by Larry Niven
The copper disc glowed bright orange with the heat of its spin. It should have fragmented, or melted, long ago.
“Then there are the dead places, the places where a wizard dares not go. Places where magic doesn’t work. They tend to be rural areas, farmlands and sheep ranges, but you can find the old cities, the castles built to float which now lie tilted on their sides, the unnaturally aged bones of dragons, like huge lizards from another age.
“So I started wondering.”
Hap stepped back a bit from the heat of the disc. It glowed pure white now, and it was like a sun brought to earth. Through the glare Hap had lost sight of the Warlock.
“So I built a disc like this one and set it spinning. Just a simple kinetic sorcery, but with a constant acceleration and no limit point. You know what mana is?”
“What’s happening to your voice?”
“Mana is the name we give to the power behind magic.” The Warlock’s voice had gone weak and high.
A horrible suspicion came to Hap. The Warlock had slipped down the hill, leaving his voice behind! Hap trotted around the disc, shading his eyes from its heat.
An old man sat on the other side of the disc. His arthritic fingers, half-crippled with swollen joints, played with a rune-inscribed knife. “What I found out—oh, there you are. Well, it’s too late now.”
Hap raised his sword, and his sword changed.
It was a massive red demon, horned and hooved, and its teeth were in Hap’s right hand. It paused, deliberately, for the few seconds it took Hap to realize what had happened and to try to jerk away. Then it bit down, and the swordsman’s hand was off at the wrist.
The demon reached out, slowly enough, but Hap in his surprise was unable to move. He felt the taloned fingers close his windpipe.
He felt the strength leak out of the taloned hand, and he saw surprise and dismay spread across the demon’s face.
The disc exploded. All at once and nothing first, it disintegrated into a flat cloud of metallic particles and was gone, flashing away as so much meteorite dust. The light was as lightning striking at one’s feet. The sound was its thunder. The smell was vaporized copper.
The demon faded, as a chameleon fades against its background. Fading, the demon slumped to the ground in slow motion, and faded further, and was gone. When Hap reached out with his foot, he touched only dirt.
Behind Hap was a trench of burnt earth.
The spring had stopped. The rocky bottom of the stream was drying in the sun.
The Warlock’s cavern had collapsed. The furnishings of the Warlock’s mansion had gone crashing down into that vast pit, but the mansion itself was gone without a trace.
Hap clutched his messily severed wrist, and he said, “But what happened?”
“Mana,” the Warlock mumbled. He spat out a complete set of blackened teeth. “Mana. What I discovered was that the power behind magic is a natural resource, like the fertility of the soil. When you use it up, it’s gone.”
“But—”
“Can you see why I kept it a secret? One day all the wide world’s mana will be used up. No more mana, no more magic. Do you know that Atlantis is tectonically unstable? Succeeding sorcerer-kings renew the spells each generation to keep the whole continent from sliding into the sea. What happens when the spells don’t work any more? They couldn’t possibly evacuate the whole continent in time. Kinder not to let them know.”
“But…that disc.”
The Warlock grinned with his empty mouth and ran his hands through snowy hair. All the hair came off in his fingers, leaving his scalp bare and mottled. “Senility is like being drunk. The disc? I told you. A kinetic sorcery with no upper limit. The disc keeps accelerating until all the mana in the locality has been used up.”
Hap moved a step forward. Shock had drained half his strength. His foot came down jarringly, as if all the spring were out of his muscles.
“You tried to kill me.”
The Warlock nodded. “I figured if the disc didn’t explode and kill you while you were trying to go around it, Glirendree would strangle you when the constraint wore off. What are you complaining about? It cost you a hand, but you’re free of Glirendree.”
Hap took another step, and another. His hand was beginning to hurt, and the pain gave him strength. “Old man,” he said thickly. “Two hundred years old. I can break your neck with the hand you left me. And I will.”
The Warlock raised the inscribed knife.
