and molestations.
It was just as bad as the Wall Street Field had been. Didn’t these people appreciate the fact that they had a roof over their heads now, that they weren’t outcasts anymore?
Obviously not. About the only comfort was that the population of the palace seemed to be declining; there were clearly fewer people in the corridors now. They might just be moving into the rooms and chambers, or down into the deeper areas where she didn’t see them, but Tabaea liked to think that they were finding places for themselves outside, in the houses her people were taking back from the old overlord’s tax collectors, or with their families, or somewhere.
She frowned. There had been that rumor that some were moving back to the Wall Street Field. She didn’t like that.
And then there were all the complaints from the other people, the outsiders, the merchants and nobles and even sailors and craftsmen and the like, worried about the absence of the city guard, complaining about the loss of their slaves, claiming they had been robbed and the thieves had taken shelter in the palace, and any number of other things...
The pleasures of ruling, Tabaea thought as she neared the steps that would lead her up to the start of her working day, were overrated, and it didn’t help at all that she had gone and limited what pleasures there were, in her idealistic drive to improve the lot of her subjects. She could think of interesting ways to pass the time with a handsome slave, now that she could afford one, could have had one for the asking—but she had abolished slavery. She sighed, straightened her skirt, and proceeded up the steps toward the throne room.
At least she had finally had the sense to give up on those silly gowns and gewgaws. She didn’t need to look like some jewel-encrusted queen out of an old story to convince people that she was the empress; all she needed was to be herself, Tabaea the First.
As always, there was a crowd waiting for her; as always, she ignored them and marched straight toward the dais, expecting them to get out of her way.
Then, abruptly, she stopped. Something was wrong. She sniffed the air.
Someone in the crowd was terrified—not just nervous, but really scared, and at the same time she scented aggression. And it wasn’t from someone lurking in a back corner, it was someone nearby. She saw movement, a hand raising. Another assassination attempt, obviously. Well, this time she didn’t intend to be killed. Even if she always recovered almost instantly, it still hurt; in fact, it was downright agonizing, for a few seconds. It used up precious magic energy, and besides, it made a mess, getting blood all over everything.
This time she sensed warlockry, just a trace of it, a tiny bit of magic. That had happened before; warlocks had tried to stop her heart, had tried to throw knives at her, had tried to strangle her from afar, and every time, she had blocked the attempt easily. Warlockry didn’t work on warlocks, and she, thanks to that silly Inza, was a warlock.
Usually, though, the warlock attacks had come when she was alone, not here in the throne room.
Well, those attacks hadn’t worked, so a change in strategy was sensible enough. She wondered just what was intended this time.
All this ran through her mind almost instantly; she was reacting far faster than any ordinary human could, faster than any ordinary warlock.
The frightened warlock in the crowd was holding something hi his upraised hand, something small and golden, and then he was releasing it, sending it flying toward her at incredible speed, supported and propelled by magic. An ordinary woman probably wouldn’t have seen it in time to react. An ordinary warlock probably couldn’t have gathered the will to respond before the gold thimble reached her.
Tabaea had no trouble at all knocking the thing aside while it was still three or four feet away; the thimble dropped to the floor, rattling on the stone, and the single drop it held spattered out.
Immediately, a white vapor arose, hissing. Tabaea didn’t concern herself with that; she had an assassin to stop. She leaped over the smoking thimble, reaching the warlock in a single bound; she grabbed the front of his tunic with her left hand, and her right snatched her dagger from its sheath. Then she stopped.
People were screaming and backing away, the white vapor was spreading, and Tabaea could smell it, a horrible, burning stench like nothing she had ever smelled before; the assassin, more frightened than ever, was struggling helplessly hi her grip, trying to get free. Tabaea ignored all that. The knife in her hand felt wrong.
It was a fairly subtle thing, and she couldn’t have described exactly what the difference was, but the instant her hand closed on the hilt, she knew, beyond any doubt, that this knife was not the Black Dagger. A person gets to know a tool when it’s handled with any frequency, gets to know its feel, its shape. Without question, Tabaea knew the Black Dagger.
And without question, the knife in her hand was not the Black Dagger.
Furious, she rammed the blade into her would-be assassin’s belly, partly to be certain that this was not just some inexplicable transformation that had left the magic intact, and partly because after all, even if she couldn’t steal his life, this man had tried to kill her, and was therefore a traitor who deserved to die.
She felt no surge of energy, no tingle of magic, as the man screamed and clutched at her hand.
There was no magic. The Black Dagger was gone.
She threw the assassin aside, unconcerned whether he was dead or alive, and turned to face the stairway she had just ascended.
Where could the Black Dagger have gone?
She had some vague idea of retracing her steps, but when she turned, she found herself face-to-face with that stinking smoke. It was still rising, still spreading. She looked down.
The contents of the thimble had spread, and now completely covered an area the width of her hand, perfectly circular in shape—and Tabaea knew that that perfect a circle was unnatural. The stuff should have sprayed unevenly across the stone in a fan shape.
What was more, within that circle the floor was completely invisible, hidden by a layer of... of something. Tabaea had no name for it, either for the substance or even for its color. It wasn’t exactly green, wasn’t exactly gray or brown or yellow, but it was closer to those colors than to anything else. It was liquid, but she couldn’t say what kind; it was shiny and looked somehow slimy, but it wasn’t quite like anything she had ever seen before. And it wasn’t still; it roiled and rippled and bubbled and steamed, though Tabaea could feel no heat from it. It moved almost as if it were somehow alive.
She had assumed at first that the drop was some sort of concentrated acid, or virulent poison, but this stuff was obviously magic.
What’s more, it was spreading.
And, she realized with a twinge of horror, it wasn’t spreading on top of the marble floor; it was eating into the stone.
And someone had wanted to put that stuff on her, and she didn’t even have the Black Dagger to protect her, it would have eaten away at her, just as it was eating at the floor. She shuddered.
Who was responsible for this? She looked up and around at the throne room. Most of the crowd had fled, but some were still there, staying well away from her and from the little pool of whatever-it-was. No one was smiling; no one seemed to stand out as reacting oddly, unless she counted the assassin, who was still breathing, still alive.
Had the assassin known that her dagger was gone, that she was no longer protected against wizardry? Had he taken the dagger himself?
She strode over to him and used one toe to roll him over onto his back. He lay there, gasping and bleeding. The knife on his belt was obviously not the Black Dagger; Tabaea could see that at a glance.
“Who sent you?” she demanded.
He made a strangled choking noise. He clearly was in no condition to answer, even if he had wanted to. Tabaea frowned.
She reached out, warlock-fashion, and tried to sense the damage her knife blow had done.
The wound was pretty bad, but she thought it could be healed if someone, a powerful witch or a warlock who had been trained properly, got to it before the man finished bleeding to death, or if a theurgist managed to get the right prayer through in time. Unfortunately, Tabaea could not do it herself; she had never learned to heal, with either warlockry or witchcraft.
She turned and spotted Arl, standing by the dais. “You, Art,” she said. “Find a witch or a priest or
