The Unwilling Warlord loe-3

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  So now Sterren stood on the ramparts, watching his soldiers herd the peasants out the gate.

  Each one, whether man, woman, or child, did the same thing upon passing the gate. Each one looked north, at the warlock’s building site.

  Vond’s project was progressing well. He had completed his crypts, or at least the shell, in that first day, and had built his hill up around them overnight. Now he was erecting white marble walls on that base. The ground shook each time a new section dropped into place, and the roar of stone grinding against stone was almost constant.

  Vond’s first quarry, now closed, had yielded granite, so the marble, gleaming in the morning sun, was a surprise, and combined with the horrendous racket it was very hard to ignore.

  The entertainment, for Sterren, was not that each face turned toward the palace, but in seeing what each one did next.

  Some stopped and stood staring, open-mouthed, until proddings from behind forced them to move on. Others took a single glance and marched on, stolidly accepting this miraculous construction as just another event that was none of their business. A few looked, then looked away, clearly frightened, as if just looking at the palace might somehow get them in trouble. Some of the children laughed and applauded as huge stones fell into position, or pointed wonderingly at the tiny black-robed figure hanging unsupported above the high white walls.

  The next thing that each peasant did, after looking at Vond’s latest handiwork, was to look at the ruined village, and the reactions to that were far more consistent. Sterren could see despair plainly in the expressions and slumped shoulders of virtually all the evictees.

  He had already decided, by the time the first peasant passed the threshold into the mud-soaked, debris-strewn village market, that he would order his soldiers to help with the clean-up and rebuilding. They were supposed to be men of war, and it was the war that had made this mess, so cleaning it up fell within their duties as Sterren saw them.

  The last peasant was stepping unwillingly out into the mud when the roar from the north stopped.

  It took a moment for the echoes to die away and silence to descend, and by then everyone had noticed the change, and every face had turned toward the new palace. The little black shape no longer flew above the marble walls; instead, it was soaring gracefully toward them. Sterren heard a few whispers from the crowd below, but then silence fell again as they all stared at the approaching warlock.

  Sterren, too, stared, wondering why Vond had stopped work at this particular moment. He hadn’t finished the wall he was working on. If he was coming to force King Phenvel to surrender, it struck Sterren as rather peculiar timing.

  Then he realized that from his position high above the palace, Vond would have seen the people emerging from the castle. He might even have seen Sterren, on the battlements above, and recognized him.

  And Sterren, after all, was warlord of Semma. The warlock might think that an attack was being organized, or a formal surrender, or some other operation involving him.

  “Hai!” he called, waving an arm. “Vond! Over here!” He did not want the warlock to believe for even a moment that anything suspicious was going on. He could probably kill every peasant there, and Sterren, too, as easily as Sterren would stamp on an ant.

  Vond waved and a moment later he settled down onto the wall beside Sterren. The peasants below stared up at the two of them. “Hello, Sterren,” he said, “What’s happening? I saw the crowd from over there.” He waved toward his palace, and Sterren saw a proud smile flash across his face. “Coming along nicely, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Sterren agreed. Privately, he thought that the place looked somewhat forbidding; Vond had not bothered with much architectural detailing, but had used huge blank slabs of stone for most of his construction. He had not yet cut windows in them, either. The result, despite the white marble, looked more like a fortress than a palace.

  Vond himself looked as human and ordinary as ever, just a smiling middle-aged man in black robes, and it was a bit hard to comprehend that he had singlehandedly erected most of that fortress in a day and a half.

  “What’s this?” the warlock asked, waving at the market square. It was obvious to anyone that the ragged crowd milling below was no army readying for an attack.

  “The king’s evicting them,” Sterren explained. “They took shelter in the castle during the siege and, now that the siege is over, they’re leaving.”

  “Where are they going?” Vond asked, interested.

