Witchcraft was versatile and adaptable, but limited. It just didn’t do anything as impressive as the other magics. No witch ever moved a mountain or flattened a city, but wizards had reportedly done both. Warlocks could call up storms, shatter walls, strike foes dead with a glance, set the very ground ablaze; wizards seemed to be able to do absolutely anything if they could find the proper spell; but witches were far more limited. A witch could light a fire in an instant, but only in a proper fuel. A witch could open a locked door, but not shatter one. A witch could predict a storm, but not bring one.
What use his three witches would be in battle, Sterren was not quite sure, but he thought they would be far better than any ordinary warriors.
Sorcerers, with their prepared talismans that could be used instantly, seemed much like wizards, though perhaps a little less impressive. He wondered what Phenvel had against them.
Herbalists might be very useful if the war was lost, for treating the wounded, but unless one were to poison Ophkar’s water supply, Sterren could not see much use for an herbalist in battle. The various other specialties likewise seemed too narrow in scope. What good was an oneiromancer, for example, if nobody happened to have any dreams?
So he had his three witches, his two wizards, and his nameless warlock, and ninety-three fighting men. He hoped it would be enough.
After all, his life depended on it.
PART TWO
War
CHAPTER 18
Sterren stood shivering beside the right-hand draft horse and stared miserably through the rain and gloom at the distant glow of the campfires and the looming black shape of Semma Castle. The mare’s breath puffed up in clouds from her nostrils, and Sterren could smell her sweat. Raindrops pattered heavily on the old wagon that he had bought in Akalla, on the driver’s seat he had just abandoned, and on the hooded heads of the six magicians huddled in the back. The four Semmans, on their own mounts, were clustered nearby.
“I thought they’d wait until spring,” he said again.
Lady Kalira replied, “We all did. They always waited before.” Her tone was flat and dead. Sterren was grateful that she was not castigating him for refusing to buy a storm to speed their journey; it was bad enough that he was cursing himself for it.
“I guess one of their warlords must have as little respect for tradition as I do,” he said resignedly.
“Or maybe,” Alder suggested, “they heard you were gone and figured that it would be a good time to attack, when you weren’t there to lead us.”
“More likely they found out he was fetching these damned magicians and they wanted to take the castle before they could get here,” Dogal muttered.
Sterren ignored that and tried to think what to do.
A selfish part of him suggested turning around and heading back to Akalla. After all, through no fault of his own he had been cut off from the castle and its defenders. If he left, who could say he had failed in his duty? He glanced up at Lady Kalira, sitting astride her horse. She could, for one, and he could accuse himself, as well. He had gone and fetched magicians to fight his war; well, here he was, here were his magicians, and here was the war, a little sooner than he had expected, perhaps, but so what?
All he had to do was figure out how to use the magicians he had hired. He had to at least make the attempt after coming this far, he told himself.
If he tried and failed, if the castle fell anyway, then he could flee in good conscience, and even Lady Kalira could not fault him.
First, though, he had to try to defeat the enemy. But how was he supposed to do that with his six sorry magicians?
“What do we do now?” Annara called from the wagon in Ethsharitic, echoing his own thoughts. She glanced at the deserted farmhouse off to the party’s left, as if expecting monsters to leap from it at any minute.
“Are you sure it’s really the enemy besieging the castle and not just a festival of some sort?” one of the witches asked in the same tongue; Sterren did not see if it was Hamder or Ederd and could not yet distinguish them by voice.
He did not bother to reply to the witch, but after a moment he told Annara, “That’s up to you people. This is what I hired you for, after all, to fight this stupid war. I’d say that your first job is to break the siege.” He did not say how, of course, since he didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about it.
“In the rain?” Shenna of Chatna wailed.
The other two witches shushed her.
“Don’t tell me to shut up!” she shouted. “I’m cold and I’m wet and I don’t like this place and I wish I’d never come here!”
Hamder and Ederd exchanged unhappy glances; then Ederd, in the rear of the wagon and out of Shenna’s sight, raised his hands in a curious embracing gesture.
Shenna abruptly fell silent, but her expression was still one of abject misery.
The Semmans watched all this uncomprehendingly; none of them had picked up much Ethsharitic in the twelve days of the return voyage, and the magicians had not had time to learn much Semmat. All six magicians had preferred relying on Sterren as their translator to struggling with the unfamiliar tongue, and as a result he now saw the wisdom of Lady Kalira’s ban on Ethsharitic during his own first voyage south. He had been forced to learn Semmat in order to make himself understood; the magicians were picking up a few words, at least, some of them were, but only as a sideline, not as a matter of survival.
Forbidding the crew to speak Ethsharitic, or refusing to use it himself, would not have made much difference, since the six magicians had each other to talk to. Besides, he hadn’t noticed the problem until after they reached Akalla of the Diamond. Once he had noticed, he had thought he could safely leave it until the party reached Semma Castle.
And now, of course, it was too late, and they might never reach the castle at all.
