Captive Scorpio

Five

The trick chair vanished with an almighty crash into the black maw gaping in the floor like the mouth of a chank. The two guides, flustered by my non-disappearance, flicked out their rapiers. They were stikitches and therefore expert with weapons. They rushed on me, silently, determined to cut themselves a little of Laygon’s fee.

My feet hit the wooden floor and dust puffed up. The whole floor groaned; the place was as rotten as the worm-eaten hull of the Swordship Gull-i-mo.

“Cut him down!” grated that iron voice. ‘“He refuses an accommodation in honor, now he must pay the penalty.”

My own rapier ripped out — a nice blade but not a top-quality brand in its decorations, serviceable, well-used, the kind of rapier a fellow might wear in Drak’s City — and the steel jangled and slid as the blades crossed.

The two assassins brought their four blades into play at once. I ducked and weaved and fended them off with the rapier alone. I did not draw the matching main gauche.

Before Barty and I had ventured in here I had insisted that he wear one of the superb mesh-steel shirts Delia and I owned. We kept them particularly well-cared for, on formers, well-oiled, safe in the armory of our Valkan villa in Vondium. One of those shirts cost more than even a relatively well-paid working man could earn in his entire lifetime.

The blades clashed and the lamplight glinted from the steel.

I vaulted back, slashed away, foined, and kept one eye on the four chief assassins at the table. They were the real danger.

One of the guides thought to play it clever and slid in below his fellow. His dark face glared up at me. He tried to hold his left-hand dagger up so as to parry any downward cut I might make, and thrust me through with his rapier. At the same time his companion pressed in strongly, seeking to pin me. I leaped, thrust, landing a high hit along a shoulder above any armor they might be wearing under their drab tunics, brought a yell of agony, withdrew, and so kicked the clever one in the nose as I went by. His blade hissed past. He sprawled back, his nose a crimson flower, spraying blood. I hit them both with the hilt — left and right, one two — and sprang away from the spot. A dagger whistled through the air where I had been standing.

The two guides sprawled on the floor. The woman still stood in the pose of throwing as I whirled to face the table in the corner.

One of the stikitches had gone. A door was just closing in the left-hand angle of the walls. He was the silent one. Laygon and Nath had drawn their blades. They stood, clearly expecting the woman’s dagger cast to finish me. Now I waggled my rapier at them admonishingly.

“I do not wish to kill any of you. Though, Opaz knows why not, for you are all ripe to die. But I am willing to spare you and so save future trouble.”

I know. I know. That was weak. But I had work to do in Vallia and I didn’t want a pack of rascally stikitches on my neck, interfering. If they could be convinced they had no future trying to assassinate me, then I would have achieved a great deal.

That was the new Dray Prescot talking, of course. .

“You will die, here and now.” The iron voice of Nath the Knife held not a single note of hesitation. Inflexible, he could not understand why what he wished had not already occurred. A mocking thought occurred to me.

The two men, Nath and Laygon, rounded each end of the table to get at me. They were quite clearly hyr stikitches, top men, superb with weapons. Killing was their trade and they would have made of it an art.

“If I have to slay you, I will,” I said. “But think. If you kill me, here and now, you will never have the chance of another client. No one else will offer you gold for my death.”

As I say, I mocked them.

They did not reply but bore on.

The woman was the danger, now. She’d have another dagger or three stuffed down her bodice. I’d have to skip and leap and against these two my attention was likely to be fully engaged. Time for Remberee. .

The window, probably. .

It would be nonproductive to attempt to return across the rain-swept walkway to The Ball and Chain. The door through which Silent Sam or Tongueless Tom had disappeared would open to a trick lock, and there wouldn’t be time. So it would have to be the window.

The woman came back to life. Her hand raked out. Steel glinted.

My left hand flicked up to my neck, the fingers gripped, twisted, withdrew and the terchick flew. Like a homing bee it buzzed clean into the woman’s upper right arm. She let out a hoarse gasp, never a scream, and staggered. The dagger fell from her nerveless fingers.

“I would crave your pardon, lady,” I said. “If you were not a stikitche. As you are, you may rot in a Herrelldrin Hell for my talens.”

Then the two men were on me and I ripped out the left-hand dagger and we set to. Even as the blades crossed a thought so shocking occurred to me that I faltered, and stamped back, and then backpedaled most rapidly around the room aiming for the window. What an onker I was!

