Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

  How much of that was T’yl’s work? Did he give the mountain detailed instructions? How much of it was the mountain taking a basic instruction and running with it? With suitable directions, could the mountain form a hollow space in the stone and fill it with metal? Could it grow a metal object?

  I’m discovering new ramifications of having an enormous pet rock.

  For that matter, how smart is it? It doesn’t seem intelligent—not like I think of intelligence—but insects are capable of immensely complicated behavior. Computers aren’t intelligent, but they can be taught—programmed—to perform intricate functions. Does the mountain learn? If it does, what will it learn in a hundred more years? A thousand? Ten thousand?

  It’s starting to frighten me again, and this time it didn’t do anything. I guess I’m a coward at heart.

  At least the dragon’s-head throne-sculpture wasn’t much different. It still came out of the southern wall as though the dragon stuck his head through. It struck me that it was larger than before. A quick butt-check confirmed my estimate. It was actually more comfortable than I remembered. I could sit on the length of the dragon’s snout, lean back between the dragon’s eyes, put my arms on the eye-ridges, even put my feet up on a nostril-ridge.

  If I have to have a throne, at least it’s getting better as a seat. I kind of wish it was a regular chair, if it has to be anything. The dragon’s head is impressive, I grant you, especially with those rubies for the pupils. They can glitter menacingly. I’d still rather have a chair.

  Bronze waited in the throne room while Firebrand and I searched the palace level of the undermountain. Not only had the layout changed, but the doors weren’t quite tall or wide enough for Bronze to use anymore. Someone shrank them, which I find annoying. I took several minutes to mention this to the mountain and discovered it had already started enlarging things to make her feel more welcome. I made it a point to mention the corridors and doors should always be large enough to accommodate her.

  The mountain understood immediately; it knows Bronze. Strangely, that seems entirely appropriate to me.

  Taken as a whole, the upper portion of the mountain was easily large enough to count as a full-scale palace. Formed under the mountaintop, it was a mass of tunnels and rooms only loosely organized into floors. A rough estimate, walking around, gave me preposterous numbers without even bothering to explore half a dozen passages leading down to who-knows-where. A quarter of a million square feet? Five floors? Thirty or forty bedrooms, barracks for five hundred people, kitchens, bathrooms, meeting rooms, food storage, armory, public baths, gymnasium, and rooms I’m still not sure about.

  What does anyone need beyond a bedroom, kitchen, bath, and living area? A hobby room? A big closet? Maybe a garage?

  “Well, I have a house,” I noted, slouching back onto the dragon’s head. Slouching around in my actual bedroom didn’t feel right.

  You do, Firebrand agreed. It’s a nice house. I like it. Cavernous. It could use a nice pile of gold, though.

  “I’m glad you approve.”

  Bronze does, too.

  “I can tell. Have you been here before?”

  Twice, not counting our jailbreak. The other guy didn’t like it here. I think he didn’t much care for your personal religion, and this city is their base.

  “How do people get in and out?” I asked, ignoring the religion comment. “The road from the courtyard used to spiral down the mountain spire. Now the city and roads stop at least, what? A hundred feet down? It looks as though the only way is the Kingsway.”

  There’s an entry room lower down, Boss, inside the mountain, with access to the undercity.

  “Show me.”

  We went down a long, curved, sloping hall, somewhat below the courtyard level. I pushed open the door at the end. It divided a platform beyond in two, overlooking a deep, circular room. The room beyond was fifty or sixty feet in diameter and obviously an entryway. Ramps led down, following the walls, to the floor opposite. An identical door—closed—showed where people would enter and depart the Royal Palace.

  “Now I know how to get out,” I observed.

  What’s wrong with the way we came in?

  “Enemy fire.”

  People know where this one is, too, Boss.

  “I’ll have a word with the mountain about other escape routes,” I promised. “Now, how do we go about finding Tort and T’yl?”

  Search me. I don’t hear either of them. Or anyone else, for that matter. It’s quiet up here.

  I closed the door and headed back up to the throne room. I could spend a mortal lifetime searching the interior of the mountain, without even considering the possibilities inherent in magical concealment. On the other hand, the mountain could feel its own interior. I would ask it to do the heavy lifting.

  Becoming part of the mountain was surprisingly easy. I generally put a heavily slowed-down message into a wall and it reacts at its own pace. During the day, I can merge my consciousness with it, if I need to do something precise or complicated, but it always works better at night—being dead means I don’t have to worry about tricky biological questions when I slow my consciousness down.

  This time, I slipped into the mountain like slipping into an old pair of, well, slippers. The way we communicated was different, too. Instead of a series of feelings and intentions rolling back and forth, this was more like… no, I don’t have something to compare it to. Maybe it was like putting on a hat with some extra brains in it. For a little while, I was the mainframe in a vast computer network, and then it went back to running on nothing but the peripheral systems. I was the spider at the center of the web, the driving force, the mind and will of something so large and so vast as to dwarf anything human-sized. It certainly made me feel dwarfed. Possibly even halflinged. Maybe pixied.

