Sarai nodded again. "So you don't know how long?"
"No."
The young noblewoman considered for a moment, then said, "I'll wait."
Thar nodded. He stepped aside and admitted her to the consulting room, small but cozy, where Sarai settled into a blue brocade armchair.
Thar hovered for a moment, making sure the important guest was comfortable, then vanished through the archway that led to the rest of the building.
Sarai waited, looking over the room. She had seen it before, of course, but she had little else to do.
There were three armchairs, blue, green, and gold, arranged around three sides of a small square table, a table of carved wood inlaid with golden curlicues. Eight little boxes stood on the table-gold, silver, brass, abalone, crystal, and three kinds of wood, all intricately carved and finely polished. Ink paintings hung on the walls, depicting rocky seashores, lonely towers, and other fanciful locations unlike anything in Ethshar of the Sands; Mereth had said once that these had been painted by her grandmother. An ornate wool rug in gold and red covered most of the floor; the rest was oiled wood. A shelf over the door held half a dozen mismatched statuettes, and a cork sculpture of a dragon wrapping itself around a peasant's farmhouse stood on the windowsill.
It was really a rather pretentious and fussy little room, Sarai thought. For lack of anything better to do, she turned her attention to a study of the ink paintings.
She had just about exhausted all possible interest in that when Mereth finally emerged, breathlessly hurrying through the archway, tunic awry and feet bare.
"Lady Sarai!" she said. "I didn't know you were coming! Sit down, sit down!"
"I've been sitting, thank you," Sarai said, as Thar stumbled after his mistress into the room.
"Oh, yes, of course you have," Mereth agreed, flustered. "Well, whatever you please, then. What can I do for you?"
"You were investigating the death of Inza, the apprentice warlock, I believe."
"Trying to, anyway," Mereth said.
Sarai waited.
Mereth sighed. "I can't see anything," she said. "Nothing works. Not the Spell of Omniscient Vision, not Fendel's Divination-none of my spells worked."
Those two spells, Sarai knew, were among the most powerful and useful information-gathering spells of all those known to wizardry; she suspected that between the two of them they provided more than half Mereth's income. "Is it because she was a warlock?" she asked. "I know different kinds of magic…"
"No, that's not it, or at least…" Mereth paused, collecting her thoughts, then explained, "The warlockry doesn't help, Lady Sarai, but I could get around that, I'm sure, if that was all there were. It isn't. She was killed by magic, strong magic-I can't tell what kind."
Sarai blinked. "She was killed with a knife, I thought-her throat was cut and she was stabbed."
"It might have been a knife," Mereth said, "or something else, I can't even tell that much. But I do know that whatever killed her was magical." Her tone was definite. "There's no possible doubt."
"But why would a magician kill anyone that way?" Lady Sarai asked. "I mean, aren't there spells… spells that leave no traces, or make it look like an accident?"
The wizard looked decidedly uncomfortable and did not answer.
Lady Sarai frowned at her silence. "Mereth," Sarai said, "I'm no fool; I've been the overlord's Minister of Investigation for four years now. I know that people who seriously offend wizards or warlocks or demonologists tend to turn up dead in fairly short order, even if, most of the time, we can never prove anything. People who bother warlocks have heart attacks, or fall from heights, or trip over their own feet and break their necks. People who fatally annoy wizards, I mean more than just enough to wind up with a curse like the Dismal Itch or Lugwiler's Haunting Phantasm, can have any number of strange accidents, but they seem especially prone to mysterious fires and smothering in their own blankets. People who are stupid enough to get demonologists angry usually just disappear completely. Witches don't seem to kill people; either that, or they're too subtle for us. Their enemies have plenty of bad luck, though, even if it isn't fatal. I 'm not sure about sorcerers or theurgists or the others. But everyone knows it's bad business to anger magicians, any kind of magicians. I know that, my father knows that, the overlord himself knows that." She swallowed, remembering that her father had not angered any magicians, but had instead annoyed a god and was now dying as a result. Then she forged on. "Every man in the city guard knows that you don't anger magicians and expect to live. It's not our job to protect people when they cut their own throats. We know magicians kill people sometimes-it's so easy for you, after all. When the victims go asking for it, and the killers don't make a show of it, we don't worry too much. But in this case… Mereth, the girl was seventeen years old, never hurt anybody that we can see, and she got her throat cut. We can't let this one pass."
"I know, Lady Sarai," Mereth said unhappily. "But honestly, I swear, on my oath as a member of the Wizards' Guild, that I don't know what happened. I don't know why anyone would do it this way; you're right, there are other, easier, less-obvious spells. I don't know who did this, or why, or how; I only know that it was magic."
Sarai studied the wizard for a moment, then sighed.
"A rogue magician," she said. "Wonderful."
CHAPTER 14
Tabaea stared at the mug and concentrated.
This would, she was sure, be easier if she had an older, more experienced warlock who could help her, could tell her what to do, but of course she could hardly tell any warlocks what she had done. She had to guess what she was supposed to do.
She had seen warlocks, in the taverns, in their shops, and in the Arena, and they had all been able to move things without touching them. That seemed to be the most basic ability that warlocks had. Inza had surely had it.
But how did it work?
Tabaea had no idea how to make it happen; despite her optimistic expectations, none of Inza's memories had transferred, none of what the apprentice had learned in her five years of training. If there were tricks or secrets to the warlock's arts, Tabaea didn't know them.
But Inza's raw magical ability should have transferred, the Black Dagger should have stolen it away and given it to Tabaea, and the only way Tabaea knew to test that was by trying. She hoped that warlockry worked just by thinking, by concentrating hard enough.
She stared at the empty mug. She stared so hard that her head began to hurt. Somewhere she thought she heard whispering, a muttering in some foreign language; she tried to ignore it.
She shouldn't be able to hear any whispers, she thought, annoyed-not here in this empty house in the middle of the night. She certainly couldn't have heard anything if she were still an ordinary person; this whisper was somehow alien. She supposed it was some trick of her newly enhanced senses, something that a dog could hear when a person wouldn't, but she couldn't think what it might be. Who would be speaking a strange tongue near here? She hadn't seen anyone around the place who didn't look Ethsharitic. And this was a very strange tongue, nothing she had ever heard before, she was sure.
Maybe it wasn't human at all. Still staring at the mug, she tried to make out the words and where it was coming from.
There were no words, she realized, and the whisper wasn't coming from anywhere. It seemed to be inside her own head.
Then, abruptly, as she focused on the whispering that wasn't really a sound at all, she felt as if something had touched her, or perhaps she had touched something, in a place that she could not locate, a part of her that didn't correspond to anywhere on or in her body. The whispering ran through her, and she could suddenly feel the mug, as well as see it, even though it was six feet away.