The Time of the Warlock Read online

  Then pictures invaded his mind and sent him reeling dizzily against the rock wall.

  Nobody had ever told him that the world was round. After the daydream-pictures stopped flitting through his mind, he remembered that. He remembered that everyone was about to die. But the pictures he had understood so well, grew muddled now, and faded…

  Never mind. What to do next? Orolandes thought of fleeing; but he wasn’t frightened.

  HOW CAN I STOP THE MOON IN ITS COURSE? YOU WHO WORK IN A LAND THAT IS ALMOST DEAD, YOU MUST HAVE CONSIDERED THIS. The question came with crushing urgency, and Orolandes thought frantically. How would a Greek soldier go about stopping the Moon? Then his head cleared…

  Well. The last god was proving very dangerous. Perhaps it would be best to kill the thing, Orolandes thought. The magicians seemed in no position to do so, and killing wasn’t really their field.

  He pulled the silver chain from the back pack. He found the red chalk too, looked at it…but he couldn’t reproduce Mirandee’s symbols. Nor to the arm-waving. Best stick with the chain and the sword.

  And still he wasn’t frightened. It was strange to be thinking this way, as if Orolandes had no more importance than any other man or woman. He had lost even love of self. This was no drug dream. It was like battlefield exhaustion, when he had fought and killed and run and fought until even his wounds no longer hurt and dying meant nothing but a chance to lie down. Thrice he had known that terrible death of self. He had not stopped fighting then.

  YES, GOOD. I CAN DO THAT, he thought; and he imagined himself stretching into the sky, growing very thin and very tall.

  But it was Roze-Kattee that stood upright and reached skyward. Roze-Kattee’s furry legs grew narrow, and the knees went up and up; but Roze-Kattee’s torso receded much faster, up through a stratum of broken clouds and onward.

  There was no way to reach a vital spot now. Well…Orolandes marched toward the last god’s foot.

  There was now something spidery about Roze-Kattee. The eyes were tiny dots of light, stars faint by daylight and right overhead. The fingers of both hands seemed thin as spiderweb strands: a web enclosing a pale crescent moon. The feet had spread and flattened as if under enormous pressure, and Orolandes had no trouble stepping up onto the foot itself, though it must cover several acres.

  At no time did he picture himself as a mosquito attacking a behemoth with cold-blooded murder in mind. Orolandes’ sense of humor was stone dead.

  He jogged toward the slender ankle. His skin felt puffy. He guessed that the sensation came from Roze-Kattee, and ignored it. He never guessed its origin: most of Roze-Kattee was in vacuum.

  The last god’s ankle was like an ancient redwood, slender only in proportion. Orolandes looped the silver chain and held it against the furry skin. He thrust through the loop. The blade grated against bone. He withdrew the blade, moved the loop and thrust again. The point scraped bone, found a joint and sank to the hilt. He grasped the hilt in both hands and worked the blade back and forth. Roze-Kattee was slow to respond. Without impatience he withdrew the blade and stabbed again.

  HURT! Orolandes yelled and grabbed his ankle. It felt like a snake had struck him. He found no wound…but he would not be unwounded long, because Roze-Kattee’s spidery hands were descending in slow motion.

  Something else had changed. Suddenly it mattered very much whether a Greek swordsman survived. Orolandes ran limping across the last god’s foot, swearing through clenched teeth.

  The Warlock said, “What?” exactly as if someone had spoken. He shook his head. Now what had startled him? And how had he hurt his foot? He bent to look, but the scream stopped him.

  “Orolandes!” Mirandee’s scream.

  It was a puzzling sight. Roze-Kattee was spread across the view like a child’s stick-figure drawing defacing a landscape painting. The scrawled line-figure stopped as if to tie a bootlace. And Mirandee was running toward where a flea seemed to be scuttling across the thing’s foot…

  Then it jumped into perspective, and the Warlock saw Orolandes running for a gap in the World-Worm’s cheek. He snapped, “Wavyhill!”

  “Here. Somewhere we have lost control.”

  “He had us controlled till Orolandes distracted him”

  “Suggestions?”

  “Kill it.”

