The Unwelcome Warlock

“Of course, your Majesty,” Hanner said, managing as much of a bow as he could without letting Zallin fall.

“And I’m claiming this house as my own, Hanner. You can stay on as one of my retainers, or not, as you please. If you decide to leave, though, I’ll want you to show me this magical tapestry of yours before you go.”

“That woman Leth said something...”

“I’ve told everyone to choose sides. Anyone who stays in this house will be loyal to me, and me alone. I can be very good to those who help me. Those who defy me will die. Anyone who won’t accept that had better be out of this house by the time I get back.”

“I see,” Hanner said. He glanced at Zallin, who seemed to have sobered up considerably listening to this. He also looked up the stairs, and saw several faces peering over the railing, Rudhira’s among them. He was reassured to see that she was still alive and well.

“He stays,” Vond said, pointing at Zallin. “I like him. I’m going to keep him.”

Zallin’s mouth fell open, and he made a dull, strangled noise.

“As your Majesty says,” Hanner said quickly, to cover any other reaction Zallin might have made.

Then Vond flew out the open door, arcing up out of sight, the witch’s corpse following a few feet behind. He did not bother to close the door after himself.

Hanner stared out the open door at the dark street for a moment, then turned to look at Zallin.

“Oh, Hanner,” Zallin said. “I don’t want this. What I saw when he was touring the city — I was hoping the oushka would let me forget. That woman...” He shuddered, and his shoulders heaved as if he was trying not to vomit.

“Did he kill anyone else when you were out?” Hanner asked.

“I don’t...I don’t think so,” Zallin said. “But he hurt people. Threw them around. And he wants me to stay? What, as his pet?”

Hanner looked up the stairs. “Did he hurt anyone else up there?” he called.

There were murmurs he could not make out, and then Rudhira called down, “Not that we know of.”

“Did he say exactly what he was planning to do?”

Rudhira glanced around at the others, then replied, “No.”

Hanner bit his lip, looking up at Rudhira, then at the open door. He guided Zallin into a sitting position on the stairs, and released him. “I think I’d better go see what he’s up to,” Hanner called. Then he turned and trotted out the door. Unlike Vond, he did close it behind him, cutting off Rudhira’s cry of protest.

Once outside the gate on High Street Hanner looked up and down the street, and although the street lamps and the lit windows of neighboring houses provided adequate light, he saw no sign of Vond. He remembered to look up, as well, but saw only clouds, with a few stars and the lesser moon peeping through gaps between them.

Vond had said he was going to confront Ithinia, who lived on Lower Street, a few blocks to the east. Hanner turned east, then rounded the corner onto Coronet Street to get the one block north to Lower. He hurried down the hill, wishing he could fly — this was almost the first time he had really missed his magic.

Coronet did not quite reach Lower Street; the corner was cut off by a short stretch of Merchant Street. Hanner turned right, then fifty yards later he turned right again, onto Lower. He looked down Lower Street — and then up.

Vond was there, hanging in the sky a hundred feet up, glowing brightly. A gargoyle was also hanging in the air, about halfway between the warlock and the street; it was not moving, and appeared to be bound somehow.

The few pedestrians who were out at this hour of the night had all stopped in their tracks to stare up at this apparition. Hanner did not stop; he broke into a run, east on Lower Street.

“Ithinia!” Vond roared, his voice magically amplified to the level of thunder. It rolled through the streets and echoed from the rooftops. “I’ve brought back your witch! ”

Hanner did not see the witch’s body anywhere at first, but as he hurried toward Ithinia’s house he could make out a dark lump on her doorstep.

“This gargoyle that was watching my house — that’s yours too, isn’t it?”

The gargoyle suddenly plummeted to the ground, landing in the street with an earth-shaking thud. Hanner struggled to move faster as he ran down the street, though he really had no very clear idea what he intended to do when he got there.

“You think this city is yours, and you can do what you please here?” Vond bellowed. “I say it’s mine now. And I’m about to show you why! ”

With that, the warlock turned and flew away to the north.

Hanner slowed to a stop, baffled. What was Vond up to now? The warlock himself had vanished from Hanner’s view, behind the rooftops, but the orange glow was still there — he had not gone very far. Hanner took a few more paces, to the corner of Center Avenue, and looked north down the slope, along the broad avenue, past Second Street and Short Street to the plaza at the end of the street, and to the overlord’s palace on the north side of the plaza.

Vond was flying directly over the palace, rising higher and higher. Hanner felt a chill of foreboding.

For any citizen of Ethshar of the Spices, the palace was a symbol of the city’s power, the heart of the government, the overlord’s residence, but for Hanner it was also his childhood home. He had grown up in that place, behind those yellow marble walls. He had played in those stone corridors, dropped pebbles in the surrounding canals, run shouting across the red brick plaza.

And he had family in the palace. His sister Alris was in there, and according to Mavi, his daughter Hala. After seventeen years he didn’t know who else might still be living there, but Alris and Hala — Hala who was now a grown woman, who he had last seen as a little girl, who he had not yet taken time to visit — were inside those walls, beneath that roof. Hanner watched in dread as Vond hung glowing in the sky above the familiar structure.

The warlock stopped rising, a mere glowing dot against the night sky, and although it was hard to be certain at such a distance, Hanner thought he looked down.

Then the ground shook, and Hanner heard the loudest sound of his life, an immense roar as the entire palace shivered, shook, then tore free of its surroundings and began to rise. The shattered remnants of the bridge that crossed the canal from the plaza to the palace door fell, rattling and splashing, as the palace ripped loose. The guards who had stood at the outer end of the bridge ran, arms over their heads, to escape the flying debris, and Hanner stared in open-mouthed horror as the entire palace ascended into the night sky — not merely the three stories above ground, but the huge underlying block of dark, rough stone that Hanner realized must contain the cellars.

The guards at the inner end of the demolished bridge were now perched on a narrow ledge, where they had flattened themselves against the tightly-closed doors to keep from falling to their deaths. Hanner could see that one had dropped his spear, while the other had not.

As the initial indescribable noise faded to the rumble of settling wreckage, Hanner registered that people were screaming all around him, and had been for several seconds; the roar of the palace tearing out of the ground had drowned them out.

He didn’t blame them for screaming. He had never seen anything so frightening — not on the Night of Madness, nor any time since, not even when he first awoke in Aldagmor to see that inexplicable thing in the sky above him, and the other thing in the ground beneath. The very alienness of the Source and the Response had made them less terrifying than this horrible distortion of the World as he knew it.

He had known Vond was powerful. He had heard the stories about how Vond once bent the edge of the World itself, how he built a gigantic palace of his own overnight, magically cutting the walls from bedrock. Hanner had thought he comprehended what a powerful warlock could do; he had seen Rudhira, long ago, pull a literal mountain of water out of the city’s harbor.

None of that had prepared him for this, and he stood frozen to the spot, staring with his mouth open, as the overlord’s palace rose to a height of a few hundred feet, then moved majestically southward, across the plaza and over the mansions of the New City.