The Spell of the Black Dagger

CHAPTER 7

Lady Sarai rubbed her temple wearily and tried to listen to what was being said. It had been four years since she had first sat at her father’s left hand and watched him work; now, for the first time, she was in his throne and doing his work herself. She had put it off as long as she could, but someone had to do it, and her father no longer had the strength.

And, she feared, she wasn’t doing it very well. How had her father ever stood up under this constant stream of venality and stupidity?

“...she told me it was her father’s—what am I supposed to do, call in a soothsayer of some kind every time I buy a trinket? How was I supposed to know it was stolen?”

“A trinket?” the gem’s rightful owner burst out angrily. “You call that stone a trinket? My grandfather went all the way to Tazmor to find a diamond that size for my grandmother! You...”

Sarai raised her right hand while the left still massaged her forehead. At the gesture, a guard lowered his spear in the general direction of the victim.

The victim’s shouting stopped abruptly.

For a long moment, the three principals stood in uneasy silence, watching Lady Sarai as she sat in her father’s throne, trying to think.

“All right,” she said, pointing, “you get your diamond back. Right now. Give it to him, somebody. No further compensation, though, because you were stupid to let her near it in the first place. Now, get out of here.”

Another guard handed the robbery victim the pendant; he took it, essayed a quick, unhappy bow in Lady Sarai’s direction, then fled the room, the jewel clutched tight in his hand.

The jeweler began to protest, and even before Sarai raised her hand, the lowered spear moved slightly in his direction.

The thief grinned; her head was down, but Sarai saw the smile all the same. A hot, rough knot of anger grew in her own chest at the sight.

“Straighten her up,” Sarai snapped.

A soldier grabbed the thief’s long braid and yanked her head back; the smile vanished, and she glared at Sarai. Sarai could see her arms flexing, as if she were trying to slip free of the ropes around her wrists.

“Sansha of Smallgate, you said your name was?” Sarai demanded.

The thief couldn’t nod, with her hair pulled back; she struggled for a moment, then said, “That’s right.”

“You spent all the money?”

“That’s right, too.” “It’s hard to believe you could use up that much that fast— eight rounds of gold, was it?”

“I had debts,” Sansha said, tilting her head in a vain attempt to loosen the guard’s grip.

“That’s too bad,” Sarai said, “because now you’ve got another one. You owe this man eight rounds of gold.” She pointed to the jeweler.

“Eleven,” the jeweler protested. “The stone was worth at least eleven!”

“You paid her eight,” Sarai told him. “The stone never belonged to you, only the money you paid her.”

The jeweler subsided unhappily, and Sarai turned her attention back to Sansha.

“You owe him eight rounds,” she said.

Sansha didn’t answer. Sarai had the impression that she would have shrugged, had her hands been free.

“I’m going to buy that debt from him,” Sarai said. “So now you owe me eight rounds of gold.”

“I can’t pay you, either,” Sansha retorted.

“I know,” Sarai said. “So I’ll settle for the five or six bits on the piece that I’ll get by selling you at auction. Somebody give him his money, and then take her down to the dungeon until we can get a slaver to take a look at her.” She waved in dismissal as Sansha’s expression shifted abruptly from defiance to shock.

She watched as the jeweler was led out in the direction of the treasury, and the thief was dragged, struggling and crying, toward the stairs leading down. Then she let out a sigh, and leaned over toward Okko.

“How did I do?” she asked.

He considered that for a moment.

“I think,” he said, “that your father would have lectured the jeweler briefly on his carelessness and might have only promised him the auction proceeds, rather than the full amount of the debt.”

“You’re right,” Sarai admitted. “That’s what I should have done.” She glanced at the door. “It’s too late now, isn’t it? It wouldn’t look right.”

“I’m afraid so,” Okko agreed.

“I wish my father was doing this,” Sarai said. “I hate it.”

Okko didn’t reply, but was clearly thinking that he, too, wished Lord Kalthon were there.

“I hope he’ll be better soon,” Sarai added.

Again, Okko said nothing; again, Sarai knew quite well what he was thinking. He was thinking that Lord Kalthon wasn’t going to get better.

Sarai feared that Okko might be right. She was doing everything she could to prevent it, but still, her father’s illness was growing steadily worse. It really wasn’t fair.

And her brother wasn’t any help—his sickliness was worse lately, too; he coughed all the time, bringing up thick fluid and sometimes blood. And he was too young to serve as Minister of Justice anyway, even if he were healthy; their father should have been around for another twenty years.

She wasn’t supposed to be her father’s heir, though; she was Minister of Investigation, not Minister of Justice! It was completely unfair that she should be stuck here, settling all these stupid arguments, instead of finding some way to cure her father’s illness. Why couldn’t some local magistrate have dealt with Sansha of Smallgate, and all the others like her? So what if the jeweler lived in a different jurisdiction from the gem’s owner?

Okko looked steadily back at her, and she realized she was staring quite rudely at him. She straightened up, then slumped back in the big chair.

For four years now, she had been learning the arts of investigation—with very little guidance, since there were no older, more experienced investigation specialists to aid her. Her assistant, Captain Tikri, was useful in a variety of ways, especially in her attempts to recruit spies, but he knew even less than she did about finding criminals or determining the facts of a puzzling case. Her father had taught her his own methods, but they were very limited—mostly a matter of which magicians to talk to.

Because magic could do so much in answering riddles and untangling puzzles, she had spent most of her time studying magic—in theory, never in practice. She knew the names of a hundred spells, but had never worked a one; she knew the names of a score of gods and as many demons, and had never summoned any of them; she knew the nature of a warlock’s talents, but had not a trace of them herself.

She had studied the working of the various spells of contagion and clairvoyance and whatever else had been used in the solving of crimes and mysteries. She knew how, with the appropriate spells, the merest traces of blood or hair could be linked to their owners; she knew which questions the gods would answer when summoned, and what the souls of the dead were likely to know-it was really rather surprising how many murder victims had no idea how they had died. She knew how warding spells worked, how locks both magical and mundane operated, and how gems could be appraised and identified.

And with all this knowledge, she couldn’t do a thing for her father or brother.

It was, of course, the fault of the Wizards’ Guild.

“Shall we bring in the next case, my lady?” Chanden, the bailiff, asked quietly.

Sarai blinked. She hadn’t even noticed him approaching the throne. “The next?”

“Yes, my lady. Tenneth Tolnor’s son claims he was cheated by the wizard Dagon of Aldagmor.”

Cheated by wizards. Her mouth twisted. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. That’s all for today.”

“My lady?” Sarai knew the polite question was a protest, that she was shirking her duties—no, shirking her father’s duties, not her own—but she didn’t care. She needed to stop. She set her jaw.

“Perhaps a short recess, my lady?”

“All right,” she said, giving in. “Half an hour, at least. T need that long. I need it, Chanden.”

“Yes, my lady.” He straightened and turned to face the little knot of people waiting at the lower end of the room—the crooked room, Sarai realized, and a crooked grin twisted her lip. The justice chamber itself was crooked—why hadn’t she realized that years ago?

It all depended on magic, after all. They used magicians to tell who was telling the truth and who was lying, to determine what had actually happened when claims conflicted. But who could tell them if the magicians were lying? “Lady Sarai, Acting Minister of Justice for Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, hereby declares that further judgments shall be postponed one half hour,” Chanden announced loudly. “Clear the room, please.”

Sarai ignored the murmurs and did not wait for the room to empty; she slipped out the back door as quickly as she could and headed down the passageway toward the southeast wing, where her family’s rooms were.

It was all those wizards, she thought, the Guild and its stupid rules. If her father were a wealthy commoner, they could buy a healing spell—but because he was a member of the nobility, because he held a post in the government, the Wizards’ Guild forbade the use of magic to prolong his life.

And it didn’t matter whether the spell was a simple disinfectant or perfect immortality—anything that prolonged life, in any degree, was forbidden to the nobility, as far as wizards were concerned.

What’s more, the Wizards’ Guild actively discouraged other magicians from healing the nobility, as well. Sarai had had to argue to get other magicians even to look at her father.

Not that it had done much good.

In fact, it was really quite startling how little worthwhile healing magic was out there. As she reached the first flight of steps up, Sarai began counting off the different schools of magic and how they had failed her.

Demonology was inherently destructive; it was no great surprise that demons couldn’t heal. The demonologists had all agreed on that.

The sorcerers swore that with the right artifacts, they could heal diseases, even the sort of slow, lingering weakness mat was gradually killing Lord Kalthon, or the illness of the lungs that was crippling his son—but the right artifacts could no longer be found. None existed in Ethshar of the Sands.

Sarai had paid a large fee to have a search begun throughout all the World, from the wastes of Kerroa to the Empire of Vond, but so far nothing had come of it, and she doubted anything ever would.

The warlocks were apologetic, but couldn’t work on anything that small. Patching up an opened vein, repairing a ruptured heart, welding a broken bone—those warlockry could at least attempt, though success was not always certain. But whatever was wrong with her father, they said, attacked the individual nerves, operating on a scale they could not perceive, and therefore could not affect.

Witchcraft held out some promise at first; the half-dozen witches Sarai had summoned to the palace had tried, at least. They had fed father and son strength, drawing it from their own bodies—but to no avail. When the spell was broken, the weakness returned within hours. Witchcraft could, at great cost to the witch, put the elder Kalthon back on his feet for a day or two, but could do nothing permanent.

“His own body has given up,” the eldest, Shirith of Ethshar, explained. “We can’t heal it without its help.”

But all of those Sarai had tried only when she became desperate. She had begun with the theurgists—after all, didn’t everyone pray to the gods for good health? She reached the second floor and started up the next flight. Okko had refused to handle the job—although he acknowledged that he was a top-ranked theurgist, a high priest, in fact; his specialties were truth and information. Healing was not his province. He had instead recommended her to Anna the Elder. Anna had summoned gods, had spoken with them, and had reported back to Kalthon and Sarai.

“We know of three gods of health and healing,” Anna had explained. “There are the siblings Blusheld and Blukros and their father, Mekdor. Blusheld involves herself only with the maintenance of health and thus will not concern herself with this case—it’s too late to ask her aid. Mekdor concerns himself with great wounds and catastrophes, with plagues and epidemics; anything as slow as this wasting disease, attacking only one or two people, is beneath his notice. Thus, this is clearly the province of Blukros.”

At that point Anna had hesitated, and Lord Kalthon had tried to save him the embarrassment of explaining, saying that he understood.

Sarai would have none of it; she had demanded that Anna summon Blukros and beseech him to heal her father.

“No,” Kalthon had said, “he can’t. Not on my behalf.” “Why nor?” Sarai had demanded.

“Because seven years ago, after having summoned him to help your mother, I offended the god Blukros,” Kalthon had explained. “I refused him a silver coin I had promised, and he forever withdrew his protection from me, and from my family.” Sarai had stared at her father and demanded, “But why?” “Because I was angry—your mother had died.” And so, because of her father’s long-ago pique, there was no help to be had from the gods. Anna had tried, and he had promised to attempt to call upon Luzro, god of the dead, to see if, once dead, Kalthon could be restored to life—but nothing had come of it.

So theurgy was no help. And that left wizardry.

And the wizards had healing spells and youth spells and strength spells; they had transformation spells, and if all else failed they could transform Kalthon to some other, healthier form.

But they wouldn’t.

She reached the top of the stairs and stamped down the corridor. They wouldn’t, because the Wizards’ Guild forbade it, and to oppose the will of the Guild was to die. And the Guild forbade it because they refused to meddle in politics. It was strictly forbidden for any wizard to be a member of the nobility in his or her own right; a century ago, they had even been forbidden to marry into the nobility, but that rule had been relaxed. They could hold office only if the office was one that required a magician—a post such as Okko’s, for example. No wizard could kill a king in the Small Kingdoms, or a baron in Sardiron, or an overlord or a minister or any other high official of the Hegemony, save in self-defense or to enforce Guild rules; the direct heirs of the nobility were similarly off-limits. Wizards were forbidden to use any magical compulsion on any official above the rank of lieutenant in the city guard without written consent from three Guildniasters. And anyone they could not kill, they were forbidden to heal, as well. “That’s stupid,” Sarai had said.

Algarin of Longwall, her father’s chief wizardry consultant, had turned up an empty palm. “It’s the Guild law,” he said. “Why?” Algarin had had no answer, and Sarai had demanded to see a more highly placed wizard, so it was the city’s senior Guild-master, Serem the Wise, who finally explained it.

“Magic, Lady Sarai,” the old man had said, “is power, but of a different sort than the power you and your father wield.”

“I can see that for myself,” Sarai had snapped in reply.

“And power,” Serem had continued, untroubled by her interruption, “must be kept in balance. If it is not, the World will be plunged into chaos.”

“Says who?”

“It’s self-evident,” Serem had replied, with mild surprise. “Imagine, if you will, that a wizard were to become overlord of Ethshar of the Sands.”

Sarai had glowered at him, and Serem had revised his suggestion. “Suppose,” he said, “that Lord Ederd the Heir had apprenticed to a wizard in his youth. Suppose that he decided he was tired of waiting for his father to die and cast a spell that slew the overlord.”

“Then he’d be guilty of treason, and he would be executed,” Sarai had replied. “That’s easy enough. My father would see to it.”

“But how?” Serem had asked. “Suppose this evil wizard were to use his spells to guard himself, and you could not appeal to the Wizards’ Guild, because there are, in our hypothetical case, no Guild rules forbidding his actions, no matter what other laws he may have broken.”

“There aren’t any Guild rules requiring that you wizards obey the laws?”

Serem had hesitated before answering, his first hesitation, but then admitted that there were no such rules.

Sarai had insisted that a rule requiring wizards to obey the same laws as ordinary people would serve just as well as this stupid rule about keeping out of polities, and Serem had then tried to convince her that allowing kings and ministers to live for centuries, as would inevitably happen if the rules were changed, would be a bad thing.

Sarai had not accepted that.

The argument had dragged on for days—sixnights, in fact. In the end, when Sarai refused to be convinced, Serem had simply turned up a palm and said, “My lady, those are the Guild rules, and I have no power to change them.” They were stupid rules, Sarai thought as she opened the door of her father’s bedchamber, and she wanted them changed.

CHAPTER 8

The Drunken Dragon was probably not the most dangerous tavern in the city, Tabaea thought as she gulped down the watery stuff that passed for ale in that establishment, but it was the most dangerous she ever cared to see. Coming here had been a serious mistake.

She had been making a lot of serious mistakes lately.

Oh, not as bad as some, certainly. She hadn’t wound up in front of a magistrate, or tied to a post somewhere for a flogging, or in the hands of the Minister of Justice or his crazy daughter, like poor Sansha. Tabaea had watched the auction that morning, had seen Sansha sold to the proprietor of one of the “specialty” brothels—not the ones in Soldiertown, which generally employed free women and treated them reasonably well, but one of the secretive establishments in Nightside that catered to the more debauched members of the nobility.

Tabaea shuddered. She had heard stories about what went on in places like that. They had to use slaves—free women wouldn’t work there. Tabaea wouldn’t have changed places with Sansha for all the gold in Ethshar.

And it was all because Sansha had stolen the wrong jewel, a diamond pendant that the owner thought was worth enough to justify hiring magicians to recover it.

Tabaea had stolen plenty of wrong jewels in the past few years—but all hers had been wrong in the other direction, had turned out to be worthless chunks of glass or paste, or at best some semiprecious bauble. And even with the best of them, she’d been cheated by the fences and pawnbrokers.

Mistakes, nothing but mistakes.

She had been making mistakes all her life, it seemed. She hadn’t run away as a child, like her brother Tand—and she had heard a rumor that Tand was a pilot on a Small Kingdoms trader now, with a wife and a daughter, successful and respected.

Of course, the rumor might not be true; land might be starving somewhere in the Wall Street Field, or he might be a slave in the dredging crews, or he might be long dead in an alley brawl, or he might be almost anywhere.

But if she had run away...

Well, she hadn’t. She stared into the remaining ale, which was flat and lifeless.

She hadn’t found an apprenticeship, either. She hadn’t even tried. That seemed so stupid, in retrospect.

She had never taken opportunities when they presented themselves. She hadn’t married Wulran of the Gray Eyes when he offered, two years ago, and now he was happily settled down with that silly Lara of Northside and her insipid giggle.

She hadn’t signed up for the city guard when she was sixteen—though they might not have taken her anyway; they took very few women, and she wasn’t really anywhere near big enough.

She hadn’t stolen much of anything from her family, and now her drunken stepfather had spent everything.

She hadn’t stolen anything from Serem the Wise, when she broke into his house all those nights four years ago without getting caught—she had just kept spying on him until he spotted her.

All she had come away with there was the secret of athame-zation, and she hadn’t even done that right! Here she had this wonderful secret that the Wizards’ Guild had guarded for centuries, and all she had to show for it was a stupid black dagger that didn’t do anything an ordinary knife wouldn’t do just as well.

She pulled the dagger from her belt and looked at it. It was black, from pommel to point, and it seemed to stay sharp without sharpening, but otherwise, as far as she could tell, it was completely ordinary.

She knew, had known for years, that she must have made a mistake in the athamezation ritual—another mistake in the long list. She had no idea what the mistake might have been, but something had gone wrong. And when she had tried again, nothing had happened at all. The magic she had felt the first time wasn’t there; she was just going through a bunch of meaningless motions.

Well, Serem had said that a wizard could only perform the spell once. Apparently that applied even when the spell was botched.

She put the knife back in its sheath and gulped down the last of her ale. Then she put the mug down and looked around the taproom again.

The place was definitely unsavory. She had come here because it was cheap, and she was, as usual, down on her luck. She had hoped to find a purse to pick, or a man she wouldn’t mind going home with, but neither one had turned up. The men here were mostly drunkards, or disgusting, or both, and none of them seemed to have fat purses—after all, why would anyone with significant amounts of money be in the Drunken Dragon? And what little cash its patrons did have they watched carefully.

She wasn’t going to find anything useful here.

And that meant that after years of avoiding it, she was going to yield to the inevitable. She would spend the night in Wall Street Field.

There wasn’t anywhere else left. The little stash of stolen money she had accumulated in better days was gone, down to the last iron bit. She couldn’t go back to her mother’s home, not after that last fight, and she had exhausted her credit at every inn in Ethshar. Sleeping in the streets or courtyards would make her fair game for slavers—and she had just seen what had happened to Sansha, so any notion she might have had that slavery could be an acceptable life was gone.

That left the Field.

She sighed and looked out the narrow front window.

The Drunken Dragon stood on Wall Street, facing the Field; a good many of the customers there looked like permanent inhabitants of the Field, in fact. Tabaea guessed that when they could scrape together enough for a drink or a meal, the beggars and runaways and thieves who lived in the Field would come here just because it was close and cheap. They wouldn’t care that the drinks were watered and the food foul, that the floors and walls were filthy, or that the whole place stank; they were used to that.

No one else looked out the window; Tabaea had the view all to herself.

Wall Street itself was about thirty feet wide; the dismal drizzle that had fallen all day had left the hard dirt slick with a thin layer of mud, and a thousand feet had left their marks in that mire, but still, it was mostly clear and unquestionably a street.

On the far side, though, the Field was a maze of ramshackle shelters—huts and lean-tos and tents, most of them brown with mud. Cooking fires and the lights from Wall Street provided patchy illumination, but most of the details were lost in the gloom of night and rain.

The Wall itself provided a black backdrop, about a hundred and fifty feet away at this particular spot. Tabaea knew that when the stone was dry and the sun was high the Wall was a rather pleasant shade of gray, but just now it looked utterly black and featureless and depressing, considerably darker than the night sky above. The sky, after all, was covered in cloud, and the clouds caught some of the city’s glow. The Wall did not.

Sleeping in the Wall’s shadow was not an appealing prospect, but Tabaea knew she had to sleep somewhere. And she didn’t have so much as a tattered blanket; those inhabitants of the Field with huts and tents were the lucky ones.

But she had nowhere else to go.

She pulled her last copper bit from her pocket and put it on the table to pay her bill; the serving wench spotted it from two tables away and hurried over to collect it. Tabaea rose, nodded in acknowledgment as the coin was claimed, and started toward the door.

Something caught her attention, she wasn’t sure what; had the server gestured, perhaps? She glanced around.

A man was staring at her, a big man in a grubby brown tunic and a kilt that had been red once. The look he was giving her was not one she cared to encourage. As she looked back, he got ponderously to his feet; he was obviously drunk.

Quickly, she turned away and left the tavern.

She didn’t pause in the doorway. The rain was little more than mist now, and she had sold her cloak a sixnight ago, in any case; she had no hood or collar to raise. Besides, any hesitation might have been taken as an invitation by the man in the kilt. She walked directly out the door and down the single step.

The mud was more slippery than she had realized; she had to reach out and catch herself against the wall of the inn, turning half around. Above her the signboard creaked; she glanced up at it, at the faded depiction of a green dragon dancing clumsily on its hind feet, long pointed tongue lolling to one side, a goblet that had once been gold but was now almost black clutched in one foreclaw. The torches that lit it from either side flickered and hissed in the drifting mist.

At least it wasn’t cold, she thought. Setting each foot carefully, she set out across the street. “Hoi, ” someone called when she was nearing the far side.

Tabaea turned, not sure whether the voice was addressed to her or to someone else.

“Hoi, young lady,” the voice continued, slurring the words, “are you headed for the Field?”

“You mean me?” Tabaea asked, still not sure who was speaking.

“Yes, I mean you,” the voice said, and now she located the speaker. It was the drunken man in the kilt, speaking from the mouth of the alley beside the bin.

“What business is it of yours?” Tabaea answered.

“Now, come on, don’t be... don’t be like that.” His consonants were blurred by liquor, but Tabaea had had long practice in understanding the speech of drunkards. “A pretty thing like you can do better than the Wall Street Field!”

“Oh, really?” she demanded. “How?”

“Come with me, and I’ll show you,” he said.

She turned away, her muscles tensing, her hand sliding down to the hilt of the black dagger. She took another step toward the Field.

Then she looked where she was going and stopped.

Before her was a hut built out of an old table propped up on piles of bricks, the sides partially boarded over with broken doors and other scrap, leaving an opening where the tattered remains of a sheet hung. Leaning out of this aperture was an old woman, who was listening with interest to the conversation between Tabaea and the kilted man. The woman’s hair was a rat’s nest of gray; her open mouth displayed no more than half a dozen teeth, and those were black. Her face was as withered and wrinkled as an apple in spring.

Beside the hut was a tent, made of the remnants of a merchant’s awning; stripes that had once been red were now a pale pink, where they weren’t hidden by greenish black mildew. A one-eyed boy of ten or so was watching Tabaea from the open end of the tent. His black hair was so greasy that it stood up in spikes, and Tabaea imagined she could see things crawling in it. In the muddy waste beyond, in the flickering and scattered light, Tabaea could see a dozen other faces, young and old, male and female—and all of them hungry and tired, none of them smiling.

She turned back toward the alley. “What did you have in mind?” she asked.

The man in the kilt smiled. “I have... have a room,” he said, “but it’s a bit lonely, for just me. Care to come take a look?”

Tabaea still hesitated.

There could be little doubt what the man had in mind. If she accepted, she would be whoring, really—and at a terribly low price, at that; she would be exchanging her favors for a room for the night, without even a meal, let alone cash, to accompany it.

But if the alternative was the Wall Street Field—well, she could at least take a look at the room. And maybe she could demand additional payment, or simply take it when the man was asleep. He was bound to sleep heavily after drinking so much.

In fact, he might be too drunk to really bother her, once they got to his room. She marched back across the muddy street, moving as quickly as she could without slipping.

She slowed as she neared the alley and saw the big man’s face again. There wasn’t anything she could point to that was obviously wrong with it, beyond drunkenness—he wasn’t deformed or even particularly ugly, he appeared to still have both eyes and all his teeth—but still, there was something about him that made her very uneasy. His nose was very red, and his eyes very dark.

She brushed at her skirt, as if trying to knock away the mud on the hem, and her hand came away with the black dagger tucked in her sleeve. One advantage of that weapon, she reminded herself, was that it didn’t sparkle in the torchlight.

Then, with a false smile pasted across her lips, she stepped up to the man in the alleyway. “Where’s mis room of yours?” she asked. “I’ll be glad to get in out of this mist.”

“This way,” he said, beckoning her into the alley. She smelled cheap oushka on his breath—lots of cheap oushka. Warily, she followed him into the shadows.

“How far is it?” she asked.

He turned abruptly and caught her in his arms. “Right here,” he said. He drew her to his chest, breathing great clouds of alcohol and decay in her face, and the grease on his tunic stained her own. His hands slid down, trapping her arms against him.

“Let me go!” she demanded.

“Oh, pretty, now, you were... you were happy enough to come with me when you thought I could put a roof over your head,” he said, in a tone that was probably intended as wheedling. “You’ll have just as good a time here in the alley.” “Let go!” she shouted.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “I live in the Field with the others, and over there we’d have shared...”

She didn’t wait to hear any more. He was holding her arms down, so that she couldn’t reach up far enough to pull anything from her belt, but she didn’t need to; she yanked the dagger down out of her sleeve and slashed.

The knife was really amazingly sharp. She wasn’t able to put any real strength into the blow, with her arms almost pinned, but the black blade sliced neatly through the red kilt and into the leg beneath, leaving a dark red line, almost as black in the shadows as the blade that had made it, a line no wider than a hair across the outside of her captor’s thigh.

Tabaea felt an odd tingling as the knife cut flesh; her head seemed to swim, as if the alcohol on the man’s breath were suddenly affecting her, while at the same time she felt a surge of strength and well-being.

The excitement, she told herself. It was the excitement and fear getting to her. She had never been in a serious fight, nor had she ever cut anyone before. Even as she thought that, the drunk reacted instinctively, flinging his arms wide and stumbling backward the instant he felt the first cut; that allowed her arm more freedom, and with that odd feeling of strength flooding through her, with that strange light-headedness giving her irrational courage, she thrust with the dagger, plunging the blade deep into the meat of her attacker’s thigh.

He gasped, and a sensation of power overwhelmed her as he fell back against the bricks of the Drunken Dragon’s wall.

Then she realized she was free, and habit took over; she whirled, clutching the knife, and ran out onto Wall Street, her feet sliding in the muck as she turned the corner. She caught herself with one hand and got upright again, then headed for Grandgate Market at full speed.

Behind her, the man in the red kilt looked down at his leg, at his ruined kilt; the thin line of the initial slash was slowly widening as blood oozed out, but he ignored that.

The stab wound was spilling blood as a burst barrel spills beer. He took a few steps, out to where torchlight turned his tunic from black to brown, his skin from gray to orange, and his entire left leg redder than his veteran’s kilt. Drunk as he was, the pain cut through the alcohol.

He tried futilely to wipe away the blood and only opened the gash wider; blood spilled out in a thickening sheet, and the dim knowledge that he was badly, perhaps fatally hurt finally penetrated.

He let out a gurgling squawk and fainted, facedown in the mud.

Tabaea saw none of that as she ran, slipping and stumbling, along Wall Street. She rounded the S-curve where the Field wrapped around the north barracks tower, and from there it was a straight three blocks to the market. The torches of the gate watch glowed before her.

With safety in sight, she allowed herself to slow. She caught her breath and tried to compose herself—and to her own surprise, succeeded quite well.

She was, she realized, completely awake and alert—and at the same time, she felt light-headed, as if she were drunk.

But she had only had the one pint of ale. And she had been exhausted—why else would she have ever considered sleeping in Wall Street Field?

She wasn’t exhausted now. She felt fine.

She felt better than fine; she felt strong.

With wonder in her eyes, she looked down at the bloody knife she held.

CHAPTER 9

In the opinion of his fellow guardsmen, Deran Wuller’s son was prone to work too hard. He had been known deliberately to volunteer for various duties; he kept his boots polished even when no inspections were anticipated. And when a citizen asked for help—well, any guardsman was required to provide aid, but Deran would do it cheerfully, without griping or delaying or trying to pass the job on to someone else.

