The Fiddler's Dagger

by W H Lock

  Rube nodded. "So then what's a sorcerer?"

  "Well, Del said it right. A pompous ass that enjoys showing off how smart they are."

  "Well, if you go to a fancy magic school to become a magician and you have to join a coven to be a witch, how do you get to be a sorcerer?"

  Rube pulled the car to a halt in front of Gartrell's house. Del opened the door on her side and slipped out of the car. Quinn slid across the seat and paused at the door.

  "How do you become a sorcerer? Ronny James Dio album covers. Which is also why there are so few sorcerers. Sing the wrong song while holding one of those covers and most sorcerers become lunch." Quinn winked at Rube as he got out.

  Del shut the door behind Quinn and straightened his tie. Quinn adjusted the round spectacles on his nose. He turned to look at himself in the car window. He frowned as he looked at his reflection, then he grinned and turned to Del with his hands wide, as if to say 'Am I amazing or what?"

  Del rolled her eyes. "Come along then, poppet. You can impress the mark with how pretty you are."

  As they walked, her hair subtly changed from the straight dishwater blonde back to the bouncy curled brass blonde she had been in the Stephens Club. Her curves widened, and her hips took on more of a sway. She grinned at Quinn with lips that were a touch fuller than normal.

  "Hey, Del," Quinn said. "It's you and me, right? All the way to the end?" Quinn held onto the satchel with the copy of the Oera Linda tightly in his hand.

  Del stopped and took Quinn's face in her hands. Her sly grin faded as she looked him in the eyes. Her green eyes locking on to his blue. "Quinn, my dearest heart. If you play this right, we shall live in comfort in France for the rest of our very, very long and very rich lives." She planted a long hard kiss on his mouth.

  Quinn grinned at her. She winked back and turned to walk to Gartrell's house. Quinn snapped his fingers and spun to flare his jacket out. He followed her with a fast shuffling tap dance that involved a lot of high steps.

  Quinn felt it as they passed through the wards built into Gartrell's iron fence. Unlike most of the wards he had felt, these were crystalline and brittle. He understood what Karen had been talking about now. Quinn shuddered at the memory of the probing fingers of the Vatican wards. Those wards had been ancient and powerful but continuously updated and monitored.

  The wards around Gartrell's were thin. They were brittle and interconnected. Quinn wasn't the best at ward cracking, not even by a long shot. But as he passed through Gartrell's magical defense, he was certain he could have breached them without being detected any time he wanted. But there was something else. Something that was not what Quinn had expected. He was being watched. It wasn't a feeling he was accustomed to at all.

  "Del," Quinn caught her hand to hold her back. "Something's not right here. Something is watching us."

  She turned to look at him with concern. "You're just noticing that now? Quinn, my poppet, what must it be like to live in a world like yours? Something has always been watching from inside this house. Anyone with half a lick of sense would have been able to tell that from a block away." She patted his cheek as if he were a small child and said, "Don't ever change, poppet. You're delightfully unaware. It's a part of your charm, actually."

  Gartrell's door opened as the couple approached. Gartrell himself was waiting for them just inside the doorway. He held out his arms expansively and said, "Welcome to my humble family estate!"

  Gartrell let the door open wide and gestured for Del and Quinn to come inside his home. He hungrily eyed Del as she sauntered past. He winked at Quinn as Quinn followed along behind her. Quinn held up the yellow leather satchel for Gartrell to see. The older man had trouble keeping his attention on the satchel as Del walked further into his house. The sway of her hips was hypnotic.

  She turned around, and Quinn could tell that her hips had gotten wider, her thighs thicker, and her breasts pushed against the constraints of her dress.

  When they were younger and dating, Quinn had found it exhilarating to have a girlfriend that could look like any woman imaginable. But over time he had found that he preferred her when they were alone together. Naturally, Del had ruddy brown hair that she kept very short, not more than a few inches on top and shaved at the sides. She had a laurel tattoo on her head that wrapped around the back from ear to ear. When Quinn saw the leaves, he felt she let him see a special private part of her that the rest of the world didn’t know existed.

