The Unwilling Warlord

CHAPTER 18

Sterren stood shivering beside the right-hand draft horse and stared miserably through the rain and gloom at the distant glow of the campfires and the looming black shape of Semma Castle. The mare’s breath puffed up in clouds from her nostrils, and Sterren could smell her sweat. Raindrops pattered heavily on the old wagon that he had bought in Akalla, on the driver’s seat he had just abandoned, and on the hooded heads of the six magicians huddled in the back. The four Semmans, on their own mounts, were clustered nearby.

“I thought they’d wait until spring,” he said again.

Lady Kalira replied, “We all did. They always waited before.” Her tone was flat and dead. Sterren was grateful that she was not castigating him for refusing to buy a storm to speed their journey; it was bad enough that he was cursing himself for it.

“I guess one of their warlords must have as little respect for tradition as I do,” he said resignedly.

“Or maybe,” Alder suggested, “they heard you were gone and figured that it would be a good time to attack, when you weren’t there to lead us.”

“More likely they found out he was fetching these damned magicians and they wanted to take the castle before they could get here,” Dogal muttered.

Sterren ignored that and tried to think what to do.

A selfish part of him suggested turning around and heading back to Akalla. After all, through no fault of his own he had been cut off from the castle and its defenders. If he left, who could say he had failed in his duty? He glanced up at Lady Kalira, sitting astride her horse. She could, for one, and he could accuse himself, as well. He had gone and fetched magicians to fight his war; well, here he was, here were his magicians, and here was the war, a little sooner than he had expected, perhaps, but so what?

All he had to do was figure out how to use the magicians he had hired. He had to at least make the attempt after coming this far, he told himself.

If he tried and failed, if the castle fell anyway, then he could flee in good conscience, and even Lady Kalira could not fault him.

First, though, he had to try to defeat the enemy. But how was he supposed to do that with his six sorry magicians?

“What do we do now?” Annara called from the wagon in Ethsharitic, echoing his own thoughts. She glanced at the deserted farmhouse off to the party’s left, as if expecting monsters to leap from it at any minute.

“Are you sure it’s really the enemy besieging the castle and not just a festival of some sort?” one of the witches asked in the same tongue; Sterren did not see if it was Hamder or Ederd and could not yet distinguish them by voice.

He did not bother to reply to the witch, but after a moment he told Annara, “That’s up to you people. This is what I hired you for, after all, to fight this stupid war. I’d say that your first job is to break the siege.” He did not say how, of course, since he didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about it.

“In the rain?” Shenna of Chatna wailed.

The other two witches shushed her.

“Don’t tell me to shut up!” she shouted. “I’m cold and I’m wet and I don’t like this place and I wish I’d never come here!”

Hamder and Ederd exchanged unhappy glances; then Ederd, in the rear of the wagon and out of Shenna’s sight, raised his hands in a curious embracing gesture.

Shenna abruptly fell silent, but her expression was still one of abject misery.

The Semmans watched all this uncomprehendingly; none of them had picked up much Ethsharitic in the twelve days of the return voyage, and the magicians had not had time to learn much Semmat. All six magicians had preferred relying on Sterren as their translator to struggling with the unfamiliar tongue, and as a result he now saw the wisdom of Lady Kalira’s ban on Ethsharitic during his own first voyage south. He had been forced to learn Semmat in order to make himself understood; the magicians were picking up a few words, at least, some of them were, but only as a sideline, not as a matter of survival.

Forbidding the crew to speak Ethsharitic, or refusing to use it himself, would not have made much difference, since the six magicians had each other to talk to. Besides, he hadn’t noticed the problem until after they reached Akalla of the Diamond. Once he had noticed, he had thought he could safely leave it until the party reached Semma Castle.

And now, of course, it was too late, and they might never reach the castle at all.

He had just said that breaking the siege, if siege it actually was, was up to the magicians. Shenna’s outburst, however, had not been followed by any suggestions from any of the others. They were all waiting for him to tell them what to do.

He suppressed a sigh. What had he done, he wondered, to deserve this? Why did he have to be in charge?

Sterren observed the witches silently for a moment, then beckoned to Hamder.

The young witch clambered over the side of the wagon, dropped to the mud, and splashed over to the shelter of the farmhouse eaves. Sterren joined him there.

“Witches can read minds, can’t they?” Sterren asked.

Hamder hesitated. “Sometimes,” he admitted.

“Well, right there two leagues ahead of us are a few hundred minds, I’d say, and I’d like to know what some of them are thinking and planning. I’d like to be sure just who we’re facing, for one thing; is that both Ophkar and Ksinallion there, or did one of them decide to get the jump on the other? If one of them tried a sneak attack, then maybe we can swing the other over to our side after all, despite King Phenvel.”

Hamder looked distinctly unhappy. “My lord Sterren-” he began.

“Oh, forget the ’lord’ stuff, when we’re speaking Ethsharitic!” Sterren interrupted. He had grown accustomed to hearing the title in Semmat, but it still sounded silly in Ethsharitic.

“Yes, my... yes, sir. As I was saying, I doubt I’ll be able to learn much. None of those people out there are going to be thinking in Ethsharitic.”

Sterren stared at him. “Thinking in Ethsharitic?”

“Yes, sir. After all, people do tend to think in words, or at least the same concepts that we use words for, and those are different in different languages.”

“So you can’t read minds unless you know the right language?”

Hamder nodded, then stopped himself. “Well, there are exceptions. If you’re up close to someone and paying close attention, you can usually start to pick up the underlying concepts after a while. In fact, that’s how we witches learn other languages so quickly...”

“You learn other languages quickly?”

“Of course! Witches are famous for the gift of tongues!”

“I haven’t heard you speaking Semmat.”

Hamder’s mouth opened, then closed. “Oh,” he said. After a moment’s pause, he asked, “Were we supposed to? I didn’t think there was any hurry.”

“It might have been nice,” Sterren pointed out. “I don’t particularly enjoy translating back and forth for everybody, especially when I don’t know Semmat all that well myself, yet.”

“Oh.” Hamder was obviously embarrassed. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Never mind that.” Sterren brushed it away. “Can you tell me anything about whoever’s around all those campfires, or can’t you?”

“I... I... I don’t know, sir. Probably not, from this distance.”

“You have my permission to go closer, witch.”

Hamder glanced at the distant campfires, then back at Sterren. “Ah... could it wait until morning? They’re liable to be a bit nervous at night...”

Sterren sighed. “They’re presumably fighting a war; they’re liable to be a bit nervous any time. But never mind, at least for now.” He started to turn away, then paused.

“The other witches, I assume that they would give me the same answers?”

“I think so, sir, but I can’t be certain. We do have our specialties.”

Sterren nodded and waved in dismissal. Hamder sloshed away, back to the wagon; Sterren stayed where he was and gestured for Emner, his second wizard, to join him.

Emner slid from the wagon and slogged up beside him.

“You’re a wizard, right?”

Emner nodded, cautiously.

“Wizardry can do just about anything, right?”

“Given the right conditions, the right materials, and the right spell,” Emner replied judiciously, “wizardry appears to be capable of almost anything.”

“But you, yourself, are limited in what you can do, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Emner answered immediately, “very limited.”

Sterren nodded. “Over there,” he said, waving an arm in the direction of Semma Castle, “It appears that there is a hostile army besieging the castle that I hired you to defend. I don’t know what the situation is, but that’s how it appears. Is there anything you can do about it?”

Emner considered this carefully. He gazed thoughtfully at the distant campfires, then looked up at the sky. He moistened a finger and held it up to check the wind, then scanned the eastern horizon.

“I don’t know,” he said, finally. “I know a few spells I thought would be useful in a war, but I don’t see how any would help in the present situation. If the wind were behind us, I could levitate and drift over that way, with a magical shield under me in case I were spotted, to see what’s happening, but the wind’s awfully light and from the north, and I’d need to go east. I don’t have a spell for directional flight. I know a spell that can stun a man and make him somewhat suggestible, so that if we could catch someone alone I might well coax truth from even a reluctant tongue, but I can’t think... Hmm...” His voice trailed off.

