“Could you summon another demon to fight Tarker, perhaps?”
“No! Demonology doesn’t work like that. I can’t… Demons don’t fight each other. It’s not in their nature. They’ll fight and kill and destroy anything else, but not other demons. None of them will do anything to protect me from Tarker.”
That was not something Morvash had ever heard before, and he was fascinated. “Really?”
Karitha did not answer, but just stared at him, her eyes wild.
“What about a god?” Zerra asked.
“I can’t summon a god! I’m not a theurgist.”
“Doesn’t sound as if you’re much of a demonologist anymore, either,” Zerra said. “You can’t hire someone to summon a god on your behalf? The god of protection, whoever that is?”
Karitha shook her head. “Gods and demons don’t interact,” she said. “Not since the war. It’s part of the agreement they made.”
“Well, I can’t fly you around forever,” Zerra said. “Once Erdrik and his ridiculous pet are dealt with, however that may happen, I’m going home to Ethshar and you’ll be on your own.”
Karitha burst into tears. “I wish you’d left me a statue!” she said to Morvash, slapping him on the arm.
“Maybe I could turn you back,” he said, not mentioning that he had never attempted any sort of petrifaction spell and did not have the necessary instructions.
“That won’t…no!” She turned away, sobbing.
For the remainder of the descent to Hindfoot Village neither Zerra nor Morvash said a word; the only sounds were the wind rushing past the carpet and Karitha crying.
As they approached the town Zerra spotted someone waving to them, swinging both arms above his head; she directed the carpet toward him, and as they drew nearer Morvash recognized him as Pender. Hakin, Darissa, and Marek were standing behind him, the four of them in the street near the workshop, and the official with the blue sash was beside him.
Zerra brought the carpet to a halt a few feet away, and Pender trotted up to the edge of the fabric. “What’s happening up there?” he asked. Behind him, the other three were staring at Karitha, who was still weeping.
“Erdrik’s performing his spell,” Zerra said. “It should be complete tomorrow morning.”
“Is it working?”
Zerra and Morvash exchanged glances. “It’s doing something,” Morvash said. “We could feel powerful magic, and it felt…” He groped for a word before finally settling on, “It felt right. As if it’s doing what it’s supposed to.”
“We can’t know for certain until the spell is complete,” Zerra said.
“Will it bring the entire dragon to life, or just the head?” Pender asked.
Morvash blinked in surprise.
“That’s a very interesting question,” Zerra said. “We don’t actually know. He’s certainly trying to bring the whole thing to life.”
“He would never tell us,” Pender said. “The spell will happen tomorrow morning?”
“Yes.”
Pender turned and spoke to the mayor in Sardironese. The mayor frowned, then turned and hurried away, calling something.
“What’s going on?” Morvash asked.
“We need to leave,” Pender said. He pointed at the gigantic foot that rose up from one side of the town. “If that moves, everything will be broken, even if the dragon does not try to.”
“We had wondered about that,” Morvash said.
“We have a place,” Pender said. “A narrow place, a crack in the stone. We have stored things we need there, food and other things. We can hide there until the dragon is gone.”
“That would be wise,” Zerra replied.
“We have been making the place for years, while we waited for the wizard to return.”
“Good.”
“Excuse me. I must help my family.”
“Of course.”
Pender turned and hurried away, leaving the six visitors. Karitha was still snuffling; Hakin leaned forward and asked Morvash, “Is she all right?”
“She’s terrified,” Darissa said, before Morvash could respond. “Wouldn’t you be? There’s a demon after her, one called ‘the Unrelenting.’ I’m amazed she’s held up as well as she has.”
“I know that!” Hakin said. “But she wasn’t crying before. And don’t you have an assassin after you?”
“We have someone who was looking for us, but we don’t know if he’s an assassin, and he’s just human, so far as Morvash’s uncle could tell; he isn’t a demon. He’s probably still back in Ethshar, looking for an indecent statue.” She eyed Hakin, then said, “You spent so long with Tarker that you aren’t afraid of it, didn’t you? The rest of us haven’t, you know.”
“I…” Hakin frowned. “I know it’s dangerous, but yes, I lived with it for years and it never hurt me.”
“You probably have a better idea of how fast it is than the rest of us do; when do you think it will get here?”
Hakin looked up at the ridge to the south that separated them from the rest of Tazmor. “It’s hard to say,” he said. “I don’t really know how far we came, or how fast we were flying.”
“Maybe a hundred and twenty leagues,” Zerra said. “Give or take a few miles. Maybe a little more.”
“And it’s been what, seven days? Eight?” Hakin frowned. “I think Tarker should be here by now—it isn’t as fast as the carpet, but it doesn’t need to eat or sleep the way we did. I’d estimate it should be able to cover at least twenty leagues in a day. Something must have delayed it. Or maybe it had to rest—it isn’t as strong as it once was. Being in our world for so long has weakened it.”
“Has it?” Marek asked. “I didn’t realize that was how it worked.”
