Nightlord: Sunset (14 page)

THURSDAY, AUGUST 25
TH

I
t keeps running through my head.  Over and over.  I keep jumping on top of a large rock to see what’s smoking… and there’s a Sasha-shaped glassy spot.  Like she caught fire.  I don’t know what happened.  I don’t know what could have done that.  But I can see it in the mind’s eye, imagination.  She’s running away, she’s hurt, and some sort of rocket hits her… and she’s engulfed in flames.  She falls, screaming… and burns.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27
TH

I
’ve been thinking.  Thinking a lot.  Things have changed, somehow.

I’ve been spending my transitions in body bags out at the ruins; I didn’t see much point in going anywhere else.  Not the brightest move on my part, perhaps.  If they’d come back while I was alone, things might have gone badly.  Maybe they thought I’d died in the fire.  Maybe they assumed I ran.  I don’t know.

While I was there, grieving, trying to put my head in order, there was something that began to bother me.  I was utterly devastated by the loss of Sasha… but it was a colder, more distant thing than I had felt when I first saw the outline.  I thought it might be a good sign, a sign I was going to be able to cope with the loss.  It kept getting more distant.  Like I was watching it from the outside, and it was fading away.

I recalled some of the things I had read about; specifically, influencing another’s thoughts.

I had been under a spell.  A powerful spell.  Someone had wanted me to love Sasha.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I loved her.  She was a really great lady.  The grief I felt at knowing she was dead was still there.  But the overwhelming, heart-wrenching, soul-rending agony of it was blunted by the fact I had to doubt my own feelings, to a degree.

That, and the fact that I was seriously pissed off.  A man’s mind is the last place of privacy in a world wired for sound.  I can find out someone’s name, phone number, address, favorite food, type of pets, and sexual fantasies if I just know where to look in the electronic environment of the Internet.  Even physical violation, whether it’s from a sharp object or a simple beating isn’t an invasion of Who You Are.

This was.

Someone had influenced my mind.  Someone had messed with my head, and twisted my emotions like a child would twist taffy.

The question thought: 
cui bono
?  Who benefits?  Sasha?  She had all the magical expertise of a century of learning, but all the capability of a garden-variety houseplant.  She could drain away an emotion, a thought, a concept, because that’s in almost any vampire’s capacity.  To implant one took more than just the spirit-tendrils and a hunger.  It had to be magical.  So, who could
want
me to love her?  And why?

No answers.  I thought about it for hours, but there simply wasn’t anyone or anything I could think of.  That just made me more angry.

I didn’t fly into a rage.  I don’t, usually.  It’s normal for me to just simmer—at least, it used to be.  This tendency to kill people was new, but so was the idea of people trying to kill
me.
  But the anger helped to balance out the grief and got me moving again, brought me back to an awareness of the world around me.

I went to my old apartment—yes, I still have it.  It occurred to me that having a backup address might be a good thing.  Sasha had agreed.  For the first time in days, I got a change of clothes and a shower before the sun went down… and noticed I was hungry.

So I went out as soon as it was dark.  Feeding time would wait; there was something more important.

I went back to the house to say goodbye.

It was an ugly sight, now that I could look at it and
see
it.  The house was cold, not even wisps of smoke.  A lot of it was still standing, the charred skeleton of a house.  I went around it, found the blackened and melted place where she died.  I stood there for a while.

I did love her.  Maybe not with the all-consuming passion the spell had caused, but forget the spell.  This was remembering
her
, not some faceless person with an unknown motive.

Yes, I loved her.  Maybe I would have married her without the influence of the spell.  Maybe it would have grown into that huge, all-encompassing emotion on its own.  Maybe I would have truly loved her anyway; perhaps this just hastened the process.  Maybe.  Did it matter?  She made me a dayblood, loved me, and died.  We had a very limited time together and we loved all we could—more, I think, with the spell than without it.  Forget the fact my head was messed with—and my heart.

There was more to it.  She wasn’t just someone who did this, did that, and isn’t here.  She was Sasha.  She was a lovely lady, old beyond her appearance perhaps, and always smiling at me.  Forget the occasional frown; forget the sudden smack of a wooden sword.  Remember instead waking up to her touch and soft whisper.  Remember her laughter.  Remember how she held me so tightly and never wanted to let go.

