Night of Madness loe-7

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “No,” she said. “If anything, I feel stronger than ever.”

  “That could be bad,” Hanner said.

  “Should I go back, then?”

  “No. We need to give them time to arrange matters. You should be all right.”

  They passed over the Arena, and Hanner called again.

  And then Kirsha called, “Look!” She pointed to the south.

  Something was rising toward them, something brightly colored and larger than a man.

  “Stop here,” Hanner said, and Kirsha halted their southward drift.

  The rising shape became clear, and Hanner realized it was a man sitting cross-legged on a carpet-a flying carpet, perhaps eight feet by twelve. The man wore red and gold robes, and the carpet was dark blue patterned in gold.

  The carpet was coming toward them, swooping gracefully through an upward spiral. Hanner waited.

  A moment later the carpet reached their own level and stopped a dozen feet away. The seated man-the wizard, certainly-was no one Hanner had ever seen before; he was short, stocky, and going gray. Hanner sensed an odd wrongness about him, but could not say what it was. He frowned. He hoped that this really was a wizard and not some sort of illusion. “Hai!” the seated man said. “What do you want with us, warlock?”

  Hanner ignored the feeling of wrongness and replied, “I need to speak to whomever it is that’s going to decide what the Wizards’ Guild does about warlocks.”

  “If the Guild wishes to hear from you, they’ll summon you,” the red-robed man said.

  “My uncle Faran waited to be summoned,” Hanner said. “That didn’t work out well. The Guild would summon me if they knew what was best for us all, themselves included. They don’t know that yet, because they haven’t heard what I have to say. Surely, you don’t maintain that even the Guild knows everything. Ithinia never thought it necessary to speak to Lord Faran, and see howthat turned out.”

  “Don’t threaten me, warlock,” the wizard said warningly. “I think you’ll find me harder to kill than Lord Faran’s executioner.”

  “I was not making threats,” Hanner said. “I merely speak the truth.”

  The mention of Faran’s executioner, however, gave him the clue he needed to recognize the nature of the wrongness he had felt.

  The wizard had no heartbeat. In fact, he had no heart in his chest. Hanner could feel only a magical darkness where a heart should be. Stopping his heart, as Hanner had done to Faran’s slayer, would not be possible.

  Hanner had heard of wizards doing this, hiding their hearts before undertaking some particularly perilous task; they could still be hurt, but the heart would keep beating, wherever it was stored, and the wizard would not die of injuries that would ordinarily be instantly fatal. Hewould be harder to kill, Hanner thought-but probably not impossible.

  If the wizard had taken such a precaution before coming to speak to him-well, it would seem that the Wizards’ Guild did accept that warlocks could pose a real threat.

  That was promising, in a way.

  And that they had prepared this messenger to speak to him, rather than sending some magical assassin after him, was even more promising.

  While Hanner considered this, the wizard had considered Han-ner’s words. Now he responded.

  “Very well,” he said. “I’ll bring you to them.”

  Hanner turned to Kirsha. “Put me down on the carpet,” he said.

  “Sir, are you sure-”

  “I’m sure,” Hanner said, cutting her off. “I’ve dealt with wizards for years. Put me on the carpet, then go back to the house and wait for me. And don’t use any more magic until tomorrow. If you have nightmares tonight, don’tever use any more.”

  “As you say.” Hanner felt himself pushed forward, and a moment later his feet touched the thick pile of the carpet. He stepped forward cautiously. It was like walking across a featherbed; he sat down quickly, and the wizard moved aside to make room.

  Hanner turned to see Kirsha still hanging unsupported in midair, staring at him.

  “Go on,” he said, waving to her. “I’ll be fine. We all will.”

  She waved back, then turned and flew away.

  Then Hanner turned to the wizard. “I am Hanner the Warlock, Chairman of the Council of Warlocks,” he said.

  The wizard looked at him silently for a moment, then said, “I’m a wizard. You don’t need my name.”

  Names had power, Hanner remembered-some spells required the name of the person the spell would affect. The wizard was not simply being rude.

