The Time of the Warlock Read online

  The Time of the Warlock

  FIRST EDITION

  Published by:

  SteelDragon Press

  Box 7253, Powderhorn Station

  Minneapolis, MN 55407

  Copyright © 1984 by Larry Niven

  Illustrations copyright © 1984 by Dennis Wolf

  Parts of this volume have been published elsewhere in slightly different form. “Not Long Before the End,” “What Good Is a Glass Dagger?” and “Unfinished Story #1” all appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in the Ballantine/Del Rey collections, All the Myriad Ways and The Flight of the Horse. The Magic Goes Away was originally published by Ace Books. All have been newly revised by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without explicit permission in writing from the author or the author’s agent, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television. For information, address author’s agent: Richard Curtis, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 164 E. 64th Street, New York, NY 10021.

  ISBN 0-916595-01-3 (trade edition)

  ISBN 0-916595-02-1 (signed edition)

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-051291

  Table of Contents

  Not Long Before the End

  What Good is a Glass Dagger?

  The Dagger

  Magician’s Fee

  Challenge

  Rynildissen

  The Empty Villages

  Trolls

  The Hill Magician

  The Magic Goes Away

  The Raft

  Llon

  Orolandes

  The Blindness Spell

  The Skull of Wavyhill

  Fistfall

  Cosmology

  The Mountain

  Cloudscapes

  The Nordiks

  The Cavern of the Last God

  The Frost Giants

  The God of Love and Madness

  Appendices

  Unfinished Story #1

  Notes for Contributors to The Magic May Return

  Afterword

  List of Illustrations

  Frontispiece: The Warlock

  The Warlock had watched him coming up the hill

  “I dreamed that I would find a use for a glass dagger.”

  Great ships floated at anchor in the harbor

  The Warlock’s mounts were either lizards enlarged by magic or dragons mutated by no magic.

  Half human, half big gentle guard dog, it squatted on its haunches before the gate, looking endlessly patient.

  An arena, it was, where two sets of metal-and-leather armor stood facing each other in attack position, weapons raised, each piece of armor suspended in air.

  By noon they were high on the slope of a billowing mountain, a storm thunderhead.

  The last god was no bigger than Piranther, made of nearly translucent marble.

  NOT LONG

  BEFORE

  THE END

  Not Long Before the End

  A swordsman battled a sorcerer once upon a time.

  In that age such battles were frequent. A natural antipathy exists between swordsmen and sorcerers, as between cats and small birds, or between rats and men. Usually the swordsman lost, and humanity’s average intelligence rose some trifling fraction. Sometimes the swordsman won, and again the species was improved; for a sorcerer who cannot kill one miserable swordsman is a poor excuse for a sorcerer.

  We will call him the Warlock, as his name is both forgotten and impossible to pronounce. His parents had known what they were about. He who knows your name has power over you, but he must speak your name to use it.

  The Warlock had found his terrible truth in middle age.

  By that time he had traveled widely. It was not from choice. It was simply that he was a powerful magician, and he used his power, and he needed friends.

  He knew spells to make people love a magician. The Warlock had tried these, but he did not like the side effects. So he commonly used his great power to help those around him, that they might love him without coercion.

  He found that when he had been ten to fifteen years in a place, using his magic as whim dictated, his powers would weaken. If he moved away, they returned. Twice he had had to move, and twice he had settled in a new land, learned new customs, made new friends. It happened a third time, and he prepared to move again. But something set him to wondering.

  Why should a man’s powers be so unfairly drained out of him?

  It happened to nations too. Throughout history, those lands which had been richest in magic had been overrun by barbarians carrying swords and clubs. It was a sad truth, and one that did not bear thinking about, but the Warlock’s curiosity was strong.

  So he wondered, and he stayed to perform certain experiments.

  His last experiment involved a simple kinetic sorcery set to spin a metal disc in midair. And when that magic was done, he knew a truth he could never forget.

  So he departed. In succeeding decades he moved again and again. Time changed his personality, if not his body, and his magic became more dependable, if less showy. He had discovered a great and terrible truth, and if he kept it secret, it was through compassion. His truth spelled the end of civilization, yet it was of no earthly use to anyone.

  So he thought. But some five decades later (the date was on the order of 12,000 B.C.) it occurred to him that all truths find a use somewhere, sometime. And so he built another disc and recited spells over it, so that (like a telephone number already dialed but for one digit) the disc would be ready if ever he needed it.

  The name of the sword was Glirendree. It was several hundred years old, and quite famous.

  As for the swordsman, his name is no secret. It was Belhap Sattlestone Wirldess ag Miracloat roo Cononson. His friends, who tended to be temporary, called him Hap. He was a barbarian, of course. A civilized man would have had more sense than to touch Glirendree, and better morals than to stab a sleeping woman. Which was how Hap acquired his sword. Or vice versa.

  The Warlock recognized it long before he saw it. He was at work in the cavern he had carved beneath a hill, when an alarm went off. The hair rose up, tingling, along the back of his neck. “Visitors,” he said.

