Nightlord: Shadows (4 page)

I wondered about the visions and hauntings, but I suspected there might be undigested ghosts involved. If so, I didn’t want to know. I’d deal with that when and if they presented themselves, probably by chewing more thoroughly.

“What sort of enchantments?” I asked, instead.

“My father’s sword needs never be sharpened.”

“The edge on my father’s sword never chips,” Torvil offered. “He’s parried axes that should have broken it, but it’s still whole. And my elder brother’s is very good at thrusting through armor.”

“My father killed a were-beast with his, and it died like the blade were silver,” Kammen said.

“Sounds like good stuff,” I observed, while thinking that I wasn’t going to ask what sort of were-beast was involved. “Well, if I manage to get fed sometime in the near future, we’ll see if I can come up with something appropriate for you three.”

They traded that look with each other again. Kammen was the one who spoke.

“Are we going to, you know, have to, well, deal with any of the, the ghosts?”

“I haven’t seen one since I woke up, but I’m certain you’ll manage just fine. Meanwhile, let’s see if we can get a firepit going. Anyone know how to slaughter and roast a goat?”

The boys/men knew how. They gathered firewood from the overgrown area at the peak; the courtyard’s inner wall went straight up for thirty feet or so, then turned into a wilderness on top. They went up the steps of the inner courtyard wall and came back with a lot of deadwood. Some basic woodcraft later, they had a spit and braces, with pieces of goat-meat searing over a fire. Seldar even went so far as to catch the goat’s blood in a bowl when they slaughtered it. Torvil gathered more wood and Kammen cooked.

I resisted the urge to drink the blood. Blood cravings during the day were new. Normally, I just want something mundane to eat. Fortunately, Kammen had a few slices of meat ready fairly quickly. I inhaled them and waited patiently for more. The four of us started spitting meat and roasting it as quickly as the fire allowed.

To give credit where credit is due, they didn’t react too badly the first time I snapped a piece of meat right off a stick with my teeth. They were merely startled. Nobody screamed, but I think it was a close thing. They seemed determined to be unruffled if I did anything odd.
I
was surprised, but I tried to keep myself in better check after that.

I ate everything edible, right down to the marrow in the bones. I felt a little better, and the appeal of a bowl of fresh goat blood was considerably lessened. Maybe it was just exceptional hunger.

About then I heard the ringing, like the bells on an old-style, wind-up alarm clock, but much deeper.

“Thank you very much for breakfast, gentlemen,” I said, rising. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think my horse is here.”

“Lord?” Kammen asked. They all treated me with a good deal more respect and deference. Whether that was because they regarded me as a monster or a king, I’m not sure.

“What’s on your mind, Kammen?”

“Will you be back… later?”

I nodded.

“I will. My plans are to, first, go find a
dazhu
and eat it. Then, after sundown, I’ll go back to the herd and eat the rest of them. Probably.” I frowned. On the other hand, if I was as hungry as I expected to be, I might not have that much presence of mind. Well, we could put a bowl of blood outside and they could hide in the room with my statue. And maybe Bronze could sort of encourage me to go chase
dazhu.

Outside, the alarm-bell clangor had grown considerably louder. Bronze, looking very much like a massive draft horse, galloped across the bridge, around the mountain, and started the spiral up. The main thoroughfares ascended at a shallow angle, leading up and around. Other streets ran in counter-spirals, making a sort of grid, but Bronze didn’t bother to slow down for the switchback turns that would require. For my part, I hurried out the northern door, around to the far side of the courtyard and was at the south-facing outer gate by the time she skidded through it, hooves trailing comet tails of blue-green lightning. The metal-on-stone screech must have been audible for miles.

Bronze. My horse. At slightly over seven feet at the shoulder, she’s markedly larger than any horse I’ve ever seen. She was definitely more heavily built than I recalled, with thicker legs and a deeper chest. She seemed more of a golden color than I recalled, but there’s no telling what she’s been eating.

She kept her head up for a moment, blowing fire and smoke for several seconds, then lowered her head to apply her forehead to my chest, almost knocking me from my feet. Then she put her head over my shoulder and I threw my arms around her neck despite the scorching. For a long moment, we just stood there. She had missed me the way I might miss one of my arms. And I realized that I missed her, somehow, even though it seemed only a short while since last I saw her. She wasn’t just Bronze. She was, on some deep level that I may never understand, a part of me.

When I let go and stepped back, I took note of the horsecollar with broken bits of chain hanging from it.

“Were you busy?”

She tossed her head dismissively, as if to say,
Not with anything important
.

“I trust you didn’t run over anybody?”

She merely twitched an ear,
Not anyone important
.

I looked at her sternly, or tried to. She whickered and shook her mane, making the wires tinkle and chime like laughter. She snorted hot smoke all over me and I knew she was joking.

My horse has a sense of humor. It’s a lot like my sense of humor, and that’s a shame.

“It’s good to see you, too,” I told her. “I feel hungry. How about we go down there, kill a large piece of meat, you torch it, I eat it, and then we come back here for the sunset?”

She pawed at the ground, making blue-green sparks and a metal-on-stone screeching noise that could wake the dead. I mounted up and we thundered down into the plains like an avalanche of bronze and steel.

Kammen is a better cook than Bronze. But raw, rare, medium, and well-done are all acceptable when it’s just a matter of stuffing down fuel. And we did. I didn’t have time to eat an entire
dazhu
, but we gave it a really good try. I hacked off a chunk, Bronze breathed fire over it, and I ate the outer layer while holding up another chunk for her to toast.

Where I put all that meat was a mystery. Doubtless, a magical metabolism had something to do with it. I didn’t think that applied during the day, though. My nighttime metabolism is magical—I’m dead, after all—but during the day… shouldn’t I have to stop eating at some point? If I hadn’t been so focused on eating enough to save three young men’s lives, I would have let it worry me.

