The Unwelcome Warlock

Chapter Twenty-Three

Hanner did not want to knock, but he forced himself to raise his fist and rap his knuckles on the door. He hated being back here on Mustard Street. He did not want to see Mavi again – at least, not so soon, and not under these circumstances, when he was still in the same clothes and had done so little to make a new place for himself. The heavy overcast and cold wind that soured his mood did not help.

He had no choice, though, if he wanted to provide a refuge for former warlocks. Arvagan had been very definite – the tapestry had been Hanner’s property, and had therefore been delivered to his heirs when he was Called. It had been brought to Mavi at Warlock House, and Arvagan had no idea what happened to it after that. “You’ll have to ask your wife,” he said.

“Ex-wife,” Hanner had answered, and the wizard had turned up an empty hand.

“Ex-wife, then,” he said. “I gave it to her, and haven’t seen it since.”

It could have been worse, Hanner told himself as he waited for an answer to his knock. At least Arvagan had still been operating the same shop, and had remembered the tapestry in question. The tapestry hadn’t been destroyed, so far as the wizard knew, nor sold.

And it wasn’t raining yet.

The door opened, and Mavi was standing there, but Hanner barely had time to recognize her before he was almost knocked backward by someone else shrieking, “Hanner!” and throwing her arms around him. “You’re alive!”

“Ah,” he said. “Who?” He looked down at the plump, dark-haired woman embracing him, her face buried in his shoulder. She lifted her head to look up at him, and he exclaimed, “Nerra!” She was heavier than when he last saw her, and her face was showing signs of age, but it was unmistakably his sister.

“Hanner,” she said, hugging him again. “We thought you were dead for so long, and then there were stories about warlockry not working, and the Called coming back, so I came to ask Mavi if she had seen you, and here you are!”

“Here I am,” he agreed, hugging her back. “It’s good to see you.” He decided not to mention that from his point of view, he had seen her – a much younger her – scarcely a month ago.

“What’s happened?” Nerra asked, raising her head and releasing her hold. “And…you haven’t changed! You look so young!”

“I…” He hardly knew where to begin. He looked over his sister’s head at Mavi.

“Hello, Hanner,” she said. “I wrote them out for you.” She reached over to a table by the door and held up a sheet of paper.

“What?”

“The children’s addresses. Isn’t that what you came back for?”

“Oh – actually, no,” Hanner admitted.

“Then what? You didn’t know Nerra was here, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” Hanner said, looking back to his sister. “That was a pleasant surprise.”

“Then what did you want?”

Mavi and Nerra were both staring at him in a most distracting manner – Mavi, who he would have expected to be affectionate if not for last night’s events, looked downright hostile, while Nerra, who had never been very demonstrative of family feeling, looked almost adoring. Hanner could not get his thoughts sufficiently in order to answer.

“I see you didn’t bring your whore with you,” Mavi. “Did you think I might reconsider taking you back?”

“She’s not my whore,” Hanner protested. “She’s a fellow Called warlock. And I’m here on behalf of other Called warlocks – I need to know what happened to the tapestry I commissioned.”

Mavi’s stare changed from hostile to puzzled. “The one that got you Called?” she asked.

He started to argue that the tapestry hadn’t been responsible for his Calling, but caught himself before a single word escaped. It had gotten him Called, after a fashion, by letting him lower his guard, and besides, that didn’t matter anymore. “Yes,” he said. “That one.”

“We put it in storage with your uncle’s old things. I didn’t want it, and I thought maybe the Council would find a use for it someday. I thought maybe they could figure out what went wrong, why it didn’t work the way you expected.”

Again he was tempted to argue, since the tapestry had worked more or less as he had expected, but he resisted. “In storage? Where?”

“In the house on High Street, of course. Up on the fourth floor.”

So it had been right there in Warlock House all along? Or perhaps not – there was no telling what the Council might have done with it in the seventeen years since his Calling. “Where?” he asked again.

“I can show you,” Nerra said, before Mavi could reply. “Alris and I helped sort through your belongings after you…after you left.”

Startled, Hanner said, “You did? You can?”

“I’d be happy to. It will give us a chance to talk.”

“I’d like that,” Hanner said. “Thank you.” He turned to Mavi. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

He was caught completely off-guard, as completely as when he had emerged from the tapestry world into the attic of Warlock House and been hit by the renewed Calling, when Mavi burst into tears. He stood, silent and helpless, as she sobbed; he wanted to reach out for her, to comfort her, but she was no longer his wife; it wouldn’t be right. He started to reach toward her anyway, before he could stop himself, but she pulled away. He felt a tightness in his own throat, and a stinging in his eyes; he blinked.

