Author: Larry Niven; Dennis Wolf
Date: 1984-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Science Fiction
Description: Contains: Not Long Before the End What Good is a Glass Dagger? The Magic Goes Away Unfinished Story #1 and: The Magic May Return Notes for a Series of Stories to be Set in the Fantasy World of The Magic Goes Away

Copyright

The Time of the Warlock

FIRST EDITION

Published by:
SteelDragon Press
Box 7253, Powderhorn Station
Minneapolis, MN 55407

Copyright © 1984 by Larry Niven
Illustrations copyright © 1984 by Dennis Wolf

Parts of this volume have been published elsewhere in slightly different form. “Not Long Before the End,” “What Good Is a Glass Dagger?” and “Unfinished Story #1” all appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in the Ballantine/Del Rey collections, All the Myriad Ways and The Flight of the Horse. The Magic Goes Away was originally published by Ace Books. All have been newly revised by the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without explicit permission in writing from the author or the author’s agent, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television. For information, address author’s agent: Richard Curtis, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 164 E. 64th Street, New York, NY 10021.

ISBN 0-916595-01-3 (trade edition)
ISBN 0-916595-02-1 (signed edition)
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-051291

Contents

Table of Contents

Not Long Before the End

What Good is a Glass Dagger?

The Dagger

Magician’s Fee

Challenge

Rynildissen

The Empty Villages

Trolls

The Hill Magician

The Magic Goes Away

The Raft

Llon

Orolandes

The Blindness Spell

The Skull of Wavyhill

Fistfall

Cosmology

The Mountain

Cloudscapes

The Nordiks

The Cavern of the Last God

The Frost Giants

The God of Love and Madness

Appendices

Unfinished Story #1

Notes for Contributors to The Magic May Return

Afterword

Illustrations

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece: The Warlock

The Warlock had watched him coming up the hill

“I dreamed that I would find a use for a glass dagger.”

Great ships floated at anchor in the harbor

The Warlock’s mounts were either lizards enlarged by magic or dragons mutated by no magic.

Half human, half big gentle guard dog, it squatted on its haunches before the gate, looking endlessly patient.

An arena, it was, where two sets of metal-and-leather armor stood facing each other in attack position, weapons raised, each piece of armor suspended in air.

By noon they were high on the slope of a billowing mountain, a storm thunderhead.

The last god was no bigger than Piranther, made of nearly translucent marble.

NOT LONG
BEFORE
THE END

Not Long Before the End

A swordsman battled a sorcerer once upon a time.

In that age such battles were frequent. A natural antipathy exists between swordsmen and sorcerers, as between cats and small birds, or between rats and men. Usually the swordsman lost, and humanity’s average intelligence rose some trifling fraction. Sometimes the swordsman won, and again the species was improved; for a sorcerer who cannot kill one miserable swordsman is a poor excuse for a sorcerer.

We will call him the Warlock, as his name is both forgotten and impossible to pronounce. His parents had known what they were about. He who knows your name has power over you, but he must speak your name to use it.

The Warlock had found his terrible truth in middle age.

By that time he had traveled widely. It was not from choice. It was simply that he was a powerful magician, and he used his power, and he needed friends.

He knew spells to make people love a magician. The Warlock had tried these, but he did not like the side effects. So he commonly used his great power to help those around him, that they might love him without coercion.

He found that when he had been ten to fifteen years in a place, using his magic as whim dictated, his powers would weaken. If he moved away, they returned. Twice he had had to move, and twice he had settled in a new land, learned new customs, made new friends. It happened a third time, and he prepared to move again. But something set him to wondering.

Why should a man’s powers be so unfairly drained out of him?

It happened to nations too. Throughout history, those lands which had been richest in magic had been overrun by barbarians carrying swords and clubs. It was a sad truth, and one that did not bear thinking about, but the Warlock’s curiosity was strong.

So he wondered, and he stayed to perform certain experiments.

His last experiment involved a simple kinetic sorcery set to spin a metal disc in midair. And when that magic was done, he knew a truth he could never forget.

So he departed. In succeeding decades he moved again and again. Time changed his personality, if not his body, and his magic became more dependable, if less showy. He had discovered a great and terrible truth, and if he kept it secret, it was through compassion. His truth spelled the end of civilization, yet it was of no earthly use to anyone.

So he thought. But some five decades later (the date was on the order of 12,000 B.C.) it occurred to him that all truths find a use somewhere, sometime. And so he built another disc and recited spells over it, so that (like a telephone number already dialed but for one digit) the disc would be ready if ever he needed it.

The name of the sword was Glirendree. It was several hundred years old, and quite famous.

As for the swordsman, his name is no secret. It was Belhap Sattlestone Wirldess ag Miracloat roo Cononson. His friends, who tended to be temporary, called him Hap. He was a barbarian, of course. A civilized man would have had more sense than to touch Glirendree, and better morals than to stab a sleeping woman. Which was how Hap acquired his sword. Or vice versa.

The Warlock recognized it long before he saw it. He was at work in the cavern he had carved beneath a hill, when an alarm went off. The hair rose up, tingling, along the back of his neck. “Visitors,” he said.

“I don’t hear anything,” said Sharla, but there was an uneasiness to her tone. Sharla was a girl of the village who had come to live with the Warlock. That day she had persuaded the Warlock to teach her some of his simpler spells.

“Don’t you feel the hair rising on the back of your neck? I set the alarm to do that. Let me just check…” He used a sensor like a silver hula hoop set on edge. “There’s trouble coming. Sharla, we’ve got to get you out of here.”

“But…” Sharla waved protestingly at the table where they had been working.

“Oh, that. We can quit in the middle. That spell isn’t dangerous.” It was a charm against lovespells, rather messy to work, but safe and tame and effective. The Warlock pointed at the spear of light glaring through the hoopsensor. “That’s dangerous. An enormously powerful focus of mana power is moving up the west side of the hill. You go down the east side.”

“Can I help? You’ve taught me some magic.”

The magician laughed a little nervously. “Against that? That’s Glirendree. Look at the size of the image, the color, the shape. No. You get out of here, and right now. The hill’s clear on the eastern slope.”

“Come with me.”

“I can’t. Not with Glirendree loose. Not when it’s already got hold of some idiot. There are obligations.”

They came out of the cavern together, into the mansion they shared. Sharla, still protesting, donned a robe and started down the hill. The Warlock hastily selected an armload of paraphernalia and went outside.

The intruder was halfway up the hill: a large but apparently human being carrying something long and glittering. He was still a quarter of an hour downslope. The Warlock set up the silver hula hoop and looked through it.

The sword was a flame of mana discharge; an eye-hurting needle of white light. Glirendree, right enough. He knew of other, equally powerful mana foci, but none were portable, and none would show as a sword to the unaided eye.

He should have told Sharla to inform the Sorcerer’s Guild. She had that much magic. Too late now.

There was no colored borderline to the spear of light.

No green fringe effect meant no protective spells. The swordsman had not tried to guard himself against what he carried. Certainly the intruder was no magician, and he had not the intelligence to get the help of a magician. Did he know nothing about Glirendree?

Not that that would help the Warlock. He who carried Glirendree was invulnerable to any power save Glirendree itself. Or so it was said.

“Let’s test that,” said the Warlock to himself. He dipped into his armload of equipment and came up with something wooden, shaped like an ocarina. He blew the dust off it, raised it in his fist and pointed it down the mountain. But he hesitated.

The loyalty spell was simple and safe, but it did have side effects. It lowered its victim’s intelligence.

“Self-defense,” the Warlock reminded himself, and blew into the ocarina.

The swordsman did not break stride. Glirendree didn’t even glow; it had absorbed the spell that easily.

In minutes the swordsman would be here. The Warlock hurriedly set up a simple prognostics spell. At least he could learn who would win the coming battle.

No picture formed before him. The scenery did not even waver.

“Well, now,” said the Warlock. “Well, now!” And he reached into his clutter of sorcerous tools and found a metal disc. Another instant’s rummaging produced a double-edged knife, profusely inscribed in no known language, and very sharp.

At the top of the Warlock’s hill was a spring, and the stream from that spring ran past the Warlock’s house. The swordsman stood leaning on his sword, facing the Warlock across that stream. He breathed deeply, for it had been a hard climb.

He was powerfully muscled and profusely scarred. To the Warlock it seemed strange that so young a man should have found time to acquire so many scars. But none of his wounds had impaired motor functions. The Warlock had watched him coming up the hill. The swordsman was in top physical shape.

His eyes were deep blue and brilliant, and half an inch too close together for the Warlock’s taste.

“I am Hap,” he called across the stream. “Where is she?”

“You mean Sharla, of course. But why is that your concern?”

“I have come to free her from her shameful bondage, old man. Too long have you—”

“Hey, hey, hey. Sharla’s my wife.”

“Too long have you used her for your vile and lecherous purposes. Too—”

“Sharla stays of her own free will.”

“You expect me to believe that? As lovely a woman as Sharla, could she love an old and feeble warlock?”

“Do I look feeble?”

The Warlock did not look like an old man. He seemed Hap’s age, some twenty years old, and his frame and his musculature were the equal of Hap’s. He had not bothered to dress as he left the cavern. In place of Hap’s scars, his back bore a tattoo in red and green and gold, an elaborately curlicued pentagramic design, almost hypnotic in its extradimensional involutions.

“Everyone in the village knows your age,” said Hap. “You’re two hundred years old, if not more.”

“Hap,” said the Warlock. “Belhap something-or-other roo Cononson. Now I remember. Sharla told me you tried to bother her last time she went to the village. I should have done something about it then.”

“Old man, you lie. Sharla is under a spell. Everybody knows the power of a warlock’s loyalty spell.”

“I don’t use them. I don’t like the side effects. Who wants to be surrounded by friendly morons?” The Warlock pointed to Glirendree. “Do you know what you carry?”

Hap nodded ominously.

“Then you ought to know better. Maybe it’s not too late. See if you can transfer it to your left hand.”

“I tried that. I can’t let go of it.” Hap cut at the air, restlessly, with his sixty pounds of sword. “I have to sleep with the damned thing clutched in my hand.”

“Well, it’s too late then.”

“It’s worth it,” Hap said grimly. “For now I can kill you. Too long has an innocent woman been subjected to your lecherous—”

“I know, I know.” The Warlock changed languages suddenly, speaking high and fast. He spoke thus for almost a minute, then switched back to Rynaldese. “Do you feel any pain?”

“Not a twinge,” said Hap. He had not moved. He stood with his remarkable sword at the ready, glowering at the magician across the stream.

“No sudden urge to travel? Attacks of remorse? Change of body temperature?” But Hap was grinning now, not at all nicely. “I thought not. Well, it had to be tried.”

There was an instant of blinding light.

When it reached the vicinity of the hill, the meteorite had dwindled to the size of a baseball. It should have finished its journey at the back of Hap’s head. Instead, it exploded a millisecond too soon. When the light had died, Hap stood within a ring of craterlets.

The swordsman’s unsymmetrical jaw dropped, and then he closed his mouth and started forward. The sword hummed faintly.

The Warlock turned his back.

Hap curled his lip at the Warlock’s cowardice. Then he jumped three feet backward from a standing start. A shadow had pulled itself from the Warlock’s back.

In a lunar cave with the sun glaring into its mouth, a man’s shadow on the wall might have looked that sharp and black. The shadow dropped to the ground and stood up, a humanoid outline that was less a shape than a window view of the ultimate blackness beyond the death of the universe. Then it leapt.

Glirendree seemed to move of its own accord. It hacked the demon once lengthwise and once across, while the demon seemed to batter against an invisible shield, trying to reach Hap even as it died.

“Clever,” Hap panted. “A pentagram on your back, a demon trapped inside.”

“That’s clever,” said the Warlock, “but it didn’t work. Carrying Glirendree works, but it’s not clever. I ask you again, do you know what you carry?”

“The most powerful sword ever forged.” Hap raised the weapon high. His right arm was more heavily muscled than his left, and inches longer, as if Glirendree had been at work on it. “A sword to make me the equal of any warlock or sorceress, and without the help of demons, either. I had to kill a woman who loved me to get it, but I paid that price gladly. When I have sent you to your just reward, Sharla will come to me—”

“She’ll spit in your eye. Now will you listen to me? Glirendree is a demon. If you had an ounce of sense, you’d cut your arm off at the elbow.”

Hap looked startled. “You mean there’s a demon imprisoned in the metal?”

“Get it through your head. There is no metal. It’s a demon, a bound demon, and it’s a parasite. It’ll age you to death in a year unless you cut it loose. A wizard of the northlands imprisoned it in its present form, then gave it to one of his bastards, Jeery of Something-or-other. Jeery conquered half this continent before he died on the battlefield, of senile decay. It was given into the charge of the Rainbow Witch a year before I was born, because there never was a woman who had less use for people, especially men.”

“That happens to have been untrue.”

“Probably Glirendree’s doing. Started her glands up again, did it? She should have guarded against that.”

“A year,” said Hap. “One year.”

But the sword stirred restlessly in his hand. “It will be a glorious year,” said Hap, and he came forward.

The Warlock picked up a copper disc. “Four,” he said, and the disc spun in midair.

By the time Hap had sloshed through the stream, the disc was a blur of motion. The Warlock moved to keep it between himself and Hap, and Hap dared not touch it, for it would have sheared through anything at all. He crossed around it, but again the Warlock had darted to the other side. In the pause he snatched up something else: a silvery knife, profusely inscribed.

“Whatever that is,” said Hap, “it can’t hurt me. No magic can affect me while I carry Glirendree.”

“True enough,” said the Warlock. “The disc will lose its force in a minute anyway. In the meantime, I know a secret that I would like to tell, one I could never tell to a friend.”

Hap raised Glirendree above his head and, two-handed, swung it down on the disc. The sword stopped jarringly at the disc’s rim.

“It’s protecting you,” said the Warlock. “If Glirendree hit the rim now, the recoil would knock you clear down to the village. Can’t you hear the hum?”

Hap heard the whine as the disc cut the air. The tone was going up and up the scale.

“You’re stalling,” he said.

“That’s true. So? Can it hurt you?”

“No. You were saying you knew a secret.” Hap braced himself, sword raised, on one side of the disc, which now glowed red at the edge.

“I’ve wanted to tell someone for such a long time. A hundred and fifty years. Even Sharla doesn’t know.” The Warlock still stood ready to run if the swordsman should come after him. “I’d learned a little magic in those days, not much compared to what I know now, but big, showy stuff. Castles floating in the air. Dragons with golden scales. Armies turned to stone, or wiped out by lightning, instead of simple death spells. Stuff like that takes a lot of power, you know?”

“I’ve heard of such things.”

“I did it all the time, for myself, for friends, for whoever happened to be king, or whomever I happened to be in love with. And I found that after I’d been settled for a while, the power would leave me. I’d have to move elsewhere to get it back.”

The copper disc glowed bright orange with the heat of its spin. It should have fragmented, or melted, long ago.

“Then there are the dead places, the places where a wizard dares not go. Places where magic doesn’t work. They tend to be rural areas, farmlands and sheep ranges, but you can find the old cities, the castles built to float which now lie tilted on their sides, the unnaturally aged bones of dragons, like huge lizards from another age.

“So I started wondering.”

Hap stepped back a bit from the heat of the disc. It glowed pure white now, and it was like a sun brought to earth. Through the glare Hap had lost sight of the Warlock.

“So I built a disc like this one and set it spinning. Just a simple kinetic sorcery, but with a constant acceleration and no limit point. You know what mana is?”

“What’s happening to your voice?”

“Mana is the name we give to the power behind magic.” The Warlock’s voice had gone weak and high.

A horrible suspicion came to Hap. The Warlock had slipped down the hill, leaving his voice behind! Hap trotted around the disc, shading his eyes from its heat.

An old man sat on the other side of the disc. His arthritic fingers, half-crippled with swollen joints, played with a rune-inscribed knife. “What I found out—oh, there you are. Well, it’s too late now.”

Hap raised his sword, and his sword changed.

It was a massive red demon, horned and hooved, and its teeth were in Hap’s right hand. It paused, deliberately, for the few seconds it took Hap to realize what had happened and to try to jerk away. Then it bit down, and the swordsman’s hand was off at the wrist.

The demon reached out, slowly enough, but Hap in his surprise was unable to move. He felt the taloned fingers close his windpipe.

He felt the strength leak out of the taloned hand, and he saw surprise and dismay spread across the demon’s face.

The disc exploded. All at once and nothing first, it disintegrated into a flat cloud of metallic particles and was gone, flashing away as so much meteorite dust. The light was as lightning striking at one’s feet. The sound was its thunder. The smell was vaporized copper.

The demon faded, as a chameleon fades against its background. Fading, the demon slumped to the ground in slow motion, and faded further, and was gone. When Hap reached out with his foot, he touched only dirt.

Behind Hap was a trench of burnt earth.

The spring had stopped. The rocky bottom of the stream was drying in the sun.

The Warlock’s cavern had collapsed. The furnishings of the Warlock’s mansion had gone crashing down into that vast pit, but the mansion itself was gone without a trace.

Hap clutched his messily severed wrist, and he said, “But what happened?”

“Mana,” the Warlock mumbled. He spat out a complete set of blackened teeth. “Mana. What I discovered was that the power behind magic is a natural resource, like the fertility of the soil. When you use it up, it’s gone.”

“But—”

“Can you see why I kept it a secret? One day all the wide world’s mana will be used up. No more mana, no more magic. Do you know that Atlantis is tectonically unstable? Succeeding sorcerer-kings renew the spells each generation to keep the whole continent from sliding into the sea. What happens when the spells don’t work any more? They couldn’t possibly evacuate the whole continent in time. Kinder not to let them know.”

“But…that disc.”

The Warlock grinned with his empty mouth and ran his hands through snowy hair. All the hair came off in his fingers, leaving his scalp bare and mottled. “Senility is like being drunk. The disc? I told you. A kinetic sorcery with no upper limit. The disc keeps accelerating until all the mana in the locality has been used up.”

Hap moved a step forward. Shock had drained half his strength. His foot came down jarringly, as if all the spring were out of his muscles.

“You tried to kill me.”

The Warlock nodded. “I figured if the disc didn’t explode and kill you while you were trying to go around it, Glirendree would strangle you when the constraint wore off. What are you complaining about? It cost you a hand, but you’re free of Glirendree.”

Hap took another step, and another. His hand was beginning to hurt, and the pain gave him strength. “Old man,” he said thickly. “Two hundred years old. I can break your neck with the hand you left me. And I will.”

The Warlock raised the inscribed knife.

“That won’t work. No more magic.” Hap slapped the Warlock’s hand away and took the Warlock by his bony throat.

The Warlock’s hand brushed easily aside, and came back, and up. Hap wrapped his arms around his belly and backed away with his eyes and mouth wide open. He sat down hard.

“A knife always works,” said the Warlock.

“Oh,” said Hap.

“I worked the metal myself, with ordinary blacksmith’s tools, so the knife wouldn’t crumble when the magic was gone. The runes aren’t magic. They only say—”

“Oh,” said Hap. “Oh.” He toppled sideways.

The Warlock lowered himself onto his back. He held the knife up and read the markings, in a language only the Guild remembered.

AND THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS AWAY. It was a very old platitude, even then.

He dropped his arm back and lay looking at the sky.

Presently the blue was blotted by a shadow.

“I told you to get out of here,” he whispered.

“You should have known better. What’s happened to you?”

“No more youth spells. I knew I’d have to do it when the prognostics spell showed blank.” He drew a ragged breath. “It was worth it. I killed Glirendree.”

“Playing hero, at your age! What can I do? How can I help?”

“Get me down the hill before my heart stops. I never told you my true age—”

“I knew. The whole village knows.” She pulled him to sitting position, pulled one of his arms around her neck. It felt dead. She shuddered, but she wrapped her own arm around his waist and gathered herself for the effort. “You’re so thin! Come on, love. We’re going to stand up.” She took most of his weight onto her, and they stood up.

“Go slow! I can hear my heart trying to take off.”

“How far do we have to go?”

“Just to the foot of the hill, I think. Then the spells will work again, and we can rest.” He stumbled. “I’m going blind,” he said.

“It’s a smooth path, and all downhill.”

“That’s why I picked this place. I knew I’d have to use the disc someday. You can’t throw away knowledge. Always the time comes when you use it, because you have to, because it’s there.”

“You’ve changed so. So—so ugly. And you smell.”

The pulse fluttered in his neck, like a hummingbird’s wings, “Maybe you won’t want me, after seeing me like this.”

“You can change back, can’t you?”

“Sure. I can change to anything you like. What color eyes do you want?”

“I’ll be like this myself someday,” she said. Her voice held cool horror. And it was fading; he was going deaf.

“I’ll teach you the proper spells, when you’re ready. They’re dangerous. Blackly dangerous.”

She was silent for a time. Then: “What color were his eyes? You know, Belhap Sattlestone whatever.”

“Forget it,” said the Warlock, with a touch of pique.

And suddenly his sight was back.

But not forever, thought the Warlock as they stumbled through the sudden daylight. When the mana runs out, I’ll go like a blown candle flame, and civilization will follow. No more magic, no more magic-based industries. Then the whole world will be barbarian until men learn a new way to coerce nature, and the swordsmen, the damned stupid swordsmen, will win after all.

WHAT GOOD IS A
GLASS DAGGER?

The Dagger

Twelve thousand years before the birth of Christ, in an age when miracles were somewhat more common, a wizard used an ancient secret to save his life.

In later years he regretted that. The demon-sword would certainly have killed him. But no mere demon could have been as dangerous as the secret he had kept for several normal lifetimes. Now it was out, spreading like ripples on a pond. The battle between Glirendree and the Warlock was too good a tale not to tell.

A year after the battle with Glirendree, near the end of a summer day, Aran the Peacemonger came to Shayl Village to steal the Warlock’s Wheel.

Aran was a skinny eighteen-year-old, lightly built. His face was lean and long, with a pointed chin. His dark eyes peered out from under a prominent shelf of bone. His short, straight dark hair dropped almost to his brows in a pronounced widow’s peak. What he was was no secret; and anyone who touched hands with him would have known at once, for there was short fine hair on his palms. But had anyone known his mission, he would have been thought mad.

For the Warlock was a leader in the Sorcerer’s Guild. It was known that he had a name; but no human throat could pronounce it. The shadow demon who had been his name-father had later been imprisoned in tattooed runes on the Warlock’s own back: an uncommonly dangerous bodyguard.

Yet Aran came well protected. The leather wallet that hung from his shoulder was old and scarred, and the seams were loose. By its look it held nuts and hard cheese and bread and almost no money. What it actually held was charms. Magic would serve him better than nuts and cheese, and Aran could feed himself as he traveled, at night.

He reached the Warlock’s cave shortly after sunset. He had been told how to use his magic to circumvent the Warlock’s safeguards. His need for magic implied a need for voice and hands, so that Aran was forced to keep the human shape; and this made him doubly nervous. At moonrise he chanted the words he had been taught, and drew a live bat from his pouch and tossed it gently through the barred entrance to the cave.

The bat exploded into a mist of blood that drifted slant-wise across the stone floor. Aran’s stomach lurched. He almost ran then; but he quelled his fear and followed it in, squeezing between the bars.

Those who had sent him had repeatedly diagrammed the cave for him. He could have robbed it blindfolded. He would have preferred darkness to the flickering blue light from what seemed to be a captured lightning bolt tethered in the middle of the cavern. He moved quickly, scrupulously tracing what he had been told was a path of safety.

Aran had seen sorcerous tools in the training laboratory in the School for Mercantile Grammaree in Atlantis. Most of the Warlock’s tools were unfamiliar. It was not an age of mass production. He paused by a workbench, wondering. Why would the Warlock be grinding a glass dagger?

But Aran found a tarnish-blackened metal disc hanging above the workbench, and the runes inscribed around its rim convinced him that it was what he had come for. He took it down and quickly strapped it against his thigh, leaving his hands free to fight if need be. He was turning to go, when a laughing voice spoke out of the air.

“Put that down, you mangy son of a bitch—”

Aran converted to wolf.

Agony seared his thigh!

In human form Aran was a lightly built boy. As a wolf he was formidably large and dangerous. It did him little good this time. The pain was blinding, stupefying. Aran the wolf screamed and tried to run from the pain.

He woke gradually, with an ache in his head and a greater agony in his thigh and a tightness at his wrists and ankles. It came to him that he must have knocked himself out against a wall.

He lay on his side with his eyes closed, giving no sign that he was awake. Gently he tried to pull his hands apart. He was bound, wrists and ankles. Well, he had been taught a word for unbinding ropes.

Best not to use it until he knew more.

He opened his eyes a slit.

The Warlock was a tall man in robust good health. He was deeply tanned. Legend said that the Warlock never wore anything above the waist. The years seemed to blur on him; he might have been twenty or fifty. In fact he was one hundred and ninety years old, and bragged of it. His condition indicated the power of his magic.

Behind him, Aran saw that the Warlock’s Wheel had been returned to its place on the wall.

Waiting for its next victim? The real Warlock’s Wheel was of copper; those who had sent Aran had known that much. But this decoy must be tarnished silver, to have seared him so.

The Warlock wore a dreamy, absent look. There might still be a chance, if he could be taken by surprise. Aran said, “Kplir—”

The Warlock lashed him across the throat.

The willow wand had plenty of spring in it. Aran choked and gagged; he tossed his head, fighting for air.

“That word has four syllables,” the Warlock informed him in a voice he recognized. “You’ll never get it out.”

“Gluck,” said Aran.

“I want to know who sent you.”

Aran did not answer, though he had his wind back.

“You’re no ordinary thief. But you’re no magician either,” the Warlock said almost musingly. “I heard you. You were chanting by rote. You used basic spells, spells that are easy to get right, but they were the right spells each time.

“Somebody’s been using prescience and farsight to spy on me. Someone knows too many of my defenses,” the ancient magician said gently. “I don’t like that. I want to know who, and why.”

When Aran did not reply, the Warlock said, “He had all the knowledge, and he knew what he was after, but he had better sense than to come himself. He sent a fool.” The Warlock was watching Aran’s eyes. “Or perhaps he thought a werewolf would have a better chance at me. By the way, there’s silver braid in those cords, so you’d best stay human for the nonce.”

“You knew I was coming.”

“Oh, I had ample warning. Didn’t it occur to you that I’ve got prescience and farsight too? It occurred to your master,” said the Warlock. “He set up protections around you, a moving region where prescience doesn’t work.”

“Then what went wrong?”

“I foresaw the dead region, you ninny. I couldn’t get a glimpse of what was stealing into my cave. But I could look around it. I could follow its path through the cavern. That path was most direct. I knew what you were after.

“Then, there were bare footprints left behind. I could study them before they were made. You waited for moonrise instead of trying to get in after dusk. On a night of the full moon, too.

“Other than that, it wasn’t a bad try. Sending a werewolf was bright. It would take a kid your size to squeeze between the bars, and then a kid your side couldn’t win a fight if something went wrong. A wolf your size could.”

“A lot of good it did me,” Aran said bitterly.

“What I want to know is, how did they talk an Atlantean into this? They must have known what they were after. Didn’t they tell you what the Wheel does?”

“Sucks up magic.” Aran was chagrined, but not surprised, that the Warlock had placed his accent.

“Sucks up mana,” the Warlock corrected him. “Do you know what mana is?”

“The power behind magic.”

“So they taught you that much. Did they also tell you that when the mana is gone from a region, it doesn’t come back? Ever?”

Aran rolled on his side. Being convinced that he was about to die, he felt he had nothing to lose by speaking boldly. “I don’t understand why you’d want to keep it a secret. A thing like the Warlock’s Wheel, it could make war obsolete! It’s the greatest purely defensive weapon ever invented!”

The Warlock didn’t seem to understand. Aran said, “You must have thought of that. Why, no enemy’s curses could touch Atlantis, if the Warlock’s Wheel were there to absorb it!”

“Obviously you weren’t sent by the Atlantean Minister of Offense. He’d know better.” The Warlock watched him shrewdly. “Or were you sent by the Greek Isles?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you know that Atlantis is tectonically unstable? For the last half a thousand years, the only thing that’s kept Atlantis above the waves has been the spells of the sorcerer-kings.”

“You’re lying.”

“You obviously aren’t.” The Warlock made a gesture of dismissal. “But the Wheel would be bad for any nation, not just Atlantis. Spin the Wheel, and a wide area is dead to magic for—as far as I’ve been able to tell—the rest of eternity. Who would want to bring about such a thing?”

“I would.”

“You would. Why?”

“We’re sick of war,” Aran said roughly. Unaware that he had said we. “The Warlock’s Wheel would end war. Can you imagine an army trying to fight with nothing but swords and daggers? No hurling of death spells. No prescients spying out the enemy’s battle plans. No killer demons beating at unseen protective walls.” Aran’s eyes glowed. “Man to man, sword against sword, blood and bronze, and no healing spells. Why, no king would ever fight on such terms! We’d give up war forever!”

“Some basic pessimism deep within me forces me to doubt it.”

“You’re laughing at me. You don’t want to believe it,” Aran said scornfully. “No more mana means the end of your youth spells. You’d be an old man, too old to live!”

“That must be it. Well, let’s see who you are.” The Warlock touched Aran’s wallet with the willow wand, let it rest there a few moments. Aran wondered frantically what the Warlock could learn from his wallet. If the lock-spells didn’t hold, then—

They didn’t, of course. The Warlock reached in, pulled out another live bat, then several sheets of parchment marked with what might have been geometry lessons and with script printed in a large, precise hand.

“Schoolboy script,” he commented. “Lines drawn with painful accuracy, mistakes scraped out and redrawn…The idiot! He forgot the hooked tail on the Whirlpool design. A wonder it didn’t eat him.” The Warlock looked up. “Am I being attacked by children? These spells were prepared by half a dozen apprentices!”

Aran didn’t answer; but he lost hope of concealing anything further.

“They have talent, though. So. You’re a member of the Peacemongers, aren’t you? All army-age youngsters. I’ll wager you’re backed by half the graduating class at Mercantile Grammaree. They must have been watching me for months now, to have my defenses down so pat.

“And you want to end the war against the Greek Isles. Did you think you’d help matters by taking the Warlock’s Wheel to Atlantis? Why, I’m half minded to let you walk out with the thing. It would serve you right for trying to rob me.”

He looked hard into Aran’s eyes. “Why, you’d do it, wouldn’t you? Why? I said why?”

“We could still use it.”

“You’d sink Atlantis. Are the Peacemongers traitors now?”

“I’m no traitor.” Aran spoke low and furious. “We want to change Atlantis, not destroy it. But if we owned the Warlock’s Wheel, the Palace would listen to us!”

He wriggled in his tight bonds, and thought once again of the word that would free him. Then, convert to werewolf and run! Between the bars, down the hill, into the woods and freedom.

“I think I’ll make a conservative of you,” the Warlock said suddenly.

He stood up. He brushed the willow wand lightly across Aran’s lips. Aran found that he could not open his mouth. He remembered now that he was entirely in the Warlock’s power—and that he was a captured thief.

The Warlock turned, and Aran saw the design on his back. It was an elaborately curlicued five-sided tattoo in red and green and gold inks. Aran remembered what he had been told of the Warlock’s bodyguard.

“Recently I dreamed,” said the Warlock. “I dreamed that I would find a use for a glass dagger. I thought that the dream might be prophetic, and so I carved—”

“That’s silly,” Aran broke in. “What good is a glass dagger?”

He had noticed the dagger on the way in. It had a honed square point and honed edges and a fused-looking hilt with a guard. Two clamps padded with fox leather held it in place on the work table. The uppermost cutting edge was not yet finished.

Now the Warlock removed the dagger from its clamps. While Aran watched, the Warlock scratched designs on the blade with a pointed chunk of diamond that must have cost him dearly. He spoke low and softly to it, words that Aran couldn’t hear. Then he picked it up like—a dagger.

Frightened as he was, Aran could not quite believe what the Warlock was doing. He felt like a sacrificial goat. There was mana in sacrifice…and more mana in human sacrifice…but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t!

The Warlock raised the knife high, and brought it down hard in Aran’s chest.

Aran screamed. He had felt it! A whisper of sensation, a slight ghostly tug—the knife was an insubstantial shadow. But there was a knife in Aran the Peacemonger’s heart! The hilt stood up out of his chest!

The Warlock muttered low and fast. The glass hilt faded and was gone, apparently.

“It’s easy to make glass invisible. Glass is half invisible already. It’s still in your heart,” said the Warlock. “But don’t worry about it. Don’t give it a thought. Nobody will notice. Only, be sure to spend the rest of your life in mana-rich territory. Because if you ever walk into a place where magic doesn’t work—well, it’ll reappear, that’s all.”

Aran struggled to open his mouth.

