Tales of Ethshar (legends of ethshar)

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Tales of Ethshar

  ( Legends of Ethshar )

  Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Ethshar? Some readers already recognize the name, but if you aren’t one of them, perhaps a brief explanation is in order. “Ethshar” is the invented world that has been the setting for almost a dozen novels from the pen of Lawrence Watt-Evans. Its inhabitants don’t call it that; they call it “the World.” For readers, though, that’s not specific enough. The dominant nation on the World is the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, while the largest, richest city, where most of the stories are set, is Ethshar of the Spices, so “Ethshar” is close enough. The name itself comes from words meaning “safe harbor.” You don’t need to have read any of the novels to enjoy the stories herein; each one should stand alone. And if you've read the novels, you will enjoy this return to the world of Ethshar with 11 stories... This is the first time they have all been collected in one book!

  Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Tales of Ethshar

  Introduction

  Ethshar?

  Some readers already recognize the name, and can skip this introduction, but if you aren’t one of them, perhaps a brief explanation is in order.

  “Ethshar” is what we call an invented world that’s been the setting for almost a dozen novels so far. Its inhabitants don’t call it that; they call it “the World.” For readers, though, that’s not specific enough. The dominant nation on the World is the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, while the largest, richest city, where most of the stories are set, is Ethshar of the Spices, so “Ethshar” is close enough. The name itself comes from words meaning “safe harbor.”

  You don’t need to have read any of the novels to enjoy the stories herein; each one should stand alone. Here’s a little background, though:

  The World of Ethshar is rich in magic — several varieties of magic, in fact, each with its own rules, its own strengths, and its own weaknesses. In these stories you’ll find wizardry, sorcery, theurgy, and warlockry, but there are others, as well.

  About half the inhabited World is the Hegemony of Ethshar, ruled by the overlords of its three great cities: Ethshar of the Rocks, Ethshar of the Sands, and Ethshar of the Spices. To the north of the Hegemony lie the Tintallions, the Baronies of Sardiron, and anarchic lands like Srigmor; to the east are the Small Kingdoms, more than a hundred tiny squabbling states. To the south and west is only ocean, right to the edge of the World — yes, the World is flat and has edges. It has two moons, one pink, the other orange. The greater moon follows a thirty-day cycle much like our own moon’s, while the lesser moon goes through all its phases in about a day and a half.

  The people of Ethshar measure time from the year the gods first taught human beings to talk — or at least, so legend says. Much knowledge of their history was lost in the course of the Great War, a centuries-long struggle between Old Ethshar and the Northern Empire that ended, in the last decade of the fiftieth century of human speech, with the utter destruction of the Northerners.

  The stories in this collection are all set at various times in the three hundred years following the Great War. Ethshar stories are generally not tales of great heroes battling evil, but of ordinary people trying to deal with an extraordinary world.

  The novels, in order of publication (which is not the order of their events), are these:

  The Misenchanted Sword

  With A Single Spell

  The Unwilling Warlord

  The Blood of a Dragon

  Taking Flight

  The Spell of the Black Dagger

  Night of Madness

  Ithanalin’s Restoration

  The Spriggan Mirror

  The Vondish Ambassador

  The Unwelcome Warlock

  I have hopes of writing several more. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll enjoy these little stories!

  About “The Bloodstone”

  In The Misenchanted Sword, the very first published Ethshar story, I referred to “the bloodstone spell” that allowed the soldiers of the Holy Kingdom of Ethshar to survive for extended periods without food. I was well aware that such a spell deserved more than a passing mention, and eventually I wrote this story about it.

  The Bloodstone

  Darranacy wrinkled her nose in disgust at the smell from Mama Kilina’s cookpot. “What is that?” she asked.

  “Cabbage, mostly,” Mama Kilina replied, poking at a whitish lump. “Cabbage someone pickier than me thought was too far gone to eat.”

  “Whoever it was that threw it out wouldn’t get any argument from me!” Darranacy retorted, turning away.

  Kilina looked up at her. “Oh, and I suppose you’d eat it if it were fresh? Some of us don’t have your advantages, my girl! We take what we can get!”

  Darranacy smiled smugly. “One of us doesn’t have to.”

  Kilina glared at her for a moment, then went back to her stew. “Laugh while you can, girl,” she said. “Someday the spell will break, and when it does you’ll be in the same boat as the rest of us.”

  “Or maybe someday you’ll wish it was broken,” a voice said from behind, startling Darranacy so that she jumped. She turned and found a smiling young man dressed in tattered red velvet.

  “Korun!” she said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  “Learn to listen, then,” he said.

  Darranacy frowned slightly. “I don’t understand how you can hear so much in a place like this,” she said, waving her hand to take in all of Wall Street and the Wall Street Field, the run-down houses, the city wall, and the dozens of ragged figures huddled around campfires or under blankets in between. “It’s not as if we were out in the forest, where it’s quiet.”

  “You haven’t learned to listen,” Korun said mildly.

  “I do listen!” she protested.

  “Do you? Then what was it I said that startled you so, just now?”

