The Unwelcome Warlock loe-11

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  He sniffed the air and caught the scent of the sea, or something very like it. He walked cautiously down toward the cluster of buildings that he could not help thinking of as a village, though he had no idea whether that was really an accurate description.

  As he drew near, he decided that they were indeed houses and did indeed comprise a village. They were built of some hard, golden-brown material — stone or brick or dried mud, he couldn’t tell which. There were many small windows and a few arched doorways. Arvagan had said that the builders might not be human, but the proportions looked right for humans; Hanner didn’t see anything particularly odd about the houses.

  Beyond the village, the land continued to fall away, and he could see the ocean, or something very like it, spreading out in the distance. A tree-lined stream gurgled its way past the village, which accounted for the splashing he had heard, and the leaves rustled in the gentle breeze.

  It was very pleasant, really. Arvagan had said that he couldn’t guarantee anything about this place, that there might be hidden dangers, anything from insidious poisons to rampaging monsters to distorted time, but to Hanner it looked calm and inviting. The stream would presumably provide water, and the land looked fit for growing food; there might be fish in the sea, or even clams to be dug along the shore.

  Or if appearances were deceiving, and that somehow proved impossible, if the tapestries continued to work as promised, he could still have food and even water brought in from Ethshar. Unless there were some nasty surprises awaiting him, he had his refuge — a place where warlocks could come to escape the Calling.

  He wandered around for what felt like an hour or so, exploring the houses. They were largely unfurnished, as if their intended inhabitants had never arrived, never brought their belongings.

  That was fine. That was perfect.

  The air was sweet, the sun was warm, and there was no Call. It was everything Hanner had wanted.

  In the one house, just as Arvagan had said, was the other tapestry, the one depicting the attic of Warlock House, the mansion that had once belonged to Hanner’s uncle, Lord Faran. That bare, dim room looked dismal compared to the bright sunlit refuge, but Hanner did not hesitate; he knew his wife was waiting for him there. Mavi and the children had been worried about him; this refuge would be a relief for them all, even if none of the others ever set foot in it. Hanner walked up to the tapestry, and put a hand and a foot out to touch it, eager to tell Mavi the good news.

  He knew the Calling would return, but he assumed it would take a few seconds to reach its old force. He thought he was ready for it.

  Then he was in the attic, back home in Ethshar of the Spices, and he was wrong. There was no delay at all. The Call was instantaneously a deafening, irresistible screaming in his head, and he had had no time to prepare, no chance to brace himself. After an hour of freedom, his resistance was gone, and he could not restore it quickly enough. There was one final instant of clarity, one glimpse of Mavi waiting, a glimpse of her staring at him as he appeared out of thin air, and then there was no room in his mind for any thought but the desperate need to get to Aldagmor as fast as he could, by any method he could. Nothing could be permitted to stand in his way, and with a wave of his hand he shattered the sloping ceiling, splitting the rafters and tearing wood and tile to shreds as he soared out into the sky. He could not spare so much as a second to tell his wife goodbye before flying northward.

  He did not hear Mavi call his name, did not hear her burst into tears as he vanished. He did not see Arvagan’s apprentice rush up the attic stairs to her side, to catch her before she collapsed.

  By the time the apprentice brought Mavi to Arvagan’s shop, Hanner was thirty leagues from the city. By the time word went out to the Council of Warlocks, Hanner was in Aldagmor. He could not tell them what had happened. He could not tell them that the refuge was a success, and only failed because he had been caught off-guard by the sudden instantaneous return of a Calling he had only barely been able to resist before he stepped through the tapestry. No one knew how very, very close he had been to giving in before he touched the fabric and was transported to that other reality.

  All they knew was that Hanner, Chairman of the Council, had stepped through the Transporting Tapestry still able to fight the Call, and upon emerging had instantly flown off to Aldagmor.

  There were some who theorized that the Call was somehow stronger on the other side of the tapestry, some who thought the magic of the tapestry itself somehow added to the Call’s power, some who really didn’t care about the details, but the Council as a whole agreed: The Chairman’s attempt at creating a safe haven for high-level warlocks had failed.

  The tapestry was rolled up and stored securely away — after all, it was bought and paid for, and belonged jointly to the Council and Hanner’s widow Mavi, and perhaps someday some new spell or divination would allow them to use it safely. A new Chairman was elected.

  And the Calling, that inexplicable melange of nightmares and compulsions, continued to snatch away any warlock who grew too powerful.

  Chapter Two

  The cold air rushed past Sensella’s face, drying her eyes and chilling her skin, but was not enough to distract her from her ferocious need to reach Aldagmor — or rather, a specific place in Aldagmor; she knew she was probably somewhere in Aldagmor now, but she still had a league or two to go. Nothing else mattered — not the cold, not the dark, not the family she had left behind. She knew her children and grandchildren would be upset that she was gone, that she had flown off in the middle of the night, but that wasn’t as important as getting to the thing in Aldagmor, to whatever it was that was calling her. Her magic didn’t matter, other than in helping her get there; if it were to suddenly vanish and she survived the fall, she knew she would just get to her feet and walk, or better yet, run, to answer the Call.

