The Spell of the Black Dagger loe-6 Read online

  And there were steps leading in and out of the alley beside the Drunken Dragon. The line coming out was widely spaced and smeared, as if whoever made those marks had been running and slipping.

  That was odd.

  Most guardsmen, and virtually all citizens, would have shrugged and kept walking. Deran, though, was Deran. He stopped and peered into the shadows of the alley.

  Something was lying on the ground in there, and it didn’t look like garbage.

  If it was someone sleeping there, then whoever it was was fair game for slavers, and Deran should either wake that person up and shoo him across the street to safety, or he should go fetch a slaver and collect a finder’s fee, depending on whether he wanted to be benevolent, or to be paid.

  If it was anything else...

  Well, it bore further investigation, and the light in the alley was terrible. Deran turned back a few steps to the door of the inn and took one of the signboard torches from its bracket.

  Being in the city guard did have its little privileges, he thought as he carried the hissing brand over to the mouth of the alley. If an ordinary citizen took down a torch from an open place of business it would be theft and good for a flogging.

  Dim as it was in the damp weather, the torch made the scene in the alley much clearer. Deran stared down at the man lying there in a spreading pool of blood, blood that had mixed with the muck so that it was hard to tell where the edge of the pool actually was.

  There wasn’t as much blood as he had first feared, actually; much of the red was the man’s kilt. A red kilt usually meant a soldier or a veteran; if there had been any question about leaving the man where he was—and for Deran, there really wasn’t—that put an end to it. The man in the alley was not anyone Deran recognized, but soldiers looked out for their own.

  Whoever the unconscious person was, he was a big man, and Deran was not large for a guardsman, and it was late and he was tired and the mud was slippery. He sighed and headed for the door of the Dragon, torch in hand.

  A tavern crowd, Deran knew, generally had a distinctive sound of its own. It chattered, or hummed, or buzzed, or even shouted. The patrons of the Drunken Dragon muttered, a sullen, low-pitched sound that quickly faded when a guardsman in uniform stepped in, holding up a torch.

  “I need a hand here,” Deran announced. “We’ve got a wounded man just around the corner.”

  The half-dozen customers who still lingered stared silently at him. Nobody volunteered anything, by word or motion.

  That didn’t trouble Deran. “You,” he said, pointing at the individual who looked least drunk of those present. “And you,” indicating another.

  “Oh, now...”the second man said, beginning a protest. “Five minutes, at most,” Deran snapped, cutting him off, “and if you don’t... well, we don’t need to worry about what would happen then, do we? Because you’re going to cooperate.”

  Grumbling, the two men got to their feet.

  Deran wasn’t stupid enough to walk in front of them; he had never been in the Drunken Dragon before, but he knew its reputation. He directed the two “volunteers” out the door and followed them as they slogged around the corner.

  The wounded man was so much dead weight; he showed no sign of life at all as the three men—one taking his feet and the others a shoulder apiece—hauled him into the tavern and dumped him on a table.

  That done, Deran dismissed his two assistants, paying them for their trouble by telling them, “I owe you a favor—a small one. If you ever get in trouble with the guards—small trouble— you tell them Deran Wuller’s son will speak for you.”

  The two men grumbled and drifted away, leaving Deran and his prize alone. Deran turned his attention to the bloody figure before him.

  There were only two wounds that he could find, both in the fleshy part of the man’s thigh—a long, shallow slash and then a deep stab wound that had missed the artery, Deran judged, by no more than an inch. Most of the blood came from the stab; the slash had already started to scab over.

  “Are you going to leave him there dripping all over my floor?” demanded a voice from behind Deran. The guardsman turned and found himself facing an aproned figure a bit shorter than himself.

  It was the innkeeper, of course—or rather, Deran corrected himself, the innkeeper’s night man; Deran doubted that the broad-shouldered fellow with the ferocious mustache was actually the proprietor. “Until you find me a bandage, that’s exactly what I intend,” Deran answered. “And a clean rag to wipe the wound first would be a good idea, too.”

