Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

  If he is my son, he’s a good kid. Who would have guessed? I blame his mother, whoever she is.

  According to my sources, my body might have hundreds, even thousands of offspring. Heydyl seemed all right, but what if some of them… bore the stamp of a dark and terrible thing? If a demon-possessed creature sires a child, can the child inherit some of that demonic influence? Could there be a thousand or more partly-demonic children struggling with their own inner demons—literally—as they grow up? Or was it only a hundred? Ten? Or even one? What would happen when they hit adolescence? Adulthood?

  I worked on the first part—the genes—to distract myself from thinking about the second part. If the kid’s genetics didn’t have much of a match with mine, the second part didn’t matter—to him. If he was a match, then I’d have to start thinking about ways to detect not only demon possession, but demon parentage, as well.

  Unfortunately, I don’t know too much about genetics. A little Mendel, a little Darwin, and some biology classes—along with a potential paternity incident in graduate school—at least gave me an idea of what to look for. Whatever I came up with wouldn’t be the same as a technological paternity test, but maybe it would be good enough.

  So, keep it simple, Eric. Assume you are the father. What does that mean? What, down at the genetic level, would we have in common? Genes for hair, eyes, facial features, and all of that… but I don’t know where those are, much less how to recognize them in a DNA chain. It only has four letters, but I still can’t read the genetic code.

  Back up. I can’t understand it, but I can make a spell to read it. So what if it’s gibberish? I’m only looking for patterns. If I read a string of gibberish in the kid and get matching gibberish from my own genes, that’s a result. Where do I look? The kid was male; he would have a Y chromosome. The only place he could get it was from his father. If I could get a look at his Y chromosome and compare it to mine, I could evaluate it for similarities.

  If I can psychically swim though steel and rearrange atoms, a big, fat chromosome should be no trouble.

  Worth a shot.

  I’m never going to be a geneticist. On the other hand, I may manage to be a decent bio-lab technician.

  Heydyl sat and watched while I worked. I told him I was going to test his flesh and see if it was related to mine, but I needed a sample. When I poked him with something sharp to get the sample, he barely flinched. He seems a tough, serious kid.

  This seems to be a pattern. The kids around here seem to grow up faster than in my own world. Is it the expectations? They don’t get to spend years in the public school system. Around here, they work; they get responsibilities as soon as they’re physically able to do the job. Formal education is a luxury. Is it that simple? Or is it something else? I don’t even know how to look into it.

  It took me over an hour to cobble together something to map, overlap, and compare our Y chromosome. Of course, that was after I spent a couple of hours taking cells apart looking for the damned thing. Do you know where the Y chromosome is? What structures inside the cell to look through? The nucleus of a cell, yes, but do you recognize it when you see it? Did you know it’s not actually shaped like the letter Y? If so, where were you when I needed help?

  The spell started mapping his cell sample; I cast it again on my own sample. Eventually, when they finished mapping the things, they would overlap their mapped images and the similarities or differences would stand out in bright colors.

  One of the things about living in a cave is a lack of time sense. My skinphone appears to work, at least as well as one might expect when out of network, but I keep it turned off to save the battery. Maybe I should enchant it. Or get a mechanical wristwatch on my next trip out of universe.

  “I’ve been at this for hours,” I observed. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” Heydyl nodded. “Good. I’d rather not eat alone. To the kitchen!”

  We ate everything we could hold. Along about the burping stage, Heydyl asked a question.

  “Am I your son?”

  “I’m working on that,” I told him. He concealed his disappointment pretty well, but I was watching his face. “I know it’s not what you want to hear. The spells are working on it. They’ll tell me if we’re related.”

  “Don’t you just know if you’re my father?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “How does it work?”

  Ooo, goody. My possibly-son by a lady I never met due to demonic possession and droit du seigneur or lettres de cachet or some other legal phrasing I can misuse—this kid I met earlier today—is asking me the tough questions right up front. Aren’t I supposed to have a few years to get to know him before I explain about all the squishy, biological stuff?

  “I’ll explain,” I agreed, “if you’ll tell me why you came to see me.”

  “I want to know if you’re my father.”

  “I got that part. Why is it important to you?”

  Heydyl folded his arms and frowned. I waited while he thought about it.

  “I’m a prince, but nobody believes it.”

  “Go on.”

  “Anyone who does believe it calls me a demonspawn.”

  “Unpleasant and insulting,” I agreed.

  “I don’t have a father.”

  “Your mother isn’t married?”

  “No.”

  “It must be tough.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she know you’re here?’

  No answer to that. All I got was a tighter, even more tense bundle of kid.

  “Did you even mention to her you were going to come up here?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, you don’t want to answer that, either. Tell me this: Is she alive?”

  “Of course she’s alive!”

  “Calm down. How would I know? I haven’t been here in years. Okay?”

  “…okay.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. You go let your mother know you’re all right—I have no doubt she’s worried to death—and I’ll let you come back tomorrow to find out the results. I should know for certain if you’re my son or not.”

  “Promise?” he asked, hopefully.