  “You said I should learn to listen, of course!”

  “No,” Korun corrected her, “That was the second thing I said, after I had startled you and you had told me not to sneak up on you.”

  Darranacy opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again.

  He was right, of course. It would hardly have made sense otherwise.

  But then what had he said?

  “Oh, I don’t know!” she snapped. “I was too startled to listen to the words!”

  “I said,” Korun told her, “that someday you may wish that your magic spell was broken.”

  “Oh, that was it.” She frowned. “But what a silly thing to say, Korun. Why would I ever wish that?” Before he could answer, she continued, “And if I did, the spell is very easy to break — the hard part is keeping it. If I let the enchanted bloodstone out of my possession, the spell will fade away, or if any food or water passes my lips, poof! The spell’s gone. I could break it right now with a single bite of Mama Kilina’s glop — if I wanted to, which I most certainly don’t.” She shuddered at the very idea. She missed the taste of food, sometimes, but that stuff didn’t really qualify.

  “I have heard,” Korun said, “that it is unwise to maintain the spell for too long. Magic always has a cost, Darra. An old wizard once told me that the bloodstone spell can wear you down and damage your health.”

  “Damage my health, ha!” Darranacy replied. “If I wanted to damage my health, all I would have to do is eat some of the stuff you people live on. The Spell of Sustenance can’t be any worse for me than that cabbage. I haven’t eaten a bite nor drunk a drop in four months now, and I’m just as fit as ever.”

  Korun shrugged. “I say what I heard, that’s all.”

  “You’re just jealous because you have to eat,” the girl sai
d. “You spend your time scrounging for hand-outs, and any money you get goes for food and drink, and you’ll probably be here on Wall Street for the rest of your life, but I don’t need anything. I’m free!”

  Mama Kilina looked up. “’Tain’t natural, living like that.”

  “Of course it isn’t natural,” Darranacy answered promptly. “It’s magic!”

  Mama Kilina just shook her head and went back to her cookery.

  “You’re right, of course,” Korun said. “It is magic, and it gives you an advantage over the rest of us, since you don’t need to worry about your next meal. But have you done much with that advantage? It doesn’t appear to me that you have. You’re still here in the Field, and it’s been, as you say, four months since your parents died.”

  “There’s no hurry,” Darranacy said defensively. “I’m still young.”

  “Ah, but wouldn’t it be wise to use your advantage and get yourself out of here while you are still young?”

  “I will get out of here!” Darranacy shouted. “And I’ll stay out!”

  “When?”

  “When I’m old enough for an apprenticeship! When I’m good and ready!”

  Korun shook his head. “I don’t think,” he said, “that this is quite what old Naral had in mind when he put the spell on you.”

  “Who cares what old Naral thinks?”

  “You ought to, girl,” Mama Kilina snapped. “Without him, you’d be no better off than any of us. If your mother hadn’t been his apprentice once, and if he hadn’t felt guilty when one of the spells he had taught her went wrong, you’d be starving now.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Darranacy retorted, “because if Mother had never been his apprentice, she wouldn’t have had any spells to go wrong, and she’d still be alive!”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Kilina insisted, “because it wasn’t her spell that killed her, as you well know, it was the demon your father summoned. Bad luck, mixing two schools of magic in a marriage like that, that’s what I say.”

  “But if she hadn’t been a wizard, she would have run, instead of trying to stop the demon from taking Daddy — if she’d ever have married a demonologist in the first place.”

  Kilina shook her head. “Wizard or no, and whatever else, your mother probably wouldn’t have left your father if all the demons of Hell were after him.”

  Darranacy opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She couldn’t think of any way to argue with that. Should she insist that her mother would have fled, she’d be denying her parents’ love for each other.

  Why did they have to die, anyway? Why did magic have to be so dangerous?

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said at last. “They’re both dead, and Naral did give me the bloodstone.”

  “Yes,” Korun said, “He gave you the stone and the spell, and he told you that that was all he could do, to let you get by until you could find a place for yourself.”

  “Well, then?” Darranacy snapped.

  “Darra,” Korun said quietly, “I think he had four days in mind, maybe as much as four sixnights, but not four months — or four years, the way you’ve been going.”

  “Three years. I’ll be twelve in less than three years, and then I’ll find an apprenticeship.”

  “You plan to stay that long? To keep the spell that long?”

  “Why not?” Darranacy stared up at him.

  “Do you think you’ll be in any shape to serve an apprenticeship after three years here?”

  “Why not?” Darranacy asked again.

  Korun didn’t answer.

  He didn’t have to.

  Naral hadn’t mentioned anything about the bloodstone’s spell being unhealthy; Darranacy was sure that Korun was just jealous when he said that.

  But even so, what would she have to wear after three years in the Field? She’d have outgrown all her clothes, and would just have rags. Who would she know who could give her a reference? What sort of diseases might she have caught? The bloodstone didn’t keep away disease. Or fleas, or lice, or ringworm, or any number of other things that might deter a prospective master.

  Magic always seemed to have these little tricks and loopholes built into it — but then, so did everything else in life. Nothing was ever as simple as she wanted it to be.

