“This gargoyle that was watching my house – that’s yours too, isn’t it?”
The gargoyle suddenly plummeted to the ground, landing in the street with an earth-shaking thud. Hanner struggled to move faster as he ran down the street, though he really had no very clear idea what he intended to do when he got there.
“You think this city is yours, and you can do what you please here?” Vond bellowed. “I say it’s mine now. And I’m about to show you why!”
With that, the warlock turned and flew away to the north.
Hanner slowed to a stop, baffled. What was Vond up to now? The warlock himself had vanished from Hanner’s view, behind the rooftops, but the orange glow was still there – he had not gone very far. Hanner took a few more paces, to the corner of Center Avenue, and looked north down the slope, along the broad avenue, past Second Street and Short Street to the plaza at the end of the street, and to the overlord’s palace on the north side of the plaza.
Vond was flying directly over the palace, rising higher and higher. Hanner felt a chill of foreboding.
For any citizen of Ethshar of the Spices, the palace was a symbol of the city’s power, the heart of the government, the overlord’s residence, but for Hanner it was also his childhood home. He had grown up in that place, behind those yellow marble walls. He had played in those stone corridors, dropped pebbles in the surrounding canals, run shouting across the red brick plaza.
And he had family in the palace. His sister Alris was in there, and according to Mavi, his daughter Hala. After seventeen years he didn’t know who else might still be living there, but Alris and Hala – Hala who was now a grown woman, who he had last seen as a little girl, who he had not yet taken time to visit – were inside those walls, beneath that roof. Hanner watched in dread as Vond hung glowing in the sky above the familiar structure.
The warlock stopped rising, a mere glowing dot against the night sky, and although it was hard to be certain at such a distance, Hanner thought he looked down.
Then the ground shook, and Hanner heard the loudest sound of his life, an immense roar as the entire palace shivered, shook, then tore free of its surroundings and began to rise. The shattered remnants of the bridge that crossed the canal from the plaza to the palace door fell, rattling and splashing, as the palace ripped loose. The guards who had stood at the outer end of the bridge ran, arms over their heads, to escape the flying debris, and Hanner stared in open-mouthed horror as the entire palace ascended into the night sky – not merely the three stories above ground, but the huge underlying block of dark, rough stone that Hanner realized must contain the cellars.
The guards at the inner end of the demolished bridge were now perched on a narrow ledge, where they had flattened themselves against the tightly-closed doors to keep from falling to their deaths. Hanner could see that one had dropped his spear, while the other had not.
As the initial indescribable noise faded to the rumble of settling wreckage, Hanner registered that people were screaming all around him, and had been for several seconds; the roar of the palace tearing out of the ground had drowned them out.
He didn’t blame them for screaming. He had never seen anything so frightening – not on the Night of Madness, nor any time since, not even when he first awoke in Aldagmor to see that inexplicable thing in the sky above him, and the other thing in the ground beneath. The very alienness of the Source and the Response had made them less terrifying than this horrible distortion of the World as he knew it.
He had known Vond was powerful. He had heard the stories about how Vond once bent the edge of the World itself, how he built a gigantic palace of his own overnight, magically cutting the walls from bedrock. Hanner had thought he comprehended what a powerful warlock could do; he had seen Rudhira, long ago, pull a literal mountain of water out of the city’s harbor.
None of that had prepared him for this, and he stood frozen to the spot, staring with his mouth open, as the overlord’s palace rose to a height of a few hundred feet, then moved majestically southward, across the plaza and over the mansions of the New City.
It did not come directly south, up Center Avenue, though; it was veering to the east, toward Arena Street. Hanner watched as it glided through the night sky, dark against the darkness, until it came to rest centered two blocks east and a hundred yards up from where he stood.
That put the western end perhaps a hundred feet east of his position – as he had been taught as a child, the palace measured eight hundred and four feet from one end of the southern facade to the other, and the blocks on Lower Street were scarcely three hundred feet. Hanner could look up and see the western windows.
He could see the terrified faces of servants and courtiers staring out those windows, looking down at him and the others in the streets below, and his heart clenched in his chest as he realized his sister and daughter might be among those at the windows. They probably had no idea what was happening, he realized; they could not possibly see Vond from where they were, and had probably not heard his shouting through the palace’s thick stone walls.
Then a movement caught Hanner’s eye, and he watched as Vond came swooping down around the palace, and descended to the street in front of Ithinia’s house.
Hanner started forward again. He did not know what Vond had planned, or how Ithinia would react, but he knew them both, and he wanted to be there, to provide a voice of calm reason, a neutral voice, in the inevitable confrontation.
Only then did he notice that save for Vond, the gargoyle, and himself, the street below the palace was empty; the few pedestrians who had been on Lower Street had fled, eager to get out from beneath the palace. The gargoyle was back on its feet, and seemed unhurt by its fall and whatever else Vond had done to it, but it was backing away, clearly unwilling to confront the warlock as Vond floated toward Ithinia’s door.
The body of the dead witch was still there, as well; Vond kicked it aside as he arrived on the wizard’s front step. “Open up, wizard!” Vond bellowed, his voice still unnaturally loud, but well short of the thunderous volume he had used earlier.
Hanner was still half a block away when the door swung open, and a man’s gentle voice said, “Would you care to come in, your Majesty?” Hanner clearly heard the thump as the man, presumably Ithinia’s servant Obdur, was flung back against a wall to make way for the enraged warlock. Hanner watched Vond sail through the door into the warmly-lit interior.
“Wait!” he called, breaking into a desperate run. “Wait, I should be there, too!”
No one replied. Vond did not re-emerge. For a moment nothing changed, and Hanner heard nothing but his own panting, the pounding of his own feet, and distant shouting as the city reacted to the theft of the palace and its inhabitants. The oblong of lamplight that was Ithinia’s open door drew nearer, and for a moment Hanner thought he was going to make it, that no one was going to close the door.
But then the door swung shut after all, and the latch fell into place with a distinct click.
Hanner slowed. He took a deep breath of the cold night air, letting its chill fill his lungs, and then looked up.
The palace was hanging above him; its vast dark mass blocked out the sky, and the glow of the streetlights did little to illuminate the gray stone of its underside. It was hovering motionlessly above the city – above the three blocks of Lower Street between Center Avenue and Arena Street. It was as unmoving as a ceiling, despite being supported by nothing more than a hundred yards of air and Vond’s invisible, inexplicable magic.
If anything happened to Vond, the palace would fall. Everyone in it would die, including Alris, Hala, and the overlord. Everyone beneath it would be crushed.