Nerra turned to Mavi, and gave Hanner a shove. “Wait outside,” she said, stepping back into the house and closing the door.

Hanner waited, trying to regain his calm. He looked up and down Mustard Street, hoping he didn’t appear too suspicious or out of place. No one seemed to pay him any particular attention; the street was not very busy, and the people he saw were intent on their own business, walking past without giving him much more than a casual glance.

Then the door opened again – not fully, just enough for Nerra to slip out, a piece of paper in her hand. “Here,” she said, handing it to Hanner. “Those addresses.”

“Thank you,” he said, accepting the list. “I…Is Mavi…”

“Terrin’s comforting her. The sooner you get away from here, the better – shall we go?”

He had to blink away tears again. “Yes,” he said. He let Nerra take his elbow and turn him away from the door, pointing him toward North Street.

He wanted to turn back, to go back to Mavi, but he knew he shouldn’t. He let Nerra guide him.

“Alris will want to see you, too, you know,” Nerra said conversationally. “And your children, of course. It’ll be very strange for them, seeing you again – not as bad as for Mavi, of course, but…strange.”

“Yes,” Hanner replied, not trusting himself to say more just yet.

“The whole city is…well, it’s a surprise, having all you warlocks come back. No one expected it.”

“I know,” Hanner said. “Thousands of us.”

“None of you can do magic any more, is that right?”

“Almost none,” Hanner said, without really thinking about what he was saying. “The ones who were witches or theurgists before the Night of Madness got their old magic back. And…”

He stopped himself before mentioning Vond. He wasn’t sure whether Ithinia, or Vond himself, wanted it generally known that the emperor was in the city.

“So you spent seventeen years trapped in some cave in Aldagmor?”

“Not a cave,” Hanner said, still not paying much attention to the conversation. “A crater.”

“I’m surprised most of you didn’t go mad from boredom.”

“What?” That distracted Hanner from thoughts of Mavi. “No, no. We were all trapped in a preservation spell – we weren’t conscious. It was like being asleep, or in a trance. To me, that seventeen years passed in an instant; it feels as if I haven’t been gone even seventeen days.”

“A preservation spell? So that’s why you look so young?”

“Exactly.” He glanced at her, taking in the lines on her face, the sagging here and there. She had been thirty-five when he last saw her, and now she was…fifty-two? Was that right?

She was older than he was now – how very strange! He had gone from being the oldest of the three siblings to the youngest.

“Tell me all about it,” she said. “About the Calling, and your release, and coming back to Ethshar, and all of it. I’ve heard stories, but they were all third- or fourth-hand; you can tell me what really happened.”

Hanner took a moment to gather his thoughts, then said, “Well, I’d commissioned a Transporting Tapestry because I hoped to find a place warlocks could hide from the Call…”

By the time he had told her the entire story they were walking up the slope of Coronet Street, scarcely a block from the front door of Warlock House. Telling the tale had distracted him from the emotional turmoil of his encounter with Mavi.

“So the tapestry didn’t make the Calling stronger?” Nerra asked. “We assumed it did. You’d been fighting it successfully for sixnights, and then suddenly you were gone – we thought the tapestry had backfired somehow.”

“The tapestry worked just as it was supposed to,” Hanner said. “It was the shock of coming back out that overpowered me.”

She nodded. “All right,” she said, “I suppose I understand. But then why do you want it now? After all, the Calling is gone, isn’t it?”

“It’s gone,” he agreed.

“Then why do you need the tapestry?”

They were at the corner of High Street by this point, and Hanner waved at the crowd in front of Warlock House. There were a score of people there, some in nightclothes, some in warlock black, all of them dirty, all of them visibly exhausted.

Hanner also noticed one of Ithinia’s gargoyles perched on the far side of High Street, watching everything, but he ignored it. “That’s why,” he said, pointing at the people in the street.

“I don’t understand,” Nerra said.

“They were warlocks,” Hanner told her. “Or they would have been – most of them were Called on the Night of Madness, and never knew what they had become, never learned to use the magic. They were going about their lives, minding their own business, and one night they were drawn away to Aldagmor, and the next thing they knew it was thirty-four years later, and their homes and families and friends were gone. They have no place in the World as it is now. They need somewhere to go, a refuge, somewhere safe they can live, at least for a little while.”

