The Spell of the Black Dagger loe-6

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Still, she was satisfied with the results.

  Killing a dove, on the other hand, was a serious disappointment; no matter what she did, Tabaea still could not fly, nor see behind herself without turning her head. Nor, it seemed, did birds have any abilities she hadn’t known about.

  It was perfectly clear why she couldn’t fly, of course—she had no wings. Whatever magic the Black Dagger performed, it did not alter her physical appearance. Her eyes were still on the front of her head, rather than the sides; they had not become slitted like a cat’s, either.

  Only belatedly did she realize that this was a good thing-otherwise she might have grown fur or feathers or claws and become a freak unable to live a normal life among normal people.

  Not, she admitted to herself, that her life was exactly normal. With her improved sense of smell, she could now locate gold by scent alone, and with her cat skills she could now prowl silently in near-total darkness, so her thievery had become markedly more successful—but she still had no permanent home, living instead in a succession of cheap inns; she had no real friends; she saw nothing of her family.

  Her new abilities showed no signs of fading, and they gave her the money for a more comfortable existence, but as she sat at a table in yet another inn, staring at yet another six-bit dinner of chicken stew and fried noodles, she found herself profoundly dissatisfied.

  She was becoming successful as a thief. But so what?

  She had originally taken up a career in theft in order to survive and to put food in her belly without her mother’s and stepfather’s reluctant help. She had wanted to strike back at the family and the city that had ignored and neglected her. She had wanted to become rich, to have all the things she had been denied. She had wanted everyone to know who she was and to admire her skill and courage and determination.

  She had discovered years ago that it didn’t work that way. Thieves did not become rich or famous—at least, burglars and cutpurses didn’t; there were those who accused various lords and magicians of robbery, but that was an entirely different sort of theft.

  In fact, a thief couldn’t afford to become rich or famous. Too great a success put one in front of the Minister of Justice, and then on the gallows or in a slaver’s cells. Even the limited notoriety of being well known among other thieves was dangerous; Tabaea had, over the past few years, seen virtually every well-known thief arrested or beaten or killed. The world of thieves was not closed; word could always leak out into the larger world of victims and avengers. The less-successful criminals were always ready, willing, and even eager, from jealousy or simple hunger, to sell news of their more prosperous brethren.

  So she dared not try for more than a reasonably comfortable existence—and even that was risky.

  As for paying back her family and the rest of Ethshar, that didn’t work, either. Her family had ignored her before, and they ignored her now. The city had always had thieves and paid no mind to another.

  Theft was nothing but a means of survival, a career with no room for advancement. Now that she had the Black Dagger and knew how to use it, Tabaea was not satisfied with that. She wanted more. But what?

  She chewed idly on a noodle and thought about it. She still wanted to be rich and famous and respected, to have everyone know who she was, and to pay attention to her every wish. She couldn’t get that as a thief, but now she had the Black Dagger, so she could be more than a thief. The question was, what could she be? She still had never served an apprenticeship, and at nineteen she wasn’t ever going to. She was even past normal recruiting age for the city guard.

  She was strong and fast enough to be a soldier now, she realized, and she gave that possibility some serious thought. She was still small, but she knew she could prove herself if she had to.

  And then what? Speed and strength were useful in war, but Ethshar was not at war, nor likely to be. Tabaea did not even have a very clear idea what war was. In peacetime the city guard served mostly to guard the people of Ethshar from each other, rather than from outside enemies; they guarded the gates, guarded the palace, patrolled the wall and the marketplace, ran errands for the nobility, escorted prisoners...

  None of that sounded very exciting. And much of doing it well depended, she realized, not on actual strength, but on the appearance of strength, on being big and fearsome enough that people didn’t start trouble in the first place. She looked at the slender fingers holding her fork and grimaced. She didn’t look big and fearsome.

  Did soldiering pay well? The guard spent freely enough in the brothels and gambling dens of Soldiertown, but on the other hand they lived in the barracks towers, not in big houses, and they owned no fancy clothes, only uniforms and weapons.

  And as far as fame went, Tabaea knew the names of half a dozen guardsmen, none of them officers, and those few only because she had encountered them personally. What sort of fame was that?

  Soldiers carried swords, which was appealing, and they could rely on a warm bed and filling meals and a modicum of respect—but it did not seem like a really wonderful career, especially for a woman.

  She scooped a greasy lump of chicken to her mouth and chewed.

  She had food and a bed as a thief; those things were no incentive. And the guard would have no special use that she could see for her animal-derived talents.

  Not the guard, then. What else?

  Well, who was rich and famous?

  The overlord was, of course, and the other nobles. But they had all been born into the nobility, a path that was not open to her.

  There were rich and famous merchants, but they had had money to start out with, to buy their first cargos or finance their caravans, and most, if not all, had served apprenticeships in their trades.

  There were the performers in the Arena, the jugglers and acrobats and singers and magicians.

  There were the magicians, even those who did not perform— magicians of any sort could be assured of respect.

