The Unwelcome Warlock

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Zallin was leaning heavily on Hanner’s shoulder, but he was on his feet, not being dragged, as they emerged from the dim dining room into the brightly-lit entry hall. Hanner was focused on keeping his drunken companion moving, and if Zallin had not said, “Who’s that?” Hanner might not have even noticed the woman standing by the front door, waiting for them.

Hanner turned to see who Zallin was talking about, and saw the red-skirted woman. “Oh,” he said.

“I haven’t been paid,” she said, as Vond shouted something upstairs.

“I know,” Hanner said, glancing up the stairs. “This really isn’t a good time, though.”

“I can see that,” the streetwalker replied. “He sent a woman flying out the door a moment ago, and I can hear him yelling. Still, someone owes me five rounds.”

“Five rounds?”

“That’s what he promised me.”

Hanner looked at Zallin, but the other man offered no comment. He was too busy staring down the woman’s tunic. Hanner sighed. “What was your name?” he asked.

“Leth of Pawnbroker Lane.”

“Leth. Yes. This is really not a good time. If you could come back tomorrow, I’ll see to it you’re paid.”

She hesitated, glancing up the stairs, then said, “I’m not at all sure this place will still be standing tomorrow. He just announced that he’s going to go tell the overlord and the Wizards’ Guild that he’s angry with them.”

“He did?” Hanner looked up the stairs; Vond was shouting, but he could not make out the words.

“He said anyone who’s still in this house when he gets back is his property.”

Hanner closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Then you really don’t want to be here, do you?” he said. “Listen, I promise you’ll be paid, but this drunken idiot here is the one with the money, and he’s in no condition to deal with it right now. If you won’t come back here tomorrow, go to the overlord’s palace and tell the guards on the bridge that you need to see Lady Alris – the Lady of the Household. Tell her that her brother Hanner owes you five rounds.”

Leth stared at him. “The palace? And you think she’ll believe me?”

“Yes,” Hanner said. “I do. Tell her the whole story, if you need to. Now, I really need to get this man upstairs and talk to the emperor. Excuse me.”

He turned away, and had scarcely gotten Zallin up the first step when he heard the front door close. A quick glance assured him that Leth was indeed gone.

He boosted Zallin up one more step, and then was suddenly slammed against the wall, Zallin beside him. The front door burst open again, and Vond came swooping down the stairs, his black robe flapping, a second dark figure trailing in his wake. He paused in mid-air when he spotted Hanner.

At least, Hanner thought, he was decently dressed this time, and not glowing.

“Ah, it’s you!” Vond said. “You might want to know, it was a witch who sent me that dream.” He gestured toward the thing following him, and with a shock Hanner realized it was a woman’s body; the arms and head dangled limply. From her misshapen appearance Hanner concluded that she had been crushed, “She’s dead,” Vond said, unnecessarily. “I’m going to return her to the wizard who sent her.”

Getting a look at her face, Hanner belatedly recognized the dead woman as one of that evening’s arrivals, the one who had said she didn’t trust the tapestry. He swallowed, and tried not to let his horror show. “How do you know who sent her?” he asked.

“She told me before she died,” Vond said. “It was Ithinia of the Isle.”

“Guildmaster Ithinia? She’s the most powerful wizard in the city; why would she send a witch?”

“Because this witch had shared the Calling with a warlock,” Vond replied. “So she came to share it with me, and now I’m going to share the results with Ithinia.”

“Your Majesty, do you -”

“I don’t intend to discuss it with you,” Vond interrupted. “She may be the most powerful wizard in the city, but I’m the most powerful warlock who ever lived. I am going to explain to her that she should not antagonize me.”

“Of course, your Majesty,” Hanner said, managing as much of a bow as he could without letting Zallin fall.

“And I’m claiming this house as my own, Hanner. You can stay on as one of my retainers, or not, as you please. If you decide to leave, though, I’ll want you to show me this magical tapestry of yours before you go.”

“That woman Leth said something…”

“I’ve told everyone to choose sides. Anyone who stays in this house will be loyal to me, and me alone. I can be very good to those who help me. Those who defy me will die. Anyone who won’t accept that had better be out of this house by the time I get back.”

