“Well, there, Telurinon,” Heremon called. “I told you you were being hasty.” Several other voices murmured agreement.
“You barged in here, accused us of treason...” Telurinon began.
“I had to get your attention,” Sarai retorted. “You were ignoring me.”
“You brought all these soldiers...”
“I can send them away. If you’ll agree that we’ll all sit down together and pool our information, and that henceforth I am to be kept informed of everything the Guild learns about this matter and every action it takes concerning it, then I’ll send the soldiers away.” She smiled at Telurinon. “What do you say, Guildmas-ter?”
Telurinon turned helplessly to the other wizards; a moment later, with Telurinon abstaining and only Algarin dissenting, they had agreed to do as Sarai suggested.
Swords were sheathed and the soldiers dismissed, all save Captain Tikri and two others who remained as Sarai’s assistant and bodyguards. Mereth, Sarai, Teneria, and Tikri found seats, and the meeting began.
The discussion started well enough; Sarai gave an account of the known crimes to date and let Mereth report on what her spells had shown her. Then Sarai spoke again, mentioning that both wizardry and warlockry had been involved.
“We were aware of that, my lady,” Telurinon said chidingly. Sarai ignored him and recounted the other meetings she had held with Okko and the witches and warlocks; Mereth confirmed what she said. The wizards seemed to be especially interested in the evidence that the Council of Warlocks knew nothing about the killings and had no magic that could help.
For their part, the wizards reported that they knew little about the actual killings beyond the fact that the murders had involved magic. A necromancer by the name of Thengor reported that his own studies indicated no theurgical or demonological involvement and that the souls of the victims were nowhere in the World, while some of the others expressed doubts about the accuracy of any necromantic reports.
“We did discover,” Heremon said, when Thengor had finished, “that whatever magic was involved is a sort of negative wizardry—it appeared to counteract any wizardry used in its presence. Guildmaster Serem did not come by his cognomen ’the Wise’ entirely without earning it; while he was notoriously careless about the usual wards and warning spells, he had cast several personal protective spells upon himself. The murderer’s weapon seems to have instantaneously nullified all of them when it struck.”
That was interesting, and something Sarai had not known; she leaned forward attentively.
“That’s why we sent for Tobas,” Algarin said.
Sarai looked at him questioningly, but it was Heremon who explained, “Tobas of Telven is a young wizard who has made a specialty of the study of counterwizardries, of spells that prevent other spells from functioning. He lives in the Small Kingdoms, but Guildmaster Telurinon has invited him to join us here in Ethshar, to see if he can tell us anything about the magic this killer uses.”
Sarai nodded.
That seemed to conclude the exchange of information; the Guild had gotten no further in actually determining the identity of the killers than Sarai had. Accordingly, Sarai and Telurinon threw the meeting open to speculation.
“Lady Sarai, you said it might be a cult,” a woman asked. “I know what Thengor told us, but do you think it might be demonologists after all? Maybe it’s the demons themselves using the other magicks—they can do that, can’t they?”
“What kind of a cult?” another voice demanded.
“I don’t know,” Sarai replied. “A cult of assassins, maybe...”
“Demerchan!” The name was repeated by half a dozen voices.
“No,” Sarai said, “I don’t think so.” She described her unexpected visit from Abran of Demerchan. Mereth confirmed her account.
“Maybe it’s the Empire of Vond that’s behind the killings,” a woman suggested. “Wasn’t Vond himself supposed to be some sort of superwarlock?”
“Call in the Vondish ambassador, Lady Sarai! Demand an explanation!”
“No, it’s Demerchan!”
Several voices chimed in with their opinions, and for a moment, chaos reigned.
“What could Vond hope to gain by killing those six people?” “Fear!”
“Magic!”
“They knew too much!” “It’s a sacrifice to a demon!”
“Not Demerchan, Vond! Vond is doing it to disrupt and weaken the Hegemony!”
“Demerchan is killing them to prepare the way to take over the city!”
“It’s a conspiracy that’s trying to overthrow the overlord!”
The discussion deteriorated into several small arguments, and Sarai prepared to take her leave; she had made her point and learned about as much as she could reasonably expect to learn.
And while the wizards argued and Lady Sarai straightened her skirt, Tabaea the Thief crouched in the shadows a few yards away at the top of the staircase, safely out of sight, listening.
Learning about this meeting had been easy; two different wizards had mentioned it in her hearing as she spied on them. Getting in to eavesdrop, however, had been more difficult. She had thought about trying to slip in under some false identity, perhaps as one of the inn’s maids, but had lost her nerve, and instead settled for breaking in through an attic window and hiding at the top of the stairs.
She had been late in arriving and had fled temporarily when all the soldiers marched in, but even when she abandoned her post in the shadows, Tabaea had the ears of a cat—or rather, several cats, and a bird, and several dogs. She had missed some of the discussion and couldn’t see what going on from her chosen place of concealment, but she heard most of it.
They were blaming the Empire of Vond for the killings, which was crazy—that was way off at the other end of the World, wasn’t it? And they were blaming the cult of Demerchan, whatever that was. They were blaming demonologists, and the Council of Warlocks, and even each other. They were blaming Lady Sarai for not catching the killer. They were blaming demons and monsters and just about everything except the Northern Empire. Someone even suggested that spriggans, those squeaky little green creatures like the one that had startled her in Serem’s house so long ago, were not the harmless little nuisances they appeared to be, but diabolical killers working under the direction of some renegade archimage.
Tabaea smiled broadly at that. Spriggans, killing people? The idea of spriggans as deliberate murderers was completely absurd.
Lady Sarai was leaving, and someone named Teneria of Fish-ertown was going with her. Teneria had not said much of anything, but Tabaea had heard someone explain that she was a witch who knew about ways witchcraft and warlockry were related.
Tabaea wished Teneria had spoken up more. After all, Tabaea had both the warlock talent and some witch’s skills and would have liked learning more about them.
Not that she was still as ignorant as she had been when she began. She had listened to warlocks and witches as they talked among themselves and as they lectured their apprentices. She knew that warlockry came down to two abilities, the ability to move things without touching them and the ability to create or remove heat and that everything else was just applications of those. She knew that warlocks had infinite power available and that they drew on a mysterious source somewhere in the wilderness of southern Aldagmor, far to the northeast. She knew about the Calling—she didn’t know what it was, nobody did, but she knew that any warlock who used too much power was irresistibly drawn to the mysterious source of that power and never seen again. She knew that the first warning of the Call would be nightmares, and she had sworn that if she ever again had a nightmare she would give up warlockry.