Murder by magic: twenty tales of crime and the supernatural

by edited by Rosemary Edghill

  I knew that spell. Like all the rest of our repertoire, it was uttered in the Old Tongue. My skin shivered over my flesh: the spell was rife with words and phrases that came perilously close to the Invocation of a Demon Lord.

  “It was a mistake!” I exclaimed. “A simple mistake in pronunciation, and you would have killed the child for it?”

  Vadryn’s empurpled brow creased with perplexity. Of course. Why not? Tell me that you would not devour a basket of tea cakes if it was delivered to your door by mistake! And a child is much tastier than a tea cake if you get it young enough. He gazed at Mira and licked his chops.

  That was when Lady Ulla hit him with the frying pan.

  “How dare you, sirrah!” she declaimed. “How dare you stand there before my charges and advocate the illicit appropriation of property that does not pertain to you!”

  “Yeah! Or swipin’ stuff!” Joram put in. “Even when I was m’self, I never took but what belonged to me. A fine example for the kids!”

  The… kids, as you call them, will soon have no further need of ethical examples, good or bad.Vadryn rubbed the side of his head where Lady Ulla had scored a healthy whack. It hadn’t done much damage beyond leaving the demon lord testy. Food is beyond morality.

  “Oh, no, you’re not laying a tooth on them!” I cried, placing myself between the children and the fiend. My skin crackled with the energy of a hundred banishing spells. Even as I stood ready to launch them against Vadryn, I knew that such a sudden expenditure of magic would likely leave me just as dead as it had my poor sister. That didn’t matter. I had to protect her children.

  Fool! Vadryn stamped his hoof. Any spell of banishment you can lay on me is temporary at best. You, like your sister, lack the full amount of power needful to bar me forever from this place and this prey. You’ll kill yourself for nothing, and I’ll allow it because it amuses me. Then I’ll simply wait out the term of your puny banishment spell once more before coming back and finishing my business here. You can die, or you can be wise, get out of the way, and let me devour what’s mine by right. He took another step closer to the children.

  Lady Ulla hit him with the frying pan again at about the same time that Joram chopped at his woolly leg with the cleaver. The demon king jumped back, roaring with rage. I saw lightning gather in his paws and knew that he would slay them both where they stood for their insolence.

  Then I saw the sparks gathering at Mira’s fingertips. My niece was no longer helpless with remorse and fear. She was angry. The women of my family do some of their best work when they’re angry.

  I reached out and grabbed one of Mira’s hands in mine. “Follow my lead,” I whispered. She met my eyes and nodded, looking less like a little girl and more like a battle-ready warrior woman. I felt the untapped depths of the power within her tiny frame and drew on it, weaving those first tender strands of awakening magic into an unbreakable chain with my own. Just as Vadryn leaped for Lady Ulla, I shouted out the words of Ultimate Banishment in the Olden Tongue.

  I was very careful with my pronunciation.

  Just as I spoke the final syllable, I felt someone claim my other hand. My eyes met Scalini’s.

  “Well, I did vow to take a horrible vengeance on whoever encompassed your sister’s death,” he said just as the demon lord exploded.

  It was quite spectacular. The addition of Scalini’s power to Mira’s and mine made Vadryn the Venomous burst into countless flakes and blobs of radiant ooze that splattered every available surface of Joram’s kitchen.

  “Great,” he said, looking around at the horrid mess in disgust. “That’s what I get for givin’ help where it wasn’t wanted.”

  “Joram, you —?” I began.

  He nodded. “Soon as I sensed what you were about doing with the girl, I sent my own mite o’ power to join yours. I guess Lady Ulla did the same.”

  “Just so,” Lady Ulla said primly. She lifted her free hand to her lips and blew away the strands of smoke wafting from her fingertips. “I received some instruction in the magical arts when I was but a girl back in Tyrshen. No more than was appropriate to my station, of course. I was raised to be a lady, not a mountebank. I thought I had forgotten it all.”

  “It’s like riding a horse,” I explained. “You just need to get back in the saddle for all of it to come back to you. You, on the other hand—” I turned to Joram. “How would a simple cook come to command magic? beyond the making of a decent meringue, that is.”

