Nightlord: Orb (98 page)

On the other hand, if you put a ring of people around this sort of spell and they all attempt to locate each other, they’re going to notice some members are undetected.  By drawing the lines between who cast a spell and who he saw, the borders of the undetectability can be determined.  Then you can start examining those areas by other means.

Maybe a better example is in order.

Take a stadium and black it out.  Pitch-dark.  Somewhere in the place is a big balloon.  The balloon is black to the point that if you shine a flashlight on it, it still looks like the dark background.

Now, if you could turn on the lights, the balloon would be obvious.  But we can’t turn on the lights.  Instead, we have a dozen friends with flashlights.  As they wander around in the seats, they keep shining their lights at you.  Eventually, one of them winds up on the far side of you from the balloon and his light seems to go out.  Now that you know what direction it’s in, you can guide other friends to have the same situation at different elevations and different angles.  Eventually, you can get a pretty good idea of the size and location of the blacked-out balloon and, therefore, whatever is inside it.

I intended to do that.  Or something much like it, anyway.

Never fails.  Start one project, something else pops up, even in the middle of the night.

I was in the middle of a spell, figuring out a way to make it orbit the sand table.  Technically, I was setting it up so the matrix of the spell structure would lock on to the edge of the table and follow it at a fixed distance within the plane of the table itself, rather than orbit, but “orbit” is simpler.  It was finally starting to register on me how the spell needed more than one method of detecting and ranging, as well as a method of orienting itself relative to the north-south axis of the plane—that was important for later.

Mary shoved the door open with her shoulder and it started spinning on its axis.  She came over to me and laid a firm hand on my shoulder.  I held together everything I had going, hands frozen mid-air.  I turned my head toward her.

“Important?”

“To you, yes.  It’s a child.”

I dropped the incomplete spell structures, letting them unravel and fall to nothingness.  We hurried up the corridors to the great hall.

Bronze stood next to a firepit, watching over our guests.  The guests were a mother and a child.  The mother was somewhere between sixteen and eighty—physically, at least sixteen; her eyes looked very old, indeed.  The kid was nothing more than a small, well-wrapped bundle.

Her life energies were low, but exhaustion will do that.  Her child, on the other hand, was only a flicker of life.

I looked at Mary.  Mary looked at me.

Sometimes, I hate this job.  Sometimes I hate the Grey Lady, all the various other gods, and the whole race of Man.  Like right now.

“Let me see,” I told her, gently, and sat down next to her on the edge of the firepit.  She handed me the wrapped-up bundle and I examined her child.  Cute kid, but much too thin—no baby fat at all, nothing but skin and the angles of bone.

“She wastes away,” the mother told me. “She eats and eats but it doesn’t help.”  She sounded calm, almost placid.  Judging by her expression and the faded colors of her soul, she was in the place beyond fear, panic, or despair.  A calm, still place where nothing means anything anymore.

I cast my spells, spread the net of my tendrils, and completely failed to find anything wrong.

Microorganisms?  No.  Viruses, bacteria, parasites… nothing.  Nothing lived inside her that wasn’t supposed to be there.  Cancer?  Nope.  Not a trace of the fever-bright lights, the unnatural vitality of malignant, fast-growing cells.  Injuries?  No broken places where living energy vented away.  Something mystical?  Her soul was firmly connected at all the proper mounting points.  There wasn’t even a spell or curse or anything of the sort; I would see it.

As far as I could tell, she was perfectly healthy, aside from the starving.  Yet, according to her mother—who told me the truth; I could see it in her soul—the child ate everything.  She eats, but starves anyway.  Wonderfully paradoxical and not at all good.

Someday, I will go to medical school and understand the ways the human body can fail.  I still may not be able to do anything about it, but at least I’ll know how I failed to help.

“I would refuse, but I don’t know how to keep her in her body.  This is not a miracle I can give you.  Have you asked at the Temple of Fire?”

“I have asked everywhere,” she replied, voice dead and quiet.

“Then I am sorry.”

“She suffers,” insisted the mother.  “Make it stop.”

“If I could heal her, I would.”

“Stop telling me you can’t!” she screamed.  “I know there is nothing to be done!  I know there is no hope!  I know this is the end of my daughter! 
JUST MAKE IT STOP!
”

The baby girl awoke and began to cry.  Her mother collapsed to her knees, face pressed to my thigh, hands beating feebly on either side.  What must she have endured with her child to come to the angel of death?  What does a mother do before stamping her daughter’s soul Return To Sender?  How hard is it to tell a baby “I’m sorry, I failed you.  Go back to where you came from and start over with someone better.”  What is it that gets a mother to such a state?

I don’t know.  And of all the things I don’t know, that’s one I don’t want to know.  My cold, undead heart isn’t strong enough.

I touched the mother with a tendril, draining what little vitality remained in her.  She relaxed, slumped, and I caught her with one hand to lower her gently to the floor.  I turned my attention to the crying child in my arms.  The little one worked her arms loose and waved them, squalling. I moved more wrappings to make her comfortable and smiled down at her.  She hiccupped and subsided, looking up at me.  She might have been as much as a year old, but probably less.  It was hard to tell; she was so thin!

Damn it, she
smiled
at me.

“You’re not making this any easier,” I sighed, still smiling, speaking in the adult-talking-to-baby voice.  She reached up and grabbed my nose.  She laughed, displaying a few tiny teeth.

“What are you going to do?” Mary asked, staring at me.  Her voice was an unearthly whisper, inaudible to anything with a heartbeat.

What am I going to do?
  I thought.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” I admitted, keeping my baby-talking tone.  I tickled the little girl’s nose with a fingertip as I spoke.  She grabbed it and tried to eat it, giggling.  “I can’t fix her if I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“You’re not going to…” Mary trailed off.

