Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

“Oh.” We walked in silence for a bit, away from the Temple of Shadow. “May I ask why?”

  “You know I have this nasty streak of responsibility, right?”

  “It’s a little trying at times, yes.”

  “Can you imagine what sort of screw-ups I could manage if I became a deity? I’m not talking about an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent god. I’m talking about the gods of, say, Greek mythology. Remember how they tended to ruin things for mortals, cause destruction and chaos, and all because they either didn’t anticipate or didn’t care about the repercussions?”

  “Sounds to me like you’re good god material.”

  “Good God,” I sighed. “The point is, yes, I might be a good god, but with powers like that, you can’t settle for good. And I know—or I’m afraid I know—how badly I hurt people by being a vampire wizard physicist king. I want nothing to do with manifestations of my own divinity, thank you. The world got along without a God of Vampires and will continue to do so.”

  “If you say so. But what if a God of Vampires is exactly what it needs? Didn’t you have some sort of anti-vampire apocalypse, once?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “Well, if that was the rallying cry of the Church of Light—they were the ones who went bananas on the subject, right?”

  “Again, so I’m told.”

  “Then if you’d been around to be the God of Vampires and be all ‘Hey, don’t go indiscriminately biting people,’ the Church of Luminousness wouldn’t have had so much to scream about. The vampires would have been doing their afterlife-conveying psychopompic job.”

  “You make a strong argument I don’t want to hear.”

  “Ah.” She squeezed my arm. “You really don’t like responsibility?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why do you keep trying to be?”

  “Some people have an overdeveloped sense of vengeance, some an overdeveloped sense of guilt.”

  “You have a hard time being a callous, uncaring, evil bloodsucker, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not too concerned about failing to become one, if that’s what you mean. I’m not trying to be anything aside from myself.”

  “There may be hope for you, yet.”

  We walked around town for a while, noting other prominent temples—Justice, the Grey Lady, the Lady of Mercy, Father Sky, the Lord of Law, the Twins of Need and Desire—and I realized there wasn’t a formal Temple of the Light.

  That suited me perfectly.

  Other changes since I was last in town… the sea-wall had two gates instead of one. I blame the dock-things for the increased traffic that made it necessary. They still had the double ramps—sort of an upright trapezoid on the beach—in front of each gate to get things up to the level of the low cliff. They also added a crane system for hoisting and lowering things straight up the cliff and over the wall.

  The harbor changed, too. It was deeper, for larger ships, and had a pair of stone dock-things grown out from the shore. Circling the harbor was an underwater wall, barely above the water at low tide. This acted as a break against storms, but mainly restricted the movement of larger ships. At high tide, smaller boats could go in or out right over the seawall; anything large had to sail in or out of the harbor through a moderately-narrow lane between two marker obelisks.

  My pet rock is a helpful pet rock.

  Wait a second. Tides are governed by the gravitational—

  No. Just no. I don’t know how it works. Maybe the world wobbles back and forth, like a see-saw. Maybe the moon really does cause the tides. Maybe the Great Gargantuan Goliath is sleeping under the sea bed and the rise and fall of its chest with its breathing causes the water levels to rise and fall.

  I should work on accepting the facts as I see them. Once I have enough, maybe I can create a new theory to cover it all. Something besides “this place is weird.”

  We headed out through one of the northern gates. Since we had a flesh-and-blood horse to bring along, I decided to rent a canal boat. The trip was on the canal road the whole way, but it was still on the order of a three-day march. A canal boat could let us rest in it while Bronze towed us.

  Unless someone moved the mountain again. It’s wandered off before.

  The barges came in different sizes. I settled for what they called a daelet, a small, flat-bottomed thing with roughly a four-ton capacity. It was more than enough for our needs, since Bronze would pull the thing, not ride in it. If she set foot in it, the boat would go straight to the bottom. We persuaded Clomper to board the barge and gave Bronze the tow-rope. She accelerated gently until the rope was tight as a wire and we had a bow wave threatening to spill into the barge. I moved Clomper farther to the rear to raise the bow.