  Joram lowered his head and mumbled, “Not just a cook.” He looked up and twitched his nose at me. His mustache had gone all bristly, and there was a keen sparkle in his reddened eyes. The side slit of his nightdress parted slightly, revealing a long, hairless tail, which he gathered up in his rosy paws and twiddled nervously. His ears assumed the shape of fish platters, and his skin put out the sleek, black pelt of a fine wharf rat.

  The crown on his head was worth a king’s ransom, provided that the king in question wasn’t afraid of rodents.

  “At least that explains your hostility to cats,” I remarked.

  “Your sister saved m’life,” Joram said. “We rats have our enemies—even us royal ones who’ve got some small measure of magic at our command. It was during a time of troubles that I had to flee my kingdom. Magda gave me the refuge of a human shape, and a place to stay, and a job to do. We rats hate idleness, you know. I’m proud to have had a paw in the destruction of her killer.”

  I stepped forward and, despite any weak-stomached scruples I felt, clasped his paw. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said. I meant it.

  The kitchen proved harder to tidy up than the loose ends left behind by Vadryn’s explosive demise. His death immediately threw the Underrealm into a political tizzy. Demons being demons, the tizzy evolved into all-out war before the last bits of Vadryn’s shattered body finished dripping down from the kitchen rafters. Trifling matters such as human-demon contracts were cast by the wayside.

  “I’m sorry I can’t help you with the cleanup here,” Scalini said. He wasn’t sorry at all, but it was nice of him to lie about it. “Everyone’s being recalled.”

  “Everyone?” Lady Ulla echoed. The two of us, plus Joram and thechildren, were down on hands and knees scrubbing the fireplace flagstones clean of Vadryn’s leftovers. “Even the demon armies in the Tyr-shen wizards’ service?”

  Scalini nodded emphatically.

  Lady Ulla got to her feet slowly, stretched out a kink in her back, and announced, “Children, when your father returns from Beska, please convey my regrets that I could not afford him the customary two weeks’ notice, but I do believe I have pressing business at home.” With that, she set the frying pan on the floor, stepped into it, and after a few initial wobbles flew it straight up the chimney. Niko applauded.

  So that, as I told my friend Pella when she came to visit me in Ferdralli, was why I sold the town house in Crowfield.

  “Someonehad to stay and look after the children after Lady Ulla went back home to reclaim her estates,” I said as we sat together in the parlor enjoying a fresh pot of tea. We’d already drained two in the course of my narrative. “She remembered more of her magical training than she ever imagined possible. She or anyone else. The demonless wizards never stood a chance against her. Of course Kopp approved the change in domestic personnel. A governess he can trust who wants nothing more than bed and board? He’s overjoyed to have me!”

  Joram brought us another plate of his special cakes and gave me a kiss on top of my head before whisking himself back into the kitchen. Pella eyed him askance.

  “Is that the rat?” she whispered. “The one who’s king of all the rest?”

  “Yes, and he’s my rat, so have a care how you speak of him.” I gazed fondly after Joram. “He’s quite the charmer once you get to know him. We’re to be married next spring.”

  “You can’t be serious! Marry a rodent!”Pella cried.

  “Many women do. At least I know what I’ve agreed to from the start.” I sippe
d my tea complacently.

  “But how can you—? What are you—? Why would you or any woman in her right mind ever—?”

  I leaned across the table and popped one of Joram’s cakes into Pella’s mouth.

  “Ohhh,” she breathed as a dreamy look of pleasure spread across her face. “He can cook.”

  Getting the Chair

  Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Keith R. A. DeCandido swore once to only use his superhuman powers for good, which he promises to do as soon as he gets some. He has written many stories in many universes, mostly Star Trek and Farscape, with some Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and others thrown in for good measure. He is working on Dragon Precinct, a novel featuring Torin ban Wyvald and Danthres Tresyllione’s further adventures fighting crime in Cliff’s End, which Pocket Books will publish in 2004. Find out too much about Keith at his official Web site at DeCandido.net.

  What’ve we—Lord and Lady, what is that smell?”

