Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

  “Hey, Eric?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You seemed kinda far away there for a minute.”

  “Yeah. I’m still a little hung over from my bender. Could you tell me what day it is? Did I miss a week or a weekend?”

  “Sunday. August ninth.”

  “Thanks. That’s not bad.”

  Bill fetched out a flask from his knapsack.

  “Hair of the dog?” he asked. “For the hangover?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. Shouldn’t. I’ve learned that if I start, I’ll keep going. I should wait awhile and recover.”

  “Suit yourself,” he replied, took a slug, and put it away. I got to my feet.

  “Well, it’s been nice meeting you, Bill. I should be moving on.”

  “Nice to meet you, too. Thanks for the breakfast.”

  “My pleasure.”

  I gathered up my cloak and the ball inside it, tied it up like a sack on Bronze’s integral saddlehorn, and mounted. Bill watched with an expression of mild disbelief as Bronze started moving. I don’t think he realized she wasn’t a statue. Bronze and I departed the enclosure through a gap in the fence. A little searching around the abandoned zoo eventually led us out to the road, then the highway.

  Cars hummed along with an electrical sound, alternating only occasionally with a gasoline growl. People in the cars turned to stare at us as we went by.

  I suppose we might seem a trifle unusual.

  The thought made me nervous. Every person who went by seemed to find us worthy of note. How many of them were already on the phone to the state troopers or highway patrol? A hundred? Ten? One?

  All it would take was one. I don’t think Bronze would react well to being pulled over by a cop. I’m not sure how well a cop would react to having to pull over a giant bronze statue, either. Especially carrying a guy in a quasi-renaissance outfit, complete with family-sized flaming sword, patented Glass Ball of Evilness, and a total lack of identification.

  Bronze isn’t terribly good at being inconspicuous. She tries, but she has some natural handicaps. I have some problems with it, myself.

  We made a really good try at fading into the woods.

  The abandoned zoo was still abandoned. Bill was nowhere to be seen. He probably took off shortly after a statue came to life and an armed weirdo rode away on it. I might have, myself.

  We laid low until nightfall for a number of reasons. Most of them revolved around avoiding trouble with the locals. As long as we were sitting still, though, I took the opportunity to put together a low-grade Ascension Field.

  The spell was a variation on the Ascension Sphere, a magical field used by magicians for their final exam, or their masterpiece work. It absorbed magical energy and contained it—the more magical energy it absorbed, the more it could contain. Clearly a thermodynamic paradox, but I’ve been working on ignoring those.

  I designed my variation to work specifically on Bronze. Instead of a sphere centered on a point, it was a field determined by a surface. In this case, it followed the contours of Bronze, forming a second skin.

  She’s a magical construct in a low-magic environment. That’s why she grazes almost constantly; she needs fuel to operate here. The last time I cast an Ascension Sphere for her, it helped enormously. Of course, that was to help her recuperate from injury, and I cast it in Rethven, in a high-magic environment. Here, despite my best efforts at diagram-drawing, blood-smearing, chant-singing, and hand-waving, it was still a pale shadow of the original.

  It worked, after a fashion. Bronze absorbed the energy as fast as it came in, so the Field had to be adjusted slightly. Normally, these things run off the power already inside them, making them nearly impossible to take down without going in and using—or storing—the accumulated energy. Here, though, the objective was to power Bronze, so it needed to draw in power, use whatever it needed to maintain itself, and feed the rest directly to her magical matrix.

  Burnt sticks work okay as pencils, but Bronze isn’t fond of being written on. She took it like a trooper, though.

  I wonder. If I take a day and build a really big magic circle for an Ascension Sphere, can I let it enhance the magical field inside it, then make a smaller circle inside and use the enhanced magical environment to make a more powerful Ascension Sphere… and then keep building stronger versions with more powerful magic for as many iterations as will fit? Would they act together as a sort of suction, drawing in power more quickly? Or would the inner spheres simply concentrate whatever the outer sphere drew in?

