The Unwilling Warlord loe-3

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “What do you mean, making a castle?” the king demanded.

  “I mean, your Majesty, that he is taking stones, very large stones, and putting them together into a... a castle. I don’t know the right words to make it clearer.”

  “A real castle, or just an image of some kind, a model?”

  “A real castle, your Majesty. He says he will live in it.”

  “That’s ridiculous. This is Semma Castle, and I am king! No one else may build a castle in my realm!” Sterren did not waste time answering that. “Go tell him to stop!” the king demanded.

  Sterren hesitated. “I can tell him,” he said. “But he won’t stop.”

  “Well, make him stop! This is all your fault, after all; you’re the one who brought all these infernal magicians here! We’ve never needed a lot of fancy magicians in Semma, and we got along just fine until you brought this whatever-it-is who’s not a wizard here!”

  “Your Majesty, your army was... the enemy had at least three men to each one of yours. Magic was...”

  “Oh, stop arguing! You go tell him to stop what he’s doing and put everything back the way it was!”

  “Your Majesty-”

  “Go! Do it!”

  Sterren went.

  He nodded politely to the man at the gate and followed the clear path through the ruined village once again.

  Vond saw him coming.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

  Sterren shrugged as he looked over the half-built crypts. “The king sent me,” he said. He strolled out onto one of the stone slabs.

  “Oh?” Vond said.

  “Yes. He wants you to stop what you’re doing and put everything back the way it was.”

  “I daresay he does.”

  “He ordered me to come tell you to stop.”

  Vond nodded. “Go ahead, then.”

  “In the name of Phenvel, King of Semma, stop building your palace and put everything back the way it was!”

  “No. You can go back and give him that answer. Was there anything else?”

  “Not from him. I was wondering, though, don’t you think it might get rather lonely, out here in this palace?” He waved at the cellars, which now covered a wide area around the “courtyard” and had a partially completed outer wall around most of two sides.

  Vond looked down at his elaborate stone box.

  “Maybe at first,” he admitted. “A little. But I expect other warlocks will come along, once word gets out about the new source of power here.”

  “You expect word to get out?”

  Vond looked momentarily disconcerted for the first time since he drove off the invading armies.

  “Of course,” he said, “but if it doesn’t, I’ll send messengers back to Ethshar. You know, I hadn’t thought about that, we’re really way out here in the middle of nowhere, aren’t we?”

  Sterren nodded. “If you go up about a hundred feet and look over that way,” he said, pointing south, “you ought to be able to see the edge of the World.”

  Vond sighed. “I’ve always lived in Ethshar, back in the middle of things, where you can’t keep a secret if you try. I hadn’t thought about how the news would spread; I just took it for granted.”

  “I don’t think you can, here.”

  “Well, I’ll send messengers. I expect people will notice when I start building an empire, in any case.”

  “Oh,” Sterren asked, “are you planning to build an empire?”

  “Oh, I think so,” Vond said. “Isn’t it sort of traditional, for conquerors? Besides, Semma is so tiny! If I want to put together a decent harem I need more to choose from, for one thing!”

  “What did you have in mind?” Sterren asked cautiously.

  “Well, to start,” Vond said, “I was planning to conquer Ophkar and Ksinallion; that should be easy enough, since I’ve already routed their armies. After that, I thought I’d see how far I could go before I start to hear that whisper out of Aldagmor again. I’m not stupid, Sterren; I won’t be sailing off to Ethshar where the nightmares will get me. Even so, I ought to be able to put together half a dozen of these silly little kingdoms, don’t you think?”

  Sterren had to concede that the warlock probably could, indeed, rule everything in the area. After all, he had lost contact with Aldagmor and started getting his headaches back in Akalla, which meant that Akalla, Skaia, Ophkar, and Semma would almost certainly be well within his grasp, and probably Ksinallion and several other kingdoms as well.

  Not that any of those kingdoms amounted to much of anything.

  “And you don’t think you’ll get lonely, or bored?” he asked.

