WARLOCK
Book Two of The Darkwar Trilogy
by Glen Cook
A Popular Library Edition published by Warner Books, Inc.
Published: November 1985
Cover Art by Barclay Shaw
ISBN: 0-445-20049-9
This ePub edition v1.0 by Dead^Man Jan, 2011
The Power In Her Mind
brought young Marika at last to the great Maksche Cloister, where her already precocious silth witch-like powers could be honed to an awesome mental weapon.
To the tradermales fell the skills of science and technology, while the female silth dominated the world with their mastery of the black arts. In the uneasy tradermale-silth truce, there could be no trust or friendship between the two races.
But proud, stubborn Marika was born to break all rules -- maybe even to be her world's destruction. One tradermale was her friend already. And another, closer to her heart than any living being, held a power strong enough to challenge silth domination. Marika had a choice to make, a vow to keep, and a battle to fight with the one they called... Warlock.
BOOK THREE: MAKSCHE
Chapter Fifteen
I
Bullets hammered the north wall of the last redoubt, Akard’s communications center. Mortars crumped. Their bombs banged deafeningly. Bullets leaking through the two small north windows had made a shambles of the communications gear.
Marika had done what she could to stem the nomad tide, and she had failed. She had only two regrets: that her pack, the Degnan, would go into the darkness unMourned, and that for her there would be no journey to the Reugge cloister at Maksche. For her there would be no next step on the road that might have led to the stars.
The hammer of savage weapons rose to an insane crescendo. The nomads were closing in for the last kill. Then the uproar ended. Braydic, the communications technician, whimpered into the sudden silence, “Now they will come.”
Marika nodded. The last minutes had arrived. The inevitable end of the siege had come.
Marika did something never done before. She hugged the only surviving members of her pack, the huntresses Grauel and Barlog. The scent of fear was heavy upon their rough fur.
Pups of the upper Ponath packs hugged no one but their dams, and that seldom after the first few years.
The two huntresses were touched deeply.
Grauel turned to the tradermale Bagnel, who was teaching her to operate a firearm. His comrade, last of those who had survived last week’s fall of the tradermale packfast Critza, had fallen defending one of the north windows. Someone had to hold that against the savages. Grauel’s heavy spear was too unwieldy.
“Wait!” Marika gasped. Her jaw went slack. “Something...”
The universe of the touch, the ghost plane into which silth like Marika ducked to work their witchery, had gone mad. Some mighty shadow, terrible in its power, was raging up the valley of the Hainlin River, which this last bastion of the fortress Akard overlooked. For a moment Marika was paralyzed by the power of that shadow. Then she flung herself to a south-facing window.
Three great daggerlike crosses stormed up the frozen river. They drove into the fangs of the wind in a rigid V. That fierce and dreadful shadow-of-touch preceded them, flaying the mind with terror. Upon each cross stood five black-clad silth, one at each tip of each arm, the fifth at the axis. The incessant north wind howled around them and tore at their dark robes. They seemed to notice it not at all.
“They are coming,” Marika shouted to Grauel and Barlog, who crowded her against the windowsill.
An explosion thundered out behind them. It threw them together. Marika gasped for breath. Grauel turned, pointed her rifle. It barked in unison with that of the tradermale Bagnel as savages appeared in the dust swirling in the gap created by the explosion.
Marika clung to the windowsill, looking out, waiting for death.
The rushing crosses rose as they neared Akard, screaming into lightly falling snow, parting. Marika slipped through her loophole into the realm of ghosts and followed them as they plunged toward the attacking nomads, spreading death and terror.
Grauel and Bagnel stopped firing. The nomads had fled the breach. In minutes the entire besieging horde was in full flight. Two of the flying crosses harried the savages northward. The third returned and hovered over the confluence of the forks of the Hainlin, above which Akard brooded on a high headland.
Akard’s pawful of survivors crowded the window, staring in disbelief. Help had come. After so long a wait. In the penultimate moment, help had come.
The cross drifted closer till the tip of its longest arm touched the fortress on the level above the communications center. Marika pushed weariness aside and went to meet her rescuers. She was only fourteen, as yet far from being a full silth sister, but was the senior silth surviving. The only silth surviving. Through eyes hazed with fatigue and reaction, she vaguely recognized the dark figure which came to meet her. It was Zertan, senior of the Reugge Community’s cloister at Maksche.
It looked like she would get to see the great city in the south after all.
A moment after she had fulfilled the necessary ceremonial obsequiences, exhaustion overtook her. She collapsed into the arms of Grauel and Barlog.
Marika wakened after the fading of the light. She found herself perched precariously upon the flying cross. In one hasty glance she saw that she shared the strange craft with the other survivors of Akard. Grauel and Barlog were as near her as they could get — as they always were. Bagnel was next nearest. He rewarded her with a cheerful snarl as her gaze passed over him. Communicator Braydic seemed to be in shock.
The wind seemed almost still as the cross ran with it. To the left and below, the ruins of Bagnel’s home, Critza, appeared. “No bodies anymore,” Marika observed.