  I suspect the limitation involves surface area, not intensity, but I could be wrong. When I have time and a place to try it, I will. Always so many things to do before I get around to anything else…

  I kicked dirt over the remains of my campfire, crawled into my lair, and hid from the sunset. Bronze dragged over a big, leafy branch and blocked the opening with it, darkening the interior markedly. I wrapped up in every piece of clothing I owned and waited.

  While I waited—hot, sweating, and stinking—I thought about my situation. What do I need to do? Where do I need to go? What do I want?

  What I need is someplace to call home. Preferably someplace private, fairly secluded, but with access to a large metropolitan area—the idea of a vampire hiding in a small town is ludicrous. I don’t need blood every night, but if I let it go for too long, I get cranky. Shortly after that, the rate at which neighbors start dying off will rise drastically. So, a place to call my own, no more than an hour away from a major city where a slight rise in suspected homicides won’t be so noticeable. Someplace with a major hospital would be best. There’s almost always soul food in a hospital.

  What else do I need? An identity. I need to establish myself as a person who belongs here, not some freak of spontaneous generation who appeared out of nowhere. I need to be a mild-mannered citizen going about his lawful occasions, rather than a suspect.

  Either of those will take money. Both, together, will take lots of money. And, unless I want to find a day job that will never, ever, under any circumstances ask me to be there during sunrise or sunset, I’ll need even more money.

  This can be done, I feel sure. Eventually. I’ll have to start small and work up.

  Here’s a dilemma. Sweat like an entire weightlifting team and stink forever, or strip down and fry in the ambient light?

  I hate my transformation. It’s not that I wind up a corpse afterward—or wind up rising from the dead, depending—but it hurts and it smells awful. Mostly, it’s the smell. Oh, sure; it stings like some lunatics with needles are trying to find all my veins at once. With electrified needles. With hot electrified needles. But they’re not dull needles; there’s that. The real problem is the yuck factor. The byproducts of my transformation create a foul and reeking sweat that makes crawling through a latrine seem like a way to rinse off. It’s never good, but injury and regeneration add to it.

  I have not missed that greasy, sticky feeling behind my ears and along the inside of my elbows.

  To be fair, it may not be as bad as all that. I have hyperacute senses; it goes with the job. Usually, I manage to tune out most things—sounds, smells, the rasp of my clothing against my skin, all that. It’s possible the sweat-stained smell is no worse than a post-game locker room and I’m oversensitive. That doesn’t help my nose, though, or the icky, slimy feeling.

  Last time I had this problem, I worked out a cleaning spell. My usual cleaning spell crawls over me and removes anything not actually attached. The low-power version caused that sort of thing to be ejected, tiny bit by tiny bit, as I moved—it was a transfer spell, taking energy from physical movement and transferring it to tiny bits of filth and sweat. It was slow, but it was also cheap. I drew the appropriate circle the moment I stepped out of my cave.

  After casting my spell, I wasn’t clean and wouldn’t be for an hour or more. On the other hand, I felt better knowing it was in progress. I still wanted a bath, preferably in a hot, fast-moving river. A geyser would do. I’d even settle
for two or three bathtubs and lots of soap.

  Bronze, meanwhile, ate all the vegetation inside the exhibit fence and finished two small trees outside it. She can take a bite right out of a solid tree trunk like me taking a bite out of an apple. She finished her third as I finished my cleaning spell. I noticed some suspiciously bite-shaped chunks in what was left of the metal fence, too. At least she simplified getting out of the enclosure. Did she chew her way through the whole thing? Or did she take a bite out of the hurricane fence to get one bit of wire loose and suck it up like spaghetti?

  Come to think of it, when I have some cash on me, I’m going to get her a bucket of gasoline and see what she thinks. Maybe a selection of flammable liquids. How much is charcoal, these days?

  “Ready?”

  She pawed the ground and tossed her head, clearly a case of Ready!

