The Spell of the Black Dagger

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  But she could, if she wanted. She had stashed away a goodly sum of money in her three years of thievery, and had never spent more than a few bits. Maybe making herself an athame would be worth the expense.

  It took two more days before she worked up the nerve, but at last she found herself in a small attic room at the Inn of the Blue Crab, with the proprietor’s promise not to allow anyone near for a day and a half.

  She had tried to convince him, without actually stating it, that she was a wizard’s apprentice and that her master had assigned her some spell that required privacy; fear of wild magic was about the only thing she could think of that would reliably restrain the man’s natural curiosity. She wasn’t at all sure it had worked.

  She had laid in a good supply of candles for light, and a jug of reasonably pure water—the inn’s well, the innkeeper boasted, had a permanent purification spell on it, but Tabaea suspected it was just not particularly polluted. She couldn’t have any food, she knew, but she was fairly sure that water was permissable. She had brought a change of clothing, for afterward. She had fire and water and blood, and of course, she had her dagger. She had rested well, and was as ready as she knew how to be.

  Still, she trembled as she began the first chant, the dagger held out before her.

  The incantations, the gestures, the eerie little dance, she remembered them all. She had no master or teacher in attendance urging her on, nor any other helper to light candles for her, so parts of the spell had to be performed in darkness, but she continued, undaunted.

  The attic room was warm and close, and as the candles burned down it grew hotter and stuffier. When the candles died it was almost a relief—but then the sun came up, and by mid-morning the heat was worse than ever. She would have opened the window, but to do so would have meant stepping outside the pattern of the ceremony. The innkeeper would have come up and opened the window for an ordinary customer, if only to help cool the inn as a whole, but she had forbidden him entrance.

  If she had thought ahead, she realized, she would have had the window open all along. She hadn’t, and she had to make the best of it; she couldn’t stop now.

  In fact, she was unsure whether it was literally possible to stop; she could sense the magical energies working around her, a strange, new, but unmistakable sensation. She was afraid that the magic would turn against her if she stopped, so she ignored her thirst, ignored the heat, ignored her fatigue, and continued with the spell, sweating heavily.

  Worst of all, she could see her jug of water, and she had the bowl of water used in purifying the metal of the knife, but this part of the ritual did not allow her a chance to drink so much as a drop.

  Her voice gave out by midday; she hoped that didn’t matter. By that time exhaustion, dehydration, and heat had driven her into a state of dazed semi-consciousness, and she continued with the spell more out of inertia than anything else.

  Around midafternoon she came to a part that she could not do without conscious effort. The spell called for her to draw her own blood, pricking her right hand, her throat, and the skin over her heart with the dagger.

  Hands trembling, she drew the necessary blood, and used it to paint the required three symbols on the blade, marking the weapon as eternally hers.

  The worst was yet to come, though; for the final section of the spell she would need to slash open her forehead and use the point of the knife to smear the blood across her face, mix it with the sweat and ash. That would mark her as belonging to the knife, just as the three runes marked the knife as belonging to her. She dreaded that part; she had an irrational fear that in her weakness, she would lose control and cut her own skull open.

  Still, she struggled on.

  The moment came; the blade shook as she raised the dagger to her brow, which terrified her still more. Even if she didn’t cut too deep, what if she slipped and cut an eye?

  She closed her eyes as she drew the blade across the tight skin.

  At first she thought she had somehow missed, and she reached up with her free hand. It came away red.

  Quickly, she continued with the ceremony.

  She could feel the magic around her—but somehow, even in her unthinking state, she began to sense that something had gone wrong.

  Hadn’t Lirrin’s knife been glowing at this point?

  Tabaea’s wasn’t. In fact, though it was hard to be certain in the deepening twilight, the knife seemed to have gone dark, as if blackened by smoke. But she hadn’t managed to light a candle or other fire in hours; there was no smoke in the room.

  She placed the knife before her, as the spell required, and it seemed to almost disappear in the gloom.