If he hadn’t been just as eager and cheerful when losing at three-bone, or when helping one of his mates back to barracks after a brawl or a binge, or when dodging the officer of the watch to illicitly collect a few oranges from the groves north of the city, he would have been insufferable. And he had never been known to betray a trust or let down a comrade.

Thus he got along well enough, but got more than his share of odd and unpleasant duties—such as escorting Lieutenant Sen-den’s sister home after she was found drunk and naked in the Wall Street Field.

She had been safely delivered and had even showed signs of sobering up when Deran had departed and headed back toward the north barracks tower. It was well past midnight, perhaps as much as two hours past, when Deran passed the Drunken Dragon and noticed the footprints in the muddy surface of Wall Street.

He did not ordinarily go about staring at the ground, but the mist had turned back to rain, and he had not bothered with a hat or helmet or cloak, so he was hunched forward a little, and so he noticed with mild interest the patterns of footsteps. There were several lines that ran along the middle of the street; that made sense. There were lines running in and out of the Drunken Dragon—mostly out; that, too, made sense, as the Dragon was still open, despite the hour. There were a few lines in and out of the Wall Street Field, each one alone—the Field never slept, as the saying had it, but most of its inhabitants did, so traffic in and out was light and scattered at this time of night.

And there were steps leading in and out of the alley beside the Drunken Dragon. The line coming out was widely spaced and smeared, as if whoever made those marks had been running and slipping.

That was odd.

Most guardsmen, and virtually all citizens, would have shrugged and kept walking. Deran, though, was Deran. He stopped and peered into the shadows of the alley.

Something was lying on the ground in there, and it didn’t look like garbage.

If it was someone sleeping there, then whoever it was was fair game for slavers, and Deran should either wake that person up and shoo him across the street to safety, or he should go fetch a slaver and collect a finder’s fee, depending on whether he wanted to be benevolent, or to be paid.

If it was anything else...

Well, it bore further investigation, and the light in the alley was terrible. Deran turned back a few steps to the door of the inn and took one of the signboard torches from its bracket.

Being in the city guard did have its little privileges, he thought as he carried the hissing brand over to the mouth of the alley. If an ordinary citizen took down a torch from an open place of business it would be theft and good for a flogging.

Dim as it was in the damp weather, the torch made the scene in the alley much clearer. Deran stared down at the man lying there in a spreading pool of blood, blood that had mixed with the muck so that it was hard to tell where the edge of the pool actually was.

There wasn’t as much blood as he had first feared, actually; much of the red was the man’s kilt. A red kilt usually meant a soldier or a veteran; if there had been any question about leaving the man where he was—and for Deran, there really wasn’t—that put an end to it. The man in the alley was not anyone Deran recognized, but soldiers looked out for their own.

Whoever the unconscious person was, he was a big man, and Deran was not large for a guardsman, and it was late and he was tired and the mud was slippery. He sighed and headed for the door of the Dragon, torch in hand.

A tavern crowd, Deran knew, generally had a distinctive sound of its own. It chattered, or hummed, or buzzed, or even shouted. The patrons of the Drunken Dragon muttered, a sullen, low-pitched sound that quickly faded when a guardsman in uniform stepped in, holding up a torch.

“I need a hand here,” Deran announced. “We’ve got a wounded man just around the corner.”

The half-dozen customers who still lingered stared silently at him. Nobody volunteered anything, by word or motion.

That didn’t trouble Deran. “You,” he said, pointing at the individual who looked least drunk of those present. “And you,” indicating another.

“Oh, now...”the second man said, beginning a protest. “Five minutes, at most,” Deran snapped, cutting him off, “and if you don’t... well, we don’t need to worry about what would happen then, do we? Because you’re going to cooperate.”

Grumbling, the two men got to their feet.

Deran wasn’t stupid enough to walk in front of them; he had never been in the Drunken Dragon before, but he knew its reputation. He directed the two “volunteers” out the door and followed them as they slogged around the corner.

The wounded man was so much dead weight; he showed no sign of life at all as the three men—one taking his feet and the others a shoulder apiece—hauled him into the tavern and dumped him on a table.

That done, Deran dismissed his two assistants, paying them for their trouble by telling them, “I owe you a favor—a small one. If you ever get in trouble with the guards—small trouble— you tell them Deran Wuller’s son will speak for you.”

The two men grumbled and drifted away, leaving Deran and his prize alone. Deran turned his attention to the bloody figure before him.

There were only two wounds that he could find, both in the fleshy part of the man’s thigh—a long, shallow slash and then a deep stab wound that had missed the artery, Deran judged, by no more than an inch. Most of the blood came from the stab; the slash had already started to scab over.

“Are you going to leave him there dripping all over my floor?” demanded a voice from behind Deran. The guardsman turned and found himself facing an aproned figure a bit shorter than himself.

It was the innkeeper, of course—or rather, Deran corrected himself, the innkeeper’s night man; Deran doubted that the broad-shouldered fellow with the ferocious mustache was actually the proprietor. “Until you find me a bandage, that’s exactly what I intend,” Deran answered. “And a clean rag to wipe the wound first would be a good idea, too.”

Grumbling, the night man retreated, while Deran checked the stabbing victim over.

There were no other recent wounds; his heartbeat was strong and regular, his breath steady and reeking of oushka. He was, Deran concluded, unconscious as a result of his drinking, not from the wound. While bloody, the injury just wasn’t that serious.

The innkeeper’s man returned then with a handful of reasonably clean rags, and Deran set about cleaning the man up a little. As he worked, he questioned the night man and the remaining customers.

Nobody knew the man’s name. Nobody knew what had happened to him. He wasn’t exactly a regular, but he had been there before. He might have been seen with a girl, a black-haired girl wearing dark clothes.

And that was all anyone would tell him.

When Deran pulled the bandage tight, the drunk opened his eyes.

“Am I dead?” he asked blearily. “Am I going to die?”

“You’re fine,” Deran said. “You might limp for a while.”

The drunk tried to raise his head from the table to look at himself, but couldn’t manage it. He moaned.

“What happened?” Deran demanded. “Who stabbed you?”

“Nobody,” the wounded man muttered. “Was an accident.”

Deran shrugged. “Fine. You owe the Dragon two bits for the bandages and the use of their table. If you change your mind about who stabbed you, tell the magistrate...”He hesitated, turning to the night man. “This is Northangle, right?”

“Grandgate. Northangle starts at the comer.”

“All right, tell the magistrate for Grandgate, then. And if you need me to testify, I’m Deran Wuller’s son, Third Company, North Barracks.” He yawned. “And that’s where I’m headed— I need to get some sleep.” He waved and departed.

By the time Deran was out the door the night man was trying to get his wounded customer off the table and back on his own feet.

At the north tower he almost headed straight for his bed, but his sense of duty stopped him. He checked the lieutenant’s room first.

Sure enough, Lieutenant Senden was waiting up for him.

“Is she all right?” the lieutenant asked anxiously.

“She’s fine,” Deran said. “No problem at all.”

“Then what took so long?” “When I was on my way back I practically tripped over this boozer lying in an alleyway.”

The lieutenant grimaced. “You called the slavers?”

Deran shook his head. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t entirely his fault. He’d been stabbed. So I hauled him into the nearest tavern and got him bandaged up. Wasn’t anything serious, just a flesh wound in the leg.”

“Did he say who did it?”

“No. Might’ve been a girl he was bothering.”

“All right. Goodnight, then, Deran—and thanks.”

“My pleasure, Lieutenant.”

Deran judged that he had no more than three hours until dawn when he finally fell into his bunk.

Senden, too, was quickly asleep.

The following day he was somewhat irritable, as a result of a late night largely spent in worrying, and carried out his duties in perfunctory fashion; his monthly report to Captain Tikri, a recently added requirement that Senden did not care for, was brief and sketchy. He did note down, “Guardsman Deran reports tending to stabbing victim in tavern. No accusations or arrests made.”

Late that afternoon, at the overlord’s palace, Captain Tikri had just finished going through the reports from all the guard lieutenants when Lady Sarai stepped into his office. The captain leapt up and saluted, hand on chest.

Lady Sarai waved an acknowledgment, and Tikri relaxed somewhat. “Is something wrong, my lady?” he asked.

“No, no; I just wanted to get out of that room for a few minutes,” Sarai explained, “so I came myself instead of sending a messenger. I’m here in both my official roles today, Captain, as Minister of Investigation and as Acting Minister of Justice. Is there anything I should know about?”

Captain Tikri looked down at the reports he had just read. He turned up a palm.

“Nothing, my lady,” he said. “Nothing of any interest at all.”

CHAPTER 10

Tabaea had expected the feeling of strength and power to wear off within a few minutes, like the excitement after a narrow escape.

It didn’t.

Instead, the strength stayed with her. The light-headedness faded fairly quickly, but the added strength stayed. If anything, it increased, at least at first.

She had hidden behind a merchant’s stall in Grandgate Market, crouched down between a splintery crate and the brick wall of a granary—not a place for long concealment, by any means, but she was out of sight, able to think and plan, until the merchant arrived for the day’s business. For the first several minutes, she had just sat, waiting for the weird reeling to pass.

Eventually, though, she had realized that this was not working. She began thinking about it.

She felt strong. Most especially, her left leg seemed to be almost bursting with vitality. She knew she had stabbed the kilted drunk in his left leg, so the connection was obvious. Was it an illusion, though, or was she really, truly stronger than before?

Measuring strength, especially in a leg, was not something that Tabaea had any easy method for doing; she tried out a few kicks at the crate beside her, and then tried hopping, first on her almost-normal right leg, then on her empowered left for comparison.

It was hard to be sure; she knew, from her work as a thief, how people could fool themselves without meaning to. All the same, she concluded at last that yes, the feeling of strength was genuine; somehow, she had become stronger.

And it was fairly obvious how—when she had stabbed that man in the left leg with her dagger, her left leg had become stronger. The connection could hardly be coincidence.

The black dagger, which she had known for four years to be enchanted, had somehow given her that strength because she had stabbed the drunk.

This was serious magic.

Unfortunately, she didn’t yet know the details. Was this added strength permanent? Would the magic work again, or had she used it up? Where had the strength come from—the dagger’s magic, or the drunk? Had the dagger created it, or only transferred it? And what else did the dagger do? How dangerous was it? Had it stolen the man’s soul? Would it eat her soul? She could think of three ways to find out more about it. One was to ask a magician—but that was out. How could she do that without revealing that she had stolen the secret of atha-mezation? Even if she claimed to have found the dagger, many magicians could tell lies from truth.

No, asking anyone was out of the question.

The second possible method was to stab someone or something else and see what happened.

She supposed she would have to do that sooner or later, but she wasn’t about to just go out and stab some stranger chosen at random.

And the third way to learn more would be to find the man she had stabbed and see what had happened to him. Had the dagger killed him? Had it devoured his soul? Had something horrible happened to him?

She didn’t know his name, but she knew where she had last seen him. That was, she decided, where she should start—but not until dawn. She sat back, resolved to wait until first light.

The next thing she knew, she was waking up because someone was pulling her to her feet. “Hoi!” she said, “wait a minute!” “The sleeping blossom awakens, then,” someone said.

“You call her a blossom? An insult to flowers everywhere.” “Oh, she’s not as bad as that,” a third voice said. “Clean her up and comb that hair, and she’d be fit company.”

Blinking, Tabaea saw blue sky over the shoulder of the man who held her and realized that it was well past first light and that she had fallen asleep behind the crate and been discovered by the merchant and his—or her—family. The man was not alone; a woman stood behind him, and two boys to the side.

“I’m sorry,” Tabaea said, a little blearily. “I was hiding.”

The man and woman looked at each other, concerned; the older boy, who looked about fourteen, was more direct. “Hiding from what?” he demanded.

Tabaea recognized the boy’s voice as the one that had called her an insult to flowers everywhere. “From a drunkard who apparently liked my looks better than you do,” she retorted.

The woman glanced uneasily over her shoulder.

Tabaea waved her worry away. “That was hours ago,” she said. “I must have dozed off.”

“Oh.” The woman’s relief was palpable.

Tabaea found the woman’s behavior unreasonably annoying; what was she worrying about, when she had her husband and sons to protect her? But there was no point in arguing with these people. “I’ll go now,” Tabaea mumbled.

The man released her, and she walked away across the market square. The sun was peering over the wall to the east, its light blazing across the gate towers, while most of the market was still in shadow. Steam curled out from the tower walls where hot sun hit cold, damp stone, but otherwise the clouds and mists of the night had vanished, leaving shrinking puddles and drying mud. Merchants and fanners were setting up for the day, and a few early customers were drifting in, but on a day like this, Tabaea knew, most Ethsharites preferred to wait until the streets had dried before venturing out.

She wished she could have done the same.

She noticed, as she neared the northern edge of the square, that she was limping—but it was a very peculiar limp. She was not favoring an injured leg; instead, the limp came about because her left leg was now noticeably stronger than her sound but less-altered right.

If she tried, she found she could eliminate the limp, but it took an effort.

This strange phenomenon reminded her of what she had temporarily forgotten while she slept; she paused, leaning against a canopy pole at the corner of a display of melons, and considered.

She still felt strong, particularly in the left leg, but less so, she thought, than when she had fallen asleep. It was really very hard to judge, but she thought it was less—or maybe she was adjusting to the change.

That feeling of added vitality was far less, and the light-headedness was gone entirely, but she knew she was still stronger than before.

Did that mean the drunkard was dying, so that less of his strength was reaching her? Or that the magic was fading? Or something else entirely? She wouldn’t find out here, she decided. She straightened up and marched on up Wall Street toward the Drunken Dragon, fighting the tendency to limp. By the time she had gone a block, she had promised herself that if this spell could be used again, and she ever got up her nerve to do it, she would make sure that she stabbed whoever she stabbed in the center, or at least symmetrically.

She found the alley easily enough. The morning sun was almost clear of the city wall, but still low in the east, and the narrow passage was still shadowy; even so, Tabaea had no more trouble finding the remains of blood than she had had finding the alley.

The man himself was gone—but what that meant, she couldn’t be sure. If he was dead, the corpse might have already been removed by the guard, or by thieves intent on selling the component parts to wizards; if he was alive, he might have left under his own power, or been dragged or carried.

The blood didn’t look like enough for him to have bled to death, and Tabaea knew that was the only way anyone would die of a thigh wound in a single night; infections generally took at least a sixnight. So he was probably alive, in which case the most likely place to find him was either right next door, in the Drunken Dragon, or across the street in the Wall Street Field.

She stood nervously in the inn door for several minutes, looking over the breakfast patrons; she didn’t dare enter, for fear of being trapped in there if he should show up unexpectedly. Besides, the proprietor probably wouldn’t appreciate her presence; she had no money to spend, and was, to at least some people, a known thief.

She didn’t see her assailant anywhere among the surly and largely hung-over patrons; she turned away, almost stumbling as she momentarily forgot the strength of her own left leg. Standing on the single step, she looked out at the Wall Street Field.

By daylight it looked less threatening, but even dirtier and less appealing. The table-hut and the awning-tent were still there, but their occupants were not in sight—probably asleep inside, Tabaea judged. A few ragged figures were moving about in the mud, and someone was tending a cooking fire.

The man who had attacked her, the one she had stabbed, was probably out there somewhere, in that mud and filth.

But the city wall was easily five miles long, which meant that Wall Street was just as long, and the Field ran beside it for every inch of that way. And that strip of land, five miles long by at least a hundred feet wide, was all occupied. Not all was as thickly settled as here in Grandgate, of course—the marketplace and the guard barracks gave this district by far the most beggars and thieves of any part of Ethshar of the Sands—but all of it was inhabited.

Finding one man in all that would be a long, slow job—and an extremely dangerous one. Tabaea didn’t care to try it.

She turned and headed back toward Grandgate Market, fighting her new limp and hoping to find a fat purse to steal. She would figure the dagger’s magic out later; right now, she wanted to insure that she could pay for a room for the night.

Patrolling the top of the city wall was not really a military necessity anymore, if it ever had been; the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars had been at peace since the destruction of the Northern Empire and the end of the Great War, over two centuries earlier, and Ethshar of the Sands was forty leagues from either the nearest Small Kingdoms or the Sardironese border. True, the Pirate Towns were a mere dozen or so leagues to the west, but no army could cross that thirty-some miles without advance warning reaching the city. Besides, the Pirate Towns, or any other enemies, were far more likely to attack by sea than by land.

Furthermore, the watchers atop the towers could see farther than a soldier on the ramparts.

But walking the wall was a tradition, and it did serve a purpose both for discipline and for maintenance—it was an active but not unpleasant duty, useful for keeping bored soldiers busy, and those soldiers had strict orders to report any signs of wear and damage along the route.

Deran hadn’t been particularly bored, but he’d been assigned the duty and accepted it without complaint. He strolled along the wall, whistling softly, taking his time on the long walk out to the Beachgate tower and back. He studied the stonework as he walked, peered out over the surrounding countryside, and paused every so often to look down at the city itself, at the ragged inhabitants of the Wall Street Field, the tawdry homes and shops on Wall Street, and the rooftops and streets beyond.

By the time he neared the line between Northangle and Grandgate on his return trip, the sun was well down in the west and the shadows were lengthening dramatically. Deran paused and leaned on a merlon, looking down at the Field.

Since it was still daylight, almost all the huts and tents were unoccupied, and the broad patches of mud where blankets were spread at night were bare. Most of the people who slept in the Field were elsewhere in the city, working or begging or doing whatever they did to sustain themselves.

A few people lingered, though. Four ragged young women were fighting over something; a fifth was standing back and shouting at the others. A line of children was running through the maze of huts and tents, intent on some sort of following game. Half a dozen old people, men and women, were huddled together on a faded red blanket, dickering over a pile of vegetables.

Off by himself, a big man in a brown tunic was sitting on the mud, leaning against the side of a shack, watching the others. A bandage heavily stained with dried blood was wrapped around his left thigh, and Deran realized that was the man he had found in the alley the night before.

That was interesting. A chat with him about just how he had come to be stabbed might be a pleasant diversion, Deran thought. He looked about for the nearest stairway—the city wall was theoretically equipped with a stairway every two hundred feet, either down into the interior of the wall itself or on the inward face, down into the Field, but not all the stairs actually existed. Deran was unsure whether this was a result of neglect, or if some had never been built.

There was a wooden stair down to the Field not far away; Deran used it, putting his foot through the bottom step. He shook his head; the step was rotten right through. He would have to report that.

Which meant he would have to explain why he had come down from the wall. He sighed and headed for the man in the red kilt.

The man looked up as the soldier’s shadow fell across him, but said nothing.

“Hoi,” Deran said, “remember me?” The man in the brown tunic frowned. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“I was the one who got you out of that alley last night,” Deran explained.

“Oh,” the man said. He glanced down at the bandage on his thigh and grudgingly added, “Thank you.”

“Are you a veteran?” Deran persisted, pointing a thumb at the man’s red kilt.

“What business is it of yours?”

Deran’s expression hardened—not because he was actually angry, but because it was a useful trick. It worried people, made them more likely to cooperate. Deran had needed more than a year to really get the hang of it.

“I needed to report why I was late getting back to barracks last night,” he said. “The lieutenant gave me a hard time because I didn’t know your name or who you were.”

This was not true, but that bothered Deran not a whit.

“Oh,” the man said again. He hesitated.

Deran glowered.

“My name’s Tolthar of Smallgate,” the man said. “And yes, I was in the guard, but they kicked me out for being drunk while on duty. About five years back.”

That was a year or so before Deran had signed up. “ Were you drunk?” he asked.

“Oh, I guess I was,” Tolthar admitted, “but it wasn’t my feult. We were walking the wall, and my buddy had a bottle with him, and that’s so boring, what else was there to do but drink?”

Deran nodded. Drunkards always had an excuse; he knew that. And he knew how much weight to give it; just because the bottle was there didn’t mean they had to drink it.

And he noticed that Tolthar didn’t say that his “buddy” had been kicked out of the guard. From what Deran knew of the guard, he doubted that anyone would be expelled for being drunk on duty once.

But there was no point in arguing about it. Other matters were more interesting.

“So, who stabbed you?” he asked. “Pick the wrong girl, did you? Or did you make a grab for someone’s purse?”

Tolthar frowned. “I don’t want to say,” he said. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

Deran frowned back. “You better not mean that the way it sounds,” he warned. “We don’t like it when citizens stab each other.”

“I won’t stab anyone,” Tolthar mumbled. “That’s not what I meant.” His rather feeble wits recovered belatedly, and he added, “At least, I won’t stab anyone with a blade.”

“Oh, it is a girl, then?” Deran’s frown turned to a wry smile. “Just make sure she says yes first, and means it.”

Tolthar mumbled something Deran didn’t catch.

They talked a few moments longer, saying nothing of any consequence; then Deran turned back to the stairs.

At the barracks he reported to the lieutenant on duty, and gave a warning about the rotten step. As he had expected, the lieutenant wanted to know why he had used the stairs.

Deran explained, not trying to quote the entire conversation, but simply describing the incident the night before and reporting Tblthar’s name and that he refused to say who had stabbed him.

“He wouldn’t say?”

“No.”

“Why in Hell not?” the lieutenant demanded.

Deran turned up an empty palm.

“You think he’s planning to ambush whoever it was?”

Deran shook his head. “No,” he said, “Tolthar wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He just didn’t want to say who it was.”

“Do you think there’s anything odd going on?”

“No.”

The lieutenant frowned, then shrugged. “Well, to Hell with him, then. I’ll put it in the report and if anyone higher up cares, they can worry about it.” He pulled a sheet of parchment from the box and began writing out his report.

CHAPTER 11

Tabaea watched the man in the red kilt with interest as he downed the ale someone had bought him. She had been sure he would return to the tavern eventually, and here he was, just two days later.

He hadn’t seen her, she was sure; she was wearing her working clothes, which is to say she had turned her black tunic and black skirt inside out, so the gold and red embroidery didn’t show. Her feet were bare, for better traction.

The man she watched, on the other hand, wore heavy boots— badly worn boots—and the same greasy brown tunic and old red kilt he had worn when he attacked her.

He was walking better now—and so was she. His left leg looked stiff; hers felt loose and limber, more so than usual.

She understood it now, at least partially. As the drunk got his strength back, she lost hers.

At least, that was how it appeared. She was still stronger than normal, but less than she had been, and the decline in her vitality seemed to correlate with the healing process of the man’s wounded leg.

So what would have happened if she had killed him? The dead never got their strength back.

And what if she killed someone new? Was the dagger’s magic still potent, or had she wasted it on that minor flesh wound?

She was not about to go out and kill someone in cold blood to test out her knife; she had never killed anyone and didn’t particularly care to start. But she might kill something. She thought that over carefully as she peered around the doorframe at the man she had stabbed.

That feeling of increased strength had been pleasant, while it lasted. She wanted it back.

She slipped away from the door of the Drunken Dragon and headed northwest on Wall Street, into Northangle.

Probably the easiest nonhuman creature to find—other than bugs or worms, which she didn’t count—would be a rat, and she certainly wouldn’t mind killing rats, but for one, they were hard to catch, and two, they were vicious, and three, a rat’s strength added to her own wouldn’t amount to very much—if that was, in fact, what the dagger’s magic did. She might not even be able to tell anything had happened upon killing a rat.

She needed something bigger than that—a pig would do, or a goat, or a dog.

A dog...

Dogs were not particularly common in Ethshar, but Tabaea had met a few; watchdogs were an occupational hazard for burglars. Killing somebody’s watchdog would be a pleasure.

Of course, she couldn’t do it legally, but she even knew which dog she wanted to kill—a big black one that guarded a house in Momingside that she had once tried to rob, one night a year or so back when she had been feeling unusually ambitious. The damnable beast had waited until she was inside, then had stalked her through the house and almost cornered her, all in utter silence. It was only when she turned and fled that it had started barking and awakened its master.

This time, she would be ready for it, and it wouldn’t get a chance to bark. She smiled unpleasantly to herself and stroked the hilt of the black dagger.

However, she was going in the wrong direction to reach Momingside. The district took its name from its location, just east of the overlord’s palace, near the center of the city, while Northangle was against the city wall. Tabaea turned left at the next corner and headed south.

When she reached Momingside she found her way into the quiet residential neighborhood she sought, where fine houses lined either side of the street. Lintels and cornerposts were carved and painted; polished brass fittings gleamed on doors, shutters, and windows; walls were brick or stone, not plaster.

But there were still alleyways to the courtyards in the rear. Gates closed off the alleys, but Tabaea could sometimes climb gates, or squeeze between the bars.

This one, she remembered, was one she could climb.

The walk from the Drunken Dragon had taken almost an hour, getting through the gate and onto the roof of the kitchen took five minutes.

Tabaea knew that she had to hurry with this part; she was exposed as long as she was on the roof, and despite her black tunic and skirt, anyone staying up late who came out to the courtyard and glanced in the right direction might see her. She scampered up the slope, her bare toes hooking over the joints between tiles to keep her from slipping.

At the top she worked her way carefully along the wall, checking each of the three windows. All three were shuttered for the night; in the first, faint golden light shone between the slats, while the other two were dark.

Peering through the glass of the third window, she was pleased to discover that she could see cobwebs in the corners—the shutters had not been opened recently.

That was good. This was how she had entered previously, so she knew it to be a little-used storeroom; the cobwebs indicated that the occupants had not rearranged the household, or taken to checking the room. Quite probably, they didn’t even know that a burglar had broken in before.

The window was locked, but she had brought her shun; she had the latch open in seconds. The hinges were stiff, and they creaked, but she swung the casement wide, ignoring the sound.

The latch on the shutters was even easier than the one on the casement; she flipped it up effortlessly and slid into the darkness of the house’s interior.

The storeroom was just as she remembered it—linens and blankets stacked on painted shelves, a row of closed trunks along the wall on either side. The trunks were locked, but she had picked one when she was here before and found nothing but old clothing, broken toys, and the like. She hadn’t bothered with the others, and she didn’t bother with them now; instead she opened the door slowly and carefully until she had a crack a few inches wide. She squeezed out through the narrow opening and emerged into the upstairs hallway, alert for any sign of danger.

Light leaked out from under one of the other doors; she could hear voices, as well. No one was in sight, though, and she heard no footsteps, no clicking latches, no squeaking hinges.

Prowling a house while the residents were still awake was not part of her ordinary routine, but the voices gave her the distinct impression that those residents wouldn’t be emerging right away. Besides, she was here, and she wanted to get it over with, before her nerve gave out.

Remember that strength, she told herself, and she crept to the top of the stairs.

Last time, she remembered, the dog had been hiding under the stairs. She had gone down to the dining salon, looking for silver or other valuables, and it had come out behind. Looking down toward the front room now she didn’t see it—it was probably lurking under the stairs again. She smiled, drew the black dagger, and started down the stairs, moving step by step, slowly and carefully, her eyes constantly shifting.

When she got to the bottom, the dog still hadn’t emerged; she took three steps toward the dining salon—and then whirled, knife raised.

The dog was there, halfway out from its hiding place. It growled menacingly, and bared its teeth.

Tabaea didn’t wait for it to attack, or to start barking; she jumped on it, knocking the animal to the floor.

The dog tried to get away, but she flung her left arm around its neck and hauled it closer. Without hesitating, she yanked its head back with her left arm and slashed its throat with her right.

Strength flowed into her like sudden fire; she slashed again, to be sure, and almost removed the dog’s head—her arm was already stronger, much stronger.

And that wasn’t all. The creature’s vitality burned through her with a force that made the strongest oushka seem like a pale shadow, and when it reached her head the whole world seemed to change around her. For a moment all the color drained away, and then it was back, but washed out, like an old, faded tapestry. Meanwhile, outlines sharpened, and the darkness that filled the room seemed suddenly less. The last twitch of the dog’s hind leg caught her attention far more sharply than motion ever had before; she almost started at the intensity of it.