  I did my thing, started some processes, felt around a bit, and diminished. Shrank. Let go of the sheer size, the enormity of being something vast, and became merely me.

  Now I had a pretty good idea where Tort had to be.

  If you have a chapel dedicated to you—and if you’re egotistical enough to want one—you generally put it someplace people can use it. That’s the point of a chapel, after all. People use it for prayer, meditation, and offerings. Sometimes, I suppose a chapel can also have sermons and other services, but the point is all about the people involved, whether as clergy, worshippers, supplicants, or sacrifices.

  The chapel to me wasn’t my idea. It sort of happened while I was buried in the base of my statue. It’s not my fault. I was recuperating from a really unpleasant bunch of demonic adversaries. I’m tempted to say I had the full set, but I wasn’t in any shape to find out if I caught them all. Besides, T’yl put the secret compartment in the base of the idol, not me.

  My point about the chapel, though, is it’s now on a level with the palace proper, making it a private chapel. I don’t need a private chapel to myself.

  I pushed open door after door. When I finally arrived, I had to fiddle with the idol until I figured out how to open it. The last time was easy; I just pushed from the inside. It didn’t have obvious handles on the outside to give it away.

  When I slid the slab out on its rollers, I had a pretty good idea what I would see. I thought I’d see Tort in some sort of recuperative sleep-spell. Maybe I could wake her up with a kiss, like Sleeping Beauty.

  As with so many things, the answer was yes and no.

  The body on the slab was Tort. I know her face. I know her hair. The curve of her lips, the angle of her eyebrows, the shape of her ears—I know her. Every line, every curve, every color.

  She was wrapped in a number of spells, most of which kept her alive. The slab wasn’t simply a place to put a body; it was a hospital bed for a coma patient. A highly-secure one, judging from the anti-detection spells.

  Did I dare to reach inside her with tendrils and hunt around for a spirit? The body had vitality—it was definitely alive—but I didn’t see anyone in it. If her spirit was so small and we
ak, did I want to feel around and see if I could find it? I decided to put that off.

  I tried the fairy-tale method of resuscitation, first. I kissed her.

  Nope. Well, I’m neither Prince Florian nor Prince Phillip. I’m not even all that charming.

  On the bright side, I did notice something as I kissed her. She smelled different. I sniffed her more carefully. The spells kept her continuously clean, but everyone has their own smell. She didn’t smell right.

  Now, I admit this next part sounds a little creepy when taken out of context.

  After sniffing her unconscious form, I kissed her again. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought she tasted different, too. So I licked her. Yes, she did seem to have a different flavor. I even went so far as to bite her—carefully—and taste her blood. The spells on her closed up the wound for me.

  This wasn’t Tort.

  It resembled Tort. No, it looked exactly like Tort. But it didn’t taste like Tort, nor smell like her, and the blood was completely wrong. Whoever this was, someone had made her look like Tort, but this definitely wasn’t her.

  I rooted around inside the body, looking for a spirit. I didn’t find one, but I did find the mounting points. Someone had removed a living spirit from a person and turned the body into a replica of Tort.

  Well, so much for the idea of using her body to summon back her spirit. It was barely possible I might be able to summon up the original occupant, but it was more likely that spirit was already well into the recycling process.

  What do you think happened, Boss?

  “I can think of a couple of possibilities. First, this might be a decoy. Who they’re trying to decoy, I’m not sure. The Church of Light, perhaps, or some other group that thinks she’s an evil vizier to the Demon King.”

  Or a decoy for the evil overlord version of you?

  “Ah. Good point. This could be a backup in case things went wrong, I suppose. If Tort’s body was destroyed in the escape attempt, this would actually be a good one to use as a life raft. If she could get away mystically, but not physically, at least she would have someplace to go.”

  Could she do that?

  “They tried to cram me into a physical body, didn’t they?”

  True. If they could do that, Tort shouldn’t be a problem.

  “Thing is, either of these leaves me with questions. This is not Tort. I want my Tort, and T’yl appears to be the only person who knows the details about the process they used to free me. Now I have to find him or Tort to get this sorted out.”

  Know anybody we can ask?

  “Offhandedly, no.”

  The mountain?

  “It doesn’t see people the way you or I do. They’re… presences. Things. It’s like me paying attention to my individual blood cells. They’re there, unnoticed, even beneath notice, until one of them does something to come to my attention.”

  How about Tianna? Or Seldar? They’re religious types. They might know something about it, if it is the Illuminated Idiots. Don’t those god-types keep an eye on each other?

  “I’ll ask, but I’m not hopeful.”

  No, you’re angry.

  That brought me up short. When Firebrand points out how angry I am, I’m really angry, whether I realize it or not. It was right. I was angry. Angry and disappointed. I wanted Tort. I thought I had Tort. Someone lied to me with this look-alike body. Someone took her away. Someone stole her from me.

  They could have at least left a note.

  “Thanks. I’ll try to calm down.”

  Anytime, Boss. Maybe a nice dinner and a hot bath?

  “Not right now. Right now, I’m going to see if there’s a mirror room somewhere up here. I’ve got things to look for.”

