Sleeping in the Wall’s shadow was not an appealing prospect, but Tabaea knew she had to sleep somewhere. And she didn’t have so much as a tattered blanket; those inhabitants of the Field with huts and tents were the lucky ones.
But she had nowhere else to go.
She pulled her last copper bit from her pocket and put it on the table to pay her bill; the serving wench spotted it from two tables away and hurried over to collect it. Tabaea rose, nodded in acknowledgment as the coin was claimed, and started toward the door.
Something caught her attention, she wasn’t sure what; had the server gestured, perhaps? She glanced around.
A man was staring at her, a big man in a grubby brown tunic and a kilt that had been red once. The look he was giving her was not one she cared to encourage. As she looked back, he got ponderously to his feet; he was obviously drunk.
Quickly, she turned away and left the tavern.
She didn’t pause in the doorway. The rain was little more than mist now, and she had sold her cloak a sixnight ago, in any case; she had no hood or collar to raise. Besides, any hesitation might have been taken as an invitation by the man in the kilt. She walked directly out the door and down the single step.
The mud was more slippery than she had realized; she had to reach out and catch herself against the wall of the inn, turning half around. Above her the signboard creaked; she glanced up at it, at the faded depiction of a green dragon dancing clumsily on its hind feet, long pointed tongue lolling to one side, a goblet that had once been gold but was now almost black clutched in one foreclaw. The torches that lit it from either side flickered and hissed in the drifting mist.
At least it wasn’t cold, she thought. Setting each foot carefully, she set out across the street. “Hoi, ” someone called when she was nearing the far side.
Tabaea turned, not sure whether the voice was addressed to her or to someone else.
“Hoi, young lady,” the voice continued, slurring the words, “are you headed for the Field?”
“You mean me?” Tabaea asked, still not sure who was speaking.
“Yes, I mean you,” the voice said, and now she located the speaker. It was the drunken man in the kilt, speaking from the mouth of the alley beside the bin.
“What business is it of yours?” Tabaea answered.
“Now, come on, don’t be... don’t be like that.” His consonants were blurred by liquor, but Tabaea had had long practice in understanding the speech of drunkards. “A pretty thing like you can do better than the Wall Street Field!”
“Oh, really?” she demanded. “How?”
“Come with me, and I’ll show you,” he said.
She turned away, her muscles tensing, her hand sliding down to the hilt of the black dagger. She took another step toward the Field.
Then she looked where she was going and stopped.
Before her was a hut built out of an old table propped up on piles of bricks, the sides partially boarded over with broken doors and other scrap, leaving an opening where the tattered remains of a sheet hung. Leaning out of this aperture was an old woman, who was listening with interest to the conversation between Tabaea and the kilted man. The woman’s hair was a rat’s nest of gray; her open mouth displayed no more than half a dozen teeth, and those were black. Her face was as withered and wrinkled as an apple in spring.
Beside the hut was a tent, made of the remnants of a merchant’s awning; stripes that had once been red were now a pale pink, where they weren’t hidden by greenish black mildew. A one-eyed boy of ten or so was watching Tabaea from the open end of the tent. His black hair was so greasy that it stood up in spikes, and Tabaea imagined she could see things crawling in it. In the muddy waste beyond, in the flickering and scattered light, Tabaea could see a dozen other faces, young and old, male and female—and all of them hungry and tired, none of them smiling.
She turned back toward the alley. “What did you have in mind?” she asked.
The man in the kilt smiled. “I have... have a room,” he said, “but it’s a bit lonely, for just me. Care to come take a look?”
Tabaea still hesitated.
There could be little doubt what the man had in mind. If she accepted, she would be whoring, really—and at a terribly low price, at that; she would be exchanging her favors for a room for the night, without even a meal, let alone cash, to accompany it.
But if the alternative was the Wall Street Field—well, she could at least take a look at the room. And maybe she could demand additional payment, or simply take it when the man was asleep. He was bound to sleep heavily after drinking so much.
In fact, he might be too drunk to really bother her, once they got to his room. She marched back across the muddy street, moving as quickly as she could without slipping.
She slowed as she neared the alley and saw the big man’s face again. There wasn’t anything she could point to that was obviously wrong with it, beyond drunkenness—he wasn’t deformed or even particularly ugly, he appeared to still have both eyes and all his teeth—but still, there was something about him that made her very uneasy. His nose was very red, and his eyes very dark.
She brushed at her skirt, as if trying to knock away the mud on the hem, and her hand came away with the black dagger tucked in her sleeve. One advantage of that weapon, she reminded herself, was that it didn’t sparkle in the torchlight.
Then, with a false smile pasted across her lips, she stepped up to the man in the alleyway. “Where’s mis room of yours?” she asked. “I’ll be glad to get in out of this mist.”
“This way,” he said, beckoning her into the alley. She smelled cheap oushka on his breath—lots of cheap oushka. Warily, she followed him into the shadows.
“How far is it?” she asked.
He turned abruptly and caught her in his arms. “Right here,” he said. He drew her to his chest, breathing great clouds of alcohol and decay in her face, and the grease on his tunic stained her own. His hands slid down, trapping her arms against him.
“Let me go!” she demanded.
“Oh, pretty, now, you were... you were happy enough to come with me when you thought I could put a roof over your head,” he said, in a tone that was probably intended as wheedling. “You’ll have just as good a time here in the alley.” “Let go!” she shouted.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “I live in the Field with the others, and over there we’d have shared...”
She didn’t wait to hear any more. He was holding her arms down, so that she couldn’t reach up far enough to pull anything from her belt, but she didn’t need to; she yanked the dagger down out of her sleeve and slashed.
The knife was really amazingly sharp. She wasn’t able to put any real strength into the blow, with her arms almost pinned, but the black blade sliced neatly through the red kilt and into the leg beneath, leaving a dark red line, almost as black in the shadows as the blade that had made it, a line no wider than a hair across the outside of her captor’s thigh.
Tabaea felt an odd tingling as the knife cut flesh; her head seemed to swim, as if the alcohol on the man’s breath were suddenly affecting her, while at the same time she felt a surge of strength and well-being.
The excitement, she told herself. It was the excitement and fear getting to her. She had never been in a serious fight, nor had she ever cut anyone before. Even as she thought that, the drunk reacted instinctively, flinging his arms wide and stumbling backward the instant he felt the first cut; that allowed her arm more freedom, and with that odd feeling of strength flooding through her, with that strange light-headedness giving her irrational courage, she thrust with the dagger, plunging the blade deep into the meat of her attacker’s thigh.