“Now, you came for the secret of the Warlock’s Wheel, so you might as well have it. It’s just a simple kinetic sorcery, but open-ended.” He gave it. “The Wheel spins faster and faster until it’s used up all the mana in the area. It tends to tear itself apart, so you need another spell to hold it together—” and he gave that, speaking slowly and distinctly. Then he seemed to notice that Aran was flopping about like a fish. He said, “Kplirapranthry.”

The ropes fell away. Aran stood up shakily. He found he could speak again, and what he said was, “Take it out. Please.”

“Now, there’s one thing about taking that secret back to Atlantis. I assume you still want to? But you’d have to describe it before you could use it as a threat. You can see how easy it is to make. A big nation like Atlantis tends to have enemies, doesn’t it? And you’d be telling them how to sink Atlantis in a single night.”

Aran pawed at his chest, but he could feel nothing. “Take it out.”

“I don’t think so. Now we face the same death, wolf boy. Goodby, and give my best to the School for Mercantile Grammaree. And, oh yes, don’t go back by way of Hvirin Gap.”

“Grandson of an ape!” Aran screamed. He would not beg again. He was wolf by the time he reached the bars, and he did not touch them going through. With his mind he felt the knife in his chest, and he heard the Warlock’s laughter following him down the hill and into the trees.

When next he saw the Warlock, it was thirty years later and a thousand miles away.

Magician’s Fee

Aran traveled as a wolf, when he could. It was an age of greater magic; a werewolf could change shape whenever the moon was in the sky. In the wolf shape Aran could forage, reserving his remaining coins to buy his way home.

His thoughts were a running curse against the Warlock.

Once he turned about on a small hill, and stood facing north toward Shayl Village. He bristled, remembering the Warlock’s laugh; but he remembered the glass dagger. He visualized the Warlock’s throat, and imagined the taste of arterial blood; but the glowing, twisting design on the Warlock’s back flashed at the back of Aran’s eyes, and Aran tasted defeat. He could not fight a shadow demon. Aran howled, once, and turned south.

Nildiss Range, the backbone of a continent, rose before him as he traveled. Beyond the Range was the sea, and a choice of boats to take him home with what he had learned of the Warlock. Perhaps the next thief would have better luck.

And so he came to Hvirin Gap.

Once the range had been a formidable barrier to trade. Then, almost a thousand years ago, a sorcerer of Rynildissen had worked an impressive magic. The Range had been split as if by a cleaver. Where the mountains to either side sloped precipitously upward, Hvirin Gap sloped smoothly down to the coast, between rock walls flat enough to have a polished look.

Periodically the bandits had to be cleaned out of Hvirin Gap. This was more difficult every year; for the spells against banditry didn’t work well there, and swords had to be used instead. The only compensation was that the dangerous mountain dragons had disappeared too.

Aran stopped at the opening. He sat on his haunches, considering.

For the Warlock might have been lying. He might have thought it funny to send Aran the long way over Nildiss Range.

But the dragon bones. Where magic didn’t work, dragons died. The bones were there, huge and reptilian. They had fused with the rock of the pass somehow, so that they looked tens of millions of years old.

Aran had traveled the Gap in wolf form. If Hvirin Gap was dead to magic, he should have been forced into the man form. Or would he find it impossible to change at all?

“But I can go through as a wolf,” Aran thought. “That way I can’t be killed by anything but silver and platinum. The glass dagger should hurt, but—

“Damn! I’m invulnerable, but is it magic? If it doesn’t work in Hvirin Gap—” and he shuddered.

The dagger had never been more than a whisper of sensation that had faded in half an hour and never returned. But Aran knew it was there. Invisible, waiting. With a knife in his heart, he could still survive—as a wolf. But it would hurt! And he could never be human again.

Aran turned and padded away from Hvirin Gap. He had passed a village yesterday. Perhaps the resident magician could help him.

“A glass dagger!” the magician chortled. He was a portly, jolly, balding man, used to good living. “Now I’ve heard everything. Well, what were you worried about? It’s got a handle, doesn’t it? Was it a complex spell?”

“I don’t think so. He wrote runes on the blade, then stabbed me with it.”

“Fine. You pay in advance. And you’d better convert to wolf, just to play safe.” He named a sum that would have left Aran without money for passage home. Aran managed to argue him down to something not far above reason, and they went to work.

The magician gave up some six hours later. His voice was hoarse, his eyes red from oddly colored, oddly scented smokes, and his hands were discolored with dyes. “I can’t touch the hilt, I can’t make it visible, I can’t get any sign that it’s there at all. If I use any stronger spell, it’s likely to kill you. I quit, wolf boy. Whoever put this spell on you, he knows more than a simple village magician.”

Aran rubbed at his chest where the skin was stained by mildly corrosive dyes. “They call him the Warlock.”

The portly magician stiffened. “The Warlock? The Warlock? And you didn’t think to tell me. Get out.”

“What about my money?”

“I wouldn’t have tried it for ten times the fee! Me, a mere hedge-magician, and you turned me loose against the Warlock! We might both have been killed. If you think you’re entitled to your money, let’s go to the headman and state our case. Otherwise, get out.”

Aran left, shouting insults.

“Try other magicians if you like,” the other shouted after him. “Try Rynildissen City! But tell them what they’re doing first!”

Challenge

It had been a difficult decision for the Warlock. But his secret was out and spreading. The best he could do was see to it that world sorcery understood the implications.

The Warlock addressed the Sorcerers’ Guild on the subject of mana depletion and the Warlock’s Wheel.

“Think of it every time you work magic,” he thundered in what amounted to baby talk after his severely technical description of the Wheel. “Only finite mana in the world, and less of it every year, as a thousand magicians drain it away. There were beings who ruled the world as gods, long ago, until the raging power of their own being used up the mana that kept them alive.

“One day it’ll all be gone. Then all the demons and dragons and unicorns, trolls and rocs and centaurs will vanish quite away, because their metabolism is partly based on magic. Then all the dream-castles will evaporate, and nobody will ever know they were there. Then all the magicians will become tinkers and smiths, and the world will be a dull place to live. You have the power to bring that day nearer!”

That night he dreamed.

A duel between magicians makes a fascinating tale. Such tales are common—and rarely true. The winner of such a duel is not likely to give up trade secrets. The loser is dead, at the very least.

Novices in sorcery are constantly amazed at how much preparation goes into a duel, and how little action. The duel with the Hill Magician started with a dream, the night after the Warlock’s speech made that duel inevitable. It ended thirty years later.

In that dream the enemy did not appear. But the Warlock saw a cheerful, harmless-looking fairy castle perched on an impossible hill. From a fertile, hummocky landscape, the hill rose like a breaking wave, leaning so far that the castle at its crest had empty space below it.

In his sleep the Warlock frowned. Such a hill would topple without magic. The fool who built it was wasting mana.

And in his sleep he concentrated, memorizing details. A narrow path curled up the hillside. Facts twisted, dreamlike. There was a companion with him; or there wasn’t. The Warlock lived until he passed through the gate; or he died at the gate, in agony, with great ivory teeth grinding together through his rib cage.

He woke himself up trying to sort it out.

The shadowy companion was necessary, at least as far as the gate. Beyond the enemy’s gate he could see nothing. A Warlock’s Wheel must have been used there, to block his magic so thoroughly.

Poetic justice?

He spent three full days working spells to block the Hill Magician’s prescient sense. During that time his own sleep was dreamless. The other’s magic was as effective as his own.

Rynildissen

Great ships floated at anchor in the harbor.

There were cargo ships whose strange demonic figureheads had limited power of movement, just enough to reach the rats that tried to swarm up the mooring lines. A large Atlantean passenger liner was equipped with twin outriggers made from whole tree trunks. By the nearest dock a magician’s slender yacht floated eerily above the water. Aran watched them all rather wistfully.

He had spent too much money traveling over the mountains. A week after his arrival in Rynildissen City he had taken a post as bodyguard/watchdog to a rug merchant. He had been down to his last coin, and hungry.

Now Lloraginezee the rug merchant and Ra-Harroo his secretary talked trade secrets with the captain of a Nile cargo ship. Aran waited on the dock, watching ships with indifferent patience.

His ears came to point. The bearded man walking past him wore a captain’s kilt. Aran hailed him: “Ho, Captain! Are you sailing to Atlantis?”

The bearded man frowned. “And what’s that to you?”

“I would send a message there.”

“Deal with a magician.”

“I’d rather not,” said Aran. He could hardly tell a magician that he wanted to send instructions on how to rob a magician. Otherwise the message would have gone months ago.

“I’ll charge you more, and it will take longer,” the bearded man said with some satisfaction. “Who in Atlantis, and where?”

Aran gave him an address in the city. He passed over the sealed message pouch he had been carrying for three months now.

Aran too had made some difficult decisions. In final draft his message warned of the tectonic instability of the continent, and suggested steps the Peacemongers could take to learn if the Warlock had lied. Aran had not included instructions for making a Warlock’s Wheel.

Far out in the harbor, dolphins and mermen played rough and complicated games. The Atlantean craft hoisted sail. A wind rose from nowhere to fill the sails. It died slowly, following the passenger craft out to sea.

Soon enough, Aran would have the fare. He would almost have it now, except that he had twice paid out sorcerer’s fees, with the result that the money was gone and the glass dagger was not. Meanwhile, Lloraginezee did not give trade secrets to his bodyguard. He knew that Aran would be on his way as soon as he had the money.

Here they came down the gangplank: Lloraginezee with less waddle than might be expected of a man of his girth; the girl walking with quiet grace, balancing the rug samples on her head. Ra-Harroo was saying something as Aran joined them, something Aran may have been intended to hear.

“Beginning tomorrow, I’ll be off work for five days. You know,” she told Lloraginezee—and blushed.

“Fine, fine,” said Lloraginezee, nodding absently.

Aran knew too. He smiled but did not look at her. He might embarrass her…and he knew well enough what Ra-Harroo looked like. Her hair was black and short and coarse. Her nose was large but flat, almost merging into her face. Her eyes were brown and soft, her brows dark and thick. Her ears were delicately formed and convoluted, and came to a point. She was a lovely girl, especially to another of the wolf people.

They held hands as they walked. Her nails were narrow and strong, and the fine hair on her palms tickled.

In Atlantis he would have considered marrying her, had he the money to support her. Here, it was out of the question. For most of the month they were friends and co-workers. The night life of Rynildissen City was more convenient for a couple, and there were times when Lloraginezee could spare them both.

Perhaps Lloraginezee made such occasions. He was not of the wolf people. He probably enjoyed thinking that sex had reared its lovely, disturbing head. But sex could not be involved—except at a certain time of the month. Aran didn’t see her then. She was locked up in her father’s house. He didn’t even know where she lived.

He found out five nights later.

He had guarded Lloraginezee’s way to Adrienne’s House of Pleasures. Lloraginezee would spend the night…on an air mattress floating on mercury, a bed Aran had only heard described. A pleasant sleep was not the least of pleasures.

The night was warm and balmy. Aran took a long way home, walking wide of the vacant lot behind Adrienne’s. That broad, flat plot of ground had housed the palace of Shilbree the Dreamer, three hundred years ago. The palace had been all magic, and quite an achievement even in its day. Eventually it had…worn out, Shilbree would have said.

One day it was gone. And not even the simplest of spells would work in that vacant lot.

Someone had told Aran that households of wolf people occupied several blocks of the residential district. It seemed to be true, for he caught identifying smells as he crossed certain paths. He followed one, curious to see what kind of house a wealthy werewolf would build in Rynildissen.

The elusive scent led him past a high, angular house with a brass door…and then it was too late, for another scent was in his nostrils and in his blood and brain. He spent that whole night howling at the door. Nobody tried to stop him. The neighbors must have been used to it; or they may have known that he would kill rather than be driven away.

More than once he heard a yearning voice answering from high up in the house. It was Ra-Harroo’s voice. With what remained of his mind, Aran knew that he would be finding apologies in a few days. She would think he had come deliberately.

Aran howled a song of sadness and deprivation and shame.

The Empty Villages

There was a small village called Gath, and a Guild ’prentice who came seeking black opals. He found them, and free for the taking too, for Gath was dead empty. The ’prentice sorcerer wondered about that, and he looked about him, and presently he found a dead spot with a crumbled castle in it. It might have been centuries fallen. Or it might have been raised by magic, and collapsed when the mana went out of it, yesterday or last week.

It was a queer tale, and it got around. The ’prentice grew rich on the opals, for black opals are very useful for cursing. But the empty village bothered him.

“I thought it was slavers at first,” he said once, in the Warlock’s hearing as it turned out. “There were no corpses, none anywhere. Slave traders don’t kill if they can help it.

“But why would a troop of slavers leave valuables lying where they were? The opals were all over the street, mixed with hay. I think a jeweler must have been moving them in secret when something smashed his wagon. But why didn’t they pick up the jewels?”

It was the crumbled castle the Warlock remembered three years later, when he heard about Shiskabil. He heard of that one directly, from a magpie that fluttered out of the sky onto his shoulder and whispered, “Warlock?”

And when he had heard, he went.

Shiskabil was a village of stone houses within a stone wall. It must have been abandoned suddenly. Dinners had dried or rotted on their plates; meat had been burnt to ash in ovens. There were no living inhabitants, and no dead. The wall had not been breached. But there were signs of violence everywhere: broken furniture, doors with broken locks or splintered hinges, crusted spears and swords and makeshift clubs, and blood. Dried black blood was everywhere, as if it had rained blood.

Clubfoot’s skin was reddish-brown, his hair straight and black. He was young and thin and earnest. His talent had brought him to Guild apprenticeship from the other side of the world; but he was still a little afraid of the power he commanded through magic. He was not happy in Shiskabil. He limped through the village with shoulders hunched, trying to avoid the places where blood had pooled.

“Weird, isn’t it? But I had a special reason to send for you,” he said. “There’s a dead region outside the wall. I had the idea someone might have used a Warlock’s Wheel there.”

He led the Warlock to a rectangular plot of fertile ground, a foretaste of a world dead to magic. In the center was piled rubble with green plants growing between the stones. The Warlock circled the place, unwilling to step where mana was gone.

“There was magic worked in the village,” said Clubfoot. “I tried a few simple spells. The mana level’s very low. I don’t remember any famous sorcerers from Shiskabil; do you?”

“No.”

“Then whatever happened here was done by magic.” Clubfoot almost whispered the word. Magic could be very evil—as he knew.

They found a zigzag path through the dead borderline, and a faintly live region inside. At a gesture from the Warlock, the crumbled stones stirred feebly, trying to rise.

“So it was somebody’s castle,” said Clubfoot. “I wonder how he got this effect?”

“I thought of something like it once. Say you put a heavy kinetic spell on a smaller Wheel. The Wheel would spin very fast, would use up mana in a very tight area—”

Clubfoot was nodding. “I see it. He could have led it around a track, a close path. It would give him a kind of hedge against magic around a live region.”

“And he left the border open so he could get his tools in and out. He zigzagged the entrance so no spells could get through. Nobody could use farsight on him. I wonder…”

“I wonder what he had to hide?”

“I wonder what happened in Shiskabil,” said the Warlock. And he remembered the dead barrier that hid the Hill Magician’s castle. His leisurely duel with a faceless enemy was twelve years old.

It was twenty-three years old before they found the third village.

Hathzoril was bigger than Shiskabil, and better known. When a shipment of carvings in ivory and gem woods did not arrive, the Warlock heard of it.

The village could not have been abandoned more than a few days when the Warlock arrived. He and Clubfoot found meals half cooked, meals half eaten, broken furniture, weapons that had been taken from their racks, broken doors—

“But no blood. I wonder why?”

Clubfoot was jittery. “Otherwise it’s just the same. The whole population gone in an instant, probably against their will. Ten whole years; no, more. I’d half forgotten…You got here before I did. Did you find a dead area and a crumbled castle?”

“No. I looked.”

The younger magician rubbed his birth-maimed foot—which he could have cured in half an hour, but it would have robbed him of half his powers. “We could be wrong. If it’s him, he’s changed his techniques.”

That night the Warlock dreamed a scrambled dream in pyrotechnic colors. He woke thinking of the Hill Magician.

“Let’s climb some hills,” he told Clubfoot in the morning. “I’ve got to know if the Hill Magician has something to do with these empty villages. We’re looking for a dead spot on top of a hill.”

That mistake almost killed him.

The last hill Clubfoot tried to climb was tumbled, crumbled soil and rock that slid and rolled under his feet. He tried it near sunset, in sheer desperation, for they had run out of hills and patience.

He was still near the base when the Warlock came clambering to join him. “Come down from there!” he laughed. “Nobody would build on this sand heap.”

Clubfoot looked around, and shouted, “Get out of here! You’re older!”

The Warlock rubbed his face and felt the wrinkles. He picked his way back in haste and in care, wanting to hurry, but fearful of breaking fragile bones. He left a trail of fallen silver hair.

Once beyond the mana-poor region, he cackled in falsetto. “My mistake. I know what he did now. Clubfoot, we’ll find the dead spot inside the hill.”

“First we’ll work you a rejuvenation spell.” Clubfoot laid his tools out on a rock. A charcoal block, a silver knife, packets of leaves…While he worked, the Warlock talked.

“That border’s bad. It sucks up mana from inside. He must have to move pretty often. So he raised up a hill like a breaking wave. When the magic ran out the hill just rolled over the castle and covered up everything. He’ll do it again, too.”

“Clever. What do you think happened in Hathzoril Village?”

“We may never know.” The Warlock rubbed new wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Something bad, I think. Something very bad.”

Trolls

Aran was strolling through the merchants’ quarter that afternoon, looking at rugs.

Normally this was a cheerful task. Hanging rugs formed a brightly colored maze through this part of the quarter. As Aran the rug merchant moved through the maze, well-known voices would call his name. Then there would be gossip and canny trading.

He had traded in Rynildissen City for nearly thirty years, first as Lloraginezee’s apprentice, later as his own man. The finest rugs and the cheapest, from all over this continent and nearby islands, came by ship and camel’s back to Rynildissen City. Wholesalers, retailers, and the odd nobleman who wished to furnish a palace would travel to Rynildissen City to buy. Today they glowed in the hot sunlight…but today they only depressed him. Aran was thinking of moving away.

A bald man stepped into view from behind a block of cured sphinx pelts.

Bald as a roc’s egg he was, yet young, and in the prime of muscular good health. He was shirtless like a stevedore, but his pantaloons were of high quality and his walk was pure arrogance. Aran felt he was staring rather rudely. Yet there was something familiar about the man.

He passed Aran without a glance.

Aran glanced back once, and was jolted. The design seemed to leap out at him: a five-sided multicolored tattoo on the man’s back.

Aran called, “Warlock!”

He regretted it the next moment. The Warlock turned on him the look one gives a presumptuous stranger.

The Warlock had not changed at all, except for the loss of his hair. But Aran remembered that thirty years had passed; that he himself was a man of fifty, with the hollows of his face filled out by rich living. He remembered that his greying hair had receded, leaving his widow’s peak as a shock of hair all alone on his forehead. And he remembered, in great detail, the circumstances under which he had met the Warlock.

He had spent a thousand nights plotting vengeance against the Warlock, yet now his only thought was to get away. He said, “Your pardon, sir—”

But something else occurred to him, so that he said firmly, “But we have met.”

“Under what circumstance? I do not recall it,” the Warlock said coldly.

Aran’s answer was a measure of the self-confidence that comes with wealth and respect. He said, “I was robbing your cave.”

“Were you!” The Warlock came closer. “Ah, the boy from Atlantis. Have you robbed any magicians lately?”

“I have adopted a somewhat safer way of life,” Aran said equably. “And I do have reason for presuming on our brief acquaintance.”

“Our brief—” The Warlock laughed so that heads turned all over the marketplace. Still laughing, he took Aran’s arm and led him away.

They strolled slowly through the merchants’ quarter, the Warlock leading. “I have to follow a certain path,” he explained. “A project of my own. Well, my boy, what have you been doing for thirty years?”

“Trying to get rid of your glass dagger.”

“Glass dagger?…Oh, yes, I remember. Surely you found time for other hobbies?”

Aran almost struck the Warlock then. But there was something he wanted from the Warlock, and so he held his temper.

“My whole life has been warped by your damned glass dagger,” he said. “I had to circle Hvirin Gap on my way home. When I finally got here I was out of money. No money for passage to Atlantis, and no money to pay for a magician, which meant that I couldn’t get the glass knife removed.

“So I hired out to Lloraginezee the rug merchant as a bodyguard/watchdog. Now I’m the leading rug merchant in Rynildissen City, I’ve got two wives and eight children and a few grandchildren, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever get back to Atlantis.”

They bought wine from a peddler carrying two fat wineskins on his shoulders. They took turns drinking from the great copper goblet the man carried.

The Warlock asked, “Did you ever get rid of the knife?”

“No, and you ought to know it! What kind of spell did you put on that thing? The best magicians in this continent haven’t been able to so much as touch the knife, let alone pull it out. I wouldn’t be a rug merchant if they had.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I’d have earned my passage to Atlantis soon enough, except that every time I heard about a new magician in the vicinity I’d go to him to see if he could take that knife out. Selling rugs was a way to get the money to pay the magicians. Eventually I gave up on the magicians and kept the money. All I’ve accomplished is to spread your reputation in all directions.”

“Thank you,” the Warlock said politely.

Aran did not like the Warlock’s amusement. He decided to end the conversation quickly. “I’m glad we ran into each other,” he said, “because I have a problem that is really in your province. Can you tell me something about a magician named Wavyhill?”

It may be that the Warlock stiffened. “What is it that you want to know?”

“Whether his spells use excessive power.”

The Warlock lifted an interrogatory eyebrow.

“You see, we try to restrict the use of magic in Rynildissen City. The whole nation could suffer if a key region like Rynildissen City went dead to magic. There’d be no way to stop a flood, or a hurricane, or an invasion of barbarians. Do you find something amusing?”

“No, no. But could a glass dagger possibly have anything to do with your conservative attitude?”

“That’s entirely my own business, Warlock. Unless you’d care to read my mind?”

“No, thank you. My apologies.”

“I’d like to point out that more than just the welfare of Rynildissen City is involved. If this region went dead to magic, the harbor mermen would have to move away. They have quite an extensive city of their own, down there beyond the docks. Furthermore, they run most of the docking facilities and the entire fishing industry—”

“Relax. I agree with you completely. You know that,” the magician laughed. “You ought to!”

“Sorry. I preach at the drop of a hat. It’s been ten years since anyone saw a dragon near Rynildissen City. Even further out, they’re warped, changed. When I first came here the dragons had a mercenary’s booth in the city itself! What are you doing?”

The Warlock had handed the empty goblet back to the vendor and was pulling at Aran’s arm. “Come this way, please. Quickly, before I lose the path.”

“Path?”

“I’m following a fogged prescient vision. I could get killed if I lose the path—or if I don’t, for that matter. Now, just what was your problem?”

“That,” said Aran, pointing among the fruit stalls.

The troll was an ape’s head on a human body, covered from head to toe in coarse brown hair. From its size it was probably female, but it had no more breasts than a female ape. It held a wicker basket in one quite human hand. Its bright brown eyes glanced up at Aran’s pointing finger—startlingly human eyes—then dropped to the melon it was considering.

Perhaps the sight should have roused reverence. A troll was ancestral to humanity: Homo habilis, now extinct. But they were too common. Millions of the species had been fossilized in the drylands of Africa. Magicians of a few centuries ago had learned that they could be reconstituted by magic.

“I think you’ve just solved one of my own problems,” the Warlock said quietly. He no longer showed any trace of amusement.

“Wonderful,” Aran said without sincerity. “My own problem is, how much mana are Wavyhill’s trolls using up? The mana level in Rynildissen City was never high to start with. Wavyhill must be using terrifically powerful spells just to keep them walking.” Aran’s fingertips brushed his chest in an unconscious gesture. “I’d hate to leave Rynildissen City, but if magic stops working here I won’t have any choice.”

“I’d have to know the spells involved. Tell me something about Wavyhill, will you? Everything you can remember.”

To most of Rynildissen City the advent of Wavyhill the magician was very welcome.

Once upon a time troll servants had been common. They were terrifically strong. Suffering no pain, they could use hysterical strength for the most mundane tasks. Being inhuman, they could work on official holidays. They needed no sleep. They did not steal.

But Rynildissen City was old, and the mana was running low. For many years no troll had walked in Rynildissen City. At the gate they turned to blowing dust.

Then came Wavyhill with a seemingly endless supply of trolls, which did not disintegrate at the gate. The people paid him high prices in gold and in honors.

“For half a century thieves have worked freely on holidays,” Aran told the Warlock. “Now we’ve got a trollish police force again. Can you blame people for being grateful? They made him a Councilman—over my objections. Which means there’s very little short of murder that Wavyhill can’t do in Rynildissen City.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Why did you say over your objections? Are you on the Council?”

“Yes. I’m the one who rammed through the laws restricting magic in Rynildissen City. And failed to ram through some others, I might add. The trouble is that Wavyhill doesn’t make the trolls in the city. Nobody knows where they come from. If he’s depleting the mana level, he’s doing it somewhere else.”

“Then what’s your problem?”

“Suppose the trolls use up mana just by existing?…I should be asking, do they?”

“I think so,” said the Warlock.

“I knew it. Warlock, will you testify before the Council? Because—”

“No, I won’t.”

“But you’ve got to! I’ll never convince anyone by myself. Wavyhill is the most respected magician around, and he’ll be testifying against me! Besides which, the Council all own trolls themselves. They won’t want to believe they’ve been suckered, and they have been if we’re right. The trolls will collapse as soon as they’ve lowered the mana level enough.”

At that point Aran ran down, for he had seen with what stony patience the Warlock was waiting for him to finish.

The Warlock waited three seconds longer, using silence as an exclamation point. Then he said, “It’s gone beyond that. Talking to the Council would be like shouting obscenities at a forest fire. I could get results that way. You couldn’t.”

“Is he that dangerous?”

“I think so.”

Aran wondered if he was being had. But the Warlock’s face was so grave…and Aran had seen that face in too many nightmares. What am I doing here? he wondered. I had a technical question about trolls. So I asked a magician…and now…

“Keep talking. I need to know more about Wavyhill. And walk faster,” said the Warlock. “How long has he been here?”

“Wavyhill came to Rynildissen City seven years ago. Nobody knows where he came from; he doesn’t have any particular accent. His palace sits on a hill that looks like it’s about to fall over. What are you nodding at?”

“I know that hill. Keep talking.”

“We don’t see him often. He comes with a troupe of trolls, to sell them; or he comes to vote with the Council on important matters. He’s short and dark—”

“That could be a seeming. Never mind, describe him anyway. I’ve never seen him.”

“Short and dark, with a pointed nose and a pointed chin and very curly dark hair. He wears a dark robe of some soft material, a tall pointed hat, and sandals, and he carries a sword.”

“Does he!” The Warlock laughed out loud.

“What’s the joke? I carry a sword myself sometimes.—Oh, that’s right, magicians have a thing about swordsmen.”

“That’s not why I laughed. It’s a trade joke. A sword can be a symbol of masculine virility.”

“Oh?”

“You see the point, don’t you? A sorcerer doesn’t need a sword. He knows more powerful protections. When a sorcerer takes to carrying a sword, it’s pretty plain he’s using it as a cure for impotence.”

“And it works?”

“Of course it works. It’s straight one-for-one similarity magic, isn’t it? But you’ve got to take the sword to bed with you!” laughed the Warlock. But his eyes found a troll servant, and his laughter slipped oddly.

He watched as the troll hurried through a gate in a high white wall. They had passed out of the merchants’ quarter.

“I think Wavyhill’s a necromancer,” he said abruptly.

“Necromancer. What is it? It sounds ugly.”

“A technical term for a new branch of magic. And it is ugly. Turn sharp left here.”

They ducked into a narrow alley. Two- and three-story houses leaned over them from both sides. The floor of the alley was filthy, until the Warlock snarled and gestured. Then the dirt and garbage flowed to both sides.

The Warlock hurried them deep into the alley. “We can stop here, I think. Sit down if you like. We’ll be here for some time—or I will.”

“Warlock, are you playing games with me? What does this new dance have to do with a duel of sorcery?”

“A fair question. Do you know what lies that way?”

Aran’s sense of direction was good, and he knew the city. “The Judging Place?”

“Right. And that way, the vacant lot just this side of Adrienne’s House of Pleasures—you know it? The deadest spot in Rynildissen City. The palace of Shilbree the Dreamer once stood there.”

“Might I ask—”

“The courthouse is void of mana too, naturally. Ten thousand defendants and thirty thousand lawyers all praying for conviction or acquittal doesn’t leave much magic in any courthouse. If I can keep either of those spots between me and Wavyhill, I can keep him from using farsight on me.”

Aran thought about it. “But you have to know where he is.”

“No. I only have to know where I ought to be. Most of the time, I don’t. Wavyhill and I have managed to fog each other’s prescient senses pretty well. But I’m supposed to be meeting an unknown ally along about now, and I’ve taken great care that Wavyhill can’t spy on me.

“You see, Wavyhill has taken the Wheel concept and improved it in at least two ways that I know of. Naturally he uses up mana at a ferocious rate. He may also be a mass murderer. And he’s my fault. That’s why I’ve got to kill him.”

Aran remembered then that his wives were waiting dinner. He remembered that he had decided to end this conversation hours ago. And he remembered a story he had been told, of a mundane caught in a sorcerer’s duel and what had befallen him.

“Well, I’ve got to be going,” he said, standing up. “I wish you the best of luck in your duel, Warlock. And if there’s anything I can do to help…”

“Fight with me,” the Warlock said instantly.

Aran gaped. Then he burst out laughing.

The Warlock waited with his own abnormal patience. When he had some chance of being heard, he said, “I dreamed that an ally would meet me during this time. That ally would accompany me to the gate of Wavyhill’s castle. I don’t have many of those dreams to help me, Aran. Wavyhill’s good. If I go alone, my forecast is that I’ll be killed.”

“Another ally,” Aran suggested.

“No. Too late. The time has passed.”

“Look.” Aran slapped his belly with the flat of his hand. The flesh rippled. “It’s not that much extra weight,” he said, “for a man. I’m not unsightly. But as a wolf I’d look ten years pregnant! I haven’t turned wolf in years.

“What am I doing? I don’t have to convince you of anything,” Aran said abruptly. And he walked away fast.

The Warlock caught him up at the mouth of the alley. “I swear you won’t regret staying. There’s something you don’t know yet.”

“Don’t follow me too far, Warlock. You’ll lose your path.” Aran laughed in the magician’s face. “Why should I fight by your side? If you really need me to win, I couldn’t be more delighted! I’ve seen your face in a thousand nightmares, you and your glass dagger! So die, Warlock. It’s my dinner time.”

“Shh,” said the Warlock. And Aran saw that the Warlock was not looking at him, but over his shoulder.

Aran felt the urge to murder. But his eyes flicked to follow the Warlock’s gaze, and the imprecations died in his throat.

It was a troll. Only a troll, a male, with a tremendous pack on its back. Coming toward them.

And the Warlock was gesturing to it. Or were those magical passes?

“Good,” he said. “Now, I could tell you that it’s futile to fight fate, and you might even believe me, because I’m an expert. But I’d be lying. Or I could offer you a chance to get rid of the dagger—”

“Go to Hell. I learned to live with that dagger—”

“Wolf man, if you never learn anything else from me, learn never to blaspheme in the presence of a magician! Excuse me.” The troll had walked straight to the mouth of the alley. Now the Warlock took it by the arm and led it inside. “Will you help me? I want to get the pack off its back.”

They lifted it down, while Aran wondered at himself. Had he been bewitched into obedience? The pack was very heavy. It took all of Aran’s strength, even though the Warlock bore the brunt of the load. The troll watched them with blank brown eyes.

“Good. If I tried this anywhere else in the city, Wavyhill would know it. But this time I know where he is. He’s in Adrienne’s House of Pleasures, searching for me, the fool! He’s already searched the courthouse. Do you know of a village named Gath?”

“No.”

“Or Shiskabil?”

“No. Wait.” A Shiska had bought six matching green rugs from him once. “Yes. A small village north of here. Something…happened to it…”

“The population walked out one night, leaving most of their valuables and a good deal of unexplained blood.”

“That’s right.” Aran felt sudden horrible doubt. “It was never explained.”

“Gath was first. Then Shiskabil, then Hathzoril. Bigger cities each time. At Hathzoril he was clever. He found a way to hide where his palace had been, and he didn’t leave any blood.”

“But what does he do? Where do the people go?”

“What do you know about mana, Aran? You know that it’s the power behind magic, and you know it can be used up. What else?”

“I’m not a magician. I sell rugs.”

“Mana can be used for good or evil; it can be drained, or transferred from one object to another, or from one man to another. Some men seem to carry mana with them. You can find concentrations in oddly shaped stones, or in objects of reverence, or in meteoroids.

