Relics of War

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Garander did not like the sound of that. He had been starting to relax, thinking that Tesk could easily avoid these people, but their magic might be enough to track the shatra down.

  “If you can give me an exact time,” Azlia said, startling everyone, “I can see if it was really a shatra. It might just be some sorcerer pretending to be one, to scare people.”

  Sammel turned to look at her. “How exact?”

  “Within a quarter of an hour.”

  Sammel snorted. “I can’t do that!”

  Azlia turned to Grondar. “Can you?”

  “Uh…it was the day of the first snowfall. In the morning.” He glanced at Garander. “Perhaps an hour before noon?” He turned up an empty palm. “You understand, we are farmers—we have no clocks, we live by the sun, and the clouds hid it from us that day.”

  “What day was that?”

  Both Grondar’s palms turned up, and he shook his head.

  “The first snowfall in Varag was on the twenty-third of Leafcolor,” the soldier whose name Garander did not know volunteered. “It was probably the same here.”

  “How do you remember that?” Hargal asked, startled.

  “My sister was born on the twenty-fourth of Leafcolor in 4999,” the soldier said. “She celebrates her birthday with a big dinner every year, and this year I missed the feast because of the snow.”

  “We can try that,” Azlia said. She set down her pack, knelt beside it, and began rummaging through it.

  “What are you doing?” Garander asked, staring at her.

  “The Spell of Omniscient Vision,” she replied. “Or at least, I’m seeing whether I brought the ingredients.”

  “The Spell of…what? What’s that?”

  She pulled out a small black box, then looked thoughtfully up at the sky. “It will allow me to see this place as it was on the morning of the twenty-third of Leafcolor. But it doesn’t work in sunlight; we’ll need to find someplace dark.” She set the box aside, then reached back in the pack and brought out a handful of strange gray cones, each one tagged with a colored ribbon that had been pinned to the base. The cones varied from the size of a baby’s thumb to the size of Shella’s spindle; Azlia selected a medium-sized one with a blue-green ribbon and set that atop the black box. “It also takes about an hour to prepare, maybe a little more, and then the vision lasts no more than a quarter-hour.” She looked up at Grondar. “Is there somewhere I can work undisturbed for an hour, where the sun cannot reach? A cave, perhaps, or a root cellar?”

  “I don’t…” Grondar began.

  “We have a root cellar!” Ishta volunteered excitedly.

  “That should work,” the wizard said. She dropped the other cones back in her pack, and buttoned a flap over them.

  Garander was torn, unsure whether to be angry with Ishta for her outburst; he was afraid of what the magicians might discover, but at the same time, a chance to actually see their magic in action was hard to resist.

  Besides, who ever heard of a farm that didn’t have a root cellar? And this time of year it would of course be mostly empty, since the family and livestock had been eating its contents all winter.

  “I’ll show you the way,” Grondar said resignedly.

  “Will you let us watch?” Ishta asked.

  Azlia looked at the girl and smiled. “If you like,” she said. “But you must promise, swear by any gods you know, not to interrupt the spell! It could do terrible damage if anything goes wrong.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on her,” Garander said. He did not admit, even to himself, that this was really just an excuse to watch the magic himself.

  “And I’ll watch over all of you,” Hargal said.

  “Is there room for all of you in this root cellar?” Sammel asked.

  Garander had not thought about that. “How much space do you need?” he asked Azlia.

  “Not much,” she said as she closed up her pack, leaving the black box and the gray cone to one side. “Room to raise both elbows on either side, and an arm’s length in front.” She looked around, still kneeling, then drew a knife from her belt. She looked at the tree where Tesk had sheltered from the snow, then used the knife to cut a glyph into the matted leaves by her left knee. Garander had no idea what the glyph meant, since he could not read much. He stared at the knife, which seemed to gleam unnaturally bright; it was clearly not an ordinary steel blade.

  Grondar noticed where his son’s gaze was focused. “I think it’s silver,” he whispered.

