But it was hers now, she reminded herself. She sniffed the air, but that told her little; people had been through here recently, but were not here now. The faint familiar odors of furniture, of lamps and candles, and of polishing oil reached her, mingled both with the smells of her followers and the street outside, and with scents she could not identify. No longer feeling particularly bold, she nonetheless put on a bold front and marched forward. Her footsteps tapped loudly on the shining marble, and echoed eerily from the stone walls.
Behind her came a score of the vagabonds and scoundrels who had followed her from the Wall Street Field; their feet, bare or slippered or wrapped in rags, did not make the sharp tapping her good new boots did, but slapped or scraped or shuffled. Like her, they were awed by what they saw; their shouting dropped to whispers that echoed from the stone, chasing each other back and forth along the passage.
"Where is everybody?" someone asked.
"Who do you mean?" Tabaea demanded, turning. "Who did you expect here? We fought the city guard in the streets!"
"I mean the people who live here," the beggar said. "The overlord and his family, and all the others."
"Fled, probably," someone said. "Or cowering in then-beds. "
"Did you think they'd be waiting by the door to welcome us?"
Someone laughed.
"Come on," Tabaea said. She had intended to shout it, but somehow couldn't bring herself to do it; instead she merely spoke loudly. She turned forward and marched on down the corridor.
The doors on either side were mostly closed; a few stood ajar, but the rooms beyond were dark, and Tabaea did not bother to explore them. They passed arches opening into large dark rooms, and those, too, Tabaea hurried quickly by without further investigation. Three of her followers carried torches; they waved them in the open rooms to be sure no soldiers lurked in ambush there, but then hurried on after their leader.
Ahead, that lone light spilled its golden glow across gray marble floor, walls of white marble veined with gray, and Tabaea hurried forward to see where it came from.
The answer was a disappointment; a perfectly ordinary oil lamp, apparently forgotten by whoever had extinguished the others, burned atop a black iron bracket on the side of a pillar, lighting another passageway that ran crosswise to the one they were in. This other corridor, Tabaea saw, was not so inhumanly, perfectly straight, but instead curved away in the distance.
And it gave her a choice, and therefore a problem; which way should she go?
The left-hand passage curved to the right; the right-hand passage curved to the left. Whichever of the three she took, she would be proceeding deeper in toward the center of the palace- in which case, there was no reason to prefer one over the other. She marched on straight ahead.
Now that the light was all behind her, shining over her shoulders, she could see more clearly what lay ahead. The corridor continued another forty feet or so, then ended in a dark open space-she could not judge its extent, only that its walls and ceiling were out of sight. All she could see, beyond the corridor's end, was a set of broad steps leading up into the darkness, steps of polished yellow marble.
Where had the builders of this place gotten all this stone, Tabaea wondered; she hadn't known there was so much marble in all the World.
She marched on to the end of the passage; there she paused and looked around. She sniffed the air, but caught no suspicious odors.
To either side, walls began at right angles to the corridor, then curved away into darkness; ahead, under the great staircase, were walls and, she thought, doors. There were carvings in niches and statues standing on pedestals here and there-one stood on either side of the bottommost step. Everything was of stone, in white and gold and maroon.
She let her gaze drift up the staircase; she had expected the top to be utterly black, like the unlit hallway of an inn late at night, but instead there was a faint glow, and she thought she could make out vague shapes. There was a certain airiness about it, somehow, and a hint of the pastel colors of moonslight.
She considered a warlock light, but decided against trying it; she hadn't really learned how to do one properly yet, and she was very wary about overusing warlockry. Instead she waved the torchbearers back and let her eyes adjust. After all, she reminded herself, she could see as well as any cat.
She blinked and drew in her breath.
"Come on," she said, waving her little band forward and marching up the marble steps.
At the top she paused. The sensible thing to do would be to use the torches, but she couldn't resist the more dramatic gesture; she waved, and her warlock fire-lighting skill struck a hundred candlewicks. Golden light flickered, then blazed forth, and Tabaea stepped forward into the Great Hall of the Overlord of Ethshar of the Sands.
She stood on a broad floor paved in tesselated stone, a square floor a hundred feet across. Far above, the palace's immense dome curved gracefully through shadowed distance, too far up for the light of candles to illuminate it well; a hundred-foot ring of sixteen hexagonal skylights set into the dome gave a view of the stars.
Three of the four walls were broken at the center by a broad stair; Tabaea and company had just mounted one of these, the others lying to their left and directly across. To the right, the fourth wall had no stair, but instead an elaborate display of carvings, gilt, and scarlet draperies, all centered around an ornate golden chair on a wide dais. Magnificent golden candelabra, wrought in a variety of shapes, lined the walls to either side of this display, and it was these that now provided the light.
"The throne room," someone murmured, as Tabaea's followers emerged into this splendor.
"And the overlord's throne," someone else added, pointing at the golden chair.
Tabaea grinned, her enthusiasm suddenly returning.
"Wrong," she said, bounding gaily to the throne. She leaped up and stood for a moment on its scarlet velvet cushion, watching as the last few stragglers trickled into the room.
"This is not the overlord's throne," she proclaimed, "not anymore!" She paused dramatically, then slid down and seated herself properly. "This is my throne now," she said. "Mine! Tabaea the First, Empress of Ethshar!" She smiled-not at all a pleasant smile.
After a second's hesitation, the little crowd burst into wild applause.
As they cheered, Tabaea ran her hands along the arms of the throne, enjoying the feel of it; the arms were of solid gold, she thought, worn smooth by centuries of use.
Under one arm she found a loop; curious, she tugged at it. It yielded an inch or so, then stopped. She could have forced it, but decided not to; there was no point in breaking something before she even knew what it was.
It occurred to her belatedly that the loop might have been a trap, something intended to dispose of usurpers like herself, but if so, it obviously wasn't working.
She sat and looked out at the room, at the people cheering for her, at the dim soaring dome above, the shining stone floor, the gold ornaments and silken tapestries, and an immense satisfaction settled over her.
It was hers. All of it, hers.
At least for the moment.
She sniffed the air, sorting out the scents in the room. Nothing was very fresh; no one had been in here for at least an hour before her arrival. The throne smelled of an old man-Ederd IV, of course; wasn't he seventy or eighty years old? Tabaea had never paid much attention to politics.
However old he might be, he was still the only one who had sat in this throne-until herself, of course.