  “I give you my word I will allow you to return for the results of my test.”

  “I accept.”

  “Good. Now, do you know your way through the undercity?”

  “Of course.”

  “Even better. I’ll show you to the door. You’re not risking your life on the Kingsway again.”

  I closed the door behind Heydyl and leaned on it, slid down it, sat on the floor.

  Yay. Possibly the first of my thousands of illegitimate children. That went surprisingly well.

  There was a time when I never gave any thought to being a father. Tamara changed all that—Tamara, and the Mother of Flame. Then, when I was looking forward to all the terrors of being a parent, I went and got myself beaten to an undead pulp defending the world from a demonic invasion. I completely missed becoming a father and mostly missed being a grandfather.

  Heydyl brought home all the possibilities of parenthood to me. I’m an inadvertent deadbeat dad in the biggest possible way. The only other candidates for the title are Genghis Khan and one of the sultans of Morocco.

  Hearing “Congratulations! You’re a father!” is one thing. Hearing “Congratulations! You’re the father of a thousand children!” is quite another.

  It’s not the event. It’s the scale. The sheer, unadulterated, massive scale. Heydyl was only the first.

  Then there’s the whole thing of having a child look at me, waiting on an answer. I’m not sure I’ve ever worked so hard to be inventive. He kept looking at me, as though I could wave a hand and produce all the answers. It was a pressure I’ve seldom felt before, and it was exhausting.

  “Firebrand?”

  What, Boss?

  “Do you know what I am?”

  Insecure, ridiculously self-loathing, self-deprecating, and with a god complex fit for a real deity?

>   “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘tired,’ actually.”

  About time. You’ve been on the go forever.

  “And miles to go before I sleep,” I quoted, hauling myself to my feet. “Still have work to do.”

  Would it kill you to go to bed?

  “Maybe. There’s no telling what will wander out of the basement if I don’t keep the lid locked down. Besides, I have a terrible habit of oversleeping. What if it’s another eighty-seven years?”

  We would wake you, Boss.

  “Are you sure you can?”

  Firebrand had no answer for that.

  I added Heydyl to the list of people who could come in through the underdoor and went to look at my sand table some more.

  It was in a distracted and disturbed frame of mind that I went back to my sand table and spell work. I had the sense to avoid doing anything requiring intense focus and concentration, at least. All I managed was to tie the sand table into the defensive spells around the palace and then the spells around the mountain. Of the two, getting it to coordinate with the mountain’s spells was harder. Someone had altered them.

  Good enough for a distraction. I started analyzing the changes. It seemed to me as if the original spells were used as scaffolding, a framework, upon which to build other spells. Rather like building a dome, once you have a dome already built, you can use it as support for building things under it or over it, whether the final construct winds up connecting to the original or not. My original scryshields served such a purpose and someone—T’yl? Tort? Thomen?—used it to add more.

  The scryshields blocked most magical vision from penetrating. Multiple layers performed different functions. One acted like a wall, forcing a scryer to work to get through. Another projects an illusion of a huge, lidless eye of flame, seemingly looking back at the spy. If someone penetrates that, the next layers divert the scrying sensor so it manifests somewhere I want it, rather than where the caster wanted. And that point is, of course, inside a complex illusion spell so the caster doesn’t know his vision has been diverted.

  Those were the starting shields. Since the last time I looked, they added more. There was a general shield against mind-affecting magic. Sending the whole city a psychic message wasn’t going to work unless you were already inside… and the same went for controlling minds, influencing thoughts, or nudging public opinion in the polls.

  There were more direct defenses, too, designed to block or blunt attacks of various sorts, both magical and mundane. Some spells monitored the area inside the shields. These were simply alarms or sensors, detecting all sorts of things, ranging from invisibility spells to demonic creatures. Other spells each detected a type of effect, probably for the use of the city guard—it’s good to know when a fire gets larger than a fireplace can hold, or when someone cuts loose with a bolt of lightning. Were these Rendal’s idea? Or was he in charge of them?

  Most of these defenses were controlled and monitored. Somewhere in the undercity, a few hundred feet below me, there might be a wizard sitting quietly and watching the way these spells glittered and flickered. It might be a dozen wizards. Or it could be a bunch of apprentices barely keeping half an eye on the things while they played défi.

  Are the defenses there for serious reasons? Are they forethought made manifest, anticipating their need and use? Or are they a continuation of what I started because… well, because I started it? I put up the first city-sized dome. That made it relatively easy to build onto it. If someone gives you a barn full of tools, you naturally want to build things, I suppose. Or did someone put them there after a demonstrated need for them? Are they proactive or reactive?

  I need to find Tort. To do that, I may need to find T’yl.

  The underdoor chime sounded. I swore aloud.

  “Firebrand, remind me to put a visual on all the alarms tonight.”

  I’ll do that, Boss.

  I stomped down to the entry room and stopped outside its upper door. I opened up a small scrying window in my hand mirror. No one was in the room, but the lower door was open. At a guess, someone came in without authorization and the intimidation and deterrence spells did their job. The cold, the low-frequency sound waves, and the strong positive-ion atmosphere made it an extremely unpleasant room.