  She had left before dawn, flown the day through, and now the sun had been below the horizon for more than an hour, but she would not be traveling much longer. Dark forests rolled past beneath her feet as she flew through the night sky, stars twinkled overhead, and she knew she was getting close. That was so important, so urgent, that she was barely aware of her surroundings —

  Until the sky above her lit up in a blaze of light and color that flashed in an instant from red through orange to yellow, and then turned impossibly white, lighting the World so brightly that everything was washed out, every shadow banished.

  And while the Call did not stop, it was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of reassurance, of comfort. The Calling was wordless, but put into words it would say more or less, “Come to me.” This new message, equally wordless and far more powerful, answered, “We have come.”

  But it wasn’t speaking to her.

  Sensella slowed in her flight, and blinked, trying to understand what was happening.

  The landscape ahead was lit with that strange, intensely white light that leached the color from everything. It was fading somewhat, not as bright as it had been, but it was still more than enough to see. There was a valley, there were forested mountains on the far side. It was uninhabited wilderness — no roads, no houses, no farms.

  But in the middle of the valley was a mound, a strange dark mound directly ahead of her; Sensella could not make it out clearly. It was not overgrown with trees or grasses, like a natural hill, nor was it bare stone or earth. It was made up of hundreds or thousands of objects piled one upon another, but in the eerie whiteness Sensella could not judge their size, or discern their colors.

  The source of that unnatural light hung directly above the mound, and was descending slowly toward it.

  The Calling, she realized, came from the mound. This was what she had come to Aldagmor to find. This was the source of the warlocks’ magic. She could feel the power surging through her. Until just a moment before she had been unaware of it, unable to use it for anything but flying closer, but now the spell was — not broken, but countered, by that gigantic thing that was slowly sinking down from the
heavens.

  She looked up, trying to see through the glare, and her brain refused to resolve what her eyes saw into a comprehensible shape. There was something coming down from the sky, something the size of a small city, something that glowed as brightly as the sun, but in a different spectrum, and Sensella could not make herself see it. She thought it was more or less round, and at least twice as wide as it was tall, but beyond that she could not make sense of it.

  That overwhelming message of reassurance came from the thing in the sky, just as the Call’s demand for aid came from the mound — or from something beneath the mound. The thing in the sky had come in response to the Call, just as she had herself; she knew it. She could not have explained how she knew it, any more than she could have said exactly what the Calling had been whispering to her all these years, but she did know it, completely and irrefutably.

  Sensella had slowed in her flight, but not stopped; she was still approaching the mound, and now, as her eyes adjusted to the glare and her mind to the alienness of what she was seeing, she realized what the objects composing the mound were.

  They were people. Hundreds of people, packed face-down into an immense pile. Most of them were dressed in black — warlock black.

  Shocked, she stopped in mid-air. She hung about sixty feet off the ground, staring at that great heap of humanity.

  She could not hear anything. The Call and the Response made no actual sound, but they drowned out everything else all the same, filling the part of her brain that might otherwise have reacted to what her ears detected. She could smell nothing but the cool night air of the forested hills of Aldagmor. She could see the mound, but the strange light made it hard to know exactly what she was seeing, and she could not tell whether the people stacked up before her were breathing, whether they were alive or dead. Certainly, they weren’t moving.

  The idea that she was looking at a gigantic pile of corpses horrified her, and she reached out with her magic, with that awareness of location and movement that was a part of a warlock’s supernatural abilities. She tried to sense the people she saw, to tell whether they were dead or alive.

  She couldn’t. Something stopped her perceptions.

  It wasn’t just that they were dead; warlockry could sense a dead body perfectly well. No, something was blocking her magic.

  She looked up at the glowing thing. It was still descending. If it didn’t stop, it would land upon that mound and crush all those people.

  “No!” she shouted. She moved forward again, descending, and landed running. It was only when her feet hit the dew-covered knee-high grass that she realized she was barefoot; she had risen from her bed in the middle of the night, and had been drawn away by the Calling in her nightgown, without shoes or a coat.

  That didn’t matter, though. She had to get to that mound. She had to help. Somewhere deep in her mind, she knew that she was confusing different urges, that she was combining the Call’s demand to come to this place with her desire to help those poor helpless people, but right now it didn’t matter; they both drove her toward that mound.

  To her surprise, she reached it before the descending monstrosity did — she had misjudged either the thing’s speed, or its size. She stopped just short of the mound, despite the relentless Calling that still tugged at her; she forced herself to stop, to look at the situation. The Response had drowned out enough of the Call to let her think, to allow her to remember that no Called warlock had ever returned, and she looked at the great pile in front of her and guessed that if she touched it she would be pulled in, never to escape. She was inches away from the motionless back of a gray-haired man in a black tunic, she saw, and to one side of him stood a white-haired woman, and beyond that a black-haired man; to the other side were more, wearing the black garb of warlocks, or assorted nightclothes, or in some cases nothing at all.

