Nightlord: Orb (88 page)

He nodded, wordlessly.

“Come along, guest.  I’m sure we can find something.”

So we did.  He kept looking around as though expecting monsters to crawl out of the shadows or follow us down the halls.  Having lived like that for a few years, I know the look.

Still, once I sat him down and put food in front of him, he ate.  As he ate, he relaxed.  I passed the time tossing squashed bits of bread into the air and catching them in my mouth.

“Who are you?” he asked, finally.

“Who are you?” I countered.

“I’m Heydyl.”

“Nice to meet you, Heydyl.  I’m Halar.”

I hope his reaction isn’t typical.  He gulped, jumped off his stool, and might have hurt himself kowtowing.

“I see you’ve heard the name,” I commented, dryly.

“Yes, my King.”

“Good, good.  Now, get up, sit on that stool, and finish eating.”

He got up, sat on the stool, and ate with ferocious concentration until he emptied the plate.  I watched, wondering what he heard to make him act like that.

“So,” I began, once he finished, “what brings you to my house?”

“Are you my father, Your Majesty?”

Well, that was unexpected.

“Why do you ask?” I heard myself say.

“Mom says you are and you’re here.  Your Majesty.”

“Okay, first off, drop the formalities.  My name is
Halar
.  Think you can use it?”

“Yes, Your— Yes, Halar.”

“Good.  And you can ignore the bowing and kneeling and anything else, got it?”

“Yes, Halar.”

“Hmm.  Still pretty formal, but we’ll work on it.  Now, what did your mother tell you?”

“She says you were here after the war against the evil Prince of Byrne, and that’s when you gave me to Mom, and I’m secretly a prince of Karvalen.”

I silently acknowledged to myself his mother might be right.  The Demon King got serious mileage out of my body while he was in the driver’s seat.

“Well, I haven’t been here in a few years—since before you were born, actually.  I can take a look at you and figure out if you’re my son or not, if you like.  Then you’ll know for certain.  Is that what you want?”

He nodded, wordlessly.

“All right.  Follow me.”  He did.  We went up to my workshop.

Of all the spells I know, all the magical knowledge I’ve digested from wizards and magicians both ancient and modern, there are more than a dozen different spells designed to detect a relationship between two people.  Maternity is seldom in doubt; paternity always is, hence the several spells for determining it.  Every last one of those spells is about as reliable as a coin flip.  Oh, maybe it’s not as bad as all that, but they rely more on arcane connections between the spirits of the father and the child, some resonating effect between the soul of the father and the soul of the offspring.

I tried them.  They all indicated a negative result.  Not surprising, since the “I” that did the fathering wasn’t the “me” being tested.  Any other wizard or magician would have taken the across-the-board negative as proof.

Which led to two things.  First, I needed a genetic test, not a spiritual one.  Second, if the kid was a product of my genetics,
was he also a product of my darker spirit?

Heydyl had to hold still for a while.  I subjected him to every test I knew or could think of that didn’t involve hurting him, looking for traces of anything sinister or unnatural.  I searched most thoroughly and found a boy, only a boy, bright and clean, with only those smudges on the soul that come from living in the world of men.

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.