Tales of Ethshar

About “The Warlock’s Refuge”

Back in the 1990s I wrote Night of Madness, describing how warlockry first arrived in the World, and how an accommodation was reached between these new magicians and the existing society. That story introduced Lord (later Chairman) Hanner, and established how the Calling worked. It also showed how there might be an obvious way to avoid the Calling. Clearly, I needed to explain why warlocks never exploited this, so I plotted “The Warlock’s Refuge.” I didn’t actually get around to writing it for a decade or so, though. I only finally did so because I needed readers to be familiar with it before tackling the novel that eventually became The Unwelcome Warlock. I had been planning that story (then called The Final Calling) since the 1980s, but kept putting it off, as there were all these other pieces that I thought should be done first, such as The Vondish Ambassador and “The Warlock’s Refuge.”

I did get to it eventually. “The Warlock’s Refuge” was published on my website in April of 2010, and then republished as Chapter One of The Unwelcome Warlock, and here it is again.