  Grumbling, the night man retreated, while Deran checked the stabbing victim over.

  There were no other recent wounds; his heartbeat was strong and regular, his breath steady and reeking of oushka. He was, Deran concluded, unconscious as a result of his drinking, not from the wound. While bloody, the injury just wasn’t that serious.

  The innkeeper’s man returned then with a handful of reasonably clean rags, and Deran set about cleaning the man up a little. As he worked, he questioned the night man and the remaining customers.

  Nobody knew the man’s name. Nobody knew what had happened to him. He wasn’t exactly a regular, but he had been there before. He might have been seen with a girl, a black-haired girl wearing dark clothes.

  And that was all anyone would tell him.

  When Deran pulled the bandage tight, the drunk opened his eyes.

  “Am I dead?” he asked blearily. “Am I going to die?”

  “You’re fine,” Deran said. “You might limp for a while.”

  The drunk tried to raise his head from the table to look at himself, but couldn’t manage it. He moaned.

  “What happened?” Deran demanded. “Who stabbed you?”

  “Nobody,” the wounded man muttered. “Was an accident.”

  Deran shrugged. “Fine. You owe the Dragon two bits for the bandages and the use of their table. If you change your mind about who stabbed you, tell the magistrate...”He hesitated, turning to the night man. “This is Northangle, right?”

  “Grandgate. Northangle starts at the comer.”

  “All right, tell the magistrate for Grandgate, then. And if you need me to testify, I’m Deran Wuller’s son, Third Company, North Barracks.” He yawned. “And that’s where I’m headed— I need to get some sleep.” He waved and departed.

  By the time Deran was out the door the night man was trying to get his wounded customer off the table and back on his own feet.

  At the north tower he almost headed straight for his bed, but his sense of duty stopped him. He checked the lieutenant’s room first.

  Sure enough, Lieutenant Senden was waiting up for him.

  “Is she all right?” the lieutenant asked anxiously.

  “She’s fine,” Deran said. “No problem at all.”

  “Then what took so long?” “When I was on my way back I practically tripped over this boozer lying in an alleyway.”

  The lieutenant grimaced. “You called the slavers?”

  Deran shook his head. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t entirely his fault. He’d been stabbed. So I hauled him into the nearest tavern and got him bandaged up. Wasn’t anything serious, just a flesh wound in the leg.”

  “Did he say who did it?”

  “No. Might’ve been a girl he was bothering.”

  “All right. Goodnight, then, Deran—and thanks.”

  “My pleasure, Lieutenant.”

  Deran judged that he had no more than three hours until dawn when he finally fell into his bunk.

  Senden, too, was quickly asleep.

  The following day he was somewhat irritable, as a result of a late night largely spent in worrying, and carried out his duties in perfunctory fashion; his monthly report to Captain Tikri, a recently added requirement that Senden did not care for, was brief and sketchy. He did note down, “Guardsman Deran reports tending to stabbing victim in tavern. No accusations or arrests made.”

  Late that afternoon, at the overlord’s palace, Captain T
ikri had just finished going through the reports from all the guard lieutenants when Lady Sarai stepped into his office. The captain leapt up and saluted, hand on chest.

  Lady Sarai waved an acknowledgment, and Tikri relaxed somewhat. “Is something wrong, my lady?” he asked.

  “No, no; I just wanted to get out of that room for a few minutes,” Sarai explained, “so I came myself instead of sending a messenger. I’m here in both my official roles today, Captain, as Minister of Investigation and as Acting Minister of Justice. Is there anything I should know about?”

  Captain Tikri looked down at the reports he had just read. He turned up a palm.

  “Nothing, my lady,” he said. “Nothing of any interest at all.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Tabaea had expected the feeling of strength and power to wear off within a few minutes, like the excitement after a narrow escape.

  It didn’t.

  Instead, the strength stayed with her. The light-headedness faded fairly quickly, but the added strength stayed. If anything, it increased, at least at first.

