The Unwelcome Warlock

work. If the group had all been wizards there were several places they could have met, but they were not; in fact, much of the point of the meeting was to involve the others.

“All right,” she said. “What news do we have?” She pointed to a wizard in a mouse-colored robe. “You — Arvagan the Gray, isn’t it? Why are you here?”

“I thought you might want to know that the former warlock, Chairman Hanner, came by my shop this afternoon asking after the Transporting Tapestry I sold him,” Arvagan replied. “You had asked about tapestries yourself, so I thought you’d be interested.”

“That’s the one you made him as a refuge where warlocks could avoid the Call?”

“That was the intention, yes, but when he tested it he was immediately Called.”

“As I recall, we discussed using it to get some of the refugees back to the city, but we didn’t want to route them through another universe.”

“And we weren’t sure the return tapestry would still work,” Arvagan said.

“That’s right. So Hanner wanted to know where it is?”

“Yes.”

“You told him?”

“I don’t know where it is, Guildmaster; that was another reason we didn’t use it. I returned it to his family after he was Called.”

“His family is still in Ethshar?”

“I have no reason to think otherwise.”

“So he’s trying to acquire the tapestry, to have access to his supposed refuge,” Ithinia said thoughtfully.

“But when he tested it, he was Called,” Arvagan said.

“But the Calling is gone,” Ithinia replied. “That refuge — if Vond entered it, he would presumably lose contact with the towers.”

“Until he came back out, yes. There is a return tapestry, remember.”

“Still, it might prove useful.” She nodded, then looked over the faces again, and focused on one she didn’t recognize, a man of indeterminate age in a nondescript brown cloak who was sitting quietly in the back. “You,” she said, pointing. “Who are you?”

“I am Kelder of Demerchan,” he said.

A sudden silence fell over the room.

“Are you indeed?” Ithinia asked.

The man nodded.

“I do not believe I invited you to this gathering.”

“You did not, Guildmaster, but we thought it advisable to have a representative here, all the same, to ensure that we would not be working at cross-purposes.”

“I see. Will you tell us, then, what interest the Cult of Demerchan has in the current situation?”

“Within limits, yes. Certain persons have asked us to remove the Emperor Vond. We have not yet decided whether to accept this commission.”

“By ‘remove,’ you mean ‘assassinate’?”

“The precise means of removal were not specified.”

Ithinia considered this. She knew annoyingly little about the Cult of Demerchan. They were an organization of magician-assassins, based somewhere in the Small Kingdoms, that had operated in secrecy for centuries. They made extensive use of tunnels and hidden passages, and used various kinds of magic — apparently including wizardry, though so far as she knew, none of them acknowledged the authority of the Wizards’ Guild.

Ordinarily, for anyone outside the Guild to use wizardry the penalty would be immediate execution, but somehow Demerchan had never incurred such consequences. Whether this was an oversight, deliberate neglect, or something else, she did not know; it was not her responsibility. She was the senior Guildmaster of Ethshar of the Spices, and a member of the Guild’s Inner Circle, but she was not one of the Hundred; there were levels above her, and the Guild had secrets she did not know. What happened in the Small Kingdoms was usually not her concern. She had intervened a dozen years ago when it appeared that the Empire of Vond might threaten the security of the towers in Lumeth of the Towers, and word had later reached her that her actions met with the approval of her superiors, but she had also been reminded that she was to meddle in the Small Kingdoms only in the most exceptional circumstances.

The existence and behavior of the Cult of Demerchan was therefore none of her business — or it hadn’t been until this man showed up in her house.

“If you have not yet decided to accept the commission, then what purposes do you have that we might cross?” she demanded.

“We have our own interests. I am here in part to determine whether your interests align with ours. I am here in person, Guildmaster, and visible to you all, because we prefer not to antagonize the Guild, or the Sisterhood, or the Hierarchies, or the Initiates, unnecessarily; I am to speak up should it seem that a conflict is developing that might be avoided.”

That was a reasonable answer, and a believable one. Ithinia had not missed the implication that Demerchan sometimes listened in to the Guild’s private deliberations secretly, by means of their own magic, but she decided to ignore that for now — though she might want to reconsider some of her standard wards and protections when this was all done.

“You want to know whether your interests align with ours,” she said. “I would say they do. The interests of every living thing in the World are involved.”

“Oh?”

Ithinia looked over the crowd of magicians; some of them looked confused, while other faces were alight with anticipation, and still others appeared to be confident they understood the situation. Some of them probably did.

“We are not here because warlockry ended,” she said. “The World managed without it for centuries, and will do so again. We are not here because fifteen thousand refugees have suddenly been dumped on our society; the Hegemony dealt with a far worse refugee problem at the end of the Great War, and emerged from it relatively unscathed. We are not even here because of the possible danger posed by a warlock unrestrained by any threat of the Calling, one who has already demonstrated that he is perfectly willing to kill innocent people who get in his way, though that is a matter worthy of our attention. No, we are here because the source of that warlock’s power is essential to us all, and we do not want Vond, or anyone else, tampering with it.”

“Could you be a little more specific, Guildmaster?” asked a white-robed theurgist whose name Ithinia had forgotten.

“You all know that warlocks drew their power from that thing in Aldagmor,” Ithinia said. “Well, Vond found a way to draw power from the towers in Lumeth of the Towers, and we fear that this may in time weaken or damage the towers’ magic.”

“What magic?” the theurgist asked.

Somehow, Ithinia had assumed that every powerful magician would know some of the ancient secrets of the Wizards’ Guild, but of course there was no reason for that to be the case, and clearly it wasn’t. Unless, of course, the theurgist was just testing to see whether the wizardly version of the story matched whatever the priests believed.

“You are all aware, I trust, that the World does not extend indefinitely in every direction, but has edges?” She looked around the room, and saw no one indicating otherwise. “Do you know what lies beyond those edges?”

“No,” said Kirris of Slave Street. Trust a witch to be blunt, Ithinia thought. Kirris made no secret of her dislike for wizards, and Ithinia was slightly surprised she had agreed to attend this meeting. Her friend Teneria had probably talked her into it.

“Isn’t it all just sky beyond the edge?” the theurgist asked.

“No, it’s not,” Ithinia said. “Beyond the World’s edge is a vast cloud of poisonous yellow mist; so far as we know, it goes on forever in every direction except up. No one has ever seen the bottom, or the far side, of the golden mist, though it’s possible to fly above it. You can see it in the distance if you go near the edge; most sailors have seen it, and it’s visible from much of Vond’s empire, and from the western shores of Tintallion’s Isle where I