The Unwelcome Warlock

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “And that’s what the tapestry is,” she said. “I see.”

  “Assuming it’s still where you left it, and it still works, yes,” Hanner said.

  “Well, let’s see, shall we?” Nerra strode forward, arms raised, calling, “Excuse me! Let me through!”

  The little crowd parted, and she and Hanner marched up to the front door. Hanner reached for the handle.

  It was locked.

  He frowned. “The lock was broken,” he said. He released the latch and knocked.

  He waited a moment, then raised his hand to knock again just as the door swung open. Zallin looked out at him.

  “Hanner! It’s you!”

  “Zallin! It’s you!” Hanner replied. “Stop telling me who I am and let me in.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, opening the door wide and stepping aside. He threw a glance at the waiting crowd. “I thought it might be one of them.”

  Hanner looked back over his shoulder, then stopped on the sill. He turned around and called, “Be patient, friends! I hope to have good news for you all very soon!” Then he continued into the house, ushering Nerra in with him.

  The instant they were inside Zallin swung the door shut, and clicked the latch into place. “For a moment I was afraid you were going to invite them all in,” he said with a nervous smile.

  “I might do that later,” Hanner said. “There’s something else I need to do first.”

  “But Hanner, where would you put them all? You’ve already filled half the beds. And Vond won’t like it…” Zallin’s voice trailed off as he noticed Hanner and Nerra both staring at him. It was not a friendly stare.

  “Zallin of the Mismatched Eyes,” Hanner said, “allow me to introduce my sister, Lady Nerra. Nerra, Zallin was the Chairman of the Council of Warlocks when the Calling ended.”

  “I’m honored, my lady,” Zallin said with a bow.

  Nerra didn’t say anything, but nodded an acknowledgment.

  “The lock was broken,” Hanner said, pointing at the door.

  “Vond fixed it,” Zallin said. “He didn’t want those people just walking in.”

  “Then he’s back?”

  “Oh, yes. We got home half an hour ago.” Zallin shuddered. “He brought a girl with him from Camptown, and I think if she hadn’t been here he might have…have… He wasn’t happy with those guests of yours, Hanner, or with the people outside. Sterren isn’t here, and Vond didn’t like that, either. If he hadn’t… He didn’t want to scare the girl.”

  Hanner followed this disjointed account well enough to understand the situation. “He’s upstairs with her now?”

  “Yes.”

  Hanner nodded. “We’ll try not to disturb him.” He headed for the stairs, Nerra close behind.

  “Wait, Hanner! Where are you going? You just said you weren’t going to disturb him.”

  “We aren’t.” He turned to look at Zallin. “You seem nervous, Zallin. I take it the Great Vond did not see fit to teach you how to use the second source?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Zallin said. “Not yet, anyway — he said he might someday, if he decides he can trust me.”

  Hanner did not believe for a moment that Vond would ever trust Zallin that much, but he saw no point in saying so. “What did he do?”

  “He…he flew everywhere, all the time, but mostly just a few inches off the ground, so he could see everything, and if anyone got in his way he just flung them aside. He didn’t even look at them. And in Camptown, half of the people he threw aside were guardsmen. If he saw anything he wanted in a shop, he just took it, and ignored anyone who asked for payment. I told them to send the bills here.”

  Hanner remembered the Night of Madness, when dozens of warlocks, not understanding what was happening, had behaved that way. That was why it was called the Night of Madness, rather than the Disappearance Night, or the Birth of Warlockry, or something else. Some of those warlocks had thought they were dreaming, others thought that they had gone mad, and others hadn’t cared, they did it simply because they could.

  Hanner knew that Vond did it because he could. “That girl he brought back with him,” he asked. “Did he give her a choice?”

  “Well…she didn’t protest. She expects to get paid.”

  “See that she is,” Hanner said.

  Just as he said that, Rudhira appeared in the dining room doorway. “Hello, Hanner,” she said.

  “Hello, Rudhira. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. The emperor hasn’t noticed me.”

  “This is my sister, Lady Nerra. I don’t think you’ve met.”

  Rudhira nodded. “Mavi’s friend. No, we never met.”

  “Rudhira?” Nerra said. “The one who…the warlock?”

  “The one who was Called just a few days after the Night of Madness,” Hanner said. “Rudhira, we need to do something upstairs; I’ll be back down in a few moments.”

  “Take your time,” Rudhira said.

  Hanner hesitated, staring at the little redhead; he wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know what it was. He wanted to apologize to her for Mavi calling her his whore, but she hadn’t been there to hear it, and besides, up until the Night of Madness had changed everything, Rudhira was a whore. He groped for words, but then Nerra nudged him, and he started up the stairs again.

  This time no one interrupted them, and he and Nerra were able to make their way past the second and third floors, emerging at last on the top floor, where Nerra took charge, leading the way to four rooms at the back of the house.

  Hanner remembered these rooms well; they were where he had stored away the remains of his uncle’s collection of magical artifacts more than thirty years ago. Now, though, while those mysterious knicknacks were still there, stuffed into drawers and cabinets and stacked on shelves, they were largely hidden by a variety of other things that had been jammed in after Hanner’s departure.

