“Oh.” Ezak considered this. “So…the top of my ear was cut off by some left-over Northern sorcery that’s throwing knives made of pure magical energy at us?”
Dorna nodded. “So it would seem,” she said.
“It throws them at anyone it sees?”
“Apparently.”
“But you don’t think it would throw them at Northerners?”
“Right. The magician who made it wouldn’t want to hurt his own people.”
“How did it know we aren’t Northerners? I mean, they weren’t demons, were they? They were people, like us.”
Dorna opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. She looked to the northeast and frowned, then looked back at Ezak. “You know, every time I think you two are both idiots, you surprise me by saying something smart. Why did it assume we’re enemies?”
“It probably thinks everyone is,” Kel said. “Maybe it knows there aren’t any more Northerners.”
“This thing that cut off my ear,” Ezak said. “What is it? How smart is it? I thought we were talking about a talisman, a spell, but you’re talking about it as if it’s a person, or a creature.”
“We don’t know what it is,” Dorna said. “Or how smart it is. But some talismans are…well, they can do things. They can talk. They can see. They can hear. You saw the fil drepessis-is that a spell or a creature?”
Ezak considered that for a moment, then said, “I see your point.”
“Whatever it is, there was something here that made it think it should attack us,” Kel said.
“So it would seem,” Dorna said.
Kel looked at her, trying to guess what might have made the Northern sorcery think she was an Ethsharite. She was wearing a dark green dress, with her long black hair pulled back and loosely bound in a soft green ribbon, and she had that canvas bag over her shoulder.
Ezak was wearing a tan cotton tunic that had seen better days, and brown leather breeches. His curly hair-what remained of it-was a little longer than was fashionable, but reasonably tidy.
Kel himself was wearing a dark red tunic and gray goatskin breeches, and his hair just covered his ears. They all looked ordinary enough. Had Northerners looked different, back when Northerners still existed?
A memory came to him. Ethshar’s city guards wore red and yellow now, but during the war they hadn’t. Kel thought back to pictures he had seen of soldiers in the Great War-there were murals on the walls of the magistrate’s hall back in Smallgate, and he had seen a tapestry in the south tower in Grandgate once. In those pictures, the Ethsharitic soldiers wore green and brown, while the Northerners-well, the Northerners were mostly indistinct figures in the distance, but they appeared to be wearing black and gray.
Dorna was wearing green. Ezak was wearing brown. But Kel himself was wearing red and gray, and during the war those weren’t the colors for either side. After the war the overlords dressed their soldiers in red and yellow, but it was a completely different shade of red, much brighter than the drab hue of Kel’s tunic, and anyway, how would a leftover spell from the Great War know about the change?
“Wait here,” he said.
“What?” Dorna turned to look at him, but Kel was already on his feet and running southeast, behind the low ridge.
“What are you doing?” the sorcerer’s widow shouted after him.
“Trying something,” Kel called back.
“Trying what?”
Kel was not sure just how to explain his idea, so he didn’t answer that. He got a hundred yards away from the others-he thought that should be far enough-then got down on hands and knees, and crawled up over the rise, staying hidden in the tall grass.
Then once he was over the rise, he stood up, prepared to drop to his belly if he saw a red flash. He scanned the area where he judged the Northern talisman to be, and caught the glint of sunlight on metal. He could see something shaped sort of like a horn, but with less of a flared opening than usual, atop a dark cylinder sticking up out of the grass; it swiveled toward him, and he tensed, getting ready to dive for safety.
Then it stopped, and swiveled back until it was once again aimed at Dorna and Ezak.
Maybe it didn’t think he was a Northerner, but it didn’t think he was a threat, either. It was ignoring him.
“Hai!” he called, waving at it.
The horn-shaped thing swung toward him again, then seemed to hesitate. It shifted a little further, then turned back toward the others.
In the distance he heard Dorna shouting at him, “What are you doing, you lunatic?”
He smiled, and began walking across the meadow toward the Northern talisman. If he was right, he told himself, if it really thought he was a Northerner, he ought to be able to walk right up to it and retrieve the…the fil whatever-it-is.
“Kel!” Dorna shrieked. “Get down!”
He turned, and could see her lying on the ground, peeping through the grass at him. He waved to her, then kept walking.
He was perhaps sixty feet from the Northern sorcery, whatever it was, when the horn suddenly swung toward him again, and a loud, masculine, unfamiliar voice said something in a foreign language, a language he didn’t recognize.
Kel stopped walking. He didn’t know what the voice had said, but it had the sound of a warning. The thing hadn’t given any warning before slicing Ezak’s ear off, but it had apparently thought Ezak was an enemy, where it appeared to accept Kel as a friend, or at least neutral.
Cautiously, Kel took a step backward. The horn thing seemed to hesitate. He backed up another step, and it swung around to point back toward Dorna and Ezak.
So it would let him get close, but not too close. It didn’t attack him just because it could, but it didn’t let him walk right up to it, either. That seemed sensible enough. He smiled, turned, and headed directly toward the others.
“What did you do?” Dorna called, as he drew near enough for conversation. “How did you do that? How did you know?”
“I didn’t know,” Kel replied. “I guessed. I was ready to duck if it pointed at me, but it didn’t.”
“Why not?” she demanded. “We couldn’t really see from down here-what did you do?”
“Nothing,” Kel said. “It wasn’t attacking me in the first place. All I had to do was get away from you two.”
Dorna considered this for a moment as Kel continued to march toward her through the tall grass, then asked, “Why?”
“Because you’re wearing green,” Kel said proudly. He had figured this out all by himself. “And Ezak is wearing brown.”
Dorna stared at him. “What difference does that make?”
“Well, you said it was left from the Great War, and in the Great War Ethshar’s soldiers wore green and brown, while the Northerners wore black and gray.”
“They did?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know that. How did you know that?”
“From pictures back in Ethshar. In the magistrate’s hall in Smallgate.”
“Well, I’ll be a toad. You really think that’s it?”
Kel nodded vigorously. “What else could it be? We were trying to guess how it could tell Northerners from Ethsharites; well, how did the soldiers in the Great War tell them apart? From the colors of their uniforms. Why shouldn’t this talisman be doing the same thing?”
“Every time I think you two are hopelessly stupid…” Dorna sighed. “All right. But you turned back before you got right up to it, and I thought I heard something-what happened?”
“It pointed at me and said something,” Kel explained. “It sounded like a warning, but I don’t know the language it spoke, so I’m not sure. I thought it didn’t want to let me get too close-probably because I’m not in a Northern uniform.”