Above her, the warlock still hovered, glowing, but she had his measure now; he could hold himself up, suppress her own warlockry, and provide light, but that left him no magic to spare for anything else.
Someone else shied a stone at the warlock; he turned it away, but Tabaea could sense that it distracted him slightly.
Further, he was beginning to worry, she knew—probably about the Calling. How close was he to the threshold, to the first nightmares? He could draw upon all the power he wanted, and because he had started with more than she Tabaea could never match him, but if he drew too much...
She decided the warlock was not really the major threat.
The first soldier paused a few feet away, watching the knife.
“Tabaea the Thief,” he called, “in the name of Ederd the Fourth, Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands, I order you to surrender!”
“Go to Hell, bloody-skirt!” she shouted back.
Other soldiers were surrounding her, forming a fifteen-foot circle with her at the center; the Field’s usual inhabitants had Mien back into the darkness. Tabaea tried to pick up something with warlockry, but the magician in the air above her wouldn’t allow it.
There were a dozen guardsmen encircling her; at a cautious signal from the one in front of her, they all began closing in slowly.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Tabaea said. She lunged forward, with inhuman speed, and thrust the Black Dagger’s blade under the ribs of the man before her.
His eyes widened, and he slashed belatedly with his sword, cutting her arm. Blood spilled, black in the orange light, black across her black sleeve.
It really didn’t hurt very much at all, to Tabaea’s surprise, and what pain there was was lost in the hot surge of strength she was receiving from the man she had stabbed. Then one of the other soldiers, one of the men behind her, struck.
That hurt, and the wave of strength she had just felt vanished; the blow to her back was a shock, a burst of pain, and her head jerked backward. Then it snapped forward again, involuntarily, and she found herself looking down at her own chest.
Something projected from her tunic, something dark that had cut its way out through the fabric, stretching it out and then cutting through, something dark and hard and smeared with thick liquid.
Then she realized what it was. She was looking at the point of a sword that had been thrust right through her, a sword covered with her heart’s blood.
She was dead. She had to be.
But she didn’t feel dead. Shouldn’t she already be losing consciousness, be falling lifeless to the ground?
She pulled her own blade from the soldier’s body; dark blood spilled down his pale tunic, and he crumpled to the earth. He was dead, no doubt about that. But she wasn’t. She reached down, grabbed the blade that protruded from her chest, and shoved it back, hard. She felt it slide through her, back out, and she whirled swiftly, before whoever held it could strike again.
She could feel a prickling, a tingling, and she suddenly realized that she probably had a gaping wound in her, that she might yet bleed to death. She felt no blood, though.
Tabaea looked quickly down at her chest, and sensed that the wound was closing of its own accord. That was magic—it had to be. It wasn’t anything she was doing consciously, though, and she didn’t think it was witchcraft or warlockry. It didn’t feel like those.
It felt like the sensation she got when the Black Dagger cut flesh. Whatever was happening, she was sure it was the Black Dagger’s spell at work. Whether it would truly heal her, or at least keep her going until she could do it by other means, she didn’t know. It had to be the dagger that was keeping her alive, and she didn’t understand how or why, but she had no time to worry about that now. She looked up.
The soldiers were staring at her, eyes wide; no one was moving against her. One man held a bloody sword, its tip just an inch or two from her chin.
Tabaea realized, with astonishment, that they were afraid of her.
And then she further realized, with a deep sense of surprised satisfaction, that they had very good reasons to be afraid.
She knocked the sword aside, held up the Black Dagger, and smiled a very unpleasant smile.
“It’s not going to be that easy,” she announced, grinning. “If I were you, I would throw down my weapons and run.”
“Elner, call the magicians,” a guardsman said. Tabaea turned and smiled at him.
“I am a magician,” she said. Then, moving faster than any human being could without magical assistance, she slashed the soldier across the chest—not fatally, just a nasty gash that would weaken him, and in so doing would strengthen her. He gasped, and stepped back, his hands flying up to stop the blood, his sword falling to the dirt at his feet.
She thought she understood, now, what had happened. That sword thrust should have killed her, obviously, but it hadn’t—or rather, not completely. She was fairly sure she had lost one life. But the Black Dagger had stolen a dozen for her—including dogs, cats, magicians, and the life of the man who had led this party to capture her.
She didn’t know whether dogs and cats carried as much life as people, and she did not particularly want to find out; she wasn’t going to throw her lives away recklessly. Still, she was stronger and faster than anyone else in the World, and as long as she took a life for every one she lost, she could not die. She liked that idea very much.
“I am the magician,” she said. “Not just a witch or a warlock or a wizard, but all of them!” She suddenly remembered what she had heard, listening to the Guildmasters at the Cap and Dagger; she laughed, and said, “Bow, you fools! Bow before labaea the First, Empress of Ethshar!” “She’s crazy,” someone said. The Black Dagger moved again, faster than any other human hand could move it, fast as a striking cat, and the guardsman who had impaled her fell back, bleeding. The bloody sword fell from his grasp.
“You think I’m crazy?” she shouted. “Then just try to stop me! Didn’t you seel He put a sword right through me, and it didn’t hurt me!”
“Call the magicians, Elner,” someone called mockingly from the crowd of civilians.
More guardsmen were arriving, pushing through the crowd; behind them came the robed figures of magicians.
“Magicians?” Tabaea stooped and snatched up the sword, left-handed, and flung it upward with all the speed and strength and skill of her dozen stolen lives.
The warlock shrieked, and the light went out; the orange glow vanished like the flame of a snuffed candle, plunging the Field into darkness.
When the shriek ended, silence as sudden as the darkness fell. Cloth rustled as the warlock fell out of the sky, and then he landed with a sodden thud, off to one side, upon a mixed group of soldiers and bystanders.
“You think I’m afraid of magicians’?” Tabaea screamed over the sudden tumult.
In fact, magicians were about the only thing she was still afraid of—she had no idea whether she could defend herself against all the different kinds of magic. Warlockry, yes—she could hold off another warlock indefinitely. Witchcraft, absolutely—she had greater vitality, and therefore more power, than any other witch that had ever lived.
Gods and demons and wizards, though—who knew? Sorcery, any of the subtler arts, she could not be sure of. She was bluffing—but she didn’t think anyone would dare to test her. She stood, dagger ready.
Something came sweeping toward her out of the darkness, something Tabaea could not describe, with a shape and a color she couldn’t name; reflexively, she raised her knife, and the black blade flared blue for an instant. Then whatever it was was gone.