We went back up the mountain a little before sunset and halted in the throne room. The young gentlemen went down to the statue room and I put the bowl of blood outside the main door. I shut the door to the outside and waited for the sunset to start. Bronze had instructions about keeping me from going any farther into the mountain, and I concentrated on the smell of the blood just outside the door. I couldn’t actually smell it, yet, but I would. I would.

Sunset crawled all over me like a layer of ants. Like a blanket of steel wool set on fire, it burned and itched and prickled, drawing out of me a foul mixture of sweat and filth that might have had its origins in one of the lower infernal pits.

But I didn’t care. Amidst the shivering, stinging, crawling, itching, trembling, and prickling, now I could smell the blood.

My heart stopped; I barely noticed. There was blood close at hand, and that was all that mattered. I was denied that blood, because the sunset was not yet finished, but it was there, waiting for me, waiting for the moment when the last arc of the burning daystar slipped below the rim of the world.

I hoped I could wait that long. That’s the last thing I remember.

I have no clear memory of what happened after the sunset passed a certain point. It was as though a curtain of night fell across my waking mind, leaving everything in dreams. Dreams of hunger, blood, and death.

The laughter brought me back to myself. Who was out here in the night, laughing like that? I realized it was me. I was the center of a web of forces, black and writhing lines of power, stretching in every direction to feed on the life around me. Tendrils of my spirit, flickering darkly in the night, surrounded my physical form with a vacuum of consuming emptiness. Swirling within this mass of darkness was a cloud of blood, streamers of it, spinning like a grey tornado in a world devoid of color, droplets swirling in the vortex, whirling close to me to splash my armor with black spatters in the moonlight, slithering unnaturally along the metal to vanish under the edges and soak into my skin. All this, surrounding me, part of me, and now drawing back into me.

And then…

And
then
…

I stood silent and alone in a field full of death.

Dazhu
lay in heaps around me, shrunken and withered, the stuff of life sucked out of them by the touch of coiling tendrils, throats opened by fangs and talons, the blood pulled from them by mystic forces and consumed within an all-devouring hunger. Nothing lived within a hundred yards of me, not animals, not insects, not even the grass; all that living power now moved within me, was bound to me and fed my spirit. Not a drop of blood remained, not in a corpse, not soaked into the ground. It had all been sucked out of opened throats, drunk down in great gulps or whirled about and drawn within the hungry darkness.

Gallons of blood. Acres of living things. And now, all around me was the grey on grey of the dark and moonlight, seen through eyes of night. The darkness visible illuminated the world to my nighteyes, stealing away all color, but giving back a world as sharp as a razor’s edge.

All that I could sense was in perfect clarity and focus. I felt as though I could know everything just by looking, do anything by a mere act of will. I could count the leaves on the trees of the Eastrange, miles away, and trace the delicate veins in each one. I could hear the wind whisper secrets to me. I could taste dust and fur, feel it between my teeth, feel it lining my throat.

“Ghaaaak!”

There I was, drunk on my own power, choking on furballs. It really killed my moment of supernatural exaltation.

I coughed and spat, hacking.
Dazhu
have a shaggy pelt, full of fuzz and dust, and I bit through enough of them to seriously annoy vegetarians and possibly Greenpeace. If you’ve never had fur stuck in your teeth, you have no idea how awful it can be. I could feel every dusty fiber, every dirty strand.

I went to my knees, hacking up fuzz and spitting fur. It took me a minute to get a grip on myself and run a cleaning spell through my mouth. It’s hard to cast spells when you feel like you’re ready to cough up a lung. Sure, I don’t need to breathe at night, but the reflexes are still there.

While I did that, my flesh and bones finished moving around inside me, altering, shifting, changing. Now my armor fit perfectly, instead of hanging slack on my frame. My hands were fully fleshed instead of skeletal, and my fingernails were definitely a bit longer and sharper than before. I wondered where my gauntlets had got to. And my skin was no longer that terrible, almost luminescent white; now it was a grey so dark as to be almost black, unreflecting, drinking the light.

Is that normal for a vampire? Do we start out pale as milk and get darker with age? Or is it something else? Side effect of an Ascension Sphere? Or prolonged starvation? Or is it peculiar to the many, many things I’ve eaten that aren’t human? I did drink a lot of dragon ichor…

On the other hand,
this
is the color of something that hunts in the dark.

I finished spitting
dazhu
fur and dust, wiped my mouth. I wished I had something handy to rinse with. I felt a different sort of itching as my tongue healed. A little more fishing around with my tongue and I realized what the problem was. My teeth were sharp. The outer face of my teeth had altered, growing slightly longer and a bit pointed. It wasn’t a mouthful of fangs, but a dentist might accuse my grandmother of unnatural acts with a shark. Well, maybe a great-grandmother. I wondered how my smile looked.

I resolved to be very careful about biting my tongue. Given the new sharpness of my teeth, if I wasn’t careful, I would very quickly learn to be—a lesson I hoped not to have.

Monster problems. Nobody told me about this one! I wondered if Sasha ever knew this could happen. Then again, her teeth were human-normal. So… age related? Or magical-universe-related? Dammit, I need a thousand vampires and a century of experimentation to get an adequate statistical universe!

My altered teeth made me examine the
dazhu
more closely. Yes, rather than punctures, the throats had large chunks bitten completely out. The bites were enormous. I wondered if I unhinged my jaw to do it. I tried it and discovered that I could, in fact, open my mouth a lot wider than I should. If I was careful, I could put my naked fist in my mouth without quite cutting skin on my teeth.