“Forensic sorcery?” She glanced at Tikri, who shrugged. “I didn’t know there was such a thing.”
“It’s rather a neglected field,” Kelder admitted.
“I did talk to sorcerers, you know,” Sarai said. “None of them were able to help.”
Kelder shrugged. “Ethsharitic sorcerers,” he said scornfully. “Amateurs.”
“And you’re a professional?” Tikri demanded.
“I like to think so,” Kelder said, a trifle smugly. “I’ve been studying forensic sorcery ever since I was an apprentice. In general, Sardironese sorcery is considerably more advanced than anything you have here.”
“The Northern taint,” Tikri remarked.
“Yes, exactly,” Kelder agreed, ignoring the captain’s insulting tone. “The Baronies of Sardiron, and especially my homeland of Tazmor, were part of the Northern Empire throughout the Great War. Thanks to the relics of the Empire, we have far more to work with than you southerners.”
“So you’ve come south to show us how it’s done?” Tikri suggested sarcastically.
“No,” Kelder said, still unoffended. “I was at Sardiron of the Waters when Lady Sarai’s messengers arrived, looking for information about cults or conspiracies, maybe involving surviving Northerners, and I thought I might be able to help.”
Tikri glanced at Sarai. “You thought we might be dealing with Northerners? My lady, they’ve all been dead for two hundred years!”
Sarai shrugged. “We think they’ve all been dead for two hundred years,” she said. “The World is a big place.”
“Oh, I think they have,” Kelder said.
“So, sorcerer,” Tikri said, “you know something about cults and conspiracies?”
“No,” Kelder said, “but I know forensic sorcery. So I came here and studied the places where the killings occurred—I confess, it wasn’t until I followed you and those other two women today that I was sure I had located them all. And of course, I was too late to study the bodies, unfortunately.”
Sarai looked at him with renewed interest. The funny little man with the northern accent was full of surprises. “You followed us?” she asked.
The sorcerer nodded.
“Do you think you learned something?” she asked.
“Yes, my lady,” he said.
“And what might that be?” Tikri asked. “Was sorcery involved in these crimes?”
“Not that I know of,” Kelder said, “but that doesn’t mean very much. Sorcery doesn’t always leave traces. But I did learn that there were four people who had, prior to today, been in each room where a person was murdered.”
“Four?” Sarai stared. “So it was a conspiracy...”
“Yes, four, my lady, two men and two women, but it was not necessarily a conspiracy. I could not determine the exact times that these people were there, only that they had been. And I have identified one of the four as the final victim, the witch Kelder of Quarter Street—I assume that he visited the rooms in the course of investigating the crimes. One or more of the others might have been legitimate visitors as well, perhaps even among the other investigators. Should all three prove to have been there for other reasons, then perhaps that will prove that there was more than one murderer. Have your investigations found anyone who visited all those places?”
Sarai blinked. “Well, I did, after the killings.”
“Yes, of course,” Kelder agreed. “I should have expected that. Then I assume one of the two women was yourself—might I test that hypothesis, please?”
“How?”
“With this talisman.” He drew a flat silver object from inside his tunic and held it out. A circle of milky crystal was set into the center of a metal oblong roughly the size of Captain Tikri’s hand. “If you would be so kind as to touch your fingertip to the white disk...”
Sarai glanced at Captain Tikri, who shrugged. Then she reached out and touched the crystal.
“Thank you. And do you perhaps...”
“I was in all of them,” Tikri interrupted.
“Ah. Then could you... ?” Kelder held out the talisman again.
Tikri glanced at Sarai.
“Do it,” she said.
Tikri obeyed, tapping one forefinger lightly on the white crystal.
“Thank you, sir.” Kelder pulled the talisman away and closed both his hands around it, holding it near his chest, not quite touching the fabric of his tunic. He stared down at it for a moment, stroking the metal with his thumbs, clearly concentrating hard.
Sarai watched with interest; she had rarely seen sorcery in action before, and nothing at all like this.
After roughly a minute and a half, the little Sardironese looked up at Sarai again.
“It’s definite,” he said. “You, Lady Sarai, were one of the women, and the captain here was the other man. There is evidence that the two of you, and my late namesake, all visited the sites after the other woman. I therefore suspect that this other woman is connected with the crimes. Unless there was another...”
Sarai shook her head. “I can’t think of any other woman who visited all the rooms before I took Teneria and Luralla around this morning,” she said. “Mereth saw some of them, but she didn’t go to every room. Can you tell us anything more about this woman?”
Kelder glanced down at his talisman. “She has black hair and brown eyes,” he said, “and is not tall, certainly not as tall as you, though I cannot specify her height any more exactly than that. She is thin and light on her feet, with a rather square face, a wide nose, and pale skin. She usually wore black clothing, and may have gone barefoot. Beyond that...” He turned up an empty palm. “Beyond that, I’m afraid I know no more.”
“That isn’t Mereth,” Sarai said. “The height’s right, but not the rest of it. Are you sure of this?”
“Oh, absolutely. A woman fitting that description visited each murder site within a sixnight or so of the killings.”