  She had hidden behind a merchant’s stall in Grandgate Market, crouched down between a splintery crate and the brick wall of a granary—not a place for long concealment, by any means, but she was out of sight, able to think and plan, until the merchant arrived for the day’s business. For the first several minutes, she had just sat, waiting for the weird reeling to pass.

  Eventually, though, she had realized that this was not working. She began thinking about it.

  She felt strong. Most especially, her left leg seemed to be almost bursting with vitality. She knew she had stabbed the kilted drunk in his left leg, so the connection was obvious. Was it an illusion, though, or was she really, truly stronger than before?

  Measuring strength, especially in a leg, was not something that Tabaea had any easy method for doing; she tried out a few kicks at the crate beside her, and then tried hopping, first on her almost-normal right leg, then on her empowered left for comparison.

  It was hard to be sure; she knew, from her work as a thief, how people could fool themselves without meaning to. All the same, she concluded at last that yes, the feeling of strength was genuine; somehow, she had become stronger.

  And it was fairly obvious how—when she had stabbed that man in the left leg with her dagger, her left leg had become stronger. The connection could hardly be coincidence.

  The black dagger, which she had known for four years to be enchanted, had somehow given her that strength because she had stabbed the drunk.

  This was serious magic.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t yet know the details. Was this added strength permanent? Would the magic work again, or had she used it up? Where had the strength come from—the dagger’s magic, or the drunk? Had the dagger created it, or only transferred it? And what else did the dagger do? How dangerous was it? Had it stolen the man’s soul? Would it eat her soul? She could think of three ways to find out more about it. One was to ask a magician—but that was out. How could she do that without revealing that she had stolen the secret of atha-mezation? Even if she claimed to have found the dagger, many magicians could tell lies from truth.

  No, asking anyone was out of the question.

  The second possible method was to stab someone or something else and see what happened.

  She supposed she would have to do that sooner or later, but she wasn’t about to just go out and stab some stranger chosen at random.

  And the third way to learn more would be to find the man she had stabbed and see what had happened to him. Had the dagger killed him? Had it devoured his soul? Had something horrible happened to him?

  She didn’t know his name, but she knew where she had last seen him. That was, she decided, where she should start—but not until dawn. She sat back, resolved to wait until first light.

  The next thing she knew, she was waking up because someone was pulling her to her feet. “Hoi!” she said, “wait a minute!” “The sleeping blossom awakens, then,” someone said.

  “You call her a blossom? An insult to flowers everywhere.” “Oh, she’s not as bad as that,” a third voice said. “Clean her up and comb that hair, and she’d be fit company.”

  Blinking, Tabaea saw blue sky over the shoulder of the man who held her and realized that it was well past first light and that she had fallen asleep behind the crate and been discovered by the merchant and his—or her—family. The man was not alone; a woman stood behind him, and two boys to the side.

  “I’m sorry,” Tabaea said, a little blearily. “I was hiding.”

  The man and woman looked at each other, concerned; the older boy, who looked about fourteen, was more direct. “Hiding from what?” he demanded.

  Tabaea recognized the boy’s voice as the one that had called her an insult to flowers everywhere. “From a drunkard who apparently liked my looks better than you do,” she retorted.

  The woman glanced uneasily over her shoulder.

  Tabaea waved her worry away. “That was hours ago,” she said. “I must have dozed off.”

  “Oh.” The woman’s relief was palpable.

  Tabaea found the woman’s behavior unreasonably annoying; what was she worrying about, when she had her husband and sons to protect her? But there was no point in arguing with these people. “I’ll go now,” Tabaea mumbled.

  The man released her, and she walked away across the market square. The sun was peering over the wall to the east, its light blazing across the gate towers, while most of the market was still in shadow. Steam curled out from the tower walls where hot sun hit cold, damp stone, but otherwise the clouds and mists of the night had vanished, leaving shrinking puddles and drying mud. Merchants and fanners were setting up for the day, and a few early customers were drifting in, but on a day like this, Tabaea knew, most Ethsharites preferred to wait until the streets had dried before venturing out.