  “I don’t hear anything,” said Sharla, but there was an uneasiness to her tone. Sharla was a girl of the village who had come to live with the Warlock. That day she had persuaded the Warlock to teach her some of his simpler spells.

  “Don’t you feel the hair rising on the back of your neck? I set the alarm to do that. Let me just check…” He used a sensor like a silver hula hoop set on edge. “There’s trouble coming. Sharla, we’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “But…” Sharla waved protestingly at the table where they had been working.

  “Oh, that. We can quit in the middle. That spell isn’t dangerous.” It was a charm against lovespells, rather messy to work, but safe and tame and effective. The Warlock pointed at the spear of light glaring through the hoopsensor. “That’s dangerous. An enormously powerful focus of mana power is moving up the west side of the hill. You go down the east side.”

  “Can I help? You’ve taught me some magic.”

  The magician laughed a little nervously. “Against that? That’s Glirendree. Look at the size of the image, the color, the shape. No. You get out of here, and right now. The hill’s clear on the eastern slope.”

  “Come with me.”

  “I can’t. Not with Glirendree loose. Not when it’s already got hold of some idiot. There are obligations.”

  They came out of the cavern together
, into the mansion they shared. Sharla, still protesting, donned a robe and started down the hill. The Warlock hastily selected an armload of paraphernalia and went outside.

  The intruder was halfway up the hill: a large but apparently human being carrying something long and glittering. He was still a quarter of an hour downslope. The Warlock set up the silver hula hoop and looked through it.

  The sword was a flame of mana discharge; an eye-hurting needle of white light. Glirendree, right enough. He knew of other, equally powerful mana foci, but none were portable, and none would show as a sword to the unaided eye.

  He should have told Sharla to inform the Sorcerer’s Guild. She had that much magic. Too late now.

  There was no colored borderline to the spear of light.

  No green fringe effect meant no protective spells. The swordsman had not tried to guard himself against what he carried. Certainly the intruder was no magician, and he had not the intelligence to get the help of a magician. Did he know nothing about Glirendree?

  Not that that would help the Warlock. He who carried Glirendree was invulnerable to any power save Glirendree itself. Or so it was said.

  “Let’s test that,” said the Warlock to himself. He dipped into his armload of equipment and came up with something wooden, shaped like an ocarina. He blew the dust off it, raised it in his fist and pointed it down the mountain. But he hesitated.

  The loyalty spell was simple and safe, but it did have side effects. It lowered its victim’s intelligence.

  “Self-defense,” the Warlock reminded himself, and blew into the ocarina.

  The swordsman did not break stride. Glirendree didn’t even glow; it had absorbed the spell that easily.

  In minutes the swordsman would be here. The Warlock hurriedly set up a simple prognostics spell. At least he could learn who would win the coming battle.

  No picture formed before him. The scenery did not even waver.

  “Well, now,” said the Warlock. “Well, now!” And he reached into his clutter of sorcerous tools and found a metal disc. Another instant’s rummaging produced a double-edged knife, profusely inscribed in no known language, and very sharp.

  At the top of the Warlock’s hill was a spring, and the stream from that spring ran past the Warlock’s house. The swordsman stood leaning on his sword, facing the Warlock across that stream. He breathed deeply, for it had been a hard climb.

  He was powerfully muscled and profusely scarred. To the Warlock it seemed strange that so young a man should have found time to acquire so many scars. But none of his wounds had impaired motor functions. The Warlock had watched him coming up the hill. The swordsman was in top physical shape.

  His eyes were deep blue and brilliant, and half an inch too close together for the Warlock’s taste.

  “I am Hap,” he called across the stream. “Where is she?”

  “You mean Sharla, of course. But why is that your concern?”

  “I have come to free her from her shameful bondage, old man. Too long have you—”

  “Hey, hey, hey. Sharla’s my wife.”

  “Too long have you used her for your vile and lecherous purposes. Too—”

  “Sharla stays of her own free will.”

  “You expect me to believe that? As lovely a woman as Sharla, could she love an old and feeble warlock?”

  “Do I look feeble?”

  The Warlock did not look like an old man. He seemed Hap’s age, some twenty years old, and his frame and his musculature were the equal of Hap’s. He had not bothered to dress as he left the cavern. In place of Hap’s scars, his back bore a tattoo in red and green and gold, an elaborately curlicued pentagramic design, almost hypnotic in its extradimensional involutions.

  “Everyone in the village knows your age,” said Hap. “You’re two hundred years old, if not more.”

  “Hap,” said the Warlock. “Belhap something-or-other roo Cononson. Now I remember. Sharla told me you tried to bother her last time she went to the village. I should have done something about it then.”

  “Old man, you lie. Sharla is under a spell. Everybody knows the power of a warlock’s loyalty spell.”

  “I don’t use them. I don’t like the side effects. Who wants to be surrounded by friendly morons?” The Warlock pointed to Glirendree. “Do you know what you carry?”

  Hap nodded ominously.

  “Then you ought to know better. Maybe it’s not too late. See if you can transfer it to your left hand.”

  “I tried that. I can’t let go of it.” Hap cut at the air, restlessly, with his sixty pounds of sword. “I have to sleep with the damned thing clutched in my hand.”

