The Spell of the Black Dagger Read online

  Tabaea had heard about cellars and basements all her life, in tales of faraway places, but had never been in one, unless you counted crawlspaces or the gaps between pilings. The whole idea of cellars tended to put her in mind of the overlord’s dungeons—she had heard about those all her life, too, or at any rate as long as she could remember—and of secrets and exotic places. She stared at the stone step, and wished she could see more; from her vantage point at floor level she could see the iron rail, the walls, the sloping roof, but nothing below the topmost stair.

  However, she could, she realized abruptly, hear something.

  She held her breath and listened intently, trying to ignore her own heartbeat. An older man’s voice, speaking quietly and intently—she couldn’t make out the words.

  Could it be the wizard in whose workshop she was?

  Of course; who else would it be?

  Could he be working a spell? Was that an incantation she heard, the invocation of some spirit, the summoning of some supernatural being? She could only hear the one person, no answering voice, but he seemed to be addressing someone, not just muttering to himself.

  A shiver of excitement ran through her.

  He had to be doing something secret, down there in the cellars. He couldn’t just be fetching a bottle; he wouldn’t be talking like that, and she’d be able to hear him moving around. His voice was steady, as if he were standing or sitting in one place. And he wouldn’t be doing his regular work, or just passing the time, in the cellars—cellars were for secrets and mysteries, for concealment and protection.

  Something rustled, and she leapt away from the door, sprang to her feet, the candle in her hand almost, but not quite, blown out by her sudden motion.

  That little greenish creature was watching her from atop a stack of papers. It squeaked, and scurried away into the darkness, scattering papers as it went.

  She watched it go in the dimness and made no attempt to follow. All around her, the shadows were flaring and wavering crazily as her candle flickered; she feared that if she moved anywhere she might trip over something unseen, or bump into something, in that tangle of black and shifting shapes.

  Worse, her candle might go out, and the wizard emerge from the cellars before she could re-light it. She stood by the cellar door, shielding the candle with her hand, until the flame was strong and steady once more, and the animal, or imp, or whatever it was, was long gone.

  At last she turned back to the door, intending to listen again, and caught her breath.

  The line of light across the bottom had become an L. She had bumped the door when she sprang up, and it wasn’t latched; it had come open, very slightly.

  She knew she shouldn’t touch it. She knew she should just go, get out of the house while she could—but a chance to watch a wizard at work was too much to give up.

  Who knows, she thought, maybe if things had gone a little differently for her, she might have been a wizard. She might have had the talent for it; who could say?

  Well, she supposed a master wizard could say, but she’d never had the chance to ask one.

  Or maybe she’d just never had the nerve to ask one.

  She snorted, very slightly, at that. She was Tabaea the Thief, she’d taken the cognomen for herself just last year, she was a promising young cutpurse, burglar, and housebreaker, and she was here in a wizard’s house planning to rob him, but she’d never had the nerve to talk to one.

  Of course, it was too late now, anyway. She was fifteen, and nobody would take on an apprentice who was past her thirteenth birthday.

  If her family had been willing to help out when she was twelve, if her stepfather had offered to talk to someone for her...

  But he hadn’t. And when she’d asked he was always too busy, or too drunk. He promised a dozen times that he’d get around to it later, that he’d do something to set her up, but he never had. And her mother hadn’t been any better, always busy with the twins, and on those rare and precious occasions when both the babies had been asleep she’d been too tired to go anywhere or do anything, and it wasn’t an emergency, Tabaea was a big girl and could take of herself. She could help Tabaea’s sisters and half-brothers with their reading and numbers, but she couldn’t leave the house, what if the twins woke up?

  And then Tabaea’s thirteenth birthday had come and it was too late, and old Cluros was the only one who’d been interested in her, and maybe it wasn’t an official apprenticeship, maybe there wasn’t any guild for burglars and lockbreakers, but it was better than nothing.

  And better than a bed in the brothels in Soldiertown.

  Besides, she wasn’t sure she even had the looks or personality for a brothel; she was always nervous around other people. She might have wound up walking the streets instead, and sleeping in the Wall Street Field when she couldn’t find a customer who would keep her for the night. Maybe she should have run away, like her big brother Tand, but she never had.

  So now she was a sneak thief. Which suited her just fine; she was good at not being noticed. She’d had plenty of practice, all those years staying out of her mother’s way and avoiding her stepfather’s temper when he was drinking.

  At least she hadn’t disappeared completely, like Tand, or their father. And her thieving had kept her fed when her stepfather wouldn’t any more. Thennis had taken to begging in Grandgate Market, and Tessa was spending a suspicious amount of time in Soldiertown, but Tabaea was taking care of herself just fine. Being a wizard or something else respectable and exciting would have been much better, certainly, but Tabaea wasn’t going to complain. Her career in burglary had gotten her plenty of nice little things over the past two years.

  For one thing, it had gotten her here, with a chance to spy on a wizard at some secret business in his cellar. Carefully, inch by inch, holding the knob so the hinges wouldn’t creak, she opened the door.