Sarai looked up at Tikri. “That description doesn’t bring anyone immediately to mind,” she said. “Does it for you?”
“No.” Tikri frowned. “I’m not sure how much we should trust this information.”
The sorcerer tucked his talisman back in his tunic. “That’s entirely up to you, of course,” he said, “but I give you my word that it’s reliable information. I don’t know that this woman killed anyone, but she was very definitely there. If I had been able to see the bodies, I could have told you whether the same knife was used in every case...”
Sarai waved that aside. “We already know that,” she said. “The wizards tested that for us. It was the same knife every time.”
“Oh.” Kelder essayed a quick little bow of acknowledgment.
Sarai smiled at him. “I’m not disparaging your information, Kelder of Tazmor,” she said. “Thank you for bringing it to us. If you learn anything more, please come and tell us.”
“Of course.” Kelder bowed again, and stepped away.
Sarai looked up at Tikri. “Do you think this woman is the killer?”
Tikri shook his head. “No woman smaller than you could be strong enough to have committed these murders single-handed. Perhaps she’s the high priestess of a cult that’s responsible for this—if she exists at all.”
“I think she exists,” Sarai said. “Why would the sorcerer lie?”
“To throw us off the track,” Tikri suggested. “Perhaps he’s part of the conspiracy.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sarai admitted, staring at Kelder’s back and chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. “We could check his story, though.”
“How?”
“Witchcraft. Where’s Teneria?” Sarai turned, peering out the door as if she expected to find the young witch standing in the hallway.
Thin, black hair, light on her feet, usually wore black—that described Teneria, Sarai realized. The height was probably wrong, though; the journeyman witch stood very close to Sarai’s own height. And her long, narrow face, with its pointed jaw, hardly looked square
, and while her nose was noticeable, that was because it was long, with a bump in it, not because it was wide. Her complexion wasn’t particularly pale. And weren’t her eyes green?
She wasn’t there to check.
Sarai snorted with sudden annoyance. Was she going to be matching every female she met against the sorcerer’s description, from now until the murderers were caught?
She debated sending Tikri to fetch Teneria, but before she could decide, Teneria actually did appear in the doorway.
“Just the person I was looking for!” Sarai called.
Teneria entered and bowed before Lady Sarai, then asked, “How may I be of service?”
“You don’t already know?” Sarai asked wryly.
The ghost of a smile flickered across the witch’s rather somber face. “No, my lady,” she said. “Not at the moment.”
“I need to know what’s true and what isn’t,” Sarai said. “You witches are good at that.”
Teneria cocked her head to one side and replied, “In a way. We can generally tell when people believe what they say—whether that’s actually the truth is sometimes an entirely different matter. And it works better with some people than others.”
Sarai nodded, and asked, “Suppose you spoke to a woman I thought had been connected with the murders; could you tell me whether she had, in fact, been connected?”
Teneria frowned. “That would depend. Probably. If she spoke at all, almost certainly. If she spoke freely, with no magical constraints, absolutely. But I would not necessarily be able to ascertain the nature of the connection.”
“Could you tell if a person had actually committed one of the murders?”
“Oh, yes, I would think so. Unless there was a very great deal of magic hiding the fact.”
“Suppose you were to walk down the street, or through the market; could you pick a murderer out of the crowd?”
Teneria shook her head. “Only if I was incredibly lucky. The murderer would have to be thinking about the actual killing, and feeling a strong emotional reaction to those thoughts, with absolutely no magical protection of any kind. Even then, I couldn’t be sure without stopping to investigate. What might look like a murderer’s thoughts at first glance could just be a housewife worried about killing a chicken for dinner.”
“I thought it was probably too much to ask,” Sarai admitted. “If you could do that, we’d have just had witches working for my father for years, instead of relying on Okko and the others for most of it.”
Teneria shrugged.
“But if we brought you a person and asked, ‘Is this the murderer,’ you could tell us?” Sarai asked.
“Ordinarily, yes.”
Sarai nodded. “Good enough,” she said. She pointed. “That man in the brown tunic there is a sorcerer by the name of Kelder of Tazmor; he claims to have magically established that a particular woman was present in each room where a murder was committed—though not necessarily at the time of the killing. I want you to find out how reliable his information is.”
Teneria followed the gesture, but said nothing at first.
“Does sorcery interfere with your witchcraft?” Sarai inquired.
“Not usually,” Teneria replied. “Sometimes.”
“Will it this time?”
Teneria turned and walked away from the dais, toward Kelder. “I’ll let you know,” she said, over her shoulder.
Ten minutes later, she let them know. Kelder believed absolutely in what he had told Sarai and Tikri. Sarai thanked the young witch, and stared down at the spriggan that was clutching at her ankle.
Who was that woman Kelder had described?
Chapter Twenty-One
Captain Tikri’s files were a mess. Lady Sarai had thought her own records, up in her bedroom, were not as organized as they ought to be, and had always been embarrassed when she thought of the tidy shelves and drawers that her father and his clerks maintained, but by comparison with Tikri’s random heap of reports and letters, hers were a model of order and logic.
“What are you looking for, anyway?” Tikri asked, as Sarai dumped another armful on his desk.
