Knightfall: Book Four of the Nightlord series

by Garon Whited

  I hung Firebrand on her saddlehorn and raised a shield around them both. It wasn’t much, as shields go, but it was meant for one specific purpose. Firebrand reported an almost-complete muffling of the distant thunder and retracted its earlier comments about magical horses.

  I went back to the master suite and found Mary snoozing on the bed. Did I dare have a nap? Johann was dead, all the magicians in Karvalen were there, in Karvalen, and the only thing likely to bother me was some random magi in this world. Even that was unlikely with the magic-disrupting effects currently detonating. Their shockwaves echoed around the world, doubtless annoying minor practitioners dreadfully.

  I’m paranoid—justifiably so. I cast another shielding spell, this one against mental phenomena, and set it to act as a wake-up call if anything penetrated it.

  Yep, I dared to nap. I was tired.

  The genie screamed, a banshee wail fit to burst eardrums and cause nosebleeds. It shriveled, blackened, fell. When it struck ground, it shattered like a statue of fractured glass, scattering everywhere, cutting the dirt and rocks. The earthen wounds bled, first red, then black, then nothing. Everything dried up, wore down, turned to dust.

  The world was a barren place of dust and shifting sand, flat and featureless, where the wind made ghosts of dust to wander across the empty wastes. The sun shone down with an unholy glare, burning the blackened world.

  I jerked upright, gasping, drenched in sweat.

  I am never sleeping again, I thought. Mary turned over next to me and threw one leg over mine. I lay back on the bed and tried to get my breathing under control.

  Everything seemed so quiet. Did the engines stop? No, I could still feel the steady throb of the paddlewheels turning. I worked my jaw to pop my ears and it hurt. I touched one and my fingertips came away wet with sweat and a trace of blood.

  In the bathroom, I examined myself. Some of what I took for sweat was a slight nosebleed and a trace of blood coming out of my ears. A few words to my daytime reflection and I realized I wasn’t completely deaf, but I had a distinct loss in hearing. This caused a few more words to my reflection, followed by a trio of healing spells—one for each ear and one for my nose. They were minor spells, very focused, but it still took a while to build them in this world.

  Mary came into the bathroom, yawning. She looked like something out of a movie, what with the robe, the loose tumble of hair, the smile. I don’t look so good even on my best day. The most I manage is horrifying. Well, beauty and the beast. She finished waking up in a hurry when she saw me.

  “Are you bleeding?” she asked. I heard her, distantly, as though we were underwater. Trust me; I know exactly how it sounds.

  “Not anymore.”

  “What happened?” She turned my head to examine an ear.

  “I had a bad dream.”

  “You never mentioned this.”

  “First time. Not for a bad dream, but the first time I’ve ever suffered damage from one.”

  “Why? What did you dream?”

  So I told her about it. She shook her head.

  “I don’t have any idea,” she admitted. “Why would this damage you?”

  “I suspect it’s because we’re so close to a nexus, a major one. I may not have done the containment matrices perfectly. Those things pour out so much power they distort reality. Remember what I told you about my hand?”

  “Ah, yes. Did you ever find out what was going on with that?”

  “No. When I flew into the area of the magic-disruption spells, my hand hurt a bit, but it went away. That’s when my enchanted underwear shorted out, too. I haven’t been able to wave myself clean since then.”

  “Pity.”

  “I’ll build another ring. Oh, crap. I just realized I’m wandering around without cloaking spells.”

  “Do you need them? Johann is dead.”

  “Good point. I probably don’t. Nevertheless, I want one. And something for disguise spells. I’ve got a whole laundry list of things I want on me as a matter of routine.”

  “So do it while you’re down at this nexus.”

  I blinked at her. Maybe she is smarter than me, despite what I said about perspectives. Then again, up until a few days ago, I was so focused on killing Johann I might not have been qualified to think about anything else. Then again again, I don’t really want to think about much of anything. I’m tired. Not physically tired, but my soul is weary. I’m definitely taking a vacation.