Sterren waited patiently, and after a pause Emner continued, “I have another spell. I never thought it would be any help, but it might serve here, after all. I can make a stone or a stick whistle, from a distance, hardly a valuable talent, I’d have said, and I certainly chafed at being forced to practice it as an apprentice. Now, though, perhaps I can lure someone over with a whistle, stun him, and question him.”

Sterren nodded, considering. “You’re sure you can do that?”

Emner hesitated, then said, “Reasonably sure.”

“Could Annara do it?”

“No.” Emner did not hesitate at all this time.

“Why not?” Sterren asked, genuinely curious.

Emner blinked, then slowly replied, “I am not sure it’s my place to say.”

“Oh, go ahead,” Sterren said, annoyed.

Emner paused, as if thinking out his words in advance, and then said, “I suppose you know that Annara had been sleeping out in the Hundred-Foot Field and hadn’t eaten for two or three days when you found her.”

“I suspected as much,” Sterren acknowledged.

“Well, it’s so,” Emner said. “She told me, as a fellow Guild member. Naturally, I was curious about how she came to be reduced to that, and she was glad to have a chance to discuss her situation with a fellow wizard. It seems that although she is a true wizard, served the full apprenticeship required by the Guild, and was initiated into the Guild’s mysteries, she never managed to master more than a handful of simple spells. Her master only knew a dozen or so, and she found herself unable to manage some of those, including the ones that provided most of his small income. The spells she did learn, well, they’re real enough, and they have their places, but they aren’t exactly marketable. There isn’t any demand for them, as a rule. And I can’t see how they could be of any use at all in the present situation.”

“You didn’t think your own could help, at first. Perhaps I should ask Annara directly; after all, she’s surely more familiar with the possibilities of her magic than you are.”

Emner shrugged. “Maybe. We’ve agreed to trade spells and better both our positions, but to be honest, I think I agreed to that as much from pity as from my own self-interest. Her spells... Well, for instance, what use is there to an invisibility spell that only works on transparent objects?”

“Transparent objects?”

“Yes, transparent. Water, ice, glass, and so on.”

Sterren nodded. “I see your point. It’s an interesting idea, though, that invisibility spell. What if you were to make weapons out of glass, and then enchant them?”

Emner considered that. “I’m not sure how it works, but you’re right, that might be interesting. Hard to parry a glass sword, I suppose, but easy to break one.”

“I was thinking of glass arrows. You wouldn’t know where they’re coming from.”

Emner nodded slowly.

“Well,” Sterren said, after a moment’s silent thought, “that’s not doing us any good right now, is it? We don’t have a glassmaker’s oven at hand. Thank you for your help, wizard, and if you would go back and send me the warlock, I’d appreciate it.”

Emner bowed slightly in acknowledgment, then trotted back to the wagon and hauled himself back aboard. A moment later the warlock strode up beside Sterren. He wore a heavy black cloak and hood against the rain, and had it pulled well forward, hiding his face completely. Sterren found himself speaking to an oval of black shadow.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Terrible,” the warlock replied, through clenched teeth.

“Oh?” The warlock had been complaining of headaches and constant fatigue since the third day aboard ship. He had also taken to sleeping long hours, he was always the first to retire at night and the last to awaken. The morning after leaving Akalla he had to be hoisted into the wagon still half asleep and had almost fallen out twice since then.

But at least, Sterren thought, there had been no sign of nightmares.

“My head feels as if it’s going to burst.”

“Oh.” Sterren made a sympathetic noise. “Ah... are you aware of the situation here?”

“No.”

Sterren waited for a moment, expecting him to go on.

“No?” he said at last.

“No. Should I be?”

“I think so, yes.”

“All right, then, what’s the situation?”

“Well, over there is Semma Castle, which is what we all came here to defend. And all around it there appear to be campfires and what look like tents, sentries, siege machinery, and so forth. What’s more, judging by this house behind us and the others we passed in the last league or two, the peasants in the area appear to have fled their homes. I would assume that what we see here are the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion, besieging the castle, but I am not actually certain of that. I called you up here in hopes you might be able to help me settle the matter.”

“You want to know if those are really the armies you think they are?”

Sterren nodded. “That’s right.”

The warlock snorted. “How the hell should I know?” he demanded.

“You’re a warlock, aren’t you?” Sterren asked calmly.

“That’s right, I’m a warlock, I’m not a damned mind-reading witch, or a wizard with a scrying spell, or a sorcerer with a crystal ball, or a theurgist with a god whispering in my ear, or even a demonologist with an imp to run my errands! I can do things, or I could back in Ethshar, anyway, but I don’t have any way of knowing any more about what’s out there than you do.”

“Do you have any way of finding out? Could you fly over and take a look around, perhaps?”

The warlock was silent for a long moment, the only sounds the patter of the rain and the snuffling of the horses a dozen paces away.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I know how to fly, certainly, but I’m so weak here...” He took two steps away, then stood, arms raised, hood thrown back, face up.

He seemed to shudder, from his head right down to his muddy boots; his cloak flapped suddenly, although there was no more wind than a moment before.

Then he toppled over backward into the mud.

Sterren hesitated, then decided against lending aid.

The warlock got to his feet under his own power, then glared at Sterren and shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I can’t fly here.”

Sterren nodded. “All right,” he said. He turned back to face the rest of the party, where the others had watched the warlock’s pratfall in puzzled silence.

“We’ll stay here until morning!” he called, first in Ethsharitic, and then in Semmat, pointing at the empty farmhouse.

“Then what?” Lady Kalira called back to him.

Sterren glanced over his shoulder at the dozens of campfires that ringed the castle. “Then we find out who those people are,” he said. “And if they’re the enemy?” Lady Kalira demanded.

“Then,” Sterren said, “we attack!”

CHAPTER 19

Shenna’s shriek awoke Sterren from a sound slumber; he sat up quickly, looking around for the source of the scream.

Everyone else was roused as well, and the other two witches reached her first. After an exchange too quick for spoken words, Hamder turned and called, “Sterren! Shenna says that someone was prowling around the house we’re in, and saw us!”

Sterren was still not really thinking. “Who was it?” he asked.

“I don’t know!” Shenna replied. “I didn’t see him.”

“Then how do you know he was there?” Annara asked.

“I had wards set, and he tripped one, wizard!”

“Well, if he didn’t know we were here before, he certainly does now, the way you screamed,” Emner said.

Ederd and Hamder frowned at that; Shenna chose to ignore it. Sterren said nothing, but mentally filed it away for future reference that the witches and the wizards did not appear to like each other much. He wasn’t sure if it was a personal matter, or something inherent in the two arcane disciplines.

“Did anyone else have any wards, or other spells, set to warn us of intruders?” Sterren asked.

“I don’t even know what wards are,” Annara announced.

“I wouldn’t brag about it,” Ederd snapped.

Sterren raised a hand for silence, just as Lady Kalira demanded in Semmat, “What’s going on?”

“The witch... her magic heard something,” he said.

Alder, who had been watching the magicians, heard this and immediately headed for the nearest window, approaching it carefully, then peering around the frame, out into the rain.

Dogal took a window on the opposite side, and after a moment Alar headed for the door. The fourth side of the room was the wall separating the main room from the kitchen; the warlock, seeing what the soldiers were doing, slid quickly through the curtained doorway, presumably to look out the kitchen window.

“There’s someone running off toward the castle,” Dogal announced. “A soldier, I guess, he’s wearing a red kilt and a sword, anyway.”

“What army?” Sterren asked.

Startled, Dogal replied, “How should I know?”

Sterren, not fully awake even yet, could not think of a Semmat word for “recognize” or “identify,” so after a moment’s mental fumbling he just said, “What uniform?” He had certainly had to learn that word in order to function as warlord.

