The Spell of the Black Dagger loe-6

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  She had been making a lot of serious mistakes lately.

  Oh, not as bad as some, certainly. She hadn’t wound up in front of a magistrate, or tied to a post somewhere for a flogging, or in the hands of the Minister of Justice or his crazy daughter, like poor Sansha. Tabaea had watched the auction that morning, had seen Sansha sold to the proprietor of one of the “specialty” brothels—not the ones in Soldiertown, which generally employed free women and treated them reasonably well, but one of the secretive establishments in Nightside that catered to the more debauched members of the nobility.

  Tabaea shuddered. She had heard stories about what went on in places like that. They had to use slaves—free women wouldn’t work there. Tabaea wouldn’t have changed places with Sansha for all the gold in Ethshar.

  And it was all because Sansha had stolen the wrong jewel, a diamond pendant that the owner thought was worth enough to justify hiring magicians to recover it.

  Tabaea had stolen plenty of wrong jewels in the past few years—but all hers had been wrong in the other direction, had turned out to be worthless chunks of glass or paste, or at best some semiprecious bauble. And even with the best of them, she’d been cheated by the fences and pawnbrokers.

  Mistakes, nothing but mistakes.

  She had been making mistakes all her life, it seemed. She hadn’t run away as a child, like her brother Tand—and she had heard a rumor that Tand was a pilot on a Small Kingdoms trader now, with a wife and a daughter, successful and respected.

  Of course, the rumor might not be true; land might be starving somewhere in the Wall Street Field, or he might be a slave in the dredging crews, or he might be long dead in an alley brawl, or he might be almost anywhere.

  But if she had run away...

  Well, she hadn’t. She stared into the remaining ale, which was flat and lifeless.

  She hadn’t found an apprenticeship, either. She hadn’t even tried. That seemed so stupid, in retrospect.

  She had never taken opportunities when they presented themselves. She hadn’t married Wulran of the Gray Eyes when he offered, two years ago, and now he was happily settled down with that silly Lara of Northside and her insipid giggle.

  She hadn’t signed up for the city guard when she was sixteen—though they might not have taken her anyway; they took very few women, and she wasn’t really anywhere near big enough.

  She hadn’t stolen much of anything from her family, and now her drunken stepfather had spent everything.

  She hadn’t stolen anything from Serem the Wise, when she broke into his house all those nights four years ago without getting caught—she had just kept spying on him until he spotted her.

  All she had come away with there was the secret of athame-zation, and she hadn’t even done that right! Here she had this wonderful secret that the Wizards’ Guild had guarded for centuries, and all she had to show for it was a stupid black dagger that didn’t do anything an ordinary knife wouldn’t do just as well.

  She pulled the dagger from her belt and looked at it. It was black, from pommel to point, and it seemed to stay sharp without sharpening, but otherwise, as far as she could tell, it was completely ordinary.

  She knew, had known for years, that she must have made a mistake in the athamezation ritual—another mistake in the long list. She had no idea what the mistake might have been, but something had gone wrong. And when she had tried again, nothing had happened at all. The magic she had felt the first time wasn’t there; she was just going through a bunch of meaningless motions.

  Well, Serem had said that a wizard could only perform the spell once. Apparently that applied even when the spell was botched.

  She put the knife back in its sheath and gulped down the last of her ale. Then she put the mug down and looked around the taproom again.

  The place was definitely unsavory. She had come here because it was cheap, and she was, as usual, down on her luck. She had hoped to find a purse to pick, or a man she wouldn’t mind going home with, but neither one had turned up. The men here were mostly drunkards, or disgusting, or both, and none of them seemed to have fat purses—after all, why would anyone with significant amounts of money be in the Drunken Dragon? And what little cash its patrons did have they watched carefully.

  She wasn’t going to find anything useful here.

  And that meant that after years of avoiding it, she was going to yield to the inevitable. She would spend the night in Wall Street Field.