  As we foamed our way up the canal, we had some time to kill. Mary and I worked on more of the Rethven language, reviewing our memories of the conversation with Amber and comparing English to Rethven. During periods when she studied on her own, I watched the countryside roll by and tried to enjoy the trip. I was more than a little anxious, but what was I going to do besides twiddle my thumbs and worry?

  I learned quite a bit about the place by looking. The canal system was, indeed, a divided highway. Luckily, we were going the correct direction in our lane—north in the western canal, south in the eastern, like British traffic. Passing involved calling out to the people ahead so they could get out of the way. This involved stopping, pushing their boat away from the inner median and its horse-travel lanes. We then passed them, slowing slightly to avoid swamping the other boat. There were several prepared campsites along the way, all of them in the median between the canals and protected by them from predators and other annoyances.

  To the left, or west, there were farms. After a several miles, those gave way to grasslands and ranching. Farms continued on the eastern side of the canals all the way to Karvalen. Was it because the canals were used as a fence for ranching on the western side, but the availability of water was too valuable to pass up completely? I’m sure someone knows.

  While watching the world go by, I also noticed something unusual about Bronze. Her gaits are normally quite smooth, no matter how she chooses to travel—well, unless she’s pretending to be a robot horse; that’s a bit uncomfortable. Now, though, her movements struck me as being exceptionally liquid and graceful. I wondered about that. She changes herself over time to adapt to whatever seems appropriate, from draft horse to racehorse and back, even to the point of creating a built-in saddle and stirrups. (Which I find interesting, since that’s not a requirement. It’s a convenience for me—and one I appreciate—but it shows me she can choose what to do.)

  So, what was she doing? Altering her internal structure to be more horse-like? Instead of a golem bending the metal of its legs, was she creating cables for muscles, tubes for bones, mercury for joint lubricant? She saw enough animal shows on video, she might have decided to do so. How would such modifications affect her functionality? Would having horse-like joints limit her to horse-like movements? Would actual joints be easier—and faster—than bending animate metal? Would a bent leg recover as quickly as before, or would it “heal” in stages, first as an animate chunk of metal, then re-form the internal structures?

  I decided not to ask. When you get right down to it, Bronze is her own person. If she wants to wear her hair differently or grow a unicorn’s horn, that’s up to her. Although, if she’s going to do something blatant like the horn, I hope she would ask me, first. I’m pretty sure she could do it if she wanted to, though.

  Traveling at relatively high speed—twenty miles an hour? Thirty? More?—saw us closing in on the mountain-city before nightfall.

  Overall, the place hadn’t changed much. It was still a big wheel, almost flat, with a sudden, steep spike in the center. There was supposed to be water pouring from four points, high up the central mountain-spire, but I saw no sign of them. The upper portion of the mountain was smooth and unmarked. I wondered what happened. Were they inside the mountain, now, pouring down
internal channels instead of down the mountainside? That would be better, certainly. If so, who decreed the change to the mountain? Or did it think of the idea on its own?

  The canals connected to the huge moat encircling the place; four bridges connected the city to the land. I was pleased to see the main gates had developed nicely. Each one was a huge slab of stone, balanced to pivot around a horizontal axis. When the inner half of the slabs tilted up, the gates were closed; the outer half of the slabs tilted down, leaving massive pits in front of them instead of road. When reversed, the slabs became part of the road. They were huge and unwieldy and worked. I liked them.

  The one thing that stood out was a new road. Well, I say a new road. It was really the old Kingsway taken up a notch, or taken up by several arches. Originally, to cut through all the circle-spiral streets running through town, I had a long, straight road run from the central mountain to the southwest gate. Now the road stood on arches, presumably to let cross-traffic go by underneath, and ran as straight as a beam of light. It was one long, single-lane bridge from the upper courtyard, near the peak, down to the market plaza behind the gate.

  “What do you think?” Mary asked. “Wait until after dark? Or hurry in before sunset?”