  Hanner recognized much of this added clutter — hardly surprising, since a significant portion of it was either his or his uncle’s. Some of the rest he recognized as belonging to other warlocks he had known; apparently it had all been brought here when they, too, were Called.

  This meant, Hanner realized, that he could finally get out of the filthy clothes he had been wearing ever since he went to Arvagan’s shop that day. He had aired them out while he slept, but had not had anything else to wear — until now; he could see some of his clothes neatly folded and stacked.

  Of course, they had been sitting here for seventeen years. Even if moths hadn’t eaten them, they might still fall apart when he tried to put them on.

  “I’m fairly sure we put the tapestry in here,” Nerra said, interrupting his thoughts as she indicated the room in the southeast corner. “The workmen were very careful handling it, since it was obviously dangerous.” She opened the door, raising a cloud of dust, and pointed. “There,” she said.

  Hanner’s gaze followed her finger, and sure enough, there was a thick roll of fabric, shoved between the legs of a dusty table. He stepped forward, bending down for it.

  Nerra grabbed his arm. “Wait a minute!” she said. “Won’t it… If you touch it, won’t…something happen?”

  “Not while it’s rolled up,” Hanner said. “It has to be flat to work.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. It took a year to make this thing after I commissioned it, so I had plenty of time to learn about how it works.” He tugged at the roll of fabric, and sneezed as his motion disturbed a decade’s accumulation of dust and cobwebs. “Give me a hand?”

  Together, the two of them hauled the tapestry out of its resting place and got it hoisted up onto Hanner’s shoulder. They carried it out into the central hallway, and had it almost to the head of the stairs when a thought struck him.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, lowering his burden to the floor.

  “What?” Nerra asked.

  “I need to check something.” He hurried to the stairs — but not to the broad steps goin
g down; instead he opened the door that revealed the steep, narrow stair leading up to the attic, and quickly clambered up them.

  “Hanner, what are you doing?” Nerra called after him.

  At the head of the stairs he stopped and looked at the attic. It was dim, lit only by a single small window in the north gable and by what light leaked in beneath the unsealed eaves. It was a single room extending the entire length and most of the width of the house, directly under the sloping roof and exposed rafters; headroom ranged from nothing at all at the sides to about twelve feet at the center, though tie-beams ran from side to side just six feet above the bare plank floor.

  It looked just as Hanner remembered it; the hole he had smashed in the roof had been repaired, and no one had used it for storage. It was still completely bare and empty.

  He had chosen it as the target for his first tapestry, the one that now hung in that other-worldly refuge, exactly because it was empty and unused, and lit from the north, so that the daylight was more or less constant. He had considered using one of the rooms below, and had rejected the idea — it would be too easy for someone to carelessly move a piece of furniture, or leave a stray object, and render the tapestry inert.

  He had tested that tapestry before turning it over to Arvagan and his apprentice; he hadn’t wanted to be stranded in his refuge. He wished he could test it again, but he could see no way to do that; it was still in that other world.

  The attic looked exactly the same to him, but he was relying on mere mortal eyesight, and his own fallible memory. If anything had changed, then any trip into the magical refuge might be a one-way journey, with no possibility of return.

  But would that really be so terrible? The entire plan, once upon a time, had been for warlocks to live in that other world permanently to avoid the Call. He and Arvagan had designed the image in the tapestry to be as appealing and unthreatening as possible, to be a haven where warlocks could retire in peace and comfort. When he had tested it, a sixnight or seventeen years ago, he had been eager to get back to Ethshar to tell everyone that it had worked, and to be with Mavi and the children again — but Mavi was gone and the children were grown.

  He backed down the steep attic stairs.

  “Come on,” he said to Nerra, as he stooped to retrieve the tapestry. “Let’s hang this up somewhere and see if it still works.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The gathering in Ithinia’s parlor was more crowded than she liked; if the weather had been warmer, she would have held the meeting in her garden, instead. On a chilly, overcast day like this one, though, that would not work. If the group had all been wizards there were several places they could have met, but they were not; in fact, much of the point of the meeting was to involve the others.

  “All right,” she said. “What news do we have?” She pointed to a wizard in a mouse-colored robe. “You — Arvagan the Gray, isn’t it? Why are you here?”

  “I thought you might want to know that the former warlock, Chairman Hanner, came by my shop this afternoon asking after the Transporting Tapestry I sold him,” Arvagan replied. “You had asked about tapestries yourself, so I thought you’d be interested.”

  “That’s the one you made him as a refuge where warlocks could avoid the Call?”

  “That was the intention, yes, but when he tested it he was immediately Called.”

  “As I recall, we discussed using it to get some of the refugees back to the city, but we didn’t want to route them through another universe.”

  “And we weren’t sure the return tapestry would still work,” Arvagan said.

  “That’s right. So Hanner wanted to know where it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “You told him?”

  “I don’t know where it is, Guildmaster; that was another reason we didn’t use it. I returned it to his family after he was Called.”

  “His family is still in Ethshar?”

  “I have no reason to think otherwise.”