  Lieutenant Danthres Tresyllione of the Cliff’s End Castle Guard stopped short in the doorway of the cottage. Behind her, Lieutenant Torin ban Wyvald, her partner, had to do likewise to keep from being impaled on the standard-issue longsword scab­bard that hung from her belt. He found himself staring at the brown cloak with the eagle crest of Lord Albin and Lady Meerka that Danthres (and Torin, and all lieutenants in the guard) wore.

  Torin was about to ask what she was on about when he, too, noticed the smell.

  Danthres was half-elf, so her senses were more acute. Torin could only imagine how much worse the stench was for her—it was pretty wretched for him. He detected at least four different odors competing to make his nose wrinkle, and only one matched the expected stench of decaying flesh.

  The guard who had summoned the two lieutenants was a young man named Garis. Like most of the guards assigned to Unicorn Precinct—which covered the more well-to-do regions of Cliff’s End—Garis was eager to please and not very bright. “Uh, that’s the body ma’am.”

  “Guard, I’ve been around dead bodies most of my adult life. They don’t usually smell like rotted cheese.”

  “Uh, no, ma’am,” the guard said.

  A brief silence ensued. Danthres sighed loudly. “So what is the smell?”

  “Ah, probably the rotted cheese, ma’am. It’s on the table. Or it could be other food items we’ve found.”

  “Who found the body?” she asked, still standing in the doorway blocking Torin. Since she was half a head taller than him, and had a wide mane of blond hair, he had no view of the interior. Under other circumstances, he might have complained. Instead, he was happy to enjoy the less unpleasant aroma of the street a while longer. At least this murder wasn’t in Dragon Precinct or, worse, Goblin Precinct, where a rotting corpse constituted a step up in the local odors.

  “Next-door neighbor, ma’am,” Garis said. “The, ah, smell got to her—”

  “No surprise there.”

  “—and, ah, when he didn’t answer the door, she summoned the Castle Guard. I came, broke the door in, and found this body. He’s the only one here, and there’s only one bedroom upstairs, so he probably lived here alone.”

  “You didn’t ask the neighbor that?”

  “Uh, no, ma’am, I thought that you—”

  “Would do all your work for you. Naturally. Did you at least have the wherewithal to summon the M.E.?”

  “Yes, ma’am, the magical examiner sent a mage-bird saying he’d be here within half an hour—and that was about a quarter of an hour ago.”

  Danthres finally moved into the house, enabling Torin to do likewise. He surveyed the sitting room, which seemed to take up most of the ground floor. To his left, a staircase led, presumably, to the second level. To his right was a wall taken up almost entirely with shelvesstuffed to bursting with books, scrolls, papers, and other items, interrupted only by two windows. The wall opposite where he stood was the same, those shelves broken only by a doorway. Directly in front of Torin was a couch, festooned with papers, dust, writing implements, and wax residue from candles. Perpendicular to it on either side were two easy chairs, one in a similar state of disarray as the couch, the other relatively clean. A table sat in front of the sofa, covered with a lantern, papers, books, scrolls, candles, bowls, and foodstuffs—including the cheese responsible for keeping Torin’s nostril hairs flaring

  Lying facedown on the floor was the body of an elderly man, already decomposing, which meant he’d been dead at least a day. The corpse wore a simple—but not cheap—linen shirt and trousers. Most important, the man’s head was at the wrong angle relative to the rest of his body.

  “The question now,” Danthres said, “is whether he broke his neck or if someone broke it for him.”

  “I’d say the latter.” Torin pointed at the body. “Look how neatly he’s arranged—almost perfectly parallel to the couch, with his arms at his sides. He was set there by someone.”

  Danthres nodded in agreement, then looked around. “Probably too much to hope for that it was a robbery. Not that we’d be able to tell if something was missing in this disaster.” She turned to look at Garis, folding her arms across the eagle crest—a match for the one on her cloak—on the chest of her standard-issue black leather armor. “Why haven’t you opened a window?”

