The Unwilling Warlord (15 page)

“You want to know if those are really the armies you think they are?”

Sterren nodded. “That’s right.”

The warlock snorted. “How the hell should I know?” he demanded.

“You’re a warlock, aren’t you?” Sterren asked calmly.

“That’s right, I’m a warlock — I’m not a damned mind-reading witch, or a wizard with a scrying spell, or a sorcerer with a crystal ball, or a theurgist with a god whispering my ear, or even a demonologist with an imp to run my errands! I can do things — or I could back in Ethshar, anyway — but I don’t have any way of knowing any more about what’s out there than you do.”

“Do you have any way of finding out? Could you fly over and take a look around, perhaps?”

The warlock was silent for a long moment, the only sounds the patter of the rain and the snuffling of the horses a dozen paces away.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I know how to fly, certainly, but I’m so weak here . . .” He took two steps away, and then stood, arms raised, hood thrown back, face up.

He seemed to shudder, from his head right down to his muddy boots; his cloak flapped suddenly, although there was no more wind than a moment before.

Then he toppled over backward into the mud.

Sterren hesitated, then decided against lending aid.

The warlock got to his feet under his own power, then glared at Sterren and shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I can’t fly here.”

Sterren nodded. “All right,” he said. He turned back to face the rest of the party, where the others had watched the warlock’s pratfall in puzzled silence.

“We’ll stay here until morning!” he called, first in Ethsharitic, and then in Semmat, pointing at the empty farmhouse.

“Then what?” Lady Kalira called back to him.

Sterren glanced over his shoulder at the dozens of campfires that ringed the castle. “Then we find out who those people are,” he said.

“And if they’re the enemy?” Lady Kalira demanded.

“Then,” said Sterren, “we attack!”

Chapter Nineteen

Shenna’s shriek awoke Sterren from a sound slumber; he sat up quickly, looking around for the source of the scream.

Everyone else was roused as well, and the other two witches reached her first. After an exchange too quick for spoken words, Hamder turned and called, “Sterren! Shenna says that someone was prowling around the house we’re in, and saw us!”

Sterren was still not really thinking. “Who was it?” he asked.

“I don’t know!” Shenna replied. “I didn’t see him.”

“Then how do you know he was there?” Annara asked.

“I had wards set, and he tripped one, wizard!”

“Well, if he didn’t know we were here before, he certainly does now, the way you screamed,” Emner said.

Ederd and Hamder frowned at that; Shenna chose to ignore it. Sterren said nothing, but mentally filed it away for future reference that the witches and the wizards did not appear to like each other much. He wasn’t sure if it was a personal matter, or something inherent in the two arcane disciplines.

“Did anyone else have any wards, or other spells, set to warn us of intruders?” Sterren asked.

“I don’t even know what wards are,” Annara an­nounced.

“I wouldn’t brag of it,” Ederd snapped.

Sterren raised a hand for silence, just as Lady Kalira demanded in Semmat, “What’s going on?”

“The witch . . . her magic heard something,” he said.

Alder, who had been watching the magicians, heard this and immediately headed for the nearest window, approaching it carefully, then peering around the frame, out into the rain.

Dogal took a window on the opposite side, and after a moment Alar headed for the door. The fourth side of the room was the wall separating the main room from the kitchen; the warlock, seeing what the soldiers were doing, slid quickly through the curtained doorway, presumably to look out the kitchen window.

“There’s someone running off toward the castle,” Dogal announced. “A soldier, I guess — he’s wearing a red kilt and a sword, anyway.”

“What army?” Sterren asked.

Startled, Dogal replied, “How should I know?”

Sterren, not fully awake even yet, could not think of a Semmat word for “recognize” or “identify,” so after a moment’s mental fumbling he just said, “What uniform?” He had certainly had to learn that word in order to function as warlord.

“I can’t tell Ophkar from Ksinallion,” Dogal said, “or from Shan on the Desert or anywhere else, for that matter. It’s not Semman, though.”

Alder had crossed the room during this exchange, and was squinting after the fleeing figure. Lady Kalira came up behind Dogal, as well.

“Looks Ksinallionese to me,” Alder said. Lady Kalira nodded agreement.

“Not Semman?”

“Oh, no,” all three agreed. “Not Semman!”

Sterren sighed. “We’d better get out of here, then,” he said.

Nobody argued, and in five minutes the party had collected its belongings and retired to the porch, where the horses were waiting.

In another five, the Semmans were all mounted, the draft horses were hitched up, and Sterren and the magicians were all settled in the wagon, moving unhappily out of their shelter into the thin morning drizzle.

“Which way?” Hamder asked.

