Ghouls have wide mouths displaying a daunting expanse of sharp, wedge-shaped teeth designed for ripping. Their big, pointed goblin-ears come erect and alert as they listen intently or show apprehension. Ghoul hearing is quite sensitive; they gather information more by eavesdropping than by asking questions. Their night vision is excellent. Their eyes, not overly large, appear quite human and have chocolate-brown pupils. A single thick eyebrow traces an “M” across the brow. The nose is flattened, knobby, and not exceptionally broad. The Night People have straight, shiny, dark hair on their heads which most keep trimmed and combed.
Male and female Ghouls alike usually wear a big purse or pouch on a shoulder-strap, and (except in cold climates) nothing else. Their repulsive look and odor offends the sensibilities of most Ringworld natives. Though Ghouls do rishathra, few hominids ever suggest it. Low-born City Builders are an exception: in some areas traditions demand their society’s debt to the Ghouls be paid in periodic rishathra.
Second Role of the Ghouls
The Night People are intelligent, clever, and curious. As a species, they have accumulated a great deal of information. They, in fact, deal in information, though they find myths, opinions and detailed observations frequently as useful as substantiated truth. So long as the dead are ultimately left unburied, they do not antagonize other species, and they do not use their pool of knowledge to manipulate or to exploit them. They respect the technologies and life-styles of all, and rarely attempt to intervene in the affairs of other species. They watch and listen. Their gift for oral history is superlative, and only the most advanced civilizations realize the true extent of Ghoul knowledge and interest. From time to time the Night People do not understand the implications of the incidents they witness. Nevertheless, the visual impressions, legends, undocumented rumors, and superstitions they report often prove to be as valuable as actual political events or scientific facts. It is hardly surprising that City Builders, Machine People, and other progressive societies have a degree of acceptance and respect for the Ghouls going far beyond uneasy tolerance. They work together, and Night People are sometimes permitted access to their libraries. Their value in “helping to hold together what is left of civilization” is recognized and appreciated.
The Ghouls have shown little overt interest in changing their traditional mode of existence, perhaps acquiring advanced-engineering skills, or procuring sophisticated technology. There is some evidence, though, that they do collect and accumulate curious objects, tools, valuable items, historical relics, books, and intriguing weapons in hidden caches. If they have a language of their own, no one knows it (except perhaps the Healers). They commonly use the City Builder tongue, or the local dialect in dealing with other species.
News usually travels slowly on Ringworld between widely-separated locations. The Ghouls, however, have developed a system of signaling over very large distances using flashes of light reflected into darkened lands from remote mirrors. They occasionally transmit information to the people of the Spill Mountains, and receive replies—but for the most part their network of communication remains a great mystery. The central bases and native lands (if any) of the Night People may be very far apart on the Ring, and outsiders are rarely permitted even to learn of their existence.
Though they make no claim to rule, the Ghouls are in a sense the invisible masters of Ringworld. More than most sentient hominids, they have gained a hard-won, humbling awareness of the Ring’s true dimensions and of the self-centered provincialism of most of its inhabitants. There may in fact be many species of Ghouls, but there must be many more species who lack any contact with Night People. Ghouls, comfortably well-adapted to their present nocturnal way of life, are on the whole wise enough to appreciate its limitations. Probably there are no Ghouls in deserts, swamps, on mountain ranges, in barren icy realms, or on the Island Maps in the Great Oceans.
One of the Protectors who assisted Teela Brown in repairing the attitude jets was a female of the Night People. Alone among them, she survived to supervise the defense or the evacuation of breeders in lands imperiled by radiation. The Night People Protector may yet remain a force to be reckoned with on Ringworld.
• • •
• • •
It was taking too long, much longer than he had expected. Sharls Davis Kendy had not been an impatient man. After the change he had thought himself immune to impatience. But it was taking too long! What were they doing in there?
THE INTEGRAL TREES, 1983
WHAT GOOD IS A GLASS DAGGER?
THE WARLOCK’S ERA
Robert Howard and his tradition do speak to some part of the brain…but not the rational part. What kind of magician can’t defend himself against a sword-swinging barbarian? The inept kind, that’s what. Think of it as evolution in action.
Why did Conan keep finding magic as a shocking surprise in desert places? If magic had such power, it would be the basis of civilization!
Where did all the magic go? The older the legend, the more powerful was the magic. Magic must wear out, like oil reserves.
And that’s all I was trying to say when I wrote a short story, “Not Long Before the End.” But my mind kept chewing at it. Yesterday’s civilizations must have been scrambling to find something to replace the depleted magic. Merpeople would run the fishing industry; when they went mythical, men would have to learn how to fish. Cities would have werewolf sections…
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
I
Twelve thousand years before the birth of Christ, in an age when miracles were somewhat more common, a Warlock used an ancient secret to save his life.
In later years he regretted that. He had kept the secret of the Warlock’s Wheel for several normal lifetimes. The demon-sword Glirendree and its stupid barbarian captive would have killed him, no question of that. But no mere demon could have been as dangerous as that secret.
