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 gate, 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