  We took off, Bronze trailing smoke from her ears. I kept us off the highway and stayed mainly on rural roads. I’ll say this for Pennsylvania: Even the worst of the back roads beat the so-called “roads” in Rethven by two ruts, a layer of mud, and a hundred potholes. I expected to take most of the night to get home. Taking the back ways and only occasionally hitting a secondary highway, we turned onto Rattlesnake Pike and pounded up to my old driveway a little after midnight.

  I expected a fancy, old-style, wrought-iron gate guarding a worn driveway leading to a burned-down vacant lot.

  There was no gate. There was no sign a gate was ever there. We advanced, still looking, and eventually came to a typical farmyard gate—sheet metal construction, meant to keep cows and other animals from wandering—with a wire fence. Beyond that I saw a large barn and a couple of smaller outbuildings.

  Clearly, this wasn’t my home.

  Bronze stood quietly by the gate while I pondered.

  T’yl was trying to put me back where I came from. He’s never been there, but he’s helped open the way before, so he should be able to manage it. At least, I would think so. He had a magical key to help him, too—although, to be fair, I’m still not sure exactly how those keys work. They made it easier for the Hand to open a gate to my homeworld, but how they did so was still unclear. Still, T’yl only had one; the Hand’s setup in Telen used several.

  Admittedly, I wasn’t overwhelmingly pleased with the idea of surviving in post-nuclear-apocalypse-world with omnivorous giants ants—I don’t want to talk about it—and carnivorous ivy, but it beats being the victim of a heavily-armed palace coup.

  Could T’yl have just plain missed? Or was he trying something special? He knew where I went the last time; I told him about the place. It’s possible he was trying to be kind to me by avoiding it. Maybe he aimed for—and hit—something closer to where and when I came from. Closer, but not quite on target.

  There are a number of parallel universe theories. I have empirical evidence of, possibly, four. Well… five, if you count energy-state universes. So, there really are multiple universes with extraordinary similarities, suggesting there are not only other universes, but bringing up the possibility of parallel or alternate universes—variations on the branching timeline theory. Either that, or interdimensional gates are subject to temporal slippage.

  No, it can’t be temporal slippage. The cars we saw on the road were electric; that means we’re later along the timeline than when I left. Therefore, if this is my original world, there should be signs of my old house. And there aren’t. The area has some outbuildings and a barn, nothing else. There’s no sign of the house, the stables, the main gate, or anything, which implies they never existed in this reality. None of the present buildings would require the eradication of all former construction. Someone would have to go to a lot of trouble to remove all signs of the house and grounds.

  Or were all signs gone? I checked. I searched. I reached into the ground with psychic tendrils, ran my fingers over fragments of rock. The foundations of the gate-pillars should still be up by the highway… no. I sprang lightly over the fence and navigated by memory and space, rather than by eye, to find the house. No old foundations underneath anything, no basement bomb-shelter, no sign of the in-ground pool, nothing.

  Okay. Either someone went to extraordinary lengths to remove all signs of a mansion and its attendant structures, or I was in an alternate reality.

  Strangely, given the choice between a couple million dollars of landscaping or being transported to an alternate reality, the alternate reality sounds more plausible. That really says something about my life. I’m not sure it says anything good, but it says something.

  Bronze and I walked back along the driveway—well, okay, the dirt road—back toward Rattlesnake Pike.

  If there are an infinite number of worlds, picking out one specific world could be tricky. At one point, the Hand was doing it on a regular basis, though, so they had to have a way to pick the one they wanted. Did the keys have something to do with that?

  Or, if there are a limited number of similar worlds, they could have simply not cared; they could hunt vampires in all of them, presumably.

  No, there had to be lots of options. Their astrological research and calculations were too precise, too complicated, for only one pair of universes or even for a small number. Now I wish I’d spent more time looking over their work. It would give me more to work with.