“I can’t tell Ophkar from Ksinallion,” Dogal said, “or from Shan on the Desert or anywhere else, for that matter. It’s not Semman, though.”

Alder had crossed the room during this exchange and was squinting after the fleeing figure. Lady Kalira came up behind Dogal, as well.

“Looks Ksinallionese to me,” Alder said. Lady Kalira nodded agreement.

“Not Semman?”

“On, no,” all three agreed, “not Semman!”

Sterren sighed. “We’d better get out of here, then,” he said.

Nobody argued, and in five minutes the party had collected its belongings and retired to the porch, where the horses were waiting.

In another five, the Semmans were all mounted, the draft horses were hitched up, and Sterren and the magicians were all settled in the wagon, moving unhappily out of their shelter into the thin morning drizzle.

“Which way?” Hamder asked.

That, Sterren had to admit, was a very good question. With a shrug, he pointed north. “That way,” he said. He shook the reins, and the wagon led the way across a muddy brown cornfield.

After a few minutes he reined in his horses and held up a hand to signal the Semman outriders. They gathered into a little knot at the center of what was probably a pasture in the summer, but was now mostly more mud.

The others all stared at him expectantly, hunching against the thin misty rain.

Sterren hesitated, unsure of what to say.

“Well,” he said at last, in Ethsharitic, “here we are in Semma, and that’s the Ksinallionese army over there, and maybe the Ophkarite army as well. Your job is to drive them out of Semma. Go right ahead.”

The magicians glanced at one another, then back at Sterren, for a long moment before Hamder asked, “How?”

“How should I know?” Sterren said, irritated. “You’re the magicians, with all your secrets.”

“But you’re the warlord,” Annara pointed out, “and you’re the boss; you hired us, now tell us what to do.”

Sterren had dreaded this, and here it was. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “I was forced into this stupid job and I don’t know any more about fighting a war than you people do.”

“In that case,” Hamder said, “I think we may all be in very serious trouble.”

“Why don’t we just go home?” Shenna asked. “We can’t do anything here! Look at all those people!”

In point of fact, the besieging armies were invisible from where Sterren’s party happened to be at that moment, but nobody bothered to correct her. Sterren had told them, on board ship, that they would be facing armies totaling about four hundred and fifty men.

“Not a one of those soldiers,” Sterren pointed out, “knows anything about magic. Not one! They’ve probably never even seen any magic; it’s all scarce as fish fur in this part of the world!”

“Well, we aren’t exactly Fendel the Great,” Annara retorted.

“No, but you’re magicians, and you all agreed to come here and fight this war. Now, let’s fight it! You, Emner, last night you were telling me you could levitate and that you have a shield spell and a way of dazing people?”

“Felshen’s First Hypnotic Spell,” Emner replied, “and Tracel’s Levitation, and Fendel’s Elementary Protection. But I’ll still just be one man against an army, and Felshen’s won’t kill anyone, or make them give up the fight. I can harass them, I suppose, but-”

“But nothing!” Sterren interrupted. “You’re forgetting the effect it will have on their morale to have a genuine wizard attacking them! These soldiers have never conceived of using magic to fight a war; you’ll terrify them!”

Emner looked doubtful.

Sterren was growing desperate. “Listen, I don’t expect you to destroy an army overnight, but this is what you all agreed to do, what you came here for, the reason we fed you all and transported you here and even clothed some of you.” Annara had owned only a single tattered purple robe; Lady Kalira had provided her with a decent change of outfit while aboard ship, so that she could clean and repair the gown with fabric, thread, and needle provided by Lady Kalira. She was wearing her own purple again at the moment, but she knew who Sterren meant. “I think you’ll find that it’s not as hard as you expect. Remember, it’s not just the eleven of us here; we have an army of our own inside that castle over there, with three fine officers who I’m sure will take advantage of any opportunity we give them.” Sterren was not at all certain of anything of the sort and actually expected his three officers to fumble every opportunity, but he knew better than to admit that. “Those people in the castle, hundreds of them, including dozens of innocent women and children, are depending on us!”

That was most likely true; he could easily picture Princess Shirrin watching from the castle windows for the triumphant return of her warlord hero. She probably expected him to ride up on a white charger, banners flying and trumpets sounding, rather than driving a battered Akallan haywagon.

“I can set some traps,” Annara admitted grudgingly.

“At least, while my supplies hold out. I’ll need some wax. And parchment, if you have any.”

“There!” Sterren said. “That’s more like it!” He looked at the others expectantly.

“If one of these witches or the warlock can push me once I’m airborne, I can levitate and go see what’s happening, or take messages into the castle,” Emner said.

The witches glanced at each other, but it was the warlock who said, “I ought to be able to manage that much. You’re weightless when you levitate, aren’t you?”

“Well, not really, not with Tracel’s,” Emner admitted. “There’s another levitation spell that makes you weightless, but I never got the hang of it.”

“Well, I can try it, anyway,” the warlock said.

“We can probably help,” Hamder volunteered, “as long as you’re in sight.”

“You can do a test run,” Sterren suggested.

That elicited a round of nods.

“We can... well, I can pick off enemy soldiers, strangle them at a distance, if we can find them away from the main camp,” Ederd said.

“Or drop rocks on them,” Hamder said.

Shenna wrinkled her nose in disgust, then admitted, “I can poison their water. Without touching it, I think.” She hesitated, then repeated, “I think, it’s a lot easier to just make their food go bad, if you can find out where they keep it and it’s not sealed in anything.”

All eyes fell on the warlock, who shrugged and said, “I don’t know how much I can do, here, but I’ll do what I can. Strangling from a distance, I might be able to do that. Easier, for me, to just stop hearts.”

A moment of uneasy silence followed this announcement.

“There!” Sterren said, breaking it. “You see? This shouldn’t be as bad as all that! There’s a lot we can do, and they won’t have any way to fight it, or even know what’s going on!”

A couple of the magicians nodded glumly. Nobody argued. Nobody displayed any enthusiasm, either.

Sterren decided to settle for what he could get. Enthusiasm might come later. A lack of resistance was enough to start with.

“What’s going on?” Lady Kalira asked, in Semmat. Sterren sighed and told her.

CHAPTER 20

Two days later, in a barn roughly a mile and a half northwest of Semma Castle, two of the witches were straining, watching or listening or using some other sense Sterren couldn’t guess at. The Semmans and the other magicians were waiting for something to happen. For himself, Sterren didn’t expect to know anything about it until the witches told him.

Both witches started suddenly, but that was nothing very new. They often reacted to unseen events while in perceptive trances.

Even with that warning, the bang a second or so later came as a complete surprise. Sterren had been quite sure he wouldn’t hear it.

For that matter, he hadn’t expected the spell to work. Annara had been so very pessimistic about her abilities ever since he first met her that he had, he realized, given up on ever getting any use out of her.

He glanced over at her, and she looked as surprised as he felt. “Gods!” she said, “I made it as big as I could, but that must have been huge.”

Sterren had to agree with that. According to what the witches had gleaned from the minds of passing soldiers, Sterren and his band were presently almost a mile from the Ophkarite warlord’s tent, and that was where the false message had presumably gone. An explosion that could be heard for a mile would have to be much larger than what they had expected.

Ederd suddenly emerged from his trance. “I thought you’d like to know,” he said without preamble, “We just killed the general’s secretary, I mean, the warlord’s. We didn’t get the warlord himself.”

“Killed him?” Annara squeaked.

Ederd nodded. “You don’t want the details,” he said, “but I’m sure he’s dead. Didn’t hit anybody else, though, and although there were plenty of sparks, the tent didn’t catch.”

Sterren looked at Annara with new respect. “Good work,” he said.

“But the Explosive Seal isn’t supposed to kill anybody!” she protested. “At worst, it’s intended to... well, to blow their hands off. Usually it just burns them a little.”

“Well, maybe you got something wrong, then,” Sterren suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Ederd replied. “He was holding the parchment up to his face, studying the seal. I think he suspected something.”

