“Tell my wife I love her,” he said. “Tell her to wait for me in Warlock House attic. If this works, I’ll meet her there and let her know. If it doesn’t, well...”
“Should we tell her any details? About the tapestries?”
Hanner shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ll tell her. She knows I was planning something, and I want to be the one to tell her what it was.” He paused, then added, “If it works. For all we know, the Call will be even stronger in there.”
“I suppose it might be,” Arvagan admitted. “Though I don’t see why it would be. Wherever that place is, it’s not Aldagmor.”
“But it could be near Aldagmor, somehow.”
“I suppose.”
Hanner turned to Arvagan. “You’ll tell her?”
“The instant I see you enter the tapestry, I’ll send word for her to go to meet you.”
“Good. Good.” He turned back to face that shining image of green fields, and tried to step toward it, but his foot would not lift.
Inspiration struck. “Arvagan, would you do me a favor?”
“What sort of a favor?”
“Would you move the tapestry to the north wall? Or just turn it so it faces south?”
“Is it that bad, Chairman?”
“Yes, it is,” Hanner said. “I didn’t know... It took so long...”
“We told you when we started that it took a year or more to make a Transporting Tapestry.”
“Yes, you did — but I hadn’t realized how close I was to being Called. A year ago it was nothing, just a little murmur in my head; now it’s... it’s everything, it’s constant, it’s so strong.”
Arvagan nodded. Then he reached up and pushed at the rod supporting the tapestry, being careful not to let his hand come too close to the fabric. Like the sail of a ship clearing the breakwater, the tapestry swung slowly around.
Hanner turned with it, and when it was due north, between him and Aldagmor, he found he could lift his arm and step forward, step northward. His finger touched the silky cloth.
And the secret room was gone, the wizard’s house was gone, Wizard Street and the Wizards’ Quarter had vanished, the entire city of Ethshar of the Spices was gone. He was standing on a gentle, grassy slope.
He didn’t notice.
A sun was shining warmly on his face, a sun that wasn’t quite the same color as the one he had seen every day in Ethshar, and a soft wind was blowing against his right cheek; he didn’t notice that, either.
Sky and sun and wind and grass, a sound of splashing somewhere in the distance, a cluster of strange buildings — Hanner ignored them all.
He was too busy listening to the silence in his head.
The Call was gone. The constant nagging, the murmuring voice in his head, the wordless muttering that he had somehow been able to draw magic from, was gone. There was nothing in his head but him.
He hadn’t experienced such total mental freedom since the Night of Madness, more than ten years before. Even before he had consciously noticed it, he had lived with the whisper of magic constantly for so long that its absence was overwhelming. Now he simply stood, listening for it, for several minutes.
At first he didn’t show any reaction; the change was too sudden, too complete, to comprehend. Then the rush of relief swept over him, and his knees gave way, and he tumbled onto the grass, trembling with the impact of his release from bondage — and trembling with terror, as well. His magic was gone, and it had been central to his existence for so long that he barely knew who he was without it.
He lay on the grass for several minutes, and gradually began to notice his surroundings — the sun, the breeze, the grassy slope. He tried to stand up.
It didn’t work.
He took a moment to absorb that, and to realize that he had become so accustomed to levitating any time he stood up that trying to rise using only his own muscles was difficult, surprisingly difficult. He had forgotten how to do it.
He had tried to spring directly to his feet — or really, since of late he had usually hung in the air with his feet an inch or so off the ground, “to his feet” wasn’t quite right. He had tried to fling himself upright, but without magic it hadn’t worked. Now he rolled onto his back and pushed himself up into a sitting position, then set his feet on the ground, one by one. Then he stood up, leaning forward and straightening his legs.
That time it worked.
He stood for a moment, taking in his surroundings and his situation.
He had no magic. Wherever he was, he wasn’t a warlock here; probably nobody would be. All the little things he had done magically he either had to do with his own muscles, or not at all.
He was dismayed to realize how many of them there were. He had been using warlockry to stand up, to walk — or rather, to fly; he realized now he hadn’t actually walked in months. He had been summoning things to his hand, rather than reaching out to take them. Magic had infiltrated every part of his life. Now that his head was clear he could remember any number of ways he had used magic — walking, lifting, cooking, cleaning, heating, cooling, playing with his children, even making love to his wife. He had done it all without thinking. Even when he had begun to feel the Call, when his dreams had become nightmares and the whisper in his head had become a constant nagging, and he had tried to stop using warlockry because it made him more susceptible, he had unconsciously continued doing all those little, everyday magics. The power wanted to be used, so he had used it.
And only now that he couldn’t use it did he realize he had been doing so. He was standing here on a grassy hillside, and his legs were supporting his entire weight, his skin was unprotected from sun and wind, and it felt strange.
He thought he could get used to it, though. After all, he hadn’t been born a warlock; he had grown to adulthood without any magic. Most people managed just fine without warlockry.
He sniffed the air, and caught the scent of the sea, or something very like it. He walked cautiously down toward the cluster of buildings that he could not help thinking of as a village, though he had no idea whether that was really an accurate description.
As he drew near he decided that they were indeed houses, and did indeed comprise a village. They were built of some hard, golden-brown material — stone or brick or dried mud, he couldn’t tell which. There were many small windows, and a few arched doorways. Arvagan had said that the builders might not be human, but the proportions looked right for humans; Hanner didn’t see anything particularly odd about the houses.
Beyond the village the land continued to fall away, and he could see the ocean, or something very like it, spreading out in the distance. A tree-lined stream gurgled its way past the village, which accounted for the splashing he had heard, and the leaves rustled in the gentle breeze.
It was very pleasant, really. Arvagan had said that he couldn’t guarantee anything about this place, that there might be hidden dangers, anything from insidious poisons to rampaging monsters to distorted time, but to Hanner it looked calm and inviting. The stream would presumably provide water, and the land looked fit for growing food; there might be fish in the sea, or even clams to be dug along the shore.
Or if appearances were deceiving, and that somehow proved impossible, if the tapestries continued to work as promised he could still have food and even water brought in from Ethshar.