Tales of Ethshar

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “That wardrobe you sold me!” Shanelle shouted. “Do you have any idea how hideous the stuff it’s making is?”

  The former statue turned to stare at the wizard and his angry customer. “Where am I?” she asked. “Who are you people?”

  Manolo smiled at her, and bowed. “I am Manolo the Blank, master wizard,” he said. “I have just reversed a petrifaction spell someone cast on you long ago.”

  “Wizard!” Shanelle demanded.

  Annoyed, Manolo turned to her. “Could you wait for just a moment, please? I have just rescued this lovely woman from a fate worse than death, by means of a very dangerous eighth-order spell, and I would like to have a few words with her. I will attend to your complaint shortly.”

  “You’d better,” Shanelle said. She glared at the naked woman. “Who are you, anyway, and who turned you to stone?”

  “My name is Vweeton,” she said. “I assume it was the wizard Ballensyagga who petrified me—he objected to having to compete with a witch for business.”

  Shanelle looked dubious. “What kind of a name is Vweeton?” she demanded. She turned to Manolo. “You know, I don’t think she was petrified at all; I think your magic brought a real statue to life.”

  “Oh, no,” Manolo said. “Javan’s Restorative won’t do that. Here, look.” He dipped the dagger in the pot again and flung a few drops at the beast statue. “Pyrzqxgl,” he said.

  The air flickered, and the white surface began to dissolve, revealing tawny fur; Manolo’s mouth fell open in astonishment. “But it can’t!” he said. “That’s an imaginary monster!”

  “What, the lion?” Vweeton said, stepping down from her pedestal. “No, it’s not imaginary; why would you think that?” She walked toward the emerging beast and reached out a calming hand. “You might want to find some way to restrain him, though. I can keep him happy with my witchcraft for awhile, but I’m eventually going to get tired, and he’s going to get hungry, and yes, he’ll happily eat people.”

  “Augh!” Manolo said, backing away.

  “You might also find me some clothes,” the witch said, as she petted the lion’s head. “I suppose Ballensyagga caught me in my bath—at least, the last thing I remember is hearing a noise as I got out of the tub.”

  Manolo looked around and saw the gown draped on Shanelle’s arm. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “That,” Shanelle said, “is why I’m here. It’s hideous! Your magic wardrobe is turning out the ugliest clothes I’ve ever seen!”

  “It’s still better than nothing,” Vweeton said. “Toss it here.”

  Shanelle obeyed. “Go ahead and put it on, if you want,” she said, “but don’t blame me if you look like a clown.”

  Vweeton stepped away from the lion and untangled the dress, then pulled it over her head, tugged it down, and settled it on her hips. She looked down at it critically.

  Shanelle, Deyor, Armani, and Manolo stared. The chartreuse that had looked so ghastly in Shanelle’s bedroom went surprisingly well with the witch’s brown skin, and the absurd single shoulder was oddly fetching.

  “You know,” Deyor said, after a long moment of silence, “on you, it looks good.”

  Notes:

  All the characters who appear in the story are named for fashion icons:

  Shanelle = Chanel

  Deyor = Dior

  Guchi = Gucci

  Manolo the Blank = Manolo Blahnik

  Armani = Armani

  Vweeton = Vuitton

  Ballensyagga = Balenciaga

  General Gor, Lord Wulran, Javan, and Piskor the Generous are established figures in Ethshar’s history, and the geography (this is set in Ethshar of the Rocks) is accurate and consistent with all other Ethshar stories.

  In case you didn’t pick up on it, the “blue breeches” are a pair of jeans.

  “Timsez mekkitwerk” = “Tim says, make it work,” a reference to Tim Gunn’s signature line on TV’s “Project Runway.”

  “Pyrzqxgl” is the magic word used by Kiki Aru to transform himself and others in L. Frank Baum’s The Magic of Oz.

  Armani’s initial refusal to admit the visitors to see the wizard is modeled on a scene in MGM’s 1939 film of “The Wizard of Oz.”