  There wasn’t anywhere else left. The little stash of stolen money she had accumulated in better days was gone, down to the last iron bit. She couldn’t go back to her mother’s home, not after that last fight, and she had exhausted her credit at every inn in Ethshar. Sleeping in the streets or courtyards would make her fair game for slavers—and she had just seen what had happened to Sansha, so any notion she might have had that slavery could be an acceptable life was gone.

  That left the Field.

  She sighed and looked out the narrow front window.

  The Drunken Dragon stood on Wall Street, facing the Field; a good many of the customers there looked like permanent inhabitants of the Field, in fact. Tabaea guessed that when they could scrape together enough for a drink or a meal, the beggars and runaways and thieves who lived in the Field would come here just because it was close and cheap. They wouldn’t care that the drinks were watered and the food foul, that the floors and walls were filthy, or that the whole place stank; they were used to that.

  No one else looked out the window; Tabaea had the view all to herself.

  Wall Street itself was about thirty feet wide; the dismal drizzle that had fallen all day had left the hard dirt slick with a thin layer of mud, and a thousand feet had left their marks in that mire, but still, it was mostly clear and unquestionably a street.

  On the far side, though, the Field was a maze of ramshackle shelters—huts and lean-tos and tents, most of them brown with mud. Cooking fires and the lights from Wall Street provided patchy illumination, but most of the details were lost in the gloom of night and rain.

  The Wall itself provided a black backdrop, about a hundred and fifty feet away at this particular spot. Tabaea knew that when the stone was dry and the sun was high the Wall was a rather pleasant shade of gray, but just now it looked utterly black and featureless and depressing, considerably darker than the night sky above. The sky, after all, was covered in cloud, and the clouds caught some of the city’s glow. The Wall did not.

  Sleeping in the Wall’s shadow was not an appealing prospect, but Tabaea knew she had to sleep somewhere. And she didn’t have so much as a tattered blanket; those inhabitants of the Field with huts and tents were the lucky ones.

  But she had nowhere else to go.

  She pulled her last copper bit from her pocket and put it on the table to pay her bill; the serving wench spotted it from two tables away and hurried over to collect it. Tabaea rose, nodded in acknowledgment as the coin was claimed, and started toward the door.

  Something caught her attention, she wasn’t sure what; had the server gestured, perhaps? She glanced around.

  A man was staring at her, a big man in a grubby brown tunic and a kilt that had been red once. The look he was giving her was not one she cared to encourage. As she looked back, he got ponderously to his feet; he was obviously drunk.

  Quickly, she turned away and left the tavern.

  She didn’t pause in the doorway. The rain was little more than mist now, and she had sold her cloak a sixnight ago, in any case; she had no hood or collar to raise. Besides, any hesitation might have been taken as an invitation by the man in the kilt. She walked directly out the door and down the single step.

  The mud was more slippery than she had realized; she had to reach out and catch herself against the wall of the inn, turning half around. Above her the signboard creaked; she glanced up at it, at the faded depiction of a green dragon dancing clumsily on its hind feet, long pointed tongue lolling to one side, a goblet that had once been gold but was now almost
black clutched in one foreclaw. The torches that lit it from either side flickered and hissed in the drifting mist.

  At least it wasn’t cold, she thought. Setting each foot carefully, she set out across the street. “Hoi, ” someone called when she was nearing the far side.

  Tabaea turned, not sure whether the voice was addressed to her or to someone else.

  “Hoi, young lady,” the voice continued, slurring the words, “are you headed for the Field?”

  “You mean me?” Tabaea asked, still not sure who was speaking.

  “Yes, I mean you,” the voice said, and now she located the speaker. It was the drunken man in the kilt, speaking from the mouth of the alley beside the bin.

  “What business is it of yours?” Tabaea answered.

  “Now, come on, don’t be... don’t be like that.” His consonants were blurred by liquor, but Tabaea had had long practice in understanding the speech of drunkards. “A pretty thing like you can do better than the Wall Street Field!”

