The Unwilling Warlord

CHAPTER 1

The dice rolled, smacked against the baseboard, then bounced back and skittered to a stop. One showed five pips, and the other two each showed six, clearly visible even in the flickering light of the tavern alcove.

The paunchy farmer in the greasy gray tunic stared at the dice for a moment, then snapped his head up and glared suspiciously at his opponent. He demanded, “Are you sure you’re not cheating?” His breath carried the warm, thick aroma of stale wine.

The thin young man, who wore a patched but clean tunic of worn blue velvet, looked up from raking in the stakes with a carefully contrived expression of hurt on his face. His dark brown eyes were wide with innocent dismay.

“Me?” he said. “Me, cheating? Abran, old friend, how can you suggest such a thing?”

He pushed the coins to one side, then smiled and said, “Still my throw?”

Abran nodded. “Make your throw, and I’ll decide my wager.”

The youth hesitated, but the rules did allow a losing bettor to see the next roll before wagering again. If Abran did decide to bet, though, it would be at two-to-one instead of even money.

That probably meant the game was over.

He shrugged, picked up the bits of bone again, and rolled them, watching with satisfaction as the first stopped with six black specks showing, the second seemed to balance on one corner before dropping to show another six, and the last bounced, rebounded from the wall, spun in mid-air, and came down with five spots on the top face.

Abran stared, then turned his head and spat on the grimy floor in disgust. “Seventeen again?” he growled, turning back. “Sterren, if that’s really your name,” he said, in a more natural tone, “I don’t know what you’re doing — maybe you’re just honestly lucky, or maybe you’re a magician, but however you do it, you’ve won enough of my money. I give up. I’m leaving and I hope I never see you again.”

He stood, joints creaking.

An hour earlier the purse on his belt had been bulging with the proceeds of a good harvest; now it clinked dismally, only a few coins remaining, as he walked stiffly away.

Sterren watched him go without comment and dropped the coins of the final wager into the purse on his own belt, which had acquired much of the bulge now missing from Abran’s.

When the farmer was out of sight he allowed himself to smile broadly. It had been an exceptionally successful evening. The poor old fool had stuck it out longer than any opponent in years.

And of course, where two could be seen having a game, others would sit in for a round or two. A dozen besides poor Abran had contributed to Sterren’s winnings.

For perhaps the thousandth time in his career as a tavern gambler, Sterren wondered whether he had been cheating. He honestly did not know. He knew he certainly was not guilty of anything so common as using weighted dice or muttering spells under his breath, but there were magicks that needed no incantations, and he had been apprenticed to a warlock once — even if it had only been for three days before the warlock threw him out, calling him a hopeless incompetent. His master had tried to give him the ability to tap into the source of warlockry’s power, and it hadn’t seemed to work — but maybe it had, just a little bit, without either his master or himself realizing it.

Warlockry was the art of moving things by magically enhanced willpower, moving them without touching them, and it was quite obvious that a warlock would have no trouble at all cheating at dice. It wouldn’t take much warlockry to affect something as small as dice, and it was said only warlockry could detect warlockry, so the wizards and sorcerers Sterren had encountered would never have known it was there.

Might it be that he controlled the dice without knowing it, using an uncontrolled trace of warlockry, simply by wishing?

It might be, he decided, but it might also be that he was just lucky. After all, he didn’t win all the time. Perhaps one of the gods happened to favor him, or it might be that he had been born under a fortunate star — though except for his luck with dice, he wasn’t particularly blessed.

He stood, tucked the dice in his pouch, and brushed off the knees of his worn velvet breeches. The night was still young, or at worst middle-aged; perhaps, he thought, he might find another sucker.

He looked around the dimly lit tavern’s main room, but saw no promising prospects. Most of the room’s handful of rather sodden inhabitants were regulars who knew better than to play against him. The really easy marks, the backcountry farmers, would all be asleep or outside the city walls by this hour of the night; he had no real chance of finding one roaming the streets.

Other serious gamers would be settled in somewhere, most likely on Games Street, in Camptown on the far side of the city, where Sterren never ventured — there were far too many guardsmen that close to the camp. Guardsmen were bad business — suspicious and able to act on their suspicions.

A few potential opponents might be over in nearby Westgate or down in the New Merchants’ Quarter, which were familiar territories, or in the waterfront districts of Shiphaven and Spicetown, which he generally avoided; but to find anyone he would have to start the dreary trek from tavern to tavern once again.

Or of course, he could just sit and wait in the hope that some latecomer would walk in the door.

He was not enthusiastic about either option. Maybe, he thought, he could just take the rest of the night off; it depended upon how much he had taken in so far. He decided to count his money and see how he stood. If he had cleared enough to pay the innkeeper’s fee for not interfering, the past month’s rent for his room, and his long-overdue bar tab, he could afford to rest.

He drew the heavy gray curtain across the front of his little alcove for privacy, then poured the contents of his purse on the blackened planks of the floor.

Ten minutes later he was studying a copper bit, trying to decide whether it had been clipped or not, when he heard a disturbance of some sort in the front of the tavern. It was probably nothing to do with him, he told himself; but, just in case, he swept his money back into the purse. The clipped coin — if it was clipped — didn’t really matter; even without it he had done better than he had realized and had enough to pay his bills with a little left over.

Only a very little bit left over, unfortunately — not quite enough for a decent meal. He would be starting with a clean slate, though.

The disturbance was continuing; loud voices were audible and not all of them were speaking Ethsharitic. He decided that the situation deserved investigation and he peered cautiously around the end of the curtain.

A very odd group was arguing with the innkeeper. There were four of them, none of whom Sterren recalled having seen before. Two were huge, hulking men clad in heavy steel-studded leather tunics and blood-red kilts of barbarous cut, with unadorned steel helmets on their black-haired heads and swords hanging from broad leather belts — obviously foreigners, to be dressed so tackily, and probably soldiers of some kind, but certainly not in the city guard. The kilts might possibly have been city issue — though if so, some clothier had swindled the overlord’s officers — but the helmets and tunics and belts were all wrong. Both of the men were tanned a dark brown, which implied that they were from some more southerly clime — somewhere in the Small Kingdoms, no doubt.

A third man was short and stocky, brown haired and lightly tanned, clad in the simple bleached cotton tunic and blue woolen kilt of a sailor, with nothing to mark him as either foreign or local; it was he who was doing most of the shouting. One of his hands was clamped onto the front of the innkeeper’s tunic. The other was raised in a gesture that was apparently magical, since a thin trail of pink sparks dripped from his raised forefinger.

The group’s final member was a woman, tall and aristocratic, clad in a gown of fine green velvet embroidered in gold. Her black hair was trimmed and curled in a style that had gone out of favor years ago, and that, added to the shoddy workmanship of the embroidery and her dusky complexion, marked her as just as much of a foreign barbarian as the two soldiers.

“Where is he?” The sailor’s final bellow reached Sterren’s ears quite plainly. The innkeeper’s reply did not, but the finger pointing toward the curtained alcove — toward Sterren — was unmistakable.

That was a shock. It was obvious that the foursome meant no good for whomever they sought, and it appeared they sought him. He did not recognize any of them, but it was possible that he had won money from one or all of them in the past, or perhaps they were relatives of some poor fool he had fleeced, come to avenge the family honor.

He tried to remember if he had won anything from any barbarians lately; usually he avoided them, since they were reputed to have violent tempers, and the World was full of gullible farmers. He did not recall playing against any barbarians since Festival, and surely nobody would begrudge anything short of violence that had happened during Festival!

Perhaps they were hired, then. In any case, Sterren did not care to meet them.

He ducked back behind the curtain and looked about, considering possibilities.

There weren’t very many.

The alcove was absolutely simple, composed of three gray stone walls and the curtain, the plank floor with betting lines chalked on it, and a beamed wooden ceiling, black with years of smoke, that undoubtedly served as a floor for an upstairs room. There were no doors, no windows, and no way he could slip out. No hiding places were possible, since three wooden chairs were the only furniture. Smoky oil lamps perched on high shelves at either end provided what light there was, as well as the fishy aroma that combined with stale ale in the tavern’s distinctive stench.

No help was to be had in here, that was plain, nor could he hope to rally the tavern’s other patrons to his aid; he was not popular there. Gamblers who usually win are rarely well-liked — especially when they play for stakes so low that they can’t afford to be lavish with their winnings.

Sterren realized he would have to rely on his wits — and those wits were good enough that he knew he would rather not have to rely on them.

They were, however, all he had, and he had no time to waste. He flung back one end of the curtain and pointed at the door to the street, shouting, “There he goes! There he goes! You can still catch him if you hurry!”

Only two of the foursome paid any heed at all, and even those two treated it only as a minor distraction, giving the door only quick glances. The two immense soldiers did not appear to have heard him. Instead, upon seeing him, they turned and marched heavily toward him, moving with a slow relentless tread that reminded Sterren of the tide coming in at the docks.

The other two, the sailor and the foreign noblewoman, followed the soldiers; the sailor flicked his forefinger, and the trail of sparks vanished.

Sterren did not bother ducking back behind the curtain; he stood and waited.

It had been a feeble ruse, but the best he could manage on such short notice. As often as not, similar tricks had been effective in the past; it had certainly been worth trying.

Since it had failed, he supposed he would have to face whatever these people wanted to do with him. He hoped it wasn’t anything too unpleasant. If they had been sent by one of his creditors he could even pay — if they gave him a chance before breaking his arm, or maybe his head. Even if someone demanded interest, there was no one person he owed more than he now had.

The quartet stopped a few feet away; one of the soldiers stepped forward and pulled aside the curtain, revealing the empty alcove.

The sailor looked at the bare walls, then at Sterren. “That was a stupid stunt,” he said in a conversational tone. His Ethsharitic had a trace of a Shiphaven twang, but was clear enough. “Are you Sterren, son of Kelder?”

Cautiously, Sterren replied, “I might know a fellow by that name.” He noticed the tavern’s few remaining patrons watching and, one by one, slipping out the door.

The spokesman exchanged a few words with the velvet-clad woman in some foreign language, which Sterren thought might be the Trader’s Tongue heard on the docks; the woman then spoke a brief phrase to the soldiers, and Sterren found his arms clamped in the grasp of the two large barbarians, one on either side. He could smell their sweat very clearly.

It was not a pleasant smell.

“Are you Sterren, son of Kelder, son of Kelder, or are you not?” the sailor demanded once again.

“Why?” Sterren’s voice was unsteady, but he looked the sailor in the eye without blinking.

The sailor paused, almost smiling, to admire the courage it took to ask that question. Then he again demanded, “Are you?”

Sterren glanced sideways at the unmoving mass of soldier gripping his right arm, obviously not in the mood for civilized discourse or casual banter, and admitted, “My name is Sterren of Ethshar, and my father was called Kelder the Younger.”

“Good,” the sailor said. He turned and spoke two words to the woman.

She replied with a long speech. The sailor listened carefully, then turned back to Sterren and said, “You’re probably the one they want, but Lady Kalira would like me to ask you some questions and make sure.”

Sterren shrugged as best he could with his arms immobilized, his nerve returning somewhat. “Ask away. I have nothing to hide,” he said.

It must be a family affair, he decided, or his identity wouldn’t be a matter for such concern. He might talk his way out yet, he thought.

“Are you the eldest son of your father?”

That was not a question he had expected. Could these people have some arcane scruples about killing a man’s first heir? Or, on the other hand, did they consider the eldest of a family to be responsible for the actions of his kin? The latter possibility didn’t matter much, since Sterren had no living kin — at least, not in any reasonable degree of consanguinity.

Hesitantly, he replied, “Yes.”

“You have a different name from your father.”

“So what? Plenty of eldest sons do — repeating names is a stupid custom. My father let his mother name me, said there were too damn many Kelders around already.”

“Your father was the eldest son of his mother?” This made no sense to Sterren at all. “Yes,” he said, puzzled.

“Your father is dead?”

“Dead these sixteen years. He ran afoul of-”

“Never mind that; it’s enough we have your word that he’s dead.”

“My word? I was a boy of three, scarcely a good witness even had I been there, which I was not. But I was told he was dead and I never saw him again.” This line of questioning was beginning to bother him. Were these people come to avenge some wrong his father had committed? He knew nothing about the old man save that he had been a merchant — and, of course, the lurid story of his death at the hands of a crazed enchanter had been told time and time again. It would be grossly unfair, in Sterren’s opinion, for his own death to result from some ancestral misdemeanor, rather than from one of his own offenses or failings; he hoped he could convince these people of that.

It occurred to him that perhaps this sailor with his pink sparks was that very same crazed enchanter, but that idea made no sense, and he discarded it. It was far more likely that the pink sparks were part of some shop-bought spell.

In fact, they might well be all there was to the spell, a little something to impress the ladies, or anybody else, for that matter.

“His mother, your grandmother — who was she?” the sailor asked.

His grandmother? Sterren was even more baffled than before. He had been seven when she died and he remembered her mostly as a friendly, wrinkled face and a warm voice telling impossible tales. His grandfather, who had raised him after all the others were dead, had missed her terribly and had spoken of her often, explaining how he had brought her back from a tiny little kingdom on the very edge of the world, talking about how she got along so well with everyone so long as she got her way.

“Her name was Tanissa the Stubborn, I think; she came from the Small Kingdoms somewhere.” As did these four, he realized, or at least three of them. The questions suddenly began to make sense. She must have stolen something, or committed some heinous offense, and they had finally tracked her down.

It had certainly taken them long enough. Surely they wouldn’t carry their revenge to the third generation! “She’s dead,” he added helpfully.

“Was she ever called Tanissa of Semma?”

“I don’t know; I never heard her called that.”

There was another exchange in the familiar but incomprehensible language, including his grandmother’s name as well as his own. By the end of it the woman seemed excited and was smiling.

The smile didn’t look vindictive, but that was very little comfort; whatever crime his grandmother had committed must have been half a century ago, and this woman could scarcely have been born then. She wasn’t exactly young, but she didn’t look that old — and she didn’t look young enough to be using a youth spell. She must have been sent on the hunt by someone else; perhaps her father or mother was the wronged party. In that case she’d be glad to have the job done, but would have no reason for personal dislike.

A glance to either side showed the two soldiers as impassive as ever, and he wondered whether they understood what was going on any better than he did.

The interpreter, as the sailor apparently was, turned back to Sterren and asked, “Do you have any family?”

“No.” He didn’t think it was worth trying to lie.

“No wife?”

Sterren shook his head.

“What about your mother?”

“She died bearing me.” Perhaps, he thought, they would take pity on him because he was an orphan.

“Since you’re the eldest, there could scarcely be brothers or sisters if she died bearing you. What about old Kelder, your grandfather?”

It occurred to Sterren, a bit belatedly, that he was removing the possibility of spreading the blame or getting off on grounds of family support; but it was too late already, and he continued to tell the truth. “He died three years ago. He was an old man.”

“Uncles? Aunts? Cousins?”

“None.”

“Your other grandparents?”

“Dead before I was born, from drinking bad water.”

“Good!” the sailor said with a smile. “Then you should be able to leave immediately!”

“What?” Sterren exclaimed. “Leave where? I’m not going anywhere!” He made no attempt to hide his surprise and indignation. “Why not?” the sailor demanded. “You’re not still an apprentice, are you?”

“What if I am? Where are you taking me? Who are you?” His remaining assurance faded a little more; they wouldn’t dare kill him here in the tavern, probably not anywhere in Ethshar, but if they managed to remove him from the city they could do anything they pleased. There was no law outside the walls — or at least Sterren knew of none.

“I’m just an interpreter...” the sailor began.

“What were those sparks?” Sterren interrupted.

The sailor waved the question away. “Nothing; I bought them on Wizard Street to help find you. Really, I’m just an interpreter. I’m not the one looking for you.”

“Then who are these others, and what do they want with me?”

“The Lady Kalira is taking you to Semma,” the sailor replied.

“The hell she is!” Sterren said. “I’m not leaving the city!” He was close to panic; visions of death by slow torture flickered through his mind.

The sailor sighed. “I’m afraid you are, whether you like it or not.”

“Why?” Sterren asked, letting a trace of panic into his voice in hopes of inducing pity. “What do these people want with me?”

The man shrugged. “Don’t ask me. They hired me in Akalla to get them to Ethshar and find you, so I got them to Ethshar and found you. It’s none of my business what they want you for.”

“It’s my business, though!” Sterren pointed out. He tried to struggle; the soldiers gave no sign they had even noticed. He subsided and demanded, “You can ask, at least, can’t you?”

“I can ask Lady Kalira,” the sailor admitted. “Those two don’t speak Trader’s Tongue, and for all I know they’re the ones who want you.” He seemed appallingly disinterested.

“Ask her!” Sterren shrieked.

The sailor turned and said something.

The tall woman did not answer him, but stepped forward and spoke directly to Sterren, saying very slowly and distinctly, “O’n Sterren, Enne Karnai t’Semma.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Sterren asked. He was about to say something further when he realized that the two barbarians had released his arms. He looked up at them and saw that their huge flat faces were broken into broad grins. One stuck out an immense paw and shook Sterren’s hand vigorously, clasping it hard enough to sting. Utterly confused, Sterren asked the sailor, “What did she say?”

“Don’t ask me; that was Semmat, not Trader’s Tongue. I don’t speak Semmat.”

Lady Kalira saw Sterren’s continued incomprehension and said, “Od’na ya Semma!” When he still looked blank, she said, “Et’sharitic is bad.” Her pronunciation was horrendous.

Sterren stared for a moment, then turned to the sailor and demanded, “Is she telling me my native tongue isn’t fit for her to speak? Is this some sort of barbarian ritual thing?” He was even more thoroughly confused than before.

“No, no, no,” the sailor said, “she’s just saying she can’t speak it very well. I don’t think she knows more than a dozen words, to be honest, and I taught her half of those on the way here.”

The Semman aristocrat apparently gave up on direct communication with her captive and gave the interpreter a long message to relay. He interrupted her twice, requesting clarifications — at least that was what Sterren judged to be happening, since each interruption was followed by a careful repetition of an earlier phrase.

Finally, the sailor turned to Sterren and explained, “She says she was sent by her king, Phenvel the Third, to find the heir of your grandmother’s brother, the Eighth Warlord, who died four months ago. She consulted a magician — I’m not clear on what sort — and that led her to you. She is to bring you back to Semma to receive your title and inheritance and to fulfill your hereditary duties as the new warlord — you’re Enne Karnai, the Ninth Warlord.”

“That’s silly,” Sterren replied. He relaxed somewhat. If the story were true, then his worries about vengeance were groundless, and he saw no reason for the woman to bother lying.

“That’s what she said,” the sailor replied with a shrug.

“What if I won’t go?” he asked. While it might be nice to have an inheritance waiting for him, that bit about ’hereditary duties’ didn’t sound good, and he wanted nothing to do with wars or warlords. Wars were dangerous. Besides, who would want to live among barbarians? Particularly among barbarians who apparently didn’t speak Ethsharitic.

The idea was ludicrous.

The interpreter relayed his question, and Lady Kalira’s face fell. She spoke an authoritative sentence; the sailor hesitantly translated it as, “Failure to perform one’s duty to one’s country is treason, and treason is punishable by immediate summary execution.”

“Execution?” The inheritance suddenly sounded much more attractive.

Lady Kalira said something in Semmat; the smiles vanished from the faces of the soldiers, and each dropped a hand to his sword hilt.

“But it’s not my country!” Sterren protested. “I was born and raised here in Ethshar, of Ethsharitic parents!” He looked from the sailor to Lady Kalira and back.

The sailor shrugged, a gesture that was getting on Sterren’s nerves. Lady Kalira said, in halting Ethsharitic, “You, the heir.”

Sterren looked despairingly at the two soldiers; he could see no chance at all that he could outrun or outfight either of them, let alone both. The one on the left slid a few inches of his blade from its scabbard, in warning.

“Hai! No bloodshed in here! Take him outside first!” The innkeeper’s voice was worried.

No one paid any attention to his outburst — save that, Sterren hoped he would call the city guard.

Hoping for the city guard was a new experience for him.

Even if they were summoned, though, they could not possibly arrive in time to do him any good. He had no way out. Struggling to smile, Sterren managed a ghastly parody of a grin as he said, “I guess I’ll be going to Semma, then.”

Lady Kalira smiled smugly.

CHAPTER 2

Sterren stared at the decaying, sun-bleached town of Akalla of the Diamond in dismay. It lived up to his worst imaginings of what the barbaric Small Kingdoms would be like.

He had been given very little warning of what to expect. His captors had spirited him out of the tavern, paused at his room on Bargain Street only long enough to gather up his few belongings, and then taken him, protesting vigorously, onto their chartered ship.

He had looked desperately for an opportunity to escape, but none had presented itself. At the last minute he had dived off the dock, only to be fished ignominiously out of the mud and dragged aboard.

After that, he had given up any thoughts of escape for a time. Where could he escape to from a ship? He wasn’t that strong a swimmer. Instead, he had cooperated as best he could, biding his time.

His captors had separated him from the interpreter and made it plain that they expected him to learn their barbaric tongue, Semmat, they called it. He had swallowed his revulsion at the thought of speaking anything but proper Ethsharitic and had done his best to oblige. After all, if he couldn’t understand what was being said around him, he would have little chance of learning anything useful. His language lessons had not covered very much when the ship docked in Akalla of the Diamond, just ten days after leaving Ethshar of the Spices. The weather had been hot and clear, and fairly calm, which is why it took ten days just to cross the Gulf of the East and sail the South Coast. One of the two immense Semman soldiers, the one who called himself Alder d’Yoon, told Sterren in a mixture of baby Semmat and sign language that the voyage in the other direction had taken only four days because the ship had been driven before a storm much of the way, a very expensive storm, conjured up for that very purpose, if Sterren understood him correctly.

Alder guessed the total distance between the two ports at less than a hundred leagues, a figure that surprised Sterren considerably. He had always thought of the Small Kingdoms as being a very long way off, on the far side of the ocean, and a hundred leagues across a mere gulf didn’t seem that far.

Of course, Sterren was not absolutely certain that he had understood Alder correctly. He knew he had the numbers straight, because he had learned them from counting fingers, but he wasn’t completely sure of the Semmat terms for “day” and “league.” He wished that he could check with the interpreter, but Lady Kalira, or rather, Aia Kalira, in Semmat, had expressly forbidden the man to talk to him in any language, and she was paying enough that the sailor would not take any chance of losing his job.

Several members of the crew spoke Ethsharitic, but Lady Kalira had paid each of them to not speak it to Sterren except in emergencies. He was to communicate in Semmat or not at all.

Too often, it was not at all, leaving him unsure of much of his limited vocabulary.

Whatever the exact distances, there could be no doubt that on the afternoon of the tenth day their ship put into port at Akalla, in the shadow of the grim pile of guano-whitened stone the Semmans called Akalla Karnak. Sterren thought that karnak probably meant castle, but again he was not quite sure. He had never seen a castle before, and the forbidding fortification at Akalla did not encourage him to seek out others.

He had gathered that Semma lay somewhere inland, and that Akalla of the Diamond was the nearest seaport to it. He was not yet clear on whether Akalla was a separate country, a conquered province, or a district within the kingdom of Semma. The truth was that he didn’t much care, since it did not seem relevant to any plans to escape back to Ethshar.

And Akalla looked like a place that very few people cared about. It consisted of three or four streets lined with small shops and houses, all huddled onto a narrow stretch of beach in the castle’s shadow, between two jagged stretches of broken cliffs.

The buildings of the town were built of some sort of yellowish blocks that looked more like brick than stone, but were far larger than any bricks Sterren was familiar with. The joints all seemed to be covered with faded greenery, brown mosses or gray lichen or half-dead ivy climbing the walls. The roofs were of turf, with thin, scorched brown grass on top. He saw very few windows. Flies buzzed in clouds above the streets, and the few people who were visible on those streets seemed to be curled up asleep, completely covered by dirty white robes. The whole place smelled of dry rot.

Sterren was not at all impressed by the town.

The castle was far more impressive, but it, too, was streaked with dying plant life and seemed lifeless, almost abandoned.

As Sterren watched the sailors tying up to the dock, he asked the soldier beside him, not Alder, but the other one, Alder’s comrade Dogal d’Gra, how far it was to Semma.

Rather, he tried to ask that, but his limited knowledge of Semmat forced him to say instead, “How many leagues is Semma?” That assumed that he was using the correct word for leagues and hadn’t screwed up the grammar somewhere.

What he had thought was a simple question plunged his guard into deep concentration; the Semman muttered to himself, saying in Semmat, “Akalla, maybe one; Skaia, four or five; Ophkar, hmm.”

Finally, after considerable calculation, he arrived at an answer. “Twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen leagues.”

Sterren knew the numbers up to twenty beyond any question, and a good many beyond with reasonable confidence, but to be sure he held up his ten fingers and said, “And two, three more?”

Dogal nodded. “Yeah.”

Horrified, Sterren stared back out at the port. Thirteen leagues? The entire city of Ethshar was little more than a league from corner to corner, yet he had never managed to explore it all. It took a good hour just to walk from Westgate to the Arena, more, if traffic was heavy. They would have to walk all night to reach Semma!

In the event, as he later learned, they would not walk at all, and certainly not at night. Instead, when the ship was secured at bow and stern and the gangplank in place, he found himself escorted not out onto the highway to Semma, but to a small inn near the docks, small by Sterren’s standards, that is, since it was, except for the castle, the largest structure in town.

The interpreter, to Sterren’s consternation, stayed behind on the ship; he had fulfilled his contract and would not be accompanying them further.

Upon learning this, Sterren suddenly wished he had tried even harder during his language lessons. Now if an emergency arose he would have to rely on his limited command of Semmat, rather than finding an interpreter. He felt more cut off than ever.

Once inside the inn, out of the hot sun and into the cool shade, Sterren looked around, and his opinion of Akalla went up a notch. The inn was laid out well enough, with several cozy alcoves holding tables and one wall lined with barrels. A stairway at either side led up to a balcony, and the rooms for travelers opened off that. A good many customers were present, eating and drinking and filling the place with a pleasant hum of conversation, while harried but smiling barmaids hurried hither and yon.

Most of the customers wore the thin white robes Sterren had seen on the street, but here they were thrown back to reveal gaily colored tunics and kilts beneath.