And then the smells hit—the hot red stink of the dog’s blood, the pungency of its fur, the oily reek of the polish on the wooden floor, the smoky odor of the lamp that was burning upstairs, a hundred, a thousand, a million other scents were spilling through her nose, so clear and sharp and distinct that they were like a painting of the house. It was like a banquet spread before her, each odor unique.

Her hearing was suddenly sharper, too—at any rate, she could hear the woman’s voice upstairs say, “Did you hear something?”

The sound was distorted, though; she was unsure whether that was because of the distance and intervening corners and doors, or because something had changed about her hearing.

Whatever had happened, there could be no question that the Black Dagger’s magic was not used up. Moving quickly, she rose and headed for the front door, the quickest way out, leaving the dead dog lying on the floor in its own blood.

She knew blood was all over her hands and tunic, as well, but she couldn’t afford the time to do anything about it until she was well away from the house. She fumbled with the latch and bolt, then swung the door wide and stepped out onto the stoop.

The smells of the city washed over her like a great storm-driven wave, and she paused for a moment, drinking them in, sorting them out; then she remembered herself and ran.

As she worked her way north through the city streets, staying out of the better-lit areas where her bloodstained hands and clothes would show, she thought through what had happened.

She had killed a dog, and its strength had flooded into her, as she had hoped—but more than that had happened. She had gained the dog’s senses, as well—the sensitivity to motion and strong night vision, the incredible sense of smell, and, she realized as she listened to the city around her, better hearing, but only in high pitches.

This was amazing; she had a whole new way of perceiving the city. She could smell things she had never smelled before— but she couldn’t always identify them. She knew the salt was the sea, and the smoke came from the lamps and fires of the city; she knew the scents of men and women; but what was that odor like rust, like... she had no words for it.

Would this fade away gradually, she wondered, or was this permanent? The dog was dead, nothing could heal it, nothing could give it back its strength—but could she really keep it forever? She flexed her arms, feeling the power there—not, perhaps, any stronger than a big man, but far stronger than that of the young woman she had been an hour earlier, probably stronger than any woman she had ever known. She could feel it.

She could smell her own excitement, though it took her a moment to recognize it for what it was.

Was that permanent? Would she be able to use her nose like this for the rest of her life? She wasn’t sure she would be able to sleep, with that flood of sensory impressions pouring in on her.

And all this came just from killing a dog. Think how strong she would be if she killed a man.

And think what she might be able to do if she killed a magician!

CHAPTER 12

The cat’s death did little for Tabaea’s strength, but it gave her incredibly quick reflexes, even sharper night vision and movement perception than killing the dog had provided, and perhaps some other abilities—she wasn’t sure whether or not those were real, or her imagination at wo±. She had never heard that cats could speed up or slow down their perception of time and suspected it was simply an illusion. The ability to balance was very hard to judge. And the ability to catnap was probably there all along, just not used.

Still, she was satisfied with the results.

Killing a dove, on the other hand, was a serious disappointment; no matter what she did, Tabaea still could not fly, nor see behind herself without turning her head. Nor, it seemed, did birds have any abilities she hadn’t known about.

It was perfectly clear why she couldn’t fly, of course—she had no wings. Whatever magic the Black Dagger performed, it did not alter her physical appearance. Her eyes were still on the front of her head, rather than the sides; they had not become slitted like a cat’s, either.

Only belatedly did she realize that this was a good thing-otherwise she might have grown fur or feathers or claws and become a freak unable to live a normal life among normal people.

Not, she admitted to herself, that her life was exactly normal. With her improved sense of smell, she could now locate gold by scent alone, and with her cat skills she could now prowl silently in near-total darkness, so her thievery had become markedly more successful—but she still had no permanent home, living instead in a succession of cheap inns; she had no real friends; she saw nothing of her family.

Her new abilities showed no signs of fading, and they gave her the money for a more comfortable existence, but as she sat at a table in yet another inn, staring at yet another six-bit dinner of chicken stew and fried noodles, she found herself profoundly dissatisfied.

She was becoming successful as a thief. But so what?

She had originally taken up a career in theft in order to survive and to put food in her belly without her mother’s and stepfather’s reluctant help. She had wanted to strike back at the family and the city that had ignored and neglected her. She had wanted to become rich, to have all the things she had been denied. She had wanted everyone to know who she was and to admire her skill and courage and determination.

She had discovered years ago that it didn’t work that way. Thieves did not become rich or famous—at least, burglars and cutpurses didn’t; there were those who accused various lords and magicians of robbery, but that was an entirely different sort of theft.

In fact, a thief couldn’t afford to become rich or famous. Too great a success put one in front of the Minister of Justice, and then on the gallows or in a slaver’s cells. Even the limited notoriety of being well known among other thieves was dangerous; Tabaea had, over the past few years, seen virtually every well-known thief arrested or beaten or killed. The world of thieves was not closed; word could always leak out into the larger world of victims and avengers. The less-successful criminals were always ready, willing, and even eager, from jealousy or simple hunger, to sell news of their more prosperous brethren.

So she dared not try for more than a reasonably comfortable existence—and even that was risky.

As for paying back her family and the rest of Ethshar, that didn’t work, either. Her family had ignored her before, and they ignored her now. The city had always had thieves and paid no mind to another.

Theft was nothing but a means of survival, a career with no room for advancement. Now that she had the Black Dagger and knew how to use it, Tabaea was not satisfied with that. She wanted more. But what?

She chewed idly on a noodle and thought about it. She still wanted to be rich and famous and respected, to have everyone know who she was, and to pay attention to her every wish. She couldn’t get that as a thief, but now she had the Black Dagger, so she could be more than a thief. The question was, what could she be? She still had never served an apprenticeship, and at nineteen she wasn’t ever going to. She was even past normal recruiting age for the city guard.

She was strong and fast enough to be a soldier now, she realized, and she gave that possibility some serious thought. She was still small, but she knew she could prove herself if she had to.

And then what? Speed and strength were useful in war, but Ethshar was not at war, nor likely to be. Tabaea did not even have a very clear idea what war was. In peacetime the city guard served mostly to guard the people of Ethshar from each other, rather than from outside enemies; they guarded the gates, guarded the palace, patrolled the wall and the marketplace, ran errands for the nobility, escorted prisoners...

None of that sounded very exciting. And much of doing it well depended, she realized, not on actual strength, but on the appearance of strength, on being big and fearsome enough that people didn’t start trouble in the first place. She looked at the slender fingers holding her fork and grimaced. She didn’t look big and fearsome.

Did soldiering pay well? The guard spent freely enough in the brothels and gambling dens of Soldiertown, but on the other hand they lived in the barracks towers, not in big houses, and they owned no fancy clothes, only uniforms and weapons.

And as far as fame went, Tabaea knew the names of half a dozen guardsmen, none of them officers, and those few only because she had encountered them personally. What sort of fame was that?

Soldiers carried swords, which was appealing, and they could rely on a warm bed and filling meals and a modicum of respect—but it did not seem like a really wonderful career, especially for a woman.

She scooped a greasy lump of chicken to her mouth and chewed.

She had food and a bed as a thief; those things were no incentive. And the guard would have no special use that she could see for her animal-derived talents.

Not the guard, then. What else?

Well, who was rich and famous?

The overlord was, of course, and the other nobles. But they had all been born into the nobility, a path that was not open to her.

There were rich and famous merchants, but they had had money to start out with, to buy their first cargos or finance their caravans, and most, if not all, had served apprenticeships in their trades.

There were the performers in the Arena, the jugglers and acrobats and singers and magicians.

There were the magicians, even those who did not perform— magicians of any sort could be assured of respect.

Performers... could she use her feline reflexes to become a juggler or acrobat? She knew that most learned their arts during apprenticeships, but if she could learn the skills on her own, they could not stop her from performing.

And as for magic—well, she was a magician already, wasn’t she?

But she was not openly a magician.

She swallowed the chicken and started on a chunk of carrot, thinking.

She didn’t know all that very much about magic, beyond the secret of athamezation—and of course, she had gotten that spell wrong when she tried to use it. Still, it seemed to her that magic had real possibilities. There were all those different kinds of magicians, for one thing—wizards and warlocks and witches, theurgists and demonologists and sorcerers, illusionists and herbalists and scientists, and all the others.

And with The Black Dagger, she could kill one of each and steal all their abilities! Or could she? She frowned and swallowed the carrot. At least part of magic was knowledge, rather than anything physical, and she didn’t know whether the Black Dagger stole knowledge. She certainly hadn’t learned anything from the minds of the dog or the cat or the dove—but perhaps beasts were too different.

She hadn’t learned anything from the kilted drunk, either— but she hadn’t killed him, she had only stabbed him in the leg. She had only acquired the strength he had lost, and even that had returned to him and departed from her as he healed. Stabbing him hadn’t robbed him of any of his memories or wits.

Killing a person would steal those memories away, wouldn’t it? But would the Black Dagger transfer them to her, or would they simply be lost?

Or was knowledge part of the soul, of the part of a person that did not die? If the victim became a ghost, the ghost would still have its knowledge and memories—the dagger couldn’t give them to Tabaea, then. If the victim’s soul escaped into another realm, wouldn’t it take the knowledge with it?

But then, it was said that certain magicks could even trap or destroy a person’s soul—what if the Black Dagger was one of them?

Tabaea had to admit that she had no idea whether her magic knife could steal souls, or transfer knowledge. The only way to find out would be to kill a person, preferably a magician.

She pushed a lump of potato around the plate with her fork as she thought about that.

It would mean murder, cold-blooded murder. She had never killed a person. Killing dogs and cats was one thing, killing a person was quite another.

But then, how else would she ever know what the Black Dagger could do? How else would she ever become a magician, or anything more than a common thief?

She might make it as a performer just with the skills of animals—but then she would never know. And performing might not work. And magic—she wanted more magic.

And she could have it, if memories transferred, and maybe even if they didn’t. All she had to do was kill magicians with the Black Dagger.

Somewhere in the back of her mind it occurred to her that she had never seriously thought about murdering people before; she had never killed anyone in the course of her career as a thief. Cats, of course, were natural hunters and killers; dogs, too, were predators. She had absorbed abilities from a dog and a cat; might some of the predator’s blood-lust come along? She dismissed the idea.

So if she was going to kill magicians to steal their abilities, which magicians should she kill?

Sorcerers and wizards seemed to depend on their tools and formulae—sorcerers, in particular, seemed to need the talismans and artifacts. And wizardry might bring her in contact with the Wizards’ Guild, and besides, she already knew that she could never make a proper athame—she had the Black Dagger instead.

So those were out.

That left demonologists and theurgists and witches and warlocks and herbalists and scientists and illusionists and plenty of others, of course. Demonology looked risky—Tabaea thought it was significant that she had never seen an old demonologist.

Theurgists had to leam prayers and invocations and so forth to work their magic; if knowledge didn’t convey, then that wouldn’t work; she wouldn’t know the rituals she needed.

Herbalists were so limited, with their plants, and like wizards and sorcerers, they were powerless without their supplies.

Illusionists just did tricks—there was some doubt as to whether it was real magic at all.

Scientists—Tabaea didn’t understand scientists, and most of the scientific magic she had seen wasn’t very useful, just stunts like using a glass to break sunlight into rainbows, or making those little chimes that spun around and rang when you burned candles under them. And there were so few scientists around, maybe a dozen in the entire city, that killing one seemed wasteful.

The various sorts of seers and soothsayers were a possibility, but telling the real ones from the frauds wasn’t easy. Tabaea considered carefully as she finished her noodles, and decided in the end that prophecy could wait.

Ignoring the more obscure sorts of magician, that left witches and warlocks. They didn’t seem to need equipment or incantations or anything, and they indisputably did real magic. One of them would do just fine.

How to find one, then?

She couldn’t go entirely by appearance; while most varieties of magicians had traditional costumes, there were no hard and fast rules about it. Telling whether a black-robed figure was a demonologist or a warlock or a necromancer or something else entirely was not easy. She had been mistaken for a warlock once or twice herself, when wearing black—warlocks favored all-black clothes even more than demonologists did.

She knew a couple of magicians, of course, and knew of several others. She thought over all of them, trying to decide if there was one she wanted to kill.

No, there wasn’t, not really...

She stopped, fork raised.

There was that snotty little Inza of Northangle, Inza the Apprentice she called herself now. She was two or three years younger than Tabaea, but she and Tabaea had played together when they were young. Then Inza had gotten herself apprenticed to a warlock, old Luris the Black, down on Wizard Street in Eastside, and after that she never had time to so much as say hello to her old friends. Inza claimed her master kept her too busy, but Tabaea knew it was because she didn’t want to associate with a bunch of thieves and street people now that she was going to be a big important magician.

And Inza would be nearing the end of her apprenticeship now, she would be changing her name to Inza the Warlock soon.

If she lived that long.

Tabaea smiled, and her hand dropped from the table to the hilt of the Black Dagger.

CHAPTER 13

Lady Sarai leaned in the doorway and asked, “Anything interesting today?”

Captain Tikri looked up, startled; before he could do more than drop the report he was reading, Sarai added, “Don’t bother to get up.”

“Yes, my lady.” He settled back and looked up at her uneasily.

“So, is there anything interesting in your reports today?” Sarai insisted.

“Oh.” Tikri looked down at the paper. “As a matter of fact, there is one odd case. It’s probably just a revenge killing, but... well, it’s odd.”

“Tell me about it.” Sarai stepped into the office and found a chair, one with a dragon carved on the back and the seat upholstered in brown velvet.

“A girl named Inza, an apprentice warlock,” Tikri said. “Her throat was cut last night while she slept, and then she was stabbed through the heart—to make sure she was dead, I suppose.”

Sarai grimaced. “Sounds nasty,” she said.

Tikri nodded. “I would say so, yes. I didn’t go myself, but the reports... well, I’d say it was nasty.”

Sarai frowned and leaned forward. “You said it was probably revenge? Who did it?”

Tikri shrugged. “We don’t know who did it—not yet, anyway. Whoever it was came in through a window—pried open the latch, very professional job, looked like an experienced burglar—but then, nothing was stolen or disturbed, so it wasn’t a burglary at all.”

“Unless the thief panicked,” Sarai suggested.

Tikri shook his head. “Panicked? Cutting the throat and a thrust through the heart doesn’t look like anyone who would panic.”

“So it was revenge—but you don’t know who did it?”

“No.” Tikri frowned. “Not yet, anyway. The girl’s master swears she doesn’t know of any enemies, anyone who hated Inza or had a grudge against her. Warlocks don’t do divinations, of course, so she couldn’t identify the killer herself; we have a wizard checking on it instead.”

“You don’t think it was the master herself?”

Tikri turned up an empty palm. “Who knows? But we don’t have any reason to think it was her. And Luris is a skilled warlock; why cut the girl’s throat when she could have simply stopped her heart? Or if a warlock wanted to be less obvious, she could have staged any number of plausible accidents.”

“That’s true.” Sarai considered and tapped the arm of her chair as her feet stretched out in front of her—signs that she was thinking. “It’s very odd, you know, that anyone would kill an apprentice warlock—isn’t this Luris now duty-bound to avenge the girl’s death?” Tikri nodded. “Just so. Whoever did this isn’t afraid of warlocks, obviously.”

“And how could an apprentice have an enemy who hated her enough to kill her? Apprentices don’t have time or freedom to make that sort of enemies, do they?”

“Not usually,” Tikri agreed.

“How old was she?”

Tikri glanced at the report. “Seventeen,” he said. “She would have made journeyman next month.”

“Seventeen.” Sarai bit her lip. She had been worried about her father, but he was almost sixty, he had had a long and full life. She had been worried about her brother, but he probably wouldn’t die of his illness. If he did, if either of them died, it wouldn’t be a shock. But a healthy seventeen-year-old girl, five years younger than Sarai herself, had been killed, without warning, apparently without any good reason.

“Has anyone talked to her family?” she asked.

Tikri shrugged. “I think someone sent a message,” he said.

“I was also thinking of asking if anyone in her family knew if she had any enemies,” Sarai remarked.

Tikri blinked. “Why bother?” he asked. “The magicians will tell us who did it.”

Sarai nodded.

“Let me know what they find out,” she said. She rose and turned away.

She had intended to stay and talk to Captain Tikri for a while. She didn’t have any specific questions or assignments for him; she just thought it was a good idea to know what her subordinates were doing. She wanted to know everything about how the city guard worked, how crimes were investigated, how reports were written, what got included and what got left out— the real story, not what she would be told if she asked. She wanted Tikri to talk to her easily and not treat her as some lordly creature who couldn’t be bothered with everyday details. Chatting with him had seemed like the best way to work toward that. The news of the murder bothered her, though, and she no longer felt any interest in light conversation.

There were murders fairly often in Ethshar, of course—with hundreds of thousands of people packed inside the city walls, killings were inevitable. The annual total was often close to a hundred, even without counting the deaths that might have been either natural or magical.

Most of them, however, involved open arguments, drunken brawls, attempted robbery, or marital disputes. Someone breaking into a warlock’s house to butcher a sleeping apprentice was definitely not typical.

But there really didn’t seem to be much she could do about it just now.

Then a thought struck her, and she turned back. “You said a wizard is doing the divination for this one?” “That’s right.” Tikri nodded. “Who is it?”

“Mereth of the Golden Door. Do you...” “Oh, her! Yes, I know her. Is she working at her home?” “I think so, yes...” Before Tikri could finish whatever he was going to say, Sarai cut him off. “Thanks,” she said. Then she turned away and strode down the hallway.

She did not care to wait for an official report; she wanted to talk to Mereth and find out just what had happened, why this poor Inza had been killed. Mereth’s home and shop were on Wizard Street, of course—at least three-fourths of all the magicians for hire in Ethshar of the Sands located their businesses on Wizard Street.

Wizard Street, however, was several miles long, winding its way across the entire city, from Westbeach to Northangle; simply saying a house was on Wizard Street didn’t tell anyone much.

In Mereth’s particular case, her shop was just three blocks from the palace in the district of Nightside, where Wizard Street made its closest approach; that was probably, Sarai knew, why Mereth got so much investigative work.

Or perhaps Mereth had chosen her home in order to be close to her preferred customers; Sarai really didn’t know which was the ox and which was the wagon.

The weather was cool, but not unpleasant, and Sarai didn’t bother with a wrap. She marched quickly across the bright stone pavement of the plaza surrounding the palace, across Circle Street, and out North Street—which, with the usual Ethsharitic disregard for unimportant details, ran west by northwest through Nightside, and not north through Shadyside.

Like all the neighborhoods close around the palace, Nightside was largely occupied by the mansions of successful merchants and the city’s nobility; this portion of North Street ran between tall iron fences that guarded gardens and fountains. Sarai paid them no attention.

Harbor Street, being a major thoroughfare between the waterfront and Grandgate, was crowded and bustling where North Street intersected it, and was also far less aristocratic than its surroundings. As she crossed the avenue Sarai was jostled by a heavy man who reeked of fish; her hand fell automatically to her purse, but it was still there and seemed intact. If the man had been a cutpurse or pickpocket he had missed his grab.

At the corner of North and Wizard she turned left, and there was Mereth’s shop, two doors down on the far side. The draperies were drawn and the windows closed, but the trademark gilded door was ajar.

Sarai hesitated on the threshold, listening; she could hear voices somewhere within, but could not make out the words. She knocked, and waited.

A moment later young Thar, Mereth’s apprentice, appeared in the crack, peering out at her. He swung the door wide, but held a finger to his lips for silence.

Sarai nodded.

“She’s working, Lady Sarai,” Thar whispered. “Do you want to wait?”

“That depends,” Sarai replied. “What’s she working on?”

“A murder,” Thar answered, his voice low but intense.

“Then it’s probably the very thing I came to ask her about,” Sarai said.

Thar blinked. “Inza the Apprentice?” he asked. Sarai nodded.

“Do you want to come in and wait, then?”

“How much longer do you think it will be?”

Thar frowned. “I don’t really know,” he said. “To tell the truth, I thought she’d be done by now. I guess I misjudged, or maybe she’s using a different spell from the usual—I don’t know that much about it. I haven’t started learning divinations yet myself. She says that if I keep on as well as I have been, though, I’ll start on them after Festival.”

Sarai nodded again. “So you don’t know how long?”

“No.”

The young noblewoman considered for a moment, then said, “I’ll wait.”

Thar nodded. He stepped aside and admitted her to the consulting room, small but cozy, where Sarai settled into a blue brocade armchair.

Thar hovered for a moment, making sure the important guest was comfortable, then vanished through the archway that led to the rest of the building.

Sarai waited, looking over the room. She had seen it before, of course, but she had little else to do.

There were three armchairs, blue, green, and gold, arranged around three sides of a small square table, a table of carved wood inlaid with golden curlicues. Eight little boxes stood on the table—gold, silver, brass, abalone, crystal, and three kinds of wood, all intricately carved and finely polished. Ink paintings hung on the walls, depicting rocky seashores, lonely towers, and other fanciful locations unlike anything in Ethshar of the Sands; Mereth had said once that these had been painted by her grandmother. An ornate wool rug in gold and red covered most of the floor; the rest was oiled wood. A shelf over the door held half a dozen mismatched statuettes, and a cork sculpture of a dragon wrapping itself around a peasant’s farmhouse stood on the windowsill.

It was really a rather pretentious and fussy little room, Sarai thought. For lack of anything better to do, she turned her attention to a study of the ink paintings.

She had just about exhausted all possible interest in that when Mereth finally emerged, breathlessly hurrying through the archway, tunic awry and feet bare.

“Lady Sarai!” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming! Sit down, sit down!”

“I’ve been sitting, thank you,” Sarai said, as Thar stumbled after his mistress into the room.

“Oh, yes, of course you have,” Mereth agreed, flustered. “Well, whatever you please, then. What can I do for you?”

“You were investigating the death of Inza, the apprentice warlock, I believe.”

“Trying to, anyway,” Mereth said.

Sarai waited. Mereth sighed. “I can’t see anything,” she said. “Nothing works. Not the Spell of Omniscient Vision, not Fendel’s Divination—none of my spells worked.”

Those two spells, Sarai knew, were among the most powerful and useful information-gathering spells of all those known to wizardry; she suspected that between the two of them they provided more than half Mereth’s income. “Is it because she was a warlock?” she asked. “I know different kinds of magic...”

“No, that’s not it, or at least...” Mereth paused, collecting her thoughts, then explained, “The warlockry doesn’t help, Lady Sarai, but I could get around that, I’m sure, if that was all there were. It isn’t. She was killed by magic, strong magic—I can’t tell what kind.”

Sarai blinked. “She was killed with a knife, I thought—her throat was cut and she was stabbed.”

“It might have been a knife,” Mereth said, “or something else, I can’t even tell that much. But I do know that whatever killed her was magical.” Her tone was definite. “There’s no possible doubt.”

“But why would a magician kill anyone that way?” Lady Sarai asked. “I mean, aren’t there spells... spells that leave no traces, or make it look like an accident?”

The wizard looked decidedly uncomfortable and did not answer.

Lady Sarai frowned at her silence. “Mereth,” Sarai said, “I’m no fool; I’ve been the overlord’s Minister of Investigation for four years now. I know that people who seriously offend wizards or warlocks or demonologists tend to turn up dead in fairly short order, even if, most of the time, we can never prove anything. People who bother warlocks have heart attacks, or fall from heights, or trip over their own feet and break their necks. People who fatally annoy wizards, I mean more than just enough to wind up with a curse like the Dismal Itch or Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm, can have any number of strange accidents, but they seem especially prone to mysterious fires and smothering in their own blankets. People who are stupid enough to get demonologists angry usually just disappear completely. Witches don’t seem to kill people; either that, or they’re too subtle for us. Their enemies have plenty of bad luck, though, even if it isn’t fetal. I ’m not sure about sorcerers or theurgists or the others. But everyone knows it’s bad business to anger magicians, any kind of magicians. I know that, my father knows that, the overlord himself knows that.” She swallowed, remembering that her father had not angered any magicians, but had instead annoyed a god and was now dying as a result. Then she forged on. “Every man in the city guard knows that you don’t anger magicians and expect to live. It’s not our job to protect people when they cut their own throats. We know magicians kill people sometimes—it’s so easy for you, after all. When the victims go asking for it, and the killers don’t make a show of it, we don’t worry too much. But in this case... Mereth, the giii was seventeen years old, never hurt anybody that we can see, and she got her throat cut. We can’t let this one pass.”

“I know, Lady Sarai,” Mereth said unhappily. “But honestly, I swear, on my oath as a member of the Wizards’ Guild, that I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why anyone would do it this way; you’re right, there are other, easier, less-obvious spells. I don’t know who did this, or why, or how; I only know that it was magic.”

Sarai studied the wizard for a moment, then sighed. “A rogue magician,” she said. “Wonderful.”

CHAPTER 14

Tabaea stared at the mug and concentrated.

This would, she was sure, be easier if she had an older, more experienced warlock who could help her, could tell her what to do, but of course she could hardly tell any warlocks what she had done. She had to guess what she was supposed to do.

She had seen warlocks, in the taverns, in their shops, and in the Arena, and they had all been able to move things without touching them. That seemed to be the most basic ability that warlocks had. Inza had surely had it.

But how did it work?

Tabaea had no idea how to make it happen; despite her optimistic expectations, none of Inza’s memories had transferred, none of what the apprentice had learned in her five years of training. If there were tricks or secrets to the warlock’s arts, Tabaea didn’t know them.

But Inza’s raw magical ability should have transferred, the Black Dagger should have stolen it away and given it to Tabaea, and the only way Tabaea knew to test that was by trying. She hoped that warlockry worked just by thinking, by concentrating hard enough.

She stared at the empty mug. She stared so hard that her head began to hurt. Somewhere she thought she heard whispering, a muttering in some foreign language; she tried to ignore it.

She shouldn’t be able to hear any whispers, she thought, annoyed—not here in this empty house in the middle of the night. She certainly couldn’t have heard anything if she were still an ordinary person; this whisper was somehow alien. She supposed it was some trick of her newly enhanced senses, something that a dog could hear when a person wouldn’t, but she couldn’t think what it might be. Who would be speaking a strange tongue near here? She hadn’t seen anyone around the place who didn’t look Ethsharitic. And this was a very strange tongue, nothing she had ever heard before, she was sure.

Maybe it wasn’t human at all. Still staring at the mug, she tried to make out the words and where it was coming from.

There were no words, she realized, and the whisper wasn’t coming from anywhere. It seemed to be inside her own head.

Then, abruptly, as she focused on the whispering that wasn’t really a sound at all, she felt as if something had touched her, or perhaps she had touched something, in a place that she could not locate, a part of her that didn’t correspond to anywhere on or in her body. The whispering ran through her, and she could suddenly feel the mug, as well as see it, even though it was six feet away.

She could feel it with the whisper.

That made no sense, but that was how it felt; she could touch the whisper, and with it she could touch the mug.

She gripped it tentatively with her... her whatever-it-was. She took a deep breath, tightened her hold, and lifted. The mug shot upward; startled, she threw her head back, eyes following its trajectory. Her mouth fell open and her eyes widened with surprise.

The mug whacked against the ceiling, and at the impact she lost her intangible hold on it. It tumbled down and smashed against the table, shattering spectacularly.

Tabaea stared at the spot on the ceiling where the mug had struck, and her openmouthed astonishment slowly transformed itself into a broad grin. So that was warlockry!

It had worked. And she had liked it; it had felt good, had made her feel strong and awake, even stronger than she already was—and since killing Inza, she had roughly twice her former strength, she was no longer just a weak woman, but as strong as most grown men.

