Relics of War

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Ishta nodded.

  “Like that magical cloth.”

  Ishta’s mother looked at her husband, startled. Her elder daughter said, “Magic cloth?”

  “A sort of tent,” Grondar said. “It stayed warm and dry even in the snow.” He met Ishta’s eyes. “That was in his pack?”

  “I guess,” Ishta said. “I never saw it before today, and he already had it hung in the tree when I got there.” She hesitated, and then added, “I didn’t know he had it. I went out there to make sure he was all right—since he doesn’t have a home to go to, I thought the snow might make things hard for him.”

  “But he had his magic.”

  She nodded again.

  “Did you know he was a magician?”

  Ishta glanced at Garander, then nodded. “I knew he has magic stuff.”

  “What kind of a magician is he? A wizard?”

  Ishta shook her head. “He’s not a wizard.”

  “A witch, then? Some of them like to wear black.”

  “No.”

  “Ishta, tell me what kind of a magician he is. Because the only other kind I know of that usually wears black is demonologists…”

  “No! He’s not a demonologist, Father. He’s a sorcerer.”

  Garander grimaced, glad that the others were all too focused on Ishta to pay any attention to him. He knew, and he thought Ishta knew, that Tesk was not a sorcerer in the usual sense. He was something much worse.

  “Ah.” Grondar leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest as he considered his youngest child. “A sorcerer. Who lives in the woods, with no home to go to. Who talks to children, but runs away at the sight of an adult.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

  “If I were making up a story, Father, I’d do a better job of it.” Ishta looked insulted. “I’m telling the truth.”

  Grondar considered that for a moment, then abruptly turned his attention to Garander. “And you,” he said. “Why did you follow me out there? Did you know she was meeting this mysterious friend of hers?”

  “I…thought she might be,” Garander admitted.

  “So you knew he existed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you meet him the same time your sister did?”

  “No, sir.” Garander shook his head. “I only found out a couple of sixnights ago.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me about it? Or your mother?”

  “I…I felt I owed Ishta a favor for letting the baron keep her talisman, sir, so I agreed not to say anything. He seemed harmless.”

  “Harmless? She says he’s a sorcerer!”

  “Well, but…she’s been meeting him for months, and he hasn’t done anything. He’s just lonely.”

  “Why is this sorcerer so blasted lonely? Why is he lurking out there in the woods instead of coming out in the opening and earning an honest living?”

  Ishta and Garander exchanged glances. “I…I don’t know, sir,” Garander said.

  That was his first outright lie. He had shaded the truth, and answered vaguely or selectively, but this time he was simply lying.

  Grondar stared at him. Garander could almost see his father thinking.

  He knew his father was not a stupid man, so he was not surprised to see Grondar’s mouth open slightly.

  “Oh,” he said, staring at his son. “A sorcerer. Sorcerers don’t generally go leaping about like that. Not ordinary sorcerers, anyway. Not our sorcerers. But this man—is his name really Kelder?”

  “No,” Garander admitted.

  “Did he tell you his real name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I…I can’t pronounce it. We call him Tesk.”

  “A sorcerer dressed all in black, with a name that isn’t Ethsharitic, hiding in the woods, afraid to let anyone but children see him—he’s a Northerner, isn’t he?”

  Garander nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “He’s been hiding in the wilderness for twenty years?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You knew he was a Northerner?”

  “Yes, sir.” For a moment silence fell; Garander could almost feel Grondar’s glare, and finally he said, “The war’s been over since before we were born, Father. He knows it’s over, and his side lost; he doesn’t want any trouble. If he meant us any harm he could have killed us all in our sleep, but instead he’s just talked to Ishta and kept her company.”

  “If he killed us, that would alert the baron that there was something dangerous in the area.”

  Garander didn’t have a good answer for that. In truth, he had not thought of it.

  “It’s been twenty years,” Grondar said thoughtfully. “How much magic can he have left?”

  “I don’t know,” Garander said.

  Grondar turned to Ishta.

  “I don’t know, either,” she said. “He won’t talk about things like that.”

  “Grondar,” her mother said, “are you seriously telling me there’s a Northern sorcerer still alive in the forest near here?”

  “Oh, yes,” Grondar said. “And he definitely still has some magic—there’s that magic cloth, and you should have seen the way he moved! He didn’t even look hum…”

  He stopped in the middle of a word, staring at his wife.

  “What is it?” she asked, frightened.

  “He’s not just a sorcerer, is he?” Grondar asked, turning back to Garander.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Garander said—lying again.

  “He isn’t entirely human, is he?”

  “What else would he be?” Shella the Younger asked.

  “Shatra,” Grondar said.

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s a shatra, isn’t it?” Grondar interrupted, straightening up and glaring at his son. “That’s how it could survive alone in the woods for twenty years. That’s how it can move like that. That’s why it doesn’t dare let anyone who remembers the war see it—it knows that we might let an ordinary Northerner live, but shatra are just too dangerous. It’ll be hunted down and destroyed if the barons or the overlords find out it’s there.”

