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 smashing 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. Smashing 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 pass-the spell would wear off, or some damnable 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 DГ©tha 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 of Fortress 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 ship last year-hewas on the list, along with the ship 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 of Arena 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 Perréa, 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, on Circus Street.”
“I’ll take a look,” Rudhira said.
“Go ahead,” Hanner said as the woman veered sideways and swooped up Circus 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 of Circus 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.