But if there was more than one killer, why? Why would a group want to commit these murders? It seemed even less likely than an individual—unless it was some sort of conspiracy or cult at work.
Was there, perhaps, a secret conspiracy of magicians? Had Inza and Serem and the others been offered a chance to join, and been killed to insure their silence when they refused?
But why kill them all the same way, then? Was that a warning to others, perhaps? Or was it in fact a ritual? Was this a cult of some sort, perhaps followers of a demon that had somehow escaped from the Nether Void without coming under a demonologist's control? Or people enthralled by some wizardry, perhaps? There were wizards who could command elemental spirits or animals or ghosts—why not people? Or might the killers be ensorceled? Sarai had heard rumors, dating all the way back to the Great War, of sorcerers who could control the thoughts of others.
Cults and conspiracies—what was she up against? Could there be a cult of killers? She seemed to remember stories of such a thing.
"Tikri," she asked, "have you ever heard of an organization of assassins?"
"Do you mean the cult of Demerchan?" the soldier asked, startled.
Demerchan—that was the name. All she knew about it was vague legends and unfinished tales. "Do I? Could they be responsible for these killings?"
Tikri hesitated, then admitted, "I don't know."
"I don't either," Sarai muttered.
She didn't know—so she would just have to find out. And not just about Demerchan. There were magicians involved. She intended to check out the organizations of magicians that might be involved—the Wizards' Guild, the Council of Warlocks, the Brotherhood, the Sisterhood, the Hierarchy of Priests, and any others she could uncover.
"Tikri," she whispered, "I'm going to need several men. And women, too, probably."
Captain Tikri shot her a glance, then nodded.
CHAPTER 16
Four days later, a dozen blocks away, Tabaea lay back on the bed and stared up at the painted ceiling. This inn was a far cry from the dingy, malodorous places on Wall Street where she had spent most of her nights just a few months before. The sheets were clean, cool linen; the blanket was of fine wool, dyed a rich blue and embroidered with red and gold silk; the mattress was thick and soft, filled with the finest eiderdown.
No more burlap and straw for Tabaea the Thief, she told herself. Three fluffy pillows. A bottle of wine and a cut-glass goblet at her bedside, a fire on the hearth, and a bellpull in easy reach. Even the beams overhead were decorated, a design of red flowers and gold stars against a midnight blue background. The plaster between beams continued the blue, sprinkled with white stars and wisps of cloud.
She ought, she supposed, to be happy. She had more money than ever before in her life, she was stronger and healthier and more powerful than she had ever imagined she could be. She could take almost anything she wanted.
But she was not happy, and that "almost" was the reason why. There were things she wanted that she couldn't have. True, she had gotten away with half a dozen murders, but they had not all yielded the results she sought.
She had killed Inza, and now she could work warlockry—but only at an apprentice level, at least so far. And sometimes it felt so good doing it that it scared her; she knew nothing about it and was afraid she was doing something wrong, something that, even if it didn't harm her directly, would draw the attention— and the wrath—of the real warlocks, or, worse, of whatever it was that was responsible for the whispering she drew her power from.
She had killed Captain Deru, and with his strength added to the rest she was stronger than any man in Ethshar; she could wield a sword with the best of them and could put an arrow in a dog's eye at sixty paces; but she still looked like a half-starved, plain-faced girl, and no one stepped aside at her approach, and no one was intimidated by her bellow.
She had killed Athaniel, and that had done her no good at all; the gods still didn't listen when she prayed and still didn't come at her call. She didn't know the right formulae, the invocations, or the secret names; none of that had transferred.
She had killed Karitha and had discovered that demons were just as picky as gods in how they were summoned.
She had killed Serem, and she really wasn't even sure why, because by then she had known what would happen. She didn't know the incantations, the ingredients, or the mystic gestures. She didn't even know the names of any of the spells. And of course, she had no athame and could not make one; she had only the Black Dagger, instead.
Maybe the dagger was her reason for killing him, she thought, in frustration over his part in saddling her with it. True, it had given her power and strength, and it had saved her from that awful drunk, but it was so maddening, having this magic right there in her hands and not understanding any of it.
She hadn't really thought the dagger had influenced her at the time, but yes, she admitted to herself, it probably had something to do with it.
Whatever the reason, she had killed him, and it hadn't done any good.
And finally, just a few days before, she had killed a witch by the name of Kelder of Quarter Street. She had seen him at Ser-em's funeral and had followed him home. That had some result, anyway—she seemed to have acquired at least one new ability; she could feel odd, sometimes incomprehensible bits of sensation fairly often, especially when near other people.
She could not, however, make very much sense of them. She was no apprentice; she had no one to tell her what anything meant. When she sensed a wet heat from a man's thoughts, or an image of red velvet, or a tension like the air before a thunderstorm, what did that represent? The cool blackness from the potted daisies here in her room at the inn—was that normal? Did it mean they were thriving, or dying?
The truth was that she could gain more useful information about the world and its creatures through her canine sense of smell than through any of her supernatural abilities.