This was greatl She only wished it hadn’t taken four years to find out what the Black Dagger could do. She had a lot of lost time to make up for.

The dagger wouldn’t teach her anything, apparently, wouldn’t steal knowledge or memories, but it would take power. Strength, talent, skill—she could take any of those she wanted. All she had to do was kill the people who had them. Her grin dimmed.

She had to kill them, if she wanted to keep what she stole. That was the nasty part. She didn’t like killing people, not really. It was true that Inza was a stuck-up little beast who had thought Tabaea was just gutter trash, but even so, killing her had probably been more than she deserved.

It had been a necessary experiment, of course, to prove the Black Dagger’s power, and it had gotten Tabaea her wonderful new talent for warlockry, but still, it was nasty.

Well, Tabaea told herself, sometimes life was nasty. At least, from now on, she would be on the dispensing end of the nastiness, rather than the receiving.

She would pick and choose her victims carefully, though. There was no reason to kill large numbers of people. In fact, for raw strength, there was no reason to kill people at all—dogs and cats and other animals would serve just as well, perhaps better, for that.

But skills—agility and dexterity, and of course all the different schools of magic—those would come from people. Dogs and cats had no fingers and couldn’t do anything much with their toes, they couldn’t transfer anything involving tools, or that called for standing upright.

Scent and vision and hearing, yes—without those, she could hardly have located this empty house and been certain it was deserted. She knew that she would spot the owner’s return before he suspected anything was wrong, or would hear or smell him before he got near her, and with her faster reflexes and increased speed she could be gone before he noticed her, and that was all due to the animals.

But for human skills, she needed to kill humans.

She looked down at the dagger on her belt and shrugged.

Well, she told herself, people died every day in Ethshar. Men bragged in the taverns about how many people they had slain. Magicians killed each other and any other enemies they might have. Demonologists sacrificed children or troublesome neighbors to their diabolic servants, and necromancers traded souls for the wisdom of the dead. Everyone knew all that. Surely, no one would notice a few more deaths.

It did occur to Tabaea, somewhere in the back of her mind, that while she always heard about all these horrible deaths, she had never seen one, and very few of the people she knew personally had died of anything other than natural causes.

If they were natural causes and not vindictive magic.

Well, it was a big city, and even if she had been lucky, everyone knew that people were murdered every day in Ethshar, stabbed or beaten in the Wall Street Field, poisoned or smothered in the lounges and bedrooms of the palace, roasted or petrified by wizards, or carried off to nameless dooms by demons and other supernatural creatures. No one would notice anything out of the ordinary if there were a few more deaths than usual.

That settled, the only questions remaining were who and when.

She had killed a warlock—she reached out and picked up the biggest chunk of the broken mug and sent it sailing in broad circles around the room, all without touching it; now that she knew how, it seemed to grow easier with every passing second. The next step would be either some other form of magic, or some vital, nonmagical skill—archery, perhaps, or swordsmanship. A soldier, then?

Yes, a soldier, but one who knew his trade, not just one of the fat, lazy bullies who guarded Grandgate by day and caroused in Soldiertown by night. An officer, perhaps—one who trained the new enlistees.

And then some more magicians—a demonologist, perhaps, and a theurgist. Even if they needed incantations, maybe she could learn those somewhere, listen to someone at work; it couldn’t be that hard, once you had the gift, the skill, whatever it was that made them magicians instead of mere mortals. And then maybe a wizard, despite the Guild and her inability to make an athame, maybe two, they didn’t all use the same spells, maybe she could learn something useful. A sorcerer, a witch...

She drew the dagger and looked at it.

“We’re going to be busy,” she said. She smiled. “And it’ll be worth it.”

CHAPTER 15

“There’s wizardry here,” the witch said, kneeling by the body.

“You’re sure it’s wizardry and not some other magic?” Sarai asked from the doorway.

The witch frowned. “Well, my lady,” he said, “it’s either wizardry or something entirely new, and if it’s something entirely new, it’s something that’s more like wizardry than it’s like anything else we’ve ever known.”

“So it could be something entirely new?”

The witch sighed as he got stiffly to his feet. He ran a bony hand through thinning hair. “I don’t know, Lady Sarai,” he said. “I know that when warlockry first came along, when I was just finishing my apprenticeship, we had a hard time telling it from witchcraft at first, because there are similarities, and we didn’t know the differences yet. I know that theurgy and demonology are opposite sides of the same coin, so that in some ways they look alike and in others they couldn’t be more different. Whatever happened here feels like wizardry to me, but it might be that it’s something new, and I just don’t know the differences yet. But it feels like wizardry.”

Sarai nodded.

“All right,” she said. “Wizardry, then, or something like it. Can you tell me anything about the person who did it?”

The witch shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid not. The magic fouls up everything else.”

“Can you tell me anything more about the magic, then?” Sarai asked. “Would you know it if you met the murderer on the street?”

The witch tilted his head and considered that carefully. “I doubt it,” he said at last. “What I sense here is the flavor of the single spell that killed him. It doesn’t seem likely that the killer would be walking around with that spell still active. I’m not a wizard, but as I understand it, their spells are usually temporary things—they make them fresh each time, as it were.”

Sarai nodded again. “But it’s the same spell here as the others?”

The witch shrugged. “I think so,” he said, “but I can’t be absolutely certain. The others were not so recent when I saw them.”

For a moment the two of them stood silently, staring at the bloody corpse on the floor. The body, in turn, was staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

“There’s one thing,” Sarai said. “You and the others all keep saying that a spell killed these people, but it’s plain to see that a knife killed them. Do you mean that it was an enchanted dagger? That an ordinary knife was wielded by magic? That the dagger was conjured out of thin air?”

The witch hesitated. “I mean,” he said, very carefully, “that whatever made the wounds was magical and that the life was drawn out by that magic. If it was a dagger, the dagger was enchanted; whether it was wielded by magic or by someone’s hand I have no way of knowing.”

“Very well, then,” Sarai said, “suppose it’s an enchanted dagger, and you happen to bump into someone on the street who’s wearing that dagger on his belt. Would you know it?”

The witch hesitated even longer this time. “I doubt it,” he said at last. “But I think—I think—that if I saw someone use that dagger to cut someone, I would know it.”

“Well, that’s better than nothing,” Sarai muttered.

“I would, of course, immediately inform you, my lady, if I saw anything of the sort.”

“Of course,” she said. “Or the nearest guardsman, or whoever.” “Of course.”

Sarai turned and headed for the stairs.

This one was the worst yet, and for a very simple reason-she had known the victim. Serem the Wise was one of the best-known enchanters in Ethshar of the Sands—or rather, he had been; now he was nothing but a wandering ghost and a throat-slashed cadaver.

His apprentice—what was her name? Oh, yes, Lirrin. Lirrin was waiting at the foot of the stairs, looking pale and ill. Behind her, in the front parlor, Sarai could see Serem’s famous fan-tree, waving away as if nothing had happened; trust old Serem to use solid, permanent enchantments, not the feeble sort that would have died with their creator.

Lirrin would be doing all right for herself, probably—as far as Sarai knew, there were no relatives with a stronger claim to any part of the estate than that of a new apprentice. If Serem had any children or siblings, they were long since grown, and any wives were dead, divorced, or disappeared. Under Ethshar-itic custom, a child’s welfare came before that of any adult other than a spouse, and Lirrin, at seventeen, was still officially a child. She would inherit the wizard’s house and goods, including his Book of Spells and the contents of his workshop.

That might be a sufficient motive for murder, and despite Lirrin’s display of grief Sarai might have suspected her, were it not for all the other deaths.

Inza the Apprentice Warlock had been the first, slain in her own bed, her throat slashed, a stab wound in her chest; then there had been Captain Deru, waylaid in an alley off Archer Street, stabbed in the back, and his throat slashed. Athaniel the Theurgist was jumped in his shop, his throat slashed, and a single thrust through his heart to finish him off. Karitha of East End, a demonologist, had been beaten into unconsciousness in her own parlor, her throat cut as she lay insensible.

Strangest of all, even as these murders had been talcing place, a dozen animals, mostly stray cats or runaway dogs, had been found dead at various places in the Wall Street Field, with their throats cut open. Had they all been killed before Inza, then Sarai might have guessed the killer was working up his nerve, practicing before he dared risk tackling a human being, but they were not; instead, a dog and a cat had been killed shortly after Inza, the rest one by one in the days that followed, interspersed with the other victims.

And now old Serem was dead, on the floor of his bedchamber, stabbed in the belly, and—like all the rest—his throat had been cut.

And on all of them, men, women, and beasts, the magicians found lingering traces of a strange magic, probably wizardry, that blocked any divination or scrying spell.

Mereth swore she couldn’t identify the killer. Okko could tell nothing of what had happened. Luris the Black had offered to help, to avenge her dead apprentice, but she was as useless as any warlock when it came to knowledge, rather than raw power. And now this witch, Kelder of Quarter Street, had failed, as well.

“He hasn’t killed any witches yet,” Sarai remarked as she marched down the stairs. “One of you will probably be next; he seems to be trying for one of every sort of magician.” “There are still sorcerers, Lady Sarai,” Kelder replied, “and the various lesser disciplines, the herbalists and scientists and illusionists.”

“True,” Sarai conceded. “Still, I’d lock my door, if I were you, and maybe invest in a few warding spells. Besides your own, I mean.” Witches did not have any true warding spells of their own, she knew, but she also knew that witches didn’t want outsiders to know it.

“Perhaps you’re right, my lady,” the witch agreed. “I would like to say that I don’t fit the pattern in these killings, but in truth, I don’t see a clear pattern.” “Neither do I,” Sarai admitted.

That bothered her. There ought to be more of a pattern in who was killed, and how; criminals were usually abysmally unimaginative. This one, though...

They had no idea of any motive. The killer had slain the apprentice warlock, leaving Luris untouched, but here he or she had killed Serem, the master, and had left the apprentice, Lirrin, untouched. Athaniel had had no apprentice, nor, of course, had Deru, since the city guard did not operate on an apprenticeship system. Karitha’s apprentice was a boy of fourteen who had been visiting his parents on their farm somewhere outside the city. Serem’s apprentice inherited everything; Karitha’s, due to the existence of the demonologist’s husband and nine-year-old daughter, inherited nothing but a few papers and the right to stay on until Festival.

There was no pattern, no connecting motive, no common factor among the victims that Sarai had yet discovered.

Lirrin was inheriting a large and valuable house and a great deal of wealth, which would make an excellent motive, and she was a wizard of sorts, as well—could she have arranged the entire thing, staging the other killings in order to throw off suspicion? It was hard to believe that anyone could be so coldblooded; besides, if that was it, she had been foolish to kill Inza and not Luris, thereby missing the chance to create a false pattern and divert suspicion onto Inza. And why kill the dogs?

Besides, Karitha was killed by a very strong person—she had been picked up and flung against a wall at one point. And the killer had not been gentle with Deru or Athaniel, either. Lirrin scarcely looked strong enough to do anything like that. She wasn’t as scrawny and underfed as some apprentices, but she still had more bone showing than muscle. Of course, with magic, anything is possible... Sarai realized that she had reached the bottom of the stairs and was now staring into Lirrin’s face from a distance of only four or five feet.

“I’m sorry,” Sarai said, trying to sound sincere. She was sorry that Serem was dead, genuinely sorry, but right now she was thinking too hard about who might have killed him to get real emotion into her voice.

Lirrin grimaced. “I guess you see things like this all the time, Lady Sarai,” she said, her voice unsteady.

“No,” Sarai said. “No, I don’t. Usually the guard takes care of... of deaths without calling me in. They’re usually simple— someone lost his temper and is sitting there crying and confessing, or there are a dozen witnesses. If it’s not that obvious, then we call in the magicians, and generally we have the perpetrator in the dungeons the next day.” She sighed. “But this time,” she said, “we seem to be dealing with a lunatic of some sort, one who uses magic that hides all his traces. So they called me in, because I’m supposed to be good at figuring these things out. And I’m trying, Lirrin, I really am, but I just don’t know how to catch this one.”

“Oh,” the apprentice—the former apprentice, Sarai reminded herself, since the apprenticeship was over and done, and Lirrin would have to prove herself worthy of journeyman status before the representatives of the Wizards’ Guild, despite missing the final year of her studies—said, in a tiny voice.

Sarai hesitated before saying any more, but finally spoke. “Lirrin,” she said, “you’re Serem’s heir, and that means you’re responsible for his funeral rites. But before you build a pyre, I have a favor to ask, a big one.”

“What?” Lirrin was clearly on the verge of tears.

“Could you summon a necromancer to see if someone can speak to Serem’s ghost? His soul won’t be free to flee to Heaven until his body is destroyed; if we can question him, ask who stabbed him—he must have seen who it was. He might not know a name, he might not remember everything—ghosts often don’t—but anything he could tell us might help.”

Lirrin blinked, and a tear spilled down one cheek. “You said there were others...”

Sarai sighed again.

“There were,” sheadmitted, “but with the first few we didn’t know it would be necessary until it was too late, until after the funeral. We did finally try with the demonologist; her soul was gone without a trace, probably taken by some demon she owed a debt to. We hope to do better with Serem. With your permission.”

“Of course,” Lirrin said weakly. “Of course.”

The smoke from the pyre drifted lazily upward; the weather was starting to turn cooler again, and the air was clear, the sky a dazzling turquoise blue.

“Damn it,” Sarai muttered.

Captain Tikri glanced sideways at her, then across at Lirrin. The apprentice seemed oblivious to everything but the burning remains of her master. The handful of friends and family in attendance were lost in their own thoughts or talking to one another.

“Troubled, Lady Sarai?” Tikri murmured.

“Of course I am!” she said in reply. “It’s all so wasteful and stupid! Even this funeral—it’s just empty ritual. His soul isn’t even in there; there’s nothing to be freed!”

“You’re sure?”

“The necromancer was sure, anyway, or at least he said he was.”

Tikri didn’t reply for a moment; when he did, it was to ask, “Which sort of necromancer was it?” “A wizard,” Sarai answered. “Does it matter, though?” Tikri shrugged, showing her an empty palm. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might. My Aunt Thithenna always used a theurgist to talk to Uncle Gar, after he died—at least, until the priest said she should leave him alone and let him enjoy the afterlife. Worked fine.”

Sarai sighed. “Your Aunt Thithenna was lucky,” she said. “Half the time theurgical necromancers can’t find the one you want, even when there isn’t any question of other magic. And demonological necromancers are worse—unless the ghost you want is a dead demonologist; they’re lucky to contact one out of ten. Sorcerers and warlocks don’t do necromancy at all— they’re probably smart. It’s a messy business. And as often as not the ghost doesn’t remember anything useful.” “What about a witch, then?” It was Sarai’s turn to shrug.

“It’s a little late now,” she said. “I know theurgists and de-monologists don’t need the body, but witches do, even more than wizards. I did have a witch look at him, though—Kelder of Quarter Street. You know him, don’t you?” Tikri thought for a moment, then nodded. “Well, he’s not a real necromancer,” Sarai said. “But he couldn’t see anything.”

“Too bad.” Tikri hesitated, and said, “There’s news, though. I was going to wait until after the funeral to tell you, but maybe I should mention it now.” “Oh? What is it?” “It’s not good news.”

Sarai sighed again. “In this case, I wasn’t expecting good news. What is it, another body?” “No, no,” Tikri hastily assured her. “Not that bad.” “Not even a dog?” Tikri shook his head. “Well, then?” Sarai demanded.

“Well, it looks like we have more than one killer. Mereth and her apprentice were studying the traces in Athaniel’s shop—the actual break-in was done by warlockry.”

Sarai frowned. “But it wasn’t warlockry that killed him. Mereth was sure of that.”

Tikri nodded. “So if our killer is a wizard, he has a warlock working with him,” he said.

“Maybe it’s a warlock who’s gotten hold of an enchanted dagger somewhere,” Sarai suggested.

“Maybe,” Tikri conceded. “But why would a warlock be doing any of this? A warlock can stop a man’s heart without touching him; why cut throats?”

“Why would anybody do all this?” Sarai retorted.

“A demonologist making a sacrifice, maybe? Or a wizard collecting the ingredients for a spell?”

“And how would a demonologist or a wizard do warlockry?” Sarai started to take a deep breath to say more and accidentally caught a lungful of smoke from the pyre; she lost whatever she had intended to say in an extended coughing fit. Tikri stood silently by, waiting.

When she regained control of herself, Sarai was no longer thinking entirely about warlocks or motives; the coughing had reminded her of her father’s failing health and poor Kalthon the Younger with his fits. Her family was not exactly robust or numerous anymore. She had to face the possibility that any day, she could find herself the new Minister of Justice permanently, not just filling in—and she would still be Minister of Investigation, as well.

As a girl, she had never expected to have this sort of responsibility; her father and brother were supposed to handle the Ministry of Justice, and back then there had been no Minister of Investigation yet. By rights, she shouldn’t have had a government job at all; she should have been married off years ago to a wealthy merchant, or to some noble not too closely related to her. She should be raising chickens and sewing clothes and tending children, not standing here watching a murdered friend burn and worrying about who killed him instead of remembering his life.

The idea of being the overlord’s investigator had sounded intriguing four years ago, but the idea of spending the rest of her life at it, at hunting down demented criminals and sadistic thugs, or worse, failing to hunt them down...

It was beginning to wear on her. She wondered how her father could stand going on being Minister of Justice, year after year.

But of course, maybe he couldn’t stand it, maybe that was why he was dying.

And here before her was the body of a man who could have saved her father, and had refused. Maybe, Sarai thought bitterly, she should be applauding, instead of mourning.

Then she blinked, startled.

Could that be the killer’s motive?

It wasn’t at all likely that all the victims had wronged any one person by their actions, but might they have done so by inaction? Was there something the killer wanted that all of them, the warlock, the soldier, the theurgist, the demonologist, the wizard, had failed to provide?

It seemed like a reasonable -possibility. It didn’t explain the almost ritualistic throat-slashing, or the use of both warlockry and wizardry, though.

Sarai remembered that Tikri thought there was more than one killer involved. That made sense—the man who threw Athaniel and Karitha around had clearly been immensely strong and must have been large and muscular, while Inza’s killer appeared to have slipped in through a window open only a few inches. De-ru’s killer had been big enough to kill him while he was awake, without leaving signs of a struggle, but had done so from the back—and an experienced old brawler like Deru would not have turned his back on anyone he considered a threat. That called for someone strong, but not big and burly.

But if there was more than one killer, why? Why would a group want to commit these murders? It seemed even less likely than an individual—unless it was some sort of conspiracy or cult at work.

Was there, perhaps, a secret conspiracy of magicians? Had Inza and Serem and the others been offered a chance to join, and been killed to insure their silence when they refused?

But why kill them all the same way, then? Was that a warning to others, perhaps? Or was it in fact a ritual? Was this a cult of some sort, perhaps followers of a demon that had somehow escaped from the Nether Void without coming under a demon-ologist’s control? Or people enthralled by some wizardry, perhaps? There were wizards who could command elemental spirits or animals or ghosts—why not people? Or might the killers be ensorceled? Sarai had heard rumors, dating all the way back to the Great War, of sorcerers who could control the thoughts of others.

Cults and conspiracies—what was she up against? Could there be a cult of killers? She seemed to remember stories of such a thing.

“Tikri,” she asked, “have you ever heard of an organization of assassins?”

“Do you mean the cult of Demerchan?” the soldier asked, startled.

Demerchan—that was the name. All she knew about it was vague legends and unfinished tales. “Do I? Could they be responsible for these killings?”

Tikri hesitated, then admitted, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t either,” Sarai muttered.

She didn’t know—so she would just have to find out. And not just about Demerchan. There were magicians involved. She intended to check out the organizations of magicians that might be involved—the Wizards’ Guild, the Council of Warlocks, the Brotherhood, the Sisterhood, the Hierarchy of Priests, and any others she could uncover.

“Tikri,” she whispered, “I’m going to need several men. And women, too, probably.”

Captain Tikri shot her a glance, then nodded.

CHAPTER 16

Four days later, a dozen blocks away, Tabaea lay back on the bed and stared up at the painted ceiling. This inn was a far cry from the dingy, malodorous places on Wall Street where she had spent most of her nights just a few months before. The sheets were clean, cool linen; the blanket was of fine wool, dyed a rich blue and embroidered with red and gold silk; the mattress was thick and soft, filled with the finest eiderdown.

No more burlap and straw for Tabaea the Thief, she told herself. Three fluffy pillows. A bottle of wine and a cut-glass goblet at her bedside, a fire on the hearth, and a bellpull in easy reach. Even the beams overhead were decorated, a design of red flowers and gold stars against a midnight blue background. The plaster between beams continued the blue, sprinkled with white stars and wisps of cloud.

She ought, she supposed, to be happy. She had more money than ever before in her life, she was stronger and healthier and more powerful than she had ever imagined she could be. She could take almost anything she wanted.

But she was not happy, and that “almost” was the reason why. There were things she wanted that she couldn’t have. True, she had gotten away with half a dozen murders, but they had not all yielded the results she sought.

She had killed Inza, and now she could work warlockry—but only at an apprentice level, at least so far. And sometimes it felt so good doing it that it scared her; she knew nothing about it and was afraid she was doing something wrong, something that, even if it didn’t harm her directly, would draw the attention— and the wrath—of the real warlocks, or, worse, of whatever it was that was responsible for the whispering she drew her power from.

She had killed Captain Deru, and with his strength added to the rest she was stronger than any man in Ethshar; she could wield a sword with the best of them and could put an arrow in a dog’s eye at sixty paces; but she still looked like a half-starved, plain-faced girl, and no one stepped aside at her approach, and no one was intimidated by her bellow. She had killed Athaniel, and that had done her no good at all; the gods still didn’t listen when she prayed and still didn’t come at her call. She didn’t know the right formulae, the invocations, or the secret names; none of that had transferred.

She had killed Karitha and had discovered that demons were just as picky as gods in how they were summoned.

She had killed Serem, and she really wasn’t even sure why, because by then she had known what would happen. She didn’t know the incantations, the ingredients, or the mystic gestures. She didn’t even know the names of any of the spells. And of course, she had no athame and could not make one; she had only the Black Dagger, instead.

Maybe the dagger was her reason for killing him, she thought, in frustration over his part in saddling her with it. True, it had given her power and strength, and it had saved her from that awful drunk, but it was so maddening, having this magic right there in her hands and not understanding any of it.

She hadn’t really thought the dagger had influenced her at the time, but yes, she admitted to herself, it probably had something to do with it.

Whatever the reason, she had killed him, and it hadn’t done any good.

And finally, just a few days before, she had killed a witch by the name of Kelder of Quarter Street. She had seen him at Ser-em’s funeral and had followed him home. That had some result, anyway—she seemed to have acquired at least one new ability; she could feel odd, sometimes incomprehensible bits of sensation fairly often, especially when near other people.

She could not, however, make very much sense of them. She was no apprentice; she had no one to tell her what anything meant. When she sensed a wet heat from a man’s thoughts, or an image of red velvet, or a tension like the air before a thunderstorm, what did that represent? The cool blackness from the potted daisies here in her room at the inn—was that normal? Did it mean they were thriving, or dying?

The truth was that she could gain more useful information about the world and its creatures through her canine sense of smell than through any of her supernatural abilities.

And her warlockry seemed to be getting worse. Not by itself; at first, she had thought she was just being distracted, or forgetting what she had managed to learn, but now, looking back on it, she was fairly certain that every time she had killed another magician, her warlockry had weakened. The effect was most noticeable when she added witchcraft to her collection of skills. Now she had to listen intently to find that whisper; it wasn’t intruding uninvited as it had at first.

Did the different magicks interfere with each other, like kittens stumbling over their litter-mates?

If she had killed a witch first, could she have made sense of what she saw and felt? Would she be able to do more, even without training?

It was all rather discouraging. There was so much she didn’t know. Here she had, at least in theory, the ability to perform five different kinds of magic, and she didn’t know how to use any of them properly! And no matter what she did, no matter how powerful, how fast, how perceptive she became, she still looked like a ragged half-grown thief, and those around her still treated her accordingly. She had had to pay cash in advance for this room, and the innkeeper had clearly been astonished when Tabaea had pulled out a handful of silver.

And she couldn’t tell anyone about any of it; there was no one she could trust, no one she could talk to. If she ever admitted anything, they would all know that she was a murderer, and she’d be hanged.

It just wasn’t working out the way she had thought it would.

There had to be something she could do to make it work, though. Maybe if she knew more about all the different kinds of magic, she thought, she would be able to get some use out of them. She couldn’t just steal the knowledge, of course—the Black Dagger didn’t work that way; she now knew that beyond any doubt, she would never learn anything from it.

And of course, she was too old to be an apprentice. She was nineteen, almost twenty.

But maybe, if she listened—she had superhuman hearing now, at least in the upper registers, thanks to a dozen dead animals. She could get in anywhere, with her lockpicking and house-breaking skills, her animal stealth, her stolen strength, and her warlockry.

If she crept into a magician’s home and watched and listened, if she found a new apprentice just beginning his training...

It was certainly worth a try.

Moving like a cat—not figuratively, but literally—she leaped from the bed and crept to the door, then down the hall, down the stair, through the common room, and out into the gathering night.

CHAPTER 17

The legendary assassins’ cult of Demerchan, Captain Jikri assured Lady Sarai, was quite real and headquartered somewhere in the Small Kingdoms; beyond that he knew nothing definite. At Lady Sarai’s insistence, Tikri sent a well-funded agent to attempt to learn more.

Until the agent returned there was nothing else to be done about Demerchan, so Sarai turned her attention to other organizations, ones that happened to be closer at hand—the organizations that represented the different schools of magic. She knew of five—the Wizards’ Guild, the Council of Warlocks, the Brotherhood, the Sisterhood, and the Hierarchy of Priests. Neither sorcerers nor demonologists nor any of the lesser sorts of magicians, such as herbalists or scientists, seemed to have any unifying body—at least, four years of research into magic had failed to find any sign of one operating in Ethshar.

Lady Sarai didn’t think it was worth worrying about herbalists or the like, and she couldn’t do much about the sorcerers or demonologists, but the five known groups definitely wanted attention—especially the wizards and warlocks, since the killers had left indications of wizardry and warlockry.

The Wizards’ Guild was by far the most powerful of the organizations—every wizard was a member, bound by Guild rules, as well she knew. Every wizard in the World was responsible to his or her local Guildmaster.

Most people thought that the Guildmasters ran everything, but Sarai knew better. She had learned a year before that the Guildmasters, popularly believed to all be equals in the government of the Wizards’ Guild, in fact answered to a select few called the Inner Circle—that secret, she was given to understand, could cost her her life if she were too free in its dissemination.

If she wanted to speak to someone with real power in the Wizards’ Guild, she knew she should speak to a member of the Inner Circle—but if the very existence of the Inner Circle was secret, she could hardly expect anyone to tell her who was a member.

Serem the Wise might or might not have been a member; her informant thought that he had been. This particular rumor had come up in a discussion of Serem’s apparent successor as the senior Guildmaster in Ethshar of the Sands—Telurinon of the Black Robe was definitely not a member of the Inner Circle and was said to have hopes of changing that.

But if Telurinon was not in the Inner Circle, was he really the city’s senior member of the Guild?

Well, whether he was or not, he was her best possible contact with the Guild; she sent him a message asking if a private meeting could be arranged for her to speak to the Guild’s representatives in Ethshar of the Sands.

While she waited for a reply, she considered the other organizations.

The Council of Warlocks was a much looser body than the Guild; while every warlock she spoke to seemed more or less to acknowledge its authority, at least within the city walls, no one mentioned rules or discipline or death threats when discussing the Council. The membership of the actual Council seemed to change fairly often—since it was nominally composed of the twenty most powerful warlocks hi the city, its members were also the warlocks most likely to hear the Calling and vanish without notice.

