Vond strode forward and snatched the sword from Marl’s hand, but kept it pressed against Hanner’s neck. He pushed a little harder, drawing a drop of blood. “You did this to keep me from getting my magic back, didn’t you?” he said. “You think you’re in charge now, as the one who someone in Ethshar will contact. You don’t believe Zallin will do anything; you think you’re the one someone will rescue. You think you can leave me here, powerless, or maybe that I’ll agree to whatever terms the wizards set to get them to help me.”
Hanner tried to raise his jaw higher, to pull away from the sword’s point. He did not answer.
“You think I won’t kill you?” Vond shouted, his voice rising in pitch.
Hanner tried to move to one side, to get away from the blade pressing into his throat, but Vond turned to follow. Kolar stepped back to make room.
The pressure on Hanner’s throat increased, and he could feel blood running down his neck and under the collar of his tunic. He would have swallowed, but that would only make the sword cut deeper.
Hanner realized he was going to die. Vond had already demonstrated that he didn’t mind killing people who annoyed him, and Hanner had just done far worse to him than anyone else ever had — well, anyone except perhaps that poor witch who had sent him the Calling nightmare.
A motion above and behind Vond’s head caught Hanner’s eye, and he looked upward for an instant. A panel had opened in the ceiling, and he could see a dark space there. He caught a glimpse of red hair. No one else seemed to notice; they were all facing the other way, staring at Hanner and the ruined tapestry.
Then Vond flicked the sword slightly, drawing a stinging scratch across his skin, and Hanner’s attention returned to the warlock.
“They’ll come for me eventually,” Vond said. “Zallin or one of the others. I’m the one who can bring warlockry back into the World, Hanner. Maybe you don’t want your magic back, but plenty of people do. Maybe you don’t want power, but someone will, and he’ll come here to find me. I don’t need you, and I can’t trust you. You’ll have to die. I’m sorry about that — you were almost a legend, you know. You founded the Council and saved warlocks from extermination, but now you’ve turned against us, and I can’t allow a traitor to live. You understand that, don’t you?” The blade cut a little more deeply, and Hanner felt the stream of warm blood running down his neck thicken. He could feel it trickling down his chest.
He was going to die.
He had faced an inevitable doom before, when he heard the Call, but this was more immediate, more personal. He could feel his entire body tensing; his hands were trembling. He wanted to close his eyes, to not see the killing blow, to not see the hatred in Vond’s expression, but he kept them open; he did not want to give the warlock the satisfaction of seeing how scared he was.
Hanner stared defiantly at the warlock, his heart pounding. Vond drew his hand back to strike.
And Rudhira plummeted from the opening in the ceiling, an iron cooking pot in one hand and her belt-knife in the other. She landed on the warlock’s shoulders, then slammed the heavy pot down onto Vond’s head with ferocious force. Hanner heard bone crunch.
Vond collapsed, with Rudhira riding him to the floor; the sword fell from his hand, and Rudhira’s knife reached around and slashed his throat from ear to ear.
Someone screamed. The crowded room was thrown into complete chaos as anyone who had still been asleep awoke, while some people were trying to escape the violence and others were trying to get a better look.
Blood spurted from Vond’s opened throat as he struggled on the floor, trying to speak, trying to get his limbs under him; his eyes were wide with terror and pain.
Rudhira had not waited to make sure Vond was dead, or to see how the others would react; once she had finished her attack she dropped the iron pot, sprang to her feet, and ran for the door, her bloody knife still in her hand. Two of Vond’s men reached for her, but not in time. The two or three people directly in her path stepped aside; no one wanted to touch the woman who had just appeared out of nowhere and cut a man’s throat. She vanished out the door into the sunlit street.
For an instant Hanner, Marl, and Kolar didn’t move; then Hanner and Marl simultaneously dove for the dropped sword. Hanner did not worry about reaching the hilt, so his hand got there first, closing around the blade. He felt the edge cut into his fingers, but he didn’t care; he snatched the weapon up and stepped back. He was just reaching his other hand toward the hilt when Kolar’s blade pressed against his chest.