  And I trust the presence of a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe requires no explanation.

  About “The Warlock’s Refuge”

  Back in the 1990s I wrote Night of Madness, describing how warlockry first arrived in the World, and how an accommodation was reached between these new magicians and the existing society. That story introduced Lord (later Chairman) Hanner, and established how the Calling worked. It also showed how there might be an obvious way to avoid the Calling. Clearly, I needed to explain why warlocks never exploited this, so I plotted “The Warlock’s Refuge.” I didn’t actually get around to writing it for a decade or so, though. I only finally did so because I needed readers to be familiar with it before tackling the novel that eventually became The Unwelcome Warlock. I had been planning that story (then called The Final Calling) since the 1980s, but kept putting it off, as there were all these other pieces that I thought should be done first, such as The Vondish Ambassador and “The Warlock’s Refuge.”

  I did get to it eventually. “The Warlock’s Refuge” was published on my website in April of 2010, and then republished as Chapter One of The Unwelcome Warlock, and here it is again.

  The Warlock’s Refuge

  Hanner the Warlock looked at the tapestry without really seeing it; that constant nagging whisper was distracting him. He closed his eyes for a moment to clear his thoughts, but that seemed to make it worse. He clenched his jaw, shook his head, and balled his hands into fists.

  “Is this not what you had in mind, Chairman?”

  The wizard’s voice brought Hanner back to reality for a moment. He opened his eyes and forced himself to focus on the tapestry.

  The silky fabric hardly seemed to be there at all; the image woven into the cloth was so detailed, so perfect, that he seemed to be looking through the tapestry into a world beyond, rather than at the material itself.

  In that world gentle golden sunlight washed across a green hillside strewn with wild flowers beneath a clear blue sky above. In the distance he could make out a cluster of handsome golden-tan buildings, though details were vague.

  “Does it work?” he asked.

  The wizard beside him glanced at the tapestry. “It does,” Arvagan said. “My apprentice tested it before I sent for you. The tapestry that can return you to Ethshar is hanging in that house there, on the right.” He pointed, but was careful to keep his finger well back from the cloth—the slightest contact would trigger the tapestry’s magic and pull him into that other world.

  “The tapestry that comes out in the attic of Warlock House?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And these tapestries will work for warlocks?”

  The wizard hesitated. “I think so,” he said at last. “You understand, without a warlock’s cooperation we have no way of testing it. Divinations are unreliable where warlocks are concerned. We know some tapestries work for warlocks, and I don’t see any reason these wouldn’t, but magic is tricky.”

  That brief hesitation had been enough for the Calling to once again start to work on Hanner; he had turned his head away from the tapestry as if to listen to the wizard’s reply, but then the motion had continued, and now he was staring over the wizard’s left shoulder, to the north, toward Aldagmor.

  He needed to go there, and soon. He needed to forget about all this Council business, forget about the wizards and their tapestries, forget about schemes to avoid the Calling. He needed to forget about Mavi and their children, and about his sisters and his friends, and about the other members of the Council of Warlocks, and just go. Whatever was up there in Aldagmor, it needed him, and he needed to go to it…

  “Chairman?”

  Hanner bit his lip. What he needed, he told himself as he forced himself back to reality, was a refuge where he couldn’t he
ar the Calling, couldn’t feel its constant pull.

  And that was what these tapestries were supposed to provide. That was what he had paid the Wizards’ Guild eight thousand rounds of gold to obtain, a fortune that had completely wiped out his own assets, and half the Council’s money as well.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What were you saying?”

  “I was saying that we do not actually know whether this tapestry will do what you wanted. We don’t understand your magic, any more than you understand ours, and we have no way of testing how those two magics will interact, other than sending a warlock through the tapestry. We know that warlocks have used other tapestries safely, but wizardry can be…erratic. We can’t promise what this tapestry will do until a warlock tries it.”

  “You haven’t tested that?”