That, Sterren had to admit, was a very good question. With a shrug, he pointed north. “That way,” he said. He shook the reins, and the wagon led the way across a muddy brown cornfield.

After a few minutes he reined in his horses and held up a hand to signal the Semman outriders. They gathered into a little knot at the center of what was probably a pasture in the summer, but was now mostly more mud.

The others all stared at him expectantly, hunching against the thin misty rain.

Sterren hesitated, unsure of what to say.

“Well,” he said at last, in Ethsharitic, “here we are in Semma, and that’s the Ksinallionese army over there, and maybe the Ophkarite army as well. Your job is to drive them out of Semma. Go right ahead.”

The magicians glanced at one another, then back at Sterren, for a long moment before Hamder asked, “How?”

“How should I know?” Sterren said, irritated. “You’re the magicians, with all your secrets.”

“But you’re the warlord,” Annara pointed out, “and you’re the boss; you hired us, now tell us what to do.”

Sterren had dreaded this, and here it was. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “I was forced into this stupid job, and I don’t know any more about fighting a war than you people do.”

“In that case,” Hamder said, “I think we may all be in very serious trouble.”

“Why don’t we just go home?” Shenna asked. “We can’t do anything here! Look at all those people!”

In point of fact, the besieging armies were invisible from where Sterren’s party happened to be at that moment, but nobody bothered to correct her. Sterren had told them, on board ship, that they would be facing armies totalling about four hundred and fifty men.

“Not a one of those soldiers,” Sterren pointed out, “knows anything about magic. Not one! They’ve probably never even seen any magic; it’s all scarce as fish fur in this part of the world!”

“Well, we aren’t exactly Fendel the Great,” Annara retorted.

“No, but you’re magicians, and you all agreed to come here and fight this war. Now, let’s fight it! You, Emner, last night you were telling me you could levitate, and that you have a shield spell and a way of dazing people?”

“Felshen’s First Hypnotic Spell,” Emner replied, “and Tracel’s Levitation, and Fendel’s Elementary Protection. But I’ll still just be one man against an army, and Felshen’s won’t kill anyone, or make them give up the fight. I can harass them, I suppose, but . . .”

“But nothing!” Sterren interrupted. “You’re forgetting the effect it will have on their morale to have a genuine wizard attacking them! These soldiers have never conceived of using magic to fight a war; you’ll terrify them!”

Emner looked doubtful.

Sterren was growing desperate. “Listen, I don’t expect you to destroy an army overnight, but this is what you all agreed to do, what you came here for, the reason we fed you all and transported you here and even clothed some of you.” (Annara had owned only a single tattered purple robe; Lady Kalira had provided her with a decent change of outfit while aboard ship, so that she could clean and repair the gown, with fabric, thread, and needle provided by Lady Kalira. She was wearing her own purple again at the mo­ment, but she knew who Sterren meant.) “I think you’ll find that it’s not as hard as you expect. Remember, it’s not just the eleven of us here; we have an army of our own inside that castle over there, with three fine officers who I’m sure will take advantage of any opportunity we give them.” Sterren was not at all certain of anything of the sort, and actually expected his three officers to fumble every opportunity, but he knew better than to admit that. “Those people in the castle, hundreds of them, including dozens of innocent women and children, are depending on us!”

That was most likely true; he could easily picture Princess Shirrin, watching from the castle windows for the ­triumphant return of her warlord hero. She probably ex­pected him to ride up on a white charger, banners flying and trumpets sounding, rather than driving a battered Akallan haywagon.

“I can set some traps,” Annara admitted grudgingly. “At least, while my supplies hold out. I’ll need some wax. And parchment, if you have any.”

“There!” Sterren said. “That’s more like it!” He looked at the others expectantly.

“If one of these witches or the warlock can push me once I’m airborne, I can levitate and go see what’s happening, or take messages into the castle,” Emner said.

The witches glanced at each other, but it was the warlock who said, “I ought to be able to manage that much. You’re weightless when you levitate, aren’t you?”

“Well, not really, not with Tracel’s,” Emner admitted. “There’s another levitation spell that makes you weightless, but I never got the hang of it.”

“Well, I can try it, anyway,” the warlock said.

“We can probably help,” Hamder volunteered, “as long as you’re in sight.”

“You can do a test run,” Sterren suggested.

That elicited a round of nods.

“We can . . . well, I can pick off enemy soldiers, strangle them at a distance, if we can find them away from the main camp,” Ederd said.

“Or drop rocks on them,” Hamder said.

Shenna wrinkled her nose in disgust, then admitted, “I can poison their water. Without touching it. I think.” She hesitated, and then repeated, “I think. It’s a lot easier to just make their food go bad, if you can find out where they keep it and it’s not sealed in anything.”