He froze, but did not release the sword. He nodded toward Vond. “He’s not dead yet,” he said.
Kolar did not allow himself to be distracted, but others, jarred from immobility by Hanner’s words, moved to roll Vond over. Someone had a piece of cloth, perhaps from a tunic, that he was using as a makeshift bandage to stanch the flow of blood, but it wasn’t enough; the pool of blood was spreading, and Vond’s movements were weakening. His eyes were wide and staring. He was still choking, but more weakly.
“What did you do?” Kolar demanded.
“I ruined the tapestry,” Hanner said.
“You killed Vond!” Marl shouted.
“I most certainly did not!” Hanner shouted back. “If I had meant to kill him, why would I have cut the tapestry and trapped all of us here?”
“Kill him, Kolar!” Marl yelled.
Kolar kept his sword in position, but did not advance. Instead he eyed Hanner thoughtfully. “Was Vond right? What he said about you thinking you can get us out of here?”
“More or less,” Hanner said. “I think my sisters will look for me, and find some way to get us all back to Ethshar.”
“Who was that?” Kolar asked. “The woman who attacked Vond?”
“Her name is Rudhira of Camptown,” Hanner said. “She’s another of the Called.”
“Why did she do it?”
“You’ll have to ask her. I don’t know.”
“I should kill you for what you did.”
“Maybe,” Hanner said, “but if you do, you’ll be hurting your chances of ever getting home. And Vond won’t be paying you now — he doesn’t have any allies to make good on his debts once he’s dead.”
Hanner had managed to keep his voice steady as he spoke, though he was not sure how he had done it — perhaps he had been so certain that Vond was about to kill him that Kolar’s threat carried little weight by comparison. Now he met Kolar’s gaze, looking him directly in the eye, just as he had Vond. If he was about to die after all, at least he could still do so with dignity.
“You won’t make good his debts?”
The question caught Hanner by surprise. His eyes flicked very briefly to the rest of the room, to see how the other swordsmen were taking this, then back to Kolar. “How much did he promise you?” he asked. “I don’t have much money of my own, but my sisters are wealthy; we might be able to work out a partial payment of some sort.”
Kolar was still considering when someone called, “That sounds good enough to me!”
“He ruined the tapestry that would have gotten us all home!” a new voice protested.
“It wasn’t working,” another voice retorted. “We don’t know if it ever would have worked again.”
At that the whole room seemed to break out in argument.
As swordsmen and refugees debated Hanner’s fate, the Great Vond, emperor of Semma and the Vondish Empire, died there on the floor. The crude attempts to help him had been too little, too late — though in fact, it was unlikely anything but powerful magic could have saved him. Even if something had stopped the bleeding, the blow to the head had cracked his skull and might have been fatal on its own.
For several moments it appeared Hanner might follow him, but in the end, no one really wanted Hanner dead. If he had been run through immediately it would probably have been accepted as a reasonable response, but no one had the heart to kill him in cold blood long after the tapestry was ruined and Vond was dead.
If Rudhira
had been present, providing a more appropriate target, matters might have been different, but by the time anyone thought to attempt pursuit she had vanished completely. Hanner hoped that she was all right, wherever she might be.
And while he did not care to admit any approval of her methods, he knew she had probably saved the World a great deal of trouble.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Zallin stared at the tapestry in the fourth-floor bedroom, but kept his distance. He did not understand exactly how the spell worked, and had no intention of getting close enough to risk suddenly learning more.
Vond had vanished through that thing, and had left Zallin in charge in his absence — but he hadn’t given Zallin any magic, and how was he supposed to be in charge without magic? He wasn’t a lord, with a family history of authority. He wasn’t a guardsman, with weapons and training in giving orders. Zallin had only ever had the ability to command anything when he was a warlock. If Vond had made him a warlock again...