  It wouldn’t hurt you to take a break, Boss.

  “Thank you for your concern.”

  There wasn’t a formal mirror room for communications—at least, not one with a dozen dedicated mirrors. There were a couple of magical workrooms, though. One of them was obviously T’yl’s; it wasn’t in disarray, exactly, but it had a lived-in look. I didn’t want to invade his space, though, so I kept looking and found an unused workroom. It had a free-standing, full-length mirror in a heavy steel frame. It would do nicely. It was probably set up for me, in fact, in case I ever put in an appearance.

  As I thought about it, I wondered where the gate room was. I also wondered if it was. When a gate goes ker-flooie, how awful is it? It was disruptive on my side, but what about over here? Later, later, later…

  I spent the next few hours looking over the various cities of Karvalen and Rethven.

  I really should get a new name for Rethven. It’s a defunct kingdom; it doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe it’s Karvalen, now, but Karvalen is a city on a mountain as well as a kingdom. How do people cope with that? Maybe I’ll poll the citizens and see what they think. Or maybe I’ll stay out of it and let Lissette run the place without my interference.

  Yeah, like that’s going to happen. At least I can try. I wonder how long it will last.

  There’s only so much you can tell about a place by—essentially—flying over it and through it. I found out the mountain grew roads everywhere, much to my delight. It even managed to arrange for sewage and drainage in the cities, which was only partly delightful. I approved of the improvement, worried about the effects of having one entity as the literal foundation of the kingdom.

  Much of the Eastgate Pass—or the Vathula Pass, I suppose—was now a road. There was a small town on this side, the eastern side, of the pass. It spread out enough to block the pass and ran far enough out of it to reach the northern canal.

  Mochara was larger than I remembered and now had two gates in the southern wall; it needed them, what with two big, stone piers… docks… quays… whatever they call big, rectangular chunks of rock sticking out from the shore so ships can pull up alongside them. Brisk trade went through there because of the big stone dock-things. The obelisk-things on the semi-submerged harbor wall included magical lights to mark the harbor mouth at night.

  Carrillon was more interesting. The mountain grew through the kingdom’s muddy tracks, turning them into roads on the way to the various city walls. It spread through road and wall, taking them over much as it had done for Mochara, Vathula, and other cities. The walls and roads were solid stone. Carrillon also had the improved drainage and sewage systems—meaning, it had them at all. From the looks of things, the place was nearly as clean as Mochara or the mountain.

  One of the more interesting things was the palace. I couldn’t look into it. It was blocked off with several powerful spells. One of them scrambled the image badly enough I couldn’t even tell if it was a spell or an enchantment. Smart move, that. I’d have to do something like it here.

  Other cities were pretty much as I recalled, aside from some obviously new buildings replacing old buildings. At a guess, those were from when my dark side decided it was a city’s turn to be conquered. At least the kingdom had roads worthy of the name. There were no armies marching along them, which was even better.

  The Quaen river flowed again in its accustomed riverbed. Looking northward, there was no sign of the avalanche that once formed a temporary dam. Did someone clear it, or was it another example of earth-moving by a super-colossal earth elemental? Regardless, the river was back and the city of Bildar once again had a river running under most of it. The bridge-city seemed to be in suspiciously good shape. I suspected mountaineering influences.

  All in all, everything seemed quiet and well-ordered, at least from a bird’s-eye view. Give credit to an iron-fisted tyranny; it gets things done.

  I wondered how long things would stay that way.

  I shut down the mirror and started getting things together.

  Boss?

  “Yes?”

  You’re still angry.

  “Yes.”

  Are you about to do something grumpy?

  “You sound worried.”

  Only because I know you, Boss, and sometimes you scare me.


  “Am I scaring you? I don’t mean to.”

  You don’t usually stay this upset for this long without doing something…

  “Something?”

  Drastic?

  “No, I’m not doing anything drastic. At least, I don’t intend to.”

  Now, see, that’s part of what scares me, Boss. I’ve seen some of the things you think about and about half of them are things you don’t consider drastic. It’s not the things themselves, bad as those are, but the fact you don’t think of them as drastic. See what I mean?

  “I think so. But I’m also not planning to do anything extreme. All I’m doing is trying to find Tort. I’ve given it some thought while I was looking over the kingdom. I’ve had time to calm down. I’m not going to send out an ultimatum to all the kingdoms of the world. I’m not even going to dump cities into the ocean.

  “What I am going to do,” I continued, sharpening a piece of chalk, “is what any decent wizard would do when he’s lost something. I’m going to cast a detection spell. I don’t expect it to work. I’ll seek for Tort, then for T’yl. If I get a hit, great. I’ll keel over in shock. If I don’t, at least I’ll have confirmed what I already know.”

  Uh, if you know it’s not going to work…?

  “I’m trying it anyway,” I explained, “because, while I am a fool, I’m not a complete fool. You have to try the simple things. Besides, if I later discover all I had to do was send out a seeker spell, I’ll have to be angry again, but angry at myself.”

  Well, at least you’ve had practice at that, Firebrand observed. I slapped the hilt and it shut up.