Nightlord: Orb (65 page)

I discussed it with Mary.  I think she agreed to the one outside Sheffield only because it was in a forest.  She doesn’t like the idea of being dive-bombed by an explosive-laden drone.  Come to that, neither do I.

Of course, first we have to drive around a bit and scoop up power.  And I have to get some work done on preparing ideograms for the gate.  Plus, we need something to build a gate out of… and a needle or compass or something to guide us to the exact spot.

The gate will be hard work, but first there’s more work to do before I can start working on it….

Mary is not only ornamental and dangerous, but she’s smart and resourceful.  I kept an eye on the van—I stayed in and kept working—while she popped into a hardware store and brought back lengths of stiff plastic tubing.  It wasn’t rigid enough to be pipe, but it wasn’t flexible enough to be hose.  It was white, so I could use a marker on it with no trouble.  It also braided moderately well.

Noting my desire to destroy temporary gates behind me, she also brought back a few rolls of heavy cotton string, a roll of heavy twine, two cans of lighter fluid, some fertilizer, and a bag of charcoal.  The charcoal was for Bronze.  The string and twine would run through the tubing and be soaked in lighter fluid, then the tubing packed with fertilizer as an oxidizer.  When we left, the gate would burn, possibly even explode.

Am I allowed to love more than one woman?  I mean, I love Tort—it’s taken me long enough to recognize it!—but can I love Mary, too?  It hasn’t been all that long, realistically, but we’ve spent almost all of our time together
together
.  She really does seem to get me.  She has more of a taste for adventure and excitement than I do, but that might actually be good for me.  I would be a stodgy, boring, stay-at-home guy, otherwise.  Is she good for me?  Am I good for her?

I’ll have to ask Bronze.  After she finishes her charcoal—which I soaked in lighter fluid; she seems to like it better that way.

Friday, December 11
th

We’ve been driving pretty much non-stop since yesterday.  The spells to pick up and convert electrical energy from the power road are running as well as I can make them; there are dozens of layers involved.  I only stopped adding conversion layers when we started to overheat the induction elements of the vehicle.  The road probably thinks we’re a semi going uphill, rather than a van out for a cruise.  The energy this setup produces is pumped straight into a storage gem.

The power circle on the van, however, is still sucking up everything in its path.  I’m using some of it as I work on the tubing of what will become a temporary arch.  Doing it now, investing the power ahead of time, means I won’t have to waste time on it once we’re there.

Bronze has also contributed.  She’s quite happy to let the power scoop on the roof of her trailer feed the van’s power circle.  It’s not much, by comparison, but every little bit helps.  She’s pleased we’ll be going somewhere she doesn’t have to hide or conserve power.  Being here must be like a man from the seacoast trying to go jogging on some high plateau.  Bronze has a magical oxygen mask, but it’s still an annoyance to her, and therefore to me.

Mary did try to help on the magical energy front.  I demonstrated to her how a nightlord can pour personal energies into a spell, then replenish those energies from the people we brush past in the night.  The second part she’s got down pat; she used to feed off human vitality all the time.  Storing it, directing it, channeling it, and using it?  Not so much.  She’s never had to, and her wizard training is still in the early stages.  It will be quite a while before she’s good at it.

And… I think she’s got a small battery.  She doesn’t seem to hold all that much vital essence.  If she downs a living person and takes everything, she’s pretty much full.  I don’t understand it.  Is it a Thessaloniki thing?  Do they not store much power?  Or will her capacity increase with time and practice?  Or is it a personal thing—that’s Mary, and that’s how she is?  Would other people—professional mystics or wizards—have a greater capacity when turned into vampires?  I’m not sure I want to experiment with it to find out.

Not for the first time, I wish I’d had a chance to interrogate Keria a bit more thoroughly.  She’s the only magician-turned-undead I know of.  As I understand it, she was demon-possessed for most of my nap.  The demon didn’t work spells, since it was a demon, not a magician.  Could Keria have done so?  Did she keep her magical training and abilities intact as an undead?  I guess I’ll never know.

On the plus side, Mary did a pretty good job of pulling up next to someone in an autodrive vehicle at night, stealing a slice of their vitality-pizza, and then giving me some of the energy she’d gained.  Repeat the process a couple hundred times over the course of the night and it adds up to a sizable sum.

Now we’ve hit a couple of fast-food places in quick succession and, if we time it right, ought to hit our campsite a little before dark.  Then, with the camper parked and Bronze loaded with our stuff, we can head for our magical drilling site.  If we strike magic, we’re off to see the wizards.  If not, we bust brush back to our camper and hit the road again.

