The Vondish Ambassador

Chapter Ten

For a moment Emmis desperately hoped that Annis did not speak Ethsharitic as well as she thought, that she had said the wrong word. There was something very strange about coming here after visiting his family, abruptly going from happy gossip about weddings and babies and jobs and apprenticeships to this foreigner cheerfully talking about assassination.

“You want to kill him?” he asked. “Why?”

“Because he’s building an army of warlocks!”

Emmis stared at her in astonishment. “He is?”

“Yes!” She looked baffled by his surprise. “You were there, you heard him talking to Ishta — he wants to send his grandson to Ethshar to learn warlockry, then bring him back to Vond. And I’m sure it’s not just the one grandson; he probably has a dozen children ready for training. If it were just one, wouldn’t he have brought the boy with him? No, he’s making arrangements for several, we’re sure of it.”

“Even if he is...” Emmis stopped. Lar wasn’t making arrangements to provide his empire with a dozen warlocks, so why argue about what it would mean if he did?

“Why else would they want warlocks? They’re going to expand again. They’re probably going to try to conquer all the Small Kingdoms!”

“I don’t think so,” Emmis said, but he didn’t sound convincing even to himself.

He was trying to remember what Lar had said about revealing this. Was his real reason for consulting Ishta a secret? He remembered that Lar said these people wouldn’t believe the truth even if they heard it, and Emmis thought that was probably right, but shouldn’t he at least try?

No, he was fairly sure that Lar had said it was secret.

“He hasn’t said anything to you about this plan for conquest?”

“He hasn’t said anything about any plan for conquest!” Emmis replied. “He said the Empire of Vond was big enough as it is, and they aren’t planning to expand any further.”

“Then he’s lied to you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, what else would he want these new warlocks for?”

“I don’t know — building roads, maybe, or healing the sick. What makes you think warlocks are only good for fighting?”

“Because that’s how the empire used Vond, of course.”

“I think you mean that’s how Vond created his empire, don’t you?”

“It’s the same thing. The empire is still there, even if Vond himself isn’t — and you know, we still don’t know where he went, or whether he might come back. Maybe this ambassador is recruiting Vond’s new staff, for when he returns.”

“He isn’t going to...” Again, Emmis stopped in mid-sentence. He didn’t really know whether Vond might come back someday; no one did. While no warlock had been known to return from Aldagmor at any time in the last twenty-two years, no one knew why, or what was really going on. For all Emmis knew, they might all come home tomorrow.

But that wasn’t the way he would have bet it.

“Why do you keep assuming he wants several warlocks? How do you know this isn’t just personal business, trying to find his grandson an apprenticeship?”

“Even one would be too many! Besides, he treated it as official business. He brought you along. We think it’s clearly part of a war plan.”

“But isn’t it a tradition in the Small Kingdoms not to use magic in your wars?” he asked.

“It was before the Great Warlock came along, yes. He ruined that.” The bitterness in her voice startled Emmis. “The empire uses magic.”

“They did before, yes, but Vond is gone.”

“Why would that matter? The Imperial Council is his heir. If they didn’t intend to follow his path, why haven’t they broken up the empire, and let the seventeen provinces go back to being seventeen kingdoms?”

“Well, but that’s hardly the same thing!”

“That’s what their envoys say, but why should we believe them?”

“This is ridiculous. One man talked to a warlock about an apprenticeship for his grandson, and you’re convinced it’s the first step in a campaign to conquer the World!”

“Probably just the Small Kingdoms,” Annis said. “They know they couldn’t fight the Hegemony — you have thousands of magicians here.”

“There are magicians in the Small Kingdoms!”

“Some, yes, especially in the north, along the Great Highway — but an army of warlocks could defeat most of them, and the rest would probably flee. Don’t forget, Emmis, we saw what Vond did. He smashed entire armies. He summoned storms out of a calm sky, and built his palace by pulling stone out of the ground with a wave of his hand. A dozen warlocks like that would be enough to defeat Ashthasa and Lumeth in a day, all the Small Kingdoms in a year.”

“But most warlocks aren’t like that! They hear the Calling before they have that kind of power!”