“Do I have a choice?”

“But you… you do the thing.  You and children.  You’ve got a… a thing.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re still going to…?”

I smiled up at Mary.  I think it was a smile.  My lips were pulled back and my teeth were showing.  Maybe the word I’m searching for is “rictus.”

“If I had a choice,” I told her, still trying to keep my tone cheerful for the child, “I would take it.”

“Didn’t you once tell me, early on, about how magic manifests the will?”

“Yes.  I did.  Your will acts like a program in a computer.  The more processing power you put behind it—magical force—the more effectively the program runs.  The more will you put into it—the more robust the program—the better it works.  And the more detail you have—the more specific the programmed function—the more powerful the effect.  I don’t know what’s wrong with her.  I can’t fix it because I don’t know how.”

“Can’t you… can’t you skimp on one and double down on the other two?”

“Yes, sort of.  But it would take mammoth—” I broke off, thinking.

Most of my spells are highly specific in what they do, which makes them highly effective—they usually do one specific
thing and therefore do it well.  On the flip side, I also know spells I didn’t create.  Wizard spells, kludged together by people who don’t know the underlying theory; all they want is an effect.  Start a fire.  Make it rain.  Help grain to grow.  Have a woman conceive a son.  Break a fever.  All the things wizards have been doing for thousands of years without really understanding how their spells worked.  They would scratch in the dirt, chant, and sometimes spend days in meditation, building their power to achieve some effect.

The kid doesn’t have that long, but I’ve been building up power for a while, now.  Enough to do the job?

I am a doorway into death.  Can I decide to stay closed?

It could be, no matter how hard I try, this kid is going to die tonight.  But it won’t be because I didn’t give it the best damn try I could.

“You had an idea,” Mary accused.

“What?”

“The look on your face.  You had the thousand-yard stare and your eyebrows did the thing.  You do that when you have an idea.”

“My eyebrows do a thing?” I repeated.

“They do a little dance.  It’s hard to describe.”

“Okay.  Hold her,” I told Mary, and handing her the kid.  “I’ll be right back.”

I stepped inside my headspace to search for spells.

Mary sat there with the crying child and I blinked a few times, reorienting myself.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.  “Was I gone long?”

“Two minutes or so.”  Mary handed me the child.  “She doesn’t like me.”  I took the kid and she quieted almost immediately, hugging on to me and burying her face in my shirt.

She likes the Lord of Night, but the Lady of Night is totally unacceptable.  Children are weird.

“Did you find what you needed?” Mary asked.

“I think so.  Want to watch me blow phenomenal amounts of power?”

“Of course.”

We went to the magical workshop and Mary fetched things at my direction; I was hampered by having only one arm to use.  Every time I tried to put little whatever-her-name-was down, she immediately started wailing.

While Mary drew a diagram on the floor for me, I went and fetched my four remaining power-diamonds.  They were still in their power circle charging stations, but I was going to need them.  I shoved power into them, draining the power circles, and brought them with me to the lab.

The kid was not happy to be put down in the diagram.  I soothed her as best I could, not wanting to take any of her limited vitality.  She didn’t want to be soothed; she wanted to be picked up and held.  If she could have stood up in her condition, she would have, quickly followed by grabbing me and hanging on.

One of the translation spells I know works by tapping concepts, rather than language centers.  Worth a shot.  I built it carefully and cast it on her; she was the one who would have the most trouble with comprehension.

“Now listen,” I told her.  She stared fixedly at me with wide eyes.  “You have to stay right here for a few minutes.  I’m not leaving.  I’ll be right here.  But you have to stay still.  Can you do that for me?  Please?”

She stopped squirming and lay quietly, still looking at me.  She seemed to be waiting.

“Thank you.  You stay right there and I’ll pick you up again in a minute.  Okay?”

She made a noise the spell interpreted as “I don’t like it, but all right.”

If I ever need to be fantastically wealthy, I can sell enchanted translators so people can speak baby.  I can name my price and people will pay it. People will line up at my door.  People will murder each other to get ahead in line.  Ask any parent.

Mary and I finished the diagram.  I reviewed our work and didn’t see anything that needed changing; she was definitely getting better at this.  I complimented her on it.  Mary gave me a curtsey, spreading her hands, miming a skirt.

I set up four of the low-power fans, arranged to blow magic into the diagram.  I’d have used the jet versions, but those take too long to build.  Besides, with the four massively-charged gems placed in lesser circles, I had enough power for anything I might want to try.  Probably.

I stepped into the conjurer’s circle.

“Do you have anything resembling a plan?” Mary asked, stepping into a lesser circle.  She wasn’t going to help, but the lesser circle would protect her from any untoward or unintentional effects.  Sort of like a blast shield, it was there just in case.

“Yes.  You know how healing spells work?”

“Welding?  Or focusing?”

“Focusing.”

“They tell the body about the problem and encourage it to devote resources to that specific problem.  They also usually supply more energy and some help in enhancing the body’s response to the problem.  The ones you’ve shown me also give it better instructions than ‘fill in the gap with scar tissue.’  Right?”

“Pretty much.  There are other spells to do similar things.  The physical enhancement spells I told you about—the ones where I helped the fledgling knights grow bigger and stronger?”

“The steroid spells,” she agreed.  “They exercised and the spells made their body overreact, sort of, growing more muscle than you would expect, and faster.”

“Close enough.  They are kind of like drugs, now that you mention it.  Those sorts of spells work until they run out, then the body goes back to working normally.  In the case of muscle mass, you still have to maintain it with exercise and suchlike; your body still thinks it’s supposed to be smaller.”