Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

  “Tell me your name,” Jason ordered.

  “Vladimir Smith,” I answered. One of the younger Mendozas, a black-haired girl in her late teens, maybe as old as twenty, spoke up.

  “He’s partly lying.”

  “Partly?” Jason echoed.

  “I think he’s using the name, so it is his,” she explained, “but that’s not the whole truth. He’s leaving out a lot. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to tell.”

  I decided she was going to be trouble.

  Jason turned his attention to me again.

  “What name were you born with?”

  “I didn’t have a name when I was born.”

  “Truth,” indicated the girl.

  “How could he not have a name?” Jason demanded.

  “You ask bad questions, Señor,” she replied, almost respectfully. “He was not named before he was born. Naming comes after.” Jason turned and half-snarled at me.

  “I want to know what to call you!”

  “You can call me ‘Vlad,’ if you like. I’m used to that.”

  “Señor Fries,” Esteban snapped, rapping his cane on the floor. “Perhaps we might move along to more profitable lines of inquiry?”

  “Fine,” he snapped. “Go ahead.”

  Señor Mendoza smiled and nodded. He stepped more fully into my field of view.

  “Good evening,” I offered.

  “Good evening. I trust you understand your position?”

  “I think so. One moment, please.” I moved on the table-thing, tugging and pulling, testing the restraints. He made no objection, but Jason was ready to burst a blood vessel. I was stalling, but he was willing to let me test the restraints. I felt certain that, if left alone, I could tear free in a matter of minutes. If.

  “Yes, Señor Mendoza,” I agreed. “I think I understand my position. I must admit I do not understand why I’m in it, but I will trust you to make it clear.”

  “Very good, Vladimir. We are aware you are a servant to one of the undead. Do not bother to deny it.”

  “Okay.”

  I wondered what they thought of my weight. I suppose it depended on how they transported me. Or maybe they thought it was normal for a long-term servant of the undead. How much about vampires did they know?

  “We have captured your mistress and will interrogate her shortly. We will ask you both a number of questions.”

  “Cross-checking to make sure we’re telling the truth?”

  “Exactly,” he said, nodding. “Exactly.”

  “She’s got a spell for that,” I pointed out, nodding toward the young lady. She sneered in return.

  “Yes,” Esteban agreed, “but it only works on the living. Once we have your mistress’ answers, we will put the questions to you, as well, to determine her truth or falsity, as well as to determine what she may know that you do not.”

  “I understand. Happy to help. Shall we start with the vampire population of Oklahoma City?”

  Esteban blinked at me. Everyone else traded glances. They seemed a bit surprised.

  “Yes, by all means. Go ahead.”

  “Let’s see… you already know about the three major tribes of vampires? Or do I need to start there?”

  “We know. Continue.”

  “There are about ten or so undead in the city. At least, so I’m told. I’ve only met Mary and Tony—Antonio Corbano, who seems to be the oldest Thessaloniki in town. I think; I’m not really all that clear on the hierarchy. It’s not my business, you understand. Then there’s Conrad, of the Phrygians, and Bruno, of the Constantines. I think Mary’s progenitor is someone named Horace, but I’ve never met him. For the Thessaloniki, I think it runs from Mary to Horace to Tony. After that, if you want someone older or higher up the chain, you have to look elsewhere. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “Where do they reside?”

  “I don’t know about that, except for Mary, obviously.”

  “You seem remarkably cooperative for a man enslaved by the forces of evil,” Jason interrupted.

  “You think being enslaved is fun?” I asked.

  This caused considerable consternation among the others. Jason seemed unmoved, but Esteban’s expression was thoughtful.

  “You mean to say you are not a willing servant?” Esteban asked.

  “I am not a willing servant,” I agreed, truthfully, and added, “I despise slavery.”

  They glanced at the truth-sayer; she nodded.