“I remember,” I said, crouched there by the glassy earth.  “Oh, yes.  I remember.”

I reached down and touched the smooth-and-crazed glassiness.  It was cold, even to my fingertips.

“And I
will
remember.”

What is it worth, I wonder, to have such a promise?  Do the spirits of the dead look on at the funeral and wonder who will remember them, and for how long?  If so, is the promise of an immortal’s remembrance worth anything extra?  I hope so.  And I hope Sasha was watching.

I got up and went back toward the car, but I couldn’t help curiosity about the house.  Maybe it’s just the kid in me, but I had to wander around in the burned-out wreckage and see if anything survived.  I knew the manuscripts were gone with the library; the center section of the house was nearly completely ash.  But there were memories still in the wrack and ruin.

I poked around a bit, finding all sorts of things.  Melted glasses, for example, and some lumps of what were probably kitchen utensils.  Large sections of bathroom tile, too; the wall behind it had burned away, and the tile fell almost as a piece.  The claw-footed bathtub was almost all intact, too—not bad, considering it had been on the second floor.

The wings were in slightly better shape; not at all salvageable, but more recognizable.  A wall used to be here; I can tell by the steel members that reinforced it.  Little things.

Something flickered, a small flame.  I looked sharply that direction, wondering irrationally if it might be a gas leak.  I couldn’t spot it.  Sniffing, I went to look.

The moonlight glinted on it, and I lifted it from the ashes; a sword.

His
sword.  Now
my
sword.  Or, at least… maybe it
will
be…

It looked unhurt.  I was completely unsurprised, because I could feel the magic in there.  Even the red leather winding on the grip was intact.  There was fire magic shifting in the blade like a live thing, looking at me.

“Good evening,” I said, more out of reflex than anything else.

I could feel a… a sort of… an acknowledgement, and contentment.  A quiet subsiding into slumber.

I shivered.  This thing was
alive
.  A moment ago, it had been
awake.

Maybe it’s silly, but it creeped me out worse than anything I’ve ever known.  It’s one thing to have a wild animal look at you and then roll over and go back to sleep—even if it’s a lion and it doesn’t feel like eating you just this second.  But this was a piece of metal.  Someone slagged down a chunk of rock, skimmed the crap off, blasted it with fire and water while hammering it into shape.  Even without any trace of eyes, it
looked
at me, sized me up, decided it would be okay for me to hold it—and then went from dozing to snoozing again.  But something about it seemed more awake than before.  Like it rolled over and went back to sleep, but it wasn’t hibernating any more.

Creepy doesn’t
begin
to describe that!

I didn’t put it down, though.

The scabbard for the sword had suffered badly; I found a buckle.  I poked around a bit more, sword in hand, but didn’t find anything worth looking at, really.  Some of the windows made some interesting melted-glass sculpture, though.  Pity about being blackened and cracked.  They might have been quite pretty.

At last, I headed back to my apartment, sword lying in the back seat.  I made a note to get something to keep it in—there are a lot of people who make nice weapon accessories in the SCA.  Tomorrow, I decided; tomorrow.

I got home, cleaned a lot of soot and ashes off of me and then cleaned the sword.  It was easier to clean the sword; nothing seemed to stick to it.  I also discovered the blade was far sharper than it should be.  Normally, a sword-blade—especially a big, heavy sword—has a fairly dull edge; this helps keep it from chipping when it strikes armor.  Smaller swords, like a saber or rapier, generally have sharper edges.  They aren’t supposed to encounter armor—just flesh.  This big monster was just made for knocking an armored man out of the saddle.  I’d expected an edge like a woodaxe.

I realized my mistake when my cleaning rag started to fall to the floor in pieces.  I ran it down the flat of the blade to wipe the soot off, and two pieces of rag hit the floor.

I was a lot more careful after that.

The soot came right off; not a trace of it tried to stick.  The metal wasn’t even faintly marked by being in a house fire.  Not that I was really surprised, after its initial greeting, but it was still amazing to see.  I looked at it more closely and wondered how it was enchanted and what went into its making.