  She had no choice but to continue, though. She had the final chant to get through, and then she would pick up the knife and the spell would be over—if she could pick up the knife. She remembered Lirrin forcing her hands down as if against strong resistance.

  She hurried through the chant as quickly as she could in her weakened, frightened, and voiceless condition, thinking all the while that this had been an incredibly stupid thing to try all on her own, that it was fantastically dangerous, that it couldn’t possibly work, that the knife might kill her when she picked it up—and at the same time, underneath her terror, she exulted in the knowledge that she was working magic, that if she came through this she would be a wizard, that the dagger would be her athame and she would be the World’s only Guildless wizard.

  She spoke the final word, and pressed her hands down toward the dagger.

  They met no resistance at all.

  She closed her eyes against the flash as her fingers closed on the hilt.

  There was no flash. The eerie sensation of magic at work faded quickly away, and she was just a girl sitting cross-legged on the floor of a hot, airless attic room, holding an ordinary dagger.

  But that couldn’t be true, she told herself, it wasn’t possible. She blinked in the darkness, trying to see the knife, but the daylight was gone, and the light from the window, compounded of lanterns and torches and the lesser moon’s pink glow, wasn’t enough.

  She dropped the dagger and groped for the candles and her tinderbox. In a moment she had a light going, and looked down at the knife that lay on the bare planks.

  It was blackened all over, a smooth, even black; the silver blade still gleamed, but with the dark shimmer of volcanic glass.

  Tabaea felt it. It wasn’t glass; it was still metal.

  But it was black.

  Hilt and guard were black, as well.

  The entire dagger was utterly, completely black, totally colorless.

  That wasn’t right. Tabaea didn’t know much about wizards, but she had seen them in the streets, she had seen the athame that Serem carried, the athame that Lirrin had made. All those athames were perfectly ordinary and natural in appearance, not this unearthly black.

  Something had gone wrong.

  She remembered the tests that Serem had described, but which she had not seen Lirrin attempt because of her need to flee. She couldn’t try any of the ones that involved other people or other athames, but...

  She wrapped a leather thong from her belt around one arm, tied it off with a simple knot, then touched the black dagger to it.

  Nothing happened.

  The cord was supposed to untie and fall away, but nothing happened.

  She touched the blade of the dagger to her forehead, gently; it came away bloody, but there was no glow, not so much as a flicker of color. The gash on her brow did not heal.

  She held the dagger out by the blade, on the flat of her palm; it did not tremble, did not turn its hilt to her, did not prepare to defend her.

  It did nothing that an athame was supposed to do.

  It was not an athame.

  It was nothing.

  Staring at the worthless black dagger, hungry, thirsty, exhausted, Tabaea felt her eyes fill with tears. She fought back the first sob, but then gave in and wept.

  Part Two: Killer

  Chapter
Seven

  Lady Sarai rubbed her temple wearily and tried to listen to what was being said. It had been four years since she had first sat at her father’s left hand and watched him work; now, for the first time, she was in his throne and doing his work herself. She had put it off as long as she could, but someone had to do it, and her father no longer had the strength.

  And, she feared, she wasn’t doing it very well. How had her father ever stood up under this constant stream of venality and stupidity?

  “...she told me it was her father’s—what am I supposed to do, call in a soothsayer of some kind every time I buy a trinket? How was I supposed to know it was stolen?”

  “A trinket?” the gem’s rightful owner burst out angrily. “You call that stone a trinket? My grandfather went all the way to Tazmor to find a diamond that size for my grandmother! You...”

  Sarai raised her right hand while the left still massaged her forehead. At the gesture, a guard lowered his spear in the general direction of the victim.

  The victim’s shouting stopped abruptly.

  For a long moment, the three principals stood in uneasy silence, watching Lady Sarai as she sat in her father’s throne, trying to think.

