Night of Madness loe-7

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “I do know how it is,” Hanner agreed, “but this one is true. Lord Faran is dead.”

  “The wizards killed him?” “Yes.”

  “I’m very sorry, my lord.” He sounded quite sincere. Hanner could feel his throat tightening as he replied, “Thank you.” He blinked, just to make sure no tears would escape, and said, “Might I ask you a question in return?” “Of course, my lord.”

  “Just what is the situation here? A couple of days ago the overlord wasn’t allowinganyone into the Palace, for fear warlocks would get in, but here you’ve let Al... Lady Alris and Bern in. Has the order been rescinded?”

  “Yes, it has,” the guard said. “Last night. After all, those warlocks made it pretty clear yesterday that if they wanted to get in we couldn’t stop them, and if we’re going to have workmen in to repair the damage, and magicians in to make sure it doesn’t happen again, well, we can’t keepeveryone out. So we’re back to the old rules-anyone with business in the Palace, or who knows the password, is allowed in.”

  Hanner nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. He resisted the temptation to add that that made it all the more surprising Lord Azrad had agreed to it. “If you heard about my uncle’s death, did you hear anything about who is to replace him as the overlord’s chief advisor?”

  The two soldiers glanced at each other. “There’s talk that Lord Ildirin will be promoted,” one said.

  “Or Lord Karannin,” the other added.

  “Or even Lord Azrad the Younger,” said the first.

  “So he intends to keep it in the family, then?”

  “I don’t think he trusts anyone else anymore.”

  “Except us, of course, but we aren’t courtiers.”

  Hanner grimaced. “Of course,” he agreed. “And do you know what Lord Azrad intends to do about the warlocks?”

  The soldiers looked at each other again.

  “I don’t think we can talk about that,” one said. “After all, you were with those warlocks, and they might be listening in with their magic.”

  Hanner smiled. “Warlocks can’t do that,” he said. “Their magic doesn’t work that way.”

  The guardsman turned up a palm. “I wouldn’t know, my lord. I’m not sureanyone really knows what a warlock can and can’t do, when they’re so new.”

  “Better to be safe,” the other added. “Has anyone said anything about me?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, my lord.”

  The other didn’t answer with words, but raised an empty hand.

  “Well, thank you,” Hanner said. He could see Alris looking angrily impatient, and Bern looking worried. He pointed at Bern. “I can attest that this man is Lord Faran’s housekeeper, and at least as of yesterday he wasn’t a warlock. Unless someone turned him into one overnight, I assume he still isn’t.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” The guard glanced at his companion. “I suppose we’ll be going, then.”

  “Good enough,” Hanner said. “Thank you for escorting them here.”

  The two soldiers both essayed quick little bows, then turned and marched off while Hanner unlocked the door to the family’s rooms.

  “You heard about Uncle Faran?” Nerra asked.

  “Yes,” Alris said. “It soundshorrible! Poor Uncle Faran!”

  “It was quick,” Hanner said as he swung the door open and stood aside to let the others in.

  When they were all inside, and the door closed, Hanner said, “I assume you’re here, Alris, simply because you wanted to come home-but, Bern, why areyou here? Are the warlocks throwing out everyone who isn’t one of them?”

  Alris and Bern exchanged glances. “No, my lord,” Bern said. “I’m afraid we’re here with bad news, and... well, we need your advice.”

  Hanner’s stomach began to hurt. “More bad news?” he said. “It isn’t enough that Uncle Faran and Rudhira and Varrin are all gone?”

  “It’s about the wizard,” Alris said as she settled onto a chair.

  “Ithinia?”

  “No, no,” Bern said quickly. “Manrin the Mage.”

  “What about him?”

  “We found him dead in his bed this morning,” Bern said. “That apprentice wizard, Ulpen, says that he was killed by wizardry for refusing an order from the masters of the Wizards’ Guild.”

  Hanner considered this for a moment, then asked, “And how does Ulpen know this?”