“And that’s what the tapestry is,” she said. “I see.”

“Assuming it’s still where you left it, and it still works, yes,” Hanner said.

“Well, let’s see, shall we?” Nerra strode forward, arms raised, calling, “Excuse me! Let me through!”

The little crowd parted, and she and Hanner marched up to the front door. Hanner reached for the handle.

It was locked.

He frowned. “The lock was broken,” he said. He released the latch and knocked.

He waited a moment, then raised his hand to knock again just as the door swung open. Zallin looked out at him.

“Hanner! It’s you!”

“Zallin! It’s you!” Hanner replied. “Stop telling me who I am and let me in.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, opening the door wide and stepping aside. He threw a glance at the waiting crowd. “I thought it might be one of them.”

Hanner looked back over his shoulder, then stopped on the sill. He turned around and called, “Be patient, friends! I hope to have good news for you all very soon!” Then he continued into the house, ushering Nerra in with him.

The instant they were inside Zallin swung the door shut, and clicked the latch into place. “For a moment I was afraid you were going to invite them all in,” he said with a nervous smile.

“I might do that later,” Hanner said. “There’s something else I need to do first.”

“But Hanner, where would you put them all? You’ve already filled half the beds. And Vond won’t like it…” Zallin’s voice trailed off as he noticed Hanner and Nerra both staring at him. It was not a friendly stare.

“Zallin of the Mismatched Eyes,” Hanner said, “allow me to introduce my sister, Lady Nerra. Nerra, Zallin was the Chairman of the Council of Warlocks when the Calling ended.”

“I’m honored, my lady,” Zallin said with a bow.

Nerra didn’t say anything, but nodded an acknowledgment.

“The lock was broken,” Hanner said, pointing at the door.

“Vond fixed it,” Zallin said. “He didn’t want those people just walking in.”

“Then he’s back?”

“Oh, yes. We got home half an hour ago.” Zallin shuddered. “He brought a girl with him from Camptown, and I think if she hadn’t been here he might have…have… He wasn’t happy with those guests of yours, Hanner, or with the people outside. Sterren isn’t here, and Vond didn’t like that, either. If he hadn’t… He didn’t want to scare the girl.”

Hanner followed this disjointed account well enough to understand the situation. “He’s upstairs with her now?”

“Yes.”

Hanner nodded. “We’ll try not to disturb him.” He headed for the stairs, Nerra close behind.

“Wait, Hanner! Where are you going? You just said you weren’t going to disturb him.”

“We aren’t.” He turned to look at Zallin. “You seem nervous, Zallin. I take it the Great Vond did not see fit to teach you how to use the second source?”

“No, he didn’t,” Zallin said. “Not yet, anyway – he said he might someday, if he decides he can trust me.”

Hanner did not believe for a moment that Vond would ever trust Zallin that much, but he saw no point in saying so. “What did he do?”

“He…he flew everywhere, all the time, but mostly just a few inches off the ground, so he could see everything, and if anyone got in his way he just flung them aside. He didn’t even look at them. And in Camptown, half of the people he threw aside were guardsmen. If he saw anything he wanted in a shop, he just took it, and ignored anyone who asked for payment. I told them to send the bills here.”

Hanner remembered the Night of Madness, when dozens of warlocks, not understanding what was happening, had behaved that way. That was why it was called the Night of Madness, rather than the Disappearance Night, or the Birth of Warlockry, or something else. Some of those warlocks had thought they were dreaming, others thought that they had gone mad, and others hadn’t cared, they did it simply because they could.

Hanner knew that Vond did it because he could. “That girl he brought back with him,” he asked. “Did he give her a choice?”

“Well…she didn’t protest. She expects to get paid.”

“See that she is,” Hanner said.

Just as he said that, Rudhira appeared in the dining room doorway. “Hello, Hanner,” she said.

“Hello, Rudhira. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. The emperor hasn’t noticed me.”

“This is my sister, Lady Nerra. I don’t think you’ve met.”

Rudhira nodded. “Mavi’s friend. No, we never met.”

“Rudhira?” Nerra said. “The one who…the warlock?”

“The one who was Called just a few days after the Night of Madness,” Hanner said. “Rudhira, we need to do something upstairs; I’ll be back down in a few moments.”

“Take your time,” Rudhira said.

