The Unwilling Warlord loe-3

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “You didn’t see anything wrong with using the nobles I threw out of power?”

  “No, I didn’t!” Sterren answered. “What are they going to do? You’d kill anyone who got out of line, and they know it.” He gestured at the councillors, reminding Vond that they were listening.

  “They could stir up discontent,” the warlock suggested.

  “Why should they? Listen, Vond, I don’t think you appreciate what these people have done here. I picked the most competent people I could, without worrying about where they came from. Each of them agreed to help run the empire because they could see that it was here to stay; and each one of them was labeled a traitor by his friends and family because of that! They put up with that because they want to see their people, nobles, peasants, merchants, everybody, ruled fairly and well. If your empire ever did fall, and the old kingdoms were restored, they’d probably all be hanged for treason for having helped you!”

  “You think so?” Vond said, his expression unreadable.

  “Yes, I think so!” Sterren snapped.

  At that point Ildirin entered quietly, bearing a tray that held a full decanter and a dozen wineglasses. He proceeded around the edge of the room to the emperor, who court etiquette required be served first.

  “And I don’t suppose,” Vond said, “that you might be trying to put the nobility back in power, leaving me just a figurehead!”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Sterren asked, genuinely puzzled.

  Vond accepted a glass of wine. “Because you’re a noble yourself, of course, Sterren, Ninth Warlord!” He drank.

  Sterren’s mouth fell open in astonishment. One of the councillors giggled, then quickly suppressed it. Ildirin silently poured wine.

  “Me?” Sterren said at last. “I’m an Ethsharitic merchant’s brat! I’m no noble; my grandmother ran away from home, and I don’t give a damn who her father and brother were. I’m no more a part of the old nobility here than you are!”

  Vond’s expression stopped him, and he corrected himself, “Well, not much more. I didn’t know I had any noble blood.” He glanced at the councillors and said, “Besides if I were trying to restore the old nobility, wouldn’t I have put kings and princes on the council, instead of these people?”

  “Kings would be a little obvious,” Vond pointed out, “and you did put a few princes in here, didn’t you?”

  “I did?” Sterren looked at the councillors again and recognized Prince Ferral of Enmurinon.

  “Oh,” he said. Defensively, he added, “Only one. Out of seven.”

  “So far,” Vond said.

  Ildirin had served all the councillors, now, and approached Sterren with a filled glass. He waved it away; it appeared he needed his head clear if he was going to keep it.

  “So far,” Sterren said, “and forever, I don’t choose new councillors; I don’t know who can handle the job and who can’t. I let each councillor choose his own successor.”

  Ildirin, still holding the glass he had intended for Sterren, looked around the room and noticed that the emperor’s glass was empty. He stepped back and started gliding silently along the wall, back toward Vond’s place at the head of the table.

  “Oh, I see!” the warlock said, sneering, “You won’t put any kings on the council, but if these seven name kings as their heirs, then retire, there’s nothing you can do to stop it!”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sterren said, and he heard someone gasp quietly at his audacity in addressing the warlock emperor thus. “The Imperial Council serves at my pleasure, as well as yours, your Majesty. I can dismiss any councillor any time I please. So can you, just as you can dismiss me as your chancellor. And I assure you, I’d dismiss any king or queen, and probably whatever fool named him as heir.”

  “Ah, you would? Why?”

  “Because we don’t want the old royalty back in power. We don’t want one councillor, by virtue of his former station, to perhaps sway the rest of the council unduly. We don’t want to confuse the peasants by restoring a king to any semblance of authority.”

  “That’s right,” Vond said, accepting the full wineglass from Ildirin. “We don’t want any of that. I’m sure the peasants resent me, consider me a usurper...”

  Algarven, once royal steward of Semma, coughed suddenly, choking on a sip of wine. Vond turned to glare at him between sips from his own fresh glass.

  “Excuse me, your Majesty,” Algarven said, as soon as he could breathe and talk again, “but the peasants... why would you think the peasants resent you?”

  A flicker of uncertainty crossed Vond’s face.

  “I’ve overthrown their kings,” he said.

  “Forgive me, your Majesty,” said Berakon Gerath’s son, once royal treasurer of Akalla of the Diamond, “but so what? What did the old kings ever do for the peasantry? You’ve built roads and houses, put an end to wars, and even done what seemed impossible and regulated the weather. With all this, your taxes are no higher than the old. Believe me, your Majesty, the peasants don’t mind at all that you’ve replaced the old kings, though they do worry a bit about the inevitable price for this bounty.”

  Vond handed his empty glass to Ildirin, who struggled a moment to balance everything on the tray before he could accept it. Vond threw him an annoyed glance.

  “All right,” Vond said. “Forget the peasants. You say nobody here wants the old kings restored, but you have a prince on the council; what happens when his father dies?”

  “Your Majesty,” Prince Ferral said quietly, “my father has been dead for five years now. You deposed my elder brother, not my father.”

  “All right, then,” Vond said, as Ildirin fumbled with the decanter, “what happens when your brother dies?”

  “Nothing much, your Majesty. He has children and other brothers older than myself. I am eighth in the line of succession.”

