The Spell of the Black Dagger

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  She shouldn’t be able to hear any whispers, she thought, annoyed—not here in this empty house in the middle of the night. She certainly couldn’t have heard anything if she were still an ordinary person; this whisper was somehow alien. She supposed it was some trick of her newly-enhanced senses, something that a dog could hear where a person wouldn’t, but she couldn’t think what it might be. Who would be speaking a strange tongue near here? She hadn’t seen anyone around the place who didn’t look Ethsharitic. And this was a very strange tongue, nothing she had ever heard before, she was sure.

  Maybe it wasn’t human at all. Still staring at the mug, she tried to make out the words, and where it was coming from.

  There were no words, she realized, and the whisper wasn’t coming from anywhere. It seemed to be inside her own head.

  Then, abruptly, as she focused on the whispering that wasn’t really a sound at all, she felt as if something had touched her, or perhaps she had touched something, in a place that she could not locate, a part of her that didn’t correspond to anywhere on or in her body. The whispering ran through her, and she could suddenly feel the mug, as well as see it, even though she wasn’t touching it, was sitting six feet away.

  She could feel it with the whisper.

  That made no sense, but that was how it felt; she could touch the whisper, and with it she could touch the mug.

  She gripped it tentatively with her ... her whatever-it-was. She took a deep breath, tightened her hold, and lifted.

  The mug shot upward; startled, she threw her head back, eyes following its trajectory. Her mouth fell open, her eyes widened with surprise.

  The mug whacked against the ceiling, and at the impact she lost her intangible hold on it. It tumbled down and smashed against the table, shattering spectacularly.

  Tabaea stared at the spot on the ceiling where the mug had struck, and her open-mouthed astonishment slowly transformed itself into a broad grin.

  So that was warlockry!

  It had worked. And she had liked it; it had felt good, had made her feel strong and awake, even stronger than she already was—and since killing Inza, she had roughly twice her former strength, she was no longer just a weak woman, but as strong as most grown men.

  This was great! She only wished it hadn’t taken four years to find out what the Black Dagger could do. She had a lot of lost time to make up for.

  The dagger wouldn’t teach her anything, apparently, wouldn’t steal knowledge or memories, but it would take power. Strength, talent, skill—she could take any of those she wanted.

  All she had to do was kill the people who had them.

  Her grin dimmed.

  She had to kill them, if she wanted to keep what she stole. That was the nasty part. She didn’t like killing people, not really. It was true that Inza was a stuck-up little beast who had thought Tabaea was just gutter trash, but even so, killing her had probably been more than she deserved.

  It had been a necessary experiment, of course, to prove the Black Dagger’s power, and it had gotten Tabaea her wonderful new talent for warlockry, but still, it was nasty.

  Well, Tabaea told herself, sometimes life was nasty. At least, from now on, she would be on the dispensing end of the nastiness, rather than the receiving.

  She would pick and choose her victims carefully, though. There was no reason to kill large numbers of people. In fact, for raw strength, there was no reason to kill people at all—dogs and cats and other animals would serve just as well, perhaps better, for that.

  But skills—agility, and dexterity, and of course all the different schools of magic—those would come from people. Dogs and cats had no fingers and couldn’t do anything much with their toes, they couldn’t transfer anything involving tools, or that called for standing upright.

  Scent and vision and hearing, yes—without those, she could hardly have located this empty house and been certain it was deserted. She knew that she would spot the owner’s return before he suspected anything was wrong, would hear or smell him before he got near her, and with her faster reflexes and increased speed she could be gone before he noticed her, and that was all due to the animals.

  But for human skills, she needed to kill humans.

  She looked down at the dagger on her belt, and shrugged.

  Well, she told herself, people died every day in Ethshar. Men bragged in the taverns about how many people they had slain. Magicians killed each other, and any other enemies they might have. Demonologists sacrificed children or troublesome neighbors to their diabolic servants, and necromancers traded souls for the wisdom of the dead. Everyone knew all that. Surely, no one would notice a few more deaths.

