“Is there anyone taking care of you?” Tabaea asked.
“No.”
“That’s too bad,” Tabaea said. “I think you could use some help. But you’ll have to go now.”
“Will you take care of me?”
“No, I’m too busy. I’m the empress.”
“Hike you.”
“That’s nice. Go away, now, and let someone else have a turn.”
“But I didn’t get to sit in the pretty chair.” Tabaea stared at the old woman, frustration beginning to overwhelm her determination to be patient and understanding. She wished someone else would come and drag the old fool away, that there was someone she could signal, but Arl was much too busy keeping order among the others, and she had no one else there to help her. Her other new appointees had been sent off about their various businesses, and what with desertions and confusion she didn’t have all the guards and servants that the overlord had kept close at hand.
To get rid of this nuisance she would either have to call for help or use her own two hands, either of which seemed beneath her dignity as empress.
Tabaea began to see that mere was a contradiction here, between her desire to be an absolute ruler, honored and respected, and her desire to avoid oppressing her people. She might want to be a fair and reasonable empress, but obviously, there were people in the city who wouldn’t be fair and reasonable subjects.
And with people like that, soldiers would be very useful.
Even if she had had a thousand soldiers in the palace, Tabaea realized, in her determination to be a good and kind and fair and accessible ruler she would have sent them away while she was holding court. She now saw that this would not have been a good idea. She resolved that when things were more organized, when she had a proper city guard of her own, she would keep a couple of soldiers nearby.
For now, she had to improvise. The warlock power reached out and pinched the old woman’s nostrils shut.
“Go away,” Tabaea told her, as the woman gasped for breath.
The invisible grip vanished, and the woman got to her feet.
She did not leave, however, instead she reached out and slapped Tabaea across the face. “You nasty!” she shrieked. “You squeezed my nose!”
Tabaea, with her animal responses, had seen the blow coming and ducked aside; what should have been a resounding blow was just a gentle brush across one cheek.
Still, it could not be tolerated; in an instant, Tabaea was on her feet, picking the old woman up by the throat, one-handed.
She looked up at the astonishment on the ancient face and said, “You should die for that. The person of your empress is not to be touched. Because of your age, because my reign is new and you understand little, you won’t die this time, but don’t ever let me see or smell you again.”
Then she flung the woman out onto the marble floor of the audience hall. Brittle old bones snapped, and the woman lay in a heap, moaning softly.
“Get her out of here,” Tabaea said.
No one moved.
“Get her out of here!” Tabaea shouted, pointing at the line of waiting petitioners.
Two men from the back ran to obey; a few of the others abruptly decided that whatever requests they might have had could wait until a more propitious time, and scurried away down the side stairs.
Tabaea settled back on the throne, touched her unmarked cheek, then turned to Arl and snapped, “Next!”
CHAPTER 31
It had been Lady Sarai ’s own suggestion that she not stay at the same inn as Tobas and his wives; she had been worried that such a group would be too distinctive. Instead, she had gratefully accepted a loan of a dozen copper rounds and had found herself lodgings at the Fatted Calf, an inn on Soldiertown Street, a block south of Grandgate Market. The rather inept painting on the inn’s signboard had given it the nickname the Bloated Beef, and that had seemed to imply a cheerful good humor.
That was not, Sarai discovered, reflected hi the urn’s rather tense atmosphere. Her night there was an uneasy one; whenever she had set foot outside her own room she had been in constant fear that someone would recognize and denounce her.
The conversation in the common room had been strained for almost everyone; two burly men had announced that they were friends of the new empress, members of the new court, and as such entitled to the best oushka in the house, at no charge. The innkeeper had been inclined to refuse, and a former guardsman—at least, he wore no sword, though he was still hi the traditional red and yellow and had spoken of fighting Tabaea’s mob on Harbor Street—had supported that refusal, whereupon the two thugs had beaten the guardsman soundly and thrown him out into the street.
