“My angel?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, working my shoulders. It hurt a little, but I could do it. “Not a happy angel, mind you, but still here.”
“I am pleased at your presence,” she told me, seriously, and put her arms around me. I hugged her in return and let her keep on hugging me until she was done. Never stop hugging a woman until she does; you never know how much hug she needs. It’s a good rule, even though I wanted to wince when she squeezed.
“I’m pleased to have you here,” I told her. “What did I miss?”
“An assassin stabbed you and was slain,” she said, still holding me. “While Seldar worked to preserve your mortal life, Torvil and Kammen summoned others to your aid. Most of these around you are simply the first passers-by who could be drafted to this duty.”
“Fair enough, I suppose. I’m guessing you and he were the ones who did most of the work?”
“Actually,” she said, leaning back from the hug, “Torvil’s elder brother, Norvil, was the most help. He had the idea to stop your heart for the flesh-joining, and the idea to move your blood in another fashion until then. He also suggested a spell to keep you breathing, just for caution’s sake, but we did not require its use. We three then worked quickly to seal up the layers of the wounds.”
She bit her lip and then hugged me again. I still didn’t object. When she spoke, it was a whisper.
“When your heart was once more intact, it beat but once,” she said, “and I was afraid.”
“I took care of that,” I told her. “I’ll show you how to do that, and soon. I really do need to teach more classes on how to care for massive trauma. We’re training fighters, after all, and they should know how to deal with the results of fights.”
“Promise me,” she said, squeezing me fiercely, “that you will always come back to me. Promise!”
Seldar cleared his throat. Tort stopped squeezing me quite so hard.
“Please,” she added. I had to think about that for a minute.
I’ve already gone over the reasons for being a bit behind the curve about relationships. Can I please me excused for a little emotional difficulty? But Tort
needed
me to be here for her. What
I
felt wasn’t the issue, and I realized it was selfish of me to continue. I should get off my overly-emotional, whiny backside and, for Tort’s sake, I should man up.
Fundamentally, that’s what it really comes down to: Tort needed me.
I pressed my lips to her ear and murmured, “Not here. Tonight, in my chambers.” She accepted that and released me.
“So,” I continued, aloud, “am I fit enough to disconnect everyone?” Seldar and Tort looked me over with eyes and spells. “Hey, where’s… Norvil?” I asked.
Torvil pointed him out. He was on the floor next to me, part of the wound-sharing spell. I made a note to expedite testing that man for knighthood.
Once they pronounced me fit enough to survive on my own, they disconnected the spell. I thanked everyone and gently sent them on their way. There was some difficulty getting them out; the corridor was full of people who wanted to find out more. We spread the word that I would be at dinner and everyone could see for themselves. That helped clear the corridor.
Then I turned my attention to the assassin and his dagger. Well, what was left of the assassin after they made sure he was dead. Someone had gathered up all the invisible bits and laid them out on the now-bloody table. Good thing it had a raised lip at the edge; the blood pooled rather than running off. Messy.
I found that if I moved with a bit of care and caution, the welded-together parts didn’t mind too much. Fair enough; I could do that.
The body was still invisible. The dagger wasn’t, nor was the blood, but his flesh and his clothes were. The dagger was also plain steel—not even very good steel—without a trace of enchantment or magic. As far as a vampire hunter’s weaponry was concerned, this almost didn’t qualify as a weapon at all. When I laid the dagger on the largest piece of his torso, it remained visible.
Tort and I conducted an analysis of the magic involved, with Torvil, Kammen, Seldar and the twins joining us for the examination as though it were a lesson. This wasn’t a spell; it was an enchantment. While I had thought enchantments were either impossible or potentially awful on a living being, Tort showed me the reason it worked.
It wasn’t a mortal enchantment. It was an alteration made by a Thing from outside the world. This wasn’t a magician’s work; it was demonic. Whoever this person was, or used to be, he made a deal with such a creature.
I’ve met my first sorcerer. How nice. I am not encouraged to be friendly toward them.