  “I’m torn. If we hurry in, we’ll need to find someplace light-proof almost immediately, and I don’t know where they keep their inns, or even if they have shutters on the windows. On the plus side, I can start getting to the bottom of this quickly. If we sneak in, the only people who might possibly notice are the ones actively looking for us—well, me—but we might get away with poking around for a while before our presence becomes known.”

  “Do you have any friends besides T’yl in town?”

  “Tianna is here.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Not that I know of. Why?”

  “You could let Tianna know, privately, if we sneak into town.”

  “I could pay her a visit,” I agreed, “but Amber should have told her I was on my way.”

  “On the other hand, if you want to see who your friends and enemies are, go on in.”

  “There’s something tempting about that, too. You’re not really helping.”

  “Who asked the professional sneak-thief for advice?”

  “Point taken,” I admitted. “It’s hard to play if you don’t know who the other players are, so here’s my thought. We’ll do both.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll march in boldly and draw fire. You sneak in, watch what happens, and find out what you can while everything is stirred up.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, dubiously. “I don’t speak the language. I mean I can, but I’ll instantly be marked as a tourist. I won’t be able to follow fast conversations, understand idioms, or blend in.”

  “I’ll give you a long-duration translation spell.”

  “Well… I don’t like letting you out of my sight. You have a tendency to go through magical gates and disappear. And my feeble skills are no match for the power of your dark magic when it comes to locating you. Is your cloaking spell still on?”

  “Yes. But I promise not to leave the world without you. At least, if I have any say in the matter. If they kill me you’re on your own.”

  “All right. Let’s pull over and camp for a bit. I want to change and run through a cleaning spell one more time before I have to start doing it by myself.”

  “Sure. Want me to leave you our cash?”

  “What for?”

  “Expenses?”

  Mary gave me a pitying look.

  “Maybe you do actually need to sleep. Your brain is definitely not firing on all cylinders.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I do for fun?”

  “Oh.”

  She has a point, Boss, Firebrand told me, privately. You do seem a little slow.

  Thank you for the observation. I’ll consider it. In a bunker. With guards. And wards. And both you and Bronze.

  Thought I’d mention it, Firebrand replied, amused. A dragon would have had a year-long nap by now.

  You’re assuming my time in the basement counts as being awake.

  You bet.

  Why?

  Because you’re not as sharp as you used to be.

  That made me wonder. If the psychic sword is saying I’m not at my sharpest, should I be concerned?

  The central lane between canals ended at the moat. A pair of high bridges from median to shore allowed barges to be towed out of the canals and to either side in the moat. The city side of the moat had a long row of boat-pocket docks, presumably for barge loading and unloading, but I didn’t see a way to tow them over. There were some barges in view, though; they approached the city shore slowly, rowed along like giant canoes.

  We stopped the barge at the last rest stop before the bridges. Mary and I unloaded Clomper for Bronze to babysit while we became corpses in body bags on the barge.

  Karvalen—the city, not the kingdom—doesn’t close up shop for the night like smaller cities. The place is lit like a Christmas tree set on fire. Traffic flows via the roads and canals pretty much constantly. Mary had no trouble docking or parking or whatever it is you do with a canal boat.

  Who do they trade with? What do they trade? Why are people coming and going constantly? I mean, sure, it’s a city. Cities have traffic. You put more than a hundred thousand people in an enclosed area to live their lives and someone is going to be awake and busy. I wonder what’s going on, that’s all.

  Anyway, getting in wasn’t a problem. While Mary and Clomper parked the boat, Bronze and I walked over a bridge, along the outer road, and straight through the city gate. Beyond was a big, square area. It was relatively quiet, but hucksters, hustlers, and vendors of all sorts still pitched their wares. Within a hundred yards, people tried to sell me knives, perfume, food of every description, magical talismans (fake), demon-repellent (probably fake), enchanted lights (spells, really, of limited duration, marketed as “eternal”), jewelry, clothing, horseshoes, rare wine (he claimed), rope, a backpack, a lantern with a spare flask of oil, and a ten-foot pole.

