The Unwelcome Warlock

Chapter Forty

Sterren looked thoughtfully out at the harbor, at the masts swaying slightly as ships rocked at their moorings. The air was cold, but the afternoon sun on his back kept off the worst of the chill.

He glanced up at the overlord’s palace, hovering above the Fishertown docks to the east. The workmen were supposed to have its old site prepared for its return any time now, if they didn’t already, but rumors said Lord Azrad was in no hurry to give up his newfound mobility. For most of Azrad VII’s reign there had been no consensus on just what cognomen should be attached to his name, but now, after more than a decade of being labeled Azrad the Hard to Classify or Azrad the Ambiguous, more and more he was called Azrad the Airborne. He had already taken one aerial cruise along the coast as far as the mouth of the Great River, and had not seemed to be in any hurry to return.

But the spell only lasted a month, and Sterren knew Ithinia had no intention of renewing it, so Azrad would be earthbound again in another few days.

Well, let the overlord enjoy his flying palace while he could. Sterren had had his fill of flying, and he hadn’t had a palace around him while he did it. Right now, he had his own concerns.

He had thought, when he escaped from Vond, and then when Vond’s death was reported, and when his wife and children had finally reached Ethshar safely and rejoined him, that his worries were over. He had thought he could take his savings from his fifteen years as regent, invest them, and live off the earnings – or if necessary, if the investments failed, then he could live by cheating at dice, as he had when he was a boy. He was, after all, the only warlock left in the World, and almost no one else knew there were any. No one would ever suspect him of using warlockry to win. He had thought he would settle here in Ethshar, in his home city, and live happily ever after.

But it seemed that wasn’t going to work.

He had thought that the Imperial Council might want him back, and that that might be a problem, but so far there was no hint that they cared one way or another whether he returned to Semma. No messages, magical or mundane, had reached him. From what little Sterren had heard, Lady Kalira seemed to be doing just fine as the new regent.

He had thought some of Vond’s victims and enemies might hold a grudge for his service to the late emperor, but again, no one seemed to care.

No, his big problem was one he had never expected at all, and he felt foolish that he had not foreseen it. It was really quite simple, and he should have considered it.

Shirrin didn’t like it here.

In fact, that was seriously understating the case. His wife hated Ethshar of the Spices. She hated the crowds, the smell, the size of the city. She hated how closed in it felt. She hated not being recognized as a princess and the regent’s wife. She said it was dirty and dangerous and decadent, and she wanted to go home.

The children weren’t quite as emphatic, but they didn’t care for Ethshar, either. They, too, wanted to go back to Semma – or at least, to somewhere in the Small Kingdoms, somewhere other than this vast, intimidating city.

Sterren, however, did not particularly want to go back to the Vondish Empire. He was not at all certain that he could reclaim his title of regent from Lady Kalira, and if he retired instead, what would he do with himself? But he didn’t want to make his family miserable.

“May I join you?”

Startled, Sterren looked up to see a man of medium height wrapped in a worn brown cloak. “Of course,” he said, sliding over to make room on the bench.

The man sat down, and for a moment the two of them sat silently side by side, looking out at the harbor. A cold breeze brought the odors of fish and salt water to Sterren’s nose, and he shivered slightly.

Then the brown-clad man said, “You are Lord Sterren of Semma, I believe? Late of His Imperial Majesty’s service?”

Sterren threw the man an uneasy glance. “And if I am? Who are you?”

The man held out a hand. “I am called Kelder of Demerchan,” he said.

Sterren had started to stretch out his own hand in response, but at the name “Demerchan” he froze, staring.

Kelder smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “If you were our target, you would already be dead.”

“That assumes that all you wanted was my death,” Sterren replied.

“That’s true,” Kelder acknowledged. “Let me rephrase it, then, and simply say that we mean you no harm.” He lowered his hand, which Sterren’s own had never reached.

There was no point in arguing about that; if they did mean him harm, there was little he could do to prevent it. “Then what can I do for you, Kelder?” he asked, in the tone he had learned, during his years as regent, to use when speaking with troublesome petitioners.

Kelder’s smile broadened. “I’ll answer that eventually, my lord, but I would like to discuss a few things first.”

“I am at your service,” Sterren said, with a bob of his head.

“You indeed do not, I notice, seem to be heavily burdened with other duties at the present time.”

“I’m not,” Sterren said, pulling his elbows in against his sides.

“I would think a man of your experience would be in great demand.”

Irritated, Sterren said, “I doubt you sought me out to discuss my career options.”

“On the contrary, my lord, that is precisely why I am here.”

Sterren blinked. “What?”

Kelder smiled at him. “You recognized the name Demerchan.”

