Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

  He never tried using sunlight as a torture implement. Probably because he didn’t know how awful it is, but possibly because it would only be useful during a narrow window.

  See? I still have my sense of humor, such as it is.

  This morning, after my transformation, I was pretty much intact. Yesterday I was missing some non-vital bits, which was more than a little disturbing. It’s an interesting experience to have only one eye, or be short a thumb, or find some less-vital organs have gone missing. Puts a sort of perspective on things regarding people who have to deal with disabilities. Today was better in that respect, but everything was firmly tied down to the grating, which was slowly heating up. He left me there while he went to quiz Juliet a bit more.

  I noticed she also tended to regenerate. Not as quickly as I, but also without infusions of blood. Powerful healing spells, I assume. Possibly some sort of magic to supply the nutritional requirements of a healing body—if the spells in question even worked that way. For all I knew, it might function as a slow-motion undo function, reversing the damage purely through magical means.

  Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good idea. Maybe I should look into it. Hello, Someday.

  To keep myself distracted, I wondered how long Johann had gone without sleep. Something on the order of two days? Of course, he’s was running on a power high, so he might not be feeling it. He might even have spells to eliminate the need for sleep. If so, this could go on for an awfully long time before I got a real break.

  Actually, I already had several breaks. Mostly arms and legs. I was surprised at how difficult it was to break my bones. You’d think a brawny-looking guy conjured out of thin air could do it with a well-placed kick, but no—they tried clubs, then upgraded to sledgehammers. At least they had to work for it.

  I also had to respect Juliet. If she hadn’t given up her co-conspirators yet, she was either a lot tougher than me, or she didn’t know, either. I thought it unlikely she wouldn’t even know her own relatives in the cabal, but it was slightly possible. If she did, I had to respect her guts, notwithstanding the times I saw them hanging out of her.

  The heat in the metallic grating was starting to become painful on my mortal skin, so I tested my bonds again. Nope. Still fastened down like a passed-out frat boy covered in duct tape. On the plus side, my hair and clothes burned away early on, so I didn’t have to worry about them catching fire again. Even my beard went away.

  It says something when that’s the high point of my day. It doesn’t say anything good, but it says something.

  I spent most of the day on the grill. With uncanny timing, every time the burned areas got to the point where the nerves started to shut down, the whole grating jounced, shifting me on my griddle to expose new bits of fresh skin. That was just mean.

  I’ve had better days.

  That night, immediately after sunset, I was more than a little hungry from regenerating the extensive burns on the back of my body and the usual crop of full-body piercings. I decided to distract myself with a puzzle. The chains kept grounding out my spells; they didn’t seem to have much effect on my tendrils. I probed the metal, getting a feel for it, trying to analyze it. Oddly, while I could examine them without too much trouble, they felt much more solid than any other form of matter. Instead of whisking through them as easily as air, they felt thick, almost sticky. It took real effort to push a tendril through the material, then more effort to pull it back out. I could even move the material with tendrils, but it did me no good. I lacked the strength to physically rip my way free; my tendrils are orders of magnitude weaker.

  Examining the stuff kept me suitably distracted until my host paid me another visit.

  Johann didn’t bother to ask me anything. He started poking holes in my undead flesh with a carefree lack of compunction. As always, it was nothing too damaging from a structural standpoint, but aimed quite skillfully at the goal of causing pain. It was a fairly mild treatment, at least in comparison to his previous creativity, though.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “Ready to talk?”

  “If I could tell you what you wanted to know, I would have.”

  “Any human would,” he countered.

  “So, this is going to go on until I tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that incentive enough to believe I would have told you?”

  “No.”

  “Hard to argue with that,” I said, trying not to sound condescending. “I have a question, though.”

  “You want to question me?” he asked, eyebrows climbing his forehead.

  “If you don’t—ow—mind.”

  “By all means, go right ahead.”

  “This bronze-ish stuff. What is this? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It’s an Atlantean alloy called orichalcum. It’s a magical conductor. Atlantean magical technology relied heavily on it.”

  “Thank you. I was wondering. Ouch. It must be a pain to work with, though.”

  “Not really,” he assured me, shrugging. “I have people for that. It cannot be worked with magic, that’s all. It must be done with fire and water, the old way.” He shrugged. “There are some special tricks to it, but it can only be worked by hand.”

  “Fair—Ow!—enough.”

  Johann nodded and drank something while watching his conjured servants continue to stick sharp spikes through me.

  “That reminds me,” I added, then grit my teeth while a spike went through my undead liver. “I’m getting hungry.” I hoped he recognized an understatement when he heard it.

  “I know.”

  “Ah. Not interested in my sparkling wit and pleasant conversation?”

  “All you do is lie,” he sighed. “Maybe you shall feel differently when you return to your senses.”

  “Can I ask what you’ll do if you ever get evidence I’m telling the truth?”

  “Regret the wasted time,” he told me. “Or not. It has been somewhat interesting. I certainly won’t apologize.”

  “I thought not.”

