Algarin of Longwall, her father's chief wizardry consultant, had turned up an empty palm. "It's the Guild law," he said. "Why?" Algarin had had no answer, and Sarai had demanded to see a more highly placed wizard, so it was the city's senior Guild-master, Serem the Wise, who finally explained it.
"Magic, Lady Sarai," the old man had said, "is power, but of a different sort than the power you and your father wield."
"I can see that for myself," Sarai had snapped in reply.
"And power," Serem had continued, untroubled by her interruption, "must be kept in balance. If it is not, the World will be plunged into chaos."
"Says who?"
"It's self-evident," Serem had replied, with mild surprise. "Imagine, if you will, that a wizard were to become overlord of Ethshar of the Sands."
Sarai had glowered at him, and Serem had revised his suggestion. "Suppose," he said, "that Lord Ederd the Heir had apprenticed to a wizard in his youth. Suppose that he decided he was tired of waiting for his father to die and cast a spell that slew the overlord."
"Then he'd be guilty of treason, and he would be executed," Sarai had replied. "That's easy enough. My father would see to it."
"But how?" Serem had asked. "Suppose this evil wizard were to use his spells to guard himself, and you could not appeal to the Wizards' Guild, because there are, in our hypothetical case, no Guild rules forbidding his actions, no matter what other laws he may have broken."
"There aren't any Guild rules requiring that you wizards obey the laws?"
Serem had hesitated before answering, his first hesitation, but then admitted that there were no such rules.
Sarai had insisted that a rule requiring wizards to obey the same laws as ordinary people would serve just as well as this stupid rule about keeping out of polities, and Serem had then tried to convince her that allowing kings and ministers to live for centuries, as would inevitably happen if the rules were changed, would be a bad thing.
Sarai had not accepted that.
The argument had dragged on for days-sixnights, in fact. In the end, when Sarai refused to be convinced, Serem had simply turned up a palm and said, "My lady, those are the Guild rules, and I have no power to change them."
They were stupid rules, Sarai thought as she opened the door of her father's bedchamber, and she wanted them changed.
CHAPTER 8
The Drunken Dragon was probably not the most dangerous tavern in the city, Tabaea thought as she gulped down the watery stuff that passed for ale in that establishment, but it was the most dangerous she ever cared to see. Coming here had been a serious mistake.
She had been making a lot of serious mistakes lately.
Oh, not as bad as some, certainly. She hadn't wound up in front of a magistrate, or tied to a post somewhere for a flogging, or in the hands of the Minister of Justice or his crazy daughter, like poor Sansha. Tabaea had watched the auction that morning, had seen Sansha sold to the proprietor of one of the "specialty" brothels-not the ones in Soldiertown, which generally employed free women and treated them reasonably well, but one of the secretive establishments in Nightside that catered to the more debauched members of the nobility.
Tabaea shuddered. She had heard stories about what went on in places like that. They had to use slaves-free women wouldn't work there. Tabaea wouldn't have changed places with Sansha for all the gold in Ethshar.
And it was all because Sansha had stolen the wrong jewel, a diamond pendant that the owner thought was worth enough to justify hiring magicians to recover it.
Tabaea had stolen plenty of wrong jewels in the past few years-but all hers had been wrong in the other direction, had turned out to be worthless chunks of glass or paste, or at best some semiprecious bauble. And even with the best of them, she'd been cheated by the fences and pawnbrokers.
Mistakes, nothing but mistakes.
She had been making mistakes all her life, it seemed. She hadn't run away as a child, like her brother Tand-and she had heard a rumor that Tand was a pilot on a Small Kingdoms trader now, with a wife and a daughter, successful and respected.
Of course, the rumor might not be true; land might be starving somewhere in the Wall Street Field, or he might be a slave in the dredging crews, or he might be long dead in an alley brawl, or he might be almost anywhere.
But if she had run away…
Well, she hadn't. She stared into the remaining ale, which was flat and lifeless.
She hadn't found an apprenticeship, either. She hadn't even tried. That seemed so stupid, in retrospect.
She had never taken opportunities when they presented themselves. She hadn't married Wulran of the Gray Eyes when he offered, two years ago, and now he was happily settled down with that silly Lara of Northside and her insipid giggle.
She hadn't signed up for the city guard when she was sixteen-though they might not have taken her anyway; they took very few women, and she wasn't really anywhere near big enough.
She hadn't stolen much of anything from her family, and now her drunken stepfather had spent everything.
She hadn't stolen anything from Serem the Wise, when she broke into his house all those nights four years ago without getting caught-she had just kept spying on him until he spotted her.
All she had come away with there was the secret of athamezation, and she hadn't even done that right! Here she had this wonderful secret that the Wizards' Guild had guarded for centuries, and all she had to show for it was a stupid black dagger that didn't do anything an ordinary knife wouldn't do just as well.
She pulled the dagger from her belt and looked at it. It was black, from pommel to point, and it seemed to stay sharp without sharpening, but otherwise, as far as she could tell, it was completely ordinary.
She knew, had known for years, that she must have made a mistake in the athamezation ritual-another mistake in the long list. She had no idea what the mistake might have been, but something had gone wrong. And when she had tried again, nothing had happened at all. The magic she had felt the first time wasn't there; she was just going through a bunch of meaningless motions.
Well, Serem had said that a wizard could only perform the spell once. Apparently that applied even when the spell was botched.
She put the knife back in its sheath and gulped down the last of her ale. Then she put the mug down and looked around the taproom again.
The place was definitely unsavory. She had come here because it was cheap, and she was, as usual, down on her luck. She had hoped to find a purse to pick, or a man she wouldn't mind going home with, but neither one had turned up. The men here were mostly drunkards, or disgusting, or both, and none of them seemed to have fat purses-after all, why would anyone with significant amounts of money be in the Drunken Dragon? And what little cash its patrons did have they watched carefully.
She wasn't going to find anything useful here.
And that meant that after years of avoiding it, she was going to yield to the inevitable. She would spend the night in Wall Street Field.
There wasn't anywhere else left. The little stash of stolen money she had accumulated in better days was gone, down to the last iron bit. She couldn't go back to her mother's home, not after that last fight, and she had exhausted her credit at every inn in Ethshar. Sleeping in the streets or courtyards would make her fair game for slavers-and she had just seen what had happened to Sansha, so any notion she might have had that slavery could be an acceptable life was gone.
That left the Field.
She sighed and looked out the narrow front window.
The Drunken Dragon stood on Wall Street, facing the Field; a good many of the customers there looked like permanent inhabitants of the Field, in fact. Tabaea guessed that when they could scrape together enough for a drink or a meal, the beggars and runaways and thieves who lived in the Field would come here just because it was close and cheap. They wouldn't care that the drinks were watered and the food foul, that the floors and walls were filthy, or that the whole place stank; they were used to that.