Hanner hesitated, staring at the little redhead; he wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know what it was. He wanted to apologize to her for Mavi calling her his whore, but she hadn’t been there to hear it, and besides, up until the Night of Madness had changed everything, Rudhira was a whore. He groped for words, but then Nerra nudged him, and he started up the stairs again.

This time no one interrupted them, and he and Nerra were able to make their way past the second and third floors, emerging at last on the top floor, where Nerra took charge, leading the way to four rooms at the back of the house.

Hanner remembered these rooms well; they were where he had stored away the remains of his uncle’s collection of magical artifacts more than thirty years ago. Now, though, while those mysterious knicknacks were still there, stuffed into drawers and cabinets and stacked on shelves, they were largely hidden by a variety of other things that had been jammed in after Hanner’s departure.

Hanner recognized much of this added clutter – hardly surprising, since a significant portion of it was either his or his uncle’s. Some of the rest he recognized as belonging to other warlocks he had known; apparently it had all been brought here when they, too, were Called.

This meant, Hanner realized, that he could finally get out of the filthy clothes he had been wearing ever since he went to Arvagan’s shop that day. He had aired them out while he slept, but had not had anything else to wear – until now; he could see some of his clothes neatly folded and stacked.

Of course, they had been sitting here for seventeen years. Even if moths hadn’t eaten them, they might still fall apart when he tried to put them on.

“I’m fairly sure we put the tapestry in here,” Nerra said, interrupting his thoughts as she indicated the room in the southeast corner. “The workmen were very careful handling it, since it was obviously dangerous.” She opened the door, raising a cloud of dust, and pointed. “There,” she said.

Hanner’s gaze followed her finger, and sure enough, there was a thick roll of fabric, shoved between the legs of a dusty table. He stepped forward, bending down for it.

Nerra grabbed his arm. “Wait a minute!” she said. “Won’t it… If you touch it, won’t…something happen?”

“Not while it’s rolled up,” Hanner said. “It has to be flat to work.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. It took a year to make this thing after I commissioned it, so I had plenty of time to learn about how it works.” He tugged at the roll of fabric, and sneezed as his motion disturbed a decade’s accumulation of dust and cobwebs. “Give me a hand?”

Together, the two of them hauled the tapestry out of its resting place and got it hoisted up onto Hanner’s shoulder. They carried it out into the central hallway, and had it almost to the head of the stairs when a thought struck him.

“Wait a minute,” he said, lowering his burden to the floor.

“What?” Nerra asked.

“I need to check something.” He hurried to the stairs – but not to the broad steps going down; instead he opened the door that revealed the steep, narrow stair leading up to the attic, and quickly clambered up them.

“Hanner, what are you doing?” Nerra called after him.

At the head of the stairs he stopped and looked at the attic. It was dim, lit only by a single small window in the north gable and by what light leaked in beneath the unsealed eaves. It was a single room extending the entire length and most of the width of the house, directly under the sloping roof and exposed rafters; headroom ranged from nothing at all at the sides to about twelve feet at the center, though tie-beams ran from side to side just six feet above the bare plank floor.

It looked just as Hanner remembered it; the hole he had smashed in the roof had been repaired, and no one had used it for storage. It was still completely bare and empty.

He had chosen it as the target for his first tapestry, the one that now hung in that other-worldly refuge, exactly because it was empty and unused, and lit from the north, so that the daylight was more or less constant. He had considered using one of the rooms below, and had rejected the idea – it would be too easy for someone to carelessly move a piece of furniture, or leave a stray object, and render the tapestry inert.

He had tested that tapestry before turning it over to Arvagan and his apprentice; he hadn’t wanted to be stranded in his refuge. He wished he could test it again, but he could see no way to do that; it was still in that other world.

The attic looked exactly the same to him, but he was relying on mere mortal eyesight, and his own fallible memory. If anything had changed, then any trip into the magical refuge might be a one-way journey, with no possibility of return.

But would that really be so terrible? The entire plan, once upon a time, had been for warlocks to live in that other world permanently to avoid the Call. He and Arvagan had designed the image in the tapestry to be as appealing and unthreatening as possible, to be a haven where warlocks could retire in peace and comfort. When he had tested it, a sixnight or seventeen years ago, he had been eager to get back to Ethshar to tell everyone that it had worked, and to be with Mavi and the children again – but Mavi was gone and the children were grown.

He backed down the steep attic stairs.

“Come on,” he said to Nerra, as he stooped to retrieve the tapestry. “Let’s hang this up somewhere and see if it still works.”