Ethshar - Night Of Madness Part 5

Queen Rulura, until recently a princess of the more straitlaced neighboring kingdom of Hollendon, had, as usual, gotten disgusted with her husband and gone up to bed early. She had married King Agravan for dynastic reasons, and while they generally got along well enough despite the twelve-year difference in their ages, she never pretended to love everything about him. Excessive drinking usually meant a few days of frosty silence between them.

It was a surprise, therefore, when Agravan found the door of her bedchamber ajar and two lamps burning therein. He signaled to his bodyguards and stumbled over for a closer look.

"Rulura?" he asked, leaning into the room.

"Agri!" she called happily, turning to smile at him. She was sitting at her writing desk. "Come in!"

He took a cautious step into the room. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Look what I can do!" She gestured, and a quill pen floated in midair before her outstretched hand.

Agravan frowned at it, puzzled-but much less drunk than he had been a moment before.

"How?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said cheerfully. "I just discovered that I could do it."

"It's magic?"

"I think it must be, yes."

"Rulura, you're a queen," Agravan said quietly. "You don't do magic."

"I do now!" she said proudly. "Oh, Agri, think how useful it could be! I can pa.s.s things to you where no one can see them, pick things up ... I could even be an a.s.sa.s.sin!" She giggled. "I could go up to someone with empty hands, and then stab him in the back." "You could," Agravan said slowly.

"We could use this, Agri, I know we could. It might not be much of anything, but I'm still learning. If there are other things I can do, this might make Tirissa the most powerful of all the Small Kingdoms!"

"Ruli," Agravan said gently, "the Wizards' Guild forbids kings and queens to use magic."

Rulura hesitated. "I thought that was just for wars."

"No, the agreement not to fight wars with magic is just good sense, that's not the Guild's doing."

"Well, I didn't go out andlearn this," the queen protested. "It just happened."

Agravan nodded. "I'm sure it did," he said. "Maybe it will go away again. Good night, Ruli." He stepped back and closed the door.

Then he beckoned to one of his bodyguards and told him quietly, "Tonight, when she's asleep, kill her."

He no longer sounded drunk at all.

"Kill thequeen}" the guard asked, startled.

"Yes," Agravan said. "Kill the queen." He glanced back at the door, hoping this mysterious magic hadn't given Rulura the ability to hear through a closed door.

"It'll mean war with Hollendon, Your Majesty," the bodyguard warned him. "Are you sure you shouldn't wait until you're sober to decide such a thing?"

"I'm sure," Agravan said. "We can't afford to wait. You heard what she said about putting a knife in someone's back. She might well put one inmy back, if she thinks she can use her magic to get away with it. There's areason the Wizards' Guild won't allow anyone of royal blood to learn magic."

"She's just levitating pens," the guard protested.

"So farit's just pens. I'm not going to risk waiting. You have your orders."

The bodyguard sighed. "Yes, Your Majesty," he said.

An hour later the only member of any royal family in the Small Kingdoms to have become a warlock became a corpse, eliminating any possible threat to the Guild's prohibitions on mixing magic and government.

In one small village in Aldagmor, easternmost and most mountainous of the Baronies of Sardiron, an old woman named Kara had hidden in her wardrobe when the screaming and other noises began. Now that everything had been quiet for a time she finally emerged, looking around cautiously by the dim moonlight.

Everything appeared normal. She lit a lamp and saw that her bedroom was undamaged. The village was quiet.

The village was, she thought,too quiet. After all the commotion before she would have expected her neighbors to be gossiping in the road, but she couldn't hear any voices through her open window. She threw on a shawl-even in midsummer the night breeze could be cool on the slopes of the mountains-and hurried through the other room of her cottage, out into the center of the village.

It was utterly deserted.

She looked around at the other houses. Some were intact, untouched and dark.

Others were just as dark, but far from intact. The greenhouse at the east end of the cottage where Imirin the Herbalist lived had been smashed to bits. Half the roof was gone from her brother Karn's house. And Elner's house was gone completely.

"Hai!"she called. "What happened?"

No one answered. The only sound was the gentle sighing of the night wind in the trees.

Frightened, Kara began searching the village house by house, looking for some sign of life, someone who could tell her what had happened.

She found no one. Doors were unlocked, many standing open, even in the intact houses, so she was able to investigate thoroughly. Every remaining bed was empty; no one replied to her cries.

Finally, she stood in the center of the village again, certain she was the only person left there, alive or dead.

She had found footprints leading southeast. She had noticed that the open doors, broken walls, missing roofs, and so on were all on the east or south. She looked in that direction, into the darkness of the night, and saw nothing.

For a moment she thought of following, of walking southeast in search of her missing friends and family.

The urge grew, huge and irrational, and she took a step.

Then she caught herself. She hadn't survived seventy-three northern winters by acting on impulse or following blindly after other people. Something haddrawn the villagers in that direction, and now it was belatedly trying to drawher, and she wasn't going.

She turned and began marching determinedly northwest. She chose that direction simply because it was the opposite of the direction everyone else had taken, but she knew it was also taking her the first few steps toward Sardiron of the Waters, thirty leagues away, where the Council of Barons met. If nothing intervened, she intended to walk the entire way and ask the Council for succor.

It would take at least a sixnight to walk that far, but after all, she had no further obligations here.

And in Ethshar of the Rocks, the smallest, westernmost, and most northerly of the three great cities of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, a man named Shemder Parl's son stood at the window of his rented room, watching the lunatics in the street below.