“I don’t think anyone did,” Hakin said. “No one ever held a demon in our world for so long before.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” Karitha sobbed.
“No one suggested you did,” Darissa told her. “No one is blaming you!”
Zerra and Morvash exchanged glances at that, and Darissa gave them an angry glare.
It was all very well to be polite, Morvash thought, but Karitha had summoned a demon to murder someone; she was hardly an innocent in all this. Some would consider it simple justice if Tarker got her.
For his own part, he thought seven years as a statue was enough of a punishment to at least win her a second chance, especially since it had been her victim who petrified her—her own attack could even be considered self-defense. But telling her no one blamed her for summoning Tarker was going a little further than Morvash considered reasonable.
“Listen,” Hakin said, “if Tarker shows up, you can just tell it to kill Erdrik, can’t you? You don’t need the secret name for that.”
“So what?” Karitha asked. “It’ll kill Erdrik and ten minutes later it’ll be after me again.”
“It may not be that easy to kill Erdrik,” Zerra said. “He’s more powerful than Wosten ever was. His protective spells kept Tarker out of his house for hours.”
“But Tarker did find a weakness eventually, and besides, Erdrik doesn’t have all those wards in place up here,” Morvash pointed out. “I didn’t sense any protections around him except the animation spell’s aura.”
“I did, journeyman,” Zerra retorted. “You’re right that he doesn’t have many in place, because he doesn’t want anything to interfere with Ellran’s Animation, but he has some, and he has a levitation spell in that bracelet he’s wearing, so he could fly out of the demon’s reach.”
“He does? How do you know that?” Morvash had never heard of any spell that would have revealed that to Zerra without attracting any notice.
“Because he had the same bracelet when I met him twenty years ago, when the Guild was still trying to
get him to behave himself. He made that black stone with Tolnor’s Synthetic Jewel; not sure which levitation spell it is.”
“That explains how he got everything up to the dragon’s ear,” Morvash said. “I’d thought maybe that rug of his could fly.”
Zerra shook her head. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s just a rug. Sitting on bare stone for two days isn’t very comfortable.”
“But wait,” Hakin said. “If he can fly out of Tarker’s reach, that’s even better. Tarker won’t be able to catch him, and it won’t hurt Karitha until it catches Erdrik.”
Zerra and Morvash looked at one another. “Would that work?” Morvash asked.
“Probably not forever,” Zerra said. “I don’t know how long he could levitate. There might be a time limit, or he might need to be awake. And he’ll need to come down to eat.”
“Not if he has a bloodstone with the Spell of Sustenance on it,” Morvash replied. “Which I assume he does, since he survived eleven years sealed in that vault.”
“But he probably has some limit—needing sleep, or renewing the spell, or something.”
“That’s probably true,” Morvash agreed. “But ordering Tarker to kill him could buy Karitha some time to escape.”
“Can you give Tarker a new target without the secret name?” Darissa asked.
Karitha nodded. “I think I remember how. It’s not hard.”
“But does Erdrik deserve to die?” Prince Marek asked. “Who are we, to sentence him to death?”
“He’s already lived at least three hundred years,” Zerra said. “And he’s violated Wizards’ Guild rules; that carries a death penalty, and he swore to obey Guild law when he was an apprentice.”
“Did he?” Darissa asked. “Did the Guild exist three hundred years ago?”
Zerra started to reply, then caught herself. “I’m not completely sure,” she said. “But I know there was some sort of regulation of magic in Old Ethshar’s military. Erdrik isn’t free to do anything he wants with his magic.”
Morvash was not entirely convinced Zerra’s argument really worked, since Old Ethshar’ military had long ago ceased to exist, but he was not inclined to disagree with the basic conclusion. Erdrik could not be permitted to simply operate unchecked; wizardry had the power to destroy the World, and had come close to doing so on at least two occasions.
But that meant he should be stopped, not that he should be killed. Prince Marek had a point. This idea of setting Tarker after him was not necessarily the right thing to do, despite its obvious benefits—especially since Tarker and Erdrik might do a great deal of damage to the surrounding area in their eventual conflict.
But Morvash had no better plan.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Darissa the Witch’s Apprentice
3rd of Newfrost, YS 5238
Darissa finally managed to pull Zerra aside early that afternoon. The people of Hindfoot Village were packing up and removing their more valuable possessions, carrying them away to the ravine beyond the dragon’s tail where they intended to take shelter if the monster their people had spent two centuries carving were to go on a rampage, and Zerra had been providing airborne transportation for large quantities of this cargo, accepting payment in fine gemstones. Morvash and Hakin and Marek had been providing more mundane assistance, and had been talking to Karitha about what might be done to protect her from Tarker; Pender, of course, had been assisting his family in their relocation. Darissa had been using her witchcraft to learn a little Sardironese, and to heal a few minor injuries.
For the most part, the people of Hindfoot Village were a healthy lot; Darissa suspected their isolation had something to do with that, or perhaps Erdrik had cast a spell of some sort to protect them. Any time you had hundreds of people working stone, though, there would be injuries—mashed toes, bruised shins, dislocated fingers.
