Nightlord: Sunset (111 page)

A faint glow hovered over the trail, in my way.  In my vision, it was like seeing the dim outline of a human’s life, but without the flesh to give it form.  A ghost.

It took on clearer form as I approached, becoming more human-like.  I went around it, or tried to, but it always hovered in front of me, forcing me to stop or run straight through it.  I looked past it; the trail ran on down the boulevard and up to the front door of a huge,
coliseum-like structure.  Momentarily content with that knowledge, I paused to consider the ghost.  I’ve never seen a ghost before.

“Out of the way,” I told it.  It continued to gain form and substance and I felt it regard me.  When it replied, it was faint, very faint, lower than a whisper.  I’m still not sure if I heard it in my ears or my head.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter; I heard it.

“You are a nightlord,” it said—no,
she
said; its form was coalescing into a woman’s.  “You have come through the Gate.”

“You could say that,” I answered.  “I’m sorry, but I’m a bit busy just now; I’m after the guy who just came through here.  If you’ll excuse me?”

“Wait.  Please.”  She stayed in my way and held out her hands to me.  I noticed she didn’t touch the ground.

“All right, but make it quick.  What do you want?”

“I want—what we all want—is to be free.”

“Free?” I echoed.  “Free of what?  And what do you mean, ‘we
all
want’?”

“I am Queen Flarima, last ruler of Zirafel, City of the Western Edge.  I and my people have died, yet we are bound here, forbidden to move on to the next cycle of existence.  We number half a million—you understand this number?”

“I understand a million,” I agreed.

“That is good.  We are cursed to remain here, captives of deific ire, unable to escape the confines of the City or the ever-more-cruel constraint of sanity.  Ghosts cannot go mad; we cannot find comfort even in that.  We must endure the passing of the ages amid the ruins of what was once our home, now our prison.”

“So where are the rest?” I asked, interested despite myself.

“They are here, all about us.  I alone have the power to manifest that mortal eyes might see me.”

I looked around, deliberately looking for them.  Yes, there was a faint shimmer of energies surrounding us, filling the ruined avenue as far as I could see.  I doubted anyone except a well-prepared magician could have detected them.  Then again, there may be spells specifically for that—I wouldn’t know.

“I see.  All this is good to know, but what do you want from
me
?”

“You live on the threshold of one plane of existence and another.  You are a nightlord, a doorway between life—yea, even unlife—and death.  Open the way for us and let us know peace again, I beg you.”

I blinked.

“You want me to… to consume a city full of ghosts?”

“Yes.  Release us.  Let us flee to whatever awaits us in the next cycle of existence.”

I thought about it.  It
was
, as far as I could tell, the reason for nightlords in the first place…

“What did you do to get stuck like this?” I asked.

“The offense is mine,” she said, “and mine alone.  I sought a balance of forces between light and darkness, that one should not dominate wholly over the other.  This was unacceptable, and so I was condemned to this fate—and my people with me.”

“Most unfair,” I agreed.  “All right, if the darkness bound you here, it’s only fair that—”

“It was not the darkness,” she interrupted.  “It was the Mother of Flame that cursed us so.”

I shut up and stared at her.

The
Mother
locked their spirits here?  For wanting to achieve a balance of light and dark?  No, She locked them here for their
Queen
wanting such a balance.  I don’t see why She would object to a balance, and I certainly don’t see why She would punish innocent civilians for the actions of their monarch.

“Why would She do such a thing?” I asked.

Flarima shrugged.  “The gods are jealous—and intolerant of disobedience.  I defied Her.  She smote my city and my people for it.  The Guide cannot reach us, nor may we depart.”

I rubbed my jaw and thought about it.  I wasn’t too sure
I
wanted to court deific ire, myself—at least, not any more of it, and especially not from the one that appeared to be on my side.  Still, a whole city of people, condemned for something they didn’t even do…

I’m not a god.  Maybe I can’t see it the way it ought to be seen.  It struck me as unjust in the extreme.  I expected better of the Mother of Flame, in whatever aspect She was using.

