The Dagger of Trust

by Chris Willrich

"Quite. Sometimes we must coax the brain, rather than flog it. I have recommended the thaumacycle for others before."

  Gideon smirked. "And it'll keep me out of trouble?" And possibly, Gideon considered, give him something that could entice Corvine to visit him.

  "There's that. I'll place you on special assignment. For the college as well. As it's almost winter recess, that will be simple. Indeed, as soon as I return I'll cancel your commitments for the day, and rearrange your tests, so you may begin work. It might be good to keep you out of the official eye. Be careful this fine frosty day." Xeritian turned.

  "Wait."

  The headmaster stopped.

  "You're the third person today who's warned me to be careful," Gideon said. "Is there something I should know? If there's danger, why can't I investigate along with you? What does the future hold?"

  Xeritian smiled. "I'll use the historian's standard answer: ‘That is not my period of study.' As for the rest—you're simply not ready, Gull. I'm sorry. Even I must be wary, as I go hunting."

  "Be careful, Headmaster."

  "Always, Gull." The headmaster paused. "You dislike lies, and that is admirable. Remember the value of truth. It is high. But it is not infinite."

  "I don't understand."

  "I believe you will."

  Xeritian walked into the crowd, and there should have been no way that the old historian could simply disappear from Gideon's sight, but that was exactly what happened. Of course the headmaster of the Shadow School would have access to magic. But Gideon knew that thought was merely an attempt to salvage his own pride. You're forgetting you're still a student.

  Hoping his pride would be burnished by Corvine's letter, Gideon pulled it out and finished reading.

  as we both know he must be rather connected in government. But he may be at sea. Alert whom you can. You're surrounded by bards, I'm sure you can get the word out. Sorry this is so rushed. I have good gigs, will report later. Am I done? No, I'm never done! But there's no more room and these letters are as tiny as I can make them GBYE

  Gideon reread the letter and pocketed it. He smiled. The concerns about anything between Corvine and Sebastian dissipated like morning mist. He strode jauntily into the snowfall, looking here and there for swirling shadows. He took the letter out and read it again, put it back in his pocket. He whistled.

  A dim part of his mind replied, You are pathetic, Gideon Gull. Your would-be lover is under threat and all you can think of is how relieved you are there's probably no reason to be jealous of Sebastian.

  A bright-lit part of his mind said, You have that part right, Gideon Gull! But she did say not to be alarmed!

  Pathetic.

  Whistling, his mind drifted toward the problem of a thaumacycle. It was a welcome change after the visions of the fog. Perhaps if he completed the work quickly, he could still be involved in the investigation, somehow.

  As his thoughts drifted, so did his path through the snowfall, his feet leading him through the city, the deep parts of his mind in charge.

  Gideon's boots led him to an empty sliver of city park dominated by a bust commemorating the sponsoring royal. Dark trees cradled the air and brought a hush to the white cobblestones and granite benches. It reminded Gideon of the Verduran Forest that enfolded the border of Andoran and Taldor far to the north. He remembered the family trip to Bellis on the Andoren side, and running around trees trying to tag Gareth...

  But best not to think of that day.

  He stopped and stretched. Gideon appreciated the park but could never remember the benefactor's name, only the patrician expression the sculptor had conjured. He decided the royal looked like he'd take chill without a hat, so Gideon molded one from snow.

  The two took up parallel views of the river, as men in serious discussion might.

  "You know much about women, Prince?" Gideon asked the bust. "I'm assuming you were a prince. If you appear to desire a woman, she frequently edges away. If you give up your desire, she frequently returns. This would seem to be perverse behavior, yet I've seen it time and again."

  Gideon paused and nodded.

  "Yes, of course you're right, the obvious stratagem is to pretend a lack of desire. And as a performer I normally find pretense as simple as plucking a note. Yet in the matter of Corvine Gale, I'm just not myself. For I find, with her, I can only be myself. Maddening."

  A long-suffering member of the Lighters' Guild shuffled into the park with his pole and began to kindle the park's lantern. He stopped to study Gideon as the bard conversed with a stone head. Gideon waved. The Lighter muttered a prayer to Abadar, god of cities, and hurried about his work.