  “I’ll do that,” I agreed, “if I can find something crystalline to use as an enchantment matrix. Do we have any crystals or gemstones? Gemstones, preferably. Diamonds ought to take the pressure pretty well.”

  “You’re in luck. I have jewelry.”

  “I hate to raid your jewelry box,” I said. She shrugged and smiled.

  “You’ll give me a reason to steal more. Let’s see what looks good on you.”

  Wednesday, February 24th

  We arrived at our nexus point last night, but I didn’t want to start anything so late. It’s a long way down and a long way up again.

  Instead, we made port on Great Abaco Island, preparing for another long trip. Mary discussed crew and staff leaves, promising a lengthy stay in Europe. I added it would probably involve a bonus. This seemed to go down very well. Crew morale rose somewhat. I even saw Captain Tillard smile.

  Mary and I went through her jewelry collection. She expressed surprise and pleasure at some of the ornaments in the box of trinkets. After the third one, I had to ask.

  “You mean you didn’t know this was in here?”

  “I can’t be expected to review every single piece of jewelry,” she protested. “I usually deal in volume, not in the big, unique pieces. I learned my lesson about that in London. Pesky Brits. I didn’t even lay a hand on any of the jewelry, much less get away with any.”

  I refrained from comment.

  There were a number of multiple-gem objects to choose from. Most of the rings were ladies’ rings, not only too small for my fingers but also too fine and fragile. My hands tend to get messy. There was a man’s ring of the right fit which also had a number of gems, but it was a big, gaudy thing. I couldn’t even hide it under gloves.

  We finally settled on a brooch. It was a stylized sunflower, which I thought ironic. The central disk was something dark but glittery, with yellow petals radiating out from it. It didn’t suit me at all, but Mary thought it was perfect and said so through her giggles. I accepted it with a sigh, removed the pin from the backing, magically smoothed the metal out, and pressed it flat against my chest. I could wear it low, under my clothes, even beneath my armored underwear, and no one need ever see it to ask about it.

  “Okay, the student has a question for the wise master,” Mary began.

  “I’ll relay it to a wise master when I find one. In the meantime, I’ll try to answer it if I can.”

  “This thing,” Mary held up another brooch, “has maybe a dozen different stones in it. I get that you can enchant each stone as a separate item. I get that you can enchant the mounting as an item to tie all this stuff together. Aren’t big gems preferable? Doesn’t size matter?”

  “You would know better than I.”

  “Size matters, but so does skill,” she replied. “But I was talking about spells. Does the size of the gem matter?”

  “Only for power storage, not for spell effects.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Here’s the thing. The rigid, regular structure of a crystalline substance is ideal for imprinting a fixed magical construct inside. However, since this happens on a micro-scale—possibly on a quantum scale, but don’t press me for details; I haven’t done my research—it doesn’t need a lot of space. Think of it like data storage. Each tiny crystal is a program stored in a tiny memory module.

  “Size matters—in this specific instance,” I added, cutting her off, “—when you’re talking about power storage. The brooch backing and the largest of the gems comes into play there. The backing, or a wizar
d’s staff, or any other mounting piece acts like an antenna, drawing in ambient magical power when you try to run a program. Since you’re generally touching it, you can feed it power yourself, if you like. The tiny crystal acts like a lens for that power, producing the effect stored inside it. If you’ve got a crystal specifically designed to store power—a completely different order of enchantment—it can draw on that, too.”

  “And the bigger the battery,” Mary said, examining the brooch, “the more often it can fire off spells?”

  “Pretty much. Of course, in Karvalen, a lot of enchantments don’t require battery power. They can work on the ambient energy around. A cleaning spell, a disguise spell, a silence spell… any one of those can run pretty much indefinitely with a suitable power intake. Now, if we’re here, and not near a nexus, we would want several devices for each function, each with its own power crystal. Each would need to rest and recharge.”