  I gave the mountain a message. After a while, it shifted a tiny bit of mass around in the lower door. With it ever so slightly out of balance, gravity swung it slowly closed. People could still push it open, but at least it would close behind them. Maybe I should install a manual signal at the top? Say, a bell they can ring to say they want attention and they’re determined to stay until they get it?

  On the other hand, I still didn’t know who tried to come in. It shouldn’t be a problem when I added a visual to the psychic alarm, but for now it was a mystery. Well, if it was important, they’d try again. In fact, they might be trying right now, headed up the Kingsway. Or they might have decided bothering the Demon King wasn’t really worth it.

  Still grumbling to myself, I went upstairs, out through the great hall, and around through the courtyard. Yes, someone was coming up the Kingsway. He didn’t look at all happy about it. His horse didn’t seem too pleased, either, but I believe—at least for the horse—it was an effect of the height, not the destination. They were taking it at a walk, so it would be a while.

  This was somewhat annoying. By the time I made it into my projects again, I’d have to answer the door. I needed something to kill a little time.

  There are stairs along the inner wall of the courtyard, leading up to a parklike area. This place has dirt, trees—all the things you might expect to find on top of a small mountain. It was actually a garden; most of the plants were edible in some form or fashion. Trees had nuts and fruit, vines and bushes had berries, and so on. Nothing was in season at this time of year, of course, but it was worth a walk-through as a winter garden.

  I went up the stairs and followed the paths spiraling around the mountaintop, just for the feel of it. It needed a gardener or three and a chainsaw, but it was a nice contrast from the cold, smooth courtyard. It hadn’t actually gone wild, but when Spring arrived, it would. All it needed was some snow and it would make a good picture on a calendar.

  Nesting all around the base of the big, pagoda-like chimneys were families of thashrak—leather-winged snakes, basically. They didn’t seem to mind my looking at them. I think they were too happy just being near the chimney heat. There were more of them than I remembered. I wondered about population control. Since they were native to the southern continent, they might need the warmth of a chimney stack to survive the winter. That could limit their population. If not… Can I domesticate them? People could use them in place of cats to cut down on mice and rats.

  Okay, I could use them so. Cats avoid me. These things don’t seem to mind so much.

  I came back down the steps into the courtyard, still thinking about it, and paused halfway down. A spirit, standing in the shadow of the peak, watched me as I came down. He was translucent and nearly colorless, but I could see him. There seemed to be some sort of silver wire coming out of his midsection, like the tied-off portion of a long belt. This wire floated in the air, fading out after about three feet. He wore a pale headband of some sort—not a reflection of an item of clothing, but some sort of spell.

  I must have stared too long. He noticed me staring and it startled him. Fear crossed his face. He tugged on the silver strand and it pulled him away from me; he shrank into the distance. A moment later, he faded from view completely.

  Ghosts don’t bother me. Spiritual visitations don’t bother me especially, either; most people won’t put their immortal soul anywhere near a nightlord. It’s on par with coating your hand in meat sauce before trying to tummy-scratch a hungry tiger. This, however, bothered me.

  The spirit was wearing slacks, shirt, and a tie.

  Magi? It would seem so. The clothes certainly didn’t belong here. How could they follow me? Did they have the spells for that? It was
possible; I never had a chance to see an index of all their spells. From meals, I knew they thought of travel to otherworldly realms in terms of “spirit realms” rather than physical locations. Astral projection into those realms—and apparently this world—wasn’t unheard-of.

  At least eating a bunch of magi was good for something.

  I wasn’t sure how they could track me down, though. Hitting the right world might not be unreasonable—they could, in theory, use the magical or psychic resonance off the point where Mary and I departed. Come to that, if they found the place I arrived over there, it could help, too. And, of course, if they were the ones who stole the Black Ball… yeah, that would make things relatively simple.

  But how could they find me? It’s one thing to find a planet, but once you’ve found the planet, how do you find one person on it? Go looking?

  Or get advice from someone?

  They could have asked around. People around here don’t necessarily scream and run by default when confronted by a spirit. A sufficiently-powerful projection might even be mistaken for a living person—at night, at least. But then there’s the language problem…

  Oh, who am I kidding? The Magi stole the Black Ball and it’s encouraging them to come after me. It was pretty much the worst thing I could think of, so, naturally, it was happening.

  There’s one good thing about it, Boss.

  “There is?”

  At least we’ll have leads on how to find it. If they keep sending people over, you can catch one and quiz him.

  “That’s actually not a bad idea,” I agreed, sitting down on the lowest step. “Not a bad idea at all.”

  You’re so generous with your praise, Boss. Is my face flaming?

  “Not a bit. Thanks, Firebrand.”

  Someone has to do your thinking for you.

  “Yes, but Tort isn’t here.”

  That’s just mean, Boss.

  “I’ve got a reputation to uphold,” I told it. I sat down on one of the inner wall’s steps and listened to the slow clop of approaching hooves on the Kingsway.