“Oh...” Annara looked sick.

“What’s going on?” Alder asked, in Semmat.

“We just killed the... the... a helper to the Warlord of Ophkar,” Sterren told him.

“Helper?”

“The man who writes and reads for him.”

“His aide?”

“I guess so.”

Alder grinned broadly. “Well, it’s a start,” he said.

“This magic may do some good after all,” Dogal admitted grudgingly.

Sterren nodded, but he doubted that they would be able to use that particular stunt again. The enemy was warned.

Well, maybe they would find other ways to use the Explosive Seal. Could it be put on tent flaps, perhaps? Or saddles, to detonate when the cavalry unsaddled their horses?

And could the enemy really afford to ignore sealed messages?

They hadn’t ignored this one. Hamder’s witchcraft had convinced the sentries that he was telling the truth, despite the total lack of confirmation; they had accepted him as an Ophkarite courier despite his lack of uniform, his unfamiliarity with the Ophkaritic language, and the fact that he had approached, on foot, from entirely the wrong direction. Even though he had only been able to pick a dozen or so words of the language from their minds, he had managed to make them absolutely certain that the parchment they accepted was an urgent message from the King of Ophkar that must be delivered to their warlord immediately.

Not a bad stunt at all, and Sterren had made sure Hamder knew how impressed everyone was. He regretted that Hamder wasn’t in the main room to thank again.

And now Annara had come through, as well; Sterren had not expected the seal to do any real damage.

He hoped that Emner and Hamder would be equally successful.

Even as that thought crossed his mind, Shenna dropped out of her trance and announced, “Hamder’s bringing the wizard back, but I don’t know why.”

Sterren answered, “Thanks. I’ll go ask.”

He got up from the floor, brushed himself off, ambled across the room, and mounted the ladder to the hayloft.

Hamder was sitting cross-legged in the open loft door, staring fixedly out toward the castle. Sterren looked over his shoulder and saw a small black dot growing larger in the distance.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

The witch ignored him. Sterren glanced down just as Hamder’s breath came out all in a rush, and he toppled over sideways into the hay.

“I can’t do it any more,” he said in a breathy whisper.

Sterren could see, now, that Hamder had completely exhausted himself. He leaned forward and peered at the distant figure of Emner, drifting helplessly above the enemy armies.

“Maybe the warlock can fetch him back,” he said. Hamder had no breath to reply, but he managed a feeble nod.

Sterren turned and clambered back down the ladder, then headed for the corner where he had last seen the warlock.

The black-robed Ethsharite was still there, crouched down and muttering to himself. He did not glance up as Sterren approached.

“We have a problem,” Sterren said. “Emner’s drifting out there, and Hamder’s exhausted.”

The warlock shook his head, then winced; it was obvious he had another of his headaches. “Get one of the other witches,” he said. “I’ve been experimenting; I can’t move anything as massive as a person, not even when he’s levitating.”

“They’re busy; are you sure?”

The warlock looked up at Sterren, then rose to his feet. “Do you have any string?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Sterren replied. “Why?”

“Because if you did, I might be able to lift one end of it up to him, and he could just pull himself in with it. But I know what I can do and I can’t move him. You’ll need to get one of the other witches.”

Sterren sighed and went to get one of the other witches.

That trick with the string, though, that might be useful. He wanted to remember that.

He sighed again, remembering the high hopes he had first had for his warlock. The fellow was turning out to be pitifully feeble. He could levitate a few pounds at a time, light small fires, open locks, but that was about it, and he was almost constantly sick with his ferocious headaches.

The headaches worried Sterren somewhat. He had never heard of warlocks getting headaches. Ordinarily, warlocks were the epitome of health and vigor, able to heal themselves, able to obliterate any diseases that attacked them, drawing strength from the Power, at least, until the nightmares started. Even then, they stayed physically healthy, except perhaps for some minor adverse effects of not sleeping.

The nightmares had stopped for this one, but the mysterious headaches might well be worse than the nightmares. Since the headaches had started, the warlock even seemed to have more gray in his hair.

Sterren had heard of warlocks who fled south when the nightmares began, but he had never heard anything about headaches.

Shenna was back in trance, but Ederd was taking a break, leaning back against a pile of straw. After all, the excitement was over, the explosion had gone off; Shenna could keep an eye on things by herself for the moment. “Ederd,” Sterren said, “you’ll have to take over with Emner; Hamder’s worn out.”

“Is he all right?” Ederd asked, getting quickly to his feet.

Sterren was not completely sure whether Ederd meant Emner or Hamder, but it didn’t really make much difference. “I think so,” he replied.

Ederd was already at the ladder and climbing. Sterren looked around the interior of the barn. Alder and Dogal were sitting on one side, chatting quietly in Semmat. Lady Kalira and Alar were talking nearby. Shenna was sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor, and the warlock was in his corner, leaning against a wall. Annara was doing something with her belt dagger and a bucket in another corner. Ederd and Hamder were up in the loft, fetching Emner back from his scouting mission.

It was a shame Emner knew no Semmat, and Sterren could not be sure anyone in the castle spoke Ethsharitic or Emner’s native Lamuinese; otherwise, he could have used the wizard to establish contact with the besieged Semmans. Nobody else in the party could levitate that far; the witches could, working together, get one of their number a good way off the ground, but only for a very short time, nowhere near long enough to propel him or her all the way to the castle ramparts. The warlock had been able to fly in Ethshar, but here he was unable to lift himself so much as an inch.

It occurred to Sterren for the first time that he could send written messages back and forth, even if his own Semmat was limited, especially in writing. Lady Kalira was fluent and literate.

That was something to keep in mind, but then, what would he say in a message? And Hamder had half killed himself hauling Emner about on his scouting trip; getting him in and out of the castle would be a major project.

The whole project of winning the war was turning out to be more work than he had hoped. His magicians, while willing enough once they got started, seemed unable to think for themselves and needed to be told what to do almost every step of the way. He had thought at first that he could turn them loose and sit back and wait for victory, but instead he found himself plotting and planning constantly.

He wondered why he bothered. He had made his gesture; why didn’t he just pack up and go home to Ethshar?

There was Lady Kalira, of course, and the three soldiers, who might try to stop him, but he thought that he could slip away if he tried, take a horse, or all the horses, to prevent pursuit and give him something to sell in Akalla to pay for passage, and make a dash for it.

The longer he stayed here, the more likely he was to be captured or killed outright by the invaders. He wasn’t really doing Semma much good; only one enemy soldier dead so far, after two days!

There were all those people in the castle depending on him, but how much good could he really do them?

He thought it over, very seriously, and decided he didn’t know why he was staying.

Maybe he would flee, in a day or two.

But not yet.

CHAPTER 21

He had still not fled by the twenty-first of Midwinter, 5220. In two sixnights of war, Sterren and his little band had settled down into a calm routine. Each day, Sterren and the magicians would pick away at the enemy, using whatever stunts and devices they could come up with, while the four Semmans would scout out a new hiding place. Sterren did not think it would be safe to stay in the same place two nights running, and it made the Semmans feel useful.

He still had just the four Semmans with him. None of them had deserted, if it would have been desertion, under the circumstances, and no one else had turned up who cared to join Sterren’s guerrilla band.

So far as Sterren knew, no one had been able to slip out of the castle; and if anyone had, he might well have other plans, in any case.

Occasionally a peasant who had fled when the invaders arrived and taken shelter with friends or relatives not too far away would wander by to see if it was safe to go home, but these people always left immediately once they saw that the invading army was still there. None of them ever volunteered to help Sterren and his crew.

Sterren got the impression from these strays that most of the peasants who had lived in the village and surrounding farms were now lurking quietly just beyond the horizon, waiting for the war to be over and refusing to get involved with a struggle that they saw as being the aristocrats’ affair and none of their business.

Lady Kalira denounced them as unpatriotic cowards; Sterren and the three soldiers were less condemnatory. After all, what could a few unarmed peasants do?