  Gartrell couldn’t take his eyes off her now voluptuous form and long flowing hair. He all but drooled as he gazed possessively at her.

  The foyer of the Gartrell house was the beginning of a central hallway that ran through the length of the house. Through the leaded glass doors on the other end, Quinn could just make out the manicured garden of a backyard. A dark wood staircase went to the second story. To the left and right of the foyer were sitting and greeting rooms common in the old southern plantation houses. The walls were covered in smooth plaster. Carved wooden imperial-looking pillars punctuated the walls. Between the pillars, in the smooth places, were hand-painted murals of cotton plants.

  Somewhere in the house, a grandfather clock tolled the time. The bell sound was deep and measured as if it had marked the time for a century and would do so for another hundred years.

  "Would you two care for some refreshment?" Gartrell asked as he led them into the house. He turned under the stairs into a small hallway hidden from the front door. At the bottom of the small staircase was a dark wooden door. Quinn saw the wards on this door. These, again, were brittle with age. They had been reinforced over the years and rebuilt, but again as if it had been done by rote rather than a skilled worker.

  On the other side of a door was a large office. The desk was neat and clean, devoid of any sign of work. A marble fireplace flanked the desk across from the door. The windowless room had been painted in warm yellows to make it more comfortable. Gartrell closed the door behind Del and Quinn. Quinn felt the magic of the wards sealing the room behind them.

  Across from the desk was another floor to ceiling bookshelf. Both bookshelves were filled with artfully placed collections of books and small objects of art. They were arranged by color and size. These weren't the bookshelves of someone who read extensively. These were the shelves of a man who considered books to be in the same class as a vase of flowers. They were decorations.

  But behind that second bookshelf, Quinn could feel whatever had been watching him from the moment he had stepped inside the iron fence. Being this close to it, Quinn knew two, well, three things. The first, that behind that bookshelf was the very heart of this house, even perhaps the entire Gartrell family. The second was that if the dagger were anywhere in Gartrell's possession, it would be there. The third was Quinn had encountered something just like whatever was behind that door before. Quinn put the satchel down on the desk. He reached out to open the yellow leather satchel as he licked his lips.

  Quinn stopped him by clamping down on the flap.

  "As long as the satchel is shut, it can't be discovered. The moment it comes out, anyone looking for it will be able to see it. Do you have somewhere we can view this with security?"

  Gartrell grinned. Del handed him a glass of his own wine and all but perched on his shoulder. Gartrell finished the wine in one smooth gulp and tossed the glass over his other shoulder. He stepped out from under Del and went to a bust of a man on the shelf behind the desk.

  Gartrell moved a bust of Jefferson Davis on the bookshelf across from the desk. There was a mechanical click from behind the wall. Gartrell nodded with a grin at the bookcase. It moved forward and aside to reveal a steel door.

  The door had seen better days. It had outward facing dents. The door had been battered from the inside in an attempt to force it open. But it had held. The strongest wards in the house were focused on this door. These were the oldest by far and the most crystalline in structure. The door, the room behind it, and the wards were likely the oldest parts of the house. The
door was held fast by a massive iron handle and two matching bolts that drove into the stone walls.

  Gartrell pulled the two bolts. Quinn felt the magic letting go of the seal around the door. With the turn of the iron handle, the last of the seals let go, and the door opened with a slight hiss. As if the air itself had been trying to escape the room but couldn’t.

  Quinn expected to confront something uniquely horrifying. A room left over from the darkest days of the Confederacy. As the door swung open, tasteful track lights flicked on to fill the room with a clear and warm light. The walls were covered in bookshelves. Like the two in the office behind them, the books were organized first by size and then by color. Here and there along the shelves, books were held open by stands to display that specific piece of text.