“I see,” Hanner said. He glanced at Zallin, who seemed to have sobered up considerably listening to this. He also looked up the stairs, and saw several faces peering over the railing, Rudhira’s among them. He was reassured to see that she was still alive and well.

“He stays,” Vond said, pointing at Zallin. “I like him. I’m going to keep him.”

Zallin’s mouth fell open, and he made a dull, strangled noise.

“As your Majesty says,” Hanner said quickly, to cover any other reaction Zallin might have made.

Then Vond flew out the open door, arcing up out of sight, the witch’s corpse following a few feet behind. He did not bother to close the door after himself.

Hanner stared out the open door at the dark street for a moment, then turned to look at Zallin.

“Oh, Hanner,” Zallin said. “I don’t want this. What I saw when he was touring the city – I was hoping the oushka would let me forget. That woman…” He shuddered, and his shoulders heaved as if he was trying not to vomit.

“Did he kill anyone else when you were out?” Hanner asked.

“I don’t…I don’t think so,” Zallin said. “But he hurt people. Threw them around. And he wants me to stay? What, as his pet?”

Hanner looked up the stairs. “Did he hurt anyone else up there?” he called.

There were murmurs he could not make out, and then Rudhira called down, “Not that we know of.”

“Did he say exactly what he was planning to do?”

Rudhira glanced around at the others, then replied, “No.”

Hanner bit his lip, looking up at Rudhira, then at the open door. He guided Zallin into a sitting position on the stairs, and released him. “I think I’d better go see what he’s up to,” Hanner called. Then he turned and trotted out the door. Unlike Vond, he did close it behind him, cutting off Rudhira’s cry of protest.

Once outside the gate on High Street Hanner looked up and down the street, and although the street lamps and the lit windows of neighboring houses provided adequate light, he saw no sign of Vond. He remembered to look up, as well, but saw only clouds, with a few stars and the lesser moon peeping through gaps between them.

Vond had said he was going to confront Ithinia, who lived on Lower Street, a few blocks to the east. Hanner turned east, then rounded the corner onto Coronet Street to get the one block north to Lower. He hurried down the hill, wishing he could fly – this was almost the first time he had really missed his magic.

Coronet did not quite reach Lower Street; the corner was cut off by a short stretch of Merchant Street. Hanner turned right, then fifty yards later he turned right again, onto Lower. He looked down Lower Street – and then up.

Vond was there, hanging in the sky a hundred feet up, glowing brightly. A gargoyle was also hanging in the air, about halfway between the warlock and the street; it was not moving, and appeared to be bound somehow.

The few pedestrians who were out at this hour of the night had all stopped in their tracks to stare up at this apparition. Hanner did not stop; he broke into a run, east on Lower Street.

“Ithinia!” Vond roared, his voice magically amplified to the level of thunder. It rolled through the streets and echoed from the rooftops. “I’ve brought back your witch!”

Hanner did not see the witch’s body anywhere at first, but as he hurried toward Ithinia’s house he could make out a dark lump on her doorstep.

“This gargoyle that was watching my house – that’s yours too, isn’t it?”

The gargoyle suddenly plummeted to the ground, landing in the street with an earth-shaking thud. Hanner struggled to move faster as he ran down the street, though he really had no very clear idea what he intended to do when he got there.

“You think this city is yours, and you can do what you please here?” Vond bellowed. “I say it’s mine now. And I’m about to show you why!”

With that, the warlock turned and flew away to the north.

Hanner slowed to a stop, baffled. What was Vond up to now? The warlock himself had vanished from Hanner’s view, behind the rooftops, but the orange glow was still there – he had not gone very far. Hanner took a few more paces, to the corner of Center Avenue, and looked north down the slope, along the broad avenue, past Second Street and Short Street to the plaza at the end of the street, and to the overlord’s palace on the north side of the plaza.

Vond was flying directly over the palace, rising higher and higher. Hanner felt a chill of foreboding.

For any citizen of Ethshar of the Spices, the palace was a symbol of the city’s power, the heart of the government, the overlord’s residence, but for Hanner it was also his childhood home. He had grown up in that place, behind those yellow marble walls. He had played in those stone corridors, dropped pebbles in the surrounding canals, run shouting across the red brick plaza.