Now it was out, spreading like ripples on a pond. The battle between Glirendree and the Warlock was too good a tale not to tell. Soon no man would call himself a magician who did not know that magic could be used up. So simple, so dangerous a secret. The wonder was that nobody had noticed it before.
A year after the battle with Glirendree, near the end of a summer day, Aran the Peacemonger came to Shayl Village to steal the Warlock’s Wheel.
Aran was a skinny eighteen-year-old, lightly built. His face was lean and long, with a pointed chin. His dark eyes peered out from under a prominent shelf of bone. His short, straight dark hair dropped almost to his brows in a pronounced widow’s peak. What he was was no secret; and anyone who touched hands with him would have known at once, for there was short fine hair on his palms. But had anyone known his mission, he would have been thought mad.
For the Warlock was a leader in the Sorcerer’s Guild. It was known that he had a name; but no human throat could pronounce it. The shadow demon who had been his name-father had later been imprisoned in tattooed runes on the Warlock’s own back: an uncommonly dangerous bodyguard.
Yet Aran came well protected. The leather wallet that hung from his shoulder was old and scarred, and the seams were loose. By its look it held nuts and hard cheese and bread and almost no money. What it actually held was charms. Magic would serve him better than nuts and cheese, and Aran could feed himself as he traveled, at night.
He reached the Warlock’s cave shortly after sunset. He had been told how to use his magic to circumvent the Warlock’s safeguards. His need for magic implied a need for voice and hands, so that Aran was forced to keep the human shape; and this made him doubly nervous. At moonrise he chanted the words he had been taught and drew a live bat from his pouch and tossed it gently through the barred entrance to the cave.
The bat exploded into a mist of blood that drifted slantwise across the stone floor. Aran’s stomach lurched. He almost ran then; but he quelled his fear and followed it in, squeezing between the bars.
Those who had sent him
had repeatedly diagramed the cave for him. He could have robbed it blindfold. He would have preferred darkness to the flickering blue light from what seemed to be a captured lightning bolt tethered in the middle of the cavern. He moved quickly, scrupulously tracing what he had been told was a path of safety.
Though Aran had seen sorcerous tools in the training laboratory in the School for Mercantile Grammaree in Atlantis, most of the Warlock’s tools were unfamiliar. It was not an age of mass production. He paused by a workbench, wondering. Why would the Warlock be grinding a glass dagger?
But Aran found a tarnish-blackened metal disc hanging above the workbench, and the runes inscribed around its rim convinced him that it was what he had come for. He took it down and quickly strapped it against his thigh, leaving his hands free to fight if need be. He was turning to go, when a laughing voice spoke out of the air.
“Put that down, you mangy son of a bitch—”
Aran converted to wolf.
Agony seared his thigh!
In human form Aran was a lightly built boy. As a wolf he was formidably large and dangerous. It did him little good this time. The pain was blinding, stupefying. Aran the wolf screamed and tried to run from the pain.
He woke gradually with an ache in his head and a greater agony in his thigh and a tightness at his wrists and ankles. It came to him that he must have knocked himself out against a wall.
He lay on his side with his eyes closed, giving no sign that he was awake. Gently he tried to pull his hands apart. He was bound, wrists and ankles. Well, he had been taught a word for unbinding ropes.
Best not to use it until he knew more.
He opened his eyes a slit.
The Warlock was beside him, seated in lotus position, studying Aran with a slight smile. In one hand he held a slender willow rod.
The Warlock was a tall man in robust good health. He was deeply tanned. Legend said that the Warlock never wore anything above the waist. The years seemed to blur on him; he might have been twenty or fifty. In fact he was one hundred and ninety years old, and bragged of it. His condition indicated the power of his magic.
Behind him, Aran saw that the Warlock’s Wheel had been returned to its place on the wall.
Waiting for its next victim? The real Warlock’s Wheel was of copper; those who had sent Aran had known that much. But this decoy must be tarnished silver, to have seared him so.
The Warlock wore a dreamy, absent look. There might still be a chance, if he could be taken by surprise. Aran said, “Kplir—”
The Warlock lashed him across the throat.
The willow wand had plenty of spring in it. Aran choked and gagged; he tossed his head, fighting for air.
“That word has four syllables,” the Warlock informed him in a voice he recognized. “You’ll never get it out.”
“Gluck,” said Aran.
“I want to know who sent you.”
Aran did not answer, though he had his wind back.
“You’re no ordinary thief. But you’re no magician either,” the Warlock said almost musingly. “I heard you. You were chanting by rote. You used basic spells, spells that are easy to get right, but they were the right spells each time.
“Somebody’s been using prescience and farsight to spy on me. Someone knows too many of my defenses,” the ancient magician said gently. “I don’t like that. I want to know who, and why.”
When Aran did not reply, the Warlock said, “He had all the knowledge, and he knew what he was after, but he had better sense than to come himself. He sent a fool.” The Warlock was watching Aran’s eyes. “Or perhaps he thought a werewolf would have a better chance at me. By the way, there’s silver braid in those cords, so you’d best stay human for the nonce.”
“You knew I was coming.”