  Across from the massive steel door, at the furthest point in the house from the outside world was the dagger. It sat in a spotlight of its own. It was placed on a small pedestal, about chest high. There was nothing to cover it or prevent anyone from walking up and taking the dagger.

  Nothing if you didn't count the demonic presence bound into the pedestal. It radiated malevolence and directed hatred that Quinn was sure even a normal human would feel. That's when Quinn realized that the door wasn't to keep people out. It was to keep whatever guarded the dagger in. Gartrell shut the door and sealed them in the room with the dagger and the beast that guarded it.

  "Let's look at this artifact from our forefathers," Gartrell smacked his hands together and licked his lips again. He moved to take the satchel from Quinn's hands.

  It took Quinn a moment to force himself to look away from the pedestal. It wasn’t because the dagger was there but what was inside. The beast was familiar to Quinn. Not that he had encountered this specific one before, but he knew the type of Hell beast that was in the room with them. It was a barghest. Viscous demonic dogs used for a variety of jobs, but to guard something was the most common. Once a barghest had been set to guard something, be it a door, a thing, or even a person, nothing short of death would stop it from attacking any threat. Either someone in Gartrell’s family line was a powerful magician that summoned a barghest from Hell and bound it or they had made a bargain with a devil to have one placed here. Either way, it was a problem Quinn would have to figure out. Fast.

  Quinn turned away from the pedestal and held up his hand to stop the older man. Quinn said, "What you are about to experience, Gartrell, is something that has been passed down to us from our Friesian ancestors. This isn't the cheap tricks of a street conjurer or even what those fools in the ivory towers have convinced themselves as truth, but this is the deep truth of the world. Are you ready to learn these?"

  Gartrell nodded.

  "Now," Quinn said as he popped the catches on the satchel, "this is old Frisian. Are you conversant with Frisian?"

  Gartrell looked confused at the idea a book being written in a language he couldn't understand.

  "There is no modern equivalent to this language, my friend. It is not like reading in Spanish or Italian, which fool can put together. This is the language of the ancients. Each word is packed with more meaning than the weaker races could understand."

  Gartrell's eyes went wide.

  "I heard a man went mad trying to read it once," Del said from behind Gartrell. She grinned like a fox in a hen house, and said, "It seems his weak blood could not handle the strain of truth." She reached up and ran a finger gently along Gartrell's ear in a soft but demanding caress.

  "This is a dangerous book," Quinn said. "I don't want to expose you to something for which you are unprepared." He opened the satchel and flicked the top open. With a sharp glance at Gartrell, Quinn pulled out the Oera Linda.

  The book was a masterpiece in forgery. A single strap of leather wrapping around the entire book held it together. Like the real thing, Max had not bound the pages in the book's spine, but rather kept loose with only two holes with thin leather ties to keep the pages in order. Quinn ran his thumb along the open side of the book. He stopped at the page that had been placed further out than the rest. With a flick, he opened the book to the illustrated page that Max had finished.

  The illustration was glorious. A map of ancient Frisia was laid out in detail. Certain details such as bays and river deltas were given exaggerated importance and size while interior features were made smaller and less important.

  Gartrell's breath caught in his throat as he took in the book. He reached out with his hands to pick it up. Del timed her gasp of awe just a second after Gartrell's. Quinn cut him off by turning the page to show him the Frisian runes that had been transcribed onto the page.

  "I don't know about you, my friend, but I can feel the ancient power and wisdom from this book seeping into my pores," Quinn said.

  "It's so amazing," Del whispered as she stepped close to Gartrell and pressed herself against him.

  Quinn had never inspected the words written in the book. The runic characters reminded him of the Norse runes, but simpler. To Quinn, the Frisian runes looked like they would be better drawn with crayons than the time Max has spent replicating them.

  Gartrell reached out again to take the book into his hands. This time Quinn let him take it. Gartrell reverently turned each page, drinking in the rich and complex detail that Max had put into the book.

