Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Annals of the Chosen 01 Read Online Free PDF

ancestors—set
this up? Why didn't you just rule Barokan yourselves? Why don't you now?"
    "Because we don't want to—don't you understand? We're the descendants of the rogue wizards you
hear horror stories of at your mother's knee—and most of the stories are true,
    Breaker; have you ever heard about the Siege
of Blue-flower?"
    "I know the song . .."
    "The song is true, Breaker. That really happened. If there's no greater power to rein us in we wizards run
rampant across Barokan, pillaging and plundering and smashing anything we
please, and fighting among ourselves. You must have heard how the old wizard
wars laid waste to entire areas—you just said it happened,
so I know you heard about i t! Well, the only thing that prevents that
sort of chaos now is the Wizard Lord, the one man with the power to smash us
all. There's a reason we vested the means to destroy him in
ordinary men and women, rather than keeping it for ourselves and our fellow wizards—we know we
can't be trusted with it."
    Breaker thought about that
for a moment. He thought about the Siege of Blueflower, famed in song and
story, where according to legend three rogue wizards had joined forces to
enslave an entire town, and had or dered the men of the town to defend them
against the Wizard Lord, on pain of seeing their wives and daughters tortured
to death should they fail to do their utmost.
    The men had done
their best, for the most part, and out of pity the Wizard Lord had done hi s best to see that
neither they nor their loved ones died—but the song's last three verses were a
mournful recitation, horrifyingly detailed, of how the victorious Wizard Lord
and the freed townsfolk had found the mangled remains of a dozen young women in
the dead wizards' stronghold, and how the Wizard Lord had grieved over his
failure to save them all.
    That had been five hundred years ago—but this
wizard was acknowledging that she was one of the heirs to those three rogues.
    "But then why doesn't the Wizard Lord just
kill you all, so you can't go rogue? And then you couldn't unleash the Chosen."
    "Because that would unleash the Chosen—the Chosen have instructions to kill the Wizard Lord
if the Council fails to reassure them every year or so that everything is running smoothly.
Our ancestors weren't suicidal—we like being wizards, even if we know we can't be
trusted."
    "So the Wizard Lord is required to
defend Barokan against the wizards, and defend the
wizards against themselves, without killing you all? And the Chosen are
there to ensure that works?"
    "Yes."
    "It sounds complicated."
    "It is. I told you earlier that it was.
We don't claim it's a perfect system; it's just the best our ancestors could
come up with, and it's worked well enough since then that we haven't tried to
change it much. If anything, we've made it even more complicated, adding new
rules and more Chosen over the years—and we haven't had to kill a Dark Lord in
over a century, so it seems to be about right." -
    "I suppose."
    "And now you have a chance to be a vital
part of it all."
    "By promising to kill the Wizard Lord if
he ... what? If he displeases this
Council of yours? His fellow wizards?"
    The wizard let out an exasperated sigh.
    "More than displeases us," she
said. "He has to start killing or raping or robbing innocent people—and
not just one or two, either—before we'll summon the Chosen. Either that, or
breaking the rules."
    "See? If he breaks your rules!"
    "Breaker, the rules are all there to
make sure he's not trying to destroy the system and make himself invulnerable.
The rules mostly say that he can't kill the Chosen, that he can't interfere
with them or with anything else that's designed to keep him in check, that he
can't try to acquire magic that would let him defeat the Chosen. That's all. He
can do what he pleases otherwise; he can kill members of the Council and we
probably won't try to stop him—past Wizard Lords have done just that. After
all, the whole point of the