  Wavyhill didn’t like the taste of that. “How?”

  “The Warlock’s Wheel.”

  “You built another one? Why?”

  “I was trying for a prescient dream. Success or failure for the Guild meeting. I took the right drugs, and I slept in the right frame of mind, and I had a nice, peaceful, dreamless sleep. Understand? Magic wasn’t working where I was trying to look. So maybe I’d be using a Warlock’s Wheel.”

  Now the swordsman was somewhere inside the World-Worm’s mouth. Roze-Kattee reached with spidery fingers into the hole a much tinier Roze-Kattee had broken through the sandstone.

  Clubfoot was on the ground, his arms over his face, his body clenched like a fist.

  Wavyhill said, “That’s suicide for us both. There’s got to be a better way. Warlock, there’s mana in god-murder. If we can kill it and take its power—”

  “How?”

  “Mirandee’s vampire spell!”

  “She’d be cremated, or turned into something shapeless. Could you hold that much power? Could I? Poor Clubfoot’s already had more than he can take.”

  “I hate it. All our work, lost! That’s the world’s last large source of mana, and you talk of burning it out to save a swordsman!”

  “To save the world,” the Warlock said gently.

  “Even Roze-Kattee can’t bring down the Moon by pushing on it!”

  Pain stabbed at the Warlock’s hand. Roze-Kattee howled in their brains…and was suddenly quiet. It turned to look at them, to study them.

  The cavern was black. Orolandes stayed on his hands and knees. Stalagmites he could feel his way around, but a drooping stalactite would take his head off. His foot hurt like fury. He turned left, toward the cavern’s main entrance.

  Marble pillars tipped with claws blasted their way through the wall and began feeling their way around, knocking World-Worm teeth in all directions.

  Now there was light. Orolandes waited.

  The hand paused as if bewildered.

  Orolandes sprang. He slashed at a knuckle, howled, set himself and slashed again. He ducked under the wounded finger and slashed at another. Nobody who loved Orolandes would have recognized him now, with saliva dripping from his jaws and his face contorted in murder-lust.

  The hand reacted at last. It spasmed. Then it cupped and swept through the cavern gathering spires of rock. It gathered Orolandes. He stabbed again, into a joint. Then closing fingers squeezed the breath from him. His eyes blurred…

  Wavyhill was shouting, “But what about us?” when the god’s blazing yellow eyes found them. “Never mind,” he said. “I think I see.”

  Those eyes: they could make you not care; they could make you lose interest. But they guaranteed a dispassionate overview and a selfless judgment.

  “I don’t care if it can bring down the Moon or not. It’s got to die,” said the Warlock. “The world belongs to the gods or it belongs to men.”

  “I said I understand. Go ahead.”

  The Warlock’s legs wouldn’t hold him. He started to crawl. Orolandes’ backpack was yards away, and his knees and hands hurt. Roze-Kattee’s vast spidery hand emerged from the cavern.

  “Come on.”

  “This is my top speed. Well, at least I did it to myself.”

  “What?”

  “This is where it ends, the killing of Glirendree. Maybe I made the wrong choice. It was a long time ago…” The Warlock spilled the pack and picked a copper disk out of the litter.

  …Again his spells were losing their power. Irritated, but curious too, a young magician had made a copper disk and set two spells on it. One was simple and powerful: it held the metal together, gave it near-infinite tensile stre
ngth. The other set it spinning.

  And when the Wheel had destroyed itself, he knew.

  “I didn’t have anything else that would kill Glirendree. I couldn’t let it run loose, could I? But the battle made too good a story. The secret spread like a brushfire.”

  “You and your damn Wheel.”

  “The magic goes away and never comes back. All the magicians panicked. You made a whole discipline out of murder and resurrection. Piranther and his band scrambled for a place of safety. Rynildissen City barred magicians—”

  “Do it. Before we’re stopped.”

  The Warlock spoke a word in the old Guild language and let go fast. The Wheel hovered in the air, spinning.

  Roze-Kattee reached for them.

  The Warlock heard a humming, rising in pitch. Sudden weakness dropped him on his side, limp. The disk glowed dull red. Roze-Kattee’s fingers disappeared into the glow, stretching and thinning like smoke in a draft. The Warlock felt no pain from the god, only the god’s amazement changing to horror.