Even the three Semman soldiers weren’t doing much. It was the magicians who were waging the war, and the Semmans did nothing but run errands. Annara had become quite expert at the Explosive Seal and had successfully booby-trapped books, tent flaps, and even a pair of boots. Actually, she had not ensorcelled the tent flaps themselves, merely the leather ties that laced them shut. The witches had found it very difficult to put the laces back without disturbing the seals.

She had not managed to do a saddle; the horse had refused to stay sufficiently still.

The spell had four noticeable drawbacks.

First, it took half an hour, and any interruption during that time, Annara insisted, could be disastrous. She needed to be left strictly alone for the full time. That meant that someone had to stand guard over her, and that she could not be moved quickly if an emergency arose. So far, no emergency had arisen, but Sterren worried about it all the same.

Second, she had to have whatever she was putting the seal on right there in front of her, which meant that somebody had to steal it away from the enemy, then put it back again later. Emner and the witches had been able to do this, using Emner’s levitation spell or the witches’ little mind-twisters, but it was very risky, especially when cautiously putting sealed tent ties back in place.

Third, the spell required a drop of dragon’s blood for each seal, and Annara had only had a tiny vial of the stuff, perhaps a dozen drops in all. Emner was no help; when asked, he said, “I never use the stuff. None of my spells need it, and it’s so expensive!”

Sterren knew it was expensive, and was amazed that Annara hadn’t sold hers long ago, but she explained, “With it, and my other things, I’m a wizard and I can work magic. Without my supplies, I’m just another charlatan. And besides, if you hadn’t turned up when you did, I would have sold it. I just wasn’t that desperate yet.”

Fourth, and finally, the seal was visible. It came out either red or black, Annara was unable to explain why it should be one or the other, rather than always the same, but it seemed to vary at random between the two.

The seal itself was made of wax, and when Annara used clear beeswax from a supply found in an abandoned kitchen, she was able to enchant the stuff with Eknerwal’s Lesser Invisibility so that the wax could not be seen at all, but even then, the trace of dragon’s blood remained visible, shaped into a strange rune, and nothing could be done to hide it.

That hadn’t helped the owner of the boots, who started to put them on in the dark and lost his right hand and foot. It hadn’t helped the lieutenant who opened the first book, who had taken the rune to be mere ornament, and lost an eye and three fingers, as well as the book. The first enchanted tent flap laid a soldier up with serious burns from shoulder to fingertip.

The owner of the second enchanted tent flap, however, had been more cautious and had carefully not disturbed the rune. He slipped into his tent from the back, crawling in the mud, and had then taken the tent down entirely and moved it well away from camp before poking at the flap with a stick.

The resulting explosion burned the tent to ash, but injured no one.

After that, the enemy knew what to look for, and the use of the Explosive Seal changed somewhat. Annara no longer bothered with the Lesser Invisibility and, instead of seriously trying to injure anyone, she put the seal in places where it would have maximum nuisance value.

For example, with all three witches standing guard, convincing the few late-night passers-by that Annara either wasn’t there or had every right to be there performing her arcane ritual, she sealed the wheel of a water cart to its axle hub. The seal blew the wheel off, terrifying the horses, when it came time to haul the next load.

The warlock pointed out that one of the witches could have done the same damage with a hammer, but Sterren thought the demoralizing effect was worth the special effort.

He took the hint, though, and later sent the witches around breaking spokes and cutting ropes. The Ksinallionese army’s financial records were found with a seal on them, and a messenger was sent home to fetch another copy, since no way could be found to open them without incinerating them.

Two more tents were sealed and had to be taken down and detonated.

All in all, Annara was earning her keep. So were the witches who helped her.

Emner, with his levitation spell, had provided excellent scouting reports, locating the enemy’s headquarters tents and counting the soldiers present, which turned out to be about three hundred, not the full four hundred and fifty. He had stunned a few sentries, when the witches needed a distraction, and had made life miserable for a few of the enemy for several hours by enchanting a cockroach to sing “Spices in the Hold,” an old sea chanty, loudly and off key for hours on end. That had only stopped when one of the soldiers, more by luck than skill, stamped on the roach.

That the roach was dead, Emner explained, made no difference, as far as Galger’s Singing Spell was concerned, but a hard tap on the enchanted object was the signal to stop. If somebody happened to step on the dead insect again later, it would start singing again.

Unfortunately, nobody happened to step on the dead roach.

In addition to helping the wizards, the witches had pulled off several little tricks of their own. Shenna had spoiled a hundredweight of meat and a wagonload of vegetables, so that at least for a few days the besiegers ate less than the besieged. Sentries had acquired the habit of disappearing, then turning up dead in entirely the wrong place, so much so that for the last three nights there had been no sentries at all.

Only one water cart’s load had been poisoned; Shenna found it to be far more difficult than she had thought. Furthermore, the result had a discernible odor and a nasty taste, so that no one would take more than a tiny sip before spitting the stuff out.

The warlock had not worked closely with the others. He preferred to slip away by himself and pick off random enemy soldiers. He did not need them to be nearby and isolated, as the witches did. Also, where the witches’ victims turned up strangled or stabbed, the warlock’s simply fell over dead, without warning, without a mark on them, in the midst of their friends and companions.

This had created a good deal of near-panic. The witches reported picking up snatches of conversations about curses and demons.

Unfortunately, the enemy officers had not allowed this to get out of hand. They had even launched a counterpropaganda campaign, arguing that this demonic activity indicated that the evil Semman king had joined forces with powers of darkness and had to be stopped before he became more powerful.

The success of this argument was in doubt, but as yet the invading army seemed to be holding up. Sterren had no reports of desertion or mutiny.

There were certainly casualties, though. All in all, Sterren counted forty-one dead and seven injured among the enemy as a direct result of the magicians’ efforts, and in addition they had created considerable disorder. He was pleased. Forty-eight men were a significant part of the besieging army, and Sterren had not lost a single person! His people had been spotted, on occasion, but so far they had always escaped.

He had managed to establish communication with the inhabitants of Semma Castle, too. Although the warlock could not lift or push a person that far, and the witches could only do so by utterly exhausting their reserves, the warlock could, and did, send messages written on parchment sailing over the enemy’s encirclement and into the castle, to drop into the courtyard there.

In reply, the people in the castle would run a green banner up on the west ramparts and hang their own message beneath it on a string. The warlock could usually retrieve this without too much trouble.

Thus, Sterren knew that the castle’s inhabitants were far from comfortable. They were horribly overcrowded, as over a hundred peasants had taken shelter within the walls when the invaders arrived, in addition to the usual dense population, and those peasants also added heavily to the food consumption, of course, since none of them had brought any significant amounts of food with them.

Fortunately, the winter stores had been safely inside the walls when the invaders came. Even with all the additional mouths to feed, the castle had plenty of food and water, enough for at least another month.

In addition to the crowding and worry attendant upon any siege, the attackers had siege machines in use that dropped flaming bundles into the castle every so often, and at other times hurled heavy stones through windows or even through roofs. The stable in the western courtyard had been burned to the ground one night when a watchman dozed off at his post. A dozen windows had been smashed, and holes punched through three roofs. Five people had been killed outright, a score injured, and a great many were ill, overcrowding made isolation impractical and hygiene more difficult, and diseases of various sorts were getting out of hand. Lice were a nuisance, too.

Sterren’s three officers were apparently unable to organize a very coherent defense, and any thought of a sortie was abandoned when they could not agree on who would lead it.

That, somehow, did not surprise Sterren in the least.

And finally, the enemy was trying to undermine the castle walls, and the defenders could not agree on what to do about it. A few hastily trained Semman archers had forced the attackers to stay under shelter, but that was easy enough, given the village outside the gate; crude galleries had been built connecting some of the houses and shops, so that enemy sappers could approach without exposing themselves to arrows.

