Even warlocks, though, even those who had heard the Calling and woke up every night with nightmares about it, did not know what the Source was. Nobody knew what it was, or why it should be in that particular place.
Some people theorized that that spot was the exact center of the World, and that the Power was a gift of the gods, but others maintained that the Source was something from outside the World entirely, a mysterious something that had fallen from the heavens on the Night of Madness, back in 5202, when warlockry first emerged. Sterren had been a babe in arms on that night when half the people in Ethshar woke up screaming from nightmares they could never remember, and when one person in a thousand or so was suddenly transformed, forever after, into a warlock, able to move objects without touching them, to kill with a thought, to start fires with a mere gaze.
Whatever the Source was, whatever the Power was, Sterren had never had more than the faintest trace of it, and here in Semma, dozens of leagues to the southeast of Ethshar and almost that much farther from Aldagmor, which lay well to the north of the city, even that trace was gone.
In fact, in two sixdays of careful investigation, Sterren had been unable to find any evidence that anyone in all of Semma had ever heard of warlockry, or ever had any trace of the Power at his or her command. Nobody could provide him with a Semmat word for “warlock” or “warlockry.” Nobody even remembered anything about a night of bad dreams, twenty years before, and Sterren had always thought that the effects of the Night of Madness had been worldwide.
Warlockry was totally, completely unknown in Semma.
Sterren had to give up playing dice.
Watching the men toss down their coins on the betting lines, totally ignoring the presence of their warlord, he also gave up any hope of successfully defending Semma against the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion with the forces at his disposal.
Lar had brought another report the night before; Ophkar had two hundred men under arms, Ksinallion two hundred and fifty.
Semma had ninety-six. And that was after Sterren had calls for volunteers posted in all the surrounding villages. Furthermore, although fifteen or twenty of them took their role seriously, the rest seemed to think being a soldier meant nothing more than an excuse to go drinking and wenching in exchange for a few hours a day of marching and weapons drill, or, in the case of the cavalry, riding and weapons drill.
Sterren knew that war was coming. Lar knew that war was coming. Lady Kalira and a dozen other nobles knew war was coming. The rest of the castle’s inhabitants, including the king, refused to worry about it.
Princess Shirrin apparently believed that war was coming, but thought that it was all very exciting, and that Sterren, her valiant warlord, would save the kingdom by singlehandedly slaughtering the foe, as if he were some legendary hero like Valder of the Magic Sword. At least, that was what Princess Lura reported her sister’s thoughts to be; Shirrin herself still found it impossible to say more than a dozen words in Sterren’s presence without blushing and falling into an embarrassed silence.
She hadn’t actually run away from him for more than a sixday, though, and he had seen her, several times, watching him and his men from a window, or around a corner.
Princess Nissitha deigned to speak to him on occasion, now, but still obviously considered him far beneath her.
He sighed again. His life was not going well.
He had carefully broached the subject of defeat to Lady Kalira one night, in the castle kitchens, when both of them had been drinking.
“You don’t want to think about it,” she had said, very definitely.
“Why not?” he had replied.
“Because if you lose a war, you’ll be killed.”
“Not ness... ness... necessarily. Surely you don’t expect the army to fight to the last man...” he began.
“No, you silly Ethsharite, that’s not what I mean.” She had glowered at him.
“What do you mean, then?” he asked, puzzled.
“I mean,” she said, “that for the last century or two it’s been traditional for a victorious army to execute the enemy’s warlord, as a symbolic gesture. You can’t go around killing off kings; it sets a bad precedent. And you don’t want to slaughter anyone useful, not even peasants. But a defeated warlord isn’t any good to anybody and he might go around plotting revenge, so he gets beheaded. Or hanged. Or burned at the stake. Or something.” She hiccupped. “Your great-great-grandfather, the Sixth Warlord, got drawn and quartered, back in 5150.”
Sterren, who up to that point had been more or less sober, had proceeded to finish the bottle and a second one as well.
He had no desire to die, but he was beginning to run out of alternatives. He still saw no way to escape from Semma; his door was always guarded, as was the castle gate, and any time he set foot outside at least one soldier accompanied him. He had not tried ordering his escort away; it seemed pointless.
Even if he did lose an escort and make a dash for it, he would probably be caught and brought back long before he could reach Akalla of the Diamond and get out to sea, and that was assuming he could find Akalla despite the lack of roads, maps, guides, and landmarks.
Chances of escaping back to Ethshar looked slim, and a failed escape attempt would mean execution for treason. That made it too dangerous to risk.
If he stayed, however, he would wind up leading his pitiful army into battle and inevitably being defeated. If he survived the battle, which was certain to be a rout and probably a bloodbath, he would still be executed by the victors.
He could not imagine any strategem whereby he could win, with his ninety-six men against more than four hundred. A purely defensive war would take longer, perhaps, the castle could probably hold off the invaders for a month or two, at least, but a long siege would not put the enemy in a very favorable frame of mind, and Semma had no friends who might come to lift a siege, nor much hope of outlasting the foe.
Sterren wished he had some way of coaxing his native Ethshar into aiding Semma; Azrad’s ten thousand guardsmen would make short work of these silly little armies that the Small Kingdoms fielded.
When Azrad VII had come to power a little over a year before, however, he had inherited from his father, Azrad VI, a long-standing policy handed down in unbroken line from Azrad I against interfering in the internal squabbling of the Small Kingdoms. On the rare occasions when an army from Lamum or Perga or some other little principality had strayed across the border into the Hegemony, it had been quickly obliterated; but Ethsharitic troops were never, ever, sent into the Small Kingdoms themselves.
Sterren leaned against the whitewashed stone wall of the barracks and told himself that he needed a miracle.
Well, he replied silently, every Ethsharite knows that miracles are available, if one can pay for them.
Miracles were available in Ethshar, though, in the Wizards’ Quarter; not in Semma.
The only magician of any sort that the royal family put any trust in was Agor, the castle’s resident theurgist. Other than a glimpse or two of that rather confused and confusing fellow, Sterren had not as yet encountered a single magician worthy of the name during his stay in the Small Kingdoms.
He hadn’t been able to do much looking, of course; his duties, and his desperate attempts to train his “army” into something useful, had not left him the free time to go wandering about investigating village herbalists and the like.
It was always possible that some eccentric hermit was lurking in a hut somewhere out there, a hermit with sufficient magic to defeat both of the would-be invaders, but how could Sterren locate him, if he existed?