  “Please yourself,” Hanner started to say, but the final syllable stretched out and vanished as the carpet abruptly turned and swooped downward. Wind rushed past him, yanking his words away. He closed his eyes against the drying wind, and when he opened them again the carpet was sailing into a great dark opening in an upper floor of a building he did not recognize.

  Once inside, the carpet settled to the floor, and abruptly became as flat and lifeless as any ordinary rug.

  Hanner looked around at a large rough chamber where most of one wall was open to the outside. There were no furnishings, no windows other than the open wall; overhead were the bare rafters of a peaked roof.

  The wizard got to his feet, then turned and watched, not offering his hand, as Hanner rose. “This way,” he said, pointing to a small, perfectly ordinary wooden door.

  Hanner followed the wizard through the door into a small, bare, wooden room, where assorted cloaks and hoods hung on a row of pegs on one wall. The wizard selected a blue velvet hood, one with no eyeholes, and handed it to Hanner.

  “Face that door,” he said, pointing at another ordinary wooden door. “Then put this on.”

  Hanner obeyed and found himself blinded-but he was a warlock; he could sense his surroundings with his magic, even through the opaque hood. The wizard stepped forward and opened the door, then stepped aside.

  “Walk forward,” the wizard said.

  Hanner started forward, then hesitated a step from the open door. He could sense nothing beyond it-not empty space, but nothing at all. Something there blocked his warlock sight completely.

  Some sort of wizardry, presumably-warlockry and wizardry did not work well together, he remembered.

  “Go on,” the wizard urged him. “Straight ahead, another step or two.” The Wizards’ Guild would hardly have gone to this much trouble to kill him, but Manner still hesitated-something deep inside him did notlike that blank emptiness. He reached out to touch it...

  And suddenly he was genuinely, completely blind; his warlock sight had vanished as completely as the light from a snuffed candle. Panicked, he reached up and snatched off the hood.

  He wasn’t in the little wooden room anymore. There was no open door before him, no wall, no sunlight spilling in through the open side of the room behind him where the carpet had landed. Instead he stood on rough slate pavement in a vast, torchlit hall. Ahead of him stretched two parallel rows of gray stone pillars, each pillar as big around as a century-old oak, with twenty feet between the rows and each pillar eight or nine feet from the next. For the nearest part of each row, each pillar bore a pair of torches set in black iron brackets slightly above the level of a tall man’s head.

  He could not see the end of the hall; the torches stopped some dozen pillars, perhaps thirty yards, before him, but the pillars continued on into the darkness beyond. He could not see the side walls clearly, but they were perhaps twenty feet beyond the pillars on either side.

  In the torchlit stretch before him stood a great dark wooden table, strewn with papers and objects. He could see cups and bowls and staves and jewels and books and a hundred other things, mixed together seemingly at random.

  And around this table stood a score of wizards, male and female, all apparent ages, in robes that ranged from unadorned gray to the most elaborate embroidered polychrome fancywork he had ever seen.

  “Hanner, Chairman of the Council of Warlocks,” a woman said, and Hanner recognized her as Ithinia
of the Isle, senior Guild-master of Ethshar of the Spices. “No longer Lord Hanner of Eth-shar. You wished to speak to the masters of the Wizards’ Guild.” She waved an arm at her companions.

  “Speak,” she said.

  Chapter Forty-two

  “Where are we?” Hanner asked as he struggled to regain his composure.

  “I quite literally cannot answer that completely, even if I wanted to,” Ithinia said. “You are in a meeting place that is accessible only to the Wizards’ Guild; that’s all you need to know.” Hanner tried to reach out with his magic, and felt nothing at all. He was as powerless as if the Night of Madness had never happened.

  “You’ve removed my warlockry,” he said. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

  That changed everything. If warlocks could be turned back to ordinary people, then the Calling could be averted, and Lord Azrad’s fears assuaged, and order restored...

  Ithinia’s next words dashed that hope. “Itisn’t possible, so far as we know,” she said. “Warlockry doesn’t work here, but when you return to the World it will return, and you will be a warlock once again, at the same level as before.”

