He was going to die.
He had faced an inevitable doom before, when he heard the Call, but this was more immediate, more personal. He could feel his entire body tensing; his hands were trembling. He wanted to close his eyes, to not see the killing blow, to not see the hatred in Vond’s expression, but he kept them open; he did not want to give the warlock the satisfaction of seeing how scared he was.
Hanner stared defiantly at the warlock, his heart pounding. Vond drew his hand back to strike.
And Rudhira plummeted from the opening in the ceiling, an iron cooking pot in one hand and her belt-knife in the other. She landed on the warlock’s shoulders, then slammed the heavy pot down onto Vond’s head with ferocious force. Hanner heard bone crunch.
Vond collapsed, with Rudhira riding him to the floor; the sword fell from his hand, and Rudhira’s knife reached around and slashed his throat from ear to ear.
Someone screamed. The crowded room was thrown into complete chaos as anyone who had still been asleep awoke, while some people were trying to escape the violence and others were trying to get a better look.
Blood spurted from Vond’s opened throat as he struggled on the floor, trying to speak, trying to get his limbs under him; his eyes were wide with terror and pain.
Rudhira had not waited to make sure Vond was dead, or to see how the others would react; once she had finished her attack she dropped the iron pot, sprang to her feet, and ran for the door, her bloody knife still in her hand. Two of Vond’s men reached for her, but not in time. The two or three people directly in her path stepped aside; no one wanted to touch the woman who had just appeared out of nowhere and cut a man’s throat. She vanished out the door into the sunlit street.
For an instant Hanner, Marl, and Kolar didn’t move; then Hanner and Marl simultaneously dove for the dropped sword. Hanner did not worry about reaching the hilt, so his hand got there first, closing around the blade. He felt the edge cut into his fingers, but he didn’t care; he snatched the weapon up and stepped back. He was just reaching his other hand toward the hilt when Kolar’s blade pressed against his chest.
He froze, but did not release the sword. He nodded toward Vond. “He’s not dead yet,” he said.
Kolar did not allow himself to be distracted, but others, jarred from immobility by Hanner’s words, moved to roll Vond over. Someone had a piece of cloth, perhaps from a tunic, that he was using as a makeshift bandage to stanch the flow of blood, but it wasn’t enough; the pool of blood was spreading, and Vond’s movements were weakening. His eyes were wide and staring. He was still choking, but more weakly.
“What did you do?” Kolar demanded.
“I ruined the tapestry,” Hanner said.
“You killed Vond!” Marl shouted.
“I most certainly did not!” Hanner shouted back. “If I had meant to kill him, why would I have cut the tapestry and trapped all of us here?”
“Kill him, Kolar!” Marl yelled.
Kolar kept his sword in position, but did not advance. Instead he eyed Hanner thoughtfully. “Was Vond right? What he said about you thinking you can get us out of here?”
“More or less,” Hanner said. “I think my sisters will look for me, and find some way to get us all back to Ethshar.”
“Who was that?” Kolar asked. “The woman who attacked Vond?”
“Her name is Rudhira of Camptown,” Hanner said. “She’s another of the Called.”
“Why did she do it?”
“You’ll have to ask her. I don’t know.”
“I should kill you for what you did.”
“Maybe,” Hanner said, “but if you do, you’ll be hurting your chances of ever getting home. And Vond won’t be paying you now – he doesn’t have any allies to make good on his debts once he’s dead.”
Hanner had managed to keep his voice steady as he spoke, though he was not sure how he had done it – perhaps he had been so certain that Vond was about to kill him that Kolar’s threat carried little weight by comparison. Now he met Kolar’s gaze, looking him directly in the eye, just as he had Vond. If he was about to die after all, at least he could still do so with dignity.
“You won’t make good his debts?”
The question caught Hanner by surprise. His eyes flicked very briefly to the rest of the room, to see how the other swordsmen were taking this, then back to Kolar. “How much did he promise you?” he asked. “I don’t have much money of my own, but my sisters are wealthy; we might be able to work out a partial payment of some sort.”
Kolar was still considering when someone called, “That sounds good enough to me!”
“He ruined the tapestry that would have gotten us all home!” a new voice protested.
“It wasn’t working,” another voice retorted. “We don’t know if it ever would have worked again.”
At that the whole room seemed to break out in argument.
As swordsmen and refugees debated Hanner’s fate, the Great Vond, emperor of Semma and the Vondish Empire, died there on the floor. The crude attempts to help him had been too little, too late – though in fact, it was unlikely anything but powerful magic could have saved him. Even if something had stopped the bleeding, the blow to the head had cracked his skull and might have been fatal on its own.
For several moments it appeared Hanner might follow him, but in the end, no one really wanted Hanner dead. If he had been run through immediately it would probably have been accepted as a reasonable response, but no one had the heart to kill him in cold blood long after the tapestry was ruined and Vond was dead.
If Rudhira had been present, providing a more appropriate target, matters might have been different, but by the time anyone thought to attempt pursuit she had vanished completely. Hanner hoped that she was all right, wherever she might be.
And while he did not care to admit any approval of her methods, he knew she had probably saved the World a great deal of trouble.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Zallin stared at the tapestry in the fourth-floor bedroom, but kept his distance. He did not understand exactly how the spell worked, and had no intention of getting close enough to risk suddenly learning more.
Vond had vanished through that thing, and had left Zallin in charge in his absence – but he hadn’t given Zallin any magic, and how was he supposed to be in charge without magic? He wasn’t a lord, with a family history of authority. He wasn’t a guardsman, with weapons and training in giving orders. Zallin had only ever had the ability to command anything when he was a warlock. If Vond had made him a warlock again…
But Vond hadn’t given anyone access to his new kind of warlockry. He had claimed that he would, in time, but he hadn’t yet. He had gone adventuring off through the tapestry without giving anyone the means to keep order in his absence.
In fact, Zallin was beginning think Vond would never teach anyone else to use the Lumeth source. He would keep dangling it just out of reach.
Zallin was also beginning to wonder whether he really even wanted his magic back, if it was conditional on being Vond’s underling. He wanted to be a warlock again, yes, very much, but he wanted to be the kind of warlock he had always been – a respected magician, a normal part of Ethshar’s society, someone people hired to do things that could not be done without magic. He didn’t want to be a servant to a madman who was terrorizing the city, feuding with witches and wizards and antagonizing the overlord.
Most of all, he didn’t want to hurt anybody.
He had seen Vond throwing people around. He had seen the palace hanging in the air above the city. Vond didn’t care who he hurt, or what damage he did. Zallin did not consider himself a soft-hearted weakling – when he happened to observe a thief’s flogging, he had applauded justice being done, and he didn’t regret seeing murderers hanged. That was all part of the way the World worked. The sort of casual violence that Vond displayed, though, was not justice, it was brutality. Claiming Warlock House for his own, ordering everyone out – it wasn’t right.