Nightlord: Shadows (76 page)

As the sunrise started, I went into the bathroom and waited it out. It was not the most comfortable place, but I’ve endured worse. And there were no windows, which was the chief selling point.

I came back out once everything settled down again. The arch was essentially done. I fiddled with it, scoring some symbols a little deeper, and continued to push more power into it. I didn’t intend for it to be too sophisticated, but I did mean for it to be sturdy and reliable.

Then I sat down next to it and rested.

Something moved, outside, beyond the milky plastic. A shadow against the sunlit glass, no more.

Carefully, I cracked the door open and peeped out. Nothing. No sign of anything out there beyond the hanging streamers of the ivy.

Wait, what? I cut the ivy away—quite a lot of it.

I frowned at the ivy and poked one of the vines with the point of my sword. It wrapped around the blade. Of course, this caused it to slice itself off, but the movement caused me to jerk back and pull the door closed.

The bit of vine that came in, still clinging to my blade. It writhed and twisted like a dying earthworm. I shook it to the floor and examined it closely. It oozed a fairly pungent, yellowish sap as it twisted itself into coils, unwound, and coiled again.

I opened the door to flick it out with my swordpoint, but half a dozen more vines entered as I did so.

My comment was probably inappropriate, involving as it did a sexual act and a chainsaw. Well, I was startled.

Quickly—
very
quickly—I swiped all the way around the door, severing the thorny ivy vines. I swept them all outside and pulled the door closed again. That’s when it occurred to me that fire-safety doors can’t really be barricaded shut. If the vines worked their way in between the door and the jamb, they might be able to pull it open.

I found the severed bit of bolt that once locked the door. I put it back in place and started the process of telling the metal to join with the metal, all the while gripping the pushbar and holding the door firmly shut.

How smart is an animated, thorny ivy? I don’t know. Not smart enough, apparently, to force its way in while I was working. I locked the door again and encouraged the metal of the door and the jamb to pull a little closer. It didn’t have much effect, considering how hard I worked at it, but I didn’t mind the effort one bit. Getting the door and frame to effectively swell shut by even a millimeter was enough to seal it pretty thoroughly.

By that time, the door was considerably darker, instead of brighter. As the sun rose, it should have been much lighter out, and probably was… but the door was covered in ivy again. Probably
coated
in ivy. At a guess, the ivy either smelled me—or whatever it is that plants use in place of a sense of smell—or it detected the chemical signature of its own sap. Either way, it flailed and waved its way in my direction.

I don’t think this is home anymore,
I reflected.
The roof leaks, the carpet is shot, the power’s out, the water’s on the fritz, the toilets don’t work, and someone has really let the yard go to hell. Or brought the yard back from Hell.

I sat down next to my makeshift arch and started pushing power into it, charging it. This was going to take a while.

We finally got the gate to open so I could make good my escape from the Land of Angry Ivy.

I recall looking over a lot of star-charts and astrology when I was researching gates in Rethven; unfortunately, Zirafel didn’t do a lot of experimenting with interuniversal travel. What I read about was research—or, at least, empirical observation—by the magicians working for the Hand. I suspect there’s some sort of rotation or orbit or other cyclic effect that changes the scale of a gate connection. Sometimes the universes align, making the trip very short; sometimes they don’t, making the power requirements enormous. And sometimes they’re completely out of sync, making it virtually impossible.

How I’m going to chart that hypothetical alignment is not a subject for today.

When the gate opened, it looked a lot like the whirlpool did, just without the water. A grey-blue-white mist seemed to swirl into the archway and then spin, reaching back from the arch and into… well, nowhere. Elsewhere. Somewhere. Tort and T’yl detected the activity in the main arch and suddenly there was a hole leading to the far-distant gate room, a long, swirling hallway leading into the distance, and just as suddenly the distance collapsed into an archway one could step through straight into the gate room. I did so without delay.

We discovered interuniversal time was a trifle odd. It was longer in my homeworld than in Rethven. I came home after about twenty hours or so, for me. For Tort, I was gone only about three. It’s not exact; candles aren’t the best units of measurement. But that’s close.

Of course, that assumes the curvature of spacetime is a uniform curve, rather than an irregular one, and the axes of the interuniversal rotation don’t cause the intersections to encounter discontinuities in the hypersurface. But let’s do some slicing with Occam’s Razor and hope the simplest explanation is true: it’s a six to one time differential.

That means my eighty-seven years in Rethven have been a little over five hundred back on Earth. Let’s do some rounding and call it the year 2,500. I could probably narrow that down a bit more, if I cared to, but I don’t. Anything over one human lifetime is forever.

It’s not home anymore. It’s another country, and an inhospitable one. It still has things I want, but now, instead of going over and buying stuff while trying to blend in, it’s a straight salvage operation.