“There is much mana associated with murder,” said the Warlock. “Too much for safety, in my day. My teacher used to warn us against working near the site of a murder, or the corpse of a murdered man, or murder weapons—as opposed to weapons of war, I might add. War and murder are different in intent.

“Necromancy uses murder as a source of magic. It’s the most powerful form of magic—so powerful that it could never have developed until now, when the mana level everywhere in the world is so low.

“I think Wavyhill is a necromancer,” said the Warlock. And he turned to the troll. “We’ll know in a moment.”

The troll stood passive, its long arms relaxed at its sides, watching the Warlock with strangely human brown eyes and with a human dignity that contrasted oddly with its low animal brow and hairy body. It did not flinch as the Warlock dropped a kind of necklace over its head.

The change came instantly. Aran backed away, sucking air. The Warlock’s necklace hung around a man’s neck—a man in his middle thirties, blond-haired and bearded, wearing a porter’s kilt—and that man’s belly had been cut wide open by one clean swing of a sword or scimitar. Aran caught the smell of him: he had been dead for three or four days, plus whatever time the preserving effects of magic had been at work on him. Yet he stood, passively waiting, and his expression had not changed.

“Wavyhill has invented a kind of perpetual motion,” the Warlock said dryly; but he backed away hastily from the smell of the dead man. “There’s enough power in a murdered man to make him an obedient slave, and plenty left over to cast on him the seeming of a troll. He takes more mana from the environment, but what of that? When the mana runs out in Gath, Wavyhill’s trolls kill their masters. Then twice as many trolls move on to Shiskabil. In Hathzoril they probably used strangling cords; they wouldn’t spill any blood that way, and they wouldn’t bleed themselves. I wonder where he’ll go after Rynildissen?”

“Nowhere! We’ll tell the Council!”

“And Wavyhill a Councilman? No. And you can’t spread the word to individual members, because eventually one of them would tip Wavyhill that you’re slandering him.”

“They’d believe you.”

“All it takes is one who doesn’t. Then he tells Wavyhill, and Wavyhill turns loose the trolls. No. You’ll do three things,” said the Warlock in tones not of command but of prophecy. “You’ll go home. You’ll spend the next week getting your wives and children out of Rynildissen City.”

“My gods, yes!”

“I swore you wouldn’t regret hearing me out. The third thing, if you so decide, is to join me at dawn, at the north gate, a week from today. Come by way of Adrienne’s House of Pleasures,” the Warlock ordered, “and stay awhile. The dead area will break your trail.

“Do that today, too. I don’t want Wavyhill to follow you by prescience. Go now,” said the Warlock.

“I can’t decide!”

“Take a week.”

“I may not be here. How can I contact you?”

“You can’t. It doesn’t matter. I’ll go with you or without you.” Abruptly the Warlock stripped the necklace from the neck of the standing corpse, turned and strode off down the alley. Following the path.

The dead man was a troll again. It followed Aran with large, disturbingly human brown eyes.

The Hill Magician

That predawn morning, Adrienne’s House of Pleasures was wrapped in thick black fog. Aran the rug merchant hesitated at the door; then, shivering, squared his shoulders and walked out into it.

He walked with his sword ready for tapping or killing. The fog grew lighter as he went, but no less dense. Several times he thought he saw monstrous vague shapes pacing him. But there was no attack. At dawn he was at the north gate.

The Warlock’s mounts were either lizards enlarged by magic or dragons mutated by no magic. They were freaks, big as twin bungalows. One carried baggage; the other, two saddles in tandem.

“Mount up,” the Warlock urged. “We want to get there before nightfall.” Despite the chill of morning he was bare to the waist. He turned in his saddle as Aran settled behind him. “Have you lost weight?”

“I fasted for six days, and exercised too. And my wives and children are four days on their way to Atlantis by sea. You can guess what pleasures I chose at Adrienne’s.”

“I wouldn’t have believed it. Your belly’s as flat as a board.”

“A wolf can fast for a long time. I ate an unbelievable meal last night. Today I won’t eat at all.”

The fog cleared as they left Rynildissen, and the morning turned clear and bright and hot. When Aran mentioned it, the Warlock said, “That fog was mine. I wanted to blur things for Wavyhill.”

“I thought I saw shapes in the fog. Were those yours too?”

“No.”

“Thanks.”

“Wavyhill means to frighten you, Aran. He wouldn’t attack you. He knows you won’t be killed before we reach the gate.”

“That explains the pack lizards. I wondered how you could possibly expect to sneak up on him.”

“I don’t. He knows we’re coming. He’s waiting.”

The land was rich in magic near Wavyhill’s castle. You could tell by the vegetation: giant mushrooms, vying for variety of shape and color; lichens growing in the shapes of men or beasts; trees with contorted trunks and branches, trees that moved menacingly as the pack-lizards came near.

“I could make them talk,” said the Warlock. “But I couldn’t trust them. They’ll be Wavyhill’s allies.”

In the red light of sunset, Wavyhill’s castle seemed all rose marble, perched at the top of a fairy mountain. The slender tower seemed made for kidnapped damsels. The mountain itself, as Aran saw it now for the first time, was less a breaking wave than a fist raised to the sky in defiance.

“We couldn’t use the Wheel here,” said the Warlock. “The whole mountain would fall on us.”

“I wouldn’t have let you use the Wheel.”

“I didn’t bring one.”

“Which way?”

“Up the path. He knows we’re coming.”

“Is your shadow demon ready?”

“Shadow demon?” The Warlock seemed to think. “Oh. For a moment I didn’t know what you were talking about. That shadow demon was killed in the battle with Glirendree, thirty years ago.”

Words caught in Aran’s throat, then broke loose in a snarl. “Then why don’t you put on a shirt?”

“Habit. I’ve got lots of strange habits. Why so vehement?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been staring at your back since morning. I guess I was counting on the shadow demon.” Aran swallowed. “It’s just us, then?”

“Just us.”

“Aren’t you even going to take a sword? Or a dagger?”

“No. Shall we go?”

The other side of the hill was a sixty degree slope. The narrow, meandering path could not support the lizard beasts. Aran and the Warlock dismounted and began to climb.

The Warlock said, “There’s no point in subtlety. We know we’ll get as far as the gate. So does Wavyhill…excuse me.” He threw a handful of silver dust ahead of them. “The road was about to throw us off. Apparently Wavyhill doesn’t take anything for granted.”

But Aran had only the Warlock’s word for it; and that was the only danger that threatened their climb.

A rectangular pond blocked the solid copper gates. An arched bridge led across the pond. They were approaching the bridge when their first challenger pushed between the gates.

“What is it?” Aran whispered. “I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

“There isn’t. It’s a changed one. Call it a snail dragon.”

…A snail dragon. Its spiral shell was just wide enough to block the gate completely. Its slender, supple body was fully exposed, reared high to study the intruders. Shiny leaflike scales covered the head and neck, but the rest of the body was naked, a soft greyish-brown. Its eyes were like black marbles. Its teeth were white and pointed, and the longest pair had been polished to a liquid glow.

From the other side of the small arched bridge, the Warlock called, “Ho, guardian! Were you told of our coming?”

“No,” said the dragon. “Were you welcome, I would have been told.”

“Welcome!” The Warlock guffawed. “We came to kill your master. Now, the interesting thing is that he knows of our coming. Why did he not warn you?”

The snail dragon tilted its mailed head.

The Warlock answered himself. “He knows that we will pass this gate. He suspects that we must pass over your dead body. He chose not to tell you so.”

“That was kind of him.” The dragon’s voice was low and very gravelly, a sound like rocks being crushed.

“Kind, yes. But since we are foredoomed to pass, why not step aside? Or make for the hills, and we will keep your secret.”

“It cannot be.”

“You’re a changed one, snail dragon. Beasts whose energy of life is partly magical, breed oddly where the mana is low. Most changed ones are not viable. So it is with you,” said the Warlock. “The shell would not protect you from a determined and patient enemy. Or were you counting on speed to save you?”

“You raise a salient point,” said the guardian. “If I were to leave now, what then? My master will probably kill you when you reach his sanctum. Then, by and by, this week or the next, he will wonder how you came to pass his guardian. Then, next week or the week following, he will come to see, or to remove the discarded shell. By then, with luck and a good tail wind, I could be halfway to the woods. Perchance he will miss me in the tall grass,” said the bungalow-sized beast. “No. Better to take my chances here in the gate. At least I know the direction of attack.”

“Damn, you’re right,” said the Warlock. “My sympathies, snail dragon.”

And he set about fixing the bridge into solidity. Half of it, the half on the side away from the gate, really was solid. The other half was a reflected illusion, until the Warlock—did things.

“The dead border runs under the water,” he told Aran. “Don’t fall into it.”

The snail dragon withdrew most of itself into its shell. Only his scaly head showed now, as Aran and the Warlock crossed.

Aran came running.

He was still a man. It was not certain that Wavyhill knew that Aran was a werewolf. It was certain that they would pass the gate. So he reserved his last defense, and came at the dragon with a naked sword.

The dragon blew fire.

Aran went through it. He carried a charm against dragon fire.

But he couldn’t see through it. It shocked hell out of him when teeth closed on his shoulder. The dragon had stretched incredibly. Aran screamed and bounced his blade off the metallic scales and—the teeth loosed him, snapped ineffectually at the Warlock, who danced back laughing, waving—

But the Warlock had been unarmed!

The dragon collapsed. His thick neck was cut half in two, behind the scales. The Warlock wiped his weapon on his pantaloons and held it up.

Aran felt suddenly queasy.

The Warlock laughed again. “‘What good is a glass dagger?’ The fun thing about being a magician is that everyone always expects you to use magic.”

“But, but—”

“It’s just a glass dagger. No spells on it, nothing Wavyhill could detect. I had a friend drop it in the pond two days ago. Glass in water is near enough to invisible to fool the likes of Wavyhill.”

“Excuse my open mouth. I just don’t like glass daggers. Now what?”

The corpse and shell of the snail dragon still blocked the gate.

“If we try to squeeze around, we could be trapped. I suppose we’ll have to go over.”

“Fast,” said Aran.

“Right, fast. Keep in mind that he could be anywhere.” The Warlock took a running start and ran/climbed up the curve of the shell.

Aran followed almost as quickly.

In his sanctum, the snail dragon had said. The picture he had evoked was still with Aran as he went up the shell. Wavyhill would be hidden in his basement or his tower room, in some place of safety. Aran and the Warlock would have to fight their way through whatever the enemy could raise against them, while Wavyhill watched to gauge their defenses. There were tales of magicians’ battles…

Aran was ravenously hungry. It gave him a driving energy he hadn’t had in years, decades. His pumping legs drove a body that seemed feather-light. He reached the top of the shell just as the Warlock was turning full about in apparent panic.

Then he saw them: a horde of armed and armored skeletons coming at them up a wooden plank. There must have been several score of them. Aran shouted and drew his sword. How do you kill a skeleton?

The Warlock shouted too. Strange words, in the Guild language.

The skeletons howled. A whirlwind seemed to grip them and lift them and fling them forward. Already they were losing form, like smoke rings. Aran turned to see the last of them vanishing into the Warlock’s back.

My name is legion. They must have been animated by a single demon. And the Warlock had pulled that demon into a demon trap, empty and waiting these thirty years.

The problem was that both Aran and the Warlock had been concentrating on the plural demon.

The Warlock’s back was turned, and Aran could do nothing. He spotted Wavyhill gesticulating from across the courtyard, in the instant before Wavyhill completed his spell.

Aran turned to shout a warning; and so he saw what the spell did to the Warlock. The Warlock was old in an instant. The flesh seemed to fade into his bones. He looked bewildered, spat a mouthful of blackened pebbles—no, teeth—closed his eyes and started to fall.

Aran caught him.

It was like catching an armload of bones. He eased the Warlock onto his back on the great snail shell. The Warlock’s breathing was stertorous; he could not have long to live.

“Aran the Merchant!”

Aran looked down. “What did you do to him?”

The magician Wavyhill was dressed as usual, in dark robe and sandals and pointed hat. A belt with a shoulder loop held his big-hilted sword just clear of the ground. He called, “That is precisely what I wish to discuss. I have found an incantation that behaves as the Warlock’s Wheel behaves, but directionally. Is this over your head?”

“I understand you.”

“In layman’s terms, I’ve sucked the magic from him. That leaves him two hundred and twenty-six years old. I believe that gives me the win.

“My problem is whether to let you live. Aran, do you understand what my spell will do to you?”

Aran did, but—“Tell me anyway. Then tell me how you found out.”

“From some of my colleagues, of course, after I determined that you were my enemy. You must have consulted an incredible number of magicians regarding the ghostly knife in your heart.”

“More than a dozen. Well?”

“Leave in peace. Don’t come back.”

“I have to take the Warlock.”

“He is my enemy.”

“He’s my ally. I won’t leave him,” said Aran.

“Take him then.”

Aran stooped. He was forty-eight years old, and the bitterness of defeat had replaced the manic energy of battle. But the Warlock was little more than a snoring mummy, dry and light. The problem would be to get the fragile old man down from the snail shell.

Wavyhill was chanting!

Aran stood—in time to see the final gesture. Then the spell hit him.

For an instant he thought that the knife had truly reappeared in his heart. But the pain was all through him! Like a million taut strings snapping inside him! The shape of his neck changed grindingly; all of his legs snapped forward; his skull flattened, his eyes lost color vision, his nose stretched, his lips pulled back from bared teeth.

The change had never come so fast, had never been more complete. A blackness fell on Aran’s mind. It was a wolf that rolled helplessly off the giant snail shell and into the courtyard. A wolf bounced heavily and rolled to its feet, snarled deep in its throat and began walking stiff-legged toward Wavyhill.

Wavyhill was amazed! He started the incantation over, speaking very fast, as Aran approached. He finished as Aran came within leaping distance.

This time there was no change at all. Except that Aran leapt, and Wavyhill jumped back just short of far enough, and Aran tore his throat out.

For Aran the nightmare began then. What had gone before was as sweet dreams.

Wavyhill should have been dead. His severed carotid arteries pumped frantically, his windpipe made horrid bubbling sounds, and—Wavyhill drew his sword and attacked.

Aran the wolf circled and moved in and slashed—and backed away howling, for Wavyhill’s sword had run him through the heart. The wound healed instantly. Aran the wolf was not surprised. He leapt away, and circled, and slashed and was stabbed again, and circled…

It went on and on.

Wavyhill’s blood had stopped flowing. He’d run out. Yet he was still alive. So was his sword, or so it seemed. Aran never attacked unless it seemed safe, but the sword bit him every time. And every time he attacked, he came away with a mouthful of Wavyhill.

He was going to win. He could not help but win. His wounds healed as fast as they were made. Wavyhill’s did not. Aran was stripping the flesh from the magician’s bones.

There was a darkness on his brain. He moved by animal cunning. Again and again he herded Wavyhill back onto the slippery flagstones where Wavyhill had spilled five quarts of his blood. Four feet were surer than two. It was that cunning that led him to bar Wavyhill from leaving the courtyard. He tried. He must have stored healing magic somewhere in the castle. But Aran would not let him reach it.

He had done something to himself that would not let him die. He must be regretting it terribly. Aran the wolf had crippled him now, slashing at his ankles until there was not a shred of muscle left to work the bones. Wavyhill was fighting on his knees. Now Aran came closer, suffering the bite of the sword to reach the magician…

Nightmare.

Aran the Peacemonger had been wrong. If Aran the rug merchant could work on and on, stripping the living flesh from a man in agony, taking a mortal wound for every bite—if Aran could suffer such agonies to do this to anyone, for any cause—

Then neither the end of magic, nor anything else, would ever persuade men to give up war. They would fight on, with swords and stones and whatever they could find, for as long as there were men.

The blackness had lifted from Aran’s brain. It must have been the sword: the mana in an enchanted sword had replaced the mana sucked from him by Wavyhill’s variant of the Warlock’s Wheel.

And, finally, he realized that the sword was fighting alone.

Wavyhill was little more than bloody bones. He might not be dead, but he certainly couldn’t move. The sword moved itself at the end of the stripped bones of his arm, still trying to keep Aran away.

Aran slid past the blade. He gripped the hilt in his teeth and pulled it from the magician’s still-fleshy hand. The hand fought back with a senseless determined grip, but it wasn’t enough.

He had to convert to human to climb the dragon shell.

The Warlock was still alive, but his breathing was a thing of desperation. Aran laid the blade across the Warlock’s body and waited.

The Warlock grew young. Not as young as he had been, but he no longer looked—dead. He was in the neighborhood of seventy years old when he opened his eyes, blinked, and asked, “What happened?”

“You missed all the excitement,” said Aran.

“I take it you beat him. My apologies. It’s been thirty years since I fought Glirendree. With every magician in the civilized world trying to duplicate the Warlock’s Wheel, one or another was bound to improve on the design.”

“He used it on me, too.”

“Oh?” The Warlock chuckled. “I suppose you’re wondering about the knife.”

“It did come to mind. Where is it?”

“In my belt. Did you think I’d leave it in your chest? I’d had a dream that I would need it. So I kept it. And sure enough—”

“But it was in my heart!”

“I made an image of it. I put the image in your heart, then faded it out.”

Aran’s fingernails raked his chest. “You miserable son of an ape! You let me think that knife was in me for thirty years!”

“You came to my house as a thief,” the Warlock reminded him. “Not an invited guest.”

Aran the merchant had acquired somewhat the same attitude toward thieves. With diminished bitterness he said, “Just a little magician’s joke, was it? No wonder nobody could get it out. All right. Now tell me why Wavyhill’s spell turned me into a wolf.”

The Warlock sat up carefully. He said, “What?”

“He waved his arms at me and sucked all the mana out of me, and I turned into a wolf. I even lost my human intelligence. Probably my invulnerability too. If he hadn’t been using an enchanted sword he’d have cut me to ribbons.”

“I don’t understand that. You should have been frozen into human form. Unless…”

Then, visibly, the answer hit him. His pale cheeks paled further. Presently he said, “You’re not going to like this, Aran.”

Aran could see it in the Warlock’s face, seventy years old and very tired and full of pity. “Go on,” he said.

“The Wheel is a new thing. Even the dead spots aren’t that old. The situation has never come up before, that’s all. People automatically assume that werewolves are people who can turn themselves into wolves.

“It seems obvious enough. You can’t even make the change without moonlight. You keep your human intelligence. But there’s never been proof, one way or another, until now.”

“You’re saying I’m a wolf.”

“Without magic, you’re a wolf,” the Warlock agreed.

“Does it matter? I’ve spent most of my life as a man,” Aran whispered. “What difference does it make—oh. Oh, yes.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you didn’t have children.”

“Eight. And they’ll have children. And one day the mana will be gone everywhere on Earth. Then what, Warlock?”

“You know already.”

“They’ll be wild dogs for the rest of eternity!”

“And nothing anyone can do about it.”

“Oh, yes, there is! I’m going to see to it that no magician ever enters Rynildissen again!” Aran stood up on the dragon’s shell. “Do you hear me, Warlock? Your kind will be barred. Magic will be barred. We’ll save the mana for the sea people and the dragons!”

It may be that he succeeded. Fourteen thousand years later, there are still tales of werewolves where Rynildissen City once stood. Certainly there are no magicians.

THE MAGIC
GOES AWAY

The Raft

The waves washed him ashore aboard a section of the wooden roof from an Atlantean winery. He was half dead, and mad. There was a corpse on the makeshift raft with him, a centaur girl, three days dead of no obvious cause.

The fisherfolk were awed. They knew the workmanship of the winery roof, and they knew that the stranger must have survived the greatest disaster in human history. Perhaps they considered him a good luck charm.

He was lucky. The fisherfolk did not steal the golden arm bands he wore. They fed him by hand until he could feed himself. When he grew strong they put him to work. He could not or would not speak, but he could follow orders. He was a big man. When his weight came back he could lift as much as any two fishermen.

By day he worked like a golem, tirelessly: they had to remember to tell him when to stop. By night he would pull his broken sword from its scabbard—the blade was broken to within two thumbs of the hilt—and turn it in his hands as if studying it.

He stayed in the bachelors’ longhouse. Women who approached him found him unresponsive. They attributed it to his sickness.

Four months after his arrival he spoke his first words.

The boy Hatchap was moving down the line of sleeping bachelors, waking them for the day’s fishing. He found the stranger staring at the ceiling in grief and anguish. “Like magic. Like magic,” he mumbled—in Greek. Suddenly he smiled, for the first time Hatchap could remember. “Magician,” he said.

That night, after the boats were in, he went to the oldest man in the village and said, “I have to talk to a magician.”

The old man was patient. He explained that a witch lived in the nearest village, but that this Mirandee had departed months ago. By now she would be meeting colleagues in Prissthil. There would be no competent magician nearer than Prissthil, which was many days’ journey.

Mad Orolandes nodded as if he understood.

He was gone the next morning. He had left one of his bracelets in the headman’s house.

Llon

Prissthil and the village called Warlock’s Cave were six hundred miles apart. Once the Warlock would have flown the distance in a single night. Even today, they might have taken riding dragons, intelligent allies…and in some place where indiscriminate use of magic had leeched mana, they might have left dragon bones to merge with the rocks.

It annoyed the Warlock to be leaving Warlock’s Cave on muleback; but he and Clubfoot considered this prudent.

It was worse than they had thought. The mana-rich places they expected to cross by magic, were not there. Three of their mules died in the desert when Clubfoot ran out of the ability to produce rain.

The situation was just this desperate: Clubfoot and the Warlock, two of the most powerful magicians left in the world, came to the conference at Prissthil on foot, leading a pack mule.

Clubfoot had red skin and straight black hair and an arched beak of a nose. His ancestors had fled an Asian infestation of vampires, had crossed the world’s broadest ocean by magic in the company of a tribe of the wolf people. His limp was a handicap he might have cured decades ago, except that it would have cost him half his power.

And the Warlock limped because of his age.

Limping, they came to the crest of a hill overlooking Prissthil.

It was late afternoon. Already the tremendous shadow of Mount Valhalla, last home of a quarrelsome pantheon of gods now gone mythical, sprawled eastward across Prissthil. The village had grown since the Warlock had last seen it, one hundred and ten years ago. The newer houses were lower, sturdier…held up not by spells spoken over a cornerstone, but by their own strength.

“Prissthil was founded on magic,” the Warlock said half to himself.

Clubfoot heard. “Was it?”

The Warlock pointed to a dish-shaped depression north of the city wall. “That crater is old, but you can still see the shape of it, can’t you? That’s Fistfall. This village started as a trading center for talismans: fragments of the boulder of starstone that made that crater. The merchants ran out of starstone long ago, but the village keeps growing. Don’t you wonder how?”

Clubfoot shrugged. “They must be trading something else.”

“Look, Clubfoot, there are guards under Llon! Llon used to be all the guard Prissthil needed!”

“What are you talking about? The big stone statue?”

The Warlock looked at him oddly. “Yes. Yes, the big stone statue.”

Winds off the desert had etched away the fine details, but the stone statue was still a work of art. Half human, half big gentle guard dog, it squatted on its haunches before the gate, looking endlessly patient. Guards leaned against its forepaws. They straightened and hailed the magicians as they came within shouting distance.

“Ho, travelers! What would you in Prissthil?”

Clubfoot cried, “We intend Prissthil’s salvation, and the world’s!”

“Oh, magicians! Well, you’re welcome.” The head guard grinned. He was a burly, earthy man in armor dented by war. “Though I don’t trust your salvation. What have you come to do for us? Make more starstone?”

Clubfoot turned huffy. “It was for no trivial purpose that we traveled six hundred miles.”

“Your pardon, but my grandfather used to fly half around the world to attend a banquet,” said the head guard. “Poor old man. None of his spells worked, there at the end. He kept going over and over the same rejuvenation spell until he died. Wanted to train me for magic too. I had more sense.”

A grating voice said, “Waaarrl…lock.”

The blood drained from the head guard’s face. Slowly he turned. The other guard was backing toward the gate.

The statue’s rough-carved stone face, a dog’s face with a scholar’s thoughtful look, stared down at the magicians. “I know you,” said the rusty, almost subsonic voice. “Waarrllock. You made me.”

“Llon!” the Warlock cried joyfully. “I thought you must be mythical by now!”

“Almost. I sleep for years, for tens of years. Sometimes I wake for a few hours. The life goes out of me,” said the statue. “I wish it were not so. How can I do my duty? One day an enemy will slip past me, into the city.”

“We’ll see if we can do something about that.”

“I wish you luck.”

Clubfoot spoke confidently. “The best brains in the world are gathering here. How can we fail?”

“You’re young,” said Llon.

They passed on. Behind them the statue froze in place.

Orolandes

It was luck for Orolandes that Prissthil was no farther. Else he would have died on the way. He made for a place he knew only by name, stopping sometimes to ask directions, or to ask for work and food. He was gaunt again by the time he reached Prissthil.

He circled a wide, barren dish-shaped depression. It was too circular, too regular; it smacked uneasily of sorcery. There was a great stone statue before the city gate, and guards who straightened as he came up.

“We have little need for swordsmen here,” one greeted him.

“I want to talk to a magician,” said Orolandes.

“You’re in luck.” The guard looked over his shoulder, quickly, nervously; then turned back fast, as if hoping the swordsman wouldn’t notice. “Two magicians came today. But what if they don’t want to talk to you?”

“I have to talk to a magician,” Orolandes said stubbornly. His hand hung near his sword hilt. He was big, and scarred, and armed. Perhaps he was no longer an obvious madman, but the ghost of some recent horror was plain in his face.

The guard forebore to push the matter. The stranger was no pauper; his gold arm band was a form of money. “If you’re rude to a magician, you’ll get what you deserve. Welcome to Prissthil. Go on in.”

The Blindness Spell

The inn the Warlock loved best was gone, replaced by a leather-worker’s shop. They sought another.

At the Inn of the Mating Phoenixes they saw their mule stabled, then moved baggage to their rooms. Clubfoot flopped on the feather mattress. The Warlock dug in a saddlebag. He pulled out spare clothing, then a copper disk with markings around the rim. He moved to set it aside; then, still holding it, he seemed to drift off into reverie.

Once there had been a proud and powerful magician. When barely past his brilliant apprenticeship; but he had the temerity to forbid the waging of war throughout the Fertile Crescent, and the power to make it stick. He consistently hired himself out to battle whichever nation he considered the aggressor.

Oh, his magic had been big and showy in those days! Floating castles, armies destroyed by lightning, phantom cities built and destroyed in a night. In his pride he nicknamed himself Warlock. Had he known that his nickname would become a generic term for magicians, he would not have shown surprise.

But over the decades his spells stopped working. He moved away, and his power returned, to some extent…then gradually dwindled, until he moved again.

It happened to nations too. Bound together by its own gods and traditions and laws and trade networks, a nation like Acheron might come to seem as old and stable as the mountains themselves…until treaties sealed by oaths and magic lost their power…until barbarians with swords came swarming over the borders. The Warlock was the first to learn why. If he kept his discovery secret, his motive was compassion. His terrible truth spelled the end of civilization, yet it was of no earthly use to anyone. Fifty years ago his secret had finally escaped him…

“Never mind that,” said Clubfoot. “Let’s get dinner.”

The Warlock shook himself. “Shortly,” he said. He set the Wheel aside and reached again into the saddlebag.

Clubfoot snorted. He gathered up spilled clothing and began hanging it.

The Warlock set a wooden box on the table. Inside, within soft fox skins, was a human skull. The Warlock handled it carefully. One hinge of its jaw was broken, and there were tooth marks on the jaw and cheek bones and around both earholes.

Clubfoot said, “I still think we should have contrived to lose that.”

“I disagree. Now let’s get dinner.”

The inn was crowded. The dining hall was filled with long wooden tables, too close together, with wooden benches down both sides. The magicians fitted themselves into space on one of the benches. Citizens to either side gradually realized who and what they were and gave them plenty of room.

“Look at this logically,” Clubfoot said. “You’ve carried Wavyhill’s skull six hundred miles, when we had to throw away baggage we needed more. It’s just a skull. It’s not even in good condition. But if there’s enough local mana to power your spells, and if you work your spells exactly right, you just might be able to bring Wavyhill back to life so he can kill you!”

The Warlock stopped eating long enough to say, “Even if I revive it, it’s still just a skull. You’ll be all right if you don’t stick your fingers in its mouth.”

“He’s got every reason to want your life! And mine too, because I’m the one who led you to Shiskabil and Hathzoril. If I hadn’t found the gutted villages, you’d never have tracked him down.”

“He may not have known that.”

“I’d rather he did. Hellspawn! He’s branded my memory. I’ll never forget Shiskabil. Dead empty, and dried blood everywhere.”

“I’m going to revive him tonight. Want to help?”

Clubfoot gnawed at the rich dark meat on an antelope’s thighbone. Presently he said, “Would I let you try it alone?”

The Warlock smiled. Clubfoot was near fifty; he thought himself experienced in magic. At five times his age the Warlock might have laughed at Clubfoot’s solicitude. But the Warlock knew that most of his dangerously won knowledge was obsolete.

The mana had been richer, magic had been both easier and more dangerous, when the Warlock was raising his floating castles. Clubfoot was probably more in tune with the real world. So the Warlock only smiled and began moving his fingers in an intricate pattern.

Primary colors streamed up from between the Warlock’s fingers, roiled and expanded beneath the beamed roof. Heads turned at the other tables. The clattering of table knives stopped. Then came sounds of delight and appreciative fingersnapping, for a spell the Warlock had last used to blind an enemy army.

Now a lean, scarred swordsman watched the Warlock with haunted eyes. The Warlock did not notice. As he left the dining hall he took with him a bunch of big purple grapes.

The Skull of Wavyhill

The Warlock could remember a time when murder was very dangerous; when the mystical backlash from a careless killing could reverberate for generations. But that was long ago.

Wavyhill had learned his trade in an age when all spells were less powerful. There was still strong mana in murder, but Wavyhill had learned to control it. He had used magic to make himself unkillable. For these past twenty years he must have been regretting that terribly.

Wavyhill’s skull sat grinning on the table. Clubfoot regarded it uneasily. “It may be we’ve had too much wine to try this sort of thing tonight.”

“Would you rather try it tomorrow, before dawn, with hangovers? I want Wavyhill with me when we meet Mirandee and Piranther.”

“All right, go ahead.” Clubfoot bolted the door, then worked spells against magical intrusion. Reviving a murderous dead man was chancy enough without risk of some outsider interfering—and there were amateur magicians everywhere in Prissthil. Magic was an old tradition here, dating from a time when starstone was plentiful.

The Warlock sang as he worked. He was an old man, tall and lean, his head bald as an egg, his voice thin and reedy. But he could hold a tune. The words he sang belonged to a language no longer used except by members of the Sorcerers’ Guild. Wake and see the world…

He knotted a loop of thin leather thong to mend the broken jaw hinge. Other strips of thong went along the cheekbones, the jaw hinges, the ears. Many overlapped. When he finished they formed a crude diagram of the muscles of a human face.

The Warlock stepped back, considering. He cut up a sheet of felt and glued two round pads behind the ear holes. A longer strip went inside the jaws, the back end glued to the table between the jaw hinges.

He looked at Clubfoot, who had been watching intently. Clubfoot said, “Eyes?”

“Maybe later.” The Warlock said in the old language, “Kranthkorpool, speak to me.”

The skull opened its jaws wide and screamed.

Clubfoot and the Warlock covered their ears. It didn’t help. The skull’s voice was not troubling the air, and it did not reach the ears. At least it would not bother the other guests.

“He’s insane! Shut him off!” Clubfoot cried.

“Not yet!”

The skull screamed its agony. Minutes passed before it paused as if drawing breath. Into the pause the Warlock shouted, “Kranthkorpool, stop! It’s over! It’s been over for twenty years!”

The skull gaped. It said, “Twenty years?”

“It took me almost that long to find your true name, Kranthkorpool.”

“Call me Wavyhill. Who are you? I can’t see.”

“Just a minute.” The Warlock plucked two of what was left of the grapes. He picked up the skull and inserted them into the eye sockets from inside. He inked in two black dots where they showed through the sockets.

“Ah,” said the skull. The black dots moved, focused. They studied Clubfoot, then moved on. “Warlock?”

The Warlock nodded.

“I thought I’d killed you. You were two hundred years old when I cancelled your longevity spells.”

“I was able to renew them. Partly. I give you a technical victory, Wavyhill. It was my ally who defeated you.”

“Technical victory!” There was hysteria in the skull’s falsetto laughter. “That werewolf rug merchant kept tearing and tearing at me! It went on forever and ever, and I couldn’t die! I couldn’t die!”

“It’s over.”

