by Larry Niven
“Fast,” said Aran.
“Right, fast. Keep in mind that he could be anywhere.” The Warlock took a running start and ran/climbed up the curve of the shell.
Aran followed almost as quickly.
In his sanctum, the snail dragon had said. The picture he had evoked was still with Aran as he went up the shell. Wavyhill would be hidden in his basement or his tower room, in some place of safety. Aran and the Warlock would have to fight their way through whatever the enemy could raise against them, while Wavyhill watched to gauge their defenses. There were tales of magicians’ battles…
Aran was ravenously hungry. It gave him a driving energy he hadn’t had in years, decades. His pumping legs drove a body that seemed feather-light. He reached the top of the shell just as the Warlock was turning full about in apparent panic.
Then he saw them: a horde of armed and armored skeletons coming at them up a wooden plank. There must have been several score of them. Aran shouted and drew his sword. How do you kill a skeleton?
The Warlock shouted too. Strange words, in the Guild language.
The skeletons howled. A whirlwind seemed to grip them and lift them and fling them forward. Already they were losing form, like smoke rings. Aran turned to see the last of them vanishing into the Warlock’s back.
My name is legion. They must have been animated by a single demon. And the Warlock had pulled that demon into a demon trap, empty and waiting these thirty years.
The problem was that both Aran and the Warlock had been concentrating on the plural demon.
The Warlock’s back was turned, and Aran could do nothing. He spotted Wavyhill gesticulating from across the courtyard, in the instant before Wavyhill completed his spell.
Aran turned to shout a warning; and so he saw what the spell did to the Warlock. The Warlock was old in an instant. The flesh seemed to fade into his bones. He looked bewildered, spat a mouthful of blackened pebbles—no, teeth—closed his eyes and started to fall.
Aran caught him.
It was like catching an armload of bones. He eased the Warlock onto his back on the great snail shell. The Warlock’s breathing was stertorous; he could not have long to live.
“Aran the Merchant!”
Aran looked down. “What did you do to him?”
The magician Wavyhill was dressed as usual, in dark robe and sandals and pointed hat. A belt with a shoulder loop held his big-hilted sword just clear of the ground. He called, “That is precisely what I wish to discuss. I have found an incantation that behaves as the Warlock’s Wheel behaves, but directionally. Is this over your head?”
“I understand you.”
“In layman’s terms, I’ve sucked the magic from him. That leaves him two hundred and twenty-six years old. I believe that gives me the win.
“My problem is whether to let you live. Aran, do you understand what my spell will do to you?”
Aran did, but—“Tell me anyway. Then tell me how you found out.”
“From some of my colleagues, of course, after I determined that you were my enemy. You must have consulted an incredible number of magicians regarding the ghostly knife in your heart.”
“More than a dozen. Well?”
“Leave in peace. Don’t come back.”
“I have to take the Warlock.”
“He is my enemy.”
“He’s my ally. I won’t leave him,” said Aran.
“Take him then.”
Aran stooped. He was forty-eight years old, and the bitterness of defeat had replaced the manic energy of battle. But the Warlock was little more than a snoring mummy, dry and light. The problem would be to get the fragile old man down from the snail shell.
Wavyhill was chanting!
Aran stood—in time to see the final gesture. Then the spell hit him.
For an instant he thought that the knife had truly reappeared in his heart. But the pain was all through him! Like a million taut strings snapping inside him! The shape of his neck changed grindingly; all of his legs snapped forward; his skull flattened, his eyes lost color vision, his nose stretched, his lips pulled back from bared teeth.
The change had never come so fast, had never been more complete. A blackness fell on Aran’s mind. It was a wolf that rolled helplessly off the giant snail shell and into the courtyard. A wolf bounced heavily and rolled to its feet, snarled deep in its throat and began walking stiff-legged toward Wavyhill.
Wavyhill was amazed! He started the incantation over, speaking very fast, as Aran approached. He finished as Aran came within leaping distance.
