the palace; she wished there was more natural light to help her. The greater moon was rising in the east, casting orange light on the rooftops, but not yet penetrating to the streets below, while the lesser moon was far down in the west, its pale pink glow of no use at all.
By the time she reached North Street the roar of battle was overpowering, and farther ahead, farther around the circle, she could see reflected torchlight and the shadowed backs of soldiers. North Street was no more brightly illuminated than the others she had passed, but she could scarcely go any farther around the circle if she meant to escape; she turned left onto North Street, despite the darkness.
And then, suddenly, she knew where she was going. She would go to Wizard Street, just three blocks away. She would go to Mereth’s shop, Mereth of the Golden Door. Even if Mereth wouldn’t take her in, surely the wizard would know of someone who would.
Now that she had a destination in mind, Sarai began to hurry.
Behind her, a man’s dying scream sounded above the fighting. Sarai winced. It seemed so pointless, fighting Tabaea every step of the way like this; didn’t Lord Torrut see that? He was letting his men die for nothing.
But there was nothing Sarai could do about it, not anymore. She fled down North Street.
The stub of a lone torch still burned unnoticed above a shuttered shop on Harbor Street; Lady Sarai glanced at it, grateful for the slight relief from the surrounding night. To see Harbor Street utterly empty and almost dark seemed very odd indeed; she had never before been out so late and never seen the streets so deserted.
Behind her, the shouting seemed to be fading away. By the time she turned left onto Wizard Street, she was no longer entirely sure whether she heard shouting, or the distant roar of the sea.
Here there were no torches, only whatever light moons and stars might provide, but Sarai could see that the door of Mereth’s shop was shut, her signboard unlit. The shop windows were tightly closed, draperies drawn, but a thin line of light showed around the edges; it would scarcely have been visible were the street brighter, either with daylight or the glow of the evening’s torches and lanterns.
Sarai hurried to the door and rapped gently on the gilded panels.
For a long moment, nothing happened; then, abruptly, the door was flung open. “Get in!” someone ordered.
Sarai obeyed, and the door slammed shut behind her, leaving Wizard Street once more dark and empty.
CHAPTER 26
The palace door was locked and barred, but Tabaea didn ’t mind; sbs braced herself against the paving stones of the plaza, put her shoulder to the brass-covered panels, and shoved with all her supernatural strength. The latch shattered, the brackets holding the bar snapped, and the twisted, ruined door swung open. Tabaea laughed and shouted, “Come on!” She waved to her followers; some of them surged forward, close on her heels, but others hung back, intimidated by the idea of intruding on the palace itself.
Tabaea stepped through the broken portal into a broad and shadowy marble corridor; somewhere far ahead light spilled through an archway, and the contrast of the distant glow with the surrounding darkness seemed to exaggerate the length of the passage.
Or did it? Tabaea was unsure; the palace was for larger than any other building she had ever been in. Perhaps the corridor really was that long.
The euphoria of her triumphant march from Grandgate faded quickly at the sight of the polished stone floor, the countless doors on either side, and a gleaming staircase barely visible in the dim distance. This hardly seemed to her like a part of her own familiar city, or like anything human at all. She had thought old Serem’s house was almost offensively magnificent, yet this palace hall dwarfed anything in the wizard’s home.
But it was hers now, she reminded herself. She sniffed the air, but that told her little; people had been through here recently, but were not here now. The faint familiar odors of furniture, of lamps and candles, and of polishing oil reached her, mingled both with the smells of her followers and the street outside, and with scents she could not identify. No longer feeling particularly bold, she nonetheless put on a bold front and marched forward. Her footsteps tapped loudly on the shining marble, and echoed eerily from the stone walls.
Behind her came a score of the vagabonds and scoundrels who had followed her from the Wall Street Field; their feet, bare or slippered or wrapped in rags, did not make the sharp tapping her good new boots did, but slapped or scraped or shuffled. Like her, they were awed by what they saw; their shouting dropped to whispers that echoed from the stone, chasing each other back and forth along the passage.
“Where is everybody?” someone asked.
“Who do you mean?” Tabaea demanded, turning. “Who did you expect here? We fought the city guard in the streets!”
“I mean the people who live here,” the beggar said. “The overlord and his family, and all the others.”
“Fled, probably,” someone said. “Or cowering in then-beds. ”
“Did you think they’d be waiting by the door to welcome us?”
Someone laughed. “Come on,” Tabaea said. She had intended to shout it, but somehow couldn’t bring herself to do it; instead she merely spoke loudly. She turned forward and marched on down the corridor.
The doors on either side were mostly closed; a few stood ajar, but the rooms beyond were dark, and Tabaea did not bother to explore them. They passed arches opening into large dark rooms, and those, too, Tabaea hurried quickly by without further investigation. Three of her followers carried torches; they waved them in the open rooms to be sure no soldiers lurked in ambush there, but then hurried on after their leader.
Ahead, that lone light spilled its golden glow across gray marble floor, walls of white marble veined with gray, and Tabaea hurried forward to see where it came from.
The answer was a disappointment; a perfectly ordinary oil lamp, apparently forgotten by whoever had extinguished the others, burned atop a black iron bracket on the side of a pillar, lighting another passageway that ran crosswise to the one they were in. This other corridor, Tabaea saw, was not so inhumanly, perfectly straight, but instead curved away in the distance.
And it gave her a choice, and therefore a problem; which way should she go?
The left-hand passage curved to the right; the right-hand passage curved to the left. Whichever of the three she took, she would be proceeding deeper in toward the center of the palace— in which case, there was no reason to prefer one over the other. She marched on straight ahead.
Now that the light was all behind her, shining over her shoulders, she could see more clearly what lay ahead. The corridor continued another forty feet or so, then ended in a dark open space—she could not judge its extent, only that its walls and ceiling were out of sight. All she could see, beyond the corridor’s end, was a set of broad steps leading up into the darkness, steps of polished yellow marble.
Where had the builders of this place gotten all this stone, Tabaea wondered; she hadn’t known there was so much marble in all the World.
She marched on to the end of the passage; there she paused and looked around. She sniffed the air, but caught no suspicious odors.
To either side, walls began at right angles to the corridor, then curved away into darkness; ahead, under the great staircase, were walls and, she thought, doors. There were carvings in niches and statues standing on pedestals here and there—one stood on either side of the bottommost step. Everything was of stone, in white and gold and maroon.
She let her gaze drift up the staircase; she had expected the top to be utterly black, like the unlit hallway of an inn late at night, but instead there was a faint glow, and she thought she could make out vague shapes. There was a certain airiness about it, somehow, and a hint of the pastel colors of moonslight.
She considered a warlock light, but decided against trying it; she hadn’t really learned how to do one properly yet, and she was very wary about overusing warlockry. Instead she waved the torchbearers back and let her eyes adjust. After all, she reminded herself, she could see as well as any cat.
She blinked and drew in her breath. “Come on,” she said, waving her little band forward and marching up the marble steps.
