The Unwilling Warlord

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “I see,” Sterren said. He hesitated, and then plunged on. “So, at least so far, you weren’t planning to conquer Semma, or anything like that?” He hoped fervently that he hadn’t just presented Vond with an appealing idea.

  No, he decided, he was certain that anyone in Vond’s position would have thought of it already.

  Vond laughed. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “I’ve already conquered Semma. They just don’t know it yet!”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Sterren stayed and chatted with Vond for several more minutes, but he could see that the warlock was eager to get back to his palace-building, and he knew that the king would be growing ever more impatient.

  He was not looking forward to facing King Phenvel, but he knew he would have to sooner or later, and he decided he might as well get it over with. He told Vond farewell and started back toward the castle.

  He had gone scarcely a dozen steps when he paused and considered.

  Did he really have to go back to the castle at all? Couldn’t he just turn and head overland to Akalla, and back home to Ethshar? After all, if Vond had conquered Semma, then presumably he was no longer the hereditary warlord, and King Phenvel no longer had any authority over him—or anybody else, for that matter.

  It occurred to him for the very first time that royal power and authority were simply a matter of belief, of common consent to an arrangement. There was nothing inherent in Phenvel of Semma that gave him the power of life and death over his subjects; that power existed only because the people of Semma believed it existed. His castle guards and his courtiers obeyed him because they believed he was the rightful ruler of the land, and others obeyed because those guards and courtiers enforced his wishes.

  If the guards ever decided that Phenvel was just a crazy old man, then he would be just a crazy old man.

  Vond’s power, on the other hand, was quite real. He might not have any hereditary title or special cachet of authority, but he could easily make anyone obey him by using his warlockry. He needed no guards or courtiers. When he said that he had already conquered Semma, Sterren could accept that—who could defy him?

  And wasn’t that the true definition of power? Vond could do anything he pleased, and no one could prevent it. Phenvel could do what he pleased only so long as people believed in his authority as king.

  Vond’s power seemed much more substantial.

  This, Sterren guessed, would soon make the warlock’s conquest an accepted fact. Phenvel had offended Vond, and now Vond was making plain just who really held power in Semma. Surely, Phenvel’s power would collapse quickly once it became obvious that he could do nothing against Vond. His authority would be destroyed, and the whole elaborate structure of hereditary nobility would undoubtedly collapse with it.

  Sterren would no longer be warlord.

  He could just turn now, and go home.

  But on the other hand, it was a long trip, and he was in no particular hurry. The situation in Semma had gotten very interesting, and he was curious about how it would turn out.

  He was interested, also, in what might befall some of the people in the area.

  He walked on, toward the castle.

  The gatekeeper let him in without discussion, and he headed directly for the royal apartments.

  He was admitted immediately. Queen Ashassa and the two younger princesses had joined the king; Princess Lura grinned at him, and even Princess Shirrin managed a tentative smile.

  The instant Sterren had completed his formal bow King Phenvel demanded, “Well? What’s he doing out there?”

  “He says he’s making a castle, your Majesty,” Sterren replied. He did not know the Semmat for “palace,” and was unsure what other verb might be most suitable for “building.”

  “Making a castle?” Queen Ashassa asked, puzzled.

  “Yes, your Majesty,” Sterren said.

  “What do you mean, making a castle?” the king demanded.

  “I mean, your Majesty, that he is taking stones, very large stones, and putting them together into a ... a castle. I don’t know the right words to make it clearer.”

  “A real castle, or just an image of some kind, a model?”

  “A real castle, your Majesty. He says he will live in it.”

  “That’s ridiculous. This is Semma Castle, and I am king! No one else may build a castle in my realm!”

  Sterren did not waste time answering that.

  “Go tell him to stop!” the king demanded.

  Sterren hesitated. “I can tell him,” he said, “but he won’t stop.”

  “Well, make him stop! This is all your fault, after all; you’re the one who brought all these infernal magicians here! We’ve never needed a lot of fancy magicians in Semma, and we got along just fine until you brought this whatever-it-is who’s not a wizard here!”

  “Your Majesty, your army was ... the enemy had at least three men to each one of yours. Magic was...”

  “Oh, stop arguing! You go tell him to stop what he’s doing and put everything back the way it was!”

  “Your Majesty...”

  “Go! Do it!”

  Sterren went.

  He nodded politely to the man at the gate, and followed the clear path through the ruined village once again.

  Vond saw him coming.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

  Sterren shrugged as he looked over the half-built crypts. “The king sent me,” he said. He strolled out onto one of the stone slabs.

  “Oh?” Vond said.

  “Yes. He wants you to stop what you’re doing and put everything back the way it was.”

  “I daresay he does.”

  “He ordered me to come tell you to stop.”

  Vond nodded. “Go ahead, then.”

  “In the name of Phenvel, King of Semma, stop building your palace and put everything back the way it was!”

  “No. You can go back and give him that answer. Was there anything else?”

  “Not from him. I was wondering, though—don’t you think it might get rather lonely, out here in this palace?” He waved at the cellars, which now covered a wide area around the “courtyard” and had a partially-completed outer wall around most of two sides.