This time there was no change at all. Except that Aran leapt, and Wavyhill jumped back just short of far enough, and Aran tore his throat out.
For Aran the nightmare began then. What had gone before was as sweet dreams.
Wavyhill should have been dead. His severed carotid arteries pumped frantically, his windpipe made horrid bubbling sounds, and—Wavyhill drew his sword and attacked.
Aran the wolf circled and moved in and slashed—and backed away howling, for Wavyhill’s sword had run him through the heart. The wound healed instantly. Aran the wolf was not surprised. He leapt away, and circled, and slashed and was stabbed again, and circled…
It went on and on.
Wavyhill’s blood had stopped flowing. He’d run out. Yet he was still alive. So was his sword, or so it seemed. Aran never attacked unless it seemed safe, but the sword bit him every time. And every time he attacked, he came away with a mouthful of Wavyhill.
He was going to win. He could not help but win. His wounds healed as fast as they were made. Wavyhill’s did not. Aran was stripping the flesh from the magician’s bones.
There was a darkness on his brain. He moved by animal cunning. Again and again he herded Wavyhill back onto the slippery flagstones where Wavyhill had spilled five quarts of his blood. Four feet were surer than two. It was that cunning that led him to bar Wavyhill from leaving the courtyard. He tried. He must have stored healing magic somewhere in the castle. But Aran would not let him reach it.
He had done something to himself that would not let him die. He must be regretting it terribly. Aran the wolf had crippled him now, slashing at his ankles until there was not a shred of muscle left to work the bones. Wavyhill was fighting on his knees. Now Aran came closer, suffering the bite of the sword to reach the magician…
Nightmare.
Aran the Peacemonger had been wrong. If Aran the rug merchant could work on and on, stripping the living flesh from a man in agony, taking a mortal wound for every bite—if Aran could suffer such agonies to do this to anyone, for any cause—
Then neither the end of magic, nor anything else, would ever persuade men to give up war. They would fight on, with swords and stones and whatever they could find, for as long as there were men.
The blackness had lifted from Aran’s brain. It must have been the sword: the mana in an enchanted sword had replaced the mana sucked from him by Wavyhill’s variant of the Warlock’s Wheel.
And, finally, he realized that the sword was fighting alone.
Wavyhill was little more than bloody bones. He might not be dead, but he certainly couldn’t move. The sword moved itself at the end of the stripped bones of his arm, still trying to keep Aran away.
Aran slid past the blade. He gripped the hilt in his teeth and pulled it from the magician’s still-fleshy hand. The hand fought back with a senseless determined grip, but it wasn’t enough.
He had to convert to human to climb the dragon shell.
The Warlock was still alive, but his breathing was a thing of desperation. Aran laid the blade across the Warlock’s body and waited.
The Warlock grew young. Not as young as he had been, but he no longer looked—dead. He was in the neighborhood of seventy years old when he opened his eyes, blinked, and asked, “What happened?”
“You missed all the excitement,” said Aran.
“I take it you beat him. My apologies. It’s been thirty years since I fought Glirendree. With e
very magician in the civilized world trying to duplicate the Warlock’s Wheel, one or another was bound to improve on the design.”
“He used it on me, too.”
“Oh?” The Warlock chuckled. “I suppose you’re wondering about the knife.”
“It did come to mind. Where is it?”
“In my belt. Did you think I’d leave it in your chest? I’d had a dream that I would need it. So I kept it. And sure enough—”
“But it was in my heart!”
“I made an image of it. I put the image in your heart, then faded it out.”
Aran’s fingernails raked his chest. “You miserable son of an ape! You let me think that knife was in me for thirty years!”
“You came to my house as a thief,” the Warlock reminded him. “Not an invited guest.”
Aran the merchant had acquired somewhat the same attitude toward thieves. With diminished bitterness he said, “Just a little magician’s joke, was it? No wonder nobody could get it out. All right. Now tell me why Wavyhill’s spell turned me into a wolf.”
