Knives in the Night

by Nathan A. Thompson

  And if anything ever did happen to me, people needed to know just how much of a friggin’ genius Wes’ sister was, so that they could all listen to her and live.

  “It wasn’t really—” Rachel started to say, but the rest of the team wasn’t having it.

  “No, those ideas were all hers,” Himari said softly as she walked up behind us. “Our leader speaks the truth.”

  “Yep,” Christina said with a nod, “Davelon listens to all of us, but nine times out of ten Rachel’s plan is usually the most brilliant by far.”

  “Ah,” Rashem said in a respectful, impressed tone.

  “Yeah man,” Andre added, “and it’s a good thing she catches all the stupid things I always—ow!”

  He had walked up in time to catch a shoulder punch from Himari, who rolled her eyes and smiled at him.

  “Ahhhhhhhh…” Rashem said again, sounding far more enlightened this time. Somehow, his doing so made Rachel relax again. “At any rate, we are glad you were here. The mage and his escort would have given us much trouble with their unique powers, but your band fought them as if you had trained in this sort of combat all your lives.”

  Heh, Rachel sent smugly.

  “What was more,” the elven man continued, “our spies tell us that no new rabid Horde bands have emerged from the Pits in several days, so we may finally have the spare room we have been needing to continue preparations. The main armies are all still on the march, however.”

  A little light flared out from the middle of the Wealthwalkers, and our orange communication fairy spiraled into view.

  “Message from Avalon!” the tiny, orange-haired woman squeaked, throwing a hasty salute. “A new development has occurred with the native inhabitants! Passing on the message to all Earthborn teams, per Lady Guineve’s orders!”

  We all turned to listen to the news.

  CHAPTER 27: BLADE PRACTICE

  Wes’ Perspective

  I dodged this time.

  The giant, semicircular slash tore past me into the dark, ethereal void, tearing apart the air and black nothingness like a razor blade tore through fabric.

  The darkness repaired itself, and far more quickly than I could. The attack hadn’t come within a foot of me, but the force behind the swing still sent a sharp current of air that left cuts all over my phantasmal skin and armor.

  “Still haven’t answered my question,” the Pendragon grumbled, holding out his hand, fingers extended, thumb tucked carefully at the top. It looked for all the world like the kind of karate chop I had seen in one of the few martial arts classes my parents took me to, except that there was a translucent layer of force that somehow reminded me of a massive, two-handed sword. “What’s the most common way you can tell that your city is about to be hit by an Air Master’s thunderstorm?”

  “Fuck! Ow!” I shouted as my vital guard worked to close well over a dozen small cuts. “Do we really have to do things this way? I almost lost an ear that time!”

  “Probably not,” the Avalonian man admitted with a small shrug. “But you went on and on over how big massive thunderstorms, sandstorms, and other shit were for you right now, and how you really needed to make dealing with those a priority.”

  “I meant, can you not test me during a fight?” I shouted as I ran to get more distance between the two of us. Toirneach—or at least a dream-version of it—appeared in my hand, but I held off from throwing it in case the asshole decided to be reasonable.

  “Maybe,” the Pendragon said with another indifferent shrug, “but choosing not to would require resisting my impulse to attack you, so we’ll probably never know. Now answer the question before I swing at your groin.”

  “Motherfu—the sky!” I screamed, as he pulled his hand back for another chop. “The sky will usually change to a gray or bronze color, even before the clouds arrive! Like I saw before! And the longer the buildup of the spell, the more noticeable the color change!”

  “Right,” the Avalonian asshole blinked, “I forgot you’ve already seen at least two of those. I’ll have to think of a better question.”

  Then he swung his hand out in a horizontal chop.

  This time I leaped as high as I could into the air, and as soon as he attacked. The powerful cutting force passed harmlessly underneath me, though the air still shook all around me with the intensity of the attack.

  But I had already battled a number of things by now that could turn the terrain and atmosphere into a blotchy scene from a children’s coloring book. I twisted my body as I landed behind him, launching an overhead swing with Toirneach and stabbing downward at his leg with Colada.

  “Not a bad attack with your dual-wielding,” the Pendragon said clinically he stepped away from the stab and parried the mythical axe of the Woadlands with the same hand that had sliced through time and space a moment ago, at an angle where he would either dismember himself or somehow knock my axe out of the way.

  There was angry clang as the weapon met bare flesh, and my phantasmal muscles screamed in protest as I struggled to keep the massive tomahawk from flying out of my hand. I stumbled, then leaped back away from him before he could take advantage of my being so off-balance.

  “But you still need to cut down on all the somersaults and twirls. It’s better to keep your fighting moves as simple and efficient as possible. Also, leaping away from me isn’t giving you that much protection, since your opponent can still fight well at range.” He raised his hand up to launch another freakish hurricane slash. “You’d have been better off if you just brought your other weapon up to cover yourself.”