“Vond didn’t.”

Emmis frowned. “So he was a freak...”

Annis shook her head. “No,” she said. “We think it’s something about Semma that’s different. Warlocks are more powerful there.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Emmis said, but as he spoke he remembered what Lar had asked Kolar. That hum that Vond had heard — was that somehow related to his abnormally powerful magic?

Was that why the empire really didn’t want any more warlocks?

“Listen,” he said, “we have hundreds of warlocks here in Ethshar, and they don’t cause any trouble. Why are you so sure they’d be a problem where you live?”

“You have all the other magicians to keep them under control,” Annis said. “You have the Wizards’ Guild, and the witches and sorcerers and demonologists and the rest. And for that matter, you have the other warlocks; they aren’t all united in a single cause.”

“So why do you think...”

“We can’t risk it!” she snapped. “If the nobles of the empire have their own children trained as warlocks, that’s completely different from anything anywhere else!”

“So you’re going to kill the ambassador? How do you even know that will stop them?”

“We’re going to kill this ambassador, and anyone else from Vond who tries to talk to warlocks, or to make an alliance with the Hegemony. The empire is quite strong enough without Ethshar’s help.”

Emmis blinked. “You know, I don’t think the overlord would like that,” he said.

“Why would he care?”

“You mean aside from generally not approving of murder? You’re trying to cut off his communication with another country!”

“But he hasn’t had any communication with the empire — why would he care when that doesn’t change? After all, isn’t he called Azrad the Lazy?”

Emmis stared at her. “No, he isn’t,” he said. “That was his father. Azrad VI was called ’the Sedentary,’ yes, but he died five years ago. The present overlord is Azrad VII, and he doesn’t have an agreed-upon cognomen yet — my sister Sharra calls him ’Azrad the Hard to Classify.’ But he isn’t lazy.”

Annis looked distinctly disconcerted at that, but quickly regained her composure. “Still, why would he care what happens to troublemakers from the far side of the Small Kingdoms?”

“Because they’re trying to talk to him, and he doesn’t like being interrupted!” This didn’t seem real to Emmis, talking like this. He had heard people talking about killing someone on occasion, but it had always been in a fit of anger, over a theft or a woman or some personal wrong, and it had usually been when they were very drunk. He had never heard someone calmly explain that someone was to be killed over politics, as if murder weren’t important. It was hard to believe she was serious.

If she was serious, though, he would have to do something to stop her.

“So what sort of assassination are you planning?” he asked.

“Planning? It’s done. Or happening, anyway. I wouldn’t have told you otherwise — I don’t trust you that much. Neyam hired someone.”

“What?”

“Well, yes! Hagai couldn’t do it, he’s a theurgist, and I wouldn’t know how to find an assassin, but Neyam...”

Emmis leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair. “Where are they?”

“Where are who?” Annis asked, startled.

“Neyam and his assassin! I have to stop them!”

“No, you don’t,” Annis said. “Sit down. Don’t be silly.”

“Yes, I do,” Emmis said. “It’s murder! Where are they?”

“I don’t know. The Lumethans are doing this, it’s not my idea — well, mostly not...”

Emmis turned away and ran out the door onto Commission Street, where he turned left and headed for Shiphaven Market at a trot. If he had been certain where he was headed he would have run, but he wasn’t sure yet. Should he just go to the house in Allston and warn Lar?

That assumed it wasn’t already too late. He hoped it wasn’t already too late. He had sat there listening to the Ashthasan madwoman far longer than he should have, he told himself. He should have run to help as soon as she mentioned assassination.

But it hadn’t seemed real. People didn’t talk openly about such things! Hadn’t she realized that Emmis worked for Lar, that he liked Lar? Did she think that just because he had taken her money, he had no loyalty at all to his employer, not even the basic consideration he would give any human being?

He couldn’t imagine thinking like that.

The market was uncrowded this time of day, and he was able to make it through and onto Twixt Street quickly. He picked up his pace; he still didn’t know whether he was heading to Allston or the Wizards’ Quarter, but either way, he would have to cross the Old Merchants’ Quarter and the New City to get there.