  Without bothering to tell me to wait, Esteban turned to Jason, gave him a meaningful look, and the two of them left the room. Behind me, I heard the door thump shut. At least I was certain where it was, now.

  They were gone for quite a while. I did my best to breathe deeply and flex various muscle groups. I still had drugs in my system and wanted to encourage my body to wash them out as quickly as possible. Besides, working the kinks out of my abused upper back gave me something to do. Those zappy-sticks hurt when I’m mortal. They’re probably no fun for humans, either.

  Esteban and Jason came back in and resumed their questioning without so much as a passing pleasantry.

  “Tell us where you learned the power-gathering spell,” Jason demanded. I glanced at Esteban. He nodded, once. Jason was ready to snarl again. I don’t think he liked having his questions confirmed through Esteban. The fact he swallowed his outburst told me the Mendoza family was in charge of this.

  “The place is called Karvalen. I studied it as an existing spell—that is, I analyzed it as it stood in place—and I also studied under two magicians who knew it.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Her name is Tort; his name is T’yl. Tort is from a place called Rethven. I think T’yl is from a place called Kamshasa—I don’t remember the details well enough to say for certain. He didn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Do not trouble yourself about that, please,” Esteban ordered. “Are you capable of teaching the spell to others?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I admitted. I thought about it for a minute. If they were willing to learn my ideogrammatic alphabet, at least enough of it for the Ascension Sphere, it shouldn’t really be a problem.

  “I haven’t tried,” I went on, “but if someone with a familiarity in magical arts is willing to study and practice, I believe I can. But since we’re after absolute truth,” I added, nodding toward the dark-haired truth-teller, “I can’t make it a promise.”

  The tingling of the sunset started. I did my best to lay there and take it without giving any outward sign. It wasn’t easy. When a horde of needle-legged insects walk through fire on their way to crawl all over you, it’s unpleasant.

  Esteban and Jason moved out of my field of view to discuss things. Everyone else relaxed a little. A middle-aged man stepped into my line of sight and laid fingers on my neck to check my pulse.

  “I don’t like his vitals.”

  “I’m not feeling well,” I admitted. He came around in front of me and used a penlight on one of my eyes.

  “Ow,” I noted. “Nice technique.”

  “Shut up. Pupil response is good.” He moved behind me again. Something beeped. Were there monitoring sensors built into the restraints or the table-slab-thing? Possibly. I wondered what the readouts were showing.

  By this point, I was sweating profusely and the doctor-nurse-whatever sounded worried. I recognized a portable defibrillator. It failed to fill me with joy. I’m developing an aversion to electric shocks. On the other hand, maybe that could be turned around to my advantage.

  “No!” I shouted. “Not more electricity! I’ve been zapped to hell and back already!”

  He ignored me and applied conductive gel to the paddles. I clenched my teeth and waited for the inevitable.

  Over the next several minutes, he did his best to save my life. I have to give him credit for that. He rotated the table to lay flat and started working on me in earnest. Two injections into my arm, one big needle into my heart, a tube down my throat with a plastic bag to ventilate my lungs, and no
less than six bolts of lightning from that damned defibrillator. Plus CPR.

  The fact he was trying to save my life doesn’t change the fact those things hurt. I don’t like being zapped, bagged, or stabbed in the heart with a six-inch medical dagger full of whatever the hell they use.

  I retreated into my mental study after the first shock.

  Inside my study, I could largely ignore what they were doing to my body. It helped to know I was dying anyway. In the process of trying to save me, they were unlikely to kill me before I died, so that was to the good.

  I started work on an emergency disguise spell. My skin was going to darken over the next few minutes to a deep, charcoal grey. I wanted to look like a perfectly normal corpse for as long as possible. Fortunately, I was in a zone with a much higher magical potential than usual for this world. It wasn’t up to Rethven standards, but it was plenty to work with. The spell went off quite nicely. Nobody seemed to notice. After all, who expects the unconscious and immobile guy to be working magic? You need chalk, chanting, and hand-waving at the very least. Besides, they were probably more concerned with my heart attack than anything else.

