Read Online Northlight by Deborah Wheeler - Free Book Online

nails down to the quick. “I’m still investigating.”
    â€œIt was the dagger, all right,” Orelia said. “Hold on, I’ll show you.”
    She got up and opened the side door. An older man wearing the black uniform of the City Guards entered the room, carrying a bundle wrapped in densely woven canvas. The officer behind Montborne moved forward, tense and alert.
    Terricel stared at the Guard’s face, at the same time fascinated and repulsed. One eye socket was little more than a pleated mass of scars that ran diagonally upward, slashing through the eyebrow and dividing it with a shiny gap, then continuing downward through the substance of the cheek in a deeply puckered chasm. The socket itself was hollow, the flesh twisted into a knot.
    Terricel had never seen a deformity like that before. In his junior-level courses, he knew a student who’d had a leg amputated because of bone cancer, but the wooden prosthesis was always covered by his clothing.
    Why doesn’t he do something about that eye — get a glass one or have the scars fixed? He could at least cover it...
    Wearing gloves of supple black leather, the weapons specialist laid the bundle in the center of the table and slowly unwrapped it.
    â€œAh!” Cherida cried, and Montborne leaned forward, his indrawn breath a hiss.
    In the center of the cloth lay a dagger. Like most weapons, it used a minimal amount of metal. The guards, handle, and reinforcing strips were carved bone. The pointed tip and ribs running the blade’s length were pig-steel of the type originally made in Laurea and then re-worked in the cruder norther smithies. The northers were said to be expert at assassination and sneak attacks on enemy camps, slipping their narrow blades beneath a victim’s ribs in a quick, silent thrust to the heart.
    Terricel’s mouth went dry. For a terrible moment, the rest of the room faded. Nothing mattered, nothing existed except the dagger. This thing killed Pateros.
    Orelia’s weapons expert smoothed the folds of the canvas, carefully avoiding touching the blade. The man’s face was grim with concentration. Suddenly Terricel was ashamed of his own lack of compassion.
    He must have fought the northers, perhaps at Brassaford. He lost an eye to keep us safe.
    â€œSuperficially,” the man said, “this appears to be an ordinary norther weapon, adorned here and here,” he indicated the hilt and guards, again avoiding any direct contact with them, “with their distinctive motifs. However, closer examination of the base of the hilt has revealed something new in their arsenal. If you will observe the pin hidden there, undetectable to casual inspection...”
    He pressed the pin and a sliver of ornamented metal slid aside to reveal a tiny cup lined with a gummy residue. His mouth drew downward at the corners, except for where the scar twisted his lip.
    â€œWe have also discovered, by virtue of magnified examination, a minute tube leading from this reservoir to an opening in the tip of the dagger.”
    â€œPoison,” Cherida said, nodding. She gestured toward it, and Terricel saw that her hand trembled. “The dagger administers a poison so deadly that only a small amount is needed. It must be brought down to the tip by capillary motion, like the fang system of a venomous snake.
    â€œI want a sample of that residue sent to my labs right away,” she said. “If there are traces of it in Pateros’s tissues, I’ll find them, even if I have to thin-section his entire central nervous system. My guess, by the speed of its action, is we’re looking for a neurotoxin.”
    â€œI will see that it’s done,” said Orelia.
    The weapons specialist rewrapped the dagger and carried it from the room.
    â€œI knew it would come to this,” Montborne said grimly. “Those gaea-priests have kept our hands tied year after year, while the northers are free to develop that!