And he had family in the palace. His sister Alris was in there, and according to Mavi, his daughter Hala. After seventeen years he didn’t know who else might still be living there, but Alris and Hala – Hala who was now a grown woman, who he had last seen as a little girl, who he had not yet taken time to visit – were inside those walls, beneath that roof. Hanner watched in dread as Vond hung glowing in the sky above the familiar structure.

The warlock stopped rising, a mere glowing dot against the night sky, and although it was hard to be certain at such a distance, Hanner thought he looked down.

Then the ground shook, and Hanner heard the loudest sound of his life, an immense roar as the entire palace shivered, shook, then tore free of its surroundings and began to rise. The shattered remnants of the bridge that crossed the canal from the plaza to the palace door fell, rattling and splashing, as the palace ripped loose. The guards who had stood at the outer end of the bridge ran, arms over their heads, to escape the flying debris, and Hanner stared in open-mouthed horror as the entire palace ascended into the night sky – not merely the three stories above ground, but the huge underlying block of dark, rough stone that Hanner realized must contain the cellars.

The guards at the inner end of the demolished bridge were now perched on a narrow ledge, where they had flattened themselves against the tightly-closed doors to keep from falling to their deaths. Hanner could see that one had dropped his spear, while the other had not.

As the initial indescribable noise faded to the rumble of settling wreckage, Hanner registered that people were screaming all around him, and had been for several seconds; the roar of the palace tearing out of the ground had drowned them out.

He didn’t blame them for screaming. He had never seen anything so frightening – not on the Night of Madness, nor any time since, not even when he first awoke in Aldagmor to see that inexplicable thing in the sky above him, and the other thing in the ground beneath. The very alienness of the Source and the Response had made them less terrifying than this horrible distortion of the World as he knew it.

He had known Vond was powerful. He had heard the stories about how Vond once bent the edge of the World itself, how he built a gigantic palace of his own overnight, magically cutting the walls from bedrock. Hanner had thought he comprehended what a powerful warlock could do; he had seen Rudhira, long ago, pull a literal mountain of water out of the city’s harbor.

None of that had prepared him for this, and he stood frozen to the spot, staring with his mouth open, as the overlord’s palace rose to a height of a few hundred feet, then moved majestically southward, across the plaza and over the mansions of the New City.

It did not come directly south, up Center Avenue, though; it was veering to the east, toward Arena Street. Hanner watched as it glided through the night sky, dark against the darkness, until it came to rest centered two blocks east and a hundred yards up from where he stood.

That put the western end perhaps a hundred feet east of his position – as he had been taught as a child, the palace measured eight hundred and four feet from one end of the southern facade to the other, and the blocks on Lower Street were scarcely three hundred feet. Hanner could look up and see the western windows.

He could see the terrified faces of servants and courtiers staring out those windows, looking down at him and the others in the streets below, and his heart clenched in his chest as he realized his sister and daughter might be among those at the windows. They probably had no idea what was happening, he realized; they could not possibly see Vond from where they were, and had probably not heard his shouting through the palace’s thick stone walls.

Then a movement caught Hanner’s eye, and he watched as Vond came swooping down around the palace, and descended to the street in front of Ithinia’s house.

Hanner started forward again. He did not know what Vond had planned, or how Ithinia would react, but he knew them both, and he wanted to be there, to provide a voice of calm reason, a neutral voice, in the inevitable confrontation.

Only then did he notice that save for Vond, the gargoyle, and himself, the street below the palace was empty; the few pedestrians who had been on Lower Street had fled, eager to get out from beneath the palace. The gargoyle was back on its feet, and seemed unhurt by its fall and whatever else Vond had done to it, but it was backing away, clearly unwilling to confront the warlock as Vond floated toward Ithinia’s door.

The body of the dead witch was still there, as well; Vond kicked it aside as he arrived on the wizard’s front step. “Open up, wizard!” Vond bellowed, his voice still unnaturally loud, but well short of the thunderous volume he had used earlier.

