“Perhaps you might show me your notes on Ognyan Spitignov’s inscription,” I suggested. The longer I spent in the basement with the trapped mermaids, the more uneasy I felt. If the nameless master mage had kept some kind of man-eating monsters trapped in his basement, I could have felt their imprisonment and torment somehow justified, but these were mere mermaids. Harmless, except perhaps in the way that an attractive woman is a danger through distraction; Johann had been so entranced by their appearance that he was still silently staring at them.

  “You think you have the strength for his approach, Magnificat?” The nameless master gave me a measuring look, covering his right eye. “Perhaps you do.”

  Johann leaned over the edge of the tub, reaching out a hand in the direction of one of the little mermaids, turning as he did so to look at the nameless master.

  The nameless master yanked at Johann’s sleeve, pulling his hand away. “Minificat! Be more careful and watch yourself; you could lose a finger… They may be small, but they are just as dangerous as the larger ones.”

  Flinching away from the master’s shout as dramatically as Johann, the two petite fish-women huddled together at the far edge of the tub, their eyes large and declaring their innocence. For a long moment, there was silence.

  “I suppose I am supposed to be a teacher,” the nameless master said thoughtfully, looking back at me and at Johann. “And your education has already been irregular. If it accomplishes little else, trying to explain a masterwork will help me learn what it is that you know—and what gaps lie in the irregularly accumulated snowball of your knowledge. First, what do you know of athames?”

  “A magical blade,” I said, thinking back to a book I had read. “From artavus, a pen for the trimming of quills, either being derived from such as a scholar’s convenience in rites involving cutting, severing, or drawing of blood or perhaps being concealed as such by sages not wishing to expose themselves as learned magicians.”

  Johann cocked his head to the side.

  The nameless master nodded. “Word for word out of the definition in Zigadenus’s guide to the Latinate Solomonic texts. You are lucky to have found a copy, especially since you are not an anointed priest or an avowed monk. But what does it mean? Have you used an athame? Is any magical blade an athame?”

  Johann nodded and then hesitated, not wanting to draw the attention of the erratic man by answering the question, staring instead at me as if willing me to speak; but I hesitated, unsure how to answer.

  I had, long ago, used a penknife in a mock ritual concocted to fool soldiers into thinking they had sworn a binding blood oath of loyalty to me. I had also witnessed closely a similar ritual involving Gulben signing a contract in blood, though the blood had been supplied by Katya’s enchanted wolf-mark sword in that case. “I don’t think I have used one,” I said, though I suddenly felt unsure. Perhaps, unwittingly, I had. “Though I may have seen one used. And… surely any magical blade will serve as an athame if it is used in a blood ritual?”

  The nameless master’s eyes flickered to the crow’s head of the pommel of my bronze sword, jammed in a scabbard that had been remade to accommodate the kinked curve of the blade. “I do not think you would succeed with your sword,” he said. “Please do not test it as such on either of my specimens—I have another trap set out, but I will be surprised if I catch another triad so soon. They are quite skilled at liberating one another from confinement if the trap is less than perfect.”

  His warning complete, he turned sharply on his heel and started climbing up the stairs, one slow step at a time, his progress back up to the study slowed by a lecture muttered under his breath, barely better than an incoherent string of fragmentary sentences, some of which he repeated, or repeated in minor variation. After we had gotten back to his study and he had sat down at the desk, he straightened his back, cleared his throat three times, and then started over with the first sentence he had muttered.

  “There are four distinct types of athames: Focus athames, unpowered or ritual athames, athames of convenience, and athames of alternative function.”

  The repetition of his stairway lecture was not exact; a few sentences had been left incomplete or repeated the first time, and the second time, he not only spoke more loudly, but had smoothed away the gaps and enunciated more clearly. Then he got past where he had been and began to interrupt and repeat himself again, starting with a section on the metals used for blades, though he did not drop the volume back to the soft mutter he had started with.

  “The substance of silver—no, I should start with iron, or perhaps at the other end with orichalcum—the substance of silver is generally regarded as ideal for an unpowered athame because silver represents purity. Impurity becomes tarnish, which may be purified, leaving the metal without memory. But sometimes, memory of repetition can be valuable, if the athame is to be used for the same ritual frequently. I have met one Lithuanian master of the art who would never give up his iron athame, and iron clings to blood, as blood clings like to like, so if the athame is to be used for the same ritual frequently, it may be better that it is not silver, or silver bearing its memory in tarnish, for impurity in silver becomes tarnish, which is memory if it is not purified.”

  For the reader’s sake, I will not repeat a lecture word for word whose general contents may evidently be obtained readily from any master of magic, especially given the remarkable metallurgical diversity he felt required to discuss and the disorganized nature of the latter part of the lecture; I will simply note that even after the lecture had ended with a discussion of twenty-seven different metals, I wasn’t quite sure why my antique bronze sword was exceptionally unsuitable to be an athame of convenience. It was old, and bronze carries memories strongly, but that was a matter of convenience rather than disaster. It was not as if the blade was some kind of living weapon that drank blood to fuel its own magic or any of the other exotic examples that he brought up when he was discussing athames of alternative function.