Lady Kalira ignored the bustle and headed directly for the innkeeper, who stood leaning against one of the barrels. She took two rooms for her party, one for herself, and one for Sterren, Alder, and Dogal.

Sterren glanced around and decided that even though it was a pleasant enough inn, he did not really want to be there, not with Alder and Dogal watching him constantly, and with, he presumed, nobody around who spoke Ethsharitic.

Since he had no choice, however, he resolved to make the best of it. While Dogal took the party’s baggage up to their rooms and Lady Kalira settled with the innkeeper on the exact amount of the party’s advance payment, Sterren attempted to strike up a conversation with a winsome barmaid, using his very best Semmat.

She stared at him for a few seconds, then smiled, said something in a language he had never heard before, and hurried away.

He stared after her in shock.

“What was...” he began in Ethsharitic, and then caught himself and switched to Semmat. “What was that?” he asked Alder.

“What?” the soldier asked in reply.

“What the... the... what she said.”

Alder shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “She was speaking Akallan.”

“Akallan? Another language?”

“Sure,” Alder said, unperturbed.

Sterren stared about wildly, listening to first one conversation, then another. Lady Kalira and the innkeeper were speaking Trader’s Tongue, he realized. A couple at a nearby table was whispering in some strange and sibilant speech that didn’t sound like Trader’s Tongue, Akallan, or Semmat, and which certainly wasn’t Ethsharitic. Other voices were speaking any number of dialects.

“Gods,” Sterren said, “How does anybody ever talk to anyone here?”

Alder asked, “What?”

Sterren realized he’d spoken Ethsharitic again; he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to weep or scream. He did know he wanted a drink. He sat down heavily in the nearest chair and resorted to a language understood everywhere; he waved a finger in the air in the general direction of the barmaid and threw a coin on the table.

That worked, and the barmaid smiled at him as she placed a full tankard before him. He began to feel more cheerful.

After all, he reminded himself, he was in a port. Naturally, there would be a variety of travelers, speaking a variety of tongues. “In Semma,” he said to Alder, “all speak one language?” He knew, as he said it, that his phrasing was awkward, but it was the best he could do.

“Sure,” Alder said, settling down at Sterren’s table. “Everyone in Semma speaks Semmat. Just about, anyway; I guess there might be some foreigners now and then who don’t.”

Sterren struggled to follow his guard’s speech. He had been resigned to learning Semmat, but now he was becoming really eager to learn. Whatever the ignominy of being forced to use a barbarian tongue, it was nothing compared to the isolation and inconvenience of not being able to speak with those about him.

And it looked as if he was, indeed, going to be stuck in Semma for the foreseeable future, if he didn’t get away very, very soon. Thirteen leagues inland! There was simply no way he would be able to slip away and cover that distance without being caught and dragged back, not if the Semmans had any sort of magic available, as they surely did.

If he was going to escape, he would have to do so tonight, here in Akalla, and stow away aboard a ship bound for Ethshar.

And how could he do that when he couldn’t find three people in Akalla who spoke the same language as each other, let alone anything that he, himself, understood? How could he learn which ship was bound whither, and when?

Even if he once got aboard a ship, how could he earn his way home, when he couldn’t even understand orders, or argue about the rules of a friendly game? No, it was hopeless. He was doomed to go to Semma, a country that his grandmother had been only too glad to flee, even at the loss of her noble status. Being thus doomed, all he could do was make the best of it. He would have to find some way to fit in.

He might even have to actually be a proper warlord. First though, he needed to know the language. “Alder,” he said, “I want to learn Semmat better.”

Alder gulped beer, then nodded. “Sure,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

CHAPTER 3

The road had vanished, but they seemed confident of the route, so he did not question it. For one thing, he was far too busy trying to minimize the bruising of his backside to worry about where he was going, or why. He put aside all worries about wars and warlords and life among the barbarians, concentrating solely on matters closer to hand, and closer still to his seat.

By the time the party stopped by a tiny stream for a midday rest and refreshment, out of sight of even Akalla Karnak’s highest tower, Sterren’s throat ached from dryness, his hands ached from clutching the reins, his feet ached from being jammed into the stirrups, his back ached from trying to keep him upright, and worst of all, his rump ached from the constant abrasive collisions with his saddle. He did not descend gracefully, but simply fell off his mount onto a tuft of prairie grass.

Alder and Dogal politely pretended not to notice, but Lady Kalira was less kind.

“You haven’t ridden before, have you?” she demanded without preamble.

Sterren took a moment to mentally translate this into Ethsharitic. “No,” he admitted. He was too thirsty, weary, and battered to think of any sarcastic comment to add, let alone to translate it into Semmat. Her blithe assumption that an Ethsharitic street gambler would know how to ride seemed to call for a cutting remark, but Sterren could not rise to the occasion.

“You should have told me back at the inn,” she said. “I could have gotten a wagon. Or we could have walked. Or at the very least we could have given you a few lessons.”

Sterren tried to shrug, but his back was too stiff for any such gesture. “I... It was... It did not... damn!” He could not think of any word for “appeared” or “looked” or “seemed.” Before any of the Semmans could volunteer a suggestion, he managed, “I saw it was not bad, but I saw wrong.”

“It looked easy, you mean.”

Sterren nodded. “I guess that’s what I mean.”

“A warlord really should know how to ride,” Lady Kalira pointed out.

“I’m no warlord,” Sterren said bitterly.

“You are Sterren, Ninth Warlord of Semma!” Lady Kalira reminded him sternly.

“I’m Sterren of Ethshar. I play dice in taverns,” Sterren retorted.

Lady Kalira backed away slightly. “You know, you mustn’t tell anyone that when we get to Semma,” she said.

“Why not?” Sterren demanded.

“Because you’re the warlord!” Lady Kalira replied, shocked. “You hold a position of great power and respect. We can’t let it be common gossip that you made your living cheating at gambling.”

Sterren did not follow all of this speech, but he guessed one vital word from context. “I didn’t cheat!” he shouted; the effort sent a twinge through his back and legs, and more than a twinge through his buttocks.

“Then how did you win regularly enough to live?”

“I was lucky,” he muttered unconvincingly. He had learned the word aboard ship.

“Ha!” she said. “Wizard’s luck, if you ask me.”

“Wizard?” Sterren asked. He knew the word meant one variety of magician, but wasn’t sure which. “Warlock,” he said in Ethsharitic.

Lady Kalira did not recognize the word; instead she changed the subject.

“You must relax,” she said, demonstrating by letting her arms fall limply, “when you ride. Move with the horse, not against it.”

Sterren nodded, not really believing that he would ever learn the skill.

“And we can pad the saddle, that velvet tunic in your pack will help. And you can walk sometimes.”

Sterren nodded again, with a bit more enthusiasm.

By midafternoon, thanks to additional cushioning, a slower pace, and walking when the blisters on his rump became unbearable, he had improved enough that, although he still ached in every joint and in several unjointed places as well, he was able to think about his future and to carry on some limited conversation with his companions as he rode.

He began by pointing in each direction and asking what lay there. All they could see was sand and sun and grass, which made it obvious that he was asking what lay beyond.

Ahead, of course, was Semma; behind was Akalla of the Diamond. To the left, the north, Dogal told him, “Skaia.” The name meant nothing to him.

The reply when he pointed to the right was more interesting.

“Nothing,” Dogal told him.

“Nothing?”

“Well, almost. A couple of leagues of sand, and then the edge of the World. If you stand up in the stirrups and stare, you may be able to see it.”

“See it?”

“Yes.”

That, Sterren thought, was a very interesting concept, seeing the edge of the World. Standing up in the stirrups, however, was a terrifying concept, so he decided to forgo the view.

How, he wondered, could one see the edge of the World? What did it look like? What lay beyond it? The southern horizon, he noticed, did look slightly different from the others; there seemed to be a yellowish tinge to both ground and sky in that direction. He stared, but could make out nothing.

The very idea fascinated him, all the same. To be so close to the actual edge!

He had thought that Ethshar of the Spices was in the center of the World, but if he had come so close to the edge so quickly, then that could not be so; he knew the World was bigger than that. He had heard travelers speak of Ethshar as being in the southeast, but had, until now, put it down to a distorted worldview.

Obviously, it was his own view that had been in error.

That was quite a realization, that he had been wrong. He wondered if he had ever been wrong about anything important.

Dogal distracted him from that line of thought. “Might be Ophkar to the north of us now,” he remarked. “Skaia’s not that big. Bigger than Semma or Akalla, smaller than Ophkar.”

“Semma is next, beyond Ophkar?” Sterren asked.

Dogal nodded. “That’s right. Your accent is improving greatly, Lord Sterren; congratulations.”

Sterren said nothing in return, but felt a touch of pride. He had tried very hard to get the accent right on the barbaric names of the surrounding kingdoms, and it was good to know he had succeeded.

He had come to realize that Akalla, Skaia, and Ophkar were all indeed separate kingdoms, squeezed into the thirteen leagues between Semma and the coast, and he marveled that the Small Kingdoms were that small.

He also wondered all the more just what he was getting into. If the kingdoms were crowded together that closely, they must surely rub each other the wrong way every so often. No wonder they needed warlords.

“What is Semma... What... Tell me about Semma,” he said, unable to come up with the words to ask, “What is Semma like?” or “What sort of a place is Semma?”

Dogal shrugged. “Not much to tell.”

“There must be something you can tell me; are there many cities?”

“No cities.”

Sterren could not think of a word for “town.” Instead, he asked, “Are there many castles?” The word for castle was indeed karnak; he had checked on that back at the inn.

“Just one, Semma Castle. That’s where we’re going.”

Dogal was not exactly a torrent of information, Sterren decided; he nudged his mount over toward Alder, on his right.

“Hello,” he said.

Alder nodded politely. “Hail, Lord Sterren.”

Sterren sighed; he supposed he would have to get used to that pompous greeting. “Tell me about Semma,” he said.

Alder glanced at him curiously. “What do you want to know?”

“What it... what I... how it is there.”

“What it’s like, you mean?”

Gratefully, Sterren latched onto the phrase he had been missing. “Yes, what it’s like.”

“Well, Lord Sterren, it’s hard for me to say, because it’s the only place I’ve ever been, except for this trip to Et’shar to fetch you. I was born there, never lived anywhere else.”

“Ethshar, not Et’shar,” Sterren said idly, pleased to be the one correcting for once, rather than the one corrected.

“Et’th’shar,” Alder said, spitting messily as he struggled with the unfamiliar combination of aspirants.

“Are there many people?”

Alder shrugged. “I don’t know, really,” he said. “The castle is certainly crowded enough.”

“I didn’t just mean the castle.” “Well, that’s where everyone lives except the peasants.”

That startled Sterren and caused him to wonder if he was still misunderstanding the word karnak after all. “Everyone?”

“Just about.”

“Peasants?” The word was new to him.

“The common people, the farmers,” Alder explained.

Sterren nodded, he knew about the easy marks from outside the walls. “Are there many peasants?” he asked.

Alder shrugged again. “I guess so.”

“Are you a peasant?”

“I’m a soldier, Lord Sterren.” The reproof was obvious in Alder’s tone.

“You weren’t born a soldier,” Sterren pointed out, proud he had remembered the word “born” from Alder’s earlier comments.

Alder reluctantly admitted, “True. I was born a peasant.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Sterren said, seeing he had hurt the big guard’s feelings. “I was born a peasant, too.”

This was a lie, of course; he had been born into the merchant class. He meant, however, that he had been born a commoner.

Startled, Alder corrected him. “No, Lord Sterren, you were born a nobleman.”

“Well, I didn’t know it,” Sterren retorted. Alder considered that, then smiled. “True,” he said. Sterren rode on in silence for a long moment, marshaling his thoughts.

At least he would be living in the castle, which would presumably be at least an imitation of real civilization. He had feared that he might find himself in some muddy little village somewhere. A castle was not a city, but it was, he hoped, better than nothing.

In the remainder of the afternoon and around the campfire that night, Sterren pieced together a rough idea of what Semma was like from a constant questioning of his two guards. This also served to improve his Semmat considerably, adding to his vocabulary and giving him practice in pronunciation and sentence construction.

Semma was a quiet little kingdom, almost all of it occupied by peasants on small family farms, scraping a living out of the sandy soil by growing oranges, lemons, dates, figs, olives, and corn, or by raising sheep, or goats, or cattle. At one time some peasants had grown spices for export, but Semma had lost its spice trade long ago, when Ophkar had temporarily cut off all the routes to the sea and the markets had found other, more reliable sources. The soldiers knew of no mines, or towns, or any sort of manufacture or trade.

In the center of the kingdom stood Semma Castle, with a large village clustered around it, the closest thing to a town or city that the kingdom could boast. The castle itself was home to something over a hundred nobles. Sterren had balked initially at believing that, but both Dogal and Alder had insisted it was the truth. Sterren could imagine a hundred people willingly jammed into a single building readily enough, since he had seen the crowded tenements of his native city, but he could not imagine a hundred people living like that who called themselves nobles.

Back home in Ethshar, Azrad VII surely had a hundred or more people living in his palace, but only a few could call themselves nobles; most were servants and courtiers and bureaucrats.

Alder had noticed his disbelief and had explained, “Well, that’s counting the kids, and besides, a lot of them are lesser nobility, and it’s a big castle. You’ll see.”

Sterren considered that, and Lady Kalira took this opportunity to present him with a salve for his developing saddlesores.

“It’s always a good idea to bring a healing salve when traveling,” she said, “though this wasn’t exactly the use I had in mind.”

Sterren accepted it gratefully and crawled away from the campfire somewhat in pursuit of privacy. Lady Kalira discreetly turned away, and the Ethsharite slid down his breeches and applied the ointment liberally. That done, he rejoined the others. He had just begun to inquire about the army he was supposed to command when Lady Kalira announced it was time to shut up and sleep.

Sterren obliged, leaving military matters for the morning.

CHAPTER 4

They spotted the castle’s central tower by midmorning of the third day, scarcely an hour after they had buried the ashes of their breakfast fire and set out again. Sterren had to admit that it looked like a big castle, as Alder had said.

At that point they had just begun to pass farms, rather than open plain, compact yellow houses surrounded by small stands of fruit trees, patches of tall corn, and miscellaneous livestock grazing the native grass down to stubble. The various inhabitants of these establishments, intent on their own concerns of herding or cultivation or hauling water, invariably ignored the travelers.

The plain was no longer quite so smooth and flat as it had been for most of the journey; the ground they traversed had acquired something of a roll, though it was still far from hilly.

Sterren had never gotten around to asking much about the army, but he had learned that Semma was roughly triangular, bounded on the southeast by the desert that stretched to the edge of the World, on the north by the relatively large and powerful kingdom of Ksinallion, and on the west by Ophkar. Semma had fought several wars against each of her neighbors over the last two or three centuries, particularly Ksinallion, but under the Seventh and Eighth Warlords had stayed at peace for an amazingly long time. Alder and Dogal did not remember any of the wars themselves, but Alder’s maternal grandfather had fought against Ksinallion in the Sixth Ksinallionese War, about fifty years ago. Sterren was still patiently listening to tales of ancestral bravery when the castle came into view.

Not long after that a cloud of dust appeared ahead of them and grew until a dozen horsemen emerged from it. Sterren was worried, but the three Semmans seemed very pleased by this welcoming committee.

The horsemen were all large, dark-skinned men dressed much like Alder and Dogal, riding horses in red and gold trappings, and Lady Kalira announced that this was an honor guard, sent to escort the newfound warlord to the castle.

Sterren was relieved to discover, when the party came to a halt a few paces away, that this was correct. The government had not been overthrown since Lady Kalira’s departure.

The conversation between his original escort and the new arrivals was too fast for him to follow, so Sterren simply sat astride his horse until it was over.

The newcomers wheeled about and formed up into a column around Sterren, Lady Kalira, and the two soldiers, and waited.

Sterren looked about, puzzled, and saw Lady Kalira gesturing with her head. It dawned on him that he was in command; this guard was in his honor, and they were waiting for him to start.

Reluctantly, he urged his mount forward, and the entire party rode on toward the castle.

Sterren found his inquiries about Semma’s army inhibited by the presence of a dozen uniformed strangers. He shrugged and accepted the situation. After all, he would be able to see for himself, soon enough, just how matters stood. He rode on in dignified silence, up the dusty road and into the village that surrounded the castle.

The travelers were greeted at the castle gate by a ragged fanfare of trumpets, at least one trumpeter was always a fraction behind the others, and an occasional sour note could be heard, but in general it was an impressive and gratifying experience for Sterren. He had heard far better, far more stirring music played in the Arena, or in the overlord’s occasional parades, or even by impromptu street bands, back in Ethshar, but never before had he heard more than a brief cheer in his own honor. He counted a dozen trumpeters spaced along the ramparts; impressed, he tried to sit up a little straighter on his horse, to live up to his role.

Certainly, being a warlord had its positive aspects; as long as he could avoid any actual wars, he thought it might be enjoyable. Unfortunately, he doubted he would be able to avoid wars; the Small Kingdoms were notorious for constantly going to war over stupid little disputes.

On the other hand. Alder and Dogal had said that Semma had been at peace for more than forty years. Maybe that peace would last.

Or maybe a war was overdue. He simply didn’t know anything about the situation.

It was time, however, to start learning as much as he could, as quickly as he could. With that in mind, even as he tried to ride with dignity and pride, and to look the part of a warlord despite his shabby, travel-worn clothes, he was studying everything in sight.

The castle stood upon a slight rise, the closest thing to a hill that Sterren had seen since leaving Akalla; Sterren could not tell if the little plateau, standing eight or ten feet above the plain, was natural or man-made, but it was certainly not new, in either case. Surrounding the castle and its raised base were scattered two or three dozen houses and shops, all the same dull yellow as the outlying farmhouses, all built of some substance Sterren had never seen before and could not identify, all with thick walls and only a few heavily shuttered windows. Gaily colored awnings shielded most of the doorways and served as open-air shops; there was no single market square, just a small plaza at the castle gate, and the streets were rather haphazard. All the ground in the castle’s vicinity was dry, hard-packed bare dirt, trampled smooth and even, and the houses and shops were not arranged in clear, sharp streets, but just ragged lines that wiggled every which way.

Outside the village in any direction Sterren could see scattered farmhouses, built in the same way as the village’s structures, strewn unevenly across the plain.

The castle itself was a stark contrast to these humble dwellings; it was an immense and forbidding structure built of dark red stone. An outer wall topped with iron-braced battlements stood more than fifteen feet high, with no opening anywhere in it save the gate by which Sterren’s little party entered.

As they passed through this portal, Sterren saw that the wall was roughly twenty feet thick and the gateway equipped with three sets of heavy doors as well as a spiked portcullis and openings overhead through which assaults might be made on anyone trying to enter uninvited.

It was not, perhaps, as overwhelming a piece of engineering and defense technology as Ethshar’s city walls and gate towers, but it had its own grim power, certainly. Sterren was quite sure that he would not care to try to pass that wall and gate without a very clear invitation.

Of course, his escort, now numbering fifteen in all, clearly constituted an invitation.

The castle within that outer wall was vaguely pyramidal in its overall shape. Low wings, a mere two stories in height, stretched out to either side of the central mass, which stood some six stories, and was in turn topped by a great central tower whose peak was, Sterren judged, fully a hundred feet from the ground upon which the castle stood. A few turrets protruded here and there, ruining the stepped outline. Window openings were nonexistent at ground level, but grew steadily from narrow slits on the second floor to broad expanses of glass under graceful stone arches on the uppermost level of the tower.

The strip of ground between the curtain wall and the keep was entirely taken up with paved walks and close-packed patches of garden; Sterren was a bit surprised to see no inner line of defense there. The gap between Ethshar’s walls and its outermost street, he knew, was carefully kept clear of trees and permanent structures of any sort, to allow for the deployment of troops and military equipment in the event of siege or assault; in times of peace, such as the past two centuries, this area filled up with the city’s criminals and homeless. Semma Castle had no equivalent of this infamous Hundred-Foot Field.

He had little time to look at the gardens, though. As soon as the last of the company had passed the outer-most gate, the trumpet fanfare ended with a final flourish, waiting guards slammed the outermost pair of the heavy doors, and servants in red and yellow garb leaped forward to take charge of the horses. Sterren was quickly lifted from the saddle and lowered to the ground by half a dozen of the men in his escort, as his mount was led to the stables beside the castle’s inner gate.

This assistance was welcome, since he suspected he would be too stiff, after so long in the saddle, to have dismounted under his own power.

He was whisked past the stables and into the castle proper. The main door was, like the outer gate, equipped with a full range of defenses, but on foot, and alerted by the intervening greenery, he looked a little more closely this time and saw signs of disuse, dust on the hinges, a spider web across one of the overhead openings. Forty years of peace, he guessed, had naturally had an effect.

He had expected the party to stop and disband once they were all inside, perhaps leaving him in the charge of servants, or a guard or two, but instead the whole contingent marched on down a broad, marble-floored central corridor. The soldiery kept him carefully centered in the group.

“Where are we going?” Sterren demanded in Semmat.

Lady Kalira glanced toward the commander of the honor guard and whispered a question Sterren could not catch. The soldier nodded in reply, and Lady Kalira called back to Sterren, “The king is waiting to meet you.”

“The king?” Sterren wasn’t certain he had heard the word correctly; he did know its meaning, as it had come up in discussions with Alder.

“Yes, the king, his Majesty Phenvel, third of that name, by right of succession King of Semma and lord of the southern deserts.”

“Oh.” Sterren had never met a king before and was unsure how to react.

A pair of heavy, gold-trimmed doors swung open, and Sterren found himself swept into what he immediately identified, despite a complete lack of previous experience with such things, as a throne room. A broad red carpet stretched from the door to the base of a dais and up three steps to the feet of a portly man in scarlet robes, seated on a large black chair. To either side of the carpet stood a small crowd of people, all well dressed, of all shapes and sizes.

Lady Kalira stopped at the foot of the dais; the soldiers stopped at the same instant she did and gracefully stepped away to either side, with the exception of Alder and Dogal, bringing up the rear, who remained on the carpet.

Sterren, not having known what was coming, took a step or two forward before he stopped himself, coming uncomfortably close to walking into Lady Kalira’s back.

Kalira bowed deeply, going down on one knee before her sovereign. Hesitantly, and awkwardly, since he had never made such an obeisance before, Sterren copied her actions.

Lady Kalira rose, and Sterren stood again.

The hall was almost, but not quite, silent; Sterren could hear a steady hiss of whispering among the watchers.

“Your Majesty,” Lady Kalira said, “may I present your servant Sterren, Ninth Warlord of Semma.” She gestured toward Sterren and stepped aside, turning so that she stood on the edge of the carpet, her back to the audience and able to speak to either monarch or Ethsharite.

Thinking some action was called for, Sterren bowed again, from the waist this time, wishing somebody had seen fit to coach him a little.

“Hello,” the king said.

“Hello,” Sterren replied nervously. He tried to judge the king’s age and guessed it at something over forty, but almost certainly still short of sixty.

“Are you really Tanissa the Stubborn’s grandson? It’s hard to believe.”

Sterren, still unfamiliar with the language, needed a moment to puzzle that out and phrase a response. This was not the sort of question he had expected from a king in what he took for a formal audience. “Yes, I... Yes, your Majesty, I am,” he replied. He was grateful that Lady Kalira had provided him, in her introduction, with the correct form of address.

“I never met her,” the king said, “but I heard about her when I was a boy, especially from her brother, your great-uncle, that is, the old warlord. She ran away with that merchant a couple of years before I was born. And you’re really her grandson, are you?”

Sterren nodded.

“There’s no need to be shy, lad,” the king said, smiling. “After all, we’re all family here.”

“We are?” Sterren asked, puzzled.

“Oh, certainly; didn’t you know? You’re my seventh cousin once removed. I looked it up.” He gestured expansively, taking in the crowd of observers. “And these,” he said, “are the collected nobility of Semma. And all of us, lad, are descended from Tendel the First, first King of Semma.”

“You are?”

“You, too, lad,” Phenvel corrected him, gently.

“I am?”

“Yes, indeed; I’m in a direct male line, of course, and you descended from the second son of Tendel the Second, rather than the first son. You’re also descended from a couple of Tendel the First’s daughters, the nobles here tend to marry back into the family.”

This came as something of a shock to Sterren, once he had puzzled out exactly what had been said, and at first he simply didn’t believe it. A king, one of his ancestors? All these people his relatives? He was in the habit of thinking of himself as having no family at all; to find himself in a room crowded with his distant relations was more than he could absorb. He could imagine no reason for the king to lie about it, however.

“Oh,” he said.

“That’s one reason you’re here, straight from your journey. We all wanted a look at you, our long-lost cousin.”

“Oh,” Sterren said again.

This whole situation was beginning to seem unreal. Oh, the castle was real enough, and the people, he could smell them, as well as see and hear them, and he’d never heard of an illusion as detailed as that, but the idea that they were really the ruling class of one of the Small Kingdoms, just a few leagues from the edge of the World, and that he was one of them, a hereditary warlord, seemed so completely absurd that for a moment it was easier to believe the whole thing was a gigantic joke of some kind.

An uncomfortable silence fell, to be broken by Lady Kalira.

“Your Majesty,” she said, “I believe that our new warlord is weary from his journey and overwhelmed by meeting you. Nor has he eaten since dawn.”

This was not strictly true, since Sterren’s party had finished breakfast well after sunrise, but it was close enough.

“Of course,” the king agreed. “Of course. Take him to his room, then, and let him recover himself. We’ll speak with him more when he’s rested and has eaten.” He waved a hand in dismissal.

Lady Kalira bowed, and Sterren imitated her again. Then she motioned for him to follow and led the way to the right, through the crowd to a door, and out of the throne room. Alder and Dogal followed discreetly.

They emerged into a corridor, where Lady Kalira turned left and led the way up curving stairs. Sterren’s stiff legs protested, but he followed her.

At the second-floor she kept going, and Sterren followed without question.

At the third floor he paused, hoping she would change her mind, but she kept on climbing. He suppressed a moan. At the fourth floor he considered asking how much further they had to go, but couldn’t think of the right words in Semmat.

At the fifth floor he was panting heavily.

At the sixth floor the staircase ended, and he breathed a sigh of relief as Lady Kalira led him down a passageway, and then she reached another staircase and started up again. He balked.