  Vond looked down at his elaborate stone box.

  “Maybe at first,” he admitted, “a little. But I expect other warlocks will come along, once word gets out about the new source of power here.”

  “You expect word to get out?”

  Vond looked momentarily disconcerted for the first time since he drove off the invading armies.

  “Of course,” he said, “but if it doesn’t, I’ll send messengers back to Ethshar. You know, I hadn’t thought about that—we’re really way out here in the middle of nowhere, aren’t we?”

  Sterren nodded. “If you go up about a hundred feet and look over that way,” he said, pointing south, “you ought to be able to see the edge of the World.”

  Vond sighed. “I’ve always lived in Ethshar, back in the middle of things, where you can’t keep a secret if you try. I hadn’t thought about how the news would spread; I just took it for granted.”

  “I don’t think you can, here.”

  “Well, I’ll send messengers. I expect people will notice when I start building an empire, in any case.”

  “Oh,” Sterren asked, “are you planning to build an empire?”

  “Oh, I think so,” Vond said. “Isn’t it sort of traditional, for conquerors? Besides, Semma is so tiny! If I want to put together a decent harem I need more to choose from, for one thing!”

  “What did you have in mind?” Sterren asked cautiously.

  “Well, to start,” Vond said, “I was planning to conquer Ophkar and Ksinallion; that should be easy enough, since I’ve already routed their armies. After that, I thought I’d see how far I could go before I start to hear that whisper out of Aldagmor again. I’m not stupid, Sterren; I won’t be sailing off to Ethshar where the nightmares will get
me. Even so, I ought to be able to put together half a dozen of these silly little kingdoms, don’t you think?”

  Sterren had to concede that the warlock probably could, indeed, rule everything in the area. After all, he had lost contact with Aldagmor and started getting his headaches back in Akalla, which meant that Akalla, Skaia, Ophkar, and Semma would almost certainly be well within his grasp, and probably Ksinallion and several other kingdoms as well.

  Not that any of those kingdoms amounted to much of anything.

  “And you don’t think you’ll get lonely, or bored?” he asked.

  “Why should I?” Vond snapped. “I can have as many people around as I want, just by ordering it! And beautiful women—there must be some, even here. Men in power always attract beautiful women.”

  “But they’ll all be scared of you. You won’t have anyone you can talk to just casually, as an equal—or even near-equal. And what will you do with this empire?”

  “I’ll just sit back and enjoy it, of course! I’ll live the good life. And other warlocks will hear about it and will come to live here; I’ll have my own court, and all the nobles will be warlocks, and we’ll rule because we deserve to, not because we were born lucky.”

  “What if one of these other warlocks gets ambitious and decides to take over, though?”

  Vond shook his head. “It can’t happen. I thought of that. But I got here first, so I’ll always be the most powerful, as long as I keep using magic. Look, I was almost as powerful as a warlock could ever get, back in Ethshar—I had the nightmares pretty badly. If I’d done one or two more big magicks, I’d have heard the Calling and gone north. So nobody is going to arrive here any more powerful than I was when I got here. And nobody will have any special way to overtake me, because warlockry doesn’t work that way. You get more power by using power, and you can only use it so fast. As long as I keep working magic, I’ll always be more powerful than anyone who comes after me. You see?”

  Sterren did see, and said so.

  Vond nodded. “So,” he said, “my empire will be a haven for warlocks—when they start worrying about the Calling, they’ll pack up and come here, where they can safely use all the magic they want.”

  Sterren could see how this might, in fact, happen. He could see how it would be very pleasant indeed for warlocks.

  He could also see how it might be very unpleasant for everybody else. Magicians elsewhere always kept each other in check, or were kept in check by natural limits on their magic. Witches and seers and sorcerers and a variety of other magicians generally had only very limited abilities. Demonology was risky, and ever more risky as it got more powerful, since demons can’t be trusted. Theurgy was limited by the gods’ unwillingness to interfere with the World beyond a certain level. Wizardry—well, Sterren didn’t really know what kept wizards from getting out of hand, unless it was rivalry with other wizards, or something about the seemingly chaotic way wizardry worked, or maybe just the difficulty of acquiring the bizarre ingredients they needed for their spells.

  Warlockry had always been kept in check by the Calling. Now Vond had found a way around that—or at least he thought he had.

  Sterren suspected that Vond was being overly optimistic about that, but in light of his announced plans to build an empire, mentioning this seemed like a mistake.

  He wondered what the other sorts of magician might think about all this. Might the rumored-to-exist Wizards’ Guild resent the presumption of a warlock establishing an empire?

  They very well might, Sterren thought, and he almost said as much to Vond, but then he caught himself.

  Why should he do Vond any favors? The man was about to enslave an entire section of the Small Kingdoms to avenge a slight from a foolish old man—and for the fun of it. It was true that he and Sterren had been comrades in arms, as it were, but that hardly took precedence over common decency.

  But on the other hand, would Vond be any worse than Phenvel? He might turn out to be a perfectly adequate ruler.

