The Unwilling Warlord Read online

  “What is it?” he called.

  The door opened partway, and Alder stuck his head in.

  “There’s someone here who wants to see you,” Alder said apologetically. “He says he has business with you.”

  “At this hour?”

  Alder explained, “He’s been stopping by regularly all evening, but you weren’t in before.”

  That was true enough. “All right,” Sterren said, “what kind of business?”

  “He won’t say. Something about settling an account your great-uncle left, I think.”

  “Settling an account?” That did not sound encouraging at all. “Who is it?”

  Alder considered before replying, “He’s a traveling merchant, I think—if that’s not too grand a word for him. He deals in trinkets and what-not. I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him before. He really did deal with the old warlord.”

  “Trinkets?”

  Alder explained, “This and that. Little things.”

  Sterren considered telling Alder to get rid of this uninvited visitor, but his curiosity got the better of him; what had the old warlord had to do with a traveling dealer in trinkets? Why was the merchant so eager to see him that he had not been able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and leave the business, whatever it was, until morning?

  “Send him in,” he called, as he sat up on the bed.

  Alder ducked back out of sight, and a moment later another man slipped in through the half-open door, then carefully closed it securely behind him.

  He was short and dark, his hair greying, and he looked as if he had been fat once, but was not eating well lately. He wore a greasy brown tunic and even greasier grey breeches; his boots were well made, and also well worn. Despite his clothing, his face and hair were clean, and he had no objectionable odor.

  After closing the door he checked the latch carefully, then turned and made a polite but perfunctory bow.

  “Hello, Lord Sterren,” he said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m called Lar Samber’s son. As your guard said, I’m a dealer in trinkets and oddities, and the occasional love charm or poison.”

  Sterren nodded an acknowledgement, but before he could say anything, Lar continued, “And I’m sure you’re wondering what old Sterren had to do with me, and what this account is I want to settle. That wasn’t really my reason for coming here. I have another business besides my trading, you see—or rather, I trade in a product less tangible, but more important, than beads and gewgaws. Your great-uncle was my only customer, and the only person who knew about it.” He paused, eyeing Sterren, his face curiously expressionless.

  Sterren nodded expectantly. “Go on,” he said.

  Lar hesitated for the first time.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “I don’t know you, either,” Sterren pointed out.

  Lar nodded slowly. “True enough, and it’s not as if I have a choice.” The merchant hesitated again, but only briefly. “I’m your chief spy,” he burst out hurriedly. “I deal in information. Naturally, this is a secret, one that your great-uncle kept well; nobody else in Semma ever knew, until now. I’m trusting you with my life, my lord, by telling you this.”

  His face remained oddly blank even as he said this; if he felt any great anxiety over the risk he was taking, it did not show.

  Sterren puzzled over the word “spy” for a moment, then smiled, and pointed to a chair. “Sit down,” he said, “and tell me about it.”

  Lar’s face did not change as he took a seat, but Sterren was sure he was relieved.

  He was relieved himself; it was good to know that his predecessor had had spies, and had not relied entirely on his three officers and their men.

  A thought occurred to him; Lar was a traveler and a dealer in information. “Do you speak Ethsharitic?” he asked.

  Startled, Lar admitted, “Some. Not much. Mostly I speak Ophkaritic, Ksinallionese, Thanorian, and Trader’s Tongue.”

  Sterren had never even heard of Thanorian, but he didn’t let that worry him. Instead, he burst out with a string of questions in his native tongue.

  Lar had to repeatedly ask him to slow down, and several times the conversation switched back into Semmat for a time, or slipped into a pidgin of the two languages that they improvised on the spot. Even so, Sterren was able to communicate more freely than he had in days.

  Unfortunately, what Lar had to communicate was not encouraging.

  Both Ophkar and Ksinallion were planning to invade Semma.

  Somehow, although he had been trying to convince himself war was unlikely, this news did not really surprise Sterren at all.

  This impending invasion was not really a secret; in fact, the suspicion that it was being planned had been responsible for the urgency of Lady Kalira’s mission to Ethshar. The aristocrats of Semma were confident that they could survive a war—if they had a warlord.