  Garander didn’t say anything, but Ishta wailed, “He’s my friend! I don’t want him to be destroyed!”

  “But it really is a shatra?” their mother asked, looking up from her pins.

  “Yes,” Garander said. “He is. But he’s been there for twenty years and never hurt anyone! We didn’t even know he was there until he got so bored and lonely he let Ishta find him!”

  “But it’s a shatra!” Grondar replied. “It probably killed hundreds of good people during the war!”

  “And our people wiped his out! He says there wasn’t a single survivor when he went back to his home village.”

  “Is that supposed to make me trust it?”

  “No, I’m just saying the war was different! Both sides did things no one would do now.”

  Grondar stared at his son for a moment. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” he said. “The same people who ran things during the war are still running things now, pretty much. General Gor and Admiral Azrad call themselves overlords now, but they have as much power as ever. General Anaran may be dead, but from what I hear, his son Edaran isn’t very different. The barons who meet at Sardiron are mostly the same men who tracked down and slaughtered the surviving Northerners. The wizards and theurgists say they aren’t ever going to use their magic for war again, but I haven’t heard anything like that about sorcerers or demonologists, and the wizards could change their minds. You three don’t know what the World is like, growing up out here; people are still the same as ever. And shatra are still half-demon monsters. Maybe this Tesk really does want to live in peace, but that doesn’t mean it can.”

  Garander stared back at his father for a moment, then said, “You know, there are other Northern monsters in the woods.”

  Grondar blinked. “What are you talking about?”

&n
bsp; “There are mizagars.”

  It was Grondar’s turn to stare. “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Tesk told us.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “Yes!” Ishta shouted. “Yes, we believe him. He’s my friend. He never lied to us about being shatra; why would he lie about the mizagars? They obey him. He told them to stay away from us.”

  “It didn’t lie about being a shatra because that’s obvious!” Grondar replied. “I saw it for maybe half a minute at most, from a distance, in the snow, and I figured out what it was. It knew it couldn’t fool you about that. But mizagars? Did it show you any evidence?”

  Ishta looked at Garander, who turned up an empty palm. “No,” he admitted. “But wasn’t this Northern land during the war? Shouldn’t there be mizagars? You always warned us about them.”

  Grondar frowned. “Maybe the gods and wizards killed them all.”

  “Or maybe surviving shatra who don’t want to restart the war are holding them back.”

  “And maybe they all flew away to the third moon. We don’t know what happened to them, and I’m not going to take a shatra’s word for it.”

  “So what are you going to do about Tesk?”

  Grondar hesitated, then looked out the window at the snow piling up on the barn roof.

  “Nothing,” he said. “At least for now. I don’t know how to catch it, and if I tried it would probably kill me. Even if it didn’t want to—it’s not human, and it probably can’t always control its own actions. According to the stories I heard during the war, sometimes the demon takes over when it needs to fight; that’s part of why we needed wizards or dragons to fight them, the demon part is more ferocious than anything that belongs in the World. So I’m not about to go after it, and with this snow I’ll know if either of you goes into the woods after it, so you won’t go warn it, either. When the weather lets up and we’ve all had time to think about it, maybe I’ll send word to the baron. Or maybe I’ll decide it’s best left alone. I don’t know. And neither do you—I don’t care how much fun you had playing with it, it’s dangerous, and you need to stay away from it!”

  “That’s right,” their mother said, clearly upset. “You stay away from that thing! And Ishta, hold still, unless you want me to stab you with this pin.”

  Ishta stamped her foot, then straightened up and froze into position.

  Garander looked at her for a moment, then at his father, then at the kitchen. “I’m going to get lunch,” he said.

  “You’ll stay out of the woods?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let me give you a hand with the food.”

  Father and son headed for the kitchen.

  Chapter Nine

  The snow stopped around mid-afternoon, leaving about a foot on the ground. Grondar and Garander slogged through it to the barn, where they checked on the livestock, then found shovels and began clearing paths between the various outbuildings. By suppertime they were both chilled to the bone and thoroughly exhausted.

  As they worked Garander saw his father staring at the snow-covered woods, and studying the snow for tracks. He was obviously not convinced Tesk would remain safely hidden away. For his own part Garander thought the shatra was probably just fine where he was, out in the forest somewhere, and would not intrude where he wasn’t wanted. He wondered whether Tesk even felt the cold; demons were supposed to be immune to heat and cold, weren’t they?

  By the time they finally went inside for supper and peeled off their sodden coats Garander was too tired to care what Tesk was doing. He was much more interested in eating the stew his mother had prepared, and then collapsing into bed.

  The next day was mostly sunny, but cold; not much of the snow melted, and the glare off the white surface made any outdoor activity unpleasant. Accordingly, Grondar and his wife and children mostly stayed inside, huddled around the hearth, once the necessary chores were done.

  At first they were largely silent, talking only about the minutia of their lives—how much firewood was stocked in the shed, what vegetables were in the bins, whether they had enough thread to do all the sewing Shella of the Green Eyes had planned, and so on. Shella the Younger asked Garander a few questions about what he had seen women wearing in Varag.