With all this in mind, on this particular day, the twenty-first of Midwinter, Sterren had resolved that it was time to do something about the siege machines. The sappers were a more serious problem in the long term, but the siege machines would be easier to get at and were doing more harm to the morale of the besieged.

Their shelter, at the moment, was a partially burned farmhouse to the northeast of the castle, and it was there, on the morning of the twenty-first, that Sterren gathered his entire band into a circle on the floor of the main room.

“Emner,” he said, “tell me about their siege machines.”

Emner shrugged. “What can I tell you? They’re siege machines.”

Sterren glared. “How many are there? What kinds? Where are they?”

Emner coughed, embarrassed. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I’d say they have about half a dozen in all, mostly trebuchet catapults, but also a mounted ram. The ram’s in the village; the others are arranged in a ring around the castle, spaced out pretty evenly.”

“What’s a trebuchet?” Annara asked. Sterren was pleased, partly because it meant she was paying attention, but mostly because now he didn’t need to ask himself and show how little he knew.

“Well, it’s like a big lever on a frame; there’s a heavy weight on one end, usually a big box filled with rocks, and on the other end is a sling. There’s a rope attached to the sling end, and the rope winds around a drum at the bottom of the frame. You wind the rope around the drum, and it pulls the sling down and the weight-box up. You load whatever you want to throw into the sling, release the rope, the weight falls, and whap, the sling flies up and throws whatever you put in it. Depending on what weight you use, it can toss up to, oh, three hundred pounds, I’d say, over a castle wall from safely outside archery range. Anything heavier than that and the frame’s likely to break.”

Sterren nodded; whatever his other faults, Emner was good at descriptions. Sterren felt he had a good, clear picture of how these catapults worked.

That didn’t mean he knew what to do about them. “Is there some way we can burn them all?” he asked. The witches looked at each other, while Annara and Emner blinked and shrugged.

“What sort of wood are they?” Hamder asked. “Um... ironwood, I think. Maybe oak. Something very hard and strong,” Emner replied.

“I can’t kindle that,” Shenna said. “Sorry.”

“Not me,” Ederd said.

Hamder shook his head.

Sterren looked at Annara.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “All I have that can burn things is the Explosive Seal, and that generally won’t set anything more than paper or oilcloth on fire. And besides, I meant to tell you, I only have enough dragon’s blood left for one more seal, and not a very big one, either.”

That was unpleasant news; the Explosive Seal had been one of their best resources. He turned to the four Semmans, who were huddled against one wall, looking bored.

“Does anyone in the castle,” he said in Semmat, “have... ah... from an animal that makes fire...” As he spoke, he was vaguely aware that the witches were whispering with Emner about something.

“A dragon?” Lady Kalira asked. “There are dragons in the mountains north of Lumeth of the Towers, but they’ve never come this far south.”

“Not the whole dragon, just the... the stuff. Red stuff. From inside.” Sterren knew he had heard the Semmat word for “blood,” but he could not think of it.

“Blood? Dragon’s blood?” Alder asked.

“Yes! Blood. Dragon’s blood.”

“I never heard of anybody who had any,” Lady Kalira replied. “Why? Is it good for something?”

“Annara needs it for her magic.”

The four Semmans looked at one another, then back at Sterren. “Sorry,” Alder said.

Sterren sighed and switched back to Ethsharitic. “About these catapults...”

“From Emner’s description, they’re too big for us to move,” Hamder said. “Especially if it’s really ironwood.”

“It takes ten men to move one, even with the wheels,” Emner explained.

“And witches may use magic instead of arms and legs and backs, but they aren’t any stronger than Ophkarite or Ksinallionese soldiers, even so,” Shenna said.

“Can you break them, somehow?”

Shenna and Hamder started to glance at each other, but Ederd flatly stated, “No. Not if they’re as strongly made as Emner says.”

Emner shrugged apologetically. “They need to be strong to heave rocks that big,” he said.

“All right,” Sterren said, “the witches can’t do anything. What about you, Emner?”

“I can make them whistle or sing, but that’s all. I’m sorry.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Sterren turned to Annara, but before he could speak, she said, “Not without more dragon’s blood, and probably not then.”

That left the warlock.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t burn the frames, nor break them outright, not in my present condition, but I might be able to break some of the ropes, or do some other damage. I don’t have the straight lifting power these witches have here, but I believe I can do subtler things, crackings and frayings and twistings, that they cannot.”

“Crackings?” Emner looked thoughtful, and said, “If you could crack the main crosspiece, the lever, while they were preparing to fire, the whole machine would probably come apart under the strain.”

“That would be perfect,” Sterren said.

The warlock shrugged. “I can try,” he said.

“Good,” Sterren replied. “And you will.”

CHAPTER 22

“Will this do?” Sterren asked, pointing. The warlock crept up beside him and peered over the ridgepole. “I think so,” he said. “I can see the structure from here, anyway.”

Sterren nodded. “Good,” he said, “Because we can’t find anywhere better that’s half this safe.”

The warlock glanced at him. “Why did you come with me, then, if it’s dangerous?” he asked.

Sterren was not really sure himself. He shrugged and said, “I get tired of just hearing reports. I wanted to see some of the action for myself.” He did not really want to think about that any more; it only reminded him just how dangerous his situation actually was, perched on a rooftop a hundred yards from an enemy camp. He changed the subject.

“How’s your head today?”

“Better, or at least different,” the warlock said.

“Different? How is it different?”

The warlock hesitated, then said, “Maybe I’m just getting used to it.”

It seemed to Sterren that his mysterious black-clad companion was being unusually talkative today, and he decided to try to take advantage of that to get a few answers to mysteries that had been bothering him.

“You know,” he said, “I never heard of warlocks having headaches like yours. That’s not what the stories say happens when you move south.”

“I never heard of it, either,” the warlock said. “I don’t understand it.”

“It is somehow related to your magic, isn’t it?” Sterren asked.

“Oh, I would say so.” He hesitated, then continued, “You’re a warlock yourself, aren’t you? I thought I could see that, before we got so far south and I lost my finer perceptions.”

“Not really,” Sterren admitted, “I failed my apprenticeship.”

“Ah, that would explain it entirely! It took me a long time, you know, to decide that you were one, you didn’t act like one, but you seemed to know the art, and I could feel something in your mind. I thought you were just keeping it secret for some reason.”

“No,” Sterren said, “I might have a trace of the Power, but I’m not really a warlock. I won more than I should at dice, back in Ethshar, but that’s all.”

The warlock nodded. “Then you wouldn’t know,” he said.

“Know what?”

“What it feels like to use the Power.”

“No,” Sterren agreed, “I don’t know. What is it like?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain. It’s as if something, not someone, because it clearly isn’t human, but something, perhaps a god or a demon or something we don’t have a name for, is whispering in your mind, and you can’t understand anything it’s saying, you can’t be sure it’s words at all, but you can pull strength from it all the same. You can take the sound of the whisper and reshape it and use it to feel and shape and change the world around you. Do you understand?”

Sterren almost thought he did. He nodded, but said nothing.

“And after you’ve used warlockry a lot, the whisper is always there, always, whether you’re listening or not, using the Power or not, awake or asleep. It’s a constant background and it gets a little louder each time you draw on it. And it’s trying to tell you something, but you don’t know what.” He paused, then said, “You know about the night-” It was not a question, but Sterren nodded again.

“The nightmares are when the whisper begins to make sense. You still can’t make out the words, still can’t tell what it’s trying to tell you, or what’s whispering, but you catch bits of it, little bits and pieces of images. And you can’t shut them out; the whisper is always there, it won’t go away, and those images seep into your mind little by little.” He shivered. “And when you came south?” Sterren prompted. “When I came south,” the warlock said, “the whispering faded away. It was wonderful at first; I could forget the little glimmers of meaning I’d been catching, and the nightmares stopped. I couldn’t hear the whisper at all. But then, when we headed inland, I started to hear buzzing.”

Startled, Sterren stared at him. “Buzzing?” he said.

