Night of Madness loe-7

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Her occupation was obvious, and Hanner was not sufficiently worldly to avoid reacting to it. He was not accustomed to encountering streetwalkers in the Wizards’ Quarter, or anywhere else he went regularly, for that matter. They tended to stay near the gates or docks or in Camptown, none of which he generally frequented.

  “More or less,” he said hastily, trying to cover his embarrassment. “I was in Newmarket, actually, when the trouble started, and I came directly here.”

  “It’s happening in Newmarket, too?” asked a man in gray homespun.

  “In Newmarket and the Old City and Arena-everywhere I’ve looked,” Hanner replied.

  “But you don’t know what’s happening at the Palace?” the streetwalker persisted.

  “Not firsthand, no,” Hanner admitted.

  “We thought it was just Camptown at first,” the man in homespun said. “But then we discovered it was here, too.”

  “We thought it might be some sort of attack on the soldiers,” the redhead added. “Several of them apparently vanished right out of the camp, flying away, and it didn’t seem as if theywanted to. I wondered whether anything had happened to the overlord.”

  That possibility had not occurred to Hanner. “I don’t know,” he said unhappily. “People were breaking into houses and shops in Newmarket, flying about screaming, and I thought that... well, someone said to deal with magic, find a magician, which made good sense, so I came here.”

  “So did we,” the streetwalker said.

  “Rudhira is a regular customer of mine,” Perréa added.

  “She suggested we ask Mother Perréa what we should do,” the man in homespun said. “So about half a dozen of us came here together.”

  Hanner did not see the half dozen described in this particular group; the conversation included only himself, Mother Perréa, the woman in red, the man in homespun, and two young men who had not yet spoken. Perréa, apparently reading his face, said, “When I couldn’t help, the others moved on.”

  “Yorn came with me,” Rudhira said, pointing to the guardsman who was now standing by himself, looking lost. “And that man there; he said his name was Elken.” She pointed at a person in ill-fitting rags who was sitting against the wall of a shop, looking dazed; his hair and beard were so tangled and matted that they obscured most of his face, making it hard for Hanner to judge his age.

  Hanner frowned, trying to think what he should do, what questions he should ask. The soldier’s yellow tunic caught his eye. “That guardsman,” Hanner said. “He’s in uniform. He was on duty when it began? Did he desert his post to come here or was he sent?” “I think he came on his own,” Rudhira said.

  “He should have waited for orders from his captain. The guard should be trying to restore order.”

  “I guess he panicked,” the man in homespun said.

  “Guards aren’t supposed to panic,” Hanner replied.

  “Guards aren’t supposed to be able to fly, either,” Rudhira retorted.

  Hanner turned, startled. “He... what?”

  “Well, not literally fly, in his case,” Perréa said. “At least, I haven’t seen him do it.”

  “All right, not Yorn,” Rudhira said. “But some of the soldiersdid fly; most of the ones who could flew off and didn’t come back. That didn’t happen to Yorn, but that’s why he came here with me-he has the magic, too, but not very strong. He thought it might be a curse or a trap, so he came here for advice.”

  “But he didn’t go mad?”

  Rudhira put her hands on her hips. “Neither did I,” she said.

  Hanner’s mouth opened, then snapped shut.

  “Look,” Rudhira said. She raised her arms and floated gently upward, a foot or so into the air, then sank back to the ground. “Why did youthink I came?”

  “Uh... to find out what was happening,” Hanner said, confused.

  “Yes, exactly,” Rudhira agreed. “But why would I care, if it wasn’t happening tomet”

  Hanner said, “I thought maybe you were robbed or attacked by one of these madmen.”

  “I’d probably be dead if that had happened,” Rudhira said. “I passed at least two corpses on the way here.”

  Hanner closed his eyes and swallowed. He suspected that he had passed at least one himself, but had refused to look closely enough to be sure.

  Then Rudhira’s words registered.“Can you fight back?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she answered. “I can... well, feel it, and make it stop...” She frowned. “I don’t have a good way to describe it.”

  “Of course,” Hanner said. “You never did it before. You aren’t a magician.”

  “Well, she wasn’t one until tonight,” Perréa said. “Now I’m not so sure.”

  “You think this might bepermanent}” Hanner asked. That thought was just as astonishing as the discovery that not all the people affected had turned into rampaging monsters. “It might be,” Perréa said. “I told you we don’t know much about it. We’re just guessing. It seems a little bit like descriptions I’ve heard of something witches used to do sometimes for emergencies during the Great War, where several witches would lock their magic into a single person for some special job-that sort of magic did eventually get used up, and some of the contributing witches could die of exhaustion without ever getting out of their chairs if the war-locked person burned away too much of it, but the personusing the magic could keep on going without getting tired or feeling any strain right up until the last contributing witch died.”

  “So do you think someone somewhere is supplying the magical power forthis war-locking?” Hanner asked. “Will it end when that source dies?”

  Perréa turned up an empty palm. “Who knows? I told you, I’m guessing.”