  “All right, then, I’ll find a place sooner!” she said. “I’ll fix myself up and I’ll be in fine shape when I turn twelve!”

  Korun smiled sadly.

  “You think I won’t find a place for myself?” she demanded.

  “I think you won’t unless you start looking,” Korun told her. “I’ve seen too many people start out with fine plans and high hopes only to rot here in the Wall Street Field. You think Mama Kilina, here, never set her sights any higher than this?”

  Darranacy turned and started to say something rude, then stopped.

  She had never thought of Mama Kilina ever being anywhere else. Just days after the demon had carried her parents off, leaving their tidy little apartment and shop a burnt-out ruin, and after Naral had enchanted her but refused to take her in, the tax collector had come around for the annual payment on the family’s property.

  Darranacy hadn’t had the payment — she hadn’t had any money at all, had never found where her parents had hidden their savings, if in fact they had any. She had packed up a few belongings and fled, crying, and had come to the Field — everyone in Ethshar of the Sands knew that that was the last refuge, the place where the city guard never bothered you and nobody cared who you were or what you’d done. She’d found Mama Kilina there, sitting by her cooking pot, just as she was now, and it had never occurred to her, then or any time since, to wonder how old Kilina came there.

  Even Kilina must have been young once, though.

  Mama Kilina grinned at her. She still had almost half her teeth, Darranacy saw.

  Darranacy did not want to ever wind up like Mama Kilina, bent and old and eating rotten cabbage.

  “All right,” Darranacy said, “I’ll find a place, then. Right now!”

  “How?” Korun asked quietly.

  Darranacy looked up at him angrily. “Why should I tell you?” she demanded, as she stared challengingly at Korun.

  He shrugged. “Please yourself, child,” he said. He squatted down by the cookpot. “Spare me a little, Mama?”

  Darranacy watched as the two of them ate Mama Kilina’s cabbage stew. The smell reached her, and simultaneously revolted and enticed her.

  She never felt real hunger now, but the smell of food could still affect her — even such food as this. She remembered the happy meals with her parents in the back of the shop, the pastries her father sometimes bought her when they were out on one errand or another, how she would sit and nibble at a bowl of salted nuts while she practiced her reading...

  But she couldn’t eat anything now. It would break the spell, and then she’d need to find more food or starve, she’d need to find clean water — the stuff the others here in the Field drank, mostly rainwater collected from gutters of the city ramparts or from gravel-lined pits dug in the mud, was foul and full of disease. Attempts to dig a proper well had always been stopped by the city guard — the edict that had created the Field in the first place said that no permanent structure was permitted between Wall Street and the city wall itself, and that included wells as well as buildings.

  Once she had a proper home again, then she could break the spell. Not before.

  She thought over Korun’s words. He was right, it was time to find a proper home.

  She stood up and turned away from Mama Kilina and her cookpot, and began walking.

  Darranacy reached her own little shelter, built of sticks and knotted-together rags pilfered from Grandgate Market — a crude thing that could be knocked down, or simply trampled, in a matter of seconds if the city guard ever decided to clear the Field out properly. She ducked inside, shoved aside her crude bedding, and dug into the sand, uncovering the pack she had hidden there.

  This pack held e
verything she had brought from her parents’ house that she wasn’t already wearing.

  There wasn’t anything really valuable in the pack; the demon and the fire had destroyed all her parents’ precious arcane supplies, the dragon’s blood and virgin’s tears and so on that her mother had used, and Darranacy hadn’t been able to find any gold or silver anywhere — maybe the demon had taken it all, some demons did crave money, though her father had never told her what they did with it.

  There was, however, her good tunic — fine brown silk with elaborate rucking around the waist, and gold embroidery on the sleeves and hem. Wearing that she would be attired well enough to travel anywhere in the city, up to and including the Palace itself.

  She looked down at it for a moment.

  She could go anywhere in it — but where should she go?

  She wasn’t about to go to the Palace; that was too much. The overlord scared her; she’d never met him, but she had heard enough about him that she was not about to intrude on the Palace.

  But she wanted to find someone rich to live with.

  Well, there were plenty of big, elaborate homes around the Palace, homes where rich people lived. She didn’t know how she could get someone there to take her in, but maybe if she looked around...

  An hour later Darranacy, in her fine silk tunic but still barefoot, was wandering the streets of the Morningside district, admiring the marble shrines on the street corners, the iron fences and ornate gates that guarded the homes, the lush gardens behind the fences, the lavish homes beyond the gardens.

  This was so different from the crowded streets where she had always lived! On Wizard Street or Wall Street the shops were jammed against each other right along the street, with no room for gardens either between them or in front of them, and the courtyards to the rear would hold only small vegetable patches, not these great expanses of flowers in every color of the rainbow. The residents lived upstairs from their shops, or behind them — a home without a business, a building without a signboard over the door or a display in the window, was rare indeed. A block a hundred yards long would hold at least a dozen homes in a solid row, broken perhaps by a single dark, narrow alley — two at the most.