She wasn’t sure just who the current chairman was; Sarai was fairly certain that Mavis of Beachgate had left the city, either Called or fleeing southward by ship, hoping to get farther from Aldagmor before the Calling could claim her.

Luralla would know, though; she had the warlock called in and asked her to take a message to the chairman of the Council. Those groups were the important two, but for the sake of thoroughness, Lady Sarai considered the others.

Only a minority of theurgists had any connection with the Hierarchy of Priests; Sarai wasn’t sure whether that would have made them more or less suspicious under other circumstances. As it was, though, Okko happened to be the high priest, and Sarai simply couldn’t take seriously the idea that he might be behind some fiendish conspiracy.

Still, she did go so far as to question him briefly while a witch by the name of Shala of the Green Eyes sat concealed in an adjoining room, watching for lies or any sign of guilt. Shala had been hired almost at random, after a walk down the western portion of Wizard Street—Sarai wanted to avoid using anyone Okko might recognize or might have had any chance to subvert. Shala found no evidence that Okko was concealing anything and assured Sarai that the old theurgist was telling the truth when he swore he knew nothing about the murders he hadn’t told Lady Sarai. Of course, there might be another organization of theurgists— but really, theurgists committing murder? The gods didn’t approve of that sort of thing.

That brought Sarai to the witches.

Witches had two organizations, segregated by sex—which made no sense that Sarai could see, since she hadn’t come across any differences between how witchcraft worked for men and how it worked for women. Neither of them was very structured—the Sisterhood generally chose their leaders by lot at erratic intervals, while the Brotherhood elected them annually, and there was no permanent hierarchy in either group. Between them, they included perhaps a third of the thousand or so witches in the city. The Sisterhood was somewhat larger than the Brotherhood—but then, Sarai had the impression that there were more female witches than male.

Of the witches she had dealt with, Sarai knew at least one was a member of the Sisterhood—Shirith of Ethshar, who had tried unsuccessfully to heal Lord Kalthon. There were no annoying delays while meetings were arranged; Shirith and her apprentice came when invited and met with Lady Sarai in the Great Council Chamber that same evening.

Sarai had chosen the council chamber, rather than one of the innumerable smaller rooms in the palace, to impress upon the witches just how important this was—and also because the chamber gave an impression of great privacy, even while Okko would be listening from a concealed room adjoining, and Mer-eth of the Golden Door would be watching by means of a scrying spell.

She dressed for the meeting in a nondescript tunic and skirt. She not only didn’t wear the impressive robes of the Minister of Justice—she had had a set altered to fit her when first she found herself forced to act in her father’s place—but she dressed far more simply than was her wont, to add to the air of secrecy.

The thought struck her as she straightened her skirt that she was probably entitled to some sort of formal costume as Minister of Investigation; she had never worried about it before, since it was not in the nature of the job to make public appearances.

Perhaps this plain black skirt and dark blue tunic would serve. Her mouth twisted in a semblance of a smile at the thought.

She could hear her father’s labored breathing as she crossed to the door; Kalthon the Younger was asleep in his chamber, but their father was awake, lying on the couch—or at any rate, as awake as he ever was anymore.

She took a moment to kiss his brow, then left the apartments and hurried down the corridor.

She found the two witches waiting in the council chamber, looking very small and alone in the two chairs they occupied of the hundred or so that the room held. Three red-kilted guards were standing watch, one at each door; Sarai dismissed them. “Shirith,” she said, when the doors had closed behind the guards, “I’m so glad you could come.”

The elder witch rose and curtsied. When she stood again she smiled wryly, and said, “Perhaps, Lady Sarai, you have not yet realized just how unlikely any citizen of Ethshar is to ignore a summons to the Palace from the Acting Minister of Justice, especially one delivered by a member of the city guard in full uniform, including sword.” Sarai had not thought of it in those terms. She had sent a soldier because he was handy—most of the officials of the overlord’s government used the city guard for their errands outside the palace.

To an ordinary citizen, though...

Well, she saw Shirith’s point. And perhaps it was just as well; she had wanted to impress the witches with the severity of the situation, after all.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Sarai asked. She knew the more skilled and powerful witches could hear the thoughts in people’s heads, if they tried, and Shirith was undoubtedly skilled.

“Do you want me to?” Shirith countered. “Ah, I see you do, if only to save time. I’m sorry, Lady Sarai, but I’m afraid that... oh.”

She paused, then said, “The killings. Poor Kelder.”

Sarai nodded.

“If you could tell me more, Lady Sarai...” Shirith began.

Lady Sarai explained quickly, well aware that Shirith was filling in missing details with her witchcraft.

“I’m afraid,” Shirith said at last, “that I can’t help you. We in the Sisterhood are naturally concerned, even though Kelder was obviously not one of our members. I can attest that I am in no way involved in these killings, nor is any member of the Sisterhood with whom I have spoken in the past month. Your theurgist will confirm that I speak the truth; I don’t know what the wizard’s spell will show, but if it tests veracity, then that, too, should support me.”

So much, Sarai thought, for secrecy.

“Well,” Shirith said apologetically, “once I start listening to what lies behind your words, I can’t always help hearing more than you might want.”

Sarai waved that away. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “and I didn’t really suppose that the Sisterhood was behind the murders. Can you vouch for the Brotherhood, as well?”

“Not as definitely,” Shirith admitted, “but I can send their leaders to you for questioning.”

Sarai nodded. “That would be useful. Do you have any other suggestions? Anything you would advise me to do to track down these killers who use both wizardry and warlockry?”

Shirith shook her head. “No,” she said, then added, “it’s odd, that combination; wizards and warlocks have distrusted each other since the Night of Madness, and from what I’ve heard, warlockry fits better elsewhere.”

“What do you mean?” Sarai asked. Then she remembered something Kelder had said, when the two of them were studying Serem’s corpse.

“Well,” Shirith said, “it appears, from all I’ve heard, that witchcraft and warlockry are much more closely related to each other than either one is to wizardry.” “I’ve heard that, too,” Sarai admitted. “Do you know who you might want to talk to?” Shirith suggested. “Teneria of Fishertown, from Ethshar of the Spices. The word in the Sisterhood is that she’s made some remarkable discoveries about connections between witchcraft and warlockry— especially remarkable, since she’s still only a journeyman.”

“Thank you,” Sarai said, making a mental note of the name. “I’ll do that.”

In the three days that followed Sarai spoke to a four-man delegation from the Brotherhood and removed that group from suspicion, as well. She sent a messenger by sea to Ethshar of the Spices, to fetch this Teneria of Fishertown. She had notices circulated to demonologists, sorcerers, and other magicians of various kinds that she sought any information they could provide about whoever was responsible for the recent murders.

But she received no reply from either the Council of Warlocks or the Wizards’ Guild, nor did she learn who had killed those men, women, and dogs.

CHAPTER 18

There had been no killings for three sixnights, but Sarai did not believe anyone was safe. The conspirators, whoever they were, might just be lying low, or perhaps the phase of the greater moon might be related, in which case the next murder could occur at any moment.

And during this lull there had been some very curious break-ins. No one was harmed, nothing stolen, but several magicians of different sorts, alerted by Sarai’s far-flung inquiries, had reported signs that they had been spied upon, their workshops entered, their books read. What’s more, the signs left by these strange invasions had included traces of wizardry, warlockry, and even witchcraft. This last had prompted further questioning of Shirith and several other witches, but again, all swore to their innocence, and other magicians said those oaths were truthful.

Sarai was convinced that these break-ins were the work of the murderous conspiracy, but she still had no idea what the conspirators were up to. Furthermore, she still had not met with the Council of Warlocks or the representatives of the Wizards’ Guild.

With all this going on, she really did not much care that Lord Tollern, Minister of the Treasury, was not happy with her. Finding the killers and unmasking the conspiracy was more important than money. Money was only worth what it could buy, and when she hired magicians and sent ships to Ethshar of the Spices and so forth, Sarai was buying information.

“That’s all very well,” Lord Tollern told her, “but you can’t spend the city’s entire treasury on this.”

“Why not?” Sarai demanded.

“Because we need it for other things, as well. Oh, I don’t deny that this conspiracy is dangerous, Lady Sarai, I don’t deny it at all, not for a moment. But it isn’t the only danger that old Ederd has to worry about. What good will it do to stop these mysterious magical murderers, if it allows common thieves to run amok, or we let the walls fall into ruin, or the harbor silt up so that no ships can dock?” “I’m not spending that much!” Sarai protested. “No,” Tollern admitted, “but this isn’t anything we’ve budgeted for, you see. My dear, can’t you find some way to settle this whole matter quickly?”

“How?” Sarai asked. “I’m doing the best I can, but I can’t even get the Wizards’ Guild to talk to me.” “My dear Lady Sarai, you’re Minister of Investigation and Acting Minister of Justice; surely you can order them to talk to you, in the name of our beloved Ederd the Fourth. Even the Wizards’ Guild would not be quick to refuse a command from the overlord himself. Defy one of the triumvirs of the Hegemony? That’s a risky business, even for a magician.”

Sarai hesitated. She knew the treasurer was technically correct, but she hadn’t dared to directly invoke the overlord’s name before. Any power used too often was power wasted, and she knew that Ederd did not take kindly to those who called upon his authority too freely. Up until now, people had cooperated willingly—or had been intimidated much more easily; as Shirith had pointed out, most citizens did not care to argue with soldiers sent by one of the government ministers. “I’ll think about it,” she replied.

The following day she sent not a lone messenger, but a squad commanded by a lieutenant, to order the Council of Warlocks, in the name of Ederd, Overlord of Ethshar, to wait upon the Minister of Investigation in the Great Council Chamber, at a time to be mutually agreed upon.

The reply arrived that same evening; the meeting was held the following day.

She prepared for the meeting in her family’s apartments, gathering her wits and her notes, trying not to look at her father as he lay unconscious in his bed. This time, acting in the overlord’s name, there would be no pretense of privacy or informality; she wore the attire of a Minister of Justice.

It occurred to her, as she made the turn into the broad marble passage that led from the outer apartments into the central mass of the palace, that she should have arranged for attendants to accompany her—when she entered the justice chamber in her lather’s place she was always preceded by Chanden the bailiff and Okko the theurgist and a couple of guardsmen and followed by the door guards. The overlord himself, when entering a room on official business, might have a retinue of anywhere from a handful of bodyguards to a parade of a hundred soldiers and officials. As Minister of Investigation, Sarai realized, she was surely entitled to bring a couple of guards and her chief of staff, Captain Tikri.

She couldn’t very well bring Okko, since as before, he and Mereth were to spy on the meeting, but some guards would have been a good idea.

Well, she wouldn’t worry about it. She had put Tikri in charge of arranging seating and keeping an eye on the warlocks, so he wouldn’t be available in any case.

When she reached the council chamber there were guards posted outside the door—Tikri’s work, of course. One stood on either side of the gilded archway; each was a big man, in his best uniform of mustard yellow tunic and bright red kilt, and each carried a gold-shod spear with a very nasty, practical-looking barbed head. At the sight of Lady Sarai they snapped to attention and thumped their heavy spears on the stone floor.

They did not, however, open the door; Sarai hesitated.

As she did, a small door in the side of the passage opened, and a servant in the overlord’s livery stepped out.

“Lady Sarai,” he said, bowing low. “Just a moment, and we’ll have your way prepared.”

Sarai blinked. Tikri had apparently been more thorough than she had expected. “Is everyone here?” she asked.

The servant said, “We have twenty people here who have identified themselves as the Council of Warlocks. That’s all I know, my lady.”

“Thank you,” Sarai said. “What needs to be prepared, then?”

“You’ll have to ask Captain Tikri, my lady.” Before she could ask another question she heard footsteps and turned to find a party approaching. Captain Tikri was in the lead, with half a dozen soldiers in gleaming breastplates marching at his heels, while two minor palace officials hurried alongside.

It appeared that even if she hadn’t thought of providing an entourage, Tikri had. “Are you ready, my lady?” Tikri asked. Sarai, smiling, nodded. Two soldiers stepped forward and flung open the doors; one of the officials stepped in and proclaimed loudly, “Stand and obey! Behold the Lady Sarai, Minister of Investigation and Acting Minister of Justice to Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, Triumvir of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, Commander of the Holy Armies and Defender of the Gods! Bow to the overlord’s chosen representative!”

He stepped aside, and two other soldiers marched in and up to the low dais at the far end. Lady Sarai, picking up her cue, followed them; behind her came the other official, Tikri, and the two remaining guards.

The two who had opened the doors now closed them, from the inside, and took up positions as guards, while the official who had announced her hurried around the side of the room.

Sarai walked slowly up the aisle, keeping her eyes straight ahead, but she still got a good look at her audience.

All of them wore the monochromatic robes and peculiar hats that had somehow become the accepted occupational garb for magicians of every sort; for most of them, the single color was black, but she saw one in red velvet, one in dark green, and two in shades of blue. There were old men and youths, ancient crones and handsome young women. She saw a few familiar faces, but mostly strange ones.

And all of them bowed, as ordered. Lord Tollem had been right; they were cowed.

At least, for the moment.

She reached the dais and made her way to the center; there she turned and faced the crowd, waiting while her entourage took up positions around her.

The official who had announced her had now made his way around the room to one of the front corners; he bellowed, “By courtesy of the Lady Sarai, you may be seated!”

It wasn’t really very different from presiding over her father’s court, once she got started—right down to listening to feeble excuses.

“I swear, my lady, we had every intention of meeting with you,” the chairman insisted—Vengar the Warlock, he called himself, and Sarai did not recall ever meeting him or hearing his name before this. “It was simply a matter of logistics; there are twenty of us, after all, each with his or her own schedule, each with his or her own concerns, and coordinating such a meeting...”He didn’t finish the sentence; instead, he said, “We had not realized the importance you attached to it. We have nothing to tell you as a group that we have not told your agents separately; none of us are involved in these killings; and at any rate, the deaths have stopped, have they not?” He glanced uneasily at the door guards, and asked, “Or have there been others we were not informed of?”

“There have been none of these killings reported for three sixnights,” Sarai confirmed. “However, there could be more at any time, and the overlord’s government cannot tolerate such things.”

“Of course,” Vengar agreed. “But what has this to do with us? We are no part of Lord Ederd’s government.”

“No,” Sarai agreed, “but at least one of your people, a warlock, is involved in the killings.”

“Who says so?” a younger warlock demanded—Sirinita of somewhere, Sarai thought her name was.

“Kelder of Quarter Street,” Sarai replied. “A first-rate witch who was aiding me in my investigations. He assured me that both wizardry and warlockry were involved.”

“Why doesn’t he speak for himself?” Sirinita called angrily.

“Because he’s dead,” Sarai answered, just as angrily. “He was the last victim—that we know of.”

“How convenient!” Sirinita replied, her voice dripping sarcasm.

This disrespect was too much for some of the other warlocks, provoking a shocked murmur from several of them. “My apologies, Lady Sarai,” Vengar said, throwing a furious glance at Sirinita. “You are sure of this? A warlock was involved in the killings?”

“Quite sure,” Sarai replied.

Vengar frowned. “I regret to say,” he said, “that we are still unable to help you. Ours is purely a physical magic; we have no way to read the thoughts or memories of other warlocks, and we do not spy on each other. It may well be that one or more warlocks participated in these crimes; it may even be that those participants were among the warlocks of Ethshar of the Sands, and as such nominally subject to this council. Still, we have no knowledge of them, nor any means of obtaining such knowledge.”

“You’re certain of that?” Sarai asked.

“I swear it,” Vengar answered.

“You all say so? You all swear it?”

There was a general mutter of agreement, but Sarai was not satisfied; she went through the entire score, one by one. All gave their oaths that they knew nothing about the murders that Sarai did not.

Finally, the vows complete, Sarai announced, “I accept your word. Still, you claim to represent the warlocks of this city, and that means that you are partially responsible for them, as well. I therefore charge you all to tell me at once if you learn anything more, and further, I hereby require, in the overlord’s name, that if at any point in this investigation 1 call upon the services of the Council of Warlocks, that those services will be forthcoming. It doesn’t have to be any of you who does what I ask—send your journeymen, your apprentices, whoever you please, but when I call, I expect cooperation.” This speech was composed on the spur of the moment; she was up against a magically gifted multiple murderer, who might reasonably be expected to be very dangerous. Knowing that she could call on several powerful warlocks would be reassuring. “Is that clear?” she asked.

Sirinita spoke up again. “Who are you,” she demanded, “to give orders to the Council of Warlocks?”

“I,” Sarah answered, “am Minister of Investigation and Acting Minister of Justice to Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, Triumvir of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, Commander of the Holy Armies—which means that I have those holy armies, which is to say the city guard, at my disposal.”

“You seek to frighten us with mere soldiers?” Sirinita sneered.

“Not exactly,” Sarai said. “I hope to frighten you with the knowledge that if you defy me, you’ll be forced to use your warlockry over and over to defend yourselves for as long as you stay in this city—and we all know what happens when a warlock uses a little too much of his magic, don’t we? The twenty of you are the most powerful warlocks in the city—but you and I realize what most people do not, that that also makes you the twenty most vulnerable to the Calling. True, you’ll easily be able to defeat a dozen guardsmen apiece, but I have several thousand soldiers I can send and send and send, until the Calling does my work for me. And there’s nothing south of here but ocean; if you try to flee farther from Aldagmor, that means the Small Kingdoms far to the east, or the Pirate Towns to the west—is that really what you want?”

She stared questioningly at them; no one answered.

After a moment of silence, Sarai said, “I don’t like making threats, you know; I’m not trying to make enemies of you, any of you. I’m just explaining that I do know who and what you are, and that I will have your cooperation, one way or another. This investigation is very, very important to me.”

There was a reluctant mutter of acknowledgment.

With that, Sarai dismissed eighteen of the warlocks, but asked Vengar and Sirinita to stay for a moment.

“Sirinita,” she said in a low voice, when the others had gone, “I don’t know why you seem so displeased that the overlord’s government should require the cooperation of the Council of Warlocks. Is there some personal issue at stake here?”

Sirinita, a magnificent creature who looked scarcely older man Sarai but far more powerful, and who stood several inches taller, peered down her nose at the noblewoman. “I became a warlock,” she said, “because I was tired of being told what I could and couldn’t do. I worked my way up to the Council at an earlier age than anyone else for the same reason. And I still don’t like it.”

Sarai sighed. “I will keep mat in mind, then.” She dismissed them both; she had only wanted Vengar as a witness and restraint on Sirinita, should she prove dangerous.

Then, for several minutes, she sat on the edge of the dais, thinking.

She had completely forgotten her entourage until Captain Tikri cleared his throat. She looked up.

“Yes? ”she asked.

“My lady,” Tikri said, “one of my men reports that a stranger wishes to speak with you.”

Sarai blinked up at nun. “What sort of a stranger?”

Tikri shrugged. “He’s dressed as a magician,” he said. “That’s all we know. That, and that he knew where to find you.”

“Send him in,” Sarai said, puzzled.

The moment she spoke, the door at the back of the council chamber opened, and a figure in white appeared. Sarai watched silently as he approached.

He was a man of medium height, heavily built, wearing a robe of fine white linen; a hood hid any hair, and his weathered face was clean-shaven—Sarai could not remember ever before seeing a man so obviously mature without so much as a mustache.

He stopped a few feet away, looking down at her. He did not bow.

“I am Abran of Demerchan,” he announced. Sarai stared silently up at him.

“It has come to the attention of our organization, Lady Sarai,” Abran said, speaking slowly and clearly, as if he were reciting a prepared speech in a language not his own, “that you suspect we are responsible for a series of unnatural deaths that have taken place in this city. I am here on behalf of Demerchan to address this suspicion.” “Go on,” Sarai told him.

Abran nodded, and said, “You know of Demerchan as a cult of assassins; that description is inadequate, at best, but it is true that at times we have slain outsiders. However, we have not struck down any of those whose slayer you seek. I swear, by my name and by all the gods, that Demerchan had no part in the deaths of Inza the Apprentice, Captain Deru of the Guard, Athaniel the Theurgist, Karitha of the East End, Serem the Wise, or Kelder of Quarter Street. If you doubt me, consider that Demerchan has existed for centuries—why, then, should we suddenly kill these, and in this new and noticeable way?”

“Any number of possible reasons,” Sarai answered, a little surprised by her own courage hi answering this intimidating figure. “Someone could have hired you, for example.”

“Butnonedid,” the spokesman for Demerchan replied. “You have your concealed magicians who can tell truth from falsehood; they will tell you I speak the truth.”

Sarai was rather annoyed by this; what was the point of putting Okko in another room if everyone knew he was there? “There are spells that can fool any magician,” she remarked.

“I need no such spells,” Abran insisted. “I promise you, if we of Demerchan had sought to remove these people, none of you would ever know that then deaths had not been mere happenstance and coincidence. We are not so obvious as this new power that stalks your city; our ways are subtle and various.”

“That’s what you claim,” Sarai said. For the first time, Abran allowed himself to appear visibly annoyed.

“Yes,” he said, “that is what we claim, and we make this claim because we know it to be true. Why would we want to slay these people? None of them had troubled us; indeed, we do not trouble ourselves with Ethshar of the Sands at all, in the normal course of events. Our interests lie farther east.”

“Maybe you’re extending those interests,” Tikri suggested from behind him. “Things have been pretty stirred up in the Small Kingdoms lately—that’s where you people operate, isn’t it? But the Empire of Vond has been changing things...”

“Even if we were troubled by Vond, which we are not, why would Demerchan want anything to do with Ethshar of the Sands?” Abran asked. “I don’t know,” Sarai admitted.

“Lady Sarai,” Tikri said, “regardless of whether he’s responsible for these mysterious deaths, hasn’t this man just admitted that he’s part of a conspiracy of murderers?”

Sarai, somewhat startled, realized that Abran had, indeed, done just that. She nodded to Tikri, who started forward.

Before the captain could touch the white-robed figure, however, Abran raised his hands, spoke a single strange word, and vanished.

“Damn,” Tikri said, stopping short. Sarai bit her lip. This was magic, of course. Well, she had some of that available herself, just now. “Okko! Mereth!” she called. “Did you see where Abran went? Is he still here, invisible?” “Keep the doors closed!” Tikri called. Okko’s voice sounded from his hiding place. “I find no trace of him.”

And no trace was ever found—a search of the room turned up nothing, a hastily summoned witch could detect no sign that anyone fitting Abran’s description had ever been hi the Great Council Chamber. A canvass of the inns failed to locate any such visiting foreigner.

Okko and Mereth agreed that he had been there, however, and Okko said that there had been no sign at any time in the conversation that Abran was lying.

When Sarai finally retired, late that night, she was unsure just what she had seen and spoken to, unsure whether to believe what he had told her—but all in all, she thought that he was most likely just what he said he was, that he had spoken the simple truth, and departed by means of a prepared spell of some sort. If so, then Demerchan was not responsible, nor, she believed, were any of the other magicians’ groups—except, perhaps, the Wizards’ Guild.

CHAPTER 19

Teneria of Fishertown arrived the next day, a thin, solemn young woman Sarai judged to be not yet twenty.

Sarai had intended to arrange a meeting with representatives of the Wizards’ Guild, rather as she had with the Council of Warlocks, but the witch’s arrival distracted her from that; instead, she settled down in Captain Tikri’s office and chatted with Teneria about the connections and differences between witchcraft and warlockry—or tried to. “I understand you’re a witch, but that you’re supposed to be expert on the other sorts of magicians,” Sarai said.

Teneria shook her head. “Not all magicians, my lady. It just happens that a little over a year ago I found myself in the company of a warlock for a time, and the two of us discovered some interesting things about our two varieties of magic. Where most magicks conflict one with another, we found that we could make ours work together, and thereby become more than the sum of their parts. So since then I’ve tried to study the interactions between witchcraft and the other magicks—but I haven’t learned much, yet. I’ve been too busy earning a living and living my life.”

Sarai nodded. “What became of the warlock, then?”

Teneria hesitated. “He went to Aldagmor,” she said at last.

Sarai blinked.

“Went to Aldagmor?” Captain Tikri asked. “How do you mean...?”

Teneria shrugged, and Sarai waved Tikri to silence. “Went to Aldagmor” surely meant that he was drawn by the Calling, and was gone forever; no warlock ever returned from Aldagmor. If Teneria’s interest in him had been personal, as well as professional, the subject was probably a painful one, and it didn’t seem relevant to the matter at hand.

The conversation continued, and the two were just getting comfortable with one another when a knock sounded on the office door.

Tikri answered it, as Sarai and Teneria watched. They heard a woman’s voice say, “Hello, Captain; I wasn’t sure you were in, your door isn’t usually closed.”

Sarai recognized the voice. “That’s Mereth of the Golden Door,” she told Teneria. “She’s a wizard specializing in divinations.”

“What can I do for you, wizard?” Tikri asked.

“I just wanted to be sure that Lady Sarai wouldn’t be needing me today,” Mereth replied. “I have a meeting to go to...”. Tikri glanced at Lady Sarai, who frowned. What sort of a meeting was Mereth talking about? “Bring her in,” she told the captain.

Tikri opened the door and motioned for Mereth to enter; she stepped in, looked around the cluttered little room, and spotted Sarai and Teneria. Teneria rose from her chair.

“Oh, hello, Lady Sarai,” she said cheerfully.

“Good morning, Mereth,” Sarai answered. “I’d like you to meet Teneria of Fishertown; she’s a witch who will be helping us investigate the murders. From Ethshar of the Spices.”

“Oh,” Mereth said, startled. “You’re bringing in foreign advisers, too?”

“Yes, I thought...” Sarai stopped hi midsentence. Something about the way Mereth had phrased her question had belatedly caught her attention. “What do you mean, ’too’?” she asked.

Mereth looked flustered. “Well, I mean the Wizards’ Guild has been sending for experts as part of their investigations— there’s a wizard from the Small Kingdoms called Tobas of Telven who’s due to arrive any day now, and a witch who works with him named Karanissa of the Mountains.”

“A witch?” Sarai asked. A witch working with a wizard? She glanced at Teneria.

Mereth shrugged. “That’s what I heard. And they’re trying to find Fendel the Great: they hope they can convince him to come out of retirement...”

Sarai started; even before she became Minister of Investigation and began seriously studying magic, she had heard of Fen-del the Great. She had thought he was long dead. “Wait a minute,” Sarai said. “What do they want with these people? What do you mean, ’their investigations’?”

“Well, I mean their investigation of the murders, of course, Lady Sarai. After all, it involves wizards—someone murdered a Guildmaster, and that means that everyone responsible must die as quickly and horribly as possible, and then there’s the fact that whoever did it used wizardry, and the Guild doesn’t allow anyone to use wizardry except real wizards, and besides, the magic involved might be an entirely new spell, and the Guild...” “And they didn ’t tell me!” Sarai shouted. Mereth, cowed, blinking at her silently. “What’s this meeting you were going to?” Sarai demanded. “Is it connected with this?”

Mereth nodded. “I’m supposed to meet the Guildmasters at the Cap and Dagger and tell them what I know from helping you,” she explained timidly. “Ordinarily I suppose they’d use the Guildhouse, but they...” “When?” Sarai demanded. “Noon.”

“Where is this Cap and Dagger? That’s an inn?” Mereth nodded. “On Gate Street, between Wizard and Arena,” she said.

“Good,” Sarai said, rising from her chair. “Captain Tikri, I want as many guardsmen as you can find to accompany me; Teneria, I would appreciate it if you would join us. Mereth, I am going with you to this meeting.” “I don’t...” Mereth began uncertainly. “I didn’t ask,” Sarai snapped.

An hour later, as noon approached, Mereth walked up Gate Street with a burly soldier on either side; immediately behind her came Sarai and Teneria, and following the two of them came Captain Tikri at the head of three dozen uniformed men. The normal midday traffic stepped aside as this formidable party approached, and they arrived unhindered at the door of a large and elegant inn, where a signboard above the door displayed a silver dagger across a red-and-gold wizard’s cap.