Those others among the guests who might have been inclined to help found themselves badly outnumbered by those who were cheering the thugs on and had declined to intervene, thereby avoiding an all-out brawl.
The thugs got their oushka. They also got the company of a frightened young woman. One of them eyed Sarai herself, but when Sarai bared her teeth, in as threatening a snarl as she could manage, he turned away and didn’t pursue the matter.
And Sarai stayed the night, as she had planned, since it was too late to go elsewhere and she had nowhere else to go, but the next morning she left quickly, taking a pastry with her for her breakfast.
Like anyone strolling in that part of the city with no particular destination hi mind, she found herself wandering into Grand-gate Market. For a while she strolled about, nibbling her pastry while looking over the merchants’ goods and the farmers’ produce; superficially, it all appeared quite normal, unchanged by Tabaea’s accession.
On a closer look, though, anyone reasonably observant—and Sarai knew herself to be at least reasonably observant—would notice that there were no guards at the gate.
There were subtler differences as well. The great gates themselves stood open, but the doors that led into the towers did not; they were instead locked and barred. The familiar yellow tunics and red kilts of soldiers were not only not to be seen at the gate, they were nowhere in sight, not in the gate or the market or the streets.
The rather sparse crowd hi the marketplace did not seem particularly troubled by the guards’ absence; in fact, if anything, Sarai thought the buyers and sellers looked somewhat more prosperous than usual.
That didn’t seem right; she looked again.
There was a real difference, she realized, but it was not that the merchants or farmers or their customers were attired any better than their usual wont. Rather, the difference was that there were no beggars. In all of Grandgate Market, no one wore rags, any more than anyone wore the red kilt of the overlord’s service.
Sarai wondered at that. Tabaea might well have promised to eliminate poverty, but how could she have possibly made any significant change so quickly!
And for that matter, where did all the soldiers actually go! Ten thousand people—well, seven or eight thousand, anyway; she knew that the guard had not been up to its full authorized strength for decades—could not simply vanish.
Or could they? It was a big city, after all. There were hundreds of miles of streets and alleyways out there, and all a soldier needed to do to hide was to get out of uniform.
And there were plenty of little-used military and government installations, as well—die towers at Beachgate and Northgate and Smallgate, the Island Tower out past the South Channel, the Great Lighthouse, the four towers guarding the harbor, all the dozens of watch-stations along the wall, the tunnels and passages under the wall, even the Arena’s maze of storerooms and corridors, all of those were under Lord Torrut’s jurisdiction before Tabaea’s arrival. Companies of guardsmen could be gathered in any of them.
The soldiers could even still be in the two immense barracks towers here at Grandgate itself, or in the six towers that guarded the city’s main landward entrance; just because the doors were closed and no soldiers were in sight, that didn’t mean there were no soldiers inside. Sarai wandered northward across the square, toward the g
ate, the towers, and the barracks.
The tower doors were unmistakably closed and barred; the windows were shuttered, those that had shutters. From her vantage point in the market she could see no signs of life anywhere in the entire elaborate complex that guarded the entrance to Ethshar of the Sands.
Idly, she wandered on northward, out of the market and into the Wall Street Field.
And in the Field she finally found a place that did not appear normal in the least.
Most of the shacks and hovels were still there, though some had been knocked down or had simply collapsed; the stones that some of those who dwelt there had used as boundary markers or weights to keep blankets in place were still scattered about, indicating rough paths between bedsites. The charred remnants of cookfires could still be seen here and there.
The hundreds of Ethsharites who had lived there, though, were gone.
Normally, Lady Sarai would not have dared to enter the Field without an escort of well-armed guardsmen. Normally, the place would be constantly abuzz with conversation, shouts, arguments, the cries of children, and the rattle of crockery. Babies would be waning, youngsters would be laughing and chasing one another through the chaos. The only sounds now were the flapping of unfastened door-cloths, the snuffling of dogs and other animals scavenging in the ruins, and the distant hum of Grandgate Market and the rest of the city going about its business.