  “Chairman Hanner, you specifically forbade us from telling any other warlock anything about this project. That was part of our contract, and we have abided by it.”

  “Of course,” Hanner said. “I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. So you don’t know whether I will be able to hear the Calling from that other world?”

  “Chairman, we have no idea what the Calling is. No, we don’t know how it works, or whether it extends into the new universe we created for you. We know that you can breathe the air there, and drink the water, and that my apprentice suffered no ill effects from doing so. We know he chewed on a blade of grass and wasn’t poisoned. We know that the village in the tapestry was uninhabited when he got there, though we can’t say with any certainty whether its builders, if it was built, might still be around somewhere. We know he says that he walked three or four miles around the area without finding any people, or any animals larger than a rabbit, or any edge to the world he was in. But that’s about it as far as our knowledge goes. We don’t know whether warlockry will operate there. We don’t know whether there are natives dwelling somewhere in that world. We don’t even know how long the day is there—he didn’t stay long enough to determine that. Creating worlds is an unpredictable business, Chairman; we told you that when we first agreed to this.”

  “You did,” Hanner admitted.

  This had been a tremendous gamble, paying the wizards to create a world, and there was only one way to find out whether it had worked, or whether he had thrown away an immense fortune for nothing. All he had to do was reach out and touch the tapestry, step into it, and he would be in that other world, that beautiful refuge.

  He started to raise his hand, then stopped.

  “Not here,” he said. “I might not…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence; when he realized what he had been going to say, he forced himself to stop.

  He had been about to say he couldn’t use the tapestry because it might cut him off from the Calling, but that was what he had wanted; that was the whole point. This tapestry was intended to let warlocks escape from the doom that eventually befell them all.

  Every warlock knew that the farther he was from Aldagmor, the weaker the Calling was—and the weaker his magic was, as well, but that was only a secondary consideration. That weakening had given Hanner the idea to find, or make, a place so distant from Aldagmor than the Call couldn’t reach it at all.

  The Calling reached to every corner of the World; warlocks had established that. From sun-baked Semma in the southeast to frozen Kerroa in the northwest, there was no place in the World where a warlock was safe.

  So obviously, the warlocks needed a refuge that wasn’t in the World at all, and that meant they needed wizardry. The only three kinds of magic that could reach out of the World into other places were demonology, theurgy, and wizardry—herbalism, witchcraft, ritual dance, and the rest were limited to everyday reality.

  The gods didn’t recognize warlocks as human beings, and had trouble even acknowledging their existence, so theurgy wasn’t going to help. The Nethervoid, where demons originated, wasn’t anywhere anyone would ever want to go, and trusting demons was usually a stupid thing to do, so demonology was out, too. That left wizardry. Wizards had various spells that could reach other planes of existence. It wasn’t clear whether these spells opened a path to places that had existed all along, or created new places out of nothing, but they could definitely provide access to other worlds. Hanner had even visited one, long ago, and found that warlockry did not work there, and that presumably the Calling did not reach it.

  And here it was, the wizardry he had asked for—a Transporting Tapestry to another world that just might be the refuge the warlocks needed.

  It looked lovely, but that didn’t mean much. Arvagan’s apprentice had survived a visit there, so it couldn’t be too hostile, but would it really be a decent place to live? Would it be a safe home for his wife and children?

  He grimaced at that. He was assuming that Mavi would want to accompany him, but he had not actually asked her yet. He knew she was worried about the Call, but worried enough to give up her life in Ethshar of the Spices, the city that had always been her home? It wasn’t as if she was in any danger; he had invited her to become a warlock, to have that little adjustment made that would let her draw magical power from the Source, but she had never done it. She was content to leave the magic to him and the other warlocks while she attended to more mundane matters.

  But she loved him, and wanted to be with him, so of course she would want to come with him. She wouldn’t need to stay; she could go back and forth at will, while he would need to remain in that other place once the Calling became too strong.

