But I fancied I knew what he did mean. He was a prince and had not rubbed shoulders with the poor of the world. Many of the shacks were simply moldering away. Those built of the soft mud, hardened by a kiss of fire, were sloughing their footings into the mud in which they were set. People moved about their business, and three-quarters of that, I’ll warrant, was highly illegal. I drew my cloak around that splendid mesh mail. Tyfar saw the movement.
“Do you likewise, Tyfar. We are too brightly decked for this neighborhood. And keep your weather eye open.”
“Where is this pestiferous hayloft?”
A string of calsanys blundered past, their backs obscured by swaying lashings of straw. The Rapa leading them shuffled, head down, a wisp of straw sticking out from under the vulturine beak. Farther along a pair of hirvels drew a cart which lurched over the ruts, its fragile wheels appearing as if they would burst asunder at every forward plunge. Slaves were not too much in evidence. The people here were on the breadline, no doubt, and villainy kept their stomachs apart from their backbones. Khorundur was one of the countries of the Dawn Lands in which airboats were manufactured. These fliers were in nowise as splendid or efficient as those made in such secrecy by Hamal or Hyrklana; but they were functional, although small and oftentimes chancy of operation. No doubt the voller builders of Khorundur had not mastered all the secrets of the various ingredients contained in the silver boxes that uplifted and powered vollers.
Six taverns stood cheek by jowl, so that when a drunk was thrown out of the first, he could work his way along the rest without having to walk too far. Beyond them a cluster of stores displayed dusty goods, and then a hostelry lifted two stories. A beam and ropes jutted from a double door in the gabled front.
“There,” said Tyfar, and he would have pointed had I not cautioned him swiftly. “Yes, Jak, you are right. They are a cutthroat lot down here.”
“And quiet. Too quiet. Something is going on.”
He did not have the ruffianly experience of an old adventurer to give him the scent of mischief. The string of calsanys had gone, the cart vanished up a dolorous side alley. The people were taking themselves off the street. Although the surface was pockmarked with potholes and rutted, this street for these people would serve as their open-air gathering place. One would expect it to be filled with chaffering throngs, and also one would be certain that we two, our expensive cloaks betraying us even though the armor was concealed, would have been subjected to more than simple horseplay. In all probability as many attacks as there were paces would have been launched against us.
So that meant just one thing.
You have to have the nose for authority if you wish to stay alive in many of the more raffish and desperate places of Kregen.
Zair knows, I’d kicked against authority enough in my time.
“Just rest a moment in the shade of this awning, Tyfar.”
“But we must press on! Barkindrar-”
“Watch.”
He glared at me. Something in my manner showed him I did not counsel thus without reason. More probably, although it pains me to report this, something about my manner must have told him I was in no mood to be argued with. He was a prince; but he subsided and we stood in the shadows, looking keenly out onto that doleful street.
A neighborhood gets to know when trouble is on its way.
In a tightly controlled voice, Tyfar said, “We should have gone straight away to the magistrates. Or even the king. His palace may be a moth-eaten dump; but he is a king and would have received me as a prince.”
About to find a diplomatic way of reminding Tyfar of his country of origin, I closed my mouth. The tramp of iron-studded soles and the swish and clang of a party of soldiers kept us both stock still. I said in a voice that just carried, “This is the reason, Tyfar. Bide you still.”
The soldiers were paktuns, clearly enough, a mixture of races, all clad in a semblance of uniform. They were a hard-bitten lot. At their head marched their Jiktar, and I can say I did not care for him at first glance. I would not like to serve as a paktun in his pastang. He had not brought his whole pastang, a company which might be eighty strong; but only three audos, three sections of eight men each. The iron-studded boots stomped the rutted road.
The mercenaries approached from the direction we had come, and I said to Tyfar, “Quickly, now!
Around the back of the stables and in the rear window. Sharp!”
We ran between the wooden wall of the stables and the sagging mud wall of the nearest store. At the back a lumberyard showed with an adobe wall beyond. Thick trees cut off the view. At the back of the hostelry an aromatic yard piled with dung and straw and a few broken carts gave us access to the back of the building. There were a few calsanys in their stalls and a hirvel twitched his snout at us, his cup-shaped ears flicking forward, his tall round neck curving. The air hung unnaturally quiet, and the buzz of flies sounded like miniature ripsaws.
“In this window — quick and quiet!”
The sill was rotten and I shoved the wooden leaves open cautiously. The interior of the place stank. The floor was cumbered with shadow-shrouded impedimenta of the animal trade. Stalls lined both walls with a ladder beyond. Most of the stalls were empty. In the one nearest to the ladder a freymul, the poor man’s zorca, suddenly looked splendid as he tossed his head in a shaft of the suns’ light breaking in through a crack in the dilapidated walls. His fine chocolate-colored coat with those brave streaks of tromp beneath gleamed, and he showed his teeth and neighed.
“That’s done it,” I said. “Up the ladder!”
I sprang up the ladder four rungs at a time. If one of the treads snapped beneath my boots… But they held. I reached the landing at the top and faced a half-open door in which the light of a mineral-oil lamp glowed. Shadows moved.
In the hayloft, Quienyin had said.
Tyfar sprang up the ladder after me.
Three paces took me to the door.
My hand reached out to push the door open.
Abruptly, it was snatched back.
I stared into the oil lamp’s radiance. Hay piled up to the pitch of the roof. A woman stood facing me, the bow in her hand bent and the steel head of the arrow aimed directly at my breast. The man who had flung the door open appeared. It was nicely done. In a single instant the bow could loose and the arrow drive through me.
“Hold still, dom,” said the man. He was apim, strongly built and with a brown beard, trimmed to a point. His eyes were dark and his face, big-boned, powerful, held a look of such savage anger I knew I would have to treat him with the utmost caution. “One move — one — and you’re spitted.”
“Stand quite still,” said the woman.
Her voice was mellifluous, very pleasing in other circumstances. She wore a russet tunic and russet trousers, cut tightly, and her slender waist was cinctured by a wide brown belt, and the gold buckle glittered in the light. As to her face, that lay in shadow; but I caught the impression of a firmness there, the shape conveying that sense of strength as her head half-turned to stare along the shaft. Her eyes fastened upon me, large and brown and luminous above the bar of shadow from her left arm.
“We shall all have to move very-” I began.
The man spat out a curse.
“You speak when you are spoken to, dom, not before. You are very near death.”
“Oh, aye,” I said. “And so are we all-”
The man lifted his fist. His nostrils pinched in.
“Kaldu!” The voice of command as the woman spoke smoked into the room. She was used to telling people what to do and seeing them do it. “Quiet, Kaldu. No chance has brought these two horters here.”
“They mean us mischief, my lady. Let me-”
I said, “Stop clowning about, Kaldu. Listen to your mistress. And we must all get out of here. The watch is on the way. Where are — where is the injured man and his comrade?”