Sterren snorted. “I was Regent of the Vondish Empire for fifteen years. Yes, I have heard the name.”

“Of course.”

“What does that have to do with anything, Kelder of Demerchan? Why are you talking to me?”

“Bear with me, my lord. Let me begin, then, by saying that despite requests from you, the Imperial Council, and the Wizards’ Guild, we had no part in the death of the Great Vond.”

“I had wondered,” Sterren remarked.

“Many people wondered, and we have no objection if people want to credit us with his removal, but in fact, we were not involved. We had come to the conclusion that the late emperor was worth more to us alive than dead.”

Sterren cocked his head. “Why?” he asked bluntly. “He wasn’t going to hire any assassins; he was perfectly capable of carrying out his own killings.”

Kelder grimaced. “Yes, he was. But the Cult of Demerchan is not merely a company of assassins, and we wanted him alive.”

“Why?” Sterren repeated.

“The Cult of Demerchan is dedicated to gathering and preserving knowledge, my lord.”

This was the first time Sterren had ever heard anything of the sort. “It is?” he asked. “I thought you were assassins.”

“We are. Among other things. The name ‘Demerchan’ does come from an old word meaning ‘hired killer,’ but that is not all we are. We collect information, as well, and in fact we consider that our primary purpose. We protect secrets – we ensure that they are not lost, but also that they do not fall into the wrong hands. Yes, half our name says we are assassins, but do not forget the other half – we are not a guild, or brotherhood, or company, but a cult. We have a hidden purpose, and that is the gathering of secrets.”

That made a certain amount of sense, and would explain why they had wanted the late emperor alive. “You wanted the secret of Vond’s new form of warlockry?”

Kelder nodded.

“What a shame, then, that it died with him,” Sterren said.

Kelder smiled again. “We both know it did not,” he said.

“Do we?” Sterren said, suddenly very uncomfortable indeed. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure no one else was in earshot – though of course, nowhere was safe from scrying spells.

“We dedicate our entire existence to collecting secrets, my lord,” Kelder said. “Did you think we had missed yours, after fifteen years?”

“Well, I had hoped so,” Sterren said. He did not see much point in further denials.

“Then I regret to say your hopes have been disappointed. We know that you are a warlock, albeit a weak one, and that Vond attuned you to the power of the towers in Lumeth of the Towers.”

“That’s very unfortunate,” Sterren said. “That you know that.”

“Perhaps not. We mean you no harm, my lord, as I said before. Indeed, I am here to offer you a position.”

“A position?” he asked warily. “What sort of position?”

“As an acolyte in the Cult of Demerchan.”

Sterren’s jaw dropped. Then he snapped it shut, and said, “I would think I’m a little old to be an acolyte.”

“Your age is of no concern, my lord.”

“It is to me. I’m not interested in joining a cult. I’m too old for that sort of idiocy.”

“I don’t think you understand the situation, my lord.”

Sterren turned to stare out to sea again. “I understand that you want me because I’m the last warlock in the World, and you want that secret for yourselves.”

“Well, yes. That’s true. But we did not approach Vond, because we knew he was unfit for the cult, while you seem very suitable.”

“I do?” He could not resist giving Kelder another glance. “What do you know about it?”

“We have been observing you for fifteen years, my lord, ever since you first went to Semma.”

“Oh, that’s endearing!” Sterren grimaced. “Knowing you’ve been spying on me just makes me so eager to join up!”

“You were the warlord of Semma, and then the Regent of the Vondish Empire,” Kelder said. “Of course you were watched.”

Sterren could hardly deny that it had been reasonable to keep an eye on him, but that still did not make the idea appealing. That was not the important issue here, though. “I’m not interested in joining a cult of assassins so that you can have a warlock at your beck and call,” he said.

“Yet I suspect you know almost nothing of the cult’s origins and purpose,” Kelder said.

“No one outside the cult knows its origins and purpose.”

“That is not literally true,” Kelder assured him. “There are exceptions. And you, my lord, are about to be, at least partially and briefly, one of those rare exceptions.”

Sterren did not at all like the sound of “briefly,” but he ignored that and said, “Go on.”

“You are aware, of course, that the Small Kingdoms were once a single nation?”

“Old Ethshar. Of course.”

“Yes, the Holy Kingdom of Ethshar. Which went to war, centuries ago, with the Northern Empire.”

“Yes.”

“You know that the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars was created after the war by the military of Old Ethshar.”

“Yes.”

“You know that the founders of the Hegemony, Azrad, Anaran, and Gor, made no attempt to reunite the fragments of Old Ethshar.”

“Yes, I know that,” Sterren said, baffled as to where this was leading.