  “So they could charge up independently when we’re not using them!”

  “Exactly!”

  “But couldn’t we just use them as spells?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You said we could put our own energies in. We can operate them like spells we cast, only we don’t cast them, we activate them.”

  “Yes, but it’s still going to cost us energy. It’s a trade-off between activating spells and having the strength to go do what you want to do.”

  “Isn’t it always?” Mary agreed, sadly.

  Mary also selected a nice pendant for herself—a bird, done in gold and some dark gems, possibly onyx. It was built around a sizable central stone as the body of the bird. Since her magical inventory went the way of all magical objects anywhere near the bombardment zone, I needed to replace them. While I was at it, I laid a power matrix in the few loose stones we had on hand. You never know when even a small charged gemstone will come in handy.

  Once we picked out our future amulets, Mary and I spent the rest of the day sorting through spells, building the basic frameworks, setting up the power-intake modules, and getting our jewelry ready. With a collection of stones in each object, fitting several different functions wasn’t too hard. My only concern—aside from Mary’s lessons in spellcraft and enchantment—was to make sure the spell structures were built solidly enough to take the enchantment process. There’s a lot of power that goes into making a permanent magical item, and I wasn’t going to do it the gentle way.

  It's possible to build a very low-power enchantment and gradually add power to it, running energy through all the spell structures, leaving behind a mild increase in capacity. It’s kind of like strength training at the gym, or magnetizing something. I’ll go with the magnet metaphor. If you run a magnet over a piece of iron, it gets a little bit magnetic on its own—nowhere near as strong as the original magnet, but at least a little magnetic. Run the magnet over the iron again and again and the iron grows more and more powerful as a magnet. This process can be repeated with an enchanted item for days, weeks, years—as long as one cares to build on it. Eventually, though, you have to close it up, seal it, make it a self-contained unit. After that, it may gain a little strength from constant use, but for all intents and purposes, it’s pretty much as-is. This technique is great for people who don’t have buckets of power lying around, but it’s time consuming.

  The other way is the way I usually do it. I gather up huge masses of power, hammer it into specific shapes, fit the pieces of my spell together, jam it into the object, and seal it up on the spot. This is much faster, but it requires channeling more raw energy than most mortal flesh and bone can endure.

  Someday, I’ll build an enchantment my way and leave it unsealed so I can coax it to even greater power in the traditional way. I suspect, whatever it is, it’ll be impressive. In the meantime, I’ll have to muddle along.

  Mary had some requests.

  “How many spells are we putting in these things?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I know I need a disguise spell, also one especially for my eyes—that’s a complex illusion. I’m definitely including a cleaning spell and, of course, my usual set of cloaking devices. I might add an automatic healing spell, just in case something awful happens to me during the day, and an emergency deflection spell.”

  “How about a Somebody Else’s Problem spell? The one where people see you, but they don’t notice you?”

  “Good thought.”

  “Didn’t you tell me the Demon King also had a shadow-manipulating thing?”

  “Yes, he did. I have an amulet for it down in Bronze’s saddlebags.”

  “Could you duplicate it?”

  “I’m pretty sure I could. Why? Do you want one?”

  “Oh, yes, please!”

  “Let’s experiment a little. I’ve got a variation that works with my shadow, but my shadow is a little unusual.”

  So we worked on it for a while. It was trickier than I thought, but Mary was the one who figured it out. It treated shadows and darkness as objects, rather than a lack of light. Magic does things like that, but I’m never comfortable with it. For example, it’s possible to freeze something with magic. All you do is take the heat out of it. But magic can treat cold not merely as a concept, but as an actual thing. Therefore, one can inject cold into a hot object and it cools down. Same thing with the shadows. A shadow is a place where light doesn’t reach because something blocks it. With magic, shadow is a substance, not a condition, and can be manipulated.