  I wonder what they thought of the stink? Was it something they took as a matter of course for a dying man? I think the smell is in the middle of the scale between week-old gym socks and chemical weaponry. Then again, maybe it’s not as bad as I think. My perspective isn’t exactly unbiased, after all. Or, when you get right down to it, even human.

  When they gave up trying to resuscitate me, I came out and played dead. I’m pretty good at that, especially at night. The doctor expressed an opinion that someone might have gotten a little too enthusiastic with the high-voltage stun baton. This started an argument.

  The argument ended when the doctor peeled back one of my eyelids to check something. He wasn’t talking; someone else was saying something about how a stun baton would only be dangerous if I already had a heart condition, and he couldn’t be held responsible for not knowing that. But the doctor made a small noise when he saw the black, featureless eyeball and froze for a second.

  I got the skin right, but the eyeballs are tricky. Oh, well. There’s my cue.

  I lashed out with tendrils, slashing in all directions through flesh and spirit and soul, dragging the life force of every living thing I touched back to me. Two of them were protected by spells that wouldn’t let me touch them. I grabbed one of them and squeezed it. It cracked under the strain and broke; the man inside died instantly.

  He was Jason Fries, acting head of the Fries family, here on the orders of his Pater, Johann, to help the Mendoza family capture and interrogate a vampire. A thousand other things surged through my spirit as I bolted his down. For an instant, I knew him as well as he knew himself, then it all began to fade, like a sunset, leaving only a few winking stars behind.

  The other shielded person tried to leave, but I slammed the door and grabbed his shell, too.

  While all this went on, I sat up, peeled away bits of restraints, and stood. Esteban gave up on opening the door and pointed his cane at me. The stored spell he launched was a basic disintegration; I recognized the type. It disrupted chemical bonds, breaking molecules apart. This usually causes rapid oxidation, resulting in the target losing a chunk of itself and bursting into flame. (A real disintegration, one that merely causes a target to crumble to dust, is much more difficult.)

  I deflected it to the restraint table. It quasi-exploded and the flammable bits started to burn. He didn’t know he was dealing with a master wizard as well as a lord of night. They thought I was a mortal servant to a monster.

  Hard luck for them.

  “Your preparations and containment were perfect,” I told him, walking up to him, my lines of darkness still surrounding and squeezing his protection spell. “Any human servant of a vampire would still be alive and well and thoroughly trapped.”

  “What are you?” he asked, holding his cane in front of himself.

  “Oh, no, no, no. It’s my turn to ask questions. What’s your problem with vampires?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t go to all this effort just to annoy Mary, did you? You don’t like vampires in general. Why not?”

  “They are a foul stain on the soul of all magi! They are monsters and must be purged from the Earth!”

  “I’ve heard that before,” I said, mildly. “Could you elaborate on the bit about them being a stain on the souls of the magi?”

  “I will not bandy words with you, dark creature!” he snapped.

  “Okay, now, let’s take a minute,” I told him. “Before you get too high up on that horse, bear this in mind. I’ll take you at your word. If you tell me you’d rather die than betray the secrets of your holy order or whatever, I’ll believe you. Think about that for a second.”

  “Nothing you can do will force me to tell you anything further!”

  I sighed. No, it didn’t help.

  “Some people don’t pay attention,” I noted. I squeezed his protective spell slightly harder, putting it under more strain, and carefully poked it with a tendril. It cracked and I immediately eased off on the pressure. I kept it cracking, carefully, until it failed. Then I grabbed him with every tendril at my command and dragged him over to me, his feet sliding along the tile.

  “Now, are you telling me you’re useless to me?” I inquired. Esteban looked at my eyes, licked his lips nervously, and thought about his answer.

  “I will tell you nothing,” he quaked, “but I am a valuable hostage.”