  An hour or so went by. Johann stepped up his game, forcing my regeneration to work harder. Fire and acid are especially difficult to regenerate. They actually destroy flesh rather than simply open it up. This hastened the onset of a severe hunger fit. It was obviously his goal and he knew how to go about it. I was in no position to stop him.

  It wasn’t long before the hunger grew to inhuman, even monstrous proportions. When it grew large enough, there was no room for me.

  When I came out of my berserk hunger rampage, I was standing amid piles of corpses, fully healed, while a mist of blood whirled in the air and condensed on my skin, vanishing. I was still in the torture chamber, but someone had unfastened me from the grating, turning me loose on a bunch of people.

  Small people.

  Children.

  I was knee-deep in corpses. They ranged mostly from four to twelve years old. None of them appeared to be sleeping.

  Then I realized I wasn’t standing on the floor. I was standing on another layer of bodies.

  How many bodies? I don’t know. I hope I never know. Hundreds, certainly; possibly a couple of thousand. It was a big room, and the floor had more than one layer. I didn’t dig down to find out just how many.

  Hunger was one thing. I know the feeling well.

  Rage was entirely another. I haven’t felt so vast a wrath since the elves blew chunks out of Bronze. It was a burning sensation, as though I was on fire on the inside. If I’d tried, I think I could have breathed fire, chewed stone, and spat lava. I already intended to kill Johann if I could manage it. At that instant, he stopped being a target of opportunity and became a goal.

  As bad as it was, it got worse.

  I found five bodies fastened to the wall, kept separate and obvious, above the piles of bloodless dead. Their placement and positioning made going for the throat awkward, so they were disemboweled rather than bitten. The smallest hung in two pieces, half still suspended on
the wall, the other half dangling by a few strips of internal tissue.

  Johann found out about my feelings regarding children, so he tormented me with feeding on them.

  Then he went to the trouble of finding my old neighborhood.

  The bodies were the Fabulous Four—Gary, Luke, Edgar, and Patricia. Worst of all, though, were the broken remains of little Olivia.

  I can weep. My tears are bloody things and sink into my cheeks as quickly as they form, but I weep, nonetheless. I would have torn my hair out if Johann hadn’t burned it off.

  He deliberately provoked me into a berserk hunger, knowing I would kill anything I could reach. He then introduced hundreds of children into the monster’s cage—my cage. Moreover, he deliberately included children who meant something to me, personally. He carefully set it up so the special ones would remain visible even after I turned a mob of children into a pile of corpses.

  He was moving on from torturing my flesh to torturing my soul, and doing an amazingly good job of it.

  My burning rage dimmed, replaced by a bitter, empty cold. I sank to my knees before the broken bodies and gently—oh, so gently!—searched within them for any trace of life. Of course, there was nothing. Nothing survives a nightlord gone berserk with hunger, much less a defenseless child. They were as cold and empty as I was, and their eyes could not even accuse me.

  I wanted to kill Johann before this. I wanted to take him in my hands and rip him to pieces in such a way as to make music of his screams.

  Now I wanted him to live—live a long, protracted, excruciating life. I wanted him to survive for a thousand years in an agony so vast he couldn’t scream. I wanted his essence placed in a lantern so his soul could burn and provide me with a warm glow.

  I used to joke about being a guardian demon, I thought, still holding Olivia’s lifeless hand. Johann will find out what that means. Today, it’s not a fucking joke.

  To make it possible for me to kill as he wanted me to kill, he had to let me out of the orichalcum chains. I was still confined to a room, yes, caged in a cell, but free to move around, free to cast spells. Free for how long? Long enough to suffer? Surely, but there was no point to my suffering if he couldn’t enjoy it. He was watching—must be watching. The moment he thought I passed beyond pain and rage and into something closer to rationality, he would have me back in chains.

  I’ve never tried to cast a spell in overdrive. Time to give it a shot.

  While I knelt there, next to the wall, I moved my awareness through my body. There is no heartbeat to increase, no breathing to accelerate, but there is something inside me, ticking with a slow, steady movement. It is nothing physical, but mystical, spiritual. Perhaps it is my soul, washing back and forth inside my flesh, like water in a shaken vessel.

  I shook it faster. And faster. And faster.

  Power surrounded me in this place, as always. I left it alone for the moment, building the first spell I wanted—shields. Shields against being simply grabbed and stuffed somewhere; a barrier to directed magic. I built it out of my own energies, a trick mortal spellcasters can’t use. Trying to do so would exhaust them for even the simplest spell. I have the advantage of many souls to feed my forces.

  Only when it was complete did I gather up the magic around me, squeeze it, mold it, compress it, funnel it into the matrix of my shielding spell. It came alive, sparkling around me, and immediately I started work on a second spell.

  Johann appeared in the room, somewhere behind me. I could feel the bastard smiling.

  “My, but you seem upset,” he chuckled. “Did the evening meal not agree with you?”

  I ignored this; if he wanted to monologue, that was fine by me. I finished my second shielding spell and a third while he was trying to be a witty villain.