These men believed I was a warrior of the imagination, a figment of the Vallian Empire’s publicity machine. They had seen me enter the tavern, no doubt of that, and they took me at face value. The woman had been devastatingly contemptuous. And here I was, at last beginning to warm up, freed from talk and intrigue and into the business of bashing skulls, and taking that evil joy from it that sometimes overcomes me — to my shame. But — but! If they realized I could handle a sword that would make life far more hazardous in the future. And it was to the future that all my efforts had been directed. All this talk, and inanity, and inaction — all had been designed to give me breathing space in Vallia. I did not wish to take on the work I had to do with a gang of cutthroat stikitches dogging my heels all the time. If I slew all these, there would be more. .

The very correctness of my estimation of the situation was borne out as Nath and Laygon charged on.

“It is true!” bellowed Laygon in his rich voice. “We had a report from our spies. The twelve who were slain and of whom you boast, you rast, were killed by your friends. You did not even draw your blade.”

That was true.

“Stand and die like a man,” grated Nath the Knife, and started to work his way around to my back.

“I have had luck with the knife,” I said. I ran backwards, casting a single quick look to see where I was going, aiming for the sacking-covered window. “But you are hyr stikitches — good at your foul work. But, you cramphs, you will not get my gold.”

I was at the window.

I spun about, bracing myself.

“Nor my hide!”

And with a single leem-leap I went head-first through the window.

All this idle chatter as I fought — I was really lapsing into some fairy-tale layabout, all silks and graces, quite unlike the hard and vicious and totally practical fighting man I am. . Rain lashed at me as I fell. I went head over heels. I had thought to land on my feet, and back, rolling, and so come up ready to fight.

Instead as I sailed from the window I turned over and fell splat into the back of an overfilled dung cart. Muck pulsed up around me. The stink sizzled. I scrabbled around in heaving nausea, sloshing about in the odoriferous and sticky collections of a hundred cesspits and stables. Shades of Seg and his dungy straw!

I flailed my arms and heard the squishings and squelchings.

The man on the cart yelled as the brown spray hit him.

I got a knee onto the rotten wood of the cart and heaved up.

Above my head three faces peered out of the shredded sacking. The woman’s face was, like them all, hidden by the steel mask; but I fancied she was whiter than usual. I hoped so. The cart lurched and I managed to slide off the back.

Nath let out a yell.

“Seize him up! Tally ho! Stikitches! Slay him!”

The rain slicked across the cobbles. The smell rose despite the rain. The cart lumbered off. Men and women appeared in the shadowed doorways of the street. I was around the corner from the front entrance of The Ball and Chain, and if I went that way Barty would come prancing out of the door of The Yellow Rose ready to fight and ready to be chopped.

So I ran the other way and, by all the confounded imps of Sicce, here came Barty, red-faced, bellowing, running after me with his rapier naked in his fist. By Zim-Zair! I groaned. Now we’re in for it!

“I am with you pri — Jak!”

“Well, stay with me!”

The three steel masks vanished from the window. A few men pushed out into the rain. In a few murs we’d be surrounded. Once the hue and cry was up we’d have all kinds of rascals out for a bit of fun and bashing running after us besides the assassins.

“This way, Barty. And put that damned sword away! Run!”

We pelted off through the rain heading away from the Gate of Skulls, along the side street parallel to the walls. The walls of the Old City of Vondium are mostly noticeable by their great age and their state of disrepair. But, for all that, they demarcate a very real line, a barrier between the Old and the New. People stared after us. The rain was a blessing in one way, in that it had driven a considerable number of idlers into shelter and so we had a pretty clear run. But, in the other way, and a worse way, too, it meant there were far fewer crowds in which to become lost. So — we ran.

I, Dray Prescot, ran.

I told myself that I ran because of Barty. I did not want him killed. I had never yet met my daughter Dayra to talk to her and I did not want our first meeting to be shadowed by the death of her fine young man who ran puffing and red-faced at my side. But Barty was young and tough and filled with ideas of chivalry and valor.

“Let us turn on them and rend them!” he panted out.

“Run.”

We cut along the first cross street aiming to get back to the walls and find a loophole out. I had no real idea of the geography of Drak’s City — I doubt if anyone had much idea of that crawling maze of streets and alleys and hidden courts as an entirety — and so could do no more than run and follow my nose. It would be nice if Ashti and her brother Naghan turned up and out of gratitude for the silver sinvers guided us to safety. But, again, that was out of fairy books.

