The Spell of the Black Dagger loe-6 Read online

  Then a thought struck her, and she turned back. “You said a wizard is doing the divination for this one?” “That’s right.” Tikri nodded. “Who is it?”

  “Mereth of the Golden Door. Do you...” “Oh, her! Yes, I know her. Is she working at her home?” “I think so, yes...” Before Tikri could finish whatever he was going to say, Sarai cut him off. “Thanks,” she said. Then she turned away and strode down the hallway.

  She did not care to wait for an official report; she wanted to talk to Mereth and find out just what had happened, why this poor Inza had been killed. Mereth’s home and shop were on Wizard Street, of course—at least three-fourths of all the magicians for hire in Ethshar of the Sands located their businesses on Wizard Street.

  Wizard Street, however, was several miles long, winding its way across the entire city, from Westbeach to Northangle; simply saying a house was on Wizard Street didn’t tell anyone much.

  In Mereth’s particular case, her shop was just three blocks from the palace in the district of Nightside, where Wizard Street made its closest approach; that was probably, Sarai knew, why Mereth got so much investigative work.

  Or perhaps Mereth had chosen her home in order to be close to her preferred customers; Sarai really didn’t know which was the ox and which was the wagon.

  The weather was cool, but not unpleasant, and Sarai didn’t bother with a wrap. She marched quickly across the bright stone pavement of the plaza surrounding the palace, across Circle Street, and out North Street—which, with the usual Ethsharitic disregard for unimportant details, ran west by northwest through Nightside, and not north through Shadyside.

  Like all the neighborhoods close around the palace, Nightside was largely occupied by the mansions of successful merchants and the city’s nobility; this portion of North Street ran between tall iron fences that guarded gardens and fountains. Sarai paid them no attention.

  Harbor Street, being a major thoroughfare between the waterfront and Grandgate, was crowded and bustling where North Street intersected it, and was also far less aristocratic than its surroundings. As she crossed the avenue Sarai was jostled by a heavy man who reeked of fish; her hand fell automatically to her purse, but it was still there and seemed intact. If the man had been a cutpurse or pickpocket he had missed his grab.

  At the corner of North and Wizard she turned left, and there was Mereth’s shop, two doors down on the far side. The draperies were drawn and the windows closed, but the trademark gilded door was ajar.

  Sarai hesitated on the threshold, listening; she could hear voices somewhere within, but could not make out the words. She knocked, and waited.

  A moment later young Thar, Mereth’s apprentice, appeared in the crack, peering out at her. He swung the door wide, but held a finger to his lips for silence.

  Sarai nodded.

  “She’s working, Lady Sarai,” Thar whispered. “Do you want to wait?”

  “That depends,” Sarai replied. “What’s she working on?”

  “A murder,” Thar answered, his voice low but intense.

  “Then it’s probably the very thing I came to ask her about,” Sarai said.

  Thar blinked. “Inza the Apprentice?” he asked. Sarai nodded.

  “Do you want to come in and wait, then?”

  “How much longer do you think it will be?”

  Thar frowned. “I don’t really know,” he said. “To tell the truth, I thought she’d be done by now. I guess I misjudged, or maybe she’s using a different spell from the usual—I don’t know that much about it. I haven’t started learning divinations yet myself. She says that if I keep on as well as I have been, though, I’ll start on them after Festival.”

  Sarai nodded again. “So you don’t know how long?”

  “No.”

  The young noblewoman considered for a moment, then said, “I’ll wait.”

  Thar nodded. He stepped aside and admitted her to the consulting room, small but cozy, where Sarai settled into a blue brocade armchair.

  Thar hovered for a moment, making sure the important guest was comfortable, then vanished through the archway that led to the rest of the building.

  Sarai waited, looking over the room. She had seen it before, of course, but she had little else to do.