“I thought it wouldn’t ever be over. It went on and on, a piece of me gone every time he got close enough—”

The skull stopped, seemed to consider. Its expression was unreadable, of course. “I don’t hurt. In fact, I can’t feel much of anything. There was a long time when I couldn’t feel or see or hear or smell or…Did you say twenty years? Warlock, what do I look like?”

The Warlock detached a mirror from the wall, brought it and held it. Wavyhill’s skull studied itself for a time. It said, “You just had to do that, didn’t you?”

“I owed you one. Now you have a decision to make. Do you want to die? I can cancel the spell of immortality you put on yourself.”

“I don’t know. Let me think about it. What do you want of me, Warlock?”

“Some technical help.”

The skull laughed. “From me?”

“You were the world’s first necromancer. You were powerful enough to defeat me,” said the Warlock. “I’d be dead if I hadn’t brought help. You used your power for evil, but nobody doubts your skill. Tomorrow I meet two powerful magicians. We’ll want your advice.”

“Do I know of them?”

“Piranther. Mirandee.”

“Piranther!” The skull chuckled. “I’d like to see that meeting. Piranther walked out on your conference, didn’t he? After you called him a shortsighted fool. I heard that he took a whole colony of his people to the South Land Mass and swore never to come back.”

“You heard right. And he never did come back, but he’s coming now.”

The skull was silent for a time. Then it said, “You’ve roused my interest. I don’t care to die just now. Under the circumstances that may be silly, but I can’t help it. Can you make me a whole man again?”

“Look at me.”

The Warlock’s back was festive with colored inks: a five-sided tattoo, hypnotic in its complexity. The famous demon trap, was empty now; but he still preferred to wear nothing above the waist. Its purpose had been lost, but the habit remained.

It showed him to disadvantage. The Warlock’s ribs protruded. His small pot belly protruded. Pouchy, wrinkled, unflexible skin masked the strong lines of his face and showed the shrinkage of his musculature. Vertebrae marched like a tiny mountain range across the fading inks of the empty demon trap.

The skull sighed mournfully.

“Look at me! I’d wish my youth back, if wishing were all it took,” the Warlock said. “I was young for two hundred years. Now the spells are failing. All spells are failing.”

“So you need a necromancer.” The dots on the grapes turned to the red man. “Are you involved in this madness too?”

“Of course.”

The Warlock said, “This is Clubfoot, our ally.”

“A pleasure. I’d shake hands, but you see how it is,” said Wavyhill.

Clubfoot was not amused. “One day you may have hands again, but you will never take my hand. I’ve seen the villages you gutted. I helped kill you, Wavyhill.”

The dots on the grapes turned back to the Warlock. “And this tactless boor is to be our ally? Well, what is your project?”

“We’re going to discuss means of restoring the world’s mana.”

The skull’s laugh was high and shrill. The Warlock waited it out. Presently he said, “Are you finished?”

“Possibly. Will it take all five of us?”

“I tried to call a full meeting of the Guild. Only ten answered the call. Of the ten, three felt able to travel.”

“Has it occurred to you that magic can only use up mana? Never restore it?”

“We’re not fools. What about an outside source?”

“Such as?”

“The Moon.”

The Warlock expected more laughter. It did not come. “Mana from the Moon? I never would have thought of that in a thousand years. Still…why not? Starstones are rich in mana. Why not the Moon?”

“With enough mana, and the right spells, you could be human again.”

The skull laughed. “And so could you, Warlock. But where would we find magic powerful enough to reach the Moon?”

The door rocked to thunderous knocking.

The magicians froze. Then Clubfoot stripped a bracelet from his upper arm. He looked through it at the door. “No magic involved,” he said.

“What would a mundane want with us?”

“Maybe the building’s on fire.” Clubfoot raised his voice. “You, there—”

Neither the old spells, nor the old bar across the door, were strong enough. The door exploded inward behind a tremendous kick. An armed man stepped into the room and looked about him.

“I have to talk to a magician,” he told them.

“You are interrupting magicians engaged in private business,” said the Warlock. No sane man would have needed more warning.

The intruder was raggedly shaved, his long black hair raggedly chopped at shoulder length. His dark eyes studied two men and a skull decorated with macabre humor. “You are magicians,” he said wonderingly. In the next instant he almost died; for he drew his sword, and Clubfoot raised his arms.

The Warlock shook Clubfoot’s shoulder. “Stop! It’s broken!”

“Yes. I broke it,” said the intruder. He looked at the bladeless hilt, then suddenly threw it into a corner of the room. He took two steps forward and closed hands like bronze clamps on the Warlock’s thin shoulders. He looked searchingly into the Warlock’s face. He said, “Why did it happen?”

Clubfoot’s arms were raised again.

Human beings are fragile, watery things. Death spells are the easiest magic there is.

“Back up and start over,” said the Warlock. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are you?”

“Orolandes. Greek soldier.”

“Why did you break your sword?”

“I hated it. I thought maybe it happened because of the people I killed. Not the other soldiers. The priests.”

Clubfoot exclaimed, “You were in the Atlantis invasion!”

“Yes. We finally invaded Atlantis. First time Greeks ever got that far.” Orolandes released the Warlock. He looked like a sleepwalker; he wasn’t seeing anything here in the room. “We came for slaves and treasure. That’s all.”

“And trade advantage,” said the Warlock.

“Uh? Maybe. Nobody told me anything like that. Anyway, we won. The armies of Atlantis must have gotten soft. We went through them like they were nothing. But the priests were something else. They stood in a long line on the steps of the big temple and waved their arms. We got sick. Some of us died. But we kept coming, crawling—I was crawling, anyway—and we got to them and killed them. And then Atlantis was ours.”

He looked with haunted eyes at the magicians. “Ours. At last. Hundreds of years we’d dreamed of conquering Atlantis. We’d take their treasure. We’d take away their weapons. We’d make them pay tribute. But we never, we never wanted to kill them all. Old men, women, children, everyone. Nobody ever thought of that.”

“You son of a troll. I had friends in Atlantis,” said Clubfoot. “How did you live through it? Why didn’t you die with the rest?”

“Uh? There was a big gold Tau symbol at the top of the steps. We were laughing and bragging and binding up our wounds when the land started to shake. Everybody fell over. The Tau thing cracked at the base and fell on the steps. Then someone pointed west, and the horizon was going up. It didn’t look like water. It was too misty, too big. It looked like the horizon was getting higher and higher.

“I crawled under the Tau thing with my back against the step. Captain Iason was shouting that it wasn’t real, it was just an illusion, we must have missed some of the priests. The water came down like the end of the world. I guess the Tau thing saved my life—even the water couldn’t move it, it was so heavy—but it almost killed me too. I had to get out from under it and try to swim up.

“I grabbed something that was floating up with me. It turned out to be part of a wooden roof. I got on it. A centaur girl came swimming by and I hauled her up on the roof. I thought, well, at least I saved one of them. And then she just fell over.”

Clubfoot said, “There’s magic in centaur metabolism. Without mana she died.”

“But what happened? Did we do it?”

“You did it,” said Clubfoot.

“I thought…maybe…you’d say…”

“You did it. You killed them all.”

The Warlock said, “Atlantis should have been under the ocean hundreds of years ago. Only the spells of the priest-kings kept that land above the waves.”

Orolandes nodded dumbly. He turned to the door.

“Stop him,” said Wavyhill. As Orolandes turned to the new voice, the skull snapped, “You. Swordsman. How would you like a chance to make amends?”

Orolandes gaped at the talking skull.

“Well? You wiped out a whole continent, people and centaurs and merpeople and all. You broke your sword, you were so disgusted at yourself. How would you like to do something good for a change? Keep it from happening to others.”

“Yes.”

Clubfoot asked, “What is this?”

“We may need him. I may know of a source of very powerful mana.”

“Where?”

“I’ll reserve that. Do the words ‘god within a god’ mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Good.” The skull chuckled. “We’ll see what develops tomorrow. See to it that this…Orolandes is with us when we meet your friends. You, Orolandes, have you got a room here?”

“I can get one.”

“Meet us at dawn, for breakfast.”

Orolandes nodded and walked out. There was no spring in his walk. His sword hilt he left lying in a corner.

Fistfall

From Prissthil’s gate one could make out an elliptical depression, oddly regular, in the background of low green hills. Time had eroded Fistfall’s borders; they disappeared as one came near. Greenery had covered the pits and dirt piles where earlier men had dug for starstone. From what must be the rim, Orolandes could see only that the land sloped gradually down, then gradually up again.

It was just past sunrise; there was still shadow in the hollow. Orolandes shivered in the morning chill.

The old man did not shiver, though he walked naked to the waist. A talking skull sat on his shoulder, fastened by straps over the lower jaw. He and the skull and the younger man chatted as they walked: trivia mixed with incomprehensible shop talk mixed with reminiscence from many lifetimes.

Orolandes shivered. He had fallen among magicians, willingly and by design, and he was not sure of his sanity. Before that terrible day in Atlantis he would never have considered a magician to be anything but an enemy.

In the village of the fisherfolk Orolandes had waited for the images to go away. Don’t speak of it, don’t think of it; the vivid memories would fade.

But in the dark of sleep the sea would rise up and up and over to swallow the world, with his spoils and his men and the people he’d conquered. He would snap awake then, to stare into the dark until it turned light.

Or on a bright afternoon he would heave at the awkward weight of a net filled with fish…and he would remember pulling at the limp, awkwardly right-angled centaur girl, trying to get her up on the broken roof. She’d had to lie on her side; he’d felt unspeakably clumsy trying to give her artificial respiration. But he’d seen her breathe at last! He’d seen her eyelids flicker open, seen her head lift and look at him…seen the life go out of her then, draining away to somewhere else.

What had happened that day? If he knew why, then the horror would leave him, and the guilt…He had clung to that notion until last night. Now he knew. What the magicians had told him was worse than he had imagined.

The notion he clung to now might be the silliest of all. Orolandes could read nothing in the white bone face of the dead magician. Even to its friends it was a tolerated evil. But nobody else had offered Orolandes any breath of comfort.

On the strength of a skull’s vague promise, he was here. He would wait and see.

The Warlock felt uncommonly alive. As they moved into Fistfall his vision and his hearing sharpened, his normal dyspepsia eased. Over the centuries the townspeople had removed every tiniest fragment of the boulder that had come flaming down from the skies; but vaporized rock had condensed and sifted down all over this region, and there was no removing it. Old spells took new strength.

Down there in the shadow, two walked uphill toward them.

“I recognize Mirandee,” said Clubfoot. “Would that be Piranther?”

“I think so. I only met him once.”

Clubfoot laughed. “Once was enough?”

“I’m surprised he came. We didn’t part as friends. I was so sure I was right, I got a little carried away. Well, but that was fifty years ago.” The Warlock turned to the swordsman. “Orolandes, I should have said it before. You can still turn back.”

The big man’s hand kept brushing his empty scabbard. He looked at the Warlock with too-wide eyes and said, “No.”

“You are about to learn the secrets of magicians. It isn’t likely you’ll learn too much, but if you do, we may have to tamper with your memory.”

It was the first time the Warlock had seen him smile. The swordsman said, “There are parts you can cut out while you’re about it.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I’m not sure. What kind of man is that? Or is it the woman’s familiar?”

The man approaching them was small and dark-skinned and naked in the autumn chill. His hair was white and puffy as a ripe dandelion. A skin bag hung on a thong around his neck.

“His people are powerful and touchy,” said Clubfoot. “Be polite.”

Piranther’s companion was a head taller than he was, a slender woman in a vivid blue robe. Snow-white hair fell to her waist and bobbed with her walk. Mirandee and the Warlock had dwelt together in a year long past, sharing knowledge and other things, experimenting with sex magic in a way that was only partly professional.

But now her eyes only brushed the Warlock and moved on. “Clubfoot, a pleasure to see you again! And your friends.” Visibly she wondered what the scarred, brawny, bewildered man was doing here. Then she turned back to the Warlock, and the blood drained from her face.

What was this? Was she reacting to the bizarre decorated skull on his shoulder? No. She took a half-step forward and said, “Oh my gods! Warlock!”

So that was it. “The magic goes away,” he told her gently. “I wish I’d thought to send you some warning. I see that your own youth spells have held better.”

“Well, but I’m younger. But you are all right?”

“I live. I walk. My mind is intact. I’m two hundred and forty years old, Mirandee.”

Wavyhill spoke from the Warlock’s shoulder. “He’s in better shape than I am.”

The woman’s eyes shifted, her brow lifted in enquiry.

“I am Wavyhill. Mirandee, I know you by reputation.”

“And I you.” Her voice turned winter-cold. “Warlock, is it proper that we deal with this…murderer?”

“For his skill and his knowledge, I think so.”

The skull cackled. “I know too much to be absent, my dear. Trust me, Mirandee, and forgive me the lives of a few dozens of mundanes. We’re here to restore the magic that once infused the world. I want that more than you do. Obviously.”

But Mirandee was looking at the Warlock when she answered Wavyhill. “No. You don’t.”

The age-withered black man spoke for the first time. “Skull, I sense the ambition in you. Otherwise you conceal your thoughts. What is it you hide?”

“I would bow if I could. Piranther, I am honored to meet you,” said Wavyhill. “Do you know of the god within a god?”

Piranther’s brow wrinkled. “These words mean nothing to me.”

“Then I have knowledge you need. A point for bargaining. Please notice that I am more helpless than any infant. On that basis, will you let me stay? I won’t ask you to trust me.”

Piranther’s eyes shifted. His face was as blank as his mind, and his mind was as dark and hidden as the floor of the ocean. “Warlock, I should be gratified that you still live. And you must be Clubfoot; I know you by reputation. But who are you, sir?”

“Orolandes. I, I was asked to come.”

Wavyhill said, “I asked him. His motives are good. Let him stay.”

Piranther half-smiled. “On trust?”

Wavyhill snorted. “You’re a magician, they say. Read his mind. He hasn’t the defenses of a turtle.”

That, and Piranther’s slow impassive nod…“No!” cried Orolandes, and his hand spasmed above the empty scabbard. He backed away.

The skull said, “Stop it, Greek. What have you to hide?”

Orolandes moaned. His guilt was agony; he wanted to burrow in the ground. One flash of hate he felt for these who would judge him: for the Warlock’s sympathy, the woman’s cool curiosity, the black demon’s indifference, the red magician’s irritation at time-wasting preliminaries. But Orolandes had already judged himself. He stood fast.

Corpses floated in shoals around his raft. They covered the sea as far as the horizon. Sharks and killer whales leapt among them…

Piranther made a grimace of distaste. “You might have warned me. Oh, very well, Wavyhill, he’s certainly harmless. But he trusts you no more than I do.”

“And why should he?”

Piranther shrugged. He settled gracefully onto a small grassy hillock. “I had hoped to be addressing thirty or forty trained magicians. It bodes ill for us that no more than five could come. But here we are. Who speaks?”

Cosmology

There was an awkward pause. Clubfoot said, “If nobody else wants to…”

“Proceed.”

Mirandee and the Warlock settled cross-legged on the ground.

Clubfoot looked toward Mount Valhalla, collecting his thoughts. He may have been regretting his temerity. After all, he was the youngest of the magicians present. Well—

“First there were the gods,” he said. “Earth sparkled with magic in those days, and nothing was impossible. The first god almost certainly created himself. Later gods may not have been that powerful, but there are tales of mountains piled one on another to reach sky-dwelling gods and overthrow them, of a god torn to pieces and the fragments forming whole pantheons, of the sun being stopped in its track for trivial purposes. The gods’ lives were fueled by magic, not fire. Eventually the mana level dropped too low, and the gods went mythical…as I suppose we’d die if fires stopped burning.

“We still have the habit of thanking the gods, mundanes and sorcerers alike. With reason. Before they died, some of the gods played at making other forms of life. Their creations were their survivors. Some live by what seems to be slow-burning fire…men, foxes, rabbits…and most plants use fire from the sun. Other plants and beasts use fire and mana both. We find unicorns surviving in mana-poor regions, though the colts are born with stunted horns, or none. But many mana-dependent peoples are going mythical: mer-people, dragons, centaurs, elves. Hey—”

Clubfoot did a strange thing for a man making a speech. He darted over to a boulder, heaved at it and turned it over. Underneath was a blob of grayish jelly two feet across.

In his youth the Warlock had killed carnivorous goo the size of houses. To a mere warrior they were more dangerous than dragons: a sword was generally too short to reach the beast’s nucleus. By contrast this goo was tiny. It was formless and translucent, with darker organs and vacuoles of food showing within its body. It arched itself in the morning sunlight and tried to flow into Clubfoot’s shadow.

“There! That’s what I’m talking about!” Clubfoot cried. “The goo are surviving, but look at it. Goo are named for the first word spoken by a baby. They’re said to be children of the first god: formless, adaptable, created in the image of the Crawling Chaos. We saw them smaller than a man’s fist in the desert, where the mana is poor. Do you see how small it’s gotten? Goo live by fire and magic, but they can use fire alone. When the world is barren of magic the goo will remain, but they’ll probably be too small to see.

“And we’ll survive, because we live by fire alone. But we’ll be farmers or merchants or entertainers, and the swordsmen will rule the world. That’s why we’re here. Not to save the centaurs or the dragons or the goo. To save ourselves.”

“Thank you. You’re very eloquent,” said Piranther. He seemed to have taken charge, with little challenge from anyone. He looked about at the rest. “Suggestions?”

Mirandee said, “What about your project, Piranther? Fifty years ago you were going to map the mana-rich regions of the world.”

“And I said that was self-limiting,” said the Warlock.

“And you called me a short-sighted fool,” Piranther said without heat. “But we carried through in spite of you. As you know, there are places human magicians never reached or settled, where the mana remains strong. I need hardly point out that they are the least desirable living places in the world. The land beneath the ice of the South Pole. In the north, the ice itself. The clouds. Any fool who watches clouds can tell you they’re magic. I know spells to render cloud-stuff solid and to shape it into castles and the like.”

“So do I,” said the Warlock.

“So did Sheefyre,” Mirandee said dryly. “The witch Sheefyre will not be joining us. She took a fall. Where are you on a cloudscape when the mana runs out?”

“Precisely. It was our major problem,” Piranther said. “There are places one can practice magic, but when the spells stop working, where are you? A desert, or an inaccessible mountaintop, or the terrible cold of the South Pole. But our search turned up one place of refuge, an unknown body of land in the southern hemisphere.

“Australia was probably infested with demons until recently. They’re gone now. All we have of them is the myth of a Hell under the world. But why else should the fifth largest land mass in the world have been uninhabited until we came? You know that when we finished our mapping project,” said Piranther, “I took my people there, all who would go. The mana is rich. There are new fruits and roots and meat animals. On a nearby island we found a giant bird, the moa, the finest meat animal in the world—”

The Warlock grinned. “Do I hear an invitation to emigrate?”

For a moment Piranther looked like a trapped thing. Then the bland, expressionless mask was back. He said, “I’m afraid we have no room for you.”

“What, in the world’s fifth largest land mass?”

“At the conference fifty years ago you said…what was it you said? You said that mapping mana-rich places only brings magicians to use up the mana. So—” Piranther shrugged delicately. “I take you at your word.”

They looked at him. He was hiding something…and he knew they knew…“I must,” he said. “The castles we raised by magic along the coast are falling down. The ambrosia is dying. We must migrate inland. I fear the results if my students can’t learn to use less powerful spells.”

“They’ll go further and further inland,” Mirandee said in a dreamy voice, “using the mana as they go.” Her face was blank, her eyes blind. Sometimes the gift of prophecy came on her thus, without warning. “Thousands of years from now the swordsmen will come, to find small black people in the barren center of the continent, starving and powerless, making magic with pointing-bones that no longer work.”

“There is no need to be so vivid,” Piranther said coldly.

Mirandee started. Her eyes focused. “Was I talking? What did I say?”

But nobody thought it tactful to tell her. Clubfoot cleared his throat and said, “Undersea?”

The Warlock shook his head. “No good. There’s nothing to breathe in the water, and the mana is in the sea floor. When the spells fail, where are you?” He looked around him. “Shall we face facts? There’s no place to hide. If we can’t bring the magic back to the world, we might as well give it to the swordsmen.”

Piranther asked, “Do you have something in mind?”

“An outside source. The Moon.”

Nobody laughed. Even the Greek swordsman only gaped at him. Piranther’s wrinkled face remained immobile as he said, “You must have been thinking this through for hundreds of years. Is this really your best suggestion?”

“Yes. Silly as it sounds. May I expound?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t have to say anything that isn’t obvious. Stones and iron fall from the sky every night. They burn out before they touch earth. Their power for magic is low; it has to be used fast, while they still burn.

“Some starstones do reach earth. The bigger they are, the more power they carry. Correct?” The Warlock did not wait for an answer. “The Moon is huge. Watch it at moonrise and you’ll know. It should carry enormous power—far more than the Fist carried, for instance. In fact, it must. What else but magic could hold it up? I suggest that the Moon carries more mana than the world has seen since the gods died.

“But you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?—Orolandes, is there magic in the Moon?”

The ex-soldier started. “Why ask me? I know no magic.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “All right, yes, there’s magic in the Moon. Anyone can feel it.”

“We all know that,” said Piranther. “How do you propose to use it?”

“I don’t know. If our spells could reach the Moon at all, its own mana would let us land it.”

“This all seems very…hypothetical,” Mirandee said delicately. “I don’t know what holds the Moon up. Do you? Does anyone?”

There were blank looks. Wavyhill’s skull cackled. “We could pull the Moon down and find we’d used up all the mana doing it.”

Mirandee was exasperated. “Well, then, does anyone know how big the Moon is? Because the bigger it is, the higher it must be, and the harder it’s going to hit! It could be thousands of miles up!”

“It must be tremendous,” Piranther said. “From Iceland and from Australia, it looks exactly the same. Nothing remotely as large has ever struck earth. Otherwise we’d find old records of a time when there were two moons.”

“We’ll have to give it plenty of room, if we solve the other problems.” The Warlock hesitated. “I’d thought of the Gobi Desert.”

Wavyhill said, “There’s even more room in the Pacific.”

Clubfoot made a rude noise. “Tidal waves. And we couldn’t get to it after it sank.” He tugged thoughtfully at a single braid of straight black hair. “Why not the South Pole? No, forget I said that. The Moon never gets over the Poles.”

Piranther wore an irritating half-smile. “Basics, brothers, basics. We don’t know how big the Moon is. We don’t know what it weighs, or what holds it up. We don’t have magic powerful enough to reach it. You’re all thinking like novices, trying to do it all in one crackling powerful ceremony of enchantment, whereas in fact we need spells and power to reach the Moon, and study it, and learn enough to tell us what to do next, and finally to use that magic to tap the Moon’s power.” His smile deepened. “There is nothing in the world today that is sufficiently sacred to do all that. Warlock, you once called me a short-sighted fool. I will not call you short-sighted. Your daydream would be work for generations, if it could be done at all.”

The Warlock was not pleased.

“What exactly are you gloating about? We had the big conference fifty years ago. The power existed, then. But you and your group wanted to make maps.”

Piranther’s half-smile disappeared. His small black hand stroked the skin bag at his chest—and forces could be felt gathering.

“I know of a mana source,” said the skull on the Warlock’s shoulder.

Wavyhill saw that he had everyone’s attention. “I thought I had better interrupt while we still had a conference. I wish I could give guarantees, but I can’t. I may know of a living god, the last in the world. I’ll lead you to it.”

“I find this hard to believe,” Piranther said slowly. “A remaining god? When even the dragons are nearly gone? When half the world’s fishing industries are run by men, from boats, because the merpeople have died off?”

“It seems more believable when you know the details. I’ll tell you the details, and I’ll lead you to it,” said Wavyhill. “But I want oaths sworn. To the best of your abilities, when we have gained sufficient mana for the spells to work, will each of you do your best to return me to my human form?”

Nobody hurried to answer.

“Remember, your oaths will be binding. A geas is more powerful than any natural law, in a domain of rich mana. Well?”

“I had other projects in mind,” Piranther said easily. “Your oath would claim too much of my time. Also, you have a much greater interest in the Warlock’s project than any of us.”

“Your interest isn’t slight,” said Wavyhill. “We who pull down the power of the Moon will rule the world.”

“True enough. But why should you have a head start on the rest of us while we fulfill your geas? Swear us the same oath, Wavyhill. Then we can all scurry about for ways to put you back together again. Otherwise we’ll wake to find you ruling us.”

“Willingly,” said Wavyhill, and he swore.

Piranther listened with his half-smile showing, while Mirandee and the Warlock and, reluctantly, Clubfoot swore Wavyhill’s oath.

Then, “I will not swear,” said Piranther. “Thus I presume you will not guide me?” He stood, lithely, and walked away. If he expected voices calling him back, there were none, and he walked away toward Prissthil.

“That means trouble,” said Wavyhill.

“We can do it without him,” said Clubfoot.

“You don’t follow me,” said Wavyhill. “I meant what I said. If we fail, there is no world. If we draw the power of the Moon, we rule the world. If Piranther follows us and learns what we learn, and if Piranther is there when we pull down the Moon or whatever, he’s the only one of us who can concentrate purely on controlling it.”

Clubfoot saw it now. “You and your stupid oath.”

“He’ll have serious trouble following us,” said the Warlock.

The Mountain

They climbed Mount Valhalla on foot: three magicians, two porters hired in Prissthil, Orolandes carrying a porter’s load, and the skull of Wavyhill still moored to the Warlock’s shoulder. Wavyhill’s eyes had been replaced with rubies.

He had hired the porters, he had chosen their equipment, but Orolandes had no idea why he was going up a mountain. He had asked Wavyhill, “Is the last god at the peak, then?”

“Gear us for the peak,” Wavyhill had told him, “and don’t think too much. Piranther can read your mind. He’ll be getting your surface thoughts until we can break you loose.”

The porters were small, agile, cheerful men. They did better than Orolandes at teaching the magicians elementary climbing techniques. They showed neither awe of the magicians’ power nor scorn for their clumsiness. To natives of Prissthil a magician was a fellow-professional, worthy of respect.

Clubfoot was a careful climber, little hampered by his twisted foot. But they were all aging, even Mirandee of the smooth pale skin and the white hair. On the first night they hurt everywhere. They couldn’t eat. They moaned in their sleep. In the morning they were too tired and stiff to move, until hunger and the smell of breakfast brought them groaning from their blankets.

It was good for Orolandes’ self-confidence, to see these powerful beings so far out of their element. He became marginally less afraid of them. But he wondered if they had the stamina to continue.

As the ascent grew steeper the packs grew lighter. Food was eaten. Heavy cloaks were taken from the packs and worn. But the air grew lean, and Orolandes and the porters panted as they climbed.

Not so the magicians. With altitude they seemed to gain strength. Here above the frost line there were even times when the rich creamy fall of Mirandee’s hair would darken momentarily, then grow white again.

It usually happened when they were passing one of the old fallen structures.

They had passed the first of these on the third day. No question about what it was. It was an altar, a broad slab of cut rock richly stained with old blood. “This was why the gods survived so long here,” the Warlock told Orolandes. “Sacrifice in return for miracles. But when the gods’ power waned in the lands below the mountain, the miracles weren’t always granted. The natives didn’t know why, of course. Eventually they stopped sacrificing.”

Higher structures were stranger, and not built by men. They passed a cluster of polished spheres of assorted sizes, fallen in a heap in a patch of snow. They glowed by their own light: four big spheres banded in orange and white, one with a broad ring around it; three much smaller, one mottled ochre and one mottled blue-and-white and one shining white; and two, the smallest, the yellow-white of old bone. Further on was a peaked circular structure sitting on the ground. It looked like a discarded roof.

Though Orolandes was still the master climber, this was evidently magicians’ territory.

There was no firewood on the third night. It was not needed. After they made camp the magicians—tired but cheerful, no longer bothered by strained muscles—sang songs in a ring around a sizeable boulder, until the boulder caught fire. Another song brought a unicorn to be slaughtered and butchered by the porters. Orolandes could only admire the porters’ aplomb. They roasted the meat and boiled water for herb tea on a burning rock, as if they had been doing it all their lives.

After dinner, as they were basking around the fire, Clubfoot said to Mirandee, “You know that I’ve admired you for a long time. Will you be my wife while our mission lasts?”

Orolandes was jolted. Never would he have asked a woman such a question except in privacy. But Clubfoot did not expect to be turned down…and it showed in his face when Mirandee smiled and shook her head. “I gave up such things long ago,” she said. “Being in love ruins my judgment. It takes my mind off what I’m doing, and I ruin spells. But I thank you.”

On the morning of the fourth day they came on a flight of stairs leading up from the lip of a sheer cliff. Aided by climbing ropes, they crawled sideways along an icy slope to reach the stairs: broad slabs of unflawed marble that narrowed as they rose, but that rose out of sight into the clouds.

Placed on random steps were statues, human, half-human, not at all human. Orolandes tried to forget, and could not, a half-melted thing equipped with tentacles and broad clawed flippers and a single eye. But there was a hardwood statue of a handsome, smiling man that Orolandes found equally disturbing, and for no reason at all. Magic. Here where men could not live because they could not grow food, magic still lived.

Snow and ice covered the rocks to either side, but no ice had formed on the marble. The stairway rose past strange things. Here was something shattered, a hollow flowing shape that must have looked like a teardrop flowing upward before it broke at the base and toppled. There, a single tree bore a dozen kinds of ripe fruit; but it withered as the magicians came near, until nothing was left but a dry stick.

And there, a section seemed to have been bitten out of the mountainside to leave a broad flat place. An arena, it was, where two sets of metal-and-leather armor stood facing each other in attack position, weapons raised, each piece of armor suspended in air. As the little party climbed past, the armor dropped in two heaps.

The Warlock stopped. “Orolandes, climb down there and get one of those swords.”

“I gave up swords,” said Orolandes.

“Maybe you won’t use it, but you should have it. Magic can’t do everything. None of us has ever used a sword…except Wavyhill.”

The skull laughed on his shoulder. “Much good it did me, then and now. Get the sword, Greek.”

Orolandes shucked his pack and clambered down and across the icy slope. At his approach the fallen armor stirred, then slumped. He chose the straight-bladed sword over the scimitar. It would fit his scabbard. It felt natural in his hand, but it roused unpleasant memories.

He was turning to go when he saw what had been hidden from the stair by a shoulder of rock.

Rows of thrones carved into the slanted rock face. Stands for the battle’s audience. On each of the scores of thrones a wisp of fog shifted restlessly.

Orolandes retreated behind his sword. Nothing followed.

Now the marble stairs above them were hidden by cloud, the banner of cloud that always streamed from the mountain’s peak.

The Warlock dismissed the porters, paying them in gold. Orolandes piled what was left in the packs into one pack, and they went on, up into the cloud.

The cold became wet cold. Ice crystals blew around them. The magicians below were half-hidden. Orolandes climbed with one hand on the rock wall. The other side was empty space.

The snow-fog thinned. They were climbing out of the cloud.

They emerged, and it was glorious. The cloud bank stretched away like a clean white landscape, under a brilliant sun and dark blue sky. The Warlock rubbed his hands in satisfaction. “We’re here! Orolandes, let me get into that pack.”

The others watched as he chose his tools. If the Warlock had told them what he was about, Orolandes hadn’t heard it. He did not speculate. He waited to know what was expected of him.

The attitude came easily to him. He had risen through the ranks of the Greek army; he could follow orders. He had given orders, too, before Atlantis sank beneath him. Since then Orolandes had given over control of his own fate.

“Good,” muttered the Warlock. He opened a wax-stoppered phial and poured dust into his hand and scattered it like seeds into the cloudscape. He sang words unfamiliar to Orolandes.

Mirandee and Clubfoot joined in, clear soprano and awkward bass, at chorus points that were not obvious. The song trailed off in harmony, and the Warlock scattered another handful of dust.

“All right. Better let me go first,” he said. He stepped off the stairs into feathery emptiness.

He bounced gently. The cloud held him.

Clubfoot followed, in a ludicrous bouncing stride that sank him calves-deep into the fog. Mirandee walked out after him. They turned to look back at Orolandes.

Clubfoot started to choke. He sat down in the shifting white mist and bellowed with a laughter that threatened to strangle him. Mirandee fought it, then joined in in a silvery giggle. There was the not-quite-sound of Wavyhill’s chortling.

The laughter seemed to fade, and the world went dim and blurry. Orolandes felt his knees turn to water. His jaw was sagging. He had climbed up through this cloud. It was cold and wet and without substance. It would not hold a feather from falling, let alone a man.

The witch’s silver laughter burned him like acid. For the lack of the Warlock’s laughter, for the Warlock’s exasperated frown, Orolandes was grateful. When the Warlock swept his arm in an impatient beckoning half-circle, Orolandes stepped out into space in a soldier’s march.

His foot sank deep into what felt like feather bedding, and bounced. He was off balance at the second step, and the recoil threw him further off. He kicked out frantically. His leg sank deep and recoiled and threw him high. He landed on his side and bounced.

