Hanner really didn’t know how to answer that, so he didn’t; instead he simply nodded and continued down the steps.
Rudhira met him at the foot of the staircase and took his arm to lead him into what he discovered to be the mansion’s dining hall.
“My lord,” Bern said, appearing as Hanner stepped through the door. He bowed discreetly. “I have kept the head of the table for you-I assume your uncle will not be joining us?”
“So far as I know, he’ll be staying in the Palace until further notice,” Hanner agreed.
“And will your party be staying on?”
“I don’t know,” Hanner said. “We’ll have to discuss that later.”
“If I may say so, so large a group is really more than I can care for single-handed at even a minimal level. If you do stay, I feel it would be advisable to call in more servants. Your uncle has a fine staff on call.”
“I’ll let you know what we decide,” Hanner said, moving past and turning his attention to the others in the room-and to the room itself.
The dining hall was large-which was hardly surprising in a house this size. A splendid table of gleaming unfamiliar wood inlaid with ivory took up the center of the room, with a dozen oaken chairs spaced along its sides and one larger chair at the far end. Four ornate cabinets were arranged along the east and west walls, each with various drawers and compartments glittering with brass and ivory inlay; three of the four included glass-fronted upper sections, and Hanner could see something moving behind one of those panels, but the glass was so elaborately cut and beveled that he could not tell what it was. Since that was hardly an appropriate place to keep a pet, he supposed Uncle Faran had indulged in some variety of magically animated tableware.
Mirrors hung on all four walls; the south wall was pierced by three generous multipaned windows partially obscured by lace curtains, looking out on the dooryard and High Street. At the north end a large sliding door was closed tightly, while two small doors to the east stood open. Seven people were seated around the table-three warlocks on either side, and his sister Lady Alris at the foot of the far side. Four more warlocks stood or leaned elsewhere around the room, not counting Rudhira, who was at his shoulder. They had obviously been talking earlier, when he had heard voices, but now they were all staring silently at him.
None of the four prisoners they had taken were present. “Where are the...” he began.
“We locked the prisoners in their rooms,” Rudhira said before he could finish the sentence. “The others are still asleep.”
“I’ll wake them if you like, my lord,” Yorn said. He was standing to one side.
“It’s not necessary,” Hanner said. Hesitantly, uneasy under the silent scrutiny of a dozen watchers, he crossed the room and took his seat at the head of the table.
He had never been at the head of a table before, and wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea; this was properly his uncle’s place. As a nobleman Hanner had grown up giving orders to servants and soldiers and expecting a certain amount of deference, but he had also almost always been subordinate to someone else-his parents, his uncle, the overlord, the various other lords who ran the city. The only times he had been the highest-ranking person at a meal had been in the palace kitchens or in the city’s inns-never in a formal dining room. It felt odd to sit in the big carved oak chair and look down the length of the table.
An empty plate lay ready for him, while half-empty platters of bread and ham and a pitcher of small beer stood close at hand. Hanner could see that the others had not waited for him to appear before eating;Bern had not yet cleared away the used plates and scattered crumbs.
Hanner speared a slice of ham with his belt knife and transferred it to his plate, then reached for the beer and a pewter mug Bern had provided.
“My lord,” Yorn said as Hanner poured, “I should return to my company.”
Hanner looked up, startled. “Has the warlockry gone away?” he asked, putting down the pitcher.
He should have asked that sooner, he realized. It should have been the first thing he said when he came down the stairs and found Rudhira waiting. It was obviously the most important question, the single thing that would most affect what he did that day.
“No,” Yorn said.
“No,” Zarek agreed. He was seated on Hanner’s left. “Look!”
Zarek’s plate lifted into the air, then hovered and began to spin-which flung bread crumbs in all directions. One landed in Hanner’s beer.
“Sorry,” Zarek said as the plate dropped the foot or so to the table and landed with a ringing clatter.
“It’s nothing,” Hanner said, picking up the mug and staring at the floating crumb. He glanced up and noticed Bern ’s silent but intense disapproval of Zarek’s action.
Well,Bern was the servant and Zarek the guest, despite Zarek’s ragged attire;Bern would just have to tolerate such behavior. With a grimace Hanner gulped beer, then set the mug down again.
“So the magic is still here,” he said. “Hasanything changed since last night?”
The others looked at one another; no one spoke at first, then Zarek offered, “I’ve had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in years, thanks to that lovely bed you let me use, but other than that, noth-ing.”
“Has there been any word from the Palace?” He directed this at Alris, but she turned to Bern.
“There have been no callers since your arrival, my lord,” Bern replied.
“Did anyone receive any messages by other means, then?” Hanner looked around the table and at the others beyond. “A wizard-sent dream, perhaps?”
A few empty hands turned up; no one spoke.
“Alris?”
“I haven’t heard a thing,” she said. “If I had any dreams I don’t remember them.”
“I had dreams,” Rudhira volunteered. “Not messages, though— nightmares. Bad ones. Fire and falling and suffocation, all jumbled together, and something calling to me.”
“So did I!”
“Me, too!”
Half a dozen voices chimed in, startled.
“But those werebefore,” one young woman said, overriding the others. “That was what woke me up in the first place, when I first found out I could do magic. I dreamed I was flying but burning as I flew, and then I fell and fell and fell and dove into the earth as if it were a pond, but then it fell in on me and I was buried, I was trapped and smothered, and that was when I woke up and discovered my bedsheets were floating in midair.”
Again, several voices spoke at once, but this time not all were agreeing-some were protesting that their dreams had been later, here in the mansion.
“Silence!” Hanner bellowed. He stood up and pointed at Ru-dhira. “When did you dream?”
“I was awake when the magic came,” Rudhira said. “It was like a flash in my mind, and I could fly and... well, you all know about that. It was here, in this house, that I had dreams about burning and falling and strangling.”
Hanner nodded and pointed to Yorn.
“I had no dreams,” the soldier said. “I was awake when the screams came, and it was when I tried to help one of the others in my barracks that I found I could move things.”
The next man, Alar Agor’s son, had been asleep when the magic came and had been awakened by nightmares, and the nightmares had recurred, far less intensely, after going back to sleep in Lord Faran’s mansion.
The next person, the young woman whose bedsheets had floated above her, had been awakened by the dreams, but they had not recurred. Hanner asked her name, which she gave as Artalda the Fair.
In the end, of the eleven warlocks in the room, four had been awake when the magic came, and all seven of the others had been awakened by the same nightmare of a fiery plunge into entrapment in the ground. Four of them-two who had originally been awake and two who had been asleep-had had milder nightmares afterward, here in the house on High Street.
Neither Hanner nor Alris nor Bern had dreamed at all, so far as they could recall.
“The later dreams were different,” said Desset of Eastwark, a plump woman who was one of the two who had experienced both, and who was one of the three who had been flying steadily last night. “Something wascalling me. I don’t think it was the first time.”
“Something was definitely calling me,” Rudhira agreed.