  “Here,” Sterren said, waving. “They’re mostly from the village here. They’ll have to clean it up and rebuild, of course; I’ll be sending my men out to help. I suppose some of them come from the farms, too.” He couldn’t resist adding, “I don’t know if any of them are from the farms you’ve torn up for your palace.”

  Vond glanced at him, startled, and then looked back down at the peasants.

  “Oh,” he said, “but this can’t be all the people from all those farms and the entire village, too! What happened to the rest? Did the invaders kill them?”

  Sterren shrugged. “Some of them, probably, but a lot must have fled every which way. You remember meeting some of those. These are just the ones who got to the castle before the gate was closed; nobody’s gone out to bring in the others yet.”

  Vond stared down at the people for a moment longer, and a good many of them stared back at him.

  “Hai,” he called suddenly, “I am the Great Vond, the new lord of Semma! You see my palace over there!”

  Sterren started to protest, to grab the warlock’s sleeve, and then thought better of it. After all, the warlock was speaking Ethsharitic, which none of the peasants understood, a fact that Vond had clearly forgotten.

  “I am going to want servants. Any of you who would be interested in working for me, you need only walk over to my palace and wait there! You need not decide immediately; come when you choose, and I will find places for you!” A mutter of puzzlement ran through the crowd. Nobody moved.

  “I will show you, now, why I am the true ruler of Semma, and not the oaf who calls himself your king!”

  Vond raised his arms, and the mud of the marketplace rippled. Stones and broken beams were thrown up, to hang in mid-air for an instant, and then fling themselves away, out of the village and into the distance. The mud itself separated into water and soil, and the water, too, was flung away.

  In a moment, the marketplace was clean and dry, the dirt hard-packed beneath the peasants’ bare feet, pressed down almost into pavement by Vond’s warlockry.

  Sterren, watching in fascination, thought that even the dirt from the peasants’ clothes and faces had gone into that smooth surface, leaving the crowd noticeably cleaner.

  With a rush of wind, debris rolled up from one blocked street into a ball that hung in the air and then sailed away.

  Then another street was cleared, and another, in similar fashion.

  In twenty minutes, Vond had cleared out all the wreckage, leaving untouched the houses that still stood, and removing all trace of those that had been knocked down.

  Unfortunately, that left only half a village, and most of that half was missing windows, doors, roofs, or even chunks of wall.

  Vond eyed the results critically, then shrugged. “It’s a start,” he said. He raised a hand again.

  Something, perhaps a motion in the corner of his eye, made Sterren turn and look at the castle. Faces were crowded in every window, watching this spectacle.

  He turned back toward the village.

  The wreckage that had been sent off over the rooftops was coming back now, as one huge, irregular mass that hung in the air like a cloud. It was shifting its shape like a cloud, too, though far faster than any natural formation. Wood, stone, and thatch were separating out into distinct portions; everything else was being dropped into a refuse heap in a handy field.

  It occurred to Sterren for the first time that there were no natural clouds anywhere in sight, which, in light of what he had been told
, hardly seemed normal for winter in Semma. He wondered if the warlock was controlling the weather, keeping the sky clear to make his working environment more pleasant.

  When the different materials were sorted, Vond chose a house and studied it critically.

  The thatch roof and most of the shutters were gone, but it was otherwise intact. Vond waved, and masses of thatch came flying down from the cloud and piled themselves into place.

  “What about the shutters?” Sterren asked.

  Vond glanced at him, then back at the house. “To Hell with the shutters,” he said, “I can’t do everything! How am I supposed to find the right ones out of all that?”

  Sterren shrugged. “Just asking,” he said.

  The repair work continued, as Sterren and the peasants watched.

  As the day dragged on, most of the peasants settled to the ground, sitting or lying on the hard earth and chatting amongst themselves. A few leaned up against the castle walls. None dared venture out of the market.

  The faces in the castle windows changed, as people tired of watching and were replaced by others. Still, Vond had a steady audience for his performance. Sterren thought he saw Princess Shirrin there almost the entire time.