“Humming, buzzing, something like that. It’s not really a sound, it’s a source, a mental sensation, like the whisper, but this one isn’t a voice, isn’t an intelligence at all, it’s a mindless drone, like a beehive or a millstone. And... well, have you ever lived somewhere where you hear some unpleasant noise constantly, a loud one? It gives you a headache.” He sighed. “But after a while, you get used to it and, in time, you don’t even notice it any more. I expect that eventually I won’t notice this any more. At present, I’m still constantly aware of it, but my head doesn’t hurt.”

Sterren nodded.

He thought he understood the analogy the warlock made and had an idea what it must feel like, but he had no idea what could be causing the buzzing the warlock described.

But then, nobody knew what the Aldagmor Source was, either. Presumably there was another, different one somewhere near Semma, one that had never created its own magicians the way the Aldagmor Source had back in 5202, but which warlocks could perceive.

“If it’s like the Source,” he asked, “can you draw Power from it?”

The warlock looked at him, startled. “I have no idea,” he said. “I haven’t been able to so far; it doesn’t offer Power the way the Source does. But it... I don’t know.”

He chopped his words off short and stopped speaking.

Sterren decided not to push the matter. He peered over the farmhouse ridgepole and said, “I think they’re getting ready to load. It looks like pitch. A ball of pitch. I suppose they’ll light it right before they release.”

The warlock stared. “Yes,” he said.

“Can you crack the beam?”

The warlock didn’t answer; Sterren glanced over and saw his jaw clenched with strain, his eyes narrowed.

Sterren shaded his eyes with a hand and stared at the trebuchet. Was the beam starting to bend a little more than it should, perhaps?

He shifted, squinted, and stared harder.

The catapult exploded. One moment it was there, the crosspiece bending only slightly; and the next instant the entire superstructure was gone, lost in a spreading cloud of red-hot debris. The great wooden bucket of stones that served as the counterweight crashed to the ground and shattered, the ball of pitch burst into flame and rolled back onto the crew that had just loaded it, and the framework simply vanished in the burst of glowing fragments. The earth shook, and a tremendous rolling roar reached the two men on the rooftop.

Sterren gaped and clung desperately to the thatch as the building swayed beneath him.

A long moment later, burning splinters began to rain down about him, spattering onto the thatch. The scent of burning reached his nose, and he began sliding quickly backward down the slope.

He stopped at the edge and looked back up the slope.

The warlock was still lying there on the roof, but nothing touched him; fragments that might have struck him instead swerved aside as they approached.

“Gods,” Sterren said, “What happened?”

The warlock turned and grinned down at him, by far the broadest smile Sterren had ever seen on that dour face. “Can’t you guess?” he said. “It was your idea, you know.”

Sterren shook his head.

“I’ve tuned into the buzzing; I’m drawing Power from it. I’m as powerful as I ever was!” He rose upright, in a totally unnatural manner; his hands and knees never moved, but his body simply swung up unsupported. Once standing, he lifted further, up into the air. His black robe spread into great flapping wings, and he laughed triumphantly. “Sterren,” he called, “there are no voices! It’s just Power, nothing but Power!” He laughed again, and thunder rolled overhead.

The warlock looked up at the sound, and, without warning, a bolt of lightning flashed down and incinerated the remaining fragments of the catapult.

The lightning was not the natural blue-white; it was a fiery orange-red. Warlock lightning. Sterren had heard of it, but never seen it.

Another bolt struck off to the left, destroying another catapult; then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and the enemy’s long-range arsenal was gone.

The wind was rising, and Sterren decided that a roof was not a good place to be. He was unsure how completely the warlock was actually controlling this sudden storm and did not care to risk a miscalculation, or even a deliberate attack, since after all, he hardly knew the warlock. He slid down until his feet caught on the ladder they had used to climb up, then descended quickly.

Thunder boomed again, and this time even the thunder was clearly unnatural, it was great rolling laughter.

It was recognizably the warlock’s voice.

He hurried around the corner of the house and was in time to see the wind sweeping soldiers off their feet, knocking them flat to the ground.

The wind stopped, and the braver Ksinallionese — Sterren had learned the different uniforms and could see no Ophkarites on this side of the castle — got to their feet again.

The thunder-voice spoke again, in words this time.

“Go home!” it roared, “This land is under the protection of Vond the Warlock! To stay here is to die!”

Then, again, laughter rolled across the plain.

Sterren saw the enemy milling in confusion at first; then a mounted officer panicked and spurred his horse to a gallop, bound north toward Ksinallion.

Panic spread like a wave through the besiegers, rippling out from that fleeing lieutenant, and in minutes the entire army was in full flight, pursued by howling unnatural winds.

Their morale had been deteriorating for days, men dying mysteriously, explosive booby traps scattered about, strange figures flying overhead invulnerable to arrows. This supernatural storm and voice like an angry god was more than these frightened soldiers could take. Individually or in groups, they broke and ran, bound for their homes.

Sterren did not blame them in the least for running. He stood and watched, smiling happily, as the storm swept on around the castle, driving the besieging army away from every side.

He had won the war. He and his six magicians had defeated fifty times their number. He was safe from execution by either side. In fact, he would be a hero to the Semmans.

He looked up at the warlock, hanging in mid-air, his black robe transformed into immense black wings that gave him the appearance of a hovering hawk, and waved triumphantly.

Vond, as the warlock had called himself, returned the wave. Thunder rumbled about him, and clouds gathered thickly overhead, ready to burst.

Sterren looked at the distant castle. The inhabitants had a celebration coming. They were saved.

At least, Sterren corrected himself, they were saved from Ophkar and Ksinallion. He supposed they would now have to deal with Vond, he would presumably want to stay here permanently, away from the whispering of Aldagmor. Having so powerful a warlock around the place might well change a few things. He might not be satisfied with the handful of gold and gems he had been promised. At the very least, Agor would probably be displaced as royal magician in short order.

But, Sterren thought, his grin returning, that wasn’t his problem. He remembered the peasants whose only interest in the siege was knowing when it would be over, so they could go home, regardless of who won. They probably wouldn’t care about anything Vond did, either. It wasn’t their problem.

King Phenvel might have a problem. Agor might have a problem. Any number of other people might have problems.

Right now, Sterren felt as if he had none at all. Vond probably felt the same way, Sterren thought, and a tiny little thought poked its way into his mind, like a pin working into a quilt.

If the warlock thought his problems were gone, he was wrong; he definitely had a very real problem. Sterren looked up, wondering if Vond knew. The storm broke suddenly, and sparkling blue rain spilled heavily down, soaking him instantly. He looked up, blinking, and saw Vond hanging in the sky, cloak spread, head thrown back, laughing wildly as the sheets of rain parted before him, leaving him untouched and dry.

CHAPTER 23

Eventually, of course, Vond landed again. Sterren was stubborn enough to wait for him.

He was not stubborn enough to wait out in the rain, though. He ducked into the little farmhouse and tried in vain to dry off, glancing out the windows every so often to see if Vond had tired of playing with the storm.

The clouds were rained away completely somewhat before sunset, but the warlock stayed aloft, whipping the winds back and forth, sending sprays of sand and rock hither and yon. The besieging armies were long since gone, leaving behind scattered bits of equipment and trash, strewn across a sea of mud.

Sterren saw no bodies, but he suspected a few might be out there. He noticed that much of the village surrounding Semma Castle had been flattened, not just the sappers’ ramshackle structures or the lightly built shops, but the solid original houses as well.

The sun was down, and the last light fading, when the warlock finally settled to earth.

“Hai,” Sterren called from his shelter. “Congratulations!”

Vond turned, spotted him in the window, and bowed. “Thank you, my lord,” he said. He smiled. “Gods, that felt good! To be able to let myself go, use all the power I wanted, without worrying about those damned nightmares, it was wonderful!”

Sterren did not bother going around to the door. He hoisted himself up into the window and was about to drop down on the outside when he felt an invisible grasp close about him and pull him free of the frame.

