The Unwelcome Warlock

yours, after fifteen years?”

“Well, I had hoped so,” Sterren said. He did not see much point in further denials.

“Then I regret to say your hopes have been disappointed. We know that you are a warlock, albeit a weak one, and that Vond attuned you to the power of the towers in Lumeth of the Towers.”

“That’s very unfortunate,” Sterren said. “That you know that.”

“Perhaps not. We mean you no harm, my lord, as I said before. Indeed, I am here to offer you a position.”

“A position?” he asked warily. “What sort of position?”

“As an acolyte in the Cult of Demerchan.”

Sterren’s jaw dropped. Then he snapped it shut, and said, “I would think I’m a little old to be an acolyte.”

“Your age is of no concern, my lord.”

“It is to me. I’m not interested in joining a cult. I’m too old for that sort of idiocy.”

“I don’t think you understand the situation, my lord.”

Sterren turned to stare out to sea again. “I understand that you want me because I’m the last warlock in the World, and you want that secret for yourselves.”

“Well, yes. That’s true. But we did not approach Vond, because we knew he was unfit for the cult, while you seem very suitable.”

“I do?” He could not resist giving Kelder another glance. “What do you know about it?”

“We have been observing you for fifteen years, my lord, ever since you first went to Semma.”

“Oh, that’s endearing!” Sterren grimaced. “Knowing you’ve been spying on me just makes me so eager to join up!”

“You were the warlord of Semma, and then the Regent of the Vondish Empire,” Kelder said. “Of course you were watched.”

Sterren could hardly deny that it had been reasonable to keep an eye on him, but that still did not make the idea appealing. That was not the important issue here, though. “I’m not interested in joining a cult of assassins so that you can have a warlock at your beck and call,” he said.

“Yet I suspect you know almost nothing of the cult’s origins and purpose,” Kelder said.

“No one outside the cult knows its origins and purpose.”

“That is not literally true,” Kelder assured him. “There are exceptions. And you, my lord, are about to be, at least partially and briefly, one of those rare exceptions.”

Sterren did not at all like the sound of “briefly,” but he ignored that and said, “Go on.”

“You are aware, of course, that the Small Kingdoms were once a single nation?”

“Old Ethshar. Of course.”

“Yes, the Holy Kingdom of Ethshar. Which went to war, centuries ago, with the Northern Empire.”

“Yes.”

“You know that the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars was created after the war by the military of Old Ethshar.”

“Yes.”

“You know that the founders of the Hegemony, Azrad, Anaran, and Gor, made no attempt to reunite the fragments of Old Ethshar.”

“Yes, I know that,” Sterren said, baffled as to where this was leading.

“They were unable to decide which of the hundreds of squabbling governments in the Small Kingdoms was the legitimate heir to the old national government, so they stayed out of the old homeland. They had had enough fighting and bloodshed, and did not want to intervene in any internal disputes.”

“Yes. What does this have to do with Demerchan?”

“Patience, my lord. Now, think back to when you first came to Semma and were thrust into the role of Ninth Warlord, and ordered to defend the kingdom against its neighbors. What resources did you have for your war?”

“Resources?” Sterren was puzzled. “I had a miserable, under-sized, half-trained army.”

“What else?”

Baffled, Sterren said, “I had a reasonably defensible castle, and the king let me have some money to hire Ethsharitic magicians.”

“What else? Or perhaps I should say, who else?”

Sterren tried to think back. He had been a boy in his teens, dragged from Ethshar at sword-point. Lady Kalira, then the king’s trade expert, had been sent to fetch him, accompanied by a couple of the kingdom’s biggest soldiers, and had brought him back to Semma Castle, where he had been given his great-uncle’s rooms and dressed in his great-uncle’s clothes. He had met his officers, and...

And Lar Samber’s son. “My spies,” he said. “My intelligence service.”

“Ah! Yes,” Kelder said. “Now, you know that Old Ethshar’s armies became Ethshar of the Sands and Ethshar of the Rocks, and Old Ethshar’s navy became Ethshar of the Spices, and Old Ethshar’s hired magicians became the Wizards’ Guild and the Sisterhood and the various schools of magic. But of course Old Ethshar had an intelligence service, too.”

“Devoted to collecting secrets, and making sure only the right people knew them,” Sterren said. He nodded. “I see. You’re claiming that the intelligence service became the Cult of Demerchan.”

“Oh, I not only claim it, we can document it. We still operate out of some of the same hidden bases our ancestors used in the Great War. We have tunnels and secret passages and hidden rooms all over the Small Kingdoms. We have ancient magic that has been lost everywhere else.”

“Do you?”

Kelder nodded silently.

“Yet the cult of Demerchan let Old Ethshar disintegrate?”

Kelder spread empty hands. “When the government broke apart, like the generals and Admiral Azrad, we didn’t know which faction to back. We did know that we should stay united, and fight only the Northerners, not one another, so we stayed neutral. We thought that in time the rifts would heal, but instead everything just kept splintering. Eventually we did begin to intervene — it was the cult that first introduced and enforced the rule that no magic is used in wars in the Small Kingdoms, and over the centuries we did remove various individuals who threatened to make matters even worse. I’m sure you’ve heard that we were available for hire, and we have indeed been happy to accept payment for our actions, but in truth, we always chose our own targets in accord with our own goals.”

“I always heard that you refused commissions if you considered the intended target to be morally superior to your client.”

“That was a handy explanation, but in fact we removed those we considered dangers to the well-being of the Small Kingdoms as a whole, whether we were hired to do so or not. We tried to find them before they did any real damage. You were one of our failures, Lord Sterren — we had our limited resources elsewhere and did not notice when you brought your little band of third-rate magicians to Semma’s aid. The far south had never been an area of great interest for us, as it was poor in magic and the other resources we cared about, so your arrival was not seen as anything of immediate importance. Then, when Vond began his conquests, we did not react quickly — partly because we did not understand where he got his power, but also partly because we did not see the removal of King Phenvel as a bad thing, and Vond’s relatively bloodless unification of the southernmost Small Kingdoms seemed like quite a good idea to us. In fact, we still think the Empire is an improvement on what was there before, so we did nothing to interfere with it.”

“Well, thank you for that,” Sterren said. “I suppose that any interference would have involved my assassination.”

“Probably,” Kelder agreed cheerfully.

“But you knew I was a warlock all along?”

“Oh, not all along, but we did figure it out after a year or two.”

“But you didn’t do anything about a warlock ruling the Empire? A magician holding political power?”

“We aren’t the Wizards’ Guild, my lord, and we don’t enforce their rules. We don’t even obey their rules. We have our own. We are much older than the Guild, my lord.”

Sterren stared at the other man.