Tabaea her wonderful new talent for warlockry, but still, it was nasty.
Well, Tabaea told herself, sometimes life was nasty. At least, from now on, she would be on the dispensing end of the nastiness, rather than the receiving.
She would pick and choose her victims carefully, though. There was no reason to kill large numbers of people. In fact, for raw strength, there was no reason to kill people at all—dogs and cats and other animals would serve just as well, perhaps better, for that.
But skills—agility and dexterity, and of course all the different schools of magic—those would come from people. Dogs and cats had no fingers and couldn’t do anything much with their toes, they couldn’t transfer anything involving tools, or that called for standing upright.
Scent and vision and hearing, yes—without those, she could hardly have located this empty house and been certain it was deserted. She knew that she would spot the owner’s return before he suspected anything was wrong, or would hear or smell him before he got near her, and with her faster reflexes and increased speed she could be gone before he noticed her, and that was all due to the animals.
But for human skills, she needed to kill humans.
She looked down at the dagger on her belt and shrugged.
Well, she told herself, people died every day in Ethshar. Men bragged in the taverns about how many people they had slain. Magicians killed each other and any other enemies they might have. Demonologists sacrificed children or troublesome neighbors to their diabolic servants, and necromancers traded souls for the wisdom of the dead. Everyone knew all that. Surely, no one would notice a few more deaths.
It did occur to Tabaea, somewhere in the back of her mind, that while she always heard about all these horrible deaths, she had never seen one, and very few of the people she knew personally had died of anything other than natural causes.
If they were natural causes and not vindictive magic.
Well, it was a big city, and even if she had been lucky, everyone knew that people were murdered every day in Ethshar, stabbed or beaten in the Wall Street Field, poisoned or smothered in the lounges and bedrooms of the palace, roasted or petrified by wizards, or carried off to nameless dooms by demons and other supernatural creatures. No one would notice anything out of the ordinary if there were a few more deaths than usual.
That settled, the only questions remaining were who and when.
She had killed a warlock—she reached out and picked up the biggest chunk of the broken mug and sent it sailing in broad circles around the room, all without touching it; now that she knew how, it seemed to grow easier with every passing second. The next step would be either some other form of magic, or some vital, nonmagical skill—archery, perhaps, or swordsmanship. A soldier, then?
Yes, a soldier, but one who knew his trade, not just one of the fat, lazy bullies who guarded Grandgate by day and caroused in Soldiertown by night. An officer, perhaps—one who trained the new enlistees.
And then some more magicians—a demonologist, perhaps, and a theurgist. Even if they needed incantations, maybe she could learn those somewhere, listen to someone at work; it couldn’t be that hard, once you had the gift, the skill, whatever it was that made them magicians instead of mere mortals. And then maybe a wizard, despite the Guild and her inability to make an athame, maybe two, they didn’t all use the same spells, maybe she could learn something useful. A sorcerer, a witch...
She drew the dagger and looked at it.
“We’re going to be busy,” she said. She smiled. “And it’ll be worth it.”
CHAPTER 15
“There’s wizardry here,” the witch said, kneeling by the body.
“You’re sure it’s wizardry and not some other magic?” Sarai asked from the doorway.
The witch frowned. “Well, my lady,” he said, “it’s either wizardry or something entirely new, and if it’s something entirely new, it’s something that’s more like wizardry than it’s like anything else we’ve ever known.”
“So it could be something entirely new?”
The witch sighed as he got stiffly to his feet. He ran a bony hand through thinning hair. “I don’t know, Lady Sarai,” he said. “I know that when warlockry first came along, when I was just finishing my apprenticeship, we had a hard time telling it from witchcraft at first, because there are similarities, and we didn’t know the differences yet. I know that theurgy and demonology are opposite sides of the same coin, so that in some ways they look alike and in others they couldn’t be more different. Whatever happened here feels like wizardry to me, but it might be that it’s something new, and I just don’t know the differences yet. But it feels like wizardry.”
Sarai nodded.
“All right,” she said. “Wizardry, then, or something like it. Can you tell me anything about the person who did it?”
The witch shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid not. The magic fouls up everything else.”
“Can you tell me anything more about the magic, then?” Sarai asked. “Would you know it if you met the murderer on the street?”
The witch tilted his head and considered that carefully. “I doubt it,” he said at last. “What I sense here is the flavor of the single spell that killed him. It doesn’t seem likely that the killer would be walking around with that spell still active. I’m not a wizard, but as I understand it, their spells are usually temporary things—they make them fresh each time, as it were.”
Sarai nodded again. “But it’s the same spell here as the others?”
The witch shrugged. “I think so,” he said, “but I can’t be absolutely certain. The others were not so recent when I saw them.”
For a moment the two of them stood silently, staring at the bloody corpse on the floor. The body, in turn, was staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
“There’s one thing,” Sarai said. “You and the others all keep saying that a spell killed these people, but it’s plain to see that a knife killed them. Do you mean that it was an enchanted dagger? That an ordinary knife was wielded by magic? That the dagger was conjured out of thin air?”
The witch hesitated. “I mean,” he said, very carefully, “that whatever made the wounds was magical and that the life was drawn out by that magic. If it was a dagger, the dagger was enchanted; whether it was wielded by magic or by someone’s hand I have no way of knowing.”
“Very well, then,” Sarai said, “suppose it’s an enchanted dagger, and you happen to bump into someone on the street who’s wearing that dagger on his belt. Would you know it?”
The witch hesitated even longer this time. “I doubt it,” he said at last. “But I think—I think—that if I saw someone use that dagger to cut someone, I would know it.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing,” Sarai muttered.
“I would, of course, immediately inform you, my lady, if I saw anything of the sort.”
“Of course,” she said. “Or the nearest guardsman, or whoever.” “Of course.”
Sarai turned and headed for the stairs.
This one was the worst yet, and for a very simple reason-she had known the victim. Serem the Wise was one of the best-known enchanters in Ethshar of the Sands—or rather, he had been; now he was nothing but a wandering ghost and a throat-slashed cadaver.
His apprentice—what was her name? Oh, yes, Lirrin. Lirrin was waiting at the foot of the stairs, looking pale and ill. Behind her, in the front parlor, Sarai could see Serem’s famous fan-tree, waving away as if nothing had happened; trust old Serem to use solid, permanent enchantments, not the feeble sort that would have died with their creator.
Lirrin would be doing all right for herself, probably—as far as Sarai knew, there were no relatives with a stronger claim to any part of the estate than that of a new apprentice. If Serem had any children or siblings, they were long since grown, and any wives were dead, divorced, or disappeared. Under Ethshar-itic custom, a child’s welfare came before that of any adult other than a spouse, and Lirrin, at seventeen, was still officially a child. She would inherit the wizard’s house and goods, including his Book of Spells and the contents of his workshop.
