certainly not as tall as you, though I cannot specify her height any more exactly than that. She is thin and light on her feet, with a rather square face, a wide nose, and pale skin. She usually wore black clothing and may have gone barefoot. Beyond that...” He turned up an empty palm. “Beyond that, I’m afraid I know no more.”
“That isn’t Mereth,” Sarai said. “The height’s right, but not the rest of it. Are you sure of this? ”
“Oh, absolutely. A woman fitting that description visited each murder site within a sixnight or so of the killings.”
Sarai looked up at Tikri. “That description doesn’t bring anyone immediately to mind,” she said. “Does it for you?”
“No.” Tikri frowned. “I’m not sure how much we should trust this information.”
The sorcerer tucked his talisman back in his tunic. “That’s entirely up to you, of course,” he said, “but I give you my word that it’s reliable information. I don’t know that this woman killed anyone, but she was very definitely there. If I had been able to see the bodies, I could have told you whether the same knife was used in every case...” Sarai waved that aside. “We already know that,” she said. “The wizards tested that for us. It was the same knife every time.”
“Oh.” Kelder essayed a quick little bow of acknowledgment.
Sarai smiled at him. “I’m not disparaging your information, Kelder of Tazmor,” she said. “Thank you for bringing it to us. If you learn anything more, please come and tell us.”
“Of course.” Kelder bowed again, and stepped away.
Sarai looked up at Tikri. “Do you think mis woman is the killer?”
Tikri shook his head. “No woman smaller than you could be strong enough to have committed these murders single-handed. Perhaps she’s the high priestess of a cult that’s responsible for this—if she exists at all.”
“I think she exists,” Sarai said. “Why would the sorcerer lie?”
“To throw us off the track,” Tikri suggested. “Perhaps he’s part of the conspiracy.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sarai admitted, staring at Kelder’s back and chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. “We could check his story, though.”
“How?”
“Witchcraft. Where’s Teneria?” Sarai turned, peering out the door as if she expected to find the young witch standing in the hallway.
Thin, black hair, light on her feet, usually wore black—that described Teneria, Sarai realized. The height was probably wrong, though; the journeyman witch stood very close to Sarai’s own height. And her long, narrow face, with its pointed jaw, hardly looked square, and while her nose was noticeable, that was because it was long, with a bump in it, not because it was wide. Her complexion wasn’t particularly pale. And weren’t her eyes green?. She wasn’t there to check.
Sarai snorted with sudden annoyance. Was she going to be matching every female she met against the sorcerer’s description, from now until the murderers were caught?
She debated sending Tikri to fetch Teneria, but before she could decide, Teneria actually did appear in the doorway. “Just the person I was looking for!” Sarai called. Teneria entered and bowed before Lady Sarai, then asked, “How may I be of service?” “You don’t already know?” Sarai asked wryly. The ghost of a smile flickered across the witch’s rather somber face. “No, my lady,” she said. “Not at the moment.”
“I need to know what’s true and what isn’t,” Sarai said. “You witches are good at that.”
Teneria cocked her head to one side and replied, “In a way. We can generally tell when people believe what they say— whether that’s actually the truth is sometimes an entirely different matter. And it works better with some people than others.” Sarai nodded, and asked, “Suppose you spoke to a woman I thought had been connected with the murders; could you tell me whether she had, in fact, been connected?”
Teneria frowned. “That would depend. Probably. If she spoke at all, almost certainly. If she spoke freely, with no magical constraints, absolutely. But I would not necessarily be able to ascertain the nature of the connection.”
“Could you tell if a person had actually committed one of the murders?”
“Oh, yes, I would think so. Unless there was a very great deal of magic hiding the fact.”
“Suppose you were to walk down the street, or through the market; could you pick a murderer out of the crowd?”
Teneria shook her head. “Only if I was incredibly lucky. The murderer would have to be thinking about the actual killing and feeling a strong emotional reaction to those thoughts, with absolutely no magical protection of any kind. Even then, I couldn’t be sure without stopping to investigate. What might look like a murderer’s thoughts at first glance could just be a housewife worried about killing a chicken for dinner.”
“I thought it was probably too much to ask,” Sarai admitted. “If you could do that, we’d have just had witches working for my father for years, instead of relying on Okko and the others for most of it.”
Teneria shrugged.
“But if we brought you a person and asked, ’Is this the murderer,’ you could tell us?” Sarai asked.
“Ordinarily, yes.”
Sarai nodded. “Good enough,” she said. She pointed. “That man in the brown tunic there is a sorcerer by the name of Kelder of Tazmor; he claims to have magically established that a particular woman was present in each room where a murder was committed—though not necessarily at the time of the killing. I want you to find out how reliable his information is.”
Teneria followed the gesture, but said nothing at first.
“Does sorcery interfere with your witchcraft?” Sarai inquired.
“Not usually,” Teneria replied. “Sometimes.”
“Will it this time?”
Teneria turned and walked away from the dais, toward Kelder. “I’ll let you know,” she said, over her shoulder.
Ten minutes later, she let them know. Kelder believed absolutely in what he had told Sarai and Tikri. Sarai thanked the young witch, and stared down at the spriggan that was clutching at her ankle.
Who was that woman Kelder had described?
CHAPTER 21
Captain Tikri’s files were a mess. Lady Sarai had thought her own records, up in her bedroom, were not as organized as they ought to be, and had always been embarrassed when she thought of the tidy shelves and drawers that her father and his clerks maintained. By comparison with Tikri’s random heap of reports and letters, her records were a model of order and logic. “What are you looking for, anyway?” Tikri asked, as Sarai dumped another armful on his desk.
“I don’t know,” Sarai said, picking a paper off the stack. “But I hope I’ll know it when I see it.”
“How will you know it if you don’t know what it is? I’d offer to help, but how can I?” Sarai sighed.
“What I’m after,” she said, “is some record of a crime that the conspirators might have committed before the murders. Once they killed Inza, we were looking for them, and I’m sure they’ve been careful, and certainly we’ve been careful, checking out everything that we thought might be connected. Right?” “Right,” Tikri said, a trifle uncertainly. “Well, this conspiracy probably didn’t burst out of nowhere, full-grown and completely ready, the night poor Inza died,” Sarai explained. “They must have been preparing before that. They may have killed more dogs, for example, before working their way up to people. They may have injured people without killing them. They may have stolen things they needed for their magic. And maybe, since they weren’t so experienced yet, they left traces and clues. Now do you see what I’m after?”
“Oh,” Tikri said. He hesitated. “How far back do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Sarai admitted. “You may not find anything.”
“I know that,” Sarai said, flinging down a thick report and glaring angrily at Tikri. “Don’t you think I know that? But I don’t have much of anything else left to try. The Wizards’ Guild wants to catch whoever it is for themselves, because it won’t look as good for them if I do it, so they won’t help me any more than they have to.”