  Yes, there were stone steps going down, between gray stone walls. The glow of a distant lamp spilled in through an archway at the bottom, and threw Tabaea’s shadow down the full length of the room behind her.

  Cautiously, she descended the stairs, pausing on each step, watching and listening. The man’s voice—the wizard’s voice, she was sure—grew louder with each advance, droning on and on. And with each step she could see a little more of what lay beyond that arch.

  There was a small square of stone floor, and then steps to either side, and a black iron railing straight ahead—the cellar went down even farther into the ground!

  At the bottom she hesitated. Straight ahead she could see through the archway into an immense chamber, lit by a great three-tiered chandelier. That chandelier was directly ahead of her, beyond the archway and the landing and the iron railing. She couldn’t really see much of the space below.

  But if she advanced any farther, out onto the landing, she would be terribly exposed.

  She paused, listening, and realized she could make out words now.

  “...it’s a part of you,” the wizard was saying. “A part of your soul, your essence. It’s not just some random energy, something that anybody could provide, or that you could get from somewhere else.”

  For the first time Tabaea heard a second voice answering, a higher-pitched voice, a woman or a child. She didn’t catch the words.

  That was simply too fascinating to miss. She crept forward, crouching lower with each step. By the time she passed through the arch she was on her knees, and by the time she peered through the railing she was lying flat on her belly, hands braced to either side, ready to spring up if she were spotted.

  The cellar or crypt or whatever it was lay before her, a single huge space. The stone-ribbed ceiling arched a dozen feet above her, and the floor twenty feet below—she realized that that floor must be thirty feet below ground, and marveled that the sea had not flooded it.

  But then, the walls were massive stone barriers, sloped and buttressed to hold back the sand and water. Those great braced walls enclosed a square thirty or forty feet on a side—the room
was almost a cube, she decided. In the center of the far wall was a broad slate hearth below a fine smooth stone chimney; there were, of course, no windows. Heavy trestle tables were pushed against the walls, four of them in all.

  The floor was more stone, and in the center a thick carpet was spread, and seated cross-legged on that carpet, facing each other, were two people—a man perhaps half a century in age, and a girl two or three years younger than Tabaea herself. The man wore a red silk robe and held a silver dagger; another dagger and a leather sheath lay on the carpet by his knee, and several other small objects were in a clutter to one side. The girl wore a simple white robe and sat with her hands empty, listening intently; the man was speaking.

  “The edge will never dull, as long as you remain whole and strong,” he said, “and the finish will stay bright as long as your spirits do.”

  The girl nodded.

  Tabaea stared. This was a wizard, beyond question—and his apprentice.

  “If you can so much as touch it, it will cut any bonds put upon you, even heavy chains,” the wizard continued. “Physical bonds, at any rate—while it can dispel a minor geas, or ward off many spells, there are many others it will not affect.”

  Tabaea let the muscles of her arms ease a little. The two were intent on their conversation, and would only notice her if she were to somehow draw their attention.

  “Those are just side-effects, of course,” the wizard said. “Incidentals. I’m sure, after these past four months, you understand that.”

  “Yes,” the girl said, in a hushed voice.

  “So, if you understand what an athame is, and why a true wizard must have one, it’s time you learned how to make yours, is it not?”

  The girl looked up at the wizard’s face and said again, “Yes.”

  “It will take several days to teach you, but we can at least make a start tonight.”

  The apprentice nodded. Tabaea folded her hands beneath her chin and settled down to listen, her heart fluttering in her chest.

  She had never heard that word the wizard used, but if it was something every wizard needed—well, she had never heard of such a thing. It must be one of the secrets of the Wizards’ Guild, something only wizards were permitted to know—probably one of the most important of their secrets.

  Knowing such a secret could be very, very useful. Blackmailing a wizard would be impossibly risky, but it might be possible to sell the information somewhere.

  Or just possibly, if she could learn the trick, she could make one of these things for herself.

  Perhaps she could even become a wizard herself, without a master, without anyone knowing it. If she could learn how to work magic...

  She listened intently.

  Chapter Three

  Sarai, a little nervous, looked around the justice chamber.

  She was seated at her father’s left hand, just off the dais, a foot or two in front of the red velvet drapery that bore the overlord’s seal worked into it in thick gold braid. The chamber was long and narrow, deliberately built with a slight slope to the floor, so that prisoners and petitioners would be looking up at the Minister of Justice as if from a pit, or as if they dared to look up at a god descending from the heavens—but would probably not consciously notice the slope at all.

  The overlord’s palace was full of tricks like that. The Great Council Chamber, under the overlord’s Great Hall, was arranged so that all the doors were partially hidden, to make it easier for people to believe that what they said there was secret, when in fact there were spy-holes in several places; the Great Hall itself was open to the huge central dome to over-awe petitioners; there were any number of clever constructs. The justice chamber hadn’t been singled out.