Further examination and a little jigsaw puzzle work revealed that he was a man, about five foot six, well-muscled, with long hair. I also noticed that his invisibility was slowly starting to fade. A bright light appeared to dim slightly when viewed through his head and his clothing was starting to reappear. The process appeared progressive, which cut short any ideas I had for harvesting his skin to make invisible leather and a cloak of invisibility.
Yes, I can be a bad person. Getting stabbed in the heart makes me cranky. I think that little quirk can be excused.
On the other hand, I did get to observe the invisibility magic close up. It was instructive. Since it was demonic, rather than human, it used principles most magicians have never seen before. We called in T’yl and Thomen to see it, as well, and it was Thomen who made the observation.
“It looks much like the enchantment on your horse, Sire.”
Once he pointed it out, I could see some similarities. It was similar in that it held power inside it, much as Bronze’s essence is contained inside her. The structure of the enchantment was also similar in some ways, leading me to believe that it was a… less structured?... form of magic. It looked like the things I do when I’m playing directly with the raw forces, rather than building wiring diagrams for spell-circuits. Something closer to a shamanistic style, rather than the detailed formulas of wizards or magicians. It seemed as though someone—well, some Thing—had drawn on primal forces directly to build it, formed it out of raw magical energy, and bound it to the flesh and soul of the sorcerer.
I realized something, then. A sorcerer that makes a deal with a Thing generally gives the Thing a free ride into the material world in exchange for a power of some sort.
How is that different from a priest and the gods? A priest acts on the will of his deity in exchange for power. Is there a real difference? True, the gods don’t necessarily live inside a priest in order to manifest in the world when he dies, but I have seen a goddess possess a priestess more than once. Are demons really all that different from the gods? Or are the gods just demons with more long-term goals? Or are priests just descendants of sorcerers with better bargaining skills?
I am not amused.
We watched the invisibility effect break down over time, now that it was no longer drawing on the life-stuff of the sorcerer. I couldn’t be sure during the day, but I thought it was consuming the sorcerer’s soul and starting to run out of fuel. Once it finished, it would collapse completely and the body would again be fully visible.
“Doesn’t a sorcerer generally promise something in return for his powers?” I asked.
“Yes,” T’yl replied. “Typically, the bargain is that a demon gets to—oh.” He wiped one hand through the blood on the table and started to draw a triangle on the floor around the table. Tort and Thomen saw what he was doing and quickly joined him, forming a triangle around the triangle, the inner one with points at the midpoint of the outer triangle’s sides. I puzzled out what was going on as they worked their way around the room, inking the bloody containment symbol.
They finished and empowered the containment, chanting and pushing energy into it.
“There. Now, as I was saying,” T’yl continued, as though he had only paused for a sip of tea, “the demon usually rides inside the bargainer, shielded from most forms of detection and, of course, from the sunlight. When the sorcerer dies and whatever gift the demon granted ceases to be, the demon is then freed into our world, at least for a while.”
“We need to do something about that,” I noted. “A demonic Thing loose in the undercity could survive indefinitely.”
“Does the sunlight from the spells not affect them?” Tort asked. “As I understand it, the light truly is sunlight. Would it not destroy them?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “On the other hand, the light is only in the corridors; it could hide anywhere else during the day and only come out at night.” Tort and Thomen looked concerned. T’yl shrugged.
“We can establish some demon defenses in various corridors,” he suggested. “That will confine any invading demon in its small area of the undercity, making it easy to hunt down. We could treat them like dangerous vermin, then, rather than a roaming threat.”
“Good idea,” I told him. “Could you please show me a plan for that at tomorrow’s breakfast meeting?”
“Of course. Nothing simpler.”
“Thank you. Meanwhile, this thing. Do you think it’s about to manifest?”
T’yl, Tort, and Thomen all looked at each other. Tort spoke.
“The gift of invisibility is breaking down,” she said. “Everything not of the sorcerer himself has returned to visibility. It is almost possible to see a faint shadow of the flesh. If this continues, I should think the demon will be free in no more than a single band of the candle. Such things are dormant during the day, though, or it would have broken free the moment the sorcerer died. It is possible that even when the demon’s gift finally fails, the creature will not manifest until after dark.”