Alder and Dogal came up behind him and did not stop; he yielded and hurried on, up into the tower.

After just one more flight, on the seventh floor, they left the staircase and headed down one more short passage, to an iron-bound door. Lady Kalira turned a large black key in the lock, then swung the door open to reveal the room beyond.

“This is your room, as the warlord,” she announced. She stood back to let him enter. “It was your great-uncle’s for almost twenty years, and his father’s, your great-grandfather’s, for half a century before that.”

Sterren stepped in cautiously.

He was in a large, airy chamber, one side mostly taken up by three broad, curtainless, many-paned windows. Thick tapestries, slightly faded but still handsome, hid the stone walls. A high canopied bed stood centered against one wall, with a table on either side, a wardrobe beyond the left-hand table, and a chest of drawers to the right. Opposite the bed was a desk, or worktable, flanked by tall bookcases jammed with books and papers. A chair was tucked away in each corner of the room; counting the one at the desk, there were five in all.

Sterren turned and discovered that the wall around the doorway was covered with displays of weapons, swords, knives, spears, pole-arms, and a good many he could not put a name to, even in Ethsharitic. He wondered if he, as warlord, was expected to learn to use them.

The weapons were all dusty. In fact, everything was covered by a layer of dust, the desk, the books, the papers, everything. The air was full of the dry, dusty smell of disuse. It was plain that nobody had been living in the room recently.

Hesitantly, he crossed to the windows and looked out. He judged the angle of the sun and decided he was looking almost due north.

The view was spectacular; he could see the castle roofs below him, hiding his view of the outer wall and most of the surrounding village. Beyond that he could see a few houses, and then the plain, rolling on into the distance, spotted with farmhouses, orchards, and various outbuildings, marked off into individual holdings by hedges and fences. He saw no roads, however; what traveling was done here was apparently done straight across country.

To the right he thought he could see, out near the horizon, the farms and grasslands fading into desert sand; somewhat to the left of center he thought he might be seeing the peaks of distant mountains somewhere beyond the horizon.

He turned back to the doorway and saw that Lady Kalira and the two soldiers were still standing in the corridor. He had a sudden vision of the door slamming, trapping him inside.

“Aren’t you coming in?” he asked.

Lady Kalira nodded and stepped in.

“What did you wait for?” he asked.

“I would not enter your private chamber without an invitation, Lord Sterren,” she replied.

Baffled by this pronouncement, which clearly implied that he had some authority and was not merely a prisoner, it took Sterren a moment to realize that Alder and Dogal were still waiting in the hall. He looked at Lady Kalira.

She looked back, paying no attention to the soldiers. “May I sit down?” she asked.

“Yes,” Sterren said in Ethsharitic, again caught off guard by her sudden deference. He corrected himself, repeating it in Semmat, as he remembered his escort waiting for him, back out on the plain. Maybe they were serious about calling him a lord.

She pulled a chair from a corner and sat. Sterren considered for a long moment before lowering himself cautiously into the chair by the desk.

The healing salve on his saddlesores was working; he could sit with only mild discomfort.

“You must have questions,” Lady Kalira said. “Now that we’re safely home, maybe I can answer them.”

Sterren stared at her for a moment, still puzzled, and then smiled crookedly. “I hope so,” he said.

CHAPTER 5

“Everything in this room is yours,” Lady Kalira said. “This, and the position of warlord, are your inheritance from your great-uncle Sterren. Nothing else; everything he owned when he died is right here, or was given, at his request, to others.”

Sterren struggled with that for a moment and carefully phrased a question.

“How did he give anything to me? How did he know I... I was alive, when he hadn’t seen my grandmother for so long?”

“Oh, he didn’t know you existed, but he had no choice in the matter,” Lady Kalira said, waving the question away. “Semma has very clear and definite laws on the lines of succession. This room and its contents were his as the warlord, not his, personally, so he had no say about who would receive them, nor who would receive the title. If people were allowed to influence successions it would result in all sorts of intrigues, and frankly, we have too much of that even as it is.”

“Succession? Intrigues?”

Lady Kalira explained the words as best she could, and eventually Sterren thought he understood.

“But why me?” he asked. “Isn’t there anyone here who could be warlord?”

The noblewoman snorted in derision. “Your ancestors,” she said, “were about the worst line in the whole family at providing enough heirs. It doesn’t help that warlords tend to die young, in battle.”

That statement, when the unfamiliar terms had been defined, did little to help Sterren’s peace of mind, but he made no comment.

“After you,” Lady Kalira continued, “the next heir is the old warlord’s third cousin, your third cousin twice removed. That’s only the seventh degree of consanguinity. You’re an heir in the third degree of consanguinity. That’s a pretty big difference. And besides, you’re young and strong...”

Sterren took this as flattery, since he knew he was relatively scrawny.

“She’s past fifty. If she had a son, well, that would be the eighth degree, but it might do. Unfortunately, her only child is a daughter. Unmarried, even if we allowed inheritance by marriage instead of blood.”

An attempt to explain the new words this time was unsuccessful until, exasperated. Lady Kalira rose and crossed to the desk, where she found a sheet of paper, a pen, and ink, then leaned over and began drawing a family tree.

Sterren, still seated, watched with interest as she ran down the history of Semma’s nine warlords.

The first, Tendel, was the younger brother of King Rayel II, born almost two hundred years ago. His son, also named Tendel, followed him, and a grandson after that, but this third Tendel managed to get himself killed in battle early in the disastrous Third Ksinallionese War, before he could get around to marrying and siring heirs. His brother Sterren inherited the title as Fourth Warlord, only to get himself killed three years later in the same war.

This first Sterren had been kind enough to produce five children, though three of them were daughters, and the younger son died without issue. The elder son succeeded as Fifth Warlord. His only child became Sixth Warlord, and in turn produced only one son, the eventual Seventh Warlord, before meeting a nasty end after losing a war.

Sterren, Seventh Warlord, was only twenty-one when he inherited the title and lived to be seventy-three. He was something of a legend. He broke with tradition and, instead of marrying a distant cousin, married an Ethsharitic woman he found somewhere.

They had three children, though the second one, Dereth, died in infancy. The eldest, Sterren, eventually became the Eighth Warlord, and the youngest, Tanissa the Stubborn, ran away with an Ethsharitic trader in 5169 and was never heard from again.

She, of course, was Sterren of Ethshar’s grandmother. And since her brother never did get around to marrying or producing children, that made Sterren the Ninth Warlord.

The next-closest heir was Nerra the Cheerful, a granddaughter of the Fourth Warlord’s eldest daughter, not exactly an obvious choice.

Lady Kalira put aside the sketchy genealogy after that and continued her explanation without further prompting. Sterren listened politely, following the unfamiliar words as best he could.

When it had become clear that old Sterren was finally dying, the royal genealogist, unaware of Tanissa’s son and grandson, had needed over an hour simply to determine who the heir should be.

He had noticed the notation in the records of Tanissa’s elopement and had reported it, along with his conclusions, to the king and his advisors. After considerable debate Agor, the castle theurgist, had been called in; he in turn had called up Unniel the Discerning, a minor goddess, who after much coaxing had, in her turn, called upon Aibem, a more powerful god, who had, finally, informed everybody that although Tanissa was dead, her grandson was still alive and well.

After that, of course. Lady Kalira and her little entourage had been sent to find Sterren and bring him back to Semma and they had done just that. Lady Kalira, who was not anywhere in the line of succession for warlord, had gotten the job because she was the heir presumptive to her cousin Inria, Seventh Trader. Inria, eighty years old, could not have made the trip herself.

When Lady Kalira had finished, Sterren nodded. “And here I am,” he agreed. “Now what do I do?”

“I would think that would be obvious, you’re to take command of the army and defend Semma.”

“Defend Semma?”

“Protect it from its enemies,” she explained.

“What enemies?”

“All enemies.”

“Semma has enemies?”

“Of course it does, idiot! Ksinallion, for one, and Ophkar, for another.”

Up until that moment, Sterren had entertained a vague hope that his unwanted new job would turn out to be a sinecure, with a title and pay and no duties. He suppressed a sigh of disappointment.

It came as especially bad news that both Semma’s larger neighbors were considered enemies, but at least, he told himself, he hadn’t arrived in the middle of a war.

“Do you think that... that a war may come soon?”

Lady Kalira grimaced. “Much too soon,” she said, “from the look of you, and what I’ve seen in the barracks of late.”

Had his knowledge of Semmat been good enough for the job, Sterren would have made a retort about being glad to relinquish his position as warlord, which he hadn’t asked for in the first place, if she thought someone else could do better.

Instead, he asked, “What do I do now? Today?”

“Well,” Lady Kalira said, looking about the chamber, “I suppose you’ll want to settle in here, maybe clean up a little. I’ll have Dogal fetch water and something to eat; I don’t suppose that you’ll want to come down for lunch. You’ll be expected to eat at the high table at dinner, of course, to talk to his Majesty and meet some of the people here, the princes and princesses, for example, but I think you can leave all that until dinner. For this afternoon, I would recommend that you take some time to learn the situation here, talk to your officers, maybe look over the barracks, that sort of thing. You’re the warlord; you must know more about it than I do.”

Astonished, Sterren said, “But I was never a warlord before!”

“It’s in your blood, isn’t it?”

“Not that I ever noticed,” Sterren replied.

Lady Kalira ignored that, as she turned to the doorway and called, “Dogal, go down to the kitchens and get wash water and something for Lord Sterren to eat, would you?”

Dogal bobbed his head. “Yes, my lady,” he said, and then quickly departed.

“Alder, here, will help you unpack, if you like,” she suggested.

Sterren nodded absently. Alder stepped into the room, carrying the bundle of possessions that Sterren had collected from his room back on Bargain Street. He deposited it upon the bed and began untying it.

“My officers, you said,” Sterren said. The phrase carried an impression of power and authority, and he felt a sudden surge of interest.

“Yes, of course,” Lady Kalira replied.

“I suppose I should meet them, talk to them.”

“Yes.”

The thought of all those stairs came to him, and he asked, “Could you send them up here?”

“Of course, Lord Sterren,” Lady Kalira said, with a faint bow.

The bow startled him. Lady Kalira noticed his surprise, and explained, “Lord Sterren, I think I really should tell you that as warlord, now that you have accepted the position and that the king has acknowledged you, you outrank me. In fact, you are now one of the highest-ranking nobles in Semma. Historically, the warlord and the foreign minister are equal in rank and second only to the king and his immediate family, with all others, steward, treasurer, trader, all of them, your inferiors.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Sterren mused on that for a while, wondering just what such an exalted rank would actually mean in terms of power, privilege, and responsibility. He almost forgot Lady Kalira was there until she reminded him.

“My lord?” she asked.

“Ah,” Sterren said, startled. “Yes?”

“Lord Sterren, I’m tired and hungry, too. If you have no more questions, may I have your leave to go?”

Startled anew, Sterren stammered. “Of course,” he managed at last.

Lady Kalira curtseyed, then turned.

“Send up my officers,” Sterren called, “when I’m done eating.”

He was sure she had heard him, but she said nothing as she slipped out of the room.

He stared after her for a moment.

The switch from her role as exasperated jailer to one of deferential subordinate was curiously unnerving. He was not accustomed to having anyone defer to him. He had always settled for simple tolerance, which was all a tavern gambler or street brat could reasonably ask.

There was something very seductive about the thought of a woman unable to leave his room until he granted permission. Admittedly, the aging and irritable Lady Kalira was not herself seductive in the least, but the idea of such power certainly had its appeal.

But it came with the job of warlord, with all the unknown hazards and duties that must surely imply. War meant swords and blood and death and killing, and he wanted no part of it.

But Semma had been at peace since twenty years before he was born. Maybe he could defend it without fighting any wars, as his immediate predecessor, the great-uncle he had never known, had.

“My lord,” Alder said, startling him from his muddled thoughts, “shall I hang this in the wardrobe?” He held up one of Sterren’s old tunics.

“Yes,” Sterren said. He took a sudden interest in his belongings, seeing that everything went somewhere appropriate, and that he knew how the room was arranged. It was becoming clear that, barring the unforeseen, he was going to be staying for quite some time.

He was unsure, now, whether that was good news or bad.

CHAPTER 6

He pushed away the plate and stood up. Alder looked up, startled, and began, “My lord-”

“Oh, go ahead and eat,” Sterren said crossly. He was already getting tired of the strange new deference paid him. Alder had just started to eat, but he was obviously ready to leap up and follow orders, should his warlord care to give any.

His warlord did not. His warlord was feeling very much out of place. His moods kept swinging back and forth. This room, and title, and rank were all very well, and could be a lot of fun, but they also seemed to be permanent and involuntary, which could be tiresome, quite aside from the accompanying responsibilities and risks. It was clear, despite the submissive gestures from Alder and Lady Kalira, that he was still something of a prisoner; if he tried to just walk out of the castle and head back toward Ethshar, he was quite sure that Alder or Dogal or both would follow him and probably stop him before he got out of the village.

And he was tired of seeing Alder and Dogal, after several days spent traveling in their close, very close, company.

At least Lady Kalira was gone, and he would be meeting other people soon.

Of course, that, too, had both its appealing and frightening aspects. These people were barbarians, not Ethsharites; he was sure that he was not what anybody expected in a warlord and he had no idea just how the Semmans might deal with his shortcomings. That mention of summary execution, back in the tavern on Bargain Street, had stayed with him, always somewhere in the back of his mind.

Dogal and Alder had eaten in turns, and Dogal was now guarding the door, keeping Sterren’s officers, who had arrived a moment earlier, waiting in the hall.

“Dogal,” Sterren called, “send them in.”

Dogal said nothing, but stepped aside and allowed the three waiting men to enter.

Each in turn stepped into the chamber, bowed, spoke, and then stepped aside to make room for the next.

“Anduron of Semma, Lord Sterren,” said the first, with a graceful bow and a jingle of jewelry. He was tall and sturdy, richly dressed in blue silk, perhaps thirty years old, certainly much older than Sterren. Like every Semman Sterren had yet seen, he was dark-haired and deeply tanned. Sterren thought he detected a family resemblance to the king.

He also detected, more definitely, a trace of scent, something vaguely flowery.

“Arl of the Strong Arm,” said the next, bobbing his head. He was shorter, but Sterren guessed his weight to be no less than Anduron’s, and his age was probably similar. He wore a red kilt and red-embroidered yellow tunic and smelled of nothing but leather and sweat.

“Shemder the Bold,” said the third, without ceremony. He fell between the others in height, but clearly weighed less than either of them, being thin and wiry, and was younger as well, surely no more than twenty-five, but still older than Sterren. His garb was similar to Arl’s, but more ornate and better kept, and Sterren could detect no odor at all.

These three were more or less displaying the forms of deference due a superior, but it was obvious they did not really feel any of the respect those forms implied.

Lady Kalira had been subtler in her contempt.

“I’m Sterren of Ethshar,” Sterren replied, bowing in his turn. He pronounced “Ethshar” correctly, refusing to yield to the Semman usage. After all, he thought resentfully, Semmat did use the th sound, just not in combination with sh.

“Your pardon, my lord,” said Anduron, “but would it not be more proper to call yourself Sterren, Ninth Warlord of Semma?”

Anduron’s words were smoothly spoken, and Sterren would have liked to make a graceful reply. His limited knowledge of the language forced him to make do with, “I guess you’re right. I’m still new at this.” He smiled, not very convincingly.

Behind him. Alder was hurriedly stuffing the last few bites of gravy-soaked bread into his mouth.

The three new arrivals stood stiffly silent for a moment.

“Lord Sterren,” Shemder said, finally, “you sent for us?”

“Yes,” Sterren said. “Of course. Sit down.” He waved at the chairs in the various corners. Alder was just getting up from the chair at the desk, and after an instant’s hesitation Sterren settled on the foot of the bed instead of trying to maneuver behind the soldier.

The officers obeyed, bringing the chairs to a rough semicircle. Once seated, they stared stonily at Sterren.

He took a deep breath and delivered his little speech, two of the longest sentences he had yet contrived in Semmat.

“I called you here because I am told I am a warlord now, whether I like it or not. I think I need to find out what that means, and what it is I am expected to do.”

The officers still stared silently.

“You aren’t making this easy,” Sterren said, blinking at them.

“Lord Sterren,” Shemder said, “you still haven’t told us what you want of us.”

“What I want,” Sterren said, “is to know what I, your warlord, am expected to do. I want you three to tell me.”

The three exchanged looks.

“My lord,” Shemder said, “it is not our place to tell you what to do. It is your job to tell us what to do.”

Sterren suppressed a sigh. Whether they resented the elevation of a stranger as their superior, or whether they were testing him somehow, or whether they were simply stupid or stubborn or unimaginative, Sterren had no way of knowing, but he could see plainly enough that his officers were not going to be a great deal of help.

At least, not at first. Perhaps they would adjust eventually.

“Lord Shemder-” he began.

“I am no lord,” Shemder interrupted.

Sterren acknowledged the correction with a nod and said, “Shemder, then, tell me your duties.”

“My duties. Lord Sterren?”

“Yes, your duties.” He hoped he hadn’t gotten the wrong word.

“I-have no duties at present, my lord; I am the commander of the Semman cavalry, not a mere guardsman.”

“Cavalry?” The word was unfamiliar.

“Cavalry.”

Sterren looked at Alder, who supplied, “Soldiers on horses.”

Sterren nodded, filing the word away. “Cavalry. Good. You’re the commander of the Semman cavalry. Do you have a particular title? Do I call you my lord, or commander?”

“Captain, my lord,” Shemder said grimly. “You call me Captain.” “Thank you. Captain Shemder. And Captain Arl, is it?”

“Yes, Lord Sterren.” Where Shemder had sounded barely tolerant of his new lord, Arl sounded resigned and despairing.

“Captain of what?”

“Infantry, my lord, foot soldiers.”

Sterren nodded politely, appreciative of Arl’s trace of cooperation in explaining an unfamiliar word without forcing Sterren to ask.

“And Captain Anduron?”

“Lord Anduron, my lord. I am your second in command, in charge of everything that Captain Arl and Captain Shemder are not, archers, the castle garrison, supply, and so forth.” He spoke with studied nonchalance, sprawling comfortably on his chair.

“Ah!” That sounded promising, especially once Alder and Lord Anduron between them had explained the unfamiliar words. Sterren wondered if he could palm off all his duties on Lord Anduron and leave himseif to enjoy his position as a figurehead. Lord Anduron had a look of cool competence about him that Sterren hoped was not mere affectation. “How many archers are there?” he asked.

Lord Anduron’s reply burst Sterren’s bubble instantly.

“None, at present,” he said calmly.

“None?”

“None. We’ve had no need of any for forty years, after all; archers aren’t particularly impressive in parades or display, and bowwood is expensive. Old Sterren, that is, your esteemed predecessor, the Eighth Warlord, allowed all the old archers to retire and left it to me, or my father before me, to replace them, and we didn’t trouble to do so. If we need archers, I’m sure we can find and train them quickly.”

“Ah.” Sterren tried to look wise and understanding, although he had missed several words and was fairly certain that training a competent archer took a good deal more time and effort than Lord Anduron thought, especially if there were no trained archers around to serve as teachers. “What about the castle... garrison? Is that the word?”

“My lord speaks Semmat like a native, of course,” Lord Anduron said. Shemder interrupted him with a quickly suppressed burst of derisive laughter. Lord Anduron cast him a cold glance, then went on, “The castle garrison, my lord, is composed of whoever happens to be inside the castle at the time of an attack.”

“I see, you mean the nobles, and the servants, and so on?”

“Why, no, Lord Sterren, of course not. One could hardly expect the nobility to soil their hands with the hauling about of gates and bars, or hurling-stones, and the servants will have their normal duties to perform. No, I mean whatever villagers reach the shelter of the castle walls in time.”

Sterren stared at Lord Anduron for a moment, then decided argument would do no good, most particularly in his limited Semmat. He turned his head and asked, “Captain Shemder, how many men and horses do you have?”

“Twenty men, my lord, and twelve horses,” Shemder replied promptly and proudly.

Sterren realized with a shock that his escort into the castle had been most of the cavalrymen in the entire kingdom, and all the cavalry’s horses.

“Captain Arl?”

“At present, Lord Sterren, I have sixty-five men and boys, all fully armed, well trained; and ready for anything.”

Sterren somehow doubted that the Semman infantry was ready for anything. What, he wondered, would they do in the face of an attack by the overlord of Ethshar of the Spices? Azrad VII had ten thousand men in his city guard alone. He could overwhelm Semma completely with a tenth of his soldiery, without calling on any of his more important resources, the militia, the navy, his magicians, the other two-thirds of the Ethsharitic triumvirate, and so on.

But these were the Small Kingdoms, and things were obviously different here. The three officers all seemed very confident, certainly, and they surely knew more of the situation than he, a foreigner, did.

Even so, eighty-five men and a few frightened refugees did not seem like a very large force for a castle the size of Semma’s.

“Lord Anduron,” he asked, “what about magic?”

The young nobleman looked puzzled. “What about magic, my lord?”

“What magicians do you command?”

“None, my lord; what would I have to do with magicians?”

“Are they infantry or cavalry, then?”

“No,” Arl said, as Shemder shook his head.

“Aren’t there any magicians in the castle, then?” Sterren asked, truly frightened.

The three officers stared at each other. It was Lord Anduron who spoke, finally, saying, “I suppose there might be one or two. Queen Ashassa keeps a theurgist about, Agor by name, and I’ve heard the servants chatter about a wizard among their number. The village has an herbalist or two, and a witch, I believe, but they aren’t in the castle. Lord Sterren, forgive me, but why do you ask?”

“Don’t you use magic... Isn’t it...” Sterren’s Semmat failed him momentarily. He took a deep breath and began again.

“In Ethshar,” he said, “Lord Azrad keeps the best magicians with him. They would use their... their magic, if the city were attacked. Ships carry magicians, to defend against... against other ships, which of course have their own magicians. No one would dare a big fight without magic.” He cursed himself and all of Semma for his lack of a correct title for Azrad, and the words for “spells,” “pirates,” and “battle.”

For several long seconds the room was absolutely silent. Then Shemder spat a word that Sterren had never heard before.

“Lord Sterren,” Lord Anduron said, “we do not use magic in war here.”

Lord Andyron’s tone was flat and final, but Sterren could not stop himself from shouting, “Why not?” In his thoughts, which were in Ethsharitic, his phrasing was a good bit more colorful.

“It isn’t done. It never has been.”

Sterren stared at him for a moment. “I see,” he said at last. He blinked and then said, “If you will forgive me, I am tired from my journey. I need to rest.” In truth, what he felt a need for was time to digest the situation. “Go now, and I will speak with you again later. Perhaps after dinner. I would like to... to look at the soldiers.”

“Review the troops?” Arl suggested.

“I think so,” Sterren agreed, nodding. He stood up.

The other three leaped up as well. Each in turn bowed, then left the room.

Lord Anduron bowed deeply and swept out; Arl bowed stiffly and marched out; Shemder bobbed his head and stalked out.

Sterren stared after them, then burst out, in Ethsharitic, “What a bunch of idiots!” He had been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in regard to the numbers and preparedness of their forces, but to so completely and arbitrarily rule out the use of magic in warfare was ridiculous! What would guard them against treachery? How could they know what the enemy was planning? Who would heal wounds? Sending soldiers out to fight with nothing but swords and shields was truly barbaric.

And most importantly, what would they ever do if they fought an enemy who did not bother with such scruples?

Obviously, they would lose, and lose quickly and decisively.

He could only hope that nothing like that happened while he was warlord. His duty, Lady Kalira had told him, was to defend Semma, but some things were indefensible.

An Ethsharitic obscenity escaped him.

“My lord?” Alder inquired, startled by the outburst.

“Nothing,” Sterren said, “It’s nothing.” His initial amazement at the idea of fighting a war without using magic was beginning to fade, and another thought struck him. “What was that that Shemder said, about using magic to fight?”

Uncomfortably, Alder asked, “You mean that word, gakhar?” He shifted uneasily.

“Yes, that’s it.” Sterren saw Alder’s discomfort, but declined to let him off the hook; he stared inquiringly.

Reluctantly, Alder said, “It means a... a person of no culture, a person not fit to be among ordinary people.”

Sterren considered that, then stared after the vanished Shemder the Bold.

“You mean he called me a barbarian?” Sterren was dumbfounded. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream with rage at the unbelievable insult of being called a barbarian by people such as these, but after a moment laughter won out.

Alder stared at him, puzzled and amused, but not particularly displeased with his new warlord.

CHAPTER 7

The clothes in the wardrobe did not fit him; Sterren, Eighth Warlord had obviously been considerably larger than was Sterren, Ninth Warlord. Not that he had been anything like Alder or Dogal, but he surely had the advantage of a few inches over his great-nephew, both in height and circumference.

Even so, Sterren thought that he would do better to wear something from the wardrobe, belted up tight, than to try to get any more use out of his own tattered garments. He was to eat dinner with the king, at the High Table, and he had not a single tunic left that had neither patches nor major stains.

Furthermore, he saw that all his clothes were cut differently from the prevailing mode in Semma. The local style was looser, more flowing, but with more fancywork to it.

He picked out an elegant black silk tunic embroidered in gold, and a pair of black leather breeches, black seemed to be the predominant color in the collection, and he guessed it had something to do with the office he held. It seemed an appropriate color for a warlord.

Of course, it might just be that his great-uncle had liked the dramatic, or maybe he had a morbid streak, but in any case, black clothes might not look quite so oversized on him.

He would, he thought with a sigh, have to alter all the clothes, take them in to fit him.

No, he wouldn’t, he corrected himself, brightening up; he was an aristocrat now! He could find a servant to do that. The castle probably had a tailor somewhere.

He pulled the tunic over his head and looked in the flaking, yellowed mirror that hung in the back of the wardrobe.

He shuddered. The tunic almost reached his knees; he looked like a little boy.

He pulled on the breeches, then began adjusting belts and fabric.

By tucking in the top of the breeches and folding under the cuff on each leg, he was able to make them fit, though they were still rather baggy in spots. The tunic was less cooperative, but he finally contrived an arrangement of two belts, one under and one over, that pulled the hem up to a height he could live with. The embroidered sleeves he had to roll up.

He was studying his appearance critically when someone knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” he called, unthinkingly using Ethsharitic.

