Knightfall: Book Four of the Nightlord series Page 7

  Which still left half the table blank and featureless.

  If the Mountains of the Sun fuzzed out scanning for some reason—magical ore? Naturally-occurring orichalcum? Singularity-powered Romulan spiders weaving anti-scanning webs? —the table would expand the apparent scale to best fit the tabletop. This seemed to indicate the orbiting scan-spells couldn’t send back data pulses, but the permanent linkage between them and the mountain’s triangulation points was able to keep track of them. Kind of like being able to track a satellite beacon even after losing the spy camera signal.

  Which implied the world was even bigger than I thought. About twice as big, in fact. There might be a whole other half of the world beyond the Mountains of the Sun. The mountain range might not be the southern edge of the world, just the fence between two halves of it!

  Would people on that side think of the Mountains of the Sun as “south”? If you go far enough away from the Mountains, far from the path of the sun, where it gets cold and icy, would they think of that as the “north”?

  I worked with the sand table for a bit, trying to examine the Mountains more closely. There was definitely something wrong, there. It didn’t resist my attempts to look into them, not in any way I understood. It seemed more like shining a light into a fog, or trying to tune in a radio station through intense static. Which, come to think of it, would help explain why everyone believed them to be the southern edge of the world. You can’t look past the edge of the world. There’s nothing there to see!

  I let the sand table go back to mapping and regarded it thoughtfully. All the little dots of scrying shields—some of them large in a human scale, but still tiny on a map of the world—made me think of the power-centers in another world. They didn’t have the distribution, of course, but Mary’s world has been on my mind. I started visualizing lines of power between them, looking for patterns. I didn’t see any, but you never know.

  Does this world have ley lines? Are there power centers I could tap here? Or are they only on spherical worlds? Or in universes with particular magical laws?

  I felt a sudden temptation to tell everyone to go to hell while I walked away, off to explore different worlds. Maybe I will. Not today.

  I returned to the magic mirror. I knew about how high I could go, so I set the view for something like maximum height and looked down. A little spell-work and some panning back and forth revealed nothing. No ley lines, no lines of power, just a regular, generic magical field. Not a webwork of hidden forces, but a field, like a magnet, accessible everywhere.

  But if it’s like a magnet, I reasoned, where are the magical analogues of the magnetic poles?

  This world doesn’t have a magnetic field, so the people on it couldn’t use it as a metaphor, a frame of reference. Has anyone ever looked at the magical field itself, before? Has anyone ever known what to look for? Surely, someone has wondered about the source of magic?

  I didn’t recall anything from my digested memories. Maybe nobody cared, as long as magic worked. Or, perhaps it was esoteric knowledge, known only by a few people who had a burning interest, or… or no one who ever tried to find out ever reported their findings.

  I can think of a couple of reasons for that last one.

  Still, I might need to know. There are godlike magi to deal with and maybe a hostile guild of wizards.

  I stepped up the gain on my magical detection spell. I’ve been meaning to develop a measuring system, but I don’t know how to set up a standard unit of magic. On the other hand, all I wanted at the moment was the ability to tell whether the local magical field was stronger or weaker in two areas, not get a precise measurement.

  With some good cheer, I set about scrying a few dozen random spots. This gave me a rudimentary chart of variations in the field intensity. As a rule—barring some weird spots—magic gets weaker toward the north, stronger toward the south. The highest intensity is in the Shining Desert, near the middle of the Mountains of the Sun. It falls off a little to the east and west, along the range, but it falls off much more rapidly with distance northward and levels out quickly. The difference is small, not even enough to concern most spellcasters, but it’s detectable, and that’s good enough for me.

  I didn’t get to make an equation for it, but it reminded me of part of a high-intensity black-body radiation curve. The field strength increased gradually along the line from north to south—it was a barely detectable slope—and increased markedly in the Shining Desert. It skyrocketed just inside the Mountains of the Sun, where the field grew too intense to examine.