  Roze-Kattee set its feet and pulled back. Now the disk was yellow-hot. Bursitis, arthritis, kidney stones, all the agony of a body that had lived too long flared and faded, and the Warlock’s strength and his senses faded together. His eyes blurred. The disk was a blue-white sun, and Roze-Kattee was pulled into it. The god’s panic was thick enough to touch…and then that faded too.

  Mirandee came picking her way delicately through fallen rock. Her face was above Orolandes when he opened his eyes. “It’s all over,” she said.

  Orolandes sighed. “I’ve been thinking of giving up magic.”

  What should have been a joke only made her nod soberly. In daylight spilling through the smashed cavern wall, her hair glowed white. On her shadow-darkened face his caress found roughness and wrinkles.

  The daylight was dwindling as they left the cavern. Orolandes saw no trace of Roze-Kattee. He saw a scar of burned and melted rock, and smelled vaporized copper.

  It was possible to imagine that the mountain range to the south had the shape of a serpent, or that the earthquake-shattered cavern had some of the symmetry of a snake’s mouth. But really, the landscape was quite ordinary. Where magicians had made their last stand, they found the red man curled up and apparently asleep beside what seemed a human skeleton with two skulls.

  Mirandee stooped with difficulty. She put a large-knuckled hand on Clubfoot’s shoulder and said, “Kaharoldil, speak to me.”

  “I couldn’t handle it,” Clubfoot said without moving.

  “You can’t go mad. Roze-Kattee saw to that. Come on, sit up. We need you.”

  Clubfoot rolled over and opened his eyes. He touched the two skulls beside him, almost caressingly.

  “Nice, wasn’t it?” he said, perhaps to the skulls. “Knowing how to grant wishes instead of working for them. Must have been bad when the gods were alive, though. They might grant your prayer, they might grant your enemy’s, but they’d certainly grant their own. A god’s wishes wouldn’t have anything to do with what human beings wanted.” Clubfoot looked up at last. “Mirandee, love, we should have remembered what the gods were like. Whimsical. Willful. They wiped out humanity at least once, and made us over again. These last thousand years were a golden age. We got our prayers granted, but not often, and not too far granted, and it took some skill to do it.”

  “It’s over,” Mirandee said.

  “Are you both all right?”

  Mirandee nodded. Orolandes said, “Nothing broken, I think. I’ll have some interesting bruises. I’d have been crushed if the Warlock hadn’t distracted the god’s attention.”

  “What do we do next? We’re stranded on a mountain with no magic.”

  “We’ll spend the night in the cave,” Orolandes said. “Get out of here in the morning. We’ll be hungry. You probably summoned all the game in this area. So I’ll put my spear back together, and we’ll put the pack on you, Clubfoot; it’ll be empty anyway. You won’t want your tools now. What about the skulls?”

  “Might as well leave them. I wish—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  APPENDICES

  Unfinished Story #1

  As he left the blazing summer heat outside the Warlock’s cave, the visiting sorcerer sighed with pleasure. “Warlock, how can you keep the place so cool? The mana in this region has decreased to the point where magic is nearly impossible.”

  The Warlock smiled—and so did the unnoticeable young man who was sorting the Warlock’s parchments in a corner of the cave. The Warlock said, “I used a very small demon, Harlaz. He was generated by a simple, trivial spell. His intelligence is low—fortunately, for his task is a dull one. He sits at the entrance to this cave and prevents the fast-moving molecules from leaving. The rest he lets pass. Thus the cave remains cool.”

  “That’s marvelous, Warlock! I suppose the process can be reversed in winter?”

  “Of course.”

  “Ingenious.”

  “Oh, I didn’t think of it,” the Warlock said hastily. “Have you met my clerk? It was his idea.” The Warlock raised his voice. “Oh, Maxwell

  The Magic May Return

  Notes for a Series of Stories to be Set in the Fantasy World of The Magic Goes Away

  by Larry Niven

  If you have been persuaded to write stories set in the Warlock’s universe, then these notes are for your benefit.

