That was a frightening thought.
Garander wondered whether he should tell someone about Tesk. He had promised not to, but if Tesk was a Northern sorcerer…
And if he was a harmless halfwit who had wandered off from a farm or camp, as Ishta thought, then what? In that case, telling others wouldn’t accomplish anything except angering both Ishta and Tesk.
Or what if he really was a squirrel or a snake some passing wizard had enchanted in the waning days of the Great War? What good would it do to tell anyone?
Destroying Tesk’s privacy and ruining his own relationship with his sister before he was sure that Tesk was dangerous did not appeal to Garander. He decided that he needed to find out more about Tesk, and more about Northerners, and see how well they matched up. Having reached this decision he tried to get to sleep, with only intermittent success.
At breakfast the following morning Garander was so obviously not at his best that his mother asked if he was feeling well.
“It’s nothing,” Garander mumbled.
Shella considered this, then turned away. Grondar eyed his son for a moment, then continued eating.
A moment later Garander asked, “Father? During the war, did you ever meet any Northerners?”
“Meet any? No. How could I meet any?”
“I thought there might have been prisoners you spoke to.”
Grondar shook his head. “We never took any prisoners.”
“Did you ever see any Northerners, then?”
Grondar snorted. “More than I wanted to.”
“You did?”
“Of course. Mostly at a distance, though-I didn’t see much close combat, thank the gods!”
“So you didn’t get a good look at them?”
“Not when they were alive. I helped strip and burn some of the bodies a couple of times, and that certainly let me see more of them than I wanted.”
“So they really were human?”
“Oh, is that what this is about? Yes, they were really human. Once the uniforms were off, you couldn’t tell a dead Northerner from a dead Ethsharite.”
Garander nodded.
“You were wondering how ordinary people could serve an evil empire?”
“Well, that,” Garander said. “And I heard stories in Varag that made me wonder. One of the soldiers there said that Northerners didn’t move like ordinary people-he said they were faster than we are, and their movements were…funny. Really smooth and graceful.”
His father turned up an empty palm. “The ordinary Northerners were just people, and they moved like anybody else. But according to the stories, shatra moved the way that soldier said.” Grondar shuddered. “I never saw any shatra, thank the gods!”
“What are shatra?” Ishta asked. Garander had not realized she was listening; he threw her a nervous glance, wondering whether she had realized why he was asking about Northerners.
Something about the word “shatra” was troubling him, but he was unsure what. He had heard it before, in stories about the war, but that wasn’t it…
“Shatra were half man, half demon,” Grondar told his younger daughter. “According to what our magicians told us, it took a demonologist and a sorcerer working together to turn a man into one, and no one on our side could do it. Shatra were stronger and faster than humans, and they could move so silently that no one could hear them coming; there were stories about sentries who turned around and found shatra had come up right beside them, or behind them, and they hadn’t heard a thing. The stories said that shatra were inhumanly efficient, that they never wasted any motion, and could hold so still that they blended in with the background. They didn’t have any scent-watchdogs couldn’t smell them-and they could see in the dark. They dressed all in black, and they were all sorcerers, carrying dozens of powerful talismans, including a big wand that was some kind of magical weapon that could spit fire.”
Garander listened to this description with mounting horror.
“I never saw one myself,” Grondar continued. “I just heard stories. But they were definitely real, because we had orders about what to do if we saw one. We weren’t supposed to try to fight it, even if it was just one of them against our entire regiment; our orders were to retreat and call for magicians and dragons to tackle it. One shatra was a match for at least a hundred Ethsharitic soldiers.”
Garander looked at Ishta, who was staring at their father, fascinated.
This was horrible, even worse than Garander had feared. It sounded as if Ishta’s friend in the forest was not just a Northerner, or even a Northern sorcerer, but a half-demon shatra. In fact, Garander realized what had been troubling him about the very word-hadn’t it been a part of Tesk’s name? Right in the middle of that string of syllables? That really didn’t leave much room for doubt.
Surely, Garander thought, there must be some sort of mitigating element that would make this less of a disaster! “If they were so dangerous,” he asked, “then how did we win the war?”
“Because there were only a few of them at any one time,” Grondar replied. “Maybe a few hundred, at most. Maybe only a few dozen. For some reason the Northerners couldn’t make very many of them.” He turned up an empty palm. “Maybe the demons they used to make them didn’t like it, or maybe there were only a few of the right kind of demon available. Besides, they weren’t impossible to kill; a dragon had a pretty good chance against a shatra, at least a flying dragon, and a good wizard could usually find a spell that would get through even a shatra’s defenses. There was even supposed to be at least one magic sword powerful enough that an ordinary soldier could kill a shatra with it, though I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to try it. A shatra might do a lot of damage, but sooner or later they all got stopped somehow. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t have won the war!”
“I suppose the last ones were all killed by the gods,” Garander said. “I mean, at the end of the war, didn’t the gods kill all the demons?”
“You can’t kill a demon,” his father corrected him. “All you can do is send it back to the Nethervoid. And that’s what the gods did-they cast all the demons out of the World, and I assume that would have included half-demons like the shatra. But I don’t know for sure, and I don’t know whether anyone really does.”
With that, Ishta finally looked at Garander, and for a moment he feared his sister was going to say something stupid, such as telling Grondar that the shatra hadn’t all been destroyed, but instead she held a knuckle to her lips, indicating that her brother should keep his mouth shut.
So she did understand what they had just been told, Garander thought. She did know now that her friend Tesk was a half-demon monster left from the Great War, one that had somehow survived the destruction of the Northern Empire.
The question was, what was she going to do about it?
“Are you done eating?” Grondar asked his son. “Because if you are, there are chores that need doing.”
Garander looked down at his plate, then called to his mother, “Is there any more hash?”
By the time he had finished breakfast and completed his chores the morning was almost gone, and Garander was growing steadily more worried. What if Ishta went out into the woods to ask Tesk what it was like being a shatra? The Northerner might kill her rather than risk exposure.