  So, the Mountains of the Sun contained a huge amount of magical energy. From long exposure to sunlight, perhaps? Power radiated from the sun—and the moon, for all I know—for thousands upon thousands of years, diffusing outward through the world. Every day, it refreshed the system with a new wave of energy, “heating” the mountains up again to radiate magical force.

  It’s one hypothesis. I don’t see a way to test it from here, though. I can’t exactly pack up and head south to look, either.

  Still, I wonder why one world would have ley lines and another would have a completely different energy distribution system. Difference in sources? Difference in magical laws? Difference in other laws, other physical constants, in the universe as a whole? Since there are different universes, apparently with different physical laws, how do they all relate? Admittedly, the ones I’ve visited are universes which permit life to exist—usually in a manner I can comprehend—but what combinations of those physical constants permit it? How do they interact with each other? Some of them are obvious, but I suspect I’m not qualified even to speculate by a dozen or thirty Ph.D.’s.

  I went back to studying the shielded areas. I might not find Tort today, but I could at least start eliminating places. Knocking down a scryshield is possible, but generally regarded as rude. It’s on par with bashing through a privacy fence. It takes work and it usually gets you noticed. That’s why the palace scryshields don’t block a scrying spell, just divert it into a complex illusion. If you don’t know you’ve failed to look through a scryshield, you can’t work on knocking it down.

  On the other hand, scrying shields only work against spells projecting a sensor through them. You can look around inside the shield if you’re already inside, of course. Or, if outside, you can park a scrying sensor near a shielded area, then treat it as though you’re standing outside, looking in. To go with the fence metaphor, I can stand on a ladder and look over the fence, no problem. I just need a telescope. I still can’t float my magical camera view around inside the house, but I can look in the windows, at least. It might be cheating, but I’m okay with that. I started with the isolated ones, for practice. The clusters in population centers were going to be trickier.

  During the next hour, I found a number of isolated towers, ruined fortresses, mountain hideaways, and forest huts. While I couldn’t put a sensor inside the shields and look around, I could passively scan for other radiations emitted. Using a spectrum shifter to scan them in infrared and other non-visible ranges allowed me to mark all of them off my list. These people and places were minding their own business—or, at least, staying out of mine—so I returned the favor once I determined Tort was not present.

  A feeling of deep unease interrupted my work of Tort-finding. Something was wrong. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the laboratory, but the feeling persisted. It took only a moment to realize Bronze was annoyed.

  Huh. Well, that’s unusual, thought I.

  I tried to reach out to her, to see what she saw, but our connection isn’t like that, it seems. I can’t use a location spell; she’s better protected against that sort of thing than I am. Maybe with a magic mirror… no, no help from that without some idea where she was. All I could tell was Bronze was somewhere to the west. Hardly a precise measurement.

  I started crafting a message spell to target Bronze. With a function to allow her to plant an impression of her location, it would then come back to me and I could magic mirro
r my way to her.

  And I almost screamed in frustration at myself. The hammerblow of enlightenment landed squarely on my metaphorical third eye and cracked my shell of preconceptions.

  Hmm. I should look into the idea of a mystical “third eye.” It would explain a lot about how wizards see magic, as well as how vampires see life energy. Or would that require four eyes? I recall something about the idea of a mystical eye, or an inner eye, or whatever from my digested memories, but there are so many different magical traditions, schools of thought, methods and systems…

  Back to my point. Message spells. Identifying spells. Alarm spells. All these and variations thereof require the spell to recognize certain qualities in a subject before performing an action. These don’t act like radar. They’re passive detection. They’re like ears or eyeballs. They’re like old-fashioned transistor radios. They don’t send out a pulse to ask for identification; they only receive whatever signals are broadcast. Tune them to a specific set of signals and you get music. The radio doesn’t actually go out and get it; it just tells you what it hears.

  The compass-box! The magic-detecting compass-box I… borrowed… from the Etiennes. It did much the same thing. Admittedly, it was looking for power sources—much “louder” than anything else—but the principle was the same. The throne in Zirafel… even the stick I made for Tyma… Good lord, how many other examples have been staring me in the face, sticking out their tongues, mocking me all this time?

