He watched as the dice bounced from the wall and rolled across the floor. The first landed showing a single pip; the second bumped it, but did not tip it over, and it, too, showed just one pip when it came to rest.
The third bumped the toe of a soldier’s boot and stopped, showing one pip.
Laughter and applause sounded again, as Sterren picked up his winnings.
Nobody was laughing half an hour later, when Sterren had won some sixty copper bits in one of the shortest games of three-count ever seen.
The soldiers scattered, leaving him standing there with a full purse in one hand, the dice in the other. He stared at the bits of polished bone. His talent was back. Vond’s attuning had worked, and he was drawing luck from the Lumeth source. He wondered whether he should be pleased.
CHAPTER 29
The peasants were being evicted from the castle, and Sterren stood atop the wall and watched as they went unwillingly out the gate into the wreckage that had been their village.
These were the people who had run for the shelter of the castle walls when the banners of the invaders first appeared on the horizon; the gates had been shut and barred well before the enemy armies came within bowshot, leaving the stragglers to flee in all directions. The people who had reached the castle were not the bravest, and were in no hurry to venture back out into the World.
King Phenvel, however, had put up with enough of the crowding and inconvenience and at dinner the previous night had announced that all peasants were to be outside the gates before noon. He had ordered Sterren and Lord Algarven, the royal steward, to see to it.
Although he did not really think that Phenvel’s authority still amounted to much, Sterren had shrugged and obeyed. Vond had only begun building his palace the previous morning, and despite Sterren’s warnings, the new situation had not yet sunk in. Phenvel still thought of himself as ruler of Semma, and the other Semmans still had the habit of obeying him. The castle was still his.
So now Sterren stood on the ramparts, watching his soldiers herd the peasants out the gate.
Each one, whether man, woman, or child, did the same thing upon passing the gate. Each one looked north, at the warlock’s building site.
Vond’s project was progressing well. He had completed his crypts, or at least the shell, in that first day, and had built his hill up around them overnight. Now he was erecting white marble walls on that base. The ground shook each time a new section dropped into place, and the roar of stone grinding against stone was almost constant.
Vond’s first quarry, now closed, had yielded granite, so the marble, gleaming in the morning sun, was a surprise, and combined with the horrendous racket it was very hard to ignore.
The entertainment, for Sterren, was not that each face turned toward the palace, but in seeing what each one did next.
Some stopped and stood staring, open-mouthed, until proddings from behind forced them to move on. Others took a single glance and marched on, stolidly accepting this miraculous construction as just another event that was none of their business. A few looked, then looked away, clearly frightened, as if just looking at the palace might somehow get them in trouble. Some of the children laughed and applauded as huge stones fell into position, or pointed wonderingly at the tiny black-robed figure hanging unsupported above the high white walls.
The next thing that each peasant did, after looking at Vond’s latest handiwork, was to look at the ruined village, and the reactions to that were far more consistent. Sterren could see despair plainly in the expressions and slumped shoulders of virtually all the evictees.
He had already decided, by the time the first peasant passed the threshold into the mud-soaked, debris-strewn village market, that he would order his soldiers to help with the clean-up and rebuilding. They were supposed to be men of war, and it was the war that had made this mess, so cleaning it up fell within their duties as Sterren saw them.
The last peasant was stepping unwillingly out into the mud when the roar from the north stopped.
It took a moment for the echoes to die away and silence to descend, and by then everyone had noticed the change, and every face had turned toward the new palace. The little black shape no longer flew above the marble walls; instead, it was soaring gracefully toward them. Sterren heard a few whispers from the crowd below, but then silence fell again as they all stared at the approaching warlock.
Sterren, too, stared, wondering why Vond had stopped work at this particular moment. He hadn’t finished the wall he was working on. If he was coming to force King Phenvel to surrender, it struck Sterren as rather peculiar timing.
Then he realized that from his position high above the palace, Vond would have seen the people emerging from the castle. He might even have seen Sterren, on the battlements above, and recognized him.
And Sterren, after all, was warlord of Semma. The warlock might think that an attack was being organized, or a formal surrender, or some other operation involving him.
“Hai!” he called, waving an arm. “Vond! Over here!” He did not want the warlock to believe for even a moment that anything suspicious was going on. He could probably kill every peasant there, and Sterren, too, as easily as Sterren would stamp on an ant.
Vond waved and a moment later he settled down onto the wall beside Sterren. The peasants below stared up at the two of them. “Hello, Sterren,” he said, “What’s happening? I saw the crowd from over there.” He waved toward his palace, and Sterren saw a proud smile flash across his face. “Coming along nicely, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Sterren agreed. Privately, he thought that the place looked somewhat forbidding; Vond had not bothered with much architectural detailing, but had used huge blank slabs of stone for most of his construction. He had not yet cut windows in them, either. The result, despite the white marble, looked more like a fortress than a palace.
Vond himself looked as human and ordinary as ever, just a smiling middle-aged man in black robes, and it was a bit hard to comprehend that he had singlehandedly erected most of that fortress in a day and a half.
“What’s this?” the warlock asked, waving at the market square. It was obvious to anyone that the ragged crowd milling below was no army readying for an attack.
“The king’s evicting them,” Sterren explained. “They took shelter in the castle during the siege and, now that the siege is over, they’re leaving.”
“Where are they going?” Vond asked, interested.
“Here,” Sterren said, waving. “They’re mostly from the village here. They’ll have to clean it up and rebuild, of course; I’ll be sending my men out to help. I suppose some of them come from the farms, too.” He couldn’t resist adding, “I don’t know if any of them are from the farms you’ve torn up for your palace.”
Vond glanced at him, startled, and then looked back down at the peasants.
“Oh,” he said, “but this can’t be all the people from all those farms and the entire village, too! What happened to the rest? Did the invaders kill them?”
Sterren shrugged. “Some of them, probably, but a lot must have fled every which way. You remember meeting some of those. These are just the ones who got to the castle before the gate was closed; nobody’s gone out to bring in the others yet.”