  Azlia looked up. “Yes, it’s silver,” she said. “Or silver-plated, anyway; I’m not sure pure silver would be strong enough.” She sheathed her knife, then hoisted her pack onto her shoulder. She picked up the black box and gray cone and got to her feet. “Let’s see this root cellar.”

  Grondar looked around at the others, and decided nothing more need be said. He turned and led the way back to the farm.

  As they walked, Garander leaned over and whispered to Ishta, “You don’t want to help them find…uh…anything, do you?” As he spoke he watched Azlia, three or four paces ahead; the wizard had already demonstrated that she had keen ears, and Garander did not want her overhearing.

  Ishta looked up at him, startled. “They won’t find him if he doesn’t want them to.” Her whisper was not quite as quiet as Garander might have hoped.

  “Ishta, she’s a wizard. Remember what Father said he had orders to do if he saw a shatra?”

  “Send for a dragon!”

  “A dragon or a wizard.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah.” She glanced at Azlia’s back. “I guess I forgot. But what could she do?”

  “I don’t know, and that’s why I’m worried.”

  Just then Azlia glanced back over her shoulder at them, and Garander decided not to risk further conversation.

  A few minutes later they were back at the farm, where Grondar led the way down through the barn’s lower level to the root cellar. He opened the door and stood aside, letting the wizard peer in.

  The room was dark and cool, the walls of rough stone and the floor of hard-packed earth. Wooden bins lined both sides, leaving a narrow path down the middle. On a shelf just inside the door stood a small lantern holding a stub of candle.

  Azlia seemed more concerned with the heavy wooden ceiling than anything else; she leaned in, studying it for any signs of sunlight. Finding none, she turned to Grondar and said, “This should do.” She set her box and cone on the shelf beside the lantern, then drew the silver knife from her belt. She transferred it to her left hand and then, to Garander’s astonishment, stabbed her own right index finger, drawing a bead of blood. Then she began speaking, but her voice had changed—it had dropped almost an octave in pitch, and the tone had altered so that it barely sounded human as she recited something incomprehensible. Then she curled the fingers of her right hand into a fist except for the index, which she held out, straight and rigid.

  The drop of blood burst into flame, bright and yellow. Azlia used it to light the candle stub, then curled her finger; the magical flame instantly went out.

  Garander stared, and realized his mouth was hanging open. He snapped it shut, then glanced at Ishta.

  Her mouth was open, too.

  “She’s just showing off,” Sammel muttered behind them. “I could have lit it more quickly.”

  Azlia turned. “I heard that. I’m also getting the sense of the magic in this environment.”

  “I thought you said you needed darkness,” Grondar said.

  “It’s really just sunlight that’s a problem,” Azlia said. “In fact, I need light to work, and the candle’s easier than a spell.”

  “But you lit it with a spell!” Ishta said.

  Azlia smiled at her. “Just a little one. It’s called the Finger of Flame. A proper light spell that would last long enough would be much more difficult.”

  “Oh.” Ishta continued to stare as the wizard picked up the lantern and marched down the three steps into the root cellar. She took up a position in the center o
f the chamber, then held the lantern high as she looked around.

  “This should do.” She unslung her pack and dropped it to the earthen floor, then looked back at the others. “Anyone who wants to watch, get in here. Anyone who doesn’t, go away. And close the door behind you.”

  Garander and Ishta almost collided with one another as they hurried down into the cellar; behind them, Hargal moved onto the steps and closed the heavy wooden door behind himself. The chamber was plunged into near-darkness, with the lantern’s dull glow the only illumination.

  Garander hesitated for a moment, wondering what he was getting himself into, trapping himself in here with a wizard and a soldier and his silly little sister. But then he remembered he was about to see a demonstration of real magic, of wizardry.

  But he didn’t want to stand here for an entire hour, with Hargal right behind him. He turned and clambered into one of the bins, kicking aside a few scattered onions that still lingered in the bottom.