“They were unable to decide which of the hundreds of squabbling governments in the Small Kingdoms was the legitimate heir to the old national government, so they stayed out of the old homeland. They had had enough fighting and bloodshed, and did not want to intervene in any internal disputes.”

“Yes. What does this have to do with Demerchan?”

“Patience, my lord. Now, think back to when you first came to Semma and were thrust into the role of Ninth Warlord, and ordered to defend the kingdom against its neighbors. What resources did you have for your war?”

“Resources?” Sterren was puzzled. “I had a miserable, under-sized, half-trained army.”

“What else?”

Baffled, Sterren said, “I had a reasonably defensible castle, and the king let me have some money to hire Ethsharitic magicians.”

“What else? Or perhaps I should say, who else?”

Sterren tried to think back. He had been a boy in his teens, dragged from Ethshar at sword-point. Lady Kalira, then the king’s trade expert, had been sent to fetch him, accompanied by a couple of the kingdom’s biggest soldiers, and had brought him back to Semma Castle, where he had been given his great-uncle’s rooms and dressed in his great-uncle’s clothes. He had met his officers, and…

And Lar Samber’s son. “My spies,” he said. “My intelligence service.”

“Ah! Yes,” Kelder said. “Now, you know that Old Ethshar’s armies became Ethshar of the Sands and Ethshar of the Rocks, and Old Ethshar’s navy became Ethshar of the Spices, and Old Ethshar’s hired magicians became the Wizards’ Guild and the Sisterhood and the various schools of magic. But of course Old Ethshar had an intelligence service, too.”

“Devoted to collecting secrets, and making sure only the right people knew them,” Sterren said. He nodded. “I see. You’re claiming that the intelligence service became the Cult of Demerchan.”

“Oh, I not only claim it, we can document it. We still operate out of some of the same hidden bases our ancestors used in the Great War. We have tunnels and secret passages and hidden rooms all over the Small Kingdoms. We have ancient magic that has been lost everywhere else.”

“Do you?”

Kelder nodded silently.

“Yet the cult of Demerchan let Old Ethshar disintegrate?”

Kelder spread empty hands. “When the government broke apart, like the generals and Admiral Azrad, we didn’t know which faction to back. We did know that we should stay united, and fight only the Northerners, not one another, so we stayed neutral. We thought that in time the rifts would heal, but instead everything just kept splintering. Eventually we did begin to intervene – it was the cult that first introduced and enforced the rule that no magic is used in wars in the Small Kingdoms, and over the centuries we did remove various individuals who threatened to make matters even worse. I’m sure you’ve heard that we were available for hire, and we have indeed been happy to accept payment for our actions, but in truth, we always chose our own targets in accord with our own goals.”

“I always heard that you refused commissions if you considered the intended target to be morally superior to your client.”

“That was a handy explanation, but in fact we removed those we considered dangers to the well-being of the Small Kingdoms as a whole, whether we were hired to do so or not. We tried to find them before they did any real damage. You were one of our failures, Lord Sterren – we had our limited resources elsewhere and did not notice when you brought your little band of third-rate magicians to Semma’s aid. The far south had never been an area of great interest for us, as it was poor in magic and the other resources we cared about, so your arrival was not seen as anything of immediate importance. Then, when Vond began his conquests, we did not react quickly – partly because we did not understand where he got his power, but also partly because we did not see the removal of King Phenvel as a bad thing, and Vond’s relatively bloodless unification of the southernmost Small Kingdoms seemed like quite a good idea to us. In fact, we still think the Empire is an improvement on what was there before, so we did nothing to interfere with it.”

“Well, thank you for that,” Sterren said. “I suppose that any interference would have involved my assassination.”

“Probably,” Kelder agreed cheerfully.

“But you knew I was a warlock all along?”

“Oh, not all along, but we did figure it out after a year or two.”

“But you didn’t do anything about a warlock ruling the Empire? A magician holding political power?”

“We aren’t the Wizards’ Guild, my lord, and we don’t enforce their rules. We don’t even obey their rules. We have our own. We are much older than the Guild, my lord.”

Sterren stared at the other man.

The only other person he had ever heard speak of the Guild so dismissively had been Vond, and Vond was dead – but the Cult of Demerchan had indeed been around for a long time. Perhaps not as long as this Kelder claimed, but a long time, all the same.

Seeing that Sterren was not going to reply, Kelder continued, “Demerchan failed to preserve Old Ethshar’s unity, my lord, but we have preserved most of its secrets, and we have deliberately kept them out of the hands of the kings and councils of the Small Kingdoms, so that they will not be misused, or turned against other heirs of Old Ethshar. In particular, we have preserved as much as we could of the Holy Kingdom’s magic. The Wizards’ Guild has surpassed us in their own field, and to some extent a witch’s abilities depend on the individual rather than anything we can teach, but in sorcery, science, demonology, and theurgy we are the greatest magicians in the World today. It was the cult that kept warlockry severely limited in the Small Kingdoms, but we had our own warlocks, hidden away, until the Calling ended. We have every sort of magic we could discover, and we use that magic to keep the peace, as much as we can.”