  She wished she could have done the same.

  She noticed, as she neared the northern edge of the square, that she was limping—but it was a very peculiar limp. She was not favoring an injured leg; instead, the limp came about because her left leg was now noticeably stronger than her sound but less-altered right.

  If she tried, she found she could eliminate the limp, but it took an effort.

  This strange phenomenon reminded her of what she had temporarily forgotten while she slept; she paused, leaning against a canopy pole at the corner of a display of melons, and considered.

  She still felt strong, particularly in the left leg, but less so, she thought, than when she had fallen asleep. It was really very hard to judge, but she thought it was less—or maybe she was adjusting to the change.

  That feeling of added vitality was far less, and the light-headedness was gone entirely, but she knew she was still stronger than before.

  Did that mean the drunkard was dying, so that less of his strength was reaching her? Or that the magic was fading? Or something else entirely? She wouldn’t find out here, she decided. She straightened up and marched on up Wall Street toward the Drunken Dragon, fighting the tendency to limp. By the time she had gone a block, she had promised herself that if this spell could be used again, and she ever got up her nerve to do it, she would make sure that she stabbed whoever she stabbed in the center, or at least symmetrically.

  She found the alley easily enough. The morning sun was almost clear of the city wall, but still low in the east, and the narrow passage was still shadowy; even so, Tabaea had no more trouble finding the remains of blood than she had had finding the alley.

  The man himself was gone—but what that meant, she couldn’t be sure. If he was dead, the corpse might have already been removed by the guard, or by thieves intent on selling the component parts to wizards; if he was alive, he might have left under his own power, or been dragged or carried.

  The blood didn’t look like enough for him to have bled to death, and Tabaea knew that was the only way anyone would die of a thigh wound in a single night; infections generall
y took at least a sixnight. So he was probably alive, in which case the most likely place to find him was either right next door, in the Drunken Dragon, or across the street in the Wall Street Field.

  She stood nervously in the inn door for several minutes, looking over the breakfast patrons; she didn’t dare enter, for fear of being trapped in there if he should show up unexpectedly. Besides, the proprietor probably wouldn’t appreciate her presence; she had no money to spend, and was, to at least some people, a known thief.

  She didn’t see her assailant anywhere among the surly and largely hung-over patrons; she turned away, almost stumbling as she momentarily forgot the strength of her own left leg. Standing on the single step, she looked out at the Wall Street Field.

  By daylight it looked less threatening, but even dirtier and less appealing. The table-hut and the awning-tent were still there, but their occupants were not in sight—probably asleep inside, Tabaea judged. A few ragged figures were moving about in the mud, and someone was tending a cooking fire.

  The man who had attacked her, the one she had stabbed, was probably out there somewhere, in that mud and filth.

  But the city wall was easily five miles long, which meant that Wall Street was just as long, and the Field ran beside it for every inch of that way. And that strip of land, five miles long by at least a hundred feet wide, was all occupied. Not all was as thickly settled as here in Grandgate, of course—the marketplace and the guard barracks gave this district by far the most beggars and thieves of any part of Ethshar of the Sands—but all of it was inhabited.

  Finding one man in all that would be a long, slow job—and an extremely dangerous one. Tabaea didn’t care to try it.

  She turned and headed back toward Grandgate Market, fighting her new limp and hoping to find a fat purse to steal. She would figure the dagger’s magic out later; right now, she wanted to insure that she could pay for a room for the night.

  Patrolling the top of the city wall was not really a military necessity anymore, if it ever had been; the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars had been at peace since the destruction of the Northern Empire and the end of the Great War, over two centuries earlier, and Ethshar of the Sands was forty leagues from either the nearest Small Kingdoms or the Sardironese border. True, the Pirate Towns were a mere dozen or so leagues to the west, but no army could cross that thirty-some miles without advance warning reaching the city. Besides, the Pirate Towns, or any other enemies, were far more likely to attack by sea than by land.