  “All right,” she said, pointing. “You get your diamond back. Right now. Give it to him, somebody. No further compensation, though, because you were stupid to let her near it in the first place. Now, get out of here.”

  Another guard handed the robbery victim the pendant; he took it, essayed a quick, unhappy bow in Lady Sarai’s direction, then fled the room, the jewel clutched tight in his hand.

  The jeweler began to protest, and even before Sarai raised her hand, the lowered spear moved slightly in his direction.

  The thief grinned; her head was down, but Sarai saw the smile all the same. A hot, rough knot of anger grew in her own chest at the sight.

  “Straighten her up,” Sarai snapped.

  A soldier grabbed the thief’s long braid and yanked her head back; the smile vanished, and she glared at Sarai. Sarai could see her arms flexing, as if she were trying to slip free of the ropes around her wrists.

  “Sansha of Smallgate, you said your name was?” Sarai demanded.

  The thief couldn’t nod, with her hair pulled back; she struggled for a moment, then said, “That’s right.”

  “You spent all the money?”

  “That’s right, too.”

  “It’s hard to believe you could use up that much that fast—eight rounds of gold, was it?”

  “I had debts,” Sansha said, tilting her head in a vain attempt to loosen the guard’s grip.

  “That’s too bad,” Sarai said, “because now you’ve got another one. You owe this man eight rounds of gold.” She pointed to the jeweler.

  “Eleven,” the jeweler protested. “The stone was worth at least eleven!”

  “You paid her eight,” Sarai told him. “The stone never belonged to you, only the money you paid her.”

  The jeweler subsided unhappily, and Sarai turned her attention back to Sansha.

  “You owe him eight rounds,” she said.

  Sansha didn’t answer. Sarai had the impression that she would have shrugged, had her hands been free.

  “I’m going to buy that debt from him,” Sarai said. “So now you owe me eight rounds of gold.”

  “I can’t pay you, either,” Sansha retorted.

  “I know,” Sarai said. “So I’ll settle for the five or six bits on the piece that I’ll get by selling you at auction. Somebody give him his money, and then take her down to the dungeon until we can get a slaver to take a look at her.” She waved in dismissal as Sansha’s expression shifted abruptly from defiance to shock.

  She watched as the jeweler was led out in the direction of the treasury, and the thief was dragged, struggling and crying, toward the stairs leading down. Then she let out a sigh, and leaned over toward Okko.

  “How did I do?” she asked.

  He considered that for a moment.

  “I think,” he said, “that your father would have lectured the jeweler briefly on his carelessness, and might have only promised him the auction proceeds, rather than the full amount of the debt.”

  “You’re right,” Sarai admitted. “That’s what I should have done.” She glanced at the door. “It’s too late now, isn’t it? It wouldn’t look right.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Okko agreed.

  “I wish my father was doing this,” Sarai said. “I hate it.”

  Okko didn’t reply, but was clearly thinking that he, too, wished Lord Kalthon were there.

  “I hope he’ll be better soon,” Sarai added.

  Again, Okko said nothing; again, Sarai knew quite well what he was thinking. He was thinking that Lord Kalthon wasn’t going to get better.

  Sarai feared that Okko might be right. She was doing everything she could to prevent it, but still, her father’s illness was growing steadily worse.

  It really wasn’t fair.

  And her brother wasn’t any help—his sickliness was worse lately, too; he coughed all the time, bringing up thick fluid and sometimes blood. And he was too young to serve as Minister of Justice anyway, even if he were healthy; their father should have been around for another twenty years.

  She wasn’t supposed to be her father’s heir, though; she was Minister of Investigation, not Minister of Justice! It was completely unfair that she should be stuck here, settling all these stupid arguments, instead of finding some way to cure her father’s illness. Why couldn’t some local magistrate have dealt with Sansha of Smallgate, and all the others like her? So what if the jeweler lived in a different jurisdiction from the gem’s owner?