  Ishta followed his example, climbing into a bin on the opposite side. Then both of them settled down to watch Azlia perform her spell.

  Chapter Twelve

  Garander had never imagined magic could be so dull. For over an hour Azlia had stood, or knelt, or sat, waving her silver dagger around and chanting unintelligible nonsense. The black box had turned out to hold nothing but a smooth pebble the size of a sparrow’s egg, and the gray cone was some sort of incense that burned with a faintly salty smell; Azlia moved the pebble about, sometimes holding it in one hand while her dagger was in the other, sometimes setting it on the ground, and the gray cone smoldered and burned on the floor in front of her, filling the root cellar’s air with smoke that made Garander’s eyes itch. There was also an occasional odd tingling sensation that he supposed was magic, but it was not especially powerful.

  The candle-stub in the lantern flared and flickered in unnatural ways, and Azlia’s knife sometimes seemed to be glowing with its own blue light, but even that lost all interest after awhile. Ishta had fallen asleep after perhaps half an hour, and there were times when it took an effort for Garander to remain awake himself, but he held out, hoping something exciting would happen eventually.

  And then the wizard picked up the little gray stone and held it out in front of her, and it began to glow a color Garander had never seen before. She released it, but instead of falling it hung there, suspended in the smoky air directly above the stump of the cone of incense.

  “The spot I marked with the rune of location, at one hour before noon on the twenty-third of Leafcolor, in the five thousand and eighteenth year of human speech,” Azlia said in clear Ethsharitic, in her own natural voice.

  Garander jerked upright and stared. “Ishta!” he hissed.

  “Hm?” The girl stirred. Garander could not reach her to shake her awake, but Hargal took pity on her, leaned over the side of the bin, and patted her shoulder. Then he straightened up to watch the spell.

  Ishta yawned and sat up; then she caught sight of what was happening a few feet away and stared, her mouth open.

  The pebble was spreading, as if it was not a stone but a drop of oil upon a surface—and the surface was vertical and invisible. It became something like a pool or a window, hanging in the air of the root cellar before the wizard Azlia, an arm’s length from her face. Through it, Garander could see the forest—not as they had seen it today, on the eighteenth of Thaw, but as it had been on the twenty-third of Leafcolor, with snow falling steadily and blanketing the ground.

  And there at the base of a tree, sitting side by side under that magical cloth, were Ishta and Tesk. There was no sound—or rather, no sound but the breathing of the four people in the root cellar, and the heavy tread of Hargal’s boots as he moved closer to the floating image. The long-ago Tesk said something, and the Ishta image laughed. Then she reached out to scoop up some snow and tried to fling it at the shatra, but he somehow managed to dodge it without rising, letting it splat against the trunk by his shoulder.

  “Oh, no,” the present-day Ishta murmured. Garander saw Hargal turn to look at her before returning his attention to the conjured image. The soldier leaned forward, studying the vision.

  “Can you make it show that part again?” Hargal asked. “Where he dodges the snow?”

  Azlia shook her head.

  Garander realized that the image was still expanding; that wintry forest now filled the entire far end of the root cellar. It was almost as if Tesk and the second Ishta were here in the storeroom with them.

  The two had settled back against the tree again, talking silently and watching the snow fall. Garander watched in fascinated horror, expecting to see his father and himself appear at any moment.

  But they did not. Tesk alerted at something, said something to Ishta—and then the image vanished, an effect midway between a bubble popping and smoke dispersing, and the entire root cellar was plunged into darkness. The candle-stub had finally burned out, and the incense had burned down to a small pile of ash.

  For a moment the blackness seemed absolute. Garander heard his companions breathing, and heard a small plop, but he saw nothing at all—until his eyes adjusted enough to make out the faintest of blue glows where the wizard’s dagger gleamed.

  “I’ll get the door,” Hargal said, and Garander heard the rustle of cloth and the creak of leather as the guardsman marched back up.

