Nightlord: Shadows (101 page)

So we went over scrying spells. They weren’t very good with them, so we stuck to the simplest forms. The plan was, when we went to fire my next warning shot, I would have already placed a vision-sharing spell on them. That way, they could each see what the other saw. Likewise, I planned to have a couple of small mirrors with scrying enchantments.

(The lesson on scrying spells wasn’t necessary, but any enchanted item is easier to use if you understand the principles. This is one reason most people don’t use enchanted items even if they happen to come across one; they have no idea how to make it go.)

One of them would place a scrying sensor somewhere and look around. The second one would also see the area and would put his scrying sensor somewhere in the field of view. The third would do the same by looking through the second scrying sensor, and then the first one would pick up from there. In this manner, they could leapfrog around us, patrolling beyond our line of sight without ever leaving my side.

For my part, I was going to irradiate everyone I could.

See, I have spells to distort light. They change the refractive index of the air, making a lens. I can even create a virtual mirror by causing all the light in a plane to simply reflect. These aren’t terribly complicated or powerful spells, by themselves, but it does mean that I can make, say, a three-foot magnifying glass and focus all that light down to a point.

Ever played with a magnifying glass like that? Good bet you’ve never played with one
three feet wide
. Imagine. Now try to imagine the result for one three meters wide. Or thirty.

With another lens to turn that focused dot into a beam, I can send it downrange to set fire to things. So far, so good.

The part that makes people gape in openmouthed wonder, however, is the way I change the frequency of the light.

Normally, a lot of the sunlight is wasted. Sunlight is made of lots of frequencies we can’t see, like ultraviolet or infrared, microwaves and radio waves, and all that other stuff. Your glass magnifying lens only bends certain types of light; the rest either bounces off or goes straight through.

I can alter the light coming into the big lens—I don’t change its energy; it still has the same amount of energy in it—by changing its wavelength. I can shift the ultraviolet light, for example, down the spectrum into visible blue light, which the magnifying lens will affect. Everything outside the normal visible range gets shifted up or down into visible light, making it much, much brighter. This
all
goes into the lens and focuses down to that point. Now I’m using
all
of the sunlight, not just the part we can usually see.

Then, after it goes through the lens that turns it into a beam, I shift it all up. Up into the ultraviolet. Up again, into the high ultraviolet. Up again, into the x-ray range. Up again, and again, and again…

I’m sure you see where this is going.

Not all of the light gets shifted, of course. There’s a little wastage; a little gets through, but it’s no brighter than a flashlight. All that light is still light—electromagnetic radiation—but at a fantastically higher frequency. Now it’s a beam of gamma radiation, invisible and deadly.

I thought aiming an invisible beam was going to be a problem, but I used a frequency-altering spell across my eyes like a visor. It downshifted the stray ionization into the visible range, making the gamma ray beam look like a searchlight through a fog.

I tweaked the focus of the lenses, widening the beam angle just a trifle, and played with it until I had it just right. I wanted this to go as quickly and smoothly as possible.

This morning, the guys and I took the fastest canal boat up the northern canal from Karvalen; Bronze pulled us and the three horses. The canal ran past the mouth of the pass and continued north. I wondered where it ended.

We did have a bit of trouble getting out of the canal; as we went north, the walls of the canal rose faster than the floor of the canal. I suppose if the floor had the same angle, the water in the canal would flow too rapidly. Still, we were very close to where we wanted to be when we stopped. There was a bit of a delay in disembarking; getting the horses up over a six-foot lip of stone was challenging.

Interesting note. When loading, the horses did not want to get into the boat. Bronze snorted at them and they stopped fussing, got into the boat, and stood there shivering for the rest of the trip. Bronze was also instrumental in getting them off the boat. She got down in the canal, worked her way under the boat, and stood up under one end to make the whole boat into a ramp. Afterward, she just leaped out.