  Vond glared and reached for a glass of wine just as Ildirin started to hand him one. Their arms collided, and the wine spilled down the emperor’s chest, staining the golden embroidery on his black robe an ugly shade of red.

  The warlock stared down at the spill for an instant, then shrieked, “You idiot!” He waved an arm, and Ildirin was flung hard against the marble wall. The crack as his spine broke was clearly audible to everyone in the room. Vond waved again, and the servant’s head was crushed, the bones shattered, leaving the skin a limp sack. Blood gushed from his nose and mouth as he died. The corpse fell heavily to the floor and lay in a pool of gore.

  Sterren and the councillors stared in shocked silence.

  The tray that held the decanter still stood on the table. Vond smoothed his robe, but did not seem overly disturbed.

  Sterren knew, as he stared at the corpse, that he would not be warning Vond of anything.

  CHAPTER 36

  Little was accomplished in the remainder of the meeting. The presence of Ildirin’s body cast a pall over the conversation, and Vond seemed to have spent his anger. In the end, he agreed to let the Imperial Council continue as it had been, with the understanding that it existed entirely by his sufferance, and that he had the right to dismiss any member at any time and to overrule any decision.

  None of this had ever been in any question, as far as Sterren and the councillors were concerned, but nobody was foolish enough to point this out.

  Afterward, Sterren took a long walk.

  It was obvious that Vond was losing control. The magnificent buildings, the prosperous empire, the thriving crops had all served to hide this; Ildirin’s gruesome death had dragged it out into plain sight. Not only was any thought of a warning gone, Sterren was now convinced that he had to do all he could to destroy Vond quickly.

  That night Vond ate dinner in the Great Hall, with Sterren at his right hand. As often as not he ate in his private apartments, if he bothered to eat meals at all, but on this particular occasion he held a formal dinner, with himself, Sterren, and the Imperial Council at the high table and the rest of the imperial household arrayed along three low
er tables.

  “You know, your Majesty,” Sterren remarked as he chewed a bite of apple, “you haven’t done any real spectacular magic lately.”

  Vond looked at him. “Oh?”

  “I mean, early on, you conjured up that storm to rout the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion, and you quarried and assembled the stone for this palace in a few days, and so forth; but lately you haven’t done anything much more impressive than laying pavement stones. Oh, that’s certainly useful, and so is regulating the weather, and all the rest, but you haven’t done anything really showy in months.”

  “You don’t consider lighting the night sky showy?”

  Sterren pretended to consider that. “Well, I suppose,” he admitted. “But it’s not new. Everybody’s used to it now.”

  “And why should I want to be showy?” Vond asked.

  “To impress people, to remind everybody what their emperor is capable of. If you got the awe you’re due, you wouldn’t need to worry about disloyalty, and we could avoid unpleasantness like that meeting this morning.”

  Vond nodded.

  “Besides,” Sterren added, “I thought you liked using your magic as much as you could.”

  “I do,” he said. “In fact, I’ve been getting irritable lately, and nervous. I wonder if it might be because I haven’t been doing enough. The power’s there to be used, after all. It’s always there in the back of my head, and I feel it so very clearly now...” His voice trailed off. Sterren nodded encouragingly.

  “What would you suggest?” Vond asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, move a mountain, maybe?”

  Vond snorted. “I’d need to build one, first; there are no mountains in the empire. Besides, where would I put it?”

  Sterren waved that away. “Not a mountain, then. Well, the edge of the World lies a few leagues to the south of here; could you do something with that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, peel it back and see what’s underneath, maybe. I’ve heard theorists argue about what holds the World up and keeps it from falling into the Nethervoid. Or maybe just go see what lies beyond the edge and bring back a piece.”

  “There isn’t anything beyond the edge, is there?” Vond asked.

  Sterren shrugged. “Nobody knows,” he said.

  Vond considered that, clearly intrigued.

  Nothing more came of it that night, but the following morning, the tenth of Harvest, Sterren awoke not in his own bed, but hanging in mid-air, just outside the open window of his room.

  “Good morning!” Vond called from above him. “I thought you’d like to come along to the edge of the World and see what it’s like!”

  Sterren looked up nervously. This was not really what he’d had in mind. “Good morning!” he called in reply. “I hope you slept well!”

  Vond frowned.

  “Actually,” he said, “I didn’t. I dreamt... well, I don’t know exactly what I dreamt, but it wasn’t pleasant, whatever it was.” The frown faded. “Never mind that, though,” he said. “We’re off to the edge!”

  Sterren concealed his lack of enthusiasm for the venture, and rolled over in midair so that he could see where he was flying.

  They sailed quickly past Semma Castle and across the few leagues of farmland beyond, into the empty southern desert.

  Sterren would have watched the scenery, but there wasn’t any below; and to either side he could see nothing but mile after mile of sand spattered with tough, patchy grass.

  Behind him he could see the towers of Semma Castle and the Imperial Palace gradually shrinking.

  And ahead he could see nothing. The edge of the World was wrapped in yellow haze.

