Vond had said almost nothing during this, but had nodded calm acceptance when Sterren proposed that each of the other five be paid one full gold piece, and that Vond receive the other five and all the gems.
Sterren had gone on to apologize for the poor reception the king had given them, and all six had been wonderfully understanding. Shenna had made a few bitter remarks, but had carefully not directed them at Sterren.
Vond had said nothing, then.
The conversation had shifted to whether or not they should all head directly back to Ethshar. The wizards and witches discussed various ideas without reaching any conclusions.
Vond had stated simply, “I’m staying here,” and said nothing more.
The party had broken up not long after that, and servants had escorted the magicians to rooms in the south wing. Sterren had wearily ascended to his own room in the tower. His last sight of the warlock was not reassuring; Vond was clearly very much awake, unlike the rest of the party, and was looking about intently as he followed the footman down the crowded passage.
Vond’s entire manner worried Sterren, but he was too tired to really think about it. He closed his eyes and slept.
It seemed just a moment later that a distant rumble awoke him. He blinked, and saw sunlight pouring into his chamber, and realized it was midmorning.
The rumble sounded again, and he felt the bed shift slightly beneath him. He realized that bright, unobstructed sunlight was pouring in. The rumble was not thunder.
He sat up, startled.
The rumble sounded again, and despite the trembling of the bed he thought it came from the outside. He slid from the bed and crossed to the window.
The view had changed since last he saw it. The castle roofs were spattered with broken tiles and shards of stone, wood, and tile. The outer houses of the village were gone. The rolling countryside was no longer a neat patchwork of farm and field, sprinkled with houses and barns, but a great expanse of mud and wreckage, strewn with all manner of debris.
And directly before him, a half mile or so away, a black-robed figure was hanging in mid-air, arms spread wide, cloak flapping like wings, and below him the earth itself was splitting open. The sandy mud had washed back to either side, forming a deep pit easily a hundred yards across, and not just the mud, but the clay beneath, down to the hard bedrock.
Then the rumble came again, and as Sterren watched an immense block of that bedrock rose up into the air toward the hovering warlock.
The block was rectangular, and by comparing it to Vond, for the flying man could hardly be anybody else, Sterren judged it to be about ten feet high, fifteen feet long, and five feet thick, give or take a foot or three in any dimension.
The block hovered for a moment, then slid sideways through the air, and dropped to the ground.
The rumble sounded again, and again, and again, and another block lifted into the air, slid sideways, and landed on top of the first. The cutting and lifting went more quickly this time.
A third and a fourth were added to the stack, and the cutting was just beginning on a fifth when someone pounded loudly on the door.
“Lord Sterren?”
Sterren started for the wardrobe, but then realized he had never undressed the night before. He still wore the same tattered and mud-stained garments he had worn through the storm and the audience with the king.
This was not the time to worry about neatness, he decided. He changed direction and crossed to the door.
“Yes?” he called.
“My lord, the king wishes to see you immediately.”
Sterren was not surprised. He opened the door and found himself facing a very worried-looking messenger boy. “I’m here,” he said. “Come on.”
A few minutes later he found himself facing a very worried Phenvel III in the royal family’s private sitting room, the king’s expression an odd contrast to the warm sunlight and bright, cheerful furnishings. The only other people present were the messenger boy and a worried valet. Another rumble ran through the castle as Sterren made his formal bow.
“Warlord,” the king demanded, “what the hell is your magician doing out there?”
“I don’t know, your Majesty.” Sterren would have been far more expressive in Ethsharitic; in Semmat he had to stick to the simple statement of fact.
“Is this something to do with the war?” the king demanded peevishly. “Do you expect another attack? I thought you said the enemy was beaten!”
“I don’t know, your Majesty,” Sterren repeated.
“Why not? He’s your damn wizard!”
“He’s a warlock, your Majesty, not a wizard,” Sterren explained wearily. “I hired him for a job. I don’t own him. He does as he pleases.”
“What in hell is a warlock?”
“He is, your Majesty, a kind of magician unknown here in Semma. Until now.”
“All right, he’s a warlock,” the king said. “What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know, your Majesty,” Sterren admitted. “Well, damn it, go find out!” The note of fear in King Phenvel’s voice was obvious.
Sterren bowed. “As your Majesty wishes,” he said. He departed quickly, before the king could change his mind or impose stupid conditions. He was curious himself.
He did not bother with any sort of preparations or cleaning up; he marched directly from the royal apartments out of the castle, ignoring the peasants huddled asleep on the corridor floor, pausing only to ask the man at the gate, “Did the black-robed magician come through here?”
“No, my lord,” came the reply. “He flew over the north wall.”
Sterren nodded and marched on.
The outside air was cool, but wonderfully fresh and clean. The ruined market at the castle gate, however, was not clean at all.
Traveling by air, he quickly concluded, was a major advantage. As he picked his way through the wreckage of the village he wondered how he and his party had ever gotten to the castle gate without so much as tripping over a broken beam.
Then he realized that Vond had been with them, more or less leading the way. He had undoubtedly cleared a path. Sterren had been following an old road, but now he stopped and looked around.
Sure enough, a path had been cut directly through the village, straighter than any street there had ever been, from the gate out toward the farm where he and Vond had climbed the rooftop to spy on the Ksinallionese trebuchet. He clambered across a smashed pottery shop to reach it, then followed it easily out into the open fields beyond.
Once clear of the ruins of the village, he turned north and headed toward Vond, who was still hanging in the sky, stacking up immense blocks of stone.
A bird sang cheerily somewhere nearby, and a gentle breeze rumpled Sterren’s hair as he walked.
He was perhaps halfway to the edge of Vond’s pit when the warlock stopped cutting slabs and turned to a low rise nearby, not that there were any real hills, other than the one covered by Semma Castle; this little bump in the ground was one of the higher elevations in the area. It also had the distinction of somehow having avoided being churned into mud by armies and storms; the top of it still bore a large patch of brown grass.
With a deeper, louder rumble than any that had come before, the top of the hillock lifted up and flattened out. The rumble continued for several minutes, and the ground shook wildly; Sterren stumbled and fell to all fours. The birdsong stopped abruptly.
He watched and realized that Vond was filling in underneath the patch of grass, pulling soil and rock from all sides, and building himself a rectangular mound of earth with the grassy area on top.
It took several minutes; then, abruptly, the rumbling and shaking stopped. The rectangular mound stood like a giant block.
