Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

  “Can I?”

  I thought about it for a minute. Aside from watching, what good would it do? She needed serious training to understand what I was doing, much less assist. Maybe if we found some magi, I could avoid killing them outright and let her eat them. It would be tricky, but it was an idea to keep in mind if opportunity presented.

  “No, not yet. But we’ll give you your first lesson in wizardry before sunrise. Then you’ll at least be able to see what I’m doing and start getting a feel for it. How’s that sound?”

  “You go do your thing. I’ll make sure we don’t hit a truck.”

  The Ascension Van—I really need a new name for that spell—worked pretty well. In fact, I think it worked exceptionally well. Power seemed to be building up more rapidly than expected. Was it the region? Or was it the constant motion, with the spell acting like a scoop? It wasn’t a huge difference, but it was more than merely noticeable; it was definite. It was also enough to make me wonder.

  I toyed with the idea of an actual scoop of magical force on the front of the van. I gave up on the idea when I realized I needed to place it outside the effect of the power-gathering spell in order to work. The concept would be something like a Bussard interstellar ramjet, only scooping up magical energy instead of interstellar hydrogen.

  On the other hand, the overhead light gave me an idea. At the heart of my mountain was a matter-conversion spell—a pants-wettingly frightening thing. Around it were several layers of conversion spell, each layer absorbing a fraction of the released energy and allowing the rest to go right through. Those spells were things I nightmared during a long sleep. Having seen them and thought about them since, I’ve had some ideas for improvements.

  In the mountain’s matter-conversion reactor, each spell layer converted as much as it could into two things: magical power to keep the spell going and vital force to feed into the mountain. By the time the radiant energy reached the last layer of those spells, it was merely an eye-searing glare of intolerable brightness instead of a wave of radiant destruction.

  I didn’t want anything on such a scale. I turned on an overhead light and put a revised and improved spell around it to convert the light into magical power—enough to maintain the spell, and the excess helping charge the Ascension Van. Outside the first spell, an identical spell repeated the process, catching some of what the first spell didn’t.

  Very quickly, I realized the conversion factor wasn’t an absolute value. The output of a dome light is next to nothing, yet the spell still didn’t convert all of it. Instead, the spell converted a fraction of it into magical energy and the rest of the dome light’s radiant energy made it through. The second spell layer did the same thing, converting roughly the same fraction of the energy it received into magical power. Every successive layer continued to convert the same fraction of power, but every layer also received less power than the ones inside, reducing the absolute amount of magical energy produced.

  I want my voltmeter. No, it’s a burned bit of junk in a collapsed basement. I want a new voltmeter so I can run some tests. As it is, I think my best conversion spell weighs in at about a four percent conversion—and my so-called measurement has a large margin of error. I need better instruments than I have in this van. But I know the physical transformer I built did a much better job. How much better? I wish I knew. While I’m wishing, I wish I had some ruthenium.

  The dome light seems only to glow, now, rather than shine brightly. Thirty spells, each passing about ninety-six percent of the light—absorbing and converting four percent—means the light shining through is ninety-six percent of ninety-six percent of ninety-six percent, thirty times over. This works out to about thirty percent of the light actually escaping. Overall, it’s a seventy percent efficiency for an awful lot of time and work. Less, really, because some of the energy goes into maintaining each of the conversion spells.

  At least I know I can do it, provided I want to spend all day—or all night—at it.

  I really want a better conversion spell. As it is, I don’t have any idea how to improve it. All I can do, at least until I get a better idea, is stack them.

  I can probably do something similar to the windows, turning sunlight into magical power and darkening the window slightly. Or, with multiple layers of spell, the windows could darken considerably. Of course, I’d have to build in an automatic shutoff so it wouldn’t run itself into nothing at night… not all that complicated, really, but another layer of trouble when casting each of the layers.

  How much power can I route from the power road, through the van, and convert? With a dozen layers of conversion—or twenty, or fifty, or a hundred—how much power can I turn into magic? Given enough power to start with, could I put a spell over a few square miles of some random piece of ocean, suck up solar radiation, and cut down on global warming? Could I cover the far side of the moon in such a spell and beam magical energy to Earth?

  What would be the effect of raising the magical power level of the planet? What would change? How much would change? Would anyone even notice, aside from the magi?

  I didn’t know. I still don’t. But at least I had the first layer of spells for the windows designed and applied by the time Mary pulled over at a rest stop for the pre-dawn preparations.

  “Want to spend an hour on lessons?” she asked, turning the seat to face me in the back. “According to the sign, there are showers here. After the lecture, we can have hot water instead of the tepid drizzle.”

  “Why do women like water so hot it takes the skin off everyone else?” I asked.

  “Not all of us,” Mary replied, grinning. “Only the ones descended from Lilith. The heat reminds us of home.”

  “I’m not touching that one.”

  “So touch this one. After sunrise and a shower.”

  “I can do that. Come here and we’ll talk magic until the night starts to bleed in the east.”

  Thursday, November 26th

  Mary isn’t terribly talented as a wizard. I’ve seen worse, but I’ve definitely seen better. Most of the students who went through the Imperial Academy’s entrance examinations showed more promise. I’d say she only ranked about the fortieth percentile, certainly no better than that.