In a hard, low voice, Bagnel said, “The nomads feed upon their dead. The grauken rules the Ponath.” The grauken, the monster lying so close beneath the surface of every meth. The archetypal terror of self with which every meth was intimately familiar.
The Maksche senior eyed Bagnel, then Marika from her standing place upon the axis of the cross. She pointed skyward. “It will get worse before it gets better. The grauken may rule the entire world. It comes on us with the age of ice.”
Marika looked skyward, trying to forget the dust cloud that was absorbing her sun’s power and cooling her world. She tried to concentrate on the wonder of the moment, to take joy in being alive, to forget the horror of the past, of losing first the pack with which she had lived her first ten years, then the silth packfast where she had lived and trained the past four. She tried to banish the terror lurking in her future.
Jiana! Doomstalker! Twice!
The voice in her mind was the voice of a ghost. She could not make it go away.
The hills of the Ponath gave way to plains. The snowfall faded. And the flying cross fled with the breath of the north wind licking behind.
II
For months Marika had seen nothing but overcast skies. Always the bitter north wind had been present, muttering of even colder times to come. But now the gale could not catch her. She mocked it quietly.
Cracks began to show in the cloud cover. One moon, then another, peeped through, scattering the white earth with silver.
“Hello, strangers,” Marika said.
“What?”
The response startled Marika, for she had been enclosed entirely within herself, unmindful of her bizarre situation. “I was greeting the moons, Grauel. Look. There is Biter. One of the small moons is running behind her. I cannot tell which. I do not care. I am just glad to see them. How long has it been?”
The huntress shifted her weapon and position gingerly. It was a long fall to the frozen river. “Too long. Too many months.” Sorrow edged Grauel’s
voice. “Hello, moons.”
Soon Chaser, the second large moon, showed its face too, so that shadows below looked like many-fingered paws.
“Look there!” Marika said. “A lake. Open water.” She too had not seen unfrozen water in months.
Grauel would not look down. She clung to their transport with a death grip.
Marika glanced around.
Five strangers, five friends. All astride a metal cross the shape of a dagger, running with the wind a thousand feet above the earth and snow. Grauel and Barlog, known since birth. Bagnel, known only months, strange, withdrawn, yet with the aroma of someone who could become very close. At that moment she decided he would become an integral part of her destiny.
Marika was silth. The Akard sisters had called her the most powerful talent ever to be unearthed in the upper Ponath. Sometimes the strongest silth caught flashes intimating tomorrow.
Braydic. The only friend the exile pup had made in her four years at Akard. Marika was glad that Braydic had survived.
Finally, two pups of meth who had served the silth, holding one another, terrified still, not yet knowing their fates. She realized that she did not know their names. She had saved them, as she had saved herself, for redoubled exile. Shared terror and last-second salvation ought to account for more intimacy.
“So,” she said to Grauel and Barlog. “Here we go again. Into exile once more.”
Barlog nodded. Grauel merely stared straight ahead, trying to keep her gaze from taking in the long fall to the silvered snows.
The Hainlin twisted away to the west and out of sight for a time, then swept back in beneath. It widened into a vast, slow stream, though mostly it remained concealed behind a mask of white. Time passed. Marika shook off repeated fits of bleak memory. She suspected her companions were doing the same.
Meth were not reflective by nature. They tended to live in the present, letting the past lie and allowing the future to care for itself. But the pasts of these meth were not the settled, bucolic pasts of their foredams. Their pasts reechoed with bloody hammer strokes. Their futures threatened more of the same.
“Lights,” Grauel croaked. And in a moment, “By the All! Look at the lights!”
Ten thousand pinpricks in the night, like a nighttime sky descended to earth. Except that the sky of Marika’s world held few stars, filled as it was with a dense, vast cloud of interstellar dust.
“Maksche,” Senior Zertan said. “Home. We will reach the cloister in a few minutes.”
The flying crosses pacing them suddenly swept ahead, vanished into the darkness. The lights ahead bobbed and rocked and swelled, and then the first passed below, maybe five hundred feet down. Marika felt no awe of the altitude. She exulted in the flying.
Soon the cross settled into a lighted courtyard, to a point between crosses already arrived. Scores of silth in Reugge black waited silently. The cross touched down. Zertan stepped off. Several silth approached her. She said something Marika did not catch, gestured, and stalked away. The other silth left their places at the tips of the cross.
A meth female in worker apparel approached Marika and the others. “Come with me. I have been instructed to show you quarters.” She assessed them cautiously. “Not you,” she told Bagnel, diffidently. “Someone from your Bond is coming for you.”
Marika was amused, for she knew this meth saw only savages out of the Ponath. Even her, for all she was silth. And she knew this city meth was frightened, for savages from the Ponath had reputations for being unpredictable, irrational, and fierce.
Marika gestured. “We go. You, lead the way.”
Bagnel stood aside, looking forlorn, one paw raised in a gesture of farewell.
Grauel followed the worker. Marika followed her. Barlog stayed close behind, weapon at port. Braydic and the pups tagged along at the end.