And her warlockry seemed to be getting worse. Not by itself; at first, she had thought she was just being distracted, or forgetting what she had managed to learn, but now, looking back on it, she was fairly certain that every time she had killed another magician, her warlockry had weakened. The effect was most noticeable when she added witchcraft to her collection of skills. Now she had to listen intently to find that whisper; it wasn't intruding uninvited as it had at first.
Did the different magicks interfere with each other, like kittens stumbling over their litter-mates?
If she had killed a witch first, could she have made sense of what she saw and felt? Would she be able to do more, even without training?
It was all rather discouraging. There was so much she didn't know. Here she had, at least in theory, the ability to perform five different kinds of magic, and she didn't know how to use any of them properly!
And no matter what she did, no matter how powerful, how fast, how perceptive she became, she still looked like a ragged half-grown thief, and those around her still treated her accordingly. She had had to pay cash in advance for this room, and the innkeeper had clearly been astonished when Tabaea had pulled out a handful of silver.
And she couldn't tell anyone about any of it; there was no one she could trust, no one she could talk to. If she ever admitted anything, they would all know that she was a murderer, and she'd be hanged.
It just wasn't working out the way she had thought it would.
There had to be something she could do to make it work, though. Maybe if she knew more about all the different kinds of magic, she thought, she would be able to get some use out of them. She couldn't just steal the knowledge, of course—the Black Dagger didn't work that way; she now knew that beyond any doubt, she would never learn anything from it.
And of course, she was too old to be an apprentice. She was nineteen, almost twenty.
But maybe, if she listened—she had superhuman hearing now, at least in the upper registers, thanks to a dozen dead animals. She could get in anywhere, with her lockpicking
and house-breaking skills, her animal stealth, her stolen strength, and her warlockry.
If she crept into a magician's home and watched and listened, if she found a new apprentice just beginning his training…
It was certainly worth a try.
Moving like a cat—not figuratively, but literally—she leaped from the bed and crept to the door, then down the hall, down the stair, through the common room, and out into the gathering night.
CHAPTER 17
The legendary assassins' cult of Demerchan, Captain Jikri assured Lady Sarai, was quite real and headquartered somewhere in the Small Kingdoms; beyond that he knew nothing definite. At Lady Sarai's insistence, Tikri sent a well-funded agent to attempt to learn more.
Until the agent returned there was nothing else to be done about Demerchan, so Sarai turned her attention to other organizations, ones that happened to be closer at hand—the organizations that represented the different schools of magic. She knew of five—the Wizards' Guild, the Council of Warlocks, the Brotherhood, the Sisterhood, and the Hierarchy of Priests. Neither sorcerers nor demonologists nor any of the lesser sorts of magicians, such as herbalists or scientists, seemed to have any unifying body—at least, four years of research into magic had failed to find any sign of one operating in Ethshar.
Lady Sarai didn't think it was worth worrying about herbalists or the like, and she couldn't do much about the sorcerers or demonologists, but the five known groups definitely wanted attention—especially the wizards and warlocks, since the killers had left indications of wizardry and warlockry.
The Wizards' Guild was by far the most powerful of the organizations—every wizard was a member, bound by Guild rules, as well she knew. Every wizard in the World was responsible to his or her local Guildmaster.
Most people thought that the Guildmasters ran everything, but Sarai knew better. She had learned a year before that the Guildmasters, popularly believed to all be equals in the government of the Wizards' Guild, in fact answered to a select few called the Inner Circle—that secret, she was given to understand, could cost her her life if she were too free in its dissemination.
If she wanted to speak to someone with real power in the Wizards' Guild, she knew she should speak to a member of the Inner Circle—but if the very existence of the Inner Circle was secret, she could hardly expect anyone to tell her who was a member.
Serem the Wise might or might not have been a member; her informant thought that he had been. This particular rumor had come up in a discussion of Serem's apparent successor as the senior Guildmaster in Ethshar of the Sands—Telurinon of the Black Robe was definitely not a member of the Inner Circle and was said to have hopes of changing that.
But if Telurinon was not in the Inner Circle, was he really the city's senior member of the Guild?
Well, whether he was or not, he was her best possible contact with the Guild; she sent him a message asking if a private meeting could be arranged for her to speak to the Guild's representatives in Ethshar of the Sands.
While she waited for a reply, she considered the other organizations.
The Council of Warlocks was a much looser body than the Guild; while every warlock she spoke to seemed more or less to acknowledge its authority, at least within the city walls, no one mentioned rules or discipline or death threats when discussing the Council. The membership of the actual Council seemed to change fairly often—since it was nominally composed of the twenty most powerful warlocks in the city, its members were also the warlocks most likely to hear the Calling and vanish without notice.
She wasn't sure just who the current chairman was; Sarai was fairly certain that Mavis of Beachgate had left the city, either Called or fleeing southward by ship, hoping to get farther from Aldagmor before the Calling could claim her.
