“We locked the prisoners in their rooms,” Rudhira said before he could finish the sentence. “The others are still asleep.”
“I’ll wake them if you like, my lord,” Yorn said. He was standing to one side.
“It’s not necessary,” Hanner said. Hesitantly, uneasy under the silent scrutiny of a dozen watchers, he crossed the room and took his seat at the head of the table.
He had never been at the head of a table before, and wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea; this was properly his uncle’s place. As a nobleman Hanner had grown up giving orders to servants and soldiers and expecting a certain amount of deference, but he had also almost always been subordinate to someone else-his parents, his uncle, the overlord, the various other lords who ran the city. The only times he had been the highest-ranking person at a meal had been in the palace kitchens or in the city’s inns-never in a formal dining room. It felt odd to sit in the big carved oak chair and look down the length of the table.
An empty plate lay ready for him, while half-empty platters of bread and ham and a pitcher of small beer stood close at hand. Hanner could see that the others had not waited for him to appear before eating;Bern had not yet cleared away the used plates and scattered crumbs.
Hanner speared a slice of ham with his belt knife and transferred it to his plate, then reached for the beer and a pewter mug Bern had provided.
“My lord,” Yorn said as Hanner poured, “I should return to my company.”
Hanner looked up, startled. “Has the warlockry gone away?” he asked, putting down the pitcher.
He should have asked that sooner, he realized. It should have been the first thing he said when he came down the stairs and found Rudhira waiting. It was obviously the most important question, the single thing that would most affect what he did that day.
“No,” Yorn said.
“No,” Zarek agreed. He was seated on Hanner’s left. “Look!”
Zarek’s plate lifted into the air, then hovered and began to spin-which flung bread crumbs in all directions. One landed in Hanner’s beer.
“Sorry,” Zarek said as the plate dropped the foot or so to the table and landed with a ringing clatter.
“It’s nothing,” Hanner said, picking up the mug and staring at the floating crumb. He glanced up and noticed Bern ’s silent but intense disapproval of Zarek’s action.
Well,Bern was the servant and Zarek the guest, despite Zarek’s ragged attire;Bern would just have to tolerate such behavior. With a grimace Hanner gulped beer, then set the mug down again.
“So the magic is still here,” he said. “Hasanything changed since last night?”
The others looked at one another; no one spoke at first, then Zarek offered, “I’ve had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in years, thanks to that lovely bed you let me use, but other than that, noth-ing.”
“Has there been any word from the Palace?” He directed this at Alris, but she turned to Bern.
“There have been no callers since your arrival, my lord,” Bern replied.
“Did anyone receive any messages by other means, then?” Hanner looked around the table and at the others beyond. “A wizard-sent dream, perhaps?”
A few empty hands turned up; no one spoke.
“Alris?”
“I haven’t heard a thing,” she said. “If I had any dreams I don’t remember them.”
“I had dreams,” Rudhira volunteered. “Not messages, though— nightmares. Bad ones. Fire and falling and suffocation, all jumbled together, and something calling to me.”
“So did I!”
“Me, too!”
Half a dozen voices chimed in, startled.
“But those werebefore,” one young woman said, overriding the others. “That was what woke me up in the first place, when I first found out I could do magic. I dreamed I was flying but burning as I flew, and then I fell and fell and fell and dove into the earth as if it were a pond, but then it fell in on me and I was buried, I was trapped and smothered, and that was when I woke up and discovered my bedsheets were floating in midair.”
Again, several voices spoke at once, but this time not all were agreeing-some were protesting that their dreams had been later, here in the mansion.
“Silence!” Hanner bellowed. He stood up and pointed at Ru-dhira. “When did you dream?”
“I was awake when the magic came,” Rudhira said. “It was like a flash in my mind, and I could fly and... well, you all know about that. It was here, in this house, that I had dreams about burning and falling and strangling.”
Hanner nodded and pointed to Yorn.
“I had no dreams,” the soldier said. “I was awake when the screams came, and it was when I tried to help one of the others in my barracks that I found I could move things.”
The next man, Alar Agor’s son, had been asleep when the magic came and had been awakened by nightmares, and the nightmares had recurred, far less intensely, after going back to sleep in Lord Faran’s mansion.
The next person, the young woman whose bedsheets had floated above her, had been awakened by the dreams, but they had not recurred. Hanner asked her name, which she gave as Artalda the Fair.
In the end, of the eleven warlocks in the room, four had been awake when the magic came, and all seven of the others had been awakened by the same nightmare of a fiery plunge into entrapment in the ground. Four of them-two who had originally been awake and two who had been asleep-had had milder nightmares afterward, here in the house on High Street.
Neither Hanner nor Alris nor Bern had dreamed at all, so far as they could recall.
“The later dreams were different,” said Desset of Eastwark, a plump woman who was one of the two who had experienced both, and who was one of the three who had been flying steadily last night. “Something wascalling me. I don’t think it was the first time.”
“Something was definitely calling me,” Rudhira agreed.
“I think something called meboth times,” said Varrin the Weaver, the last of the three flyers, the other who had dreamed twice, and the one whose initial experience, destroying his entire bedroom, had been the most violent.
Just then another warlock, newly arisen from his borrowed bed, wandered in, to be immediately confronted by Rudhira.
“Didyou have any strange dreams last night?” she demanded.
Startled, the warlock-a youth named Othisen Okko’s son— said, “What?”
Rudhira repeated the question. The boy, a farmer’s son who had been in the city consulting a theurgist when the new magic appeared, looked around at the crowd staring at him.
“Sort of,” he said. “I don’t really remember.”
Rudhira looked ready to interrogate Othisen further, but Hanner interrupted.
“I don’t think it matters,” he said. “I think it’s clear that there is some common phenomenon at work here, something that happened last night that caused these nightmares and that gave you all this strange magic. And it’s clear that it’s affected different people differently, which is why some of you have much more powerful magic than others, some have more intense dreams, and so on. Finding out exactly which effect it’s had on whom isn’t important. Finding out what it was, and whether the effects are permanent, and whether there areother effects we don’t know about,might be important. So we know that the magic hasn’t gone away, and the dreams haven’t gone away-but not everyone had the dreams, and they do seem to be a little less intense the second time around. Now, has anyone noticed anything else out of the ordinary? Has the magic faded at all?”
The warlocks looked at one another. Rudhira ventured, “There was a lot of screaming last night, when it all first started.”