  Looking between the shoulders of this front layer, she could see more people, jammed together skin to skin, and stacked atop the people at ground level were others, standing or kneeling on shoulders and heads, leaning forward. The entire mound seemed to be a great mass of people, piled together too tightly to move or breathe, all utterly still, completely unmoving. She heard no movement, no breathing, no heartbeats — yet they did not look dead. Her warlock perception could not detect anything at all; it was as if the World ended a step in front of her. The surrounding hills and forests, the grass beneath her feet, the air around her and the earth upon which she stood were all their normal, natural selves, composed of a myriad of tiny particles and subtle forces moving and interacting in ways that she, as a warlock, could sense but not explain, but the pile of people in front of her was just...blank.

  She let her gaze move up, past the head of the man in front of her, past the woman sprawled above him, to where the stars and moons should have been, to where the mysterious, incomprehensible thing was instead. If that monstrosity did come down to crush the mound, she realized, she wouldn’t be able to get out from underneath it in time; it filled the entire sky above her, a gently-glowing immensity she still could not bring into focus.

  But then the descent stopped, and something protruded from the hovering mass, reaching down toward the mound of people. Something shimmered, and something moved, and she sensed thumping and rustling — sensed it more than heard it, though she realized that her hearing was beginning to adjust to the overwhelming presence of the Response. She stepped back — and even as she did, she marveled that she could step back, away from the source of the Calling.

  She knew she should be terrified, should be mad with terror, being here and seeing these things — that gigantic thing in the sky, the huge pile of what could only be Called warlocks that were neither alive nor dead, these displays of magic completely outside human understanding — but somehow she was not. The Response, even though it was very clearly not directed at anything human, was so reassuring that it calmed her and let her watch everything with a certain detachment.

  Then the first body rolled down the mound and thumped onto the ground a few feet away.

  She started, and turned to find a middle-aged man lying on his back in the grass, looking dazed. She turned to help him. “Are you all right?” she asked, as she reached for his hand.

  His gaze was fixed on the thing in the sky, and he did not take her hand. She was unsure he had even heard her. “What is that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you sit up?”

  He finally turned his head enough to see her, and her outstretched hand. “Am I dead?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Sensella replied. “But if you don’t move, that may not last.”

  “But I —”

  He was interrupted by the thump of another body hitting the ground.

  “Come on,” Sensella said. “I don’t think we should stay here!”

  He finally took her hand and allowed her to help him to his feet, just as an elderly woman fell to the ground a dozen feet away.

  “What’s going on?” the man demanded. “Where are we?”

  “We’re in Aldagmor,” Sensella told him. “But I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “That thing,” the man said. “Who is it talking to?”

  Sensella glanced up. “Then you hear it, too?”

  “Of course I do! How could I not? It’s deafening!” He turned and looked at the mound. “And...the Calling? I answered the Call?”

  “So did I,” Sensella said. “I think they all did.”

  “Was I in there?” The expression on his face worried Sensella; it seemed not so much the apprehension or revulsion she would have expected, but eager longing.

  More people were tumbling down the sides of the mound, falling onto the grass; a few cried out in pain and surprise as they hit the ground. Then one of them, a woman Sensella thought looked about thirty, caught herself halfway down and flew to one side.

  As if that reminded the others that they were warlocks, several people took to the air; suddenly curious, Sensella did
the same, lifting herself up, leaving the confused man behind.

  Her magic worked as well as ever — better, in fact. She shot upward with astonishing ease and had to catch herself before she slammed into the underside of the gigantic glowing object.

  Once airborne, she had a clearer view of what was going on. A long, thin, grayish-white projection of some sort, vaguely tubular, was reaching down from the hovering thing and pushing down into the mound of people, pulling some of them out and heaving them aside, where they tumbled down to the ground — or if they reacted in time, caught themselves before they fell that far. Some of them, Sensella saw, then flung themselves back against the mound, trying to get back into it. She couldn’t tell whether any of them succeeded.

  Most of them, though, were able to resist the Calling, as Sensella could, now that the Response had come. They were flying about the scene in a cloud of warlocks, like gnats around a lantern, looking at the mound and at the thing blotting out the sky.

  “It was Called, too!” someone exclaimed, pointing up.

  “Listen to it,” someone else replied. “That’s what was being Called all along! Whatever’s down there didn’t want us, it wanted that!”

  “We just got caught up by accident?”

  “But what is it?”

  Dozens of people were talking at once now, in a dozen languages, and Sensella could no longer follow it all. She ignored the other warlocks and tried to understand what was happening.

  The pile, she knew, was made up of warlocks who had answered the Call, and the only reason she had not plunged right into it and become part of it, trapped in whatever spell held it together, was that the Response, as she thought of it — the voiceless message of comfort that came from that gargantuan flying thing that had come down out of the sky — had drowned out the Calling and let her think again.

  The Calling came from beneath the pile of warlocks, she was sure, and whatever was down there was protected by a spell of some kind, a spell that had frozen the warlocks when they got too close, a spell that had made them imperceptible to her own magic. It was probably a defensive spell, a magical barrier, guarding the Call’s source until the thing it was Calling came for it.