  “Well, it’s too late then.”

  “It’s worth it,” Hap said grimly. “For now I can kill you. Too long has an innocent woman been subjected to your lecherous—”

  “I know, I know.” The Warlock changed languages suddenly, speaking high and fast. He spoke thus for almost a minute, then switched back to Rynaldese. “Do you feel any pain?”

  “Not a twinge,” said Hap. He had not moved. He stood with his remarkable sword at the ready, glowering at the magician across the stream.

  “No sudden urge to travel? Attacks of remorse? Change of body temperature?” But Hap was grinning now, not at all nicely. “I thought not. Well, it had to be tried.”

  There was an instant of blinding light.

  When it reached the vicinity of the hill, the meteorite had dwindled to the size of a baseball. It should have finished its journey at the back of Hap’s head. Instead, it exploded a millisecond too soon. When the light had died, Hap stood within a ring of craterlets.

  The swordsman’s unsymmetrical jaw dropped, and then he closed his mouth and started forward. The sword hummed faintly.

  The Warlock turned his back.

  Hap curled his lip at the Warlock’s cowardice. Then he jumped three feet backward from a standing start. A shadow had pulled itself from the Warlock’s back.

  In a lunar cave with the sun glaring into its mouth, a man’s shadow on the wall might have looked that sharp and black. The shadow dropped to the ground and stood up, a humanoid outline that was less a shape than a window view of the ultimate blackness beyond the death of the universe. Then it leapt.

  Glirendree seemed to move of its own accord. It hacked the demon once lengthwise and once across, while the demon seemed to batter against an invisible shield, trying to reach Hap even as it died.

  “Clever,” Hap panted. “A pentagram on your back, a demon trapped inside.”

  “That’s clever,” said the Warlock, “but it didn’t work. Carrying Glirendree works, but it’s not clever. I ask you again, do you know what you carry?”

  “The most powerful sword ever forged.” Hap raised the weapon high. His right arm was more heavily muscled than his left, and inches longer, as if Glirendree had been at work on it. “A sword to make me the equal of any warlock or sorceress, and without the help of demons, either. I had to kill a woman who loved me to get it, but I paid that price gladly. When I have sent you to your just reward, Sharla will come to me—”

  “She’ll spit in your eye. Now will you listen to me? Glirendree is a demon. If you had an ounce of sense, you’d cut your arm off at the elbow.”

  Hap looked startled. “You mean there’s a demon imprisoned in the metal?”

  “Get it through your head. There is no metal. It’s a demon, a bound demon, and it’s a parasite. It’ll age you to death in a year unless you cut it loose. A wizard of the northlands imprisoned it in its present form, then gave it to one of his bastards, Jeery of Something-or-other. Jeery conquered half this continent before he died on the battlefield, of senile decay. It was given into the charge of the Rainbow Witch a year before I was born, because there never was a woman who had less use for people, especially men.”

  “That happens to have been untrue.”

  “Probably Glirendree’s doing. Started her glands up again, did it? She should have guarded against that.”

  �
��A year,” said Hap. “One year.”

  But the sword stirred restlessly in his hand. “It will be a glorious year,” said Hap, and he came forward.

  The Warlock picked up a copper disc. “Four,” he said, and the disc spun in midair.

  By the time Hap had sloshed through the stream, the disc was a blur of motion. The Warlock moved to keep it between himself and Hap, and Hap dared not touch it, for it would have sheared through anything at all. He crossed around it, but again the Warlock had darted to the other side. In the pause he snatched up something else: a silvery knife, profusely inscribed.

  “Whatever that is,” said Hap, “it can’t hurt me. No magic can affect me while I carry Glirendree.”

  “True enough,” said the Warlock. “The disc will lose its force in a minute anyway. In the meantime, I know a secret that I would like to tell, one I could never tell to a friend.”

  Hap raised Glirendree above his head and, two-handed, swung it down on the disc. The sword stopped jarringly at the disc’s rim.

  “It’s protecting you,” said the Warlock. “If Glirendree hit the rim now, the recoil would knock you clear down to the village. Can’t you hear the hum?”

  Hap heard the whine as the disc cut the air. The tone was going up and up the scale.

  “You’re stalling,” he said.

  “That’s true. So? Can it hurt you?”

  “No. You were saying you knew a secret.” Hap braced himself, sword raised, on one side of the disc, which now glowed red at the edge.

  “I’ve wanted to tell someone for such a long time. A hundred and fifty years. Even Sharla doesn’t know.” The Warlock still stood ready to run if the swordsman should come after him. “I’d learned a little magic in those days, not much compared to what I know now, but big, showy stuff. Castles floating in the air. Dragons with golden scales. Armies turned to stone, or wiped out by lightning, instead of simple death spells. Stuff like that takes a lot of power, you know?”

  “I’ve heard of such things.”

  “I did it all the time, for myself, for friends, for whoever happened to be king, or whomever I happened to be in love with. And I found that after I’d been settled for a while, the power would leave me. I’d have to move elsewhere to get it back.”