While they lived, the warlords had prevented such an alliance, but with the death of the Eighth Warlord, all the elaborate network of checks and treaties had collapsed. Enmurinon and Kalithon and Thanoria and Nushasia and Skaia were no longer involved; despite the web of inter-marriages that had allied them to Semma, they all refused to make any further promises. Phenvel’s mother had come from Enmurinon, his wife from Thanoria; a daughter was a princess in Kalithon, and an aunt had been queen in Nushasia. Still, Semma was on its own. Phenvel had somehow offended every single one of his foreign relatives.
Sterren’s spirits sank steadily as he listened to all this.
“Why aren’t the Ophkaritic and Ksinallionese armies already here?” he asked.
Lar sighed and explained that the only reason the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion had not yet invaded was that they were still settling how the booty and conquered territory were to be divided. Lar and his like, he employed several people himself, and was fairly sure that old Sterren, Eighth Warlord, had some others in his own employ, had done their best to delay these negotiations, bringing up potential difficulties, picking at nits, losing messages, and so forth, and had managed to hold things off this long. The coming winter rains would presumably provide another short breathing space, but in the spring both armies would surely march.
And it was Sterren’s job, as warlord, to hold them off indefinitely, or if possible to defeat them outright.
“How am I supposed to do that?” Sterren demanded.
Lar shrugged. “I wish I knew,” he replied, “I really do.”
CHAPTER 10
As usual, the off-duty soldiers were playing dice in a corner of the barracks. Sterren sighed at the sight.
His dismay was partly due to the fact that despite his best attempts at speech making, his repeated talks about how important it was that Semma’s chosen defenders do all they could to get themselves ready to fight had obviously had no effect on how his men spent their leisure time.
It was also due, however, to the knowledge that he didn’t dare join the game. Since arriving in Semma, his once-notorious luck at dice had deserted him completely.
He had been embarrassed to discover that without that edge, he was actually a very poor gambler. Whenever he played, he lost steadily.
At least he now knew, beyond question, that he had indeed picked up a trace of warlockry in his brief apprenticeship; nothing else could explain how he had flourished for so long back in Ethshar. Wizards and witches had been unable to detect any magic in use, but wizards and witches knew nothing about warlockry.
It was slightly odd, perhaps, that he’d never been caught by a warlock, but maybe warlocks took pity on him, or chose to protect one of their own, no matter how feeble his talents.
And his talent had to be warlockry, because no other form of magic was so dependent on location. He knew that much. Wizardry and witchcraft and sorcery and theurgy and demonology and herbalism and all the others worked equally well almost everywhere, or so he had heard, though there were those who complained that so much wizardry had been used in the city of Ethshar of the Spices that its residue fouled the air and weakened subsequent spells.
Warlockry, though, a warlock’s power depended on how close he was to the mysterious Source of the Power that all warlocks drew on.
Nobody knew exactly where the Source was, or what it was, because nobody who went to find it ever came back, but every warlock knew that it was somewhere in the hills of Aldagmor, near the border between the Baronies of Sardiron and the Hegemony of Ethshar. It supposedly called to warlocks who grew strong enough to hear it and lured them away, and since all warlocks improved with practice, that meant most of them heard it, sooner or later, and if they stayed within range they were eventually drawn away to Aldagmor. This was referred to as the Calling, and it was invariably accompanied by weird, frightening dreams and other strangeness, and it was something that warlocks did not talk about to outsiders; it frightened them, and admitting that warlocks were afraid of anything was not in the best interests of the art. Sterren only knew about it because his former master had explained it, in lurid detail, in trying to discourage him from his apprenticeship.
Even warlocks, though, even those who had heard the Calling and woke up every night with nightmares about it, did not know what the Source was. Nobody knew what it was, or why it should be in that particular place.
Some people theorized that that spot was the exact center of the World, and that the Power was a gift of the gods, but others maintained that the Source was something from outside the World entirely, a mysterious something that had fallen from the heavens on the Night of Madness, back in 5202, when warlockry first emerged. Sterren had been a babe in arms on that night when half the people in Ethshar woke up screaming from nightmares they could never remember, and when one person in a thousand or so was suddenly transformed, forever after, into a warlock, able to move objects without touching them, to kill with a thought, to start fires with a mere gaze.
Whatever the Source was, whatever the Power was, Sterren had never had more than the faintest trace of it, and here in Semma, dozens of leagues to the southeast of Ethshar and almost that much farther from Aldagmor, which lay well to the north of the city, even that trace was gone.
In fact, in two sixdays of careful investigation, Sterren had been unable to find any evidence that anyone in all of Semma had ever heard of warlockry, or ever had any trace of the Power at his or her command. Nobody could provide him with a Semmat word for “warlock” or “warlockry.” Nobody even remembered anything about a night of bad dreams, twenty years before, and Sterren had always thought that the effects of the Night of Madness had been worldwide.
Warlockry was totally, completely unknown in Semma.
Sterren had to give up playing dice.
Watching the men toss down their coins on the betting lines, totally ignoring the presence of their warlord, he also gave up any hope of successfully defending Semma against the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion with the forces at his disposal.
Lar had brought another report the night before; Ophkar had two hundred men under arms, Ksinallion two hundred and fifty.
Semma had ninety-six. And that was after Sterren had calls for volunteers posted in all the surrounding villages. Furthermore, although fifteen or twenty of them took their role seriously, the rest seemed to think being a soldier meant nothing more than an excuse to go drinking and wenching in exchange for a few hours a day of marching and weapons drill, or, in the case of the cavalry, riding and weapons drill.
Sterren knew that war was coming. Lar knew that war was coming. Lady Kalira and a dozen other nobles knew war was coming. The rest of the castle’s inhabitants, including the king, refused to worry about it.
Princess Shirrin apparently believed that war was coming, but thought that it was all very exciting, and that Sterren, her valiant warlord, would save the kingdom by singlehandedly slaughtering the foe, as if he were some legendary hero like Valder of the Magic Sword. At least, that was what Princess Lura reported her sister’s thoughts to be; Shirrin herself still found it impossible to say more than a dozen words in Sterren’s presence without blushing and falling into an embarrassed silence.
She hadn’t actually run away from him for more than a sixday, though, and he had seen her, several times, watching him and his men from a window, or around a corner.
Princess Nissitha deigned to speak to him on occasion, now, but still obviously considered him far beneath her.
He sighed again. His life was not going well.
He had carefully broached the subject of defeat to Lady Kalira one night, in the castle kitchens, when both of them had been drinking.
“You don’t want to think about it,” she had said, very definitely.
“Why not?” he had replied.
“Because if you lose a war, you’ll be killed.”
“Not ness... ness... necessarily. Surely you don’t expect the army to fight to the last man...” he