  “And while we’re guessing, people are dying,” Hanner said. “Things are being smashed and stolen and burned all over the city. We need todo something.” He looked at Rudhira. “Get Yorn, and anyone else who came with you who can use this magic. To deal with magic, find a magician, she said; well, it would seem the ordinary magicians can’t deal with this, but maybeyou can.” He took a deep breath, then said, “As a representative of Azrad, overlord of Ethshar of the Spices, I hereby require you to accompany me and obey me, and I pledge that service will be rewarded.”

  Even as he spoke, Hanner had second thoughts. He always said the wrong thing, he had told Mavi as much a few hours ago. Had he just done it again?

  But somebody did have to do something!

  Rudhira looked at the embroidered silk on Hanner’s shoulders and the bay-leaf sigil on his breast. “He can do that?” she asked Perréa.

  “He’s a lord of the city, so he has the authority, yes,” Perréa said, looking somewhat bemused. “I’d never have expected this of Lord Hanner, though. He’s taking a risk. If he misuses this power he can be beheaded for it-but that’s up to the overlord to decide, not you. For now, the law says you have to obey him.”

  Hanner shuddered at the reminder of the possible consequences-but he was sure now he was doing the right thing, and that his uncle and old Azrad would approve. “Get Yorn and the others,” he told Rudhira. Then he raised his voice and announced to the entire street, “Any of you who can use this new magic, I hereby require you to accompany me and obey me, in the overlord’s name!”

  The hum of conversation stopped, and half a hundred faces turned to look at him.

  “Your services will be rewarded,” he said. “And disobedience will be punished.”

  Though just how he would enforce that if these people could fly and throw things around without touching them, he had no idea.

  Chapter Six

  Throughout the World, as people discovered their new talents, sudden dramas played themselves out. Most of these were quick and ended badly.

  In the Small Kingdoms His Majesty Agravan III, King of Tir-issa, was very drunk as he made his way up the stairs to his apartments, so drunk that one of his bodyguards had to support him. The evening had begun as a celebration of the a
rrival of the new ambassador from Trafoa, but had quickly turned into simply another night of swilling ale with the gentlemen of the court.

  Queen Rulura, until recently a princess of the more straitlaced neighboring kingdom of Hollendon, had, as usual, gotten disgusted with her husband and gone up to bed early. She had married King Agravan for dynastic reasons, and while they generally got along well enough despite the twelve-year difference in their ages, she never pretended to love everything about him. Excessive drinking usually meant a few days of frosty silence between them.

  It was a surprise, therefore, when Agravan found the door of her bedchamber ajar and two lamps burning therein. He signaled to his bodyguards and stumbled over for a closer look.

  “Rulura?” he asked, leaning into the room.

  “Agri!” she called happily, turning to smile at him. She was sitting at her writing desk. “Come in!”

  He took a cautious step into the room. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Look what I can do!” She gestured, and a quill pen floated in midair before her outstretched hand.

  Agravan frowned at it, puzzled-but much less drunk than he had been a moment before.

  “How?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said cheerfully. “I just discovered that I could do it.”

  “It’s magic?”

  “I think it must be, yes.”

  “Rulura, you’re a queen,” Agravan said quietly. “You don’t do magic.”

  “I do now!” she said proudly. “Oh, Agri, think how useful it could be! I can pass things to you where no one can see them, pick things up... I could even be an assassin!” She giggled. “I could go up to someone with empty hands, and then stab him in the back.” “You could,” Agravan said slowly.

  “We could use this, Agri, I know we could. It might not be much of anything, but I’m still learning. If there are other things I can do, this might make Tirissa the most powerful of all the Small Kingdoms!”

  “Ruli,” Agravan said gently, “the Wizards’ Guild forbids kings and queens to use magic.”

  Rulura hesitated. “I thought that was just for wars.”

  “No, the agreement not to fight wars with magic is just good sense, that’s not the Guild’s doing.”

  “Well, I didn’t go out andlearn this,” the queen protested. “It just happened.”

  Agravan nodded. “I’m sure it did,” he said. “Maybe it will go away again. Good night, Ruli.” He stepped back and closed the door.

  Then he beckoned to one of his bodyguards and told him quietly, “Tonight, when she’s asleep, kill her.” He no longer sounded drunk at all.

  “Kill thequeen}” the guard asked, startled.

  “Yes,” Agravan said. “Kill the queen.” He glanced back at the door, hoping this mysterious magic hadn’t given Rulura the ability to hear through a closed door.

  “It’ll mean war with Hollendon, Your Majesty,” the bodyguard warned him. “Are you sure you shouldn’t wait until you’re sober to decide such a thing?”

  “I’m sure,” Agravan said. “We can’t afford to wait. You heard what she said about putting a knife in someone’s back. She might well put one inmy back, if she thinks she can use her magic to get away with it. There’s areason the Wizards’ Guild won’t allow anyone of royal blood to learn magic.”

  “She’s just levitating pens,” the guard protested.

  “So farit’s just pens. I’m not going to risk waiting. You have your orders.”

  The bodyguard sighed. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said.