The effect was eerie and utterly unsettling; despite the growing heat of the day, Sarai shivered and pulled her loose tunic a little more closely about her. Even that didn’t help much, as it reminded her that this was the third day that she had been wearing this same tunic, this same skirt.
Her uneasiness was such that she almost screamed when a spriggan giggled nearby, leaped down from atop a ramshackle lean-to, and ran shrieking past her feet. Cursing, she watched the little nuisance scurry away.
When she had regained her composure, she forced herself to think.
Where had everyone gone?
She knew that some of the people here had followed Tabaea in her march to the palace, but surely, not all of them had! The mob that the magicians had reported had hardly been large enough to account for the entire population of the Field!
Where were the rest of them, then? Had Tabaea done something terrible to those who had refused to follow her? Old tales Sarai had heard from her mother as a child came back to her, stories about how Northern demonologists, during the Great War, would sacrifice entire villages to appease their patron demons, or to pay for horrible services those demons might perform. Sarai had long since decided that those tales were just leftover lies, wartime propaganda, but now she wondered whether there might be some truth to the legends, and whether Tabaea might have made some ghastly bargain with creatures no sane demonologist would dare approach.
Of course, she told herself, she might be jumping to conclusions. She didn’t even know for certain how much of the Wall Street Field really was abandoned; it could just be a block or two here by the barracks. Perhaps the city guard, before disbanding or fleeing or whatever they had done, had cleared this area for some obscure reason.
She walked on, past huts constructed of broken furniture and collapsed tents made of scavenged draperies, and sure enough, as she rounded the corner from Grandgate into Northangle, she saw the smoke of a small fire sliding up the summer sky.
“Hello!” she called. “Who’s there?”
No one answered; cautiously, almost timidly, Sarai inched closer, until she could see the little cookfire and the old woman sitting beside it.
“Hello!” she called again. The woman turned, this time; and spotted Sarai. “Hello yourself,” she said. “May I talk to you?” Sarai asked nervously. “Don’t see how I can very well stop you,” the old woman replied. “I’m not planning to go anywhere if I can help it, and I doubt I have the strength to chase you away if you don’t care to go.” She poked at her fire with what looked to Sarai like an old curtain rod.
Sarai could hardly argue with this. She crept forward, then squatted beside the fire, at right angles to the old woman. To remain standing seemed rude, but she could not quite bring herself to sit on the dirt here, and there were no chairs, no blankets within easy reach. “My name’s Sarai,” she said.
“Pretty,” the old woman remarked. She poked the fire again, then added, “I don’t usually give my name out to strangers. Most of the folks who used to live here called me Mama Kilina, though, and you can call me that if you need a name.” “Thank you,” Sarai said, a little uncertainly. For a moment the two sat silently; Sarai was unsure how to phrase her question, whether there was anything she should say to lead up to it, and Mama Kilina clearly had nothing that she particularly cared to say.
Finally, however, Sarai asked, “Where did everybody go?” Mama Kilina glanced at her, a look that was not hostile, exactly, but which made it clear that the old woman didn’t think much of the question. “Most folks,” she said, “didn’t go anywhere special. I’d suppose that everyone in the Small Kingdoms or the mountains of Sardiron must be going about all the usual business hi the usual way, without paying any mind to what we’ve been doing here in Ethshar. And for that, I doubt the fifth part of the city knows anything’s out of the ordinary, even here.” “I mean...” Sarai began.
Mama Kilina did not let her say any more; she raised a hand and said, “I know what you meant. I’m no dotard. You mean, where did most of the folks that ordinarily stay here in the Field for lack of anywhere better to go, go? And if you think, Sarai, as you name yourself, you might see that that question’s got half its own answer in it, when it’s asked right, just like most questions.”
Sarai blinked. “I’m not sure I... oh. You mean they had somewhere better to go?”
“Well, they thought so, anyway. I didn’t agree, and that’s why I’m still here.”