  “The Guild sent him a dream,” Alris said. “With the same order. Only he obeyed.”

  That more or less made sense; Hanner had heard the Spell of Invaded Dreams described, though he had never experienced it directly. “What was the order?” “He won’t say,” Bern replied.

  “But he says he’s not a wizard anymore,” Alris added. “Not even an apprentice. He’s just a warlock.”

  Hanner’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

  Alris turned up a palm. “That’s what hesaid.”

  Hanner nodded. It made sense. The Wizards’ Guild was enforcing its rules, as they had with Uncle Faran-no hereditary nobles could use magic, and no one could use more than one kind of magic.

  Manrin and Ulpen hadn’tasked for a second kind of magic, so the Guild had offered a choice-give up one, or die. And there was no way to give up warlockry.

  Apparently there was a way to give up wizardry. That was interesting, if not particularly useful information.

  And while news of Manrin’s death was also interesting, and somewhat distressing, Hanner had hardly known the old man and did not quite see what it had to do withhim. He was about to say so when there was a knock on the door.

  “I’ll get it,” Alris said, bouncing up from her chair.

  She opened the door, and Hanner heard a familiar voice say, “Alris? You’re home?”

  “Mavi!” Nerra said, rising from the window seat. “Come in!”

  Alris ushered Mavi in, where Nerra embraced her. Hanner smiled at the sight of her, but did not touch her.

  “Good morning, Mavi,” he said.

  “Hanner!” She smiled a broad, bright smile at him. “It’s good to see you back where you belong. I heard they were letting people into the Palace again, so I came to see how Nerra was doing-I should have realized you’d be here, too!” Then she noticed the other man and looked questioningly at Hanner.

  “Bern was about to explain why he came,” Hanner said. He looked at the servant expectantly.

  “Oh,” Bern said. He glanced at Mavi, then said, “It’s simple enough, my lord. With your uncle’s death, you are now the owner of the house at the corner of High Street and Coronet, and therefore my employer. I came to discuss the nature and terms of my further employment there, if any, and your plans for the property.”

  “Lord Faran is dead?” Mavi asked, clapping her hands to her mouth in horror.

  “He died yesterday,” Hanner said. “The Wizards’ Guild killed him for meddling in magic.”

  “But he killed the wizard they sent,” Alris added. Hanner did not contradict her; the weight of that unknown wizard’s death was on his own soul, and he thought he might well have to deal with it eventually, but for now it would do no one any good to reveal the truth. “That’s terrible!” Mavi said, falling onto a chair. Nerra patted her hand comfortingly.

  “Please forgive the interruption, Bern,” Hanner said when Mavi was settled. “You were saying?”

  “I was saying, my lord, that you are the eldest surviving member of Lord Faran’s family, and are therefore his heir-he named you as his heir in papers he left in my care, to remove any possible question.”

  It was Hanner’s turn to feel unsteady on his feet, but he remained standing. He had not thought Uncle Faran had thought highly enough of him to have made out such papers.

  “He did?”

  “Yes, my lord. Where his ownership of that house had been kept secret, he wanted to be certain there would be no confusion on this point.”

  Manner glanced at his sisters.

  “Well,” he said, “at least
we’ll have somewhere to live if Lord Azrad evicts us.”

  The legacy meant rather more than that, Manner knew. While he was unsure how much money Uncle Faran had left, he had seen the furnishings of that house, in particular the magical materials and devices on the upper floors, and he knew that he could sell them off for enough to live on for a long, long time. His future, and the future of his sisters, was suddenly far less uncertain.

  “That’s assuming the warlocks let you in,” Nerra said. “Haven’t they taken over that place?”

  “Uncle Faran invited them,” Alris said. “We can uninvite them, if we choose. Besides, most of them have already left-they got scared by what happened yesterday, with Rudhira and Varrin being Called, and then Uncle Faran dying, and then Manrin.”

  “They have?” Hanner asked Bern.