  When I send a message spell to look for someone, I imprint on it a sort of psychic signature and send it to where I think the person is. It circles around, listening for the psychic radiations matching the signature. The range isn’t great; it’s not very sophisticated. It’s like a person, wandering around, listening for someone’s voice so it can deliver a letter.

  Why not scale them up? Why not build a… a giant spell-dish and listen for Tort? I could build three—one on the mountain, two in the Eastrange to form an equilateral triangle, and pick up signals from anywhere in the world! Then it’s just a matter of triangulation, and I’ve already got the best map of the world ever made!

  I’m a genius. A slow genius, but I get there.

  Okay. Okay. First things first. Bronze.

  I put together my psychic listening device. In principle, it’s easy. Think of it as a parabolic reflector to focus the emanations, much like a satellite dish, or one of those bowl-shaped solar ovens. Once I had the idea, it wasn’t overwhelmingly difficult. I even had other spells that incorporated something like it in the design. It was only a matter of drastically increasing the sensitivity. Doing so took me half an hour, mostly to work out the basic structure of the prototype. It wasn’t what I’d call pretty, but some cardboard and tinfoil can concentrate enough sunlight to start fires. I can develop an industrial-scale version later.

  It had some bugs. I ignored the psychic screeching—static? —and got a bearing on Bronze. Of course, by then, she wasn’t annoyed anymore. I still wanted to see if this would work.

  Since I couldn’t triangulate—all I had was a bearing—I cranked up the magic mirror, set the altitude at a couple hundred yards above ground, and scrolled the world by. It was like having a souped-up version of a drone camera. My viewpoint shot westward along the line, jiggling up and down as it went over the Eastrange, and rising slightly with distance to widen my view and allow for errors in alignment. Once on the far side of the mountains, it settled down. I noticed it was bearing slightly to my left, or south.

  If Bronze was out on the coastal Kingsroad, where my bearing line crossed it would be a good place to look. I shifted my scrying sensor there and started looking along the road.

  I zoomed in on a pulsing flare of fire. It didn’t stand out, really, not in the daytime, but the trail of smoke was like a broad arrowhead pointing straight to it. Bronze was headed east at a moderate pace—sixty miles an hour? Moderate for Bronze, anyway. She was well outside Carrillon on the road to Tolcaren. I panned and scanned; there was nobody chasing her. When I zoomed in from altitude, I saw Tianna was aboard and had Firebrand hanging on Bronze’s saddlehorn.

  Well, that would simplify things. With a mirror image for targeting and a communication spell to enhance a psychic link…

  Firebrand?

  Boss! Where are you?

  Karvalen.

  And I can hear you from there? I’m impressed. Got yourself a big brain, Boss.

  When it works, I countered. I felt Bronze’s annoyance. What’s going on?

  Oh, Tianna’s been talking with the Queen and everybody else. Your granddaughter likes you, Boss. She’s been trying to explain what happened to you and what you want, at least as far as we understand it. There’s been some religious stuff, too, but mostly she’s been trying to break your image as a monster, blaming it all on the Demon King.

  Any luck?

  Yes and no. A lot of people believe her because of who—or what—she is. Lissette always starts the day unwilling to believe, but by evening is usually more willing to listen. Then, the next time they talk, it’s the same thing.

  Like she changes her mind overnight and goes back to her original viewpoint?

  Pretty much, yeah. Then Tianna talks her out of it again. Your nest-mate isn’t the most stable brain in the world, Boss.

  I’m going to have a talk with Thomen. This could be him pillow-talking her around to his viewpoint, but I’m told he’s directly affecting her mind. If he’s doing this because he hates me, that’s one thing. We can sort that out. If he’s doing this because he’s angling for the throne, that’s another thing. Not that I would object, necessarily, to him being King, but I strongly object to his methods. I want to know his motives before I put my foot so far up his backside my toenails tickle his brainstem.