  But then, out of nowhere, Grondar asked Ishta, “What did the shatra tell you about mizagars?”

  “What?” She looked at her father, startled.

  “You said the shatra told you things, and that there are mizagars in the forest. What did it tell you about mizagars?”

  “Oh.” Ishta thought for a second, then answered, “Well, he said they had been created by Northern sorcery three or four hundred years ago to watch border areas where the Empire didn’t want to bother putting soldiers…”

  Garander listened with interest. Now that Ishta was no longer trying to keep anything secret, and seemed to be over her anger at the loss of her talisman, she seemed eager to talk about Tesk, and to repeat everything he had told her over the past few months—not just about mizagars, but about trees and moss and squirrels and birds’ nests and spiders and leaf mold and a hundred other things.

  It occurred to him, as he listened, that Tesk knew as much about the forest as Grondar knew about farming, and Ishta had been far more interested in learning it than she ever had been in what her father had tried to teach her.

  But then, she had always loved the woods, even before she knew anyone was living out there. Garander wondered whether there was some way she might make a living in the forest when she grew up; he had heard old stories that mentioned woodcutters and hunters, but he did not know of any such people in the present day. Despite the frequent parental warnings of danger, he had never seen any game bigger than a rabbit in the woods. He didn’t really see how anyone could make a full-time job out of hunting rabbits. If anyone wanted that many rabbits it was easy enough to raise them on a farm, as old Elkan did.

  Perhaps there was some other occupation that would suit her interest in the wilderness.

  After supper, as the family gathered around the hearth again, Ishta was tired of talking, but now Grondar was the one who seemed eager to speak. Instead of talking about the farm as he usually did, though, he talked about his days in the Ethsharitic army during the Great War. He had served seven years in the Central Command under General Anaran, but he had never actually met the legendary war leader. He had never seen any shatra, or any mizagars, either. He had seen dragons, but only from a safe distance—a mile or two. He had seen three wizards, but had never spoken to any of them. His company had had a witch to look after their health, but he had never seen her do any magic other than healing. He knew there were wonderful stories about the war, about gods and heroes and monsters, battles and magic, stratagems and surprises, but most of what he remembered was mud and cold and hunger, and never knowing where the enemy was or what was going on. He had been in four small battles and two or three skirmishes too small to qualify, and had seen perhaps thirty of his fellow soldiers die—mostly from arrows or sorcery, not the sort of close-in sword fight that the stories talked about. Sometimes he didn’t know how men had died; he saw them lying on the ground, covered in mud and blood, and didn’t have time to worry about it. He had never been stuck with the unpleasant duty of hauling the bodies to the pyres, though he had helped build the pyres a few times.

  He described the smell of a battlefield after the fighting was over, the stink of the dead. He talked about the smell of the pyres, and the smoke staining the sky.

  Over the years Garander had heard his father tell a few war stories, but never like this.

  Finally, during a brief pause in the flood of memories, Garander’s mother asked, “Why are you telling us this all of a sudden?”

  “The shatra,” Grondar replied. “It’s brought the war back.”

  “No, he hasn’t,” Ishta said. “The war’s still over. Tesk doesn’t want it back.”

  Grondar shook his head. “It’s not like that. It’s…” He took a
deep breath and held it for a moment, then let it out. “My life is in two parts,” he said. “There’s the war, and there’s after the war. They’re two different lives, in two different worlds. Shatra are from the war. If there are still shatra out there, then there might be other things I thought were gone—officers and orders and marching and killing, wizards and dragons, magic and monsters, all those things I never want to see again. And the things I thought I would keep forever, maybe I don’t get to keep them—the farm, and my family, and my friends. During the war I never got to stay in one place for very long; we would have to move because the front was moving, or because we were needed somewhere, or because it wasn’t safe anymore where we had been. Whole villages would grow up in a month when an army camped somewhere, when everyone came to support the army, and whole villages would disappear overnight when the Northerners showed up.”

  “Father, he’s just one left-over shatra,” Garander said.

  “But what’s it doing there?” Grondar asked angrily.

  “Nothing! He’s just living in the woods,” Ishta said.

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go!” Garander said. “He can’t go home; his home is gone. The whole Northern Empire is gone. And he can’t come live anywhere with ordinary people, because he’s shatra!”

  Grondar stared silently at his son for a moment.

  “I’m sorry he’s brought back all these bad memories, Father,” Garander said, “but he didn’t do it on purpose. He doesn’t mean any harm.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s had twenty years to do whatever terrible evil thing he might be planning, and he hasn’t done it. Listen to what Ishta said—he didn’t talk to her about war or killing. They talked about trees and sunlight and field mice.”

  Garander was surprised at the vehemence in his own words. He had never intended to defend Tesk; he had had his own doubts about the Northerner. Something about his father’s stories, though, had brought this out—he had needed to convince both his father and himself that Tesk was not part of those long-ago horrors, not anymore.

  “You stopped being a soldier,” Ishta said. “So did Tesk.”