  It did occur to Tabaea, somewhere in the back of her mind, that while she always heard about all these horrible deaths, she had never seen one, and very few of the people she knew personally had died of anything other than natural causes.

  If they were natural causes, and not vindictive magic.

  Well, it was a big city, and even if she had been lucky, everyone knew that people were murdered every day in Ethshar, stabbed or beaten in the Wall Street Field, poisoned or smothered in the lounges and bedrooms of the Palace, roasted or petrified by wizards, carried off to nameless dooms by demons and other supernatural creatures. No one would notice anything out of the ordinary if there were a few more deaths than usual.

  That settled, the only questions remaining were who and when.

  She had killed a warlock—she reached out and picked up the biggest chunk of the broken mug and sent it sailing in broad circles around the room, all without touching it; now that she knew how, it seemed to grow easier with every passing second. The next step would be either some other form of magic, or some vital, non-magical skill—archery, perhaps, or swordsmanship. A soldier, then?

  Yes, a soldier, but one who knew his trade, not just one of the fat, lazy bullies who guarded Grandgate by day and caroused in Soldiertown by night. An officer, perhaps—one who trained the new enlistees.

  And then some more magicians—a demonologist, perhaps, and a theurgist, even if they needed incantations maybe she could learn those somewhere, listen to someone at work; it couldn’t be that hard, once you had the gift, the skill, whatever it was that made them magicians instead of mere mortals. And then maybe a wizard, despite the Guild and her inability to make an athame, maybe two, they didn’t all use the same spells, maybe she could learn something useful. A sorcerer, a witch...

  She drew the Dagger and looked at it.

  “We’re going to be busy,” she said. She smiled. “And it’ll be worth it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “There’s wizardry here,” the witch said, kneeling by the body.

  “You’re sure it’s wizardry, and not some other magic?” Sarai asked from the doorway.

  The witch frowned. “Well, my lady,” he said, “it’s either wizardry or something entirely new, and if it’s something entirely new, it’s something that’s more like wizardry than it’s like anything else we’ve ever known.”

  “So it could be something entirely new?”

  The witch sighed as he got stiffly to his feet. He ran a bony hand through thinning hair.

  “I don’t know, Lady Sarai,” he said. “I know that when warlockry first came along, when I was just finishing my apprenticeship, we had a hard time telling it from witchcraft at first, because there are similarities, and we didn’t know the differences yet. I know that theurgy and demonology are opposite sides of the same coin, so that in some ways they look alike and in others they couldn’t be more different. Whatever happened here feels like wizardry to me, but it might be that it’s something new, and I just don’t know the differences yet. But it feels like wizardry.”

  Sarai nodded.

  “All right,” she said. “Wizardry, then, or something like it. Can you tell me anything about the person who did it?”

  The witch shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid not. The magic fouls up everything else.”

>   “Can you tell me anything more about the magic, then?” Sarai asked. “Would you know it if you met the murderer on the street?”

  The witch tilted his head and considered that carefully. “I doubt it,” he said at last. “What I sense here is the flavor of the single spell that killed him. It doesn’t seem likely that the killer would be walking around with that spell still active. I’m not a wizard, but as I understand it, their spells are usually temporary things—they make them fresh each time, as it were.”

  Sarai nodded again. “But it’s the same spell here as the others?”

  The witch shrugged. “I think so,” he said, “but I can’t be absolutely certain. The others were not so recent when I saw them.”

  For a moment the two of them stood silently, staring at the bloody corpse on the floor. The body, in turn, was staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

  “There’s one thing,” Sarai said. “You and the others all keep saying that a spell killed these people, but it’s plain to see that a knife killed them. Do you mean that it was an enchanted dagger? That an ordinary knife was wielded by magic? That the dagger was conjured out of thin air?”