Hanner was still half a block away when the door swung open, and a man’s gentle voice said, “Would you care to come in, your Majesty?” Hanner clearly heard the thump as the man, presumably Ithinia’s servant Obdur, was flung back against a wall to make way for the enraged warlock. Hanner watched Vond sail through the door into the warmly-lit interior.

“Wait!” he called, breaking into a desperate run. “Wait, I should be there, too!”

No one replied. Vond did not re-emerge. For a moment nothing changed, and Hanner heard nothing but his own panting, the pounding of his own feet, and distant shouting as the city reacted to the theft of the palace and its inhabitants. The oblong of lamplight that was Ithinia’s open door drew nearer, and for a moment Hanner thought he was going to make it, that no one was going to close the door.

But then the door swung shut after all, and the latch fell into place with a distinct click.

Hanner slowed. He took a deep breath of the cold night air, letting its chill fill his lungs, and then looked up.

The palace was hanging above him; its vast dark mass blocked out the sky, and the glow of the streetlights did little to illuminate the gray stone of its underside. It was hovering motionlessly above the city – above the three blocks of Lower Street between Center Avenue and Arena Street. It was as unmoving as a ceiling, despite being supported by nothing more than a hundred yards of air and Vond’s invisible, inexplicable magic.

If anything happened to Vond, the palace would fall. Everyone in it would die, including Alris, Hala, and the overlord. Everyone beneath it would be crushed.

If the Wizards’ Guild had intended to kill Vond, it would seem they had missed their chance. Even an organization as ruthless as the Guild was rumored to be would not deliberately allow that thing to drop onto the city.

But surely, even Vond couldn’t keep it up there forever. He would need to sleep eventually, wouldn’t he? Warlockry could provide all the physical energy he would need, but even warlocks needed to sleep to stay sane.

Of course, Vond might not be particularly concerned with sanity. Hanner looked down at the pitiful remains of the dead witch, lying on the hard-packed dirt, limbs and clothing askew, cast aside by the Great Vond as beneath his notice.

He had never even learned her name, Hanner thought. This woman had died in his house, and he had no idea who she really was. She might have family, friends, perhaps an apprentice, expecting her to return home at any moment.

He looked up again at the palace, then at the surrounding houses, their windows a patchwork of lamplight and darkness. Ithinia’s front windows were bright, while others varied. Hanner knew that Vond and Ithinia were meeting behind those windows, probably exchanging ultimatums. He had wanted to be in there with them, trying to keep them calm. If he knocked on the door, Obdur might let him in – but would his presence really help? He might just infuriate the others. He might say the wrong thing and bring the palace crashing down.

He looked at the surrounding houses again. There might be people sleeping in those houses, completely unaware of what was happening. Yes, uprooting the palace had been impossibly loud, and had shaken much of the city, but some people slept soundly, or might have dismissed it as thunder, or an earthquake, and gone back to sleep.

He should rouse them, Hanner thought, and get them clear. Or perhaps he should go to the Wizards’ Quarter and see if magicians could get up to the palace and rescue the hundreds of people trapped in it. He could probably do more good that way, getting innocents out of harm’s way, than by thrusting himself between the two sides in this magicians’ quarrel.

He looked up and down the street to see if there was anyone he could recruit. No pedestrians were in sight; everyone had fled that looming impossibility overhead.

Everyone human, at any rate. That gargoyle was still there, crouched so motionlessly that Hanner had somehow briefly overlooked its presence.

“Hai!” Hanner called. “Gargoyle! We need to get people out of here!”

The thing straightened and turned. “Do we?” it asked in its deep, rasping voice.

“Yes, we do.” Hanner waved at the houses on the south side of the street. “We need to make sure there’s no one home! If that thing comes down, we want to keep the carnage to a minimum.”

The gargoyle craned its neck back with a hideous grinding sound and looked up at the palace.

“I will inform my mistress’ household,” it said.

“If you can get word to any wizards, can you ask about getting people down from the palace? With flying carpets, or levitation spells?”

It nodded slowly.

“Good!” Hanner said. “You do that, and I’ll start knocking on doors.”

The gargoyle spread great stone wings, and took to the air.

Hanner spared only a second to watch it before he turned and ran toward the door of the house across the street from Ithinia’s.