The Wizard Lord Read online

  The Wizard Lord had provided a dry night and a pleasantly cool day, and the sun was still low above the distant eastern cliffs; wisps of morning mist lingered in the trees and fields. Breaker found no reason to hurry. He ambled past the smithy and the carpenters’ shops, then took the middle path under the pavilion terrace, stretching his legs to skip every second stone. He called a greeting to the brewmaster and Younger Priestess as he passed the shadowy door to the cellars; he could hear rattling and sloshing, and the priestess speaking to ler in their own language, presumably negotiating with them for all to go well with this new batch of beer.

  No one returned his call, but that was no surprise; they were busy. He emerged from the shadows into the slanting sun and turned to mount the southern steps. At the top he turned again, and slouched into the pavilion itself.

  Last night’s debris had largely been cleared away, the floor swept, and he wondered whether some of the villagers had risen early to deal with this, or whether Elder had talked some of the ler into taking care of it.

  Then he noticed the old woman seated by the flickering hearthfire, and wondered instead whether the wizards had used their magic.

  But a wizard’s magic, like a priest’s, still depended on the cooperation of ler—wizards just used different ler, ler not tied to a specific place. A priest could call on the spirits of earth and tree, field and stream, root and branch, spirits bound to their own corner of the world, while a wizard controlled spirits of wind and fire, light and darkness, spirits that could roam freely wherever their fancy—or the wizard’s orders—might take them.

  And of course, priests generally asked the ler for favors, and bargained with them, where wizards were said to bind them and compel them.

  Elder might have summoned the pavilion’s own ler, the spirits of plank and stone that dwelt in the structure itself, or the ler of the surrounding trees, or of the mice and insects and other creatures that undoubtedly lived beneath the building; the wizards could have summoned a wind from halfway across the world to blow away the dust and spilled beer. Either way, the floor was swept.

  As he stood there considering this the old woman, the female wizard, looked up and saw him.

  “Ah, boy,” she said. “Come here, would you?”

  Breaker hesitated—like most villagers he avoided strangers, and this woman was not merely a stranger, but a wizard. Not only might she unwittingly anger the local ler through ignorance of their ways or her mere presence, but she had ler of her own at her beck and call, strange ler not bound to Mad Oak or its surroundings.

  But that was all the more reason not to be rude to her, and if he was to become the world’s greatest swordsman, one of the Chosen, one of the assigned heroes who would defend Barokan should the Wizard Lord go mad, then he would presumably need to deal with strangers, and even with wizards, regularly. He would need to get over his reluctance. He squared his shoulders and marched across the room to her.

  She gestured at an empty chair, and he sat down beside her.

  For a moment the two of them sat silently, looking at one another while trying not to stare rudely; then she asked, “I know you don’t use true names here in Mad Oak, but what do they call you?”

  “Breaker,” he said.

  She grimaced. “And what do you break?” she asked. “Not heads, I hope.”

  Breaker smiled. “No,” he said. “My mother’s dishes, the poles for the beans, that sort of thing. I was clumsy as a child; my father said it was because I was growing so fast that my body had to keep relearning how to move.”

  “I’m not sure that’s much better,” the wizard said. “A head-breaking temper would be a bad thing in a swordsman, but a clumsy swordsman might be even worse.”

  “I’m not clumsy now,” Breaker said. “Ask Little Weaver, or Curly.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The girls I danced with last night. They’ll tell you that I’ve caught up with my growth.”

  “So you remember last night, then?”

  “Most of it.”

  “The beer hasn’t washed it all away? You remember the dancing—do you remember what you spoke of with my companions before the music began?”

  “You mean about becoming the Swordsman? Yes, I remember.”

  “And do you still want to take on the role?”

  Breaker hesitated, remembering his mother’s words, her hostile face. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t want to be a killer.”