Meanwhile, Mary’s eating those sausage and bacon breakfast burrito things.  I shudder from smelling them.  I’ll stick with the pancakes.

We pulled into a campground and paid for a pull-through spot.  The RV now has an electrical hookup, water and sewage hoses, and a data cable.  The data cable isn’t plugged in; we’re taking no chances we can avoid.

Sunset did its thing. Mary and I died together in the shower.  With a water line, that works pretty well, but it’s also pretty snug.  It’s really not built for two people, but as long as we pretended to be a double rotisserie, at least we rinsed about as fast as we sweat.  Afterward, we took turns with the full cleaning cycle, each of us packing a bag while the other one washed.  Once we were dressed for travel, we took a look around the camper for anything incriminating, illegal, or even vaguely clue-like.  If someone came by, searched the place, and tried to figure out anything, what would they find?

Not much.  The incriminating and personal stuff—including the Diogenes drive—came with us.  Except the vampire fingers, that is.  We burned those only to dispose of them, not annoy their owners.  They burned well and completely.

We mounted up and headed off into the forest.

We got a few looks from the neighbors; Bronze was conspicuous, especially carrying us and our luggage.  She’s huge, though; we had room for everything.  Aside from those few stares, it was a clean getaway, I think.

Picking our way through unfamiliar forest took longer than I liked, but we had to take our time. Visibility was minimal due to the trees and undergrowth.  The last thing I wanted to find was a ravine at thirty miles an hour.  Bronze agreed with me.  She remembers the time she hit a gopher hole at full speed.  So do I.  While it didn’t do us any lasting harm, it is not my most pleasant memory.

My makeshift compass—a length of wire suspended from a string—let us take a bearing on the nexus every few minutes.  We homed in on it gradually, finally coming to a halt when the wire tried to tilt down.  I dismounted and walked around a bit, marking a rough circle through the trees.  The nexus was only about fifteen or twenty feet across, much smaller than the others I have known.  Of course, those were larger, multi-line sites where magi had built their homes and established dominion.  This was a mildly-favorable spot for spellcasting with slightly-elevated magical potential.

“Now what?” Mary asked, still sitting on Bronze.

“Now you can unpack the tubing,” I told her.  “Pay attention to the colored numbers on the ends when you fit lengths of them together.  Also, look them over carefully and make sure we didn’t abrade any symbols away going through the woods.  Then you can start braiding them together.  The blue numbers have symbols from this world’s magical alphabet; fit the one to the one, the two to the two.  The red numbers have symbols from Karvalen.  The green numbers alternate between alphabets.  While you’re setting that up, I’m going to drill for magic and see if we get a gusher or a slow ooze.”

“Should I go ahead and prep them for detonation?”

“Not until I figure out whether or not we have the juice to get out of here.  I’d hate to accidentally blow up all the work we’ve already got in it.”

“Roger that.”  She dismounted and started pulling the tubing from the carrier straps along Bronze’s sides.  Transporting the things was tricky when I knew we would go through heavy forest.  I wound up tying one end to Bronze’s left side, wrapping the tubing around her front, and tying the other end off to her other side.  It was awkward-looking, but it worked.  It also let me wrap them in plastic bags for protection.  I didn’t want to drag them behind; it would have ruined my symbol work.

I sat down in the center of the nexus and started working my spells.

My idea was, as usual, pretty direct and straightforward.  Under normal circumstances, my tendrils only reach about a hundred yards—and that’s like a someone straining to reach out and barely brushing something with fingertips.  It’s within my reach, but not really within my grasp, if you follow me.  With a spell, I can stretch them much farther.  Since the slow pulse of energy through the ley lines looks like the heartbeat of the planet, maybe I could tap into a lesser heart, drain off a pint, and be on my way.

Breathe in, not for the air, but sucking in magic.  Breathe out, pushing power into the spell to stretch my tendrils.  Breathe in, breathe out, becoming one with the flow of power.  Downward.  Ever downward.

I felt my way deeper and deeper, reaching into the earth with invisible lines of darkness.  Soil and rock swam past as I sought for that shining dot, the radiant point of light and power.  A place of intense energies, certainly, but so far down it was almost nonexistent to anyone on the surface.  Which is why I had to drill for it.

Breathe in the magic, breathe out the power.

I closed in on it, pushed deeper, and struck magic.

When I started, I wasn’t sure if it was going to blow like an oil rig in a disaster film or sit there like water at the bottom of a well.  It was more in the middle.  Power flowed up along my spell-lined tendrils and into me.  I was braced for a fire hose of energy; this was a garden hose.  Still, it was a hose of power in the desolate wilderness. I drank it up and channeled it into the spell structures I’d prepared.