  “Oh, really?” she demanded. “How?”

  “Come with me, and I’ll show you,” he said.

  She turned away, her muscles tensing, her hand sliding down to the hilt of the black dagger. She took another step toward the Field.

  Then she looked where she was going and stopped.

  Before her was a hut built out of an old table propped up on piles of bricks, the sides partially boarded over with broken doors and other scrap, leaving an opening where the tattered remains of a sheet hung. Leaning out of this aperture was an old woman, who was listening with interest to the conversation between Tabaea and the kilted man. The woman’s hair was a rat’s nest of gray; her open mouth displayed no more than half a dozen teeth, and those were black. Her face was as withered and wrinkled as an apple in spring.

  Beside the hut was a tent, made of the remnants of a merchant’s awning; stripes that had once been red were now a pale pink, where they weren’t hidden by greenish black mildew. A one-eyed boy of ten or so was watching Tabaea from the open end of the tent. His black hair was so greasy that it stood up in spikes, and Tabaea imagined she could see things crawling in it. In the muddy waste beyond, in the flickering and scattered light, Tabaea could see a dozen other faces, young and old, male and female—and all of them hungry and tired, none of them smiling.

  She turned back toward the alley. “What did you have in mind?” she asked.

  The man in the kilt smiled. “I have... have a room,” he said, “but it’s a bit lonely, for just me. Care to come take a look?”

  Tabaea still hesitated.

  There could be little doubt what the man had in mind. If she accepted, she would be whoring, really—and at a terribly low price, at that; she would be exchanging her favors for a room for the night, without even a meal, let alone cash, to accompany it.

  But if the alternative was the Wall Street Field—well, she could at least take a look at the room. And maybe she could demand additional payment, or simply take it when the man was asleep. He was bound to sleep heavily after drinking so much.

  In fact, he might be too drunk to really bother her, once they got to his room. She marched back across the muddy street, moving as quickly as she could without slipping.

  She slowed as she neared the alley and saw the big man’s face again. There wasn’t anything she could point to that was obviously wrong with it, beyond drunkenness—he wasn’t deformed or even particularly ugly, he appeared to still have both eyes and all his teeth—but still, there was something about him that made her very uneasy. His nose was very red, and his eyes very dark.

  She brushed at her skirt, as if trying to knock away the mud on the hem, and her hand came away with the black dagger tucked in her sleeve. One advantage of that weapon, she reminded herself, was that it didn’t sparkle in the torchlight.

  Then, with a false smile pasted across her lips, she stepped up to the man in the alleyway. “Where’s mis room of yours?” she asked. “I’ll be glad to get in out of this mist.”

  “This way,” he said, beckoning her into the alley. She smelled cheap oushka on his breath—lots of cheap oushka. Warily, she followed him into the shadows.

  “How far is it?” she asked.

  He turned abruptly and caught her in his arms. “Right here,” he said. He drew her to his chest, breathing great clouds of alcohol and decay in her face, and the grease on his tunic stained her own. His hands slid down, trapping her arms against him.

  “Let me go!” she demanded.

  “Oh, pretty, now, you were... you were happy enough to come with me when you thought I could put a roof over your head,” he said, in a tone that was probably intended as wheedling. “You’ll have just as good a time here in the alley.” “Let go!” she shouted.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “I live in the Field with the others, and over there we’d have shared...”

  She didn’t wait to hear any more. He was holding her arms down, so that she couldn’t reach up far enough to pull anything from her belt, but she didn’t need to; she yanked the dagger down out of her sleeve and slashed.

  The knife was really amazingly sharp. She wasn’t able to put any real strength into the blow, with her arms almost pinned, but the black blade sliced neatly through the red kilt and into the leg beneath, leaving a dark red line, almost as black in the shadows as the blade that had made it, a line no wider than a hair across the outside of her captor’s thigh.

