The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [211]
One spell Otho would acknowledge, especially to someone that he liked and trusted; the other he would have hid from his own brother. The first produced in the metal itself an antipathy to the auric vibrations of the elven race, so that the dagger glowed brightly 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 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 favor 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 seaport, 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 seaport and on a sudden whim sold it to another marketplace jeweler, 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 jeweler’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 rading run.
Of course, poor Londalo didn’t realize that in Deverry offering a silver dagger as a gift was a horrible