  "True," Gideon continued, as if the bust had just lectured him, "she's no flower wilting in the snow. If I want Corvine's attention, I must live what, to my lights, is a life of attainment and honor, whether or not she consents to share it. She won't want a man whose chief occupation is talking about her with rocks. Thank you, Prince."

  The Lighter might have set a speed record, for his work was already done, and he padded on. The sky darkened, and with the lantern ablaze there was a wash of amber light about the white-frilled, dark-wooded branches, as though the park were some old etching in bronze.

  The stillness was broken by the sounds of a snapping twig and the unsheathing of a blade.

  Gideon's well-trained ears had alerted, him but couldn't make out the exact direction. So he did the prudent thing and scrambled onto the bust.

  A thug was approaching with a dagger, faster now that he was discovered. The man wore a leather jerkin and breeches and a fine cloak. Even in this prosperous swath of the city, he might pass as a well-to-do merchant or a buccaneer who'd fetched a rich haul. For that matter, perhaps he truly was one of those things, and was angling for supplemental funds. This was not the finest of times for Taldor.

  "First snow's beautiful, eh?" said Gideon.

  "It is, good madman, it is!" said the other. "Now howsabout you throw down your purse, and you can enjoy it with your eyes still in your head?"

  "Crude! Uncouth! Good sir, I've lived in places where mugging is a refined art, with certain protocols. I might say, ‘Lovely weather,' and you might say, ‘Yes, but it's cold,' and I might say, ‘Ah, and you are seeking a donation for those without good winter gear, who've only a rusty knife to see them through,' and of course you might say, ‘That's about the size of it,' and then I offer my purse out of generosity, you bow, and I run like mad. Civilized!"

  "I got your civilization right here." The mugger waved the blade. "Just hand it over!"

  "Ah, you didn't specify, ‘it.'" Gideon reached into a pouch, but not his coin purse.

  He pulled forth a small rolled piece of parchment, wider at one end, upon which he'd written the aria "Valley of Echoes." Under his breath, Gideon incanted strange syllables to the song's tune...

  "Who dares disturb the peace of my park?" rumbled a voice.

  "What?" screeched the mugger. "Who's there? What was that?"

  It was Gideon who mouthed the words, but the sounds seemed to emanate from elsewhere. "It is I, Prince ..." (he thought a moment) " ...Acerbic, of the ...Age of Enthronement!" (As the Age of Enthronement had lasted over four and a half thousand years, Gideon figured he could tuck an imaginary prince in there somewhere.)

  "Where are you hiding?" The mugger, while frightened, had still not discerned that the voice emanated from the bust.

  Gideon rolled his eyes and slapped a hand over his face. He thought of the old Carpenden song "A Helping Hand" and murmured another incantation as he spread his fingers to keep an eye on his assailant.

  With his other hand he gestured and caused a clump of snow to rise from a bench and move toward the thief.

  "Boo," Gideon said, and remotely shoved snow down the man's back.

  This sort of trick was commonplace enough, but the thief was already nervous. He screamed.

  Some people, if taken by fear, will run. Others will lash out. This one was the second kind. He whirled and jabbed
madly at the air, shouting, "Where are you where are you where are you—"

  Gideon, a person of the first inclination, was already fleeing the scene. He could probably overpower the thug, but it wasn't his job to protect the streets, and no amount of training was a guarantee when a knife was involved. Besides, the college didn't need a criminal investigation on top of their run-in with Matharic, Royal Adjunct Pain in the Posterior.

  Panting, Gideon at last stopped upon the Grand Bridge over the River Porthmos.

  A river. The thought hit Gideon like a snowball to the face. The thaumacycle—my characters will escape assailants by taking a raft upon the Sellen. That northern river, greater even than the Porthmos, churned with more than a thousand miles of adventure and mystery. Where better to let loose a raft of vagabonds?

  His characters would come from Galt, he decided. They would flee the guillotines of that failed democracy and ride the river south, encountering elves and dwarves and gnomes, crusaders and traders and pirates, Andorens and Taldans and druids. They would argue and laugh and weep. And sing, of course. At last at the sea, all would be resolved, as much as anything in life is resolved. Blood and crescendos.

