He straightened up, frowned, looked down at his feet, and tried again, concentrating on pressing the ground away from the soles of his sandals.
He rose unsteadily for an inch or two, then wobbled and started to fall backward. Again, he used his warlockry to catch himself.
He couldcatch himself easily enough, he thought. It was annoying; it was as if his magic worked better when he didn’t think about it.
But if he didn’t think about it, he couldn’t fly!
He heard footsteps and turned to see a patrolling guardsman marching toward him. Quickly he tugged up his tunic and untied his breeches, to provide the obvious excuse for why someone was standing inches from a blank wall at night.
“Hai!” the soldier called. “Go find somewhere better!”
“Sorry!” Hanner called, retying his breeches. “Drank too much ale at supper.”
“Well, get rid of it somewhere else.”
“Yes, sir.”
He hesitated, then took a step toward Merchant Avenue. The guardsman marched on.
Hanner turned back to the wall, studying it with his warlock sense, wondering whether he could somehow brace against it to stay upright while he lifted himself over it. Bricks and mortar, bricks and...
“Oh,” he said.
The service entrance was right there, a few yards to his right, a wooden gate with an iron latch. How had he missed it?
He hurried to it, reached out-and realized he couldn’t see any gate. The brick was solid and unbroken...
To normal eyes. To a warlock, there was a gate.
At last Hanner figured it out. Uncle Faran had had his gate enchanted, had a protective illusion put on it. He reached out and felt the “wall.”
Sure enough, it was wood, not brick. The illusion wasn’t so complete it fooled his fingers. He found the latch by feel, and tried to open it. It was locked. He could sense the mechanism, a bolt that could be worked from the inside. There was a slot below it; presumably Bern carried a tool that could reach through the slot and work the bolt from the outside.
Hanner had no such tool-but he was a warlock.
The bolt slid back, and the gate opened, and he was inside. He closed the gate carefully, hoping he hadn’t disrupted the undoubtedly costly illusion, and headed for a door from the garden into the house.
A moment later he was inside, making his way along the central hallway. He could hear voices ahead.
He found half a dozen people in the candlelit front parlor; they turned to look at him as he entered.
“Lord Hanner!” Rudhira said from a chair by one of the front windows where she had been watching the crowd in the street outside. “I’m glad you got back inside safely.”
“I’m not sure how safe it really is,” Hanner replied as he looked around. Besides Rudhira and himself, the room held Alla-dia, Othisen, and three other warlocks whose names he didn’t recall immediately. “Where’s Uncle Faran?” he asked.
“Upstairs with the wizards,” Rudhira said. “He has us on guard duty for now, making sure those people outside don’t do any harm.” She pointed at the top of the window by her chair. “Someone caught us off guard and threw a brick through there about an hour ago, but we fixed it. You can hardly tell the glass was ever broken.”
“You fixed it?” Hanner stared at the panes, which appeared completely intact. “How?”
One of the others giggled, and Othisen said gently, “We’re warlocks, remember?”
“Yes, but... I know you can move things, but I didn’t know you could fix them.”
“We can do a lot of things,” Rudhira said. “Move things, break things, unbreak them. We can make light, as you’ve seen.” She held up an orange-glowing hand to demonstrate. “We’ve been teaching each other. We can open locks and heal wounds and heat things up or cool them down. We can harden things, or dissolve them, or set them on fire. We can see things too small to be seen without magic, see the insides of things, and feel things without touching them. It’swonderful, my lord! I thought it was good enough just being able to throw things around and fly, but there’s so much more!”
“That’s... that’s wonderful,” Hanner said, hoping he sounded more convinced than he felt.
He didn’t know how to do all that-but presumably, if everyone else had learned these things, he could learn them. All he had to do was admit he was a warlock, throw in his lot with the others-and put himself at risk of exile or death, not to mention being something that Mavi found repulsive.
It was tempting, all the same-he could feel the magic in him calling out to be used, to be trained and built up.
But he wasn’t going to do it.
At least, not yet. “That girl, Sheila, who was apprenticed to a witch,” Othisen said, “she said we could make more warlocks, and sort of showed us how, but we didn’t have anyone to experiment on.”
“Lady Alris wouldn’t volunteer,” Rudhira said. “And you weren’t here.”
“And I’m not volunteering now,” Hanner said, heading off any such suggestion and hoping none of these people were as attuned to warlockry’s presence as Sheila had been. “But what about those people out there?” he asked with a wave at the windows. “Maybe you could change one ofthem. That might convince them warlocks aren’t monsters.”
“Them?” Rudhira glanced toward the window, and the drapes flapped aside, though there was no wind in the closed room. The glow from her hand vanished. “I wouldn’t do them the favor!” she said angrily.
“Besides,” Othisen said, “you need to be very close to do it. Touching, if possible.”
“Still, it’s interesting that it’s possible,” Hanner said. “And you can learn different... different spells from each other.” He didn’t really think “spells” was the right word, but he couldn’t think of a better one. “That means that if this stays around, warlocks could take on apprentices and train them, just like other magicians.”
“Yes!” Rudhira said.
“I suppose that’s true,” Alladia said slowly.
“I’m so glad you found me in the Wizards’ Quarter, my lord,” Rudhira said. “Without you I wouldn’t have come here, and I wouldn’t have met Lord Faran, and I might never have learned all these things.”
“I’m happy you’re pleased,” Hanner said, a bit taken aback by this enthusiasm. After all, there was an angry mob just outside, ready to throw more bricks at a moment’s notice; it hardly struck Hanner as an enviable situation. It felt as if they were besieged— and that was without even mentioning the sentence of exile hanging over their heads, and the possibility that Lord Azrad or the Wizards’ Guild might decide even exile wasn’t enough and demand their deaths.
This was certainly not his idea of a decent way to live, trapped here, awaiting an uncertain fate, and it was no improvement at all over his previous existence-but then, he’d never been a Camp-town streetwalker.
“Lord Faran’s quite a man,” Alladia said.
“He’s saved us all,” Rudhira said. “Without him I’d never have had the nerve to fight back. I’d be an exile outside the walls by now, begging travelers for crusts of bread.”
Hanner somehow found that unlikely; he couldn’t imagine Rudhira giving up without a fight, and her warlockry was the most powerful he had yet seen. If she had accepted exile, he still thought she would probably have done something a little less passive than begging to earn her keep.
“He’s had experience,” Hanner said.
“Yes, of course!” Alladia said. “It’s obvious when he speaks.”
“He’s a natural leader,” Rudhira said. “You’re a lucky young man to be his nephew.” “I’m sure I am,” Hanner said. He did not add anything more, though he was tempted.
He had had experience himself-not at leading, but at being the Great Man’s nephew. He was used to living in his uncle’s shadow, and knew that anything he might say other than vague agreement could easily be misinterpreted. A disparaging word about Uncle Faran would mark him as a disloyal and jealous in-grate, while an injudicious, overly positive one would brand him a sycophant with no self-respect. If he were to point out that he, not Faran, had first thought of gathering warlocks together as a force for order and mutual defense, he’d be seen as a braggart.
He had a knack for saying the wrong thing, but right now he really didn’twant to say the wrong thing. So he