  Sterren had seen that haze from the tower, but had assumed it was just windblown sand, or glare from sunlight reflecting off the edge itself. To his surprise, he could now see that it was neither, but a sort of very thin golden mist. It would have been almost invisible in any imaginable confined area, but here it seemed to go on forever. He could look through the golden mist, but all he saw beyond it was more golden mist, and still more golden mist, until eventually it added up to opacity. If there were anything beyond the mist, he could not see it.

  And of course, nobody had ever suggested that anything existed beyond the edge of the World, except perhaps Heaven, where the gods lived, and that was more usually thought to lie somewhere above the sky.

  He had nothing to provide him with any scale, but Sterren thought he must be seeing literally hundreds of miles of nothing but that yellow haze.

  Vond called down to him, “What is that stuff?”

  “How should I know?” Sterren called back. “Do you think we can get above it?”

  “I have no idea!”

  “I’m going to try.” With that, Vond began to rise, pulling Sterren up with him.

  They ascended for what seemed like hours, and eventually the golden mist thinned still further, but so did the air about them. The blue sky above turned darker and darker, and grew steadily colder, until Sterren was shivering so badly that he could scarcely shout his protests to the warlock.

  They did, indeed, come to the top of the yellow fog, but they were unable to see over it or through it; all they saw was a seemingly infinite expanse of golden haze, stretching on before them forever, while behind them all the Small Kingdoms were laid out, the central mountain chain curving down between the rich-green coastal plain and the paler, drier eastern lands. The ocean appeared on the western horizon, the burning sands of the great deserts on the eastern, and still they saw nothing to the south but golden haze.

  When they could see the haze on the eastern horizon, beyond the desert, wrapping around the southeastern corner of the World, even Vond gave up.

  Sterren had been ready to give up long before; unlike Vond, he had no supernatural power source to warm him or gather in air. Frost had formed on his face and hands, and he was having serious trouble breathing by the time Vond finally began descending.

  When they had once again reached the warm, thick air of the everyday world, the warlock remarked, “I’d never gone that high before. It’s quite something, isn’t it?”

  Sterren’s frozen muscles had not yet thawed; he could not answer.

  They landed, and Vond stepped forward to the edge while Sterren waited atop a small dune.

  The edge looked like an ordinary cliff; it was not particularly straight or even, but just a place where the dunes ended in a drop-off.

  What made it unique was that it extended as far as Sterren could see in both directions, and that he could see nothing at all on the other side except that infinite golden mist.

  Vond stood atop that cliff, looking down. “I can’t see anything,” he called back, disappointed. “Just that damned haze.”

  Sterren stepped cautiously forward and peered over, still several feet back.

  Like Vond, he could see nothing but the yellow mist. “Wait here,” the warlock said. He rose into the air and drifted forward.

  Almost immediately, he stopped and flew back to hang in the air near Sterren and said, amazed, “There’s no air! I couldn’t breathe. And that yellow stuff smells horrible and it burns your throat. And I still couldn’t see any bottom. The mist just goes on forever!”

  Sterren looked up and down.

  “What holds it back, though? Why does the mist stay on that side, and the air on this side?”

  Vond looked up and down, as Sterren had, and then shrugged. “It must be magic,” he said. “Wizardry, maybe.”

  Sterren shrugged. “I never saw magic do anything this big.”

  “The gods must have done it,” Vond said, in sudden enlightenment. “The tales say they brought the World out of chaos, don’t they? That yellow stuff must be chaos!”

  That did not sound right to Sterren. The story he had heard was that the World had been a bit that was left over, unnoticed, when the universe split into Heaven and Hell. The gods had found it later, and helped shape it, but they hadn’t created it out of chaos.

&
nbsp; Besides, why would chaos be yellow? Why would it be any color at all?

  He didn’t think that there were any explanations for the golden mist; it was just there, and they would have to accept it.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  Vond looked about, considering. “I don’t think I want to fool around with that stuff,” he said. “If it is chaos, it’s dangerous.”

  Sterren was not about to argue with that; he said nothing.

  “What if I were to fold back the edge, here? That might even be useful; if the magic that holds that stuff back ever fails, a wall here would be a good second line of defense.”

  Again, Sterren was not inclined to argue, although he thought Vond was talking nonsense. He could not help balking at the immensity of the idea, however.

  “Fold it back,” he said, his voice cracking.

  “Why not?” Vond said. “I’ll need to see how thick it is,though.”

  “How thick what is?”

  “The World, of course!” He bent over, peering down between his dangling feet, and Sterren watched as a narrow hole appeared in the sand before him.

  Sand slithered steadily up into a ring around the hole, and did not slide back down to fill it in again. Instead the surrounding ring grew and spread.

  Vond stared down into this unnatural opening for several minutes, and Sterren settled down to sit on a dune and watch. From where he sat he could not see into the hole at all, but he found he did not much care.

  At last, Vond straightened up. “I can’t find the bottom,” he said. “I went down well over a mile, I’m sure.” He shrugged. “Well, I’ll just peel back the top layer, then, and fold that up.” He looked about, calculating, and his gaze fell on Sterren.

  “Oh,” he said, “I’d better get you out of here. This may be messy.”