Chapter XL (40)- The Dagger's Enchantments

The water beneath the boardwalk glowed an eerie green as they crossed it. Kizu wanted to stop to examine it, and maybe take a couple samples for his own research, but Basil pulled him along towards the common room hut. The cleaning supplies had already started scrubbing away at every exposed surface. Dodging around a swaying mop, Kizu wondered why he had never seen anything like this in his own dormitory at night.

They both entered the painting and arrived back in the academy’s hallway. Kizu let out a sigh of relief.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea what the academy would do with all of my sister’s things?” Kizu asked, dropping his illusion while they walked.

“Probably toss it,” Basil said nonchalantly. “But I guess if there was anything useful, they might have put it in storage. If you can use illusions to trick the painting into letting you into the girls’ dorms, you could probably disguise yourself as a James to get into the storage rooms.”

The last thing Kizu wanted at the moment was to engage in another infiltration mission. But he filed the info away. It was something to keep in mind.

Instead of going to bed when they made it back to their dorm, Kizu collected Mort and decided to go on a walk around the academy grounds. The movement helped him sort his thoughts. And he hoped it might loosen up his cramped leg.

Not for the first time, he wished there were better trees for climbing at the academy. Not only did most of the trees on campus look scrawny and weak, they’d all had their lower branches pruned. He missed the thick canopies and abundance of vines in the Hon Basin. The trees at the academy looked too… manicured. Artificial, almost.

Twice, he almost ran into a James patrolling the grounds. Both times, he managed to duck out of sight just in time. After the second encounter, he found himself redirected to a familiar courtyard. The one where he had discovered the box full of enchanted objects.

Mort leapt off his shoulder and began dashing in and out of the shrubs.

The necklace was incredibly useful, Kizu reflected as he watched Mort pulling up some flowerbeds. He wondered what he could accomplish if he managed to figure out how to use all three items. He tried to imagine what you could accomplish with an enchantment on a book. Get it to read the text to you? Maybe produce illusionary images for immersion? That seemed like a lot of work to enchant page by page, for very little gain. But then again, Aoi’s diary had been enchanted to contain extra pages and prevent others from reading it. Maybe it was something like that. Now that he thought about it, maybe that was why the necklace had been buried alongside it. If it had worked for the diary, maybe it would allow him to bypass the book’s enchantments, too. Perhaps it was meant only to be read by the wearer of the necklace. Actually, the more he considered it, the more useful an enchanted tome could be. It could contain a massive wealth of information. Or it could even be designed as a gate entrance. Nobody said it had to involve words. That was a limitation he was just assuming.

Mort hummed from under a bush. Kizu walked over to see what he wanted. He blinked. The dirt had been dug up recently, and whoever had done it hadn’t bothered to replace it. Heaps of soil stood beside a crater in the flowerbeds. Kizu glanced around. It wasn’t exactly where he’d dug up the box, but it was close. Close enough that it was unlikely to be a coincidence. Someone had come looking for what he had found buried here.

“Come on, Mort,” Kizu said, a shiver running up his spine. “We’re going back to our dorm.”

Thankfully, despite being significantly less careful on his return, he encountered no one on the way back.

He opened the door of his bedroom and immediately went to the box hidden under his bed.

It wasn’t there.

He checked all around, crawling fully under the bed and sweeping the area with his arms. He found stray articles of clothing, but nothing else.

“What are you doing squirming around under your bed?” Basil asked. “Are you stuck?”

“No!” Kizu said. Not a complete lie, though it was admittedly a very tight space. “I had a wooden box under here, and I can’t find it.”

“Oh, that? I moved it.”

Kizu scrambled out from under the bed, slamming his head on the wooden frame in his haste.

“You what?” he demanded, nursing the new lump.

“Moved it over there.” Basil pointed to the corner of the room. “I needed something to stack this new batch of clothing I just finished. I didn’t want it on the ground, but I haven’t cleared out a space to hang it up yet.”

Kizu reached under the pile of clothes and yanked out the buried box. He opened it. Both the dagger and the book were there, untouched. He let out a sigh of relief.

“What’s that?” Basil asked. “A book? Wait, a hidden book under your bed… don’t tell me-”

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“They’re enchanted objects I found buried in a courtyard outside,” Kizu interrupted. He knew no good would come from Basil finishing that speculation. His imagination would likely make it more interesting than the actual truth. “I don’t know what they do.”

“What’s the book about?” Basil asked, obviously still hopeful.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to figure out the enchantments and it’s too dangerous to just open.”

“It’s too dangerous to open a book.” Basil stared at him flatly.

“It could be cursed. For all I know, it might suck me into a pocket dimension prison.”

Basil crossed the room and picked up the book before Kizu could protest, flipping it open and sifting through its pages. He glanced up.

“It’s just a book of maps. Has some stuff scribbled in the footnotes, but that’s it. Talk about disappointing.”

