The Unwilling Warlord Read online

  “His mother, your grandmother—who was she?” the sailor asked.

  His grandmother? Sterren was even more baffled than before. He had been seven when she died, and he remembered her mostly as a friendly, wrinkled face and a warm voice telling impossible tales. His grandfather, who had raised him after all the others were dead, had missed her terribly and had spoken of her often, explaining how he had brought her back from a tiny little kingdom on the very edge of the world, talking about how she got along so well with everyone so long as she got her way.

  “Her name was Tanissa the Stubborn, I think. She came from the Small Kingdoms somewhere.” As did these four, he realized, or at least three of them. The questions suddenly began to make sense. She must have stolen something, or committed some heinous offense, and they had finally tracked her down.

  It had certainly taken them long enough. Surely they wouldn’t carry their revenge to the third generation! “She’s dead,” he added helpfully.

  “Was she ever called Tanissa of Semma?”

  “I don’t know; I never heard her called that.”

  There was another exchange in the familiar but incomprehensible language, including his grandmother’s name as well as his own. By the end of it the woman seemed excited, and was smiling.

  The smile didn’t look vindictive, but that was very little comfort; whatever crime his grandmother had committed must have been half a century ago, and this woman could scarcely have been born then. She wasn’t exactly young, but she didn’t look that old—and she didn’t look young enough to be using a youth spell. She must have been sent on the hunt by someone else; perhaps her father or mother was the wronged party. In that case she’d be glad to have the job done, but would have no reason for personal dislike.

  A glance to either side showed the two soldiers as impassive as ever, and he wondered whether they understood what was going on any better than he did.

  The interpreter, as the sailor apparently was, turned back to Sterren and asked, “Do you have any family?”

  “No.” He didn’t think it was worth trying to lie.

  “No wife?”

  Sterren shook his head.

  “What about your mother?”

  “She died bearing me.” Perhaps, he thought, they would take pity on him because he was an orphan.

  “Since you’re the eldest, there could scarcely be brothers or sisters if she died bearing you. What about old Kelder, your grandfather?”

  It occurred to Sterren, a bit belatedly, that he was removing the possibility of spreading the blame or getting off on grounds of family support, but it was too late already, and he continued to tell the truth. “He died three years ago. He was an old man.”

  “Uncles? Aunts? Cousins?”

  “None.”

  “Your other grandparents?”

  “Dead before I was born, from drinking bad water.”

  “Good!” the sailor said with a smile. “Then you should be able to leave immediately!”

  “What?” Sterren exclaimed. “Leave where? I’m not going anywhere!” He made no attempt to hide his surprise and indignation.

  “Why not?” the sailor demanded. “You’re not still an apprentice, are you?”

  “What if I am? Where are you taking me? Who are you?” His remaining assurance faded a little more; they wouldn’t dare kill him here in the tavern, probably not anywhere in Ethshar, but if they managed to remove him from the city they could do anything they pleased. There was no law outside the walls—or at least Sterren knew of none.

  “I’m just an interpreter...” the sailor began.

  “What were those sparks?” Sterren interrupted.

  The sailor waved the question away. “Nothing; I bought them on Wizard Street to help find you. Really, I’m just an interpreter. I’m not the one looking for you.”

  “Then who are these others, and what do they want with me?”

  “The Lady Kalira is taking you to Semma,” the sailor replied.

  “The hell she is!” Sterren said. “I’m not leaving the city!” He was close to panic; visions of death by slow torture flickered through his mind.

  The sailor sighed. “I’m afraid you are, whether you like it or not.”

  “Why?” Sterren asked, letting a trace of panic into his voice in hopes of inducing pity. “What do these people want with me?”

  The man shrugged. “Don’t ask me. They hired me in Akalla to get them to Ethshar and find you, so I got them to Ethshar and found you. It’s none of my business what they want you for.”

  “It’s my business, though!” Sterren pointed out. He tried to struggle; the soldiers gave no sign they had even noticed. He subsided, and demanded, “You can ask, at least, can’t you?”