  The witch hesitated. “I mean,” he said, very carefully, “that whatever made the wounds was magical, and that the life was drawn out by that magic. If it was a dagger, the dagger was enchanted; whether it was wielded by magic or by someone’s hand I have no way of knowing.”

  “Very well, then,” Sarai said. “Suppose it’s an enchanted dagger, and you happen to bump into someone on the street who’s wearing that dagger on his belt. Would you know it?”

  The witch hesitated even longer this time. “I doubt it,” he said at last. “But I think—I think—that if I saw someone use that dagger to cut someone, I would know it.”

  “Well, that’s better than nothing,” Sarai muttered.

  “I would, of course, immediately inform you, my lady, if I saw anything of the sort.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Or the nearest guardsman, or whoever.”

  “Of course.”

  Sarai turned and headed for the stairs.

  This one was the worst yet, and for a very simple reason—she had known the victim. Serem the Wise was one of the best-known enchanters in Ethshar of the Sands—or rather, he had been; now he was nothing but a wandering ghost and a throat-slashed cadaver.

  His apprentice—what was her name? Oh, yes, Lirrin. Lirrin was waiting at the foot of the stairs, looking pale and ill. Behind her, in the front parlor, Sarai could see Serem’s famous fan-tree, waving away as if nothing had happened; trust old Serem to use solid, permanent enchantments, not the feeble sort that would have died with their creator.

  Lirrin would be doing all right for herself, probably—as far as Sarai knew, there were no relatives with a stronger claim to any part of the estate than that of a new apprentice. If Serem had any children or siblings they were long since grown, and any wives were dead, divorced, or disappeared. Under Ethsharitic custom a child’s welfare came before that of any adult other than a spouse, and Lirrin, at seventeen, was still officially a child. She would inherit the wizard’s house and goods, including his Book of Spells and the contents of his workshop.

  That might be a sufficient motive for murder, and despite Lirrin’s display of grief Sarai might have suspected her, were it not for all the other deaths.

  Inza the Apprentice Warlock had been the first, slain in her own bed, her throat slashed, a stab wound in her chest; then there had been Captain Deru, waylaid in an alley off Archer Street, stabbed in the back, and his throat slashed. Athaniel the Theurgist was jumped in his shop, his throat slashed, and a single thrust through his heart to finish him off. Karitha of East End, a demonologist, had been beaten into unconsciousness in her own parlor, her throat cut as she lay insensible.

  Strangest of all, even as these murders had been taking place, a dozen animals, mostly stray cats or runaway dogs, had been found dead at various places in the Wall Street Field, with their throats cut open. Had they all been killed before Inza, then Sarai might have guessed the killer was working up his nerve, practicing before he dared risk tackling a human being, but they were not; instead, a dog and a cat had been killed shortly after Inza, the rest one by one in the days that followed, interspersed with the other victims.

  And now old Serem was dead, on the floor of his bedchamber, stabbed in the belly, and—like all the rest—his throat had been cut.

  And on all of them, men, women, and beasts, the magicians found lingering traces of a strange magic, probably wizardry, that blocked any divination or scrying spell.

  Mereth swore she couldn’t identify the killer. Okko could tell nothing of what had happened. Luris the Black had offered to help, to avenge her dead apprentice, but she was as useless as any warlock when it came to knowledge, rather than raw power.

  And now this witch, Kelder of Quarter Street, had failed, as well.

  “He hasn’t killed any witches yet,” Sarai remarked as she marched down the stairs. “One of you will probably be next; he seems to be trying for one of every sort of magician.”

  “There are still sorcerers, Lady Sarai,” Kelder replied, “and the various lesser disciplines, the herbalists and scientists and illusionists.”

  “True,” Sarai conceded. “Still, I’d lock my door, if I were you, and maybe invest in a few warding spells. Besides your own, I mean.” Witches did not have any true warding spells of their own, she knew, but she also knew that witches didn’t want outsiders to know it.