“I don’t know,” Sarai said, picking a paper off the stack. “But I hope I’ll know it when I see it.”
“How will you know it if you don’t know what it is? I’d offer to help, but how can I?”
Sarai sighed.
“What I’m after,” she said, “is some record of a crime that the conspirators might have committed before the murders. Once they killed Inza we were looking for them, and I’m sure they’ve been careful, and certainly we’ve been careful, checking out everything that we thought might be connected. Right?”
“Right,” Tikri said, a trifle uncertainly.
“Well, this conspiracy probably didn’t burst out of nowhere, full-grown and completely ready, the night poor Inza died,” Sarai explained. “They must have been preparing before that. They may have killed more dogs, for example, before working their way up to people. They may have injured people without killing them. They may have stolen things they needed for their magic. And maybe, since they weren’t so experienced yet, they left traces and clues. Now do you see what I’m after?”
“Oh,” Tikri said. He hesitated. “How far back do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Sarai admitted.
“You may not find anything.”
“I know that,” Sarai said, flinging down a thick report and glaring angrily at Tikri. “Don’t you think I know that? But I don’t have much of anything else left to try. The Wizards’ Guild wants to catch whoever it is for themselves, because it won’t look as good for them if I do it, so they won’t help me any more than they have to.” Tikri started to protest, and Sarai cut him off. “Oh, they’ll put up a pretense of cooperation, I’m sure,” she said, “but half of them probably still think I’m trying to blame them for all this, or steal the credit. I won’t know if they’re covering up something or not, I can’t be sure, and they aren’t about to tell me. The Council of Warlocks is no help; they’re all afraid that if they do anything to help me they’ll draw down the Calling on themselves. The Brotherhood is less organized than a children’s street game; they don’t even know who’s in charge, or who their members are. The Sisterhood isn’t much better—they don’t know how many witches there are in Ethshar, let alone what any of them are doing. And none of them seem to be getting anywhere with their magic, anyway. So what else would you suggest I do?”
“The magicians can’t help at all?”
“They can’t help any more. Okko says the gods can’t see anything through the haze of wizardry; Kallia says the demons won’t tell her anything, and she doesn’t know whether they know anything to tell. The warlocks all swear their magic doesn’t handle information. Kelder’s told me all he can, and that’s more than I could get from any Ethsharitic sorcerer. Wizards and witches tell me what magic was used, what went where, but they can’t give me names or faces. So I’m reading these papers. Don’t you ever sort them?”
“No,” Tikri admitted.
Sarai let out a wordless noise of exasperation, and turned back to the reports.
Tikri, hoping to be of help, began picking up papers and glancing through them, as well. The two sat, reading silently, for several minutes.
“Here’s a report of a missing dog,” Tikri ventured.
Sarai glanced up. “Let me see it.”
Tikri obeyed; Sarai skimmed through the report quickly, and then put it to one side. “It might be worth another look,” she said.
A moment later she found one herself.
“What ever happened in this case?” she said, handing two pages to Tikri.
Tikri read enough to remind himself what had happened. “Oh, this,” he said. “Nothing happened. We never found out who it was.”
Sarai took the two sheets back. “Guardsman Deran reports tending to stabbing victim in tavern,” she read. “No accusations or arrests made.” She looked up. “That’s in your handwriting.”<
br />
Tikri nodded. “That’s right,” he said.
“The other one isn’t,” Sarai pointed out.
“No, that’s the lieutenant who was in charge, Lieutenant Senden,” Tikri agreed. “He sent it in the next day.”
“And you actually managed to keep the two together? It is the same stabbing?”
Tikri shrugged. “Sometimes I get lucky,” he said. “It’s the same one.”
“Guardsman Deran Wuller’s son tended to two knife wounds, a slash and a stab, on the upper left thigh of a man who gave his name as Tolthar of Smallgate, who claimed to have been discharged from the city guard five years previously for being drunk while on duty,” Sarai read aloud. “It was Guardsman Deran’s conclusion that the stabbing was a result of a disagreement with a young woman; witnesses at the scene reported that the so-called Tolthar had been seen talking with a woman shortly before the stabbing. Those elements of their descriptions of the woman that are in general agreement were as follows: Thin, black hair, below average height, wearing dark clothing.” She put down the report. “Short, thin, black hair, dressed in black,” she said. “A stab and a slash. Sound familiar?”
“But it wasn’t his throat,” Tikri protested.
“She probably couldn’t get at his throat,” Sarai pointed out. “He was awake.”
“But drunk.”
Sarai glowered at Tikri. “Are you seriously claiming you don’t see any possible connection?”
“No,” Tikri admitted. “I’m just not sure there’s a connection.”
“Neither am I,” Sarai said. “But it’s worth investigating, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” Tikri said.
“Then send for this Lieutenant Senden and this man Deran Wuller’s son, and have them find Tolthar of Smallgate and bring him to me for questioning.”
“Now?”
“Do you know of a better time? Yes, now!”
Tikri put down his own stack of reports and headed for the door, in pursuit of a messenger. In so doing he almost collided with a messenger who had been about to knock at the open door.
The Spell of the Black Dagger Page 17
