The Unwilling Warlord (17 page)

“Does anyone in the castle,” he said in Semmat, “have . . . ah . . . from an animal that makes fire . . .” As he spoke, he was vaguely aware that the witches were whispering with Emner about something.

“A dragon?” Lady Kalira asked. “There are dragons in the mountains north of Lumeth of the Towers, but they’ve never come this far south.”

“Not the whole dragon, just the . . . the stuff. Red stuff. From inside.” Sterren knew he had heard the Semmat word for “blood,” but he could not think of it.

“Blood? Dragon’s blood?” Alder asked.

“Yes! Blood. Dragon’s blood.”

“I never heard of anybody who had any,” Lady Kalira replied. “Why? Is it good for something?”

“Annara needs it for her magic.”

The four Semmans looked at one another, then back at Sterren. “Sorry,” Alder said.

Sterren sighed, and switched back to Ethsharitic. “About these catapults . . .”

“From Emner’s description, they’re too big for us to move,” Hamder said. “Especially if it’s really ironwood.”

“It takes ten men to move one, even with the wheels,” Emner explained.

“And witches may use magic instead of arms and legs and backs, but they aren’t any stronger than Ophkarite or Ksinallionese soldiers, even so,” Shenna said.

“Can you break them, somehow?”

Shenna and Hamder started to glance at each other, but Ederd flatly stated, “No. Not if they’re as strongly made as Emner says.”

Emner shrugged apologetically. “They need to be strong to heave rocks that big,” he said.

“All right,” Sterren said, “the witches can’t do anything. What about you, Emner?”

“I can make them whistle or sing, but that’s all. I’m sorry.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Sterren turned to Annara, but before he could speak, she said, “Not without more dragon’s blood, and probably not then.”

That left the warlock.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t burn the frames, nor break them outright, not in my present condition, but I might be able to break some of the ropes, or do some other damage. I don’t have the straight lifting power these witches have here, but I believe I can do subtler things — crackings and frayings and twistings — that they can­not.”

“Crackings?” Emner looked thoughtful, and said, “If you could crack the main crosspiece, the lever, while they were preparing to fire, the whole machine would probably come apart under the strain.”

“That would be perfect,” Sterren said.

The warlock shrugged. “I can try,” he said.

“Good,” Sterren replied. “And you will.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Will this do?” Sterren asked, pointing.

The warlock crept up beside him and peered over the ridgepole. “I think so,” he said. “I can see the structure from here, anyway.”

Sterren nodded. “Good,” he said, “because we can’t find anywhere better that’s half this safe.”

The warlock glanced at him. “Why did you come with me, then, if it’s dangerous?” he asked.

Sterren was not really sure himself. He shrugged, and said, “I get tired of just hearing reports. I wanted to see some of the action for myself.” He did not really want to think about that any more; it only reminded him just how dangerous his situation actually was, perched on a rooftop a hundred yards from an enemy camp. He changed the subject.

“How’s your head today?”

“Better — or at least different,” the warlock said.

“Different? How is it different?”

The warlock hesitated, and said, “Maybe I’m just getting used to it.”

It seemed to Sterren that his mysterious black-clad companion was being unusually talkative today, and he decided to try to take advantage of that to get a few answers to mysteries that had been bothering him.

“You know,” he said, “I never heard of warlocks having headaches like yours. That’s not what the stories say happens when you move south.”

“I never heard of it, either,” the warlock said. “I don’t understand it.”

“It is somehow related to your magic, isn’t it?” Sterren asked.

“Oh, I would say so.” He hesitated, and then continued, “You’re a warlock yourself, aren’t you? I thought I could see that, before we got so far south and I lost my finer perceptions.”

“Not really,” Sterren admitted, “I failed an apprenticeship.”

“Ah, that would explain it entirely! It took me a long time, you know, to decide that you were one — you didn’t act like one, but you seemed to know the art, and I could feel something in your mind. I thought you were just keeping it secret, for some reason.”

“No,” Sterren said, “I might have a trace of the Power, but I’m not really a warlock. I won more than I should at dice, back in Ethshar, but that’s all.”

The warlock nodded. “Then you wouldn’t know,” he said.

“Know what?”