“Oh, I had ample warning. Didn’t it occur to you that I’ve got prescience and farsight too? It occurred to your master,” said the Warlock. “He set up protections around you, a moving region where prescience doesn’t work.”
“Then what went wrong?”
“I foresaw the dead region, you ninny. I couldn’t get a glimpse of what was stealing into my cave. But I could look around it. I could follow its path through the cavern. That path was most direct. I knew what you were after.
“Then, there were bare footprints left behind. I could study them before they were made. You waited for moonrise instead of trying to get in after dusk. On a night of the full moon, too.
“Other than that, it wasn’t a bad try. Sending a werewolf was bright. It would take a kid your size to squeeze between the bars, and then a kid your size couldn’t win a fight if something went wrong. A wolf your size could.”
“A lot of good it did me.”
“What I want to know is, how did they talk an Atlantean into this? They must have known what they were after. Didn’t they tell you what the Wheel does?”
“Sucks up magic,” said Aran. He was chagrined, but not surprised, that the Warlock had placed his accent.
“Sucks up mana,” the Warlock corrected him. “Do you know what mana is?”
“The power behind magic.”
“So they taught you that much. Did they also tell you that when the mana is gone from a region, it doesn’t come back? Ever?”
Aran rolled on his side. Being convinced that he was about to die, he felt he had nothing to lose by speaking boldly. “I don’t understand why you’d want to keep it a secret. A thing like the Warlock’s Wheel, it could make war obsolete! It’s the greatest purely defensive weapon ever invented!”
The Warlock didn’t seem to understand. Aran said, “You must have thought of that. Why, no enemy’s curses could touch Atlantis, if the Warlock’s Wheel were there to absorb it!”
“Obviously you weren’t sent by the Atlantean Minister of Offense. He’d know better.” The Warlock watched him shrewdly. “Or were you sent by the Greek Isles?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you know that Atlantis is tectonically unstable? For the last half a thousand years, the only thing that’s kept Atlantis above the waves has been the spells of the sorcerer-kings.”
“You’re lying.”
“You obviously aren’t.” The Warlock made a gesture of dismissal. “But the Wheel would be bad for any nation, not just Atlantis. Spin the Wheel, and a wide area is dead to magic for—as far as I’ve been able to tell—the rest of eternity. Who would want to bring about such a thing?”
“I would.”
“You would. Why?”
“We’re sick of war,” Aran said roughly. Unaware that he had said we. “The Warlock’s Wheel would end war. Can you imagine an army trying to fight with nothing but swords and daggers? No hurling of death spells. No prescients spying out the enemy’s battle plans. No killer demons beating at unseen protective walls.” Aran’s eyes glowed. “Man to man, sword against sword, blood and bronze, and no healing spells. Why, no king would ever fight on such terms! We’d give up war forever!”
“Some basic pessimism deep within me forces me to doubt it.”
“You’re laughing at me. You don’t want to believe it,” Aran said scornfully. “No more mana means the end of your youth spells. You’d be an old man, too old to live!”
“That must be it. Well, let’s see who you are.” The Warlock touched Aran’s wallet with the willow wand, let it rest there a few moments. Aran wondered frantically what the Warlock could learn from his wallet. If the lockspells didn’t hold, then—
They didn’t, of course. The Warlock reached in, pulled out another live bat, then several sheets of parchment marked with what might have been geometry lessons and with script printed in a large, precise hand.
“Schoolboy script,” he commented. “Lines drawn with painful accuracy, mistakes scraped out and redrawn…The idiot! He forgot the hooked tail on the Whirlpool design. A wonder it didn’t eat him.” The Warlock looked up. “Am I being attacked by children? These spells were prepared by half a dozen apprentices!”
&
nbsp; Aran didn’t answer; but he lost hope of concealing anything further.
“They have talent, though. So. You’re a member of the Peacemongers, aren’t you? All army-age youngsters. I’ll wager you’re backed by half the graduating class of the School of Mercantile Grammaree. They must have been watching me for months now, to have my defenses down so pat.
“And you want to end the war against the Greek Isles. Did you think you’d help matters by taking the Warlock’s Wheel to Atlantis? Why, I’m half minded to let you walk out with the thing. It would serve you right for trying to rob me.”
He looked hard into Aran’s eyes. “Why, you’d do it, wouldn’t you? Why? I said why?”
“We could still use it.”
“You’d sink Atlantis. Are the Peacemongers traitors now?”
“I’m no traitor.” Aran spoke low and furious. “We want to change Atlantis, not destroy it. But if we owned the Warlock’s Wheel, the Palace would listen to us!”
He wriggled in his tight bonds, and thought once again of the word that would free him. Then, convert to werewolf and run! Between the bars, down the hill, into the woods and freedom.
“I think I’ll make a conservative of you,” the Warlock said suddenly.
He stood up. He brushed the willow wand lightly across Aran’s lips. Aran found that he could not open his mouth. He remembered now that he was entirely in the Warlock’s power—and that he was a captured thief.
The Warlock turned, and Aran saw the design on his back. It was an elaborately curlicued five-sided tattoo in red and green and gold inks. Aran remembered what he had been told of the Warlock’s bodyguard.