  “Well, that’s all right, then,” the wizard said. “We don’t want you running off and putting a blade through the Wizard Lord on a whim; killing a man is serious business, killing a wizard even more so, killing the Wizard Lord most of all. We want a swordsman who is reluctant to act, who will give even the darkest Lord a fair chance to depart in peace—but who is ready to do what is necessary if the Lord will not yield.”

  Breaker blinked at her. “Depart in peace?” he said. “Is that possible?”

  “Certainly!” She smiled at him, and he noticed a tooth was missing on one side. “As long as a corrupt Wizard Lord is removed from power, why would anyone care how? In all the centuries of the Wizard Lords’ rule, there have been five slain by the Chosen—and three who left of their own free will rather than face the Chosen, giving their talismans and oaths over to the Council of Immortals and allowing a new Wizard Lord to take power.”

  Breaker gazed silently at her for a long moment, then said, “I’m sorry; I thought I understood the system and knew about the Dark Lords, but it seems I was mistaken. Eight Dark Lords? I had only heard of four, I think. And who or what is the Council of Immortals? I heard it mentioned last night, but I admit I don’t know what it is.” He grimaced. “I begin to think I was far too hasty in saying I might want to be one of the Chosen.”

  The smile vanished, and the wizard sighed.

  “There is a great deal of history involved,” she said. “And far too many complicated rules have accumulated. It all started out very simple, but of course it couldn’t stay simple.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because it’s done by people,” the wizard said. “We can never leave anything alone; we always meddle, and adjust, and repair.” She straightened in her chair. “So then, Breaker,” she said, “what do you know of the Wizard Lords, and the Chosen Heroes?”

  Breaker hesitated. He had heard the stories as a child, but told in childish terms, and he did not want to sound childish to this woman. She seemed to be treating him as an adult, and he did not want to lose that respect. He would tell the story as he remembered it, but not necessarily in the same words.

  “More than six hundred years ago,” he began, “a group of wizards decided that Barokan would be a happier land if a single person ruled it all, from the Eastern Cliffs to the Western Isles, to put an end to destructive disputes between wizards—wicked wizards and magical duels had laid waste to large areas and killed many innocent people, and everyone agreed it had to be stopped, and these wizards thought that setting up a single ruler was the best way to stop it. They chose one of their number to be this ruler, the first Wizard Lord, and bestowed upon him much of their combined magic, binding to him the most powerful ler known to humanity, including mastery of the skies and wind.

  “With so much magic at his disposal none could stand against the Wizard Lord, and he brought peace to all the lands from cliffs to sea, and reigned well for many years. He hunted down and slew any wizard who preyed on the innocent, and arbitrated disputes to prevent magical duels. In time he grew old and tired, and he gave up his power and withdrew from the world, and named another wizard his successor as Wizard Lord. He, too, reigned long and well before going peacefully into retirement.

  “But the third Wizard Lord, although he had feigned otherwise, had an evil heart, and once he was in power he began to kill his enemies and to steal whatever he saw that caught his fancy, and to hunt down and slaughter all other wizards so that they could not threaten his rule, rather than just the few who made trouble. But a
few of the surviving wizards, although they could not face the Wizard Lord’s overwhelming magic directly, devised a scheme to bring him down. They chose a few ordinary people and granted them magical abilities that the evil Lord could not counter, and these Chosen Heroes were able to confront and slay the Wizard Lord, though most of them died in the process. And when it was all over, a new Wizard Lord was chosen—but the surviving heroes also found successors, for themselves and their slain comrades, and let it be known that henceforth any Wizard Lord who violated the trust of the people of Barokan would be slain, as the third one, now called the Dark Lord of the Midlands, was.

  “Nonetheless, every so often a Wizard Lord has thought he found a way to defeat the Chosen, or was simply overcome by madness or evil, so that three more times the Chosen had to leave their ordinary lives and find their way into the Wizard Lord’s stronghold, wherever it might be, and kill the corrupt ruler. The most recent was a little over a hundred years ago, when the Dark Lord of Goln Vleys was defeated, and the eight Chosen—the Swordsman, the Beauty, the Leader, the Scholar, the Thief, the Seer, and . . . I don’t remember the others just now.”

