“Hanner, have you gone mad?” Desset demanded.
“We swore to obey the law,” Hanner said. “This is the ultimate test of that oath. If we fail the test, then they’llnever trust us. If we yield, Lord Azrad may reconsider-or some warlock who never agreed to the Council’s terms in the first place may stop his heart one night, and his son may think better of driving us away.”
“I could send them all running back to the Palace!” Desset said.
“And you’d be flying northward to Aldagmor ten minutes later,” Hanner retorted. “Now, we need to grab whatever we want to take with us. Someone tell Bern to bring the household funds, if there are any left. Everyone get your own belongings ready by the door, then come upstairs-we’re warlocks, so we should be able to carry a goodly portion of Uncle Faran’s collection of magic, and I expect we’ll be able to sell that anywhere.”
“I don’t like this,” Hinda said.
“None of us do,” Hanner told her. “Now, go on-we only have a few minutes!”
They were hauling their bundles out into the dooryard, ignoring the taunts of the watching civilians, when Hinda burst into tears. Sheila hurried to comfort her.
“I’ve never been out of the city!” Hinda wailed. “I don’t want to go!”*
“None of us do,” Sheila told her as she wrapped her arms around the younger girl. Ulpen and Desset watched the two girls silently. The scene reminded Hanner of something; he turned to Captain Naral.
“I still have family in the Palace,” he said. “My two sisters are there. Could someone take them word of what’s happened?”
“I think...” Naral began.
He didn’t finish the sentence; as he spoke the earth suddenly shook, and a tremendous roaring rilled the air. Soldiers tumbled to the ground. Hanner watched in astonishment as the surface of the street rose up into a mound, sending guardsmen rolling away to every side.
The disturbance was contained in a small area, though-Hanner could see that while Warlock House and its immediate neighbor to the east were shaking, as was the house directly across High Street, the buildings on the far side of Coronet Street or farther along High Street were still and solid.
This was not, then, a natural earthquake.
The mound rose higher and grew wider until it stood perhaps eight feet high and twenty feet across, filling the street from the iron fence in front of the dooryard of Warlock House almost to the front of the house across the street; then it split open. A fissure began near the top on the side facing Hanner, quickly stretched vertically, and then widened. The two halves of the mound fell away, crumbling to dust and sinking back into the street.
And where the mound had been stood half a dozen wizards, in their finest robes, each with a gleaming dagger in his or her right hand, and a six-foot staff in the left.
The rumbling stopped and the dust settled, leaving the wizards standing silently in a cleared circle of street, scattered guardsmen lying strewn about them.
Hanner recognized all the wizards’ faces from the meeting in that mysterious columned hall. He smiled wryly. He still didn’t know why the wizards had appeared, here and now, but he was impressed.
“They certainly know how to make an entrance,” he said, to no one in particular.
Captain Naral had caught himself against the gatepost and stayed on his feet; now he turned to face the wizards and demanded, “What are you people doing here?”
Hanner couldn’t fault the captain’s courage; not many men would shout like that at a group of wizards who had just manifested themselves so spectacularly.
“We have come to prevent Lord Azrad from making a mistake,” Ithinia of the Isle announced, raising her staff. “The Wizards’ Guild recognizes the Council of Warlocks as our equal in rights and privileges under the ancient laws of Ethshar, and as the rightful governing body of all warlocks. The overlord has no more authority to exile the Council from this city, nor to destroy its headquarters, than to exileus, or destroy our homes.”
Captain Naral looked quickly at Hanner, then back at the wizards.
“Oh,” he said.
Hanner cleared his throat. “In light of this new development, Captain,” he said, “perhaps you might take it upon yourself to return to the Palace and ask Lord Azrad to reconsider your orders.”
“I think that’s an excellent suggestion, my lord,” Naral replied.
Hanner didn’t bother correcting him this time.
As Naral turned to go an old man shouted at the wizards, “Are you all mad? The warlocks stole my son!”
One of the wizards raised her staff and gestured, then spoke.
“Kennan of the Crooked Smile,” she said, “your son Aken was not taken by warlocks. Aken was a warlock himself, and was drawn to his doom in Aldagmor by the same power that draws all warlocks. Go home and tend to your son’s family, not to some misdirected vengeance.”
Kennan’s jaw dropped, then snapped shut. He blinked, backed away a step, then turned without another word and began marching away.
Hanner watched him go and saw that the other watchers who had haunted High Street were starting to scatter as well.
“Thank you,” he said to the party of wizards. “As one magician to another, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you.”
Chapter Forty-five
Negotiations with wizards were always a challenge, but in the end Hanner thought he got a fair price for the fortune in wizardly supplies and artifacts that Uncle Faran had stored away. That turned out to be the easy part.
Finding sorcerers who would pay decently for the talismans on the fourth floor took a few sixnights. The various shrines, altars, and pentacles turned out to have no inherent magic at all-Alladia explained to Hanner that shrinesnever did, that wasn’t how the gods worked, and demons presumably operated on similar principles-so they brought relatively little, and as many of them wound up going to wealthy neighbors to decorate their homes as went to theurgists or demonologists for serious use.
Hanner didn’t get so much as a brass bit for the stores of herbs; the herbalists he talked to weren’t interested, since many of the plants hadn’t been stored properly or were simply too old to be trusted. One old woman finally agreed to clean out the entire store in exchange for whatever she found useful.
And then there were the things that Hanner couldn’t identify— dozens of assorted statues, a collection of notched sticks, several ordinary bricks marked with numbers written in black wax, un-labeled jars of brown goo, stones carved into unrecognizable shapes, lumps of dried fungus, various machines built of gears and springs that didn’t appear to do anything, and so on. Faran had labeled and organized most of his collection, but several items had remained completely anonymous, and some of the labels on others were hopelessly cryptic; Manner had no idea, for example, why Faran had tagged a chunk of rock “Under G. 4996,” or written “Red Glow” on a jar of seawater. A glance through his uncle’s notebooks convinced Hanner that Faran had been trying to find a unifying theory forall schools of magic and had collected objects he thought might have magical properties not yet recognized by any of the existing schools, but how he had made some of his selections remained a mystery. In the end Hanner gave up the idea of being able to use the entire house and shoved all this unsold detritus into four rooms at the back of the top floor. He hoped that someday some scholar more gifted than himself might want to sort through it all and continue Faran’s research.
That left three and a half floors for the use of the Council of Warlocks, and for Hanner’s own home.
The proceeds from selling the collection were enough to furnish the upper stories and to commission a generous supply of black clothing from the weavers in the Old Merchants’ Quarter, with a goodly sum left over. Hanner offered this surplus as loans to warlocks who wanted to set up shop-preferably in the Wizards’ Quarter, with the other magicians. There were a few shops available for sale and rent-some of them shops vacated by magicians or other tradesmen who had vanished on the Night of Madness.
Hanner accompanied Ulpen and Sheila in negotiating the purchase of one such shop, to provide an adult presence, and was pleased to see how cooperative the sellers were. He knew that a sixnight earlier they would