  Then the latch rattled, the hinges squealed, and daylight spilled into the room, forcing everyone within to blink and squint.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t show you more detail, or repeat anything,” Azlia said. “The spell doesn’t work that way; you get maybe ten to fifteen minutes, just the way it happened, and then you’re done. I’d need to do the entire spell over to show you anything a second time, and there’s no way to change the angle or distance.”

  “I think we saw enough,” Hargal said. “I’d say yes, that was a shatra.” He turned to glare down at Ishta, who crouched in the vegetable bin. “And I’d say that someone besides father and son most certainly did see it.”

  “I didn’t…I mean, I didn’t know…” Ishta began.

  “Leave her alone!” Garander said. “She’s just a girl!”

  Hargal turned to face him. “I’d say you didn’t seem very surprised by what we saw. I think you knew more than you said.”

  “He wasn’t in the image,” Azlia said.

  “No,” Hargal agreed. “But…”

  “But I would have been, in another moment,” Garander said, interrupting the soldier. There was no point in trying to hide anything anymore; these two really were magicians, and could find out all the secrets. Instead, he intended to tell the truth and hope he could convince them to leave Tesk alone. “My father and I found Ishta there, talking to the shatra. We didn’t tell you because she’s just a girl, and we didn’t want her involved.”

  “Hmph.” Hargal frowned at him, and then at Ishta. “You befriended that thing?” he asked her.

  “He’s not a thing!” Ishta protested. “He’s nice! Nicer than you, anyway!”

  “The baron doesn’t pay me to be nice.”

  Just then Sammel leaned in the door. “I heard the latch, and the voices,” he said. “Did the spell work?”

  “It worked,” Azlia said, as Grondar and the other soldier appeared on either side of the sorcerer. “It seems that the young lady here made friends with our Northern abomination.”

  Garander could see that his father looked miserable. “He’s not an abomination,” Garander said. “He’s a shatra, but he knows the war’s over. He won’t hurt anyone.”

  “He’s nice!” Ishta insisted.

  “If it’s really a shatra, it’s half-demon,” Sammel pointed out.

  “You’ve spoken with it,” Hargal said to Ishta. “I saw that.” Then he turned to Garander. “Have you spoken with it?”

  Garander nodded.

  “And you?” The soldier looked at Grondar.

  “No,” Grondar said. “I saw it with my children, but it fled
at the sight of me, leaping up into the tree, just as I told you.”

  “You saw it with your children.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did that happen?”

  “Ishta slipped away, and Garander and I followed her tracks in the snow.”

  “She slipped away.” He turned back to the girl. “Why did you do that?”

  “I wanted to be sure Tesk was all right. I didn’t think he had anywhere to go to get out of the snow.”

  “Tesk. Tesk?”

  “That’s what we call him,” Garander volunteered. “We can’t pronounce his real name correctly.”

  “It’s Northern,” Ishta added. “It doesn’t sound like anything Ethsharitic.”

  “You knew it was there? And that it was a Northerner?”

  Ishta threw Garander a look, but he turned up an empty palm to indicate he didn’t know how to help her. Then he decided that yes, he did know, and he spoke before she could. “We knew,” Garander said. “We had met him before, and we figured out he was a shatra. But by then we liked him.”

  “I’ve never, ever heard of anyone talking with a shatra before,” Azlia said.

  “They usually didn’t get a chance,” Sammel said. “Most people who met shatra didn’t get a chance to do anything but die.”

  “That was during the war!” Ishta protested. “It’s different now!”

  “But it’s still a shatra,” Hargal said. “It’s still a half-demon monster.”

  “Sort of,” Garander said. “He doesn’t seem like a monster.”

  “But it’s still half demon?”

  “Yes,” Garander reluctantly admitted. “But the man part is completely in control of the demon part.”

  “How do you know?” Sammel asked.

  “Tesk said so!” Ishta exclaimed.

  “And you believe it?”

  Garander and Ishta exchanged glances. “Yes, we do,” Garander said.

  “I didn’t,” Grondar said. “That was why I warned the neighbors.”