Time was running, too.  Tobias had Shada in there, whatever that building was, and was doing maybe-the-gods-knew-what.  Make a decision, Eric.  Make it and get busy!

“How long have you been here?”

“Long,” she replied.  “Centuries.  How many I do not know, for we have lost count.”

I uncoiled tendrils and spread them as wide as my outstretched arms.  I wove the strands thickly, ready to draw strong and hard on anything that touched them.

“Come to me,” I said, and they did.  The sea of faint ghosts surged toward me, a barely-discernable mob.  As they poured toward me, crowding into each other to escape from their eternity of—what?  Boredom?—they funneled themselves into my being.  I absorbed one, ten, a hundred.  More came, and faster, until each spark of their existence merged into a steady, searing blaze, grounding into my own spirit.  Dying sparks by the thousands, feeding my power and filling my being.

It was unlike the rush of power that comes with the drinking of a living person.  Most of that is the energy of the body, the day-to-day power everyone expends in moving, thinking, and living.  What hit my tendrils and was that last piece, the part that made a person more than merely animate flesh—the vital spark of a life, perhaps the soul.

How long it took, I don’t know.  It wasn’t long, I know that.  Ghosts can move more quickly than a man in flesh, and they can overlap.  They poured forward into me without pause until only Flarima remained.  I was dizzy and a little shaky, as though my whole body had been asleep.  A pins-and-needles sensation danced not only in my skin but deeper, in every organ and vessel—even in my bones.  I could feel it in everything. 
Everything
.  And in my heart there were tens of thousands of voices, each vying with each other for direction and purpose and attention.  A small piece of each person remained with me, but clamored, unquiet and noisy.

“You have defied a goddess,” she observed.

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I guess I have.”

She came close, swayed toward me and away.  “Will you close your portal for a moment?” she asked.

I unwove my tendril-screen like a normal person unlaces fingers.  I’m glad it wasn’t anything complicated; I was still trying to cope with the surging sense of
others
inside.  Vampire indigestion is not pleasant.

She moved close and kissed my cheek.  I couldn’t feel it.  Well, maybe.

“What was that for?” I asked.

She smiled.  “The thanks of a Queen.  Now send me on.”

“One moment.  That building, there,” I said, indicating the one Tobias had so recently fled into.  “What is it?”  A thousand voices inside whispered answers, each in their own way.  I did my best to ignore them.

“It is the Plaza at the Edge of the World.”

“What will I find in there?”

“Nothing,” she answered. 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what I have said.  There is a large, open space.  The floor ends at the edge of the world.”

I wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to accept that.  I was in a terrible rush and was somewhat high from having a city full of ghosts use me as death’s door.  If I’d been thinking straight, I might have asked a lot of questions—about the gods, about the city, about the Gate.  I wasn’t.  Instead, I just held out my arms and spread my tendrils to either side.  She came to me smiling and embraced me in ghost-pale arms.  I enfolded her with arms and with masses of tendrils, like great wings.  Then she was gone, vanished away down black lines of power, devoured by the darkness within me.

In the external silence, I could more easily hear the echoes of all those people filling my soul, like the whispers of the crowd in a stadium.  I couldn’t pick out any single voice from the masses, but I could feel them, every one of them.  I was an army.  No, an army has organization and discipline; I was a mob, but a mob with a definite leader.

I ignored the susurrus of voices, dashed up the avenue between the ruined monuments, and took the broad stairs before the door in three skipping jumps.  The door itself was a carefully-balanced block of stone.  It stood about eight feet tall and was perhaps twice that in width.  Opening it required it to pivot around the center, its balance.  Judging by the scrapes along the dusty portico, Tobias had found it no trouble at all.  I, however, shoved on each side of the block in turn without result.  Maybe he locked it.