And I had a revelation.

I was drifting.

What was I doing, really?  Sitting around, not doing anything.  Drifting.  I was cleaning a sword, remembering the dead, and not thinking about my situation or my life.

Maybe that’s typical when things go really wrong, but I don’t like it.  Maybe it has something to do with the aftereffects of a mind-affecting spell—in which case, I hated it.  Either way, I had the sudden urge to
do
something, not just sit around.

So I did.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
TH

T
ravis I trust enough for this secret.  I don’t feel like being too public with my current status, so he gets to be Igor to my Mad Wizard.  We spent most of the day rounding up the cattle on the estate property and herding them in toward the fenced-in pasture area nearer where the house had been.  It was a dirty, nasty, smelly job and I don’t think Travis has ever had that much fun.  I may have noted he’s a bit weird at times—at least, to me he is.

Oh, and I got a scabbard, belt, and baldric for the sword.  It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it was the best Dave had on hand when I dropped in on him.  It worked.  I wore it and the blade all day, getting used to it and adjusting the straps to fit comfortably.

MONDAY, AUGUST 29
TH

W
e spent today refreshing and elaborating on the symbols in the rock garden.  Most of them were still there—Sasha’s crater was nowhere near that section.  I explained to Travis what I believed to have happened; he wisely asked no questions nor offered sympathy.  He just nodded when I told him I was going to kill something that didn’t want to die—and I wanted his help.  He agreed and we worked to make it happen.  I taught him his part of the upcoming spell so he could help me, and some of the underlying magical principles just because he wanted to know.

I added some symbols from memory to the rim of the reflecting pool—not just from the grimoires I had been studying, but also one or two I saw on the floor of the other place.  I hadn’t had a good look at them but a couple stood out in memory.  By the law of correspondences, if nothing else, I figured they would help.  They seemed to fit, somehow; something down deep inside me seemed to think they belonged exactly where they were.

Maybe wizards get that feeling when they know they have it right.  Or when they think they do.  If something fiery, ugly, and wielding a pitchfork showed up, I’d know I
hadn’t
.

Then we drained the pool.

Travis eyed the sacrificial rock and the brown sludge slowly gurgling out of the hose we were using to siphon the pool out.

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably not.”

“I’m guessing that there are no human lives involved?”

“That’s right.  At least, not directly.”

“Fine.  Is it okay to take home some steaks, afterward?”

I laughed.

“You can take a whole cow, if you can figure out how to butcher it.  I won’t have any use for it.”

“Fair.  I’ll see what I can manage.”

I didn’t doubt him for a second.  We watched the level of the pool continue to drop.

“Eric?”

“Yes?”

“This isn’t part of the original plan, is it?”

“No.”

“Can I have some details?  What I know of the big picture is still pretty sketchy.”

I shrugged.  “My picture isn’t much better.  I’m not going to meet them at our little rendezvous.  I wasn’t intending to keep the deal; obviously, they weren’t either.  So it’s all off, along with the gloves.  I’m going to kick open their door and kill anything that moves on my way to the person in charge.”

“Ah?”

“Yes.  I made a sort of contact, you’ll recall?”

“You mentioned it.”

“It was tough.  It was hard to reach them at all and I wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been reaching out at the same time.  I get the feeling we sort of met in the middle.  Like their spell was a lightning bolt that hadn’t decided where to ground—and I stuck up a flagpole.  I think they were aiming for someplace else entirely.”

“If you say so.  So?”

“That was a lot of personal power along with the sacrifice of a cow.  I’m going to up the power factor a bit.”

Travis eyed the corral of cattle.

“So I see.  How much is ‘a bit’?”

“The way I figure it—and this is purely subjective; there’s no mathematics for magic—”

“—yet,” he interrupted.

“Yet,” I agreed, smiling.  He and I chuckled over that.  “But I have the feeling, by way of gross observation—”

Travis eyed the brown sludge again, then looked at me.

“All right, all right,” I said, “No pun intended!  Happy?”

“Close enough.  Go on.”