“That won’t work. No more magic.” Hap slapped the Warlock’s hand away and took the Warlock by his bony throat.
The Warlock’s hand brushed easily aside, and came back, and up. Hap wrapped his arms around his belly and backed away with his eyes and mouth wide open. He sat down hard.
“A knife always works,” said the Warlock.
“Oh,” said Hap.
“I worked the metal myself, with ordinary blacksmith’s tools, so the knife wouldn’t crumble when the magic was gone. The runes aren’t magic. They only say—”
“Oh,” said Hap. “Oh.” He toppled sideways.
The Warlock lowered himself onto his back. He held the knife up and read the markings, in a language only the Guild remembered.
AND THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS AWAY. It was a very old platitude, even then.
He dropped his arm back and lay looking at the sky.
Presently the blue was blotted by a shadow.
“I told you to get out of here,” he whispered.
“You should have known better. What’s happened to you?”
“No more youth spells. I knew I’d have to do it when the prognostics spell showed blank.” He drew a ragged breath. “It was worth it. I killed Glirendree.”
“Playing hero, at your age! What can I do? How can I help?”
“Get me down the hill before my heart stops. I never told you my true age—”
“I knew. The whole village knows.” She pulled him to sitting position, pulled one of his arms around her neck. It felt dead. She shuddered, but she wrapped her own arm around his waist and gathered herself for the effort. “You’re so thin! Come on, love. We’re going to stand up.” She took most of his weight onto her, and they stood up.
“Go slow! I can hear my heart trying to take off.”
“How far do we have to go?”
“Just to the foot of the hill, I think. Then the spells will work again, and we can rest.” He stumbled. “I’m going blind,” he said.
“It’s a smooth path, and all downhill.”
“That’s why I picked this place. I knew I’d have to use the disc someday. You can’t throw away knowledge. Always the time comes when you use it, because you have to, because it’s there.”
“You’ve changed so. So—so ugly. And you smell.”
The pulse fluttered in his neck, like a hummingbird’s wings, “Maybe you won’t want me, after seeing me like this.”
“You can change back, can’t you?”
“Sure. I can change to anything you like. What color eyes do you want?”
“I’ll be like this myself someday,” she said. Her voice held cool horror. And it was fading; he was going deaf.
“I’ll teach you the proper spells, when you’re ready. They’re dangerous. Blackly dangerous.”
She was silent for a time. Then: “What color were his eyes? You know, Belhap Sattlestone whatever.”
“Forget it,” said the Warlock, with a touch of pique.
And suddenly his sight was back.
But not forever, thought the Warlock as they stumbled through the sudden daylight. When the mana runs out, I’ll go like a blown candle flame, and civilization will follow. No more magic, no more magic-based industries. Then the whole world will be barbarian until men learn a new way to coerce nature, and the swordsmen, the damned stupid swordsmen, will win after all.
WHAT GOOD IS A
GLASS DAGGER?
The Dagger
Twelve thousand years before the birth of Christ, in an age when miracles we
re somewhat more common, a wizard used an ancient secret to save his life.
In later years he regretted that. The demon-sword would certainly have killed him. But no mere demon could have been as dangerous as the secret he had kept for several normal lifetimes. Now it was out, spreading like ripples on a pond. The battle between Glirendree and the Warlock was too good a tale not to tell.
A year after the battle with Glirendree, near the end of a summer day, Aran the Peacemonger came to Shayl Village to steal the Warlock’s Wheel.
Aran was a skinny eighteen-year-old, lightly built. His face was lean and long, with a pointed chin. His dark eyes peered out from under a prominent shelf of bone. His short, straight dark hair dropped almost to his brows in a pronounced widow’s peak. What he was was no secret; and anyone who touched hands with him would have known at once, for there was short fine hair on his palms. But had anyone known his mission, he would have been thought mad.
For the Warlock was a leader in the Sorcerer’s Guild. It was known that he had a name; but no human throat could pronounce it. The shadow demon who had been his name-father had later been imprisoned in tattooed runes on the Warlock’s own back: an uncommonly dangerous bodyguard.