  “The hell I would,” I spat, hurling Toirneach at the bastard’s face. “If you can deflect a blow from a weapon I’ve used to injure an Umbra, you can tear me in half at close range.”

  “If that was true,” the Pendragon said as he casually swatted the axe out of the air with another chop of his bullshit greatsword palm, “you shouldn’t have immediately chosen to—”

  I launched a stored fireball straight at his open mouth.

  He sliced his hand straight up, bisecting both the air and my fireball. The two burning halves sped harmlessly past him to blow up somewhere off in the distance.

  “Launch an attack that—” he continued, but my stored lightning bolt blasted out a moment after my fireball did.

  “You were confident I could parry, without an effective follow-up,” he said as he somehow stabbed his hand forward before my lightning bolt could reach him.

  The spell crackled as it impacted against the inherent sword magic behind the Pendragon’s casual attack. The sword magic won, overwhelming the lightning bolt completely and making it fizzle out of existence. Then the remaining force traveled to impact against my chest.

  But destroying the Practitioner-level lightning bolt had robbed the stab of much of its force, so it only impacted against my breastplate with the force of a gunshot, something my armor could handle. My scalemail dented, but the padding and Woad chain mail protected whatever passed for my vital organs inside this mental realm.

  It still hurt like a bitch, and knocked me off of my feet.

  I landed well and rolled back up immediately, sputtering every oath the Testifiers had managed to teach me so far.

  A moment later, I remembered that I only had two stored spells left, but I was still probably going to run out of expletives first.

  In a surprising display of compassion, the Pendragon actually winced.

  “Darn,” the former Planetary Lord said as he saw how heavily I was panting, “I thought removing my gauntlet and fighting unarmed would be enough to keep this challenging but still useful for you. I’m going to have to start pulling my blows a little more.”

  I sputtered uselessly.

  Then I wondered how many curse words Via knew, whether or not she could teach me, and just how long it had been since I’d seen her.

  “Let me see if I can take it down by about a hundred skill ranks,” the tall, pale man offered, dispelling over half of the translucent, sli
cing energy covering his hand. “And we’re getting off track anyway. We were talking about protecting your settlements from intense magical storms. Do you remember how I told you to handle that?”

  “There are defensive enchantments I can throw down on my cities to limit the amount of damage caused by magical environments,” I said quickly, in case the Pendragon was only kidding about his suddenly deciding to be a decent person for a little bit. “There are expensive but permanent Script, Shaping, and Ideal Wards that can be etched into the foundations of my city’s walls and major buildings. There are also temporary wards that can be thrown up and laid around most districts and neighborhoods, providing I or the inhabitants recognize the early warning signs. Finally, every home should have some kind of warded basement with at least the cheapest of wards stored inside of it. It won’t be enough to save the rest of the building, but the inhabitants themselves should be able to survive. But for all of that to happen to begin with, my court and I need to have the resources available, the craftsmen to implement them, and a populace educated enough to make proper use of the protections.”

  “Very good,” the former Solar High King said with a nod I barely noticed, because I was still watching his magical death hand. “That covers most of the preventative stuff. What needs to happen when one of the storms occurs?”

  “Aside from putting up the temporary wards,” I began, still carefully watching the magic fireball-slicing gunshot-stabbing sword hand, “the city needs to have all emergency staff on standby. All hospital staff, any disaster relief specialists like firefighters, any Saga or Ideal wizards directly employed, the police force, the army—”

  “Army or police force?” the Pendragon asked, narrowing his eyes. “Which one?”

  “Both,” I retorted firmly. “The police force’s job will be to direct traffic into shelters and prevent any spontaneous crime. The military might do a small amount of that, but they need to be ready to defend the city from additional threats, because any enemy with the resources to hurl a thunderstorm at me will also have the resources to send a massive monster or invading army in its wake.”

  “Very good,” the Pendragon repeated.

  Then he thrust the magical death hand forward in a stab.

  Another sharp current of force headed my way, but I could immediately tell that this one was much weaker. So I twisted Colada into a parry, and found that I was able to deflect it away.

  “What should you be doing all this time?” Avalon’s former lord asked as he pulled back his hand and launched another stab at me. I deflected his next one, then summoned Toirneach back into my hands and charged him.

  “It depends on how strong I am,” I answered, knocking away another blast as I closed the distance to him. “And who else is on site to deal with the threat. If I know where my enemy is…” I paused to take a swing at the Pendragon’s face—something he had assured me would be fine. He batted away my weapon, but this time, I retained my footing easily, and kept attacking. “Then I should do what I did last time: get a team of my strongest people together and go for his throat. Unless he’s strong enough to both take me down and keep hurling natural disasters at my populace, at which case I’m screwed, and need to try and sue for terms, and give him whatever I need to keep my worlds and people alive, and nothing more.”