  All right. Until proven otherwise, I’ll go with the infinite universes theory—there are an infinite number of the things and targeting one particular universe requires the utmost in care and finesse. The one in which I currently reside is merely one of many where no one built a house on that particular piece of land. For all I know, Sasha might be alive and well somewhere else in the world. Various alternate versions of everybody I knew might be wandering around.

  I might be around.

  Regardless of any larger, pan-dimensional problems, there are still the issues of the here and now. My main problem was being conspicuous; drawing attention was way down on my list of things to do. While I could pass for an alcoholic actor from a renaissance fair, anyone in authority was going to ask me which fair, where it was, and may I see some identification, sir?

  Somehow, I suspected the guy on the animated statue and wearing a four-foot violation of the local weapon ordinances was not going to pull off “I left my wallet in my other pants.”

  First order of business: blend in. All I’ve got to do is pass as an ordinary human being.

  This could be a problem.

  I gave serious thought to casting a disguise spell to alter my skin color from my nighttime charcoal-grey to something more human, but I would need to cast a considerably more complicated illusion to conceal my eyes. Given the local paucity of power, the spells would be both difficult and short-lived.

  Instead, I took my outfit apart. There were a number of layers involved—undershirt, shirt, doublet, quilted jerkin over that, tabard over that… plus underwear, shorts, hose, pants, et cetera or et al. It was like my alter ego was trying to see how many layers of clothes he could get away with. Admittedly, it was all silky stuff, most of it silky-thin, but it still seemed excessive. It did, however, give me enough options to put together an outfit that might be regarded as poor fashion sense instead of raging anachronism.

  The magic underwear was, possibly, the most interesting part of the ensemble. It wasn’t quite a suit of longjohns; it covered my torso and extended nearly to my elbows and knees. The odd part was the way it had small panels, like brigandine armor, sewn into pockets on the inside and the outside. The pockets were offset enough between layers so they overlapped. I recognized the material of the plates; it was the super-duper-polymer-fiber-whatever I brought back from Carnivorous Ivy Land. My bet is this silky stuff is all spider silk, too. It strikes me as a suitably paranoid thing to wear.

  As for enchantments, the underwear had some resistance to oxidation—it could be burned, but it wouldn’t burn without some other fuel to make it burn. It also had what I think of as the standard enchantment package—self-mending, self-cleaning.

&nb
sp; At least if I get into an accident, I’ll have on clean underwear. Sadly, though, since it’s underwear, it just transfers any dirt, sweat, or other filth to any other layers of clothing.

  Bronze took me right up to the edge of town and we found an abandoned gas station. The three of us hid there—me from the sunrise, them from prying eyes—and I walked into town on my own.

  Monday, August 10th

  Bronze was not happy about waiting. Neither was Firebrand. During the day, I could at least pretend to blend in. They would attract attention like a vampire in a blood bank.

  I recast my cleaning spell and jogged the rest of the way into town to look for a pawnshop. It was surprisingly difficult to find one. A phone book would have been immensely useful. I couldn’t even find a public phone. Of course, with the rise of the mobile phone, they were already disappearing when I left. Instead, I had to ask around and get directions.

  People have tried to cheat me on a number of occasions. This was one of the worst.

  I laid out my non-magical rings for the owner of the shop; their gems were sizable. He looked the rings over with a critical eye, scratched some glass with the diamond, and made me an offer so low—judging by the prices of the goods in his shop—that I wondered if he knew gems.

  On the other hand, I needed money. Having local currency is important. I can’t walk into a fast-food joint and plunk down a ruby. It gets one talked about.

  We haggled for a bit, he came down to “take it or leave it,” and I scooped up my rings and walked. I made it out the door before he called after me to wait—maybe we could work something out.

  We did. I let him have the diamond ring for slightly more than a song and dance. It was enough for now and might be sufficient to get me to a more legitimate broker of gems and jewelry. More importantly, one that could recognize hand-crafted stuff and might be persuaded to believe they were antiques. The techniques used in making them were certainly not modern.