Nightlord: Shadows (110 page)

When I looked up at the sky, I had a much better view of the stars. Overcast or no, I could
see
. The stars were there, blazing away in glorious colors! No feeble, twinkling points of white, these, but brilliant lights in the sky.

I had a hard time recognizing them. Their magnitudes altered markedly with the addition of false spectrum colors. It took a little while to puzzle out the shapes I knew. North was
that
way, so… that was Polaris. If that was the North Star, then there was Orion, and the Dippers. And there was the Moon, pale and shadowy as it reflected a feeble glow, but studded with bright points like diamond dust.

Fast-moving stars flew across the sky, glowing bright as small suns.

I stood there in the dark, gazing upward at the lights of the heavens, and wondered.

Satellites, yes, solar-powered and beaming out radio signals for all to see. No problem. But what was on the Moon? Communications relays? Human colonies? Aliens?

It’s only a quarter of a million miles. All I need is a space program. Maybe I’ll cobble together a radio and a parabolic antenna and see if anyone answers. Someday.

Meanwhile, I guessed I had about half the night left. Bronze felt pretty good, so I rode to other buildings. She stayed outside to graze while I carefully cracked open doors.

Why are we being careful? Are computers dangerous?

“No. Well, yes, they can be, but I doubt these are in any condition to bother us. They’re old.”

So, why are we being careful?

“There’s no telling. I might want to come back here for something I haven’t even thought of. If I just bash holes in the walls, wind and rain and animals will get in for free. They might ruin things.”

Thinking ahead, huh? Smart, Boss.

“Immortality problems,” I replied. “I have to think ahead; there’s a lot of it.”

After searching several buildings, I realized the university’s computer model had changed over the years. Instead of hundreds of computers connected through a network, each building had a central computer with dozens of terminals. All the work in the building was done on that central machine. Each building’s machine communicated, presumably, with the others, although I didn’t find out how—landline, radio, microwave, superpowers, or what. I couldn’t even tell if there was a peer-to-peer network between the buildings or if they all linked to a central machine.

Still, I managed to vandalize—excuse me, “salvage”—a dozen computer cores. If I could build a combat simulator, I could certainly build a scholar. People could teach it things they learned, which would preserve that knowledge for anyone who needed it later. Mathematics, literacy, magic… or simply sheep-shearing, thread-spinning, and weaving.

There were other reasons I came through the gate, though.

Bronze took me back to the police station, where I did a more thorough job of ransacking. The weaponry was at least as modern as the armor. At one time most of it was, presumably, electronic and nonlethal. Naturally, it no longer worked. They did have some ballistic weapons, once I forced my way into an arms locker. They appeared to be based on electromagnetic propulsion, though, rather than on combustion gases.

This was not helpful.

We searched downtown for a bit; I found an antiques dealer. There were some antique firearms in his shop, but they did not meet with my approval. Sure, the nickel-plated revolver was nice, but someone had filled the barrel with a clear substance. Everything that looked capable of firing was treated that way. The older pieces—or the worse-preserved ones—were not, but I wouldn’t risk my hand by trying to use them.

Where else might I get weapons? National Guard armory? Military post? Would they have anything useful left?

We went to find out.

I originally thought that we would head toward Horsham Township and the joint base there, at least until we started to head through Harrisburg. Well, what was left of it.

Whatever else happened while I was gone, they definitely nuked the place. My spectrum-shifting visor spell was still going. As we got closer, I could see some places glowing with faint radioactivity.

If I fed Bronze some plutonium, would that fuel her? Or would it just make her dangerous to sit on?

Nevermind.

Harrisburg was a wasteland. Nothing grew there. How long had it been? Long enough for the buildings that survived the blast to give way to rain and wind. Crumbled ruins and mud, that’s all.

I decided not to press on to the military base. If someone had hit Harrisburg, they definitely hit a target like a military base.

Was the Statue of Liberty lying on the beach, half-buried? Could I go there and scream, “You blew it all to Hell!”? No, better not. Too melodramatic. Besides, the Statue of Liberty would have been crumpled by the bomb that got New York.

Bronze and I turned around.

Problem, Boss?

“Not really. Yes. I don’t know.”

You’re pissed off and sad all at once.

“Yeah, I suppose I am. Does it show?”

Only to me.

Bronze snorted.

…and to her, of course,
Firebrand added, hastily.

“This used to be my world,” I said, softly. “I used to live here. It was home.”

And nobody took care of it?

“And these assholes ruined it,” I corrected. “You bet I’m pissed about it.”

And the sad part?

“I’m going to miss it,” I said, sighing. “I liked it. I grew up in it. It was home.”

I’m sorry, Boss.

“You don’t sound sorry.”

I was a dragon. Dragons don’t think of someplace as home. They hatch, they get taught to fly and stuff, and then they get kicked out of mom’s hunting grounds. It’s not really a happy home memory kind of thing.

“Point taken.”

The closest thing a dragon has to a happy home life is when mom plops down something to eat that hasn’t been killed, yet. Then you get to roast it or rip it apart yourself. Although, come to think of it, that is a rather pleasant memory…

“I get it, I get it.”