  “So are the rest of these people,” I pointed out, gesturing around the room. “They’re unconscious, not dead. Well, except for Jason, there. I broke his shield a bit too forcefully. I’d say you need to answer my questions to be more valuable than the rest.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

  “For every question you refuse to answer, I’ll crush a skull,” I bluffed. I pointed at the nearest person. “Do we start now?”

  “What do you want to know?” he grudged.

  “Is Mary here?”

  “Your undead mistress? Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Down the hall, on the left.”

  “Are there any children in the building?”

  “No.”

  “Be certain,” I told him. I didn’t bother to mention that, with his shield down, I could see whether or not he was lying.

  “I am certain. We do not expose innocents to danger.”

  “Good man. Now, about that bit with the stain on the souls of magi—what’s that about?”

  “Your kind are an abomination born of dark rituals,” he spat. “Ancient magi sought to prolong their lives through such magic and created the first of you. They sacrificed the lives of a hundred thousand people, broke the power of magic in the world, and sank a continent, all for the sake of their own precious lives. We who were not part of their vile ritual have sought out your kind to destroy them ever since.”

  Ah, guilt! Handed down from father to son for generations, apparently. What hath guilt wrought? Not much, but it’s cost some people golden opportunities.

  “Has it occurred to you the originators of this curse are long-gone?” I asked. “The rest of us nighttime people should be considered victims, rather than accomplices. Did you ever think about that?”

  “It matters not,” he retorted. “It is our fault for not stopping it in the beginning; we will erase this foulness from the Earth!”

  With that, he struck at me with his cane. I caught it with my left hand and spells in it went off. Every bone in my hand, wrist, and forearm shattered into powder. The shattering effect would have gone farther up my arm, but my bones are tough; I think it would have powdered the entire skeleton of a human being. It also sent a jolt of power into my nervous system, activating the pain sensors. Any mortal hit by the thing would have died of suffocation—unable to breathe without any intact bones—and in appalling agony.

  It couldn’t kill me, but it felt as though I’d been se
t on fire. Trust me. I know.

  Unfortunately for Esteban, this sort of thing causes my reflexes to take over. The lesson, here, is to avoid startling the guy with a gun pressed to your head. Or the nightlord with tendrils wrapped around your soul.

  As I collapsed to my knees, screaming and cradling my wounded arm, the tendrils still wrapped around him constricted sharply. He died instantly as his soul shredded and disappeared. His body didn’t cope well, either. Lacerations appeared everywhere, bone-deep, as my tendrils sliced through him like whips of wire.

  I didn’t know I could do that. Of course, at that moment I didn’t know I had; I was busy.

  After an instantaneous constriction, like a fist clenching, my tendrils lashed outward. Less than material, now, they passed through steel and stone, slicing through everything in the realm of the spirit for several seconds before I managed to get a grip on myself.

  On the plus side, the blood from Esteban’s sliced corpse ran quickly to me and soaked into my skin without any hindrance whatsoever. That helped enormously with the damage and the pain from my injuries. The pain spell continued, but it started to fade, probably running down. After several seconds of forever, I managed to come to terms with the diminishing agony and orient myself. I focused on ignoring the sensations evoked by the spell—it was only pain, not actual damage, and I kept telling myself that.

  I crawled over to Jason and bit into him, spat out a mouthful of flesh, and stuck my tongue into the wound. It writhed deep into his flesh, absorbing blood at an incredible rate; I sucked his circulatory system dry. It didn’t help with the agony, but my arm appreciated it. The spell continued to run its course, still gradually fading.

  After breakfast with Jason, I thought I could concentrate enough for some coherent magical work. I felt out the pain spell and pulled the remainder of it apart. It broke with a flash of white-hot agony and disappeared. Relief was instantaneous. It felt like a cold plunge after a sauna, or waking up from a nightmare.

  I climbed to my feet and leaned on the wall for a moment, taking stock.