Lord Kalthon stared at her, smiling slightly. “Speak, then,” he said.
“Really, it’s not as difficult as all that,” Sarai said, stalling for time as her nerve suddenly failed her for a moment. What if she was wrong? Her father’s smile had vanished, she saw, replaced with a puzzled frown.
She took a deep breath and continued. “Kallia swears that she saw Heremon commit the crime, and every indication is that she speaks the truth, that that’s exactly what she saw. Furthermore, Heremon swears that he did not commit the crime, and chamber, and then ran for it. One of the warlocks burst his heart.” He glanced at Kalthon the Younger, who was listening intently, and then added, “I told her to.”
“What happened to the demon?” little Kalthon asked. “The one he conjured in the chamber.”
“The guards killed it,” the Minister of Justice replied. “Cut it to pieces with their swords, and eventually it stopped struggling.” He sighed. “I’m afraid that Irith isn’t very happy about it.”
“Who’s Irith?” Sarai asked.
“She’s the servant who cleans the justice chamber every night,” Lord Kalthon explained. “I told her that if she couldn’t get the stain out, not to worry, we’d hire a magician to do it.”
“Will you really?”
“Maybe,” Kalthon said. “We’ve certainly used plenty of magic already on this case.” He sighed. “More than I like. There are too damn many magicians in this city.”
Sarai nodded.
“And that reminds me, Sarai,” her father said, picking up the last drumstick. “Have you been dabbling in magic, perhaps?”
Sarai blinked, astonished. “No, sir,” she said. “Of course not.”
“So you really figured out that it was this Katherian all by yourself, then? Just using your own good sense?”
Sarai nodded. “Yes, Father,” she said.
Kalthon bit into the drumstick, chewed thoughtfully, and swallowed. “That was good thinking, then,” he said at last. “Very good.” “Thank you,” Sarai said, looking down at her plate.
“You know,” her father continued, “we use Okko and the other magicians to solve most of the puzzles we get. I mean, the cases where it’s a question of what the facts are, rather than just settling an argument where the facts are known.”
“Yes, sir,” Sarai said, “I’d noticed that.”
“Every so often, though, we do get cases like this one, with Kallia and Heremon and Katherian, and sometimes they’re real tangles. They usually seem to involve magicians, which doesn’t help any—such as the one where a man who’d been turned to stone a hundred years ago was brought back to life, and we had to find out who enchanted him, and then decide who owned his old house, and whether he could prosecute the heirs of the wizard who enchanted him, and for that matter we couldn’t be sure the wizard himself was really dead...”He shook his head. “Or all the mess after the Night of Madness, before you were bom—your grandfather handled most of that, but I helped out.” He gestured at Kalthon the Younger. “Yjur brother will probably be the next Minister of Justice, you know—it’s traditional for the heir to be the eldest son, skipping daughters, and I don’t think Ederd’s going to change that. But I think we could use you—after today, I think it would be a shame not to use wits like yours.”
“Use me how?” Sarai asked warily.
“As an investigator,” her father said. “Someone who goes out and finds out what’s going on in the difficult cases. Someone who knows about different kinds of magic, but isn’t a magician herself. I’d like to ask the overlord to name you as the first Lord—or rather, the first Lady of Investigation for Ethshar of the Sands. With a salary and an office here in the palace.”
Sarai thought it over for a moment, then asked, “But what would I actually do?”
“Usually, nothing,” the Minister of Justice replied. “Like the Lord Executioner. But if there’s ever anything that needs to be studied and explained, something where we can’t just ask Okko or some other magician, it would be your job to study it and then explain it to the rest of us.”
Sarai frowned. “But I can’t know everything,” she said.
“Of course not,” her father agreed. “But you can learn as much as you can. The overlord doesn’t expect his officers to be perfect.”
Sarai, remembering what she had heard of Ederd IV, overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, wasn’t any too sure of that. “What would I do when I can’t...”
“You would do the best you can,” her father interrupted. “Like any of the city’s officials.” “I’d need help sometimes,” Sarai said. “You’d be given the authority to call on the guard for help— I’ll ask Lord Torrut to assign you a regular assistant. And you could hire others.”
“Father, if we need someone to figure out these things, why hasn’t anyone already been given the job?”
Lord Kalthon smiled wryly. “Because we never thought of it. We’ve always improvised, done it all new every time.” “Have you talked to the overlord yet?”
“No,” Lord Kalthon admitted. “I wanted to see whether you wanted the job first.”
“I don’t know,” Sarai admitted.
There they left the matter for a sixnight; then one evening Lord Kalthon mentioned, “I spoke to the overlord today.”
“Oh?” Sarai asked, nervously.
Her father nodded. “He wants you to be his investigator, as I suggested. And I think he’d like the job to include more than I originally intended—he was talking about gathering information from other lands, as well, to help him keep up with events. He doesn’t like surprises, you know; he wasn’t at all happy that he had no warning about the rise of the Empire of Vond, in the Small Kingdoms, two years ago.”
“But I don’t know anything about...” Sarai began.
“You could learn,” Kalthon replied.
“I don’t know,” Sarai said. “I don’t like it. I need time to think about it.”
“So think about it,” her father answered.
In truth, she found the idea of being paid to study foreign lands fascinating—but the responsibilities and the fact that she would be reporting to the overlord himself were frightening.
Still, a sixnight later, she agreed to take the job.
CHAPTER 5
“We’ll go on to the next step tomorrow,” the wizard said, putting the dagger aside. The apprentice nodded, and Tabaea, watching from the landing, got quickly and silently to her feet and padded swiftly up the stairs. Her candle had gone out, and she dared not light another, so she moved by feel and memory. She knew she had to be out of the house before the two came upstairs and found her, so she wasted no time in the thefts she had originally planned. Her sack still hung empty at her belt as she made her way back through the workshop, the hallway, and the parlor.
It was in the parlor that she stumbled over something in the dark and almost fell. Light glinted from the hallway; the wizard and his apprentice were in the workroom. Frightened, Tabaea dropped to her knees and crept on all fours through the dining salon, and finally out to the mudroom. There she got to her feet and escaped into the darkness of the alley beyond.
It was later than she had realized; most of the torches and lanterns over the doors had been allowed to burn out for the night, and Grandgate Market’s glow and murmur had faded to almost nothing. Grand Street was empty.
She hesitated. She had come down to Grandgate Market in unfulfilled hopes of filching a few choice items from the buyers and sellers there; the wizard’s house had caught her eye as she passed on her way to the square, and she had turned down the alley on her way home. All she should do now was to go on the rest of the way, north and west, back to her family’s house in Northangle. But it was so very dark in that direction, and the streets of Ethshar weren’t safe at night. There were robbers and slavers and, she thought with a glance eastward at Wizard Street, quite possibly other, less natural, dangers. But what choice did she have?