  Smiling to himself, he nodded to the passersby, for there was always somebody on the bridge. He came around the foot of the statue of General Coren, leader of the Third Army of Exploration. There was a legend that if you touched Coren's foot you would always make a return journey to Oppara. He reached out and patted the statue. "Just in case," he murmured.

  An image came to him unbidden, of a small hand touching a huge insectile leg.

  Gideon stopped in his tracks.

  Snowflakes hit his face like scores of tiny biting insects, the kind that attack once and perish. His eyes saw nothing of the bridge or the city or the wayfarers who glanced at him curiously.

  In his mind's eye, he was ten years old again, looking up at a monster. It resembled a giant beetle with legs like broken halberds, vast green eyes and curved mandibles, and antennae that flexed and quivered far out from its nightmarish head. Behind it swirled an unseasonably thick, cold fog. His heart was pounding, in the past and in the now, and the monster had him half-entrapped by the spears of its legs. Yet terrified as he was, the boy Gideon knew the creature didn't mean to eat him. An eerie sound like a pipe organ cut through the fog of memory, and Gideon imagined the monster turning its head, and the boy following its alien gaze.

  Then the vision was gone, and Gideon stood alone on the Grand Bridge.

  But he could still hear the dirge.

  No one else appeared to notice. The sound seemed to emanate from somewhere upriver. He moved to the eastern edge of the bridge, leaned upon it, and looked out. He had a good view of the river and the city. The crescent moon was up, and the lamps were lit everywhere except the slum district known as the Narrows.

  The eerie music came louder to his ears, and squinting for a source he saw a ship beyond the city, a long way upstream.

  It was a ship that had no business being that far inland. This was a galleon with a sweeping prow and high stern, wide amidships, with four spindly masts, and a deep draft. Gideon was no mariner or boatman, but even he knew that the river's unseen shallows should gut such a keel.

  And perhaps such a fate had already occurred, and this was a dead ship. For the vessel was suffused with a ghostly glow. Its torn sails gleamed, its gargoyle figurehead glinted, and its crew stood at attention with skeletal poise, eye sockets aimed at the Grand Bridge.

  "Do you see it?" Gideon demanded of the nearest bystander, a Taldan nobleman. "Do you see the ship?"

  The richly garbed man's expression was unreadable. "There are many ships," he ventured, with a nod toward the harbor.

  "Not like this! Right there! Something right out of Blacwin's Wanderloss. Isn't it the spitting image of Wanderloss's adversary, the cursed ship Demonwake?"

  The man took a step back, then appeared to find his courage. "Good sir...your accent marks you as Andoren, no? You must be a stranger here. I happen to contribute to Madame Floret's Home for Troubled Travelers, and I'm sure they can assist you with whatever afflicts you. If you'll just come with me..."

  "Don't you see?" Gideon looked around at the few other witnesses who might validate his vision of the ship (sailing closer, blithely unconcerned about the Taldan noble's reaction). All looked at him blankly or with unease. A young girl did venture, squinting at the river, "I think, perhaps, I do see a glint of light..." before her parents hauled her over to watch something suddenly fascinating on the bridge's seaward edge.

  No, Gideon realized, they didn't see.

  And even as he'd made the comparison, Gideon had realized that the spectral craft didn't simply resemble the fictional Demonwake. It was Demonwake, just as he'd seen it in a performance in Almas many years ago. It was correct down to the flag of the horned skull above the crossbones and Captain Crookwing there in his torn black cape, and his daughter Desdimira beside him, the only human-appearing spirit aboard, ready to tempt the similarly dead cabin boy Wickham of the Wanderloss.

  All in a rush the ghost-craft reached the bridge, far swifter than a true sailing ship should manage, and as Desdimira passed beneath Gideon she looked up at him, mouthing some secret message. Then there was a flash of light, and she and her ship were gone. Gone, too, was the mournful dirge. Only a trace of bubbles remained below the bridge, and in this lunar illumination Gideon doubted even these.

  No one else nearby was looking at the waters.

  Just at him.

  The Taldan grandee was saying, "If you'll just hold still a moment, sir, everything will be all right..." The noble inched forward, and was joined by a tough-looking sightseer dressed for dockland work. First a thief, and now these excessively honorable citizens. A man can't win.