  Garis seemed to be trying to shrink into his own armor, which was a match for Danthres’s and Torin’s, save that he wore no cloak and the crest on his chest was that of a unicorn, denoting the precinct to which he was assigned. “Well, er, uh, I didn’t want to disturb the scene. I remember that robbery in Old Town last winter and I tried to close a window, and—well, ma’am may not remember, but ma’am tried to cut my head off for interfering with possible evidence before she had a chance to, ah, to examine it.”

  Danthres snorted. “That’s ridiculous. I never would have tried to cut your head off—there’d be an inquiry.”

  Torin grinned beneath his thick red beard. “I think it will be safe for you to open it, Guard.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  Garis walked to the window and found that it wouldn’t budge.

  “Honestly, they have got to raise the standards during those recruitment drives,” Danthres said scornfully. Her not-very-attractive face looked positively deathly when she was angry, and Garis tried to shrink even further inside his armor. Danthres’s features were rather unfortunate combinations of her dual heritage. The point of her ears, the elegant high forehead, and the thin lips from her elphin father were total mismatches with the wide nose, large brown eyes, and sallow cheekbones she’d inherited from her human mother.

  “I’m sure,” he said before Danthres truly lost her temper, “that it’s just stuck.” He walked over and saw that there was no locking mechanism. That, in itself, was odd. True, this was Unicorn Precinct—people didn’t need to virtually seal themselves into their homes for safety around here—but an unlocked ground-floor window was still unusual. Especially if this old man did indeed live alone.

  Torin braced himself against the window and heaved upward. It still wouldn’t budge.

  “It won’t work, you know.”

  Whirling, Torin looked for the speaker, his right hand automatically moving to the eagle-head hilt of his longsword. The only people in the room were Garis, Danthres, and himself. And the corpse, of course, though he was unlikely to speak.

  “Who said that?” Danthres asked. Her left hand was also at her sword’s hilt.

  “I did.”

  Torin realized that the voice came from the area of the couch.

  “Come out from behind there.” Torin walked around to behind the sofa.

  “Uh, sir, there’s nobody there,” Garis said. “I checked.”

  Torin saw that Garis was right.

  “It’s the couch,” Danthres said. “The couch talks.”

  “Brava to the woman,” the couch said.

  “Hell and damnation,” Torin said, “our corpse is a wizard.”

>   “And bravo to the man,” the couch added. “Yes, my dear departed owner was a mage. His specialty, as you might have already deduced,is animating furniture. He also hated the very concept of fresh air, so he magicked the windows shut.”

  Another voice said, “You’d think just once he’d take pity on us, but no.” This, Torin realized, was the lantern.

  Then the cleaner of the two chairs made a noise. “All you ever do is complain. Efrak gave you life, and now that he’s dead, you spit on his grave.”

  Danthres turned to Garis. “I don’t suppose the M.E.’s mage-bird is still here?”

  “No, ma’am, it discorporated as soon as it gave the message.”

  Another noise from the chair. “It really is a shame about poor Efrak.”

  “It’s not that much of a shame,” the couch said. “I mean, really, what did he do for us?”

  “Well, he did give us life,” the lantern said.

  “I don’t think—”

  “That’s enough!” Danthres bellowed, interrupting the furniture.

  Torin added, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to question each of you individually.”

  “What’s the point?” Danthres asked him. “He’s a wizard. The Brotherhood will claim jurisdiction, perform their own investigation, and keep us completely out of it, like they always do whenever one of their own is involved. And honestly, they’re welcome to it. I hate magic.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” said another voice, this time from the doorway. Torin recognized this one: Boneen, the magical examiner. The short, squat old man was on loan from the Brotherhood of Wizards to provide magical assistance to the law-enforcement efforts of the Cliff’s End Castle Guard.

  “Good afternoon, Boneen,” Torin said with a grin.

  “What’s so damned good about it? I was having a perfectly fine nap when one of those blasted children woke me with another damned thing for you lot.” Several young children—troublemakers, mostly orphans that had been arrested and pressed into service in lieu of incarceration in the workhouses—served as messengers and/or informants for the Castle Guard. Most of the guard called them the Youth Squad, except for Boneen, who usually had less flattering terms. Garis had nodoubt sent one such to fetch Boneen. “And what in the name of Lord Albin is that horrendous smell?”