“What?” someone answered in Semmat. The voice was female, young and female.

“Sorry,” he called, switching to Semmat as he adjusted his belts. “Who is it?” “The Princess Lura, Lord Sterren,” Alder’s voice replied.

Sterren whirled around and stared at the door. A princess? He glanced down at himself.

He looked foolish, he knew, but he would have to face this soon enough. He pursed his lips and decided not to put off the inevitable. “Come in,” he called.

The door swung open and Sterren looked up to see who was there, but at first he saw no one. Then he let his gaze drop.

“Hello,” Princess Lura said, smiling up at him. “You look funny in those clothes; don’t you have any that fit?”

Sterren was not particularly fond of children, but Lura, whom he guessed to be no more than nine, at the most, had an irresistible grin.

Besides, she was a princess. He smiled back, and it was only slightly forced.

“No,” he said, “I’m afraid I don’t. The clothes I brought with me are all worn out.”

“Can’t you get new ones?” she demanded.

“I haven’t had time,” he explained.

“Oh, I guess not.” Her gaze dropped for a moment, and an awkward silence fell, to be quickly broken when she raised her eyes again and said, “I wanted to meet you. I never met anybody from Ethshar before.”

Sterren noticed that she pronounced “Ethshar” correctly, even when speaking Semmat, and nodded approvingly. “I can understand that,” he said. “I must seem... um... I must be like... I guess you haven’t.” His Semmat vocabulary had failed him again. He hastened to cover over his slip. “I never met a princess before.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said.

“Not even back in Ethshar?”

“Not even in Ethshar. There’s only one princess in all of Ethshar of the Spices, and I never met her.”

Actually, technically, there were no “princesses” at all, but Azrad VII’s sister, Imra the Unfortunate, was a reasonably close approximation. Sterren had no idea what her correct title would be in Semmat; in Ethsharitic she was simply Lady Imra.

“Oh, we have lots of princesses here!” Lura announced proudly. “There’s me, of course, and my sisters — Ashassa doesn’t live here any more, she’s in Kalithon with her husband Prince Tabar — but there’s Nissitha and Shirrin, still. And there’s my Aunt Sanda. That’s four of us, not counting Ashassa.”

Sterren nodded. “Four’s a good number, I guess,” he said, smiling foolishly.

Lura’s expression suddenly turned suspicious. “I’m not a baby, you know,” she said. “You don’t have to play along with me.”

“I’m sorry,” Sterren said, dropping the false smile, “I didn’t mean to... to do as if you were a baby. Um... how old are you?” He looked a little more closely at her face. He could not tell her age with any certainty, but he noticed a resemblance to her father, the king.

“Seven,” she said. “I’ll be eight in Icebound. The ninth of Icebound.”

“I was born on the eighth of Thaw, myself,” Sterren said.

Lura nodded and another awkward silence fell. The two of them stood there, looking at each other or glancing around the room, until Sterren, desperately, said, “So you just wanted to meet me because I’m from Ethshar?”

“Well, mostly. And you are the new warlord, so I guess you’re important. Everybody else wants to meet you, too, but they didn’t come up here, I did. My sister Shirrin was scared to, and Nissitha says she doesn’t have time for such foolishness, but she’s just trying to act grown-up. She’s twenty-one and not even betrothed yet, so I don’t know why she’s so proud of herself!”

Sterren nodded. Lura obviously loved to talk, another resemblance to her father, he thought. He wondered if he had finally found someone who would tell him everything he wanted to know about Semma Castle and its inhabitants; certainly, Lura wasn’t reticent.

On the other hand, how much would she actually know? Gossip about her sisters was one thing; a warlord’s duties were quite another.

“Are you really a warlord?” she asked, breaking his chain of thought.

“So they tell me,” he said.

“Have you killed a lot of people?”

Sterren shuddered. “I’ve never killed anyone,” he said, emphatically.

“Oh.” Lura was clearly disappointed by this revelation. She did not let that slow her for long, however.

“What’s it like in Ethshar?” she asked.

Involuntarily, Sterren glanced out the broad windows at the endless plains to the north. “Crowded,” he said. He pointed out the window. “Imagine,” he said, “that you were on the top of the tower at Westgate, looking east across the city. The eastern wall would be halfway to the... to where the sun comes up, and everything in between would be streets and shops and houses, all crowded inside the walls.” He didn’t know any word for “horizon,” and hoped Lura would understand what he meant.

Lura looked out the window and asked, “What about farms?”

“Outside the walls, never inside.”

She looked skeptical, and he saw no point in arguing about it. “You asked,” he said with a shrug.

She shrugged in reply. “You’re right,” she said, “I did. When are you coming downstairs? Everybody’s waiting to meet you.”

“They are?”

“Well, of course they are, silly! Come on, right now; I know Shirrin wants to meet you, especially.”

“She does?” Even when he remembered who Shirrin was — one of Lura’s sisters, and therefore a princess — Sterren could not imagine why she would particularly want to meet him.

“Yes, she does. Come on!”

Sterren glanced helplessly around at the room. He had no idea what his position was relative to this little terror of a princess; certainly, she must outrank him, but would her youth affect her authority to order him about?

He couldn’t be sure of that. Reluctantly, he followed her as she marched out of the room.

Once in the hallway. Alder and Dogal fell in step behind him, and together the four of them tramped down the six nights of stairs to the door of the throne room. He stopped there to catch his breath while Lura waited impatiently.

They did not enter the throne room, but turned aside at the last moment and headed down a short corridor and through an unmarked door of age-darkened oak. Beyond was an antechamber, paneled in smoke-stained wood and furnished with heavy velvet-upholstered benches; Lura led Sterren directly through this and on through another door.

This gave into a sunny little sitting room, and as Sterren entered, Lura leading him by the hand, he glimpsed the inhabitants leaping to their feet.

He found himself facing two women and a girl a few years younger than himself, all richly dressed, all standing and staring at him.

“Shirrin, look who I found!” Lura announced.

The girl blushed bright red and glanced about as if looking for some way to escape. Seeing none, she stared defiantly back at Sterren, her cheeks crimson.

The older woman looked reprovingly at Sterren’s guide. “Lura,” she said, “watch your manners.”

The younger woman simply stood, silently gazing down her nose at Sterren. It was quite obvious that she had noticed his attire and didn’t think much of it.

Or maybe she didn’t think much of him in any case; Sterren couldn’t be sure. He had the distinct impression, however, that the woman would have sniffed with disdain if sniffing were not perhaps a trifle vulgar. He smiled politely.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Sterren of Ethshar, Sterren Ninth Warlord, they call me.”

“My lord Sterren,” the older woman said, smiling in return, “what a pleasure to meet you! I’m Ashassa, formerly of Thanoria, and these are my daughters, Nissitha,” with a nod toward the younger woman, “and Shirrin,” with a nod toward the blushing girl. “Lura you have already met, I take it.”

“Yes,” Sterren said, “she introduced herself.” He realized, with a twinge of dismay, that he was speaking to the Queen of Semma, and had presumably just come barging into the royal family’s private quarters.

At that thought, he glanced around quickly.

The room was pleasant enough; a floor of square-cut white stone was partly covered by bright-hued carpets, and white-painted paneling covered the walls on three sides. The fourth side was mostly window, the glass panes arranged in ornate floral patterns and the leading picked out with red and white paint. Several couches stood handy, all covered in red velvet, and a few small tables of white marble and black iron were scattered about.

Nothing was extraordinarily luxurious, however. Sterren had seen rooms of similar size and appointments, though never in any style quite like this one, back in Ethshar.

The queen was nodding. “I’m afraid Lura can be somewhat impetuous,” she said. “Of course, we’ve all been looking forward to meeting you, our long-lost cousin.”

“A very distant cousin, of course,” Nissitha interjected, with a meaningful glance at Sterren’s tunic.

“Lura said that you wanted to meet me,” Sterren acknowledged. “She mentioned Shirrin in particular, thought I don’t-”

He was interrupted by a shriek from Princess Shirrin. The red had faded somewhat from her cheeks, but now it flooded back more brightly than ever, and she turned and ran from the room.

Sterren stared after her, astonished.

Lura burst into giggles. Nissitha stared down at her youngest sister in clear disgust. The queen’s expression shifted to polite dismay.

“Did I say something wrong?” Sterren asked, hoping he hadn’t just condemned himself to a dungeon or worse.

“Oh, no,” Queen Ashassa reassured him, “or at least, not really. It’s Lura’s doing. And of course, Shirrin’s being foolish, too. She’s thirteen, you know, a very sensitive age, and Lura’s doing her best to embarrass her. Don’t let it worry you.” She turned to Lura and said sternly, “Lura, you go apologize to your sister!”

Lura’s giggling suddenly stopped. “For what?” she demanded, “I didn’t do anything!”

“Do as I say!” the queen thundered, pointing.

Lura knew better than to argue any further; she marched off after Shirrin.

“I’m sorry, my lord,” the queen said when Lura had closed the door behind her. “Those girls love to tease each other. You see, Shirrin’s all full of romantic stories about Ethshar and warlords and lost heirs ever since our theurgist, Agor, first told us about you, and Lura’s been making fun of her for it.”

“Silly things,” Nissitha remarked. “Getting worked up over nothing!”

Sterren was at a loss for a reply. “Ah,” he said.

“Well, then, my lord,” Queen Ashassa said, “as long as you’re here, Lura was quite right, we’ve all been eager to meet you and talk with you. You must understand, none of us have ever been more than a few leagues from this castle; my ancestral home in Thanoria is only six leagues or so, and that’s the furthest any of us has traveled. Ethshar seems unspeakably exotic. Do sit down and tell us something about it!”

Sterren glanced at his guards, but Dogal and Alder were being steadfastly silent. Seeing no polite way to refuse, he reluctantly and delicately seated himself on one of the velvet couches, while Queen Ashassa and Princess Nissitha settled onto others, and asked, “What can I tell you?”

Princess Nissitha’s expression plainly said that he couldn’t tell her anything at all, but Queen Ashassa asked, her tone sincerely interested, “Is it true the city of Ethshar is so large that you can’t see from one end to the other?”

“Well,” Sterren said, considering the question, “It would depend where you were standing. I suppose from atop the... the lord’s castle you could see the city walls on both sides. But mostly, it’s true.”

The overlord’s palace was not really a castle, but his limited Semman vocabulary did not include a more suitable term.

The queen asked more questions, and Sterren did his best to answer; gradually, as the topics ranged from the city’s size to the recently-begun overlordship of Azrad VII to wizards and other magicians, Sterren found himself relaxing and enjoying the conversation. Queen Ashassa, despite her royal title, was a pleasant enough person.

Princess Nissitha never said a word and eventually rose and glided haughtily away.

After a time, a servant entered quietly and announced that dinner was ready. Queen Ashassa rose, and for a moment Sterren thought she was going to offer her arm, to be escorted in to the meal, as he had seen ladies do in Ethshar.

Either Semman etiquette was different, or the difference in their stations as queen and warlord was too great; Ashassa marched off on her own, leaving Sterren to follow in her wake.

The dining hall, Sterren discovered, was the throne room where the king had first received him. Trestle tables had been set up and covered with white linen, and chairs brought from somewhere to line either side. A smaller table stood upon the dais, crossing the T, with a dozen chairs behind it.

As yet, almost all the chairs were still unoccupied.

Queen Ashassa took a seat at the high-table, near the center; Sterren, recognizing that the high table was a position of special honor, guessed that it was reserved for the royal family and headed for a seat at one of the long tables.

A servant caught his elbow.

“My lord,” the servant whispered, “you sit on the king’s right.” He pointed to the high table, indicating a chair two spaces over from the queen’s.

Sterren froze, suddenly overcome with fright at the idea of sitting up there and eating in full view of dozens, maybe hundreds of people, in his ill-fitting clothes, with his simple Ethsharitic manners that were surely foreign to these barbarians with their noble trappings. The servant pushed gently at his elbow, and, reluctantly, he allowed himself to be prodded forward, up the steps onto the dais.

He seized control of his dignity, once he reached the top step, and marched on to his place unaided.

The princesses, he saw, were taking their seats on the queen’s side of the table, to his left. To his right, a young man of roughly his own age and with a resemblance to the royal family took a seat two places over. Another, perhaps a year younger, took the seat just beyond that. A mutter of conversation filled the room, but Sterren, with his still-poor grasp of Semmat, could not catch any of it.

Then the king entered, followed by an entourage of soldiers and courtiers. Silence fell. Everyone who had been seated rose; Sterren followed suit a bit tardily. The courtiers gradually peeled away from the group and found seats at the long table as the party progressed up the length of the hall, but they remained standing by their chairs.

King Phenvel reached his place and sat, and his guards took up unobtrusive positions along the back wall. He nodded politely, and the rest of the company sat as well. That was the sign for the meal to begin, and the low mutter of conversation resumed. It quickly built up to considerably more than a mutter, punctuated by the occasional clash of cutlery as diners sorted out their table-ware.

The knives and forks appeared to be silver, and Sterren wondered what they were worth.

As yet, he had nothing to eat with them, so he let his own implements lie undisturbed on the tablecloth.

The noise level was roughly that of a busy but well-behaved tavern, and Sterren found that somewhat startling. He had somehow expected a roomful of aristocrats to eat in dignified silence.

That, he realized, was foolish. People were people, regardless of titles.

Other people continued to drift in and take seats as the king exchanged a few pleasantries with the queen. Sterren looked about the room, feeling a little lost.

A middle-aged man sat down to Sterren’s right and smiled at him.

“Hello,” he said, “I’m Algarven, Eighth Kai’takhe.”

“Eighth what?” Sterren asked before he could catch himself.

“Kai’takhe... Oh, you don’t know the word, do you? Let me think.” The fellow blinked twice, frowning, then smiled again, and said, in Ethsharitic, “Steward!”

“You speak Ethsharitic?” Sterren asked eagerly, in Ethsharitic.

Algarven smiled. “No, no,” he said in Semmat, “just a few words.”

“Oh,” Sterren said, disappointed.

He suddenly remembered his manners and introduced himself.

“Oh, we all know who you are,” Algarven assured him.

Somehow, Sterren did not find that reassuring.

“Here, let me tell you who everybody is,” Algarven said. He began pointing.

“You know the king and queen, of course. There to the queen’s left is the treasurer, Adrean.”

Adrean was a plump man of perhaps fifty, making him a decade or so older than Algarven; he wore a heavy gold chain around his neck, and his tunic was an unusually ugly shade of purple.

“Beyond him, that’s old Inria, our Trader. If she were a little younger, she’d have been the one to go and fetch you.”

Inria was an ancient, toothless hag, wearing black velvet and grinning out at the inhabitants of the hall.

“And then there are the three princesses, Nissitha, Shirrin, and Lura...”

“I met them this afternoon,” Sterren remarked.

“Ah! And did you meet the princes?” Algarven turned to the other side and gestured at the four youths there, ranging in age from a young man of perhaps eighteen to a boy of ten or eleven.

“No,” Sterren admitted.

“We have here Phenvel the Younger, heir to the throne, and his brothers Tendel, Rayel, and Dereth.”

“A fine family,” Sterren said.

“The king certainly hasn’t shirked his duty in providing heirs, has he?” Algarven agreed. “And his father didn’t, either; down there at the first table, those three on the end here, that’s the elder Prince Rayel, and Prince Alder, the king’s brothers, and his sister. Princess Sanda. Another brother, the elder Tendel, got himself killed seven years ago in a duel.”

“Ah.” Sterren could not think of anything further to say and was saved from the necessity of inventing something by the sudden arrival of servants bearing trays of food, breads, fruits, meats, and cheeses.

From then on, the meal was simply another meal; Sterren forgot his exposed position on the dais, forgot his improvised garb, and set about filling his belly.

Between bites he continued to make polite conversation with both the steward Algarven and King Phenvel himself, but this largely consisted of simple questions and required little thought. Any time he found himself at a loss for words he simply reached for another orange or buttered a roll.

By the end of the meal he felt fairly comfortable with the royal family and his fellow lords. They were, after all, just people, despite the titles, and he was one of them.

When he reflected on this, he was amazed at himself for accepting his situation so readily.

CHAPTER 8

The barracks adjoining the castle gate was reasonably tidy, but Sterren would not have applied the word “clean” to it. The cracks between the stones of the floor were filled with accumulated black gunk, and cobwebs dangled unmolested in the less-accessible corners of the ceiling. Various stains were visible on the whitewashed walls; some of them, particularly those near the floor, were very unappetizing.

He had certainly seen worse, though; his own room, back on Bargain Street, had been only marginally better.

His belly was pleasantly full, and his head very slightly aswim with wine, and he decided not to pick nits.

He had come directly from the dining hall out to the walls to make this inspection of his troops and their lodging, so as to get it over with. His main purpose, he reminded himself, was to see what sort of men he was supposed to command, not to criticize anybody’s house-keeping.

But still, it seemed to him that a really first-rate group of soldiers would keep their quarters in better shape.

He did not bother to look in the cabinets or kit bags at each station, nor under the narrow beds. He would not have known what to look for, and besides, it seemed like an invasion of the soldiers’ privacy. He glanced at the bunks, each with one blanket pulled taut and another rolled up to serve as a pillow, and could see nothing to comment on.

He walked on through to the armory, where a fine assortment of weapons adorned the walls and various racks. He reached out at random and picked up a sword.

It came away from the rack only reluctantly and left a little wad of rust behind. The area of blade that had been hidden by the wooden brackets was nothing but a few flakes of dull brown rust, and the leather wrapping on the hilt cracked in his grasp. Gray dust swirled up, and he sneezed.

Behind him, he heard some of his men shuffling their feet in embarrassment. He carefully placed the sword back on the rack.

He should, he knew, reprimand somebody for the incredibly poor condition of the sword, but he was unsure who, specifically, to address. Furthermore, even if he was the warlord, he was also a foreigner and a mere youth and not even particularly large. The soldiers were all considerably older and larger than himself. He knew that his title should give him sufficient authority to berate them all despite being so thoroughly outweighed and outnumbered, but he could not find the courage to test that theory.

Maybe later, he told himself, when he had settled in a bit more, he could do something about it.

Even as he thought it, he was slightly ashamed of his cowardice.

“My lord,” someone said, “these are the weapons we use for practice.” A hand indicated a rack near the door.

Sterren picked up another sword. This one was in far better shape, without a spot of rust, the grip soft and supple, but the blade, he saw, was dull.

Well, it was only a practice blade. You wouldn’t want to kill anyone in mere practice, would you? he asked himself. He nodded and returned the weapon to its place.

He wished he knew more about swords and other weapons. He had no idea what to check for.

The rust, however, was obviously a very bad sign.

He turned back to face his men.

All of them, as he had noticed before, were larger than himself, but not all were mountains of muscle like his personal escorts, Alder and Dogal. In fact, the majority seemed to be pot-bellied or otherwise running to fat. He mentally compared them to the city guards he had seen back in Ethshar, strolling the streets to keep the peace, or rousting the beggars from Wall Street, or carousing in the taverns.

The Royal Army of Semma did not fare well in the comparison. Ethshar’s guardsmen came in all sizes, but they all had a certain toughness that this oversized bunch did not display. Guardsmen might be fat, but they were never soft.

Much of Semma’s soldiery looked soft.

Sterren suppressed a shrug. Things were different here. Whatever duties these men had, they obviously didn’t require the sort of ruggedness that was needed to maintain order in the world’s largest, richest, and rowdiest city.

Alder had told him that Semma had been at peace for more than forty years; Sterren hoped that was not about to change.

If it did, though, and all he had to fight with was this pitiful handful of men, well, Semma wasn’t his homeland. He could always surrender.

Couldn’t he? It occurred to him that he had no idea what the customs were in the Small Kingdoms regarding prisoners of war.

He walked from the armory back into the barracks and noticed something he had missed before. One of the bunks had been moved. It had been shoved up against a wall, so that the space between that bunk and the next was twice the space between any other two. As further confirmation, half the floor in the widened space was cleaner and lighter than the rest of the barracks floor.

His curiosity was piqued. “You,” he said to the nearest soldier, “slide that bunk out from the wall, would you?”

The soldier glanced at his mates, who all somehow managed to be looking in other directions.

“Come on,” Sterren said, using the phrase Lady Kalira had used when urging her horse onward.

The soldier stepped forward, moving slowly as if hoping for some miraculous reprieve, and pulled the bunk out, back to its original position.

In doing so, he uncovered several lines of chalk drawn onto the dirty planks.

Sterren recognized the lines immediately and grinned. He suddenly saw that he had something in common with these oversized barbarians.

“Three-bone?” he asked, in Ethsharitic.

The soldiers looked blank, and he puzzled out a Semman equivalent and tried that.

One soldier shook his head and replied, “No, double flash.”

His companions glared at him, too late to hush him. Sterren waved their displeasure aside. “What stakes?” he asked. “And do you pass on the first loss or the second?” He had picked the word for gambling stakes up from Dogal during the journey from Ethshar. Double flash was not his favorite dice game, by any means, he would greatly have preferred three-bone, but it was certainly better than nothing.

A friendly game was just what he needed to help him feel at home.

It would also serve nicely to get to know some of his men and perhaps to build up a little money that the other nobles would know nothing about. That could be very useful if he ever decided to leave.

He still had his purse, and the winnings from his last night in Ethshar. He pulled out a silver bit. “Will this buy me a throw?”

Feet shuffled, and someone coughed.

“Well, actually, my lord...”

“For now, just call me Sterren, all right?”

“Yes, my lord. Ah... Sterren. We usually play for copper.” “Good enough; can someone make change? And who’s got the dice?”

Coins and dice emerged from pockets and purses, and a moment later Sterren and three soldiers were crouched around the chalked diagram, tossing copper bits into the various betting slots. Any further inspection was forgotten.

When the dice were passed, Sterren felt the familiar thrill of competition, but the sense of calm oneness with the dice that he usually felt was absent. He dismissed it as an effect of the unfamiliar surroundings and proceeded to throw a deuce, losing his turn.

It was well after midnight when Sterren wearily climbed back up to his room in the tower. His purse was lighter by several silver bits, the equivalent of over a hundred coppers. His luck had been consistently bad.

Whatever talent or charm had kept him alive and solvent in the taverns of Ethshar obviously had not worked in this alien place.

He wondered, as he hauled himself up the dimly lit stairs, if it would ever work again. If it didn’t, he would have to give up dice for good.

Now, that was a really terrible thought!

He thrust it aside as he reached the top and saw Alder standing by the door of his room. As he walked down the short stretch of corridor and into his room he ran over the rest of the day in his mind.

It had certainly been an eventful one.

He hoped he never had another like it.

Alder opened the door and followed him into the room. As Sterren stood yawning, the big soldier lit a candle on the desk and stood awaiting orders.

CHAPTER 9

Sterren stretched, thought for a moment, and then shooed Alder out. When the door had closed behind Alder’s back he took a moment to make sure all his belongings were stashed where he could find them. That done, he lay down on the great canopied bed and tried to sleep.

His blood was still pumping hard from the excitement of the game, the shock of losing so badly, and the long climb up the stairs from the barracks, all coming at the end of an extraordinarily long and bewildering day; sleep was slow in coming. He was still lying awake when he heard a quiet knock on his door.

“What is it?” he called.

The door opened partway, and Alder stuck his head in.

“There’s someone here who wants to see you.” Alder said apologetically. “He says he has business with you.”

“At this hour?”

Alder explained, “He’s been stopping by regularly all evening, but you weren’t in before.”

That was true enough. “All right,” Sterren said, “what kind of business?”

“He won’t say. Something about settling an account your great-uncle left, I think.”

“Settling an account?” That did not sound encouraging at all. “Who is it?”

Alder considered before replying, “He’s a traveling merchant, I think, if that’s not too grand a word for him. He deals in trinkets and whatnot. I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him before. He really did deal with the old warlord.”

“Trinkets?”

Alder explained, “This and that. Little things.”

Sterren considered telling Alder to get rid of this uninvited visitor, but his curiosity got the better of him; what had the old warlord had to do with a traveling dealer in trinkets? Why was the merchant so eager to see him that he had not been able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and leave the business, whatever it was, until morning? “Send him in,” he called, as he sat up on the bed.

Alder ducked back out of sight, and a moment later another man slipped in through the half-open door, then carefully closed it securely behind him.

He was short and dark, his hair graying, and he looked as if he had been fat once, but was not eating well lately. He wore a greasy brown tunic and even greasier gray breeches; his boots were well made and also well worn. Despite his clothing, his face and hair were clean, and he had no objectionable odor.

After closing the door he checked the latch carefully, then turned and made a polite but perfunctory bow.

“Hello, Lord Sterren,” he said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m called Lar Samber’s son. As your guard said, I’m a dealer in trinkets and oddities, and the occasional love charm or poison.”

Sterren nodded an acknowledgment, but before he could say anything, Lar continued, “And I’m sure you’re wondering what old Sterren had to do with me, and what this account is I want to settle. That wasn’t really my reason for coming here. I have another business besides my trading, you see, or rather, I trade in a product less tangible, but more important, than beads, and gewgaws. Your great-uncle was my only customer and the only person who knew about it.” He paused, eyeing Sterren, his face curiously expressionless.

Sterren nodded expectantly. “Go on,” he said.

Lar hesitated for the first time.

“I don’t know you,” he said.

“I don’t know you, either,” Sterren pointed out.

Lar nodded slowly. “True enough, and it’s not as if I have a choice.” The merchant hesitated again, but only briefly. “I’m your chief spy,” he burst out hurriedly. “I deal in information. Naturally, this is a secret, one that your great-uncle kept well; nobody else in Semma ever knew, until now. I’m trusting you with my life, my lord, by telling you this.”

His face remained oddly blank even as he said this; if he felt any great anxiety over the risk he was taking, it did not show.

Sterren puzzled over the word “spy” for a moment, then smiled and pointed to a chair. “Sit down,” he said, “and tell me about it.”

Lar’s face did not change as he took a seat, but Sterren was sure he was relieved.

He was relieved himself; it was good to know that his predecessor had even had spies, and had not relied entirely on his three officers and their men.

A thought occurred to him; Lar was a traveler and a dealer in information. “Do you speak Ethsharitic?” he asked.

Startled, Lar admitted, “Some. Not much. Mostly I speak Ophkaritic, Ksinallionese, Thanorian, and Trader’s Tongue.”