The reality came as a dozen men sprang from an alleyway and brandishing long-knives and cudgels and a sword or two came blustering down on us.

Very carefully I gave my palms a good wipe down the old blanket coat — on the inside. The muck fouled me abominably. But I needed fists that would not slip on hilts for the work that promised. As though Five-handed Eos-Bakchi decided it was time to smile — just a little — upon me, I spotted an abandoned orange-like fruit called a rosha lying in the water-streaming gutter. A single twist ripped it into half and I smeared the tacky juice over my palms and fingers. That would help to give a good grip. It smelled a little better than I did, too. “We cut through them in one go and keep running,” I told Barty. When they hit us I did just that. I used the hilt a good deal, for I had no wish to kill these fellows. One or two blades flickered around my ears; but with a bash and a whump or two I was through. I poised to run on. I was through — but not so Barty.

He pranced. He took up the stance. His rapier leaned into a perfect line. He foined. He was thoroughly enjoying himself. Like a student fresh from the salle he handled himself with all the perfection of a star pupil. I sighed.

Many a time have I seen these fine young men fresh from sword-training go into rough and brutal action. If they live they learn and then stand a better chance. But all the universities in two worlds don’t teach what a man must know to keep a knife from his guts, a knee out of his groin, a flung chain from around his neck.

They’d have had Barty — had him for breakfast and spat out the pips. Perfect in poise and lunge and parry, holding himself in the correct rapier-fighting position, he would have been easy meat for them. He was lucky — that I own — when a flung cudgel merely brushed past his brown hair. But he couldn’t last.

So I went bashing back most evilly, with a knee here, and a clutch at a raggedy coat here and a jerk and a chunk of the hilt, and a bending-forward so that the attacker went sailing up over me, to be kicked heartily as he hit the ground.

No, if you want to stay alive on many spots of Kregen you do no good trying to fence by the book. A stout-armed fellow with a kutcherer tried to stab the spiked back of the knife into my eye, and I weaved and kicked him between wind and water, and ducked a cudgel from his mate and elbowed his Adam’s apple. My own rapier and main gauche flew this way and that parrying blows and thrusts. I jumped about a fair bit. I got up to Barty and put my foot into the rear end of the man who was going to slip a long knife into Barty’s exposed back and kicked him end-over-end. I had to beat away another kutcherer, careful of that wicked tooth of metal.

Barty had allowed a ruffian to get inside his guard, and with his rapier pointing at the rain-filled skies was dancing around as though the two of them waltzed, neither able to step back to take a slash at the other.

“Barty,” I said, in what I considered a most understanding voice. But Barty jumped, anyway. “Let us get on.”

I stuck the main gauche back into my belt, ignoring the scabbard, took the fellow clasping Barty by the ear, ducked a cudgel blow from somewhere, and ran him across the street. He tried to emulate a swifter and rammed head-on into a moldy wall.

I grabbed Barty.

“And this time, young man, do not stop running!”

We took off. They followed for a bit; but I caught a hurtling cudgel out of the air and threw it back. The man who had flung it dropped as though poleaxed. After that the rest of them more or less gave up the pursuit.

But there were others, far more ruthless, who took it up as we reached the walls. And, as I saw, two thin, furtive, weasel-like fellows remained dogging our footsteps as we ran up to the wall and looked about for the nearest way through or over or under.

The assassins had gathered their strength. Now the mob of men who flowed around a buttress meant to do for us finally.

I took a single look at them and hauled Barty off. We ran fleetly along the wall, dodging refuse, leaping covered stalls, almost treading on a family sheltering under an old tarpaulin. The rain washed away a deal of the muck and stinks; but enough remained for me with my odoriferous clothes to feel at home. A splendidly orchestrated hullabaloo now racketed away at our heels. Barty kept on laughing. I own the situation amused me; but I am notorious for that kind of perverse behavior and I felt some surprise -

pleased surprise, I hasten to add — that Dayra seemed to have found herself a young man of exceptional promise. So we ran along the wall and a gang of kids pelted us with rotten cabbages, green shredding bundles falling through the rain. We ducked into a house built into the wall and leaped over an old fellow who snored in a wicker hooded chair and so rollicked up the blackwood stairs. The upper rooms were filled with all kinds of trash and bric-a-brac indicating the storage places for the junk merchants who thrived on human stupidity and cupidity. Their ruffianly agents scoured around picking up antiques which were then sold at inflated prices to the wealthy of Vondium. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world. We hared through the piles of old furniture and pictures and tatty curtains, past boxes and bales and bundles, heading for the windows. These were all barred. Barty put his foot against a wooden bar and the old wood puffed and shredded — I hardly care to describe that tired sagging away as a splintering of wood.

