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.