  So they had sent for Sterren.

  Lar, however, did not stop his revelations at the mere fact of the coming war; he went on to detail the reasons for it, and also the reasons it had not yet begun.

  The underlying reasons were simple enough: Ophkar and Ksinallion both wanted Semma’s land and wealth and people. For three hundred years, Ophkar and Ksinallion had been bitter enemies; they had fought six wars in that time. In the first, Ophkar had captured the Ksinallionese province of Semma; in the second, Ksinallion won it back. It was during the Third Ophkar/Ksinallion war, in 5002, that Semma, under Tendel the Great, had rebelled against the cruel yoke of Ksinallion and asserted its independence, siding with Ophkar and leading to an Ophkarite victory.

  Five years later, when Tendel died, Ophkar invaded Semma and attempted to annex it. Semma survived by enlisting Ksinallion’s aid.

  From then on, Semma’s policy was to maintain a balance of power between Ophkar and Ksinallion by siding with whoever was weaker at any given time, playing the two off against each other in order to maintain its independence. Tendel’s son and heir, Rayel the Tenacious, had understood that; it was only when he was old and ill that matters had gotten out of hand, and a war with Ksinallion resulted in 5026. His successor, Tendel II, known as Tendel the Gentle, reigned for twenty-two years without ever letting the balance slip.

  He was followed by Rayel the Fool, who only lasted nine years, six of them spent fighting Ophkar—and losing.

  Phenvel I, also called Phenvel the Fat, had done much better; no wars were fought during his twenty-one years on the throne.

  The idea of the balancing policy was beginning to fade, though, as the kings of Semma forgot how precarious their position actually was; Phenvel II, Phenvel the Warrior, fought Ophkar for seven years of his seventeen. Admittedly, he won—the only time Semma ever single-handedly defeated Ophkar—but seven years of war could not have been pleasant. Many stories of the horrors of that Third Ophkar/Semma War were still told.

  And the resulting weakness was largely responsible for Ksinallion’s victory over Semma in the Third Ksinallion/Semma War, during the reign of Rayel III. He earned the name Rayel the Patient by waiting eleven years, carefully building up his forces and waiting until the time was right, before he launched his counter-attack and won the Fourth Ksinallion/Semma War.

  Even that victory was probably a mistake; it laid the groundwork for the disastrous defeat Rayel IV suffered in 5150, in the Fifth Ksinallion/Semma War. Only Ophkar’s threat to come in on Semma’s side had prevented Ksinallion from annexing Semma outright.

  That was Rayel the Tall; he was followed by Rayel V, Rayel the Handsome, whose death brought about the negotiated peace at the end of the Sixth Ksinallion/Semma War, establishing the present borders. That had also been the Sixth Ophkar/Ksinallion War.

  Tendel III had been called Tendel the Diplomat because he managed to talk his way out of war several times in his twenty-four year reign; he was an expert at playing Ophkar and Ksinallion off against each other, and even bringing in their other neighbors: Skaia, Thanoria, Enmurinon, Kalithon, even little Nushasla
, far to the north, at Ksinallion’s farthest extreme. None of those bordered on Semma, but the threat of a two-front war was surprisingly effective. Ophkar had no desire to fight Skaia or Enmurinon; Ksinallion preferred peace with Kalithon and Nushasla; and Thanoria served as a threat to both.

  But then Tendel III died, in 5199, and his son Phenvel III came to the throne.

  Lar hesitated to characterize his sovereign unfavorably, but from his mutterings about inbreeding and “other interests” it was plain to Sterren that the merchant considered the king an idiot.

  Fortunately, Phenvel III had had the services of a few people who were not idiots, notably Sterren, Seventh Warlord, and Sterren, Eighth Warlord. Father and son had kept up the policies of Tendel III, using diplomacy, threats, saboteurs, and whatever else was necessary to keep peace.