  “Why should I?” Vond snapped. “I can have as many people around as I want, just by ordering it! And beautiful women, there must be some, even here. Men in power always attract beautiful women.”

  “But they’ll all be scared of you. You won’t have anyone you can talk to just casually, as an equal, or even near-equal. And what will you do with this empire?”

  “I’ll just sit back and enjoy it, or course! I’ll live the good life. And other warlocks will hear about it and will come to live here; I’ll have my own court, and all the nobles will be warlocks, and we’ll rule because we deserve to, not because we were born lucky.”

  “What if one of these other warlocks gets ambitious and decides to take over, though?”

  Vond shook his head. “It can’t happen; I thought of that. But I got here first, so I’ll always be the most powerful, as long as I keep using magic. Look I was almost as powerful as a warlock could ever get, back in Ethshar. I had the nightmares pretty badly. If I’d done one or two more big magics, I’d have heard the Calling and gone north. So nobody is going to arrive here any more powerful than I was when I got here. And nobody will have any special way to overtake me, because warlockry doesn’t work that way. You get more power by using power, and you can only use it so fast. As long as I keep working magic, I’ll always be more powerful than anyone who comes after me. You see?”

  Sterren did see and said so.

  Vond nodded. “So,” he said, “My empire will be a haven for warlocks, when they start worrying about the Calling, they’ll pack up and come here, where they can safely use all the magic they want.”

  Sterren could see how this might, in fact, happen. He could see how it would be very pleasant indeed for warlocks.

  He could also see how it might be very unpleasant for everybody else. Magicians elsewhere always kept each other in check, or were kept in check by natural limits on their magic. Witches and seers and sorcerers and a variety of other magicians generally had only very limited abilities. Demonology was risky, and ever more risky as it got more powerful, since demons couldn’t be trusted. Theurgy was limited by the gods’ unwillingness to interfere with the World beyond a certain level. Wizardry, well, Sterren didn’t really know what kept wizards from getting out of hand, unless it was rivalry with other wizards, or something about the seemingly chaotic way wizardry worked, or maybe just the difficulty of acquiring the bizarre ingredients they needed for their spells.

  Warlockry had always been kept in check by the Calling. Now Vond had found a way around that, or at least he thought he had.

  Sterren suspected that Vond was being overly optimistic about that, but in light of his announced plans to build an empire, mentioning this seemed to be a mistake.

  He wondered what the other sorts of magicians might think about all this. Might the rumored-to-exist Wizards’ Guild resent the presumption of a warlock establishing an empire?

  They very well might, Sterren thought, and he almost said as much to Vond, but then he caught himself.

  Why should he do Vond any favors? The man was about to enslave an entire section of the Small Kingdoms to avenge a slight from a foolish old man, and for the fun of it. It was true that he and Sterren had been comrades in arms, as it were, but that hardly took precedence over a common decency.

  But on the other hand, woul
d Vond be any worse than Phenvel? He might turn out to be a perfectly adequate ruler.

  Sterren had no way of knowing. He decided to wait and see. Meanwhile, he would keep any possible threats to Vond’s usurped authority to himself, in case he needed them later. That included both the Wizards’ Guild and what Sterren thought was a basic flaw in Vond’s logic about his safety from the Calling. For one thing, he could not be completely certain that either threat really existed.

  “Hai, Sterren!” Vond called. “Did you fall asleep or something?”

  Sterren realized that he had been standing motionless, absorbed in thought, for several seconds. “No,” he called. “Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh,” he said evasively, “what an empire of warlocks would be like.”

  “Well,” Vond replied, “I hope you’ll stay around and find out! I owe you a favor, Sterren, for bringing me here. You treated me well and fairly, and it was your suggestion that helped me tap into the new source. Oh, I think I might have latched onto it eventually by myself, but you made it easier. You know, you’ve got a tiny bit of warlockry yourself; you could be one of the rulers of the empire!”