We bundled through and then tottered back, clutching each other, poised dizzyingly over nothing. I grabbed the lintel. It held, thank Zair, and we hauled in. We stood perhaps fifty feet up the sheer outside wall, in a window embrasured out over the cobbled road below. And at our backs the pursuit bayed up those dark blackwood stairs.

One window along a beam jutted out with a rope and pulley. The junk would be collected here and then hoisted out and lowered onto Quoffa carts below.

“Next window, Jak,” said Barty, cheerfully.

“I had hoped there would be stairs — at the least a rope ladder.” These drikingers of the Old City have their entrances and their exits. Drikingers — bandits of a particular bent — is not too strong a word to apply to some of the fellows in Drak’s City. So we bashed along to the next window and kicked it open and seized the rope.

Loud footfalls echoed up from the room at our backs. Men fell over bundles, and a giant glass-fronted wardrobe toppled to smash to ruination.

‘Time to go, Barty. Come on.”

So, grasping the rope, we let ourselves down as the windlass held against the pawl. We were almost at street level when the first furious faces poked out of the window alongside the pulley-crowned beam.

“Jump!” I yelped. “They’ll start reeling us in any mur!”

So we jumped, and hit the rain-slicked cobbles, and staggered and a flung knife caromed past my ear. Barty staggered up and shook his fist. Men were sliding down the rope. I smiled. Oh, yes, this was a smiling situation.

“They mean to do for us, then. . More running is indicated.”

“Why can’t we stand and blatter them, Jak? By Opaz — I do not care much for all this running. I can’t get my wind.”

“They’ll open up your body quick enough, my lad. Then you’ll have wind and to spare. Run!”

Running off I was aware Barty was not with me and swung about ready to damn and blast him. He was hopping about with his old blanket coat twisted around his legs, trying to disentangle himself, first on one foot then on the other. His face was a wonder to behold.

“By Vox!” he bellowed. “This confounded blanket is alive!”

“Not as alive as most of ’em in there.” I dodged back and grabbed for the coat; but he kept toppling away and almost falling and staggering about. In the end I whipped a horizontal slash from the rapier at him and shredded the rope. The blanket coat fell away. He kicked it wrathfully.

“Opaz-forsaken garment! I nearly knocked my brains out on the cobbles.”

“Run,” I said. There was no need to draw any parallels between his outraged remarks and what would happen. So we ran.

Now we were outside Drak’s City and, in theory, back where the writ of Vondium ran. Whether Vondium’s writ ran or not, we did.

I owe that the sheer zest of this running pleased me. The idea that I ran away from enemies had long since passed. The game now was to stay ahead. That became the object, the running was the thing, the escaping the prize. If we fought that would come as an anticlimax.

The stikitches pelting after us were still yelling. Near the Old Walls, some remnant of their own powers clung.

“By Jhalak!” one of them sang out. “Stand and meet your doom like men!”

“I’m all for standing,” puffed Barty. He gave me a most reproachful look.

“Run,” was all I said.

Pressing on we came into more respectable streets and Barty, with a comment to the effect that if I intended to run I had best run with him, and that we’d best go this way and through that alley and so out onto this square, at last brought us into a part of the city I recognized. Although we were now in company with many other people all about their business, the assassins stayed with us. They kept a distance. But they dogged our footsteps.

I think most of them had removed their masks; but they all kept a fold of cloth over their faces, and this would be taken as a natural precaution against the rain. Their large floppy Vallian hats with the broad brims hanging down and shedding the water also afforded them a measure of concealment. When the rain, after the Kregan fashion, started to ease up and the splendor of the suns began to shine through, I wondered how far the stikitches would press their pursuit. Our mutual progress had now degenerated into a fast walk and we threaded our way between the people venturing out after the rain. No one took any notice of us. There were others running — slaves, mostly, about their masters’ business — and our bedraggled appearance bespoke us for slaves or free men with unpleasant work to perform. We came to the broad arrow through either side of the building that is called the Lane of the Twins. This leads to the broad kyro before the imperial palace. Barty started up it at once and so I followed. Although I say I recognized where we were this does not mean I was well acquainted with the area. Opening off the Lane of the Twins many side streets and roadways gave entrances to the streets and roads pent within two curving canals. A number of broad boulevards cross the Lane. We passed over canals bridged in a variety of the pleasing ways of Vondium. Just under the stalking feet of an aqueduct we were held up by a crowd who jostled and pushed along slowly, mingled with carts and chariots and carrying-chairs. And all these streets and alleys and canals and boulevards and aqueducts are blessed with names. . No — I knew only that if I went on along the Lane of the Twins eventually I’d reach the palace.