  “Oh.”

  That was different, and less encouraging-but still interesting. Perhaps the wizards could provide a refuge for warlocks who had reached the nightmare threshold and begun to hear the Calling.

  “Have youtried to turn warlocks back?” Hanner asked.

  “Of course we have,” Ithinia said, visibly annoyed. “We’ve been doing intensive research on that question since the Night of Madness itself. We tried the Spell of Reversal, Javan’s Restorative, the Ethereal Entrapment, healing spells, hypnotic spells, cleansings, holdings, rectifications, instrumental, extractives, transformations, and regressions-multiple trials of each, some of them in slowed or stopped time. We’ve consulted with other magicians; herbalists and theurgists and sorcerers and demonologists couldn’t even do as well as we did. Witches seem to have come nearest to success, and the Brotherhood’s experiments are still continuing, but so far, it appears that once someone becomes a warlock, nothing will change him back. A large part of the difficulty lies in the way warlockry interferes with other magic. We thought we had the answer when we discovered that if a warlock is transformed into something else, such as an ape or cat, he is no longer a warlock— but we discovered that when returned to human form he is as powerful a magician as ever; we can’t transform him into a human who isnot a warlock by any method we’ve tried. Reversible petrifaction did no better. We thought of using Fendel’s Lesser Transformation to turn a warlock into a human being who is identical save for not being a warlock, but we discovered that the spell did not affect the one portion that mattered-the core of warlockry in the subject’s brain. Wizardry simply can’t affect it-not to transform it, nor remove it, nor alter it in any way. The only reason a transformed warlock can’t use his magic is that whatever causes it only operates in human beings; the core always remains present, dormant but as untouchable as ever, in the subject of a transformation. In short, if you’ve come here hoping we can return you and your fellow warlocks to your former state, you’ve wasted your time and ours.”

  Hanner waved that idea away. “No, that wasn’t my intent,” he said. He had, as usual, said the wrong thing.

  He couldn’t afford to do that again. The time had come to say theright thing. His life, and the lives of all the other warlocks, might well depend upon it.

  “I was distracted by the loss of my magic, that’s all,” he said. “I came for two reasons. Firstly, to ask what arrangements, if any, the Guild would like made regarding the remains of Manrin the Mage, and secondly, far more importantly, to offer information that I hope will help you decide the Guild’s attitude toward warlocks.” He looked over the assembled wizards, awaiting some comment.

  A red-robed wizard at the far end of the table said, “We will see that Manrin’s remains are transported to his family in Ethshar of the Sands for a proper funeral. You need not worry about that further.”

  That was a small relief. “And the information about warlocks?” he said.

  None of them moved or spoke but Ithinia. “What information might that be?” she asked.

  “I don’t know how much you have already learned,” he said. “Forgive me if I repeat what you already knew.”

  “Go on.”

  “Do you know about the Calling?”

  “The summons to the source-point of warlockry, in southeastern Aldagmor? We are aware of it. We saw Varrin the Weaver and Rudhira of Camptown drawn away, and have observed dozens of others departing, though usually under less dramatic circumstances.”

  “Southeastern Aldagmor?”

  Ithinia sighed. “It would seem thatwe are the ones providing information, not you!”

  “An exchange is certainly welcome,” Hanner said, smiling— he desperately needed to keep this discussion on friendly terms. “We only knew that they were going north; we didn’t know their destination.”

  “Aldagmor. The phenomenon that began on the Night of Madness is centered there, and the closer one goes to that point, the more powerful it is, even now. Most of the Barony of Aldagmor has been depopulated, in fact-themajority of the population there vanished on the Night of Madness, and another large percentage has become warlocks, many of whom have since been summoned. That land is in chaos, and the only comfort we find in the situation there is that it was thinly populated to begin with. We do not wish to see anywhere else similarly transformed.”

  Hanner shuddered. “Neither do we,” he said. “We have ereated a Council of Warlocks, and one purpose of our Council is to control the spread of warlockry and to stave off any further Callings.” He hesitated, then asked, “Do you know where these warlocks are going? I mean, what’s in Aldagmor that’s attracting them?”

