

  May I ask what you’re doing?

  “Overreacting, probably.”

  Am I going to like it?

  “No. I’m going to cast a spell and then go see how Mary’s doing.”

  That’s all?

  “That’s all.”

  Uh… okay. You’re making me nervous, Boss.

  “I apologize.”

  That’s different from being sorry.

  “So it is. But, for you, I’ll also admit I regret making you nervous unnecessarily. Better?”

  Yes. Sort of. I think.

  The geode room had a collection of powered crystals. Those might do, but I didn’t want to call more attention to the place. I had a word with the mountain and found a chamber, high up in the palace, near the peak.

  Ah, yes. The hidden workroom where I was summoned out of my own head and temporarily stuffed into a body. That would do fine.

  We went through the passageways in the rock, circling around and up, and I realized Bronze needed some sort of patch on her holes. Avoiding the people still awake at this ridiculous hour of the morning would be difficult enough without walking an open furnace through the halls. We paused and I laid a field of force across the openings as temporary seals. Another pair of spells started tugging the metal inward, helping her normal healing process along. Bandages? Sort of. Maybe closer to stitches. It was something like the spell I use to weld flesh together, but slower and ongoing.

  Weird. I started with a flesh-welding spell and modified it into a bronze-welding spell. It seems as though the development process would run the other way.

  The mountain had the room unsealed for us by the time we reached it. Bronze held the door closed again while I activated the containment diagram and surrounded it with an Ascension Sphere. A couple of power fans increased the power input significantly. I wanted a big charge. What I hoped to do was extremely far-reaching.

  I sat down and visited my mental study again. This time, rather than filing things away, I wanted to dig up some old memories for the precise details. How many isotopes of gold are there?

  All right. The typical isotope of gold is gold one-nine-seven. It’s quite stable, but it can be shifted into an excited state, causing the structure of the nucleus to get a little out of whack. This excited isotope decays via isomeric transition—the protons and neutrons don’t want to be arranged that way, so they shift back into their more-stable arrangement, releasing the energy in the form of a gamma-ray photon.

  So, my Nefarious Plan. Construct a hybrid spell, one to continuously suck in magical power, build up a charge, and fire it off before building up another charge. This involves a power intake, a capacitor to store the charge, and a discharge mechanism to feed the main spell function. Any one of these components is a fair-to-complex spell, but what made them especially difficult was the need to handle massive charges.

  All this is to automate the activation of the main spell. This spell fires off in a combination of shapes. First a sphere, to affect all targets in range. I’m not sure what the spherical range is, but it should be at least a few hundred yards, probably more. The expanding sphere of energy passes through anything it’s not programmed to recognize, seeking targets. Then it grounds out through the targets.

  After the sphere function, it starts firing off in a narrow cone—say, five degrees wide—to drastically increase the range of the effect. This goes, hopefully, to the edge of the world. On the next shot, it shifts four degrees clockwise, making sure to overlap the edge of the previous shot, and fires again. And so on, all the way around.

  The effect is targeted with great precision. It only targets individual instances of amulets like the one I recovered from the religious nutjobs—having one as an example helps enormously. The layer of gold on the back of the amulet is boosted into an excited state—specifically the parts in the shape of the clenched fist and the rays of light. Thus, it can’t affect any other amulet, since they’re flat-backed, without the reverse design. It only works on the holy amulets of the Hand.

  Once these bits of gold are excited, natural processes take over, allowing them to emit gamma radiation in their own good time, irradiating the wearer gradually. Considering where these things rest, they should hit mostly the breastbone and the heart, but there was a good chance for some scatter to the thymus, possibly even the thyroid. None of these are places you want to be irradiated.

  You learn about these things when you study radioactive isotopes in physics and chemistry. It makes lab safety less of a joke and more of a gruesomely serious requirement.

  I had to be careful with the intensity. Unlike neutron radiation—a much harder thing to cause without inducing nuclear fission—gamma rays can cause burns, just as though the amulets were red-hot. My objective was to irradiate the wearers of the Hand medallions over time, not heat up their medallions and force them to take the things off. If they took them off, they wouldn’t get enough radiation dose. I wanted them to stay on so the radiation poisoning could slowly kill every last one of them in a debilitating, hideous fashion.

  The intensity was tricky, but doable. It involved a ground-fault interruption function that did not come easy. When the spell’s effect started to discharge into an amulet, a subroutine cut it off, stopped the power drain into the amulet, leaving the rest of the spell to seek out new targets. This reduced the radiation effect, but spread it out among more amulets, and therefore many members of the Hand.

  Since the spell would appear to any observer to be a simple location spell—“Oh, look, someone found my medallion”—it might be completely unnoticed for years. New members would be initiated, given medallions, and would suffer the same effect. The whole of the Hand, old members and new, could wither away and die.

  Does this count as the death-curse of the Lord of Night?

  I wonder. Could I assemble the spell as a burst, rather than a ray? If the spell was targeted at a point inside a city… no, back up. Could I launch a spell like a missile so the structure of the spell didn’t activate here, but instead traveled to a specific point before activating?
Kind of like a cruise missile, in a way. Rather than setting off bigger and bigger bombs to get targets farther and farther away, can I send the spell somewhere and have it detonate at a specific point?

  Yes, I can. It’s a variation on what I did with the magical spy satellite network, but it’s doable. It’s also harder to determine where it came from, too. Spotting the spell as it detonated wouldn’t be hard at all, but setting up a round-the-clock watch to watch for it as it approached might be unreasonable… no, I take that back. A series of detection spells could be set up around a known target point…

  Still, this method would take longer to track down. I could use the practice on it, too. Maybe I should cut out the death rays and go with the missile version. Of course, that meant I needed to target every major city and town individually, and any out-of-the-way secret temples would be missed entirely…

  Well, crap. Fine, then. I’ll use the death rays instead of the cruise missiles.

  I never realized it was so hard to be a Mad Scientist with a Death Ray. There are so many trade-offs.

  I assembled the spell, test fired it on the medallion I salvaged, and watched through a spectrum-shifting spell. The thing glowed in the gamma range on one side, but it didn’t burn my undead flesh. I did note it felt a trifle warmer to the touch, but I have an inhuman level of sensitivity and was looking for it. I doubted mortal flesh would detect it.

  I also noticed the characteristic itching sensation of regeneration in my hand. That was an excellent sign, both because it implied radiation damage and an ability to recover from it. It made me vaguely optimistic about encountering radioactive materials in the future. Good to know.

  After my tests, I entered the Ascension Sphere and cast the spell again, this time tying the medallion into the spell as a targeting sample—sympathetic magic, you know—and setting up the sequential program. This drained the Sphere, as I planned, but resulted in a spell strong enough to deliver enormous jolts of power.

  Now the thing could charge up over time, do its evil work, and repeat until the end of the world.

  Hmm. I fiddled with it a bit more, adding a counter to the number of times it would fire. A hundred or so full cycles should do it. Anyone surviving the full routine was either protected, out of range, or routinely healed—that last possibility being most likely, I felt, but this was still worth doing. When the spell fired the last time, it wouldn’t stop with just the stored charge, but would run itself out like a regular spell.