  Okko looked steadily back at her, and she realized she was staring quite rudely at him. She straightened up, then slumped back in the big chair.

  For four years now, she had been learning the arts of investigation—with very little guidance, since there were no older, more experienced investigation specialists to aid her. Her assistant, Captain Tikri, was very useful in a variety of ways, especially in her attempts to recruit spies, but he knew even less than she did about finding criminals or determining the facts of a puzzling case. Her father had taught her his own methods, but they were very limited—mostly a matter of which magicians to talk to.

  Because magic could do so much in answering riddles and untangling puzzles, she had spent most of her time studying magic—in theory, never in practice. She knew the names of a hundred spells, but had never worked a one; she knew the names of a score of gods and as many demons, and had never summoned any of them; she knew the nature of a warlock’s talents, but had not a trace of them herself.

  She had studied the working of the various spells of contagion, and clairvoyance, and whatever else had been used in the solving of crimes and mysteries. She knew how, with the appropriate spells, the merest traces of blood or hair could be linked to their owners; she knew which questions the gods would answer when summoned, and what the souls of the dead were likely to know—it was really rather surprising how many murder victims had no idea how they had died. She knew how warding spells worked, how locks both magical and mundane operated, how gems could be appraised and identified.

  And with all this knowledge, she couldn’t do a thing for her father or brother.

  It was, of course, the fault of the Wizards’ Guild.

  “Shall we bring in the next case, my lady?” Chanden, the bailiff, asked quietly.

  Sarai blinked. She hadn’t even noticed him approaching the throne. “The next?”

  “Yes, my lady. Tenneth Tolnor’s son claims he was cheated by the wizard Dagon of Aldagmor.”

  Cheated by wizards. Her mouth twisted. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. That’s all for today.”

  “My lady?”

  Sarai knew the polite question was a protest, that she was shirking her duties—no, shirking her father’s duties, not her own—but she didn’t care. She needed to stop. She set her jaw.

  “Perhaps a short r
ecess, my lady?”

  “All right,” she said, giving in. “Half an hour, at least. I need that long. I need it, Chanden.”

  “Yes, my lady.” He straightened and turned to face the little knot of people waiting at the lower end of the room—the crooked room, Sarai realized, and a crooked grin twisted her lip. The justice chamber itself was crooked—why hadn’t she realized that years ago?

  It all depended on magic, after all. They used magicians to tell who was telling the truth and who was lying, to determine what had actually happened when claims conflicted.

  But who could tell them if the magicians were lying?

  “Lady Sarai, Acting Minister of Justice for Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, hereby declares that further judgments shall be postponed one-half hour,” Chanden announced loudly. “Clear the room, please.”

  Sarai ignored the murmurs and did not wait for the room to empty; she slipped out the back door as quickly as she could, and headed down the passageway toward the southeast wing, where her family’s rooms were.

  It was all those wizards, she thought, the Guild and its stupid rules. If her father were a wealthy commoner, they could buy a healing spell—but because he was a member of the nobility, because he held a post in the government, the Wizards’ Guild forbade the use of magic to prolong his life.

  And it didn’t matter whether the spell was a simple disinfectant or perfect immortality—anything that prolonged life, in any degree, was forbidden to the nobility, as far as wizards were concerned.

  What’s more, the Wizards’ Guild actively discouraged other magicians from healing the nobility, as well. Sarai had had to argue to get other magicians to even look at her father.

  Not that it had done much good.

  In fact, it was really quite startling how little worthwhile healing magic was out there. As she reached the first flight of steps up, Sarai began counting off the different schools of magic, and how they had failed her.

  Demonology was inherently destructive; it was no great surprise that demons couldn’t heal. The demonologists had all agreed on that.

  The sorcerers swore that with the right artifacts, they could heal diseases, even the sort of slow, lingering weakness that was gradually killing Lord Kalthon, or the illness of the lungs that was crippling his son—but the right artifacts could no longer be found. None existed in Ethshar of the Sands.