Anyway, we spent most of the morning doing that, then rode hard up the pass to get to my vantage point. We parked where I did before, where the road through the pass comes around that gentle curve to reveal the gate.

They had done some repairs on the wall and repaired the portcullis. The gate itself was gone, of course, but they had a temporary wooden wall blocking access to the gateway and a number of workmen chopping lumber and hammering. The guards were also doubled. They didn’t like daytime duty, but they were there.

I cast my sunlight-conversion spells, and my guys started their virtual patrol. Once we had everything set, I raised my hands, added some amplification, and called out my warning. I wanted Firebrand. If they didn’t bring it out, they were going to suffer for it.

They didn’t bring it out. They blew horns and pounded on drums. More troops flooded the upper defensive works, armed and ready, about like I expected.

I waved the gamma-light over them, back and forth, giving everyone multiple brief exposures. I wasn’t too worried about induced radioactivity in their gear or the surrounding rock. While some of the gamma rays were probably well above the threshold necessary to induce photodisintegration, the resulting byproducts would be relatively short-lived.

I would have been overjoyed to use neutron radiation on the parapets, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to generate it. That would have made the walls radioactive for quite some time; people would rapidly decide that anyone guarding that gate would be accurséd, which is worse than just being regularly cursed.

The other problem with neutron radiation is that, in an atmosphere, it’s comparatively short-ranged. To use it, I would have had to get right up next to the gate.

Come to think of it, maybe gamma rays are the safest way. Neutron radiation makes me nervous. Unlike gamma rays, stray neutrons can stick to your atoms and make them unstable, causing them to become radioactive, which means
you
become radioactive. Neutron radiation is
contagious
.

My guys reported some activity along our flanks; sentries, scouts, nothing pressing. I nodded and continued my slow sweep of the troops along the parapets, careful to avoid irradiating the towers of the palace. I also reminded the guys to check around us for a scrying sensor. They reported the area clean; it seemed no one was willing to expose an eyeball around me. I was very pleased.

Some of the troops on the defenses seemed to be circulating. Some were withdrawing, possibly because they were puking, while fresh troops crowded up to see what was going on. That was a good sign, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t have a good way to measure the amount of radiation dose they were picking up, but rapid-onset nausea is a good indicator of a lethal dose.

Eventually, Vathula opened up the portcullis and the temporary barriers. A diplomatic type emerged, backed by an armored column of
orku
cavalry.

“Hold it right there!” I bellowed. They ground to a halt.

“Do you have my sword?” I asked. “Dip your banners if you do!”

They did not.

I shrugged and aimed the beam again, spotlighting the armored column. Eventually, they started forward again at a walk, trying not to look too threatening. They had roughly two miles to go, so I wasn’t worried. My bet was that they were sending a diplomatic-looking person to keep me in place while they moved troops closer. That was about the level of treachery and deception I expected.

After the first mile or so, a few of the armored column had to drop out; they were violently ill. Several of the horses were in a similar condition. That’s a good marker for just how much of a radiation dose they had. Seldar reported substantial movement out of our line of sight; people were coming out of caves and tunnels. They seemed to be moving to cut us off from retreat.

I agreed that our work here was done. My guys got up and mounted. Moments later, we were on our way. The armored column didn’t bother to chase us; they could see it was hopeless. We did have a few people shoot at us from high up on either side of the pass, but no one with any magical assistance. Deflection spells handled it all.

We made it back to the canal boat. I paused to let the mountain know we needed stairs right about
here
in the wall of the canal. I would give the mountain more details about where to put other sets of stairs later, but for now, a set of stairs as wide as a canal boat was long, right here in front of the pass, would do just fine.

With that done, we headed home.

I’m guesstimating that I gave everyone at least eight to ten Grays of ionizing radiation; it might be—probably was—more. Regardless, if you start to throw up immediately after a dose of radiation, that’s a Very Bad Thing. It’s usually a lethal dose for anything human. My guess is that
orku
and
galgar
—and sadly, their horses—don’t have any special tolerance. Look up the effects of acute radiation poisoning and you’ll see why I’m a monster.