Mirandee watched with her hands covering her mouth. Clubfoot’s laugh was a choking whimper now.

Orolandes got up slowly, damp all over. He waded rather than walked toward the magicians.

“Good enough. We don’t have a lot of time,” said the Warlock. “Take a little practice—we all need that—then go back for the pack.”

Cloudscapes

The layer of cloud stirred uneasily around them. It was not flat. There were knolls of billowing white that they had to circle round. It was like walking through a storehouse full of damp goose down. The cloud-stuff gave underfoot, and pulled as the foot came forward.

Orolandes found a stride that let him walk with the top-heavy pack, but it was hard on the legs. Half-exhausted and growing careless, he nearly walked into a hidden rift. He stared straight down through a feathery canyon at small drifting patches of farm. A tiny plume of dust led his eye to a moving speck, a barely visible horse and rider.

He turned left along the rift, while his heart thundered irregularly in his ears.

Clubfoot looked back. Mount Valhalla rose behind them, a mile or so higher than they’d climbed, blazing snow-white in the sunlight. “Far enough, I guess. Now, the crucial thing is to keep moving,” he said, “because if the magic fails where we’re standing it’s all over. Luckily we don’t have to do our own moving.”

He helped Orolandes doff the pack. He rummaged through it and removed a pair of water-tumbled pebbles, a handful of clean snow, and a small pouch of grey powder. “Now, Kranthkorpool, would you be so kind as to tell us where we’re going?”

“No need to coerce me,” said Wavyhill. “We go east and north. To the northernmost point of the Alps.”

“And we’ve got food for four days. Well, I guess we’re in a hurry.” Clubfoot began to make magic.

The Warlock did not take part. He knew that Clubfoot was a past master at weather magic. Instead he watched Mirandee’s hair.

Yes, her youth had held well. She had the clear skin and unwrinkled brow of a serene thirty-year-old noblewoman. Her wealth of hair was now raven black, with a streak of pure white that ran from her brow all the way back. As she helped Clubfoot sing the choruses, the white band thickened and thinned and thickened.

The Warlock spoke low to Orolandes. “If you see her hair turn sheer white, run like hell. You’re overloaded with that pack. Just get to safety and let me get the others out.” The Greek nodded.

Now the clouds stirred about them. The fitful breeze increased slightly, but not enough to account for the way the mountain was receding. Now the clouds to either side churned, fading or thickening at the edges. Through a sudden rift they watched the farmlands drift away.

“Down there they’ll call this a hurricane. What they’ll call us doesn’t bear mentioning,” Clubfoot chuckled. He walked back to where Orolandes was standing and settled himself in the luxurious softness of a cloud billow. In a lowered voice he said, “I’ve been wrestling with my conscience. May I tell you a story?”

Orolandes said, “All right.” He saw that the others were beyond earshot.

“I’m a plainsman,” said Clubfoot. “My master was a lean old man a lot like the Warlock, but darker, of course. He taught half a dozen kids at a time, and of course he was the tribe’s medicine man. One day when I was about twelve, old White Eagle took us on a hike up the only mountain anywhere around.

“He took us up the easy side. There were clouds streaming away from the top. White Eagle did some singing and dancing, and then he had us walk out on the cloud. I ran out ahead of the rest. It looked like so much fun.”

“Fun,” Orolandes said without expression.

“Well, yes. I’d never been on a cloud. How was a plains kid to know clouds aren’t solid?”

“You mean you never…realized…” Orolandes started laughing.

Clubfoot was laughing too. “I’d seen clouds, but way up in the sky. They looked solid enough. I didn’t know why White Eagle was doing all that howling and stamping.”

“And the next time you went for a stroll on a cloud—”

“Oh, no. White Eagle explained that. But it must have been a fine way to get rid of slow learners.”

Mirandee was saying, “Do you really think Piranther can’t follow us?”

“There’s no way he can travel this fast on the ground,” said the Warlock. “If he’s in the clouds, we’ll know it. Just as our weather pattern must be fairly obvious to him. Do you see any stable spots in this cloud canopy?”

“No…but there used to be other ways to fly.”

The Warlock snorted. “Used to be, yes.”

Mirandee seemed really worried. “I wonder if you aren’t underestimating Piranther. Warlock, I had occasion to visit Australia not long ago.”

“Mending fences for me?”

“If you like. I thought he might be ready to forget heated words long cooled. He wasn’t.” She gestured nervously. “Never mind that. I saw power. There are roc chicks in that place, baby birds eight feet tall, that breed as chicks and never grow up. Piranther’s people raise them for the eggs! They let children ride on their backs! I watched apprentice magicians duel for sport, with adepts standing by to throw ward-spells. It was like stepping two hundred years into the past. I watched a castle shape itself out of solid rock—”

“And now all the castles are falling down, or so says Piranther. The mana can’t be that high, not if the rocs have turned neotenous. Piranther can’t be as powerful as all of us put together.”

“He’s their leader. The most powerful of them all.”

The Warlock settled his back against a soft billow of cloud. “This place is paradise for a lazy man. Orolandes!” he called.

Orolandes and Clubfoot came chuckling about something. The swordsman let the Warlock put his hands on his head and mutter an ancient spell.

“That should break the link between you and Piranther. Now, Wavyhill, tell us about the last god.”

Orolandes settled himself cross-legged. He felt no different…and he was never going to relax here, despite the infinity of feather bed. But he would not show it either.

“Roze-Kattee was male and female,” said the skull on the Warlock’s shoulder, “and his attributes were love and madness. He was god to the Frost Giants, way north of here, where we’re going. He hasn’t been heard of in half a thousand years, not since the Nordiks conquered the Frost Giants. But he’s said to be dormant, not dead.”

“Said by whom?” Mirandee asked. “The Frost Giants are nearly mythical.”

“Oh, the Nordiks still have a few Frost Giant slaves. But the Frost Giants never talked about Roze-Kattee. All I’ve got is the old Nordik epic, the Hometaking Wars Cycle, which is certainly slanted and possibly garbled.”

Mirandee was shaking her head. “I’ve heard other tales of sleeping gods.”

“This one’s different. Mirandee, when I was still an apprentice, my master Harper was interested in the Hometaking Wars. He didn’t see how the Nordik gods beat the Frost Giant gods on their home ground. In fact they won every war except the last one.”

“But we know that,” the Warlock said. “The Nordik gods were destroyed when the Nordiks were driven out of the Fertile Crescent. They had no gods. So they fought with swords, and the Frost Giants used magic, and over three generations they used up the magic.”

“Right, and the Nordiks came swarming in before the Frost Giants could learn swordsmanship. But Harper never learned about mana depletion. That was left to you, Warlock. You and your damned Wheel. Harper and I spent some time trying to learn why Roze-Kattee failed his and her people.”

“Well?”

“It’s an unusual story,” said Wavyhill’s skull. “According to the Hometaking War Cycle, the Frost Giants took it on themselves to protect their god, instead of the other way around. When the Nordiks beat their army, three of the Frost Giant hero-priests were taking Roze-Kattee to safety. The god had lost all his power. He could barely move.”

Clubfoot said, “That’s not the kind of tale someone makes up about his enemies. But, look: why didn’t the Nordiks just find out where the god was and dig him up?”

“Oh, they probably tortured a few Frost Giants. Maybe they got the wrong ones. Maybe the hero-priests migrated afterward, or cut their own throats. But maybe the Nordiks didn’t try too hard. Why should they? Roze-Kattee did not save the Frost Giants. He went peacefully to sleep, somewhere. The poor time-weakened thing might be barely capable of killing any Nordik who found him.”

The setting sun was still brilliant, under a higher cloud canopy that thickened as night came on. Mount Valhalla was a mere point of splendor far to the southeast. The clouds were soft against Orolandes’ back. He was relaxing in spite of himself. It was all so unreal. Could one die in a dream?

“The magic went away and the gods died,” the Warlock said. “What makes you think Roze-Kattee didn’t? What would a Frost Giant consider a place of safety?”

“The cycle speaks of a ‘god within a god’.”

“You’ve already said Roze-Kattee had a dual nature.”

“Harper and I found another interpretation. We have to stretch the definition a little, but…if we’re right, then Roze-Kattee could still be alive. And the Nordiks had plenty of reason not to go looking for him.”

“And we don’t?”

“Time has passed. We know more than those barbarians did. We have more to gain. And less to lose,” said Wavyhill.

An upper cloud layer covered the stars. It had not been cold during the day, when sunlight was bouncing back at them from all of the reflecting white landscape; but it was cold now. Orolandes lay in the dark, afraid to move, hoping that a rift would not form where he was lying. When the silence had become unbearable he said, “I wish I could see your hair.”

Mirandee was nearby. She said, “Why, swordsman! Is that a compliment?” as if she didn’t much care for it.

“If your hair turns white, we’re about to fall.”

After a time she said, “Magicians and swordsmen go together like foxes and rabbits. What are you doing among us?”

“Ask Wavyhill.”

“But you didn’t have to come.”

“I did a terrible thing. I don’t want to talk about it.”

She laughed, invisible silver. “Tell me now, or I’ll read your mind. Wavyhill said you had no defenses.”

Out of the need to confess; out of his sure knowledge that the words would block his throat, rendering him mute, as he had been mute among the fishermen; out of some obscure need to be punished…Orolandes said, “Go ahead. Piranther did.”

There was a long dark silence. Then the witch woman said, “Oh, Orolandes!” in a voice filled with tears.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know. I can see it. All charged up with the need to prove you were a man. Running into death waving that big damned sword. Crawling to kill the priests because they were killing your friends.”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have looked. That’s usually the way of it. I find out I shouldn’t have looked.”

“I can’t do anything about the people that drowned. Maybe I can help put the magic back in the world. What does Wavyhill have in mind for me? Do you know?”

“No. His mind’s locked tight. I trust the Warlock, though. He’ll control Wavyhill. Go to sleep, swordsman.”

Little chance of that, Orolandes thought. He looked toward where her voice had been. Was there a pale spot in the enveloping darkness? Long hair turning white?

“There’s circulation in the clouds around and beneath us. The mana circulates. We won’t fall. Go to sleep,” she said.

Something touched his sword arm and he woke and rolled hard to the left, and came up on his feet, sword in hand. It was black as the inside of a mole’s belly. The footing was unfamiliar, treacherous. A woman’s voice cried, “Don’t!”

And he remembered.

“Mirandee? Did you wake me up?”

“You were having nightmares.”

“Sorry. Was I screaming or something?”

“No. Just the nightmares. I wish I’d stayed out of your mind. I’ve never met anyone so unhappy.”

“Can you blame me?” He sank down in unseen softness.

“Yes. You’ve killed a dozen men at least with your sword. Why be so upset about Atlantis? You killed more people, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“When I kill a man with a sword, it’s because he’s a soldier. He’s trying to kill me.”

“If you weren’t on his territory—”

“Then he’d be on mine! If Greece didn’t have an experienced army she’d be meat for the first wolf that came at the head of an experienced army. Magic didn’t help the Frost Giants, and that was a long time ago. These days magic doesn’t even slow down an army. So everyone needs armies.”

“Wars of magic aren’t much prettier. Get the Warlock to tell you about his duel with Wavyhill. Or get Wavyhill to tell you.”

“All right.” Orolandes was sliding back into sleep. But the nightmare waited for him…

The touch of her hand on his arm startled him. “You’re still unhappy.”

“I can’t do anything about it.”

“I can.” Her hand moved up into his sleeve, caressingly.

He laughed. “Does the fox bed with the rabbit?”

“We are two human beings. How long has it been since you were with a woman?”

“A long time. I—” He hadn’t wanted one. He would have thought: she is sharing love, all unknowing, with a man who murdered thousands. When the women of the fishing village came, he had turned them away without speaking, as if his voice alone would tell them what he was.

This Mirandee: he had never seen her as a woman. A figure of power she had been, a dangerous being who tolerated him, whose presence was necessary to his goal. Her mockery had hurt—

“Well, but you were so frightened! You should have seen yourself. I was frightened myself,” she confessed. “I’ve never been on a cloud before.”

Her hand felt good on his arm. It was so cold and so lonely here. He found her face with his fingers. He traced the contours gently; he stroked her temples, and scratched her behind the ears, as he would with a Greek woman. They lay against each other now, but he felt only a double thickness of fur, and the cold of a mountain night on his face…and then her cheek against his, barely warmer.

This was better than going back to the nightmare. And she knew; he was hiding nothing from her. She knew, yet she was willing to touch him. He was grateful.

He was half asleep when the lust rose up in him, burning. She sensed it. They began opening each other’s robes, leaving them on to protect their backs against the cold. Even now his urgency was tempered by that uncharacteristic gratitude. He wanted to make her feel good.

He succeeded. In climax she was wildcat and python combined: her arms and legs clasped him hard, pulling him into her.

They lay against each other with their robes overlapping. Orolandes was pleased and proud.

A thought crossed his mind…and she laughed softly in his ear. “No, I did not falsify my pleasure to give you confidence. And no, you have not become a lover fit for a queen’s harem. Your mind is in mine. I feel what you feel. It’s…exciting.”

Ruefully, but not very, he said, “What joy you would have had of another mind reader!”

She laughed more loudly. “If I were ready to die, yes, that would be a fine way to leave the world!”

“Oh.”

“You’ve found your voice. When we shared love you didn’t speak at all.”

His mind flashed back to the fishing village.

“Never mind,” she said quickly. “Shall we sleep like this?”

He nestled against her and slept without dreams.

The Warlock woke blinking in the sudden dawn. He was hungry. His face was sharply cold where it poked through the robes. The rest of him was warm and comfortable in the robes and the cloud-stuff.

Clubfoot was on his back, sprawled out like a starfish in the clouds, looking indecently comfortable. Wavyhill’s skull was where the Warlock had mounted it last night, on a billowing knoll of cloud.

The Warlock called up to Wavyhill. “Anything?”

“Nothing attacked. The mana level stayed high. It’s still high; all my senses, such as they are, are razor sharp. I think I heard something that wasn’t just the wind, around midnight. I couldn’t tell what. It might have been wings, big wings.”

“Something big enough to carry Piranther?”

“I don’t know. That’s the trouble: you think some beast has gone mythical, and then it swoops down at you. There might be all kinds of survivals, here in the sky…Warlock, had you thought of probing the Moon from here?”

“No raw materials. No food sources either.” The Warlock grinned. “That might not bother you, but you can’t work alone.”

“Right. Someone has to make the gestures.”

During the night much of the cloudscape had melted away. The mass they still occupied was pushing upward in the center. For some hours it must have blocked Wavyhill’s view forward.

Wavyhill asked, “Are you sure we’ve lost Piranther?”

“I…no.”

“All right. Neither am I.”

“I don’t see how he could be following us. But that’s no guarantee at all. Piranther and his people have had most of fifty years to explore the South Land Mass. What could he have found in the way of talismans?”

“Another Fistfall?”

“Or more than one. He could be pacing us on dragonback.” The sky burned deep blue, nearly cloudless, but the Warlock said, “Behind that one cloud, maybe, watching us. I was overconfident.”

“Did you have a choice? Relax. This is a fun way to travel. By the way, there has been another development. Tiptoe around this knob of cloud and you’ll see.”

Tiptoe? The clumsiest giant would not make an audible footfall here. The Warlock waded around, and saw Mirandee and Orolandes wrapped in each other’s arms in the cloud-shadow.

Perhaps he lied, to Wavyhill or to himself. “Good. I was afraid they wouldn’t get along.”

The air mass rushed steadily north and east. The center continued to push upward. By noon they were high on the slope of a billowing mountain, a storm thunderhead.

Clubfoot trekked up to the peak. “It’s steeper on the forward face,” he reported when he came back. “I don’t like the footing much, but the view is terrific. Wavyhill, let’s set you up there as lookout.”

“Lookout and figurehead. Why not?”

In the end they stayed up there, Clubfoot and Wavyhill and the Warlock. Orolandes and Mirandee declined to join them.

It was a heady view. The crackle of lightning sounded constantly from underneath them. Flights of birds passed far away, flying south. Once an eagle came screaming down to challenge their invasion of its territory. That was worrying. They had nothing to throw at the bird, and any magic might melt the cloud beneath them. Fortunately the eagle saw the size of them and reconsidered.

Wavyhill said, “We might be the last human beings ever to see this, for thousands of years, maybe forever.”

They were passing over an endless forest. To their right the cloud-shadow brushed the treetops; on the left a behemoth waded through crackling tree trunks, stopped, looked up at them with intelligent eyes. The cloudscape sloped steeply down from here, dazzling white, with shadowed valleys and rifts in it.

“We couldn’t ask for a better vantage point,” said the Warlock. “Or more comfortable seating.” And he glanced at Clubfoot. “What’s wrong with you? You look like your last friend just died.”

“Orolandes is a fine young man,” Clubfoot stated. “He is brave and loyal, and unlike many swordsmen, he has a conscience. Bearing all that in mind, would you tell me what Mirandee sees in that bloody-handed mundane?”

“You could ask Mirandee.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Would it help if I told you why Mirandee turned down your offer? I think she was being polite. To me. We shared a bed once. She didn’t want to remind me of what I’ve lost.”

“All right. That was nice of her. But why—”

“Nobody can tell you.” The Warlock looked at him. “I’d have thought you were too old for this kind of acidic jealousy.”

“So would I,” said Clubfoot.

At sunset the winds around the peak turned chilly. The two magicians climbed down the back slope of the thunderhead. The cloud surface was uneasy, in constant slow-flowing motion. They ate their cold rations and went to sleep.

But Wavyhill remained on the peak, on duty.

The third day was very like the second. Orolandes and Mirandee kept their own company, finding privacy in one of the shadowed valleys well aft of the thunderhead peak. Clubfoot and the Warlock lolled on the peak.

Clubfoot seemed to have come to terms with himself. He had been stiffly polite to Mirandee at breakfast, but here he could relax. “This is the way to travel. We should have gone to Prissthil this way, Warlock.”

The Warlock chuckled. “That would have been nice, wouldn’t it? We couldn’t. No mountains to climb near Warlock’s Cave. And the only place to get off would have been high on Mount Valhalla. Without porters. Come to that, we’ll have a problem when we get to where we’re going. Just where are we going, Wavyhill?”

“It’ll be part of a mountain range, and our weather magic should work,” said Wavyhill, “unless I’m wrong from the start. At this speed we’ll get there late tomorrow. We will have to do some climbing.”

Clubfoot shifted in the cloud-stuff. “So we’ll rest up for it.”

Wavyhill studied him. “Comfortable, isn’t it? You complacent troll, you. You’ve all been sleeping like the dead. And Mirandee and the swordsman, I guess they earned it, mating like mad minks all day. I wish I could sleep!”

Clubfoot’s anger left him as suddenly as it had come. “We could block your senses.”

“It’s not the same. It’s not the same as sleeping, or blinking, or—or crying. I want eyelids.”

“Let’s try something,” said Clubfoot.

They tied a line to his jawbone, for a marker, and pushed Wavyhill a foot deep into cloud. They pulled him up a minute later, and then half an hour later. He said he was comfortable. It was not like sleeping, Wavyhill said, but it was like resting with his eyes closed.

They left him there until sunset.

In a shadowed valley, enclosed in cottony wisps of fog that resisted motion, Orolandes lay with his cheek on Mirandee’s belly. The sunlight filtered through the cloud walls to bathe them in pearly light.

“Love and madness,” he mused. “They go together, don’t they?”

“You feel your sanity returning?”

“Why, no, not at all.”

“Good.” She chuckled. The flat abdominal muscles jumped pleasantly under his ear.

“I wonder,” he said. “What makes this Roze-Kattee a god of love and madness? The gods came before men, didn’t they? Did gods fall in love? And go mad?”

Troubled, she shifted position. “Good question. We’ll have to know the answers before we do anything drastic. I’d guess that one day an anonymous god looked around itself and decided it would die without worship. There were men around. What did they need that Roze-Kattee could supply? Some gods were more versatile than others. Roze-Kattee probably wasn’t.”

“What would a god of love and madness do?”

“Oh…bestow madness on enemies. Ward it from friends. Love? Hmmm.”

“The same thing? Make the Frost Giants’ enemies love them?”

“Why not? And arrange good political alliances by fiddling with the emotions of the king or queen. Priests learn to be practical, if their gods don’t.”

“Do you think this god will fight us?”

She shifted again. “It needs us as much as we need it. We’ll know better when we see this dormant god.” Her long fingernails tickled his chest hairs. “Don’t think about it now. Think about sharing love on a cloud. Few mundanes have that chance.”

“It does take practice.”

“We’ve had practice.”

“I’m the only fighter among you. Magicians wouldn’t break their backs to protect a swordsman.”

“But I would.”

In the night something woke the Warlock. He stirred in seductive comfort while his eyes searched the vivid starscape. Nothing, only stars…He was dropping off to sleep when it came again: a surging beneath him, like a cloud-muffled bump.

Clubfoot’s sleepy voice said, “What?”

“Don’t know.”

There was a more emphatic bump.

Orolandes felt it too: a surging beneath him. He stirred and felt momentary panic.

“Cloud. You’re on a cloud,” Mirandee said reassuringly. Her eyes were inches away; her breath tickled his growing beard.

“All right. But what was that—”

The cloud surged again.

Orolandes ran his fingers through her hair—it was raven black by starlight—rolled away and stood up. The others would be around the side of the puffy thunderhead peak. He walked that way, aware that Mirandee was following him.

Clubfoot and the Warlock were on their feet. Clubfoot called, “Did you see anything?”

“No, but I felt—”

Beyond the two sorcerers, beyond the edge of the cloudscape, a shadow rose up and blotted the stars. Starlight reflected faintly from huge wide-set eyes.

Mirandee was behind him, her hand on his hip.

“Don’t make magic,” the Warlock called. “Not yet. It’s a roc.”

The great bird was treading air, holding itself in position with an occasional flap of its wings. It cocked first one eye, then the other, to study the people on the cloud. Then it spoke to them in a basso profundo thunderclap.

“CAW!”

“Caw yourself!” Orolandes snarled, and he stamped toward it. His sword was longer than the bird’s beak, he thought. It would reach an eye. This would be a wild way to die. But Mirandee would be safe, if he could put out an eye.

“CAW!” bellowed the bird. Its wings rose and snapped down.

A hurricane gust threw Orolandes backward. He curled protectively around the sword blade, somersaulted twice and came up crouched. Another blast beat straight down on his head and shoulders.

The bird was overhead, stooping down on Mirandee.

Orolandes tried to run toward her. The cloud-stuff tangled his feet, slowing him.

Mirandee shouted something complex in nonsense syllables.

Soft blue radiance jumped between her outspread arms and the bird’s descending beak. Her hair flashed white, and she dropped.

Orolandes howled.

The bird fluttered ineffectually and fell into the cloudscape in a disorganized tangle.

Orolandes attacked. His blade’s edge buried itself in feathers. He set his feet, yelled and slashed again at the neck. He cut only feathers.

The bird’s wings stirred feebly. It lifted its head with great effort, said, “CAW?” and died.

Mirandee cried, “Help!”

Her hair was a black cloud spilled across white. She was buried to the armpits. “I stole its power. Gods, I feel all charged up! Lucky I remembered that vampire spell or I’d be trying to fly myself.” She was babbling in the shock of her brush with death. “Clubfoot, can you get me out of here?”

Orolandes went to her, treading carefully, knee-deep in viscous cloud. He lifted her by the elbows, pulled her out of the pit and set her down.

“Oh! Thank you. That vampire spell, old Santer taught it to me a hundred years ago, and I just knew I’d never use it. I thought I’d forgotten it. It wouldn’t even work anymore, most places. Oh, ’Landes, I was so scared.”

Clubfoot said, “You sucked that bird dry, all right. Look.”

The bird was deep in cloud and sinking deeper. As they watched it vanished under the surface.

“We can’t stay here,” said Clubfoot. “We don’t want anyone walking into that patch. It wouldn’t hold a feather, and you can’t tell it from the rest of the cloud.”

They moved far around the steeper northern face of the traveling storm.

The Nordiks

On the third morning black-and-white mountains reared their tremendous peaks to east and north. “Aim for the northernmost peak in the range,” Wavyhill ordered.

Clubfoot began his weather magic. The Warlock pulled a band of silver from his upper arm and peered through it for a time. One distant rounded peak glowed a faint blue-white. “That’s it. There’s magic in that mountain,” he said. “Wavyhill…”

“Well?”

Slowly the Warlock said, “I’m only just starting to grasp the audacity of what we’re doing. I never tried anything this big, even when I was young.”

“What have we got to lose?” Wavyhill chuckled.

“I wish you’d stop saying that. Clubfoot, how are you doing?”

“Having some trouble.”

The cloudscape drifted east. Clubfoot continued to try to swing them north. By noon the clouds were sweeping across the foothills, and surging like a sluggish sea. It was no use trying to stand. Even Clubfoot gave up the effort.

At first it wasn’t bad, riding a continual earthquake on an infinity of damp featherbed. Then Orolandes grew seasick. Twice in his life he had ridden out a storm aboard a warship; but in a way this was worse. They were trying to steer the storm itself. Clubfoot wore a grim look Orolandes didn’t like at all. Sections of cloudscape roiled into sudden ridges and hills; others tore away and drifted off in white puffs. Once the limping magician tried to stand and gesture, and a hill of cloud-stuff surged up under him and sent him spinning downslope. After that he stayed down.

The spell-hardened cloud deformed like taffy as it surged against the dark mountain slopes. Orolandes clenched his teeth against the tumbling of his belly. Ships didn’t do that! He was flat on the cloud now, like all the others, with his arms and legs spread wide.

The cloudscape slid up the mountain face; slowed; and finally, balked from crossing the range, the mass slid north instead. The ride became less chaotic. Orolandes began to relax.

“At least we’re going in the right direction,” Clubfoot muttered. He stood up. “Now let’s see if I can—” And he stopped, astonished. He was hip deep in cloud.

And Orolandes was sinking deeper, deeper in cloud. He couldn’t see the others.

Clubfoot bellowed, “Stay down! Flatten out!” He began to sing in the Guild tongue, unfamiliar words in a tone of desperation. He was chest deep and sinking, like a captain going down with his ship, as the clouds converged over Orolandes’ head.

He sank through white blindness. He held his breath and readied himself—he thought he was ready—for the moment when he would drop out of the cloud.

Too long. He gasped for breath, and found he could breathe cloud-stuff.

Somewhere above his head Clubfoot was still singing. If Orolandes yelled for Mirandee he might interrupt that spell; but it was very lonely to die like this. The white had turned light gray. The seconds stretched excruciatingly…then rough ground brushed against him and spun him head over heels.

He was on his back on solid, solid ground, with dirt and small stones beneath him and gray cloud all around. He stayed there and shouted. “Mirandee!”

Nothing.

“Clubfoot! Warlock!” He was afraid to move. To find solid ground in a cloud was too much of sorcery with too little warning. And he was still blinded by cloud!

Then a shape formed in the cloud, and resolved. He saw a pale, blond, very hairy warrior. The armored man walked in a furtive, silent crouch, his eyes shifting nervously, trying to see in all directions at once. His spear was poised to kill. But he didn’t look down.

This, at least, was in Orolandes’ field of experience.

The stranger’s first glimpse of Orolandes showed him much too close, in the air, with sword drawn. The stranger’s jaw dropped; then he tried to scream and thrust at the same time. Orolandes batted the spearhead aside and stabbed him through the open mouth.

He waited. No more blond warriors came. Presently Orolandes allowed himself to look down.

The dead man was armored in leather reinforced by brass strips. He carried sword and dirk in addition to the spear. He looked to be just past twenty, and well fed; and none of that was good. A well fed populace could support many soldiers, and a young man wouldn’t be wearing the best of the armor. A good-size, well-equipped band could be moving out there in the…fog.

Of course, fog! Orolandes grinned at himself. A cloud on the ground must be fog! Clubfoot must have managed to land the cloud while it was still viscous enough to hold them. That must have shaken the soldiers: sticky fog, and a hillside seeded with magicians.

Orolandes walked into the fog. He was painfully alert. In this white blindness you could kill friend as easily as foe. He spent some time stalking a small tree. Later two man-shaped shadows formed faintly in the mist, standing motionless above…a seated man? Orolandes charged in silence, and killed one of them before they knew they were threatened. The other fended Orolandes off long enough to scream for help. He fought badly…and lost.

The Warlock did not get up. He looked bad; as if he had collapsed in upon himself. He blinked and spoke in a feeble whisper. “Orolandes?”

“Yes. They’ll be coming, we’ve got to move. Are you hurt?”

“Youth spells worn off. No mana here. Take—”

“Where are the others?”

“Don’t know. You can’t find them. Take Wavyhill. Go up.”

“But—”

“Uphill till Wavyhill talks. Go.” The Warlock slumped back. His breathing was an ugly sound.

Orolandes bent quickly and detached the skull and its harness from the Warlock’s bony shoulder. The decorated skull seemed a pathetic toy; there was no life in it. He tucked it under his arm and moved into the fog in a crouched and silent run. Nordik warriors would be answering that scream.

He had to find Mirandee.

The Warlock rested with his eyes closed. There were bruises and a wrenched shoulder, but it was years that crippled him now. Cold seeped into his bones.

Metal clinked. He opened his eyes.

Large magics had deserted him in this dead place, but at least one small magic remained. The gift of tongues was no big, showy sorcery. Some could learn languages with no magic at all. But the gift could be useful.

The Warlock spoke in Nordik. “Don’t kill me.”

The man in beaten bronze armor said, “I make no such promise. Are you such a weakling as you seem? How did you slay these my men?”

“The swordsman we hired to guide us slew them, then fled.”

“Describe him.”

If Orolandes was caught he would be killed anyway, the Warlock told himself. He described Orolandes accurately, and added, “He was the only one of us who knew how to find the treasure.”

“What treasure was that?”

“The god within a god,” the Warlock said. If they wanted the treasure they would capture Orolandes alive…maybe. It was worth a try. “Such a thing would be immensely valuable to us. We were all magicians save him.”

“How many are you?”

“Me, and a cripple named Clubfoot, and a woman named Mirandee.” And a skull. Pitiful, thought the Warlock. “We can’t harm you here.”

“I know. Stand up or I’ll cut your throat.”

It was a long and painful process, but the Warlock got to his feet. The man in bronze watched in disgust. “You’ll never walk alone,” he said.

He called, and two soldiers came out of the fog with Clubfoot between them. Clubfoot had a nosebleed. It seemed his only injury, save that he shambled like a man who had lost all hope.

“You may carry each other,” the man in bronze instructed them. “Do not delay me. You still live because you’ve not become a nuisance. Your swordsman is a thorough nuisance, and he will die.”

The white mist enclosed them still as they made their way downslope. The Nordiks seemed unsure of their path. Perhaps they were lost. It slowed them, and that was good, for the magicians were nearly killing themselves keeping up. Clubfoot was carrying half the Warlock’s weight. He limped heavily on his birth-mangled foot.

The first time the Warlock tried to speak to him, a spear shaft rapped his funnybone. It hurt like hell. The man in bronze armor said, “You must speak only in our tongue. We have no wish to be cursed.”

“Curses won’t work here,” Clubfoot said.

“We know that. We’re so certain that we won’t even bother to test it. Right?”

Clubfoot nodded. He was morose, tired, defeated.

The Warlock spoke to him in Nordik. “Good landing. I never thought we’d live through that.”

It seemed he wouldn’t answer. Then, “I just got us down where I could. I thought I’d done a good job till they showed up.”

“It’s still better than failing to fly down. Where are you on a cloud when the magic runs out?”

The leader was a big man, strong enough to wear bronze armor without noticing the weight. White showed in his beard, and an old scar above one eye. He hadn’t seemed to care if his prisoners lived or died…until now. Now he stared openly. “Were you actually riding on a cloud?”

“We traveled almost a thousand miles on that moving storm, thanks to Clubfoot’s weather magic.”

“What’s it like?”

The Warlock suppressed a sigh of relief.

Mirandee could stay free. Her special talent would protect her, even here. Orolandes? They’d have to hope, and hope hard, because the swordsman was carrying Wavyhill. But Clubfoot and the Warlock could only expect to be questioned, then killed. Unless they could trade on their novelty value.

“Picture the most luxurious bed you’ve ever heard of,” he said. “Not beds you’ve slept in, but beds from legend. Cloud-stuff is softer than that…”

Close behind him in the fog, a voice spoke to him. “Orolandes.”

He jumped violently. He kept his sword high as he said, “Mirandee?” They might have captured her already—

“No, I stayed clear of them. Barely. There’s a fog on my mind that’s worse than this around us. I’m nearly deaf to your thoughts. Which way is the nearest mountain?”

“What about the others?”

