The Unwelcome Warlock

make it out clearly. It was not overgrown with trees or grasses, like a natural hill, nor was it bare stone or earth. It was made up of hundreds or thousands of objects piled one upon another, but in the eerie whiteness Sensella could not judge their size, or discern their colors.

The source of that unnatural light hung directly above the mound, and was descending slowly toward it.

The Calling, she realized, came from the mound. This was what she had come to Aldagmor to find. This was the source of the warlocks’ magic. She could feel the power surging through her. Until just a moment before she had been unaware of it, unable to use it for anything but flying closer, but now the spell was — not broken, but countered, by that gigantic thing that was slowly sinking down from the heavens.

She looked up, trying to see through the glare, and her brain refused to resolve what her eyes saw into a comprehensible shape. There was something coming down from the sky, something the size of a small city, something that glowed as brightly as the sun, but in a different spectrum, and Sensella could not make herself see it. She thought it was more or less round, and at least twice as wide as it was tall, but beyond that she could not make sense of it.

That overwhelming message of reassurance came from the thing in the sky, just as the Call’s demand for aid came from the mound — or from something beneath the mound. The thing in the sky had come in response to the Call, just as she had herself; she knew it. She could not have explained how she knew it, any more than she could have said exactly what the Calling had been whispering to her all these years, but she did know it, completely and irrefutably.

Sensella had slowed in her flight, but not stopped; she was still approaching the mound, and now, as her eyes adjusted to the glare and her mind to the alienness of what she was seeing, she realized what the objects composing the mound were.

They were people. Hundreds of people, packed face-down into an immense pile. Most of them were dressed in black — warlock black.

Shocked, she stopped in mid-air. She hung about sixty feet off the ground, staring at that great heap of humanity.

She could not hear anything. The Call and the Response made no actual sound, but they drowned out everything else all the same, filling the part of her brain that might otherwise have reacted to what her ears detected. She could smell nothing but the cool night air of the forested hills of Aldagmor. She could see the mound, but the strange light made it hard to know exactly what she was seeing, and she could not tell whether the people stacked up before her were breathing, whether they were alive or dead. Certainly, they weren’t moving.

The idea that she was looking at a gigantic pile of corpses horrified her, and she reached out with her magic, with that awareness of location and movement that was a part of a warlock’s supernatural abilities. She tried to sense the people she saw, to tell whether they were dead or alive.

She couldn’t. Something stopped her perceptions.

It wasn’t just that they were dead; warlockry could sense a dead body perfectly well. No, something was blocking her magic.

She looked up at the glowing thing. It was still descending. If it didn’t stop, it would land upon that mound and crush all those people.

“No!” she shouted. She moved forward again, descending, and landed running. It was only when her feet hit the dew-covered knee-high grass that she realized she was barefoot; she had risen from her bed in the middle of the night, and had been drawn away by the Calling in her nightgown, without shoes or a coat.

That didn’t matter, though. She had to get to that mound. She had to help. Somewhere deep in her mind, she knew that she was confusing different urges, that she was combining the Call’s demand to come to this place with her desire to help those poor helpless people, but right now it didn’t matter; they both drove her toward that mound.

To her surprise, she reached it before the descending monstrosity did — she had misjudged either the thing’s speed, or its size. She stopped just short of the mound, despite the relentless Calling that still tugged at her; she forced herself to stop, to look at the situation. The Response had drowned out enough of the Call to let her think, to allow her to remember that no Called warlock had ever returned, and she looked at the great pile in front of her and guessed that if she touched it she would be pulled in, never to escape. She was inches away from the motionless back of a gray-haired man in a black tunic, she saw, and to one side of him stood a white-haired woman, and beyond that a black-haired man; to the other side were more, wearing the black garb of warlocks, or assorted nightclothes, or in some cases nothing at all.

Looking between the shoulders of this front layer, she could see more people, jammed together skin to skin, and stacked atop the people at ground level were others, standing or kneeling on shoulders and heads, leaning forward. The entire mound seemed to be a great mass of people, piled together too tightly to move or breathe, all utterly still, completely unmoving. She heard no movement, no breathing, no heartbeats — yet they did not look dead. Her warlock perception could not detect anything at all; it was as if the World ended a step in front of her. The surrounding hills and forests, the grass beneath her feet, the air around her and the earth upon which she stood were all their normal, natural selves, composed of a myriad of tiny particles and subtle forces moving and interacting in ways that she, as a warlock, could sense but not explain, but the pile of people in front of her was just...blank.

She let her gaze move up, past the head of the man in front of her, past the woman sprawled above him, to where the stars and moons should have been, to where the mysterious, incomprehensible thing was instead. If that monstrosity did come down to crush the mound, she realized, she wouldn’t be able to get out from underneath it in time; it filled the entire sky above her, a gently-glowing immensity she still could not bring into focus.

But then the descent stopped, and something protruded from the hovering mass, reaching down toward the mound of people. Something shimmered, and something moved, and she sensed thumping and rustling — sensed it more than heard it, though she realized that her hearing was beginning to adjust to the overwhelming presence of the Response. She stepped back — and even as she did, she marveled that she could step back, away from the source of the Calling.

She knew she should be terrified, should be mad with terror, being here and seeing these things — that gigantic thing in the sky, the huge pile of what could only be Called warlocks that were neither alive nor dead, these displays of magic completely outside human understanding — but somehow she was not. The Response, even though it was very clearly not directed at anything human, was so reassuring that it calmed her and let her watch everything with a certain detachment.

Then the first body rolled down the mound and thumped onto the ground a few feet away.

She started, and turned to find a middle-aged man lying on his back in the grass, looking dazed. She turned to help him. “Are you all right?” she asked, as she reached for his hand.

His gaze was fixed on the thing in the sky, and he did not take her hand. She was unsure he had even heard her. “What is that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Can you sit up?”

He finally turned his head enough to see her, and her outstretched hand. “Am I dead?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” Sensella replied. “But if you don’t move, that may not last.”

“But I —”

He was interrupted by the thump of another body hitting the ground.

“Come on,” Sensella said. “I don’t think we should stay here!”

He finally took her hand and allowed her to help him to his feet, just as an elderly woman fell to the ground a dozen feet away.

“What’s going on?” the man demanded. “Where are we?”

“We’re in Aldagmor,” Sensella told him. “But I don’t know what’s happening.”

“That thing,” the man said. “Who is it talking to?”

Sensella glanced up. “Then you hear it, too?”

“Of course I do! How could I not? It’s deafening!” He turned and looked at the mound. “And...the Calling? I answered the Call?”

“So did I,” Sensella said. “I think they all did.”