But Vond hadn’t given anyone access to his new kind of warlockry. He had claimed that he would, in time, but he hadn’t yet. He had gone adventuring off through the tapestry without giving anyone the means to keep order in his absence.
In fact, Zallin was beginning think Vond would never teach anyone else to use the Lumeth source. He would keep dangling it just out of reach.
Zallin was also beginning to wonder whether he really even wanted his magic back, if it was conditional on being Vond’s underling. He wanted to be a warlock again, yes, very much, but he wanted to be the kind of warlock he had always been — a respected magician, a normal part of Ethshar’s society, someone people hired to do things that could not be done without magic. He didn’t want to be a servant to a madman who was terrorizing the city, feuding with witches and wizards and antagonizing the overlord.
Most of all, he didn’t want to hurt anybody.
He had seen Vond throwing people around. He had seen the palace hanging in the air above the city. Vond didn’t care who he hurt, or what damage he did. Zallin did not consider himself a soft-hearted weakling — when he happened to observe a thief’s flogging, he had applauded justice being done, and he didn’t regret seeing murderers hanged. That was all part of the way the World worked. The sort of casual violence that Vond displayed, though, was not justice, it was brutality. Claiming Warlock House for his own, ordering everyone out — it wasn’t right.
Zallin had stayed on, putting up with Vond’s behavior, tolerating his...his evil, in hopes of getting his own warlockry back, but now that he had had time to do some serious thinking about this, and some serious drinking to try to make it work out, he was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that if serving Vond was required to be a warlock again, it wasn’t worth it. Not even if the oushka held out, which didn’t look likely.
Right now Vond was on the other side of that tapestry, but he might reappear at any time and start ordering Zallin to run his errands again, and Zallin did not want to run the emperor’s errands.
Sterren had not wanted to serve Vond anymore, so he had simply disappeared. He had taken his luggage and vanished into the city streets. Vond had complained and called Sterren a traitor, but he had not done anything about it. He had not gone looking for Sterren, or demanded his return. Several of the other former warlocks who had initially pledged to obey Vond had also quietly slipped away. No one had wanted to be purser or envoy for the emperor; they had wanted to be warlocks. When it began to look as if, despite his promises, Vond wasn’t ever going to permit that, they had left.
If Zallin disappeared in the same fashion, would Vond do anything more? Zallin could not see why he would. Vond didn’t care about him; Vond didn’t care about anyone but himself. He wanted a few people around to run his errands, but he didn’t care whether it was Sterren, or Hanner, or Zallin, or Gerath who ran them, just so long as someone did.
In fact, now that he had his band of sword-wielding hirelings, Vond would probably find Zallin more of a nuisance than a help, and anyone Vond considered a nuisance was likely to wind up injured or dead. Zallin thought bitterly that Vond’s chief bully-boy Gerath was more likely to become a new warlock than he was.
The time had come, Zallin decided, to get out, while he had the chance. He turned and headed for the stairs.
A few moments later he was in the room he had been using since Vond usurped the master’s chamber, where he was gathering his belongings into bags and bundles. The entire time he was packing he was listening nervously for sounds from upstairs, for any hint that Vond had returned. He was ready to make a run for it without his baggage, if necessary.
But it wasn’t necessary. He was able to get everything vital stowed into two bags, a large one he slung over his shoulder, and a small one he carried in his other hand. The rest he shoved into the empty closet, in case he ever had a chance to retrieve it. Half an hour after reaching his decision to leave he was in the front hall, wrapped in his winter coat and with a broad-brimmed hat pulled down to his ears, reaching for the door.
That was when someone knocked, startling him so badly he dropped his bags. He stood frozen, staring at the white-painted wood.
When nothing more happened he glanced into the parlor, then peered into the dining room, and saw no one. He knew most of Hanner’s guests had fled, and Vond’s hirelings were all upstairs, but he was still somewhat startled to see no one else around. Uncertainly, he reached out and opened the door.
