The Sorcerer's Widow

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Besides,” Dorna added, the smile vanishing, “I don’t think Shepherd’s Well has a magistrate, and there certainly wasn’t one I’d trust. I wasn’t about to leave the two of you back there with someone you might talk into helping you steal a wagonload of magic.”

  “Steal?” Kel squeaked.

  “Yes, steal. You can’t possibly still think you’re fooling me after you set the fil drepessis off, can you?”

  Kel didn’t answer; he simply looked miserable.

  Dorna stopped walking and turned to glare at him. “I knew you were frauds when we first met, when Ezak—if that’s really his name—said he and Nabal were apprentices together,” she said. “Not very bright frauds, either—I mean, leaving aside the fact that from the look of it Ezak wasn’t born yet when Nabal was a journeyman, did you really think I didn’t know my husband’s master? Didn’t know all his apprentices?”

  “I don’t know,” Kel whispered, eyes cast down.

  “Nabal’s master was my father. That’s how we met. You two really should have done your research more carefully.”

  “Oh,” Kel said. After a moment, he asked, “His name wasn’t really Jabajag, then?”

  “Of course not. I just made up the stupidest name I could think of to see whether Ezak would guess I was onto him. My father’s name was Arnen Azdaram’s son. He didn’t need some silly pompous name like Jabajag the Magnificent; he wasn’t some stupid wizard trying to impress his customers, he was a great sorcerer, an Initiate of the Inner Mysteries!”

  She sounded furious, and Kel did not blame her. He and Ezak had made fools of themselves, trying to trick her, and she had every right to be angry with them.

  But then she continued, “Nabal was his last and best apprentice, who inherited all my father’s magic, and you two thought you could…could just take it?” Her voice cracked, and Kel looked up to see tears in her eyes. “You wouldn’t know what to do with any of it! You probably can’t tell a tokka from a noog. How dare you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kel said. He realized, a bit belatedly, that she wasn’t really upset with him; she was grieving. She had seemed so calm, so controlled, since they first met her that he had almost forgotten she had lost her husband just a few days ago. Now her control had slipped a little.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t just blow you both to bloody bits,” she said, her voice wild. “I could, you know. I’m no sorcerer, I never apprenticed with my father or anyone else, but I’ve lived my whole life around sorcery. Even when I was a little girl, my father had to teach me which talismans were which so I could help him in his workshop without hurting myself. I know how to use a zir or a shokkun, and the wagon back at the inn is full of them.”

  “I don’t know what those are,” Kel said.

  “Of course you don’t!” she shouted. “Because you’re a dirty little sneak thief, not a sorcerer or a sorcerer’s wife.”

  “Maybe we should just go away and leave you alone,” he said.

  “Oh, no! Oh, no, you don’t. You two set the fil drepessis off, and you’re going to help me get it back! It’s worth almost as much as the rest of that wagon put together.”

  Kel blinked. “It is?”

  “Yes, it is! And while he obviously didn’t know my father, maybe that friend of yours really does know some sorcery, since he woke it up.”

  “I…I don’t think so,” Kel said, glancing at Ezak, who was pointedly not listening.

  “Well, even if he doesn’t, the fil drepessis responded to him, so I might need him to get it back, so you’re coming with me until we find it.” She was starting to regain control, Kel saw; she wiped the tears from one cheek.

  “I don’t understand,” Kel said, “but I’ll try to help.”

  She glared at him for a moment, then turned to glower at Ezak, who was standing thirty or forty feet away, trying to look unconcerned, as if he stood out in the middle of a wheat field every day. “What about him?”

  “I don’t know,” Kel said. “I can’t tell Ezak what to do.”

  “Well, you can tell him that if he doesn’t help, I’ll hunt him down and kill him. I can find him anywhere.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Kel promised.

  “Then go do it,” Dorna said, with a wave of her hand. “I’ll wait here.”

  Kel nodded, then turned and ran to Ezak.

  “What happened?” Ezak asked. “What does she want? What did she get so angry about?”

  “She wants us to help her find that thing that ran off—and she knows we came to steal from her. Her husband’s master wasn’t named Jabajag. She said that to test you, and you failed.”

  “What? But why did she… Why was she testing us?”

  “I don’t know,” Kel lied.

  “That’s what she’s mad about?”

  “That, and her husband dying, and that thing running off.”

  Ezak nodded. There was a calculating look in his eye that Kel did not like.

  “She says it’s worth almost as much as the rest of the wagon put together, and if you don’t help her get it back she’ll hunt you down and kill you. She isn’t a sorcerer, but her husband taught her how to use some of his magic.” Kel did not want to say anything about Dorna’s father, though he wasn’t sure why not. “She says she may need you to catch it because you were the one who set it off.”