At Sarai’s order, soldiers flung open the door of the inn and marched in with swords drawn.

Close behind them, Sarai marched into the common room and found a dozen astonished men and women in magician’s robes looking up at this unexpected intrusion. She saw Algarin of Longwall, Heremon the Mage, and a few other familiar faces among them.

“What is the meaning of this?” demanded an elderly man Sarai recognized as Telurinon, the senior Guildmaster. “You’re interrupting a private gathering, young woman.”

Sarai announced, “Guildmaster Telurinon, you will address me properly. I am Lady Sarai, Acting Minister of Justice, and you are all under suspicion of treason.” That created a stir, during which Sarai stepped into the room and allowed Mereth, Teneria, Tikri, and the other soldiers to enter, crowding the good-sized room.

“What are you talking about?” lelurinon demanded. A soldier thrust the point of his sword toward the wizard’s throat, and Telurinon belatedly and begrudgingly added, “My lady.”

“I am talking about what appears to be deliberate subversion of the criminal-justice system of this city,” Sarai explained. “You wizards have been withholding information from the Minister of Investigation, refusing to speak with her, while using undue influence on her employees to obtain the results of her own efforts.”

“Aren’t you the Minister of Investigation?” someone asked. Sarai nodded. “That’s right,” she said, “but right now I’m here as Minister of Justice—since you all chose to ignore my invitations as Minister of Investigation.”

“What’s going on?” a white-haired wizard asked. “I thought we were all here because some rogue was using wizardry without our leave; I want no part of treason.”

“You are all here,” Sarai said, “because someone, or some group, is responsible for killing half a dozen innocent citizens of Ethshar, most of them magicians. It’s my belief that this is the work of some sort of cult or conspiracy, one that is based on magic, and because of that I formally requested the assistance of the Wizards’ Guild to help me find those guilty of these crimes, so that they may be stopped. My requests were ignored.”

“Why don’t you find them yourself?” Algarin shouted. “You claim to be the overlord’s investigator—investigate it yourself, then!”

“I have,” Sarai replied angrily.

“From what I’ve heard so far, you’ve hired a bunch of magicians to investigate, you haven’t done anything yourself!”

“And just what would you suggest I do?” Sarai demanded.

“I don’t know,” Algarin replied. “I’m a wizard, and while I may have worked for your father a few times, I don’t pretend to be an investigator!”

“Then don’t tell me how to do my job,” Sarai retorted. “I’ve investigated this. We’ve questioned everyone connected with the victims, everyone who was involved; we’ve looked at all the evidence we can find.”

“Ha! You’re just taking credit for work that was done by magicians—wizards, mostly!”

“I’m not taking credit for anything,” Sarai answered. “There’s no credit to take—we haven’t caught the people behind these killings. And that’s why I’m asking everyone here to help, to tell me anything you can that might help.” “Why should we?”

“Why shouldn’t you?” Sarai put her hands to her hips and shouted angrily, “This conspiracy, if that’s what it is, killed one of your own Guildmasters! Don’t you want Serem the Wise avenged? Aren’t you worried that you might be next? Or with all this talk about credit, are you worried that wizards might get the blame for these killings? It’s wizardry that’s at the heart of them, as far as we can determine—is the Guild covering something up?” “You ’re the one who’s covering up!” the wizard shouted back. “ You ’re the one who isn’t getting her job done! And it’s because it’s magicians getting killed, because you want the Wizards’ Guild to take the blame!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” another wizard asked, before Sarai could reply.

“It’s true!” Algarin insisted. “She’s jealous of us all, jealous of our magic! We solve far more crimes with our spells than she does with her so-called investigations, and she’s jealous!”

Telurinon, who had stood silently during this argument, spoke again. “I believe I see the reason for this baseless charge of treason. She’s Lord Kalthon’s daughter; he’s ill, probably dying, and we’ve refused to heal him—the Guild does not heal aristocrats, as you all know, and perhaps Lady Sarai resents that. I’ve heard these nobles claim we’re all playing at being gods and getting above ourselves when we make such rules; maybe the lady would like to put us back in our place.”

Captain Tikri’s ringers were closed on the hilt of his sword, but Sarai put out a hand and stopped him before he could draw it. “No violence,” she whispered, “not with so much magic here.”

With Lady Sarai thus distracted for a moment, Mereth tried to speak in her defense; other voices rose in protest against

Telurinon’s words as well, and in seconds the entire room was a chaos of shouting and arguing voices. Fists waved in the air; none, so far, had been aimed at anyone.

“You have no right to blame us because you can’t find the people responsible!” someone shouted at Sarai.

“I’m not blaming you!” Sarai shouted back. “I’m just asking you to help me find them!”

She let the bickering continue for a moment longer, but when it showed no sign of reaching any conclusion, Sarai shouted over the hubbub, “Guildmaster Telurinon! Whatevermy reasons, the charge stands and requires an answer—why did you refuse my request for a meeting and the Guild’s assistance in this?”

Telurinon turned back to face her, abandoning his argument with other Guildmasters.

“Because, my lady,” he said, “this is a matter that the Wizards’ Guild wishes to handle on its own. Someone has killed a Guildmaster; we cannot allow that person to be brought before the overlord’s courts, or thrown in the overlord’s dungeon— whoever it is must die, as horribly and publicly as possible, as a direct result of our Guild’s actions.”

“Well, damn it,” Lady Sarai shouted, “why didn’t you meet with me and soy so?”

The argument died away, as the wizards turned to listen.

“I have no problem with recognizing the Guild’s claim to vengeance,” Sarai said. “The overlord’s government makes no claims to priority in these matters. I would be delighted to arrange terms whereby, in exchange for the Guild’s cooperation, I would, as Acting Minister of Justice, turn the guilty parties over to the Guild for execution.” Telurinon blinked stupidly at her.

“Well, there, Telurinon,” Heremon called. “I told you you were being hasty.” Several other voices murmured agreement.

“You barged in here, accused us of treason...” Telurinon began.

“I had to get your attention,” Sarai retorted. “You were ignoring me.”

“You brought all these soldiers...”

“I can send them away. If you’ll agree that we’ll all sit down together and pool our information, and that henceforth I am to be kept informed of everything the Guild learns about this matter and every action it takes concerning it, then I’ll send the soldiers away.” She smiled at Telurinon. “What do you say, Guildmas-ter?”

Telurinon turned helplessly to the other wizards; a moment later, with Telurinon abstaining and only Algarin dissenting, they had agreed to do as Sarai suggested.

Swords were sheathed and the soldiers dismissed, all save Captain Tikri and two others who remained as Sarai’s assistant and bodyguards. Mereth, Sarai, Teneria, and Tikri found seats, and the meeting began.

The discussion started well enough; Sarai gave an account of the known crimes to date and let Mereth report on what her spells had shown her. Then Sarai spoke again, mentioning that both wizardry and warlockry had been involved.

“We were aware of that, my lady,” Telurinon said chidingly. Sarai ignored him and recounted the other meetings she had held with Okko and the witches and warlocks; Mereth confirmed what she said. The wizards seemed to be especially interested in the evidence that the Council of Warlocks knew nothing about the killings and had no magic that could help.

For their part, the wizards reported that they knew little about the actual killings beyond the fact that the murders had involved magic. A necromancer by the name of Thengor reported that his own studies indicated no theurgical or demonological involvement and that the souls of the victims were nowhere in the World, while some of the others expressed doubts about the accuracy of any necromantic reports.

“We did discover,” Heremon said, when Thengor had finished, “that whatever magic was involved is a sort of negative wizardry—it appeared to counteract any wizardry used in its presence. Guildmaster Serem did not come by his cognomen ’the Wise’ entirely without earning it; while he was notoriously careless about the usual wards and warning spells, he had cast several personal protective spells upon himself. The murderer’s weapon seems to have instantaneously nullified all of them when it struck.”

That was interesting, and something Sarai had not known; she leaned forward attentively.

“That’s why we sent for Tobas,” Algarin said.

Sarai looked at him questioningly, but it was Heremon who explained, “Tobas of Telven is a young wizard who has made a specialty of the study of counterwizardries, of spells that prevent other spells from functioning. He lives in the Small Kingdoms, but Guildmaster Telurinon has invited him to join us here in Ethshar, to see if he can tell us anything about the magic this killer uses.”

Sarai nodded.

That seemed to conclude the exchange of information; the Guild had gotten no further in actually determining the identity of the killers than Sarai had. Accordingly, Sarai and Telurinon threw the meeting open to speculation.

“Lady Sarai, you said it might be a cult,” a woman asked. “I know what Thengor told us, but do you think it might be demonologists after all? Maybe it’s the demons themselves using the other magicks—they can do that, can’t they?”

“What kind of a cult?” another voice demanded.

“I don’t know,” Sarai replied. “A cult of assassins, maybe...”

“Demerchan!” The name was repeated by half a dozen voices.

“No,” Sarai said, “I don’t think so.” She described her unexpected visit from Abran of Demerchan. Mereth confirmed her account.

“Maybe it’s the Empire of Vond that’s behind the killings,” a woman suggested. “Wasn’t Vond himself supposed to be some sort of superwarlock?”

“Call in the Vondish ambassador, Lady Sarai! Demand an explanation!”

“No, it’s Demerchan!”

Several voices chimed in with their opinions, and for a moment, chaos reigned.

“What could Vond hope to gain by killing those six people?” “Fear!”

“Magic!”

“They knew too much!” “It’s a sacrifice to a demon!”

“Not Demerchan, Vond! Vond is doing it to disrupt and weaken the Hegemony!”

“Demerchan is killing them to prepare the way to take over the city!”

“It’s a conspiracy that’s trying to overthrow the overlord!”

The discussion deteriorated into several small arguments, and Sarai prepared to take her leave; she had made her point and learned about as much as she could reasonably expect to learn.

And while the wizards argued and Lady Sarai straightened her skirt, Tabaea the Thief crouched in the shadows a few yards away at the top of the staircase, safely out of sight, listening.

Learning about this meeting had been easy; two different wizards had mentioned it in her hearing as she spied on them. Getting in to eavesdrop, however, had been more difficult. She had thought about trying to slip in under some false identity, perhaps as one of the inn’s maids, but had lost her nerve, and instead settled for breaking in through an attic window and hiding at the top of the stairs.

She had been late in arriving and had fled temporarily when all the soldiers marched in, but even when she abandoned her post in the shadows, Tabaea had the ears of a cat—or rather, several cats, and a bird, and several dogs. She had missed some of the discussion and couldn’t see what going on from her chosen place of concealment, but she heard most of it.

They were blaming the Empire of Vond for the killings, which was crazy—that was way off at the other end of the World, wasn’t it? And they were blaming the cult of Demerchan, whatever that was. They were blaming demonologists, and the Council of Warlocks, and even each other. They were blaming Lady Sarai for not catching the killer. They were blaming demons and monsters and just about everything except the Northern Empire. Someone even suggested that spriggans, those squeaky little green creatures like the one that had startled her in Serem’s house so long ago, were not the harmless little nuisances they appeared to be, but diabolical killers working under the direction of some renegade archimage.

Tabaea smiled broadly at that. Spriggans, killing people? The idea of spriggans as deliberate murderers was completely absurd.

Lady Sarai was leaving, and someone named Teneria of Fish-ertown was going with her. Teneria had not said much of anything, but Tabaea had heard someone explain that she was a witch who knew about ways witchcraft and warlockry were related.

Tabaea wished Teneria had spoken up more. After all, Tabaea had both the warlock talent and some witch’s skills and would have liked learning more about them.

Not that she was still as ignorant as she had been when she began. She had listened to warlocks and witches as they talked among themselves and as they lectured their apprentices. She knew that warlockry came down to two abilities, the ability to move things without touching them and the ability to create or remove heat and that everything else was just applications of those. She knew that warlocks had infinite power available and that they drew on a mysterious source somewhere in the wilderness of southern Aldagmor, far to the northeast. She knew about the Calling—she didn’t know what it was, nobody did, but she knew that any warlock who used too much power was irresistibly drawn to the mysterious source of that power and never seen again. She knew that the first warning of the Call would be nightmares, and she had sworn that if she ever again had a nightmare she would give up warlockry.

As for witchcraft, that drew its power from the witch’s heart and belly, which was why witches were so limited in what they could do. A witch could die of exhaustion doing tasks a warlock or wizard would find easy. Witches, therefore, had learned subtlety, had learned to use knowledge more than power—but Tabaea had only the power and not the knowledge, and she wasn’t sure she had the patience to learn.

It did occur to her that thanks to the Black Dagger, she surely had more raw strength in her heart and gut than any other witch who had ever lived; still, she was not sure of how to use it. She wasn’t really sure how to use any of her stolen skills and strengths, though she was learning.

Tabaea found it very amusing mat the magicians all thought she was a conspiracy, rather than an individual; she giggled quietly into the palm of her hand. Little Tabaea the Thief, a World-spanning conspiracy of evil?

Besides, she wasn’t evil, not really; she just wanted her share of the good things in life. She wanted to be on top, instead of on the bottom.

One of the wizards had suggested that the conspirators intended to overthrow the overlord and take over the city. Tabaea hadn ’t thought of that.

Overthrow the overlord? Rule Ethshar of the Sands? She liked that idea. She liked it very much indeed. The entire city at her beck and call? Servants to fulfill her every whim? Her choice of the baubles and pretties on Luxury Street, or of the handsome men of Morningside? What a lovely thought—Tabaea the First, Overlord of Ethshar!

No, not overlord—that wasn’t enough. The overlord ruled as part of the triumvirate and as first among the lords; she wanted to rule on her own, like the monarchs in the Small Kingdoms. Rather than overlord, she would be queen! Queen of Ethshar!

And why stop with the city? Why not conquer the entire World and be empress? She was not giggling anymore; she was starting to take the idea seriously. Why not?

Well, because she was just one woman, that was why. She had her magical powers, of course—she was stronger, more powerful than anyone. She knew, from her eavesdropping and some careful experimentation, that most magic could not work against her: The Black Dagger seemed to nullify any wizardry; she had warlockry of her own, and the one thing a warlock’s power couldn’t seem to touch was another warlock; witchcraft could not directly defeat her because she was stronger than any other witch; theurgy was inherently nonviolent and therefore could not harm her.

Sorcery was still an unknown, though; demonology and some of the minor arts were mysteries, too. And she was not at all sure what would happen if someone managed to get at her with an ordinary weapon. It was not likely that anyone ever could, given ner stolen senses and strength and speed—but on the other hand, she still had to sleep sometimes.

But who had to know any of that?

Conquer the city...

She would, she decided, have to think this over very carefully indeed.

Moving as silently as a cat, she hurried away, back to the window she had left open, and then out to the open air.

CHAPTER 20

Sarai sat dejectedly in Captain Tikri’s office. She had spent the day taking Teneria the witch and Luralla the warlock to the scenes of the various murders, hoping that Teneria might be able to leam something useful with her unique understanding of how witchcraft and warlockry were related; Luralla had been along more as a power source for Teneria than anything else. The net result was nothing; Teneria could do no more than confirm what other witches had already learned. Wizardry and warlockry had been used, and the murderer had left no psychic traces.

Sarai gathered from Teneria that this last was unusual, but just what it meant was not clear. Some witches could choose not to leave traces; warlocks often left no traces, but did not appear to have any voluntary control over it; some spells that wizards used could hide or erase traces. Which of those applied here, Teneria could not say.

The witch was off to her room in the palace now, to refresh herself a little, and Luralla had gone home, leaving Sarai and Tikri in the office. A spriggan had followed them back to the palace; Sarai shooed it away with a shove of her toe, and the little creature backed away, but did not leave the room.

“I hate this,” she muttered to herself. “I should be tending my father, or listening to his cases for him. There must be a sixnight’s backlog by now.”

“Then why don’t you go handle some of them?” Captain Tikri asked from behind her. She turned, startled. “I couldn’t help hearing,” he said, not very apologetically at all.

“That’s all right,” she said. “I should go—but I couldn’t concentrate on it.”

“You might want to try, though—a distraction might help clear your thoughts on this whole mess.”

Sarai stared at Tikri for a moment, then nodded. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I should...”

“Excuse me,” an unfamiliar voice said.

Startled, Sarai turned around and found a small man in a nondescript brown tunic and breeches standing in the doorway.

“Yes? ”she asked.

“I’m Kelder of Tazmor,” the man said, speaking with a curious accent. “I got your message.”

Sarai paused to gather her wits somewhat before she asked, “What message?” The accent, she realized, was Sardironese.

“Ah... you are Lady Sarai, aren’t you?” Kelder asked.

“Yes, I am,” Sarai admitted. “But I still...”

“You sent messengers to Sardiron,” the little man said, “asking for help in solving a series of murders—didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes, that message,” Sarai said. “Of course. And you...?”

“I’m a sorcerer,” Kelder explained. “A forensic sorcerer. When I got your message I came south as quickly as I could.” “Oh, I see; and you’ve just arrived? Do you need a place to stay? I’m sure a room...”

“No, no,” Kelder assured her. “I have a very comfortable room at an inn out by Grandgate; I arrived in the city several days ago.”

“Oh. And you’ve been seeing the city?” Sarai asked. Kelder nodded. “You might say that, Lady Sarai. You see, I’ve been investigating these murders independently—I didn’t want to allow myself to be influenced by any preconceived notions you might have. This is the sort of study where my specialty can really shine, Lady Sarai. I think that the use of forensic sorcery has been shamefully neglected in Ethshar, not just in this city, but throughout the entire Hegemony. To the best of my knowledge, you haven’t consulted any sorcerers on this case:” “Forensic sorcery?” She glanced at Tikri, who shrugged. “I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“It’s rather a neglected field,” Kelder admitted. “I did talk to sorcerers, you know,” Sarai said. “None of them were able to help.” Kelder shrugged. “Ethsharitic sorcerers,” he said scornfully. “Amateurs.”

“And you’re a professional?” Tikri demanded. “I like to think so,” Kelder said, a trifle smugly. “I’ve been studying forensic sorcery ever since I was an apprentice. In general, Sardironese sorcery is considerably more advanced than anything you have here.”

“The Northern taint,” Tikri remarked. “Yes, exactly,” Kelder agreed, ignoring the captain’s insulting tone. “The Baronies of Sardiron, and especially my homeland of Tazmor, were part of the Northern Empire throughout the Great War. Thanks to the relics of the Empire, we have far more to work with than you Southerners.”

“So you’ve come south to show us how it’s done?” Tikri suggested sarcastically.

“No,” Kelder said, still unoflended. “I was at Sardiron of the Waters when Lady Sarai’s messengers arrived, looking for information about cults or conspiracies, maybe involving surviving Northerners, and I thought I might be able to help.” Tikri glanced at Sarai. “You thought we might be dealing with Northerners? My lady, they’ve all been dead for two hundred years!”

Sarai shrugged. “We think they’ve all been dead for two hundred years,” she said. “The World is a big place.” “Oh, I think they have,” Kelder said. “So, sorcerer,” Tikri said, “you know something about cults and conspiracies?”

“No,” Kelder said, “but I know forensic sorcery. So I came here and studied the places where the killings occurred—I confess, it wasn’t until I followed you and those other two women today that I was sure I had located them all. And of course, I was too late to study the bodies, unfortunately.”

Sarai looked at him with renewed interest. The funny little man with the northern accent was full of surprises. “You followed us?” she asked. The sorcerer nodded.

“Do you think you learned something?” she asked. “Yes, my lady,” he said.

“And what might that be?” Tikri asked. “Was sorcery involved in these crimes?”

“Not that I know of,” Kelder said, “but that doesn’t mean very much. Sorcery doesn’t always leave traces. But I did learn that there were four people who had, prior to today, been in each room where a person was murdered.” “Four?” Sarai stared. “So it was a conspiracy...” “Yes, four, my lady, two men and two women, but it was not necessarily a conspiracy. I could not determine the exact times that these people were there, only that they had been. And I have identified one of the four as the final victim, the witch Kelder of Quarter Street—I assume that he visited the rooms in the course of investigating the crimes. One or more of the others might have been legitimate visitors as well, perhaps even among the other investigators. Should all three prove to have been there for other reasons, then perhaps that will prove that there was more than one murderer. Have your investigations found anyone who visited all those places?” Sarai blinked. “Well, I did, after the killings.” “Yes, of course,” Kelder agreed, “I should have expected that. Then I assume one of the two women was yourself—might I test that hypothesis, please?” “How?” “With this talisman.” He drew a flat silver object from inside his tunic and held it out. A circle of milky crystal was set into the center of a metal oblong roughly the size of Captain Tikri’s hand. “If you would be so kind as to touch your fingertip to the white disk...”

Sarai glanced at Captain Tikri, who shrugged. Then she reached out and touched the crystal.

“Thank you. And do you perhaps...”

“I was in all of them,” Tikri interrupted.

“Ah. Then could you...?” Kelder held out the talisman again.

Tikri glanced at Sarai.

“Do it,” she said.

Tikri obeyed, tapping one forefinger lightly on the white crystal.

“Thank you, sir.” Kelder pulled the talisman away and closed both his han’ds around it, holding it near his chest, not quite touching the fabric of his tunic. He stared down at it for a moment, stroking the metal with his thumbs, clearly concentrating hard.

Sarai watched with interest; she had rarely seen sorcery in action before, and nothing at all like this.

After roughly a minute and a half, the little Sardironese looked up at Sarai again.

“It’s definite,” he said. “You, Lady Sarai, were one of the women, and the captain here was the other man. There is evidence that the two of you, and my late namesake, all visited the sites after the other woman. I therefore suspect that this other woman is connected with the crimes. Unless there was another...”

Sarai shook her head. “I can’t think of any other woman who visited all the rooms before I took Teneria and Luralla around this morning,” she said. “Mereth saw some of them, but she didn’t go to every room. Can you tell us anything more about this woman?”

Kelder glanced down at his talisman. “She has black hair and brown eyes,” he said. “And is not tall, certainly not as tall as you, though I cannot specify her height any more exactly than that. She is thin and light on her feet, with a rather square face, a wide nose, and pale skin. She usually wore black clothing and may have gone barefoot. Beyond that...” He turned up an empty palm. “Beyond that, I’m afraid I know no more.”

“That isn’t Mereth,” Sarai said. “The height’s right, but not the rest of it. Are you sure of this? ”

“Oh, absolutely. A woman fitting that description visited each murder site within a sixnight or so of the killings.”

Sarai looked up at Tikri. “That description doesn’t bring anyone immediately to mind,” she said. “Does it for you?”

“No.” Tikri frowned. “I’m not sure how much we should trust this information.”

The sorcerer tucked his talisman back in his tunic. “That’s entirely up to you, of course,” he said, “but I give you my word that it’s reliable information. I don’t know that this woman killed anyone, but she was very definitely there. If I had been able to see the bodies, I could have told you whether the same knife was used in every case...” Sarai waved that aside. “We already know that,” she said. “The wizards tested that for us. It was the same knife every time.”

“Oh.” Kelder essayed a quick little bow of acknowledgment.

Sarai smiled at him. “I’m not disparaging your information, Kelder of Tazmor,” she said. “Thank you for bringing it to us. If you learn anything more, please come and tell us.”

“Of course.” Kelder bowed again, and stepped away.

Sarai looked up at Tikri. “Do you think mis woman is the killer?”

Tikri shook his head. “No woman smaller than you could be strong enough to have committed these murders single-handed. Perhaps she’s the high priestess of a cult that’s responsible for this—if she exists at all.”

“I think she exists,” Sarai said. “Why would the sorcerer lie?”

“To throw us off the track,” Tikri suggested. “Perhaps he’s part of the conspiracy.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sarai admitted, staring at Kelder’s back and chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. “We could check his story, though.”

“How?”

“Witchcraft. Where’s Teneria?” Sarai turned, peering out the door as if she expected to find the young witch standing in the hallway.

Thin, black hair, light on her feet, usually wore black—that described Teneria, Sarai realized. The height was probably wrong, though; the journeyman witch stood very close to Sarai’s own height. And her long, narrow face, with its pointed jaw, hardly looked square, and while her nose was noticeable, that was because it was long, with a bump in it, not because it was wide. Her complexion wasn’t particularly pale. And weren’t her eyes green?. She wasn’t there to check.

Sarai snorted with sudden annoyance. Was she going to be matching every female she met against the sorcerer’s description, from now until the murderers were caught?

She debated sending Tikri to fetch Teneria, but before she could decide, Teneria actually did appear in the doorway. “Just the person I was looking for!” Sarai called. Teneria entered and bowed before Lady Sarai, then asked, “How may I be of service?” “You don’t already know?” Sarai asked wryly. The ghost of a smile flickered across the witch’s rather somber face. “No, my lady,” she said. “Not at the moment.”

“I need to know what’s true and what isn’t,” Sarai said. “You witches are good at that.”

Teneria cocked her head to one side and replied, “In a way. We can generally tell when people believe what they say— whether that’s actually the truth is sometimes an entirely different matter. And it works better with some people than others.” Sarai nodded, and asked, “Suppose you spoke to a woman I thought had been connected with the murders; could you tell me whether she had, in fact, been connected?”

Teneria frowned. “That would depend. Probably. If she spoke at all, almost certainly. If she spoke freely, with no magical constraints, absolutely. But I would not necessarily be able to ascertain the nature of the connection.”

“Could you tell if a person had actually committed one of the murders?”

“Oh, yes, I would think so. Unless there was a very great deal of magic hiding the fact.”

“Suppose you were to walk down the street, or through the market; could you pick a murderer out of the crowd?”

Teneria shook her head. “Only if I was incredibly lucky. The murderer would have to be thinking about the actual killing and feeling a strong emotional reaction to those thoughts, with absolutely no magical protection of any kind. Even then, I couldn’t be sure without stopping to investigate. What might look like a murderer’s thoughts at first glance could just be a housewife worried about killing a chicken for dinner.”

“I thought it was probably too much to ask,” Sarai admitted. “If you could do that, we’d have just had witches working for my father for years, instead of relying on Okko and the others for most of it.”

Teneria shrugged.

“But if we brought you a person and asked, ’Is this the murderer,’ you could tell us?” Sarai asked.

“Ordinarily, yes.”

Sarai nodded. “Good enough,” she said. She pointed. “That man in the brown tunic there is a sorcerer by the name of Kelder of Tazmor; he claims to have magically established that a particular woman was present in each room where a murder was committed—though not necessarily at the time of the killing. I want you to find out how reliable his information is.”

Teneria followed the gesture, but said nothing at first.

“Does sorcery interfere with your witchcraft?” Sarai inquired.

“Not usually,” Teneria replied. “Sometimes.”

“Will it this time?”

Teneria turned and walked away from the dais, toward Kelder. “I’ll let you know,” she said, over her shoulder.

Ten minutes later, she let them know. Kelder believed absolutely in what he had told Sarai and Tikri. Sarai thanked the young witch, and stared down at the spriggan that was clutching at her ankle.

Who was that woman Kelder had described?

CHAPTER 21

Captain Tikri’s files were a mess. Lady Sarai had thought her own records, up in her bedroom, were not as organized as they ought to be, and had always been embarrassed when she thought of the tidy shelves and drawers that her father and his clerks maintained. By comparison with Tikri’s random heap of reports and letters, her records were a model of order and logic. “What are you looking for, anyway?” Tikri asked, as Sarai dumped another armful on his desk.

“I don’t know,” Sarai said, picking a paper off the stack. “But I hope I’ll know it when I see it.”

“How will you know it if you don’t know what it is? I’d offer to help, but how can I?” Sarai sighed.

