Lawrence Watt-Evans: The Unwelcome Warlock

“It’s dug down to the first warlocks, then?”

Chanden turned. “Oh. I guess it has, yes.”

Sensella was not sure why, but that troubled her. The Response, whatever it was, must be almost down to the source of the Call. She looked down and was suddenly aware that she was standing on nothing, perhaps a hundred feet up.

She had done that dozens, maybe hundreds of times since the Night of Madness. She had flown for miles without feeling any worry, but now it troubled her. She swooped down, eager to get back on solid ground. She landed perhaps fifty feet from the mound and turned – just as the next big change came.

The first had been when the flying thing had appeared out of nowhere and she had felt the Response; the second had been when it started burrowing down into the mound, flinging warlocks aside.

And the third was when the spell holding the immense mound of people together suddenly stopped.

The change was abrupt, completely unheralded – one instant the pile of people was motionless, undetectable to warlock senses, magically frozen in time, and the next instant they were awake and aware of their surroundings, aware of being trapped in a gigantic three-dimensional mob. They were writhing and screaming, spilling outward in all directions, trying to get out before they were smothered or crushed.

“It’s all right!” Sensella shouted, using her magic to snatch the nearest person out of the seething mass. “You’re safe! Just use your magic!” She pulled a second person free, and a third, dropping them unceremoniously on the grass a few yards away from the suddenly-expanding ball of screaming, crying warlocks.

The mound collapsed and vanished, and still people came spilling out, flying, running, walking, jumping, or crawling. The mound was gone, and in its place was a pit, and the pit was jammed full of people.

Sensella was not the only one helping; dozens of other warlocks were calling reassurances and pulling panicky people to safety. The crowd surrounding the pit extended for a hundred yards in every direction and was still expanding, and hundreds or even thousands of warlocks were flying above, as well.

Sensella looked up at the swarm of warlocks with an inexplicable sense of foreboding. She didn’t know why, but she was absolutely certain this was a bad time to be flying. “Get down!” she called. “It’s not safe up there!”

Still more people were clambering or flying out of the pit. Sensella could not see it through the crowd anymore, but she could sense it magically now, and she knew it was deep, very deep – the people at the bottom needed their magic to get out.

Thank the gods that only warlocks heard the Call; every one here had the magic they needed to escape.

Some of them, though, might not know it – if they had been among the very first, drawn away on the Night of Madness, they might have no idea how to control their power, how to use their warlockry to do anything other than answer the Call. Sensella was no longer close enough to be heard, or to reach anyone in the pit with her own magic when there was so much other power seething in the air, but she could sense that others were helping. The pit was mostly empty now.

Then the fourth change came.

The Calling stopped. With staggering abruptness, the constant demand, the need to come to this place that had filled every head, was simply gone.

And with that, the warlocks’ magic vanished.

Hanner awoke suddenly to find himself trapped in a mass of humanity, pressed in on all sides by other people. Instinctively, he pushed out with his magic, trying to clear himself a little breathing room, only to find himself pushed in on every side by magic as strong as his own.

He could still hear the Calling, summoning him forward, but the people ahead of him were packed too tightly to move. Maybe if he went around, he thought – around, or over. He tried to move himself upward, and was able burst free. He was still in the midst of a crowd, but no longer in danger of being crushed.

The Call wanted him to come to it, but there was something else, something new, coming from somewhere overhead, something that let him know the Call was already answered. He tried to make sense of that.When he looked up, he could see only a swarm of flying warlocks against a glowing background, a background that he could not see properly even when there was no one in the way.

What was going on ?

He was vaguely aware of screaming, of human voices calling on all sides.

What was going on? He tried to remember how he had gotten here, wherever “here” was. He had been in Arvagan’s shop; he had looked over the tapestry he had ordered, and then he had stepped through it into the refuge, and the Calling had stopped. He had looked around, taken a leisurely stroll on legs he hadn’t used properly for years, and then he had stepped back out, into the attic of Warlock House -

And the Calling had caught him off-guard, and he had flown away to Aldagmor. He had a vague memory of soaring over the city wall and out past the trade villages and farm markets, past farms and across the Great River, over more farms, and grassland, and forest, and hills, and then he had come swooping down, and there had been something ahead of him, but he didn’t bother to look, and…and here he was.

What happened ?

In all the hours he had spent trying to imagine what the source of the Calling might be, he had never pictured being packed in a great mass of people, like seeds in a pod. Had the people somehow generated the magical summons? But that didn’t match the images everyone had seen on the Night of Madness, or in their dreams once they began to feel the Call.

He needed to get clear, to see what was happening. Ordinarily he would have gone up, but that great glowing thing that filled the sky worried him. Instead, he veered sideways.

That glowing thing – was that the source of the Calling, the source of warlockry?

No, he could sense that it wasn’t. The Calling came from below; the answer to it came from the glowing thing. He flew sideways, slipping through narrow gaps in the tangle of limbs around him, looking for clear air.

And then the Call stopped, and his magic disappeared, and he found himself falling. He stretched out his arms to catch himself, and collided with a woman, but she was falling, too; he bounced from her to someone else, and then to other people, but they were all falling, they had all lost their magic.

He landed heavily on a pile of bodies, and someone else immediately landed on top of him, knocking the breath from his lungs. Hanner flung up his hands to shield his head.

The Calling was gone, just as it had been in the refuge the wizards had made for him. Could something have transported them all into another world?

People were still screaming, and he could feel the people around him writhing and struggling to get free of the immense heap of fallen bodies, but the volume of sound was less now – Hanner no longer heard or felt the thump of more people landing atop him.

But then there was a new sound, and a vibration, a shaking, like nothing he had ever felt before. He tried to turn, to see what was happening, and someone slid aside just in time to give him a view of the sky, and of that huge glowing thing that hung above them all. Thus he saw the other thing as it rose up from below, pulled up out of the ground by its airborne companion.

He recognized it. He had seen it in his dreams, and especially in his nightmares, for years, though he could never have described it or put a name to it. This was the thing that had fallen out of the sky on the Night of Madness, the thing that had plunged, fiery and screaming, down into the earth, blasting a great pit into the heart of Aldagmor. The pit had fallen in on it, the fire had damaged it, and it had been trapped there.