She ran east on Grand Street, straight toward Grandgate Market and access to Wall Street.
Behind her, the soldiers poured out the door of the Blue Dancer; a raised sword whacked the signboard and set it swinging, and even through the shouting Tabaea could hear the metal links creaking. Booted feet ran after her.
The woman, the magician, did not run; Tabaea could vaguely sense her presence, far back and growing farther with every step. She was working a spell, Tabaea was certain, some land of spell that would flatten her, steal her powers, turn her to a statue or a mouse. She ran, expecting to be felled at any instant, by spell or sword.
She was not felled; she ran headlong into Grandgate Market, not even panting, and spun to her left, turning north toward the part of the Wall Street Field she knew best. Late-night shoppers on their way home, the last merchants in the midst of packing up for the night, and a few strolling lovers, turned to stare after her.
The guards were shouting, but they were farther behind than ever; she was outrunning them. Other soldiers were emerging from the towers by the gate, but not in time to cut her off. She was into the Field, into the strip that ran alongside the barracks towers, and no one had touched her yet.
Then a man, his red kilt and yellow tunic visible in the light of a nearby torch but his face in shadow, stepped out in front of her, reaching out to grab her; she thrust out an arm and knocked him aside without slowing.
She rounded the corner of the North lower into the wider part of the Field and promptly tripped over a sleeping figure.
She stumbled, but caught herself, arms outflung, balanced like a cat, then was up and running again.
There were no torches here, no lanterns; yellow light leaked from the distant windows of Wall Street; the orange glow of the greater moon limned the top of the city wall above her, and the scattered remnants of the evening's cookfires made pools of lesser shadow here and there, but most of the Field was in darkness. Its inhabitants, asleep or awake, were but shadowy lumps in the gloom; her cat-eyes, still not yet fully adjusted from the cozy light of the Blue Dancer's dining room, let her see movement, but not colors or details. She danced through the dark, avoiding bodies and shelters at the final fraction of a second.
Then, abruptly, fire bloomed above her, orange light a thousand times brighter than any moon. She stumbled, stopped, and looked up.
A warlock hung in the air, glowing impossibly bright, like an off-color piece of the sun itself. She knew he was a warlock, but she couldn't have said how she knew; the light simply felt like warlockry.
Without thinking, she reached her own warlockry up to counter him, to extinguish the glow, but his power was greater than hers; it was like fighting the tide. She could stop anything he did from reaching her, but she couldn't put out the light or drive him away.
Around her, she realized as she pressed her power upward, were people, dozens of people, the people of Wall Street Field- the poor and dispossessed, the downtrodden, the homeless, the outlawed.
"Help me!" she called.
No one answered, and she could hear soldiers coming, she could smell leather and steel and sweat. Someone tossed a rock in the general direction of the flying figure, but it never even came close.
It gave her an idea, though.
She could not fight him with warlockry, she was outmatched that way, but warlockry was not all she had. She knelt and snatched up a chunk of brick, still warm from a cookfire, and flung it upward-not with magic, but with the strength of her arm, the strength she had stolen from Inza and Deru and the rest.
The warlock shied away, and the light dimmed somewhat.
The soldiers were coming; Tabaea snatched out her belt knife, intent on giving them a fight.
The knife was like a sliver of darkness in the warlock's glow; Tabaea held the Black Dagger ready in her hand.
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.