  King Phenvel had made this difficult, with his arbitrary insults directed at both his larger neighbors. When Prince Elken of Ophkar asked for the hand of Princess Ashassa the Younger, Phenvel had instead sent her to Prince Tabar of Kalithon. When King Corinal II of Ksinallion offered a treaty on trade routes, Phenvel had first ignored it, then sent an envoy to Ophkar asking if they cared to make a better offer. When a secret envoy came from Ophkar to discuss the possibility of war with Ksinallion, Phenvel publicly announced the whole affair; when Ophkar reacted with protests and Ksinallion offered an alliance, Phenvel had dismissed the whole thing as a foolish joke.

  There had been other incidents, as well, and now, for the first time in three hundred years, Ophkar and Ksinallion had arranged an alliance against Semma, considering Phenvel III a mutual foe.

  While they lived the warlords had prevented such an alliance, but with the death of the Eighth Warlord all the elaborate network of checks and treaties had collapsed. Enmurinon and Kalithon and Thanoria and Nushasla and Skaia were no longer involved; despite the web of intermarriages that had allied them to Semma, they all refused to make any further promises. Phenvel’s mother had come from Enmurinon, his wife from Thanoria; a daughter was a princess in Kalithon, and an aunt had been queen in Nushasla. Still, Semma was on its own. Phenvel had somehow offended every single one of his foreign relatives.

  Sterren’s spirits sank steadily as he listened to all this.

  “Why aren’t the Ophkaritic and Ksinallionese armies already here?” he asked.

  Lar sighed, and explained that the only reason the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion had not yet invaded was that they were still settling how the booty and conquered territory were to be divided. Lar and his like—he employed several people himself, and was fairly sure that old Sterren, Eighth Warlord had had some others in his own employ—had done their best to delay these negotiations, bringing up potential difficulties, picking at nits, losing messages, and so forth, and had managed to hold things off this long. The coming winter rains would presumably provide another short breathing space, but in the spring both armies would surely march.

  And it was Sterren’s job, as warlord, to hold them off indefinitely, or if possible to defeat them outright.

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Sterren demanded.

  Lar shrugged. “I wish I knew,” he replied. “I really do.”

  Chapter Ten

  As usual, the off-duty soldiers were playing dice in a corner of the barracks. Sterren sighed at the sight.

  His dismay was partly due to the fact that despite his best attempts at speech-making, his repeated talks about how important it was that Semma’s chosen defenders do all they could to get themselves ready to fight had obviously had no effect on how his men spent their leisure time.

  It was also due, however, to the knowledge that he didn’t dare join the game. Since arriving in Semma, his once-notorious luck at dice had deserted him completely.

  He had been embarrassed to discover that without that edge, he was actually a very poor gambler. Whenever he played, he lost steadily.

  At least he now knew, beyond question, that he had indeed picked up a trace of warlockry in his brief apprenticeship; nothing else could explain how he had flourished for so long back in Ethshar. Wizards and witches had been unable to detect any magic in use—but wizards and witches knew nothing about warlockry.

  It was slightly odd, perhaps, that he’d never been caught by a warlock, but maybe warlocks took pity on him, or chose to protect one of their own, no matter how feeble his talents.

  And his talent had to be warlockry, because no other form of magic was so dependent on location. He knew that much. Wizardry and witchcraft and sorcery and theurgy and demonology and herbalism and all the others worked equally well almost everywhere, or so he had heard—though there were those who complained that so much wizardry had been used in the city of Ethshar of the Spices that its residue fouled the air and weakened subsequent spells.

  Warlockry, though—a warlock’s power depended on how close he was to the mysterious Source of the Power that all warlocks drew on.

  Nobody knew exactly where the Source was, or what it was, because nobody who went to find it ever came back, but every warlock knew that it was somewhere in the hills of Aldagmor, near the border between the Baronies of Sardiron and the Hegemony of Ethshar. It supposedly called to warlocks who grew strong enough to hear it, and lured them away—and since all warlocks improved with practice, that meant most of them heard it, sooner or later, and if they stayed within range they were eventually drawn away to Aldagmor. This was referred to as the Calling, and it was invariably accompanied by weird, frightening dreams and other strangeness, and it was something that warlocks did not talk about to outsiders; it frightened them, and admitting that warlocks were afraid of anything was not in the best interests of the art. Sterren only knew about it because his former master had explained it, in lurid detail, in trying to discourage him from his apprenticeship.