He had just said that breaking the siege, if siege it actually was, was up to the magicians. Shenna’s outburst, however, had not been followed by any suggestions from any of the others. They were all waiting for him to tell them what to do.
He suppressed a sigh. What had he done, he wondered, to deserve this? Why did he have to be in charge?
Sterren observed the witches silently for a moment, then beckoned to Hamder.
The young witch clambered over the side of the wagon, dropped to the mud, and splashed over to the shelter of the farmhouse eaves. Sterren joined him there.
“Witches can read minds, can’t they?” Sterren asked.
Hamder hesitated. “Sometimes,” he admitted.
“Well, right there two leagues ahead of us are a few hundred minds, I’d say, and I’d like to know what some of them are thinking and planning. I’d like to be sure just who we’re facing, for one thing; is that both Ophkar and Ksinallion there, or did one of them decide to get the jump on the other? If one of them tried a sneak attack, then maybe we can swing the other over to our side after all, despite King Phenvel.”
Hamder looked distinctly unhappy. “My lord Sterren-” he began.
“Oh, forget the ’lord’ stuff, when we’re speaking Ethsharitic!” Sterren interrupted. He had grown accustomed to hearing the title in Semmat, but it still sounded silly in Ethsharitic.
“Yes, my... yes, sir. As I was saying, I doubt I’ll be able to learn much. None of those people out there are going to be thinking in Ethsharitic.”
Sterren stared at him. “Thinking in Ethsharitic?”
“Yes, sir. After all, people do tend to think in words, or at least the same concepts that we use words for, and those are different in different languages.”
“So you can’t read minds unless you know the right language?”
Hamder nodded, then stopped himself. “Well, there are exceptions. If you’re up close to someone and paying close attention, you can usually start to pick up the underlying concepts after a while. In fact, that’s how we witches learn other languages so quickly...”
“You learn other languages quickly?”
“Of cour
se! Witches are famous for the gift of tongues!”
“I haven’t heard you speaking Semmat.”
Hamder’s mouth opened, then closed. “Oh,” he said. After a moment’s pause, he asked, “Were we supposed to? I didn’t think there was any hurry.”
“It might have been nice,” Sterren pointed out. “I don’t particularly enjoy translating back and forth for everybody, especially when I don’t know Semmat all that well myself, yet.”
“Oh.” Hamder was obviously embarrassed. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Never mind that.” Sterren brushed it away. “Can you tell me anything about whoever’s around all those campfires, or can’t you?”
“I... I... I don’t know, sir. Probably not, from this distance.”
“You have my permission to go closer, witch.”
Hamder glanced at the distant campfires, then back at Sterren. “Ah... could it wait until morning? They’re liable to be a bit nervous at night...”
Sterren sighed. “They’re presumably fighting a war; they’re liable to be a bit nervous any time. But never mind, at least for now.” He started to turn away, then paused.
“The other witches, I assume that they would give me the same answers?”
“I think so, sir, but I can’t be certain. We do have our specialties.”
Sterren nodded and waved in dismissal. Hamder sloshed away, back to the wagon; Sterren stayed where he was and gestured for Emner, his second wizard, to join him.
Emner slid from the wagon and slogged up beside him.
“You’re a wizard, right?”
Emner nodded, cautiously.
“Wizardry can do just about anything, right?”
“Given the right conditions, the right materials, and the right spell,” Emner replied judiciously, “wizardry appears to be capable of almost anything.”
“But you, yourself, are limited in what you can do, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Emner answered immediately, “very limited.”
Sterren nodded. “Over there,” he said, waving an arm in the direction of Semma Castle, “It appears that there is a hostile army besieging the castle that I hired you to defend. I don’t know what the situation is, but that’s how it appears. Is there anything you can do about it?”
Emner considered this carefully. He gazed thoughtfully at the distant campfires, then looked up at the sky. He moistened a finger and held it up to check the wind, then scanned the eastern horizon.
“I don’t know,” he said, finally. “I know a few spells I thought would be useful in a war, but I don’t see how any would help in the present situation. If the wind were behind us, I could levitate and drift over that way, with a magical shield under me in case I were spotted, to see what’s happening, but the wind’s awfully light and from the north, and I’d need to go east. I don’t have a spell for directional flight. I know a spell that can stun a man and make him somewhat suggestible, so that if we could catch someone alone I might well coax truth from even a reluctant tongue, but I can’t think... Hmm...” His voice trailed off.
Sterren waited patiently, and after a pause Emner continued, “I have another spell. I never thought it would be any help, but it might serve here, after all. I can make a stone or a stick whistle, from a distance, hardly a valuable talent, I’d have said, and I certainly chafed at being forced to practice it as an apprentice. Now, though, perhaps I can lure someone over with a whistle, stun him, and question him.”
Sterren nodded, considering. “You’re sure you can do that?”
Emner hesitated, then said, “Reasonably sure.”
“Could Annara do it?”
“No.” Emner did not hesitate at all this time.