  Sterren had no way of knowing. He decided to wait and see. Meanwhile, he would keep any possible threats to Vond’s usurped authority to himself, in case he needed them later. That included both the Wizards’ Guild and what Sterren thought was a basic flaw in Vond’s logic about his safety from the Calling.

  For one thing, he could not be completely certain that either threat really existed.

  “Hai, Sterren!” Vond called. “Did you fall asleep or something?”

  Sterren realized that he had been standing motionless, absorbed in thought, for several seconds. “No,” he called. “Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh,” he said evasively, “what an empire of warlocks would be like.”

  “Well,” Vond replied, “I hope you’ll stay around and find out! I owe you a favor, Sterren, for bringing me here. You treated me well and fairly, and it was your suggestion that helped me tap into the new source. Oh, I think I might have latched onto it eventually by myself, but you made it easier. You know, you’ve got a tiny bit of warlockry yourself; you could be one of the rulers of the empire!”

  Sterren shook his head. “I don’t have any warlockry. Not here, anyway.”

  “It’s there, Sterren, it’s just attuned to the Aldagmor Source, not the new one. I can fix that. I can let you hear the new one, at least as well as you ever heard the Aldagmor one.”

  “I doubt that. I’ve got no aptitude for it.”

  “Don’t be silly; you lived off it for years, didn’t you?”

  “I never affected anything but dice, and I didn’t even know I was doing that! Some magic!”

  “But it should be different here; after all, I think we’re only ten leagues from the source itself.”

  That caught Sterren’s interest. “Ten leagues?”

  “I think so; I can feel it, you know, and sort of measure ... there aren’t words for it in Ethsharitic. We warlocks haven’t worked them out yet. But yes, I’m pretty certain the source is ten leagues that way.” He pointed to the northwest; Sterren noted the exact direction as carefully as he could, for future reference.

  “Ten leagues or a hundred,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be much of a warlock.”

  “Don’t argue with me!” Vond snapped. He gestured at Sterren, and Sterren blinked.

  Something had happened; he could feel it in the back of his head.

  “There!” Vond said. “I’ve adjusted your brain a little; now you can hear the new source!”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Sterren said.

  “I don’t mean hear, with your ears! I mean you’re a warlock. You can draw power from it. Here, catch this without touching it!”

  Vond pulled a clear, shiny object from the air in front of him, and tossed it at Sterren.

  Sterren threw up his hands to ward it off, and at the same time, in the back of his mind, thought to himself that maybe he was a warlock, maybe he could catch it, control it as if it were the dice he had guided back in Ethshar. He tried to think of it that way, to imagine what it would feel like to move something without touching it.

  Then the little sphere shattered on the stone at his feet.

  He looked down, bent over, and picked up a sliver. It was ice; it melted away in his hand.

  “I tried,” he said.

  Vond was glaring at him in disgust. “I know you did. I felt it. And I guess you were right; you’re no warlock!”

  “Where did you get the ice?” Sterren asked, looking at the water on his fingers.

  “I pulled it out of the air; it’s easy, for a real warlock.”

  “Oh,” Sterren said, oddly impressed. He had seen Vond cutting out huge slabs of bedrock without tools, but somehow pulling ice out of the air seemed even more unnatural. “Can you do it again?”

  “Of course I can!” Vond said, clearly affronted.

  “I only meant...” Sterren began.

  “Oh, go away!” Vond snapped. “I’m tired of all your questions, and I’ve got a palace to
build! You go tell those people in that castle that I’m in charge now, and when I finish the palace I’ll tell them what I want from them.”

  Sterren started to say something, and thought better of it.

  “Go!” Vond thundered—literally, as the air about him flashed crimson and the word sprang up from the ground.

  Sterren went.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Sterren said. Princess Shirrin blinked at him. She and her father were the only two Semmans present; the queen and Princess Lura had gone elsewhere, and at the moment the servants all happened to be out of the room.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?” said King Phenvel.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Sterren repeated. “You can’t do anything about him. You’re just going to have to live with it. He’s not ... not...” Sterren groped unsuccessfully for a Semmat word approximating “malicious,” and gave up. “If you don’t anger him,” he said, “he won’t hurt anybody.”

  “But he’s a usurper, a traitor!” the king shouted.

  Sterren shrugged. He didn’t consider it treason, since Vond was Ethsharitic, but he had to admit that the term “usurper” was accurate enough.

  “All right, warlord,” King Phenvel said. “If you were king of Semma, how would you deal with him?”

  “I’d surrender,” Sterren said immediately. He didn’t know the word for “abdicate.”

  Shirrin let out a little squeak of dismay, which the two men ignored.

  Sterren didn’t point out that if he were king of Semma, he would abdicate in any case, regardless of whether or not an all-powerful warlock were causing trouble. Being king did not look like an enjoyable occupation.

  “Oh, go away,” Phenvel growled.

  Sterren bowed, and retreated.

  With his duty fulfilled for the moment, he headed directly for the kitchens; he had not yet broken his fast, and his stomach was beginning to cramp with hunger.

  He was not particularly surprised to find the two wizards and three witches already there, seated along the benches around two sides of a low table. The presence of Princess Lura, perched atop a high stool, was somewhat less expected, but not a great shock.