Pizza. Doughnuts. Chicken fingers. Barbeque sauce. Toilet paper. Massage-setting showerheads. Movie theaters. DVD players. Recliners. Internet.

Yeah, I miss a lot of the pieces of that civilization. I also miss my old friends, enough that I don’t feel comfortable talking about it.

Immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The morning meeting—I still wonder how I got saddled with a meeting
every day
—went about as well as could be expected. No new issues, good progress reports, and so on. Malena and Malana wanted a word with me if I could spare the time. Amber called and asked if I would call back. A visitor from one of the new Rethven religions was waiting to see me.

Let me correct that last one. I should say that the religion had existed for quite some time; it was merely persecuted and overshadowed by the Church of Light. It still had followers and adherents even during the near-monopoly the Hand had enforced. Now, with that gone, dozens of the old religions were springing back.

First thing, I called Amber back. I didn’t get a response, so I assumed she was out. I made a note to try again later. Instead of phone tag, we could play mirror tag.

Next, I saw the twins. They were more than a little disturbed. Pleased, but disturbed.

“What’s on your minds?” I asked, as they did the fist-on-floor thing. In answer, they stood up, faced each other, drew their wooden swords, and started fencing.

I’ve done fencing on the strip, and it only goes on until someone scores a hit—well, a “touch,” as in
touché
. Scores a point. These two went at it without worrying about light touches; they only seemed concerned with serious hits. And they weren’t kidding, either. I was about to demand an explanation, but then they started to go faster.

And then they stepped it up. And did it again.

I’ve seen movies with actors fencing or swordfighting, going through the various maneuvers of a specific scene, counting out the beats of the combat. It’s not reflexes; it’s not a fight; it’s a dance, and one they’ve rehearsed many, many times to go through it that quickly. Plus, the film might possibly be speeded up a trifle if the director doesn’t think it looks action-y enough.

No, that’s not a legitimate movie term. I think. I don’t know what else to call it, though.

Malena and Malana weren’t dancing; they were
fighting
. They weren’t using the broadsword style that everyone else was using; they were clicking, wood on wood, back and forth, at speeds that made me wonder just what else they did with their time—for example, did they sleep? Did they
eat
? They had a couple of weeks to practice. That’s not enough time to learn to do what they were doing, much less get that fast at it.

Unless…

Okay, maybe. If a magical being stuffs a lot of ancient knowledge into your nervous system,
maybe
.

One of them finally scored, a good thrust that was only partly parried, but would clearly have skewered her sister through a lung instead of the heart. I applauded as they saluted each other and bowed to me.

“Well done,” I continued. “Very well done, indeed. So, I am pleased with your progress.”
Appalled with your progress, but in a good way,
I didn’t say. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“Majesty,” Malena… Malana? Nevermind; the twins are fungible. One of them said, “we will not question what you have done, nor why, nor even how. But… is this enough, Your Majesty?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“At first,” the other one said, “it was fun. It hurt, too; our hands and arms and legs ached all the time, and the blisters… but we enjoyed it, being fighters, earning a chance at becoming knights.”

“Then,” the other picked up, “we started to realize just how… how…”

“Dangerous we were.”

“And it started to frighten us.”

“We tried to explain to some of the other trainees, Your Majesty, but they didn’t take us all that seriously.”

“Didn’t they?” I asked. “I’ll—”

“Begging your pardon, Your Majesty,” one of them interrupted, “they do now.”

“Oh?”

“We fought with them,” the other said. “Over a dozen.”

“Oh. And you won, didn’t you?”

They nodded in unison.

“And that scares us, Your Majesty.”

“Why?”

“We aren’t… we weren’t killers, Your Majesty.”

I looked at them for a minute, considering what they were trying to say.

“You want to be knights, but you don’t want to be killers? Is that it?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“I imagine,” I agreed. “Try anyway.”

They tried. It wasn’t that they were against killing, exactly, but they were concerned that if they were that good at it, that was all they would do. It’s kind of like the problem of having only a hammer in the toolbox. If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

“I think I get it,” I told them. “I’ll see if I can take care of that. Report to me tonight; I want to look you over and make sure that thing with the skills is working right. Okay?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” the replied, in unison. I think I’m getting used to that.

“Good. You two keep on practicing, but start working with sword and shield, too. I’ll assign you other duties, aside from learning to carve things.” They looked much relieved.

I told them to rotate through my personal guards, a different one each day, to follow them around and learn what they could about what was happening, how, and why. They were right; there’s more to being a knight—what I think of as a knight, one of
my
knights—than just being a murder machine. I want officers and gentlemen who can be murder machines, but don’t define themselves by that quality.

Hmm. Why am I hurrying everyone along to become deadly, then? Is it just because they expect to be? Or because it’s a dangerous world and it’s important to be dangerous enough to survive in it?

