Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Unwelcome Warlock

“What did you do?” Kolar demanded.

“I ruined the tapestry,” Hanner said.

“You killed Vond!” Marl shouted.

“I most certainly did not!” Hanner shouted back. “If I had meant to kill him, why would I have cut the tapestry and trapped all of us here?”

“Kill him, Kolar!” Marl yelled.

Kolar kept his sword in position, but did not advance. Instead he eyed Hanner thoughtfully. “Was Vond right? What he said about you thinking you can get us out of here?”

“More or less,” Hanner said. “I think my sisters will look for me, and find some way to get us all back to Ethshar.”

“Who was that?” Kolar asked. “The woman who attacked Vond?”

“Her name is Rudhira of Camptown,” Hanner said. “She’s another of the Called.”

“Why did she do it?”

“You’ll have to ask her. I don’t know.”

“I should kill you for what you did.”

“Maybe,” Hanner said, “but if you do, you’ll be hurting your chances of ever getting home. And Vond won’t be paying you now – he doesn’t have any allies to make good on his debts once he’s dead.”

Hanner had managed to keep his voice steady as he spoke, though he was not sure how he had done it – perhaps he had been so certain that Vond was about to kill him that Kolar’s threat carried little weight by comparison. Now he met Kolar’s gaze, looking him directly in the eye, just as he had Vond. If he was about to die after all, at least he could still do so with dignity.

“ You won’t make good his debts?”

The question caught Hanner by surprise. His eyes flicked very briefly to the rest of the room, to see how the other swordsmen were taking this, then back to Kolar. “How much did he promise you?” he asked. “I don’t have much money of my own, but my sisters are wealthy; we might be able to work out a partial payment of some sort.”

Kolar was still considering when someone called, “That sounds good enough to me!”

“He ruined the tapestry that would have gotten us all home!” a new voice protested.

“It wasn’t working,” another voice retorted. “We don’t know if it ever would have worked again.”

At that the whole room seemed to break out in argument.

As swordsmen and refugees debated Hanner’s fate, the Great Vond, emperor of Semma and the Vondish Empire, died there on the floor. The crude attempts to help him had been too little, too late – though in fact, it was unlikely anything but powerful magic could have saved him. Even if something had stopped the bleeding, the blow to the head had cracked his skull and might have been fatal on its own.

For several moments it appeared Hanner might follow him, but in the end, no one really wanted Hanner dead. If he had been run through immediately it would probably have been accepted as a reasonable response, but no one had the heart to kill him in cold blood long after the tapestry was ruined and Vond was dead.

If Rudhira had been present, providing a more appropriate target, matters might have been different, but by the time anyone thought to attempt pursuit she had vanished completely. Hanner hoped that she was all right, wherever she might be.

And while he did not care to admit any approval of her methods, he knew she had probably saved the World a great deal of trouble.

Zallin stared at the tapestry in the fourth-floor bedroom, but kept his distance. He did not understand exactly how the spell worked, and had no intention of getting close enough to risk suddenly learning more.

Vond had vanished through that thing, and had left Zallin in charge in his absence – but he hadn’t given Zallin any magic, and how was he supposed to be in charge without magic? He wasn’t a lord, with a family history of authority. He wasn’t a guardsman, with weapons and training in giving orders. Zallin had only ever had the ability to command anything when he was a warlock. If Vond had made him a warlock again…

But Vond hadn’t given anyone access to his new kind of warlockry. He had claimed that he would, in time, but he hadn’t yet. He had gone adventuring off through the tapestry without giving anyone the means to keep order in his absence.

In fact, Zallin was beginning think Vond would never teach anyone else to use the Lumeth source. He would keep dangling it just out of reach.

Zallin was also beginning to wonder whether he really even wanted his magic back, if it was conditional on being Vond’s underling. He wanted to be a warlock again, yes, very much, but he wanted to be the kind of warlock he had always been – a respected magician, a normal part of Ethshar’s society, someone people hired to do things that could not be done without magic. He didn’t want to be a servant to a madman who was terrorizing the city, feuding with witches and wizards and antagonizing the overlord.

Most of all, he didn’t want to hurt anybody.

He had seen Vond throwing people around. He had seen the palace hanging in the air above the city. Vond didn’t care who he hurt, or what damage he did. Zallin did not consider himself a soft-hearted weakling – when he happened to observe a thief’s flogging, he had applauded justice being done, and he didn’t regret seeing murderers hanged. That was all part of the way the World worked. The sort of casual violence that Vond displayed, though, was not justice, it was brutality. Claiming Warlock House for his own, ordering everyone out – it wasn’t right.

Zallin had stayed on, putting up with Vond’s behavior, tolerating his…his evil, in hopes of getting his own warlockry back, but now that he had had time to do some serious thinking about this, and some serious drinking to try to make it work out, he was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that if serving Vond was required to be a warlock again, it wasn’t worth it. Not even if the oushka held out, which didn’t look likely.

Right now Vond was on the other side of that tapestry, but he might reappear at any time and start ordering Zallin to run his errands again, and Zallin did not want to run the emperor’s errands.

Sterren had not wanted to serve Vond anymore, so he had simply disappeared. He had taken his luggage and vanished into the city streets. Vond had complained and called Sterren a traitor, but he had not done anything about it. He had not gone looking for Sterren, or demanded his return. Several of the other former warlocks who had initially pledged to obey Vond had also quietly slipped away. No one had wanted to be purser or envoy for the emperor; they had wanted to be warlocks. When it began to look as if, despite his promises, Vond wasn’t ever going to permit that, they had left.

If Zallin disappeared in the same fashion, would Vond do anything more? Zallin could not see why he would. Vond didn’t care about him; Vond didn’t care about anyone but himself. He wanted a few people around to run his errands, but he didn’t care whether it was Sterren, or Hanner, or Zallin, or Gerath who ran them, just so long as someone did.

In fact, now that he had his band of sword-wielding hirelings, Vond would probably find Zallin more of a nuisance than a help, and anyone Vond considered a nuisance was likely to wind up injured or dead. Zallin thought bitterly that Vond’s chief bully-boy Gerath was more likely to become a new warlock than he was.

The time had come, Zallin decided, to get out, while he had the chance. He turned and headed for the stairs.

A few moments later he was in the room he had been using since Vond usurped the master’s chamber, where he was gathering his belongings into bags and bundles. The entire time he was packing he was listening nervously for sounds from upstairs, for any hint that Vond had returned. He was ready to make a run for it without his baggage, if necessary.