I backed off, got a running start, and jumped.  I kicked it with both feet, as high up as I could manage.  Something snapped in the wall as I hit the door.  I came to a sudden halt, thudding into the stone like a cannonball, then fell heavily to the dusty floor.  I rolled to my feet awkwardly—Firebrand can be an annoyingly large chunk of metal—and was in time to watch the whole block of stone finish a slow, majestic topple inward.  It landed flat with an echoing, tomb-door thud and sent up a huge cloud of white dust.

I was over that stone and past the cloud in an instant, dashing down a long tunnel before the echoes had finished.  Directly ahead, far distant, I could see Tobias out in the open air.  I came out of the mouth of the tunnel like the bullet from a gun.

The plaza was large.  Two football games and a cricket match could have been held concurrently in that space—complete with spectators.  The tunnel I exited was at the floor level of a grandly-curving amphitheatre facing Tobias.  All of this was scoured from rock and worn by years of use.  The floor was also natural stone, cut only to smooth it down and level it.  There was no roof at all.

Perhaps a quarter-mile away, the radius of the half-circle, Tobias had his back to me.  Shada was lying naked on a slab of rock just beyond him.  And beyond her…

The world ended.

I once wondered about the nature of the world I’m in.  Is it round?  Is it flat?  Does it go around the Sun or vice versa? 

The world is flat.  Sure, it may be round—like a coin.  But it has an edge, very real, and sharply defined.  I know.  I’ve seen it.  At least that explained why my compass never found north.

Beyond that edge exists a gulf of yawning blackness, speckled here and there by the distant stars—or are they stars?  I don’t know what they are.  Maybe they’re just lights on the inside of a great sphere of crystal, or holes in that sphere to an even greater space that happens to be better illuminated.  Maybe the stars are really angels with flaming swords and glowing halos. 

Maybe they really are distant suns… but I doubt it. 

Right up near the edge live the Things.  I recognized a few from having seen them before.  The rubbery monstrosity from the lab in Baret, along with the multi-tentacled creature that tried to eat me outside the
gata
camp.  They had a bunch of brothers with them, along with a whole lot of more distant relations.  There were hundreds, no,
thousands
of the Things in every shape and size imaginable—and many I wouldn’t choose to imagine without serious drugs.  They seemed to have no gravity out there.  They weren’t a flat crowd, but a wall, extending up and to the sides, as though they were all pressing against a barrier of glass, trying to get in.  They were clustered most thickly near Tobias, thinner out away from him.  All of them were fairly frothing at the mouth to pour from the outer darkness onto the stone floor of the world.  They chattered and chittered, hissed and clacked and moaned.  Their sounds were muted, as though there really was a barrier, but there was nothing to be seen holding them at bay.

Tobias was chanting.  He had some tools in his hands—I couldn’t tell quite what, but one seemed to be a knife.

I didn’t bother shouting.  If the focused echoes of multi-ton block of stone slamming to the ground didn’t break his concentration, I wouldn’t waste my breath.  Instead, I ran for him, Firebrand out and blazing.  If he killed Shada, I wouldn’t run him through.  I would cut his hands off, bite out his tongue, and kick him right off the world for the Things to eat.  If I got to him before he killed Shada, he would be lucky; decapitation is fairly quick.  I wasn’t about to grab him with tendrils; my indigestion was bad enough.  It crossed my mind to torch him with a blast of flame from Firebrand—an idea Firebrand heartily endorsed—but I wanted to have the satisfaction of metal meeting flesh and bone.

Was that hatred or fury?  I don’t know.  But it was strong, and I gave in to it.

He knew I was coming; he couldn’t have missed my knocking.  He didn’t even bother to turn around.  He just lifted the knife and gestured with it.  The point described a small circle, aimed well to the right.  It was as though some sort of invisible barrier beyond the world’s edge was breached for a moment.  A couple dozen Things squirted through the opening before the invisible wall restored itself.