  Crap. I’m remembering stuff from Zirafel and it’s coloring my worldview. How long has this been going on? Ever since I ate the city? Ever since I digested it? Or ever since I got the memories sorted out on my mental bookshelves?

  How else has it affected my opinions, beliefs, and behavior? And is there any way to tell?

  Immortality problems. Well, immortal, blood-sucking, soul-devouring problems.

  Still, just because she’ll never be a virtuoso is no reason not to learn to play the instrument. She’s also got the luxury of time. A hundred years of practice may be exactly what she needs to be astonishingly good. It would certainly make her a magnificent magician; they tend to memorize everything.

  We’ve made progress, but we’d still be scribbling on a pad and playing with basic focusing exercises if we weren’t undead. Mortals take a lot of training to get to the headspace-sharing stage. I suspect we’d still be at it if she wasn’t a Thessaloniki. The Constantines and Phrygians don’t have her talent with the feathery-tendril-touch thing. It was the key to getting her connected with me on a psychic level well enough for a spell to help her into my mental study. She had to visit mine; she doesn’t have one, yet.

  She was impressed at the hallucination. She was almost as leery of the basement hatch as I was. I never explained exactly what was down there, only that I’d been trapped for a while and it wasn’t good. Mary pretended to ignore it and focused more on the bookshelves. I pulled down memories of magical training and we went through them together.

  I appreciated her restraint in not saying anything about the décor or the mess. My headspace is not as neat as it could be.

  Mary may not be talented as a magic-worker, but she’s a long way from stupid. She gets the idea quickly. What slows her down is wan
ting to try it all out, one step at a time, until she’s sure she understands it thoroughly. I can’t say I blame her; I often feel that way about anything exceptionally dangerous. Which, come to think of it, is not an unreasonable attitude regarding magical operations.

  We finished days of basic training before she started to wonder about the sunrise. I reassured her; an hour or so out there could seem like a day or two in here. Speed of thought and all that. Relieved, she dug in again and I drilled her on the basics.

  When the tingling finally began, she stepped out through her exit door and back into her own head. I went through my exit and back into full physical awareness. We sheltered from the sunrise, packed a couple of toilet kits, and fed money into the rental bathrooms.

  I showered on my own, and not only for fear of her fingernails. She really does like her water hot. Really hot. I don’t know how she stands it.

  Across the street, we had breakfast at the local diner. We ate heartily, still discussing—quietly—some of the basics of magic. To an outsider, we probably seemed like a pair of granola-crunching holistic enlightenment New Age hippie mystic weirdos.

  Come to think of it, I do use crystals. Maybe they’re on to something.

  After breakfast, we drove to another diner and had second breakfast. After that, it was brunch. By then we felt well-fed enough we could find someplace out of the way, give Bronze a quart of motor oil and a big bucket of diesel fuel for a chaser, and start work on the trailer.

  Mary watched and tried to follow along as I marked on the inside of the trailer with a grease pencil.

  “So, you’re writing on the trailer,” she observed, “but you didn’t write on Bronze?”

  “Astute of you to notice. It takes far more concentration and power to cast a spell through straight visualization, but it can be done. I could save power by drawing a circle around her and using the diagram as a power focus, as well as drawing in power from around me while I worked—save power in terms of personal energies, I mean. It’s even cheaper if I write the symbols on the actual subject and make them part of the ongoing spell, rather than using them to focus my energies. That last option has a drawback, though. Do you recall?”

  “If something damages the drawing, the spell fails?”

  “Essentially, yes. If the lettering is part of the ongoing spell structure, damaging it will cause the spell to malfunction or fail. It doesn’t always collapse; it can simply short-circuit with unpredictable effects. But it is the cheap way to cast a spell.”

  “I think I get it. More time, less personal energy. More symbols, less personal energy. It’s kind of a balancing act between fast, good, and cheap?”

  “Pretty much. There are always trade-offs.”

  “So, why is the trailer a problem? Don’t explain the spell; I get the idea, if not the execution. You’re inscribing a gathering spell on it. Bronze already has a gathering spell on her. Why will hers destroy this one?”

  “As this one charges up,” I explained, “it uses some of the power it gathers to maintain itself. When Bronze steps inside it, her spell will suck up all the local power—everything inside this one—and the trailer spell won’t have enough power to maintain itself. Hers is a much more robust spell. I put a lot of effort into the version she’s currently wearing.”

  “So, the spell on the trailer kind of folds up and blows away?”

  “Sort of. It draws in power, concentrating it, and uses some of the internal power to operate itself. It’ll try to keep going, but Bronze’s spell will starve it once she crosses the borderline. Then the surrounding spell will eat the power in its own structure until it dissolves. It’s a safety thing. If it didn’t, the collapsing spell structure could produce random effects as it disintegrated. This is a best-practice sort of thing and prevents accidents, like starting fires, disrupting other spells, and ripping holes in creation.”

  “You really need a safer hobby,” she told me.

  “It’s fine. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Is that anything like ‘Hold my beer and watch this’?”