She shook her head. Her leather garments had suffered, but Mirandee wasn’t hurt; she didn’t even seem rumpled. “We can’t do magic here,” she said. “For miles and miles around it must be nothing but old battlefields. Were you thinking of rescuing them singlehanded? Or teaching me to use a sword?”

“What do we do, then?”

“We get out of this dead area. Uphill. If Wavyhill can lead us to the ‘god within a god’, we’ll just summon the others.” She took the skull in both hands; her hair brushed Orolandes’ cheek. “He doesn’t look good.”

“Was that a joke?”

She laughed. “Poor Wavyhill. Strap him to my shoulder, will you? Leave your arms free. No, I meant that he could be really dead. I’ll have to do the spells all over again…Orolandes? Do you remember Wavyhill’s true name?”

“Not offhand.”

That bothered her badly. “Try to remember. We can’t do a revival without Wavyhill’s true name.”

“All right. The wind’s that way,” Orolandes said, “and that was the way the cloud was moving along the mountains. North. So we go east.”

Orolandes didn’t like the touch of Wavyhill: dry, dead bone, and just a trace of the smell of death. He emphatically didn’t like strapping the skull next to the witch’s ear. “Why can’t we stow it in the pack? It’ll be safe enough.”

“Think of it as Wavyhill, our ally. The attitude is a large part of magic, love. He’ll live more readily if I’m here waiting for him to advise me.” She smiled at him, lovingly, and the skull grinned on her shoulder.

It became too dark to climb before they were barely started. They camped among half-seen trees. Mirandee’s small crystal ball had shattered in the fall, and they spent some time shaking shards and slivers of crystal out of the blankets and the pack.

In the night the fog turned to powdery snow. They wakened chilled despite blankets and bruised by the hard ground.

The chill dissipated as they climbed, but Mirandee tired easily. Her hair was white again. She drove herself hard. By noon they had climbed above the fog.

Mirandee argued for going straight up the nearest peak. But even if Wavyhill revived, they’d only have to go down again; it was not on their path to the hump-shouldered magical mountain. Mirandee gave in to his arguments, possibly with relief.

They went north and upward. They would stick to the ridges.

They had clean snow for water. They saw food, always receding at a good clip: a mountain goat, a small bear that shambled off although Orolandes shouted scathing insults at it. Orolandes wished for a bow and arrow, and settled for a stabbing spear made by using some of their rope to bind his sword to a straight sapling.

They didn’t talk much. Each had private woes which they suffered in silence…but Mirandee sensed her lover’s shame at abandoning companions. What with the closing in of her own mind, the loss of youth and magic, she suffered for two. Orolandes wanted to comfort her. He had no skill at it, but her empathy spoke for him.

So it went until, at sunset of the third day, Orolandes saw an elk. It would have been enough meat to feed a village, but to Orolandes it looked just right for two. He started toward it, prowling, trying to determine windage. The elk cropped the sparse mountain grass with an eye constantly lifted toward danger.

Then, casually, it turned toward Orolandes and walked toward him, ignoring the grass, looking straight ahead…

To a hunter Mirandee’s voice was shockingly loud. “I’ve summoned it. Can you butcher it?”

The elk stood waiting for him to slash its throat. He did, feeling like a murderer. The sword cut through throat and spine with startling ease. The magic sword—

“I wish we knew its name,” Mirandee said. “As it is, we’re trusting someone else’s magic whenever we use that sword.”

She had a boulder blazing before he finished the gory job of butchery. Her hair was half black, half white.

And the decorated skull on her shoulder talked to them as they ate. “Magicians spend decades searching out each others’ true names, Greek. It numbs my mind that you could hear mine twice, and forget! No, Mirandee, I’m not going to tell you. Enough that the Warlock and Clubfoot can move me like a puppet. You would be one too many.”

“…biggest bird that ever lived. We thought they’d all gone mythical. Suddenly there it was, diving down on Mirandee.” The Warlock’s voice was thin and reedy, and he had to pause for breath…for air hotter than the atmosphere of Hell, that scalded his throat. It didn’t matter. They listened. “Claws like eight curved sword blades. Eyes the size of your shield, Poul…”

The sauna was a big underground room with a wood stove glowing in the middle. There were benches along all four walls, on two levels; and thank the gods for that, for the Warlock was on the lower, cooler level. He’d have been on the floor except that it would violate Nordik custom. The village held more than two hundred, and half of them were in this incandescent room, sweating enough to fill a respectable river. They were all stark naked: men and women, older children and people so old they couldn’t walk without assistance, and even some Frost Giant slaves, seven and eight feet tall, sitting on the lower benches with their heads near the ceiling.

The Warlock had seen strange peoples in his day. He knew how various were the ways of being human. He hid his surprise at sauna customs, and showed only the diffidence of a stranger who must be shown the rules. When Poul explained that they roasted themselves in this fashion to keep themselves healthy, he only nodded.

Clubfoot had guffawed when the Warlock told him that. (But they were alone then.) To the Warlock it was a disturbing sign of the times. Medicine was a branch of magic. Take the magic out of medicine, and what was left? This?

He wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t shown some discomfort. And it was stranger than strange, to see this many naked men and women crowded this close together, pouring sweat, and none of them so much as flirting! And every so often someone would bolt and run for the river downslope. Ten minutes later he’d be back, and if he brushed you in passing his skin was icy, as if he’d been dead for days.

Yet they were paying him a signal honor, and it behooved him to take advantage of it.

“Oh, Wavyhill was as evil a man as I’ve ever known. He killed whole villages, and not by coming on them with swords, but by stealth, by gaining their trust. He sold them zombie servants that were dead men from the last village he’d gutted, revived and hidden under the seeming of good troll slaves. One night the trolls would take up knives and…”

It had been very different three nights ago, when Harric reached Vendhabn Village with magicians as his prisoners.

Vendhabn was a place of stone houses with steeply peaked roofs and tiny windows lining both sides of a street of trampled dirt that curved like the cowpath it had once been. Houses of human scale, until you came to the great hall in the middle of town.

The Warlock was dopy with fatigue and sudden senility, and Clubfoot wasn’t exactly alert, but they noticed the hall. It was tremendous. The stone blocks that made it were tremendous. The door was eighteen feet tall, and built of whole trees…and it was old. He wondered if it had been built by Frost Giants.

The night was dark and still foggy. Nobody was about. That was good; the Warlock had dreaded being put on show for a japing mob. The bronze-armored man named Harric led them past the great hall and into what had to be a jail: a hut built to the same colossal scale as the great hall, a single room with a roof eighteen feet high, and more recent stone partitions dividing it.

Their tiny room had a small window in the door. The guard outside was a tall, gangling warrior with big knobby hands. The Warlock was too exhausted to speak, to do anything but flop on the straw bedding and try to keep breathing. As Clubfoot bent over him, hurting with the need and the impossibility of curing him by magic, the Warlock had gasped three words.

“Keep them entertained.”

Later that night he had awakened; but Clubfoot still didn’t know that. The guard and Clubfoot had been pressed close to the window in the door. Clubfoot had been telling the guard about lovemaking on a solidified cloud, exactly as if he had done it himself…exactly as his jealousy-fired imagination must have painted it. Certainly the Warlock had not been meant to hear.

In the morning he had felt stronger. He’d been able to eat some bread and drink some mead. Last night’s guard had seemed friendly enough, and a bit awed by his prisoners. Clubfoot had introduced him as Poul Cloudscraper.

The magicians talked quietly on the straw bedding. “We’d rather be guests than prisoners,” the Warlock said. “What are the chances?”

“Maybe. I talked to Poul last night. Blamed the killings on Orolandes. If they get him I’ll have to say I lied. I made out that we were kind of his prisoners.”

“If they get Orolandes we can cut our throats. I’d like to give the impression we’re taking their hospitality for granted. It just hasn’t occurred to us that they might cut a wandering magician’s throat—”

“Too late. I asked Poul about that. He can’t protect us. He’s a householder, but he only gets one vote in council.”

“Oh.”

“How’s this? You’re a loveable, trusting old man, and I’m your ex-apprentice who lives only to take care of you. It might stop your heart if you thought you’d been threatened by our hosts. Should anyone be so boorish as to raise the subject—”

“You insist that I mustn’t find out. Good. Help me up.”

Leaning heavily on the red man’s shoulder, he peered out the small window. There were men and women dressed too lightly against the cold, moving to avoid puddles and patches of half-melted snow. Two giant women went past with a dressed ox carcass slung from a pole. They were both very pale of skin, and white-haired, though they seemed young, and they stood seven feet tall or taller. The Warlock glanced at Poul, their big Nordik guard, and caught Clubfoot’s warning headshake; there was no good reason whatever to speculate on whether Poul was part Frost Giant.

“We need not mention our ally Wavyhill. Too macabre,” said the Warlock.

“Right. But tell ’em about the duel, it’s a good story.”

“Fine. So you’re the old man’s loyal apprentice, and you wouldn’t dream of deserting him in these his remaining years. Once they’re convinced of that they may loosen your tether. If you get the chance, you run.”

“No way.”

“I mean it. I’m out of the game. Here—” The Warlock slipped the silver bracelet from his upper arm. “This’ll point out the mountain. Mirandee will head there, and she’ll have Orolandes and Wavyhill.”

“Sure,” said Clubfoot. He was certainly lying. He helped the Warlock back to the straw to rest.

“We use the sauna once in ten days,” Poul Cloudscraper said. Poul was on an upper rack of benches. His impressively big feet were propped higher than his head, on a row of rails for that purpose. “We keep it only warm all the time. If one comes dying of the cold, we can warm him quick.”

“You certainly can.”

“Then again, the sauna brings on a quick childbirth. You would be surprised at how many children are born in the sauna.”

“Not at all. I’m about to give birth myself.”

Poul was concerned. “Shall we dip in the river again, or have you had enough?”

The river had been icy; he had thought it would stop his heart. And now he was pouring sweat again. “I’ve had as much ecstasy as I can stand,” he assured the guard.

The cooling-off room was next to the sauna itself. It was crowded. The Nordiks would rest in here for half an hour, then leave…but today they weren’t leaving. As the Warlock washed himself he tried to hear what Clubfoot was telling them.

“None of us is old enough to remember what the gods are like,” the lame magician was saying. “Not even my friend the Warlock here. How did you like the sauna, Warlock?”

The Warlock smiled back. “A unique experience.” He accepted a towel from a silent Frost Giant woman. She used another towel to dry his back.

“There are some interesting legends, though,” Clubfoot said. “The god Dyaus-pita took a number of human women as lovers. Most of them came to grief. There was one who insisted that he show himself in his true form…which was probably a mistake.” The pleasantly shaped young woman next to Clubfoot was one the Warlock remembered: Harric’s younger sister. Good. If Clubfoot could pacify the bronze-armored warrior…

The time of the japing mob had come, of course. At midmorning Harric led them out. It was funny in a way, to see the villagers’ embarrassed reactions to Harric’s conquest: a cripple and a feeble old man. The magicians answered politely to some of the gibing questions put to them; they attempted to act like guests rather than captured freaks, and hoped that they would not therefore be taken for madmen. Harric put them back in their cell and went away angry, and the villagers went back to their tasks. The children remained.

There must have been a hundred children of all ages, maybe more. At first they only stared. The magicians began to talk to them. They gathered closer. Here and there you would see a younger one sitting on a teenager’s shoulders. At the back, a few white-haired, white-skinned boys and girls stood like trees among saplings, straining to hear, Clubfoot and the Warlock took turns at the window to tell tales of dragon fights, wars of magic, ancient kingdoms, strange half-human peoples…

Evening came, and most of them disappeared to their dinners. For those who stayed, the Warlock tried the spell he had used at the inn in Prissthil for the diners’ entertainment. In the darkness the colors were dimmer yet, like the Northern Lights brought to earth. The children loved it.

The next morning brought a cluster of angry parents.

The Warlock was exhausted. He had to let Clubfoot deal with them. He lay on the straw with his eyes closed, listening to Nordik anger and Clubfoot’s tones of bewildered hurt. He wondered what had gone wrong.

“…turn them into magicians? My son will grow up to be…”

“…corrupting our children…”

“…wiser to learn our customs before you…”

“…too dazzled to do their work, now you’ve filled their heads with…”

Came the noon meal, and they were left alone. “I wasn’t a lot of help, was I?” the Warlock said miserably. “How much trouble are we in?”

But Clubfoot seemed thoughtful rather than worried. “Not as much as you’d think. I got one old woman talking for the rest of ’em. She’s the ring-bearer’s mother.” The gift of tongues informed the Warlock that the ring-bearer was the lord of the hall, effectively the mayor. “Her name’s Olganna. Warlock, a lot of the parents are delighted we’ve got the kids interested in something. And the children are all on our side, of course.”

“What in the gods’ names was bothering those people?”

Clubfoot’s grin flashed. “Magic was always used against the Nordiks, never for them. They didn’t have any. The tales they tell their children today are all about brawny Nordik warriors against evil magicians. Justice triumphed, and now there’s no more magic.”

“Oh.”

“So now the kids are constantly bothering the Frost Giant servants at their work, and they don’t do their own chores either. They want magic. Only Frost Giants make magic.” Clubfoot dipped bread into stew, and said, “I learned some things. The Frost Giants really did have a god named Roze-Kattee, and his powers did hold off the Nordiks for a hundred years or so. Then the god’s powers waned, and the Nordik berserkers swarmed all over the Frost Giant warriors.”

“So that much was true, at least. What else did you find out about Roze-Kattee?”

“Olganna couldn’t seem to tell me what the god was doing to the Nordik armies. I think it’s been forgotten. Maybe they never knew. One thing, though. Do you know what a berserker is?”

“Not by that name.”

“A berserker sort of goes insane before battle. He froths at the mouth, he chews his shield, he charges the enemy and keeps going until he’s actually hacked apart. He doesn’t notice wounds, even lethal wounds. What I want to know is, did the Nordiks have berserkers when they were driven out of the Fertile Crescent?”

“Yes. A lot of tribes developed that technique when it got to be so difficult to raise actual zombies.”

“Well, the Nordiks didn’t use berserkers until the actual last battle. Olganna said so and they all backed her up.”

“That’s funny. I wonder why…god of love and madness?”

Clubfoot nodded vigorously. “That’s what I thought. The Nordiks couldn’t fight because Roze-Kattee kept bringing the Nordik berserkers to their senses. One more thing. The Frost Giants still worship Roze-Kattee.”

“What? But they’re slaves!”

“Interesting, isn’t it?”

They emptied their stew bowls and set them aside. Presently the Warlock said, “Have you thought what will happen to these people if Wavyhill and Mirandee can bring back magic to the world?”

Clubfoot shrugged. “They’re swordsmen.”

“Well, yes…Meanwhile we’ve got to cool off the irate parents somehow.”

“We can change our tune. There are tales where magic really was used for evil. Wavyhill’s zombie servants, and the demon-sword Glirendree, and the raising of the dead in the war against Acheron.”

“That’ll help. What about a magic show?”

“What?”

“Let the kids get it out of their systems. The adults too. I’m sure we can work something up.”

“Maybe. I’ll ask Olganna what she thinks.”

The magic show had been a huge success. The Warlock had pretended to call up the dead: phantasms that Clubfoot animated with his thoughts. Clubfoot had read minds, discreetly, and told the contents of locked boxes. The Warlock had told futures, again using some discretion.

But they were still in the cell when the day of the public sauna dawned.

He drowsed face down on the wooden bench while talk floated around him…sent a plague that killed most of his worshippers…His knuckles brushed dry earth. Why? Stingy with their sacrifices…understandable. Baal took every first-born child…The bench was harder than cloud and he was naked, but the air was warm and dry and pleasantly scented with wood and woodsmoke. Started as a war between men…eventually split the whole pantheon, with gods fighting on both sides…boredom. Sure, the gods had their squabbles, but it was boredom…flattened both cities before…Clubfoot was still talking about gods. The Warlock dozed. Mostly they worshipped out of fear. Why else would the…

Some phrase caught the Warlock’s attention and pulled him awake. He sat up. He felt good, better than he’d felt in days.

“There’s no mystery to it,” Olganna was telling Clubfoot. Her hair was white and wispy-thin, she was small and withered and wrinkled, but she still looked like she could climb a mountain. Deep stretch marks on her belly told of her eight sons and eleven daughters. “They simply wouldn’t surrender unless they were allowed to serve their god. Our forefathers could have killed them all, of course, but what for? This Roze-Kattee hadn’t helped them. We let them have their way.”

The Warlock sat up. Nobody seemed to think it strange that he had dozed off here.

“I wonder what makes them so loyal,” Clubfoot said.

“Why, they just…are. Or stubborn,” said Olganna. She seemed unaware that two Frost Giants, man and woman, were drying themselves on the far side of the room. “Once in my life and once before I was born, we got tired of their taking so much time off for their ceremonies. In my time it was a crop that had to be got in. We postponed the ceremonies. They stopped work, all work, till we gave in. It was a hungry winter.”

“But don’t you find that strange? All the old tales tell of gods striking mortals down for some casual mistake, or as part of some godlike game, or just for being proud of their own accomplishments. Sometimes the prayers and sacrifices were bribes for service, but usually they were just to get the god to let them alone: no more floods, no more plague, no more lightning, please. What did Roze-Kattee do for the Frost Giants?”

“I’ve wondered.” Olganna frowned. She looked about her…

They might have been father and daughter, or uncle and niece, or man and wife; their ages weren’t that different. White hair, pale skin, eyes the color of ice, spare frames seven feet tall: they looked very much alike. They sat together, with Nordiks comfortably close on both sides of them, in the egalitarian style of the sauna, and they rested in the peace that follows the heat.

Olganna called across the room, and the entire village must have heard her. “Gannik, Wilf, just why do you still serve a god nobody’s seen in a hundred years?”

The old man flinched. Certainly he had not come to the sauna to be cross-examined. But some are more equal than others, and Olganna’s son was the ring-bearer, the lord of the hall. The pale young woman beside him didn’t help matters; she was looking at Gannik as if she too expected an answer.

He shrugged and answered. “Those who do not worship do not marry, do not love, are not loved. It was always that way. If one loses faith after a long and successful life, his wife will desert him, his children will not speak to him, none will help him when he is sick and aged. If Roze-Kattee frowns on a man, he is impotent; on a woman, her lovers are impotent. We knew this long before you came to live in our land.”

Clubfoot had been clever, telling his tales of gods. So now we have our answer, the Warlock thought. Roze-Kattee’s power lay in the taking. He took the madness from a berserker, and the power of love from an apostate. But if the god himself had been impotent for hundreds of years…

With a thrill of horror the Warlock saw that it didn’t matter. For thousands of years only the devout had had children. Roze-Kattee had bred the Frost Giants for loyalty to Roze-Kattee.

And while this flashed through his mind Olganna was nodding dismissal to Gannik. She was satisfied. To Clubfoot she said, “My nephew tells me that you came here to search out Roze-Kattee.”

The Warlock flinched. Clubfoot said, “We came searching knowledge of Roze-Kattee. How could we not? Roze-Kattee may be the last living god, and knowledge is power to a magician. Usually.” Ruefully, “This time it was a mistake. We have lost power.”

The pair of Frost Giants seemed to have lost interest. But slaves had always been good at that.

The Cavern of the Last God

The ridged back of the mountain chain was an easier path than Orolandes had expected. These mountains were old, worn to smooth rock and rotted to soil that could hold the occasional grimly determined tuft of grass; and the towering peaks were all to the south, behind them. Mirandee’s hair remained white, but she was strong.

Yet the journey had its difficulties. Their boots wore out, and they lost half a day summoning rabbits and skinning them for new boots. Always as they walked, they had Wavyhill for their entertainment. Unhampered by the need to draw breath, Wavyhill talked constantly of the ease with which magicians used to travel, and the precautions they could and should have taken to save this grueling walk. His life story was a chain of enemies made and defeated, and they had it all in detail, until Mirandee threatened to move his felt tongue to the backpack. “What makes you so garrulous?” she demanded. “You never needed company when you were living all alone in those fortified castles.”

“Oh, blame it on the Warlock, dear. I was deaf and dumb and blind for thirty years. You’d want to talk too.”

“He could have revived you earlier, if you’d told him your true name before the battle,” she said, and Wavyhill chortled hollowly.

But he woke her that night by saying, “Kranthkorpool. It’s Kranthkorpool. Just in case.”

It took them six days.

The last few miles were the easiest, a wide, rounded ridge of smooth rock sloping gently downhill. Mirandee’s hair went dark and light as if cloud-shadows were passing. It was late afternoon.

The slope dipped more drastically there at the end, until it was a vertical drop. “Wavyhill? This way?”

“Yes! Get us down there, Greek!” Wavyhill was almost indecently eager.

Orolandes motioned Mirandee back. He stood at the edge of the drop, looking around, taking his time.

From the lip it was thirty feet to flat dirt. The rock face must slant inward; he couldn’t see it.

The drop could be made in two stages, by way of what looked to be a congealed river of lava. It was twenty feet high and thirty-odd feet wide, a rounded ridge of smooth gray rock with big potholes all over it, and it ran beneath Orolandes’ feet. Ten feet down, then another twenty feet to dirt. But the lava river itself was rounded to vertical all along its length, and it ran further than he could see, twisting into the broken foothills.

“It’ll be easier just to moor the line and climb down here. Here—” He showed Mirandee how to slide with the line around one ankle and clutched between the feet. He slid down first, then stood underneath, ready to break a witch’s fall. She did fine. He caught her anyway, for pleasure.

They stood before the mouth of an enormous cavern, under the edge of the roof.

“In there,” Wavyhill whispered. “I was right. I wasn’t sure until now.”

Orolandes dropped the pack and drew his sword. “Stay behind me, love.”

Wavyhill laughed. “Do you have any idea what to expect?”

Orolandes boosted himself to the top of a chest-high buttress of stone. “Tell me.”

Wavyhill didn’t answer.

Orolandes pulled Mirandee up. They looked into the cavern.

“Don’t go any further,” said the skull.

The entrance was big, but it widened even further beyond the opening. In the darkness they could see vertical bars, stalactites and stalagmites of prize-winning size. The twenty-foot high river of grey stone ran deep into the darkness…or it had run out of there, glowing, long ago.

“It’s big,” Orolandes said. “Do you know what this dormant god looks like? How big it is?”

“Don’t go any further. I mean it.”

True, he’d been edging in. Mirandee asked, “Why not?”

“We have a decision to make,” Wavyhill said. “Do we risk this without Clubfoot and the Warlock? Or shall we try a Great Summoning, now?”

“That’s no decision at all. We don’t have the power.”

“I think there might be enough to—”

“Wavyhill, I’m surprised at you! The mana is here, but it’s too diffuse. We need the last god first. You know what would happen if we tried a Great Summoning and failed.”

Orolandes waited. He didn’t have to trust Wavyhill. In one second his sword could split that skull, and without scratching Mirandee’s shoulder.

“Mirandee, it only strikes me that we might not know enough between us to—”

“I will not try any Great Summoning until we have the power to do it. And you can’t make the gestures.”

Wavyhill gave a barking laugh. “You win. All right, Greek, put the sword down and go in and find the dormant god.”

Mirandee said, “Alone?”

Orolandes said, “Put down the sword?”

“I said that, yes. Of course, neither of you has to take my orders.”

It was dark in there. Menacing. The sword’s weight felt comfortably normal in his hand.

“Leave it here. Otherwise it’ll kill you. Snap out of it, Greek, this is your big moment!”

He didn’t like Wavyhill’s obscene grin; but Orolandes had made his decision long since. He set the sword on a boulder. He turned and walked into the darkness.

Stalagmites stood thicker and taller than he was. He had to duck the points of the longer stalactites at first, but then the cavern’s roof became too high for that.

Wavyhill’s echoless voice followed him. “I don’t know the size or shape of what you’re looking for. You’ll find it on the other side of that stream of smooth rock, probably far back.”

He turned and called, “All right.”

It happened while his head was turned. Motion exploded around him. Things swatted his head from two directions. Orolandes threw himself flat and rolled over clutching for his sword. Things screamed all around him, their voices excruciatingly high-pitched.

Still fluttering, still screaming, they wheeled away from him. Dark shapes swarming around the roof. Bats. Orolandes got up and moved on, breathing heavily.

The lava flow ran along the side of the cavern. It ran the full length, back to a deeper blackness at the end. Orolandes’ exploring hands found smooth rock marred with potholes. Strange to find potholes here where there was no rain. And in the sides, too.

Strange but convenient. He climbed the potholes, up the rounded side of the rock. Stalactites hung low over the top.

Between the back side and the cavern’s wall was a three-foot gap. Orolandes walked toward the back, ducking stalactites, looking into the gap.

The deeper blackness at the back: could it be another cavern? He might have to search that too. Should have brought a torch. But there was a shadow far back along the gap, a big shadow. If that was the god, it was too big to be moved. Even if it wanted to be moved.

From the beginning he had wondered if it would fight him.

Wavyhill’s shout came jarringly. “Orolandes! Come back! Come back now!”

“What for?” Orolandes’ own shout echoed around him.

“Now! Obey me!”

He didn’t trust Wavyhill worth a troll’s curse. But he trusted the panic and anger in that command. He dropped lightly from the lava flow, caught himself in a controlled roll, stood up and jogged toward the entrance.

The entrance flamed with daylight. Orolandes jogged around stalagmites with his eyes on the chancy footing and his head lowered to avoid the down-pointing spires.

Mirandee leaned casually against a smooth rock wall, seemingly watching him. It was hardly a scene of panic. Orolandes called, “What’s the trouble?”

He knew that when his muscles locked. He teetered on a rigid forward leg, then toppled on his right side in running position. He tried to cry out, but his voice was locked too.

Mirandee didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t blink.

The sword was on the boulder where he had left it, a tantalizing arm’s reach away.

The skull on Mirandee’s shoulder said, “I’m sorry. My mistake, and it was made right at the beginning.” He raised his voice. “Piranther! Where are you?”

“I’m just over your heads.”

Piranther floated like an autumn leaf into the bright entrance.

The Frost Giants

They should have thought of it. Granted that the Warlock was sick with age and Clubfoot was trying to keep them both alive with old stories; there was more to it. Sorcerers have a blind spot, and that blind spot is—

“—swords. They keep appearing in your old tales,” said Harric. The burly redhead was dressed casually now, in leather and flaxen cloth. “Are these magic swords all a thing of the past?”

Harric’s invitation to dine at his table had surprised the Warlock. Less surprising was the presence of another guest, their young guard, Poul. Two other men struck the Warlock as fighting men; their arms were thick with muscle, they bore healed scars, and they walked as if they didn’t expect anyone to be standing in their way. Now he began to understand.

“Wavyhill had a magic sword,” Clubfoot was saying. “It didn’t help against the Warlock. And there was a demon forced to the form of a sword: Glirendree. The Warlock killed it. In fact…Warlock, I guess you’re our expert on magic swords.”

The Warlock smiled. Oh, yes, he should have made this happen earlier. “What would you like to know?”

“Where do they come from? What do they do?”

“Hmm…Glirendree doesn’t count. He was an actual demon. Wavyhill’s sword was enchanted to strike always at the vitals of an enemy. You can do that, or set it to block another’s weapon, or make it sharp enough to cut boulders, or all three.”

“Can you do that to any sword?” Harric leaned across the table.

“Mmm…I can, or could, if I were in a place where magic works.”

“All right, you’ve said that murder carries this magical power. There were battles fought all through here—”

“No, no. Murder and war are not the same. The intent is different, and the intent counts for a good deal.”

Harric settled back. The Warlock sipped mead and waited. Presently Poul said, “Kinawulf’s barrow?”

“Yes, by the gods! Warlock, Kinawulf was a ringbearer of our people who tried to practice sorcery himself. He had some success until Roze-Kattee turned his followers against him. They slew him after torture. His barrow is a place of ill fame, but with swords and magic to guard us we should be safe enough.”

“It sounds perfect. How far is it?”

“Most of a day’s walk…uphill. Mpf, we had best make you a litter. Are there materials you need?”

The Warlock asked for parchment and colored inks. “I’ll send Clubfoot scouting for herbs. And bring the swords, of course.”

They set out on the morning of the sixth day. The swordsmen were heavily laden: two to carry the Warlock, the others carrying half a dozen extra weapons in addition to the magicians’ materials. In his present condition the Warlock wondered if he could pick up any one of those great metal killing-things, built heavy enough to slice through armor.

He was mildly disappointed, and mildly relieved, that Clubfoot had come back with the herbs. Hell, Clubfoot hadn’t promised to run. Maybe there had been a guard. He didn’t ask.

The trees thickened as they went, until Poul and the Nordik named Hathsson had to slide sideways to move the Warlock’s chair between the trunks. The Warlock sighed and said, “I’ll walk from here.”

“It’s not much farther. Bring the chair anyway,” Harric ordered.

The forest smells were pleasant. Harric passed a fat skin of mead around. Clubfoot said, “I’ve been wondering what happened to this Kinawulf. We seem to have worked out that Roze-Kattee drove people sane.”

“Selectively,” said the Warlock. “Who attacked Kinawulf? Someone who had reason for hatred or jealousy?”

“His younger brother and a few followers, helped by Kinawulf’s wife.”

“I expect Kinawulf’s problem was that none of his own followers were mad enough to stand in the way of a sword. That was Roze-Kattee’s doing. The god wouldn’t have touched Kinawulf himself; he might have surrendered. We may well find magic operating around the barrow.”

“There—” Harric pointed.

The barrow was the peak of a small hill covered in green grass. It was clear of trees. “We want the top,” said the Warlock.

He was behind the others as he climbed, puffing, leaning on Poul’s arm. Why didn’t he feel stronger, if this place was so rich in mana? There was mana, but not enough to power a youth spell, or to work a loyalty spell or a death spell on swordsmen. Or to do much to a metal sword. Now, how does one explain to a known berserker that one can’t give him a dozen magic swords after all?

They heard Hathsson shout. Poul sprinted for the top of the hill, sword in hand. The Warlock struggled after him.

Even in this northern cold, Piranther went naked. His bright eyes searched for motion, for any sign that his spell of paralysis had failed. Nobody moved.

Piranther relaxed his grip on the leather bag at his throat. He walked nonchalantly past Mirandee, inspecting her; then turned his attention to the skull.

“Kranthkorpool, speak to me. Did you find the dormant god?”

“Maybe.” It was no more than the truth, but Wavyhill’s voice was strained.

Piranther slit the straps that held the skull to Mirandee’s shoulder. He lifted it down and looked at it, his fingers avoiding the gnashing jaws. “I could; smash you,” he said. “Or I could take away your senses and bury you here. Who would ever find you? Don’t make me dig for information, Kranthkorpool.”

Wavyhill said, “I think the Frost Giant priests must have put it behind that long, rounded wall of rock, far back. The Greek knows.”

“Thank you. Why did you want him? You could have fetched it for yourselves.”

“He’s the only strong one among us. The god is bound to be heavy. Too heavy for you, too, Piranther. Can we deal on that basis?”

Piranther looked thoughtfully into the cavern. “But with the mana inherent in it, you could float it out. Why—?”

“Curse it, we can’t afford the loss! We need all the mana the god has left to it. Don’t you understand, this is the biggest thing anyone ever dreamed of!”

Piranther laughed. “Your big and foolish project. Your one solution to all the world’s problems. Never trust such solutions, Kranthkorpool. I will take the dormant god back to the South Land Mass for our own use. It will serve our needs for some time to come.” He set the skull down facing him. “I can leave it dormant for now. I do not need its mana. I have these.”

Orolandes tried to make out what Piranther was holding. He saw intricate flashes of colored fire against the dark pink of Piranther’s palm.

“Black opals. See how beautiful they are. Sense their power. There are more black opals in the South Land Mass than in all the rest of the world. Even so…our numbers increase. These will not last forever. We must have the dormant god.”

“You think small.”

“Perhaps. Where are the others?”

“I don’t know.” Again Wavyhill’s voice was strained.

“Must I dig for information?”

“Dig…then. You say my…name badly.” Was Wavyhill gloating?

Piranther shrugged. He turned to Orolandes’ backpack. “Certainly Mirandee carried a crystal ball. True, my dear? Let us look in on them.” He upended the pack, and things spilled out: blankets, a smoked joint of elk, rope, pouches of dusts, the copper Warlock’s Wheel, a few sharp slivers of crystal. “Could I be wrong? Kranthkorpool!”

“She smashed it falling out of a cloud.” No mistake now, Wavyhill was gloating.

“Then we’ll do it the hard way. After all, I have the power. If Clubfoot and the Warlock are trying to harm me…” Piranther selected a fine, polished bit of many-colored fire as big as his toenail. “…we’ll just interrupt them.”

The Nordiks had armed themselves. They were looking downslope to where three Frost Giants waited on the hidden side of the barrow hill.

