The existence and behavior of the Cult of Demerchan was therefore none of her business – or it hadn’t been until this man showed up in her house.
“If you have not yet decided to accept the commission, then what purposes do you have that we might cross?” she demanded.
“We have our own interests. I am here in part to determine whether your interests align with ours. I am here in person, Guildmaster, and visible to you all, because we prefer not to antagonize the Guild, or the Sisterhood, or the Hierarchies, or the Initiates, unnecessarily; I am to speak up should it seem that a conflict is developing that might be avoided.”
That was a reasonable answer, and a believable one. Ithinia had not missed the implication that Demerchan sometimes listened in to the Guild’s private deliberations secretly, by means of their own magic, but she decided to ignore that for now – though she might want to reconsider some of her standard wards and protections when this was all done.
“You want to know whether your interests align with ours,” she said. “I would say they do. The interests of every living thing in the World are involved.”
“Oh?”
Ithinia looked over the crowd of magicians; some of them looked confused, while other faces were alight with anticipation, and still others appeared to be confident they understood the situation. Some of them probably did.
“We are not here because warlockry ended,” she said. “The World managed without it for centuries, and will do so again. We are not here because fifteen thousand refugees have suddenly been dumped on our society; the Hegemony dealt with a far worse refugee problem at the end of the Great War, and emerged from it relatively unscathed. We are not even here because of the possible danger posed by a warlock unrestrained by any threat of the Calling, one who has already demonstrated that he is perfectly willing to kill innocent people who get in his way, though that is a matter worthy of our attention. No, we are here because the source of that warlock’s power is essential to us all, and we do not want Vond, or anyone else, tampering with it.”
“Could you be a little more specific, Guildmaster?” asked a white-robed theurgist whose name Ithinia had forgotten.
“You all know that warlocks drew their power from that thing in Aldagmor,” Ithinia said. “Well, Vond found a way to draw power from the towers in Lumeth of the Towers, and we fear that this may in time weaken or damage the towers’ magic.”
“What magic?” the theurgist asked.
Somehow, Ithinia had assumed that every powerful magician would know some of the ancient secrets of the Wizards’ Guild, but of course there was no reason for that to be the case, and clearly it wasn’t. Unless, of course, the theurgist was just testing to see whether the wizardly version of the story matched whatever the priests believed.
“You are all aware, I trust, that the World does not extend indefinitely in every direction, but has edges?” She looked around the room, and saw no one indicating otherwise. “Do you know what lies beyond those edges?”
“No,” said Kirris of Slave Street. Trust a witch to be blunt, Ithinia thought. Kirris made no secret of her dislike for wizards, and Ithinia was slightly surprised she had agreed to attend this meeting. Her friend Teneria had probably talked her into it.
“Isn’t it all just sky beyond the edge?” the theurgist asked.
“No, it’s not,” Ithinia said. “Beyond the World’s edge is a vast cloud of poisonous yellow mist; so far as we know, it goes on forever in every direction except up. No one has ever seen the bottom, or the far side, of the golden mist, though it’s possible to fly above it. You can see it in the distance if you go near the edge; most sailors have seen it, and it’s visible from much of Vond’s empire, and from the western shores of Tintallion’s Isle where I grew up. If you’ve seen it, you must undoubtedly have wondered what holds it back – why hasn’t it swept over the World and poisoned us all?”
“Magic?” someone said; Ithinia didn’t see who had spoken.
“Magic! Of course. To be exact, the largest sorcerous talismans known to exist – the three towers in Lumeth cast a protective spell over the entire World, holding back the poisons and keeping our air clean and sweet.”
“Not the gods?” the theurgist asked.
Ithinia turned up a hand. “The legend passed down in our Guild says that the gods helped build the towers, but that it is the towers alone that now protect us. Our divinations confirm this. That is the power that this Vond is meddling with.”
“Meddling how?” Kirris asked.
“We don’t know,” Ithinia said. “Warlockry blocks our spells. But we know that’s where he’s drawing his power from, and we are concerned that he might somehow damage or weaken the towers’ magic.”
“The warlocks didn’t damage the thing in Aldagmor,” Teneria of Fishertown said. “There were thousands of them drawing on it, and it wasn’t affected at all.”
“But the towers are different,” Ithinia replied. “Ordinary warlocks can’t use their power; there’s something different about Vond.”
“The gods can see him,” volunteered old Corinal the Theurgist, from his place in the corner of the room.
“What?” Kirris said, turning.
“The gods can see him,” Corinal repeated. “They never could see ordinary warlocks, you know, and until these last few days we could never get a coherent explanation out of them.”
“Now you can?” Teneria asked.
“Well – not so very coherent as we might like, even now, but at least we have an explanation.”
“What is it?” Arvagan asked. “It might be important.”
Corinal looked at Ithinia, who nodded. “Well,” he said, “the gods do not see the World or anything in it the same way we do. They don’t recognize human beings by how we look – two arms, two legs, a head, and so on – but by how we think. They see our souls, not our physical bodies. They can’t usually see demonologists as people because dealing with demons distorts a person’s soul, and renders it not quite human enough for the gods to recognize.”
“So warlocks don’t have human souls?” Kirris asked.
“Oh, of course they do! But they also had something else. They were reflecting, or echoing, that thing in Aldagmor, and that was so loud, or so bright, or however you want to think of it, that it completely drowned out the warlocks’ own souls. That thing wasn’t from our reality at all, and the gods only concern themselves with our universe, not with others, so they paid no attention to it – it wasn’t part of the World, so it wasn’t real, as far as the gods could tell. It was like a shadow blocking their vision, or perhaps a roar deafening them, so they could not perceive warlocks or warlockry as anything but a sort of gap in reality. It was only when the Warlock Stone left, and all those human souls reappeared, that the gods understood what had happened clearly enough that they could explain it to us.”
“But they can see Vond?” Kirris asked.
“Because the towers are part of our universe,” Ithinia said.
“And because the towers aren’t trying to communicate,” Corinal said. “They aren’t drowning out Vond’s own thoughts with theirs – they don’t have any.”
“Which is why Vond doesn’t need to worry about another Calling,” Ithinia said.
For a moment the room was silent as everyone absorbed this explanation, but then Kirris asked, “Does Vond know that?”