  Performers... could she use her feline reflexes to become a juggler or acrobat? She knew that most learned their arts during apprenticeships, but if she could learn the skills on her own, they could not stop her from performing.

  And as for magic—well, she was a magician already, wasn’t she?

  But she was not openly a magician.

  She swallowed the chicken and started on a chunk of carrot, thinking.

  She didn’t know all that very much about magic, beyond the secret of athamezation—and of course, she had gotten that spell wrong when she tried to use it. Still, it seemed to her that magic had real possibilities. There were all those different kinds of magicians, for one thing—wizards and warlocks and witches, theurgists and demonologists and sorcerers, illusionists and herbalists and scientists, and all the others.

  And with The Black Dagger, she could kill one of each and steal all their abilities! Or could she? She frowned and swallowed the carrot. At least part of magic was knowledge, rather than anything physical, and she didn’t know whether the Black Dagger stole knowledge. She certainly hadn’t learned anything from the minds of the dog or the cat or the dove—but perhaps beasts were too different.

  She hadn’t learned anything from the kilted drunk, either— but she hadn’t killed him, she had only stabbed him in the leg. She had only acquired the strength he had lost, and even that had returned to him and departed from her as he healed. Stabbing him hadn’t robbed him of any of his memories or wits.

  Killing a person would steal those memories away, wouldn’t it? But would the Black Dagger transfer them to her, or would they simply be lost?

  Or was knowledge part of the soul, of the part of a person that did not die? If the victim became a ghost, the ghost would still have its knowledge and memories—the dagger couldn’t give them to Tabaea, then. If the victim’s soul escaped into another realm, wouldn’t it take the knowledge with it?

  But then, it was said that certain magicks could even trap or destroy a person’s soul—what if the Black Dagger was one of them? />
  Tabaea had to admit that she had no idea whether her magic knife could steal souls, or transfer knowledge. The only way to find out would be to kill a person, preferably a magician.

  She pushed a lump of potato around the plate with her fork as she thought about that.

  It would mean murder, cold-blooded murder. She had never killed a person. Killing dogs and cats was one thing, killing a person was quite another.

  But then, how else would she ever know what the Black Dagger could do? How else would she ever become a magician, or anything more than a common thief?

  She might make it as a performer just with the skills of animals—but then she would never know. And performing might not work. And magic—she wanted more magic.

  And she could have it, if memories transferred, and maybe even if they didn’t. All she had to do was kill magicians with the Black Dagger.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind it occurred to her that she had never seriously thought about murdering people before; she had never killed anyone in the course of her career as a thief. Cats, of course, were natural hunters and killers; dogs, too, were predators. She had absorbed abilities from a dog and a cat; might some of the predator’s blood-lust come along? She dismissed the idea.

  So if she was going to kill magicians to steal their abilities, which magicians should she kill?

  Sorcerers and wizards seemed to depend on their tools and formulae—sorcerers, in particular, seemed to need the talismans and artifacts. And wizardry might bring her in contact with the Wizards’ Guild, and besides, she already knew that she could never make a proper athame—she had the Black Dagger instead.

  So those were out.

  That left demonologists and theurgists and witches and warlocks and herbalists and scientists and illusionists and plenty of others, of course. Demonology looked risky—Tabaea thought it was significant that she had never seen an old demonologist.

  Theurgists had to leam prayers and invocations and so forth to work their magic; if knowledge didn’t convey, then that wouldn’t work; she wouldn’t know the rituals she needed.

  Herbalists were so limited, with their plants, and like wizards and sorcerers, they were powerless without their supplies.

  Illusionists just did tricks—there was some doubt as to whether it was real magic at all.

  Scientists—Tabaea didn’t understand scientists, and most of the scientific magic she had seen wasn’t very useful, just stunts like using a glass to break sunlight into rainbows, or making those little chimes that spun around and rang when you burned candles under them. And there were so few scientists around, maybe a dozen in the entire city, that killing one seemed wasteful.

  The various sorts of seers and soothsayers were a possibility, but telling the real ones from the frauds wasn’t easy. Tabaea considered carefully as she finished her noodles, and decided in the end that prophecy could wait.

  Ignoring the more obscure sorts of magician, that left witches and warlocks. They didn’t seem to need equipment or incantations or anything, and they indisputably did real magic. One of them would do just fine.

  How to find one, then?

  She couldn’t go entirely by appearance; while most varieties of magicians had traditional costumes, there were no hard and fast rules about it. Telling whether a black-robed figure was a demonologist or a warlock or a necromancer or something else entirely was not easy. She had been mistaken for a warlock once or twice herself, when wearing black—warlocks favored all-black clothes even more than demonologists did.

  She knew a couple of magicians, of course, and knew of several others. She thought over all of them, trying to decide if there was one she wanted to kill.

  No, there wasn’t, not really...

  She stopped, fork raised.