He had awakened from a nightmare, sweating and shaking, and when he reached for the pitcher beside his bed he discovered that he had somehow acquired magical abilities, that he could move things without touching them. He heard the commotion in the streets and went to the window to see what was happening.

He stood there, watching and listening and thinking, for some time.

There were others who had received the same magic, and they were out there running wild, stealing things and smas.h.i.+ng windows and setting fires, shouting about the end of the World, many of them flying off to the east.

Shemder thought they were fools.

This wasn't the end of the World. The faint sensation in his head urging him to go east was a feeble annoyance, at most. Smas.h.i.+ng and stealing was too loud, too obvious, too blatant. Sooner or later the overlord's guards or the established magicians would organize, recover, and deal harshly with those idiots. The magic would surely pa.s.s-the spell would wear off, or some d.a.m.nable high-ranking wizard would find a way to remove it-and then those rampaging morons would be rounded up and flogged or hanged. They would have wasted the opportunity of a lifetime.

Shemder was not about to waste his one unexpected chance at revenge.

He had been planning it all out, step by step. He would start with his landlady. He wouldn't touch her, but she would fall down the cellar stairs and crack her skull on the stone steps.

The magic would ensure that.

And then his brother Neran, who had gone from a childhood of bullying to an adulthood of rubbing Shemder's nose in Neran's success as a woodcarver and Shemder's own failure to ever be anything more than a stevedore at the Bywater docks, poor Neran would fall on one of his own knives.

That witch Detha of Hillside who had refused to accept Shemder as an apprentice all those years ago, and who kept telling him he needed to find his own path-shewould find her own path, right off the cliffs at the end ofFortress Street , onto the rocks at low tide.

Falissa and Kirris and Lura and all the other women who had refused him over the years-some hearts would burst, some women would mysteriously choke to death.

The magistrate who had sentenced Shemder to three lashes for stealing that statuette from the Tintallionese s.h.i.+p last year-hewas on the list, along with the s.h.i.+p captain who noticed the loss in the first place.

Shemder doubted the magic would last long enough to finish the list. It was along list.

And, he decided, he had spent enough time just thinking about it. It was time to start doing it, to see just how far down the list he could get before the magic stopped. The idea thatbe might be stopped before the magic was didn't occur to him; he wasn't a fool like those people running in the streets.

Hewas going to use his giftright, he told himself as he opened the door and called for the landlady.

Who could stop him?

Chapter Seven.

Lord Hanner marched up the broad dimness ofArena Street with a mismatched dozen of the "war-locked" walking behind him, and three more flying overhead. The rest of the crowd in Witch Alley-the man in homespun who had been speaking to Mother Perrea, the old man in rags who had followed Rudhira from Camptown, and most of the others-had either denied being "war-locked" or had quietly slipped away rather than obey Manner's orders.

But this group had accepted his authority. They were, he had told them, on their way to the Palace to volunteer their services to the overlord, and along the way they would confront any other war-locked magicians they found and stop them from doing any more damage.

"Do you see anyone?" he called up to the airborne trio.

"No, my lord," Rudhira called down in reply. Hanner quickly turned his gaze to avoid looking up her skirt as it flapped in the breeze.

"How can she fly like that?" the guardsman to Hanner's left muttered. "I can barely lift myself a foot off the ground, and there she is, swooping along as if it were nothing!"

"And I can't get off the ground at all," Hanner replied. "Obviously, this thing affected people differently."

"Well, it didn't affectyou atall, my lord," the soldier said. "I can move things, as she can-but Ican't fly."

"So she got more of this ... this warlockry than you did," Hanner said.

"But why?"

"My guess would be random chance." "My lord!" One of the flyers, an older man in a fancy linen tunic, was calling.

Hanner looked up and realized he ought to know the man's name, but didn't. "What is it?"

"There's someone flying," the man called down. "Off to the right, onCircus Street ."

"I'll take a look," Rudhira said.

"Go ahead," Hanner said as the woman veered sideways and swooped upCircus Street . He broke into a run, into the intersection and around the corner.

The other warlocks hesitated, looking at one another, unsure what to do. "Stay together," Hanner called back over his shoulder as he peered into the darkness. There were no shops along this stretch ofCircus Street , no lanterns, and all the windows in the half-timbered little houses were dark; only the torches at the corner gave any light.

He saw Rudhira's target now-a boy, scarcely old enough for breeches, hovering in midair above the center of the street.

"Stay back!" the boy called. He held up an arm warningly, but none too steadily.

Rudhira stopped suddenly and hung motionless in midair where she was. Hanner did not think she had done so deliberately; the boy had stopped her somehow.

"Oh, you think so?" she said, and the boy abruptly dropped to the street, landing on his back on the hard-packed dirt with the wind knocked out of him. Rudhira swept down and landed beside him. She didn't touch him, but Hanner could see the boy struggling unsuccessfully to sit up.

"Don't you try to pushme around, boy," Rudhira said.

"Don't hurt him!" Hanner called as he ran up panting. "We don't know whether he's done anything ..."

"I haven't," the boy gasped.

"He tried to knock me down," Rudhira said. "I felt it."

"I was just pus.h.i.+ng you away," the boy said. "You frightened me!"

"Why?" Rudhira asked angrily. "Why should you be scared of me?"

"You were flying!"

"So were you!"

"But I... you'rebigger than me."

This was just barely true, given Rudhira's rather small stature, but she was definitely an adult, while the boy definitely was not.

"And my magic is stronger," Rudhira said, finally letting the boy sit up. "Don't you forget it, either." As Hanner went down on one knee beside the boy he glanced up at Rudhira, but said nothing in reply.