A little belatedly the possibility of recruiting help among friends and family in Shiphaven occurred to him, but he immediately dismissed the idea; there might not be time, and it would just sound so ridiculous to them, running halfway across the city to stop an assassination!

He broke into a run, even though he knew he couldn’t maintain it all the way to Allston.

He was almost to Canal Square when he realized he had left all his belongings on the floor of the Crooked Candle. He cursed, but did not slow down.

He did slow down in Canal Square, though, as the crowds were thicker here. He almost tripped over a small child, brushed awkwardly against a woman, and had to slow to little more than a walk as he squeezed past a clump of people at the south end.

Kolar had said his spell would take an hour, and it was perhaps half an hour’s walk each way between Through Street and the wizard’s shop; allow a little time for other matters, and the ambassador still would have needed no more than three hours to complete his errand and return to the house to begin writing his protocol. Emmis glanced up at the sky, trying to estimate how long it had been since he had headed back toward Shiphaven. The sun was hidden behind rooftops to the west as he jogged down Commerce Street. How long had he spent at the rooming house? How long with his family? The walk back had taken almost an hour all by itself...

He was fairly sure he had been in Shiphaven for hours. Lar might already be dead.

This might be partly his fault, he thought as he trotted up the slope toward High Street. If he hadn’t talked to Annis, she and the Lumethans might not have been so quick to decide Lar had to be killed.

Or they might have been even quicker — who knew? They had been following Lar in any case. He hadn’t told them anything about planning conquest. He hadn’t told them anything about apprenticing to warlocks; they had heard that from Ishta. It wasn’t his fault.

Still, he felt somehow responsible. He turned the corner onto High Street and broke into a run again.

As he crossed Merchant Street into the New City he began worrying about what he would do if he encountered the assassins. He was big and strong, but he had no training in how to fight, no weapon except his belt-knife. He glanced at the headquarters of the Council of Warlocks as he passed, and wished he had a warlock to help him — or any kind of magician, really.

And he hoped that the assassins Neyam had hired were just thugs, and not magicians. There were magical assassins, he knew that; some demonologists were said to specialize in assassination. Warlocks could kill without a trace, and it was rumored that some of them would do that for a price. Wizards were picky about who they killed, but they, too, had lethal magic at their command.

Witches never killed anyone, so far as he knew, and he had never heard of ritual dance causing anything much worse than a headache. To the best of his knowledge the gods no longer answered prayers to kill people under any circumstances, so priests and other theurgists couldn’t be assassins. Herbalists had a wide variety of poisons on hand, everyone knew that, but he couldn’t see how anyone could use those against Lar. Scientists, well, who knew what scientists could do?

And sorcerers — during the Great War, Northern sorcerers had been the subject of nightmares and terrified whispers. No one knew how many of the horrible old weapons modern sorcerers might still have hidden away.

Emmis tried to remember all the other kinds of magic he had ever heard of. Most of them seemed harmless — prestidigitation and prophecy and the rest had no obvious lethal applications — but who knew what a clever magician might do? He estimated that at least half the schools of magic could definitely be used for assassination, and except for theurgy he couldn’t be sure any of them were entirely safe.

Annis had said Hagai was a theurgist, so he was relatively harmless; he might have used his magic to help find Lar, but beyond that, Emmis didn’t think Hagai was anything to worry about. Neyam, though — was he a magician, too? If so, what kind? Or the third Lumethan, whatever his name was — he could be anything.

Morkai, that was it.

He made the turn onto Arena Street, and almost collided with a woman eating a sausage. “Sorry,” he said, a little breathlessly, as he pushed past her.

If the Lumethans had hired magicians to kill Lar, Emmis didn’t think there was anything he could do. It took magic to fight magic. That was why the Small Kingdoms had banned using magic in their endless little wars; it would have made their regular armies useless, and you couldn’t trust magicians. They weren’t reliable. They might change sides, or decide they wanted to be in charge themselves, or they might simply die, and then where would you be, if your entire military depended on their magic?

The sun was almost down, the shadows stretching the full width of the avenue, the sky starting to darken when he turned onto Through Street and slowed to a stop, panting.