Mary dropped the tubing as though it shocked her.  It might have, now that she was sensitive to magical energies.  Come to think of it, it might have shocked her even if she wasn’t trained to be sensitive to those forces; it was quite a lot of energy.  I filled in the gate spell, charging it, reinforcing it, then diverted the flow into charging everything else we had.  Bronze came over and let some of the overflow wash over her and her Ascension Hide.  Once everything seemed stabilized, I went to help Mary put the gate together.

“Is it safe to pick up?” Mary asked, still holding the pipe glue.

“Yep!  Looks like we’re on our way.”

“In a few minutes, anyway.”  She picked up a length of tubing, gingerly, and continued fitting them together.  “Or is it closer to an hour?”

“I think we should let things charge up for at least an hour, just to be safe. Hmm.  That reminds me.”

“What?”

“Time.  You’re doing great; keep at it.  Bronze!  Come here and stomp anything that tries to get away.”  I got out my message gate tube and filled it with power.  This time, I aimed for someplace outdoors.  Since T’yl destroyed the gate inside Karvalen—the mountain—I planned to aim my gate at the Great Arch of Zirafel.  For one thing, arriving there would make the transition easier, from a power standpoint. For another, it would help avoid screwy questions about what universe I was in.

The drawback, unfortunately, is the Arch is outside and potentially in the sunlight.  Rather than go through the gate at a dead run and discover how quickly we could burn, I thought it prudent to check on the time through the miniature gate.  While I did that, Bronze could squish anything that decided to creep through the other end of the tube-gate.

I opened the mini-gate, connecting to—I think—the rim of a cup or small bowl.  Yes, it was still daytime over there.  It was a sunny day, without a cloud in the sky.  It was probably darn nice out, a perfect day for a picnic or a leisurely ride through the country.  I was unable to properly appreciate it, however, since I was, at that moment, an undead creature of the night and darkness.

See, the opening at the far end was aimed
upward.
  Sunlight blasted through the hole in space and hit me in the face like a flamethrower at point-blank range.

My own fault.  I goofed.  There’s no one to blame but myself.  That doesn’t make it hurt any less.  In fact, that may actually make it hurt even more.

The light blinded me instantly.  First, there was a massive brightness with a tinge of blue, then everything went black with hints of red.  I don’t know if my eyes literally caught fire, but it sure felt that way.  Of course, they were just joining in while my face flamed from embarrassment and uncontrolled oxidation.  And the smell!  Let us not dwell on the smell of sunlight burning undead flesh clear down to the bone.  I opened my mouth to scream and got a mouthful of light.

Quick advice: if you can avoid having your teeth set on fire, by all means, do so.

I jerked backward even as a started to scream, sending the tube spinning away.  I presume it slashed light all through the forest; only by great good luck did it not sweep across Mary.  Bronze moved to follow the tube—even blind and with my face on fire, I knew exactly where she was and what she was doing.  By moving between me and the tube, her shadow would prevent further exposure.  She also moved toward it to either nudge it aside so it shone in a different direction, or to stomp anything escaping.

Over the next several thousand years—or about two seconds—I managed to extinguish my teeth by simply keeping my mouth shut.  This was not easy; my mouth tasted like burned vampire flesh for obvious reasons.  A moment later, something landed on my head and wrapped around it, smothering the flames.  I needed that. I wasn’t merely being burned by something, I was actively
on fire.
  I found out later Mary wrapped a coat around my head.  It worked, but the intensity of the flames ruined the coat.  When my flesh burns, it burns blowtorch-hot.

Cautiously, she peeled the ruined mass from my ruined face.  I let her, trying not to grit blackened teeth all the while.

“Eww.”

“Hohgee hugck,” I replied.  My lips, tongue, and throat were more than a little blackened, burned, and cracked, as well.  I touched one cheek and a fingertip found a burned-through place; I touched a charred molar and decided to stop.

“You can say that again,” she agreed, sounding worried.  “On second thought, don’t.  You look awful.  Will this go away?  Please tell me this will go away.”

I shrugged, unable to speak effectively.  I’d never been sun-blasted before.  Well, technically…

“Do I need to go get you someone?” Mary asked, concerned.  “It’s no trouble.  Bronze and I could be back with a pair of campers in ten minutes.”  Bronze agreed with her assessment, but thought Mary was drastically over-estimating the time required.

I shook my head and regretted it.  Ow.  At least the pain was diminishing as my regeneration started working.  Either that, or I was adapting to it.