Bronze just paced along, headed back to the library and the arch. While Firebrand might say it felt sorry about how I felt, Bronze felt sorry with me.

I suppose I knew what happened, or suspected it. You don’t have a world go to hell in a handbasket like this without a major catastrophe—man-made, in this case. There was a radioactive ruin where a city used to be. Until I saw that, I wasn’t sure what did it. A near-miss by a rogue planet might have triggered massive earthquakes and altered the climate forever, for example. It’s possible something along those lines precipitated the nuclear exchange.

As a best case, perhaps we can say it was a limited exchange brought on by panic. Maybe even some minor nation decided to get up on its hind legs and be stupid—and lured someone else into doing the same. Or someone simply made a mistake and a misunderstanding bloomed into a giant flower.

Still,
someone
pushed the Big Red Button.

Sometimes, I think we’re all idiots, rushing headlong into oblivion, shouting about how unfair it is while refusing to steer anywhere else.

T’yl let me know about some attempts to penetrate the scryshield.

“It’s been there for quite a while,” I pointed out. “People are bound to take an interest.” He seemed more than a trifle frustrated with my slowness.

“Sire, if I may?” he asked. I nodded. “You’re thinking like a peasant.”

“How so?”

“You’re a King. You have a city. You’ve performed a feat of epic dimensions, shielding the whole thing from outside observation. Magicians, at least, recognize that as an epic achievement; the less-skilled are more likely to regard it as miraculous. Only a fool would attempt to penetrate it.

“And yet,” he continued, “there are fools aplenty in the world. Of those who are both fools and capable of attempting to see through your shield, none would be so foolish after the first attempt.” He smiled, an evil expression that seemed quite at home on an elf-face. “I’ve seen that flaming eye. It is quite an impressive piece of work.”

“I’ll pass along your congratulations to Peter Jackson.”

“Who?”

“A magician of my own world that specialized in illusions.”

“Ah. Well, with that as deterrent, who do you think would continue to probe at your shield?”

“Someone who was determined to see inside?”

“Exact, if not precise,” T’yl agreed. “Eventually, someone will discover a way to circumvent the shield. We shall require another method, if you intend to preserve your privacy.”

“Tort mentioned something about that. I’ll see what I can do.”

“And, if I may?”

“What?”

“With your permission, of course, I will see to adding another shield; this one, however, will be smaller, only around the palace, or the peak of the mountain.”

“Oh. Probably a good idea.”

“And, if you have not already tasked the Mistress of Spies with it,” he added, “I should like to see if I can determine the source of these magical probes. I dislike being spied upon.”

“I haven’t, and I’d like to know, too,” I agreed. “Sure, have at it.”

For my part, I sat in my mental study, picked up my notes on the scryshield, and thought.

Once I started enchanting magic mirrors for communications devices, I started to wonder about scrying sensors. What I think I’ve worked out is a redirect. If someone tries to put a scrying sensor somewhere inside the scryshield, I ought to be able to drag that sensor as it forms to a point I designate. From the other end, it should look as though it worked normally.

The only problem is that always appears in the
same
wrong place. Appearing in the same wrong place every time is a weakness in the system. The caster will discover his spell is being hijacked, which means he will then start to work on a way to counter it.

To avoid this, I’ve been thinking of a four-tiered defense.

First, another scryshield. Since I have one already in place, adding another layer to it isn’t that hard. It’s like building a new bridge when the river already has one over it. Building the new bridge next to the old bridge is a lot easier.

This scryshield, the outermost layer, will be a simple blocker. Scrying attempts try to go in and bounce off. It takes the caster more power to punch through. This is just to deter casual attempts; the shield won’t expend itself to stop someone, just act as a hefty speed bump. Since it will give way rather than break, it’ll be hard to take down through the brute-force method, but will still make it much harder to experiment with the inner defenses.

The second line is the Flaming Eye of Intimidation, the original scryshield. It can scare people off and block their vision for a cheap expenditure of power.

The third line is the redirect. A scrying spell that gets through doesn’t manifest its sensor where they intended, but where
I
intend, instead. If they figure out a way—when they figure out a way—to filter out the Fiery Eye, they’ll only see what the redirect allows them to. Wherever they’re trying to look, they’ll just get rerouted. That’s not too power-intensive, either; it should be easy to maintain.

The fourth thing is just clever, if I do say so myself.

I take a computer crystal and copy the mountain’s layout into the thing. Then I start running a change on it, causing streets to move, buildings to change, caverns to alter, doors to vanish and reappear elsewhere, the works. It’s a slow process, as befits the speed of the mountain, but the changes are also constant and totally unrelated to the mountain’s actual alterations.

When a scrying sensor gets routed to the crystal, it appears somewhere at random inside the crystal’s simulation, seeing only the mountain as simulated by the crystal.