I couldn’t bring myself to care about the various forms of ugly on the walls, but I felt bad about the horses.

More and more knights are getting their new armor. It meets with their universal approval. They love the stuff and I don’t blame them a bit. They’re not thrilled to still wear the old, steel stuff in practice, but they’ve grudgingly admitted that it’s probably a good idea.

But they wear the new stuff like clothes. I’m not sure they get out of it to sleep.

At night, I’m pushing hard to get them all enchanted with what I think of as the standard issue enchantments. Luckily, I have a pretty hefty charge on my gate; I don’t need to keep feeding power into it. Instead, I hook up my remaining prisoners directly to me and use that power.

That helps a lot. It kind of freaks T’yl out that I can do that, but he’s getting used to it. I’m a nightlord; I eat life force. He knew that from the first, so he’s coming to terms with what that means. Working together, we can finish everything on a suit in about an hour. We’ve also worked out a trick, similar to my half-enchantment, half-spell for growing a suit around someone.

While each enchantment is something unique to an object—you can’t grab twenty arrows and enchant them all in a bunch—you can use some mandala (magical diagrams) to help define what you’re doing to whatever it is you’re enchanting. So, when you put a suit of armor into a man-shaped outline on the floor and start activating the symbols around it, some of the basic groundwork is already there. And, of course, since you’re working from a drawn diagram, rather than grabbing power and shaping it by hand, it’s a lot less power-intensive.

T’yl and I are getting really good at it.

I asked Tort if she could help, but she says she’s too busy. I can’t fault her for that; she’s handling most of the day-to-day chores of running the place. I am duly grateful, and I mean that. She’s coordinating with Kelvin and Rendal, too, setting up the details of militia training and of our brand-new City Guards.

She delegates a lot. A lot more than Raeth, anyway. Of course, Raeth had a much smaller population to deal with—mostly just the knights. Tort’s dealing with over a thousand people in Karvalen alone, and her reach extends to Mochara as well.

I still haven’t heard from any of the three cities, though. Sadly, I
have
heard from a bunch of foreign dignitaries. They talked with Amber for a while, then elected to press on to Karvalen and talk to the King.

Amber snickered when I complained to her through the mirror.

“Well, it’s not easy being in charge,” she told me. “I guess you’ll just have to make time to be a ruler.”

“Oh, very funny. You’re enjoying seeing the tables turned, here.”

“If you think you can find someone better qualified,” she said, “feel free to turn the job over to them.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. She blew me a raspberry in return. A pair of mature adults, we are.

“How did Rendal take his promotion?” she asked.

“He accepted a shield from the hand of the King,” I replied. “He swore to protect and serve the people in accord with the will of the King. Stuff like that. There was cheering, as I recall.”

“Good. He’s a good man, just not a very political one.”

“I like him, I think. I looked into his soul and didn’t see any of the deep darkness.”

“I’m not going to ask.”

“I’ll explain, if you want.”

“No. I’ll just take your word for it and move along, if that’s all right.”

“Okay. The good news is that I didn’t find anything truly awful in the guys who wanted to stay in Karvalen, either. I don’t think any of them are spies or assassins or agents or whatever; they seem to be what they claim to be.”

“You can tell that?” she asked, interested despite herself.

“Not for sure, no,” I admitted. “I just didn’t see the… the flickers that come when someone is lying to me. I asked them why they wanted to stay and they told the truth. I also didn’t see the really deep, dark places that only seem to show up in people like what’s-his-name, the child murderer.”

“I am very glad to hear that.”

“So am I.”

“By the way, good luck with the dignitaries,” she said.

“You’re so helpful.”

“More often than I should be, maybe. ’Bye, Dad.”

She hung up before I could answer.

Dad.