  There was that snotty little Inza of Northangle, Inza the Apprentice she called herself now. She was two or three years younger than Tabaea, but she and Tabaea had played together when they were young. Then Inza had gotten herself apprenticed to a warlock, old Luris the Black, down on Wizard Street in Eastside, and after that she never had time to so much as say hello to her old friends. Inza claimed her master kept her too busy, but Tabaea knew it was because she didn’t want to associate with a bunch of thieves and street people now that she was going to be a big important magician.

  And Inza would be nearing the end of her apprenticeship now, she would be changing her name to Inza the Warlock soon.

  If she lived that long.

  Tabaea smiled, and her hand dropped from the table to the hilt of the Black Dagger.

  CHAPTER 13

  Lady Sarai leaned in the doorway and asked, “Anything interesting today?”

  Captain Tikri looked up, startled; before he could do more than drop the report he was reading, Sarai added, “Don’t bother to get up.”

  “Yes, my lady.” He settled back and looked up at her uneasily.

  “So, is there anything interesting in your reports today?” Sarai insisted.

  “Oh.” Tikri looked down at the paper. “As a matter of fact, there is one odd case. It’s probably just a revenge killing, but... well, it’s odd.”

  “Tell me about it.” Sarai stepped into the office and found a chair, one with a dragon carved on the back and the seat upholstered in brown velvet.

  “A girl named Inza, an apprentice warlock,” Tikri said. “Her throat was cut last night while she slept, and then she was stabbed through the heart—to make sure she was dead, I suppose.”

  Sarai grimaced. “Sounds nasty,” she said.

  Tikri nodded. “I would say so, yes. I didn’t go myself, but the reports... well, I’d say it was nasty.”

  Sarai frowned and leaned forward. “You said it was probably revenge? Who did it?”

  Tikri shrugged. “We don’t know who did it—not yet, anyway. Whoever it was came in through a window—pried open the latch, very professional job, looked like an experienced burglar—but then, nothing was stolen or disturbed, so it wasn’t a burglary at all.”

  “Unless the thief panicked,” Sarai suggested.

  Tikri shook his head. “Panicked? Cutting the throat and a thrust through the heart doesn’t look like anyone who would panic.”

  “So it was revenge—but you don’t know who did it?”

  “No.” Tikri frowned. “Not yet, anyway. The girl’s master swears she doesn’t know of any enemies, anyone who hated Inza or had a grudge against her. Warlocks don’t do divinations, of course, so she couldn’t identify the killer herself; we have a wizard checking on it instead.”

  “You don’t think it was the master herself?”

  Tikri turned up an empty palm. “Who knows? But we don’t have any reason to think it was her. And Luris is a skilled warlock; why cut the girl’s throat when she could have simply stopped her heart? Or if a warlock wanted to be less obvious, she could have staged any number of plausible accidents.”

  “That’s true.” Sarai considered and tapped the arm of her chair as her feet stretched out in front of her—signs that she was thinking. “It’s very odd, you know, that anyone would kill an apprentice warlock—isn’t this Luris now duty-bound to avenge the girl’s death?” Tikri nodded. “Just so. Whoever did this isn’t afraid of warlocks, obviously.”

  “And how could an apprentice have an enemy who hated her enough to kill her? Apprentices don’t have time or freedom to make that sort of enemies, do they?”

  “Not usually,” Tikri agreed.

  “How old was she?”

  Tikri glanced at the report. “Seventeen,” he said. “She would have made journeyman next month.”

  “Seventeen.” Sarai bit her lip. She had been worried about her father, but he was almost sixty, he had had a long and full life. She had been worried about her brother, but he probably wouldn’t die of his illness. If he did, if either of them died, it wouldn’t be a shock. But a healthy seventeen-year-old girl, five years younger than Sarai herself, had been killed, without warning, apparently without any good reason.


  “Has anyone talked to her family?” she asked.

  Tikri shrugged. “I think someone sent a message,” he said.

  “I was also thinking of asking if anyone in her family knew if she had any enemies,” Sarai remarked.

  Tikri blinked. “Why bother?” he asked. “The magicians will tell us who did it.”

  Sarai nodded.

  “Let me know what they find out,” she said. She rose and turned away.

  She had intended to stay and talk to Captain Tikri for a while. She didn’t have any specific questions or assignments for him; she just thought it was a good idea to know what her subordinates were doing. She wanted to know everything about how the city guard worked, how crimes were investigated, how reports were written, what got included and what got left out— the real story, not what she would be told if she asked. She wanted Tikri to talk to her easily and not treat her as some lordly creature who couldn’t be bothered with everyday details. Chatting with him had seemed like the best way to work toward that. The news of the murder bothered her, though, and she no longer felt any interest in light conversation.

  There were murders fairly often in Ethshar, of course—with hundreds of thousands of people packed inside the city walls, killings were inevitable. The annual total was often close to a hundred, even without counting the deaths that might have been either natural or magical.

  Most of them, however, involved open arguments, drunken brawls, attempted robbery, or marital disputes. Someone breaking into a warlock’s house to butcher a sleeping apprentice was definitely not typical.

  But there really didn’t seem to be much she could do about it just now.