All eyes fell on the warlock, who shrugged and said, “I don’t know how much I can do, here, but I’ll do what I can. Strangling from a distance — I might be able to do that. Easier, for me, to just stop hearts.”

A moment of uneasy silence followed this announcement.

“There!” Sterren said, breaking it. “You see? This shouldn’t be as bad as all that! There’s a lot we can do, and they won’t have any way to fight it, or even know what’s going on!”

A couple of the magicians nodded glumly. Nobody argued. Nobody displayed any enthusiasm, either.

Sterren decided to settle for what he could get. Enthusiasm might come later. A lack of resistance was enough to start with.

“What’s going on?” Lady Kalira asked, in Semmat.

Sterren sighed and told her.

Chapter Twenty

Two days later, in a barn roughly a mile and a half northwest of Semma Castle, two of the witches were straining, watching or listening or using some other sense Sterren couldn’t guess at. The Semmans and the other magicians were waiting for something to happen. For himself, Sterren didn’t expect to know anything about it until the witches told him.

Both witches started suddenly, but that was nothing very new. They often reacted to unseen events while in perceptive trances.

Even with that warning, the bang a second or so later came as a complete surprise. Sterren had been quite sure he wouldn’t hear it.

For that matter, he hadn’t expected the spell to work. Annara had been so very pessimistic about her abilities ever since he first met her that he had, he realized, given up on ever getting any use out of her.

He glanced over at her, and she looked as surprised as he felt. “Gods!” she said, “I made it as big as I could, but that must have been huge!”

Sterren had to agree with that. According to what the witches had gleaned from the minds of passing soldiers, Sterren and his band were presently almost a mile from the Ophkarite warlord’s tent, and that was where the false message had presumably gone. An explosion that could be heard for a mile would have to be much larger than what they had expected.

Ederd suddenly emerged from his trance. “I thought you’d like to know,” he said without preamble, “we just killed the general’s secretary — I mean, the warlord’s. We didn’t get the warlord himself.”

“Killed him?” Annara squeaked.

Ederd nodded. “You don’t want the details,” he said, “but I’m sure he’s dead. Didn’t hit anybody else, though, and although there were plenty of sparks, the tent didn’t catch.”

Sterren looked at Annara with new respect. “Good work,” he said.

“But the Explosive Seal isn’t supposed to kill anybody!” she protested. “At worst, it’s intended to . . . well, to blow their hands off. Usually it just burns them a little.”

“Well, maybe you got something wrong, then,” Sterren suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Ederd replied. “He was holding the parchment up to his face, studying the seal. I think he suspected something.”

“Oh . . .” Annara looked sick.

“What’s going on?” Alder asked, in Semmat.

“We just killed the . . . the . . . a helper to the Warlord of Ophkar,” Sterren told him.

“Helper?”

“The man who writes and reads for him.”

“His aide?”

“I guess so.”

Alder grinned broadly. “Well, it’s a start,” he said.

“This magic may do some good after all,” Dogal ad­mitted grudgingly.

Sterren nodded, but he doubted that they would be able to use that particular stunt again. The enemy was warned.

Well, maybe they would find other ways to use the Explosive Seal. Could it be put on tent-flaps, perhaps? Or saddles, to detonate when the cavalry unsaddled their horses?

And could the enemy really afford to ignore sealed messages?

They hadn’t ignored this one. Hamder’s witchcraft had convinced the sentries that he was telling the truth, despite the total lack of confirmation; they had accepted him as an Ophkarite courier despite his lack of uniform, his unfamiliarity with the Ophkaritic language, and the fact that he had approached, on foot, from entirely the wrong direction. Even though he had only been able to pick a dozen or so words of the language from their minds, he had managed to make them absolutely certain that the parchment they accepted was an urgent message from the king of Ophkar that must be delivered to their warlord immediately.

Not a bad stunt at all, and Sterren had made sure Hamder knew how impressed everyone was. He regretted that Hamder wasn’t in the main room to thank again.

And now Annara had come through, as well; Sterren had not expected the seal to do any real damage.

He hoped that Emner and Hamder would be equally successful.

Even as that thought crossed his mind, Shenna dropped out of her trance and announced, “Hamder’s bringing the wizard back, but I don’t know why.”

Sterren answered, “Thanks. I’ll go ask.”

He got up from the floor, brushed himself off, ambled across the room, and mounted the ladder to the hayloft.

Hamder was sitting cross-legged in the open loft door, staring fixedly out toward the castle. Sterren looked over his shoulder and saw a small black dot growing larger in the distance.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

The witch ignored him. Sterren glanced down just as Hamder’s breath came out all in a rush, and he toppled over sideways into the hay.