Yet Aran came well protected. The leather wallet that hung from his shoulder was old and scarred, and the seams were loose. By its look it held nuts and hard cheese and bread and almost no money. What it actually held was charms. Magic would serve him better than nuts and cheese, and Aran could feed himself as he traveled, at night.
He reached the Warlock’s cave shortly after sunset. He had been told how to use his magic to circumvent the Warlock’s safeguards. His need for magic implied a need for voice and hands, so that Aran was forced to keep the human shape; and this made him doubly nervous. At moonrise he chanted the words he had been taught, and drew a live bat from his pouch and tossed it gently through the barred entrance to the cave.
The bat exploded into a mist of blood that drifted slant-wise across the stone floor. Aran’s stomach lurched. He almost ran then; but he quelled his fear and followed it in, squeezing between the bars.
Those who had sent him had repeatedly diagrammed the cave for him. He could have robbed it blindfolded. He would have preferred darkness to the flickering blue light from what seemed to be a captured lightning bolt tethered in the middle of the cavern. He moved quickly, scrupulously tracing what he had been told was a path of safety.
Aran had seen sorcerous tools in the training laboratory in the School for Mercantile Grammaree in Atlantis. Most of the Warlock’s tools were unfamiliar. It was not an age of mass production. He paused by a workbench, wondering. Why would the Warlock be grinding a glass dagger?
But Aran found a tarnish-blackened metal disc hanging above the workbench, and the runes inscribed around its rim convinced him that it was what he had come for. He took it down and quickly strapped it against his thigh, leaving his hands free to fight if need be. He was turning to go, when a laughing voice spoke out of the air.
“Put that down, you mangy son of a bitch—”
Aran converted to wolf.
Agony seared his thigh!
In human form Aran was a lightly built boy. As a wolf he was formidably large and dangerous. It did him little good this time. The pain was blinding, stupefying. Aran the wolf screamed and tried to run from the pain.
He woke gradually, with an ache in his head and a greater agony in his thigh and a tightness at his wrists and ankles. It came to him that he must have knocked himself out against a wall.
He lay on his side with his eyes closed, giving no sign that he was awake. Gently he tried to pull his hands apart. He was bound, wrists and ankles. Well, he had been taught a word for unbinding ropes.
Best not to use it until he knew more.
He opened his eyes a slit.
The Warlock was a tall man in robust good health. He was deeply tanned. Legend said that the Warlock never wore anything above the waist. The years seemed to blur on him; he might have been twenty or fifty. In fact he was one hundred and ninety years old, and bragged of it. His condition indicated the power of his magic.
Behind him, Aran saw that the Warlock’s Wheel had been returned to its place on the wall.
Waiting for its next victim? The real Warlock’s Wheel was of copper; those who had sent Aran had known that much. But this decoy must be tarnished silver, to have seared him so.
The Warlock wore a dreamy, absent look. There might still be a chance, if he could be taken by surprise. Aran said, “Kplir—”
The Warlock lashed him across the throat.
The willow wand had plenty of spring in it. Aran choked and gagged; he tossed his head, fighting for air.
“That word has four syllables,” the Warlock informed him in a voice he recognized. “You’ll never get it out.”
“Gluck,” said Aran.
“I want to know who sent you.”
Aran did not answer, though he had his wind back.
“You’re no ordinary thief. But you’re no magician either,” the Warlock said almost musingly. “I heard you. You were chanting by rote. You used basic spells, spells that are easy to get right, but they were the right spells each time.
“Somebody’s been using prescience and farsight to spy on me. Someone knows too many of my defenses,” the ancient magician said gently. “I don’t like that. I want to know who, and why.”
When Aran did not reply, the Warlock said, “He had all the knowledge, and he knew what he was after, but he had better sense than to come himself. He sent a fool.” The Warlock was watching Aran’s eyes. “Or perhaps he thought a werewolf would have a better chance at me. By the way, there’s silver braid in those cords, so you’d best stay human for the nonce.”