  Some time after noon Sterren spotted one of his soldiers and ordered that food and drink be brought out for the peasants and himself. He asked Vond if he cared for anything.

  The warlock declined the offer and continued with his work.

  Sterren realized he hadn’t seen Vond eat anything in days, and that there was surely no food in his unfinished palace. Was he living on magic alone?

  Perhaps he was. Sterren thought better of inquiring and didn’t worry about it. He watched as his soldiers distributed bread, water, cheese, and dried fruit to the peasants, then ate his own meal, which was similar save that he drank wine.

  The restoration of the village took a long time; in fact, Vond still had three houses unfinished when the sun sank out of sight and the sky began to darken.

  Vond took care of that easily enough by summoning an orange glow in the sky that gave him enough light to work by.

  When he had completed repairs to every house that had still stood, he lowered his arms and said, “There!”

  Sterren nodded. “Very impressive,” he said.

  Vond leaned over a merlon and called, “You can go home, now! If your house is gone, stay with a neighbor, and I’ll take care of you later!”

  The crowd below stirred; some of the peasants, particularly the children, had gone to sleep and were awakened. Nobody left, however. Nobody made any move to leave the market. They just stared up at the warlock and the warlord.

  “Why are you just sitting there?” Vond shouted.

  Sterren reached out and put a hand on his arm. “They don’t understand Ethsharitic,” he said.

  Vond whirled and stared at Sterren for a moment. Then he turned back to the market below, realization dawning.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, damn!”

  “You might want to learn Semmat,” Sterren suggested mildly.

  “I’d rather they learned Ethsharitic,” Vond snapped. “And if I’m going to build an empire, I don’t want to have to learn half a dozen different tongues, damn it!”

  Sterren shrugged. “Well, in time I’m sure you can make Ethsharitic the common language for your court, but right now, none of these people knows a word of it.”

  “How the hell did all these stupid little languages happen, anyway? This was all part of Old Ethshar once, you know!”

  “I have no idea,” Sterren said. “But they did. Maybe it was demons, or a trick by the ruling class to keep people where they belonged.”

  Vond glared down at the village, lit a weird shade of orange by his unnatural illumination. “I suppose I’ll need interpreters,” he said.

  “At least for now,” Sterren agreed.

  For a moment, nobody spoke. Then Vond said, “You tell them, Sterren. Tell them they can go home. Tell them that if any of them want to work as my servants, they should come to my palace in the morning. I’m going home.” He rose into the air.

  Sterren waved a farewell as the warlock began drifting away, then leaned over the ramparts and called, “The Great Vond has finished his work! Go home now! The Great Vond wants servants! If you want to be a servant to the Great Vond, go to his castle...” He remembered the word for “palace” from earlier conversation and rephrased that. “Go to his palace in the morning! If your house is not fixed, stay with a friend!”

  The peasants stared up at him, and he heard someone say, “Who in the World is that?” He didn’t know if the man meant him or Vond; after all, since he had gone off to Ethshar before the invasion, he had not been seen much in his role as warlord.

  Then, as his message sank in, the people began scattering to their rebuilt homes and shops.

  The orange glow was fading rapidly as Vond moved off toward his fortress, but both moons were in the sky to allay the darkness. Sterren took one final look at the palace, its marble walls gleaming an eerie yellow against the black sky and plain in the strange mixed light, and then climbed back down from the wall and went inside.

  So far, he could hardly accuse Vond of tyranny. Even so, he knew that the empire was doomed from the start.

  CHAPTER 30

  Nine days after the rout the Ksinallionese army marched back into Semma.

  The exterior of Vond’s palace was almost complete; only the top of the huge northwestern tower remained open to the sky, although none of the roofs had yet been tiled.

  The warlock scarcely needed to worry about leaky roofs, of course, since he could keep the rain away easily enough, as he in fact had so far. Besides, Sterren thought, a leaky roof wouldn’t do any harm, since there was nothing inside the palace as yet but bare stone walls and floors. He and Ederd had spent much of the previous day strolling through its empty halls and chambers, admiring the vast expanses of bare marble, as Vond explained what would eventually go where.