So, best case for a spellcaster, he gathers up four or five times the power needed for a typical scrying spell, punches through with his new and much more complicated spell to bypass the flaming eye, and—unknowingly—gets redirected to a computer crystal running a mountain simulation. He doesn’t like that view? Aww. So he does it again, gathering up all that power, casting his complicated spell again, and parks his sensor… somewhere else in the crystal. If he’s done it right, he may even park his new viewpoint just down the virtual hallway from his original scrying sensor, and, piece by piece, start exploring.

But it’s still not going to do him any good. It’s really a very convincing simulation. It just lacks people. That should confuse him.

I’m thinking it’ll take a scrying spy weeks, at least—maybe years—to even figure out that something is wrong. A lot of it should be dead-end research on trying to figure out how I’m hiding all the people!

Or… can I put people simulations in there, too? They don’t have to do anything complicated, just wander around. That would add an extremely convincing depth to the simulation. Hmm.

It’ll also take longer due to the outer shield; a wizard won’t want to do that kind of spell more than once a day, maybe twice. Even magicians will be annoyed to have to do it four or five times and still not see anyone.

Best of all, I don’t have to detail a bunch of wizards to keep the things charged up and at full power. I have prisoners who have already been condemned to hard labor for life. Once the shields are at full strength, I’ll set them to charging up the gate again. But I can probably afford to have a couple of prisoners on shield duty instead of gate duty, full-time.

Now, how do I connect a scrying spell to a crystal simulation?

For my part, scrying with my sand table is easy and quick, but still rather frustrating. Given that I can look wherever I want, I still have to decide where that is. I can see anywhere that isn’t deliberately blocked, but I don’t have a search function, or a radar locator.

I spent a lot of time looking over the borders of Byrne. Not just the southern border, but all of them. Up the Quaen river on the west, then across, following the Averill river upstream as I headed west-to-east along the northern border, then south, weaving back and forth along the foot of the Eastrange.

Incidentally, Byrne still hasn’t sent anyone to talk to Vathula. I suspect Keria’s last magician may have gone to Byrne to report. Or, he might have skipped Byrne and just gone directly home. Or he may be in a dungeon, somewhere, summoning demonic hordes. I have no way to tell; Byrne’s palace is also defended with the standard barrier form of a scryshield.

Judging by the troop dispositions, Byrne doesn’t seem too worried about ugly things coming down out of the mountains. Either that, or the villages and towns along the Eastrange are considered expendable. I bet the Prince doesn’t much care about them.

Byrne’s not too worried about anyone coming over the Quaen river, either. It’s not all that wide that far north, but it’s pretty fast. A fleet of small ships could haul a sizable force across, but they’d drift a long way south, first, and have to be towed north again before they could cross another body of troops. It would be lengthy, awkward, obvious, and slow, in addition to scattering the landing forces.

In the extreme northeast of Rethven, the Averill, where it comes out of the Eastrange, is a big sucker of a waterfall. It drops maybe ninety or a hundred feet, but it’s wide, it’s foamy, it’s icy cold, and it dumps water like the flush of a Titan’s toilet. After that, it levels out pretty well into a canyon for many, many miles before it splits. The Averill continues west, but the Quaen branch turns south through some low mountains.

I scrolled along, following the course of the Averill, and paused to watch some people fishing off the north bank of the river.
Viksagi
don’t use fishing poles, it seems; they throw weighted nets into the river and use horses to haul up their catch.

I wondered if the
viksagi
would be interested in an invasion of the southlands. Specifically, into the lands Byrne currently controlled. It might be worthwhile to see how Byrne reacted. If they brought cannon to the swordfight, at least I’d know where they were. Even if they didn’t, diverting troops and supplies to deal with a northern invasion would help curb their southern expansion.

That southern expansion bothered me.

Byrne was doing a fine job of conquering the remains of Rethven. That, by itself, was a good thing. I was all for it. A unified kingdom could end a lot of the inter-city skirmishing and warfare, take a huge bite out of banditry, enhance trade, and generally make life better for everyone.

It could also rule with an iron fist.

I’ve got nothing against central government; I’m generally in favor of it. It’s a civilizing influence. It permits people to get on with their lives without worrying too much about being eaten by the neighbors. As long as we maintain some basic human rights and the dignity of the people, I think it’s a fine thing.

Byrne, on the other hand, is willing to conscript troops, decimate the population as an act of control, and take hostages from enemy cities to enforce its will.

This does not fill me with enthusiasm for rule by Prince Parrin.

Maybe he intends to use whatever methods are required to achieve unity. Maybe he’s an idealist, seeking to reunite the kingdom by any means necessary, with the intent to rule as a just and benevolent king thereafter. The only problem is that, having done everything he had to do to get there, he won’t be able to stop. If your atrocities get you the crown, you have to keep using them to keep it. There will always be people who want you dead for the things you’ve done; there will always be people who want revenge.

If Byrne gave any hint that it would be, or could be, a benevolent government, I’d stay out of it. Yes, even after their interference in my part-time life, even after a few awkward potshots at me, even after all of that. I think I could tell them to shut up and go play on their side of the Eastrange without me. They might even do it.

Problem is, I don’t see any sign that Byrne is anything but a bunch of bullies trying to take what everyone else has for themselves.