Soldiers carried swords, which was appealing, and they could rely on a warm bed and filling meals and a modicum of respect—but it did not seem like a really wonderful career, especially for a woman.
She scooped a greasy lump of chicken to her mouth and chewed.
She had food and a bed as a thief; those things were no incentive. And the guard would have no special use that she could see for her animal-derived talents.
Not the guard, then. What else?
Well, who was rich and famous?
The overlord was, of course, and the other nobles. But they had all been born into the nobility, a path that was not open to her.
There were rich and famous merchants, but they had had money to start out with, to buy their first cargos or finance their caravans, and most, if not all, had served apprenticeships in their trades.
There were the performers in the Arena, the jugglers and acrobats and singers and magicians.
There were the magicians, even those who did not perform— magicians of any sort could be assured of respect.
Performers... could she use her feline reflexes to become a juggler or acrobat? She knew that most learned their arts during apprenticeships, but if she could learn the skills on her own, they could not stop her from performing.
And as for magic—well, she was a magician already, wasn’t she?
But she was not openly a magician.
She swallowed the chicken and started on a chunk of carrot, thinking.
She didn’t know all that very much about magic, beyond the secret of athamezation—and of course, she had gotten that spell wrong when she tried to use it. Still, it seemed to her that magic had real possibilities. There were all those different kinds of magicians, for one thing—wizards and warlocks and witches, theurgists and demonologists and sorcerers, illusionists and herbalists and scientists, and all the others.
And with The Black Dagger, she could kill one of each and steal all their abilities! Or could she? She frowned and swallowed the carrot. At least part of magic was knowledge, rather than anything physical, and she didn’t know whether the Black Dagger stole knowledge. She certainly hadn’t learned anything from the minds of the dog or the cat or the dove—but perhaps beasts were too different.
She hadn’t learned anything from the kilted drunk, either— but she hadn’t killed him, she had only stabbed him in the leg. She had only acquired the strength he had lost, and even that had returned to him and departed from her as he healed. Stabbing him hadn’t robbed him of any of his memories or wits.
Killing a person would steal those memories away, wouldn’t it? But would the Black Dagger transfer them to her, or would they simply be lost?
Or was knowledge part of the soul, of the part of a person that did not die? If the victim became a ghost, the ghost would still have its knowledge and memories—the dagger couldn’t give them to Tabaea, then. If the victim’s soul escaped into another realm, wouldn’t it take the knowledge with it?
But then, it was said that certain magicks could even trap or destroy a person’s soul—what if the Black Dagger was one of them?
Tabaea had to admit that she had no idea whether her magic knife could steal souls, or transfer knowledge. The only way to find out would be to kill a person, preferably a magician.
She pushed a lump of potato around the plate with her fork as she thought about that.
It would mean murder, cold-blooded murder. She had never killed a person. Killing dogs and cats was one thing, killing a person was quite another.
But then, how else would she ever know what the Black Dagger could do? How else would she ever become a magician, or anything more than a common thief?
She might make it as a performer just with the skills of animals—but then she would never know. And performing might not work. And magic—she wanted more magic.
And she could have it, if memories transferred, and maybe even if they didn’t. All she had to do was kill magicians with the Black Dagger.
Somewhere in the back of her mind it occurred to her that she had never seriously thought about murdering people before; she had never killed anyone in the course of her career as a thief. Cats, of course, were natural hunters and killers; dogs, too, were predators. She had absorbed abilities from a dog and a cat; might some of the predator’s blood-lust come along? She dismissed the idea.
So if she was going to kill magicians to steal their abilities, which magicians should she kill?
Sorcerers and wizards seemed to depend on their tools and formulae—sorcerers, in particular, seemed to need the talismans and artifacts. And wizardry might bring her in contact with the Wizards’ Guild, and besides, she already knew that she could never make a proper athame—she had the Black Dagger instead.
So those were out.
That left demonologists and theurgists and witches and warlocks and herbalists and scientists and illusionists and plenty of others, of course. Demonology looked risky—Tabaea thought it was significant that she had never seen an old demonologist.
Theurgists had to leam prayers and invocations and so forth to work their magic; if knowledge didn’t convey, then that wouldn’t work; she wouldn’t know the rituals she needed.
Herbalists were so limited, with their plants, and like wizards and sorcerers, they were powerless without their supplies.
Illusionists just did tricks—there was some doubt as to whether it was real magic at all.
Scientists—Tabaea didn’t understand scientists, and most of the scientific magic she had seen wasn’t very useful, just stunts like using a glass to break sunlight into rainbows, or making those little chimes that spun around and rang when you burned candles under them. And there were so few scientists around, maybe a dozen in the entire city, that killing one seemed wasteful.
The various sorts of seers and soothsayers were a possibility, but telling the real ones from the frauds wasn’t easy. Tabaea considered carefully as she finished her noodles, and decided in the end that prophecy could wait.
Ignoring the more obscure sorts of magician, that left witches and warlocks. They didn’t seem to need equipment or incantations or anything, and they indisputably did real magic. One of them would do just fine.
How to find one, then?
She couldn’t go entirely by appearance; while most varieties of magicians had traditional costumes, there were no hard and fast rules about it. Telling whether a black-robed figure was a demonologist or a warlock or a necromancer or something else entirely was not easy. She had been mistaken for a warlock once or twice herself, when wearing black—warlocks favored all-black clothes even more than demonologists did.
She knew a couple of magicians, of course, and knew of several others. She thought over all of them, trying to decide if there was one she wanted to kill.
No, there wasn’t, not really...
She stopped, fork raised.
There was that snotty little Inza of Northangle, Inza the Apprentice she called herself now. She was two or three years younger than Tabaea, but she and Tabaea had played together when they were young. Then Inza had gotten herself apprenticed to a warlock, old Luris the Black, down on Wizard Street in Eastside, and after that she never had time to so much as say hello to her old friends. Inza claimed her master kept her too busy, but Tabaea knew it was because she didn’t want to associate with a bunch of thieves and street people now that she was going to be a big important magician.
And Inza would be nearing the end of her apprenticeship now, she would be changing her name to Inza the Warlock soon.
If she lived that long.