The crowds grew thicker and more solid. On the right-hand side a string of carts had come to a standstill. Each cart was piled with hay. They were filled to abundance with hay, and they were jammed tightly together, so that the pair of krahniks who pulled each cart were eagerly reaching forward to chew contentedly away at the hay dribbling from the tailgate of the cart in front. The carters sat slumped, hats over their eyes, phlegmatically waiting for whatever obstruction ahead was halting all progress to clear. I looked back.

The two thin weasely fellows were padding on apace, and with them a dozen or so of the most determined stikitches.

For a moment we stood halfway between two side streets. The doors of the buildings flanking the Lane were closed.

“Now,” said Barty, and he started to draw his rapier. “Now we cannot run any farther, thank Opaz. Now we can teach these rasts a lesson.”

The backs of the crowd ahead appeared to be a solid wall; but we could worm our way through. I frowned. I did not relish the idea of Barty being chopped to pieces, and I knew he would unfailingly be chopped if those master craftsmen at murder caught up with him. I could not risk his life.

“Up, Barty,” I said, and took his arm and fairly hurled him up onto the hay of the rearmost wagon. He started to protest at once and took a mouthful of hay, and spluttered and then I was up on the high cart with him and urging him along. Reluctantly, he allowed me to help him over the somnolent form of the driver, with a couple of steps along the broad backs of the krahniks, to reach the next cart along. So, prancing like a couple of high-wire artists, we darted along the line of hay-filled wagons. The massed crowds below showed little interest in our antics; a few people looked up, and laughed, and some cursed us; but most of them were content merely to push on in the wake of whatever was holding up progress.

The rain stopped and the twin suns shone with a growing warmth. The clouds fanned away, dissipating, letting that glorious blue sky of Kregen extend refulgently above.

We hopped along from wain to wain, leaping the drivers and the krahniks. The animals were hardly aware of the footsteps on their backs before we had leaped off and so on. The assassins followed us.

Ahead the sense of a mass moving ponderously along the Lane turned out to be a large body of soldiery, all marching with a swing. The glint of their weapons showed they were ready for an emergency, which surprised me, although it should not have, seeing the troubles through which Vallia had just come — and was still going through, by Vox. Everybody followed the troops, either unable or unwilling to push past. A number of loaded and covered carts were visible within the ranks of the formed body, and there were palanquins there, too, with brightly colored awnings against the rain or the suns. Barty missed his footing and I had to haul him up off the head of a sleepy driver, whose brown hand reached for his bolstered whip, and whose hoarse voice blasted out, outraged, puzzled, alarmed at this visitation from heaven. I shouted.

“On with you, Barty. The rasts gain on us.”

Ahead along the line of hay wains the purple shadow of an aqueduct cast a bar of blackness. That could cause us problems. We leaped the next two carts and Barty again slipped. He turned on me, then, thoroughly put out by my inexplicable insistence on running away. He held onto the high rail of a hay wain and spoke furiously.

“In my island they used to speak with hushed breath of the Strom of Valka — Strom Drak na Valka. But I have heard stories, rumors, that the great reputation is all a sham, a pretense, something to color the marriage with the Princess Majestrix. By Vox! I do not believe it — but your conduct strains my belief, prince, strains it damnably!”

The hay wains were lumbering forward again, slowly, rolling, and the purple shadows of the aqueduct fell about us.

“Believe what you will, Strom Barty. But you will go on to the next wagon and then jump down. You will mingle in the crowds. You will do this as you love my daughter Dayra.”

“And? And what will you do?”

“I will go up.” The aqueduct’s brick walls presented many handholds. “They will follow me. That is certain. I will meet you-”

“I shall go up, also!”

I lowered my eyebrows at him. He put a hand to his mouth.

“You go on under the aqueduct and jump down, young Barty. Dernun?”