  “Yes, my lord,” Bern said. “I believe only eleven warlocks remain in residence.” He cleared his throat. “Which brings me to another reason I have come. We need to know your intentions toward those who remain and any others who may return.”

  “My intentions? Well, I don’t see any reason to cast them out into the streets-they’re our guests, and some of them have nowhere else to go but the Hundred-Foot Field.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Hanner,” Alris said. “Of course there’s a reason. They’rewarlocks.”

  Hanner glared at her. “I don’t see why that makes any difference. ”

  “I’m afraid it does,” Bern said. “Quite aside from the bricks and torches that continue to be flung at the house, and the risk of damage from experimentation by the warlocks themselves, there is the question of what the authorities will do.”

  “The authorities? You mean the overlord?”

  “The city guard, yes. And the Wizards’ Guild. My lord, if they do set out to exterminate the warlocks, it would be far simpler for them to destroy that house, and everyone in it, than to kill the eleven of them one by one.”

  “Destroy it how?” Hanner asked. “The overlord isn’t about to simply burn down a mansion in the New City-what if the fire spreads?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of the overlord, my lord. I was thinking of the Wizards’ Guild.”

  “Oh,” Hanner said.

  He could hardly argue with that. Nobody really knew just what the Wizards’ Guild was capable of. They had a reputation for ruthlessness-though how well deserved it might be Hanner did not know. He could not think of any instance in his lifetime when the Wizards’ Guild had destroyed an entire house in the middle of the city-but he certainly couldn’t say they wouldn’t do it. They very well might.

  One spell would probably be cheaper than eleven, and wizards were always aware of the costs of what they did.

  Some people might argue that destroying a mansion full of valuables was a high cost in itself, but Hanner knew better. That wasn’t how the Guild thought. It wasn’ttheir mansion, and its destruction would reinforce the Guild’s reputation for fearsome-ness.

  The Guild wanted to be feared. Hanner had learned that long ago in talking to the magicians in the Wizards’ Quarter. It was much easier to convince people to obey your orders if they were terrified of you. Smashing an entire mansion to pebbles and kindling, or burning it to the ground, or simply causing it to vanish, would provide exactly the sort of example that the Guild wanted— a demonstration that no one, no matter how wealthy or powerful, could defy them.

  Uncle Faran had always believed that the Guild wanted power for its own sake, that they were building up their authority little by little with the goal of eventually ruling the World, and he had resented that. He had told Hanner that the Guild was virtually ruling the Worldnow, and that soon, when they were sure no one could oppose them effectively, they would do so openly. He had constantly sought ways to convince everyone of this, and ways to oppose the Guild’s plans.

  Hanner had never believed a word of it, and he had tried for years to convince his uncle otherwise. It was plain to Hanner that Faran’s beliefs made no sense. After all, if the Wizards’ Guild wanted to rule the World openly, they could do it at any time. For all Uncle Faran’s theories and studies and bluster, he had never found anyone who could stand up to the Guild.

  The closest he had ever come was the warlocks he led to the Palace, and all that had done was get him killed.

  No, Hanner thought he knew what the Wizards’ Guild wanted. He had talked to dozens of wizards over the past few years, from the newest apprentices up to Guildmaster Ithinia, and they had told him what the Guild wanted, and he believed them.

  What the Guild wanted was to avoid trouble.

  The Guild had been created by the wizards near the end of the Great War, a little more than two centuries earlier, not to rule the World, but toprotect it-from wizards. They had foreseen the possibility that the great wizards of Ethshar, once the war was over and their common foe was finally destroyed, might fight among themselves. They had all seen, in the course of the fighting, what magic could do when used without restraint-the eastern portion of Old Ethshar was said to still be a lifeless desert, two hundred years after the war, and the devastation of the Northern Empire’s heartland was rumored to have been even more complete, though so far as Hanner knew no one had ever gone there to check.

  So the wizards had made a pact-any magician who might cause trouble, any magician who became involved in government or who tried to combine too many skills, would be killed out of hand, before he could cause real trouble.