  It took me a while to wrap my head around that. I didn’t like it. The spell worked, but it was so counterintuitive—for me—that I took a few aspirin and worked another healing spell. I can sort of see how people think about it. Hot is hot, cold is cold—opposites of the same thing. All my training on the matter views heat as a form of energy and cold as lower levels of energy. Mary, on the other hand, had no trouble with it.

  For magic, it’s all about the alchemy. Earth, air, water, fire… hot and cold, light and dark, sound and silence… things you can see or touch or sense. Sometimes I think I would understand how to fly, or walk through walls, or any of the weird spells magicians use if I could stop thinking like a physicist and start thinking like a… a… a poet.

  Yeah. Blind spot. Doesn’t help to know it.

  At least my ears were working all right again.

  The cable paid out rapidly as I sank. Thud to the bottom, glorp in the mud, shluck-shluck-shluck as I slogged along to the nexus, scaring strange fish the whole way.

  I thought it was easy to find on my first visit. Now, the glare of my spells was visible even before I hit bottom. It reminded me rather forcefully of the heart of the mountain and the intolerable blaze of forces there. I really should add some more layers to its conversion spell structure…

  It took a while for my senses to adapt to the brightness. When they did, still squinting and shielding my eyes, I hunted around for the power taps and turned them off. The disruption spell fired again and went into standby mode, powered down. I blinked for a bit, waiting for the magic-sensitive part of my eyes to adjust.

  The enchantments went like clockwork. Come to think of it, most of my magic is very clockwork-ish, very rigid and mechanistic. I’ve done some more “organic” things, but usually I build spells like gears. I wonder if that’s a reflection of my training or simply the way I think.

  The enchantments still took time, but I stuffed as much magic into everything as I could. My underwear started repairing itself, much to my relief, and I made a point of giving it some electrically-defensive properties—I despise shock-based weapons. I also restored my hypersharp saber.

  Then I turned my attention to sealing the nexus.

  With the containment shields stabilizing the thing, it was relatively easy to put on my spell-gauntlets and poke tendrils into the seething cauldron of power. It was easier than I expected, really. Practice must pay off. But laying down a webwork of forces over the ruptured nexus wasn’t a simple task.

  Think of it as a problem of pressur
e. If I laid down a bandage over the hole, when I removed the containment shielding, the bandage would have to hold the pressure all by itself. This is kind of like putting a lid on the main magma vent under a volcano—then taking away the volcano.

  If I could close the hole, cap it, seal it, that would be a start, but insufficient for the long term. The containment shields contained the nexus, but didn’t close it. How do you heal a wound in one of the planet’s major hearts?

  After considerable poking around with my spell-armored tendrils, I thought I might have an idea.

  If I treated the nexus like an oil well and capped it, it would be a hole forever. I think. The containment shields would constantly drain some power from it in order to continue existing and containing. Opening the nexus would merely involve popping the containment shields from the outside. This wouldn’t be difficult at all.

  However, if I laid a gridwork of spell-lines over the actual opening of the nexus—not restricting the flow of energies; the containment shields did that—I might encourage the nexus to… grow a new shell? Sort of? Much as a wound heals itself, the spell-lines could act as a framework for the nexus to use, for lack of a better description, in healing over the open wound.

  I set it up and set it going. Over the course of the next hour, I thought I detected a slight drop in the intensity within the containment shields, implying the nexus was, in fact, starting to grow closed. It might take a while, but it seemed to be working. I decided to leave it overnight—overday? —for a while before checking on the progress.

  Thursday, February 25th

  Mary was delighted with her enchanted pendant. She kissed me soundly and played with her new toy, wandering around belowdecks and being stealthy. I was pleased on her behalf.

  Later, when she felt familiar with her new toy, she snuck up on me, plopped down next to me and asked me what I was building. I held up the paper with the occult diagrams on it and explained about healing a nexus. She nodded as I spoke, made appreciative noises, and waited until I finished.