  Ezak nodded again, then hesitated. “What is this thing we’re looking for?” he asked. “What does it do? Why is it so valuable?”

  “I don’t know,” Kel said. “You could ask her.”

  “Did she threaten to kill you? She threatened to kill me.”

  “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.”

  “But wizards use living things,” Kel protested.

  “Wizards are working with chaos. Sorcerers work with order.”

  Kel did not find that entirely convincing, but he let it drop and brought up another objection. “I didn’t see patterns in some of the things in the wagon.”

  “The patterns are usually too fine to be seen with the naked eye. That’s one reason you need talismans to make more talismans.”

  Ezak spoke up again. “That’s all very interesting,” he said, “but tell us more about the full-drapes-hiss.”

  “Fil drepessis,” Dorna corrected him.

  “Whatever. You said I woke it up and told it do do something?”

  “Yes. It’s all patterns—to give it instructions, you tap the top of it, and the pattern of tapping tells it what you want it to do. I deliberately left it in a half-awake state where if someone touched it without a pattern, it would scream—that was to keep away thieves. Like you. I thought that would be enough to scare you away, but apparently I misjudged. You must have accidentally made a good pattern when you were hitting it, but we don’t know which one, so we don’t know what it’s looking for.”

  “How do sorcerers know what patterns to make?”

  Dorna grimaced. “That, dear boy, is what sorcerers need a nine-year apprenticeship to learn.”

  “But you know how to use that boot-heel!” Kel said.

  “I learned how to use some of these things by watching my father and my husband, but there are plenty I can’t use, and I can’t make any new ones.”

  “So you know how to use the…the fill-dirt-presses?” Ezak asked.

  Dorna frowned. “No,” she said. “That was one reason I planned to sell it. I know a few patterns, but I don’t really understand how to work it properly. That’s probably going to make catching it tricky.”

  Kel and Ezak exchanged glances. “How tricky?” Ezak asked.

  Dorna sighed. “I wish I knew,” she said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Early that afternoon they stopped for lunch in a meadow, forty yards beyond the end of a huge wheat field, where a broken fence and a few widely-spaced trees had seemed to indicate a boundary of some sort. Ezak had been suggesting a stop, more and more pointedly every time, since mid-morning, and Dorna had gone from ignoring him to simply telling him to shut up until at last, at least an hour after the sun had passed its zenith, she had finally agreed.

  They had passed several farmhouses as they traveled, and Ezak had pointed out that the farmers would probably be happy to sel
l them some food, but when Dorna had at last deigned to stop they were in the open meadow, without a single man-made structure anywhere in sight except a couple of fenceposts and a fallen rail. Instead of buying food from a farmer’s kitchen, the sorcerer’s widow pulled a half-ball of hard cheese, half a dozen hard rolls, and a small jug of beer from her shoulder-bag.

  “This is all the food I brought,” she said, as she distributed the rolls. “I hoped it wouldn’t take this long.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kel said.

  “Why are we stopping here, then?” Ezak demanded. “Why didn’t we buy something from a farmer?”

  “Because the fil drepessis was still moving,” Dorna said. She held up the golden boot-heel. “Now it isn’t.”

  “That thing tells you whether it’s moving?” Ezak asked. “Not just the direction?”

  “Yes. And it stopped.”

  “Why are we stopping, then?” Kel asked. “Shouldn’t we catch it while we can?”

  “The only reason it would stop,” Dorna said, “is that it’s found whatever it came to repair. It’ll probably need a good long time to fix it, and when it’s fixed it’ll either stay where it is, or head back toward the inn, or go back to Nabal’s workshop—I don’t know which, but if it stays we can find it, and if it does either of the others it should come right to us.”

  “It could just be broken,” Ezak grumbled. “You said some of those talisman things break easily.”

  “Not a fil drepessis,” Dorna said. “I mean, yes, it could be broken, but nothing with fil in the name is fragile.”

  “Why?” Kel asked.

  She glared at him. “How should I know? I’m not a sorcerer. I just know what I’ve seen all my life—you can whack the fil drepessis, or the fil skork, or a fil splayoon, with a hammer, or kick it down the stairs, and it won’t even notice, where if you breathe hard on a lagash it needs to be taken apart, cleaned, and rebuilt before it works again.” She transferred the glare to the crumbly cheese in her hand. “I wish we had a fil splayoon right now; the food those things make tastes better than this stuff.”

  “So it isn’t moving,” Ezak said. “Can you tell where it is?”