  There were three armchairs, blue, green, and gold, arranged around three sides of a small square table, a table of carved wood inlaid with golden curlicues. Eight little boxes stood on the table—gold, silver, brass, abalone, crystal, and three kinds of wood, all intricately carved and finely polished. Ink paintings hung on the walls, depicting rocky seashores, lonely towers, and other fanciful locations unlike anything in Ethshar of the Sands; Mereth had said once that these had been painted by her grandmother. An ornate wool rug in gold and red covered most of the floor; the rest was oiled wood. A shelf over the door held half a dozen mismatched statuettes, and a cork sculpture of a dragon wrapping itself around a peasant’s farmhouse stood on the windowsill.

  It was really a rather pretentious and fussy little room, Sarai thought. For lack of anything better to do, she turned her attention to a study of the ink paintings.

  She had just about exhausted all possible interest in that when Mereth finally emerged, breathlessly hurrying through the archway, tunic awry and feet bare.

  “Lady Sarai!” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming! Sit down, sit down!”

  “I’ve been sitting, thank you,” Sarai said, as Thar stumbled after his mistress into the room.

  “Oh, yes, of course you have,” Mereth agreed, flustered. “Well, whatever you please, then. What can I do for you?”

  “You were investigating the death of Inza, the apprentice warlock, I believe.”

  “Trying to, anyway,” Mereth said.

  Sarai waited. Mereth sighed. “I can’t see anything,” she said. “Nothing works. Not the Spell of Omniscient Vision, not Fendel’s Divination—none of my spells worked.”

  Those two spells, Sarai knew, were among the most powerful and useful information-gathering spells of all those known to wizardry; she suspected that between the two of them they provided more than half Mereth’s income. “Is it because she was a warlock?” she asked. “I know different kinds of magic...”

  “No, that’s not it, or at least...” Mereth paused, collecting her thoughts, then explained, “The warlockry doesn’t help, Lady Sarai, but I could get around that, I’m sure, if that was all there were. It isn’t. She was killed by magic, strong magic—I can’t tell what kind.”

  Sarai blinked. “She was killed with a knife, I thought—her throat was cut and she was stabbed.”

  “It might have been a knife,” Mereth said, “or something else, I can’t even tell that much. But I do know that whatever killed her was magical.” Her tone was definite. “There’s no possible doubt.”

  “But why would a magician kill anyone that way?” Lady Sarai asked. “I mean, aren’t there spells... spells that leave no traces, or make it look like an accident?”

  The wizard looked decidedly uncomfortable and did not answer.

  Lady Sarai frowned at her silence. “Mereth,” Sarai said, “I’m no fool; I’ve been the overlord’s Minister of Investigation for four years now. I know that people who seriously offend wizards or warlocks or demonologists tend to turn up dead in fairly short order, even if, most of the time, we can never prove anything. People who bother warlocks have heart attacks, or fall from heights, or trip over their own feet and break their necks. People who fatally annoy wizards, I mean more than just enough to wind up with a curse like the Dismal Itch or Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm, can have any number of strange accidents, but they seem especially prone to mysterious fires and smothering in their own blankets. People who are stupid enough to get demonologists angry usually just disappear completely. Witches don’t seem to kill people; either that, or they’re too subtle for us. Their enemies have plenty of bad luck, though, even if it isn’t fetal. I ’m not sure about sorcerers or theurgists or the others. But everyone kn
ows it’s bad business to anger magicians, any kind of magicians. I know that, my father knows that, the overlord himself knows that.” She swallowed, remembering that her father had not angered any magicians, but had instead annoyed a god and was now dying as a result. Then she forged on. “Every man in the city guard knows that you don’t anger magicians and expect to live. It’s not our job to protect people when they cut their own throats. We know magicians kill people sometimes—it’s so easy for you, after all. When the victims go asking for it, and the killers don’t make a show of it, we don’t worry too much. But in this case... Mereth, the giii was seventeen years old, never hurt anybody that we can see, and she got her throat cut. We can’t let this one pass.”

