The Spell of the Black Dagger

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The smoke from the pyre drifted lazily upward; the weather was starting to turn cooler again, and the air was clear, the sky a dazzling turquoise blue.

  “Damn it,” Sarai muttered.

  Captain Tikri glanced sideways at her, then across at Lirrin. The apprentice seemed oblivious to everything but the burning remains of her master. The handful of friends and family in attendance were lost in their own thoughts or talking to one another.

  “Troubled, Lady Sarai?” Tikri murmured.

  “Of course I am!” she hissed in reply. “It’s all so wasteful and stupid! Even this funeral—it’s just empty ritual. His soul isn’t even in there, there’s nothing to be freed!”

  “You’re sure?”

  “The necromancer was sure, anyway, or at least he said he was.”

  Tikri didn’t reply for a moment; when he did, it was to ask, “Which sort of necromancer was it?”

  “A wizard,” Sarai answered. “Does it matter, though?”

  Tikri shrugged, showing her an empty palm. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might. My Aunt Thithenna always used a theurgist to talk to Uncle Gar, after he died—at least, until the priest said she should leave him alone and let him enjoy the afterlife. Worked fine.”

  Sarai sighed. “Your Aunt Thithenna was lucky,” she said. “Half the time theurgical necromancers can’t find the one you want, even when there isn’t any question of other magic. And demonological necromancers are worse—unless the ghost you want is a dead demonologist, they’re lucky to contact one out of ten. Sorcerers and warlocks don’t do necromancy at all—they’re probably smart. It’s a messy business. And as often as not the ghost doesn’t remember anything useful.”

  “What about a witch, then?”

  It was Sarai’s turn to shrug.

  “It’s a little late now,” she said. “I know theurgists and demonologists don’t need the body, but witches do, even more than wizards. I did have a witch look at him, though—Kelder of Quarter Street. You know him, don’t you?”

  Tikri thought for a moment, then nodded.

  “Well, he’s not a real necromancer,” Sarai said, “but he couldn’t see anything.”

  “Too bad.” Tikri hesitated, and said, “There’s news, though. I was going to wait until after the funeral to tell you, but maybe I should mention it now.”

  “Oh? What is it?”

  “It’s not good news.”

  Sarai sighed again. “In this case, I wasn’t expecting good news. What is it, another body?”

  “No, no,” Tikri hastily assured her. “Not that bad.”

  “Not even a dog?”

  Tikri shook his head.

  “Well, then?” Sarai demanded.

  “Well, it looks like we have more than one killer. Mereth and her apprentice were studying the traces in Athaniel’s shop—the actual break-in was done by warlockry.”

  Sarai frowned. “But it wasn’t warlockry that killed him. Mereth was sure of that.”

  Tikri nodded. “So if our killer is a wizard, he has a warlock working with him,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s a warlock who’s gotten hold of an enchanted dagger somewhere,” Sarai suggested.

  “Maybe,” Tikri conceded. “But why would a warlock be doing any of this? A warlock can stop a man’s heart without touching him; why cut throats?”

  “Why would anybody do all this?” Sarai retorted.

  “A demonologist making a sacrifice, maybe? Or a wizard collecting the ingredients for a spell?”

  “And how would a demonologist or a wizard do warlockry?” Sarai started to take a deep breath to say more, and accidentally caught a lungful of smoke from the pyre; she lost whatever she had intended to say in an extended coughing fit. Tikri stood silently by, waiting.

  When she regained control of herself, Sarai was no longer thinking entirely about warlocks or motives; the coughing had reminded her of her father’s failing health, and poor Kalthon the Younger with his fits. Her family was not exactly robust or numerous any more. She had to face the possibility that any day, she could find herself the new Minister of Justice permanently, not just filling in—and she would still be Minister of Investigation, as well.

  As a girl, she had never expected to have this sort of responsibility; her father and brother were supposed to handle the Ministry of Justice, and back then there had been no Minister of Investigation yet. By rights, she shouldn’t have had a government job at all; she should have been married off years ago to a wealthy merchant, or to some noble not too closely related to her. She should be raising chickens and sewing clothes and tending children, not standing here watching a murdered friend burn and worrying about who killed him instead of remembering his life.

  The idea of being the overlord’s investigator had sounded intriguing four years ago, but the idea of spending the rest of her life at it, at hunting down demented criminals and sadistic thugs, or worse, failing to hunt them down...

  It was beginning to wear on her. She wondered how her father could stand going on being Minister of Justice, year after year.

  But of course, maybe he couldn’t stand it, maybe that was why he was dying.

  And here before her was the body of a man who could have saved her father, and had refused. Maybe, Sarai thought bitterly, she should be applauding, instead of mourning.

  Then she blinked, startled.

  Could that be the killer’s motive?

  It wasn’t at all likely that all the victims had wronged any one person by their actions, but might they have done so by inaction? Was there something the killer wanted that all of them, the warlock, the soldier, the theurgist, the demonologist, the wizard, had failed to provide?

  It seemed like a reasonable possibility. It didn’t explain the almost ritualistic throat-slashing, or the use of both warlockry and wizardry, though.

  Sarai remembered that Tikri thought there was more than one killer involved. That made sense—the man who threw Athaniel and Karitha around had clearly been immensely strong, and must have been large and muscular, while Inza’s killer appeared to have slipped in through a window open only a few inches. Deru’s killer had been big enough to kill him while he was awake, without leaving signs of a struggle, but had done so from the back—and an experienced old brawler like Deru would not have turned his back on anyone he considered a threat. That called for someone strong, but not big and burly.

  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 ensure 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 Nethervoid 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 ensorcelled? 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, 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 Sixteen

  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 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, a bell-pull 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, 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, 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, still didn’t come at her call. She didn’t know the right formulae, the invocations, 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, 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, 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 of it that was at the time, but yes, she admitted to herself, that 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 Serem’s funeral, and had followed him home. That had 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 one another?

  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 housebreaking skills, her animal stealth, her stolen strength, 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 leapt 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 Seventeen

  The legendary assassins’ cult of Demerchan, Captain Tikri 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 warlockr
y.

  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 to more or less 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.