The Warlock sat up carefully. He said, “What?”
“He waved his arms at me and sucked all the mana out of me, and I turned into a wolf. I even lost my human intelligence. Probably my invulnerability too. If he hadn’t been using an enchanted sword he’d have cut me to ribbons.”
“I don’t understand that. You should have been frozen into human form. Unless…”
Then, visibly, the answer hit him. His pale cheeks paled further. Presently he said, “You’re not going to like this, Aran.”
Aran could see it in the Warlock’s face, seventy years old and very tired and full of pity. “Go on,” he said.
“The Wheel is a new thing. Even the dead spots aren’t that old. The situation has never come up before, that’s all. People automatically assume that werewolves are people who can turn themselves into wolves.
“It seems obvious enough. You can’t even make the change without moonlight. You keep your human intelligence. But there’s never been proof, one way or another, until now.”
“You’re saying I’m a wolf.”
“Without magic, you’re a wolf,” the Warlock agreed.
“Does it matter? I’ve spent most of my life as a man,” Aran whispered. “What difference does it make—oh. Oh, yes.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you didn’t have children.”
“Eight. And they’ll have children. And one day the mana will be gone everywhere on Earth. Then what, Warlock?”
“You know already.”
“They’ll be wild dogs for the rest of eternity!”
“And nothing anyone can do about it.”
“Oh, yes, there is! I’m going to see to it that no magician ever enters Rynildissen again!” Aran stood up on the dragon’s shell. “Do you hear me, Warlock? Your kind will be barred. Magic will be barred. We’ll save the mana for the sea people and the dragons!”
It may be that he succeeded. Fourteen thousand years later, there are still tales of werewolves where Rynildissen City once stood. Certainly there are no magicians.
THE MAGIC
GOES AWAY
The Raft
The waves washed him ashore aboard a section of the wooden roof from an Atlantean winery. He was half dead, and mad. There was a corpse on the makeshift raft with him, a centaur girl, three days dead of no obvious cause.
The fisherfolk were awed. They knew the workmanship of the winery roof, and they knew that the stranger must have survived the greatest disaster in human history. Perhaps they considered him a good luck charm.
He was lucky. The fisherfolk did not steal the golden arm bands he wore. They fed him by hand until he could feed himself. When he grew strong they put him to work. He could not or would not speak, but he could follow orders. He was a big man. When his weight came back he could lift as much as any two fishermen.
By day he worked like a golem, tirelessly: they had to remember to tell him when to stop. By night he would pull his broken sword from its scabbard—the blade was broken to within two thumbs of the hilt—and turn it in his hands as if studying it.
He stayed in the bachelors’ longhouse. Women who approached him found him unresponsive. They attributed it to his sickness.
Four months after his arrival he spoke his first words.
The boy Hatchap was moving down the line of sleeping bachelors, waking them for the day’s fishing. He found the stranger staring at the ceiling in grief and anguish. “Like magic. Like magic,” he mumbled—in Greek. Suddenly he smiled, for the first time Hatchap could remember. “Magician,” he said.
That night, after the boats were in, he went to the oldest man in the village and said, “I have to talk to a magician.”
The old man was patient. He explained that a witch lived in the nearest village, but that this Mirandee had departed months ago. By now she would be meeting colleagues in Prissthil. There would be no competent magician nearer than Prissthil, which was many days’ journey.
Mad Orolandes nodded as if he understood.
He was gone the next morning. He had left one of his bracelets in the headman’s house.
Llon
Prissthil and the village called Warlock’s Cave were six hundred miles apart. Once the Warlock would have flown the distance in a single night. Even today, they might have taken riding dragons, intelligent allies…and in some place where indiscriminate use of magic had leeched mana, they might have left dragon bones to merge with the rocks.
It annoyed the Warlock to be leaving Warlock’s Cave on muleback; but he and Clubfoot considered this prudent.
