Something was rising toward them, something brightly colored and larger than a man.
“Stop here,” Hanner said, and Kirsha halted their southward drift.
The rising shape became clear, and Hanner realized it was a man sitting cross-legged on a carpet-a flying carpet, perhaps eight feet by twelve. The man wore red and gold robes, and the carpet was dark blue patterned in gold.
The carpet was coming toward them, swooping gracefully through an upward spiral. Hanner waited.
A moment later the carpet reached their own level and stopped a dozen feet away. The seated man-the wizard, certainly-was no one Hanner had ever seen before; he was short, stocky, and going gray. Hanner sensed an odd wrongness about him, but could not say what it was. He frowned. He hoped that this really was a wizard and not some sort of illusion. “Hai!” the seated man said. “What do you want with us, warlock?”
Hanner ignored the feeling of wrongness and replied, “I need to speak to whomever it is that’s going to decide what the Wizards’ Guild does about warlocks.”
“If the Guild wishes to hear from you, they’ll summon you,” the red-robed man said.
“My uncle Faran waited to be summoned,” Hanner said. “That didn’t work out well. The Guild would summon me if they knew what was best for us all, themselves included. They don’t know that yet, because they haven’t heard what I have to say. Surely, you don’t maintain that even the Guild knows everything. Ithinia never thought it necessary to speak to Lord Faran, and see howthat turned out.”
“Don’t threaten me, warlock,” the wizard said warningly. “I think you’ll find me harder to kill than Lord Faran’s executioner.”
“I was not making threats,” Hanner said. “I merely speak the truth.”
The mention of Faran’s executioner, however, gave him the clue he needed to recognize the nature of the wrongness he had felt.
The wizard had no heartbeat. In fact, he had no heart in his chest. Hanner could feel only a magical darkness where a heart should be. Stopping his heart, as Hanner had done to Faran’s slayer, would not be possible.
Hanner had heard of wizards doing this, hiding their hearts before undertaking some particularly perilous task; they could still be hurt, but the heart would keep beating, wherever it was stored, and the wizard would not die of injuries that would ordinarily be instantly fatal. Hewould be harder to kill, Hanner thought-but probably not impossible.
If the wizard had taken such a precaution before coming to speak to him-well, it would seem that the Wizards’ Guild did accept that warlocks could pose a real threat.
That was promising, in a way.
And that they had prepared this messenger to speak to him, rather than sending some magical assassin after him, was even more promising.
While Hanner considered this, the wizard had considered Han-ner’s words. Now he responded.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll bring you to them.”
Hanner turned to Kirsha. “Put me down on the carpet,” he said.
“Sir, are you sure-”
“I’m sure,” Hanner said, cutting her off. “I’ve dealt with wizards for years. Put me on the carpet, then go back to the house and wait for me. And don’t use any more magic until tomorrow. If you have nightmares tonight, don’tever use any more.”
“As you say.” Hanner felt himself pushed forward, and a moment later his feet touched the thick pile of the carpet. He stepped forward cautiously. It was like walking across a featherbed; he sat down quickly, and the wizard moved aside to make room.
Hanner turned to see Kirsha still hanging unsupported in midair, staring at him.
“Go on,” he said, waving to her. “I’ll be fine. We all will.”
She waved back, then turned and flew away.
Then Hanner turned to the wizard. “I am Hanner the Warlock, Chairman of the Council of Warlocks,” he said.
The wizard looked at him silently for a moment, then said, “I’m a wizard. You don’t need my name.”
Names had power, Hanner remembered-some spells required the name of the person the spell would affect. The wizard was not simply being rude.
“Please yourself,” Hanner started to say, but the final syllable stretched out and vanished as the carpet abruptly turned and swooped downward. Wind rushed past him, yanking his words away. He closed his eyes against the drying wind, and when he opened them again the carpet was sailing into a great dark opening in an upper floor of a building he did not recognize.
Once inside, the carpet settled to the floor, and abruptly became as flat and lifeless as any ordinary rug.
Hanner looked around at a large rough chamber where most of one wall was open to the outside. There were no furnishings, no windows other than the open wall; overhead were the bare rafters of a peaked roof.
The wizard got to his feet, then turned and watched, not offering his hand, as Hanner rose. “This way,” he said, pointing to a small, perfectly ordinary wooden door.
Hanner followed the wizard through the door into a small, bare, wooden room, where assorted cloaks and hoods hung on a row of pegs on one wall. The wizard selected a blue velvet hood, one with no eyeholes, and handed it to Hanner.
“Face that door,” he said, pointing at another ordinary wooden door. “Then put this on.”
Hanner obeyed and found himself blinded-but he was a warlock; he could sense his surroundings with his magic, even through the opaque hood. The wizard stepped forward and opened the door, then stepped aside.
“Walk forward,” the wizard said.
Hanner started forward, then hesitated a step from the open door. He could sense nothing beyond it-not empty space, but nothing at all. Something there blocked his warlock sight completely.
Some sort of wizardry, presumably-warlockry and wizardry did not work well together, he remembered.
“Go on,” the wizard urged him. “Straight ahead, another step or two.” The Wizards’ Guild would hardly have gone to this much trouble to kill him, but Manner still hesitated-something deep inside him did notlike that blank emptiness. He reached out to touch it...
And suddenly he was genuinely, completely blind; his warlock sight had vanished as completely as the light from a snuffed candle. Panicked, he reached up and snatched off the hood.
He wasn’t in the little wooden room anymore. There was no open door before him, no wall, no sunlight spilling in through the open side of the room behind him where the carpet had landed. Instead he stood on rough slate pavement in a vast, torchlit hall. Ahead of him stretched two parallel rows of gray stone pillars, each pillar as big around as a century-old oak, with twenty feet between the rows and each pillar eight or nine feet from the next. For the nearest part of each row, each pillar bore a pair of torches set in black iron brackets slightly above the level of a tall man’s head.
He could not see the end of the hall; the torches stopped some dozen pillars, perhaps thirty yards, before him, but the pillars continued on into the darkness beyond. He could not see the side walls clearly, but they were perhaps twenty feet beyond the pillars on either side.
In the torchlit stretch before him stood a great dark wooden table, strewn with papers and objects. He could see cups and bowls and staves and jewels and books and a hundred other things, mixed together seemingly at random.
And around this table stood a score of wizards, male and female, all apparent ages, in robes that ranged from unadorned gray to the most elaborate embroidered polychrome fancywork he had ever seen.
“Hanner, Chairman of the Council of Warlocks,” a woman said, and Hanner recognized her as Ithinia of the Isle, senior Guild-master of Ethshar of the Spices. “No longer Lord Hanner of Eth-shar. You wished to speak to the masters of the Wizards’ Guild.” She waved an arm at her companions.