  “I sure hope not. I don’t think it is, anyway. I could be wrong, I suppose.”

  “So,” she continued, ignoring my last statement, “Bronze’s spell will destroy it, and you’re putting one up anyway. How’s that supposed to work?”

  “I’m trying to rig it so if it approaches a critical limit, it turns itself off. Then I can put a little power into it when Bronze steps out and it should start right back up again.”

  “Without having to go through the whole spellcasting thing?”

  “Right.”

  “But you store power in gems,” she protested, “and you said you had a thing going—something to turn other forms of energy into magical energy.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And?”

  “Why not use a gem as a battery?” she asked. “Like in an old-style car?”

  I stopped drawing and put the forming spell structure on hold—much like putting a finger on a knot to hold it before tying a bow. I turned to look at her.

  “Keep talking.”

  “Well, you know how the old gas-burners work, right?”

  “Mostly.”

  “The start sequence is what I’m thinking of. The battery cranked the engine. While the engine ran, it charged the battery. When the engine quit, the battery sat there until you needed to start the engine again. Couldn’t you do something like it with your hippie crystal battery things? The spell gathers power, charges the crystal up to however much it will take to restart the spell, and then does its thing. When Bronze gets into the trailer, the spell dumps everything it has into her—except the crystal—and shuts off. When she gets out, the crystal fires up the spell and starts charging again.” Mary looked at me anxiously. “I know I’m new to this. Is it a stupid idea?”

  “No… I can’t call it stupid,” I admitted. “I’d have to use other words. Brilliant. Inspired. Clever. Maybe even fantastic.” She beamed at me, but still sounded a trifle doubtful.

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  “I’m serious. It’s such a good idea I have to ignore you for a while. I’ll need to concentrate on how to wire it together. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all. I’ll unhitch the trailer and go get some infernal horse feed. How’s that?”

  “You’re not just ornamental,” I observed, “but practical, intelligent, and all-around useful, too.”

  “The same applies,” she replied, and kissed me. “Mind your spells. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I got to work on another subroutine.

  It worked. It worked perfectly.

  Okay, so, Mary might not have the makings of a virtuoso spellcaster, but she has a practical turn of mind.

  Bronze poked her head into the trailer. The spell shut down. She pulled her head out. It kicked back on. She poked her head in again.

  “Stop that,” I told her, whacking her on the shoulder and hurting my hand. She twitched an ear at me, amused. “You’ll run down the restart battery.” She continued to be amused, but she stopped.

  “So, it works?” Mary asked.

  “Absolutely. Take a look.”

  She concentrated, focusing on altering her mode of seeing. I could see it when she got it; her expression changed as her vision adjusted. I motioned for Bronze to get in; she did so without hesitation or complaint. I think she’s learning to like riding in the trailer. I’m not sure it’s good for her, though. She seems to be moving differently, somehow. I’m not sure exactly how, but there’s something not quite the same.

  Mary watched as the magical energies were sucked into Bronze’s spell and the trailer’s spell clicked off.

  “That’s supposed to happen?” she asked, doubtfully.

  “It is. It’ll be a bigger discharge if Bronze is out of the trailer for longer.”

  “Right. I’m a little… It’ll take a while to get used to all this.”

  “Take your time. It’s a whole new experience, and it’s complicated. It
takes time.”

  “I’m learning,” she assured me. “Want to help me move stuff into the feeding trough?”

  “Sure.” A moment later, I asked, “Where did you find coal?”

  “While you were busy, I found an old railroad museum in town. It closed a couple of years ago, but nobody’s bought the place. I talked to the realtor, then talked to the owner, then drove away with this. I thought she might like it as a treat.”

  “I mentioned about you being more than just ornamental, right?”

  “You did.”

  “Just making sure.”

  “I don’t mind hearing it again.”

  I obliged while we loaded up Bronze’s trough in the trailer. We left her happily crunching. Mary decided we’d done enough running around for one morning. She had me help her put away emergency groceries in the miniature pantry—things to eat if we ran out of restaurants and fast-food places, I suppose. Then she wouldn’t let me leave the van for a while.

  True, I could have done more with the day, but what I did with the afternoon was worthwhile.

  We did manage to get in another lesson in general magical theory before sundown. It’s important to practice this sort of thing in both mortal and immortal states. If it turned out she had the ability to handle massive amounts of power as an undead, she had to learn precise control and pinpoint focus as a mortal. Practicing a full-power spell is safer when you’re doing it without undead enhancement.

  Counterintuitive, I know. Wouldn’t it be safer to practice things when it’s less likely to kill you? Oddly enough, no. As a mortal, her capacity for investing power into a spell is sharply limited. Even if she makes a terrible, catastrophic error, there’s only so much dynamite in the explosion. On the other hand, if we practiced spells at night, her ability to pump power into a spell might be limited only by how much vitality she’s absorbed recently. If she can build up energy reserves the same way I can, a goofed-up spell might result in an Illudium Q-Thirty-Six Explosive Space Modulator-class kaboom.

  Besides, I don’t trust her ability to gauge how much of her nighttime resources she’s devoting to her magic. This is all new to her. Best to start small and work up.