  “And then what do you do?” the pale man asked as he swept both of my weapons to the side with his sword-karate hand, and then stabbed for my shoulder. “How long to keep or renew these treaties?”

  I couldn’t dodge the thrust completely, so I twisted my body enough to take the blow on my armored shoulder, and at an angle. The blow hurt, but didn’t damage anything.

  “Only as long as it takes me to get enough allies or personal power to deal with my enemy,” I answered as I swung my weapon. He pulled back his hand to intercept, but this time I was able to get a grazing blow on his mailed sleeve. It didn’t penetrate any better than his own attack, but he made an impressed grunt. “Then, if I can get away with it, I kill him in whatever way doesn’t put my people at great risk.”

  A light flicked on somewhere inside my brain, as my two weapons locked against the Pendragon’s blade-hand.

  “…which is either done openly, in a display of power that will leave his allies fearful of me, or with my Court Knife, so that his death can’t be traced back to me.”

  “Good observation,” the Planetary Lord said as he stepped from me, pausing the duel so that we could both get a breather. “The Expanse is full of assholes who will use what you’ve done to another asshole as an excuse to try and take your people and your worlds. And it won’t matter how blatantly justified you were in your measures. All that will matter was whether or not they think they’re strong enough to take what your people have from you, in the first case, or whether or not they can both trace the assassination back to you, and feel confident in their ability to stop your assassins better than the last guy did.”

  He gave me a hard look.

  “And that brings us back to your role as Lord. I know I agreed to talk about administration, and city-planning, and all that other vital shit that will preserve your people for aeons, and I will continue to do, but I want to make something very clear: you can only have booming economies, excellent medical systems, prestigious centers of learning, and fancy irrigation after you’ve made sure that every local asshole can’t plunder your cities and enslave your populace. And the wealthier and happier your citizens become, the more assholes are going to find out about you. You have to make sure you’re always at least strong enough for them all to decide it’s just not worth the effort to fill their storehouses with your people’s wealth and food, or to fill their brothels and slaughterhouses with your country’s attractive citizens. That is your first goal, as Planetary Lord: to keep your people safe. Be it from tyrants, monsters, or Tumults. Once you’re strong enough to do that, then you can figure out the best ways to plan your cities’ roads or what trade networks you want to set up.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still not that simple,” I replied, still looking down every now and then to make sure he wasn’t about to slice apart our shadow-realm by playing make-believe with his hand well enough to fool physics again. “All of that stuff needs to be planned out well at the beginning, too, or I’ll have issues eventually. I need both my city and its wall to be well-designed at the beginning, or they’ll get in the way of each other.”

  “That’s true.” The Avalonian ghost shrugged. “And we’ve both mentioned that before. And you’ve mentioned the solution: find other people to help you figure that out. Even if you become a High Adept at every form of administration and economic field, you’re still going to spread yourself too thin trying to do it all at once. Which brings us back to the beginning. You have to recognize what you have that is valuable, and therefore what you have to protect. That includes the people beside you, who can do all sorts of things better than you can, even though you know you have more ranks in the same Skill. Like your Court. Like your advisers…like your wife.”

  The former king sighed. His shoulders slumped, and the cutting energy around his hand dissipated.

  “We’ll go ahead and call the lesson here,” he said, his eyes meeting some memory instead of my own. “I’ll save the next sword lesson, and the next bit about people skills for the next time you either fall asleep or get hit in the head.”

  And with that, he vanished.

  I woke up a few moments later.

  It was hard to tell without any kind of windows in this room, but some unknown internal sense told me that it was still an hour or so before sunrise.

  Which meant that I had gone to bed late, and woken up early, like the kind of morning person I had never wanted to be, even before all this nonsense started.

  In fact, I had been doing that for almost a week by now, and, except for that brief bit after saving the Sun-Jeweled Seas, I had pretty much been sleeping like this ever since I escaped from captivity all that time ago. Even when I was between Tumult
s on Avalon, there had just been too much to do.

  Except that I didn’t feel nearly as tired as I would have felt back on Earth.

  Maybe it was my Rises, or my greatly enhanced Constitution score and Stamina pool, but despite that lack of sleep I was…

  Still in bed.

  I had done all that rumination about working hard for so long and being totally used to it, without so much as lifting a damned finger to actually start the day.

  I started to roll myself out of bed, and pretended that the cranky guy who used to have my job hadn’t spent the entire night lecturing and beating me in my dreams.

  Then, as I blinked myself awake to really look around, I remembered I was in a co-ed sleeping arrangement.