A patch of snow behind them made them hard to see. Gannik and Wilf stood tall with a dignity they hadn’t worn in the sauna. The third Giant was getting to his feet, taking his time.

It was worth the wait. The third Frost Giant stood seventeen or eighteen feet tall. He wore a fur about his hips, the skin of a white bear, and nothing else. His wild white hair and beard flared about his head; he was all white, even to the small tree that hung casually from one hand, with a knob of roots at the end to make an impressive cudgel.

Sword conspicuously in hand, Harric strode forward to call down the hill. “What do you want here?”

“Give us the magicians,” the big one boomed.

“They are our guests. We hold the high ground.”

The Warlock whispered to Hathsson, “What does he mean?”

“They have to come at us uphill,” the blond Nordik whispered back. “Can you enchant our swords before they decide to charge?”

“No.”

Meanwhile the big Frost Giant laughed boomingly and cried, “We are the high ground! And we must have the magicians. May Wilf come to speak to you without being hurt?”

“Yes.”

If the Frost Giant woman was afraid, she showed none of it. She walked up without haste to join them. Harric opened conversation by saying, “Nordiks have fought Frost Giants before.”

“We must have the magicians. Why must any of us die? You argued whether to kill them yourselves.”

Interestingly, Harric did not deny it. “They are to do us a service. But even that is less important than this: Nordiks do not take orders from Frost Giants.”

The Frost Giant woman looked down at Harric. “Have we not worked willingly for all of our lives? Have we refused you anything but one thing? These men threaten our god.”

Clubfoot tried to interrupt, but Harric gestured him to silence, and answered her himself. “Your god had lost nearly all its power when you buried it.”

“He kept enough!” Wilf said wistfully. “I’ve heard the old ones talking. Even today, while the god within a god sleeps…first love always fades. Marriage goes from adoration to companionship. My own lover turned to another woman for mere variety. If the god truly died—”

“We do not threaten your Roze-Kattee!” Clubfoot shouted. “Tell the big one that we want to bring the god back to life.”

The Warlock saw sidelong glances between the Nordiks. Curse! But Wilf’s reaction was stranger. The woman was blushing: pink blood beneath the white of cheek and throat. She wouldn’t look at the magicians. It was suddenly obvious that the Frost Giants preferred their god dormant.

Harric asked, “Who is this tall Frost Giant who threatens us?”

“Tolerik is my father’s cousin. He ran away when he was eleven; you may remember. He’s lived here ever since. Sometimes we bring him things he can’t get here.” All in a rush she said, “We must have the magicians. If you give them to us, Tolerik will work for you for a year.”

The local mana had allowed a Frost Giant to reach his full height, but it was too low to let a magician defend himself. They could only wait.

Poul said, “But by law he is already—”

Harric’s voice easily drowned him out. “Very well. Take them.”

Clubfoot dived for the pile of swords. Hathsson’s foot hooked Clubfoot’s twisted ankle. As Clubfoot sprawled headlong he felt a sword’s point pressing the small of his back. Clubfoot froze.

Poul said, “But the swords! Wilf, will Tolerik let the magicians enchant our swords first?”

“Don’t be a fool. We can’t trust them now,” Harric said.

Wilf gestured downslope. Her father and his huge cousin started up. The Warlock was cursing himself for that moment of stunned surprise. Surprise, that warriors would betray a magician!

What kind of threat would cow an armed man the size of a big tree? The Warlock raised his arms. A fantasm, a great red-and-gold dragon stooping, slashing…if the Giant dodged, if he fell downslope, his height alone might break his neck…

The Giant’s hand closed around Clubfoot’s ankles and lifted him.

Colors formed in the air, tinges of red and gold. Harric frowned and rapped the Warlock’s skull with his spear haft. The Warlock sank to his knees with the pain. He saw Clubfoot writhing in the Giant’s hand as the Giant prepared to dash his brains out against a rock.

Darkness rippled around Clubfoot, swallowed him, swallowed the Giant’s hand to the wrist. The Giant yelled and tried to pull away.

The Warlock sagged on the grass. It was all right. He saw the darkness closing around him and knew it for what it was: a Great Summoning. Mirandee must have found the god-within-a-god.

The hillside disappeared, and he was on dusty stone. Strength flowed into him, the strength of youth spells reviving. The Warlock stood up, saying, “W—”

And every muscle locked in place, locked him standing with his hand extended, his eyes smiling, his lips pursed on a W.

Clubfoot was on a rock floor with a great severed hand holding his ankles. Beyond him, Orolandes lay awkwardly, like a toppled statue. Mirandee leaned casually against a wall. Piranther—

Piranther returned the Warlock’s smile. “I must remember to ask Clubfoot about that hand. What kind of allies were you gathering against me?” He dusted his hands together; the dust fell like motes of colored fire. He turned to the decorated skull sitting on a rock behind him. “Or did you trick me? Did I rescue them from a greater danger?”

“Revive them and ask,” Wavyhill suggested.

“I like them better the way they are. Well, let us see your dormant god,” said Piranther. He stepped delicately across Orolandes.

“If—”

Piranther turned.

“Nothing,” said the skull. “Just a thought.”

“Well?”

“You still can’t move him.”

“I’ll decide that.” Piranther turned and walked into the cavern.

Orolandes lay frozen in a frozen world. Behind him Piranther’s footsteps were casually erratic, growing faint and blurred with echoes.

Wavyhill spoke low. “I hope you’re not dead. If you’re all dead, then I’m in serious trouble.”

The skull chuckled softly. “He’s deep in the cavern now. Warlock, if you can hear me, I claim a vengeance foregone. I could have suggested that he take you with him, for advice. He could have bound you with a loyalty spell, and you would have walked in with him. Warlock, Clubfoot, do you remember what you did to me, do you see what I am now? Mirandee, do you remember suggesting that I wasn’t worthy to join you?”

The rock softened under Orolandes’ rigid elbow. The light grew pink; or was the rock itself changing color?

The roof of the entrance descended.

Behind Orolandes came Piranther’s echoing scream. Wavyhill laughed shrilly, madly. A warm wet wind blew against Orolandes’ back. It stank like the breath of a thousand wolves. Piranther’s scream ended as if muffled.

The roof above him had dropped low enough to touch the Warlock’s head.

Wavyhill ended his cackling. “Well? Am I right? Did I have your lives in my grasp? Isn’t it a marvelous hiding place for the last god? Greek, you probably still don’t understand. Have you heard of the World-Worm, the snake that circles the world and swallows its own tail? The Nildiss Range and the Andes and the Rocky Mountains all form a part of its body. And you lie within its mouth.”

Orolandes said, “Uhn!”

“Oh, ho! You’re alive, are you? That paralysis won’t last. I could free you now, if I could make the gestures. I don’t think Piranther did anything fancy; he just bulled through our ward-spells with the power in his black opals.

“Marvelous, isn’t it? The World-Worm is a strange beast. Of course it couldn’t possibly live by eating its own flesh. The tail used to have flanges of bone behind those huge pores. It sweeps up all kinds of things: turf, birds’ nests, the dens of animals that lair in the pores, even full grown trees growing in the dirt the flanges sweep up. It grows very slowly this tail. And of course anything that wanders into the mouth gets eaten. I should be talking in the past tense, really,” said the skull. “The fins are all weathered away. The World-Worm is like all magical forms of life; it turns to stone when the mana runs low. Like dragon bones. Like that statue in front of the Prissthil gates. What fooled Piranther was the tail. Running back into the mouth like that, it changes the shape so the cavern isn’t mouth-shaped any more.”

Teeth, thought Orolandes. I was jogging through a forest of spike teeth. He said, “Uhn!” The calf of his leg kicked suddenly, painfully.

The roof of the cavern was rising…and changing in color, greying to the look of stone.

“Can talk,” Clubfoot said. “Can’t move yet. Anyone?”

The Warlock grunted. “Spell should wear off soon.”

“Got us with those black opals,” said Clubfoot. “We couldn’t know. Wavyhill. Why here?”

“Why, it’s obvious! Look: nobody who knows what this place is would come here. The World-Worm must have been nearly dead for centuries, but who’d risk it? If a mundane wandered in here all unknowing, nothing would happen. But if a magician came here looking for the dormant god—” Wavyhill chuckled. “There’s mana in magic. The power of their spells hovers around magicians. Put a mana source in the World-Worm’s mouth and what happens?”

“Poor Piranther,” said Mirandee.

“It wakes up for a snack,” Clubfoot said callously.

“I think it would have done that even without the opals. Any time a magician comes calling…or a swordsman carrying a sword stolen from a place where gods once lived. In the meantime, whatever mana is still with the World-Worm is there to keep the dormant god alive. If our luck holds.”

Clubfoot had called up a pair of hares: an old and simple magic, still potent almost everywhere. He had started a fire and cleaned the hares and was now roasting them. In his stiff back there was a rejection of the quarrel now going on in the cavern entrance.

“I won’t let him go,” Mirandee said. She sat with her back to them, her legs dangling over the stone buttress…over what must be the World-Worm’s lower lip.

Orolandes came up behind Mirandee. He moved stiffly. They were all sore from the cramps that had followed their paralysis. He put his hands on her shoulders, ignored their angry shrug. “It is what we came for.”

“Idiot! It’s eaten a powerful magician and his black opals. It may not sleep again for years! Wavyhill, tell him! It eats things that wander into its mouth!”

“It may have gone dormant again,” the skull said comfortably. “It was mana-starved for generations. It’s a big beast; it needs nourishment.”

“Father of trolls!” she spat.

“Retired.”

“Mountain goat,” the Warlock said without turning. He stood at the corner of the cavern’s mouth, a little apart.

He was ignored. The skull on the rock said, “Listen, girl. I gave up my vengeance against these, my murderers. I am willing to risk a swordsman to the same high purpose.”

The Warlock began singing to himself.

“Well, ’Landes? You heard him. You can’t throw away your life after that. What about me?” Mirandee demanded.

Floating bodies, myriads of bodies, shoals of bloated human bodies turned in the waves, bumping gently against each other and against the wooden raft on which Orolandes lay dying of thirst beside the decaying body of a centaur girl. Did they thirst for vengeance? They had the right…and if Orolandes walked out of the cavern alive, there were lives still to be saved. There were centaur and satyr tribes in Greece. He said, “I have to.”

“If you die I’ll die!”

He was startled. “You’ll die? Because you read my mind?”

“Yes!”

Wavyhill said, “She’s lying. Think it through. Piranther read your mind too. Would he have taken that risk?”

Orolandes looked at her. Her eyes did not drop. “I mean it. I won’t live without you.”

A clattering of hooves startled them. They turned as a mountain goat bounded up on the World-Worm’s lip and stood gazing up at the Warlock.

“Any of you idiots could have thought of this,” the Warlock told them. He turned back to give the goat its orders.

Stiff-legged and blank of eye, the goat walked into the cavern. They watched it blunder into stalagmites and stumble on until it had reached the entrance to the inner cave…the World-Worm’s gullet.

Clubfoot spoke grudgingly, it seemed. “You can wait till morning. Have some dinner.”

“No.”

Mirandee sat stony-eyed. She did not look up as Orolandes stroked her hair, turned and walked after the goat.

The smell of broiling meat followed him and made it hard to go on. He circled teeth taller than himself. He climbed the soil-gathering potholes in the side of the long, long tail. He walked along the top of the tail with his torch casting yellow light into the gap.

He heard only his own footsteps. The bats…the bats must have been eaten along with Piranther. The flickering flame made motion everywhere. How would he know when the roof began to descend?

Far at the back, the tip of a stalagmite tooth showed above a whitish mass that enclosed it.

The last god was no bigger than Piranther, made of nearly translucent marble. It sat with its arms and legs wrapped tight around the base of a tooth. Its slanted eyes glowed yellow-white by torchlight. Its face and ears were covered with fur. In the triangular shape of its face there was something cat-feminine.

It took some nerve to wrap his arms around the stalagmite and, throwing all of his weight into it, try to move the tooth. It was solidly fixed.

“There’s no way to get it loose from there,” he told the magicians. “Your Roze-Kattee was a coward, Wavyhill. It’s got a death-grip on that tooth.” And he sat down to eat hot disjointed hare, one-handed, with his other arm around a weeping Mirandee. He had been ready to die in there; he had come out alive, and he was famished.

When there was nothing left but bones, Wavyhill said, “It sounds bad.”

Orolandes grunted! “Would you consider chopping through one of the god’s arms?”

“No.”

“Then we’d have to chop through the tooth at the base, then have a team of men pull out tooth and statue together. Work for an army. Can we hire some of the Nordiks? They live close enough to—”

The Warlock chopped at the air. “The Nordiks won’t help us. Even the Frost Giants seem to prefer their god dormant. Curse them and their coward god.”

“And my lost vengeance,” said Wavyhill.

Clubfoot sat hugging his knees. “I don’t believe it. We came all this way, and now…No. There’s an answer. We’ve got meat to be called and snow for water. We’ll stay here until we find an answer.”

The God of Love and Madness

Fourteen thousand years have garbled all the details.

The last god is remembered in diverse legends. Roze become Eros, Kattee become Kali and Hecate, their qualities radically changed. Now only children hear of the Warlock’s great project. They learn of a foolish frightened hen who ran screaming to tell the world that the world was ending. Some she convinced. In a desperate effort to salvage something, she led them into a cave.

The solution was in the cave. So close…

“We can get close!” A bellowing voice cut deep into the Warlock’s dreams.

He rolled over, blinking. He heard rustlings and grunts of annoyance around him, and saw Clubfoot looming over him in gray pre-dawn light. Half asleep, he struggled to sit up.

Clubfoot was shivering with excitement. “Wavyhill, do you remember that gesture-spell, the variant on the Warlock’s Wheel? The one that cancels mana.”

“Remember it? Sure. I designed it. Nearly killed the Warlock with it, too. Shall I teach you the gestures?”

The Warlock said, “Wait a minute. I’m still trying to wake up. Clubfoot, have you really got something?”

“Yes! We can’t get into the cavern, right? But we can get close! Roze-Kattee is just inside the World-Worm’s cheek!”

Orolandes woke late, to the smell of roasting rabbit and the pleasant sound of Mirandee’s humming. “Eat,” she said gaily, “We’ve got work to do.”

“Work? That’s good. Yesterday it was all a dead end. Where are the others?”

“Already at work. Today it’s different. I had a dream.”

“So? Or do you dream the future? You’re so much a man’s ideal woman, I keep forgetting what else you are.”

She kissed him. “Sometimes I dream the future. It’s not dependable.” Her brow wrinkled. “This one was funny. I guess it means success. I dreamed the sky was falling.”

Orolandes laughed. “That sounds scary.”

“No, I wasn’t frightened at all. And it is what we’re after, isn’t it?”

“Maybe, but it sounds scary as Hell when you put it like that. What did you feel, watching the sky fall?”

“Nothing.”

After breakfast they walked on bare earth, swinging their linked hands. On their left a sloping wall of stone rose out of the earth, higher and higher above them as they walked on. The stone was smooth, worn by the wind, until only a suggestion of scales was left to show that this was the side of the World-Worm’s head.

They came to where a patch of the smooth rock turned to crumbly sandstone. Here was a hole in the rock, head-high, and sand spilled beneath it. Orolandes paused to look, but Mirandee pulled him on.

The second hole was higher and larger, big enough for a man to crawl through. Clubfoot and the Warlock waited as they came up. The magicians had piled rocks as stepping-stones to reach the hole. Orolandes climbed the pile and looked through.

It was black as a stomach in there. Clubfoot coaxed the end of a branch into flame and handed it up to him. By firelight Orolandes saw that he was ten feet away from the marble statue of Roze-Kattee.

“How did you break through? We don’t have so much as an ax.”

“We cursed it,” said the Warlock. “Wavyhill evolved a gesture spell that uses up the mana in whatever he aims it at. He used it on me once. We don’t use it much these days. It’s wasteful.”

Wavyhill spoke from his accustomed perch on the Warlock’s shoulder. “This isn’t just rock, after all. It’s a great brute of a dying god.”

Orolandes nodded. “What’s the next step? Can you revive Roze-Kattee through that hole?”

“We think so. The next step is tricky, and it involves climbing,” said the Warlock. “That leaves it up to you and Clubfoot.”

Clubfoot nodded, but he didn’t look happy.

And Mirandee was frowning. “Why, no. I climb better than you, don’t I, Clubfoot?”

“Well, there’s more to this than—”

“And I’m as skilled at magic. Unless this is weather magic? Just what have you in mind?”

Clubfoot answered in the Guild tongue.

They talked for some time. Whatever they were discussing, it was complicated, judging from Mirandee’s frequent questions and the way Clubfoot waved his arms. Orolandes could see that Mirandee didn’t like it. He edged closer to those inseparable colleagues, Wavyhill and the Warlock, and asked, “What’s going on?”

“Necromancy,” said the skull. “Very technical. Can you climb that rock with a pack?”

“Yes. But why is Mirandee—”

“We didn’t discuss it with her before. She didn’t know what was involved.”

“Then—”

“No!” Mirandee snapped. “If it has to be done, I’ll do it. Otherwise I wouldn’t let you do it either. Orolandes!” She turned her back on Clubfoot, whose face was a study in mixed emotions: sorrow and relief. Mirandee was biting her lower lip.

Orolandes went up alone, barefoot, using as fingerholds and toeholds those crevices and irregularities whose pattern just hinted at serpent-scales worn smooth. There were potholes in the great smooth expanse of the World-Worm’s head: real potholes this time, worn by rain pooling to dissolve rock. Orolandes chopped with the sword point—the blade was uncannily hard—until he had joined adjacent potholes into a knob that would hold the line.

Mirandee toiled up the line. There was nothing Orolandes could do from up here except hurt for her, fear for her. The slope wouldn’t kill her if she slipped, but it would remove skin and the flesh beneath, and she might break a leg at the end…

But she arrived intact, panting. She said no word to Orolandes. She spilled the pack he had carried up. She selected a chain of tiny silver links and arranged it in a circle. She drew symbols with a piece of red chalk. She looked up.

“Give me your sword,” she said.

Orolandes didn’t move. “What’s it all about?”

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“Tell me, love.”

She sagged. “Necromancy. Magical power derived from death, from murder. We need enough power to waken a half-dead god. We’re going to get it by murdering the World-Worm.”

“Oh. More death. Isn’t there any other way?”

“I tried to think of one. Don’t you believe me?”

“Yes, of course. Of course I believe you.”

“Curse it, Orolandes, the World-Worm is dead now. The land has shifted and broken its back in places; it’s not even the shape of a snake any more. The wind has worn it away, scales and skin and flesh. If we revived it completely, right now, it would die almost immediately. It’s dead, but it doesn’t know it yet, and we can take advantage of that. Give me your sword.”

He did.

“Stand well back.” she said, and turned to her work.

The song she sang was unpleasant, grating. Orolandes felt numbness in his toes and fingers and a black depression creeping into his soul. He watched as the dusty stone within the ring of silver turned dusty pink.

Mirandee raised the sword, holding the hilt tightly in both hands. She brought it down hard. Still singing, she pounded on the hilt with a rock until the blade was entirely sheathed.

The mountain shuddered. Orolandes flattened, gripping rock, ready for the next quake. Far back along the mountain chain to the south, he saw motion and churning dust.

The mountain shuddered and spilled Clubfoot’s little pile of stones. The Warlock cursed in his mind, but he started chanting immediately. Let my enemy’s heart be mine, let my enemy’s strength be mine—Wavyhill sang the counterpoint next to the Warlock’s ear, while Clubfoot worked at moving rocks.

It was hard work, and Clubfoot was in haste. Without the ladder of stones, they could not aim their spells into the cavern. Sweat ran down his cheeks and his neck, and he hurled his cloak from him and kept working. Poor Clubfoot, he couldn’t even curse. The Warlock sang on and watched the rock pile grow.

High enough. Clubfoot mumbled over a dry branch until it blazed, hurled it through the hole and went up the rocks after it. The Warlock followed more slowly, accepting Clubfoot’s assistance. He could feel the power in him now. The World-Worm’s life had fed him.

The last god seemed to move in the firelight; but it was illusion. Its marble arms gripped the World-Worm’s tooth as tightly as ever.

Wake and see the world…They sang the spell for reviving the dead. Wavyhill’s voice quavered and shifted. Wavyhill was frightened, and rightly. This could cost him his own not-quite-life. The Warlock could feel the mana leaving him.

In the middle of the chant his voice left him. He managed to finish the phrase, then signaled Clubfoot with a very ancient gesture, a finger across his throat. Clubfoot moved in smoothly. Wavyhill sang on, in an echoless voice that did not pause for breath.

The tree limb had almost burned out. The statue’s eyes picked up the firelight like cat’s-eye emeralds. The Warlock made his exaggerated passes, and worried. Let your heart beat, let your blood flow…Would a spell worked to revive men revive a god?

The song ended.

The marble statue did not move.

At last Clubfoot sighed and turned from the black opening. He stumbled down the ladder of stones. The Warlock followed. He was exhausted. The soreness in his throat felt permanent.

“I feel rotten,” said Orolandes. Shoals of shifting corpses floated past his memory. He sat slumped with his chin on his knees. He could not think of a reason ever to move again. “We killed the World-Worm. How could anything be worth that?”

“It’s the spell,” Mirandee said. “I feel rotten too. Live with it.”

“I’m glad I’m not a magician.”

“No, you don’t have what it takes.”

“What does it take?”

Her black hair was a curtain around her, rendering her anonymous. “It takes another kind of courage. You know what I can do, given the power. Cause solid rock to flow like soft clay in invisible hands. Walk on clouds. Read minds, or take them over, or build illusions more real than reality. Kill with a gesture: one moment a hale and dangerous man, the next a mass of meat already decomposing. I can wake the dead to ask them questions. All those things, and other things I know how to do: they make a hash of what a mundane would call common sense. What scares the wits out of the mundanes is knowing how fragile our reality is. Not many can take that.” She shifted a little, but the tent of hair still hid her. “Swordsman, I think we made a mistake, getting so involved with each other.”

He nodded. In retrospect it seemed almost ridiculous, how dependent he had been on this woman. “It’s no basis for a lifelong love affair, is it? I’m glad you said it first.”

When she said nothing, he added, “You read my mind by accident. You must know a spell to break you loose.”

“I do.”

The sun was warm and bright, and here they sat on the biggest corpse in the world. He had felt so good this morning. Where had it gone?

The witch-woman said, “You’re around thirty, aren’t you? A child, no more. I’m over seventy. The boy and the old lady, the witch and the swordsman. They don’t go,” she said sadly. “That’s not to say we should give up sex. That was good.”

“You pulled me out of a bad period. I guess you know I’m grateful.”

“You’re just not in love any more. Nor am I.”

“Right.”

Mirandee seemed to drift off into a private reverie of her own.

Orolandes was feeling better. The awful death-wish depression was leaving him. It was good to end a love affair this easily, with no hatred, no recriminations, no guilt…

He saw her stiffen.

She stood abruptly. “Let’s get down.”

“Not so fast,” he said as she wound the line round her waist and backed toward the drop. “You’re in too much of a hurry. Curse it, slow down, you’ll get killed that way!”

Mirandee ignored him. She went down backward, properly, but too dangerously damn fast. “Slow down!” he ordered her.

“No time!”

Huh? Well, it was her neck. He watched her descend.

“I think I’ve chanted my last spell,” the Warlock whispered. His throat felt dry as dust.

“This isn’t the end,” said Clubfoot. “Only the first attack. We’ll talk it over with Mirandee. Figure out what went wrong. Try again.”

“Sure.”

“I chanted youth spells for you once. I can do it again,” said Clubfoot, “once we land the Moon.” He paused. “That sounds insane.”

“Maybe it is.”

They sat slumped against the corpse of the World-Worm. It felt like sandstone now, crumbly soft rock that the winds would wear away. The magicians were exhausted, even Wavyhill, who had not spoken in minutes.

“No maybe about it,” Clubfoot said suddenly. “It’s crazy. How long have there been men in the world? A couple of thousand years at least, right? Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. But the mana was still rich in the world when some unknown god made men. And they used it.”

“Of course they did,” said the Warlock. “Why not?”

“The names of the great magicians come down to us. Alhazred, Vulcan the Shaper, Hera—Look, what I’m getting at is this. There were a couple of thousand years of mana so rich that none of us, no magician of these last days, has the skill to use it. His spells would kill him. Do you believe that nobody in those last two thousand years ever tried to land the Moon? Nobody?”

“Why should they?”

“Because it’s pretty! And not all those old masters were completely sane, Warlock. And some of the sane ones served mad emperors, like Vulcan served Trillion Mu.”

“All right. They tried. Certainly they failed. Maybe they weren’t desperate enough.”

“Maybe. Another thing. If we don’t know what keeps the Moon up, we sure as Fate don’t know why. One of the gods put it up, maybe; or many gods; or even a being of unknown power and unknown nature, something that doesn’t live on a world at all. If we don’t know why the Moon was put there, how can we dare call it down? We don’t even dare drain it of mana, because we don’t know what ancient spells that might ruin.”

“You make sense,” the Warlock said with some reluctance. “I’ve even been wondering if it matters to anyone but us.”

“Well, of course it matters…” Clubfoot trailed off.

“Are you sure? Animals die. Classes of animals die. Civilizations die. New things come to take their places. Look at Prissthil. The sky-stone is gone, but is Prissthil hurting? It’s a thriving village, a trade center. The guard: his grandfather was a magician, but he’s not hurting. The Nordiks had captive magicians, and what did they want from them? Magic swords, and nothing else. Even the Frost Giants are happy enough with their god dormant. The strong ones adapt.”

“I wonder what Mirandee’s in such a hurry about? She’s coming down awfully fast.”

The Warlock didn’t hear. He said, “Maybe Piranther was right. We use Roze-Kattee directly, get what good we can out of the last god. Wavyhill, what do you think?”

“I want to die,” said Wavyhill.

“What?”

“It’s not worth it. Another ten years of life, another hundred, and so what? People die. Even World-Worms die, and gods, and magicians.”

“Wavyhill, what’s got into you?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s got into me. What could get into a dead man? I don’t feel good, I don’t feel bad. I guess I like it that way. Turn me off, Warlock. Use the spell we used to break through the World-Worm’s cheek. It won’t even hurt.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Wavyhill said without regret.

Mirandee found them that way, apathetic and dreamy-eyed, when she reached them out of breath and still trying to run. “Where is it?” she demanded.

The Warlock looked up. “What? Oh, the god. It sleeps on.”

“Troll dung it does! Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“Why, it’s soaking up all the love and all the madness it can reach! Feeding on it!”

The Warlock stood up fast. Of course, he’d been stupid, they’d all three slipped into sanity without noticing! Sweet reason and solid judgment and philosophical resignation, these were not common among sorcerers. As he scrambled up the piled stones behind Clubfoot, he wondered what had tipped off Mirandee, who was stable and sensible. Then he remembered the Greek swordsman.

Clubfoot put his head in the hole. His voice was muffled. “Curse, we forgot to bring a torch! Mirandee, would you—”

The sandstone wall next to them fell outward. A splinter of rock nicked the Warlock’s cheek; another struck Wavyhill, tok! Slabs of rock fell and smashed to sand, and behind them the last god stepped forth.

God of love and madness, was it? Roze-Kattee seemed a god of madness alone. It was shaggy with coarse hair, hair that covered its face and chest, baring only the eyes. Its eyes blazed yellow-white, brighter than the daylight. Orolandes had called it small, but it wasn’t; it was bigger than the Warlock…and it was growing before their eyes.

Its pointed ears twitched as it looked around at its world. Already its head was above the magicians, and it did not see them. Alien thoughts formed in the Warlock’s mind, crushingly powerful.

ALONE? HOW CAN I BE ALONE? I CALL YOU ALL TO ANSWER, YOU WHO RULE THE WORLD…

The last god was male and female both. Its male organs were mounted below and behind the vagina, in such a way that it could probably mate with itself. And this was embarrassingly clear, because the magicians were now looking up between the tremendous hairy pillars of its legs. It was still growing!

How? Where did it find the power? Roze-Kattee’s range must be growing with its size, with its power. The Warlock had never anticipated this: that as the last god, Roze-Kattee was beyond competition. Every madman and every lover must now serve it as a worshipper.

Wavyhill snarled in the Warlock’s ear. “Get hold of yourselves! Clubfoot, quick, what’s your true name? Warlock, wake him up!”

Mirandee and Clubfoot were still gaping. The Warlock shook Clubfoot’s shoulder and shouted, “Your true name!”

“Kaharoldil.”

Wavyhill sang in the Guild tongue. My name is Kaharoldil, I am your father and mother…The Warlock joined, making Wavyhill’s gestures for him. After a moment Clubfoot joined them. It was the old loyalty spell they were using, a spell the Warlock had once rejected as unethical. It decreased the intelligence of its victims. But now he only wondered if it would work.

They had come ill-equipped, and moved too fast. Too much had been forgotten about the gods. Perhaps nobody had ever known enough.

Roze-Kattee was a hairy two-legged mountain now. Its head must be halfway up the World-Worm’s head. And still it grew. The Warlock imagined chill sanity engulfing the Frost Giants and their Nordik masters, sweeping over the Greek islands, crossing Asian and African mountains; wars ending as weaker armies surrendered to stronger, or as farmers-turned-soldier dropped their spears and returned in haste to harvest their crops; husbands returning to wives, and wives to husbands, for remembered fondness and remembered promises, old habits and the neighbors’ approval. Already the rebirth of Roze-Kattee must be changing the world.

Orolandes lay on his back on the crumbly rock, looking up at the sky.

He had tried a drug once. A red man had burned leaves in a fire, and Orolandes and some of his troop had sniffed the smoke. He had felt like this, then. Abstracted. Able to view himself, his friends, his environs, from a godlike distance and with godlike clarity.

It had not seemed worthwhile to follow Mirandee down the mountain. Whatever she and the others were planning, it could hardly be worthy of his attention.

Even the guilt was gone. That was nice.

There was a muffled booming somewhere far away. He ignored it.

Then a section of rock the size of a parade ground, not far from where he was lying, settled and hesitated and dropped away. Thunder sounded below him.

The corpse of the World-Worm was decomposing.

Orolandes moved by reflex. He swept gear into his pack (leaving gear on the battlefield could get you killed next time), donned the pack and went backward down the rope. He tried to keep his weight on the rock, not on the line. The knob of rock could crumble. His life was at stake, and Orolandes truly did not have the gift for abstraction.

I CALL YOU TO ANSWER, YOU WHO RULE THE WORLD…

Orolandes stiffened. Those were not his thoughts. He looked around.

He was then halfway down the slope, several hundred feet up. He saw a beast-thing with glowing yellow eyes, eyes level with his own. The great eyes locked with his, considered him, then turned away.

Orolandes continued to descend.

Certainly it would have been easy to let go. His muscles ached from the strain of climbing…but the hurt didn’t seem to matter either. It was easier to follow his training.

I am Kaharoldil, your teacher and your wet-nurse and your ancestors’ ghosts. I tell you things for your own good. Wavyhill and Mirandee and Clubfoot sang, and the Warlock’s fingers made patterns in the air.

Roze-Kattee heard.

The tall ears twitched, the head swiveled, the blazing yellow eyes found them clustered on the ground. Roze-Kattee dropped to knees and hands, the better to observe them.

Wavyhill said, “Ah, never mind.”

Right. What did it matter? Clubfoot had stopped singing too. Roze-Kattee covered the sky; its yellow eyes were twin suns. The Warlock sat down, infinitely weary, and leaned back against crumbling rock to watch the last god grow.

A thought formed, and tickled. Roze-Kattee was amused.

YOU WOULD USE A LOVE-SPELL ON ME?

Why, yes, a loyalty spell was a form of love spell. They’d been silly.

SILLY AND PRESUMPTUOUS. BUT YOU HAVE WAKED ME FROM MY DEATH SLEEP. HOW MAY I REWARD YOU?

The Warlock thought about it. Truly, he didn’t know. What must be would be.

YOU WISHED TO BRING DOWN THE MOON? Again the thought tickled. PERHAPS I WILL.

“Wait,” said Clubfoot, but he did not go on.

Now the Warlock imagined a fat sphere, blue and bluish-brown and clotted white. He sensed a watery film of life covering that sphere…and he sensed how thin it was. Remove the life from the world, and what would have changed?

This resignation, this fatalism, this dispassionate overview of reality went far beyond mere sanity, thought the Warlock. Roze-Kattee had practiced his power long before men ever put names to it. Now he imagined a smaller sphere, its rough surface the color of Wavyhill’s skull. It cruised past the larger sphere in a curved path. Now it stopped moving, then began to drift toward the larger sphere. Now the spheres bumped, and deformed, and merged in fire. A sticky cloud of flame began to cool and condense.

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?

“No,” Mirandee whispered.