“What it feels like to use the Power.”

“No,” Sterren agreed, “I don’t know. What is it like?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain. It’s as if something — not someone, because it clearly isn’t human, but something, perhaps a god or a demon or something we don’t have a name for — is whispering in your mind, and you can’t understand anything it’s saying, you can’t be sure it’s words at all, but you can pull strength from it all the same, you can take the sound of the whisper and reshape it and use it to feel and shape and change the world around you. Do you understand?”

Sterren almost thought he did. He nodded, and said nothing.

“And after you’ve used warlockry a lot, the whisper is always there, always, whether you’re listening or not, using the Power or not, awake or asleep. It’s a constant background, and it gets a little louder each time you draw on it. And it’s trying to tell you something, but you don’t know what.”

He paused, and then said, “You know about the nightmares.”

It was not a question, but Sterren nodded again.

“The nightmares are when the whisper begins to make sense. You still can’t make out the words, still can’t tell what it’s trying to tell you, or what’s whispering, but you catch bits of it, little bits and pieces of images. And you can’t shut them out; the whisper is always there, it won’t go away, and those images seep into your mind little by little.” He shivered.

“And when you came south?” Sterren prompted.

“When I came south,” the warlock said, “the whispering faded away. It was wonderful at first; I could forget the little glimmers of meaning I’d been catching, and the nightmares stopped. I couldn’t hear the whisper at all. But then, when we headed inland, I started to hear buzzing.”

Startled, Sterren stared at him. “Buzzing?” he said.

“Humming, buzzing, something like that. It’s not really a sound, it’s a source, a mental sensation, like the whisper — but this one isn’t a voice, isn’t an intelligence at all, it’s a mindless drone, like a beehive or a millstone. And . . . well, have you ever lived somewhere where you hear some un­pleasant noise constantly? A loud one? It gives you a headache.” He sighed. “But after awhile, you get used to it, and in time, you don’t even notice it any more. I expect that in time I won’t notice this any more. At present, I’m still constantly aware of it, but my head doesn’t hurt any more.”

Sterren nodded.

He thought he understood the analogy the warlock made, and had an idea what it must feel like — but he had no idea what could be causing the “buzzing” the warlock described.

But then, nobody knew what the Aldagmor Source was, either. Presumably there was another, different one somewhere near Semma, one that had never created its own magicians the way the Aldagmor Source had back in 5202, but which warlocks could perceive.

“If it’s like the Source,” he asked, “can you draw Power from it?”

The warlock looked at him, startled. “I have no idea,” he said. “I haven’t been able to so far; it doesn’t offer Power the way the Source does. But it . . . I don’t know.” He chopped his words off short and stopped speaking.

Sterren decided not to push the matter. He peered over the farmhouse ridgepole and said, “I think they’re getting ready to load. It looks like pitch. A ball of pitch. I suppose they’ll light it right before they release.”

The warlock stared. “Yes,” he said.

“Can you crack the beam?”

The warlock didn’t answer; Sterren glanced over, and saw his jaw clenched with strain, his eyes narrowed.

Sterren shaded his eyes with a hand, and stared at the trebuchet. Was the beam starting to bend a little more than it should, perhaps?

He shifted, squinted, stared harder.

The catapult exploded. One moment it was there, the crosspiece bending only slightly, and the next instant the entire superstructure was gone, lost in a spreading cloud of red-hot debris. The great wooden bucket of stones that served as the counterweight crashed to the ground and shattered, the ball of pitch burst into flame and rolled back onto the crew that had just loaded it, and the framework simply vanished in the burst of glowing fragments. The earth shook, and a tremendous rolling roar reached the two men on the rooftop.

Sterren gaped, and clung desperately to the thatch as the building swayed beneath him.

A long moment later, burning splinters began to rain down about him, spattering onto the thatch. The scent of burning reached his nose, and he began sliding quickly backward down the slope.

He stopped at the edge and looked back up the slope.

The warlock was still lying there on the roof, but nothing touched him; fragments that might have struck him instead swerved aside as they approached.

“Gods,” Sterren said, “what happened?”

The warlock turned and grinned down at him, by far the broadest smile Sterren had ever seen on that dour face. “Can’t you guess?” he said. “It was your idea, you know.”