“Is it worth interrogating it?” I asked. The three of them shook their heads in unison.
“It will lie,” T’yl said. “They do that. We could subject it to pain for weeks and get nothing but lies from it—lies with, perhaps, enough truth mixed in to be especially dangerous, if it is one of the smarter ones.” He glanced at the former person on the table. “I should think it is, actually. I wouldn’t trust anything it says, no matter what we do.”
Tort and Thomen agreed. I shrugged.
“Okay. So, destruction or banishment? Or do we want to bind it into something and stick it in the basement?”
“Destruction.” “Destruction.” “Destruction.”
“Well, that’s a pretty clear vote by the panel of experts,” I noted. “We’ll wait until it manifests, then eradicate it.”
While we waited, I gathered the sand into a pile and cleaned it; I didn’t want sorcerer blood contaminating my sand table. Admittedly, I had hopes that I would get it to be a hologrammatic table, someday, but I was going to need it working as a sand table until I was ready to work on the hologram part.
About then, the mirror to Baret chimed. That is, the bell built into the frame rang, signaling someone trying to call. I activated the mirror and saw the court wizard of Baret, Velina.
“Good afternoon,” I offered. “What can I do for you?”
“Your Majesty!” she said, looking surprised. “I did not expect you to… I mean, I thought someone else…”
“I answer my own phone whenever I’m near it,” I told her.
“Phone?” she asked, puzzled.
“Mirror. I answer my own magic mirrors whenever I’m next to them. What’s on your mind?”
“Is this a good time?” she asked, glancing past me at the bloody table and the half-visible pieces of corpse.
“Sure. Just waiting for something to happen. So, tell me.”
“There have been a number of… that is, word of your feat of regrowing things, like lost limbs, has spread even to Baret and beyond,” she said. Inwardly, I suppressed a groan. “There is even a song about this power, and the way you use it without asking for anything in return.”
“Is there?” I asked, knowing who
I
would be asking questions of in very short order.
“Yes, Your Majesty. And, with word of the new road through the Eastrange, there are those who have come to Baret, or sent word, asking to have some infirmity cured.” She smiled, just a little, and ruefully. “I do what I can, of course…”
“…but the people asking for help are asking for help with things nobody can fix.”
“They seek miracles, Your Majesty.”
“Fine.” I sighed. “I’m not sure of my schedule, but if I can come by tomorrow afternoon, I will. How’s that?”
“I would be most grateful, Your Majesty. I must advise you, however, that some of the infirm are not here.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I said, some of the—”
“I heard you, I just didn’t understand it. What do you mean by it?”
“Oh. Some of the wealthy or powerful have not come to Baret, only sent messengers to summon you to cure their affliction.”
“Oh. Okay. We’ll ignore those.”
“Your Majesty?” she asked, looking surprised.
“I don’t generally make house calls,” I told her. “If they want my help, they can come to me, or give me a damn good reason why the King of Karvalen should take the time and trouble to go to
them
. It’s one thing if they’re dying and the journey will kill them; it’s another thing entirely if it’s inconvenient to make a trip.”
“I see your point, Your Majesty.”
“You’re sharp; I thought you would.” I glanced at the table. I could just barely see the edge of the table through it, and a dark, misty something was oozing out of the flesh to form a cloud-like layer on the surface.
“Whups. I have to go; there’s a demon that needs destroying. Thank you for calling.”
“It was my pleasure,” she said, reflexively, while her brain obviously played back the part about destroying a demon. I cut the connection and turned to the table.
The mist was filling up the containment area inside the inner triangle, rippling slowly and apparently probing at the edge. More of it kept coming out of the flesh as it returned to visibility.
I checked the pile of dried blood I’d removed from the sand; it didn’t seem to have any demon essence oozing out of it. I set it on fire on general principles and double-checked the rest of the room, just to make sure we hadn’t missed a translucent fingertip or something.