  That was the Guild’s whole reason for existence, according to the wizards. Hanner believed it; Faran never had.

  The Guild’s entire philosophy was to smash potential trouble before it became more than mere potential-take a little trouble now to prevent far more later.

  Flattening a house full of warlocks would fit right in with that philosophy.

  But the warlocks were Hanner’s guests. He had brought them there. No matter how dangerous their presence might be, he would not simply throw them out into the street.

  But he might want to ask them to find another place.

  “Who’s in charge there?” he asked. “Who’s leading the warlocks now that Uncle Faran is dead?”

  Bern and Alris exchanged glances.

  “Youare,” Alris said. “At least, that’s what they want.”

  “That’s another reason I’m here,” Bern said quickly before Hanner could respond. “After Lord Faran died they chose Manrin as their new leader, but thenhe died, as well. Some wanted Ulpen next, but he’s still so young, just an apprentice, that the others objected, and he refused. So now they inviteyou to come lead them. Zarek in particular spoke strongly in favor of the idea-he says it wasyou, not Lord Faran, who first gathered them together on the Night of Madness.”

  “I was hoping no one would remember that,” Hanner said.

  “But Hanner can’t lead them!” Mavi protested. “He’s not even a warlock.”

  Hanner looked at her.

  He could refuse. He could agree with Mavi that it was absurd for a nonwarlock to lead a band of warlocks. He could evict them from his house and go live there in peace, a young man of good birth and inherited wealth; he could court Mavi and maybe marry her, and they could live there together. He could let the warlocks fend for themselves, let them be scattered, perhaps forced into exile or killed off by the city guard or the Wizards’ Guild.

  It really wasn’t his problem. He hadn’t asked for any of this. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

  But neither had any of the other warlocks.

  Someone had to lead them. Someone had to show them what they could do and represent them to the World. Hanner had gathered them, then abdicated his position to Uncle Faran.

  But Faran had gotten himself killed. As had Manrin, less than a day later. And the warlocks had now chosen Hanner to lead them, even though none but Sheila knew he was one of them.

  The job certainly wasn’t safe, but Hanner felt he could avoid it no longer. It was time to stop delaying, stop his pretenses that he could ever return to his
old life.

  “I’ll go,” he said. “Mavi-Iam a warlock.”

  Chapter Forty

  For a long moment the room was silent as the others stared at him in shock. Then Alris laughed.

  “Ha!” she said. “I should have known. You acted so strange sometimes! And that girl, Sheila-she knew, didn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Manner admitted. “She knows.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Mavi said, and Manner could hear the hurt in her voice. “You never said a word!”

  “Mavi, I didn’t know at first,” Manner said hastily. “And you said...” Then he stopped, realizing he was once again about to say the wrong thing.

  But he wouldn’t. He would say theright thing this time.

  He took a deep breath and continued, “Well, it doesn’t matter what you said. You’re right. I’m sorry.” He hesitated. He knew better than to approach her; she would bolt, he was sure. “You stay here and talk to Nerra,” he said. “I’ll go back with Bern. I hope I’ll see you again.” He bowed and headed for the door, beckoning to Bern.

  Mavi watched him go, saying nothing.

  Bern was frozen at first, then realized what was happening and hurried after Hanner.

  When they were both in the corridor, Hanner closed the door of the apartments and said, “On the way you can tell me more of what’s happened since Uncle Faran’s death.” “Of course,” Bern said.

  By the time they were out of the Palace Bern had described the disorganized remnants of Lord Faran’s little army returning in panicky disarray to the house, and explained how Ulpen and the others had talked Manrin into assuming leadership of the group.

  By the time they reached High Street, Bern had explained Manrin’s plan to establish warlocks as just another sort of magician, with standard attire, apprenticeships, fees for service, and so on.

  “That’s sound thinking,” Hanner said as they turned the corner. That would suit the Wizards’ Guild, he thought. If warlocks were a known quantity, bound by accepted rules, they would be less likely to stir up trouble.