  What the architects had never considered, however, was that this slope left the Minister, her father—and herself, at the moment—looking down. Or perhaps they considered it and dismissed it as unimportant, or thought it would enhance the Minister’s self-confidence.

  She couldn’t speak for her father, but the effect on her was to be constantly worried about falling. She felt as if at any moment she might slip from her chair and tumble down that hard gray marble floor into that motley collection of brigands, thieves, and scoundrels waiting at the far end of the room.

  She clutched the gilded arms of her seat a little harder.

  This was the first time she had ever been allowed in here when her father was working, and she didn’t want to do or say anything that would embarrass him or interfere in any way, and, she told herself, that was why she was nervous. She knew that she was being silly, that the slope was really insignificant, that she was in no danger of falling from her chair. After all, she had been in this room dozens of times when it was empty, starting when she was a very little girl, little more than a toddler, and she had never so much as stumbled on that subtle slope—but still, the nervousness persisted.

  Maybe, she thought, if she paid more attention to what was going on in the room, and less to the room itself, she’d forget about such foolishness.

  “...and really, Lord Kalthon, how you can take the word of this ... this peasant, over the word of your own third cousin, is utterly beyond me!” said Bardec, younger son of Bellren, Lord of the Games, in a fairly good imitation of injured dignity.

  “It is not, however, beyond me,” Lord Kalthon replied dryly, “since I have the word of our theurgist that you did exactly what this good woman accuses you of.”

  Bardec threw a quick, angry look at old Okko; the magician stared expressionlessly back, his long forefinger tracing a slow circle on the evidence table beside him. His white velvet robe hung loosely on him, his forearm was thin and bony, but Okko somehow looked far more dangerous sitting there at Lord Kalthon’s right hand than the young and brawny Bardec did standing before them.

  “I take it,” Sarai’s father said, “that you do not choose to plead any mitigating circumstances? You do not ask for the overlord’s mercy?”

  “No, Lord Kalthon, I most certainly do not, because I am not guilty!” Bardec persisted. “I am completely innocent, and can only assume that some enemy of mine has somehow cozened this woman into making this absurd charge, and that some sort of malign magic has fooled our esteemed Lord Okko into believing it...”

  “I am no lord,” Okko said, cutting Bardec off with a voice like imminent death.

  “I wish I could say the same for our young friend,” Lord Kalthon said loudly. “He is, alas, a true noble of the city, born of our overlord’s chosen representatives. He is also a fool, compounding his original crime with perjury and false accusations. Stupid ones, at that.” He sighed, and glanced at his daughter. She was watching the proceedings closely, saying nothing.

  Well, he had wanted her to see how the job was done.

  “Very well, then,” he said. “Since you show no remorse, or even comprehension, I hereby require, in the overlord’s name, that this woman’s losses be restored threefold from your own possessions and estates—that would be...” He lifted the notes dangling from his left hand to where he could read them, and continued, “Three sound hens, three dozen eggs of the first quality, three oxcarts, and six oxen, or the equivalent value in silver. I further command that you receive ten lashes from a guardsman’s whip, as a reminder that the nobility of the city are not, as you seem to think, the rulers of the people, but only the servants of our beloved overlord, and that by insisting on bringing this case this far you have wasted the time of everyone in this room. In the name of Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, Triumvir of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, Commander of the Holy Armies and Defender of the Gods, let it be done.”

  Bardec began to protest, but the guardsmen at either side did not let that interfere as they dragged him away, kicking and struggling.

  “Young idiot,” Lord Kalthon muttered, leaning toward Sarai. “If he’d had the sense to pass it off as a boyish prank, he’d have got off with simple restitution and a small fine.”

  She glanced up at he
r father, startled.

  “But that isn’t fair—that means the woman’s benefitting from Bardec’s stupidity...” Sarai whispered.

  “True enough—but that’s not what’s important. This isn’t the place; we’ll discuss it later.” He sat up straight and called, “Next case.”

  The next case was a property dispute; such things were generally handled by a local magistrate or a guard captain, but in this case one of the parties was a guard captain, so the affair had been kicked up the hierarchy to the Minister of Justice.

  Nobody questioned the facts of the case, so no magician had been called in, though old Okko remained in his place at the minister’s right; Lord Kalthon was called upon to determine not what was true, but what was just.

  Sarai listened to the tedious details, involving an unclear will, a broken business partnership, a drunken surveyor, and a temporarily-dry well, with half an ear or so, while thinking about other concerns.

  Bardec was suffering for his stupidity, and that was fair and just—if he had the wit to learn from his mistake, to change his attitudes, this might be the lesson he needed, and if he had not, then at least this might discourage him from gallivanting off with someone else’s cart from Grandgate Market next time he got drunk. The money was nothing to him, or at least to his family, but a flogging would register on anybody.

  But the woman with the cart was coming out ahead. Perhaps she deserved some compensation for the inconvenience—but why should it be higher when Bardec behaved stupidly in court than if he had been contrite?

  Well, it was undoubtedly more annoying for the victim to have Bardec calling her a liar—and perhaps the greater satisfaction was therefore just.