It was worse than they had thought. The mana-rich places they expected to cross by magic, were not there. Three of their mules died in the desert when Clubfoot ran out of the ability to produce rain.
The situation was just this desperate: Clubfoot and the Warlock, two of the most powerful magicians left in the world, came to the conference at Prissthil on foot, leading a pack mule.
Clubfoot had red skin and straight black hair and an arched beak of a nose. His ancestors had fled an Asian infestation of vampires, had crossed the world’s broadest ocean by magic in the company of a tribe of the wolf people. His limp was a handicap he might have cured decades ago, except that it would have cost him half his power.
And the Warlock limped because of his age.
Limping, they came to the crest of a hill overlooking Prissthil.
It was late afternoon. Already the tremendous shadow of Mount Valhalla, last home of a quarrelsome pantheon of gods now gone mythical, sprawled eastward across Prissthil. The village had grown since the Warlock had last seen it, one hundred and ten years ago. The newer houses were lower, sturdier…held up not by spells spoken over a cornerstone, but by their own strength.
“Prissthil was founded on magic,” the Warlock said half to himself.
Clubfoot heard. “Was it?”
The Warlock pointed to a dish-shaped depression north of the city wall. “That crater is old, but you can still see the shape of it, can’t you? That’s Fistfall. This village started as a trading center for talismans: fragments of the boulder of starstone that made that crater. The merchants ran out of starstone long ago, but the village keeps growing. Don’t you wonder how?”
Clubfoot shrugged. “They must be trading something else.”
“Look, Clubfoot, there are guards under Llon! Llon used to be all the guard Prissthil needed!”
“What are you talking about? The big stone statue?”
The Warlock looked at him oddly. “Yes. Yes, the big stone statue.”
Winds off the desert had etched away the fine details, but the stone statue was still a work of art. Half human, half big gentle guard dog, it squatted on its haunches before the gate, looking endlessly patient. Guards leaned against its forepaws. They straightened and hailed the magicians as they came within shouting distance.
“Ho, travelers! What would you in Prissthil?”
Clubfoot cried, “We inte
nd Prissthil’s salvation, and the world’s!”
“Oh, magicians! Well, you’re welcome.” The head guard grinned. He was a burly, earthy man in armor dented by war. “Though I don’t trust your salvation. What have you come to do for us? Make more starstone?”
Clubfoot turned huffy. “It was for no trivial purpose that we traveled six hundred miles.”
“Your pardon, but my grandfather used to fly half around the world to attend a banquet,” said the head guard. “Poor old man. None of his spells worked, there at the end. He kept going over and over the same rejuvenation spell until he died. Wanted to train me for magic too. I had more sense.”
A grating voice said, “Waaarrl…lock.”
The blood drained from the head guard’s face. Slowly he turned. The other guard was backing toward the gate.
The statue’s rough-carved stone face, a dog’s face with a scholar’s thoughtful look, stared down at the magicians. “I know you,” said the rusty, almost subsonic voice. “Waarrllock. You made me.”
“Llon!” the Warlock cried joyfully. “I thought you must be mythical by now!”
“Almost. I sleep for years, for tens of years. Sometimes I wake for a few hours. The life goes out of me,” said the statue. “I wish it were not so. How can I do my duty? One day an enemy will slip past me, into the city.”
“We’ll see if we can do something about that.”
“I wish you luck.”
Clubfoot spoke confidently. “The best brains in the world are gathering here. How can we fail?”
“You’re young,” said Llon.
They passed on. Behind them the statue froze in place.
Orolandes
It was luck for Orolandes that Prissthil was no farther. Else he would have died on the way. He made for a place he knew only by name, stopping sometimes to ask directions, or to ask for work and food. He was gaunt again by the time he reached Prissthil.
He circled a wide, barren dish-shaped depression. It was too circular, too regular; it smacked uneasily of sorcery. There was a great stone statue before the city gate, and guards who straightened as he came up.