The Unwelcome Warlock. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ nightmares and compulsions, continued to snatch away any warlock who grew too powerful.

      Chapter Two

      The cold air rushed past Sensella’s face, drying her eyes and chilling her skin, but was not enough to distract her from her ferocious need to reach Aldagmor — or rather, a specific place in Aldagmor; she knew she was probably somewhere in Aldagmor now, but she still had a league or two to go. Nothing else mattered — not the cold, not the dark, not the family she had left behind. She knew her children and grandchildren would be upset that she was gone, that she had flown off in the middle of the night, but that wasn’t as important as getting to the thing in Aldagmor, to whatever it was that was calling her. Her magic didn’t matter, other than in helping her get there; if it were to suddenly vanish and she survived the fall, she knew she would just get to her feet and walk, or better yet, run, to answer the Call.

      She had left before dawn, flown the day through, and now the sun had been below the horizon for more than an hour, but she would not be traveling much longer. Dark forests rolled past beneath her feet as she flew through the night sky, stars twinkled overhead, and she knew she was getting close. That was so important, so urgent, that she was barely aware of her surroundings —

      Until the sky above her lit up in a blaze of light and color that flashed in an instant from red through orange to yellow, and then turned impossibly white, lighting the World so brightly that everything was washed out, every shadow banished.

      And while the Call did not stop, it was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of reassurance, of comfort. The Calling was wordless, but put into words it would say more or less, “Come to me.” This new message, equally wordless and far more powerful, answered, “We have come.”

      But it wasn’t speaking to her.

      Sensella slowed in her flight, and blinked, trying to understand what was happening.

      The landscape ahead was lit with that strange, intensely white light that leached the color from everything. It was fading somewhat, not as bright as it had been, but it was still more than enough to see. There was a valley, there were forested mountains on the far side. It was uninhabited wilderness — no roads, no houses, no farms.

      But in the middle of the valley was a mound, a strange dark mound directly ahead of her; Sensella could not make it out clearly. It was not overgrown with trees or grasses, like a natural hill, nor was it bare stone or earth. It was made up of hundreds or thousands of objects piled one upon another, but in the eerie whiteness Sensella could not judge their size, or discern their colors.

      The source of that unnatural light hung directly above the mound, and was descending slowly toward it.

      The Calling, she realized, came from the mound. This was what she had come to Aldagmor to find. This was the source of the warlocks’ magic. She could feel the power surging through her. Until just a moment before she had been unaware of it, unable to use it for anything but flying closer, but now the spell was — not broken, but countered, by that gigantic thing that was slowly sinking down from the heavens.

      She looked up, trying to see through the glare, and her brain refused to resolve what her eyes saw into a comprehensible shape. There was something coming down from the sky, something the size of a small city, something that glowed as brightly as the sun, but in a different spectrum, and Sensella could not make herself see it. She thought it was more or less round, and at least twice as wide as it was tall, but beyond that she could not make sense of it.

      That overwhelming message of reassurance came from the thing in the sky, just as the Call’s demand for aid came from the mound — or from something beneath the mound. The thing in the sky had come in response to the Call, just as she had herself; she knew it. She could not have explained how she knew it, any more than she could have said exactly what the Calling had been whispering to her all these years, but she did know it, completely and irrefutably.

      Sensella had slowed in her flight, but not stopped; she was still approaching the mound, and now, as her eyes adjusted to the glare and her mind to the alienness of what she was seeing, she realized what the objects composing the mound were.

      They were people. Hundreds of people, packed face-down into an immense pile. Most of them were dressed in black — warlock black.

      Shocked, she stopped in mid-air. She hung about sixty feet off the ground, staring at that great heap of humanity.

      She could not hear anything. The Call and the Response made no actual sound, but they drowned out everything else all the same, filling the part of her brain that might otherwise have reacted to what her ears detected. She could smell nothing but the cool night air of the forested hills of Aldagmor. She could see the mound, but the strange light made it hard to know exactly what she was seeing, and she could not tell whether the people stacked up before her were breathing, whether they were alive or dead. Certainly, they weren’t moving.

      The idea that she was looking at a gigantic pile of corpses horrified her, and she reached out with her magic, with that awareness of location and movement that was a part of a warlock’s supernatural abilities. She tried to sense the people she saw, to tell whether they were dead or alive.

      She couldn’t. Something stopped her perceptions.

      It wasn’t just that they were dead; warlockry could sense a dead body perfectly well. No, something was blocking her magic.

      She looked up at the glowing thing. It was still descending. If it didn’t stop, it would land upon that mound and crush all those people.

      “No!” she shouted. She moved forward again, descending, and landed running. It was only when her feet hit the dew-covered knee-high grass that she realized she was barefoot; she had risen from her bed in the middle of the night, and had been drawn away by the Calling in her nightgown, without shoes or a coat.

      That didn’t matter, though. She had to get to that mound. She had to help. Somewhere deep in her mind, she knew that she was confusing different urges, that she was combining the Call’s demand to come to this place with her desire to help those poor helpless people, but right now it didn’t matter; they both drove her toward that mound.

      To her surprise, she reached it before the descending monstrosity did — she had misjudged either the thing’s speed, or its size. She stopped just short of the mound, despite the relentless Calling that still tugged at her; she forced herself to stop, to look at the situation. The Response had drowned out enough of the Call to let her think, to allow her to remember that no Called warlock had ever returned, and she looked at the great pile in front of her and guessed that if she touched it she would be pulled in, never to escape. She was inches away from the motionless back of a gray-haired man in a black tunic, she saw, and to one side of him stood a white-haired woman, and beyond that a black-haired man; to the other side were more, wearing the black garb of warlocks, or assorted nightclothes, or in some cases nothing at all.

      Looking between the shoulders of this front layer, she could see more people, jammed together skin to skin, and stacked atop the people at ground level were others, standing or kneeling on shoulders and heads, leaning forward. The entire mound seemed to be a great mass of people, piled together too tightly to move or breathe, all utterly still, completely unmoving. She heard no movement, no breathing, no heartbeats — yet they did not look dead. Her warlock perception could not detect anything at all; it was as if the World ended a step in front of her. The surrounding hills and forests, the grass beneath her feet, the air around her and the earth upon which she stood were all their normal, natural selves, composed of a myriad of tiny particles and subtle forces moving and interacting in ways that she, as a warlock, could sense but not explain, but the pile of people in front of her СКАЧАТЬ