She could think of three ways to find out more about it.
One was to ask a magician-but that was out. How could she do that without revealing that she had stolen the secret of athamezation? Even if she claimed to have found the dagger, many magicians could tell lies from truth.
No, asking anyone was out of the question.
The second possible method was to stab someone or something else and see what happened.
She supposed she would have to do that sooner or later, but she wasn't about to just go out and stab some stranger chosen at random.
And the third way to learn more would be to find the man she had stabbed and see what had happened to him. Had the dagger killed him? Had it devoured his soul? Had something horrible happened to him?
She didn't know his name, but she knew where she had last seen him. That was, she decided, where she should start-but not until dawn. She sat back, resolved to wait until first light.
The next thing she knew, she was waking up because someone was pulling her to her feet.
"Hai!" she said, "wait a minute!"
"The sleeping blossom awakens, then," someone said.
"You call her a blossom? An insult to flowers everywhere."
"Oh, she's not as bad as that," a third voice said. "Clean her up and comb that hair, and she'd be fit company."
Blinking, Tabaea saw blue sky over the shoulder of the man who held her and realized that it was well past first light and that she had fallen asleep behind the crate and been discovered by the merchant and his-or her-family. The man was not alone; a woman stood behind him, and two boys to the side.
"I'm sorry," Tabaea said, a little blearily. "I was hiding."
The man and woman looked at each other, concerned; the older boy, who looked about fourteen, was more direct. "Hiding from what?" he demanded.
Tabaea recognized the boy's voice as the one that had called her an insult to flowers everywhere. "From a drunkard who apparently liked my looks better than you do," she retorted.
The woman glanced uneasily over her shoulder.
Tabaea waved her worry away. "That was hours ago," she said. "I must have dozed off."
"Oh." The woman's relief was palpable.
Tabaea found the woman's behavior unreasonably annoying; what was she worrying about, when she had her husband and sons to protect her? But there was no point in arguing with these people. "I'll go now," Tabaea mumbled.
The man released her, and she walked away across the market square. The sun was peering over the wall to the east, its light blazing across the gate towers, while most of the market was still in shadow. Steam curled out from the tower walls where hot sun hit cold, damp stone, but otherwise the clouds and mists of the night had vanished, leaving shrinking puddles and drying mud. Merchants and fanners were setting up for the day, and a few early customers were drifting in, but on a day like this, Tabaea knew, most Ethsharites preferred to wait until the streets had dried before venturing out.
She wished she could have done the same.
She noticed, as she neared the northern edge of the square, that she was limping-but it was a very peculiar limp. She was not favoring an injured leg; instead, the limp came about because her left leg was now noticeably stronger than her sound but less-altered right.
If she tried, she found she could eliminate the limp, but it took an effort.
This strange phenomenon reminded her of what she had temporarily forgotten while she slept; she paused, leaning against a canopy pole at the corner of a display of melons, and considered.
She still felt strong, particularly in the left leg, but less so, she thought, than when she had fallen asleep. It was really very hard to judge, but she thought it was less-or maybe she was adjusting to the change.
That feeling of added vitality was far less, and the light-headedness was gone entirely, but she knew she was still stronger than before.
Did that mean the drunkard was dying, so that less of his strength was reaching her? Or that the magic was fading? Or something else entirely?
She wouldn't find out here, she decided. She straightened up and marched on up Wall Street toward the Drunken Dragon, fighting the tendency to limp. By the time she had gone a block, she had promised herself that if this spell could be used again, and she ever got up her nerve to do it, she would make sure that she stabbed whoever she stabbed in the center, or at least symmetrically.
She found the alley easily enough. The morning sun was almost clear of the city wall, but still low in the east, and the narrow passage was still shadowy; even so, Tabaea had no more trouble finding the remains of blood than she had had finding the alley.
The man himself was gone-but what that meant, she couldn't be sure. If he was dead, the corpse might have already been removed by the guard, or by thieves intent on selling the component parts to wizards; if he was alive, he might have left under his own power, or been dragged or carried.
The blood didn't look like enough for him to have bled to death, and Tabaea knew that was the only way anyone would die of a thigh wound in a single night; infections generally took at least a sixnight. So he was probably alive, in which case the most likely place to find him was either right next door, in the Drunken Dragon, or across the street in the Wall Street Field.
She stood nervously in the inn door for several minutes, looking over the breakfast patrons; she didn't dare enter, for fear of being trapped in there if he should show up unexpectedly. Besides, the proprietor probably wouldn't appreciate her presence; she had no money to spend, and was, to at least some people, a known thief.
She didn't see her assailant anywhere among the surly and largely hung-over patrons; she turned away, almost stumbling as she momentarily forgot the strength of her own left leg. Standing on the single step, she looked out at the Wall Street Field.
By daylight it looked less threatening, but even dirtier and less appealing. The table-hut and the awning-tent were still there, but their occupants were not in sight-probably asleep inside, Tabaea judged. A few ragged figures were moving about in the mud, and someone was tending a cooking fire.
The man who had attacked her, the one she had stabbed, was probably out there somewhere, in that mud and filth.
But the city wall was easily five miles long, which meant that Wall Street was just as long, and the Field ran beside it for every inch of that way. And that strip of land, five miles long by at least a hundred feet wide, was all occupied. Not all was as thickly settled as here in Grandgate, of course-the marketplace and the guard barracks gave this district by far the most beggars and thieves of any part of Ethshar of the Sands-but all of it was inhabited.
Finding one man in all that would be a long, slow job-and an extremely dangerous one. Tabaea didn't care to try it.
She turned and headed back toward Grandgate Market, fighting her new limp and hoping to find a fat purse to steal. She would figure the dagger's magic out later; right now, she wanted to insure that she could pay for a room for the night.
Patrolling the top of the city wall was not really a military necessity anymore, if it ever had been; the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars had been at peace since the destruction of the Northern Empire and the end of the Great War, over two centuries earlier, and Ethshar of the Sands was forty leagues from either the nearest Small Kingdoms or the Sardironese border. True, the Pirate Towns were a mere dozen or so leagues to the west, but no army could cross that thirty-some miles without advance warning reaching the city. Besides, the Pirate Towns, or any other enemies, were far more likely to attack by sea than by land.