  That assumed, of course, that it wasn’t just as strong on the other side of the tapestry. He really would need to try it out someday, when the Call reached a dangerous level—maybe after he got back from Aldagmor…

  He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth and held his breath.

  He was not going to Aldagmor. He was not going to give in. The Call was obviously already dangerous. It was always there, every second, day and night, nagging at him, working insidiously to draw him away. Every time he used even the slightest bit of warlockry, or took a single step to the north, it grew a little stronger. Simply facing south was becoming difficult; his head kept turning involuntarily, and his neck was getting sore from his struggle to resist. He was leaking magic, he knew that; small objects tended to levitate around him without any conscious effort on his part. He needed a refuge.

  And now, just in time, he might have one. All he had to do was reach out…

  But the wizards didn’t know, didn’t really know, whether it was safe, or whether it would work. He should go home and discuss it with his wife before he did anything more. He should go home, just a mile north of this secret room on Wizard Street.

  A mile north. A mile closer to Aldagmor.

  It was very bad. He wasn’t going to be able to hold out much longer. He couldn’t sleep anymore; when he did, he dreamed of fire and of being cast down from the heavens and buried deep in the earth of Aldagmor, he dreamed of a need to go there and help, and he always awoke to find himself moving northward. He hadn’t dared to sleep at all for the last two nights, and he had made do with brief naps for a sixnight before that.

  He just had to reach out and touch the tapestry, but he couldn’t lift his hand. He was so tired, so weary; if he gave in he could rest. He could fly, any warlock worthy of the name could fly, he could be in Aldagmor in no more than a day or two. He had been refusing to fly for about a month, so that he would not fly off to Aldagmor, but now that just seemed foolish. Why not get it over with?

  “Tell my wife I love her,” he said. “Tell her to wait for me in Warlock House attic. If this works, I’ll meet her there and let her know. If it doesn’t, well…”

  “Should we tell her any details? About the tapestries?”

  Hanner shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ll tell her. She knows I was planning something, and I want to be the one to tell her what it was.” He paused, then added, “If it works. For all we know, the Call will be even stronger in there.”

  “I
suppose it might be,” Arvagan admitted. “Though I don’t see why it would be. Wherever that place is, it’s not Aldagmor.”

  “But it could be near Aldagmor, somehow.”

  “I suppose.”

  Hanner turned to Arvagan. “You’ll tell her?”

  “The instant I see you enter the tapestry, I’ll send word for her to go to meet you.”

  “Good. Good.” He turned back to face that shining image of green fields, and tried to step toward it, but his foot would not lift.

  Inspiration struck. “Arvagan, would you do me a favor?”

  “What sort of a favor?”

  “Would you move the tapestry to the north wall? Or just turn it so it faces south?”

  “Is it that bad, Chairman?”

  “Yes, it is,” Hanner said. “I didn’t know…It took so long…”

  “We told you when we started that it took a year or more to make a Transporting Tapestry.”

  “Yes, you did—but I hadn’t realized how close I was to being Called. A year ago it was nothing, just a little murmur in my head; now it’s…it’s everything, it’s constant, it’s so strong.”

  Arvagan nodded. Then he reached up and pushed at the rod supporting the tapestry, being careful not to let his hand come too close to the fabric. Like the sail of a ship clearing the breakwater, the tapestry swung slowly around.

  Hanner turned with it, and when it was due north, between him and Aldagmor, he found he could lift his arm and step forward, step northward. His finger touched the silky cloth.

  And the secret room was gone, the wizard’s house was gone, Wizard Street and the Wizards’ Quarter had vanished, the entire city of Ethshar of the Spices was gone. He was standing on a gentle, grassy slope.

  He didn’t notice.

  A sun was shining warmly on his face, a sun that wasn’t quite the same color as the one he had seen every day in Ethshar, and a soft wind was blowing against his right cheek; he didn’t notice that, either.

  Sky and sun and wind and grass, a sound of splashing somewhere in the distance, a cluster of strange buildings—Hanner ignored them all.