The Spell of the Black Dagger

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Herbalists were so limited, with their plants, and like wizards and sorcerers, they were powerless without their supplies.

  Illusionists just did tricks—there was some doubt as to whether it was real magic at all.

  Scientists—Tabaea didn’t understand scientists, and most of the scientific magic she had seen wasn’t very useful, just stunts like using a glass to break sunlight into rainbows, or making those little chimes that spun around and rang when you burned candles under them. And there were so few scientists around, maybe a dozen in the entire city, that killing one seemed wasteful.

  The various sorts of seers and soothsayers were a possibility, but telling the real ones from the frauds wasn’t easy. Tabaea considered carefully as she finished her noodles, and decided in the end that prophecy could wait.

  Ignoring the more obscure sorts of magician, that left witches and warlocks. They didn’t seem to need equipment or incantations or anything, and they indisputably did real magic. One of them would do just fine.

  How to find one, then?

  She couldn’t go entirely by appearance; while most varieties of magician had traditional costumes, there were no hard and fast rules about it. Telling whether a black-robed figure was a demonologist or a warlock or a necromancer or something else entirely was not easy. She had been mistaken for a warlock once or twice herself, when wearing black—warlocks favored all-black clothes even more than demonologists did.

  She knew a couple of magicians, of course, and knew of several others. She thought over all of them, trying to decide if there was one she wanted to kill.

  No, there wasn’t, not really...

  She stopped, fork raised.

  There was that snotty little Inza of Northangle, Inza the Apprentice she called herself now. She was two or three years younger than Tabaea, but she and Tabaea had played together when they were young. Then Inza had gotten herself apprenticed to a warlock, old Luris the Black, down on Wizard Street in Eastside, and after that she never had time to so much as say hello to her old friends. Inza claimed her master kept her too busy, but Tabaea knew it was because she didn’t want to associate with a bunch of thieves and street people now that she was going to be a big important magician.

  And Inza would be nearing the end of her apprenticeship now, she would be changing her name to Inza the Warlock soon.

  If she lived that long.

  Tabaea smiled, and her hand dropped from the table to the hilt of the Black Dagger.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lady Sarai leaned in the doorway and asked, “Anything interesting today?”

  Captain Tikri looked up, startled; before he could do more than drop the report he was reading, Sarai added, “Don’t bother to get up.”

  “Yes, my lady.” He settled back and looked up at her uneasily.

  “So, is there anything interesting in your reports today?” Sarai insisted.

  “Oh.” Tikri looked down at the paper. “As a matter of fact, there is one odd case. It’s probably just a revenge killing, but ... well, it’s odd.”

  “Tell me about it.” Sarai stepped into the office and found a chair, one with a dragon carved on the back and the seat upholstered in brown velvet.

  “A girl named Inza, an apprentice warlock,” Tikri said. “Her throat was cut last night while she slept, and then she was stabbed through the heart—to make sure she was dead, I suppose.”

  Sarai grimaced. “Sounds nasty,” she said.

  Tikri nodded. “I would say so, yes. I didn’t go myself, but the reports ... well, I’d say it was nasty.”

  Sarai frowned and leaned forward. “You said it was probably revenge? Who did it?”

  Tikri shrugged. “We don’t know who did it—not yet, anyway. Whoever it was came in through a window—pried open the latch, very professional job, looked like an experienced burglar—but then nothing was stolen or disturbed, so it wasn’t a burglary at all.”

  “Unless the thief panicked,” Sarai suggested.

  Tikri shook his head. “Panicked? Cutting the throat and a thrust through the heart doesn’t look like anyone who would panic.”

  “So it was revenge—but you don’t know who did it?”

  “No.” Tikri frowned. “Not yet, anyway. The girl’s master swears she doesn’t know of any enemies, anyone who hated Inza or had a grudge against her. Warlocks don’t do divinations, of course, so she couldn’t identify the killer herself; we have a wizard checking on it instead.”

  “You don’t think it was the master herself?”

  Tikri turned up an empty palm. “Who knows? But we don’t have any reason to think it was her. And Luris is a skilled warlock; why cut the girl’s throat when she could have simply stopped her heart? Or if a warlock wanted to be less obvious, she could have staged any number of plausible accidents.”

  “That’s true.” Sarai considered, and tapped the arm of her chair as her feet stretched out in front of her—signs that she was thinking. “It’s very odd, you know, that anyone would kill an apprentice warlock—isn’t this Luris now duty-bound to avenge the girl’s death?”

  Tikri nodded. “Just so. Whoever did this isn’t afraid of warlocks, obviously.”

  “And how could an apprentice have an enemy who hated her enough to kill her? Apprentices don’t have time or freedom to make that sort of enemies, do they?”

  “Not usually,” Tikri agreed.

  “How old was she?”

  Tikri glanced at the report. “Seventeen,” he said. “She would have made journeyman next month.”

  “Seventeen.” Sarai bit her lip. She had been worried about her father, but he was almost sixty, he had had a long and full life. She had been worried about her brother, but he probably wouldn’t die of his illness. If he did, if either of them died, it wouldn’t be a shock. But a healthy seventeen-year-old girl, five years younger than Sarai herself, had been killed, without warning, apparently without any good reason.

  “Has anyone talked to her family?” she asked.

  Tikri shrugged. “I think someone sent a message,” he said.

  “I was also thinking of asking if anyone in her family knew if she had any enemies,” Sarai remarked.

  Tikri blinked. “Why bother?” he asked. “The magicians will tell us who did it.”

  Sarai nodded.

  “Let me know what they find out,” she said. She rose and turned away.

  She had intended to stay and talk to Captain Tikri for awhile. She didn’t have any specific questions or assignments for him; she just thought it was a good idea to know what her subordinates were doing. She wanted to know everything about how the city guard worked, how crimes were investigated, how reports were written, what got included and what got left out—the real story, not what she would be told if she asked. She wanted Tikri to talk to her easily, and not treat her as some lordly creature who couldn’t be bothered with everyday details. Chatting with him had seemed like the best way to work toward that.

  The news of the murder bothered her, though, and she no longer felt any interest in light conversation.

  There were murders fairly often in Ethshar, of course—with hundreds of thousands of people packed inside the city walls, killings were inevitable. The annual total was often close to a hundred, even without counting the deaths that might have been either natural or magical.

  Most of them, however, involved open arguments, drunken brawls, attempted robbery, or marital disputes. Someone breaking into a warlock’s house to butcher a sleeping apprentice was definitely not typical.

  But there really didn’t seem to be much she could do about it just now.

  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 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 fatal. I’m not sure about sorcerers or theurgists or the others. But everyone knows 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 kno
ws 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 girl 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 Fourteen

  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, 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.