Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Sorcerer's Widow

“Oh,” Ezak said. His expression turned thoughtful. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

“Was he burned? When you healed him?” Kel asked.

“No,” Dorna said.

“Then it probably wasn’t a fireball, or lightning.”

Dorna turned to look at him. “I thought Ezak was supposed to be the clever one.”

“He is,” Kel said, confused.

“It was a clean cut,” Dorna said. “As if something very sharp had sliced through.”

“Like…like a magical knife?” Ezak asked.

“Yes.” She frowned. “So we have some idea what we’re dealing with. Did you see a knife, Ezak?”

He shook his head. “Just a red light.”

“Did you feel anything?”

“Of course I did!” Ezak said. “I felt pain!”

“Yes, but what kind of pain? Did it feel like a knife was cutting you?”

“I…” Ezak stopped to think, then said, “I didn’t feel anything happen-one second I was fine, and the next I was bleeding all over and my ear and head hurt like death.”

“So it’s very, very fast, whatever it is. It probably didn’t just throw an ordinary knife. More likely it was raw magic.”

Ezak asked the question Kel was thinking-“So what? What difference does it make?”

“So I’m trying to think whether it might run out of ammunition, or whether we might be able to make shields or armor that would protect us while we get close to it.”

“Oh,” Ezak said, and Kel had to admit she had a good reason for her questions.

“Kel and I were thinking it must be Northern military sorcery, so if we can convince it we’re Northerners it won’t hurt us, but we don’t know how to do that, so I was thinking about shields, or making it use up whatever it’s throwing at us. Except if it’s throwing pure gaja at us, it can’t run out, ever-the World is full of gaja .”

“It is?” Ezak asked, startled.

“Yes. It is. Or sorcery would have stopped working a long time ago, when the gaja was used up.”

“Oh.” Ezak considered this. “So…the top of my ear was cut off by some left-over Northern sorcery that’s throwing knives made of pure magical energy at us?”

Dorna nodded. “So it would seem,” she said.

“It throws them at anyone it sees?”

“Apparently.”

“But you don’t think it would throw them at Northerners?”

“Right. The magician who made it wouldn’t want to hurt his own people.”

“How did it know we aren’t Northerners? I mean, they weren’t demons, were they? They were people, like us.”

Dorna opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. She looked to the northeast and frowned, then looked back at Ezak. “You know, every time I think you two are both idiots, you surprise me by saying something smart. Why did it assume we’re enemies?”

“It probably thinks everyone is,” Kel said. “Maybe it knows there aren’t any more Northerners.”

“This thing that cut off my ear,” Ezak said. “What is it? How smart is it? I thought we were talking about a talisman, a spell, but you’re talking about it as if it’s a person, or a creature.”

“We don’t know what it is,” Dorna said. “Or how smart it is. But some talismans are…well, they can do things. They can talk. They can see. They can hear. You saw the fil drepessis -is that a spell or a creature?”

Ezak considered that for a moment, then said, “I see your point.”

“Whatever it is, there was something here that made it think it should attack us,” Kel said.

“So it would seem,” Dorna said.

Kel looked at her, trying to guess what might have made the Northern sorcery think she was an Ethsharite. She was wearing a dark green dress, with her long black hair pulled back and loosely bound in a soft green ribbon, and she had that canvas bag over her shoulder.

Ezak was wearing a tan cotton tunic that had seen better days, and brown leather breeches. His curly hair-what remained of it-was a little longer than was fashionable, but reasonably tidy.

Kel himself was wearing a dark red tunic and gray goatskin breeches, and his hair just covered his ears. They all looked ordinary enough. Had Northerners looked different, back when Northerners still existed?

A memory came to him. Ethshar’s city guards wore red and yellow now, but during the war they hadn’t. Kel thought back to pictures he had seen of soldiers in the Great War-there were murals on the walls of the magistrate’s hall back in Smallgate, and he had seen a tapestry in the south tower in Grandgate once. In those pictures, the Ethsharitic soldiers wore green and brown, while the Northerners-well, the Northerners were mostly indistinct figures in the distance, but they appeared to be wearing black and gray.

Dorna was wearing green. Ezak was wearing brown. But Kel himself was wearing red and gray, and during the war those weren’t the colors for either side. After the war the overlords dressed their soldiers in red and yellow, but it was a completely different shade of red, much brighter than the drab hue of Kel’s tunic, and anyway, how would a leftover spell from the Great War know about the change?

“Wait here,” he said.

“What?” Dorna turned to look at him, but Kel was already on his feet and running southeast, behind the low ridge.

“What are you doing ?” the sorcerer’s widow shouted after him.

“Trying something,” Kel called back.

“Trying what ?”

Kel was not sure just how to explain his idea, so he didn’t answer that. He got a hundred yards away from the others-he thought that should be far enough-then got down on hands and knees, and crawled up over the rise, staying hidden in the tall grass.

Then once he was over the rise, he stood up, prepared to drop to his belly if he saw a red flash. He scanned the area where he judged the Northern talisman to be, and caught the glint of sunlight on metal. He could see something shaped sort of like a horn, but with less of a flared opening than usual, atop a dark cylinder sticking up out of the grass; it swiveled toward him, and he tensed, getting ready to dive for safety.

Then it stopped, and swiveled back until it was once again aimed at Dorna and Ezak.

Maybe it didn’t think he was a Northerner, but it didn’t think he was a threat, either. It was ignoring him.

“ Hai !” he called, waving at it.

The horn-shaped thing swung toward him again, then seemed to hesitate. It shifted a little further, then turned back toward the others.

In the distance he heard Dorna shouting at him, “What are you doing , you lunatic?”

He smiled, and began walking across the meadow toward the Northern talisman. If he was right, he told himself, if it really thought he was a Northerner, he ought to be able to walk right up to it and retrieve the…the fil whatever-it-is.

“Kel!” Dorna shrieked. “Get down!”

He turned, and could see her lying on the ground, peeping through the grass at him. He waved to her, then kept walking.

He was perhaps sixty feet from the Northern sorcery, whatever it was, when the horn suddenly swung toward him again, and a loud, masculine, unfamiliar voice said something in a foreign language, a language he didn’t recognize.

Kel stopped walking. He didn’t know what the voice had said, but it had the sound of a warning. The thing hadn’t given any warning before slicing Ezak’s ear off, but it had apparently thought Ezak was an enemy, where it appeared to accept Kel as a friend, or at least neutral.

Cautiously, Kel took a step backward. The horn thing seemed to hesitate. He backed up another step, and it swung around to point back toward Dorna and Ezak.