Sterren had never even heard of Thanorian, but he didn’t let that worry him. Instead, he burst out with a string of questions in his native tongue.

Lar had to repeatedly ask him to slow down, and several times the conversation switched back into Semmat for a time, or slipped into a pidgin of the two languages that they improvised on the spot. Even so, Sterren was able to communicate more freely than he had in days.

Unfortunately, what Lar had to communicate was not encouraging.

Both Ophkar and Ksinallion were planning to invade Semma.

Somehow, although he had been trying to convince himself war was unlikely, this news did not really surprise Sterren at all.

This impending invasion was not really a secret; in fact, the suspicion that it was being planned had been responsible for the urgency of Lady Kalira’s mission to Ethshar. The aristocrats of Semma were confident that they could survive a war, if they had a warlord.

So they had sent for Sterren.

Lar, however, did not stop his revelations at the mere fact of the coming war; he went on to detail the reasons for it, and also the reasons it had not yet begun. The underlying reasons were simple enough: Ophkar and Ksinallion both wanted Semma’s land and wealth and people. For three hundred years, Ophkar and Ksinallion had been bitter enemies; they had fought six wars in that time. In the first, Ophkar had captured the Ksinallionese province of Semma; in the second, Ksinallion won it back. It was during the Third Ophkar-Ksinallion war, in 5002, that Semma, under Tendel the Great, had rebelled against the cruel yoke of Ksinallion and asserted its independence, siding with Ophkar and leading to an Ophkarite victory.

Five years later, when Tendel died, Ophkar invaded Semma and attempted to annex it. Semma survived by enlisting Ksinallion’s aid.

From then on, Semma’s policy was to maintain a balance of power between Ophkar and Ksinallion by siding with whoever was weaker at any given time, playing the two off against each other in order to maintain its independence. Tendel’s son and heir, Rayel the Tenacious, had understood that; it was only when he was old and ill that matters had gotten out of hand, and a war with Ksinallion resulted in 5026. His successor, Tendel II, known as Tendel the Gentle, reigned for twenty-two years without ever letting the balance slip.

He was followed by Rayel the Fool, who only lasted nine years, six of them spent fighting Ophkar — and losing.

Phenvel I, also called Phenvel the Fat, had done much better; no wars were fought during his twenty-one years on the throne.

The idea of the balancing policy was beginning to fade, though, as the kings of Semma forgot how precarious their position actually was; Phenvel II, Phenvel the Warrior, fought Ophkar for seven years of his seventeen. Admittedly, he won, the only time Semma ever single-handedly defeated Ophkar, but seven years of war could not have been pleasant. Many stories of the horrors of that Third Ophkar-Semma War were still told.

And the resulting weakness was largely responsible for Ksinallion’s victory over Semma in the Third Ksinallion-Semma War, during the reign of Rayel III. He earned the name Rayel the Patient by waiting eleven years, carefully building up his forces and waiting until the time was right, before he launched his counterattack and won the Fourth Ksinallion-Semma War.

Even that victory was probably a mistake; it laid the groundwork for the disastrous defeat Rayel IV suffered in 5150, in the Fifth Ksinallion-Semma War. Only Ophkar’s threat to come in on Semma’s side had prevented Ksinallion from annexing Semma outright.

That was Rayel the Tall; he was followed by Rayel V, Rayel the Handsome, whose death brought about the negotiated peace at the end of the Sixth Ksinallion-Semma War, establishing the present borders. That had also been the Sixth Ophkar-Ksinallion War.

Tendel III had been called Tendel the Diplomat because he managed to talk his way out of war several times in his twenty-four year reign; he was an expert at playing Ophkar and Ksinallion off against each other, even bringing in their other neighbors: Skaia, Thanoria, Enmurinon, Kalithon, even little Nushasia, far to the north, at Ksinallion’s farthest extreme. None of those bordered on Semma, but the threat of a two-front war was surprisingly effective. Ophkar had no desire to fight Skaia or Enmurinon; Ksinallion preferred peace with Kalithon and Nushasia; and Thanoria served as a threat to both.

But then Tendel III died, in 5199, and his son Phenvel III came to the throne.

Lar hesitated to characterize his sovereign unfavorably, but from his mutterings about inbreeding and “other interests” it was plain to Sterren that the merchant considered the king an idiot.

Fortunately, Phenvel III had retained the services of a few people who were not idiots, notably Sterren, Seventh Warlord, and Sterren, Eighth Warlord. Father and son had kept up the policies of Tendel III, using diplomacy, threats, saboteurs, and whatever else was necessary to keep peace.

King Phenvel had made this difficult, with his arbitrary insults directed at both his larger neighbors. When Prince Elken of Ophkar asked for the hand of Princess Ashassa the Younger, Phenvel had instead sent her to Prince Tabar of Kalithon. When King Corinal II of Ksinallion offered a treaty on trade routes, Phenvel had first ignored it, then sent an envoy to Ophkar asking if they cared to make a better offer. When a secret envoy came from Ophkar to discuss the possibility of war with Ksinallion, Phenvel publicly announced the whole affair; when Ophkar reacted with protests and Ksinallion offered an alliance, Phenvel had dismissed the whole thing as a foolish joke.

There had been other incidents, as well, and now, for the first time in three hundred years, Ophkar and Ksinallion had arranged an alliance against Semma, considering Phenvel III a mutual foe.

While they lived, the warlords had prevented such an alliance, but with the death of the Eighth Warlord, all the elaborate network of checks and treaties had collapsed. Enmurinon and Kalithon and Thanoria and Nushasia and Skaia were no longer involved; despite the web of inter-marriages that had allied them to Semma, they all refused to make any further promises. Phenvel’s mother had come from Enmurinon, his wife from Thanoria; a daughter was a princess in Kalithon, and an aunt had been queen in Nushasia. Still, Semma was on its own. Phenvel had somehow offended every single one of his foreign relatives.

Sterren’s spirits sank steadily as he listened to all this.

“Why aren’t the Ophkaritic and Ksinallionese armies already here?” he asked.

Lar sighed and explained that the only reason the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion had not yet invaded was that they were still settling how the booty and conquered territory were to be divided. Lar and his like, he employed several people himself, and was fairly sure that old Sterren, Eighth Warlord, had some others in his own employ, had done their best to delay these negotiations, bringing up potential difficulties, picking at nits, losing messages, and so forth, and had managed to hold things off this long. The coming winter rains would presumably provide another short breathing space, but in the spring both armies would surely march.

And it was Sterren’s job, as warlord, to hold them off indefinitely, or if possible to defeat them outright.

“How am I supposed to do that?” Sterren demanded.

Lar shrugged. “I wish I knew,” he replied, “I really do.”

CHAPTER 10

As usual, the off-duty soldiers were playing dice in a corner of the barracks. Sterren sighed at the sight.

His dismay was partly due to the fact that despite his best attempts at speech making, his repeated talks about how important it was that Semma’s chosen defenders do all they could to get themselves ready to fight had obviously had no effect on how his men spent their leisure time.

It was also due, however, to the knowledge that he didn’t dare join the game. Since arriving in Semma, his once-notorious luck at dice had deserted him completely.

He had been embarrassed to discover that without that edge, he was actually a very poor gambler. Whenever he played, he lost steadily.

At least he now knew, beyond question, that he had indeed picked up a trace of warlockry in his brief apprenticeship; nothing else could explain how he had flourished for so long back in Ethshar. Wizards and witches had been unable to detect any magic in use, but wizards and witches knew nothing about warlockry.

It was slightly odd, perhaps, that he’d never been caught by a warlock, but maybe warlocks took pity on him, or chose to protect one of their own, no matter how feeble his talents.

And his talent had to be warlockry, because no other form of magic was so dependent on location. He knew that much. Wizardry and witchcraft and sorcery and theurgy and demonology and herbalism and all the others worked equally well almost everywhere, or so he had heard, though there were those who complained that so much wizardry had been used in the city of Ethshar of the Spices that its residue fouled the air and weakened subsequent spells.

Warlockry, though, a warlock’s power depended on how close he was to the mysterious Source of the Power that all warlocks drew on.

Nobody knew exactly where the Source was, or what it was, because nobody who went to find it ever came back, but every warlock knew that it was somewhere in the hills of Aldagmor, near the border between the Baronies of Sardiron and the Hegemony of Ethshar. It supposedly called to warlocks who grew strong enough to hear it and lured them away, and since all warlocks improved with practice, that meant most of them heard it, sooner or later, and if they stayed within range they were eventually drawn away to Aldagmor. This was referred to as the Calling, and it was invariably accompanied by weird, frightening dreams and other strangeness, and it was something that warlocks did not talk about to outsiders; it frightened them, and admitting that warlocks were afraid of anything was not in the best interests of the art. Sterren only knew about it because his former master had explained it, in lurid detail, in trying to discourage him from his apprenticeship.

Even warlocks, though, even those who had heard the Calling and woke up every night with nightmares about it, did not know what the Source was. Nobody knew what it was, or why it should be in that particular place.

Some people theorized that that spot was the exact center of the World, and that the Power was a gift of the gods, but others maintained that the Source was something from outside the World entirely, a mysterious something that had fallen from the heavens on the Night of Madness, back in 5202, when warlockry first emerged. Sterren had been a babe in arms on that night when half the people in Ethshar woke up screaming from nightmares they could never remember, and when one person in a thousand or so was suddenly transformed, forever after, into a warlock, able to move objects without touching them, to kill with a thought, to start fires with a mere gaze.

Whatever the Source was, whatever the Power was, Sterren had never had more than the faintest trace of it, and here in Semma, dozens of leagues to the southeast of Ethshar and almost that much farther from Aldagmor, which lay well to the north of the city, even that trace was gone.

In fact, in two sixdays of careful investigation, Sterren had been unable to find any evidence that anyone in all of Semma had ever heard of warlockry, or ever had any trace of the Power at his or her command. Nobody could provide him with a Semmat word for “warlock” or “warlockry.” Nobody even remembered anything about a night of bad dreams, twenty years before, and Sterren had always thought that the effects of the Night of Madness had been worldwide.

Warlockry was totally, completely unknown in Semma.

Sterren had to give up playing dice.

Watching the men toss down their coins on the betting lines, totally ignoring the presence of their warlord, he also gave up any hope of successfully defending Semma against the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion with the forces at his disposal.

Lar had brought another report the night before; Ophkar had two hundred men under arms, Ksinallion two hundred and fifty.

Semma had ninety-six. And that was after Sterren had calls for volunteers posted in all the surrounding villages. Furthermore, although fifteen or twenty of them took their role seriously, the rest seemed to think being a soldier meant nothing more than an excuse to go drinking and wenching in exchange for a few hours a day of marching and weapons drill, or, in the case of the cavalry, riding and weapons drill.

Sterren knew that war was coming. Lar knew that war was coming. Lady Kalira and a dozen other nobles knew war was coming. The rest of the castle’s inhabitants, including the king, refused to worry about it.

Princess Shirrin apparently believed that war was coming, but thought that it was all very exciting, and that Sterren, her valiant warlord, would save the kingdom by singlehandedly slaughtering the foe, as if he were some legendary hero like Valder of the Magic Sword. At least, that was what Princess Lura reported her sister’s thoughts to be; Shirrin herself still found it impossible to say more than a dozen words in Sterren’s presence without blushing and falling into an embarrassed silence.

She hadn’t actually run away from him for more than a sixday, though, and he had seen her, several times, watching him and his men from a window, or around a corner.

Princess Nissitha deigned to speak to him on occasion, now, but still obviously considered him far beneath her.

He sighed again. His life was not going well.

He had carefully broached the subject of defeat to Lady Kalira one night, in the castle kitchens, when both of them had been drinking.

“You don’t want to think about it,” she had said, very definitely.

“Why not?” he had replied.

“Because if you lose a war, you’ll be killed.”

“Not ness... ness... necessarily. Surely you don’t expect the army to fight to the last man...” he began.

“No, you silly Ethsharite, that’s not what I mean.” She had glowered at him.

“What do you mean, then?” he asked, puzzled.

“I mean,” she said, “that for the last century or two it’s been traditional for a victorious army to execute the enemy’s warlord, as a symbolic gesture. You can’t go around killing off kings; it sets a bad precedent. And you don’t want to slaughter anyone useful, not even peasants. But a defeated warlord isn’t any good to anybody and he might go around plotting revenge, so he gets beheaded. Or hanged. Or burned at the stake. Or something.” She hiccupped. “Your great-great-grandfather, the Sixth Warlord, got drawn and quartered, back in 5150.”

Sterren, who up to that point had been more or less sober, had proceeded to finish the bottle and a second one as well.

He had no desire to die, but he was beginning to run out of alternatives. He still saw no way to escape from Semma; his door was always guarded, as was the castle gate, and any time he set foot outside at least one soldier accompanied him. He had not tried ordering his escort away; it seemed pointless.

Even if he did lose an escort and make a dash for it, he would probably be caught and brought back long before he could reach Akalla of the Diamond and get out to sea, and that was assuming he could find Akalla despite the lack of roads, maps, guides, and landmarks.

Chances of escaping back to Ethshar looked slim, and a failed escape attempt would mean execution for treason. That made it too dangerous to risk.

If he stayed, however, he would wind up leading his pitiful army into battle and inevitably being defeated. If he survived the battle, which was certain to be a rout and probably a bloodbath, he would still be executed by the victors.

He could not imagine any strategem whereby he could win, with his ninety-six men against more than four hundred. A purely defensive war would take longer, perhaps, the castle could probably hold off the invaders for a month or two, at least, but a long siege would not put the enemy in a very favorable frame of mind, and Semma had no friends who might come to lift a siege, nor much hope of outlasting the foe.

Sterren wished he had some way of coaxing his native Ethshar into aiding Semma; Azrad’s ten thousand guardsmen would make short work of these silly little armies that the Small Kingdoms fielded.

When Azrad VII had come to power a little over a year before, however, he had inherited from his father, Azrad VI, a long-standing policy handed down in unbroken line from Azrad I against interfering in the internal squabbling of the Small Kingdoms. On the rare occasions when an army from Lamum or Perga or some other little principality had strayed across the border into the Hegemony, it had been quickly obliterated; but Ethsharitic troops were never, ever, sent into the Small Kingdoms themselves.

Sterren leaned against the whitewashed stone wall of the barracks and told himself that he needed a miracle.

Well, he replied silently, every Ethsharite knows that miracles are available, if one can pay for them.

Miracles were available in Ethshar, though, in the Wizards’ Quarter; not in Semma.

The only magician of any sort that the royal family put any trust in was Agor, the castle’s resident theurgist. Other than a glimpse or two of that rather confused and confusing fellow, Sterren had not as yet encountered a single magician worthy of the name during his stay in the Small Kingdoms.

He hadn’t been able to do much looking, of course; his duties, and his desperate attempts to train his “army” into something useful, had not left him the free time to go wandering about investigating village herbalists and the like.

It was always possible that some eccentric hermit was lurking in a hut somewhere out there, a hermit with sufficient magic to defeat both of the would-be invaders, but how could Sterren locate him, if he existed?

Well, how had the Semmans located him, when they needed a warlord?

They had asked Agor, of course.

And Agor might actually be quite a good theurgist, for all Sterren knew. He might be all the miracle-worker Sterren needed.

Sterren glanced again at the dice-players, at the unmade bunks, at swords lying about unsheathed and dropped carelessly anywhere convenient, and decided that it was time he spoke with Agor. He had tried acting like the warlord he was supposed to be and had gotten nowhere; now, thinking like the Ethsharite he had always been, it was time to call on a magician. When all else fails, hire a magician, that was sound Ethsharitic thinking!

He turned and marched out the door of the barracks.

He knew exactly where he was going, for once. Princess Lura had pointed out the theurgist’s door to him a few days earlier. Agor made his home in a small room in one of the smaller towers, far above the barracks, but a level below Sterren’s own more luxurious quarters.

Sterren stood in the corridor for a minute or two, gathering his courage, before he knocked.

“Come in,” someone called from within.

He lifted the latch and stepped in.

Agor’s chamber was hung with white draperies on every side, covering all four walls. Two narrow windows were left bare, and provided the room’s only light, but given all that white and the sunny weather outside, that was plenty. The chamber smelled of something cloyingly sweet, incense, perhaps? Sterren was unsure.

A few trunks, painted white and trimmed with silver, stood against the various walls. A plump feather bed, also white, occupied one corner.

In the center of the room, seated on a grayish sheep-skin that had probably been white once, was Agor himself, a rather scrawny fellow of thirty or so, with a pale, narrow face and a worried expression.

He wore white, of course, white tunic worked with gold, and off-white breeches. His feet were bare. A scroll was unrolled on the floor in front of him.

“Yes?” he asked, looking at Sterren in puzzlement.

“I’m Sterren, Ninth Warlord,” Sterren said. “You’re Agor, the theurgist?”

“Oh, yes, of course, my lord. Yes, I’m Agor. Do come in!” He gestured welcomingly.

There were no chairs of any description, so Sterren rather hesitantly seated himself on the stone floor, facing the theurgist.

“So you’re Sterren,” Agor said. “I’m glad to meet you. I take a special interest in you, you know; I was the one who found you.” He smiled uncertainly. “I know,” said Sterren, while inwardly wondering just what sort of special interest the other was referring to. After all, in the dozen days since his arrival in the castle, Agor had not bothered to say as much as a single word to him and had apparently not even bothered to get a look at him, since he had not immediately recognized him.

He knew he should say more, but found himself unsure how to begin. He knew he wanted a miracle that would keep him from getting killed as a result of the coming war, but he did not know how to ask for it.

He didn’t really know just what sort of a miracle he wanted. He did not really want anyone to get hurt or killed.

He was still thinking about this when, after a slightly longer-than-comfortable silence, Agor asked nervously, “What can I do for you, my lord?”

Sterren resolved to simply present the situation to Agor and then see where the discussion went. Perhaps a way out of his quandary would appear.

“Well, first, you can promise me that anything I tell you won’t be repeated outside this room,” he replied.

“If you wish it so, my lord.”

“I do. Ah... tell me, have you taken any interest in Semma’s military situation?”

“No,” the theurgist immediately answered, “would you like me to?”

This response caught Sterren off guard, and his tongue stumbled over his answer.

“I... that... I mean, that’s not...” He paused, caught his breath, and tried again.

“What I meant was, are you aware that Semma is in very serious danger?”

“No,” Agor replied calmly. “Is it?”

“Yes!” Sterren collected his wits and continued. “This is what I don’t want you telling anyone. A war with both Ksinallion and Ophkar is coming, and soon. I expect both of them to attack as soon as the mud dries in the spring. And we don’t have a chance of defeating them; we’re outnumbered four to one, and our army is in terrible shape, and I’m the warlord, but I have no idea at all how to run a war, or even how to get these damn soldiers to take it seriously!”

“Ah,” Agor said, his face blank.

“Yes,” Sterren said.

“So you expect to lose a battle? Do you want me to try and get a god’s blessing on our troops, is that it? I don’t suppose that would violate the ban on using magic to fight wars.”

“No! Or at least, not just that, though I suppose it couldn’t hurt.” He paused, considering. “Would it really help?”

“No,” Agor said, without an instant’s hesitation. “I’ve explained this to everybody before, but I suppose you weren’t here. The gods don’t approve of war or fighting and they won’t have anything to do with it. They don’t take sides.”

“I don’t approve of it, either! Are you sure they wouldn’t be willing to take into consideration that we’re being attacked, that we don’t want to fight?”

“It wouldn’t matter. The gods swore off war after they wiped out the Northerners two hundred years ago and they don’t change their minds easily. Besides...” This time Agor did hesitate, but at length he said, “besides, can you tell them that we did nothing to provoke an attack?”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“But did anyone?”

Sterren remembered what Lar had told him about King Phenvel’s behavior. “I suppose so,” he admitted.

“Then the gods won’t help. At least, not directly.”

That reminded Sterren of his original intention in visiting Agor. “But they might indirectly?” he asked.

“Oh, certainly. It might seem odd to a layman, but the fact is, the gods tend to be very careless indeed about the long-term consequences of their actions. You could probably get a great deal of useful advice from them, as long as it’s not overtly military.”

Locating a powerful wizard would hardly be overtly military, but Sterren decided to check out other possibilities first. He asked, “Could they, perhaps, do something to stop Ophkar and Ksinallion from attacking? Start a plague, or something?”

Agor was visibly shocked by the suggestion. “A plague? My lord, how can you think such a thing?”

“Could they?” Sterren persisted.

“No, of course not! My lord Sterren, I am a theurgist, not a demonologist! The gods are good; they do not do evil. Plagues are the work of demons!”

Sterren’s cynicism, drummed into him by years on the streets of Ethshar, came surging to the fore. “The gods don’t do evil?” he inquired, sarcastically, remembering that he, himself, was in Semma, facing eventual execution, because of a god’s interference.

“Well,” Agor said, “not directly. Sometimes their actions can have evil consequences, for some-”

“I would think so!”

“But they won’t start a plague, or anything else like that.”

Sterren considered this.

Agor was probably right. After all, he was a theurgist and surely he knew his business. All his life, Sterren had heard from priests and theurgists and even laymen that the gods were benevolent, that they did not approve of any sort of destruction or disorder, that the evil in the World was due to demons or human folly.

It was probably true.

Or if not, at least it was probably true that he, Sterren of Ethshar, would be unable to get the gods to take his side in the upcoming war.

“All right,” he said, “We’ll forget that idea, then.” Another thought popped into his head, though, and he asked, “Might they protect us from the invaders? Stop the war somehow, or at least provide us with what we need to withstand a siege? You say they don’t like war; could they prevent this one?”

“Excuse me, my lord, but wouldn’t that violate the traditional ban on magical warfare?”

“What if it did?” Sterren snapped, his frayed temper breaking. “I never agreed to any such ban and I’ll be killed if we lose this war! I’m no Semman, and I think it’s a stupid tradition.”

“Ah,” the theurgist said, nodding. “I see.”

“Does breaking the ban bother you?”

“Well, not really; it’s none of my business.”

“Then, can the gods do something to prevent this war?”

Agor hesitated and chewed his lower lip for a moment before replying, “Well, maybe...”

“Maybe?”

Agor blinked uneasily and shifted on his sheepskin. “Well, actually, my lord, they...” He stopped, visibly unhappy.

“They what?” Sterren urged.

“Well, actually, my lord, some of them would probably be glad to do that sort of thing-”

“But what?”

“Well...” Agor took a deep breath, then admitted, “but I don’t know how to contact them.”

CHAPTER 11

Sterren stared at the bony theurgist, who stared back miserably.

“What do you mean, you can’t contact them?” Sterren demanded. “Aren’t you the royal theurgist here?”

“Yes, my lord, I am.”

“Are you a fraud, then?”

“No,” Agor said, with a touch of wounded pride visible through his dismay, “I’m not a fraud; I’m just not a very good theurgist.”

“You aren’t?”

“No, I’m not. Ah... do you know anything about theurgy?”

“I know as much as most people, I suppose,” Sterren said, glaring.

“But do you know anything about how it actually works?” Agor persisted.

“No, of course not!”

Agor nodded, as if satisfied with Sterren’s answer. “Well, my lord,” he said, “it’s like this. A theurgist is just a person with a natural talent for prayer, who has learned how to pray in such a way that the gods will actually listen.”

“I know that,” Sterren said sharply.

“Well, anybody can pray, of course, but the odds are that the gods won’t hear, or won’t answer. Have you ever wondered, my lord, why the gods don’t listen to everybody, but they do listen to theurgists?”

“No,” Sterren replied flatly. This was not strictly true, but he didn’t care to be sidetracked.

“Well, it’s because of the prayers we use. We learn them as apprentices, just as other magicians learn their spells. The gods are too busy to listen to everything, but there are certain prayers that catch their attention, just the way certain sounds might catch your ear, even in a noisy place, the rattle of dice, for instance.”

Sterren realized that Agor really had taken an interest in him; coming up with that particularly appropriate example could not have been a coincidence. His annoyance faded somewhat. “Go on,” he said.

Agor continued, “Some people are better at some prayers than others. I don’t know why, they just are, just as some people are better at drawing pictures, or singing.”

Sterren nodded. He knew, firsthand, that some people had a talent for warlockry, while others, like himself, emphatically did not, and he could see no reason other magicks, such as theurgy, should be any different.

“There are many, many gods, my lord. I only know the names and prayers for nineteen of them; that was all my master knew, all he could teach me during my apprenticeship. It’s not a bad number, really. Many of the best theurgists only know a dozen or so specific prayers, and I’ve never heard of anyone who knew more than perhaps thirty, unless he was also dabbling in demonology, except we don’t call those prayers, we call them invocations or summonings.”

“So you can ask nineteen different gods for help, but only those nineteen?”

“Yes, but really, not even all those. You see, as I said, some people are better at some prayers than others. Some gods are just harder to talk to, too. And I know nineteen names and prayers, but I can’t get all nineteen of them to listen to me. Or at least, I never have. Maybe I learned a syllable wrong somewhere, or maybe they just don’t like me, but I can’t get all of them to listen.”

Sterren saw where this was leading. “How many do listen to you, then?” he asked.

“Usually, three,” Agor replied nervously.

Sterren stared. “Three? Out of nineteen?”

“I told you I’m not really a very good theurgist,” Agor said defensively.

“How did you ever wind up as the royal magician, then?”

“The royal magician to the court of King Phenvel III of Semma? Of Semma, my lord? You’re from Ethshar; you know better. If I were any good, would I still be here?”

“I suppose not,” Sterren admitted.

“I was born in Semma, but I ran away from home when I was twelve and served my apprenticeship in Lumeth of the Towers. I couldn’t make a living there, though, and I didn’t speak anything but Semmat and Lumethan, so when I got tired of starving in Lumeth I came back here, where there wasn’t any real competition. They don’t care if I can only talk to Unniel, Konned, and Morm, because nobody else here can talk to any of the gods!” A trace of pride had crept into Agor’s voice.

“Um... Who were those, again?”

“Unniel, Konned, and Morm. Unniel the Discerning is the goddess of theurgical information, Konned is a god of light and warmth, and Morm the Preserver is the god of genealogy.”

“I never heard of any of them,” Sterren said. “And how many gods have you heard of by name?”