  He bowed. "Let this be a lesson to me. This is what comes of too much opera."

  From his spell component pouch he plucked a feather and a clutch of diminutive fruit tarts. He stuffed the tarts in his mouth and commenced waving the feather at the dockhand.

  "What?" said the man, and with that Gideon blessed his good luck that his spell looked too ridiculous to be considered magic. Mouth full, Gideon began the incantation.

  "Fate and Chance walk into a tavern," he said, magic embellishing his words. "‘I wasn't expecting you,' says Chance. ‘Just the person I wanted to see,' says Fate, adding, ‘I wanted to play some chess.' So they agree to play chess, but every time Fate and Chance flip a coin to see who chooses colors, the coin explodes. Every time they pick a taverngoer to choose, the taverngoer's head explodes. By now the chess pieces have been so knocked around by exploding coins and so bloodstained from exploding heads that you can't tell which is white and which is black. And Fate and Chance both smile and say, ‘I choose red.'"

  The man's eyes got big and he commenced a horrid giggling. He collapsed upon the ground, unable to do anything but gasp and titter at the cosmic joke.

  The noble stared at Gideon.

  "I can tell another," Gideon said.

  The noble ran toward the far end of the bridge and the vagabond camp there, which said something about his desperation.

  Gideon wasted no time dashing in the opposite direction, toward the city.

  He had to talk to Xeritian about this. Even if the headmaster decided Gideon was insane, Gideon instinctively trusted the man. Once off the bridge, Gideon panted in the shadows of an alley and watched the river a little longer, until the call of the fire-lit dormitory and his pillow proved too much, and he retraced his steps to the college. Apparitions, he decided, could wait until morning.

  But in the morning Headmaster Xeritian was dead.

  Chapter Three

  Bloodstain Sonata

  Gideon awoke to a pounding on the door.

  He'd been dreaming he was walking on the moonlit green when his muse appeared beside the columns. Gideon didn't really believe in muses as such, even during his dreams, but ever since childhood he'd imagined a young woman who gave him encourag
ement. She was a dark-haired, pale figure in a peasant dress, yet she bore a sword of gleaming steel few peasants could ever afford. She never spoke a word, yet in Gideon's dreams her freckled face would smile and nod, and her hands would raise the sword and strike.

  Her targets were shadows, monstrous shapes that slithered and leapt and flapped and clawed. Gideon knew these were his fears given form. At times when he despaired of training his voice or learning his instruments, on days when he couldn't see his way through a composition, then sometimes the girl would appear in his sleep or his reveries, slashing through shadows with a grin. She'd disappear in a cascade of light, and he would find himself relaxed, able to work again.

  Not so tonight. This time she stood in the shadows, smiling as if at a secret only she knew.

  Hello? His voice was like rustling leaves.

  Time is short. Her voice was the voice from the conservatory roof.

  "Your books are overdue!" an unfamiliar voice shouted, and Gideon woke.

  Message delivered, the knocker stomped away down the dormitory hall. By the time Gideon groggily opened the door, there was no one in the hallway. The dream of the muse, disturbing as it was, whirled away like fog.

  "Is it me," Leothric murmured from the upper bunk, "or is the library getting more aggressive?" He answered himself with a snore.

  Gideon got his nightclothes off and his jerkin, pants, and boots on with a series of hops and gyrations worthy of Viridia's dancing or Ozrif's juggling. When he'd joined the Shadow School, he'd been given a series of code phrases to announce genuine emergencies, of the kind that never happened in training.

  Your books are overdue meant All-hands emergency. Only the alerts Here come the serenaders (Hostiles Approaching) or Free food at the Harbormaster's (Evacuate) were worse.

  So Gideon was out the door before dawn, still buttoning his cloak, harp forgotten, spells unprepared. He ran to the conservatory. A handful of other students, some whom he'd never suspected of training as Lion Blades, joined him. They didn't look at each other. Most headed for the library, so despite the wording of the alert, Gideon and two others snuck into the costume shop. Although no one else was present, they walked nonchalantly past increasingly crowded racks of fake armor and royal gowns, Qadiran desert robes and Ulfen furs, until the room turned into a maze of sleeves and skirts and capes.