“There’s about a three-to-one efficiency difference between something I ‘eat’ and then use, versus a sacrifice for a spell.  I’m willing to bet there are a lot of factors—several are mentioned, or
were
mentioned, in the magician’s notes.  My own ability to concentrate and focus, the precision of the ritual diagrams, the materials involved—and the nature of the spell itself, of course.”

“So if you, for example, devoured the entire herd of cattle, you could only really use about a third of the energy for a spell?”

“That’s what I think,” I agreed.  “If I spent the energy, it would be to gather more ambient magical energy.  With that method, I’d be a lot more exhausted afterward.”

“Whereas if you just cut a lot of throats?” he pressed.

“My arm might be tired, but I’ll have almost all that life energy stuffed into the spell directly.  Magic and vital force
seem
closely related, but don’t quote me.  Still, the throat-cutting is much more efficient than gathering power.”

He glanced at the lines of power on the ground.  “Any chance this is going to overload?  I mean, do I wear rubber underwear or what?”

“Sure, if you’re into that,” I replied.  “Don’t worry.  Even if I do screw it up, you should be okay; you won’t be chanting or anything—just leading a new cow over while I work with the one on the block.”

“So what will you do with the bodies once you—oh, wait.  Down the hillside?”

I nodded.  “I’ll just shove it off the rock fairly hard; the natural slope of the hill back here should be enough to get it to slide or tumble down.”

“I’m sure you’re strong enough.  Let’s mow it and pour oil on it, just to be sure.  I’m not sure a dead cow would roll down that slope.”  I looked down the hill with him and thought about it.

“Um.  Okay.”

So we mowed it and made a trip to the store for a couple of buckets of oil—motor oil, cooking oil, you name it, as long as it was slick.  Then we sat around for a while, watching the afternoon wane.

“You know, you could die,” Travis observed.

“You know, you’ve mentioned this before.”

“Yep.  And you mentioned hiding out for a thousand years or so didn’t have a whole lot of appeal.”

“I’ve had occasional second thoughts.”

“And?”

“I then have third and fourth and fifth.”

Travis chuckled and sipped at a beer; he’d brought an ice chest.  “So what’re you up to?”

“A few billion.  But inertia is a wonderful thing; it keeps me going when I have doubts about the plan.”

“It slams you into bridge abutments in the rain, too.”

“You win some, you lose some.”  I shrugged.  I wasn’t nearly as lighthearted as I sounded.  I was actually scared enough for three men; throwing out a bit of bravado helped a lot.  Act brave, sound brave, feel brave.  I also tried not to think about how scared I was.  If I did, I would have to think about how angry I was, and being that angry at the world is a bad thing; I had a lot to be angry about.  True, these people, whoever they were, didn’t deserve all of my frustration and rage, but they were going to get a lot of it. 

Such thoughts also kept me from thinking about how stupid this idea was.  It kept me from thinking how impulsive, rash, and basically foolish I can be.  It also kept me from thinking about any innocent Joe Average types I might be about to slaughter—clerks and secretaries and whatever else might be around in Fist Fanatics HQ.  If I thought about that, I wouldn’t do it.

“True enough,” Travis agreed.  “What do I tell the guys?  You know they wonder what’s become of you.”

“I married a wealthy wench and am living comfortably in Acapulco?”

“You hate the beach.”

“Oh.  London?”

“Too cold.”

“Damn.  How about Hong Kong?”

“You hate Asian food.”

“Got a suggestion?” I asked.  “I’m out.”

“
Australia.”

“
Sydney?  Melbourne?”

“They speak English, and the food’s not bad.  That could work.”

I nodded.  “We’ll go with that.  So what do they think now?”

“That you’re simply shacked up with her and lost in sexual bliss.  Hutch is firmly of the opinion that you landed on your feet—well, landed on something, and landed well—when Terri dropped you,” he said.  I must have looked hurt because he apologized immediately.  “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to say that like it sounded.”

“No problem,” I replied, trying to sit on a bunch of emotions that were suddenly clamoring for attention.  “I’m not over it, of course.  But I’m coping with it.”

“By doing something half-crazy and certainly dangerous?”

“It works.”

Travis opened his mouth and then closed it a couple of times.  I could see him start to say something, hear a few sentences into the future, then decide not to go there.