“Not many,” Sterren admitted. Laymen virtually never bothered with names, since only theurgists could count on getting a specific deity’s attention. Usually prayers were directed to categories of gods, or just any god who might be listening, to increase the chances of reaching someone.

Sterren realized he could not name a single god, other than the three Agor had just mentioned, and he didn’t think he could pronounce two of those. Konned was easy enough, but the diphthong in Unniel and the r sound in Morm were very alien indeed.

“So, could any of those three help us?” he asked. “I don’t see how,” Agor replied. “Morm is completely useless; all he does is keep track of family trees. If you need to know your great-great-grandmother’s childhood epithet, or when your third cousin was born, he can tell you, but that’s it. He’s been very useful to me, since all the nobility of Semma are obsessed with family, but a war is completely out of his area.”

“And Konned?” Sterren did not care to try pronouncing Unniel.

“Well, if you make a regular sacrifice to him, he’ll provide you with supernatural light at night, brighter than any candle, and he’ll keep you warm in the winter, so we don’t have to worry about freezing during a siege but that’s about it. And freezing isn’t very likely in Semma anyway.”

“And...”

“Unniel’s our best hope, I suppose. She knows everything there is to know about all the other gods and sometimes she can be coaxed into carrying messages to them; I found you by having her call her brother Aibem for me. I know a prayer for Aibem, but I can never make it work right, so when I really need him, sometimes I can get him through Unniel. Aibem is a god of information; I’ve never found anything he doesn’t know, but getting him to tell me what I’m after is usually like trying to catch a black cat in a dungeon at midnight. Unniel can also talk to the dead, sometimes, not all the dead, just certain ones, and I have no idea why.”

“Information? Couldn’t Um... Unniel or Aibem tell us how to avoid the war, then?”

Agor shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” He sighed. “It’s too bad I could never get Piskor the Generous to answer; she provides food and water and advice, and that would be ideal if we’re besieged, wouldn’t it?”

“It would help, certainly,” Sterren agreed.

They sat in moody silence for a moment, thinking.

Sterren considered what he had just been told and decided that he did not care to rely on the gods for help.

That meant returning to his original intent of locating a really powerful magician and somehow buying a miracle. Agor, it appeared, did not qualify.

“So, Agor,” he said, “are there any other theurgists in Semma?”

“No,” Agor answered. “It’s too bad, because I wouldn’t mind having someone to talk theurgy with.”

“What about other magicians? Do you know of any?”

“Oh, certainly! When I first got the job here, naturally I looked over the potential competition. It turned out I had nothing to worry about.” Sterren suppressed a groan at this news. Agor continued, “There are a few village herbalists, of course, and a couple of local shamans who seem to be more fraud than anything else. There are two wizards in the whole kingdom; one’s here in the castle, where he helps out in the kitchen, and the other’s in a village to the east. The one here in the castle used to be the other’s apprentice, I think.”

He paused, thinking.

“I don’t remember exactly how many witches there are; four or five, I’d say. None of them are in the castle.”

“What about sorcerers, or demonologists, or warlocks, or... or anything?”

“Well, demonology is illegal, of course, and I haven’t found any outlaw demonologists, but I suppose one could be hiding somewhere. The gods can’t see demons, usually. Sorcery is illegal, too, I suppose because the Northerners used to use it so much, and I know for certain there aren’t any sorcerers.”

“And warlocks?” He used the Ethsharitic word, since he had never heard a Semmat term.

Agor looked puzzled. “What’s a warlock?” he asked.

“Another sort of magician,” Sterren explained. “We’ve had them in Ethshar for about twenty years now.”

Agor shrugged. “I never heard of them,” he said.

That accorded well with Sterren’s suspicion that warlockry did not work in Semma, that the Power in Aldagmor was too far away. Quite aside from his losses at dice, surely, if warlockry were possible, there would be warlocks.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Not that the gods would tell me about. Believe me, I’ve asked them.”

Sterren nodded. No mysterious hermits, then. He could not help asking, “You’re absolutely sure there aren’t any you’ve missed?”

“I could have missed a demonologist and maybe one of these warlock things you mentioned, but that’s all.”

“How good are the two wizards? And the witches?”

“My lord Sterren, the younger wizard is working in the castle kitchens, lighting fires and entertaining the cooks; how good do you think he is? And they always say you can judge the master by the student.”

Sterren did not entirely believe that particular proverb, but he admitted that the older wizard could not be much of a miracle-worker. “What about the witches?”

“Well, my lord, none of them ever gave me any competition for the post of royal magician; does that tell you enough?”

Sterren had to agree that it did. He stared at the gleaming silver hasp on a nearby trunk, trying to think what else he could ask.

“My lord Sterren,” Agor said, after a thoughtful pause, “Do you really mean to use magic to fight this war?”

Sterren started. “Of course I do!” he shouted. “How else am I going to get out of this alive?”

“In that case, my lord, I don’t think you’d want Semman magicians in any case. They’ve all been raised in the tradition of using no magic in war. Wouldn’t it make more sense to get your magicians from somewhere else?”

“I suppose so, but where?”

“Ethshar, of course.”

“Of course,” Sterren said sarcastically, “except that I’m not allowed to go back there!”

“Really? Well then, you could send somebody. But are you really sure you aren’t?”

Sterren opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Because of the way he had arrived, he had assumed that he would not be allowed to leave Semma, but nobody had ever actually said that. And certainly, there were all the magicians he could ever need in the Wizards’ Quarter of Ethshar of the Spices. Not that they would be eager to go gallivanting off to Semma to get involved in something as nasty and unpleasant as a war. He would need a powerful incentive. Gold would work just fine, of course.

Sterren didn’t have any gold himself, but Semma’s royal treasury contained a good bit of the stuff. As warlord, his officers had assured him that he had access to the treasury for legitimate military expenses. He didn’t even need the treasurer’s cooperation; as warlord, he outranked the treasurer.

However, he did need the king’s permission for any expenditures out of the ordinary.

Sterren realized that it was time to speak to the king.

CHAPTER 12

His Majesty Phenvel III looked distinctly bored, but Sterren pressed on with the speech he had prepared, trying not to stumble over any of the unfamiliar words. He had picked up a few choice Semmat phrases from Agor and Lar, and did not want to ruin their effect by mispronouncing them.

“It seems clear,” he said, “that if Semma has won so many of its wars, and yet neither treacherous Ophkar nor perfidious Ksinallion has ever resorted to magic to defeat us, then Ophkar and Ksinallion cannot have many magicians available. If they had magicians surely they would have used them rather than admit defeat! Therefore, they will be unable to counter whatever magic we use. One really good wizard could probably turn the tide of this next conflict, a competent demonologist might be even better, if one could bring oneself to deal with such dark forces-”

“No demons,” the king interrupted.

“Your Majesty?”

“No demons, no demonologists,” Phenvel said, emphasizing his words with a wagging finger. “No sorcerers, either. We’ll use good, clean magic if we need to use magic at all.”

“Oh, we do need to, your Majesty,” Sterren replied quickly. “I swear that my own inexperience and the sorry state that my poor senile great-uncle left the army in leave us no other choice.” He mildly regretted insulting his dead relative, but after all, the man was dead and he really had left the army in sad shape.

“All right,” the king said, “but no demonology and no sorcery. Is that clear?”

“Oh, yes, your Majesty!” Sterren grinned with sudden relief. Up until that moment he had thought the king was not listening and would reject the whole idea out of hand.

“It might be entertaining to have some real magic around here,” Phenvel said. “Agor’s all very well, with his lights and voices, but I’d like to see something new. Do you think you can find a wizard who can fly? I’ve heard that some of them can do that; is it true?”

“Oh, yes, your Majesty,” Sterren assured him. “I’ve seen it myself, in Ethshar’s great... in Ethshar.” That was true enough. He had meant to say that he had seen wizards fly in the Arena, but he didn’t know the Semmat word. He had also seen his warlock-master fly. It was not a particularly rare or valuable talent.

“Good. Find a magician who can fly.”

Sterren nodded. He knew better than to argue, though he could see little military value in the ability to levitate.

“Yes, your Majesty. Then may I have a letter of credit against the treasury, to show that I-”

“No letter!” Phenvel snapped. “Do you think I’m a fool, to give you free run of my money like that? No, I’ll give you a pound of gold and a few jewels, I understand that wizards like jewels. That should be enough, I should think.”

The bottom dropped out of Sterren’s stomach, but he did not dare argue at this point, for fear the king would change his mind and cancel the whole project.

A pound of gold, though, would barely buy a single untraceable death spell back in Ethshar, let alone magic on a scale to be of real military value. Powerful wizards did not work as cheaply as the pitiful village witches and herbalists out here on the edge of the World. So much for borrowing against the entire royal treasury to hire a squad of hotshot magicians from the Wizards’ Quarter. He would be lucky to find one really good wizard at that price; more likely he would have to settle for a few failed apprentices.

“I do like the idea of getting a few new magicians around here,” Phenvel mused, “I really do. But no sorcerers, and no demonologists, not even a little one.”

Sterren nodded again. The king was repeating himself, but that was hardly unusual. Nobody had ever dared point out such little slips, so the king made them frequently.

He was trying to phrase a request to be excused, when Phenvel said, “You’ll need to have a guard along, of course, and I think Lady Kalira should accompany you. Does that suit you?”

“Very much, your Majesty,” Sterren lied. He had hardly dared to admit it even to himself, but he had naturally had the idea of taking this opportunity to simply vanish in the streets of Ethshar in the back of his mind right from the start. Guards would make that much more difficult, but perhaps no more difficult than buying the services of a competent magician for a pound of gold and a few nondescript gems.

It appeared he was still doomed.

At the very least, though, he would be able to revisit his homeland before he died. He had been fighting off homesickness for the last day or two, ever since the possibility of returning to Ethshar had begun to seem real.

“Good,” the king said. “You’re excused, then, and I wish you a safe journey.”

Sterren bowed and backed out of the audience chamber.

In the corridor outside he straightened up, brushed at his cut-down black tunic, and then stood, staring stupidly at the door, for a good three minutes.

What was he supposed to do now? Just turn and go? How was he to collect the gold and gems, or find Lady Kalira? Who was to chose the guards he would take with him?

Kings were not much on detail work, he supposed. It was up to him. Unless someone told him otherwise, he assumed that he would have to organize the expedition himself.

He glanced around. The only people in the antechamber with him were the two doorkeepers, and he knew better than to ask one of them to leave his post.

Sterren had no servants of his own and always felt uneasy ordering the castle servants about, since they always seemed to have plenty of work to do without running his errands, but he was the warlord, commander of the Semman army, and his soldiers never seemed to do anything at all unless he was there egging them on.

He headed for the barracks.

As usual, half a dozen soldiers were dicing in the corner. The barracks were otherwise empty.

“You men!” he called.

Two of them looked up, without much interest.

“Settle up, the game’s over. Right now.”

The two glanced at each other, and two more looked up, startled.

“Now!” Sterren bellowed.

Reluctantly, the game broke up, and the six men came sloppily to attention, facing him.

“All right, you, Kather, go find the Lady Kalira and tell her I must speak to her as soon as possible. Let her choose the time and place, but make plain that it’s very urgent, and then come back here immediately and tell me what she said.”

Kather stood silently, accepting this.

“Go!”

Startled, Kather nodded. “Yes, my lord,” he muttered, as he started off.

“You, Terrin,” Sterren said to the next. “Go find the Lord Treasurer and tell him that I need a pound of gold and a dozen of the finest gems in the treasury, no later than dinnertime tonight, by the king’s express order. Arrange a time and place for me to pick them up. If he needs to check with the king first, I have no objection, so long as he’s quick about it. If he doubts your authority, bring him back here to speak to me.”

Terrin, having learned from Kather’s experience, essayed a quick bow, said, “As you wish, my lord,” and departed.

Sterren looked over the remaining four. He knew them all slightly, but only slightly, and did not think much of any of them.

“Gror,” he said, choosing the best of the lot, “I need a party for a voyage to Ethshar, a peaceful expedition, recruiting aid for the coming war. Who would you suggest?”

“Uh...” Gror blinked. “My lord, I... I don’t know.”

“You could call for volunteers,” another soldier, Azdaram by name, suggested.

“I could,” Sterren agreed.

He considered the idea.

He almost immediately saw an obvious drawback and prepared to discard the whole notion.

Then he caught himself.

The problem with calling for volunteers was that he might well wind up with men only interested in a diversion from the tedious life of a Semman soldier. It was entirely possible that some of them would desert at the first opportunity...

He stopped his chain of thought at that point and backed up.

They might desert. The guard intended to keep him from deserting might themselves desert.

That might not be good for Semma, but it would, on the other hand, be a gift from the gods for him, personally. If his escort were to vanish he could easily lose himself in the streets of the city and leave Semma to fend for itself.

It probably wouldn’t do much worse without him than with him, really. He was hardly a great warlord, after all.

He tried to think what would happen if the guards did desert, and he, too, slipped away.

What would Lady Kalira do? What would the others, back here in Semma do, the king, the queen, the princesses, his officers and men, even Agor the theurgist?

Well, the officers and men would presumably go out, fight, and lose. Some would die, the rest surrender. Semma would probably be divided up between Ophkar and Ksinallion, and the royal family sent off into exile somewhere. Agor would almost certainly find employment elsewhere, without much difficulty.

That wasn’t so awful, was it? It seemed that a few soldiers were going to die anyway, no matter what happened, so he refused to worry about that. As for exiling the royal family, it was hard to imagine King Phenvel in exile, but on the other hand, it was hard to imagine him doing much of anything. He seemed born to be an incompetent monarch; the only way he could survive the way he was seemed to be if other people had no choice about putting up with him.

Princess Shirrin would find exile terribly romantic and exciting, Sterren was sure. Princess Lura would think it was fun. Princess Nissitha would be mortified. Queen Ashassa would take it calmly in stride.

The young princes he didn’t know well enough to say, but he suspected they would rather enjoy a change of scene.

As for divvying up Semma, would anyone but the deposed aristocrats care? In his sixnights in Semma he had never seen any sign that the peasants cared a whit which king they paid taxes to.

There might be practical problems in slipping away, though. Lady Kalira would be in Ethshar when he deserted and she would probably try to track him down. She might even succeed, eventually, though surely not before the war was lost. What if she found him?

Well, it was obvious that the aristocracy of Semma would not be at all happy with Sterren, Ninth Warlord. He would, beyond question, be guilty of treason under their laws. In all probability, any Semman noble who ever found him would try to kill him on sight.

That was not really a very appealing long-term prospect, but then, he didn’t have to stay in Ethshar of the Spices. He could move on to Ethshar of the Sands or Ethshar of the Rocks, or even head north to the Baronies of Sardiron. The nobility of Semma would not be likely to find him; the World was a big place.

The Small Kingdoms would be too dangerous, though; the Semman aristocracy, all two or three hundred of them, were likely to scatter through the region, sponging off various relatives and allies.

He’d want to take a new name, of course.

It occurred to him that the Semmans knew his true name. That was awkward. That meant that they would always be able to find him if they could afford a good wizard, or even a very good witch. Warlocks didn’t use true names; neither did sorcerers, so far as he knew.

Theurgists sometimes did, and the Semmans were familiar with theurgy. That was how they had found him in the first place.

And worse, couldn’t demonologists use true names?

If the Semmans were determined to track him down and kill him, and had the sense to hire magicians, they could do it.

Desertion looked considerably less appealing than it had a moment before.

On the other hand, Semmans weren’t accustomed to magic, and if Sterren could keep the gold and gems with him when he slipped away, perhaps he could buy himself some decent magical protections.

Could a true name be changed?

He didn’t really think it could, but he didn’t know.

He realized he was standing there looking stupid in front of his four men, so he cut off his thoughts abruptly.

“All right, then, I’m calling for volunteers, do any of you four want to sail to Ethshar?”

The four looked at each other and then one by one, answered.

“No.”

“No, my lord.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not really. Not sail. I don’t trust boats.”

Sterren was not surprised.

“All right, then, I want all four of you to separate and go find my other soldiers, all of them, and ask for volunteers. Then meet me back here, with the volunteers. And if you don’t find enough volunteers, I’ll take you four, instead. Understood?”

“Yes, my lord,” they chorused raggedly. One by one, they straggled away on this unwanted errand. One of them, Arra Varrins’s son, thought to bow as they headed for the stairs.

Sterren watched them go and pretended, not to hear the grumbling that began as soon as they were out the door.

When they were out of sight, he sank down onto a convenient bed and began thinking, planning, and weighing possibilities.

Could he really slip away in the streets of Ethshar?

Did he want to?

Which death was more certain, commanding a grossly outnumbered army, or being an escaped traitor?

That was a very hard question to answer and it was one he had to consider carefully. He had no interest in dying.

He had plenty of time to consider the question, of course. He would have the entire journey to Akalla, then the voyage across the Gulf of the East, to decide what to do and make his plans.

Of course, he knew he might never have a chance to slip away, his soldiers might not desert, he might be closely watched at all times. Still, he also knew he would be thinking about an escape all the way to Ethshar.

CHAPTER 13

As the rooftops of Ethshar grew slowly nearer, Sterren leaned on the ship’s rail and stared at them hungrily. He could smell the city as well as see it, a scent of smoke and spices with an undertone of sewage, a wonderfully familiar odor that he hadn’t smelled in far too long. He had never realized, until this moment, that the city had a distinctive odor, he had never left the city until being dragged off to Semma, so the smell had always been there, unnoticed.

Now, though, he knew that he had missed that smell during his absence, that to him that scent meant home, as the salt spray of the ocean or the hot, rotting-grass smell of Semma never could.

To his left, Dogal the Large, Dogal d’Gra, that is, sneezed.

To his right, Alder the Very Large, Alder d’Yoon, said, “May the gods keep you well!”

Dogal snuffled in reply, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and then spat at the ocean below.

Alder, apparently interpreting Dogal’s response as a negative one, said, “Well, at least we’re finally here. Not much longer now before we’re off this damned boat.”

“Except that we’ve got to sail back,” Dogal muttered.

“But going back, the wind should be with us, rather than against us,” Alder said.

Sterren took no part in the conversation, but he thought that it was certainly true that the wind had been against them. He understood now why Lady Kalira, on her previous voyage to Ethshar, had bought herself a storm from the weather-wizards in Akalla of the Diamond, and why she had wanted to spend two-thirds of his meager hoard of treasure on another one for this trip, after, of course, she had used up most of her own resources in hiring a ship that would sail when and where she wanted, rather than one that would treat the Semman party as ordinary passengers.

Sterren had absolutely forbidden wasting their funds on a storm; the little gold he had would not really be enough as it was, he was sure. He had refused to listen to any argument from Lady Kalira; it was easy enough to simply stop thinking in Semmat, so that her words became meaningless noise. His mind was made up.

Of course, he had not realized that the prevailing winds of the season were from the northwest, and that it would take their chartered ship a month and a day to tack up the Gulf of the East to Ethshar of the Spices. To make any progress to the northwest at all against the cold, steady autumn wind, they had been forced to beat back and forth, zigzagging across the Gulf from one side to the other.

The only good thing about the delay was that it had given him considerable time to practice his Semmat.

Sterren was heartily sick of the cramped shipboard life and the ship’s constant wallowing and rolling, and his feet were almost itching at the thought of walking on dry land again.

The fact that the land in question was his homeland, and that he might yet have a chance to slip away to freedom, made waiting all the harder.

Of course, he might not have a chance to slip away. Lady Kalira, when informed of the expedition, had insisted on bringing the two soldiers she most trusted, Alder and Dogal, and had gotten royal backing for this demand. Sterren had been given no choice but to yield.

He thought that Alder and Dogal liked him, at least slightly, but he was also quite certain they would not willingly let him desert and leave Semma to its fate. This was unfortunate, since the other four in the party might well desert, themselves. They were genuine volunteers, Kendrik, Alar, Zander, and Bern were their names, and Sterren was not impressed with any of them.

He knew Kendrik’s type from his gambling days; the man was obviously convinced that he was smarter than anybody else and only needed the right opportunity to make himself rich, famous, and powerful. Semma certainly didn’t provide many such opportunities, Sterren had to admit, but he suspected that Kendrik wouldn’t find them in Ethshar, either, because he wasn’t anywhere near as clever as he thought he was.

People like Kendrik had been among the most generous suppliers of Sterren’s funds before his abrupt departure from Ethshar’s taverns, but they were also bad losers and very likely to accuse him of cheating. Sterren didn’t like Kendrik any better than he had liked those old opponents.

Alar appeared to have volunteered just because somebody asked him. He was easygoing, not too bright, and highly suggestible. Sterren suspected that he had wound up a soldier at somebody else’s suggestion, and that he might well desert along with one of the others because he wouldn’t see any reason not to, until it was too late.

Sterren might have suggested it to Alar himself, if Alder and Dogal hadn’t been present. Once they were ashore he might well make a few suggestive comments in Alar’s hearing. For now, though, he was keeping Alar close at hand. He didn’t really like the poor fool, but such people could be useful to have around, they could be talked into doing all the unpleasant tasks one inevitably encountered.

Zander had joined the army to get away from a boring life as a peasant farmer. He had volunteered for this trip to get away from a boring life as a soldier in Semma Castle. Ethshar, whatever its flaws, certainly wouldn’t look boring to him, and he could easily decide against returning to his boring old homeland.

Sterren thought Zander was pretty boring, himself.

Bern was a mystery; he had said nothing beyond the necessary minimum for politeness ever since he answered the call for volunteers. Sterren had absolutely no idea what to expect from Bern, desertion, loyalty, insanity, anything might be possible.

Alder and Dogal, of course, had not volunteered. Alder might have, given a choice, but Dogal was clearly fed up with travel after his previous journey and would greatly have preferred to have stayed home, where he had a friendly understanding with one of the cook’s more attractive female assistants, and where he didn’t have to worry about seasickness or foreign languages and customs.

Alder was a bit more adventurous and seemed genuinely, if inexplicably, fond of Sterren. Sterren suspected it might be an emotion similar to what one might feel toward a stray puppy one had taken in; after all, Alder had found Sterren, taught him Semmat, and helped him settle into his job as warlord.

Lady Kalira would never have volunteered; on her previous journey she had discovered, to her surprise, that she hated travel and hated Ethshar. Neither one fit her romantic preconceptions; the stories never mentioned seasickness, rude sailors, smelly crowds, and all the other inconveniences she had encountered. Furthermore, she thought the whole idea of using magic to fight a war was revolting. She did, however, have a powerful sense of duty, which accounted for her cooperation, such as it was. The king had sent her, and she did as her sovereign ordered.

She had surely heard the call from the lookout when the city came into view, but she was ignoring it, staying in her cabin below.

To some extent, Sterren thought he could sympathize with her, but at the sight of the city spreading across the World before him, with its smell in his nostrils, he found his eyes filling with tears and felt a swelling in his chest as if he were about to burst.

He swallowed and, to distract himself, he called to a sailor who was hanging from the forestay, “Hey, there! Where will we tie up?” The sailor glanced at him, but shook his head.

Sterren realized he had spoken in Semmat, since Alder and Dogal had been speaking it.

“Where will we tie up?” he called in Ethsharitic.

“The Tea Wharves,” the sailor called back, “near the New Canal!”

Sterren was unsure exactly where the Tea Wharves were, but he knew the New Canal, which, despite its name, was about four hundred years old; it was new only in comparison to the Grand Canal, which was no longer particularly grand, but had been there for centuries before the New Canal was dug.

The New Canal divided Spicetown from Shiphaven, in the northwest corner of the city. The Wizards’ Quarter was near the southeastern corner. Sterren’s party would need to do some walking, it appeared.

That was no problem; it might provide more opportunities to escape from his escort. If there was a crowd at the Arena, for example, he could easily become separated “accidentally.” The Arena was directly on the way, too; Arena Street was certainly the best route to the Wizards’ Quarter from either Shiphaven or Spicetown.

That assumed that he actually wanted to slip away. After a month of debating that with himself, he still hadn’t really decided.

It would seem an easy enough decision to make, really, life as a fugitive in his homeland, or near-certain death in a nasty little kingdom in the middle of nowhere, but whenever he thought he had settled on escape he kept finding himself reconsidering, thinking of what might happen to the people he had come to know in Semma. Would Princess Lura wind up starving somewhere? Might Nissitha and Shirrin be raped by their victorious enemies? Would Alder and Dogal and all the soldiers he had diced with get themselves killed in a futile defense?

None of this, he told himself, really ought to be any responsibility of his, he hadn’t volunteered to be warlord.

Still, he was the warlord, like it or not, and abandoning Semma to its fate seemed wrong.

Of course, not abandoning Semma might get him killed, and that seemed even worse.

Perhaps, he thought with sudden inspiration, he could hire his magicians, then disappear into the city streets. Semma could still win its stupid war, but he would be free and home. True, he would be guilty of treason under Semman law, but surely nobody would go to all that much trouble looking for him under those circumstances. The Semman nobility would have no very strong reason to hold a grudge against him, if he won their war for them, whether he was present at the time or not.

And if his magicians didn’t win, and given his estimate of the purchasing power of his available funds, that seemed likely, at least he would have made an honest effort and would be no worse off than if he had deserted before recruiting anybody.

He would have tried, and if the Semman princesses were still raped or murdered, if the Semman army was still slaughtered, he would have done the best he could.

He liked that approach. He would carry through on his promise, hire the best magicians he could, and then, if the opportunity arose, he would escape on the way back to the ship.

That shouldn’t be too difficult, he thought. He smiled and blinked away the tears of homesickness.

He would hire magicians, but how did one go about hiring magicians for something like this?

His smile vanished again as he realized that he had no idea at all.

To buy a love spell or a curse, to cure warts or foresee the future, he knew exactly what to do. He would take his money to the Wizards’ Quarter and pick a likely magician by reading the signboards.

None of the signboards had ever advertised “Wars won,” though. How would he know which magicians to approach? Trial and error would not work; there were hundreds of magicians in the Wizards’ Quarter, and asking each one in turn would take years. Most of them surely wouldn’t be interested.

Recruiters of various sorts always worked in the city’s markets, particularly Shiphaven Market and Westgate Market, calling out their offers to the passing crowds; anyone who wanted to take up a career as an adventurer, or any other particularly hazardous and messy job, could go to the markets and pick from several options.

