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 sell 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?”
Dorna nodded as she chewed bread and cheese. “A couple of hundred yards that way,” she said, once she had swallowed. She pointed in the direction they had been walking. “We’ll catch it as soon as we’re done eating.”
That said, she settled down cross-legged on the wild grass of the meadow, and the two men followed her example, gnawing at their meal. The cheese was dry and tasteless, and the rolls were hard chewing; Kel wished the jug of beer was larger. He looked around for water, but didn’t see anything close at hand that might provide a drink; they were seated in a broad, gently-rolling expanse of knee-high grass, with a few trees visible in the distance. A warm breeze was blowing, carrying odors Kel did not recognize.
When all three had eaten their fill the rolls and every drop of beer were gone, but more than half the cheese remained; Dorna wrapped it up and returned it to her bag. She brushed crumbs from her skirt, then said, “Come on,” stood, and set out across the meadow without waiting to see whether the others were following.
This gave Ezak an opportunity he had been waiting for; he leaned over and whispered in Kel’s ear, “If we can get that fill-dirt-presses thing for ourselves, we’ll be rich!”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Kel replied, with an uneasy glance at Dorna’s back.
“Why not? What’s wrong with it?”
“She’ll know we took it.”
“So what? We’ll sell it to some sorcerer in the city, we won’t try to keep it.”
Kel pointed. “She has that bag full of magic. I don’t want her mad at me.”
“Exactly, she has all that other magic! She doesn’t need the fill-dirt-presses.”
“I don’t think it works like that.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to steal her magic, Ezak. I think it’s a bad idea.”
“You what?” Ezak glared at him. “Then what do you think we’re doing here?”
“We’re helping her get back the thing you set loose,” Kel said. “Listen, you said we were going to trick her into giving us some magic. Well, that isn’t going to happen-she knows we’re thieves. She may not really be a sorcerer, but she has a lot of magic, and I don’t want to make her angry.”
“Then what are we supposed to do, to get a share of her husband’s magic? It’s not really hers, after all; it was his.”
“It’s hers now. She can keep it. Let’s help her get to Ethshar and then go find some other way to get money.”
“But we’re here, and she has all that magic!”
“She has a list of it all. She can tell if any talismans are missing.”
“If she bothers to check every single item, yes, but why would she do that?”
“Because she knows we came here to steal it!”
“Are you two coming?” Dorna called, before Ezak could reply.
“Come on,” Kel said, setting out after her.
A few minutes later, still in the meadow, they topped a small rise, Dorna holding her sorcerous device out. “It’s just ahead,” she said. “We should be able to see it.” She looked up from her talisman, then cried, “Look out!” and flung herself to the ground.
Kel instantly copied her, although he had no idea why. His survival instincts had been honed on the streets of Smallgate, and he didn’t need a reason. As he dove, a red flash suddenly blinded him momentarily. He blinked, and landed hard on the ground. Lying flat on his belly in the grass, Kel twisted his head as his vision cleared, and peered through the tall grass to see Dorna equally prone. Ezak was not in sight, and Kel was trying to locate him when a howl from somewhere behind him drew his attention. He pushed himself up on one elbow and peered back.
Ezak was sitting on the ground just behind the low ridge in the meadow, holding the side of his head. At first Kel thought that he was seeing an after-image of the red flash, and then realized that the red stuff trickling between Ezak’s fingers and down his wrist and neck was blood. The howl was coming from Ezak.
“Shut up!” Kel hissed. “They might hear us!”
Ezak, who had been looking nowhere in particular, turned to glare at his companion. “Who might?” he said. “It hurts!”
“Whoever made that flash,” Kel said. He glanced ahead, but could not see anyone or anything moving.
“Stay down,” Dorna said, without moving from where she lay. “I don’t think it can hurt us if we stay low.”
“It?” Ezak asked. He carefully took his hand from the side of his head.
“The talisman.”
“The one we’re chasing? It can…it cut off the top of my ear?” He stared into the blood-filled palm of his hand. Kel could not see what he held, but he could see that something had cut a gouge in the side of Ezak’s head, a shallow gouge that was bleeding profusely. A large hank of Ezak’s hair had been sliced away and had tumbled down across his shoulder and tunic, scattering black hair in the blood, and his ear looked wrong-apparently a sliver had indeed been removed from its upper curve.