“I can’t do it any more,” he said in a breathy whisper.

Sterren could see, now, that Hamder had completely exhausted himself. He leaned forward and peered at the distant figure of Emner, drifting helplessly above the enemy armies.

“Maybe the warlock can fetch him back,” he said.

Hamder had no breath to reply, but he managed a feeble nod.

Sterren turned and clambered back down the ladder, then headed for the corner where he had last seen the warlock.

The black-robed Ethsharite was still there, crouched down and muttering to himself. He did not glance up as Sterren approached.

“We have a problem,” Sterren said. “Emner’s drifting out there, and Hamder’s exhausted.”

The warlock shook his head, then winced; it was ob­vious he had another of his headaches. “Get one of the other witches,” he said. “I’ve been experimenting; I can’t move anything as massive as a person, not even when he’s levitating.”

“They’re busy; are you sure?”

The warlock looked up at Sterren, then rose to his feet. “Do you have any string?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Sterren replied. “Why?”

“Because if you did, I might be able to lift one end of it up to him, and he could just pull himself in with it. But I know what I can do, and I can’t move him. You’ll need to get one of the other witches.”

Sterren sighed, and went to get one of the other witches.

That trick with the string, though — that might be useful. He wanted to remember that.

He sighed again, remembering the high hopes he had had for his warlock. The fellow was turning out to be pitifully feeble. He could levitate a few pounds at a time, light small fires, open locks — but that was about it, and he was almost constantly sick with his ferocious headaches.

The headaches worried Sterren somewhat. He had never heard of warlocks getting headaches. Ordinarily, warlocks were the epitome of health and vigor, able to heal themselves, able to obliterate any diseases that attacked them, drawing strength from the Power — at least, until the nightmares started. Even then, they stayed physically healthy, except perhaps for some minor adverse effects of not sleeping.

The nightmares had stopped for this one, but the mysterious headaches might well be worse than the nightmares. Since the headaches had started the warlock even seemed to have more grey in his hair.

Sterren had heard of warlocks who fled south when the nightmares began, but he had never heard anything about headaches.

Shenna was back in trance, but Ederd was taking a break, leaning back against a pile of straw. After all, the excitement was over, the explosion had gone off; Shenna could keep an eye on things by herself for the moment.

“Ederd,” Sterren said, “you’ll have to take over with Emner; Hamder’s worn out.”

“Is he all right?” Ederd asked, getting quickly to his feet.

Sterren was not completely sure whether Ederd meant Emner or Hamder, but it didn’t really make much difference. “I think so,” he replied.

Ederd was already at the ladder and climbing.

Sterren looked around the interior of the barn.

Alder and Dogal were sitting on one side, chatting quietly in Semmat. Lady Kalira and Alar were talking nearby. Shenna was sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor, and the warlock was in his corner, leaning against a wall. Annara was doing something with her belt-dagger and a bucket in another corner. Ederd and Hamder were up in the loft, fetching Emner back from scouting mission.

It was a shame Emner knew no Semmat, and Sterren could not be sure anyone in the castle spoke Ethsharitic or Emner’s native Lamumese; otherwise, he could have used the wizard to establish contact with the besieged Semmans. Nobody else in the party could levitate that far; the witches could, working together, get one of their number a good way off the ground — but only for a very short time, nowhere near long enough to propel him or her all the way to the castle ramparts. The warlock had been able to fly in Ethshar, but here he was unable to lift himself so much as an inch.

It occurred to Sterren for the first time that he could send written messages back and forth — even if his own Semmat was limited, especially in writing, Lady Kalira was fluent and literate.

That was something to keep in mind — but then, what would he say in a message? And Hamder had half-killed himself hauling Emner about on his scouting trip; getting him in and out of the castle would be a major project.

The whole project of winning the war was turning out to be more work than he had hoped. His magicians, while willing enough once they got started, seemed unable to think for themselves, and needed to be told what to do almost every step of the way. He had thought at first that he could turn them loose and sit back and wait for victory, but instead he found himself plotting and planning constantly.

He wondered why he bothered. He had made his gesture; why didn’t he just pack up and go home to Ethshar?

There was Lady Kalira, of course, and the three soldiers, who might try to stop him, but he thought that he could slip away if he tried, take a horse — or all the horses, to prevent pursuit and give him something to sell in Akalla to pay for passage — and make a dash for it.

The longer he stayed here, the more likely he was to be captured or killed outright by the invaders. He wasn’t really doing Semma much good; only one enemy soldier dead so far, after two days!

There were all those people in the castle depending on him, but how much good could he really do them?

He thought it over, very seriously, and decided he didn’t know why he was staying.

Maybe he would flee, in a day or two.

But not yet.