  Sterren shook his head. “I don’t have any warlockry. Not here, anyway.”

  “It’s there, Sterren, it’s just attuned to the Aldagmor Source, not the new one. I can fix that. I can let you hear the new one, at least as well as you ever heard the Aldagmor one.”

  “I doubt that. I’ve got no aptitude for it.”

  “Don’t be silly; you lived off it for years, didn’t you?”

  “I never affected anything but dice and I didn’t even know I was doing that! Some magic!”

  “But it should be different here; after all, I think we’re only ten leagues from the source itself.”

  That caught Sterren’s interest. “Ten leagues?”

  “I think so; I can feel it, you know, and sort of measure... there aren’t words for it in Ethsharitic. We warlocks haven’t worked them out yet. But yes, I’m pretty certain the source is ten leagues that way.” He pointed to the northwest; Sterren noted the exact direction as carefully as he could, for future reference.

  “Ten leagues or a hundred,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be much of a warlock.”

  “Don’t argue with me!” Vond snapped. He gestured at Sterren, and Sterren blinked.

  Something had happened; he could feel it in the back of his head.

  “There!” Vond said, “I’ve adjusted your brain a little; now you can hear the new source!”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Sterren said.

  “I don’t mean hear, with your ears! I mean you’re a warlock. You can draw power from it. Here, catch this without touching it!”

  Vond pulled a clear, shiny object object from the air in front of him and tossed it at Sterren.

  Sterren threw up his hands to ward it off, and at the same time, in the back of his mind, thought to himself that maybe he was a warlock, maybe he could catch it, control it as if it were the dice he had guided back in Ethshar. He tried to think of it that way, to imagine what it would feel like to move something without touching it.

  Then the little sphere shattered on the stone at his feet.

  He looked down, bent over, and picked up a sliver. It was ice; it melted away in his hand.

  “I tried,” he said.

  Vond was glaring at him in disgust. “I know you did. I felt it. And I guess you were right; you’re no warlock!”

  “Where did you get the ice?” Sterren asked, looking at the water on his fingers.

  “I pulled it out of the air; it’s easy, for a real warlock.”

  “Oh,” Sterren said, oddly impressed. He had seen Vond cutting out huge slabs of bedrock without tools, but somehow pulling ice out of the air seemed even more unnatural. “Can you do it again?”

  “Of course I can!” Vond said, clearly affronted.

  “I only meant-” Sterren began.

  “Oh, go away!” Vond snapped. “I’m tired of all your questions and I’ve got a palace to build. Go tell those people in that castle that I’m in charge now and when finish the palace I’ll tell them what I want from them.”

  Sterren started to say something and thought better of it.

  CHAPTER 27

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Sterren said. Princess Shirrin blinked at him. She and her father were the only two Semmans present; the queen and Princess Lura had gone elsewhere, and at the moment the servants all happened to be out of the room.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?” said King Phenvel. “No, I wouldn’t,” Sterren repeated. “You can’t do anything about him. You’re just going to have to live with it. He’s not... not...” Sterren groped unsuccessfully for a Semmat word approximating “malicious,” and gave up. “If you don’t anger him,” he said, “he won’t hurt anybody.”

  “But he’s a usurper, a traitor!” the king shouted.

  Sterren shrugged. He didn’t consider it treason, since Vond was Ethsharitic, but he had to admit that the term “usurper” was accurate enough.

  “All right, warlord,” King Phenvel said. “If you were king of Semma, how would you deal with him?”

  “I’d surrender,” Sterren said immediately. He didn’t know the word for “abdicate.”

  Shirrin let out a little squeak of dismay, which the two men ignored.

  Sterren didn’t point out that if he were king of Semma, he would abdicate in any case, regardless of whether or not an all-powerful warlock were causing trouble. Being king did not look like an enjoyable occupation.

  “Oh, go away,” Phenvel growled.

  Sterren bowed and retreated.