Later, when I met with my guys, they didn’t seem too thrilled with the idea of teaching apprentices. Maybe it was the idea of having someone follow them around and watch them. Maybe it was having pretty young ladies watch them—the fear of looking foolish in front of a girl. Maybe they just didn’t want to share being my personal guard with people who might get promoted to it.

I insisted. They agreed.

What I didn’t tell them was that this was for their own benefit, too. Having to teach someone about what you’re doing often makes you think about what you’re doing, and why, and how. Besides, Malena and Malana might have some ideas of their own. I hoped so.

“And don’t feel too bad,” I told the guys. “They earned this. You guys got the experimental spells to improve your physiques. They got the experimental spells to improve their skills. You might want to learn something from them.”

“How good can they be?” Torvil asked. He obviously wasn’t one of the ones who encountered the twins’ proof-of-concept.

“Pick up a wooden sword and find out,” I suggested. “Seldar, you be on hand for that, in case she breaks something of Torvil’s by accident.” Torvil looked surprised, then slightly worried, then got that macho expression that usually comes right before the phrase, “Hold my beer and watch this!”

“I will, Master of Medicine,” Seldar assured me.

I checked back with Amber again. She answered the mirror and asked me about immigration; I told her I had no problems with it. If people wanted to live in Mochara or Karvalen, they only had to say so. And move in, of course.

“What about their gods?” she asked. I nodded, realizing what her real question was.

“Look, if someone wants to worship their god, I plan to let them. They won’t carry out human sacrifices, or any other messily unpleasant rituals, but if someone wants to pray to Father Sky for rain, the Mother of Flame for sunny days, and Hippocrates for healing, that’s fine by me.”

“Hippocrates? I do not know this god.”

“He’s not a god, just an ancient healer. Forget it.”

“But what if they want to build temples?”

“If there are enough worshippers that they can afford to build one, sure,” I agreed. Amber bit her lip.

“The Mother will not like that.”

“The Mother can go—” I began, then checked myself. More calmly, I said, “Look, we don’t have a state religion in Karvalen. I might, if necessary, forbid a particularly nasty religion. But I’m not going to determine who or what people believe in. That’s their business, between them and their gods.

“If she’s upset about that, she’s welcome to discuss it with me. Calmly. But not through you or Tianna. I will not have you shuttling messages back and forth between mom and dad just because we’re not on speaking terms. She can occupy her idol, if she likes, or I’ll build a fire just for her to speak through. But if she has an objection, she’ll have to bring it to
me
, not go through you.”

Amber smiled, just a little.

“I shall… Father.”

“That’s my girl. Speaking of… where’s Tianna?”

“Out finding things to multiply. She is quite proud of her numbers.”

“She should be. Is her skyrocket spell still holding up?”

“I am assured by Blythe—the wizard you told to monitor it—that the spell is intact and should be ‘efficacious in the extreme, albeit temporarily.’ I take that to mean it’s fine.”

“Sounds like.”

“While I have you in the mirror… if you have a chance, could you look at your new road?”

“Problem?”

“Not with the road,” she told me. “We are expecting representatives from Baret, Wexbry, and Philemon, but they have not yet arrived.”

“Want me to see how far they’ve got to go so you can prepare a reception?” I guessed.

“No. Yes. Really, we were expecting them by now, and none of the wizards here knows the road well enough to look anywhere along it. I’m told they could… ‘walk it’ in spirit, if I insist, but that such a thing is dangerous to the wizard.”

“Yeah, it is. All right. I’ll see what I can find out. How is everything else?”

Everything else was fine, and the new mill, over the new waterwheel, was working, albeit slowly. I promised to provide a little more water and to get someone down there with the design for the windmill that powered our irrigation. Amber obviously didn’t know what I was talking about, but agreed anyway.

After our goodbyes, I went to see about my latest visitor.

The visitor was a bar code. No, he was merely in a black and white striped robe. No, he had a long garment on that looked like a robe but was more like a long coat, open at the front. His trousers and shirt were also of the same black-and-white pattern of vertical stripes. It made him look quite tall and thin, but I didn’t think he needed the help. He was easily two inches taller than I, had a light build, and was on the skinny side. He brought to mind the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the schoolteacher… what was his name? Ichabod Crane, that was it.

I received him in a lesser dining room—one for more intimate meals than the evening supper, but not so informal as to be in my own chambers. He stood up as I walked in and I moved to take a seat.

He presented an amulet. It was a stylized eye, reminding me of the Eye of Horus, and set in a square frame, the whole thing done in polished steel.

I looked at it. Then I looked at him.

“It’s nice. Good workmanship,” I observed. I took it from his hand and turned it over a few times, looking for magic. It seemed mundane enough.

He seemed to sag, almost deflate.

“Something the matter?” I asked.

He sat down, staring at the amulet, face working. I thought he was going to cry.