Death by Silver Read Free Page A

ingratiate himself that way. There were some of his clients who were pleased by the hoariest traditional methods, the bloodier and more gruesome the better, but he doubted Nevett was one of them.
    Instead he ran through a number of sigils that should have reacted with “blood,” with no result. He tipped the platter up so that its reflected light played across the wall, and tried “yourself”; in combination with any enchantment relying on “name,” it should have reflected back the sigil “name” in response, at least as a momentary flicker of light.
    Say your name, he remembered the prefects demanding in school, to which the answer was properly name, sir, not actually saying your name, unless you were asked “What are you called?” Julian had pointed out in scathing tones at one point that that particular piece of the Canon had clearly once been “Name yourself,” and that generations of Toms’ students apparently hadn’t been clever enough to repair someone’s long-ago slip of the tongue.
    As Ned recalled, he’d pointed it out in the presence of one of the school prefects, and been sorry for it afterwards, as much as Julian was ever sorry for such things. Ned had pointed out that generations of Toms’ students probably hadn’t felt it worth being beaten to contradict Senior Men about school tradition, but Julian hadn’t seemed satisfied with that answer.
    He brought himself back to the present with an effort, startled and annoyed by how easily distracted he was at the moment by memories of school days. He’d put away boyhood feuds long ago, or at least so he would have said, and it irritated him that having dealings with Victor Nevett even second-hand seemed to be putting his every nerve on edge.
    He ran through the rest of the standard tests for curses proper, and then set himself to the more tedious task of testing to see if any of the individual pieces were enchanted in any troublesome way. For that he did bring out pencil and paper, neatly and quickly constructing Agrippa’s squares through the square of the Moon, which was nine by nine and required careful penmanship to fit in its place on the page.
    It was a couple of hours of tedious work, and Nevett eventually grew bored enough to leave him to it, which was welcome. He reached the end of the tests for enchantments constructed by the Moon without a single speck of evidence that there was anything wrong with the silver in front of him at all. He’d found nothing more sinister than a couple of pieces glamored not to tarnish, a springless silver clock that relied on magic to tell the time, and one shoddy jam pot with a lid that snapped itself shut hard enough to pinch unwary fingers when the spoon was withdrawn.
    “There’s no sign of a curse as such,” he said the next time he looked up to see Nevett hovering in the doorway. As he suspected, the man looked a bit disappointed. A family curse on the silver was the sort of affliction suffered by the best families, and might have gone some distance to discourage burglars as well. “However, to be entirely certain that there aren’t any lingering malevolent influences, I think it’s best to perform a cleansing on the silver.”
    “Very well,” Nevett said, looking a little brighter. “None of that nonsense about burying it in the garden, though, with someone having to guard it night and day.”
    “No, that’s entirely unnecessary nowadays,” Ned said. It hadn’t been strictly necessary in his predecessor’s time either, but clients then had liked considerably more theater, and it had been a way of getting them to let their things alone while slow-working cleansings took effect. He took advantage of his pencil sketches to construct the cleansing that he intended to use on the square of the Moon, better and more effective for the purpose if more complex.
    He traced the sigils once he’d worked them out, a cleansing extending to all pieces of silver under the roof or owned by anyone who