near-equal. And what will you do with this empire?”
“I’ll just sit back and enjoy it, or course! I’ll live the good life. And other warlocks will hear about it and will come to live here; I’ll have my own court, and all the nobles will be warlocks, and we’ll rule because we deserve to, not because we were born lucky.”
“What if one of these other warlocks gets ambitious and decides to take over, though?”
Vond shook his head. “It can’t happen; I thought of that. But I got here first, so I’ll always be the most powerful, as long as I keep using magic. Look I was almost as powerful as a warlock could ever get, back in Ethshar. I had the nightmares pretty badly. If I’d done one or two more big magics, I’d have heard the Calling and gone north. So nobody is going to arrive here any more powerful than I was when I got here. And nobody will have any special way to overtake me, because warlockry doesn’t work that way. You get more power by using power, and you can only use it so fast. As long as I keep working magic, I’ll always be more powerful than anyone who comes after me. You see?”
Sterren did see and said so.
Vond nodded. “So,” he said, “My empire will be a haven for warlocks, when they start worrying about the Calling, they’ll pack up and come here, where they can safely use all the magic they want.”
Sterren could see how this might, in fact, happen. He could see how it would be very pleasant indeed for warlocks.
He could also see how it might be very unpleasant for everybody else. Magicians elsewhere always kept each other in check, or were kept in check by natural limits on their magic. Witches and seers and sorcerers and a variety of other magicians generally had only very limited abilities. Demonology was risky, and ever more risky as it got more powerful, since demons couldn’t be trusted. Theurgy was limited by the gods’ unwillingness to interfere with the World beyond a certain level. Wizardry, well, Sterren didn’t really know what kept wizards from getting out of hand, unless it was rivalry with other wizards, or something about the seemingly chaotic way wizardry worked, or maybe just the difficulty of acquiring the bizarre ingredients they needed for their spells.
Warlockry had always been kept in check by the Calling. Now Vond had found a way around that, or at least he thought he had.
Sterren suspected that Vond was being overly optimistic about that, but in light of his announced plans to build an empire, mentioning this seemed to be a mistake.
He wondered what the other sorts of magicians might think about all this. Might the rumored-to-exist Wizards’ Guild resent the presumption of a warlock establishing an empire?
They very well might, Sterren thought, and he almost said as much to Vond, but then he caught himself.
Why should he do Vond any favors? The man was about to enslave an entire section of the Small Kingdoms to avenge a slight from a foolish old man, and for the fun of it. It was true that he and Sterren had been comrades in arms, as it were, but that hardly took precedence over a common decency.
But on the other hand, would Vond be any worse than Phenvel? He might turn out to be a perfectly adequate ruler.
Sterren had no way of knowing. He decided to wait and see. Meanwhile, he would keep any possible threats to Vond’s usurped authority to himself, in case he needed them later. That included both the Wizards’ Guild and what Sterren thought was a basic flaw in Vond’s logic about his safety from the Calling. For one thing, he could not be completely certain that either threat really existed.
“Hai, Sterren!” Vond called. “Did you fall asleep or something?”
Sterren realized that he had been standing motionless, absorbed in thought, for several seconds. “No,” he called. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Oh,” he said evasively, “what an empire of warlocks would be like.”
“Well,” Vond replied, “I hope you’ll stay around and find out! I owe you a favor, Sterren, for bringing me here. You treated me well and fairly, and it was your suggestion that helped me tap into the new source. Oh, I think I might have latched onto it eventually by myself, but you made it easier. You know, you’ve got a tiny bit of warlockry yourself; you could be one of the rulers of the empire!”
Sterren shook his head. “I don’t have any warlockry. Not here, anyway.”
“It’s there, Sterren, it’s just attuned to the Aldagmor Source, not the new one. I can fix that. I can let you hear the new one, at least as well as you ever heard the Aldagmor one.”
“I doubt that. I’ve got no aptitude for it.”
“Don’t be silly; you lived off it for years, didn’t you?”
“I never affected anything but dice and I didn’t even know I was doing that! Some magic!”
“But it should be different here; after all, I think we’re only ten leagues from the source itself.”
That caught Sterren’s interest. “Ten leagues?”
“I think so; I can feel it, you know, and sort of measure... there aren’t words for it in Ethsharitic. We warlocks haven’t worked them out yet. But yes, I’m pretty certain the source is ten leagues that way.” He pointed to the northwest; Sterren noted the exact direction as carefully as he could, for future reference.
“Ten leagues or a hundred,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be much of a warlock.”
“Don’t argue with me!” Vond snapped. He gestured at Sterren, and Sterren blinked.
Something had happened; he could feel it in the back of his head.
“There!” Vond said, “I’ve adjusted your brain a little; now you can hear the new source!”
“I don’t hear anything,” Sterren said.
“I don’t mean hear, with your ears! I mean you’re a warlock. You can draw power from it. Here, catch this without touching it!”
Vond pulled a clear, shiny object object from the air in front of him and tossed it at Sterren.
Sterren threw up his hands to ward it off, and at the same time, in the back of his mind, thought to himself that maybe he was a warlock, maybe he could catch it, control it as if it were the dice he had guided back in Ethshar. He tried to think of it that way, to imagine what it would feel like to move something without touching it.
Then the little sphere shattered on the stone at his feet.
He looked down, bent over, and picked up a sliver. It was ice; it melted away in his hand.
“I tried,” he said.
Vond was glaring at him in disgust. “I know you did. I felt it. And I guess you were right; you’re no warlock!”
“Where did you get the ice?” Sterren asked, looking at the water on his fingers.
“I pulled it out of the air; it’s easy, for a real warlock.”
“Oh,” Sterren said, oddly impressed. He had seen Vond cutting out huge slabs of bedrock without tools, but somehow pulling ice out of the air seemed even more unnatural. “Can you do it again?”
“Of course I can!” Vond said, clearly affronted.
“I only meant-” Sterren began.
“Oh, go away!” Vond snapped. “I’m tired of all your questions and I’ve got a palace to build. Go tell those people in that castle that I’m in charge now and when finish the palace I’ll tell them what I want from them.”
Sterren started to say something and thought better of it.
CHAPTER 27
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Sterren said. Princess Shirrin blinked at him. She and her father were the only two Semmans present; the queen and Princess Lura had gone elsewhere, and at the moment the servants all happened to be out of the room.
“Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?” said King Phenvel. “No, I wouldn’t,” Sterren repeated. “You can’t do anything about him. You’re just going to have to live with it. He’s not... not...” Sterren groped unsuccessfully for a Semmat word approximating “malicious,” and gave up. “If you don’t anger him,” he said, “he won’t hurt anybody.”