  “No, we don’t know,” Ithinia said. “The Aldagmor source is like the core in a warlock’s brain-wizardry cannot affect it, cannot see into it. Anyone who ventures too close-anyone, wizard, warlock, or otherwise-is drawn into it, and does not emerge.”

  Hanner nodded. He had pessimistically assumed as much. This confirmation was no surprise.

  “You presumably came here to convince us not to destroy you all,” Ithinia said. “I think you might do well to stop asking questions and start making your case.”

  “Yes, I know.” Hanner took a deep breath, then said, “You’re concerned with warlocks because you fear we’re going to cause trouble. You think we might disrupt everything. The Guild exists to prevent magic from spreading chaos-you created it to keep yourselves from doing that.” He suddenly realized that since wizardry could extend life or restore youth, that “you” might be more literal than he had thought-the very wizards who had created the Guild two hundred years before might well still be alive and seated before him. The idea staggered him for a moment, and he paused in his speech. “Go on,” Ithinia said.

  “You had to put an artificial limit on your own power,” Hanner said, “because there is no natural limit-wizards can live forever, learning more and more magic. If two of your mightiest members went to war, you could probably lay waste to the entire World.”

  “As the demons did to the eastern provinces, and the gods did to the Northern Empire’s heartland,” a gray-robed man said, startling Hanner. “They, too, have bound themselves now.”

  “Yes,” Hanner said. “Yes, exactly. So you want warlocks removed, lest we become equally dangerous. But wecan’t. Wedo have a natural limit.”

  “The Calling, as you’ve named it,” Ithinia said.

  “Yes,” Hanner said. “Exactly.”

  A white-haired man stirred in his seat and said, “We do not bother ourselves about witches, whose magic is limited to the energy of their own bodies, nor with sorcerers, whose talismans are not sufficiently powerful or long-lasting to seriously concern us. You warlocks, though, can reach a frightening level of power before the Calling takes you. Your Rudhira demonstrated that.”

  “Frightening, yes,
” Hanner admitted. “But still limited, and your own people can wreak considerable havoc before drawing the Guild’s attention. I don’t know whether the legendary Tower of Flame in the Small Kingdoms is real-”

  “It is,” the white-haired man interrupted. “It still burns.”

  “You see? The World is full of dangerous magic, yet it survives. And a powerful warlock who goes rogue can easily be handled.”

  Some of the wizards exchanged glances.

  “Not so easily,” Ithinia said. “Warlocks resist wizardry. It’s as if you all bear powerful protective spells at all times. We have had some unfortunate incidents already. You know of one of them; the spell we used on your uncle, Lord Faran, was the strongest petrifaction spell we know, and should be utterly instantaneous, yet it took a second or two to work, and he had time to retaliate. And Lord Faran was not a terribly powerful warlock, nowhere near Rudhira’s level.”

  “It was not Faran who stopped his killer’s heart,” Hanner said. “I was able to see that, using a warlock’s added senses. I hope you’ll understand if I don’t tell you who did perform the deed.”

  That created a stir, but before anyone could speak Hanner continued, “But that wasn’t what I meant, in any case. Yes, you could destroy powerful warlocks with your spells, at some risk to yourself-but you could also slit their throats while they sleep.Manrin knew you far better than my uncle did, yet he didn’t manage to take anyone with him.”

  Hanner paused for breath and heard someone mutter, “Elken, too.”

  He ignored that, and continued. “Even that isn’t what I meant, though. Don’t you see? You can use the Calling to do your work for you!” Again, his words triggered unrest; the wizards shifted in their seats and looked at one another.

  “If you keep throwing things at a dangerous warlock, it doesn’t matter whether any of your attacks succeed,” Manner said. “He’ll use his magic to defend himself. The more magic he uses, the more powerful he becomes. And the more powerful he becomes, the stronger the Calling becomes. Rudhira destroyed herself by lifting those ships-after she did that, the Calling was always there for her, growing steadily stronger.”