Dagger Magic

He glanced surreptitiously at his fellow observers to see how they were bearing up. Not unexpectedly, Adam's composure surpassed even the professional detachment evidenced by his medical colleagues, a compassion akin to reverence stirring his patrician features. Peregrine had the feeling that nothing, not even this clinical butchery, could make his superior lose sight of Scanlan as a once-living being, possessed of an immortal soul that would survive such violation of the earthly temple it had once occupied.

By contrast, the two surgeons seemed more casual, sometimes even flippant, though Peregrine soon realized that their apparent breeziness masked righteous dismay for the fate of this young man cut down so untimely. McLeod was stoically impassive, as was his heavyset counterpart from Strathclyde; Ryan looked a little queasy but determined to stick it out. When Macaulay fired up a miniature electric saw, and the stench of fragmented bone joined the other smells of the post-mortem theatre, Murray chose that moment to hurriedly excuse himself, decidedly green around the gills.

Looking away, Peregrine caught sight of his own face mirrored off various metallic surfaces round the room - pasty white, the eyes slightly hollowed behind their wire-rimmed spectacles, lips grimly set. To distract himself and regain some perspective, he turned to a fresh page in his sketch pad, shifting position as the two surgeons turned their subject onto his stomach to inspect the back wound. Taking a firmer grip on his pencil, Peregrine forced himself to resume sketching, not looking at the long probe that Dr. Gow inserted into the wound, testing the limits of the laceration, searching for anything left behind.

"Point of entry is between the eighth and ninth ribs, approximately eight centimeters to the left of midline; depth of the wound is approximately - eighteen centimeters…."

Peregrine's sketches from this angle began as anatomical studies like the first ones, though he was uncomfortably aware of the closer connection of death with the wound Dr. Gow was examining. By concentrating on details of contour and musculature he was able to regain some much-needed objectivity, but very shortly his perceptions began spontaneously to shift, mediating between levels of awareness. Almost before he was aware of what he was doing, he found himself drawing on the astral.

His physical eyesight grew blurred; the sounds all around receded. This blunting of his external faculties signalled the imminent release of his inner vision, insulating him from his earlier horror. Like a hawk upheld by the wind, he ascended out of himself to hover serenely within the stillness of the Inner Planes.

Increasingly detached, he watched as a few bold strokes defined the emergent image of the dead man suspended head-downward in midair, as if he were falling. Protruding from his back was the ornate hilt of a strange, clumsy-looking dagger.

Squinting at the body, Peregrine let his deep sight focus on the weapon, turning to another page. At once a more detailed sketch began to take shape beneath his pencil - first, a triangular cross section of the blade, with the slight indentations of fullers, or blood grooves; then a detail of the hilt attached to the blade embedded in the dead man's back - an intricately modelled collage of demonic faces, hideously contorted in a variety of snarls and leers.

He saw it clearly in his mind's eye; his hand obeyed him, sketching its details. But as he bent to the fine detailing, he became simultaneously aware of a growing strain on the silver cord holding body and soul together. With a final stroke to the sketch, he allowed the re-fusion, briefly closing his eyes against the now-familiar pang of disorientation and vertigo. Swaying slightly, he pulled himself up and realized that Somerville and Dr. Macaulay were directing curious glances his way.

Hastily he flipped over to another blank page to hide the dagger drawing and began another quick sketch. As he did so, he caught a look of unspoken inquiry from Adam, but his only response was a fleeting grin and a small shrug. He had Seen something, all right; but determining the significance of what he had Seen would have to wait until he and Adam and McLeod had a chance to review his drawings together in private.

Half an hour later it was all over. The official verdict handed down by the two pathologists was that Michael Scan-Ian had died from massive internal hemorrhage as a result of a stab wound to the back. Beyond this primary fact, however, many of the other aspects of the case remained open to speculation. As they gathered in the coffee room afterwards, shed of their surgical scrubs, Somerville and his medical colleagues were engaged in a debate on the possible identity of the murder weapon.