  I can’t imagine the cacophony of the gate-market at its height during the day. I’m glad I was seven feet above the crowd, riding Bronze. It’s hard to pick a pocket when you can’t even reach it, or to stick merchandise in my face without a ladder.

  We made our way across the square of the gate-market to the foot of the Kingsway. The pitch was about one in ten or so. It was narrow, barely wide enough for Bronze. A street paralleled it on either side as it rose. There were drains dotted all along the two straight streets, probably because when it rained, they would turn into rivers, otherwise. I disliked it. The gradual rise of the ramp blocked cross-traffic for hundreds of yards. It would be better to have steps at this end, to quickly get some clearance underneath. That would also further reduce the pitch of the ramp, at least a little… As soon as I could talk to the mountain, I’d mention it.

  Bronze started up the Kingsway at a walk. After a little bit, the noise of the market diminished. In the relative quiet, someone shouted at me.

  “You can’t go up there!”

  We ignored this obviously erroneous impression. Silence followed us, but no one else.

  Was the Kingsway regarded as cursed? Or was it too dangerous to travel? It went straight to the upper courtyard around the peak of the mountain. Maybe the destination was considered too dangerous? Everything above the courtyard level was considered my personal quarters at one point. Maybe it still was.

  A few people followed us along the side-streets and even more came out to watch us go by. A number of people cast light spells and shone illumination up to see us more clearly, but no one came after us. I don’t think anyone even set foot on the Kingsway.

  Maybe it’s the name that does it. It’s the King’s Way, so stay off it. That could be it.

  On the other hand, it’s got no guardrails, not even curbs, and it dead-ends—possibly literally—at the front door of the Dem
on King. It’s obviously not considered a safe road.

  We reached the top of the road without incident. No one threw anything or tried to shoot us. I’m not sure they knew quite what to do.

  At the top, the Kingsway ended in a sheer drop, about ten or twelve feet from the wall surrounding the uppermost part of the mountain—the outer wall of the courtyard, the face of the mountain spire. It was a long way down.

  There was no way to open the outer wall. It didn’t even look as though it had a gate. I sank tendrils into the stone and spoke to the mountain; it’s alive, after all. It took several minutes, but the section of wall in front of the Kingsway finally started to move. A section of wall slowly tilted inward while matching section of cliff face swung out and up. When it came to rest, lying flat, it formed a bridge to the courtyard.

  I gave it another couple of minutes to merge with the Kingsway proper and affix itself. I didn’t want Bronze and I to have a dramatic failure to enter, especially not one involving a plummet to the road some eighty or a hundred feet below. We fall extremely well already. We don’t need any more practice, thank you. Nor do we need to demonstrate our exceptional skill at gravity-based acceleration in front of thousands of onlookers.

  Bronze put a hoof on the bridge, carefully, and the stone held. We entered the courtyard and circled the mountaintop to the left, clockwise, to take the short way around to the front door; the door into the great hall faced north while the Kingsway hit the edge of the courtyard in the southwest—from above, we entered the courtyard at seven-thirty and circled around to noon.

  When we reached the pivot-door to the interior, Bronze nudged it with her forehead. It rotated on its axis, swinging open, and she stepped back to let it open fully.

  “Now, let’s see who’s home.”

  Nobody.

  Absolutely nobody.

  Someone changed the layout again. T’yl lived here for nine years or so while I was occupied. It’s only to be expected he made some changes. The silver inlay in the floor was new, for example. It wasn’t magical, with mystical runes and symbols, but it was a pretty decoration. Intricate knotwork, really, all over the floor and working its way up the walls, over the balcony, and on up to the mirror-polished gold of the arched ceiling. I especially liked the way the metal content of the veins in the walls started as pure silver at the base and changed smoothly to gold. It reminded me of trees and vines, somehow. The silver veins at the base of the walls were thick. They branched rapidly on their way up, spreading out, flowing over the gallery and up behind it, until there were thousands of fine, gold lines touching the polished gold of the arched ceiling.