Luralla would know, though; she had the warlock called in and asked her to take a message to the chairman of the Council. Those groups were the important two, but for the sake of thoroughness, Lady Sarai considered the others.
Only a minority of theurgists had any connection with the Hierarchy of Priests; Sarai wasn't sure whether that would have made them more or less suspicious under other circumstances. As it was, though, Okko happened to be the high priest, and Sarai simply couldn't take seriously the idea that he might be behind some fiendish conspiracy.
Still, she did go so far as to question him briefly while a witch by the name of Shala of the Green Eyes sat concealed in an adjoining room, watching for lies or any sign of guilt. Shala had been hired almost at random, after a walk down the western portion of Wizard Street—Sarai wanted to avoid using anyone Okko might recognize or might have had any chance to subvert. Shala found no evidence that Okko was concealing anything and assured Sarai that the old theurgist was telling the truth when he swore he knew nothing about the murders he hadn't told Lady Sarai.
Of course, there might be another organization of theurgists— but really, theurgists committing murder? The gods didn't approve of that sort of thing.
That brought Sarai to the witches.
Witches had two organizations, segregated by sex—which made no sense that Sarai could see, since she hadn't come across any differences between how witchcraft worked for men and how it worked for women. Neither of them was very structured—the Sisterhood generally chose their leaders by lot at erratic intervals, while the Brotherhood elected them annually, and there was no permanent hierarchy in either group. Between them, they included perhaps a third of the thousand or so witches in the city. The Sisterhood was somewhat larger than the Brotherhood—but then, Sarai had the impression that there were more female witches than male.
Of the witches she had dealt with, Sarai knew at least one was a member of the Sisterhood—Shirith of Ethshar, who had tried unsuccessfully to heal Lord Kalthon. There were no annoying delays while meetings were arranged; Shirith and her apprentice came when invited and met with Lady Sarai in the Great Council Chamber that same evening.
Sarai had chosen the council chamber, rather than one of the innumerable smaller rooms in the palace, to impress upon the witches just how important this was—and also because the chamber gave an impression of great privacy, even while Okko would be listening from a concealed room adjoining, and Mereth of the Golden Door would be watching by means of a scrying spell.
She dressed for the meeting in a nondescript tunic and skirt. She not only didn't wear the impressive robes of the Minister of Justice—she had had a set altered to fit her when first she found herself forced to act in her father's place—but she dressed far more simply than was her wont, to add to the air of secrecy.
The thought struck her as she straightened her skirt that she was probably entitled to some sort of formal costume as Minister of Investigation; she had never worried about it before, since it was not in the nature of the job to make public appearances.
Perhaps this plain black skirt and dark blue tunic would serve. Her mouth twisted in a semblance of a smile at the thought.
She could hear her father's labored breathing as she crossed to the door; Kalthon the Younger was asleep in his chamber, but their father was awake, lying on the couch—or at any rate, as awake as he ever was anymore.
She took a moment to kiss his brow, then left the apartments and hurried down the corridor.
She found the two witches waiting in the council chamber, looking very small and alone in the two chairs they occupied of the hundred or so that the room held. Three red-kilted guards were standing watch, one at each door; Sarai dismissed them. "Shirith," she said, when the doors had closed behind the guards, "I'm so glad you could come."
The elder witch rose and curtsied. When she stood again she smiled wryly, and said, "Perhaps, Lady Sarai, you have not yet realized just how unlikely any citizen of Ethshar is to ignore a summons to the Palace from the Acting Minister of Justice, especially one delivered by a member of the city guard in full uniform, including sword."
Sarai had not thought of it in those terms. She had sent a soldier because he
was handy—most of the officials of the overlord's government used the city guard for their errands outside the palace.
To an ordinary citizen, though…
Well, she saw Shirt’s point. And perhaps it was just as well; she had wanted to impress the witches with the severity of the situation, after all.
"Do you know why you're here?" Sarai asked. She knew the more skilled and powerful witches could hear the thoughts in people's heads, if they tried, and Shirith was undoubtedly skilled.
"Do you want me to?" Shirith countered. "Ah, I see you do, if only to save time. I'm sorry, Lady Sarai, but I'm afraid that… oh."
She paused, then said, "The killings. Poor Kelder."
Sarai nodded.
"If you could tell me more, Lady Sarai…" Shirith began.
Lady Sarai explained quickly, well aware that Shirith was filling in missing details with her witchcraft.
"I'm afraid," Shirith said at last, "that I can't help you. We in the Sisterhood are naturally concerned, even though Kelder was obviously not one of our members. I can attest that I am in no way involved in these killings, nor is any member of the Sisterhood with whom I have spoken in the past month. Your theurgist will confirm that I speak the truth; I don't know what the wizard's spell will show, but if it tests veracity, then that, too, should support me."
So much, Sarai thought, for secrecy.
"Well," Shirith said apologetically, "once I start listening to what lies behind your words, I can't always help hearing more than you might want."
The Spell of the Black Dagger (2nd Edition) Page 13