  “Perhaps you’re right, my lady,” the witch agreed. “I would like to say that I don’t fit the pattern in these killings, but in truth, I don’t see a clear pattern.”

  “Neither do I,” Sarai admitted.

  That bothered her. There ought to be more of a pattern in who was killed, and how; criminals were usually abysmally unimaginative. This one, though...

  They had no idea of any motive. The killer had slain the apprentice warlock, leaving Luris untouched, but here he or she had killed Serem, the master, and had left the apprentice, Lirrin, untouched. Athaniel had had no apprentice, nor, of course, had Deru, since the City Guard did not operate on an apprenticeship system. Karitha’s apprentice was a boy of fourteen who had been visiting his parents on their farm somewhere outside the city. Serem’s apprentice inherited everything; Karitha’s, due to the existence of the demonologist’s husband and nine-year-old daughter, inherited nothing but a few papers and the right to stay on until Festival.

  There was no pattern, no connecting motive, no common factor among the victims that Sarai had yet discovered.

  Lirrin was inheriting a large and valuable house and a great deal of wealth, which would make an excellent motive, and she was a wizard of sorts, as well—could she have arranged the entire thing, staged the other killings in order to throw off suspicion? It was hard to believe that anyone could be so cold-blooded; besides, if that was it, she had been foolish to kill Inza and not Luris, thereby missing the chance to create a false pattern and divert suspicion onto Inza.

  And why kill the dogs?

  Besides, Karitha was killed by a very strong person—she had been picked up and flung against a wall at one point. And the killer had not been gentle with Deru or Athaniel, either. Lirrin scarcely looked strong enough to do anything like that. She wasn’t as scrawny and underfed as some apprentices, but she still had more bone showing than muscle.

  Of course, with magic, anything is possible...

  Sarai realized that she had reached the bottom of the stairs and was now staring into Lirrin’s face from a distance of only four or five feet.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarai said, trying to sound sincere.

  She was sorry that Serem was dead, genuinely sorry, but right now she was thinking too hard about who might have killed him to get real emotion into her voice.

  Lirrin grimaced. “I guess you see things like this all the time, Lady Sarai,” she said, her voice unsteady.

  “No,” Sarai said. “No, I
don’t. Usually the guard takes care of ... of deaths without calling me in. They’re usually simple—someone lost his temper and is sitting there crying and confessing, or there are a dozen witnesses. If it’s not that obvious, then we call in the magicians, and generally we have the perpetrator in the dungeons the next day.” She sighed. “But this time,” she said, “we seem to be dealing with a lunatic of some sort, one who uses magic that hides all his traces. So they called me in, because I’m supposed to be good at figuring these things out. And I’m trying, Lirrin, I really am, but I just don’t know how to catch this one.”

  “Oh,” the apprentice—the former apprentice, Sarai reminded herself, the apprenticeship was over and done, and Lirrin would have to prove herself worthy of journeyman status before the representatives of the Wizards’ Guild, despite missing the final year of her studies—said, in a tiny voice.

  Sarai hesitated before saying any more, but finally spoke. “Lirrin,” she said, “you’re Serem’s heir, and that means you’re responsible for his funeral rites. But before you build a pyre, I have a favor to ask, a big one.”

  “What?” Lirrin was clearly on the verge of tears.

  “Could you summon a necromancer, and see if someone can speak to Serem’s ghost? His soul won’t be free to flee to Heaven until his body is destroyed; if we can question him, ask who stabbed him—he must have seen who it was. He might not know a name, he might not remember everything—ghosts often don’t—but anything he could tell us might help.”

  Lirrin blinked, and a tear spilled down one cheek. “You said there were others...”

  Sarai sighed again.

  “There were,” she admitted, “but with the first few we didn’t know it would be necessary until it was too late, until after the funeral. We did finally try with the demonologist; her soul was gone without a trace, probably taken by some demon she owed a debt to. We hope to do better with Serem. With your permission.”

  “Of course,” Lirrin said weakly. “Of course.”