  “The Archer and the Speaker.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Anyway, the eight are still Chosen, but don’t really need to do anything but stand ready, since our modern Wizard Lords are good, well-chosen rulers—”

  “Well, that’s what we always hope for, certainly.”

  “I don’t know of any Council of Immortals, though.”

  “Oh, but you do! You mentioned us. You just don’t know the name.”

  Breaker frowned. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “The group of wizards who set up the Wizard Lords in the first place. That’s us, the Council of Immortals.”

  Breaker stared at her for a moment. “Are you claiming to be six hundred years old?” he said. He knew priests and wizards could do amazing things, but he was not sure whether he was willing to believe that—she was obviously elderly, but six hundred years?

  “No, no,” she said. “We aren’t literally immortals. And I certainly wasn’t born until centuries after the first Wizard Lord was appointed. But the group of wizards that set him up in power, and that created the Chosen, didn’t disband; they admitted new members as the old died off, including any Wizard Lord who retired honorably, and continued on, keeping an eye on matters from behind the scenes. It’s the Council of Immortals that chooses each new Wizard Lord, and that picks the Chosen, and sometimes it’s the Council of Immortals that tells the Chosen when the time has come to remove a Wizard Lord who has become a danger and refused to resign willingly. You see?”

  Breaker thought about that for a moment, then said, “So the Wizard Lord does not actually rule Barokan? He’s merely a figurehead for this council?”

  “No, no, no,” the wizard said, shaking her head vigorously. “We don’t rule anything; the Wizard Lord does. He has the magic, the eight Great Talismans. He controls the weather and the wild beasts. He has the authority to hunt down and kill rogue wizards—any wizard who disturbs the peace, even if he’s a member of the Council. All we do is choose who will be given the power, and decide if and when it must be removed. And giving the command to the Chosen, as we have just a handful of times over the past seven hundred years, requires a nearly unanimous vote—if just three of us believe the Wizard Lord’s misbehavior does not require his death, then the Chosen are not called.”

  “But you could decide to remove him at any time.”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “So you really have the final authority.”

  “Collectively, I suppose we do. But we don’t use it.”

  Breaker considered that for a long moment, then asked, “Why not? Why bother with this system of controlling the Wizard Lord? Why doesn’t the Council rule directly?”

  The wizard grimaced. “We don’t control him. I just told you that.”

  “You have the power to kill him . . .”

  “Only if we almost all agree! And believe me, lad, we don’t often agree on anything.”

  “But why did you—or your ancestors—set this up? Why didn’t you just rule Barokan yourselves? Why don’t you now?”

  “Because we don’t want to—don’t you understand? We’re the descendants of the rogue wizards you hear horror stories of at your mother’s knee—and most of the stories are true, Breaker; have you ever heard about the Siege of Blueflower?”

  “I know the song . . .”

  “The song is true, Breaker. That really happened. If there’s no greater power to rein us in we wizards run rampant across Barokan, pillaging and plundering and smashing anything we please, and fighting among ourselves. You must have heard how the old wizard wars laid waste to entire areas—you just said it happened, so I know you heard about it! Well, the only thing that prevents that sort of chaos now is the Wizard Lord, the one man with the power to smash us all. There’s a reason we vested the means to destroy him in ordinary men and women, rather than keeping it for ourselves and our fellow wizards—we know we can’t be trusted with it.”

  Breaker thought about that for a moment. He thought about the Siege of Blueflower, famed in song and story, where according to legend three rogue wizards had joined forces to enslave an entire town, and had ordered the men of the town to defend them against the Wizard Lord, on pain of seeing their wives and daughters tortured to death should they fail to do their utmost.