  The warlock’s half-dozen servants had watched silently from their impromptu camp in what would in time be the kitchens. They had little to do, as yet, beyond seeing to their own most basic needs. Nothing needed cleaning yet, and Vond could not be bothered to eat real meals, but simply conjured up food from somewhere whenever he got hungry. He had no wardrobe to worry about; he still wore the same black warlock’s robe.

  The stairways were not yet built, so the only way into the upper floors was by levitation. Some rooms had no windows as yet.

  Even so, it was a very impressive job for a mere eight days’ work. All the more so, because Vond had spent a day or so cleaning and rebuilding the village around the old castle.

  Looking out from his tower room in the old castle, and seeing the army on the horizon beyond the new palace, Sterren wondered what they thought of this great brooding edifice that had not been there when they left, just nine days before.

  For that matter, he wondered what the people of Semma thought of it.

  He sighed. He should, he thought, have realized that the lords of Ksinallion and Ophkar would not give up so easily as all that. A single battle was not a war.

  Well, it wasn’t his problem, now that Vond had conquered Semma.

  He watched as Vond appeared, rising out of the unfinished tower, his cloak spreading like wings on either side. He waited for the Ksinallionese army to be swept away.

  It wasn’t. Instead, Vond dropped to the ground facing it, out of sight behind the palace.

  Puzzled, Sterren waited a moment for him to reappear, then turned and headed for the stairs. He wanted to see what was happening.

  By the time he had saddled a horse and ridden out the gate and past the palace, it was all over. He found Vond standing atop a newly erected stone dais in the middle of a field, and the entire Ksinallionese army spread out before him, bowing in obeisance.

  Three fresh corpses lay at the foot of the dais, sprawled awkwardly, swords fallen from their hands. Another corpse lay in the dirt amid the bow
ing Ksinallionese, this one burned black.

  “Hello, Sterren,” Vond said as he rode up.

  “What happened?” Sterren asked.

  “Well, these men marched up, as you see, and I stopped them. I didn’t hurt them, just stopped them. Most of them couldn’t understand a word I said, but a few spoke Ethsharitic, and one of them said they wanted to parley. I think my citadel had impressed them. Anyway, that one there,” he said, pointing to one of the bodies that wore an officer’s uniform, “claimed to be the Ksinallionese warlord. That fellow over there,” he went on, indicating a bowing survivor, “served as his interpreter. They said that they had no quarrel with me — they called me a wizard, but I let that slide, since they didn’t know any better. Anyway, they said they were at war with Semma, not with me.”

  Sterren nodded.

  “Well, I explained that I had conquered Semma and intended to conquer Ksinallion, too, but that I hadn’t gotten around to it yet; and I offered them a chance to surrender. The warlord got all red in the face and swore he’d never surrender to a damned wizard, or something like that, and I told him that in that case, he might as well try and kill me, and we’d see what happened. So he tried, and I let him take a few stabs at me with his sword, and then I exploded his heart.”

  Sterren found the calm way in which Vond described this murder to be extremely upsetting, but he hid that reaction and asked, “What about the others?”

  “Well, after that, there was a lot of discussion in whatever language these people use amongst themselves — Ksinallionese, I suppose it is. Then this one,” he said, indicating another corpse, “tried to distract me, while that one,” pointing to the final unburned body, “came up behind me and tried to stab me. I stopped both their hearts. And while I was doing that, that one over there,” he pointed to the burned remains, “fired an arrow at me. He was too far away to be sure of getting his heart properly the first try, so I fried him, instead. After that, I told the interpreter that I would now accept the surrender of anyone who cared to surrender and bow to me. And then you rode up, and here we are.” He waved a hand. “I think a few at the back ran, instead, but I won’t worry about it.” He looked over the hundreds of groveling figures. “I think I’ve just acquired a palace guard,” he said, smiling.