Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Sorcerer's Widow

“No, she didn’t threaten me. Just you.”

“ You ask her, then!”

“We’ll both ask,” Kel said. “Please?”

Ezak grimaced. “Oh, all right,” he said.

Together, the two men walked over to where Dorna stood. “Kel tells me,” Ezak said, “that you demand I help you catch this escaped talisman.”

“That’s right. You started it, so you’ll help me catch it, or I’ll rip your heart out.”

“He also said that you don’t believe I’m a sorcerer.”

“I don’t,” Dorna said. “You might be a failed apprentice, I suppose, but mostly you’re a thief.” When Ezak started to open his mouth again, she snapped, “Don’t bother to argue! Do you think I can’t tell a lie from the truth?”

Kel could see from his expression that in fact, Ezak did not think she could tell lies from truth, but he apparently had more sense than to say so.

“Oh, don’t try to look innocent,” Dorna said. “I told your friend Kel that I was a housewife, but I was also the village magistrate. I know a liar and a thief when I see one.”

“Fine,” Ezak said petulantly. “I’m not really a sorcerer.”

“I’m glad you admit it. Go on, then-what were you going to say?”

“I don’t know what this thing is that we’re following, so I don’t know how I can help. What is it? What does it do?”

“I told you, it’s a fil drepessis .”

“But what does that mean ? What does it do? If you tell us, we might be able to help more easily.”

She considered that for a moment, then sighed. “I don’t know what the words mean,” she said. “As for what it does, it finds sorcery that doesn’t work anymore, and fixes it.”

“It…does?” Ezak blinked in surprise.

“It does. And you , Ezak, apparently told it to go find a particular kind of sorcery and fix it. But we don’t know what kind. The blue glow means it knew where to look, so it should eventually find whatever it is, and that it knows how to fix it. Can you tell me what you did to it? That might help.”

Ezak glanced at Kel, who kept his mouth tightly shut. Ezak sighed.

“I put my hand on it, and it started screaming, so I started hitting it, trying to make it stop,” Ezak admitted. “Then a bunch of the little blue squares lit up, and it began talking to me.”

“What did it say?” Dorna demanded.

“I don’t know,” Ezak said. “It wasn’t Ethsharitic.”

“Of course it wasn’t! Sorcery always speaks in the secret languages, never anything anyone human still uses. What did it sound like?”

Ezak looked helplessly at Kel, then said, “I don’t know.”

Dorna turned to Kel. “Did you hear it?”

“I guess so,” Kel said. “It sounded sort of like… Skin specks fie die ten, maybe?”

“That’s no help. If it said what I think it did, it told you it was going hunting, but unless there was more to the message than that, it didn’t say where, or what it was looking for.”

“I don’t remember any more than that,” Kel said unhappily.

“Dorna?” Ezak said.

She turned to glare at him.

“How…how can it know what to do?” Ezak said. “How to fix anything? It’s just a…a device! I never heard of such a thing!”

“Of course you didn’t, idiot!” Dorna snapped. “It’s a secret , like most sorcery! And besides, it’s no surprise you never heard of anything like it; that may be the last fil drepessis in the World. It’s been handed down from master to apprentice for at least three hundred years. It’s why we were living out in the middle of nowhere, instead of somewhere civilized; Nabal didn’t want to have every other sorcerer in Ethshar demanding his help fixing old talismans. It’s how we had so much magic-he used it to find, fetch, and fix all the old talismans for a dozen leagues in every direction. There was fighting in this area on and off all through the Great War, sorcerers were active here for centuries , so there were a lot of talismans.”

“Oh,” Kel said. Several things suddenly made more sense.

“But…it fixes broken magic?” Ezak said. “How can magic break?”

“Oh, that’s easy ,” Dorna said. “Listen, what do you boys know about magic?”

The two exchanged glances, and Ezak gestured for Kel to go ahead. He didn’t want to admit his ignorance, but if Kel did, that was fine.

“Hardly anything,” Kel said.

“Well, magic is all about power,” she said. “Come on, I’ll explain as we walk-we don’t want the fil drepessis to get any further ahead.” She turned and began marching on through the wheat, following the thing’s track with her magical golden boot-heel, and the two young men hurried to keep up with her.

“So,” she said, as they walked, “magic is about using power to do things that don’t happen naturally, and the different kinds of magic all use different kinds of power. Witchcraft uses the power of the witch’s own body, but using it through the spirit, instead of by moving muscle and bone. Theurgists use the power of gods, and demonologists use the power of demons. Wizards use the raw chaos that exists everywhere outside our universe; they let little bits of it leak in, and they channel it with spells. And sorcerers do the opposite of wizards-they use the order that underlies the World, the patterns inside everything. Sorcerers make talismans that channel the nature of our reality into doing what they want. If you take exactly the right metals and crystals and things, and assemble them into exactly the right pattern, the right talisman, then it channels the energy of the World itself, an energy we call gaja , and that makes magic happen. You understand?”

Kel and Ezak exchanged glances. “I think so,” Ezak said warily.

“Well, if something changes the pattern, however slightly, then it won’t channel power properly anymore. A talisman is just crystals and metal arranged correctly, and if anything happens to disrupt that arrangement, it stops working. Sometimes just dropping one is enough to break it. It may not look broken, the damage is usually too small to see, but it stops working. What the fil drepessis does is find where the pattern is broken, and put everything back the way it should be. Then the talisman will work again.”

“Can’t a sorcerer fix his own talismans?”

She turned up an empty palm. “Sometimes,” she said. “If he knows the pattern and can find where it’s broken. But a lot of talismans are old, left from long ago, and no one remembers exactly how some of them are made. Some talismans can be made from scratch by anyone who knows how, but others…well, sometimes you need one talisman to make another, and maybe that one took another, which needed another, back through dozens of them. Sorcery may well be the oldest form of magic; whether it is or not, it’s certainly been around for thousands of years, and there have been hundreds of generations of talismans. A sorcerer may not have the talismans he needs to make the talismans he needs to make the talisman he wants. He may not even know which talismans he needs.”

“But the full-drapes-hiss knows?” Ezak asked.

Dorna nodded. “Yes,” she said. “That’s its magic.”

Kel pointed at the boot-heel device. “That’s metals and crystals arranged a particular way?”

“Yes.”

“It looks like a boot-heel.”

Dorna looked at the talisman, and gave a snort of laughter. “I suppose it does,” she said.

“Boot-heels are made of wood or leather. Could you make a talisman of wood or leather?”

Dorna shook her head. “No,” she said. “The structures in wood and leather and just about anything else that comes from living things aren’t regular enough to make the right patterns. Sorcerers can only work with absolutely pure metals and crystals, and they have to be the right metals and crystals. You can’t substitute tin for copper, or iron for lead, or beryl for garnet.”