  “So he’s trying to acquire the tapestry, to have access to his supposed refuge,” Ithinia said thoughtfully.

  “But when he tested it, he was Called,” Arvagan said.

  “But the Calling is gone,” Ithinia replied. “That refuge — if Vond entered it, he would presumably lose contact with the towers.”

  “Until he came back out, yes. There is a return tapestry, remember.”

  “Still, it might prove useful.” She nodded, then looked over the faces again, and focused on one she didn’t recognize, a man of indeterminate age in a nondescript brown cloak who was sitting quietly in the back. “You,” she said, pointing. “Who are you?”

  “I am Kelder of Demerchan,” he said.

  A sudden silence fell over the room.

  “Are you indeed?” Ithinia asked.

  The man nodded.

  “I do not believe I invited you to this gathering.”

  “You did not, Guildmaster, but we thought it advisable to have a representative here, all the same, to ensure that we would not be working at cross-purposes.”

  “I see. Will you tell us, then, what interest the Cult of Demerchan has in the current situation?”

  “Within limits, yes. Certain persons have asked us to remove the Emperor Vond. We have not yet decided whether to accept this commission.”

  “By ‘remove,’ you mean ‘assassinate’?”

  “The precise means of removal were not specified.”

  Ithinia considered this. She knew annoyingly little about the Cult of Demerchan. They were an organization of magician-assassins, based somewhere in the Small Kingdoms, that had operated in secrecy for centuries. They made extensive use of tunnels and hidden passages, and used various kinds of magic — apparently including wizardry, though so far as she knew, none of them acknowledged the authority of the Wizards’ Guild.

  Ordinarily, for anyone outside the Guild to use wizardry the penalty would be immediate execution, but somehow Demerchan had never incurred such consequences. Whether this was an oversight, deliberate neglect, or something else, she did not know; it was not her responsibility. She was the senior Guildmaster of Ethshar of the Spices, and a member of the Guild’s Inner Circle, but she was not one of the Hundred; there were levels above her, and the Guild had secrets she did not know. What happened in the Small Kingdoms was usually not her concern. She had intervened a dozen years ago when it appeared that the Empire of Vond might threaten the security of the towers in Lumeth of the Towers, and word had later reached her that her actions met with the approval of her superiors, but she had also been reminded that she was to meddle in the Small Kingdoms only in the most exceptional circumstances.

  The existence and behavior of the Cult of Demerchan was therefore none of her business — or it hadn’t been until this man showed up in her house.

  “If you have not yet decided to accept the commission, then what purposes do you have that we might cross?” she demanded.

  “We have our own interests. I am here in part to determine whether your interests align with ours. I am here in person, Guildmaster, and visible to you all, because we prefer not to antagonize the Guild, or the Sisterhood, or the Hierarchies, or the Initiates, unnecessarily; I am to speak up should it seem that a conflict is developing that might be avoided.”

  That was a reasonable answer, and a believable one. Ithinia had not missed the implication that Demerchan sometimes listened in to the Guild’s private deliberations secretly, by means of their own magic, but she decided to ignore that for now — though she might want to reconsider some of her standard wards and protections when this was all done.

  “You want to know whether your interests align with ours,” she said. “I would say they do. The interests of every living thing in the World are involved.”

  “Oh?”

  Ithinia looked over the crowd of magicians; some of them looked confused, while other faces were alight with anticipation, and still others appeared to be confident they understood the situation. Some of them probably did.r />
  “We are not here because warlockry ended,” she said. “The World managed without it for centuries, and will do so again. We are not here because fifteen thousand refugees have suddenly been dumped on our society; the Hegemony dealt with a far worse refugee problem at the end of the Great War, and emerged from it relatively unscathed. We are not even here because of the possible danger posed by a warlock unrestrained by any threat of the Calling, one who has already demonstrated that he is perfectly willing to kill innocent people who get in his way, though that is a matter worthy of our attention. No, we are here because the source of that warlock’s power is essential to us all, and we do not want Vond, or anyone else, tampering with it.”

  “Could you be a little more specific, Guildmaster?” asked a white-robed theurgist whose name Ithinia had forgotten.

  “You all know that warlocks drew their power from that thing in Aldagmor,” Ithinia said. “Well, Vond found a way to draw power from the towers in Lumeth of the Towers, and we fear that this may in time weaken or damage the towers’ magic.”

  “What magic?” the theurgist asked.

  Somehow, Ithinia had assumed that every powerful magician would know some of the ancient secrets of the Wizards’ Guild, but of course there was no reason for that to be the case, and clearly it wasn’t. Unless, of course, the theurgist was just testing to see whether the wizardly version of the story matched whatever the priests believed.

  “You are all aware, I trust, that the World does not extend indefinitely in every direction, but has edges?” She looked around the room, and saw no one indicating otherwise. “Do you know what lies beyond those edges?”

  “No,” said Kirris of Slave Street. Trust a witch to be blunt, Ithinia thought. Kirris made no secret of her dislike for wizards, and Ithinia was slightly surprised she had agreed to attend this meeting. Her friend Teneria had probably talked her into it.