  “I know, Lady Sarai,” Mereth said unhappily. “But honestly, I swear, on my oath as a member of the Wizards’ Guild, that I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why anyone would do it this way; you’re right, there are other, easier, less-obvious spells. I don’t know who did this, or why, or how; I only know that it was magic.”

  Sarai studied the wizard for a moment, then sighed. “A rogue magician,” she said. “Wonderful.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Tabaea stared at the mug and concentrated.

  This would, she was sure, be easier if she had an older, more experienced warlock who could help her, could tell her what to do, but of course she could hardly tell any warlocks what she had done. She had to guess what she was supposed to do.

  She had seen warlocks, in the taverns, in their shops, and in the Arena, and they had all been able to move things without touching them. That seemed to be the most basic ability that warlocks had. Inza had surely had it.

  But how did it work?

  Tabaea had no idea how to make it happen; despite her optimistic expectations, none of Inza’s memories had transferred, none of what the apprentice had learned in her five years of training. If there were tricks or secrets to the warlock’s arts, Tabaea didn’t know them.

  But Inza’s raw magical ability should have transferred, the Black Dagger should have stolen it away and given it to Tabaea, and the only way Tabaea knew to test that was by trying. She hoped that warlockry worked just by thinking, by concentrating hard enough.

  She stared at the empty mug. She stared so hard that her head began to hurt. Somewhere she thought she heard whispering, a muttering in some foreign language; she tried to ignore it.

  She shouldn’t be able to hear any whispers, she thought, annoyed—not here in this empty house in the middle of the night. She certainly couldn’t have heard anything if she were still an ordinary person; this whisper was somehow alien. She supposed it was some trick of her newly enhanced senses, something that a dog could hear when a person wouldn’t, but she couldn’t think what it might be. Who would be speaking a strange tongue near here? She hadn’t seen anyone around the place who didn’t look Ethsharitic. And this was a very strange tongue, nothing she had ever heard before, she was sure.

  Maybe it wasn’t human at all. Still staring at the mug, she tried to make out the words and where it was coming from.

  There were no words, she realized, and the whisper wasn’t coming from anywhere. It seemed to be inside her own head.

  Then, abruptly, as she focused on the whispering that wasn’t really a sound at all, she felt as if something had touched her, or perhaps she had touched something, in a place that she could not locate, a part of her that didn’t correspond to anywhere on or in her body. The whispering ran through her, and she could suddenly feel the mug, as well as see it, even though it was six feet away.

  She could feel it with the whisper.

  That made no sense, but that was how it felt; she could touch the whisper, and with it she could touch the mug.

  She gripped it tentatively with her... her whatever-it-was. She took a deep breath, tightened her hold, and lifted. The mug shot upward; startled, she threw her head back, eyes following its trajectory. Her mouth fell open and her eyes widened with surprise.

  The mug whacked against the ceiling, and at the impact she lost her intangible hold on it. It tumbled down and smashed against the table, shattering spectacularly.

  Tabaea stared at the spot on the ceiling where the mug had struck, and her openmouthed astonishment slowly transformed itself into a broad grin. So that was warlockry!

  It had worked. And she had liked it; it had felt good, had made her feel strong and awake, even stronger than she already was—and since killing Inza, she had roughly twice her former strength, she was no longer just a weak woman, but as strong as most grown men.

  This was greatl She only wished it hadn’t taken four years to find out what the Black Dagger could do. She had a lot of lost time to make up for.

  The dagger wouldn’t teach her anything, apparently, wouldn’t steal knowledge or memories, but it would take power. Strength, talent, skill—she could take any of those she wanted. All she had to do was kill the people who had them. Her grin dimmed.

  She had to kill them, if she wanted to keep what she stole. That was the nasty part. She didn’t like killing people, not really. It was true that Inza was a stuck-up little beast who had thought Tabaea was just gutter trash, but even so, killing her had probably been more than she deserved.

  It had been a necessary experiment, of course, to prove the Black Dagger’s power, and it had gotten Tabaea her wonderful new talent for warlockry, but still, it was nasty.