  When he didn’t get a response—I didn’t even turn around—he tried to transport me. My guess is he wanted to put me somewhere more easily controlled. His second attempt, a blast of mental energy to stun me, met one of my other shields and fizzled. His third try was electricity-based, directing a high-voltage surge toward me. No doubt it was the magical version of an electrical stun weapon. He was too late, though. The electrical discharge hit another of my defensive spells and grounded out. None of it touched me.

  “My turn,” I whispered.

  I turned away from the wall and planted a foot against it. I pushed off, half-leaping, half-running at him. The wall cracked beneath my foot. The air tried to rip my face off as I shot toward him, claws outstretched.

  Johann didn’t even have time to look surprised before I was closing taloned hands around his throat.

  Whatever else he might be, he wasn’t unprepared. He disappeared an instant, an inch, before my outstretched claws touched him. He didn’t have time to concentrate on leaving; I moved too fast over too short a distance for human reflexes to react. No doubt a defensive measure of his own went off with the proximity, triggering an automatic teleport. I wasn’t really paying attention to his spells. All I wanted was to get my claws in him.

  I screamed in rage as he escaped, then occupied myself with hitting the far wall without damaging myself. I slowed a little on the way, absorbed some of the shock with my arms, and managed not to break anything, wall included.

  He got away. Somewhere in a high-magic environment, a mage who can teleport at will was avoiding me.

  Well, fine. Let’s see about forcing him to come to me.

  The crystal wall was still intact. I walked over to it and hit it straight with my right fist. It didn’t shatter, but it did crack nicely. A second punch cleared an opening large enough to drive a tank through. I left the abattoir and entered the relatively clean torture chamber to rescue Juliet.

  If I could free her, get out, and open up some additional power centers, the kids and grandkids could keep Granddad occupied. I would be free to find him and beat him to death with his own spine.

  Getting her loose was tricky. At the moment, she was strapped to a table rather than chained. The chains were still attached to the table, though, which made approaching it while wearing shielding spells problematic. I downshifted out of overdrive to talk to her.

  “Are you awake?” I asked. Since she was strapped down, not chained, she could be under a spell. When she did not respond, I checked; something was on her head, probably altering the structure of her dreams and keeping her unconscious. That was unfortunate. I couldn’t reach past the orichalcum chains around the table without ending my own spells. I couldn’t even affect the spell on her; the chains would ground out magical attempts to reach past it. Yet, I needed her. She was the only person I had who could show me where another nexus point might be.

  All right. I could enclose everything inside a shield—the whole room. If I made a large Ascension Sphere… Yes, that could work. The chains, being completely inside, wouldn’t have anywhere to ground out to. They would exist entirely within a higher-potential magical environment. The Sphere would act as a defense against remote spells and a spell inside the Sphere could prevent teleportation. Then I could help Juliet, raise my defensive spells again, and we could, hopefully, get out of here before Johann figured out a way to get to us.

  I set about doing so. Fortunately, I had more power surrounding me than I’m used to. It was more power than any other time I can remember, except for my wake-up call in the base of my statue. I wasn’t sure how long I might have, so I worked quickly, trying to hit a balance between personal energies expended versus time. It helped that I had several sharp objects with which to scratch symbols on the walls. While I walked around the torture chamber and scribbled-scratched, I tried to ignore the depth of the corpses in the abattoir.

  The air crackled as the Ascension Sphere activated, surrounding the room, bulging out farther than the walls themselves as it stabilized into a sphere to contain the whole chamber. For a moment, the interior of the Sphere seemed dull and dim, but power radiated from its inner surface, filling the space rapidly to higher and higher levels.

  I too
k stock. I wasn’t hungry yet and I was physically intact. I was in no sense tired; the abundance of energy here helped enormously. Good. My mental shield had taken a beating, though. Something tried to alter my thinking processes while I was paying attention to other things. I reinforced it and built a second one for safety. Then a quick barrier to bar transportation through spaces other than the usual three…

  I turned my attention to Juliet. The spell on her head was definitely a dream-inducer—probably some sort of nightmare, judging by her heart rate and the wild, panicked colors in her spirit. I ran fingernails across the straps and sliced right through them.

  Then I dismantled the spell around her head. When the spell fell apart, she opened her eyes and sat bolt upright, screaming, hands flailing, the works. I stepped back and let her get her bearings. It took a minute. After a few days of torturous destruction and magical reconstruction, I couldn’t blame her, but I was in kind of a hurry.

  “Get a grip,” I told her, not unkindly. “You’re free, and we need to move. Focus!”

  She took her sweet time about it, in my opinion. Her eyes were wild and she gripped the edges of the table with white-knuckled hands, breathing hard and fast. I kept my impatience in check. I don’t do so well when I’m rudely awakened, either. I counted to ten under my breath and addressed her again.

  “Got your bearings? Know where you are?”

  “I… yes. I’m in Grandfather’s torture chamber.”

  “Thinks of everything, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “Can you stand? Can you walk? I need your advice on how to get out of here and get to a nexus point.”

  “I can stand.” She swung her feet off the table and I helped her to stand. “I don’t know where we are, though.”

  “You just said we were in his torture chamber.”