  An hour later the only member of any royal family in the Small Kingdoms to have become a warlock became a corpse, eliminating any possible threat to the Guild’s prohibitions on mixing magic and government.

  In one small village in Aldagmor, easternmost and most mountainous of the Baronies of Sardiron, an old woman named Kara had hidden in her wardrobe when the screaming and other noises began. Now that everything had been quiet for a time she finally emerged, looking around cautiously by the dim moonlight.

  Everything appeared normal. She lit a lamp and saw that her bedroom was undamaged. The village was quiet.

  The village was, she thought,too quiet. After all the commotion before she would have expected her neighbors to be gossiping in the road, but she couldn’t hear any voices through her open window. She threw on a shawl-even in midsummer the night breeze could be cool on the slopes of the mountains-and hurried through the other room of her cottage, out into the center of the village.

  It was utterly deserted.

  She looked around at the other houses. Some were intact, untouched and dark.

  Others were just as dark, but far from intact. The greenhouse at the east end of the cottage where Imirin the Herbalist lived had been smashed to bits. Half the roof was gone from her brother Karn’s house. And Elner’s house was gone completely.

  “Hai!” she called. “What happened?”

  No one answered. The only sound was the gentle sighing of the night wind in the trees.

  Frightened, Kara began searching the village house by house, looking for some sign of life, someone who could tell her what had happened.

  She found no one. Doors were unlocked, many standing open, even in the intact houses, so she was able to investigate thoroughly. Every remaining bed was empty; no one replied to her cries.

  Finally, she stood in the center of the village again, certain she was the only person left there, alive or dead.

  She had found footprints leading southeast. She had noticed that the open doors, broken walls, missing roofs, and so on were all on the east or south. She looked in that direction, into the darkness of the night, and saw nothing.

  For a moment she thought of following, of walking southeast in search of her missing friends and family. The urge grew, huge and irrational, and she took a step.

  Then she caught herself. She hadn’t survived seventy-three northern winters by acting on impulse or following blindly after other people. Something haddrawn the villagers in that direction, and now it was belatedly trying to drawher, and she wasn’t going.

  She turned and began marching determinedly northwest. She chose that direction simply because it was the opposite of the direction everyone else had taken, but she knew it was also taking her the first few steps toward Sardiron of the Waters, thirty leagues away, where the Council of Barons met. If nothing intervened, she intended to walk the entire way and ask the Council for succor.

  It would take at least a sixnight to walk that far, but after all, she had no further obligations here. And in Ethshar of the Rocks, the smallest, westernmost, and most northerly of the three great cities of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, a man named Shemder Parl’s son stood at the window of his rented room, watching the lunatics in the street below.

  He had awakened from a nightmare, sweating and shaking, and when he reached for the pitcher beside his bed he discovered that he had somehow acquired magical abilities, that he could move things without touching them. He heard the commotion in the streets and went to the window to see what was happening.

  He stood there, watching and listening and thinking, for some time.

  There were others who had received the same magic, and they were out there running wild, stealing things and smashing windows and setting fires, shouting about the end of the World, many of them flying off to the east.

  Shemder thought they were fools.

  This wasn’t the end of the World. The faint sensation in his head urging him to go east was a feeble annoyance, at most. Smashing and stealing was too loud, too obvious, too blatant. Sooner or later the overlord’s guards or the established magicians would organize, recover, and deal harshly with those idiots. The magic would surely pass-the spell would wear off, or some damnable high-ranking wizard would find a way to remove it-and then those rampaging morons would be rounded up and flogged or hanged. They would have wasted the opportunity of a lifetime.

  Shemder was not about to waste his one unexpecte
d chance at revenge.

  He had been planning it all out, step by step. He would start with his landlady. He wouldn’t touch her, but she would fall down the cellar stairs and crack her skull on the stone steps.

  The magic would ensure that.

  And then his brother Neran, who had gone from a childhood of bullying to an adulthood of rubbing Shemder’s nose in Neran’s success as a woodcarver and Shemder’s own failure to ever be anything more than a stevedore at the Bywater docks, poor Neran would fall on one of his own knives.

  That witch DГ©tha of Hillside who had refused to accept Shemder as an apprentice all those years ago, and who kept telling him he needed to find his own path-shewould find her own path, right off the cliffs at the end of Fortress Street, onto the rocks at low tide.

  Falissa and Kirris and Lura and all the other women who had refused him over the years-some hearts would burst, some women would mysteriously choke to death.

  The magistrate who had sentenced Shemder to three lashes for stealing that statuette from the Tintallionese ship last year-hewas on the list, along with the ship captain who noticed the loss in the first place.

  Shemder doubted the magic would last long enough to finish the list. It was along list.

  And, he decided, he had spent enough time just thinking about it. It was time to start doing it, to see just how far down the list he could get before the magic stopped. The idea thatbe might be stopped before the magic was didn’t occur to him; he wasn’t a fool like those people running in the streets.

  Hewas going to use his giftright, he told himself as he opened the door and called for the landlady.

  Who could stop him?