  “I can ask Lady Kalira,” the sailor admitted. “Those two don’t speak Trader’s Tongue, and for all I know they’re the ones who want you.” He seemed appallingly disinterested.

  “Ask her!” Sterren shrieked.

  The sailor turned and said something.

  The tall woman did not answer him, but stepped forward and spoke directly to Sterren, saying very slowly and distinctly, “O’ri Sterren, Enne Karnai t’Semma.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Sterren asked. He was about to say something further when he realized that the two barbarians had released his arms. He looked up at them, and saw that their huge flat faces were broken into broad grins. One stuck out an immense paw and shook Sterren’s hand vigorously, clasping it hard enough to sting. Utterly confused, Sterren asked the sailor, “What did she say?”

  “Don’t ask me; that was Semmat, not Trader’s Tongue. I don’t speak Semmat.”

  Lady Kalira saw Sterren’s continued incomprehension and said, “Od’na ya Semmat?” When he still looked blank, she said, “Et’sharitic is bad.” Her pronunciation was horrendous.

  Sterren stared for a moment, then turned to the sailor and demanded, “Is she telling me my native tongue isn’t fit for her to speak? Is this some sort of barbarian ritual thing?” He was even more thoroughly confused than before.

  “No, no, no,” the sailor said. “She’s just saying she can’t speak it very well. I don’t think she knows more than a dozen words, to be honest, and I taught her half of those on the way here.”

  The Semman aristocrat apparently gave up on direct communication with her captive, and gave the interpreter a long message to relay. He interrupted her twice, requesting clarifications—at least that was what Sterren judged to be happening, since each interruption was followed by a careful repetition of an earlier phrase.

  Finally, the sailor turned to Sterren and explained, “She says she was sent by her king, Phenvel the Third, to find the heir of your grandmother’s brother, the Eighth Warlord, who died four months ago. She consulted a magician—I’m not clear on what sort—and that led her to you. She is to bring you back to Semma to receive your title and inheritance and to fulfill your hereditary duties as the new warlord—you’re Enne Karnai, the Ninth Warlord.”

  “That’s silly,” Sterren replied. He relaxed somewhat. If the story were true, then his worries about vengeance were groundless, and he saw no reason for the woman to bother lying.

  “That’s what she said,” the sailor replied with a shrug.

  “What if I won’t go?” he asked. While it might be nice to have an inheritance waiting for him, that bit about “hereditary duties” didn’t sound good, and he wanted nothing to do with wars or warlords. Wars were dangerous. Besides, who would want to live among barbarians? Particularly among barbarians who apparently didn’t speak Ethsharitic.

  The idea was ludicrous.

  The interpreter relayed his question, and Lady Kalira’s face fell. She spoke an authoritative sentence; the sailor hesitantly translated it as, “She says that failure to perform one’s duty to one’s country is treason, and treason is punishable by immediate summary execution.”

  “Execution?” The inheritance suddenly sounded much more attractive.

  Lady
Kalira said something in Semmat; the smiles vanished from the faces of the soldiers, and each dropped a hand to his sword-hilt.

  “But it’s not my country!” Sterren protested. “I was born and raised here in Ethshar, of Ethsharitic parents!” He looked from the sailor to Lady Kalira and back.

  The sailor shrugged, a gesture that was getting on Sterren’s nerves. Lady Kalira said, in halting Ethsharitic, “You, the heir.”

  Sterren looked despairingly at the two soldiers; he could see no chance at all that he could outrun or outfight either of them, let alone both. The one on the left slid a few inches of his blade from its scabbard, in warning.

  “Hai! No bloodshed in here! Take him outside first!” The innkeeper’s voice was worried.

  No one paid any attention to his outburst—save that Sterran hoped he would call the city guard.

  Hoping for the city guard was a new experience for him.

  Even if they were summoned, though, they could not possibly arrive in time to do him any good. He had no way out. Struggling to smile, Sterren managed a ghastly parody of a grin as he said, “I guess I’ll be going to Semma, then.”