“What I’m after,” she said, “is some record of a crime that the conspirators might have committed before the murders. Once they killed Inza, we were looking for them, and I’m sure they’ve been careful, and certainly we’ve been careful, checking out everything that we thought might be connected. Right?” “Right,” Tikri said, a trifle uncertainly. “Well, this conspiracy probably didn’t burst out of nowhere, full-grown and completely ready, the night poor Inza died,” Sarai explained. “They must have been preparing before that. They may have killed more dogs, for example, before working their way up to people. They may have injured people without killing them. They may have stolen things they needed for their magic. And maybe, since they weren’t so experienced yet, they left traces and clues. Now do you see what I’m after?”

“Oh,” Tikri said. He hesitated. “How far back do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” Sarai admitted. “You may not find anything.”

“I know that,” Sarai said, flinging down a thick report and glaring angrily at Tikri. “Don’t you think I know that? But I don’t have much of anything else left to try. The Wizards’ Guild wants to catch whoever it is for themselves, because it won’t look as good for them if I do it, so they won’t help me any more than they have to.” Tikri started to protest, and Sarai cut him off. “Oh, they’ll put up a pretense of cooperation, I’m sure,” she said, “but half of them probably still think I’m trying to blame them for all this, or steal the credit. I won’t know if they’re covering up something or not; I can’t be sure, and they aren’t about to tell me. The Council of Warlocks is no help; they’re all afraid that if they do anything to help me they’ll draw down the Calling on themselves. The Brotherhood is less organized than a children’s street game; they don’t even know who’s in charge, or who their members are. The Sisterhood isn’t much better-they don’t know how many witches there are in Ethshar, let alone what any of them are doing. And none of them seem to be getting anywhere with their magic, anyway. So what else would you suggest I do?”

“The magicians can’t help at all?”

“They can’t help any more. Okko says the gods can’t see anything through the haze of wizardry; Kallia says the demons won’t tell her anything, and she doesn’t know whether they know anything to tell. The warlocks all swear their magic doesn’t handle information. Kelder’s told me all he can, and that’s more than I could get from any Ethsharitic sorcerer. Wizards and witches tell me what magic was used, what went where, but they can’t give me names or faces. So I’m reading these papers. Don’t you ever sort them?”

“No,” Tikri admitted.

Sarai let out a wordless noise of exasperation and turned back to the reports.

Tikri, hoping to be of help, began picking up papers and glancing through them, as well. The two sat, reading silently, for several minutes.

“Here’s a report of a missing dog,” Tikri ventured. Sarai glanced up. “Let me see it.”

Tikri obeyed; Sarai skimmed through the report quickly, then put it to one side. “It might be worth another look,” she said.

A moment later she found one herself.

“What ever happened in this case?” she said, handing two pages to Tikri.

Tikri read enough to remind himself what had happened. “Oh, this,” he said. “Nothing happened. We never found out who it was.”

Sarai took the two sheets back. “ ’Guardsman Deran reports tending to stabbing victim in tavern,’ ” she read. “ ’No accusations or arrests made.’ ” She looked up. “That’s in your handwriting.”

Tikri nodded. “That’s right,” he said.

“The other one isn’t,” Sarai pointed out.

“No, that’s the lieutenant who was in charge, Lieutenant Sen-den,” Tikri agreed. “He sent it in the next day.”

“And you actually managed to keep the two together? It is the same stabbing?”

Tikri shrugged. “Sometimes I get lucky,” he said. “It’s the same one.”

“Guardsman Deran Wuller’s son tended to two knife wounds, a slash and a stab, on the upper left thigh of a man who gave his name as Tolthar of Smallgate, who claimed to have been discharged from the city guard five years previously for being drunk while on duty,’ ” Sarai read aloud. “ ’It was Guardsman Deran’s conclusion that the stabbing was a result of a disagreement with a young woman; witnesses at the scene reported that the so-called Tolthar had been seen talking with a woman shortly before the stabbing. Those elements of their descriptions of the woman that are in general agreement were as follows: Thin, black hair, below average height, wearing dark clothing.’ ” She put down the report. “Short, thin, black hair, dressed in black,” she said. “A stab and a slash. Sound familiar?”

“But it wasn’t his throat,” Tikri protested.

“She probably couldn’t get at his throat,” Sarai pointed out. “He was awake.”

“But drunk.”

Sarai glowered at Tikri. “Are you seriously claiming you don’t see any possible connection?”

“No,” Tikri admitted. “I’m just not sure there’s a connection.”

“Neither am I,” Sarai said, “but it’s worth investigating, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” Tikri said.

“Then send for this Lieutenant Senden and this man Deran Wuller’s son and have them find Tolthar of Smallgate and bring him to me for questioning.”

“Now?”

“Do you know of a better time? Yes, now!” Tikri put down his own stack of reports and headed for the door, in pursuit of a messenger. In so doing he almost collided with a messenger who had been about to knock at the open door.

“Yes?” Sarai asked, as Tikri apologized and slipped past.

“I’m looking for Mereth of the Golden Door,” the messenger said warily, eyeing Tikri’s departing back. “She has a visitor, and someone told me she might be here.”

“Mereth isn’t here right now,” Sarai replied. “What visitor is this?”

The messenger finally looked into the room. “Oh, is that you, Lady Sarai? It’s three visitors, really—the man gives his name as Tobas of Telven and the women as Karanissa of the Mountains and Alorria of Dwomor.”

Sarai recognized two of the names. These were the foreign experts the Wizards’ Guild had sent for. “Show them in,” she said.

The messenger hesitated. “Well, they aren’t...”she began. “Bring them here!” Sarai commanded, fed up with delays and explanations.

“Yes, my lady,” the messenger said, bowing; she turned and hurried away.

For the next few minutes Sarai sat looking through old reports; then the messenger knocked again.

A spriggan scurried into the room, and Sarai took a moment to chase it to the corner and warn it, “If you tear a single piece of paper, or chew on one, or spill anything on one, I’m going to rip your slimy green guts out and wear them as a necklace; is that clear, you little nuisance?”

“Yes, yes,” the spriggan said, bobbing its head and staring wide-eyed up at her. “Not hurt paper. Nice paper. Nice spriggan not hurt paper.”

“Good,” Lady Sarai said, turning away and finding a young man standing in the doorway. He looked just about her own age; she had expected this famous expert on certain wizardries to be a good deal older.

Well, maybe he had some way of disguising his age—an illusion of some sort, or a youth spell. But then, he looked rather sheepish just now, and Sarai had trouble imagining a wise old wizard, one capable of a youth spell or other transformation, looking so embarrassed when he had done nothing to cause it. Maybe this wasn’t Tobas of Telven at all.

“I’m sorry about the spriggan,” the young man said.

“Oh, it’s not your fault,” Sarai said, waving a hand airily. “The little pests are turning up everywhere lately.”

“Well, actually, I’m afraid it is my fault,” the man insisted. “I created the spriggans. By accident. A spell went wrong on me about six years ago, and they’ve been popping up ever since. And they still tend to follow me around even more than they do other wizards, which is why that one came running in just now.”

“Oh,” Sarai said, unsure whether she should believe this story. It was true that spriggans had only been around for a few years, but had they really come from a single botched spell? “I’m Tobas, by the way. You’re Lady Sarai? Or...” He paused, confused.

“I’m Lady Sarai,” Sarai confirmed.

“Ah.” Tobas bowed politely in acknowledgment, then stepped aside and ushered a black-haired young beauty into the room—one whose green velvet gown failed to hide a well-advanced pregnancy. “This is my wife, Alorria of Dwomor,” Tobas said proudly.

Alorria did not bow, Sarai noticed, and a silver coronet held her hair back from her face—she was presumably a noblewoman of some sort from one of the Small Kingdoms.

Or maybe the coronet was just an affectation, and bowing was uncomfortable because of her belly; Sarai had no firsthand experience to compare.

A second woman, taller, thinner, older, and not visibly pregnant, but also black-haired and beautiful, appeared in the door. Where Alorria wore green velvet, this other wore red.

“And this,” Tobas said, “is my other wife, Karanissa of the Mountains.”

“She’s a witch,” Alorria volunteered.

Tobas nodded agreement. Karanissa bowed.

Sarai didn’t comment, but her lips tightened. Over the years she had met a few men who had two wives, and even one eccentric old fellow with three, and she hadn’t liked the men, their wives, or the whole idea very much; it had always seemed a bit excessive and in doubtful taste. This wizard not only had two wives, he had brought both of them along, despite Alorria’s pregnancy.

The black silk tunic that Tobas wore was hardly extravagant, and his manners seemed acceptable, but still, bringing not just one wife but two, and claiming to be responsible for an entire species, in addition to his supposed expertise in magic—Sarai thought that despite his show of diffidence, this wizard appeared a little too pleased with himself for her liking. She was not favorably impressed.

“I understand you’re an expert on the magic we’re dealing with,” Sarai said, without further preamble. She was not disposed toward idle pleasantries with this man.

“Well, not really,” Tobas said, with a wry half smile. “I don’t know what you’re dealing with. I understand it’s an enchanted blade that appears to have a neutralizing effect on wizardry, and I know a little something about that, though—about things that neutralize wizardry. I don’t honestly know a great deal, but probably I know a little more than anyone else.”

“Do you,” Sarai said. The fellow spoke well enough and wasn’t really an obvious braggart, but she still didn’t like him. “Why is that?” she asked.

“Oh, well, I have rather a personal interest in it,” Ibbas explained. “I happen to have inherited a castle...”

“No, you didn’t,” Alorria protested, “you found it abandoned.”

“Oh, be quiet, All,” Karanissa said. “That’s close enough to inheriting.” “It isn’t the same thing at all!”

“Shut up, both of you,” Tobas said—not angrily, but simply making a request. To Lady Sarai’s surprise, it was obeyed, and the wizard continued.

“Let us say, then, that I have acquired a castle that happens to be under a spell cast during the Great War that renders wizardry ineffective,” Tobas explained. “And for reasons I prefer not to explain, I can’t just sell it or abandon it; I pass through its neighborhood fairly often, and being a wizard, I find the spell very inconvenient—I can’t use my magic there. So I’ve taken to studying what little is known about neutralizing wizardry, in hopes of someday reversing the spell.”

“Ah, I see,” Sarai said. “And are you close? Have you learned much about this sort of negative magic?”

“No.” Tobas shook his head. “Hardly a thing. But I’m still trying. This thing you’ve got here—I spoke to Telurinon about it and some of the others, before Heremon insisted I come find Mereth and talk to you. They tell me that someone has an enchanted weapon that appears to absorb wizardry, that they’ve been studying it, but they weren’t getting anywhere, because this thing is completely immune to wizardry, so much so that they only know there’s magic there because wizardry isn ’t, you see.”

Sarai looked blank.

“Well, ordinarily,” Tobas explained, “wizardry is sort of everywhere at once, in the light and the air and the earth, but wherever this thing has been used, this enchanted dagger or whatever it is, wizardry doesn’t work right anymore.” “So it’s an entirely new kind of magic?” Sarai said. “Maybe,” Tobas said, “or maybe it’s just a special sort of wizardry. I don’t really know a thing about it. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to come and take a look.”

“Besides, we felt so sorry for all those poor people who were killed,” Karanissa said. “We felt we had to try to do something.”

“If we can,” Alorria added.

“Tobas is a wizard, Karanissa’s a witch,” Lady Sarai said. “Are you a magician, too, Alorria?”

The woman in the coronet shook her head quickly. “Oh, no, nothing like that,” she said hastily. “I just wanted to come along... I mean, Tobas is my husband.”

Lady Sarai nodded. She wondered, though; was it comfortable to go traveling about when one was, by the look of her, six or seven months pregnant? Sarai had the feeling there was a story here she didn’t know, but it wasn’t really any of her business, so she didn’t pursue it. “And do any of you know anything about the conspiracy that’s behind the killings?” she asked. “Or is it just the murder weapon you’re interested in?”

“Is it a conspiracy?” Tobas asked, interested. “I hadn’t heard that. Please, Lady Sarai, you must understand, we only arrived in the city a few hours ago, and all we’ve heard about these terrible crimes came from the other members of the Wizards’ Guild. Naturally, they’ve paid most of their attention to the magic involved. I’d be very glad if you could tell us more. Do you have any idea who’s behind it?”

Lady Sarai eyed the wizard suspiciously. He wasn’t entirely living up to her first impression of him as a self-assured and superior boor.

“We have a description of a woman,” she admitted. “There are guards out now looking for someone who may know who she is. We know she’s involved somehow.” “And you think this man will tell you where to find her?” “We certainly hope so. If not, once we have a name, wont a fairly simple spell lead us to her?”

“If it’s a true name,” Tobas admitted. “The first name she knew herself by.”

“Well, if it’s not her true name,” Sarai said, “we’ll send the city guard to look for her, too.”

“Lady Sarai,” Alorria asked, “what will you do with her when you find her?”

“We’ll arrest her, of course! On suspicion of murder. And bring her to the Palace for questioning.” Only after she had spoken did Sarai remember that she was addressing a member of the Wizard’s Guild, and the Guild wanted Serem’s murderer turned over to them.

Well, this woman would need to be questioned to be sure she was Serem’s murderer. Anyone intelligent would see that.

“Of course,” Tobas said. Then he remarked, “It may not be that easy, arresting someone who was able to kill several different magicians.”

Sarai glanced at him, startled. “That’s a good point,” she said. “If she is the killer. I’ll have to see that whoever is sent after her takes special precautions.”

“But you think this woman you seek is part of a conspiracy?” Tbbas had moved around to the front of the desk; now he leaned back comfortably against it. Karanissa settled against a wall. To Lady Sarai’s distress, Alorria began looking around for a clear patch of floor to sit on—the chairs were stacked with reports. The spriggan in the corner rustled papers and peered out curiously; Lady Sarai turned and kicked at it, sending it squealing out the door.

“Maybe we should go somewhere more comfortable,” Lady Sarai suggested. “And I’ll tell you all about it.”

CHAPTER 22

Tolthar of Smallgate stared into the empty mug, wishing he had the price of another pint. The Drunken Dragon never gave credit, especially not to him, so there was no point in asking for it, and he didn’t have so much as an iron bit left in his purse.

He didn’t feel well enough to rob anyone, either, though he thought he might once he sobered up a little. It was too late in the day to find honest work, or to expect much from begging— not that he really wanted to try either one. That meant that dinner, if he got any at all, would probably come out of Mama Kilina’s stewpot, over in the Wall Street Field. Maybe that little hellion, Tabaea the Thief, would turn up there tonight. After all, her lucky streak couldn’t last forever.

That assumed, of course, that it was a lucky streak that had kept her out of the Drunken Dragon and out of the local portion of the Wall Street Field for the last few sixnights. He thought that if she had gotten herself killed someone would know about it; that meant she was still somewhere in the city. Tolthar couldn’t imagine that she would ever leave Ethshar of the Sands; the people he knew, the people he thought of as his own kind, simply didn’t do that. The outside world was for rich merchants and stupid farmers, not the people who lived on the fringes, who spent an occasional night in the Field.

The idea that Tabaea might have found a permanent job somewhere never occurred to him. Thieves and beggars simply didn’t do that, in Tolthar’s view of the World, and Tabaea, as her very name proclaimed, was a thief.

He supposed she might have wound up in a brothel somewhere, but that wasn’t usually permanent. Slavery was permanent, but he thought he would have heard if she had been auctioned off. He had friends—or rather, he had people who were willing to talk to him—who had promised to tell him if they saw Tabaea anywhere.

So he assumed mat she’d committed a few successful burglaries.

But the money would run out; it always did. Sooner or later, he would find her again, in the Dragon or at Kilina’s stewpot, or somewhere else among his familiar haunts.

And when he did, she would pay for the wounds in his leg. They were healed now; the leg was as good as new, but she owed him for the pain, the blood, and the time he had spent limping. She owed him for the embarrassment of having to talk to mat young snot of a guardsman, Deran Wuller’s son.

And he had a wonderful idea of how she could repay him for his troubles. She might even enjoy it; he wouldn’t mind if she did. Sometimes it was even better that way.

He shoved the mug aside and got to his feet. He was not entirely sure where he was going, whether he would head directly for Mama Kilina or make a stop or two along the way, but he knew he would have to stand up, so he went ahead with that part of the job. Once he was upright he didn’t have to worry about the proprietor of the Dragon harassing him to buy another ale or get out.

His head swam slightly. Maybe, he thought, he should have spent some of his last coppers on food, rather than ale.

Well, it was too late now. He turned toward the door.

Then he sat heavily back down. There was a guardsman standing in the doorway, and Tolthar recognized him. It was Deran Wuller’s son. Deran might be there for something entirely unrelated to Tolthar, but Tolthar did not care to try walking out past him.

Then Deran stepped in and marched straight toward Tolthar. He pointed, and Tolthar realized there were two other soldiers behind Deran. One of them had a lieutenant’s band on his arm. “Oh, gods,” Tolthar muttered. “Now what?” “Iblthar of Smallgate?” Deran asked loudly, stopping a step away.

Tolthar winced at the volume. “Yes,” he said, “you know I am. What is it this time?”

“We are ordered to bring you to the palace immediately,” Deran said.

Tblthar’s eyes widened, and the shock of Deran’s words seemed to cook away a good part of the alcohol in his body.

“Why?” he asked. “What did I do?” “You’re wanted for questioning,” Deran said, a bit more kindly. He didn’t like seeing anyone, even a worthless drunkard like Tolthar, needlessly frightened. “They didn’t tell us, but I think they want you as a witness, not for anything you’ve done yourself.”

“I haven’t seen anything,” Tolthar protested. “I haven’t heard anything, either. I don’t know anything.”

“Well, you can tell the folks at the palace that,” Deran said, reaching for him. “Come on.”

Tolthar pressed back against his chair, but the guardsman’s hand clamped around his arm like a noose drawn tight. Reluctantly, he yielded to the inevitable and allowed himself to be led out.

As he and the three soldiers marched down Wall Street in a tight little group, one at each side and the third behind, Tolthar remembered all the other people he had seen escorted away over the years. He had even escorted a few himself, before he was kicked out of the guard—but to a district magistrate, not the palace.

A good many of them never came back; they were executed, or sold into slavery, or exiled. Others took a beating, or paid a fine, and then, presumably chastened, went on with their lives. A few returned untouched and continued as if nothing had happened.

Tolthar hoped very much that he would be one of those few. At the gate, the party turned right; Tolthar was escorted across one side of Grandgate Market and into Gate Street. He could see the dome of the palace ahead already, even though it was still over a mile away—the dome was the highest structure in the city, even taller than the Great Lighthouse, and it towered over the surrounding buildings, above the rooftops, a great dark semicircle against the scarlet sunset. In the mornings Tolthar had seen it gleaming golden-white, like a huge pale moon rising in the west, but now it was shadowed and ominous. The sun was sinking just to the left of the dome, almost behind it, and for a moment Tolthar fancied that the dome was some sort of shadow-sun trying to blot the true sun out of the sky.

The foursome marched down seven blocks to the fork and bore right onto Harbor Street; now the sun was a tiny red sliver nestled at the base of the looming dome of the palace, and the sky was darkening overhead. Tolthar glanced at Deran, then up at the dome. “Can you tell me where you’re taking me, and why it’s the Palace instead of the magistrate’s office?” he said. “Am I going to see the Minister of Justice?”

“We’re taking you to Captain Tikri’s office,” Deran said, “to talk to Lady Sarai, the Minister of Investigation. She’s also Lord Kalthon’s daughter, and Acting Minister of Justice.” “But you aren’t taking me to the justice chamber?” “The captain’s office.” “Why?”

Deran shrugged apologetically. “They didn’t tell us,” he said. That brought them to the second fork, where they bore left onto Quarter Street. The dome of the palace had blocked out the sun entirely, or perhaps the sun had set; Tolthar couldn’t be sure. The sky overhead had darkened to a deep sapphire blue, and the lesser moon shone pink in the east.

They came to Circle Street, then to the colorful pavement forming a ring around the palace; they marched directly across, past the final line of stalls owned by elite and fortunate merchants. The palace itself stood before them now, the dome hidden by the wall and the eaves. Tolthar had never been here before; even during his days in the guard, he had never drawn duty in the palace. He had never been closer than Circle Street.

Somewhere behind that wall lived old Ederd IV himself, overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, master of the fates of over a million men, women, and children—one of the three most powerful mortals in the World. And Lord Kalthon, Ederd’s Minister of Justice, would be there, who could have a man flogged, hanged, beheaded, exiled, or sold on a moment’s notice. Lord Torrut, commander of the guard, was in there, as well—and his slightest word could send ten thousand men out to fight, kill, and die.

Tolthar did not particularly care to join them.

He had no choice, though; when he hesitated on the threshold of the little side door the soldiers heaved him through without even slowing.

The floors inside were stone—not rough slate or flagstone, tike an inn’s hearth, but polished granite and marble. Tolthar had never seen such floors.

The walls, too, were stone—some of them, anyway; others were paneled in wood, or hidden by drapes or tapestries. He could see them through the archways and open doors as he was hurried through what seemed like an endless maze of antechambers and corridors.

At last his escort stopped at the door of a small chamber with bare walls of pale gray stone; in the center of the room stood a large desk, with wood-and-brown-velvet chairs behind and before. Papers, scrolls, and ledgers were spread across the desk and stacked on the floor.

Two people were in the room: a tall young woman with thick brown hair and a large man in the uniform of a guard captain. They were standing by the desk, arguing. At the sound of arriving footsteps they stopped and turned toward the doorway.

“Captain Tikri,” one of the guardsmen said, “this is Tolthar ofSmallgate.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the man in the captain’s uniform said. “Bring him in.”

Deran and the lieutenant brought Tolthar into the little office, while the third man returned to the corridor.

The woman was wearing clothes of fine gold linen, and Tolthar might have guessed that she was a noblewoman of some son, but he was still startled when Tikri addressed her as Lady Sarai.

“Which magician shall I send for, Lady Sarai?” he asked.

“More than one,” the young woman replied. “I don’t want any doubt about this. Teneria, certainly, and Mereth, if you can find her, and Okko, and I suppose you should get that Tobas and his witch wife back here, and anyone else you think we might want.” As an afterthought, she added, “Not the pregnant wife, though—she’s not a magician.”

“This may not have anything to do with the case, remember,” Tikri reminded her. “And we have half a dozen other chances, if this one doesn’t work out.”

“I know that,” Lady Sarai snapped. “But this man is here, now, and he’s one of the more promising possibilities.” She turned to the guards. “Sit him down,” she ordered. Abruptly, Tolthar found himself seated, on the chair in front of the desk. He stared up silently at the woman. “Do you know who I am?” Lady Sarai demanded. Tolthar blinked and didn’t answer.

“He’s drunk,” Deran remarked. “We dragged him out of a tavern in Northangle.”

Lady Sarai nodded. Tolthar didn’t bother to argue, although he didn’t feel very drunk anymore.

A messenger appeared in the doorway. “You wanted me, Captain?” she asked.

“Yes,” Tikri said. He crossed the room quickly. “You go ahead, Lady Sarai.” He stepped out into the corridor to give the messenger her instructions.

“Close the door, Lieutenant,” Lady Sarai directed. “Let’s have some privacy.”

Senden obeyed. Lady Sarai stepped up close to the seated Tolthar and stared down at him. “You’re drunk?” she asked.

“A little,” he admitted. He was beginning to recover his nerve.

“That might be just as well. Do you know who I am?” “They call you Lady Sarai,” Tolthar said. “I can still hear.” “That’s my name; you know who I am?” “Lord Kalthon’s daughter,” Tolthar answered. Lady Sarai’s face hardened. “I am Lady Sarai, Minister of Investigation and Acting Minister of Justice to Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, Triumvir of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, Commander of the Holy Armies and Defender of the Gods, and I am speaking to you now in the performance of my duties and with the full authority of the overlord. Do you understand that?”

“Uh...” Tolthar hesitated, then said, “I’m not sure.”

“That means that I can have you flogged, or tortured, or killed, right here and now, without having to worry about appeals or consequences. And I’ll do it if you don’t cooperate.”

Tolthar stared up at her. He did not see Deran and Senden exchange doubtful glances behind him.

“Now,” Lady Sarai said, “I understand that on or about the fourth day of the month of Summerheat, you received two knife wounds in your left leg. Is that correct?”

“Yes, my lady,” Tolthar replied softly, thoroughly cowed.

“These were both inflicted with the same knife, at approximately the same time?”

“Yes.”

“And that knife was used by a woman?”

“That’s right,” Tolthar admitted.

“How tall was she?”

“Uh... if you want...” Did they think he didn’t know who had stabbed him? “How tall was she?” Sarai shouted, leaning closer. “She’s short,” he said quickly. “I mean, not tiny, but she’s... she’s pretty short.”

“What was she wearing? What color?”

“Black,” Tolthar said, “she usually wears black.”

“What’s the shape of her face like?”

Baffled, Tolthar wondered why Lady Sarai didn’t just ask for Tabaea’s name. He said, “I don’t know...”

“Did you see her face?”

“Well, yes.”

“What shape is it?”

“Let me think for a minute!”

Sarai backed away from him slightly, giving him room to breathe. “Take your time,” she said.

“Thank you, my lady,” Tolthar said, resentfully. He tried to picture Tabaea’s face. “Sort of straight,” he said, “and wide. She has a square chin, almost.”

“Along nose?”

“No, it’s more wide.”

“Brown hair?”

“I think it’s black...”

“Green eyes?”

“I didn’t notice, I thought they were brown...”

“Dark skin?”

“No, she’s pale...”

“Full-bodied?”

“Skinny as a steer in Srigmor.”

“Clumsy?”

“If she were clumsy, do you think I ’d have let her get me with the knife?” Tolthar protested angrily. “I wasn’t that drunk!”

The door opened, and Lady Sarai paused in her questioning. She looked up as a thin, black-haired girl entered.

For a moment, Tolthar thought it was Tabaea herself, and he began to imagine elaborate schemes to blame him for some crime he had not committed, to punish him for making false accusations; then he saw that this person wasn’t Tabaea, that she was taller and generally thinner, though perhaps fuller in the chest. And the new arrival had a long, narrow face that was not like Tabaea’s at all. “Teneria,” Lady Sarai said, “we think this man may have survived an attack by the killer. We want you to check his wounds, if you can, to see if the same knife was used.”

“I’ll try,” the woman Lady Sarai had called Teneria said quietly.

“They’re healed,” Tolthar protested. “My wounds are healed!”

“I’ll try, anyway,” Teneria replied. “Thank you,” Lady Sarai said. “But first,” she added, turning back to Tolthar, “I believe that this man was about to tell us the name of the woman who stabbed him.”

The long-awaited question came as a great relief. “Tabaea,” Tolthar said. “Tabaea the Thief.”

CHAPTER 23

Tabaea was coming dawn the stairs of her current residence, a pleasant little inn called the Blue Dancer, and thinking out her plans for the evening, when she heard the sound of soldiers walking. There was the distinctive slapping of scabbard against kilt, the heavy tread of the boots—definitely soldiers, on the street out front, drawing nearer. She sniffed the air, but with the inn’s door closed she could make out nothing unusual. Dinner had been beef stewed in red wine, and she could still smell the lingering aroma of every ingredient, and of the half-dozen different vintages that had been served to the Dancer’s customers. The chimney was drawing well, so the scent of the hearthfire itself was relatively faint, but its heat was making Beren, the serving wench, sweat as she swept the floor; Tabaea could smell that, too. She could distinguish the moist odors of Beren’s cotton tunic and wool skirt.

Dogs were amazing creatures, Tabaea thought. She had never realized how amazing until she had started killing them. They could all smell all these details.

The booted steps were coming directly up to the door of the inn; Tabaea wondered why. Soldiers were a common enough sight in the taverns and inns of Wall Street, but the Blue Dancer was a quiet and rather expensive place several blocks down Grand Street from the market, and the city guard was not generally found here unless someone had sent for them.