  Tabaea felt an odd tingling as the knife cut flesh; her head seemed to swim, as if the alcohol on the man’s breath were suddenly affecting her, while at the same time she felt a surge of strength and well-being.

  The excitement, she told herself. It was the excitement and fear getting to her. She had never been in a serious fight, nor had she ever cut anyone before. Even as she thought that, the drunk reacted instinctively, flinging his arms wide and stumbling backward the instant he felt the first cut; that allowed her arm more freedom, and with that odd feeling of strength flooding through her, with that strange light-headedness giving her irrational courage, she thrust with the dagger, plunging the blade deep into the meat of her attacker’s thigh.

  He gasped, and a sensation of power overwhelmed her as he fell back against the bricks of the Drunken Dragon’s wall.

  Then she realized she was free, and habit took over; she whirled, clutching the knife, and ran out onto Wall Street, her feet sliding in the muck as she turned the corner. She caught herself with one hand and got upright again, then headed for Grandgate Market at full speed.

  Behind her, the man in the red kilt looked down at his leg, at his ruined kilt; the thin line of the initial slash was slowly widening as blood oozed out, but he ignored that.

  The stab wound was spilling blood as a burst barrel spills beer. He took a few steps, out to where torchlight turned his tunic from black to brown, his skin from gray to orange, and his entire left leg redder than his veteran’s kilt. Drunk as he was, the pain cut through the alcohol.

  He tried futilely to wipe away the blood and only opened the gash wider; blood spilled out in a thickening sheet, and the dim knowledge that he was badly, perhaps fatally hurt finally penetrated.

  He let out a gurgling squawk and fainted, facedown in the mud.

  Tabaea saw none of that as she ran, slipping and stumbling, along Wall Street. She rounded the S-curve where the Field wrapped around the north barracks tower, and from there it was a straight three blocks to the market. The torches of the gate watch glowed before her.

  With safety in sight, she allowed herself to slow. She caught her breath and tried to compose herself—and to her own surprise, succeeded quite well.

  She was, she realized, completely awake and alert—and at the same time, she felt light-headed, as if she were drunk.

  But she had only had the one pint of ale. And she had been exhausted—why else would she have ever considered sleeping in Wall Street Field?

  She wasn’t exhausted now. She felt fine.

  She felt better than fine; she
felt strong.

  With wonder in her eyes, she looked down at the bloody knife she held.

  CHAPTER 9

  In the opinion of his fellow guardsmen, Deran Wuller’s son was prone to work too hard. He had been known deliberately to volunteer for various duties; he kept his boots polished even when no inspections were anticipated. And when a citizen asked for help—well, any guardsman was required to provide aid, but Deran would do it cheerfully, without griping or delaying or trying to pass the job on to someone else.

  If he hadn’t been just as eager and cheerful when losing at three-bone, or when helping one of his mates back to barracks after a brawl or a binge, or when dodging the officer of the watch to illicitly collect a few oranges from the groves north of the city, he would have been insufferable. And he had never been known to betray a trust or let down a comrade.

  Thus he got along well enough, but got more than his share of odd and unpleasant duties—such as escorting Lieutenant Sen-den’s sister home after she was found drunk and naked in the Wall Street Field.

  She had been safely delivered and had even showed signs of sobering up when Deran had departed and headed back toward the north barracks tower. It was well past midnight, perhaps as much as two hours past, when Deran passed the Drunken Dragon and noticed the footprints in the muddy surface of Wall Street.

  He did not ordinarily go about staring at the ground, but the mist had turned back to rain, and he had not bothered with a hat or helmet or cloak, so he was hunched forward a little, and so he noticed with mild interest the patterns of footsteps. There were several lines that ran along the middle of the street; that made sense. There were lines running in and out of the Drunken Dragon—mostly out; that, too, made sense, as the Dragon was still open, despite the hour. There were a few lines in and out of the Wall Street Field, each one alone—the Field never slept, as the saying had it, but most of its inhabitants did, so traffic in and out was light and scattered at this time of night.