But there was no market in the Wizards’ Quarter. There was Arena Plaza, but Sterren had never seen a recruiter there. The nearest true market was in Southgate, and Sterren had never been there at all. The taverns and gaming in Southgate were organized, and freelancers like himself were not welcome.

Or would Southmarket, by the reservoir, be closer to the Wizards’ Quarter than Southgate? He had passed through there once. He didn’t remember seeing recruiters, but he could not be absolutely sure they hadn’t been there.

And there was always Eastgate Market, and Hempfield Market, and Newmarket, and Newgate, he had gambled in inns and taverns near all those, at one time or another, before settling back into his home turf around Westgate and the two Merchants’ Quarters. Those other markets had no recruiters, generally, and weren’t particularly close to the Wizards’ Quarter, but should he rule them out completely?

For the first time, Sterren began to see the city’s immensity as a serious drawback.

He blinked, shook his head, and reconsidered.

None of the various markets seemed exactly right, but pretty obyiously, Shiphaven Market would be the best if he decided to go that route. It was the traditional place to recruit people interested in traveling by sea, after all, and it would be closest to the Tea Wharves, wherever they might turn out to be. That would mean less walking through the city streets, but on the other hand, Shiphaven Market was always crowded, was not too far from his old stamping grounds, and was surrounded by places to hide.

He didn’t know all those places as well as he might, since he had usually avoided Shiphaven in order to avoid drunken sailors who might be prone to violence, or ships’ officers who might stoop to kidnapping to complete their crews, but he thought he could manage to find something.

But would there be any magicians around Shiphaven Market?

The Arena Plaza was certainly much closer to the Wizards’ Quarter, and he thought he remembered a signboard there that he could post a message on, that was a second possibility that did not deserve to be discarded out of hand.

For that matter, simply asking around in the Wizards’ Quarter, or walking the streets calling for volunteers, might produce results. Perhaps he could inquire after ambitious near-term apprentices, or even journeymen. The magicians surely gossiped among themselves and would know who might be desperate enough for work to be interested in such an adventure.

And what’s more, there was no reason he couldn’t try all three approaches.

He smiled again. That would certainly be reasonable and would call for a good, long stay in Ethshar, with visits to two of the most crowded places in the city, Shiphaven Market and Arena Plaza. The Wizards’ Quarter was less crowded, but full of nooks and crannies and odd little byways where a person could easily lose sight of his companions.

That seemed very promising indeed.

As the city loomed before him, heart-twistingly familiar, his resolution to stay until he had hired magicians evaporated. He decided instead that he would take any opportunity to escape that arose, because any opportunity might be the last.

If the opportunity never came at all, he would live with that.

He was a gambler, after all. He was accustomed to accepting what the gods of luck sent him and making the best of it. If his luck let him slip away, he would; if he never got a chance, he would go through with the hiring of magicians and play out his role as warlord. He could see the docks ahead, now, and the mouth of the New Canal. Three wharves projected out at an angle, across a band of mud, a few hundred feet to the left of the canal; the ship seemed to be headed directly for them, and he guessed that these were the Tea Wharves.

That was the Spicetown side, but getting across to Shiphaven would be easy enough. Spicetown had no market square; the spice merchants did their bidding right on the docks. Shiphaven Market would still be the first stop in the search for magicians.

This expedition, he thought, might even be fun.

CHAPTER 14

Sterren stopped walking and pointed. “That’s the New Canal,” he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the wind, “And Shiphaven Market’s just the other side. That’s where we want to start looking.”

Lady Kalira glanced at the row of shops on the opposite bank and sniffed. “I don’t see any market over there,” she said, a trifle petulantly.

“It’s not right on the canal, it’s a few blocks in.” In truth, Sterren was not at all sure how far it was; he was not overly familiar with this part of the city and had never before needed to get from Spicetown to Shiphaven Market. “Are you still sure we should start looking immediately, and not find ourselves a good meal or a place to sleep?”

“We can sleep on the ship,” Lady Kalira replied, irritated, “and eat there, too, if we have to. Now, where’s this market?”

“How do we get across?” Alder asked. “Is there a bridge?”

Sterren had to think for a minute. “Well, there is on the Upper Canal, which turns off this one, or maybe it’s on the New Canal right before the Upper Canal turns off. I’m not sure.”

“Boats,” Kendrik pointed out. “There must be boats going across.”

“Of course there are,” Sterren said, although he hadn’t known there were until he saw what Kendrik had spotted: a small, flat-bottomed boat, obviously unfit to leave the calm waters of the canal, tied up to a dock on the opposite side. A man lay dozing in it, and some rotting fruit rinds were bumping gently against one gunwhale. Looking around, Sterren saw that a similar dock on the near side jutted forty feet out into the canal and had a space on one side where just such a boat could readily tie up.

“A ferry, that’s what it is,” he added, as he led the way down to the dock.

He hoped it actually was a ferry; if not, he knew he was going to look very foolish.

“I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Zander muttered as he followed his warlord down the cobbled slope.

“Because Shiphaven Market is where people recruit for foreign adventures; I told you all that,” Sterren retorted, as his feet hit the first planks.

Zander was not silenced. “Is it always this cold?” he asked, pulling his tunic tighter at the throat.

“No,” Sterren and Lady Kalira replied, simultaneously.

Sterren was not particularly pleased with the cold and wind, or with Zander’s whining. Both acted as deterrents to desertion. The immense size of the city did, as well; Sterren, being a native and accustomed to it from birth, had not realized how intimidating it must be to a foreigner, newly arrived from the rural openness of Semma, to find himself surrounded by a seemingly endless maze of walls and streets.

Even the rich city smell that he found so comforting probably seemed like an alien stink to the Semmans.

He was rapidly losing hope that all four of his volunteers would desert, but if even one did, he thought he could send the others after him, while he and Lady Kalira supposedly continued his recruiting mission. That might provide sufficient opportunity for his own escape. He came to the end of the dock, stopped, and waved an arm above his head.

Here he called, shouting at the top of his lungs in order to be heard over the wind, “Over here!” The man in the flat-bottomed boat looked up, startled out of his doze, and saw the party on east side. He sat up, then stood, and picked up a long-handled oar.

Sterren could feel Lady Kalira’s impatience as they stood and watched while the ferryman casually used the blunt end of the oar to push off from the dock and then began paddling his way slowly across the canal, fighting the steady breeze that wanted to push his ungainly craft out to sea. The gap between the two docks was a good forty yards, Sterren judged, and it took several long minutes for the boat to cross it.

When it drew near, the ferryman stopped rowing, reached down, and came up with a coil of rope. He threw one end of it up onto the dock.

Alder, with admirable presence of mind, caught it and began hauling the boat in.

The other end of the rope was secured to the boat’s blunt bow, and in a moment that bumped up against the battered end of the dock.

“Bunch of barbarians, is it?” the ferryman muttered in Ethsharitic. “I can’t take you all at once!” he called aloud.

The Semtnan soldiers spoke no Ethsharitic and were all crowding forward toward the boat. “Wait!” Sterren called. “Not all at once! You’ll... you’ll...” He could not think of a Semmat equivalent for “sink,” “swamp,” or “capsize.”

He didn’t need one; the soldiers got the idea and stopped pressing.

In his native tongue, Sterren called to the boatman, “Yes, they are a bunch of barbarians, but I’m stuck with them. How many can you take?”

“How many of you are there?” the boatman asked, eyeing the little mob.

Sterren did a quick head count to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anyone, then answered, “Eight, in all.”

The boatman considered, then said, “I can take four each time easily enough. Two trips will do it, then. I’ll give you a cut rate, too, six bits the lot.”

Sterren was not at all sure that was actually a cut rate, but he paid no attention. Here, sent by the gods, was a chance to split the party. He turned to Lady Kalira. “He says he can only take four at a time,” he explained. “I’ll go on ahead with Zander and Alar and Bern, say, and then he’ll come back for the rest of you.”

“Oh, no!” she replied. “No, I stay with you! You, me, Alder, and Dogal go first, and the rest can follow.”

“My lady, need I remind you that I am in charge here, and not you? This is my city, and I am your warlord.”

“This is your city, all right,” Lady Kalira interrupted, “and that’s exactly why I’m staying with you.”

Sterren opened his mouth to argue, then caught sight of the expression on Alder’s face.

It was not an easy expression to describe, having something of resignation, annoyance, and doubt in it, but Sterren knew immediately that it meant Alder didn’t trust him any more than Lady Kalira did. He closed his mouth.

“All right,” he said after a moment. “We’ll go first, then those four.” He pushed his way past the soldiers and climbed down into the boat. “My lady, if you will?” he said, turning back and offering a hand.

Lady Kalira accepted his aid, stepping down into the boat. She settled on one of the seats in the bow.

Dogal followed, then Alder with the bowline, and Sterren, prompted by the ferryman’s gestures, settled the two of them amidships, while he sat in the bow beside Lady Kalira.

“Oars are on either side,” the ferryman pointed out from where he stood in the stem.

Sterren translated, and Alder and Dogal each took an oar as the ferryman reached over them with his own long oar and pushed them away from the dock.

It took the Semman soldiers a minute to get the hang of rowing, but even so, the trip west was much quicker than the ferryman’s solo trip east had been.

Once across, they clambered quickly ashore.

The ferryman waited, and once they were all safely on the dock he said, “That’ll be six bits. I don’t get the others until I see the money.”

Sterren did not bother to translate this for the others; he just pulled the money from his purse and tossed it to the ferryman, who caught it deftly.

Then the foursome had to stand on the western dock and wait while the ferryman returned for the other soldiers.

It was only then that Lady Kalira realized that none of the other four spoke a single word of Ethsharitic, or even Trader’s Tongue. The ferryman did his best to make himself understood in both languages, bits of his shouting carried across the water, but the four Semmans were very slow indeed to find places in the boat and cast off successfully.

Sterren watched the others carefully, glancing back now and then at the city streets behind them, but he saw no opportunity to make a dash for shelter. He waited, unhappily, until the party was reunited.

The north wind was chilly, and Dogal was shivering badly by the time the others scrambled up out of the boat. Even Sterren felt the cold.

“This way,” he said, with no idea whether it was the right way; he just wanted to get moving and out of the wind.

He led the way up away from the canal, past a cross street, around a sinuous bend, and through two three-way intersections.

Then he stopped, trying to figure out where he was.

The other seven, all close behind him, nearly trampled him.

He looked about. The others followed suit.

They were obviously in Shiphaven. Most of the people in sight on the streets wore the blue kilts and white tunics of sailors. Two chandlers’ shops were in sight, and a cooper’s as well. A red-haired woman sat on the balcony of a nearby brothel, but wore a heavy shawl wrapped about her against the wind. She called a greeting, judging the soldiers to be potential customers; Kendrik in particular stared at her greedily.

Sterren did not recognize the street. He considered stopping one of the sailors strolling by, but rejected the idea immediately; he would not admit so easily to being lost in his native city.

Even over the clatter of passing feet and the whistle of the wind in the nearby eaves, he could hear voices ahead and to the left. “This way,” he said, marching on.

The Semmans followed. Alder and Dogal close on his heels. Lady Kalira just behind, and the others trailing along.

The next intersection was another cross street, and he turned left, to find himself looking directly at Shiphaven Market, two blocks away.

He recognized the street, then; he was on East Wharf Street. He still could not identify the one he had followed from the canal, however.

“There you are,” he said, pointing, “Shiphaven Market!”

He was rather proud of having led the party successfully through an unfamiliar part of the city, but none of the Semmans seemed impressed by his accomplishment. None of them realized, of course, that this part of the city was unfamiliar.

In fact, he wondered if it had really sunk in yet that the city was big enough that he wasn’t familiar with all of it.

“Good,” Lady Kalira snapped. “Let’s go find a wizard and get back to the ship, before we all freeze.”

“Doesn’t have to be a wizard,” Sterren began, but Lady Kalira’s glare discouraged him from saying any more. He marched on.

The market was not crowded, probably because of the weather, Sterren guessed. The foul winds would have kept down the number of ships reaching the harbor with goods to sell or vacancies in their crews to fill, and the cold would discourage the casual browser. He doubted he saw much more than a hundred people milling about.

One of them, however, was unmistakably a wizard, complete with crimson robe and an assortment of well-filled pouches and sheathes on her belt. Another, tall, thin, pale, and wearing black, might well be a warlock.

Sterren suddenly began to think that his presence here was a mistake. What did he want with magicians? All he wanted was to be left alone. He stopped walking.

“Come on,” Lady Kalira said, and Alder reached out for his elbow.

He walked on into the market square, found a quiet spot, and then stopped again.

“Now what?” Lady Kalira demanded.

Sterren was overcome with irrational fear, stage fright, although he had never encountered that term for it. He knew that the time had come to call out his recruiting pitch, but he could not bring himself to speak.

Inspiration struck. “You tell them what we want,” he told Lady Kalira.

“Me?”

“Yes, you; as your warlord, I demand it.”

“But my lord, I don’t speak Ethsharitic!”

In his panic, Sterren had forgotten that.

Reminded of it, a sudden inspiration struck him, and before he could lose his nerve again he raised his hands and shouted, “People of Ethshar! These barbarians think I’m going to give a recruiting speech for them, but the truth is that they’re holding me prisoner against my will! I ask that you summon the city guard!”

“Wait a minute,” Lady Kalira said, hauling down one arm. “What was that you said?”

“I said-”

“You didn’t say anything about magicians, and I heard you say something about the city guard, I think.”

Sterren saw that doubtful expression on Alder’s face again and saw his hand fall to the hilt of his sword. He cleared his throat.

“Just warming up,” Sterren said. He looked about and realized that nobody else had paid any attention to him, anyway. The wind had apparently carried his words away unheard, or perhaps they had been taken for a joke, or a stunt to attract attention.

He looked over his own party and for the first time he noticed that Kendrik was gone.

He smiled, but decided not to point this absence out. Not yet, anyway. For now, it would clearly be safer to behave himself and seriously try to recruit magicians; his chances of slipping away might well improve later on.

He turned back toward the center of the square and shouted in Ethsharitic, “Magicians needed! Magicians needed! I represent his Majesty, King Phenvel the Third of Semma, and I am here to hire fine magicians of every school to aid the royal Semman army!”

“That’s better,” Lady Kalira muttered, recognizing the familiar names.

A young man stopped to listen as Sterren continued, “Excellent pay! Comfortable accommodations! An opportunity for glory and honor in a worthy cause! Magicians of every sort are needed!” He found himself getting into the spirit of the occasion; it wasn’t really all that different from the times he had needed to talk a losing opponent out of retaliation.

“You think you’re going to find decent magicians here, at this time of year?” the young stranger asked, smirking.

“Shut up,” Sterren answered conversationally. “Magicians!” he called.

The listener snorted.

A middle-aged couple in fine clothing wandered up to listen.

“We need magicians! Payment in gold and gems, all expenses to be borne by the royal treasury!”

The red-robed wizard approached, and then the tall man in black.

“You, wizard,” Sterren asked, beckoning, “would you be interested in a trip to Semma, the jewel of the Small Kingdoms?”

The wizard smiled wryly and turned away.

“I might be,” the man in black answered.

“Are you a magician, sir?” Sterren asked.

The man in black raised a hand, and a thick swirl of dust rose up from the hard-packed ground of the market, spiraling upward before him, ignoring the wind that should have scattered it across the marketplace. The dust gathered into a ball the size of a fist, hung there in the air for an instant, and then burst apart and vanished, whipped away on the breeze.

“I’m a warlock,” said the man in black.

CHAPTER 15

After an hour’s harangue, Sterren gave up. His throat was sore, his voice giving out, and he had lost the crowd’s interest completely.

The warlock had stood by, waiting patiently the whole time. He had neither committed himself to the venture nor turned it down, had not demanded to know more, but had simply waited.

A black-haired woman with a runny nose, about Sterren’s own age and wearing a purple gown with stains that resembled those one might acquire sleeping in the Hundred-Foot Field, had also turned up, claiming to be a wizard, and she had actually volunteered. She had been more concerned with Sterren’s guarantee that she would be fed for as long as she was in Semma’s employ than in the particulars of the job, or the payment offered.

The sun was low above the rooftops on the western side of the square. “Time for dinner,” Sterren said in Semmat, turning to Lady Kalira. “Don’t you think so?”

“I suppose,” she said.

She had spent much of the hour wandering about the market looking at the goods offered for sale, but she had not bought anything. Sterren suspected that she had been too embarrassed by her poor command of Ethsharitic, if you could call her dozen or so phrases “command”, to try to haggle in that language, and the local merchants, while likely to speak several tongues, would not be likely to know anything so obscure as Semmat.

Of course, Lady Kalira spoke Trader’s Tongue, Sterren remembered, and most of the merchants could probably handle that, but perhaps she didn’t realize it. Or maybe language had nothing to do with it, and her funds were running low. That might be inconvenient, since he had hoped that her purse would be there to fall back on in an emergency.

Whatever the reason. Lady Kalira had returned, empty-handed, a few minutes before.

Dogal and Alder had stayed close at hand throughout Sterren’s pitch; even while speaking he had watched for a chance to slip away from them, but had not seen one.

The same could not be said of Alar, Zander, and Bern, all of whom had wandered off. Zander and Bern had returned; Alar as yet, had not, nor was there any sign of Kendrik.

Sterren switched back to Ethsharitic and asked the warlock, “Would you care to join my companions and myself for dinner, and perhaps discuss the job further?”

The warlock nodded casually.

“Is there somewhere around here where we can get a decent meal,” Sterren asked. “Or should we head down to Westgate?”

“This is not my part of the city,” the warlock replied.

Sterren hesitated, then thought better of asking him any further questions, such as which part of the city was his, and why wasn’t he there. Instead, he turned to the wizard, a questioning look on his face.

Before he could speak, without a word, she pointed to a tavern on the north corner of Flood Street, where a faded signboard depicted a golden dragon.

“Good enough,” he said, as he led the way.

“Wait a minute,” Lady Kalira objected. “What about Kendrik and Alar?”

Sterren stopped. “My lady,” he said, “Kendrik deserted before we even reached the market; I last saw him among the... the...” He paused, then resorted to using the Ethsharitic word. “The brothels on...” He paused again, sighed, and said, “East Wharf Street” in Ethsharitic. Switching back to Semmat, he continued, “Alar wandered off some time ago, and I have no idea where he has gone and I don’t want to either search for him, or wait for his return.”

“But you can’t allow desertion!”

“I can’t allow myself to starve, either, or perish of thirst.”

A look at Lady Kalira’s face let him know that that was not going to be sufficient. “All right,” he said, capitulating, “Zander, you and Bern go find Kendrik and Alar. Then meet us at that inn, there.” He pointed to the Golden Dragon. “If we aren’t there, go back to the ship. It’s at the...” He stopped. He wished he knew the word for “wharf” in Semmat, but he didn’t, and besides, if these two asked for directions in Semmat, nobody would know what they were saying. “Tea Wharves” he said in Ethsharitic, then asked in Semmat, “Can you say that?”

“Why should we say it?” Zander asked.

“In case you get lost,” Sterren explained.

The concept of getting lost was not one Zander, born and raised on an open plain, thought of the same way a city boy like Sterren did, but looking at the maze of streets Zander saw the sense in it. He said, “Oh.”

“Tea Wharves,” Sterren repeated. “Try it.”

Zander struggled to wrap his tongue around the unfamiliar syllables. The resulting mess was not recognizable.

“Bern?” Sterren asked.

“Tea Wharves,” Bern said, in accented but perfectly intelligible Ethsharitic. Sterren peered at him suspiciously.

“You don’t speak Ethsharitic, do you?”

“No, my lord,” Bern replied.

“Zander, try it again. Tea Wharves.”

Zander managed to produce something almost adequate this time.

“Good enough, I suppose. Work on it while you’re hunting for your comrades.”

Zander nodded; Bern didn’t bother. Together, they turned and marched back into the market crowd.

Sterren watched them go, neither knowing nor caring whether he would ever see either of them again.

He had gotten rid of four of his seven unwanted companions, he thought; he was more than halfway to freedom!

“This way,” he said, leading the way to the Golden Dragon.

The tavern was less than half full, and they found a table readily, not far from the door. Sterren, after some consideration, decided that neither facing the door nor sitting with his back to it would be best for slipping away; he sat with his right side toward the door, his back to the open room.

Lady Kalira sat opposite him, against a wall; Alder took the chair to his right, back to the door, and Dogal to his left, facing the door. The warlock sat between Alder and Lady Kalira, the wizard between Dogal and Lady Kalira.

Sterren took the opportunity for a look at his two recruits.

Both were thin, but the wizard’s slenderness appeared to be due to borderline malnutrition, while the warlock was simply built that way. The wizard wore her hair in long black ringlets that trailed halfway down her back, and even in her present tattered and dirty condition they still showed signs of having been combed not too long ago. Her face was rather drawn, her eyes brown and anxious; if she were clean, smiling, and better-fed, Sterren thought, she would be attractive, possibly even beautiful.

She sniffled, then dabbed at her nose with a stained cuff. The warlock was clean and looked as if he was as well fed as he cared to be, but he was definitely not smiling. His lined, narrow face was fixed and expressionless, his mouth a thin line, his pale green eyes unreadable. His hair, black with the first traces of gray, was cut short, barely covering his ears. Sterren guessed him to be over forty; how much over he had no idea. He might have been handsome once, but now, Sterren thought, he was merely striking.

As soon as they were seated, even before the serving maid could reach them, the warlock said, “I notice that in an hour’s speech, you never once specified the nature of the employment you offered.”

Caught off guard, Sterren agreed, “I suppose I didn’t.”

The wizard was staring hungrily at the approaching tavern girl, and Sterren used that as an excuse to change the subject. “My lady,” he said in Semmat, “what shall we have, and at whose expense?”

“You brought us here,” Lady Kalira said, “you pay for it. You wanted dinner, we’ll have dinner. What was the man in black saying?”

“He asked a question about our offer. Wine with your meal?”

Lady Kalira nodded.

Sterren glanced at each of the remaining soldiers in turn, and each nodded. “Wine would be welcome,” Alder said.

Sterren nodded back, then switched to Ethsharitic and asked the wizard, “Would you like wine with dinner?”

The serving maid had reached the table, heard this final question, and saw the wizard’s nod.

“We have several fine vintages,” she said. Her tone made it a question.

Sterren said, in Ethsharitic, “The three barbarians wouldn’t appreciate it, and I can’t afford it, so I do hope my two guests will forgive me if we have the regular house wine and whatever you have for the house dinner tonight, rather than anything special. That’s for all six of us, unless...”

He looked questioningly at the warlock, who made a small gesture of acquiescence with one hand. The wizard said, “That would be fine.”

The tavern girl departed.

“The nature of this proposed employment?” the warlock said.

Sterren had carefully avoided being specific in his marketplace spiel, for fear of frightening off prospects, but he realized that the time for prevarication was past.

He sighed. “I’m the hereditary warlord of one of the Small Kingdoms, a little place in the far south called Semma. I didn’t want the job, but I’m stuck with it. Semma is on the verge of war with two larger neighbors, and we’re doomed. The army is absolutely pitiful and badly outnumbered. We don’t stand a chance unless we cheat. In the Small Kingdoms, at least in Semma’s neighborhood, they don’t use magic in their wars; it’s considered dishonorable or something, it’s cheating. Well, I’m ready to cheat, because otherwise I’ll be killed for losing. So I’m here looking for magicians who can help us win this war. It shouldn’t take much, since there’s so little magic there and the soldiers will never have fought against magicians before.” He looked at the warlock, hoping that he wouldn’t dismiss the idea out of hand.

“A war?” The warlock’s tone was calm and considering.

Sterren nodded, encouraged that the warlock had not rejected the idea out of hand. He glanced at the wizard.

She had hardly listened; her attention was on the door to the kitchen. It was an interesting door, with the skull of a small dragon mounted so as to form the top of the frame and the dragon’s lower jaw serving as a door-handle, but Sterren suspected the poor young woman was far more interested in what would be coming through that door than in the decor that gave the tavern its name.

The wizard caught his eye and turned back to him. “I don’t care what the job is,” she said, sniffing and brushing a stray ringlet back over her shoulder, “if it won’t get me killed outright and you pay in gold. I’ll take it.” She hesitated, then wiped her nose and asked, “It won’t get me killed outright, will it?”

“I certainly hope not,” Sterren said. “If we win, it won’t, but if we lose, you’ll probably have to flee for your lives.” He shrugged. “Fleeing shouldn’t be difficult; it’s wide-open country, and the kingdoms are so small it should be easy to get safely across a border before they can catch you.”

The warlock nodded. “You say Semma is far to the south?”

Sterren nodded again. “About as far to the southeast as you can get, really; from the castle’s highest tower you can see the edge of the World, on a clear day. I’ve seen it myself.” He stared at the warlock, a suspicion growing in the back of his mind.

He had not really had time to consider his two prospective employees, but now he did.

Warlockry was virtually unknown in Semma. He had no way of knowing for certain whether it would work there at all and he was quite sure it would be far less effective than it was in Ethshar. A warlock, therefore, would not be his preferred sort of magician.

On the other hand, this particular warlock seemed very interested in going south.

Sterren could guess what that meant. This particular warlock probably wanted to get as far away from Aldagmor and the Power’s Source as he could. He might have already had the first warning nightmares that meant he had pushed his warlockry to dangerous levels.

Warlockry, as Sterren knew from his aborted apprenticeship, drew its power from a mysterious Source located somewhere in the Aldagmor region, a mountainous area far to the north of Ethshar, on the edge of the Baronies of Sardiron. A warlock’s power varied as the inverse square of the distance from this thing. A warlock’s power also increased with use; every spell a warlock cast made the next one a shade easier. Most magic worked that way, of course; most skills of any kind did. The effect was rather extreme with warlockry, however, because warlockry, unlike all other magic, also directly counteracted fatigue; magic not only didn’t tire a warlock, it revivified him, without limit.

Except that there was a limit. When a warlock’s power reached a certain level, he began to have nightmares. From then on, every further use of warlockry caused more and worse nightmares, which could make life virtually unbearable.

Eventually an afflicted warlock wouldn’t even need to be asleep to suffer these hideous visions and, in the end, every warlock ever known to have reached this point had died or vanished. Those who did not commit suicide were often seen wandering north, toward Aldagmor, usually flying, but then were never seen again.

