The Spell of the Black Dagger

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  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 athamezation? 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.

  “Hai!” 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, 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 farmers 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 smear of drying blood than she had had finding the alley.

  The man himself was gone—but what that meant she couldn’t be sure. If he were dead the corpse might have already been removed by the guard, or by thieves intent on selling the component parts to wizards; if he were 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 generally 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 was still there, and the awning-tent, 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, and who 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 ensure that she could pay for a room for the night.

  Patrolling the top of the city wall was not really a military necessity any more, 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.

  Furthermore, the watchers atop the towers could see farther than a soldier on the ramparts.

  But walking the wall was a tradition, and it did serve a purpose both for discipline and for maintenance—it was an active but not unpleasant duty, useful for keeping bored soldiers busy, and those soldiers had strict orders to report any
signs of wear and damage along the route.

  Deran hadn’t been particularly bored, but he’d been assigned the duty and accepted it without complaint. He strolled along the wall, whistling softly, taking his time on the long walk out to the Beachgate tower and back. He studied the stonework as he walked, peered out over the surrounding countryside, and paused every so often to look down at the city itself, at the ragged inhabitants of the Wall Street Field, the tawdry homes and shops on Wall Street, and the rooftops and streets beyond.

  By the time he neared the line between Northangle and Grandgate on his return trip, the sun was well down in the west and the shadows were lengthening dramatically. Deran paused and leaned on a merlon, looking down at the Field.

  Since it was still daylight almost all the huts and tents were unoccupied, and the broad patches of mud where blankets were spread at night were bare. Most of the people who slept in the Field were elsewhere in the city, working or begging or doing whatever they did to sustain themselves.

  A few people lingered, though. Four ragged young women were fighting over something; a fifth was standing back and shouting at the others. A line of children was running through the maze of huts and tents, intent on some sort of following game. Half a dozen old people, men and women, were huddled together on a faded red blanket, dickering over a pile of vegetables.

  Off by himself, a big man in a brown tunic was sitting on the mud, leaning against the side of a shack, watching the others. A bandage heavily stained with dried blood was wrapped around his left thigh, and Deran realized that was the man he had found in the alley the night before.

  That was interesting. A chat with him about just how he had come to be stabbed might be a pleasant diversion, Deran thought. He looked about for the nearest stairway—the city wall was theoretically equipped with a stairway every two hundred feet, either down into the interior of the wall itself or on the inward face, down into the Field, but not all the stairs actually existed. Deran was unsure whether this was a result of neglect, or if some had never been built.

  There was a wooden stair down to the Field not far away; Deran used it, putting his foot through the bottom step. He shook his head; the step was rotten right through. He would have to report that.

  Which meant he would have to explain why he had come down from the wall. He sighed, and headed for the man in the red kilt.

  The man looked up as the soldier’s shadow fell across him, but said nothing.

  “Hai,” Deran said. “Remember me?”

  The man in the brown tunic frowned. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “I was the one who got you out of that alley last night,” Deran explained.

  “Oh,” the man said. He glanced down at the bandage on his thigh and grudgingly added, “Thank you.”

  “Are you a veteran?” Deran persisted, pointing a thumb at the man’s red kilt.

  “What business is it of yours?”

  Deran’s expression hardened—not because he was actually angry, but because it was a useful trick. It worried people, made them more likely to cooperate. Deran had needed more than a year to really get the hang of it.

  “I needed to report why I was late getting back to barracks last night,” he said. “The lieutenant gave me a hard time because I didn’t know your name or who you were.”

  This was not true, but that bothered Deran not a whit.

  “Oh,” the man said again. He hesitated.

  Deran glowered.

  “My name’s Tolthar of Smallgate,” the man said. “And yes, I was in the guard, but they kicked me out for being drunk while on duty. About five years back.”

  That was a year or so before Deran had signed up. “Were you drunk?” he asked.

  “Oh, I guess I was,” Tolthar admitted, “but it wasn’t my fault. We were walking the wall, and my buddy had a bottle with him, and that’s so boring, what else was there to do but drink?”

  Deran nodded. Drunkards always had an excuse; he knew that. And he knew how much weight to give it; just because the bottle was there didn’t mean they had to drink it.

  And he noticed that Tolthar didn’t say that his “buddy” had been kicked out of the guard. From what Deran knew of the guard, he doubted that anyone would be expelled for being drunk on duty once.

  But there was no point in arguing about it. Other matters were more interesting.

  “So, who stabbed you?” he asked. “Pick the wrong girl, did you? Or did you make a grab for someone’s purse?”