“No!” Wavyhill shouted. “No, you maniac! We didn’t know!”

BUT IT IS WHAT I WANT. I CAN LIVE THROUGH THE TIME OF FIRE. I NEED THE…STATE OF THINGS THAT LETS GODS LIVE, THAT WARPS DEAD REALITY TO LIVING REALITY. WITH THE DEAD MOON’S AID I WILL PEOPLE THE CHANGED EARTH WITH MY CHILDREN. BECAUSE YOU HAVE SERVED ME, I WILL CREATE EACH OF YOU OVER AGAIN.

The last god had grown so huge that Orolandes couldn’t even find it at first. He stepped back from the rope and looked around him. There were the magicians, a good distance away, doing nothing obvious about the menace. There, what he’d taken for a mountain became a pillar of coarse pale hair…leading up into a hairy torso…Orolandes froze, trying to understand.

Then pictures invaded his mind and sent him reeling dizzily against the rock wall.

Nobody had ever told him that the world was round. After the daydream-pictures stopped flitting through his mind, he remembered that. He remembered that everyone was about to die. But the pictures he had understood so well, grew muddled now, and faded…

Never mind. What to do next? Orolandes thought of fleeing; but he wasn’t frightened.

HOW CAN I STOP THE MOON IN ITS COURSE? YOU WHO WORK IN A LAND THAT IS ALMOST DEAD, YOU MUST HAVE CONSIDERED THIS. The question came with crushing urgency, and Orolandes thought frantically. How would a Greek soldier go about stopping the Moon? Then his head cleared…

Well. The last god was proving very dangerous. Perhaps it would be best to kill the thing, Orolandes thought. The magicians seemed in no position to do so, and killing wasn’t really their field.

He pulled the silver chain from the back pack. He found the red chalk too, looked at it…but he couldn’t reproduce Mirandee’s symbols. Nor to the arm-waving. Best stick with the chain and the sword.

And still he wasn’t frightened. It was strange to be thinking this way, as if Orolandes had no more importance than any other man or woman. He had lost even love of self. This was no drug dream. It was like battlefield exhaustion, when he had fought and killed and run and fought until even his wounds no longer hurt and dying meant nothing but a chance to lie down. Thrice he had known that terrible death of self. He had not stopped fighting then.

YES, GOOD. I CAN DO THAT, he thought; and he imagined himself stretching into the sky, growing very thin and very tall.

But it was Roze-Kattee that stood upright and reached skyward. Roze-Kattee’s furry legs grew narrow, and the knees went up and up; but Roze-Kattee’s torso receded much faster, up through a stratum of broken clouds and onward.

There was no way to reach a vital spot now. Well…Orolandes marched toward the last god’s foot.

There was now something spidery about Roze-Kattee. The eyes were tiny dots of light, stars faint by daylight and right overhead. The fingers of both hands seemed thin as spiderweb strands: a web enclosing a pale crescent moon. The feet had spread and flattened as if under enormous pressure, and Orolandes had no trouble stepping up onto the foot itself, though it must cover several acres.

At no time did he picture himself as a mosquito attacking a behemoth with cold-blooded murder in mind. Orolandes’ sense of humor was stone dead.

He jogged toward the slender ankle. His skin felt puffy. He guessed that the sensation came from Roze-Kattee, and ignored it. He never guessed its origin: most of Roze-Kattee was in vacuum.

The last god’s ankle was like an ancient redwood, slender only in proportion. Orolandes looped the silver chain and held it against the furry skin. He thrust through the loop. The blade grated against bone. He withdrew the blade, moved the loop and thrust again. The point scraped bone, found a joint and sank to the hilt. He grasped the hilt in both hands and worked the blade back and forth. Roze-Kattee was slow to respond. Without impatience he withdrew the blade and stabbed again.

HURT! Orolandes yelled and grabbed his ankle. It felt like a snake had struck him. He found no wound…but he would not be unwounded long, because Roze-Kattee’s spidery hands were descending in slow motion.

Something else had changed. Suddenly it mattered very much whether a Greek swordsman survived. Orolandes ran limping across the last god’s foot, swearing through clenched teeth.

The Warlock said, “What?” exactly as if someone had spoken. He shook his head. Now what had startled him? And how had he hurt his foot? He bent to look, but the scream stopped him.

“Orolandes!” Mirandee’s scream.

It was a puzzling sight. Roze-Kattee was spread across the view like a child’s stick-figure drawing defacing a landscape painting. The scrawled line-figure stopped as if to tie a bootlace. And Mirandee was running toward where a flea seemed to be scuttling across the thing’s foot…

Then it jumped into perspective, and the Warlock saw Orolandes running for a gap in the World-Worm’s cheek. He snapped, “Wavyhill!”

“Here. Somewhere we have lost control.”

“He had us controlled till Orolandes distracted him”

“Suggestions?”

“Kill it.”

Wavyhill didn’t like the taste of that. “How?”

“The Warlock’s Wheel.”

“You built another one? Why?”

“I was trying for a prescient dream. Success or failure for the Guild meeting. I took the right drugs, and I slept in the right frame of mind, and I had a nice, peaceful, dreamless sleep. Understand? Magic wasn’t working where I was trying to look. So maybe I’d be using a Warlock’s Wheel.”

Now the swordsman was somewhere inside the World-Worm’s mouth. Roze-Kattee reached with spidery fingers into the hole a much tinier Roze-Kattee had broken through the sandstone.

Clubfoot was on the ground, his arms over his face, his body clenched like a fist.

Wavyhill said, “That’s suicide for us both. There’s got to be a better way. Warlock, there’s mana in god-murder. If we can kill it and take its power—”

“How?”

“Mirandee’s vampire spell!”

“She’d be cremated, or turned into something shapeless. Could you hold that much power? Could I? Poor Clubfoot’s already had more than he can take.”

“I hate it. All our work, lost! That’s the world’s last large source of mana, and you talk of burning it out to save a swordsman!”

“To save the world,” the Warlock said gently.

“Even Roze-Kattee can’t bring down the Moon by pushing on it!”

Pain stabbed at the Warlock’s hand. Roze-Kattee howled in their brains…and was suddenly quiet. It turned to look at them, to study them.

The cavern was black. Orolandes stayed on his hands and knees. Stalagmites he could feel his way around, but a drooping stalactite would take his head off. His foot hurt like fury. He turned left, toward the cavern’s main entrance.

Marble pillars tipped with claws blasted their way through the wall and began feeling their way around, knocking World-Worm teeth in all directions.

Now there was light. Orolandes waited.

The hand paused as if bewildered.

Orolandes sprang. He slashed at a knuckle, howled, set himself and slashed again. He ducked under the wounded finger and slashed at another. Nobody who loved Orolandes would have recognized him now, with saliva dripping from his jaws and his face contorted in murder-lust.

The hand reacted at last. It spasmed. Then it cupped and swept through the cavern gathering spires of rock. It gathered Orolandes. He stabbed again, into a joint. Then closing fingers squeezed the breath from him. His eyes blurred…

Wavyhill was shouting, “But what about us?” when the god’s blazing yellow eyes found them. “Never mind,” he said. “I think I see.”

Those eyes: they could make you not care; they could make you lose interest. But they guaranteed a dispassionate overview and a selfless judgment.

“I don’t care if it can bring down the Moon or not. It’s got to die,” said the Warlock. “The world belongs to the gods or it belongs to men.”

“I said I understand. Go ahead.”

The Warlock’s legs wouldn’t hold him. He started to crawl. Orolandes’ backpack was yards away, and his knees and hands hurt. Roze-Kattee’s vast spidery hand emerged from the cavern.

“Come on.”

“This is my top speed. Well, at least I did it to myself.”

“What?”

“This is where it ends, the killing of Glirendree. Maybe I made the wrong choice. It was a long time ago…” The Warlock spilled the pack and picked a copper disk out of the litter.

…Again his spells were losing their power. Irritated, but curious too, a young magician had made a copper disk and set two spells on it. One was simple and powerful: it held the metal together, gave it near-infinite tensile strength. The other set it spinning.

And when the Wheel had destroyed itself, he knew.

“I didn’t have anything else that would kill Glirendree. I couldn’t let it run loose, could I? But the battle made too good a story. The secret spread like a brushfire.”

“You and your damn Wheel.”

“The magic goes away and never comes back. All the magicians panicked. You made a whole discipline out of murder and resurrection. Piranther and his band scrambled for a place of safety. Rynildissen City barred magicians—”

“Do it. Before we’re stopped.”

The Warlock spoke a word in the old Guild language and let go fast. The Wheel hovered in the air, spinning.

Roze-Kattee reached for them.

The Warlock heard a humming, rising in pitch. Sudden weakness dropped him on his side, limp. The disk glowed dull red. Roze-Kattee’s fingers disappeared into the glow, stretching and thinning like smoke in a draft. The Warlock felt no pain from the god, only the god’s amazement changing to horror.

Roze-Kattee set its feet and pulled back. Now the disk was yellow-hot. Bursitis, arthritis, kidney stones, all the agony of a body that had lived too long flared and faded, and the Warlock’s strength and his senses faded together. His eyes blurred. The disk was a blue-white sun, and Roze-Kattee was pulled into it. The god’s panic was thick enough to touch…and then that faded too.

Mirandee came picking her way delicately through fallen rock. Her face was above Orolandes when he opened his eyes. “It’s all over,” she said.

Orolandes sighed. “I’ve been thinking of giving up magic.”

What should have been a joke only made her nod soberly. In daylight spilling through the smashed cavern wall, her hair glowed white. On her shadow-darkened face his caress found roughness and wrinkles.

The daylight was dwindling as they left the cavern. Orolandes saw no trace of Roze-Kattee. He saw a scar of burned and melted rock, and smelled vaporized copper.

It was possible to imagine that the mountain range to the south had the shape of a serpent, or that the earthquake-shattered cavern had some of the symmetry of a snake’s mouth. But really, the landscape was quite ordinary. Where magicians had made their last stand, they found the red man curled up and apparently asleep beside what seemed a human skeleton with two skulls.

Mirandee stooped with difficulty. She put a large-knuckled hand on Clubfoot’s shoulder and said, “Kaharoldil, speak to me.”

“I couldn’t handle it,” Clubfoot said without moving.

“You can’t go mad. Roze-Kattee saw to that. Come on, sit up. We need you.”

Clubfoot rolled over and opened his eyes. He touched the two skulls beside him, almost caressingly.

“Nice, wasn’t it?” he said, perhaps to the skulls. “Knowing how to grant wishes instead of working for them. Must have been bad when the gods were alive, though. They might grant your prayer, they might grant your enemy’s, but they’d certainly grant their own. A god’s wishes wouldn’t have anything to do with what human beings wanted.” Clubfoot looked up at last. “Mirandee, love, we should have remembered what the gods were like. Whimsical. Willful. They wiped out humanity at least once, and made us over again. These last thousand years were a golden age. We got our prayers granted, but not often, and not too far granted, and it took some skill to do it.”

“It’s over,” Mirandee said.

“Are you both all right?”

Mirandee nodded. Orolandes said, “Nothing broken, I think. I’ll have some interesting bruises. I’d have been crushed if the Warlock hadn’t distracted the god’s attention.”

“What do we do next? We’re stranded on a mountain with no magic.”

“We’ll spend the night in the cave,” Orolandes said. “Get out of here in the morning. We’ll be hungry. You probably summoned all the game in this area. So I’ll put my spear back together, and we’ll put the pack on you, Clubfoot; it’ll be empty anyway. You won’t want your tools now. What about the skulls?”

“Might as well leave them. I wish—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

APPENDICES

Unfinished Story #1

As he left the blazing summer heat outside the Warlock’s cave, the visiting sorcerer sighed with pleasure. “Warlock, how can you keep the place so cool? The mana in this region has decreased to the point where magic is nearly impossible.”

The Warlock smiled—and so did the unnoticeable young man who was sorting the Warlock’s parchments in a corner of the cave. The Warlock said, “I used a very small demon, Harlaz. He was generated by a simple, trivial spell. His intelligence is low—fortunately, for his task is a dull one. He sits at the entrance to this cave and prevents the fast-moving molecules from leaving. The rest he lets pass. Thus the cave remains cool.”

“That’s marvelous, Warlock! I suppose the process can be reversed in winter?”

“Of course.”

“Ingenious.”

“Oh, I didn’t think of it,” the Warlock said hastily. “Have you met my clerk? It was his idea.” The Warlock raised his voice. “Oh, Maxwell

The Magic May Return

Notes for a Series of Stories to be Set in the Fantasy World of The Magic Goes Away
by Larry Niven

If you have been persuaded to write stories set in the Warlock’s universe, then these notes are for your benefit.

In general, I have accepted that certain of the old legends are true—strangely altered by time, in some cases, but based on fact. Our source material could include old fairy tales, and classic epics like the Beowulf and Gilgamesh legends. My own Warlock stories have borrowed from the Cthulu Mythos, Henny Penny, the Old Testament, and Greek and East Indian legend.

I’ve generally assumed that what we know of anthropology is true. It’s a game, and you don’t necessarily have to play it; but it’s fun to match anthropology with a fantasy world, and it’s fun to find alternate explanations for well-known evidence. I put it to you that my explanation for how the original Americans got here (they crossed the Pacific by magic, fleeing an infestation of vampires in Asia) is as believable as the generally accepted theory (they crossed from Siberia to Alaska over frozen seawater!)

The first rule of fantasy is internal consistency.

The Laws of Magic

1. Similarity. Things that resemble each other are connected magically.

2. Contiguity (or Contagion). The part equals the whole.

These are the classic laws, known to anthropologists and fantasists both. Consider the voodoo doll. The wax doll should resemble the victim. It should include parts of the victim: hair or fingernails. The victim suffers the fate of the doll. For my own approach, see the reanimation of Wavyhill in The Magic Goes Away.

3. Poetic justice, viewed as a skewing of probabilities. Intentions matter in magic, just as in most of the old fairy tales. The fate of Wavyhill is instructive. Wavyhill invented necromancy: he used the mana inherent in murder to revive the dead. His fate: to be unable to die, though there was nothing left of him at the end of “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” but gnawed bones. In The Magic Goes Away, he earned his rest.

You can buy this, or not. What the heck, you’re already committed to belief in magic. Why not justice too?

A corollary: If intentions count in magic, then murder may have magical power, but war does not. If war routinely involves magicians, then an old battlefield may be as thoroughly robbed of mana as the Judging Place in Rynildissen (robbed of its mana by too many prayers of plaintiffs).

4. Magic is personal. Information theory goes right out the window. A magic spell can find a man easily, though he be safe even from income tax returns and junk mail.

5. Intuition counts. Mana may be inherent in anything that looks magical. Actually it works the other way around: if there is magic in a jewel or an oddly shaped stone, a magician will sense it at once, and so will the garbage collector’s halfwit son. Humans are naturally talented in magic.

These things have mana: jewels, cloudscapes (the more impressive, the more powerful), the sea, the Moon, moonlight, meteors and meteorites, and anything that strikes at your (your!) emotions for no rational cause. In present time, a Lava Lamp or kaleidoscope may have power.

Gold must be at least mildly magical, considering its effect on men. One would expect men to be affected most savagely by the mana in freshly unearthed gold ore (as in modern times in the California and Alaska gold rushes) and in gold used for religious purposes (as with Aztec gold).

Could oil and coal have mana? Dragon bones are found in coal deposits, and in the La Brea Tar Pits.

6. Mana may be transferred. Water may be blessed, made holy. A place may be cursed. Mana inheres in magicians and priests, and in women who are worshipped for their beauty by many men. Charisma is a manifestation of mana.

7. The laws of physics and chemistry hold unless specifically counteracted by some spell. A swordsman learned that the hard way, via the Warlock’s dagger, in “Not Long Before the End.”

8. Magic takes vast amounts of preparation in general (and whether or not it works). In The Magic Goes Away, most spells were done with words and gestures and a minimum of portable equipment. “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” was more true to life, as was Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror. The duel between Wavyhill and the Warlock took 30 years.

Magic of those times probably used paintings a lot (similarity magic). We have cave paintings from that age. Mightn’t the finest artists have been the finest magicians? I never dealt with this aspect adequately.

9. Lest we forget: The magic goes away. More generally: “And this, too, shall pass.” We are telling the tales of a world in the throes of change, and of men and women who “live in interesting times.”

But nothing stays blessed or cursed forever. Ghosts gradually lose the attributes of human beings (though not so quickly in the Warlock’s age). Women born with inherent glamour (a known form of magic!) grow old (though many keep their glamour unreasonably long).

Since the end of the real magicians, since the day of the swordsmen began, billions of meteorites have sifted their dust over the earth. Mana inheres in meteorites…and in murder. Spells should have power in Barringer Grater, and Belsen, and Reverend Jones’s part of Guiana (but not Hiroshima nor Nagasaki nor Dresden).

Hitler and Manson and Marilyn Monroe and the Rolling Stones and Che Guevara—dictators and bandits and movie stars—have displayed suspiciously high surges of charisma. Consider the almost violent increase in Man’s abilities in this century: there must be magic involved.

The magic is returning. By the ’80’s, we may see colts (or goats?) born with spiral horns in their foreheads.

Themes

There are main themes for the series to date. In addition, each Niven story had its own theme.

“Not Long Before the End” will be published as the first story in The Magic May Return. It opens the main theme: a worldwide civilization, loosely linked and rich in variety, is dying because a natural resource is running out.

If magic ever worked, then magic was not a rare phenomenon, occasionally found but preferably avoided by such as Conan the Cimmerian. Magic was the basis of civilization.

And if magic no longer works today, there must be some reason. De Camp has offered a good one: that overuse of iron in our culture has ended the age of magic.

I choose another explanation. Mana, the power behind magic, can be depleted as easily as present-day oil reserves, and with similar results.

The theme of “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” was pacifism. I attempted to show that it can’t be made to work, not even with magic.

In The Magic Goes Away, I tried to show the basis for new civilizations already forming, even while the remnants of the Sorcerer’s Guild tried to restore the glories of the past.

Hypothesis: This is not an alternate timeline; it is our own past. We must deal with a recurring question. Why can’t we find the evidence of magic-using civilizations in our past?

(Again: it’s a game. You may choose to play it, or not.)

When dragons die, and in general when any beast whose metabolism is based more on magic than on chemistry, dies (“goes mythical”), its bones tend to turn to terribly aged stone. Flesh too, if it isn’t eaten. Dinosaur relics are evidence of dragons.

Buildings raised by magic tend to fall to rubble when the magic goes away.

Tales of 14,000 years ago have mutated drastically.

We find cities which were once underwater, and we conclude that the sea must have risen. Might these old cities not be the ancient homes of merpeople? The fired clay bowls and metal tools were made by humans and traded for fish.

Et cetera. Remember: whatever you put into your story, our own time found no evidence of it, or misinterpreted that evidence. You are invited to show how.

What of your own themes? I can’t be much help. If I weren’t nearly out of ideas, I’d be writing these myself. You’re on your own. But if I might make some diffident suggestions…?

The fans keep telling me that the mana resources of the Moon, Mars, Alpha C, the earth’s core, etc., are untapped. If true, then the dawning era of space travel is going to take us right back to the age of magic. Experiments with Moon rocks may have been missing the point. Note also that our present attempts to find life on Mars have concentrated on chemically-based life: life run by slow-burning fire, not by mana. The ecology of (for instance) Burrough’s Mars must be magical; it doesn’t make sense otherwise. Bradbury’s Martians were always magical. Our astronauts could meet any of these, or the God of War himself.

Jim Baen’s suggestions: (a) All of the planets once developed magical life, which used up their mana supply and thus died out; (b) astrology takes advantage of whatever mana is left to these bodies; (c) Earth happened to be in the liquid-water zone for the sun.

Magic then would work weakly on many other planets, and most strongly on those bodies where life died soonest. (Meteor dust falling after life died out.) We’ll assume that the Moon and Mars were inhabited past E. R. Burroughs’ time; their mana is low. (And Venus? Refrigerated by magic? Swamps rich with strange, deadly life?) Uranus and Neptune and Pluto have no influence on horoscopes because meteors are scarce that far from the sun, or their magic obeys an inverse-square or inverse-cubed law.

14,000 years have passed since the Warlock’s age. Suppose that mana is replenished with the 25,000-year cycle of the Zodiac? Or the constant rain of meteor dust? Magic today would be uncontrolled, wild. All the old lore has been forgotten. We get cultural oddities like the subcivilization of Hollywood, the rise of strange cults and stranger politics in California (site where tons of gold were freshly mined, remember?), and tens of millions of people taking their beliefs and lifestyles from obvious idiots or charlatans. Where will it all end? With Blish’s Black Easter? Up to you, gang.

Returning to the past, consider: oaths were binding even as late as the Warlock’s time. It would take a magician of the Warlock’s class to break his oath. Treaties have real power. We may take the legends as accurate: in treaties between neighboring nations, as between man and demon, the phrasing counts for a great deal. There are loopholes, sometimes.

But as the magic goes away, so does the effective sanctity of a border…which is why barbarian armies are likely to rage across the oldest, most civilized of nations.

12,000 B.C. is an age of discovery. With the merpeople dead or returned to the deep places, fishing must be invented by men. The first approach might be a spell to keep fishermen alive underwater. What kind of man would build the first fishing pole? Or would the fish spear come first?

Medicine must be invented.

Construction techniques will begin to favor right angles, and pillars, and arches, and care for the solidity of the foundations. Earlier magical structures could have any shape whatever.

I’ve assumed writing already exists. But higher mathematics? Magic depends more on quality than quantity (doesn’t it?).

Consider another invention. Stage magic! What does a peasant do when confronted by a brawny swordsman, or an army? There are situations in which even a magician might want to show more power than he really has. Let (for instance) Clubfoot demonstrate some small magic like mind reading, then top the act by making a lady or a tiger disappear from a locked box. An invading army might be persuaded to go hastily away.

Then there’s the prayer wheel: a reversal of the Warlock’s Wheel. The Warlock’s Wheel used up the local mana. A prayer wheel is a paddlewheel or something similar, on which a magician imposes a weak spell to hold it motionless. The prayer wheel is turned by hand or by wind or by running water against the force of the spell. It thus generates and stores mana.

Settings

You’ll want to make your own, of course. But these are available:

Australia was colonized almost fifty years before The Magic Goes Away, probably a year or two after the Sorcerer’s Guild conference referred to in “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” Previously, the distant southern land mass had a bad reputation: infested with demons. We presume that the demons “went mythical” when the mana level dropped too low. Following the Guild conference, the magician Piranther led a migration of small black-skinned peoples to Australia. The mana level is high in Australia, and there are magical stones: black opals, concentrated mana sources, easily carried. Note that ostriches are assumed to be neotenous rocs (as in my Svetz time travel series). Note that today’s aborigines, with their pointing-bones that no longer work, are the descendants of Piranther’s band.

Rynildissen City is partly described in “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” There is an extensive werewolf section. Intelligent dragons used to visit, and the facilities for them still exist. The old city is too depleted of mana to be safe for them. There are shipyards and a bay, and a fishing industry which is now run by men. The underwater section of Rynildissen City has been deserted by the merpeople.

Prissthil is a smaller village, partly described in The Magic Goes Away. Prissthil’s economy depended on magic and the sale of starstones—pieces of the meteorite that made Fistfall Crater. There’s no more of the Fist (though meteorite dust permeates the area, making spells easier) and Prissthil’s economy is like that of other villages.

Nordik territory is a collection of swordsman cultures in the Scandinavian countries. The Nordiks hold Frost Giant slaves; they have invented saunas, they think like swordsmen.

Characters

The Warlock and Wavyhill are dead.

Gang, I hope you’ll grant me this. I don’t kill major characters lightly. These two died in a region absolutely devoid of mana, and there ain’t no way to bring them back.

You might consider picking either of these characters up earlier in their careers. But consider: how does the Warlock series differ from standard sword-and-sorcery? Only in the depletion of mana. Set your story too early in this era, and nobody knows about mana depletion. It becomes just another S&S story.

You choose to prove me wrong? Be my guest.

Characters alive following The Magic Goes Away include:

Mirandee. She’s in her eighties and showing it. We left her in the company of Orolandes and Clubfoot. All three will be trying to survive on the side of a frigid and mana-depleted mountain. But Mirandee will also be looking for a mana source to restore her youth. I did not give her much of a history, but at some time the Warlock was her lover.

Clubfoot. Ancestor to present-day American Indian. His folk can still remember crossing the Pacific, fleeing an infestation of vampires. (Consult Chinese vampire legends, please.) One of his feet is clubbed; he will walk funny, and it will slow him down about as much as Mirandee’s age. His own age: fifty-odd.

Orolandes. Call him twenty-eight. Of the three, he alone is young, healthy, and unharmed save for bruises. He never knew magic anyway, and he isn’t mourning the loss of a lover (as Mirandee is) or teacher (as Clubfoot is). He’ll be protecting the other two. The sword he’s carrying must have been made magically; the magic is now gone from it. He can expect it to shatter the first time he uses it.

Aran. A sixty-year-old (at the end of “What Good is a Glass Dagger?”) rug merchant with some political power, Aran is a werewolf. He has just learned that werewolves are wolves altered by magic. When the magic goes away, his people will be dumb beasts forever. Aran has eight children. He is determined to use his political power to bar magicians from Rynildissen City. Magicians use up the mana.

Sharla was the Warlock’s wife and apprentice in “Not Long Before The End.” Details of the marriage contract were not given. When next we saw the Warlock, she was gone. If Sharla still lives, she may be a powerful witch. Or not. Whatever her career, she retains what she learned of magic.

Glirendree is quite dead, but there must be others of his ilk. Glirendree was a demon imprisoned in the form of a battlesword. The shape left him some scope for his malice. A single magician of the past (not named; but he had a bastard son named Jeery who came to a bad end) may have imprisoned a good many demons in other forms.

I’ve described Glirendree, and the guardian demon the Warlock kept imprisoned in a tattooed design on his back. Demons can take any form you like.

An imprisoned demon has a problem: the spell that keeps him in a bottle, or in a hampering shape, is wearing away no faster than the demon’s own life. I can see a demon in Glirendree’s position finally finding himself free, but so frail due to mana depletion that he can’t do much about it.

The contexts and the situations certainly imply characters. Some are human, some are not.

Nordiks and Frost Giants are well described in The Magic Goes Away. The Frost Giants are nonhuman, but low mana reduces their size, making them effectively human. They remain tall, pale of skin, and light-haired. Poul Anderson probably has Frost Giant ancestry.

Merpeople were not well described. Use any legend you like as “research.” In ancient times the merpeople held an absolute monopoly on the fishing industry, and very little sea travel could occur without their permission and/or aid. By the end of the Warlock’s lifetime, they would die near any populated coast, unless they’re carrying talismans. Remember, three-fourths of the world’s meteorites (starstone) are on the seabottom. The merpeople may trade starstone or fishing techniques for the same price they’ve been getting: tools, information, red meat. (Never plants! They’re carnivores.)

Cetaceans were something I never mentioned. Could dolphins and whales be the low-mana form of the sea people? Then we can expect the merpeople to come in all sizes up to a blue whale. “Were-whales.”

Centaurs exist but were not described. Found in Atlantis and the Greek isles.

Dragons got considerable attention. Lack of mana kills them; their bones become drastically aged rock. Low mana mutates dragons. We saw two such mutated dragons in “What Good is a Glass Dagger?”: a great placid beast of burden, nonsentient, and a sentient dragon in a huge snail shell: well protected, but not speedy. Other mutants may breed true, evolving to, say, crocodiles. The Komodo Dragon could be a recent throwback, more evidence that the magic is returning in the present time.

(What would happen if someone bred two Komodo Dragons in Arizona’s Meteor Crater? Or even two crocodiles? Or Vreedevort Crater in Africa—)

Vampires were merely mentioned. (Use legends appropriate to the locality, please.) Other creatures of horror and the night were not mentioned (though any of them may be present), with the following exceptions.

Trolls are humanity’s ancestor, raised from the long dead by magic, to be servants.

Werewolves were part of the culture.

Rocs survived; there was a good deal of mana left in the upper atmosphere, where magicians rarely went.

The Midgard Serpent was alive, though dormant and badly ended, up to the time of The Magic Goes Away. It died then. A good number of mountain chains comprise its corpse.

For all of the above, remember that civilization will have found accommodations with any prevalent danger, and that sentient beings, such as centaurs, will engage in the traditional pursuits of sentient beings: trade and treaty-making, as well as war. For some, only war will be possible. What accommodation could we find with vampires?

What tales would children hear? The original forms of some of our own legends. As children, we know that these are “just stories.” But these children will be hearing freshly made news. Death of the World-Worm. Werewolves turning bandit in France. Sorcerers’ Guild fees increased again; and cheating a sorcerer is dangerous. The Pied Piper story may be older than we think.

The Pied Piper. Let’s include him as a possible character. “Glamour” is a simple magic. Did the Pied Piper use glamour on rats, then on children? Would adults have seen through the illusion?

A Wandering Artist could be in a hell of a bind. His assignment from the local king: paint the king’s portrait, and do the Dorian Grey number on it. The king knows this used to be a standard technique. The artist knows that it hasn’t been possible for centuries. He may be killed if he fails. His solution?

1. Paint the picture, and use its power (in voodoo style) to alter the king’s attitude toward himself. But it might be impossible to walk away from such a situation. Exit Wandering Artist, enter Power Behind The Throne, with self-elected assistants to help him rule.

2. Less safe, but easier: paint the portrait a little older, and keep altering it. A vain man tends to think he doesn’t really look older. The spell isn’t 100 percent effective? Big deal. The king might even be relieved to look a bit more distinguished every year. And the portrait reflects every wrong: blood on hands after an unjust war, beastial snarl after the hanging of insurrectionists—

Magicians. Well, I always did favor magicians. In The Magic Goes Away, they were trying to soft-land the Moon. That attempt ended the Sorcerer’s Guild. We can expect future magicians to be far less ambitious.

By hypothesis, magicians make poor swordsmen. We would expect them to branch out with skill they already have. They would be inventors, and painters, and singers, and tellers of tales, and teachers. A storyteller might use magic to show scenes from the tale he was telling: individualized movies.

Some would continue to practice magic, of course. Even when the energy expended in a spell is small, magic has this advantage: it is intensely personal. To a magician, the fingerprints of a thief are all that is needed to summon him straight to prison. Illusions can win battles.

Afterword

These notes on the Warlock’s Era resulted in two booksfull of stories, The Magic May Return and More Magic. Some of my suggestions did get used. Moreover, what I had hoped for did happen. The spate of new stories revived my own interest in the Warlock’s Era. With Dian Girard, I wrote “Talisman,” showing an unusual use for glamour; and I moved my favorite restaurant 14,000 years into the past to write “The Lion in His Attic.” There I was able to show the sea people and were-cetaceans.

Nonetheless, many of the stories I most wanted to read never appeared. The misguided attempts to use the wild magic in gold, with madness following. An attempt at commercial dealings with East Asian vampires. A near-powerless sorcerer waging war with illusions and bluff. The Wandering Artist who learns to restrict an evil king. The Magician-Storyteller.

I didn’t like being an editor.

Jim Baen had offered as follows: “You be the editor. I’ll do all the work, you take all the credit.” It didn’t work out that way. Jim left Ace Books. I’d sent all the advance money to the authors, figuring the books would have to earn out twice before I had to compute royalties. Well, The Magic May Return has done so, and Marilyn is computing the royalties, thank God; but I don’t think I want to be an editor again.

Think of these Notes, then, as an aid to daydreaming. If you like the Warlock’s Era, here’s a map.

—Larry Niven
April 14, 1984

Publisher’s Notes

THE TIME OF THE WARLOCK
by Larry Niven
illustrated by Dennis Wolf

This first edition was published in November of 1984, in an edition of 1000 copies. Two hundred of these are signed, numbered, and bound in buckram.

The text was set in 10 point Melior, with titles in Kennerly Bold, by Superior Graphics, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The text paper is Warren’s 60# Olde Style, an acid-free paper with an extended shelf life. This book was printed and bound by Edwards Brothers, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Table of Contents

- Copyright
- Contents
- Illustrations
- NOT LONG BEFORE THE END

- WHAT GOOD IS A GLASS DAGGER?

- The Dagger
- Magician’s Fee
- Challenge
- Rynildissen
- The Empty Villages
- Trolls
- The Hill Magician

- THE MAGIC GOES AWAY

- The Raft
- Llon
- Orolandes
- The Blindness Spell
- The Skull of Wavyhill
- Fistfall
- Cosmology
- The Mountain
- Cloudscapes
- The Nordiks
- The Cavern of the Last God
- The Frost Giants
- The God of Love and Madness

- Appendices

- Unfinished Story #1

- The Magic May Return

- The Laws of Magic
- Themes
- Settings
- Characters

- Afterword

- Publisher’s Notes