There were other footsteps as well—she hadn’t heard them at first, with the door and the windows closed and the various sounds of the city drowning them out, but someone in slippers was walking with the soldiers, someone wearing a long, rustling garment.

Suddenly nervous, Tabaea hurried down the last few steps. The guards couldn’t have anything to do with her, of course-nobody except the innkeeper and a few strangers knew she was here, no one would have any reason to connect her with any recent disturbances—but still, she didn’t care to be caught in her room upstairs if there was trouble.

Now the soldiers were at the door, five of them, in addition to the person in slippers, and one soldier was lifting the latch. Now even Beren heard them; she straightened and leaned her broom in the chimney corner as Tabaea slipped back into the little alcove under the stairs. The table there was usually occupied at meals by young lovers, as it was the most private spot in the dining room; there was nothing suspicious about it if Tabaea should happen to sit there on a quiet evening, just minding her own business.

And it would scarcely be her feult that she could hear everything that went on in the main room. “Can I help you?” Beren asked.

“We’re looking for a woman named Tabaea,” an unfamiliar man’s voice said. “We don’t know what she’s calling herself. A little below average height, thin, black hair—probably alone.” Tabaea could almost hear Beren frowning. “Let me get my master,” the serving wench said. “Is she here?” a different voice asked. “I don’t know,” Beren replied, “I’ll ask.” Tabaea watched through the archway as Beren vanished into the kitchen.

Tabaea bit her lip, worrying and wondering. Why were these men—these soldiers—looking for her? How did they know her name, or what she looked like? And what should she do about it?

It registered that the alcove was a dead end, that she could be trapped in it. True, she could hold off a small army, as they wouldn’t be able to get at her more than two or perhaps three at a time, and she could use the table as a shield, but they could besiege her there and wait her out. That would not do. Better to get out now, while she could! But the soldiers were in the front door, while Beren and the innkeeper might be emerging from the kitchen at any moment, blocking that route. That left the window.

Tavern windows varied greatly in Ethshar, in number, size, placement, and nature. The Blue Dancer gloried in a single great bow window, a long, graceful curve made up of several hundred small panes, framed not in lead, but in imported hardwood, an exotic touch that added to the inn’s expensive atmosphere. Three small casements were built into this structure, for ventilation; none of them looked large enough for even a person of Tabaea’s size to fit through.

Tabaea knew that appearances could be deceiving, though. Moving as quietly as she could—which was very quietly indeed—she rose and crept to the edge of the sheltering arch.

There, she reached out with her poorly developed and ill-understood abilities, the witch-sight and warlock sense, and dimly perceived the intruders.

She could distinguish their scents, as well, but identity was not what interested her now. She wanted to know where they were looking, to be sure that she was somewhere else. One was watching up the stairs, very carefully. Another was guarding the door. The one in slippers... that one was a woman, and she smelled of magic. That was bad. She was looking about the room with interest, not focusing on anything in particular.

One of the soldiers was watching the magician; he was no threat to anyone just now.

That left two soldiers and a magician who were looking out into the dining room; one soldier was watching the kitchen door, the other was peering into the dimly lit farther recesses—including the one where Tabaea stood.

She nudged the one in the door, ever so slightly, with a little warlock push; he started, and made a surprised noise.

The others turned to look at him, and Tabaea made her run, fast and smooth and silent, across the room and up onto the broad sill. She was almost there when she was spotted; her distraction had only held for a fraction of a second.

She swung open the nearest casement and thrust her head through; her ears scraped the frame on either side, her hair snagged on the latch. “Damn,” she whispered. She wouldn’t fit out that way. “Hey!” a guardsman called, and Tabaea, desperate, pushed at the wooden frame with the heel of her hand.

She had never really tried her accumulated strength; she had never had any reason to. Most of her killings had been for skill, more than strength. She knew she was strong—she had flung that demonologist, Karitha, around like a doll. But she had not realized until this very moment just how strong she had become. Her hand punched through the polished window frame as if it were paper, spraying splinters of wood and glass into the street beyond.

“Stop her!” someone shouted, and the guards started for her. Frightened, Tabaea kicked at the window.

Debris burst out into Grand Street like spray from a wave-struck rock; the casement itself hung for an instant by one corner, then tumbled onto the street with a shattering of glass.

Tabaea dove through the hole and landed, catlike, on her feet; she leaped up and ran, eastward, without thinking.

Behind her, men were shouting.

Run, hide, run, hide—her years as a thief had drummed that into her. When anything goes wrong, you run; when you have run the pursuit out of sight, you hide. If they find you, run again. No need to think or plan; just run and hide.

And the best places to hide weren’t empty attics or dark alleys; the best places were in crowds and busy streets, where there was always another escape route, were always other faces to distract the pursuers.

And the very best place of all was the Wall Street Field, where the clutter of destitute humanity lay down an obstacle course of ramshackle shelters and stolen stewpots, where most of the people would be on her side, where the soldiers felt outnumbered.

She ran east on Grand Street, straight toward Grandgate Market and access to Wall Street.

Behind her, the soldiers poured out the door of the Blue Dancer; a raised sword whacked the signboard and set it swinging, and even through the shouting Tabaea could hear the metal links creaking. Booted feet ran after her.

The woman, the magician, did not run; Tabaea could vaguely sense her presence, far back and growing farther with every step. She was working a spell, Tabaea was certain, some land of spell that would flatten her, steal her powers, turn her to a statue or a mouse. She ran, expecting to be felled at any instant, by spell or sword.

She was not felled; she ran headlong into Grandgate Market, not even panting, and spun to her left, turning north toward the part of the Wall Street Field she knew best. Late-night shoppers on their way home, the last merchants in the midst of packing up for the night, and a few strolling lovers, turned to stare after her.

The guards were shouting, but they were farther behind than ever; she was outrunning them. Other soldiers were emerging from the towers by the gate, but not in time to cut her off. She was into the Field, into the strip that ran alongside the barracks towers, and no one had touched her yet. Then a man, his red kilt and yellow tunic visible in the light of a nearby torch but his face in shadow, stepped out in front of her, reaching out to grab her; she thrust out an arm and knocked him aside without slowing.

She rounded the corner of the North lower into the wider part of the Field and promptly tripped over a sleeping figure.

She stumbled, but caught herself, arms outflung, balanced like a cat, then was up and running again.

There were no torches here, no lanterns; yellow light leaked from the distant windows of Wall Street; the orange glow of the greater moon limned the top of the city wall above her, and the scattered remnants of the evening’s cookfires made pools of lesser shadow here and there, but most of the Field was in darkness. Its inhabitants, asleep or awake, were but shadowy lumps in the gloom; her cat-eyes, still not yet fully adjusted from the cozy light of the Blue Dancer’s dining room, let her see movement, but not colors or details. She danced through the dark, avoiding bodies and shelters at the final fraction of a second.

Then, abruptly, fire bloomed above her, orange light a thousand times brighter than any moon. She stumbled, stopped, and looked up.

A warlock hung in the air, glowing impossibly bright, like an olf-color piece of the sun itself. She knew he was a warlock, but she couldn’t have said how she knew; the light simply felt like warlockry.

Without thinking, she reached her own warlockry up to counter him, to extinguish the glow, but his power was greater than hers; it was like fighting the tide. She could stop anything he did from reaching her, but she couldn’t put out the light or drive him away.

Around her, she realized as she pressed her power upward, were people, dozens of people, the people of Wall Street Field— the poor and dispossessed, the downtrodden, the homeless, the outlawed.

“Help me!” she called.

No one answered, and she could hear soldiers coming, she could smell leather and steel and sweat. Someone tossed a rock in the general direction of the flying figure, but it never even came close.

It gave her an idea, though.

She could not fight him with warlockry, she was outmatched that way, but warlockry was not all she had. She knelt and snatched up a chunk of brick, still warm from a cookfire, and flung it upward—not with magic, but with the strength of her arm, the strength she had stolen from Inza and Deru and the rest.

The warlock shied away, and the light dimmed somewhat.

The soldiers were coming; Tabaea snatched out her belt knife, intent on giving them a fight.

The knife was like a sliver of darkness in the warlock’s glow; Tabaea held the Black Dagger ready in her hand.

Above her, the warlock still hovered, glowing, but she had his measure now; he could hold himself up, suppress her own warlockry, and provide light, but that left him no magic to spare for anything else.

Someone else shied a stone at the warlock; he turned it away, but Tabaea could sense that it distracted him slightly.

Further, he was beginning to worry, she knew—probably about the Calling. How close was he to the threshold, to the first nightmares? He could draw upon all the power he wanted, and because he had started with more than she Tabaea could never match him, but if he drew too much...

She decided the warlock was not really the major threat.

The first soldier paused a few feet away, watching the knife.

“Tabaea the Thief,” he called, “in the name of Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, I order you to surrender!”

“Go to Hell, bloody-skirt!” she shouted back.

Other soldiers were surrounding her, forming a fifteen-foot circle with her at the center; the Field’s usual inhabitants had Mien back into the darkness. Tabaea tried to pick up something with warlockry, but the magician in the air above her wouldn’t allow it.

There were a dozen guardsmen encircling her; at a cautious signal from the one in front of her, they all began closing in slowly.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Tabaea said. She lunged forward, with inhuman speed, and thrust the Black Dagger’s blade under the ribs of the man before her.

His eyes widened, and he slashed belatedly with his sword, cutting her arm. Blood spilled, black in the orange light, black across her black sleeve.

It really didn’t hurt very much at all, to Tabaea’s surprise, and what pain there was was lost in the hot surge of strength she was receiving from the man she had stabbed. Then one of the other soldiers, one of the men behind her, struck.

That hurt, and the wave of strength she had just felt vanished; the blow to her back was a shock, a burst of pain, and her head jerked backward. Then it snapped forward again, involuntarily, and she found herself looking down at her own chest.

Something projected from her tunic, something dark that had cut its way out through the fabric, stretching it out and then cutting through, something dark and hard and smeared with thick liquid.

Then she realized what it was. She was looking at the point of a sword that had been thrust right through her, a sword covered with her heart’s blood.

She was dead. She had to be.

But she didn’t feel dead. Shouldn’t she already be losing consciousness, be falling lifeless to the ground?

She pulled her own blade from the soldier’s body; dark blood spilled down his pale tunic, and he crumpled to the earth. He was dead, no doubt about that. But she wasn’t. She reached down, grabbed the blade that protruded from her chest, and shoved it back, hard. She felt it slide through her, back out, and she whirled swiftly, before whoever held it could strike again.

She could feel a prickling, a tingling, and she suddenly realized that she probably had a gaping wound in her, that she might yet bleed to death. She felt no blood, though.

Tabaea looked quickly down at her chest, and sensed that the wound was closing of its own accord. That was magic—it had to be. It wasn’t anything she was doing consciously, though, and she didn’t think it was witchcraft or warlockry. It didn’t feel like those.

It felt like the sensation she got when the Black Dagger cut flesh. Whatever was happening, she was sure it was the Black Dagger’s spell at work. Whether it would truly heal her, or at least keep her going until she could do it by other means, she didn’t know. It had to be the dagger that was keeping her alive, and she didn’t understand how or why, but she had no time to worry about that now. She looked up.

The soldiers were staring at her, eyes wide; no one was moving against her. One man held a bloody sword, its tip just an inch or two from her chin.

Tabaea realized, with astonishment, that they were afraid of her.

And then she further realized, with a deep sense of surprised satisfaction, that they had very good reasons to be afraid.

She knocked the sword aside, held up the Black Dagger, and smiled a very unpleasant smile.

“It’s not going to be that easy,” she announced, grinning. “If I were you, I would throw down my weapons and run.”

“Elner, call the magicians,” a guardsman said. Tabaea turned and smiled at him.

“I am a magician,” she said. Then, moving faster than any human being could without magical assistance, she slashed the soldier across the chest—not fatally, just a nasty gash that would weaken him, and in so doing would strengthen her. He gasped, and stepped back, his hands flying up to stop the blood, his sword falling to the dirt at his feet.

She thought she understood, now, what had happened. That sword thrust should have killed her, obviously, but it hadn’t—or rather, not completely. She was fairly sure she had lost one life. But the Black Dagger had stolen a dozen for her—including dogs, cats, magicians, and the life of the man who had led this party to capture her.

She didn’t know whether dogs and cats carried as much life as people, and she did not particularly want to find out; she wasn’t going to throw her lives away recklessly. Still, she was stronger and faster than anyone else in the World, and as long as she took a life for every one she lost, she could not die. She liked that idea very much.

“I am the magician,” she said. “Not just a witch or a warlock or a wizard, but all of them!” She suddenly remembered what she had heard, listening to the Guildmasters at the Cap and Dagger; she laughed, and said, “Bow, you fools! Bow before labaea the First, Empress of Ethshar!” “She’s crazy,” someone said. The Black Dagger moved again, faster than any other human hand could move it, fast as a striking cat, and the guardsman who had impaled her fell back, bleeding. The bloody sword fell from his grasp.

“You think I’m crazy?” she shouted. “Then just try to stop me! Didn’t you seel He put a sword right through me, and it didn’t hurt me!”

“Call the magicians, Elner,” someone called mockingly from the crowd of civilians.

More guardsmen were arriving, pushing through the crowd; behind them came the robed figures of magicians.

“Magicians?” Tabaea stooped and snatched up the sword, left-handed, and flung it upward with all the speed and strength and skill of her dozen stolen lives.

The warlock shrieked, and the light went out; the orange glow vanished like the flame of a snuffed candle, plunging the Field into darkness.

When the shriek ended, silence as sudden as the darkness fell. Cloth rustled as the warlock fell out of the sky, and then he landed with a sodden thud, off to one side, upon a mixed group of soldiers and bystanders.

“You think I’m afraid of magicians’?” Tabaea screamed over the sudden tumult.

In fact, magicians were about the only thing she was still afraid of—she had no idea whether she could defend herself against all the different kinds of magic. Warlockry, yes—she could hold off another warlock indefinitely. Witchcraft, absolutely—she had greater vitality, and therefore more power, than any other witch that had ever lived.

Gods and demons and wizards, though—who knew? Sorcery, any of the subtler arts, she could not be sure of. She was bluffing—but she didn’t think anyone would dare to test her. She stood, dagger ready.

Something came sweeping toward her out of the darkness, something Tabaea could not describe, with a shape and a color she couldn’t name; reflexively, she raised her knife, and the black blade flared blue for an instant. Then whatever it was was gone.

Magic—it had been magic, certainly. Wizardry, probably. And the knife had stopped it. She was safe from magic other than witchcraft and warlockry—at least some of it.

She could do anything—and she knew what she wanted. She had already said it.

Tabaea the First, Empress of Ethshar! “Listen, you people!” Tabaea shouted, “you people who live here in the Wall Street Field, listen to me! Why are you here?” She paused dramatically and sensed half a hundred faces turned attentively toward her—soldiers and magicians and beggars and thieves.

“You’re here because the fat old overlord of this stinking city, the man who claims to protect you, has sent you here!” Tabaea proclaimed. “He’s taken your homes with his taxes, stolen your food to feed his soldiers, and given you nothing in return but dungeons and slavery!” She pushed aside a soldier and stepped up atop a makeshift wooden shelter. “Haven’t you had enough of this? Haven’t you had enough of seeing the rich get richer, seeing them buy your friends, your neighbors, your sons and daughters from the slavers, when they’ve stolen a few coins in order to eat? Haven’t you heard enough of girls and boys tortured in the Nightside brothels to please the perverted tastes of some wealthy degenerate?” The words seemed to be coming from somewhere deep within her, of their own accord; one of her victims, she realized, someone she had killed, must have been skilled in oratory. And she could augment that, now that she had seen how; she warmed the air about her, then let a feint orange glow seep out.

A warlock and an orator both; she suppressed a smile. Self-delight would win no converts; only anger would do that. “Haven’t you had enough!” she screamed at the people of the Field.

Some of the soldiers were backing away; some of the civilians were muttering.

“I say that Ederd has had his chance!” Tabaea shouted. “I say his time is over! Let the old man step aside, and let a woman of the people see justice done in this city! Not the justice of slaver and swordsman, but true justice! Not Lord Kalthon’s justice, but my justice! The justice of one who has no need to fear nor favor, because I cannot be harmed! Beholden to no one save those who aid me now, I am the Empress of Ethshar! Who’s with me?”

A dozen voices shouted. “I said, who’s with me!” This time, a hundred chorused in reply. “Then let’s show old Ederd who’s in charge here! Come with me to the palace! We’ll throw Ederd and his lackeys out in the Wall Street Field and take the palace for our own! Come on!” She turned and stepped off the shelter, but not down to the ground; instead she caught herself in the air, warlock fashion, and propelled herself forward, above the crowd.

Using too much warlockry wasn’t safe, of course; she doubted she was any more immune to the Calling than anyone else was. But warlockry was showy, and that was what she needed right now.

The soldiers had mostly faded away, falling back into the darkness, out of sight of the angry crowd; Tabaea and her followers marched unimpeded out of the Field onto Wall Street and down Wall Street to Grandgate Market. Many of the people behind her had torches or makeshift clubs, she saw with pleasure; one had picked up a soldier’s fallen sword. She was at the head of an army.

The Empress Tabaea, at the head of her army. She smiled broadly.

“Come on!” she called. “Come on!”

CHAPTER 24

It was Alorria of Dwomor who rousted Lord Torrut out of his bed; the soldier who had guarded the bedchamber door stood nervously beside her, holding a lamp.

“She said it was an emergency, sir...”

“It is an emergency,” Alorria said, tugging at the bedclothes. “There’s an uprising!”

Lord Torrut was not a young man anymore and did not wake as quickly as he once had; he looked up Wearily at the unfamiliar but unmistakably attractive face and smiled. “Ah, young lady...” he began. Then his head sank a little, and he saw the rest of her. His eyes widened. “Is it the baby?” he said. “Soldier, go fetch a midwife!”

“No, it’s not the baby,” Alorria snapped. “The baby’s fine and not due for sixnights. There’s an uprising! They’re marching on the palace!” Torrut sat up and shook his head to clear it; then, speaking as he reached for his tunic, he asked, “Who’s marching? What’s going on?”

“There’s a woman named Tabaea who has just declared herself Empress of Ethshar, and she’s raised an army of the poor and discontented from the Wall Street Field. They’re marching here to take the palace and kill the overlord.” Alorria stepped back, to give the commander of the city guard room to stand.

“From the Field?” Lord Torrut said, astonished; he stopped with one arm in its sleeve and the other bare. “You don’t need me for that! A hundred men and a magician or two should be able to handle it.”

Alorria shook her head. “Tabaea’s a magician—a very powerful one, the one that Lady Sarai’s been looking for for months, the one who’s been murdering other magicians.”

“Well, but surely...”

“The magicians are trying to stop her, and Captain Tikri’s getting the palace guard ready to defend against her, but so far nothing’s working. She’s already walked right through a squadron of guards, out on Wall Street; she crippled a warlock and brushed aside the wizards’ spells as if they were mere illusions.”

Torrut stared at her for a moment, then turned to his door guard. “Is this true?” he demanded.

The guard turned up an empty palm. “I don’t know, my lord,” he said. “This woman was sent by Lady Sarai and Captain Tikri, but that’s all I know.”

“Damn.” Torrut slid his arm into the empty sleeve and then reached for his kilt. “Who are you, young woman? Why wasn’t one of the regular messengers sent?”

“My husband’s a wizard,” Alorria explained. “Everyone else was busy, and I wanted to help, so they sent me to fetch you.”

Torrut nodded. “Good of you. Listen, I want you to take this soldier to vouch for you and go wake the overlord. I don’t know what’s going on here, or how much danger there really is, but I’m not about to let anyone say I didn’t do my best to protect Ederd. While you do that, I’ll go down and see what’s happening for myself.”

“Wake the overlord?” Alorria squeaked. Even though she was the daughter of a king herself, she lived in awe of the three Ethsharitic overlords. Beside her the guardsman looked very unhappy indeed.

“That’s right,” Torrut said, standing up and pulling his kilt into position. “Somebody better.” He smiled, “Don’t worry, Ederd’s a gentle old man; he won’t have your heads lopped off for disturbing him. For that matter, despite his age, he doesn’t mind looking at a lovely young woman any more than I do. All this fuss may be nothing, but I think Ederd would want to know.” He reached for his sword belt. “Now, go on, both of you!”

They went.

When Alorria had come up to the level where most of the higher nobility had their apartments, the stairways and passages had been quiet and dim; now, though, she could hear voices and running footsteps and could see lights behind a dozen doors. “Which way?” she asked. The guard pointed.

Officials were hurrying about; Alorria knew that the magicians were gathering two flights below, to prepare a defense against Tabaea’s advance, and to find a way to kill the mysterious self-proclaimed “empress.”

And out in the streets, Tabaea was marching steadily closer. Once Tabaea was out of the Wall Street Field, she got as far as the intersection of Gate Street and Wizard Street before she encountered any further organized resistance. There, though, she found herself facing a living barricade of soldiers, swords drawn, formed up in a line three deep that stretched from one side of the avenue to the other.

“Are you trying to keep me from the palace? From my palace?” she shouted.

The lieutenant in charge of the formation called back, “Drop your weapons, all of you! I call on you in the name of Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar, to surrender!”

Tabaea laughed. “I could just go around the block,” she called, “but I think I’ll teach you all a lesson.” With the Black Dagger ready in her hand, she marched forward. The line of soldiery braced to meet her. When she came within striking distance, the soldier directly in front of her called out, “Stop, or I ’11 kill you!” He raised his sword high.

“Go ahead and try!” Tabaea called back, without stopping. The man stabbed at her; catlike, she dodged the thrust. Her hand flicked out, like a cat’s paw at a mouse, and closed around the sword’s blade.

Startled, the soldier tried to snatch it back, but Tabaea tore the weapon out of his hand and flung it aside.

The soldiers to either side were striking at her, as well, now; she ducked and wove, dodging their blows. She snatched the swords away from two more soldiers. The line formation had broken, now; they were all coming to get at her, forming a tight little knot around her.

She smacked away swords, dodged their thrusts, grabbed one in her fist, and bent it until it broke; behind her she could hear her ragtag army muttering, brushing up against the soldiers, but not really fighting.

It didn’t matter. She didn’t need them.

A sword hit her squarely in the side, and she felt an instant of incredible pain, but then it was gone; she had lost another life.

Angry, she lashed out with the Black Dagger and sliced open a soldier’s throat. As he started to fall back she finished him with a thrust to the heart; she wanted a life to replace the one she had lost.

She picked up another guardsman and threw him against his companions; then another, and another. She used her hands and her warlockry both.

“You can’t stop me!” she shrieked. “No one can stop me!”

The Black Dagger flared blue, and something crackled like dead leaves in a hot fire. Someone was trying to use magic against her. “No one!” she repeated, “not even wizards!”

The dagger flared again, greenish this time. Tabaea jabbed it into a soldier’s belly.

A moment later the guard broke; several men fell back under the lieutenant’s orders, but others ran off down side streets, either Wizard Street or Arena Street, and a few ducked into the Cap and Dagger.

And of course, half a dozen or so lay unmoving on the ground.

“All right, men,” the lieutenant shouted. “She won’t make it easy, we’ll leave this one to the wizards!”

“Run away!” Tabaea called. “Look at them, you people, look at them run! Send your wizards, I don’t care! They can’t stop me!” She waved the dagger in the air, and a cheer went up from her “army.” “Come on!” she called, and again she marched toward the palace.

At the palace, the more ordinary officials and workers listened closely as the magicians reported on the encounter.

“Bad,” Karanissa said, “very bad. Three dead, at least. All on our side.”

“She’s still coming?” Lady Sarai asked.

“Oh, yes; the fight hardly even slowed her down.”

“What if we let her pass, but stopped her army?” The question was directed at the entire room, rather than at Karanissa.

“We could,” Okko agreed, “but what would that accomplish, if we can’t stop heft”

“Well, she couldn’t very well rule the city all by herself, could she?”

“No,” Okko agreed, “but I think she could kill everyone here, one by one, starting with the overlord himself, until the survivors started obeying her.”

“Would she do that?” one of the overlord’s scriveners asked, horrified.

“Yes,” Teneria said flatly. “She would.”

Sarai turned to the wizards. “What spells have you tried against her?”

“Several,” Tobas said. “From simple curses to the White Death. Whatever is protecting her blocks them all instantly.” “Is there any way to stop her?” Lady Sarai asked.

“Probably,” Tbbas replied, “and we’ll keep trying spells. But most of them would take more time than we have to prepare. And some of them would take out large parts of the city with her.”

“And we don’t really know which to use,” Karanissa pointed out. “Since we haven’t yet figured out what keeps her alive, we can’t be sure of how to kill her.”

Lord Torrut stepped into the room at that point and demanded loudly, “What’s happening?” Several people rushed to tell him; he quickly chose one to serve as his spokesman and began quietly absorbing information.

“I wonder where the other conspirators are?” Tbbas asked.

Karanissa shook her head, but before she could say anything, Kelder of Tazmor answered quietly, “I don’t think there is any conspiracy. I think there’s just Tabaea.”

“You never found traces of anyone else, did you?” Lady Sarai asked, startled. “She’s small enough, and strong enough, and seems to have several different magicks available—how can she do that?”

“There’s just Tabaea,” Karanissa agreed. “At least, there’s just Tabaea and the rabble from the Field.”

“It’s all just her...” Lady Sarai’s voice trailed off; then she asked, “What happens if we can’t stop her?”

No one had an answer for that, until Karanissa suggested, “We die, probably.”

“There’s no need for that,” Lord Torrut said, startling the others. “We don’t die; we retreat, we regroup, we reconsider our situation, and when we’re ready, we retaliate.”

“But how...” Sarai began.

“Listen, little Sarai,” Torrut said, cutting her off, “you and your father have made fun of me for years for being a warrior with no wars to fight. Well, now I have a war—and by the gods I swear that I’m going to fight it, and I’m going to win it. It’s not who wins the first battle that matters, it’s who wins the last battle. This Tabaea is going to win the first one, but I intend to make sure it’s not the last.”

The whispered side conversations had died away as Lord Torrut spoke; now everyone was listening to him.

“This Tabaea doesn’t like the overlord—that means we need to get him out of the palace before she gets here, and while we’re at it, I think we had better get his entire family out, with him: Ederd the Heir and Zarrea and Edarth and Kinthera and Annara, all of them. If she’s lived in the Wall Street Field then she probably doesn’t like the guard, and she doesn’t like me, and Sarai, she probably doesn’t like your father, Lord Kalthon—you’d better get him and your brother out of here, too. And magicians-she doesn’t like magicians.”

“But where do we go?” Lady Sarai asked, dismayed.

“She’s coming from Grandgate, is she? Then we go to Seagate. We put the overlord and his family and anyone who’s too old or too sick to fight on a ship, and we sail it out of here, out of her reach.”

“How do you know when it’s out of her reach?” Tobas asked.

That stopped Lord Torrut for a moment; then he smiled, showing well-kept teeth. “I don’t,” he said. “I’m guessing. But if she could stop a ship at sea... well, has she shown any sign of being able to affect what she can’t see?”

“No,” Karanissa said, “not yet.”

“How can we fight back from a ship, though?” Lady Sarai protested. “Until we know how to fight back,” Lord Torrut pointed out, “what does it matter where we are?”

Lady Sarai was not entirely satisfied with this, but she could think of no good answer. “I would never have thought a murder case could turn into something like this,” she muttered to herself.

No one heard her, as Lord Torrut continued, “I sent that woman Alorria to rouse the overlord. And I’ll leave it to this group here to get old Ederd and anyone else who Tabaea might want to kill out of the palace and down to Seagate before she gets here; and while you’re doing that, I’ll be doing what I can to slow her arrival.”

“Then you’re not going to flee yourself, Lord Torrut?” someone asked.

“Of course not!” Lord Torrut grinned outright. “At long last, I have a war to fight!”