“Why not?” Sterren asked, genuinely curious.
Emner blinked, then slowly replied, “I am not sure it’s my place to say.”
“Oh, go ahead,” Sterren said, annoyed.
Emner paused, as if thinking out his words in advance, and then said, “I suppose you know that Annara had been sleeping out in the Hundred-Foot Field and hadn’t eaten for two or three days when you found her.”
“I suspected as much,” Sterren acknowledged.
“Well, it’s so,” Emner said. “She told me, as a fellow Guild member. Naturally, I was curious about how she came to be reduced to that, and she was glad to have a chance to discuss her situation with a fellow wizard. It seems that although she is a true wizard, served the full apprenticeship required by the Guild, and was initiated into the Guild’s mysteries, she never managed to master more than a handful of simple spells. Her master only knew a dozen or so, and she found herself unable to manage some of those, including the ones that provided most of his small income. The spells she did learn, well, they’re real enough, and they have their places, but they aren’t exactly marketable. There isn’t any demand for them, as a rule. And I can’t see how they could be of any use at all in the present situation.”
“You didn’t think your own could help, at first. Perhaps I should ask Annara directly; after all, she’s surely more familiar with the possibilities of her magic than you are.”
Emner shrugged. “Maybe. We’ve agreed to trade spells and better both our positions, but to be honest, I think I agreed to that as much from pity as from my own self-interest. Her spells... Well, for instance, what use is there to an invisibility spell that only works on transparent objects?”
“Transparent objects?”
“Yes, transparent. Water, ice, glass, and so on.”
Sterren nodded. “I see your point. It’s an interesting idea, though, that invisibility spell. What if you were to make weapons out of glass, and then enchant them?”
Emner considered that. “I’m not sure how it works, but you’re right, that might be interesting. Hard to parry a glass sword, I suppose, but easy to break one.”
“I was thinking of glass arrows. You wouldn’t know where they’re coming from.”
Emner nodded slowly.
“Well,” Sterren said, after a moment’s silent thought, “that’s not doing us any good right now, is it? We don’t have a glassmaker’s oven at hand. Thank you for your help, wizard, and if you would go back and send me the warlock, I’d appreciate it.”
Emner bowed slightly in acknowledgment, then trotted back to the wagon and hauled himself back aboard. A moment later the warlock strode up beside Sterren. He wore a heavy black cloak and hood against the rain, and had it pulled well forward, hiding his face completely. Sterren found himself speaking to an oval of black shadow.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Terrible,” the warlock replied, through clenched teeth.
“Oh?” The warlock had been complaining of headaches and constant fatigue since the third day aboard ship. He had also taken to sleeping long hours, he was always the first to retire at night and the last to awaken. The morning after leaving Akalla he had to be hoisted into the wagon still half asleep and had almost fallen out twice since then.
But at least, Sterren thought, there had been no sign of nightmares.
“My head feels as if it’s going to burst.”
“Oh.” Sterren made a sympathetic noise. “Ah... are you aware of the situation here?”
“No.”
Sterren waited for a moment, expecting him to go on.
“No?” he said at last.
“No. Should I be?”
“I think so, yes.”
“All right, then, what’s the situation?”
“Well, over there is Semma Castle, which is what we all came here to defend. And all around it there appear to be campfires and what look like tents, sentries, siege machinery, and so forth. What’s more, judging by this house behind us and the others we passed in the last league or two, the peasants in the area appear to have fled their homes. I would assume that what we see here are the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion, besieging the castle, but I am not actually certain of that. I called you up here in hopes you might be able to help me settle the matter.”
Sterren nodded. “That’s right.”
The warlock snorted. “How the hell should I know?” he demanded.
“You’re a warlock, aren’t you?” Sterren asked calmly.
“That’s right, I’m a warlock, I’m not a damned mind-reading witch, or a wizard with a scrying spell, or a sorcerer with a crystal ball, or a theurgist with a god whispering in my ear, or even a demonologist with an imp to run my errands! I can do things, or I could back in Ethshar, anyway, but I don’t have any way of knowing any more about what’s out there than you do.”
“Do you have any way of finding out? Could you fly over and take a look around, perhaps?”
The warlock was silent for a long moment, the only sounds the patter of the rain and the snuffling of the horses a dozen paces away.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I know how to fly, certainly, but I’m so weak here...” He took two steps away, then stood, arms raised, hood thrown back, face up.
He seemed to shudder, from his head right down to his muddy boots; his cloak flapped suddenly, although there was no more wind than a moment before.
Then he toppled over backward into the mud.
Sterren hesitated, then decided against lending aid.
The warlock got to his feet under his own power, then glared at Sterren and shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I can’t fly here.”
Sterren nodded. “All right,” he said. He turned back to face the rest of the party, where the others had watched the warlock’s pratfall in puzzled silence.
“We’ll stay here until morning!” he called, first in Ethsharitic, and then in Semmat, pointing at the empty farmhouse.
“Then what?” Lady Kalira called back to him.
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