The yellow house was still there, unchanged. The door was closed. The street was largely deserted; a cat sat in a neighbor’s window, a woman several doors down was puttering with her doorway shrine, and a man sat slumped against a stoop, apparently asleep.

There were no obvious assassins to be seen, no ominous sword-wielding figures in black cloaks. There was no brown-robed Lumethan, either. But there were dozens of places where they might be concealed, in doorways and alleys or behind corners — not all the houses were built directly against one another, or with their facades aligned.

Cautiously, Emmis crossed the street to the door of the rented house. He fished the key from the purse on his belt, thanking whatever gods or fates might be responsible that he hadn’t left that on the floor of the Crooked Candle with all his other belongings.

The door was locked, just as it should be, and the key turned in the lock, just as it should. He opened the door slowly and carefully, and looked inside before stepping through, making sure there was no assassin lurking there.

Then in a sudden moment of inspiration he turned, and found the man from the stoop not asleep at all, but on his feet, belt-knife drawn, and hurrying across the street toward him.

Emmis snatched his own knife from his belt and stepped backward into the house. He slammed the door in the other man’s face, but before he could latch it he heard footsteps.

He whirled, the knife in his right hand raised, just in time to duck a swinging blow from a walking stick. The stick smacked into the wall above Emmis’s head, and he heard plaster crack.

There was a stranger in the house, a tall, thin man in a dark blue tunic and black wool breeches, his black beard trimmed to a point, his raised hands wielding a black and silver cane like a club. As Emmis took this in, a wooden cap fell from the end of the stick, revealing a sharp steel blade at least six inches long — the weapon was now as much a sword as a club.

Emmis dived at him, keeping his head down, below that sword-stick, and butted the intruder hard, sending them both tumbling backward onto the bare wood floor. They landed with Emmis on top, and he reached out his left hand, fingers spread, and grabbed his opponent’s face, shoving it back so that the stranger’s head hit the floor hard.

Then he scrambled over his dazed opponent, got back to his feet, and ran toward the back of the house.

He was not here to fight; he didn’t know how to fight, not really. He had been in a few brawls in bars or on the docks, but he was no fighter, not really. The one thing he knew which had stood him in good stead here so far, was to do the unexpected — if someone came at you, go at him as well, don’t retreat. Don’t hesitate — better to do the wrong thing quickly than the right thing too late.

And the other rule he used in fighting was that when you get the chance, put anything you can between yourself and your foe — doors, furniture, or just distance. Don’t try to beat anyone, just try to get away.

With that in mind, he didn’t look for a weapon, or turn to face the man with the stick; he just ran to the back door and out into the courtyard.

A few of the neighbors were there, and glanced at him as he ran out of the house, stumbling across the little back porch and down the single step onto the hard-packed earth. A half-formed thought of shouting for them to call for the guards crossed Emmis’s mind, but he let it go unheeded as he sprinted toward one of the narrow passages leading out of the courtyard to the streets.

Lar was not dead yet, he was sure. The assassins wouldn’t have been lingering in and around the house if they had already murdered their target. He wouldn’t have been hiding from them. That meant he hadn’t yet returned home. The assassins had been lying in wait, expecting him any moment, expecting their unprepared victim to walk in, completely unaware of any danger.

At least, Emmis hoped that was what it meant.

And they had gotten Emmis instead, a younger, stronger, more prepared opponent, and he had survived their initial attack.

But that meant that the would-be killers would be more prepared now, as well. It was more important than ever that Emmis find Lar first, and warn him.

The more heroic thing might be to stay and fight, to try to take the assassins out of action somehow, but Emmis was no hero. He had no idea how he might single-handedly defeat two men, especially not when one of them had that diabolical sword-stick.

He didn’t even know whether there were just the two. After all, neither of them was Neyam of Lumeth. There might be a whole gang lurking around Through Street.

Emmis squeezed through one of the narrower alleys and emerged onto an unfamiliar street; he paused for only a fraction of a second to get his bearings, then turned and headed for Arena Street, hoping that he had enough of a lead that the two assassins would not be able to follow him to the Wizards’ Quarter.