Yes, cracking out “dernun?” like that at him was not particularly polite. Dernun carries the connotation of punishment if you do not understand, meaning savvy, capish — but he took the intensity of my manner in good part, only going a little more red. He turned and jumped for the next cart without a word and vanished in those concealing purple shadows.

The bricks were old and here and there irregular patches of new brickwork had been inserted. The emperor liked to keep his aqueducts efficient. Even so, sprays of water spat in fine arcs out across the heads of passersby. I climbed up to the first row of brick arches and clung on and looked back. The assassins were almost up with the aqueduct, leaping like fleas over the backs of the hay wains. I waved my arm at them and then made a most insulting gesture.

The slant of the brickwork ran the water channel out over the Lane at an angle. I climbed through the lower tier of arches into a dark cavernous space, lit by the semi-circles of brilliance in serried rows, feeling the looseness of old mortar and brick chipping below, the glimmer of random puddles showing up like unwinking eyes. Water splashed down from the leaded channel above my head. The stikitches clambered up after me.

The plan was to run diagonally along the first tier of arches all the way across the Lane and so free myself of the encumbrance of Barty. I had ideas on the mores and honor of the stikitches, and if Laygon the Strigicaw was among those pursuing me — as he must almost inevitably be — then I could finish this thing cleanly.

That time-consuming altercation with Barty had afforded the pursuers the chance to catch up. They ran fleetly across the strewn ground at me, spraying water from puddles, yelling, incensed, confident they had me now and uncaring of what noise they made in this arched space, knowing it would be lost in the greater noise from the procession which passed by below.

“Kitchew!” they bellowed, and closed in.

They were good. Well, of course, to be employed as an assassin on Kregen you have to be good. Quite apart from the fact that if you are not good you won’t last, you will also starve. The shadowy effect of the brick buttresses and the shafts of brilliant light through the arched openings lent a macabre air of theatre to that fight. The blades rang and scraped and the first two went down. The others pressed in confidently enough and at the first pass with a large fellow wearing a ring in his ear, my rapier blade snapped.

Do not think it odd if I say I felt relief that the rapier snapped. Only eight of the rogues had clambered up the arches and followed me. So I was in a hurry, and with the rapier useless I could hurl the hilt in the face of the earring fellow, and then rip out the longsword.

“By Jhalak,” one of the stikitches ground out. “That bar of iron will not serve you.”

It served him through the guts, and the next fellow spun away with his steel mask shattered and blood spouting through. Two tried to run and two terchicks finished them. I was left facing the man who by his clothes and mannerisms I knew to be Laygon the Strigicaw. Time was running out. I had to be quick.

“When you are dead, Laygon,” I said cheerfully, “no stikitche will pick up your contracts without payment. But Ashti Melekhi is dead, also. So that business will be settled, with full steel-bokkertu and in all honor.”

He knew what I meant. Steel-bokkertu is a euphemism for rights gained by the sword and retrospectively legalized. So he leaped for me, snarling, and he died, like the others, and I ran to the edge of the arched space and looked down.

I might have guessed.

The procession was in an uproar.

The two weasely fellows had chosen to go after Barty because they were not stikitches and fancied he, as a Koter of Vallia, would carry a goodly sum on his person. After the assassins had finished with me, the rasts calculated, there would be no pickings for them. The rest of the stikitches must have decided to chance the ranked soldiery. Barty had spitted one of them, clearing a space among the onlookers as the procession passed, and was tinkering away with two more.

It was a long way down.

People broke away from the fight, screaming. In those first few moments of action when all was confusion, no one turned instantly to assist Barty. But he did look a sight, clad in his old clothes, bedraggled, red-faced, swearing away, thoroughly worked up. One might almost be forgiven for believing he was the murderer and the soberly-attired assassins his victims. They had removed their steel masks and now wore only the polite public half-mask often seen on Kregen, a useful adjunct to gracious living, as it is said with some irony.

Whatever might be said, in a mur or two he’d be dead.

The angle of the aqueduct had taken me out farther into the center of the Lane. Directly below passed a cart loaded with sharp-looking objects under a tarpaulin, the edges creased and unfriendly looking. To jump down on that would invite a punctured hide and a snapped backbone. Further along swayed the palanquins with their colored awnings. I eyed them savagely. The largest one — of course. It had to be the biggest and best to take the weight and the velocity of my fall. I ran along the edge of the brickwork, ducked out of the archway right over the palanquin below, and launched myself into space. As I jumped I saw the soldiers at last break ranks and advance on Barty and the assassins. Just before I revolved in the air, falling, I glimpsed the assassins running off, and Barty twisting in the grip of a Deldar.

