She wandered along Armorer Street, vaguely thinking of the South Beaches, but with no very clear plan in mind; she squinted against the sun and dust as she walked, not really looking where she was going.
She heard a man call something obscene, and a woman giggled. Tabaea looked up.
She was at the corner of Whore Street, and a man in the yellow tunic and red kilt of a soldier was shouting lewd promises to a red-clad woman on a balcony.
Those two would have no trouble finding a few minutes' privacy, she was sure-though of course they'd have to pay for it.
That was a thought-she could pay for it. She could rent a room-not here in Soldiertown, of course, but at a respectable inn somewhere. She was so accustomed to stealing everything she needed that the idea of paying hadn't occurred to her at first.
But she could, if she wanted. She had stashed away a goodly sum of money in her three years of thievery and had never spent more than a few bits. Maybe making herself an athame would be worth the expense.
It took two more days before she worked up the nerve, but at last she found herself in a small attic room at the Inn of the Blue Crab, with the proprietor's promise not to allow anyone near for a day and a half.
She had tried to convince him, without actually stating it, that she was a wizard's apprentice and that her master had assigned her some spell that required privacy; fear of wild magic was about the only thing she could think of that would reliably restrain the man's natural curiosity. She wasn't at all sure it had worked.
She had laid in a good supply of candles for light, and a jug of reasonably pure water-the inn's well, the innkeeper boasted, had a permanent purification spell on it, but Tabaea suspected it was just not particularly polluted. She couldn't have any food, she knew, but she was fairly sure that water was permissible. She had brought a change of clothing, for afterward. She had fire and water and blood, and of course, she had her dagger. She had rested well and was as ready as she knew how to be.
Still, she trembled as she began the first chant, the dagger held out before her.
The incantations, the gestures, the eerie little dance, she remembered them all. She had no master or teacher in attendance urging her on, nor any other helper to light candles for her, so parts of the spell had to be performed in darkness, but she continued, undaunted.
The attic room was warm and close, and as the candles burned down it grew hotter and stuffier. When the candles died, it was almost a relief-but then the sun came up, and by midmorning the heat was worse than ever. She would have opened the window, but to do so would have meant stepping outside the pattern of the ceremony. The innkeeper would have come up and opened the window for an ordinary customer, if only to help cool the inn as a whole, but she had forbidden him entrance.
If she had thought ahead, she realized, she would have had the window open all along. She hadn't, and she had to make the best of it; she couldn't stop now.
In fact, she was unsure whether it was literally possible to stop; she could sense the magical energies working around her, a strange, new, but unmistakable sensation. She was afraid that the magic would turn against her if she stopped, so she ignored her thirst, ignored the heat, ignored her fatigue, and continued with the spell, sweating heavily.
Worst of all, she could see her jug of water, and she had the bowl of water used in purifying the metal of the knife, but this part of the ritual did not allow her a chance to drink so much as a drop.
Her voice gave out by midday; she hoped that didn't matter. By that time exhaustion, dehydration, and heat had driven her into a state of dazed semiconsciousness, and she continued with the spell more out of inertia than anything else.
Around midaftemoon she came to a part that she could not do without conscious effort. The spell called for her to draw her own blood, pricking her right hand, her throat, and the skin over her heart with the dagger.
Hands trembling, she drew the necessary blood, and used it to paint the required three symbols on the blade, marking the weapon as eternally hers.
The worst was yet to come, though; for the final section of the spell she would need to slash open her forehead and use the point of the knife to smear the blood across her face, mixing it with the sweat and ash. That would mark her as belonging to the knife, just as the three runes marked the knife as belonging to her. She dreaded that part; she had an irrational fear that in her weakness, she would lose control and cut her own skull open.
Still, she struggled on.
The moment came; the blade shook as she raised the dagger to her brow, which terrified her still more. Even if she didn't cut too deep, what if she slipped and cut an eye?
She closed her eyes as she drew the blade across the tight skin.
At first she thought she had somehow missed, and she reached up with her free hand. It came away red.
Quickly, she continued with the ceremony.
She could feel the magic around her-but somehow, even in her unthinking state, she began to sense that something had gone wrong.
Hadn't Lirrin's knife been glowing at this point?
Tabaea's wasn't. In fact, though it was hard to be certain in the deepening twilight, the knife seemed to have gone dark, as if blackened by smoke. But she hadn't managed to light a candle or other fire in hours; there was no smoke in the room.
She placed the knife before her, as the spell required, and it seemed almost to disappear in the gloom.
She had no choice but to continue, though. She had the final chant to get through, and then she would pick up the knife and the spell would be over-if she could pick up the knife. She remembered Lirrin forcing her hands down as if against strong resistance.
She hurried through the chant as quickly as she could in her weakened, frightened, and voiceless condition, thinking all the while that this had been an incredibly stupid thing to try all on her own, that it was fantastically dangerous, that it couldn't possibly work, that the knife might kill her when she picked it up-and at the same time, underneath her terror, she exulted in the knowledge that she was working magic, that if she came through this she would be a wizard, that the dagger would be her athame, and she would be the World's only Guildless wizard.
She spoke the final word and pressed her hands down toward the dagger. They met no resistance at all.
She closed her eyes against the flash as her fingers closed on the hilt.
There was no flash. The eerie sensation of magic at work faded quickly away, and she was just a girl sitting cross-legged on the floor of a hot, airless attic room, holding an ordinary dagger.
But that couldn't be true, she told herself, it wasn't possible. She blinked in the darkness, trying to see the knife, but the daylight was gone, and the light from the window, compounded of lanterns and torches and the lesser moon's pink glow, wasn't enough.
She dropped the dagger and groped for the candles and her tinderbox. In a moment she had a light going, and looked down at the knife that lay on the bare planks.
It was blackened all over, a smooth, even black; the silver blade still gleamed, but with the dark shimmer of volcanic glass.
Tabaea felt it. It wasn't glass; it was still metal.
But it was black.
Hilt and guard were black, as well.
The entire dagger was utterly, completely black, totally colorless.
That wasn't right. Tabaea didn't know much about wizards, but she had seen them in the streets, she had seen the athame that Serem carried and the athame that Lirrin had made. All those athames were perfectly ordinary and natural in appearance, not this unearthly black.