“Okay,” he said, finally.

“Come on,” I said, rising.  “We need to rope some steers.  Then you need to shut me in the basement.”

Travis burst into laughter.  I stared at him for a long moment.

“What is it?” I finally asked.  “The entombment?  The subterranean lair?  What?”

Travis shook his head, grinning and chuckling.  “No, not at all.  I just thought most people have a
skeleton
in the
closet
.  Not a vampire in the basement.”

I grinned back at him.  “Okay, that’s funny.  I didn’t mean it to be, but it is.”

Travis sighed, calming, but still smiling.  “Yep.  Let’s go punch some cattle.”

Sunset was the usual; it tingled and shivered and prickled me from head to toe—skin and bones and organs, all—which left me with the distinct feeling that darkness was a friend, yes, absolutely, and a faint curiosity about what happens to a dayblood in the dawn.

We got busy.

First off, I got dressed.  Three pistols.  A submachine gun.  Extra ammunition.  The latest in bulletproof vests.  A small backpack.  Field boots and camouflage field uniform.  Black-and-green face paint.  I looked like an extra on a war-movie set. 

Travis suggested a small backpack of other supplies—typical short-term survival stuff, mainly, along with a cell phone and a pocket shortwave radio receiver, just in case.  Since weight wasn’t really much of an issue, we strapped gear on with an eye to getting weapons quickly and let it go at that.  One thing I was adamant about was the sword.  I was bringing it; I’d put too much effort into practice for it to go to waste.  Besides, a sword doesn’t jam or run out of ammo—and one never knows when a magical sword might come in handy.

The roped-together cattle were strung out, hobbled and blindfolded; we kept them upwind from what was about to happen.  I didn’t want them panicking.

Then again, they were used to the smell of blood; Sasha had once told me that, when hungry, nothing beats drinking straight from the throat.  Apparently, they were fed on in that fashion more than once, so maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.  This was not a time to take chances, though.

I started the spell.  This one varied slightly from the first I’d cast into the pool.  Instead of a steady chant, it was a litany, pause, repeat.  It was a longer, more drawn-out ritual, partly original, and gave me gaps in which to fit other activities.  Travis and I did a brief walkthrough—a three-cow walkthrough, if you would, without the actual cows—to get the rhythm down.

If I ever need an apprentice, I’ll keep him in mind.  He managed this without anything more than minor bobbles, and that was because neither of us handles cattle for a living.  I had to whack a couple when they spooked, but aside from that, it went smoothly.

He led a cow over to the rock and up the homemade ramp, on to the rock.  I clubbed it with a sledge and it dropped.  I recited the litany I had worked out—referring to my cheat sheet, taped to my forearm, as needed; it was a long litany—while cutting its throat and letting the blood run down into the empty pool.  After the sacrifice, I shoved it off the far side.  It slid down the greased boards and then down the oily hillside.

It wasn’t a fast process, but speed wasn’t necessary. In fact, had it been faster, we would probably have screwed it up.  As it was, it was a slow, rhythmic thing.  I could almost hear the low thunder of power flowing through the diagrams.  It reminded me of the circuits on a printed board—or the circulation of a living thing, with me as the heart.

I painted symbols of opening and movement on the floor of the empty pool before we started.  Being melodramatic at times, I decided that using my own blood for paint would be a nice touch.  The blood from the cattle covered the floor of the pool, but the designs were still visible beneath the first few millimeters as disturbed places; there was a shivering in the shape of the symbols on the surface of the bloody film.  As it grew deeper, the whole bloody mess began to swirl.  I took that as a good sign.

It was nearly four in the morning when the pool started to deepen unnaturally.  By that point we had a good whirlpool formed, but now it was deeper than the floor of the pool.  I kept the tempo, and Travis kept the cattle coming.  This must have been around forty or forty-five; I didn’t keep count—I was preoccupied.  Travis kept looking into the pool, but also kept moving.

It was getting close.  I could feel it.  It was like a sneeze, or an orgasm; it was about to happen—all it needed was one last breath, the lightest of touches…

When Travis brought another one, I knew it would be the last one; after this, it would open.