He floated smoothly over and found himself hanging in the air in front of the warlock.

This was disconcerting, but not particularly uncomfortable. Sterren flexed a little and found he could move freely, but that no matter how he moved he remained floating in the same spot, a couple of yards from the warlock’s face.

“Hello, there,” he said.

“Hello,” Vond replied, grinning broadly.

Sterren shifted, getting a bit more comfortable in his unnatural elevation. He considered carefully exactly what he ought to say and finally just asked, “What happened?”

“Well,” Vond said thoughtfully, “I’m not sure of all the details. Somehow, though, I tapped into the buzz, and then I had all the power I wanted, all at once.” He waved at the desolation on all sides, displaying his handiwork.

Sterren nodded, contemplating the wasteland. “And you aren’t worried about nightmares?” he asked. “What if this new source is just like the one in Aldagmor, in the long run?” While the warlock had been reveling in his new power, Sterren had spent much of the storm considering the various possibilities and he felt that it would be unfair to not point the many possible dangers out to Vond.

Vond shook his head. “It isn’t. It can’t be. I’d know.”

Sterren didn’t reply, but the warlock read his doubting expression.

“You think I’m being reckless, don’t you? Don’t worry, Sterren, I’m not. I tell you, I know this new source isn’t like the old. Whatever the Source in Aldagmor is, it’s conscious, or at least run by a conscious entity, I’ve known that since I was an apprentice. We warlocks always have a vague feeling of contact, of communication, when we use our magic, and besides, surely the nightmares and the Calling to go to Aldagmor are sent by something.”

Sterren nodded. He had to admit that much.

“Well,” Vond said, “This power source does not seem to be conscious, it’s just raw power. When I used the Aldagmor Source, as I told you, it was like listening to a whisper, hearing it but not catching the words. Using this new source is like listening to the hum of a bee, there are no words, just sound.”

“But if that’s so, then why aren’t there any warlocks here already, drawing on this source?” Sterren asked. “They don’t even have a word for warlock in Semmat!”

“I can only guess,” Vond said.

“Guess, then,” Sterren said.

Vond waved dramatically. “Warlockry, my dear Sterren, first appeared on the Night of Madness, back in 5202, you know that. That was when the Source first appeared in Aldagmor. It created warlockry, all at once; warlocks appeared spontaneously, hundreds of them. It was... well, it was as if the thing let out one shout, to get people listening, and then its voice died away to that whisper I keep talking about.”

Sterren nodded.

“Well,” Vond continued, “this new source never shouted. There’s no telling what it is, or how long it’s been there, but it could mean a whole new existence for warlocks, because if it’s not conscious, then it won’t cause any nightmares or compulsions, now, will it?”

“I don’t know,” Sterren said, “and neither do you. Maybe it’s just sleeping. Maybe the one in Aldagmor was just sleeping there, all along, until it woke up in 5202, and this one could wake up tomorrow.”

“Or it could sleep for another thousand years, if you’re right,” Vond said, “But you aren’t. I can feel it, I tell you; this new source is dead, not just sleeping. It was never alive and never will be. It’s totally mindless.”

“You’re the one taking the risks,” Sterren said, “so it’s none of my business, really, but Vond, I wouldn’t put that much faith in it if I were you. How do you know it isn’t sleeping? You can’t know. Your feelings could be wrong.”

Vond shook his head. “No, you don’t understand what it’s like. I can use the power itself to tell me whether it’s conscious, sleeping, alive, dead, whatever. It’s mindless, empty, like a... a running stream, or a millwheel grinding.”

Sterren was still uneasy, but saw no point in further argument on that particular subject. Vond was clearly not eager to consider any negative aspects to his situation just now, and after all, anything Sterren could say would be mere guesswork. “I hope you’re right,” he said.

“I know I’m right,” Vond replied.

“If you are,” Sterren said, nettled by Vond’s certainty, “then why hasn’t anybody found this thing before? Even if it never made its own warlocks, the way the Aldagmor Source did, there have been warlocks for twenty years, and you can’t be the first one to ever come south.”

“I may be the first one to ever come this far south,” Vond replied.

Sterren conceded the point, but said, “Even so-”

Vond cut him off. “Maybe,” he said, “I’m somehow different. Perhaps I’m unique, the only warlock who can use this new source, it is a bit different, after all, and I might never have... have listened to it, if you hadn’t suggested it.”

“Did you ever think you weren’t like other warlocks before this happened?”

“No, not really. I was getting very powerful, of course. The power increases with use as one becomes attuned to it, better able to listen in to the Source, as it were, and I’d been listening very closely for quite some time. Lord Azrad hired me to dredge the harbor last year you know, and I did it singlehanded, and... well, after that, the whisper was more of a mutter, and then... well.”

“The nightmares,” Sterren said.

“Eventually, yes. And then you came along, and here we are.”

Sterren decided to stop looking for flaws. For one thing, he had not even mentioned what he saw as the most likely long-term problem, but seeing how easily Vond had hauled him out of the window, he had a certain uneasiness about the warlock’s new power and he thought he might someday want Vond to have problems.

Not that he had any intention of telling the warlock that. “And so here you are with this new source of magic,” he said, smiling. “Congratulations!”

“Yes, isn’t it wonderful? I was straining hard, trying to listen to the old Source, to draw enough power to crack that beam, and I was ignoring the buzz. Then I thought about what you said and tried to listen to the buzz, too, and then it wasn’t a buzz anymore, it was something entirely different, something that I could draw power from, and it was close and strong and I was more powerful than I ever was back in Ethshar!”

“It’s close?” Sterren asked. He had somehow assumed that the buzz came from somewhere beyond the edge of the World, and was a good distance away.

“I think so, in that direction.” He pointed off vaguely northwest, but then, Sterren thought, almost the entire World lay to the northwest of Semma. This new source was not beyond the edge of the World, but that didn’t really narrow it down much.

The two men looked at each other, glanced around at the storm-blasted plain, and then simultaneously started to speak. They stopped, and Sterren gestured for Vond to speak first.

“I’d say the war is won,” the warlock said. “Now what do we do?”

“I’d say,” Sterren replied, “that we go to the castle and collect our rewards.”

Vond nodded. “Sounds good to me,” he said.

“We’ll want to get the others,” Sterren pointed out.

“That’s no problem,” Vond said, “I’ll bring them.” With that, he rose again into the air and began soaring toward Semma Castle.

Sterren, quite without any action on his part, sailed along close behind and he glanced back to see other figures being swept up and carried along in similar fashion — he spotted Annara by her distinctive purple robe, and Lady Kalira by her red gown, and Adier and Dogal by their size and armament. The other five were just black dots at first.

A moment later they were all standing at the castle gate, ranged in two neat rows, Sterren and Vond in the front row center. An unearthly glow of Vond’s making played across them all and lit the area a pale gold.

A sentry peered timidly over the ramparts above. “Hai,” Sterren shouted, remembering at the last minute to use Semmat. “It’s I, Sterren, Ninth Warlord, and my comrades! Open the gate!”

The soldier hesitated. “But, my lord,” he said, “the invaders...”

“The invaders are gone,” Sterren replied. “The war is over!”

The sentry glanced uneasily out across the ruins of the village, where Vond’s storm had indeed ripped away every trace of the sappers’ shelters and most of the other buildings as well. “They’re really gone?” he asked.

“All of them,” Sterren assured him. “The war is over. We won.”

“Sterren,” Vond said, speaking Ethsharitic, “I can open the gates.” “I know,” Sterren replied in the same tongue, “but let’s be polite about it. Give them another five minutes.”

“Five minutes, then.”

Sterren switched back to Semmat and said, “The magician who made the storm is becoming impatient. He says in five minutes, if the gate is still closed, he’ll smash it to pieces.”

The sentry immediately said, “Yes, my lord. I’ll have it open in a moment.”

It took about a minute and a half before the gate swung wide, and Sterren thought he saw disappointment on Vond’s face as the whole party marched in.