Then, rotating, I came down with an ear-splitting crash on the striped awning. It ripped. I went on through trailing tatters of cloth. The blue and green striped material had broken my fall and I landed with a thump on the wooden bed of the palanquin. I spat out a chunk of the blue and green banded cloth, and a strip of the white striping between the colors caught in my teeth. I ripped it out furiously and dived for the cloth-of-gold curtains.

The three women in the palanquin stared at me, petrified.

I took in their appearance at a glance — two handmaidens and a great lady. She was half-veiled, and she looked lushly beautiful, and dominating, and her color was rising and she was getting all set to spit out a mouthful of invective. You couldn’t really blame her. Here she was, sitting quietly in her palanquin being taken along with all her people, and some hairy odoriferous blanket-coated oaf falls in from the sky. I became aware of my obnoxious pong as the stink cut through the scents of the palanquin. The Womoxes carrying the poles had yielded to the sudden extra weight; but one pole broke and the whole lot came to a shuddering crash, tip-tilted on a corner. The great lady was flung across the cloth-of-gold canopied space. She fell into my arms. I couldn’t move. Her dark, intense face wrinkled up, the whiteness of the skin emphasized by the kohled eyes and the artful patch of color in the cheeks. Her flared nostrils widened. Her mouth, hidden by the veil but its outline visible as the silver gauze pressed back, curved down.

“You stink!”

“Get off, lady, I am in a hurry-”

“You dare-”

Somehow the longsword had not done any damage to the occupants of the palanquin — yet. I tried to twist it around to make it safe. She was screaming invective at me now and I half-turned to shove her off, so that she saw me. Only then I realized the medium-sized brown beard had been ripped off somewhere along the way.

She saw my face.

“Oh,” she said.

“I am in a hurry, lady. Men are trying to kill me and I must-”

“Yes, you must run away. Well, let me sit up and you may run away — run to the Ice Floes of Sicce, and you will.”

“Mayhap I will,” I said.

She struggled to sit up against the slope of the palanquin. Her two handmaidens went on screaming. A soldier stuck his head in the opening of the cloth-of-gold curtains and saw me. Instantly his rapier whipped in.

The longsword was still stuck somewhere down in among the cushions, the point jammed in the woodwork. I just hoped this great lady wouldn’t sit back too heavily.

“Keep your damned rapier out of my face!” I yelled. The guard swept the curtains aside and started to reach for me.

“Do not kill him, Rogor!” snapped the lady.

“Yes-” began this guard Hikdar, and I twisted my foot around and kicked him in the guts through the curtains. I got the sword free. The lady stared at me with those fine dark eyes filled with a blaze of contempt.

“Run — go on, run! That is all you are good for!”

The Hikdar was whooping in great draughts of air. I stood up and hit my head on the awning post and cursed and started to climb out. The lady suddenly laughed. She trilled silver malicious laughter. She pointed.

“Is that what you run from?”

Her guards had caught one of the weasely fellows and they dragged him, all a-yelling and a-squawking, up to the canted palanquin. He was in a frightful state. He screamed as they twisted his arm up his back and the knife dropped with a clatter unheard in the din. His thin face contorted with his terror, and spittle slobbered. He looked thin and frail and ridiculous as a would-be murderer, all the weasely deviltry washed away in his fear.

“That was one of them,” I said.

She laughed at me, hard, hating, hurtful laughter.

She did not hurt me, mind; but she would hurt Barty and wound him deeply, if he heard her.

“You carry a monstrous great sword and you run so hard you fall into my chair and ruin it — and that is what you run from, what so frightens you.”

“If you like,” I said. Barty? What had happened to him? I fretted, not giving this great lady much attention and, to be truthful, not much respect, either.

“Get out!” she screamed, suddenly letting her anger boil over. “You stink! You are an abomination! Get out! Get out!”

“I’m going as soon as I-” I started.

Then I saw Barty, bawling into the ears of a guard Hikdar and gesticulating, and so I knew he was safe. I own, I felt a great flood of relief, and let out a breath.

“Go on running,” spat the great lady. “There are a lot more rasts like this one for you to run from. Take your stupid great sword and clear off. You are not a real man. You are just a fake, an apology for a Jikai, a puffed up bag of vomit! Run!”