A Time of Exile. Katharine Kerr

the moment an elf came within a few feet of it. The other, the secret spell, was its necessary opposite, producing an affinity, in this case to the dagger’s true owner, so that if lost or stolen, sooner or later the magical currents of the universe would float that dagger home. The thing was, by ‘true owner’ Otho meant himself, which meant that any lost dagger would eventually come home to him, no matter who had actually made it or how much its interim owner had paid for it. Otho justified all of this by thinking of the purchase price as mere rent, a trifling detail that he never mentioned to his customers.

      Once and only once had Otho produced an exception, and that was by accident. Round about 1044, he made a dagger for Cullyn of Cerrmor, one of the few human beings he truly admired. In the course of things, that blade passed to Rhodry Maelwaedd, a young lord who was forced by political exile to join the silver daggers. As soon as Rhodry laid his hand on the dagger, it was obvious that his blood was a little rarer than merely noble – the blade blazed up and accused him of being half an elf at least. Grudgingly, and only as a favour for Cullyn of Cerrmor’s daughter, Otho took off the denouncing spell. What Otho didn’t realize, since his dweomer was a thing of rote memory rather than real understanding, was that he’d weakened the complementary magic as well. The dagger now saw Rhodry, not the dwarf, as its one true owner.

      A silver dagger’s life is never easy, and Rhodry’s time on the long road was worse than most, and by one thing and another he managed to lose the blade good and proper, far away in the Bardekian archipelago across the Southern Sea, round about the year 1064. At the same time as Rhodry was killing the man who’d stolen it. the dagger itself fetched up in the marketplace of a little mountain town called Ganjalo, where it stayed for several years, stubbornly unsold. The merchant couldn’t understand – here was this beautiful and exotic item, reasonably priced, that no one ever seemed to want to buy. Finally it did catch the eye of an itinerant tinker, who knew of a rich man who collected unusual knives of all sorts. Since this rich man lived in a sea-port, the dagger allowed itself to be installed in the collection. Again, some years passed, until the collector died and his sons divided up the various blades. The youngest, who happened to be a ship’s captain, felt drawn to the dagger for some irrational reason and traded another brother an entire set of pearl-handled fish knives for it. The next time this captain went to sea, the dagger went with him.

      But not to Deverry. The captain sailed back and forth from Bardek proper to the off-lying islands of Orystinna, a lucrative run, and he saw no reason to consider making the dangerous crossing to the distant barbarian kingdoms. After some years of this futile east–west travel, the dagger changed owners. While gambling, the captain had an inexplicable run of bad luck and ended up handing the dagger over to a friend to pay off his debt. The friend took it to a northern sea-port and on a sudden whim sold it to another marketplace jeweller who bought it on the same kind of impulse. There it lay again, until a young merchant passed by and happened to linger for a moment to look over the jeweller’s stock. Since this Londalo traded with Deverry on a regular basis, he was always in need of little gifts to smooth his way with customs officials and minor lords. The dagger had a barbarian look, and he bought it to take along on his next trading run.

      Of course, poor Londalo didn’t realize that, in Deverry, offering a silver dagger as a gift was a horrible insult. He found out quick enough in the Eldidd town of Abernaudd, where his ill-considered gesture cost him a trading pact. As he bemoaned his bad luck in a tavern, a kindly stranger explained the problem, and Londalo nearly threw the dagger onto the nearest dung-heap then and there, which was more or less what the dagger had in mind. Yet, because he also knew a lesson when he saw one, he ended up keeping it as a reminder to never take other people’s customs for granted again. If silver could have feelings, the dagger would have been livid with rage. Back and forth it went between Bardek and the Deverry coast for some years more, while a richer, older Londalo became a respected and important member of his merchant guild, until finally, in the spring of the year 1096, he and the dagger turned up in Aberwyn, where Rhodry Maelwaedd now ruled as gwerbret. The magical currents around the dagger thickened, swirled, and grew so strong that Londalo actually felt them, as a prick of something much like anxiety.

      On the morning that he was due to visit the gwerbret, Londalo stood in his chamber in the best inn Aberwyn had to offer and irritably applied his clan markings. Normally a trained slave would have painted on the pale blue stripes and red diamonds that marked him as a member of House Ondono, but it was very unwise for a thrifty man to bring his slaves when he visited the kingdom of Deverry. Surrounded by barbarians with a peculiar idea of property rights, slaves were known to take their chance at freedom and disappear. When they did, the barbarian authorities became uncooperative at best and hostile at worst. Londalo held his hand mirror at various angles to examine the paint on his pale brown skin and finally decided that his amateur job would have to do. After all, the barbarians, even an important one like the lord he was about to visit, knew nothing of the niceties of the art. Yet the anxiety remained. Something was wrong; he could just plain feel it.

      There was a knock at the door, and Harmon, his young assistant, entered with a respectful bob of his head.

      ‘Are you ready to leave, sir?’

      ‘Yes. I see you have the proposed trade agreements with you. Good, good.’

      With a brief smile Harmon patted the heavy leather roll of a document case that he carried tucked under one arm.

      As they walked through the streets of Aberwyn, Londalo noticed his young partner looking this way and that in distaste; occasionally he lifted a perfumed handkerchief to his nose as they passed a particularly ripe dung-heap. There was no doubt that visiting Deverry was hard on a civilized man, Londalo reflected. The city seemed to have been thrown down around the harbour rather than built according to a plan. All the buildings were round and shaggy with thatch, instead of square and nicely shingled; the streets meandered randomly through and around them like the patterns of spirals and interlace the barbarians favoured as a decorative style. Everywhere was confusion: barking dogs, running children, men on horseback trotting through dangerously fast, rumbling wagons, and even the occasional staggering drunk.

      ‘Sir,’ Harmon said at last, ‘is this really the most important city in Eldidd?’

      ‘I’m afraid so. Now remember, my young friend, this man we’re going to visit will look like a crude barbarian to you, but he has the power to put us both to death if we insult him. The laws are very different here. Every ruler is judge and advocate both, as long as he’s in his own lands. And a gwerbret, like our lord here in Aberwyn, is a ruler far more powerful than one of our archons.’

      In approximately the centre of town lay the palace complex, or dun as the barbarians called it, of the gwerbret. The barbarians all talked about how splendid it was, with its many-towered fortress inside the high stone walls, but the Bardekians found the stone work crude and the effect completely spoiled by the clutter of huts and sheds and pig-sties and stables all around it. As they made their way through the bustle of servants, Londalo suddenly realized that he was wearing the silver dagger on his tunic’s leather belt.

      ‘By the Star Goddesses! I must be growing old! I don’t even remember picking this thing up from the table.’

      ‘I don’t suppose it’ll matter, sir. All the men around here are absolutely bristling with knives.’

      Although Londalo had never met this particular ruler before, he’d heard that Rhodry Maelwaedd, Gwerbret Aberwyn, was an honest, fair-minded man, somewhat more civilized than most of his kind. Londalo was pleased to notice that the courtyards were reasonably clean, the servants wore decent clothing, and the corpses of hanged criminals were nowhere in sight. At the door of the tallest tower, the broch proper, the aged chamberlain was waiting to greet them. In a hurried whisper Londalo reminded Harmon that a gwerbret’s servitors were all noble-born.

      ‘So mind your manners. No giving orders, and always say thank you when they do something for you.’

      The chamberlain ushered them into a vast round room, carpeted with braided rushes and set about with long wooden tables, where at least a hundred men, all of them armed with knife and sword both, were drinking ale and nibbling on chunks of bread, while servant girls wandered around, gossiping or trading smart remarks