  Tolthar frowned. “I don’t want to say,” he said. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

  Deran frowned back. “You better not mean that the way it sounds,” he warned. “We don’t like it when citizens stab each other.”

  “I won’t stab anyone,” Tolthar mumbled. “That’s not what I meant.” His rather feeble wits recovered belatedly, and he added, “At least, I won’t stab anyone with a blade.”

  “Oh, it is a girl, then?” Deran’s frown turned to a wry smile. “Just make sure she says yes first, and means it.”

  Tolthar mumbled something Deran didn’t catch.

  They talked a few moments longer, saying nothing of any consequence; then Deran turned back to the stairs.

  At the barracks he reported to the lieutenant on duty, and gave a warning about the rotten step. As he had expected, the lieutenant wanted to know why he had climbed the stairs.

  Deran explained, not trying to quote the entire conversation, but simply describing the incident the night before and reporting Tolthar’s name and that he refused to say who had stabbed him.

  “He wouldn’t say?”

  “No.”

  “Why in Hell not?” the lieutenant demanded.

  Deran turned up an empty palm.

  “You think he’s planning to ambush whoever it was?”

  Deran shook his head. “No,” he said. “Tolthar wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He just didn’t want to say who it was.”

  “Do you think there’s anything odd going on?”

  “No.”

  The lieutenant frowned, then shrugged. “Well, to Hell with him, then. I’ll put it in the report and if anyone higher up cares, they can worry about it.” He pulled a sheet of parchment from the box and began writing out his report.

  Chapter Eleven

  Tabaea watched the man in the red kilt with interest as he downed the ale someone had bought him. She had been sure he would return to the tavern eventually, and here he was, just two days later.

  He hadn’t seen her, she was sure; she was wearing her working clothes, which is to say she had turned her black tunic and black skirt inside-out, so the gold and red embroidery didn’t show. Her feet were bare, for better traction.

  The man she watched, on the other hand, wore heavy boots—badly worn boots—and the same greasy brown tunic and old red kilt he had worn when he attacked her.

  He was walking better now—and so was she. His left leg looked stiff; hers felt loose and limber, more so than usual.

  She understood it now, at least partially. As the drunk got his strength back, she lost hers.

  At least, that was how it appeared. She was still stronger than normal, but less than she had been, and the decline in her vitality seemed to correlate with the healing process of the man’s wounded leg.

  So what would have happened if she had killed him? The dead never got their strength back.

  And what if she killed someone now? Was the dagger’s magic still potent, or had she wasted it on that minor flesh wound?

  She was not about to go out and kill someone in cold blood to test out her knife; she had never killed anyone, and didn’t particularly care to start. But she might kill something. She thought that over carefully as she peered around the doorframe at the man she had stabbed.

  That feeling of increased strength had been pleasant, while it lasted. She wanted it back.

  She slipped away from the door of the Drunken Dragon and headed northwest on Wall Street, into Northangle.

  P
robably the easiest non-human creature to find—other than bugs or worms, which she didn’t count—would be a rat, and she certainly wouldn’t mind killing rats, but firstly, they were hard to catch, and secondly, they were vicious, and finally, a rat’s strength added to her own wouldn’t amount to very much—if that was, in fact, what the dagger’s magic did, she might not even be able to tell anything had happened upon killing a rat.

  She needed something bigger than that—a pig would do, or a goat, or a dog.

  A dog...

  Dogs were not particularly common in Ethshar, but Tabaea had met a few—watchdogs were an occupational hazard for burglars. Killing somebody’s watchdog would be a pleasure.

  Of course, she couldn’t do it legally, but she even knew which dog she wanted to kill—a big black one that guarded a house in Morningside that she had once tried to rob, one night a year or so back when she had been feeling unusually ambitious. The damnable beast had waited until she was inside, then had stalked her through the house and almost cornered her, all in utter silence. It was only when she turned and fled that it had started barking and awakened its master.

  This time, she would be ready for it, and it wouldn’t get a chance to bark. She smiled unpleasantly to herself and stroked the hilt of the black dagger.

  However, she was going the wrong direction to reach Morningside. The district took its name from its location, just east of the overlord’s palace, near the center of the city, while Northangle was against the city wall. Tabaea turned left at the next corner and headed south.

  When she reached Morningside she found her way into the quiet residential neighborhood she sought, where fine houses lined either side of the street. Lintels and cornerposts were carved and painted, polished brass fittings gleamed on doors, shutters, and windows; walls were brick or stone, not plaster.

  But there were still alleyways to the courtyards in the rear. Gates closed off the alleys, but Tabaea could sometimes climb gates, or squeeze between the bars.