  Lady Kalira smiled smugly.

  Chapter Two

  Sterren stared at the decaying, sun-bleached town of Akalla of the Diamond in dismay. It lived up to his worst imaginings of what the barbaric Small Kingdoms would be like.

  He had had very little warning of what to expect. His captors had spirited him out of the tavern, paused at his room on Bargain Street only long enough to gather up his few belongings, and then taken him, protesting vigorously, onto their chartered ship.

  He had looked desperately for an opportunity to escape, but none had presented itself. At the last minute he had dived off the dock, only to be fished ignominiously out of the mud and dragged aboard.

  After that, he had given up any thoughts of escape for a time. Where could he escape to from a ship? He wasn’t that strong a swimmer. Instead, he had cooperated as best he could, biding his time.

  His captors had separated him from the interpreter, and made it plain that they expected him to learn their barbaric tongue—Semmat, they called it. He had swallowed his revulsion at the thought of speaking anything but proper Ethsharitic, and had done his best to oblige. After all, if he couldn’t understand what was being said around him, he would have little chance of learning anything useful.

  His language lessons had not covered very much when the ship docked in Akalla of the Diamond, just ten days after leaving Ethshar of the Spices. The weather had been hot and clear—and fairly calm, which is why it took ten days just to cross the Gulf of the East and sail the South Coast. One of the two immense Semman soldiers, the one who called himself Alder d’Yoon, told Sterren in a mixture of baby Semmat and sign language that the voyage in the other direction had taken only four days because the ship had been driven before a storm much of the way—a very expensive storm, conjured up for that very purpose, if Sterren understood him correctly.

  Alder guessed the total distance between the two ports at less than a hundred leagues, a figure that surprised Sterren considerably. He had always thought of the Small Kingdoms as being a very long way off, on the far side of the ocean, and a hundred leagues across a mere gulf didn’t seem that far.

  Of course, Sterren was not absolutely certain that he had understood Alder correctly. He knew he had the numbers straight, because he had learned them from counting fingers, but he wasn’t completely sure of the Semmat terms for “day” and “league.” He wished that he could check with the interpreter, but Lady Kalira—or rather, Aia Kalira, in Semmat—had expressly forbidden the man to talk to him in any language, and she was paying enough that the sailor would not take any chance of losing his job.

  Several members of the crew spoke Ethsharitic, but Lady Kalira had paid each of them to not speak it to Sterren except in emergencies. He was to communicate in Semmat or not at all.

  Too often, it was not at all, leaving him unsure of much of his limited vocabulary.

  Whatever the exact distances, there could be no doubt that on the afternoon of the tenth day their ship put into port at Akalla, in the shadow of the grim pile of guano-whitened stone the Semmans called Akalla Karnak. Sterren thought that karnak probably meant castle, but again, he was not quite sure. He had never seen a castle before, and the forbidding fortification at Akalla did not encourage him to seek out others.

  He had gathered that Semma lay somewhere inland, and that Akalla of the Diamond was the nearest seaport to it. He was not yet clear on whether Akalla was a separate country, a conquered province, or a district within the kingdom of Semma. The truth was that he didn’t much care, since it did not seem relevant to any plans to escape back to Ethshar.

  And Akalla looked like a place that very few people cared about. It consisted of three or four streets lined with small shops and houses, all huddled onto a narrow stretch of beach in the castle’s shadow, between two jagged stretches of broken cliffs.

  The buildings of the town were built of some sort of yellowish blocks that looked more like brick than stone, but were far larger than any bricks Sterren was familiar with. The joints all seemed to be covered with faded greenery—brown mosses or gray lichen or half-dead ivy climbing the walls. The roofs were of turf, with thin, scorched brown grass on top. He saw very few windows. Flies buzzed in clouds above the streets, and the few people who were visible on those streets seemed to be curled up asleep, completely covered by dirty white robes. The whole place smelled of dry rot.

  Sterren was not at all impressed by the town.