The Degnan refugees searched every shadow they passed. Marika listened with that talented silth ear that was inside her mind. She felt silth working their witcheries all around her. But the shadows were haunted by nothing more dangerous than projected fears of the unknown.
The servant led them through seemingly endless hallways, dropping first the pups, then Braydic. Marika sensed Grauel and Barlog becoming edgy. Their sense of location was confused. She grew uncomfortable herself. This place seemed too large to encompass. Akard was never so vast or tortuous that she had feared for her ability to get out.
Get out. Get out. That built within her, a smoldering panic, a dread of being unable to escape. She was of the upper Ponath, where pack meth ran free, at will.
The worker detected their mounting tension. She led them up stairs and outside, to the top of a wall at least vaguely reminiscent of the north wall at Akard, where Marika had made her away place, the place she went to be alone and think.
Each silth found such a place wherever she might be.
“It is huge,” Barlog breathed from behind Marika. Marika agreed, though she knew not whether Barlog meant the cloister or city.
The Maksche cloister was a square compound a quarter mile to a side. Its outer wall stood thirty feet high. It was constructed of a buttery brown stone. The structures it enclosed were built of the same stone, all topped with steep roofs of red tile. The buildings were all very old, very weathered, and all very rectilinear. Some had corner towers rising like obelisks peaked by triangles of red.
The worker said, “A thousand meth live in the cloister, separate from the city. The wall is the edge of our world, a boundary that is not to be passed.”
She meant what she said, no doubt, but the fierceness that rose in her charges made her drop the subject. Marika growled, “Take us where we are supposed to go. Now. I will hear rules from those who make them, and will decide if they are reasonable then.”
Their guide looked stricken.
Grauel said, “Marika, I suggest you recall all that has been said about this place.”
Marika stared at the huntress, but soon her gaze wandered. Grauel was right. At the beginning she had best submit to the local style.
“Stop,” she said. “I want to look.” She did not await approval.
The cloister stood at Maksche’s heart, upon a contrived elevation. The surrounding land was flat all the way to the horizons. The Hainlin, three hundred yards wide, looped past the city in a broad brown band two miles west of Marika’s vantage. Neat squares of cropland, bounded by hedgerows or lines of trees, showed through the snow covering the plain.
“Not a single hill. I think it will not be long before I become homesick for hills.” Marika used the simple dialect of her puphood, and was surprised when the worker frowned puzzledly. Could the common speech be so different here?
“I think so. Yes,” Grauel replied. “Even Akard was less foreign than this. It is like ten thousand little fortresses, this thing called a city.”
The buildings were very strange. But for Akard and Critza, every meth-made structure Marika had ever seen had been built of logs and stood under twenty-five feet high.
“I am not allowed much time away from my regular duties here,” the worker said, her tone whining. “Please come, young mistress.”
Marika scowled. “All right. Lead on.”
The quarters assigned had been untenanted for a long time. Dust lay thick upon what tattered furniture there was. Marika coughed, said, “We are being isolated in some remote corner.”
Grauel nodded. “Only to be expected.”
Barlog observed, “We can have this livable in a few hours. It is not as bad as it looks.”
Feebly, the worker said, “I must take you two to... to...” She fumbled for a word. “I guess you would say, huntress’s quarters.”
“No,” Marika told her. “We stay together.”
Grauel and Barlog snarled and gestured toward the door with their weapons.
“Go,” Marika snapped. “Or I will tie a savage’s curse to your tail.”
The female fled in terror. Grauel said, “Probably whelped and raised here. Scared o
f her own shadow.”
“This is a place where shadows are terrors,” Barlog countered. “We will hear from the shadow mistresses now.”
But Barlog was wrong. A week passed without event. It was a week in which Marika seldom left her quarters and had no intercourse at all with the Reugge of Maksche. She let Grauel and Barlog do the physical exploration. No one came to her.
She began to wonder why she was being ignored.
The time free began as a boon. In her years at Akard she had spent most of every waking hour in study, learning to become silth. The only respite had come during summers when she had joined hunting parties stalking the nomadic invaders who brought Akard and the Ponath to ruin.
Once her quarters were clean and she had sneaked a few exploratory forays into nearby parts of the cloister, and had penetrated the rest of it riding ghosts, and had found herself an away place in a high tower overlooking the square where she had arrived, she grew bored. Even study became appealing.
She snarled her dissatisfaction at the worker who brought their meals. That was on her tenth day in Maksche.
Things seemed to move slowly in Maksche. Marika’s complaints continued for a week, growing virulent. Yet nothing happened.
“Do not cause trouble,” Grauel cautioned. “They are studying our conduct. It is all some sort of test.”
“Pardon me if I am skeptical,” Marika said. “I have walked the dark side a hundred times since we have been here. I have seen no indication that they even know we are here, let alone are watching. We have been put out of sight, out of mind, and are imprisoned in a dungeon of the soul.”
Grauel exchanged glances with Barlog. Barlog observed, “All things are not seen by the witch’s inner eye, Marika. You are not omnipotent.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that one young silth, no matter how strong, is not going to use her talent to see what a cloister full of more practiced silth are doing if they do not want her to see.”