A young woman was standing on the front step, and while Zallin knew immediately that he had seen her before, it took a moment to place her. Eventually, though, he realized that this was the whore Vond had brought back from Camptown. She was wearing a long cloak that was entirely appropriate for the weather, but which hid her bright clothing and made identification more difficult. “Yes?” Zallin said.
“Hanner told me to come back for my pay,” she said. “Well, actually, he told me to go find his sister at the overlord’s palace, but I’m not about to swim out to that sandbar and try climbing up the stone. So I’m here, and I want my money.”
“Hanner isn’t here,” Zallin said. “At least, I don’t think he is.”
“Hanner isn’t the one who owes me,” she said. “That skinny warlock who calls himself an emperor is.”
“He’s not here, either,” Zallin began.
“You are,” she snapped. “And you were with him in Camptown, too. I saw you. You started to talk to me.”
“Yes, I remember,” Zallin said.
“So you can pay me.”
Zallin closed his eyes. He did not need this right now. He wanted to get out of Warlock House and away from High Street before Vond reappeared. He opened his eyes again and said, “I wasn’t the one who hired you.”
“You work for him.”
“But I don’t —”
She cut him off. “You know what? I don’t care who you are, or what you do. You’re here in the warlock’s house. You can pay me, or you can find someone who’ll pay me, or I can start screaming for the city guard — and in case you hadn’t noticed, there are at least a dozen guardsmen in the street out front. Which will it be?”
“Fine,” Zallin said, reaching for his smaller bag. He had packed up a good bit of the Council’s treasury — not all of it, because he did not want Vond labeling him a thief and finding additional motive to look for him, but more than half, since after all, no one other than himself knew how much money had been there to begin with. It wouldn’t be missed, as long as he left a believable sum. “How much?”
“Five rounds.”
Zallin closed his eyes again, and sighed. He did not bother to doubt her; Vond had almost certainly agreed to her price, no matter how outrageous it was. After all, he didn’t intend to actually earn his money; he would simply take it, since no one could stop him.
“I’m waiting,” the woman said.
“Yes,” Zallin said, opening his bag and digging for a purse. A moment later he counted forty bits into the woman’s waiting hand. He had to sto
p after twenty, though, so she could transfer the money to a purse of her own, somewhere under that heavy brown cloak; forty was more than she could hold in both palms.
When he had finished he tucked the purse away, and when he looked up again the whore was grinning at him. “Thank you,” she said. “I was beginning to wonder whether I’d ever really get it.”
“Well, you did,” Zallin said, picking up his baggage. “I wouldn’t suggest coming back for another night, though. I’m leaving, and I think Hanner’s already gone, and no one else around here is likely to keep his Imperial Majesty honest.”
“I wasn’t planning to come back,” she said. “Oh, it was quite an experience, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, but he’s crazy and he’s dangerous.”
Zallin nodded. “Yes, he is.”
“He smashed right through the ceiling when I was here, and hung naked in the air. It was amazing.”
“So I heard.”
She looked at his bags. “You’re leaving? Where are you going?”
Zallin opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again. He frowned. “I don’t really know,” he admitted.
“I know a cheap inn in Eastgate. I can show you.”
“That sounds as good a place as any. Thanks.” He slung the larger bag over his shoulder, and together the two of them marched out the door onto High Street.
As they walked eastward they chatted idly, their breath visible in the chilly air. Zallin finally managed to remember the woman’s name, Leth of Pawnbroker Lane. He had been drunk when he heard it before, but it came back eventually.
“When Vond and I were in Camptown,” Zallin remarked, “most people were avoiding us — with good reason. Why didn’t you?”
“There was money to be made,” she said. She hefted the fat purse under her cloak to emphasize her point. “Throwing people around reduced the competition.”
“Weren’t you worried it would reduce your lifespan, as well?”
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