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  I will say that I had not heard of “double-silver” before; evidently, it is a metal of peculiar alchemical construction and has a marked tendency to generate alchemical flame when its natural coating is scraped off, such as when cutting or striking a hard material, and Master Stanislav, the alchemist I had previously seen shouting after a student, had either acquired or produced a sample of it several years previously.

  At the end of the lengthy lecture on athames, the nameless master brought out his own silver knife as a prop. Then he also brought out the raggedly carved section of mermaid skin, followed by a piece of parchment of similar size on which runes had been drawn, traced first in chalk and then inked over for the sake of legibility and permanence. The silver blade had a splotch of dried blood on it; when I pointed that out, he cleaned it by licking it and then rubbing vigorously with the dark sleeve of his robe.

  “This is the inscription that Ognyan carved on the beast’s back,” the nameless master said, turning over an envelope in his hands. “He was working one-handed while grappling the monster, which is why the sizing is irregular and some of the strokes are off. His original message is in a language long forgotten, which Ognyan got from some mysterious mentor; there is a theory that words spoken for mundane purposes carry less power and that some languages are naturally more suitable for magic. Fortunately, he provided me with the meaning of the incantation.”

  I peered down at the parchment more closely, suddenly realizing that the offered translation must be an artistic recreation in the style of the sloppy strokes of the Butcher of Belz. The man who had stitched together a mermaid using parts of a beluga sturgeon and a human cadaver would decide to make his translation from some unknown language to the well-known language of the old rulers of Cimmeria from a thousand years ago, in the old script they had used before the arrival of the Khazars and Slavs, making a show out of producing artistically distressed strokes in spite of the translation.

  The only part that would be the same as the original inscription would be Ognyan’s name itself at the bottom, which would be the same—and since his name was the whole final line of the inscription, that part did not need to be translated. That the strokes of the bottom half of Ognyan’s name in the chalked and inked parchment matched the ragged top edge of the mermaid hide meant merely Ognyan had written in his secret language using that familiar, if no longer commonly used, alphabet.

  “This woman of the sea is linked in mind as she is in blood with Ognyan Spitignov,” I read aloud, translating the inscription into Slavonic so that Johann would also understand. (He had once confessed to me with perverse pride that he knew seven languages—he had listed them all off, just Gothic, Slavonic, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Magyar. How a man could make his whole identity out of being a student in such a cosmopolitan city as Vindobona while learning so few languages baffled me, but it would have been rude to leave Johann in the dark about the inscription’s meaning.)

  In response to my statement, the nameless master frowned, looking at the folded paper between his fingers and then back at me. Then he changed the subject entirely. “You are very subtle with your divinations, for all that you do not mask your aura in the slightest. I did not detect any active use of magic when you looked into the envelope; you must be the devil himself at a card table.”

  “He is,” Johann said. “I have seen him play at cards; he cheats as much as Vitold, but you can never catch him at it. Sometimes Vitold slips up.”

  “I do not cheat at cards,” I replied hotly, gripped by a sudden curiosity about the contents of the envelope.

  The envelope with its unknown contents went back into a desk drawer, and the nameless master raised his hands up, having decided not to teach me whatever lesson he had intended to teach next. “Magnificat, all I meant is that you could cheat easily if you liked. Now, Minificat, do you understand the danger of the incantation that the brilliant Ognyan used to capture the mermaid and why I would not risk it?”

  A silence fell as the nameless master stared at Johann, who chewed his lip in thought. “Could the mermaid command your mind?”

  The nameless master nodded. “What the Butcher of Belz did was simple—he used sympathy, exchange, and the power of naming to his will and the beast’s by blood rite. And say what you will about the man; his force of will is—was—immense.”

  Editor’s note: Few scholarly texts available in Loegrian discuss more than six or seven different metals for use in athames. Either the nameless master at Xarakel was particularly interested in the subject, or the study of athames is particularly advanced within the Golden Empire.

  Translator’s note: The term used by Mikolai here, dubleseolfor, has been rendered here as “double silver” into the closest known Frisian cognates of dubel and silfr. The metal described may have some other name among Loegrian alchemists, but I was unable to identify a likely candidate. In spite of the fire-generating property he describes, Mikolai frequently uses terms other than “double silver” to describe phoenix stones and their composition, which are generally crystalline in any event. As the educated reader is doubtless aware, the reports of metal cubes put in place of phoenix stones late in the Century War are now known to have been generated by confusion over an experimental practice by certain French gunsmiths of placing a metal cap over a phoenix stone in order to moderate the hammer’s strike, the theory being to generate a more consistent flux from a potentially variable impact.