Manrin decided he would make some suggestions when he next saw Lord Faran.
Then he noticed, out in the street, that the watchers were looking east along High Street rather than at the house. He leaned forward and peered off to the left.
Running figures were approaching-andflying figures, as well. Warlocks, returning from the Palace! Manrin started to smile, thinking that this meant the conquest was already secured, but then he stopped.
Why were theyrunning?
“Oh, no,” he said.
He didn’t see little Rudhira’s distinctive green skirt and red hair, or Varrin’s multicolored linen tunic, or Lord Faran’s silks, and he wasn’t sure what that meant, but he didn’t think it was a good sign.
Then the vanguard of the returning warlocks neared the line of watchers, and the watchers were abruptly flung back, tumbling down the street as if swept by a gigantic hand, clearing the area in front of the house.
The returning warlocks would be in the house in seconds, and Manrin decided he wanted to be there, to hear what had happened. He turned and headed for the stairs.
A moment later he trudged panting down the steps-he was really too old for all this climbing and wished that people in Eth-shar of the Spices didn’t build such tall houses. In Ethshar of the Sands only a handful of structures had more than two floors-the Palace, the Great Lighthouse, Grandgate-because the ground wasn’t stable enough to support anything higher without either magic or amazing luck. A four-story house was ostentatious even here; back home it would have been completely ridiculous.
By the time he was midway down the second flight the ground floor was swarming with frightened people, awash in a babble of voices.
One of them was Ulpen, who looked up the stairs and called, “Master!”
Manrin stopped.
Other warlocks heard Ulpen call out and looked up the stairs at Manrin. The old wizard could hear them muttering to one another.
“... he’s a wizard, he knows about magic...”
“... can talk to the Guild...”
“... used to running things...”
“... has experience...”
“Master,” Ulpen said loudly, “Lord Faran is dead. Will you lead us now?”
Manrin frowned. The lad was being ridiculous. And Lord Faran wasdead}
Manrin had not expected that. He had not thought anything would stop Lord Faran, certainly nothing short of an all-out assault by the Wizards’ Guild.
“What happened?” he asked. “How did he die?”
“A wizard turned him to stone,” Kirsha called up to him.
“But he killed the wizard, too,” someone added.
Then the Guildhad intervened. That was bad. Manrin had hoped that the Guild might indeed come to the aid of their fellow magicians in the end.
“We need a leader, Master,” Ulpen said.
Manrin snorted derisively. “I’m an old man, a wizard,” he said. “I’m not a lord. I’m not even from this city.”
“We needsomeone, Master. You were a Guildmaster, even if you weren’t a lord, and isn’t that more appropriate for a group of magicians?”
“It sounds to me as ifyou’re taking charge, Ulpen!” Manrin triedto make plain in his tone and expression that he thought this was agood thing. If someone was going to face the Guild’s wrath, Manrin would be happy to have it be someone other than himself. And the Guild might well take pity on a mere apprentice.
“Me?” Ulpen gasped, a hand on his chest. “I’m only sixteen!”
“And I’m a hundred and eleven, which is too old to be running around fighting soldiers.”
“We’ll fightfor you!” Othisen shouted. There was a ragged chorus of agreement.
Manrin sighed. It was clear he wasn’t going to get out of this easily-and really, if someone was going to have to negotiate with the Guild, he had to admit he was more qualified than anyone else in this mad assortment.
But he still didn’t want the honor. “Is there no one else more suitable?” he said. “What about that other young lord, Lord Han-ner?”
“He’s not even a warlock,” Ulpen said.
“And he didn’t come back with us,” Kirsha added. “He stayed in the Palace with his sister.”
“He did?” This was from Lady Alris, on the fringe of the crowd. She had been sitting in the parlor when the others had returned from the Palace, and now she was standing in the doorway, listening.
Several voices replied, and the gathering dissolved into noisy chaos for a moment. Manrin, looking down from above, noticed young Sheila, the former apprentice witch, standing in one corner, clearly trying to say something, but being ignored as the others all shouted at one another. She appeared to be on the verge of tears.
That was too much. He could never stand the sight of weeping children, and Sheila reminded him of his granddaughter Pianette. “Silence!” he bellowed, hands raised, augmenting his voice with warlockry as Rudhira had taught him.
Silence fell. A dozen worried faces looked up at him.
“It would seem Iam your new leader, whether I like it or not,” Manrin said. “Well, if I am to lead you, I need to know who you all are, what you can do, and what has happened so far-as you may have noticed, I have spent much of my time upstairs, using what wizardry I still have to study our situation. I have missed details of events down here, even while I learned things the rest of you don’t know. I do have some ideas-I had intended to speak to Lord Faran about them upon his return, but it appears that if he is indeed dead, I will have to act on them myself. First, though, I need to know just what has really happened, to Lord Faran and to the rest of you.” He pointed at Ulpen. “I’ll hear you one at a time, starting with my apprentice.”
For the next two hours Manrin questioned the other warlocks. He learned about the Calling, and how it had taken Rudhira and Varrin; he learned about Lord Faran’s ghastly death at the hands of the Wizards’ Guild. He took a roll call, learning who was still in the group and who had fled, going home or hiding elsewhere, and he sorted the warlocks out by their level of power, as Faran had.
When that was done he thought he had a fairly good understanding of the situation-and he didn’t like it much. Varrin had done serious damage to the Palace, and Faran had slain a high-ranking member of the Wizards’ Guild-executions were never left to anyone of low rank. The party as a whole had further antagonized the entire city by their march through the streets.
But it might not be too late to make amends, Manrin thought. Lord Faran’s death, while a tragic loss, was also an opportunity. Their dead leader could be made a convenient target for the city’s anger and mistrust. The warlocks could blame Lord Faran for all the harm they had done, absolving the survivors of any responsibility.
But, Manrin was convinced, they had to present themselves as real magicians, a lawful part of the city, not a mysterious, lawless, alien force.
He started to explain this to his new followers, but had not gotten very far before Kirsha demanded, “How?”
Manrin stopped. “How what?” he asked.
“How can we present ourselves as normal magicians? We’re not-we’re from all over the city, from a dozen different backgrounds, not people who served a proper apprenticeship to learn a trade. Just look at us!”
“You have a point,” Manrin said, “and I’ve thought about it. I think we need to do something to make ourselves look more like a coherent group. Perhaps if we all dyed our clothes to one color? Red might be nice. Is that man Bern around? He might be able to help...”
“He’s in the kitchens somewhere,” Sheila called. “I’ll go find him.”
“We can’t dye all our clothes red,” Desset said. “You can’t dye dark colors red; the old color will show through. We’d need to get all new clothes.”
“We could dye everything black,” Othisen suggested. “Black will cover anything.” “Then we’d look like demonologists,” Alladia said.
“Is that bad?” Desset asked. “Everyone knows demonologists are magicians, and they may not like them,