“Where did they go, then? What’s this better place?”
“What’s the best place in Ethshar, to most ways of thinking?”
“I don’t know, I... oh.” Sarai finally saw the connection. “The palace, you mean. They’ve all gone to the palace.”
“You have a little wit to you, I see.” Mama Kilina’s tone was one of mild satisfaction.
“But they can’t all live there!” Sarai said. “It’s not big enough! I mean, the palace is... well, it’s huge, but...”
Mama Kilina nodded. “Now, you think that’s a better place?” she asked. “I don’t, not with all that riffraff bedding down in the corridors, as I suppose they’ll be doing.”
“Oh, but that’s... I mean...” Sarai groped for words, and finally asked, “Is this Tabaea’s idea?”
Mama Kilina nodded. “That young woman’s got no sense at all, if you ask me,” she said. “What she wants to be empress for in the first place I don’t know, and how she can call herself an empress when all she rules is one city, and everyone knows an empress rules more than one people...” She shook her head. “I suppose she heard about that Vond calling himself an emperor, out in the Small Kingdoms, and she liked the sound of it, but Vond conquered half a dozen kingdoms before he called it an empire.” “What exactly did she say? Did she come out here herself to invite everybody?”
“She sent messengers,” Mama Kilina explained. “A bunch of prissy fools got up in clothes that wouldn’t look decent even on someone who knew how to wear them came out here and told us all that from now on, the palace belonged to all the people of Ethshar of the Sands, and we were all free to come and go as we pleased, and to live there if we wanted to until we could find homes of our own. And all those eager young idiots went galloping off down Wall Street to take her up on it and get a roof over their empty heads.” She shook her head and spat in disgust, into the fire, where the gob of expectorate sizzled loudly. “That whole mob living in the palace...” Sarai said. The idea was horrifying—all those stone corridors jammed with people, with ragged beggars and belligerent thieves, strangers crowding into the rooms, into her office, into the family apartm
ent—somehow the idea of Tabaea invading was nowhere near as upsetting as the notion of that entire indiscriminate mob. She wanted to get up and run back down there to save her family’s possessions, to chase the squatters out of her old room, but of course she couldn’t, she didn’t dare show her face in the palace...
Or did she?
With all those strangers wandering in and out, who would recognize her? Who would stop her? She could just walk right in and see what Tabaea was up to, she could search out Tabaea’s weaknesses—if she had any.
Of course, some people might recognize her, people who had seen her at her father’s side. If she wore a disguise of some sort, though, no one would ask her who she was or what business she had in the palace.
This was just too good an opportunity to miss. She had been wondering where she could live, and here, it seemed, was the answer.
She could live in the palace, just as she always had!
CHAPTER 32
Tobas had been idly turning a cat’s skull over in his hands; now he flung it down on the table in disgust, cracking the jaw and loosening a fang.
“You’re mad,” he said.
Telurinon drew himself up, obviously seriously affronted. “I do not think,” he began, “that there is any call for insults...”
“And that’s just more evidence that you’re mad,” Tobas said, a little surprised at his own daring even as he said it. He had never before spoken to any other wizard, let alone a Guildmas-ter, so bluntly.
“Might I remind you...” Telurinon began.
Tobas interrupted again. “Might I remind you,” he said, “that this Black Dagger is the cause of all the trouble we’ve seen in this city, trouble enough to bring me here all the way from Dwomor and to drag all of the rest of you away from your own affairs to attend these meetings. It’s prevented us from killing someone that Guild law says must die. And you want to make another one?”
“I think we should at least consider the possibility,” Telurinon said. “After all, this artifact is, by its very nature, utterly immune to all other wizardry, and protects its wielder from wizardry as well. Our spells, as we have demonstrated repeatedly over these past few days, cannot touch its bearer. That being so, how else are we to defeat this Tabaea and destroy her utterly, as we must, except by creating another Black Dagger to counter the first?”
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