  The men had done their best, for the most part, and out of pity the Wizard Lord had done his best to see that neither they nor their loved ones died—but the song’s last three verses were a mournful recitation, horrifyingly detailed, of how the victorious Wizard Lord and the freed townsfolk had found the mangled remains of a dozen young women in the dead wizards’ stronghold, and how the Wizard Lord had grieved over his failure to save them all.

  That had been five hundred years ago—but this wizard was acknowledging that she was one of the heirs to those three rogues.

  “But then why doesn’t the Wizard Lord just kill you all, so you can’t go rogue? And then you couldn’t unleash the Chosen.”

  “Because that would unleash the Chosen—the Chosen have instructions to kill the Wizard Lord if the Council fails to reassure them every year or so that everything is running smoothly. Our ancestors weren’t suicidal—we like being wizards, even if we know we can’t be trusted.”

  “So the Wizard Lord is required to defend Barokan against the wizards, and defend the wizards against themselves, without killing you all? And the Chosen are there to ensure that works?”

  “Yes.”

  “It sounds complicated.”

  “It is. I told you earlier that it was. We don’t claim it’s a perfect system; it’s just the best our ancestors could come up with, and it’s worked well enough since then that we haven’t tried to change it much. If anything, we’ve made it even more complicated, adding new rules and more Chosen over the years—and we haven’t had to kill a Dark Lord in over a century, so it seems to be about right.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And now you have a chance to be a vital part of it all.”

  “By promising to kill the Wizard Lord if he . . . what? If he displeases this Council of yours? His fellow wizards?”

  The wizard let out an exasperated sigh.

  “More than displeases us,” she said. “He has to start killing or raping or robbing innocent people—and not just one or two, either—before we’ll summon the Chosen. Either that, or breaking the rules.”

  “See? If he breaks your rules!”

  “Breaker, the rules are all there to make sure he’s not trying to destroy the system and make himself invulnerable. The rules mostly say that he can’t kill the Chosen, that he can’t interfere with them or with anything else that’s designed to keep him in check, that he can’t try to acquire magic that would let him defeat the Chosen. That’s all. He can do what he pleases otherwise; he can kill members of the Council and we probably won’t try to stop
him—past Wizard Lords have done just that. After all, the whole point of the Wizard Lord is to keep all the other wizards under control, and that includes us. And remember that we don’t control the Chosen; we can tell them we want the Wizard Lord dead, and why, but if they think our reasons insufficient, they won’t go.”

  Breaker blinked in surprise. “You can’t make them do it?”

  “The whole point of the Chosen is to dispose of Wizard Lords gone bad; of course wizards can’t control them!”

  Up to that point Breaker had been convincing himself that the whole system was corrupt, that he and everyone he knew had been deceived about how Barokan was ruled, that the Chosen and the Wizard Lord were just tools of this mysterious Council of Immortals, and that his mother was right and he should take no part in it, but this suddenly changed everything . . .

  If it was true.

  But if it was true, then in a way the Chosen were the ultimate power in all Barokan. He wasn’t just being offered a ceremonial position that would give him magical abilities with weapons that he could use to impress girls; in a way, he was being entrusted with the final authority over . . . well, over everything. He would be the one to decide whether the Wizard Lord lived or died. Yes, the Swordsman was supposed to obey the Leader, and listen to the other Chosen, and apparently to this Council of Immortals that he had never heard of by name until yesterday, but it was the Swordsman who was ultimately expected to kill any Wizard Lord who might turn to evil—and he could make up his own mind about it. He could decide! He, Breaker of Mad Oak, could determine the course of history.

  “What if the Chosen decided to act without your Council’s urging?”

  The wizard shrugged. “Then they would act. They have that right, indeed, that obligation, as part of their role—and sometimes the Seer knows things the rest of us don’t; it’s part of his or her magic to know certain things about the Wizard Lord without being told, so it might well happen. If the Seer and the Leader decide the Wizard Lord must be removed, then the Wizard Lord must be removed.”