  With his duty fulfilled for the moment, he headed directly for the kitchens; he had not yet broken his fast, and his stomach was beginning to cramp with hunger.

  He was not particularly surprised to find the two wizards and three witches already there, seated along the benches around two sides of a low table. The presence of Princess Lura, perched atop a high stool, was somewhat less expected, but not a great shock.

  He greeted them all politely and then asked one of the cooks’ helpers to find him something. “A stale bun, a lightly chewed bone, whatever comes to hand.”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry, my lord, we can always see what the dogs wouldn’t finish!”

  “Oh, excellent! Do that, please!”

  The servant hurried off, and Sterren settled onto a chair near a large chopping block that could serve him as a table, facing the others.

  “Hello, Lord Sterren,” Princess Lura said. “What’s your crazy magician doing?”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’s crazy,” Sterren replied.

  “What is he doing?” Shenna asked, in Ethsharitic. “I woke early this morning, but he was already up and gone. I’m not sure he slept at all.”

  “I’ve heard warlocks don’t need much sleep,” Emner remarked.

  “Speak Semmat!” Lura demanded, in Semmat.

  “I’ll translate anything important,” Shenna promised, in lightly accented Semmat better than Sterren’s own. “And if I don’t, then Hamder or Ederd or Sterren will. But Annara and Emner here don’t know any Semmat.”

  “Well, I don’t know any Ethsharitic, and this is my daddy’s castle!”

  “But we’re not talking to your daddy; we’re talking to each other,” Shenna pointed out. “I promise, Lura, I’ll translate.”

  “That’s your Highness Princess Lura, to you,” Lura corrected grumpily.

  Sterren looked at Lura for a moment, trying to decide whether he should say anything, and decided he shouldn’t.

  “Well?” Emner asked, using the Ethsharitic word.

  “He’s building a palace,” Sterren said in his native tongue. “He’s appointed himself dictator of Semma and plans to build an empire run by warlocks.”

  Shenna hesitated, then translated this to Lura as, “The crazy magician is building a palace so he can be a king, too.”


  “Why would he want to do that?” the princess demanded.

  Sterren answered in Semmat, “He thinks your father wasn’t very nice to him.”

  Princess Lura looked baffled. “But Daddy is rotten to everybody.” “I know that,” Sterren said, “but Vond isn’t used to it. His feelings were hurt.”

  “That’s pretty silly,” Lura declared.

  Sterren shrugged. “I guess so,” he said.

  “What was that about?” Annara asked, in Ethsharitic.

  Sterren sighed. He saw the kitchen maid approaching with a well-stocked platter, despite the threats, it was heavily loaded with dried fruit, slices of mutton left from breakfast, and assorted breads, and decided he didn’t want to deal with explanations just then. “Look,” he said in Ethsharitic, “I want to eat something, but I get confused dealing with two different languages. Could you people wait a while?” He switched to Semmat and said, “I want to eat now. Your Highness, could I come to your family quarters later and answer your questions then?”

  The little princess looked at Sterren, then around at the magicians. “Oh, all right,” she said. She slid from her perch and stalked off.

  Sterren and the five magicians managed not to laugh at her retreating figure. The warlord made it a little easier for himself by stuffing a pastry in his mouth; he found it hard to laugh with a mouthful of flaky crust.

  When Princess Lura was safely out of earshot and the edge had been taken off his hunger, Sterren leaned back in his chair and began talking, answering the magicians’ questions.

  With a little prompting, he explained about warlockry; of the five, only Ederd knew anything about it at all. He described what was known of the Aldagmor Source, and the Calling, and Vond’s discovery of a secondary source ten leagues to the northwest of Semma, and he reported what Vond had said of his intentions. When he had finished, the five looked at one another.

  “I think I’ll go home,” Shenna said. “It doesn’t look that safe around here.” Hamder nodded in agreement.

  “I must admit that if warlocks are going to be running things around here, they won’t have much use for witches,” Ederd agreed. “But I think I’d like to stay for a little while and see what develops.”