This was known as the Calling, because that was what the nightmares seemed to be: a horrible, supernatural summons of some kind that would draw a warlock either to Aldagmor or death, or both.

What most warlocks did was, when the first nightmare hit, to move south or west, further from Aldagmor, and give up warlockry for good. The smarter ones would have been charging exorbitant fees in anticipation of this and could afford to retire in comfort.

Sterren guessed that this warlock had pushed his luck, and had already had considerably more than one nightmare, so that he was now desperate to get as far from Aldagmor as possible, as quickly as possible.

Whatever his reasons, the warlock might be either a great stroke of luck or utterly worthless, depending on just what power did remain to him in Semma, so very far from Aldagmor.

Bringing him along would be a gamble, but after all, Sterren had always been a gambler.

If any warlock could be of help in Semma, one already touched by nightmare, on the verge of the Calling, would surely be most likely. The Calling only came when warlocks reached the height of their power. In fact, one theory was that the Calling was something the gods used to remove warlocks who were becoming too powerful, who might damage the gods’ plan for the World.

A lesser warlock would not be worth bothering with, but a really powerful one might be. He would surely be greatly weakened, but he would also be something that nobody in Ophkar or Ksinallion would ever have seen before.

“Nightmares?” Sterren asked quietly.

For the first time since Sterren had first seen him in the market, the warlock’s calm expression changed; he let a flicker of surprise at Sterren’s knowledge show. Then, slowly, he nodded.

Sterren smiled slightly. He knew that the Calling gave the warlock reasons for coming south far more important than a pound of gold.

That meant he would probably work cheap, far cheaper than his level of power might otherwise justify.

“You’ll be coming, then?” Sterren asked.

The warlock nodded again.

Sterren turned to the wizard. “And you?”

“What’s the pay, exactly? Are meals included?” Her voice shook a little. She looked at Sterren as she wiped her nose on her sleeve again.

The serving maid chose that moment to return with a tray holding six plates of stewed vegetables, tainted with only the smallest trace of mutton. A bottle of red wine and half a dozen stacked mugs were included, as well.

Sterren and the two Semman soldiers distributed the plates, while the warlock sent the cups floating through the air to the appropriate places. At a gesture, the cork sprang from the bottle’s neck, and the bottle then settled itself in front of Lady Kalira.

Startled, she picked it up and only after a moment’s hesitation did she begin pouring.

Sterren threw the warlock a puzzled glance. If he had reached the threshold of nightmare, didn’t he realize that every additional use of warlockry would increase his danger? At least, that was what Sterren’s master, Bergan the Warlock, had said.

The warlock saw the look and smiled slightly. “In honor of our imminent departure for more southerly climes,” he said, raising his cup as if in a toast.

The others probably thought it was just a toast, but Sterren knew what the warlock meant. After keeping his magic in check, for hours, days, sixnights, even months, perhaps, he was allowing himself a little freedom, secure in the knowledge that he would soon be sailing away from whatever waited in the mountains and valleys of Aldagmor.

Sterren put that out of his mind and turned to the wizard. “The pay,” he explained, “will include meals, and a hammock aboard ship, and a room in Semma Castle, possibly shared with others, but a bed of your own, at any rate. You’ll need to learn some Semmat, I’m afraid; virtually nobody there speaks a word of Ethsharitic. If we win our war, then the magicians involved, as a group, will be paid ten rounds of gold, and, a dozen choice gems, I can show them to you later, if you like, but not in a tavern like this. How this payment is to be divided up is yet to be determined; either the magicians can decide amongst themselves, or King Phenvel can divide it up as he deems appropriate. Would that suit you?”

She nodded, sniffling.

“If you don’t mind my asking, just what magic do you know?” Sterren inquired. Obviously, she knew no spells to keep a cold away.

“Wizardry, of course,” she said.

That was no surprise, but Sterren knew well that wizards came in a wide range of skills and power. “Much wizardry?” he asked.

“Well...” She hesitated, then admitted what her soiled clothes and empty belly had already made obvious. “No, not really. A few spells.”

“Not just tricks, though, I hope,” Sterren said, knowing he was prodding her on what was surely a sensitive subject.

“No, real spells!” she snapped. “I am Annara of Crookwall and I am a full journeyman in the Wizards’ Guild; I served my six years as apprentice and I learned what my master could teach me!”

Her flash of pride vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. “That wasn’t much, though,” she admitted, nervously tugging her hair back from her face.

That was no surprise. Sterren nodded and poured himself wine.

As they ate, the warlock and the three Semmans said nothing, while Sterren and Annara made polite small talk. Sterren inquired about her upbringing in Crookwall, while she, in turn, asked about Semma and was surprised to learn that he was a native of Westgate, rather than someplace more exotic.

After the meal had been consumed, Sterren leaned back in his chair and looked across at Lady Kalira as he tried to decide what to do next.

“Well, my lord,” Lady Kalira said, seeing his attention focused on her, “you have two magicians here, do you not?”

Sterren nodded.

“Is that sufficient, then?”

Sterren guessed at what the Semmat word for “sufficient” meant. He glanced at Annara, who would give no details other abilities beyond admitting to “a few spells,” and then at the warlock, who had as yet given no name, who might well be totally powerless in Semma.

“No,” he replied immediately, before even considering his own hopes for escape. “These two may help, but neither of them can provide any assurance of winning.”

“Then you plan to try to recruit more?”

Sterren nodded.

“My lord, are you sure you have no other intentions?”

He picked up her phrase to ask, “What other intentions might I have?” He eyed her cautiously.

“Delay, perhaps.”

“Baguir?” He did not recognize the word. He guessed it to be something like “escape,” but could not be certain. “What’s baguir?”

“To put off, to stall, to hold back, to go slowly; I don’t know the Ethsharitic.”

That was not the reply Sterren had feared and expected. “Delay?” he asked. “Why should I want to delay?”

“I would not know, my lord, but your refusal to purchase any magical assistance in sailing hither, and your insistence that two magicians are not enough, would seem to imply that you are certainly in no hurry about this foolish, disreputable business.”

He picked up her phrase again, without any very clear idea what it meant, save that it had a strong negative connotation. “This disreputable business may save Semma, my lady.”

“Not if you continue to delay.”

“I’m not delaying! Why should I?”

“Well, my lord, it has occurred to me, in my more cynical moments, that if you can stretch your visit to this, your homeland, long enough, perhaps the war in Semma will be fought and lost before our return, and you can retire to a comfortable exile here.”

Sterren stared at her. That possibility had never occurred to him.

A very tempting possibility it was, too.

He glanced quickly to either side, at the two other Semmans, the only ones in the tavern who could understand this Semmat conversation.

Alder looked seriously upset; Dogal was calmer, but eyeing Sterren suspiciously.

“I am not delaying,” Sterren insisted.

“Then tell me, my lord, just how much longer we must remain here, and how many magicians you think to find.”

“My lady Kalira, I’ve only just started! One hour in a... in one market is nothing! If we could find one magician I could be sure was powerful enough, that would be all we need; without that one, I think half a dozen might serve. To find the right ones, though, I have no way of knowing how long it will be!” Lady Kalira sighed. “My lord Sterren, let us speak frankly,” she said. “You know that despite your rank, I was sent here as your gaoler, to make sure that you did, in fact, return to Semma before the spring, when invasion is all but certain.”

Sterren noticed Alder turn to stare at Lady Kalira as she said this; he had obviously not realized either that Sterren was still under suspicion by anyone but Dogal and himself, nor that an invasion was imminent.

“You have managed to lose four of the six men set to guard you, though I am not sure how.”

“They may come back,” Sterren interrupted.

Lady Kalira held up a hand. “Yes, they may, but at present they are not here. Let me continue.” She glared at him.

“Go on,” Sterren said.

“As I was saying, you have very cleverly disposed of two-thirds of your escort already and acquired two of the magicians you sought, to confuse matters and perhaps, for all we know, to deceive the two guards remaining. We have no very clear idea what you have been discussing with them throughout this meal, since we don’t know Ethsharitic; you could have been planning your escape, with their connivance, under our very noses.”

Sterren wished he had been bold enough to try it.

“Now, you are demanding an effectively unlimited opportunity to stroll about the city, looking for a chance to slip away and hide from us in a city you know far better than we could ever hope to. I am sorry, but as your unwilling gaoler, I can’t allow it, we must set a term, at the end of which we will depart this place and sail homeward with all due speed. I would suggest that by noon tomorrow we be under way.”

Sterren sat back and used a fingernail to pick the last remnants of his supper from between his teeth as he considered this.

“I see what you mean, my lady,” he said at last, “and I truly do understand. I do not suppose that you would accept my word that I will not escape, or delay until it’s too late.” To his own surprise, he realized that he really would be willing to give his word, and that he would keep it, as he always had. Semma was not really as bad as all that, and the idea of his soldiers being slaughtered was not an appealing one. If he could just find the right magic, he was sure he could win the war. It was a challenge, a gamble, and he wanted to meet it head on. He wanted to see if a little magic really could change a sure defeat into victory.

And after it was over, maybe then he could desert.

“No, my lord,” she said, “I’m afraid I couldn’t accept your word. After all, despite your noble ancestry and your apparent good intentions, what are you really but a merchant’s brat, brought up in the streets, accustomed to cheating at dice to earn your bread? How much honor can I expect from such as you?”

Sterren smiled wryly, to hide how much Lady Kalira’s clinically exact description hurt him. “More than you might think,” he said, “But if you will not take my word, there is little I can do to make you believe me.” He sighed. “Until noon, though, is not enough. If you could give me three days...”

He let his voice trail off.

“Three days?” It was her turn to sit back and consider.

“Today is the twenty-first of Snowfall,” she said. “You will agree, then, that we must all be aboard ship by nightfall on the twenty-fourth, ready to set sail with the next tide?”

Sterren nodded. “Agreed,” he said.

“You’ll promise not to attempt escape?”

“You said that you can’t accept my word, but all the same, I’ll give it. I won’t try to escape before nightfall on the twenty-fourth of Snowfall.”

“All right,” she said, “Three days, and then we drag you back to the ship.”

CHAPTER 16

By morning the month of Snowfall was living up to its name. It was snowing, and Sterren decided that Shiphaven Market was not going to be worth another visit. Instead, he left Annara and the warlock aboard ship while he, Lady Kalira, Alder, and Dogal all set out in the early gloom for the Arena and the Wizards’ Quarter.

None of the other four soldiers had turned up yet, and that meant Lady Kalira was in a very bad temper. Sterren made no attempt at conversation as he led the way up Warehouse Street, through Shortcut Alley to North Street, and on out of Spicetown.

As they neared the Grand Canal, however, the overlord’s palace gradually became visible ahead, and Sterren noticed all three Semmans staring at it.

They weren’t being quite attentive enough to encourage escape, and besides, he had promised not to, but he did venture to remark, “Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Is that where the wizards live?” Lady Kalira demanded.

Startled, Sterren said, “No, of course not! That’s Lord Azrad’s... ah... castle.”

“How far to the magicians, then?”

“Well. North Street forks ahead and we go left on...” He hesitated and then switched to using Ethsharitic for place names. “We go left on the Promenade, then on the other side of the Palace Plaza we take Arena Street, and then it’s about a mile to the Arena, I guess.”

“You’re joking!”

“No, I’m not.”

“A mile?”

“About that.”

“I will never get over the size of this city,” Lady Kalira said, more to herself than to Sterren. “What a mess!”

Sterren did not consider his home city a mess, but he knew better than to say anything. They made the rest of the journey in silence.

The streets were almost empty because of the snow, and the city’s normal odor was largely suppressed by the pale gray blanket that covered the rooftops and most of the streets, but the scent of spices, wood smoke, and charcoal was still strong. The mansions of the New City were silent and elegant, the snow hiding much of the damage that time had done them; even the slums of the outer Arena district were quieter and less offensive in such weather.

They passed Camp Street, then the Arena itself, and came to the plaza just south of the main entrance.

There, to the right of the rampway into the Arena, was the message board that Sterren had remembered, a six-foot-high wall of rough pine planks weathered gray, fifteen feet long, plastered over its entire surface with faded and torn bits of paper, parchment, and fabric.

Sterren had written up his notice the night before, aboard ship, but he realized as he looked for a place to put it that he had not thought to bring any tacks or nails. With a shrug, he found a notice that had been attached with unusually long cut nails, announcing an estate auction that had taken place a sixnight before, and he rammed the corners of his own message over the blunt ends of the nails.

Satisfied, he read it over again.

“Magicians,” it said in large letters at the top, then continued in smaller writing below, “Employment opportunity for magicians of every school. The Kingdom of Semma is recruiting magicians for government service for a term of several months, but not to exceed one year. Room and board furnished, and transportation both ways, as well as payment in gold and gems. To apply, or for further information, contact Sterren, Ninth Warlord of Semma, aboard the Southern Wind, now docked at the Tea Wharves in Spicetown. Final application must be made by nightfall, 24 Snowfall, 5221.”

He stepped back and realized that his fine, big page was almost lost amid the jumble of paper and cloth.

There was, however, nothing he could do about it.

He looked at some of the other messages on the board, wondering what they were all about. One caught his eye immediately.

“Acclaimed prestidigitator seeks part-time employment. Leave message with Thorum the Mage, Wizard Street.”

Sterren was unsure exactly what a prestidigitator was; some sort of magician, surely! Part-time employment, that wasn’t exactly what he was offering, but still...

Thorum the Mage, he told himself, on Wizard Street. That wouldn’t be too hard to find.

He was about to start looking for more notices when he was reminded of his companions by the sound of feet shuffling in the slush.

“Hai, you three,” he said, “come here and help me read these! Some of them are from magicians looking for work! I should have come here in the first place, instead of bothering with Shiphaven!”

Dogal shook his head. “I can’t read,” he said.

Lady Kalira and Alder started forward, but then Alder stopped. A moment later, as she got close enough to make out the messages, so did Lady Kalira.

“We can’t read them, either,” she said. “They’re all in Ethsharitic.”

“Well, of course they...” Sterren let his voice trail off as he realized that he was the only one present who could read Ethsharitic. He turned back to the board and drew a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh.

“I’ll read them, then,” he said.

Two hours later he felt he had covered the board adequately. Snow, meanwhile, had attempted to cover Alder and Dogal; Lady Kalira had taken shelter in the arched entrance of the Arena.

“Doesn’t this stuff ever stop falling?” Dogal asked.

“Of course it does!” Sterren retorted, instinctively leaping to the defense of his native city.

“And then what happens to it?” Alder asked. “What do you people do with it all?”

“Nothing; it melts, of course,” Sterren said. “This isn’t Sardiron, where it piles up all winter.”

“Well, how would we know that?” Alder replied angrily, his temper obviously shortened by the long, cold wait.

“From experience, of course. Haven’t you ever seen... seen it before?” He could not think of a Semmat word for “snow.”

Alder and Dogal both stared at him, startled. “No, of course not!” Alder replied.

“How could we have seen it before?” Dogal asked.

It was Sterren’s turn to be startled. “Oh,” he said. “Doesn’t it... I mean, don’t you have this stuff in Semma?”

“No,” Alder answered.

“It doesn’t fall in the winter, like this?”

“No, it rains in the winter in Semma. We don’t have snow.”

Sterren noted the word for later use, then dropped the subject. “Oh. Well, I have a dozen messages here from magicians looking for work and I want to follow up on them, before I forget any names. Come on.”

The “dozen” was actually fifteen, though there was some overlap in the message drops they used.

With much grumbling, the soldiers came. Lady Kalira emerged from the entryway and joined the party as Sterren led them back out to Arena Street and on to the southeast, toward the Wizards’ Quarter.

Five blocks took them to Games Street, a thoroughfare that Sterren remembered well, even though he had rarely played there. The times when he tried it had all been remarkable enough to stay very clear in his memory.

And Games Street, of course, marked the line between the indeterminate streets between the Arena and the Wizards’ Quarter, where various performing magicians made their homes, and the heart of the Wizards’ Quarter proper, where virtually all the city’s magic shops were clustered.

In fact, just one more block south on Arena brought them to Wizard Street. There was no marker, but it was unmistakable. “Tanna the Great,” advertised a signboard at the corner, “Wizardry for Every Need, Love Charms a Specialty.” Peculiar odors mixed with the inevitable smell of wood smoke, the city’s famous spices had been left behind a mile to the north, but here there were strange new scents that might have been spices, or herbs, or something else entirely.

Two doors down on the right was a signboard announcing the presence of Thorum the Mage, which was one of the names Sterren had memorized. He headed directly for it.

Two hours later they took a break for a midday meal and bought bits of beef fried in dough from an open-front shop between two gambling halls on Games Street. They ate in silence, leaning against a wall, as snow drifted by and Sterren, between bites, considered what he had learned.

For one thing, he now knew what a prestidigitator was, little more than a charlatan, really. A great deal of magic appeared to be fraudulent. Never having had money to spend on spells and amulets, he had never had occasion to find this out.

Other magic, of course, was completely real and authentic and could be enormously powerful.

Unfortunately, while the frauds would often work cheap, for the more serious magicians a pound of gold would not pay for a sixnight’s work, let alone the month or more that might be necessary for a trip to Semma and back with a war in the middle.

He had been turned down by two witches, two theurgists, a wizard, a warlock, and someone who called himself a thaumaturge, a term Sterren was not familiar with.

On the other hand, he had turned down a prestidigitator, an illusionist, a sorcerer whose talents seemed genuine but hopelessly inappropriate for the job at hand, and an herbalist.

Not all of these were from the advertisements at the Arena; the theurgists and the sorcerer had turned up on their own while Sterren and his party were discussing matters with Thorum the Mage, a pleasant old fellow who, thanks to his central location, made a significant income as a message center and referral service, in addition to what his wizardry brought him.

The morning, Sterren had to admit, had been a washout. He chewed his last bite of dough, pulled his coat collar tighter, and stared longingly through the snow at a dice game visible through a tavern window on the opposite side of the street.

He wished that he could just go back to playing dice and thinking entirely in his native tongue, without having to switch languages every few minutes, without worrying about wars or wizards or warlords or warlocks, hereditary duties, and summary executions. He wanted to forget that Semma had ever existed, forget that he had ever met any of the inhabitants of that silly little kingdom.

He couldn’t, of course. Semma was real, and somehow or other he had the misfortune to be its warlord now, rather than just a tavern gambler.

Joining that game across the street was a tremendous temptation, but a glance at Lady Kalira’s sour expression convinced him that it wasn’t even worth asking if he could take a few minutes to replenish their finances.

He sighed, swallowed the last traces of his meal, and said, “Come on.”

The three Semmans looked at him, uncomprehending. “Oh, come on,” he said, in Semmat this time. They came.

CHAPTER 17

The afternoon was more successful than the morning. For one thing, the snow stopped and the sun came out, which improved tempers all around. For another, the neighborhood grapevine was working for them now and when they checked back in at Thorum’s they found a young witch, eager for adventure in foreign lands and willing to work cheap.

Another cooperative and promising witch turned up a few stops later, and then a sorcerer by the name of Kolar, whose collection of talismans included a few that clearly had some military usefulness, and, fortunately for Sterren, not all that much commercial value, so that Kolar was willing to accept Sterren’s offered job.

All three of these individuals were instructed to report to the chartered ship, the Southern Wind, by midday on the twenty-fourth.

At the next stop an argument broke out. The magician in question here was ready and willing to take the job, but Lady Kalira recognized the emblem she wore at her throat.

“She’s a demonologist!” she said. “We can’t take a demonologist!”

“Why not?” Sterren demanded. “She can probably do more for us than the rest put together! Demons love war! They created it!”

“And that’s one reason that using a demonologist is too dangerous!” the Semman aristocrat shouted.

“That’s ridiculous!”

“It is not...” Lady Kalira began; then she caught herself and continued with enforced calm, “it is not ridiculous, my Lord Sterren. And in any case, the reasons do not matter. If I might remind you, his Majesty specifically forbade the inclusion of sorcerers or demonologists. Are you going to defy a royal edict? Might I point out that the penalty for doing so is entirely up to the king’s discretion, even to beheading, for a member of the nobility?”

Sterren opened his mouth to argue, then stopped.

Phenvel III was more than a little foolish and prone to whims. For all Sterren knew, he really might order Sterren’s execution if he was angry enough and only think better of it after it was too late.

And he had specifically forbidden demonologists and sorcerers.

Sterren had forgotten that for a moment. He had not made the connection when he hired Kolar, Kolar the Sorcerer.

“Oh, damn,” he said.

He apologized to the demonologist, a woman by the name of Amanelle of Tirissa, and led the way back to the house where Kolar rented an upstairs room.

When that little problem was dealt with, Sterren continued with his search.

When the sun was below the rooftops and the shop-keepers began lighting the torches out front, he called it a day and headed back toward Spicetown, the Semmans trailing along behind him.

He didn’t even think about trying to slip away. The quest for magicians had caught his interest.

If was full dark well before they reached the wharves, and Sterren had to ask directions twice before locating the Southern Wind. He was asleep within seconds of falling into his hammock.

That was the twenty-second of Snowfall.

On the twenty-third, once again, the day was spent in the Wizards’ Quarter, recruiting. Word had gotten around, however, and this time Sterren was able to sit at Thorum’s table, drinking cheap ale and making jokes with old Thorum about the Semman barbarians he was saddled with, while candidates presented themselves.

The Semmans sat idly by, wondering what Sterren and the fat old wizard found so funny.

The weather was warmer, too, and the snow had melted away completely by midafternoon.

Even the now-familiar walk back to the ship seemed easier, especially since Sterren took care to set out well before dark. Lady Kalira brightened considerably when she discovered Alar aboard the vessel, waiting for her, apologetic about both his own extended absence and having completely lost track of Kendrik, Bern, and Zander.

Sterren thought he was a fool for coming back, but did not say so.

Sterren did not bother to leave the ship on the twenty-fourth, but instead began the preparations for the journey back to Akalla of the Diamond.

He had found no chance to slip away and he was not at all sure he would have taken it if he had. Princess Lura’s grin and Shirrin’s blush lurked in the back of his memory, and he did not want to leave them defenseless.

When the ship sailed on the evening tide, she had aboard her Sterren, Lady Kalira, Alder, Dogal, and Alar, of the original party of eight; the other three had never turned up. Sterren hoped that they would get by, stranded in a foreign city where they didn’t speak the language or know the customs. They had chosen to desert, but they had not necessarily known what they were getting into; life in Ethshar was much more complex than their simple existence back in Semma.

Perhaps, he thought, Alar was not such a fool after all.

In addition to Sterren and the four Semmans, the Southern Wind carried the warlock, who had still not given a name; Annara, the journeyman wizard; three witches, named Shenna of Chatna, Ederd of Jiastwark, and Hamder Hamder’s son; and a wizard who called himself Emner of Lamum. All but the warlock were young, beginners who had not yet found places for themselves, though none of the others were quite so young as Annara and Sterren himself.

Sterren had turned down assorted frauds and charlatans, and given in to the royal fiat against sorcerers and demonologists; he had talked to several theurgists, only to be told that they could not help with anything to which the gods objected as strongly as they objected to war. No other warlocks had turned up once the amount of the pay was known. A few of the more obscure or minor sorts of magician had turned up, such as oneiromancers and herbalists, but after much discussion had not stayed.

Still, Sterren had half a dozen assorted magicians.

He hoped it would be enough.

He wished he knew more about magic.

He did know a little, of course. He had taken an interest in the arcane arts as a child.

It was only a little, though, not much more than a few characteristics of the major varieties.

He knew something more than a minimum about warlockry, of course, from his brief stay with old Bergan. He knew it used no spells or incantations, but only the warlock’s will, to guide and shape the Power it drew upon. The only differences between what one warlock could do, and what another could do, depended on the relative level of imagination and expertise in manipulating Power.

The other magics did not appear to operate that way at all. For example, theurgists and demonologists used rote formulae to summon superhuman beings, as Agor had explained to him, and those beings were specialized and individual.

To a warlock, Power was Power, at least until the nightmares began, and there were no formulae, or at least, so Bergan had told him, and Sterren had no reason to doubt his old master.

That meant that Sterren’s warlock would be able to do as much as any warlock in waging war; there were no special spells or formulae he had to know.

Wizards, on the other hand, carried formulae to bizarre extremes; where theurgists and demonologists just used words and songs and signs, wizards needed an incredible assortment of ingredients for their spells, dragon’s blood and virgin’s tears and so forth. Wizardry seemed to have no logic to it whatsoever. And Sterren, accordingly, had no idea at all what his two wizards were capable of. Annara had a small pouch of precious ingredients for her spells; Emner had a large traveling case jammed full of jars and boxes for his. Neither would specify what spells he or she could perform. A demonstration would be meaningless; spells that proved beyond doubt that their wizardry was authentic and powerful would not mean that they knew any spells that would stop Ophkar or Ksinallion.

Witches fell somewhere in between. Witches used rituals, chants, trances, and so forth, but could improvise them apparently at will and did not require the arcane substances that wizardry called for. Witches had individual spells, but seemed to be able to modify them far more readily than wizards could. They had specialties, but almost any witch could tackle almost any piece of witchcraft, though naturally, a specialist in a given field could outperform a novice.

Witchcraft was versatile and adaptable, but limited. It just didn’t do anything as impressive as the other magics. No witch ever moved a mountain or flattened a city, but wizards had reportedly done both. Warlocks could call up storms, shatter walls, strike foes dead with a glance, set the very ground ablaze; wizards seemed to be able to do absolutely anything if they could find the proper spell; but witches were far more limited. A witch could light a fire in an instant, but only in a proper fuel. A witch could open a locked door, but not shatter one. A witch could predict a storm, but not bring one.

What use his three witches would be in battle, Sterren was not quite sure, but he thought they would be far better than any ordinary warriors.

Sorcerers, with their prepared talismans that could be used instantly, seemed much like wizards, though perhaps a little less impressive. He wondered what Phenvel had against them.

Herbalists might be very useful if the war was lost, for treating the wounded, but unless one were to poison Ophkar’s water supply, Sterren could not see much use for an herbalist in battle. The various other specialties likewise seemed too narrow in scope. What good was an oneiromancer, for example, if nobody happened to have any dreams?

So he had his three witches, his two wizards, and his nameless warlock, and ninety-three fighting men. He hoped it would be enough.

After all, his life depended on it.