Sterren shook his head.

“I’ve tuned into the buzzing; I’m drawing power from it. I’m as powerful as I ever was!” He rose upright, in a totally unnatural manner; his hands and knees never moved, but his body simply swung up unsupported. Once standing, he lifted further, up into the air. His black robe spread into great flapping wings, and he laughed triumphantly. “Sterren,” he called, “there are no voices! It’s just power, nothing but power!” He laughed again, and thunder rolled overhead.

The warlock looked up at the sound, and without warning, a bolt of lightning flashed down, and incinerated the remaining fragments of the catapult.

The lightning was not the natural blue-white; it was a fiery orange-red. Warlock lightning. Sterren had heard of it, but never seen it.

Another bolt struck off to the left, destroying another catapult; then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and the enemy’s long-range arsenal was gone.

The wind was rising, and Sterren decided that a roof was not a good place to be. He was unsure how completely the warlock was actually controlling this sudden storm, and did not care to risk a miscalculation — or even a deliberate attack, since after all, he hardly knew the warlock. He slid down until his feet caught on the ladder they had used to climb up, and then descended quickly.

Thunder boomed again, and this time even the thunder was clearly unnatural — it was great rolling laughter.

It was recognizably the warlock’s voice.

He hurried around the corner of the house, and was in time to see the wind sweeping soldiers off their feet, knock­ing them flat to the ground.

Then the wind stopped, and the braver Ksinallionese — Sterren had learned the different uniforms, and could see no Ophkarites on this side of the castle — got to their feet again.

The thunder-voice spoke again, in words this time.

“Go home!” it roared. “This land is under the protection of Vond the Warlock! To stay here is to die!”

Then, again, laughter rolled across the plain.

Sterren saw the enemy milling in confusion at first; then a mounted officer panicked and spurred his horse to a gallop, bound north toward Ksinallion.

Panic spread like a wave through the besiegers, rippling out from that fleeing lieutenant, and in minutes the entire army was in full flight, pursued by howling unnatural winds.

Their morale had been deteriorating for days — men dying mysteriously, explosive booby-traps scattered about, strange figures flying overhead invulnerable to arrows. This supernatural storm and voice like an angry god was more than these frightened soldiers could take. Individually or in groups, they broke and ran, bound for their homes.

Sterren did not blame them in the least for running. He stood and watched, smiling happily, as the storm swept on around the castle, driving the besieging army away from every side.

He had won the war. He and his six magicians had defeated fifty times their number. He was safe from execution by either side. In fact, he would be a hero to the Semmans.

He looked up at the warlock, hanging in mid-air, his black robe transformed into immense black wings that gave him the appearance of a hovering hawk, and waved triumphantly.

Vond, as the warlock had called himself, returned the wave. Thunder rumbled about him, and clouds gathered thickly overhead, ready to burst.

Sterren looked at the distant castle. The inhabitants had a celebration coming. They were saved.

At least, Sterren corrected himself, they were saved from Ophkar and Ksinallion. He supposed they would now have to deal with Vond — he would presumably want to stay here permanently, away from the whispering of Aldag­mor. Having so powerful a warlock around the place might well change a few things. He might not be satisfied with the handful of gold and gems he had been promised. At the very least, Agor would probably be displaced as royal magician in short order.

But, Sterren thought, his grin returning, that wasn’t his problem.

He remembered the peasants whose only interest in the siege was knowing when it would be over, so they could go home, regardless of who won. They probably wouldn’t care about anything Vond did, either. It wasn’t their problem.

King Phenvel might have a problem. Agor might have a problem. Any number of other people might have problems.

Right now, Sterren felt as if he had none at all.

Vond probably felt the same way, Sterren thought, and a tiny little thought poked its way into his mind, like a pin working into a quilt.

If the warlock thought his problems were gone, he was wrong; he definitely had a very real problem.

Sterren looked up, wondering if Vond knew.

The storm broke suddenly, and sparkling blue rain spilled heavily down, soaking him instantly. He looked up, blinking, and saw Vond hanging in the sky, cloak spread, head thrown back, laughing wildly as the sheets of rain parted before him, leaving him untouched and dry.