  Even warlocks, though, even those who had heard the Calling and woke up every night with nightmares about it, did not know what the Source was. Nobody knew what it was, or why it should be in that particular place.

  Some people theorized that that spot was the exact center of the World, and that the Power was a gift of the gods, but others maintained that the Source was something from outside the World entirely, a mysterious something that had fallen from the heavens on the Night of Madness, back in 5202, when warlockry first emerged. Sterren had been a babe in arms on that night when half the people in Ethshar woke up screaming from nightmares they could never remember, and when one person in a thousand or so was suddenly transformed, forever after, into a warlock, able to move objects without touching them, to kill with a thought, to start fires with a mere gaze.

  Whatever the Source was, whatever the Power was, Sterren had never had more than the faintest trace of it, and here in Semma, dozens of leagues to the southeast of Ethshar and almost that much farther from Aldagmor, which lay well to the north of the city, even that trace was gone.

  In fact, in two sixnights of careful investigation, Sterren had been unable to find any evidence that anyone in all of Semma had ever heard of warlockry, or ever had any trace of the Power at his or her command. Nobody could provide him with a Semmat word for “warlock” or “warlockry.” Nobody even remembered anything about a night of bad dreams, twenty years before, and Sterren had always thought that the effects of the Night of Madness had been worldwide.

  Warlockry was totally, completely unknown in Semma.

  Sterren had had to give up playing dice.

  Watching the men toss down their coins on the betting lines, totally ignoring the presence of their warlord, he also gave up any hope of successfully defending Semma against the armies of Ophkar and Ksinallion with the forces at his disposal.

  Lar had brought another report the night before; Ophkar had two hundred men under arms, Ksinallion two hundred and fifty.

  Semma had ninety-six. And that was after Sterren had had calls for volunteers posted in all the surrounding villages. Furthermore, although fifteen or twenty of them took their role seriously, the rest seem
ed to think being a soldier meant nothing more than an excuse to go drinking and wenching in exchange for a few hours a day of marching and weapons drill—or, in the case of the cavalry, riding and weapons drill.

  Sterren knew that war was coming. Lar knew that war was coming. Lady Kalira and a dozen other nobles knew war was coming. The rest of the castle’s inhabitants, including the king, refused to worry about it.

  Princess Shirrin apparently believed that war was coming, but thought that it was all very exciting, and that Sterren, her valiant warlord, would save the kingdom by single-handedly slaughtering the foe, as if he were some legendary hero like Valder of the Magic Sword. At least, that was what Princess Lura reported her sister’s thoughts to be; Shirrin herself still found it impossible to say more than a dozen words in Sterren’s presence without blushing and falling into an embarrassed silence.

  She hadn’t actually run away from him for more than a sixnight, though, and he had seen her, several times, watching him and his men from a window, or around a corner.

  Princess Nissitha deigned to speak to him on occasion, now, but still obviously considered him far beneath her.

  He sighed again. His life was not going well.

  He had carefully broached the subject of defeat to Lady Kalira one night, in the castle kitchens, when both of them had been drinking.

  “You don’t want to think about it,” she had said, very definitely.

  “Why not?” he had replied.

  “Because if you lose a war you’ll be killed.”

  “Not ness ... ness ... necessarily. Surely you don’t expect the army to fight to the last man...” he began.

  “No, you silly Ethsharite, that’s not what I mean.” She had glowered at him.

  “What do you mean, then?” he asked, puzzled.

  “I mean,” she said, “that for the last century or two it’s been traditional for a victorious army to execute the enemy’s warlord, as a symbolic gesture. You can’t go around killing off kings; it sets a bad precedent. And you don’t want to slaughter anyone useful, not even peasants. But a defeated warlord isn’t any good to anybody, and he might go around plotting revenge, so he gets beheaded. Or hanged. Or burned at the stake. Or something.” She hiccupped. “Your great-great-grandfather, the Sixth Warlord, got drawn and quartered, back in 5150.”