  In general, I have accepted that certain of the old legends are true—strangely altered by time, in some cases, but based on fact. Our source material could include old fairy tales, and classic epics like the Beowulf and Gilgamesh legends. My own Warlock stories have borrowed from the Cthulu Mythos, Henny Penny, the Old Testament, and Greek and East Indian legend.

  I’ve generally assumed that what we know of anthropology is true. It’s a game, and you don’t necessarily have to play it; but it’s fun to match anthropology with a fantasy world, and it’s fun to find alternate explanations for well-known evidence. I put it to you that my explanation for how the original Americans got here (they crossed the Pacific by magic, fleeing an infestation of vampires in Asia) is as believable as the generally accepted theory (they crossed from Siberia to Alaska over frozen seawater!)

  The first rule of fantasy is internal consistency.

  The Laws of Magic

  1. Similarity. Things that resemble each other are connected magically.

  2. Contiguity (or Contagion). The part equals the whole.

  These are the classic laws, known to anthropologists and fantasists both. Consider the voodoo doll. The wax doll should resemble the victim. It should include parts of the victim: hair or fingernails. The victim suffers the fate of the doll. For my own approach, see the reanimation of Wavyhill in The Magic Goes Away.

  3. Poetic justice, viewed as a skewing of probabilities. Intentions matter in magic, just as in most of the old fairy tales. The fate of Wavyhill is instructive. Wavyhill invented necromancy: he used the mana inherent in murder to revive the dead. His fate: to be unable to die, though there was nothing left of him at the end of “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” but gnawed bones. In The Magic Goes Away, he earned his rest.

  You can buy this, or not. What the heck, you’re already committed to belief in magic. Why not justice too?

  A corollary: If intentions count in magic, then murder may have magical power, but war does not. If war routinely involves magicians, then an old battlefield may be as thoroughly robbed of mana as the Judging Place in Rynildissen (robbed of its mana by too many prayers of plaintiffs).

  4. Magic is personal. Information theory goes right out the window. A magic spell can find a man easily, though he be safe even from income tax returns and junk mail.

  5. Intuition counts. Mana may be inherent in anything that looks magical. Actually it works the other way around: if there is magic in a jewel or an oddly shaped stone, a magician will sense it at once, and so will the garbage collector’s halfwit son. Humans are naturally talented in magic.


  These things have mana: jewels, cloudscapes (the more impressive, the more powerful), the sea, the Moon, moonlight, meteors and meteorites, and anything that strikes at your (your!) emotions for no rational cause. In present time, a Lava Lamp or kaleidoscope may have power.

  Gold must be at least mildly magical, considering its effect on men. One would expect men to be affected most savagely by the mana in freshly unearthed gold ore (as in modern times in the California and Alaska gold rushes) and in gold used for religious purposes (as with Aztec gold).

  Could oil and coal have mana? Dragon bones are found in coal deposits, and in the La Brea Tar Pits.

  6. Mana may be transferred. Water may be blessed, made holy. A place may be cursed. Mana inheres in magicians and priests, and in women who are worshipped for their beauty by many men. Charisma is a manifestation of mana.

  7. The laws of physics and chemistry hold unless specifically counteracted by some spell. A swordsman learned that the hard way, via the Warlock’s dagger, in “Not Long Before the End.”

  8. Magic takes vast amounts of preparation in general (and whether or not it works). In The Magic Goes Away, most spells were done with words and gestures and a minimum of portable equipment. “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” was more true to life, as was Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror. The duel between Wavyhill and the Warlock took 30 years.

  Magic of those times probably used paintings a lot (similarity magic). We have cave paintings from that age. Mightn’t the finest artists have been the finest magicians? I never dealt with this aspect adequately.

  9. Lest we forget: The magic goes away. More generally: “And this, too, shall pass.” We are telling the tales of a world in the throes of change, and of men and women who “live in interesting times.”

  But nothing stays blessed or cursed forever. Ghosts gradually lose the attributes of human beings (though not so quickly in the Warlock’s age). Women born with inherent glamour (a known form of magic!) grow old (though many keep their glamour unreasonably long).