The Unwelcome Warlock

“We aren’t.” He turned to look at Zallin. “You seem nervous, Zallin. I take it the Great Vond did not see fit to teach you how to use the second source?”

“No, he didn’t,” Zallin said. “Not yet, anyway — he said he might someday, if he decides he can trust me.”

Hanner did not believe for a moment that Vond would ever trust Zallin that much, but he saw no point in saying so. “What did he do?”

“He...he flew everywhere, all the time, but mostly just a few inches off the ground, so he could see everything, and if anyone got in his way he just flung them aside. He didn’t even look at them. And in Camptown, half of the people he threw aside were guardsmen. If he saw anything he wanted in a shop, he just took it, and ignored anyone who asked for payment. I told them to send the bills here.”

Hanner remembered the Night of Madness, when dozens of warlocks, not understanding what was happening, had behaved that way. That was why it was called the Night of Madness, rather than the Disappearance Night, or the Birth of Warlockry, or something else. Some of those warlocks had thought they were dreaming, others thought that they had gone mad, and others hadn’t cared, they did it simply because they could.

Hanner knew that Vond did it because he could. “That girl he brought back with him,” he asked. “Did he give her a choice?”

“Well...she didn’t protest. She expects to get paid.”

“See that she is,” Hanner said.

Just as he said that, Rudhira appeared in the dining room doorway. “Hello, Hanner,” she said.

“Hello, Rudhira. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. The emperor hasn’t noticed me.”

“This is my sister, Lady Nerra. I don’t think you’ve met.”

Rudhira nodded. “Mavi’s friend. No, we never met.”

“Rudhira?” Nerra said. “The one who...the warlock?”

“The one who was Called just a few days after the Night of Madness,” Hanner said. “Rudhira, we need to do something upstairs; I’ll be back down in a few moments.”

“Take your time,” Rudhira said.

Hanner hesitated, staring at the little redhead; he wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know what it was. He wanted to apologize to her for Mavi calling her his whore, but she hadn’t been there to hear it, and besides, up until the Night of Madness had changed everything, Rudhira was a whore. He groped for words, but then Nerra nudged him, and he started up the stairs again.

This time no one interrupted them, and he and Nerra were able to make their way past the second and third floors, emerging at last on the top floor, where Nerra took charge, leading the way to four rooms at the back of the house.

Hanner remembered these rooms well; they were where he had stored away the remains of his uncle’s collection of magical artifacts more than thirty years ago. Now, though, while those mysterious knicknacks were still there, stuffed into drawers and cabinets and stacked on shelves, they were largely hidden by a variety of other things that had been jammed in after Hanner’s departure.

Hanner recognized much of this added clutter — hardly surprising, since a significant portion of it was either his or his uncle’s. Some of the rest he recognized as belonging to other warlocks he had known; apparently it had all been brought here when they, too, were Called.

This meant, Hanner realized, that he could finally get out of the filthy clothes he had been wearing ever since he went to Arvagan’s shop that day. He had aired them out while he slept, but had not had anything else to wear — until now; he could see some of his clothes neatly folded and stacked.

Of course, they had been sitting here for seventeen years. Even if moths hadn’t eaten them, they might still fall apart when he tried to put them on.

“I’m fairly sure we put the tapestry in here,” Nerra said, interrupting his thoughts as she indicated the room in the southeast corner. “The workmen were very careful handling it, since it was obviously dangerous.” She opened the door, raising a cloud of dust, and pointed. “There,” she said.

Hanner’s gaze followed her finger, and sure enough, there was a thick roll of fabric, shoved between the legs of a dusty table. He stepped forward, bending down for it.

Nerra grabbed his arm. “Wait a minute!” she said. “Won’t it... If you touch it, won’t...something happen?”

“Not while it’s rolled up,” Hanner said. “It has to be flat to work.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. It took a year to make this thing after I commissioned it, so I had plenty of time to learn about how it works.” He tugged at the roll of fabric, and sneezed as his motion disturbed a decade’s accumulation of dust and cobwebs. “Give me a hand?”

Together, the two of them hauled the tapestry out of its resting place and got it hoisted up onto Hanner’s shoulder. They carried it out into the central hallway, and had it almost to the head of the stairs when a thought struck him.

“Wait a minute,” he said, lowering his burden to the floor.

“What?” Nerra asked.

“I need to check something.” He hurried to the stairs — but not to the broad steps going down; instead he opened the door that revealed the steep, narrow stair leading up to the attic, and quickly clambered up them.

“Hanner, what are you doing?” Nerra called after him.

At the head of the stairs he stopped and looked at the attic. It was dim, lit only by a single small window in the north gable and by what light leaked in beneath the unsealed eaves. It was a single room extending the entire length and most of the width of the house, directly under the sloping roof and exposed rafters; headroom ranged from nothing at all at the sides to about twelve feet at the center, though tie-beams ran from side to side just six feet above the bare plank floor.

It looked just as Hanner remembered it; the hole he had smashed in the roof had been repaired, and no one had used it for storage. It was still completely bare and empty.

He had chosen it as the target for his first tapestry, the one that now hung in that other-worldly refuge, exactly because it was empty and unused, and lit from the north, so that the daylight was more or less constant. He had considered using one of the rooms below, and had rejected the idea — it would be too easy for someone to carelessly move a piece of furniture, or leave a stray object, and render the tapestry inert.

He had tested that tapestry before turning it over to Arvagan and his apprentice; he hadn’t wanted to be stranded in his refuge. He wished he could test it again, but he could see no way to do that; it was still in that other world.

The attic looked exactly the same to him, but he was relying on mere mortal eyesight, and his own fallible memory. If anything had changed, then any trip into the magical refuge might be a one- way journey, with no possibility of return.

But would that really be so terrible? The entire plan, once upon a time, had been for warlocks to live in that other world permanently to avoid the Call. He and Arvagan had designed the image in the tapestry to be as appealing and unthreatening as possible, to be a haven where warlocks could retire in peace and comfort. When he had tested it, a sixnight or seventeen years ago, he had been eager to get back to Ethshar to tell everyone that it had worked, and to be with Mavi and the children again — but Mavi was gone and the children were grown.

He backed down the steep attic stairs.

“Come on,” he said to Nerra, as he stooped to retrieve the tapestry. “Let’s hang this up somewhere and see if it still works.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The gathering in Ithinia’s parlor was more crowded than she liked; if the weather had been warmer, she would have held the meeting in her garden, instead. On a chilly, overcast day like this one, though, that would not