But even while she was healing the townspeople and consuming large quantities of food to replace the energy spent on this magic, she kept an eye out for a chance to talk to the older wizard, and at last she saw one.
“Excuse me,” she said, as she intercepted Zerra on her way back from a quick break. “Did you have a chance last night to ask Ithinia about Melitha?”
“Oh, Darissa!” Zerra said, startled, her hand falling to the hilt of the knife on her belt. “Yes, I did. She said she didn’t know a thing about it, that most of her interests in the Small Kingdoms concerned areas much further south than Melitha, but she would check on it and should know something in a day or two.”
“She has interests in the Small Kingdoms?”
“She’s been involved with the Vondish Empire, and Lumeth of the Towers. I suppose that’s what she meant.”
Darissa blinked. She had heard of Lumeth of the Towers, though she did not know much about it, but the other name was new. “What’s the Vondish Empire?” she asked.
“Oh, that’s right! You wouldn’t know. Well, late in 5220 a warlock named Vond overthrew the king of Semma, then started using his magic to conquer the neighboring kingdoms as well. Eventually the Calling got him—but you don’t know about that, either, do you?” Zerra sighed. “You’ve missed forty years of history. Let me just sum it up—Vond is gone, but the empire he built is still there, occupying what used to be more than a dozen of the southernmost of the Small Kingdoms. It’s now ruled by a council of nobles. And because magic was involved in creating it, the Wizards’ Guild took an interest, which means Ithinia took an interest.”
“Wait, so a dozen kingdoms are gone, absorbed by this empire?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“And they fought a war using magic?”
“It wasn’t much of a war, since no one there had any magic that stood a chance against Vond, but yes.”
“The Guild let that happen?”
“I’m afraid so. We weren’t paying attention.”
Darissa needed a moment to absorb this. She had always been taught that the Guild rules were absolute and inviolable, yet this Vond, this warlock—whatever a warlock was—had been able to break them, and even after he was gone, the empire remained and the old kingdoms had not been restored.
And if that was possible…
“Is Melitha even there anymore?” After all, her homeland had never been blessed with defensible borders, and most of its neighbors had not been particularly fond of it.
“Oh, I’m fairly sure that it is,” Zerra said. “The northern Small Kingdoms weren’t involved in any of Vond’s adventures. Ithinia didn’t say anything about it being gone, and I think she would have known about that.”
That was not actually very comforting.
“Ithinia said she would check on it,” Zerra said. “That’s all I know. I understand that it’s your home and that it matters to you, but that was all decades ago, and the rest of us are far more concerned with what Erdrik is doing right now.”
“And with what these villagers can pay to use your magic carpet.”
“Well, yes. That’s how I make my living. Just as you do with your healing.”
Darissa did not think the two were exactly equivalent—for one thing, she would never refuse to heal someone simply because he couldn’t pay. She saw no point in arguing, though. She looked around at the rapidly-emptying town. “What do you think is going to happen to these people?” she asked.
“I expect they’ll hide in their little hole until Erdrik and his dragon go away, and then they’ll come out and look for a new home.”
“You don’t think they’ll stay here?”
“Why would they? There won’t be a wizard supporting them anymore—at least, not unless Erdrik has some other insane scheme that calls for stone carvers. And judging by what it’s like now, this place must be horrible in the winter. If I were one of them, I know I would head south.”
Darissa nodded.
“But is Erdrik really going to go away? What if the dragon stays here?”
“I’d say that’s all the more reason to go somewhere else.”
Darissa could not argue with that.
She tried to imagine what it would be like for Pender’s people. They had worked toward a single goal for two hundred years, and achieving it meant destroying their own homes—how could they do that? Or had they never really thought about it? She supposed that for most of the time that they had been working on the dragon statue completion had seemed so far away that it wasn’t an issue, and by the time it came within reach they were so set in their ways they could not imagine stopping. They had even sent Pender to see why Erdrik had not come.
But then, Erdrik must have been the source of their prosperity. This cold, stony land would not have supported them so well without the wizard’s help, and if he never came back their little society would eventually have collapsed. They really had not had much of a choice.
She looked up at the belly of the dragon, far overhead, and tried to imagine what would happen if it came to life.
She shuddered.
Maybe, she thought, she and Marek should just leave; they were not accomplishing anything significant here. They should head south.
Maybe they did not even need to go to Melitha. Maybe they should make a new life for themselves somewhere else. She had demonstrated that she could make a living as a witch…
But Marek could not make a living as a prince anywhere in the lands outside the Small Kingdoms. And even though she had been gone for half a lifetime, so that half the people she had known were probably dead and the rest might not even remember her, Melitha was home. Once the carved mountain and the mad wizard were dealt with, she wanted to go back there.
“You’re staying here?” she asked Zerra.
“Until Erdrik completes his spell one way or the other, anyway. After that, it depends.”
Stone Unturned: A Legend of Ethshar Page 36
