The Unwelcome Warlock. Lawrence Watt-Evans

      “Of course I do! How could I not? It’s deafening!” He turned and looked at the mound. “And…the Calling? I answered the Call?”

      “So did I,” Sensella said. “I think they all did.”

      “Was I in there?” The expression on his face worried Sensella; it seemed not so much the apprehension or revulsion she would have expected, but eager longing.

      More people were tumbling down the sides of the mound, falling onto the grass; a few cried out in pain and surprise as they hit the ground. Then one of them, a woman Sensella thought looked about thirty, caught herself halfway down and flew to one side.

      As if that reminded the others that they were warlocks, several people took to the air; suddenly curious, Sensella did the same, lifting herself up, leaving the confused man behind.

      Her magic worked as well as ever — better, in fact. She shot upward with astonishing ease and had to catch herself before she slammed into the underside of the gigantic glowing object.

      Once airborne, she had a clearer view of what was going on. A long, thin, grayish-white projection of some sort, vaguely tubular, was reaching down from the hovering thing and pushing down into the mound of people, pulling some of them out and heaving them aside, where they tumbled down to the ground — or if they reacted in time, caught themselves before they fell that far. Some of them, Sensella saw, then flung themselves back against the mound, trying to get back into it. She couldn’t tell whether any of them succeeded.

      Most of them, though, were able to resist the Calling, as Sensella could, now that the Response had come. They were flying about the scene in a cloud of warlocks, like gnats around a lantern, looking at the mound and at the thing blotting out the sky.

      “It was Called, too!” someone exclaimed, pointing up.

      “Listen to it,” someone else replied. “That’s what was being Called all along! Whatever’s down there didn’t want us, it wanted that!”

      “We just got caught up by accident?”

      “But what is it?”

      Dozens of people were talking at once now, in a dozen languages, and Sensella could no longer follow it all. She ignored the other warlocks and tried to understand what was happening.

      The pile, she knew, was made up of warlocks who had answered the Call, and the only reason she had not plunged right into it and become part of it, trapped in whatever spell held it together, was that the Response, as she thought of it — the voiceless message of comfort that came from that gargantuan flying thing that had come down out of the sky — had drowned out the Calling and let her think again.

      The Calling came from beneath the pile of warlocks, she was sure, and whatever was down there was protected by a spell of some kind, a spell that had frozen the warlocks when they got too close, a spell that had made them imperceptible to her own magic. It was probably a defensive spell, a magical barrier, guarding the Call’s source until the thing it was Calling came for it.

      But now the Response had come, more than thirty years after the Calling began, and it was digging through the trapped warlocks to get at whatever was down there.

      It had been Calling warlocks for all those years; that was a lot of warlocks. Thousands of them, surely! Already, dozens of people were flying around, and most of the mound was still untouched.

      But it couldn’t be all the Called warlocks, could it? Could there be people who had been trapped in there since the Night of Madness, back in 5202? That was thirty-four years ago! Sensella herself had been a baker’s apprentice, fifteen years old, the night she woke up screaming, hanging in mid-air above her bed, suddenly aware of every motion in the room around her, her mind filled with images of fire and falling. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, had vanished that night — they had flown off to Aldagmor, never to return. Ever since then any warlock who grew careless, who used too much magic and made himself too receptive to the Calling, had eventually been drawn away — just as she had herself, less than a day ago.

      “Aunt Kallia?”

      Sensella turned to see a man she judged to be in his late thirties staring at a young woman. Both were flying above the mound, and their almost random flight had brought them near one another, and near Sensella as well.

      The woman turned to look at the man. “Do I know you?” she asked.

      “I’m Chanden! Your nephew Chanden! Luralla’s son!”

      The woman blinked at him. “But Chanden’s just a boy!”

      “I was on the Night of Madness, when you vanished, but that was more than twenty years ago.”

      “Thirty-four,” Sensella interjected.

      The young woman looked confused. “I don’t understand,” she said.

      “Thirty-four?” Chanden turned to Sensella. “How do you know?”

      “I wasn’t in there,” Sensella said, pointing down at the pile of humanity. “I was just arriving when…when that appeared.” She pointed up.

      “So — so it’s 5236? I’m eight years in the future?”

      “It’s 5236, yes. Were you in there for eight years?”

      “I…I suppose I was.” He looked down. “It doesn’t feel like it. I was…I answered the Call, and I flew here, and I saw that, and I didn’t understand what it was, but I knew I had to get in there, so I flew down to it, and then — then I was thrown back out, and that thing was up there saying everything was all right now, and…” His voice trailed off.

      “If it was 5228 when you came, then it’s been eight years.”

      “It didn’t even feel like eight minutes.”

      “Magic,” Sensella told him. “Strong magic.”

      He looked up. “Yes,” he said. “It must be.”

      “Your aunt,” Sensella asked. “She disappeared on the Night of Madness?”

      “Yes.”

      “And that’s her? She’s out now?”

      “Yes! It flung her out just now. I saw it, and I recognized her, but she doesn’t know me…”

      “It’s dug down to the first warlocks, then?”

      Chanden turned. “Oh. I guess it has, yes.”

      Sensella was not sure why, but that troubled her. The Response, whatever it was, must be almost down to the source of the Call. She looked down and was suddenly aware that she was standing on nothing, perhaps a hundred feet up.

      She had done that dozens, maybe hundreds of times since the Night of Madness. She had flown for miles without feeling any worry, but now it troubled her. She swooped down, eager to get back on solid ground. She landed perhaps fifty feet from the mound and turned — just as the next big change came.

      The first had been when the flying thing had appeared out of nowhere and she had felt the Response; the second had been when it started burrowing down into the mound, flinging warlocks aside.

      And the third was when the spell holding the immense mound of people together suddenly stopped.

      The change was abrupt, completely unheralded — one instant the pile of people was motionless, undetectable to warlock senses, magically frozen in time, and the next instant they were awake and aware of their surroundings, aware of being trapped in a gigantic three-dimensional mob. They were writhing and screaming, spilling outward in all directions, trying to get out before they were smothered or crushed.

      “It’s all right!” Sensella shouted, using her magic to snatch the nearest person out of the seething mass. “You’re safe! Just use your magic!” She pulled a second person free, and a third, dropping them unceremoniously on the grass a few yards away from the suddenly-expanding ball of screaming,