A book of maps? Kizu carefully took the book from Basil and opened it to a random page. It wasn’t written in the Universal Script, but Kizu recognized the language. Primordial. He groaned. Why couldn’t anything just be simple?

“What about the dagger?” Basil asked. While Kizu had been distracted by the book, the changeling had snatched it up and was holding it up to the lamplight.

“Well, seeing as you haven’t fallen into a murderous bloodrage, I imagine the enchantment must kick in after you cut something.” Kizu grabbed for it, but Basil pulled back a bit, causing Kizu’s palm to lightly brush up against the blade. Just enough to cut.

A line of blood trickled down his palm. Kizu immediately snatched a piece of cloth from the ground and pushed it with a thumb against the cut to stop the bleeding.

“Whoops. My bad.”

Kizu glared at him. He didn’t feel any different, thankfully. So, at the very least the knife wasn’t imbued with magic that froze someone’s bloodstream or lit them on fire. The only thing he felt was extreme irritation with Basil.

“That’s probably normal.”

Kizu’s eyes widened, and he looked around for the source of the new voice.

“I didn’t get much of a sip there, mind reinserting me? Just for a minute. Please?”

“Basil,” Kizu said. “Was that you?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry I sliced you. I already apologized, what more do you want?”

“Listen,” the voice said. “I’ll do anything you want. Poltergeist driving you bonkers? No problem. Gnome stole your socks? Consider it vanquished. Giant centipede cramping your style? Well…actually, you’re on your own with that one. I can’t stand bugs. Not that I can do much standing at the moment, if you catch my drift. I swear, centipedes don’t know how good they have it. I’d kill for just one fiftieth the number of legs they have. Selfish bastards.”

Kizu stared at the dagger in Basil’s hand. The hilt’s pommel, once a dull black steel, now had a small yellow eye protruding from it. It winked at Kizu. Or maybe it just blinked. Hard to say, when it only had one eye.

“Basil,” Kizu said cautiously. “Give me that dagger.”

Basil handed it over with exasperated, over the top dramatics. He obviously hadn’t noticed the eye yet.

“Yes. Now stab him,” the dagger said. “Just lunge forward and thrust. It’s easy. Like three movements total. Five if you’re really bad at it.”

“He doesn’t have blood,” Kizu informed the dagger.

“Oh.”

“Who doesn’t have blood?” Basil asked, confused. “The dagger? Good, I was worried I pricked you. Have you named him already? I’ve always wanted to name a sword. Something elegant, with flair.”

“My name is Sojan!” the dagger boomed. “I am the most powerful weapon in all of creation! And the wisest. And the smartest. And the most dashing. I have a knack for poetry, too.”

“You can’t hear it?” Kizu asked Basil. He held up the knife, showing the eye in its pommel.

“No?”

“It says its name is Sojan.”

“It talks?”

“Actually,” the dagger interrupted, “I channel thoughts directly into your mind. But I could talk. You just need to stab someone first. Not him, obviously. Someone with blood.”

“I’m not stabbing anyone,” Kizu told the knife.

“You’re the most boring human I’ve ever met.”

“You should ask it about your book,” Basil suggested.

“Oh, that thing?” the dagger said contemptuously. “It’s just a map of the Labyrinth. Nothing half as valuable as my vast collection of dashing abilities.”

“Which are?” Kizu prompted it.

“You know,” Basil said. “I really hate being left out of a conversation. Especially when half of it is coming from a knife that looks like it was designed to summon eldritch gods.”

“Oh! I like him,” the dagger said. “I do look rather good, don’t I? But I’ve definitely had my fill of beauty sleep. I’m starving. How about we go stab someone real quick?”

“How long were you asleep for?”

“How should I know? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s kind of difficult to keep track of time when you’re asleep. I mean, I’m magic and magnificent, don’t misunderstand, but I’m not magic in that way. You should stab someone. Preferably in the back.”

Mort hopped onto Kizu’s shoulder, peering down at the knife.

“A monkey?” the dagger groaned. “You know what, I’m desperate. I’ll take it. Please just stab something.”

“That’s my familiar.”

“Even better!”

As if sensing the blade’s intentions, Mort hopped away from it and scampered up into his nest in the rafters.

“Damn. How high can you jump? I don’t like being thrown, but I’m not saying that option is completely off the table.”

“It doesn’t seem fair that you get to hear the sentient dagger and I don’t,” Basil complained. “I’m the one that cut you.”

“Trust me,” Kizu told him. “You’re better off.”

Instead of quipping back, the dagger yawned in his mind and closed its eye slowly, as though nodding off.

“Ugh. That was fast.”

The dagger’s eye shut.

Once again, it was just a normal dagger. Well, ‘normal’ might be a reach. It still looked like the jagged shard of metal had fallen out of a death knight’s pocket. But it didn’t look overtly magical anymore.

“Well?” Basil said eagerly, “What are you waiting for? Let’s go stab something with it.”

Kizu sighed.