  Well, Tabaea told herself, sometimes life was nasty. At least, from now on, she would be on the dispensing end of the nastiness, rather than the receiving.

  She would pick and choose her victims carefully, though. There was no reason to kill large numbers of people. In fact, for raw strength, there was no reason to kill people at all—dogs and cats and other animals would serve just as well, perhaps better, for that.

  But skills—agility and dexterity, and of course all the different schools of magic—those would come from people. Dogs and cats had no fingers and couldn’t do anything much with their toes, they couldn’t transfer anything involving tools, or that called for standing upright.

  Scent and vision and hearing, yes—without those, she could hardly have located this empty house and been certain it was deserted. She knew that she would spot the owner’s return before he suspected anything was wrong, or would hear or smell him before he got near her, and with her faster reflexes and increased speed she could be gone before he noticed her, and that was all due to the animals.

  But for human skills, she needed to kill humans.

  She looked down at the dagger on her belt and shrugged.

  Well, she told herself, people died every day in Ethshar. Men bragged in the taverns about how many people they had slain. Magicians killed each other and any other enemies they might have. Demonologists sacrificed children or troublesome neighbors to their diabolic servants, and necromancers traded souls for the wisdom of the dead. Everyone knew all that. Surely, no one would notice a few more deaths.

  It did occur to Tabaea, somewhere in the back of her mind, that while she always heard about all these horrible deaths, she had never seen one, and very few of the people she knew personally had died of anything other than natural causes.

  If they were natural causes and not vindictive magic.

  Well, it was a big city, and even if she had been lucky, everyone knew that people were murdered every day in Ethshar, stabbed or beaten in the Wall Street Field, poisoned or smothered in the lounges and bedrooms of the palace, roasted or petrified by wizards, or carried off to nameless dooms by demons and other supernatural creatures. No one would notice anything out of the ordinary if there were a few more deaths than usual.

  That settled, the only questions remaining were who and when.

  She had killed a warlock—she reached out and picked up the biggest chunk of the broken mug and sent it sailing in broad circles around the room, all without touching it; now that she knew how, it seemed to grow easier with every passing second. The next step would be either some other
form of magic, or some vital, nonmagical skill—archery, perhaps, or swordsmanship. A soldier, then?

  Yes, a soldier, but one who knew his trade, not just one of the fat, lazy bullies who guarded Grandgate by day and caroused in Soldiertown by night. An officer, perhaps—one who trained the new enlistees.

  And then some more magicians—a demonologist, perhaps, and a theurgist. Even if they needed incantations, maybe she could learn those somewhere, listen to someone at work; it couldn’t be that hard, once you had the gift, the skill, whatever it was that made them magicians instead of mere mortals. And then maybe a wizard, despite the Guild and her inability to make an athame, maybe two, they didn’t all use the same spells, maybe she could learn something useful. A sorcerer, a witch...

  She drew the dagger and looked at it.

  “We’re going to be busy,” she said. She smiled. “And it’ll be worth it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “There’s wizardry here,” the witch said, kneeling by the body.

  “You’re sure it’s wizardry and not some other magic?” Sarai asked from the doorway.

  The witch frowned. “Well, my lady,” he said, “it’s either wizardry or something entirely new, and if it’s something entirely new, it’s something that’s more like wizardry than it’s like anything else we’ve ever known.”

  “So it could be something entirely new?”

  The witch sighed as he got stiffly to his feet. He ran a bony hand through thinning hair. “I don’t know, Lady Sarai,” he said. “I know that when warlockry first came along, when I was just finishing my apprenticeship, we had a hard time telling it from witchcraft at first, because there are similarities, and we didn’t know the differences yet. I know that theurgy and demonology are opposite sides of the same coin, so that in some ways they look alike and in others they couldn’t be more different. Whatever happened here feels like wizardry to me, but it might be that it’s something new, and I just don’t know the differences yet. But it feels like wizardry.”