“You knew I was coming.”
“Oh, I had ample warning. Didn’t it occur to you that I’ve got prescience and farsight too? It occurred to your master,” said the Warlock. “He set up protections around you, a moving region where prescience doesn’t work.”
“Then what went wrong?”
“I foresaw the dead region, you ninny. I couldn’t get a glimpse of what was stealing into my cave. But I could look around it. I could follow its path through the cavern. That path was most direct. I knew what you were after.
“Then, there were bare footprints left behind. I could study them before they were made. You waited for moonrise instead of trying to get in after dusk. On a night of the full moon, too.
“Other than that, it wasn’t a bad try. Sending a werewolf was bright. It would take a kid your size to squeeze between the bars, and then a kid your side couldn’t win a fight if something went wrong. A wolf your size could.”
“A lot of good it did me,” Aran said bitterly.
“What I want to know is, how did they talk an Atlantean into this? They must have known what they were after. Didn’t they tell you what the Wheel does?”
“Sucks up magic.” Aran was chagrined, but not surprised, that the Warlock had placed his accent.
“Sucks up mana,” the Warlock corrected him. “Do you know what mana is?”
“The power behind magic.”
“So they taught you that much. Did they also tell you that when the mana is gone from a region, it doesn’t come back? Ever?”
Aran rolled on his side. Being convinced that he was about to die, he felt he had nothing to lose by speaking boldly. “I don’t understand why you’d want to keep it a secret. A thing like the Warlock’s Wheel, it could make war obsolete! It’s the greatest purely defensive weapon ever invented!”
The Warlock didn’t seem to understand. Aran said, “You must have thought of that. Why, no enemy’s curses could touch Atlantis, if the Warlock’s Wheel were there to absorb it!”
“Obviously you weren’t sent by the Atlantean Minister of Offense. He’d know better.” The Warlock watched him shrewdly. “Or were you sent by the Greek Isles?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you know that Atlan
tis is tectonically unstable? For the last half a thousand years, the only thing that’s kept Atlantis above the waves has been the spells of the sorcerer-kings.”
“You’re lying.”
“You obviously aren’t.” The Warlock made a gesture of dismissal. “But the Wheel would be bad for any nation, not just Atlantis. Spin the Wheel, and a wide area is dead to magic for—as far as I’ve been able to tell—the rest of eternity. Who would want to bring about such a thing?”
“I would.”
“You would. Why?”
“We’re sick of war,” Aran said roughly. Unaware that he had said we. “The Warlock’s Wheel would end war. Can you imagine an army trying to fight with nothing but swords and daggers? No hurling of death spells. No prescients spying out the enemy’s battle plans. No killer demons beating at unseen protective walls.” Aran’s eyes glowed. “Man to man, sword against sword, blood and bronze, and no healing spells. Why, no king would ever fight on such terms! We’d give up war forever!”
“Some basic pessimism deep within me forces me to doubt it.”
“You’re laughing at me. You don’t want to believe it,” Aran said scornfully. “No more mana means the end of your youth spells. You’d be an old man, too old to live!”
“That must be it. Well, let’s see who you are.” The Warlock touched Aran’s wallet with the willow wand, let it rest there a few moments. Aran wondered frantically what the Warlock could learn from his wallet. If the lock-spells didn’t hold, then—
They didn’t, of course. The Warlock reached in, pulled out another live bat, then several sheets of parchment marked with what might have been geometry lessons and with script printed in a large, precise hand.
“Schoolboy script,” he commented. “Lines drawn with painful accuracy, mistakes scraped out and redrawn…The idiot! He forgot the hooked tail on the Whirlpool design. A wonder it didn’t eat him.” The Warlock looked up. “Am I being attacked by children? These spells were prepared by half a dozen apprentices!”
Aran didn’t answer; but he lost hope of concealing anything further.