  The castle was far more impressive, but it, too, was streaked with dying plant life and seemed lifeless, almost abandoned.

  As Sterren watched the sailors tying up to the dock, he asked the soldier beside him—not Alder, but the other one, Alder’s comrade Dogal d’Gra—how far it was to Semma.

  Rather, he tried to ask that, but his limited knowledge of Semmat forced him to say instead, “How many leagues is Semma?” That assumed that he was using the correct word for leagues and hadn’t screwed up the grammar somewhere.

  What he had thought was a simple question plunged his guard into deep concentration; the Semman muttered to himself, saying in Semmat, “Akalla, maybe one; Skaia, four or five; Ophkar—hmm.”

  Finally, after considerable calculation, he arrived at an answer. “Twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen leagues.”

  Sterren knew the numbers up to twenty beyond any question, and a good many beyond with reasonable confidence, but to be sure he held up his ten fingers and said, “And two, three more?”

  Dogal nodded. “Yeah.”

  Horrified, Sterren stared back out at the port. Thirteen leagues? The entire city of Ethshar was little more than a league from corner to corner, yet he had never managed to explore it all. It took a good hour just to walk from Westgate to the Arena—more, if traffic was heavy. They would have to walk all night to reach Semma!

  In the event, as he later learned, they would not walk at all, and certainly not at night. Instead, when the ship was secured at bow and stern, and the gangplank in place, he found himself escorted not out onto the highway to Semma, but to a small inn near the docks—small by Sterren’s standards, that is, since it was, except for the castle, the largest structure in town.

  The interpreter, to Sterren’s consternation, stayed behind on the ship; he had fulfilled his contract and would not be accompanying them further.

  Upon learning this Sterren suddenly wished he had tried even harder during his language lessons. Now if an emergency arose he would have to rely on his limited command of Semmat, rather than finding an interpreter.

  He felt more cut off than ever.

  Once inside the inn, out of the hot sun and into the cool shade, Sterren looked around, and his opinion of Akalla went up a notch. The inn was laid out well enough, with several cozy alcoves holding tables, and one wall lined with barrels. A stairway at either side led up to a balcony, and the rooms for travelers opened of
f that. A good many customers were present, eating and drinking and filling the place with a pleasant hum of conversation, while harried but smiling barmaids hurried hither and yon.

  Most of the customers wore the thin white robes Sterren had seen on the street, but here they were thrown back to reveal gaily-colored tunics and kilts beneath.

  Lady Kalira ignored the bustle and headed directly for the innkeeper, who stood leaning against one of the barrels. She took two rooms for her party—one for herself, and one for Sterren, Alder, and Dogal.

  Sterren glanced around, and decided that even though it was a pleasant enough inn, he did not really want to be there, not with Alder and Dogal watching him constantly, and with, he presumed, nobody around who spoke Ethsharitic.

  Since he had no choice, however, he resolved to make the best of it. While Dogal took the party’s baggage up to their rooms and Lady Kalira settled with the innkeeper on the exact amount of the party’s advance payment, Sterren attempted to strike up a conversation with a winsome barmaid, using his very best Semmat.

  She stared at him for a few seconds, then smiled, said something in a language he had never heard before, and hurried away.

  He stared after her in shock.

  “What was...” he began in Ethsharitic, and then caught himself and switched to Semmat. “What was that?” he asked Alder.

  “What?” the soldier asked in reply.

  “What the ... the ... what she said.”

  Alder shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “She was speaking Akallan.”

  “Akallan? Another language?”

  “Sure,” Alder said, unperturbed.

  Sterren stared about wildly, listening to first one conversation, then another. Lady Kalira and the innkeeper were speaking Trader’s Tongue, he realized. A couple at a nearby table was whispering in some strange and sibilant speech that didn’t sound like Trader’s Tongue, Akallan, or Semmat, and which certainly wasn’t Ethsharitic. Other voices were speaking any number of dialects.

  “Gods,” Sterren said, “how does anybody ever talk to anyone here?”

  Alder asked, “What?”