He had been planning it all out, step by step. He would start with his landlady. He wouldn’t touch her, but she would fall down the cellar stairs and crack her skull on the stone steps.
The magic would ensure that.
And then his brother Neran, who had gone from a childhood of bullying to an adulthood of rubbing Shemder’s nose in Neran’s success as a woodcarver and Shemder’s own failure to ever be anything more than a stevedore at the Bywater docks, poor Neran would fall on one of his own knives.
That witch DГ©tha of Hillside who had refused to accept Shemder as an apprentice all those years ago, and who kept telling him he needed to find his own path-shewould find her own path, right off the cliffs at the end of Fortress Street, onto the rocks at low tide.
Falissa and Kirris and Lura and all the other women who had refused him over the years-some hearts would burst, some women would mysteriously choke to death.
The magistrate who had sentenced Shemder to three lashes for stealing that statuette from the Tintallionese ship last year-hewas on the list, along with the ship captain who noticed the loss in the first place.
Shemder doubted the magic would last long enough to finish the list. It was along list.
And, he decided, he had spent enough time just thinking about it. It was time to start doing it, to see just how far down the list he could get before the magic stopped. The idea thatbe might be stopped before the magic was didn’t occur to him; he wasn’t a fool like those people running in the streets.
Hewas going to use his giftright, he told himself as he opened the door and called for the landlady.
Who could stop him?
Chapter Seven
Lord Hanner marched up the broad dimness of Arena Street with a mismatched dozen of the “war-locked” walking behind him, and three more flying overhead. The rest of the crowd in Witch Alley-the man in homespun who had been speaking to Mother Perrea, the old man in rags who had followed Rudhira from Camptown, and most of the others-had either denied being “war-locked” or had quietly slipped away rather than obey Manner’s orders.
But this group had accepted his authority. They were, he had told them, on their way to the Palace to volunteer their services to the overlord, and along the way they would confront any other war-locked magicians they found and stop them from doing any more damage.
“Do you see anyone?” he called up to the airborne trio.
“No, my lord,” Rudhira called down in reply. Hanner quickly turned his gaze to avoid looking up her skirt as it flapped in the breeze.
“How can she fly like that?” the guardsman to Hanner’s left muttered. “I can barely lift myself a foot off the ground, and there she is, swooping along as if it were nothing!”
“And I can’t get off the ground at all,” Hanner replied. “Obviously, this thing affected people differently.”
“Well, it didn’t affectyou atall, my lord,” the soldier said. “I can move things, as she can-but Ican’t fly.”
“So she got more of this... this warlockry than you did,” Hanner said.
“But why?”
“My guess would be random chance.” “My lord!” One of the flyers, an older man in a fancy linen tunic, was calling.
Hanner looked up and realized he ought to know the man’s name, but didn’t. “What is it?”
“There’s someone flying,” the man called down. “Off to the right, on Circus Street.”
“I’ll take a look,” Rudhira said.
“Go ahead,” Hanner said as the woman veered sideways and swooped up Circus Street. He broke into a run, into the intersection and around the corner.
The other warlocks hesitated, looking at one another, unsure what to do. “Stay together,” Hanner called back over his shoulder as he peered into the darkness. There were no shops along this stretch of Circus Street, no lanterns, and all the windows in the half-timbered little houses were dark; only the torches at the corner gave any light.
He saw Rudhira’s target now-a boy, scarcely old enough for breeches, hovering in midair above the center of the street.
“Stay back!” the boy called. He held up an arm warningly, but none too steadily.
Rudhira stopped suddenly and hung motionless in midair where she was. Hanner did not think she had done so deliberately; the boy had stopped her somehow.
“Oh, you think so?” she said, and the boy abruptly dropped to the street, landing on his back on the hard- packed dirt with the wind knocked out of him. Rudhira swept down and landed beside him. She didn’t touch him, but Hanner could see the boy struggling unsuccessfully to sit up.
“Don’t you try to pushme around, boy,” Rudhira said.
“Don’t hurt him!” Hanner called as he ran up panting. “We don’t know whether he’s done anything...”
“I haven’t,” the boy gasped.
“He tried to knock me down,” Rudhira said. “I felt it.”
“I was just pushing you away,” the boy said. “You frightened me!”
“Why?” Rudhira asked angrily. “Why should you be scared of me?”
“You were flying!”
“So were you!”
“But I... you’rebigger than me.”
This was just barely true, given Rudhira’s rather small stature, but she was definitely an adult, while the boy definitely was not.
“And my magic is stronger,” Rudhira said, finally letting the boy sit up. “Don’t you forget it, either.” As Hanner went down on one knee beside the boy he glanced up at Rudhira, but said nothing in reply. He was not happy to hear her words; she sounded a little too assertive about her newfound abilities. Apparently shewas the most powerful of his group of warlocks, but that didn’t mean she had the right to push anyone around.
“Are you all right?” Hanner asked the boy, offering a hand to help him up.
“I guess so,” he said, taking the hand and getting to his feet. Hanner noticed that the boy was looking past him; he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the rest of his party had turned the corner and was watching intently. The other two flyers, the old man in the linen shirt and a plump nondescript woman, were on the ground now.
Hanner wished he had taken the trouble to learn everyone’s name, so he could call instructions, but he hadn’t. He turned back to the boy.
“What are you doing out on the streets at this time of night? Shouldn’t you be at home with your parents or your master?”
“My parents told me to stay outside until I stopped moving things and bumping into things. I was trying to learn how to control this magic.”
“Warlockry,” Hanner said. “That’s what the witches call it.”
“Well,whatever it is, I didn’t ask for it!” the boy said in a thoroughly aggrieved tone. “I had a nightmare and I woke up in midair over my bed, and I knocked the pitcher off the nightstand when I let myself fall, and it broke all over the floor and woke up my brothers, and then my mother came and ordered me out of the way while she cleaned up the mess, and I stumbled on the stairs and went flying and knocked over a lamp, and my father yelled at me and told me to go outside if I was going to bump into things. So I did, and I’ve been practicing flying. And other stuff.” He looked at Rudhira. “How did you make me fall? I know how to push things, but you did something different.”
“It’s easy enough,” Rudhira said. “I’m not sure how to explain it, though. I used some of my magic to... to erase yours, sort of.”
“Can you teach me how? And how to fly better?”
“I don’t think this is the time or place for that,” Hanner interjected firmly as the rest of the party came up