“That can’t be much, then,” Sterren said. “There are always wars being fought in the Small Kingdoms.”

“Small ones, with relatively little bloodshed. We don’t want to interfere too much, or make ourselves obvious, so we do not suppress every little squabble between kings. We do keep them from getting out of hand.”

Sterren could think of several questions and arguments he could make in response to this claim, but none of them seemed very important just now. He was more concerned with his own situation. “You don’t have any other warlocks left?” he asked. “You’re based in the Small Kingdoms – no one else ever learned to use the power in Lumeth?”

Kelder shook his head. “No. We’ve tried. We’ve particularly been watching the warlocks who came back from Aldagmor with Vond, and none of them have managed it. They just get headaches; they never make the transition Vond did. We’ve tried to help them, but we couldn’t make it happen. Vond must have been a fluke, a freak of nature, one of a kind. We’ve given up trying to duplicate his experience; there’s no point in torturing those poor people. Apparently the headaches are agonizing.”

“They did appear to be painful,” Sterren said.

“And useless.” He shook his head. “No, we haven’t found another Vond, another person who could spontaneously attune himself to the Lumeth source. And Vond didn’t create any others. You’re the only warlock left.”

Sterren nodded. “So I’m the only one. So you want to control the remaining warlock, to ensure I don’t start any wars or go sending palaces flying?”

“Oh, we aren’t worried about you starting any wars or smashing any cities,” Kelder said with a wave. “We watched you administer Vond’s empire for fifteen years; we know you aren’t going to do anything stupid or destructive. No, we want to protect you, to preserve the secret of warlockry. You can live almost anywhere in the Small Kingdoms you please, and do what you want, so long as you allow us to keep watch over you, and permit us to study your abilities, so that we can ensure that you don’t do anything that would drastically impair our own activities. Perhaps, in time, you might take an apprentice, and should that happen, we would want to be closely involved in selecting a trustworthy candidate.”

“That’s all?” Sterren waved a hand. “You said you wanted me to be an acolyte; I won’t need to wear a robe and live under guard in a temple somewhere?”

“No robes or temples. Unless you want them. And your guards will stay out of sight and let you go wherever you want.”

“But I’ll have guards?”

“I told you, we want to protect you.”

“From what?”

“From the Wizards’ Guild.”

Sterren blinked. “What?”

“Hadn’t you figured that out? The Guild doesn’t want anyone using the magic of the towers, for anything. They’re afraid it might interfere with the towers’ actual purpose.”

That did indeed fit with what Sterren knew of the Guild’s edicts and actions, but he asked, “What purpose?”

“Perhaps I’ll explain that later. For now, though, I’ll just point out that you, my lord, are the only person in the World who can use the magic of the towers. The Cult of Demerchan believes that sooner or later, the Guild will decide to remove that potential problem, and the secret will be lost forever. We want to ensure that doesn’t happen. We preserve secrets, we don’t allow them to be destroyed. Which is why I’m here, offering you a position as a ward of the cult. We’ll conceal you – and your family, of course – from the Guild. We’re very good at that; we’ve been hiding things from them for centuries.”

Sterren looked at Kelder, then back over his shoulder at the crowded streets of Shiphaven, then up at the palace hanging in mid-air – a palace no longer supported by Vond’s warlockry, but by a wizard’s spell.

“Anywhere in the Small Kingdoms?”

“Almost.”

“My family will accompany me?”

“If you choose, of course.”

“Will you tell them who you are?”

“A convenient fiction can be arranged, if you would prefer not to acknowledge accepting a position among assassins.”

“Is this a paying position?”

“Of course, my lord! And in addition to a generous allowance, when you complete your acolyte’s training you will have access to the cult’s magic. All of it.”

That was a fascinating detail, and Sterren thought it very interesting that Kelder had left it until last. “I’ll want to discuss it with my wife,” he said, “but I think we have a deal.”

Kelder smiled, and held out a hand. Sterren hesitated only briefly before shaking it.

Two months later, when certain wizards decided that the World would be better off without any functioning warlocks, no matter how feeble those warlocks might be, they could find no trace of Lord Sterren, former Regent of the Vondish Empire. Divinations failed to locate him, or determine what had become of him. It was eventually concluded that Vond must have killed him at some point before the emperor’s own death; several witnesses attested to Vond’s anger at his missing aide.

And that, so far as the Wizards’ Guild was concerned, was the end of warlockry, once and for all.