  It was Max that had taught Quinn the difference between a good forgery and a great one. A good forgery looked just like the original. But a great forgery didn't faithfully copy the source. A great forgery was one that met the expectations of the mark. A great forgery shouldn't look exactly like the original. It should look exactly like what the mark expected the original to look.

  And Max had delivered on that expectation. The original was a collection of aging papers with the simple Frisian script. The occasional illustration would punctuate the book. Max, however, had inserted several illustrations. He had added more maps with arcane symbols. Some of them were real, likely supplied by Karen as Max wasn't one for symbols and several that were made-up.

  Gartrell salivated over the book. He lovingly turned each page, drinking in the details Max had created for him. Just as he was about to turn the last completed page, Quinn reached out and took the book from Gartrell before he could see a blank page. Quinn delicately placed the book back inside the satchel. Del groaned in disappointment as the flap closed.

  "This came at great personal cost to me," Quinn said. He flipped the satchel closed but held off on buckling it shut. "I am taking a tremendous risk in selling it to you, Gartrell. I know we are friends and men of similar beliefs, but there are those who would not look kindly on the book being removed from the Center."

  "Name your price," Gartrell blurted. "I must have it."

  It took everything Quinn had, to not grin like a shark. He named his price. Quinn knew by instinct it was a price that Gartrell could afford but would cause him a moment of concern. He saw the greed battling against Gartrell’s inner caution. It didn't take long for the greed to win.

  "In gold, I presume," Gartrell said.

  "Of course," Quinn said with a knowing smile.

  Gartrell turned and walked to a painting taking up one section of a bookshelf. He pulled it out to reveal a small wall safe buried into the wall. He gave Quinn a rather pointed look. Quinn politely turned his back.

  Quinn took that moment to walk over and inspect the dagger. "This is an interesting piece," Quinn said.

  "Oh, that old thing," Gartrell said over his shoulder between mumbling numbers.

  "It's delightful in its simplicity, may I touch it?" Quinn turned to look at Gartrell and held his hand out as if he would pick up the dagger. Quinn felt the beast inside the pedestal move in anticipation and eagerness.

  "NO!" Gartrell spun around quickly. "You mustn't touch it!"

  Quinn froze with a look of panic on his face.

  "A man of your talents may have noticed that this room is no ordinary room," Gartrell said. “There are special protections enacted in these walls to prevent th
eft. It is vital for all our sakes you not touch that dagger.”

  Quinn nodded, tucking both his hands behind his back. "I imagine that your peers here in Savannah have made you several offers for it."

  Gartrell chuckled. "The few I have allowed to see it have indeed made me multiple offers. My grandfather, the old fool, said our family fortune rested on this dagger and that it shouldn't ever leave our possession."

  Quinn raised his eyebrows in surprise. "What provenance could this dagger have that it be so foundational to your great family?"

  "There are more than a few family stories about that dagger," Gartrell said with a grin as he turned back to Quinn. "To hear my grandfather tell it, it was used cut the throat of some Indian chief. Of course, one Christmas one of my more eccentric aunt’s told me that the Devil himself gave it to us to keep safe. And as long as we do…we will be well rewarded." Gartrell laughed again as if he found the idea of a woman having an opinion about anything to be hilarious.

  Quinn laughed along with Gartrell and waited. Gartrell turned back to his wall safe and restarted the combination to unlock it. Del and Quinn looked at each other, waiting for the idea to percolate up through Gartrell's brain.

  Gartrell finished the combination just as Del was about to speak. He opened the safe and pulled out several gold bullion bars. He wrapped them in microfiber cloths and turned back to Quinn.

  "Sorry, but I only appear to have the bulk stuff on hand. Can you wait a few days while I put together the funds from smaller amounts?"

  "It's a shame you don't have four or five daggers," Del said.

  Gartrell looked at her in confusion for a moment.

  "You could sell them to your friends, one at a time, and make a tremendous amount of money," She said as she closed the distance between the two. She nestled his arm between her now plump breasts with a wiggle. “You could make back everything you spent on the book in a matter of minutes.”