  How long has this been going on? For years, as he planned a palace coup? Or is this a gentle usurpation started since the Demon King departed? Did Lissette conspire with Thomen while the Demon King was on the throne, then try to brush him off when the Demon King was gone? Or was Thomen doing something like this all along?

  Well, crap. I’m going to have to institute a spy service just to find out who I need to know about, much less what they’re doing!

  But first things first.

  So why was Bronze annoyed?

  Tianna’s done what she can with everyone else, but she gave up on keeping Lissette convinced. So, Tianna decided to go home. She’s got duties in her temple, I hear. Thing is, Lissette didn’t say I could come. She didn’t say Bronze could, either.

  Tianna took it into her head to ride away on Bronze with you hanging off the saddlehorn?

  Pretty much, yeah. She’s the granddaughter of the King and a Priestess of the Flame. Bronze and I are the personal property of the King and were willing to go with her. She didn’t defy the Queen’s order; she simply didn’t ask permission.

  And how did it go?

  She didn’t even kill anyone! I have issues with the way you raise your younglings, Boss. They don’t seem to appreciate the value of a good torching for getting the survivors to listen. Which, when you think about it, is pretty weird, especially given who they work for!

  Your advice on mammalian child-rearing is noted. Again, I have to ask… why was Bronze annoyed?

  Leaving the Palace was easy enough, but the people called ahead and closed the city gates.

  Let me see, I mused. Big wooden things with iron and brass holding them together? Blocking the path of a fire-breathing, multi-ton metal horse? And a dragon-spirit in a flaming sword? And a fire-witch wizardess?

  Yes. Firebrand sounded smug. A little too smug.

  Did you melt the walls?

  Nope! Those are part of the mountain and it wouldn’t have understood. I torched the gate, Bronze did the kicking and running, Tianna did the whole vaporize-anything-they-shoot-at-us thing, Firebrand reported. I found myself standing, hand on swordhilt.

  They shot at my granddaughter?

  Yep. Not sure it was orders, though—just fri
ghtened guards trying to do their job. We mostly ignored them. Tianna did something magical when a wizard did something magical, but other than that…

  I didn’t think she was that good a wizard.

  It’s easier to block stuff than it is to cast it, isn’t it?

  Generally, yes. Okay, I thought back. Okay. I don’t like it, but… mistakes happen. Nothing hit her?

  Do ashes count?

  No. All right. I can let it go as a misunderstanding, I decided. Panicked guards, screaming and confusion, someone launches a bolt, a few others take their cue from him… I can see that. It might be different if they’d hurt her.

  Yeah. There might be a bunch of people running screaming out of the flaming ruins of the city.

  Intelligence is a survival trait, I told it. All right. Do you need anything?

  No. We’re on our way back. You might want to teach her the air-shield thing and the downhill-all-the-way spell, though.

  Bronze feels happy, I argued.

  She is. But she’s not hurrying, just enjoying the run. The spells help even when she’s goofing off.

  I’ll bear it in mind.

  I cut the connection and turned to Torvil.

  “Torvil?”

  “Yes, Sire?” he asked. He was already on his feet, sword out—a response to my earlier reaction.

  “Did Tort ever stay here? Did she have quarters?”

  “She did, Sire, though it was but a seldom thing even in the latter days of the reign of the Demon King. She stayed near him and he did not often visit, even in secret.”

  “Get up to her quarters and find me something she wore—a ring, a hairpin, a cloak-clasp, whatever.”

  “Immediately.” He shoved the door out of the way and hurried off, fishing out a pocket mirror as he went. I stopped the door in its spinning and closed it. I did debugging work on my kludged-together passive sensor spell.

  Seldar came in while I was working. He wasn’t stealthy about it, but he did keep quiet, for which I was grateful. He didn’t clear his throat or wave, so it wasn’t important enough to interrupt. I finished my mark two prototype and left it hanging, uncharged and waiting for a target.