The bow was held in a grip that did not tremble by so much as an eyelash. The bow was a big, compound reflex weapon that pulled enough to let a man know he held a bow; the girl gripped it and held the arrow in such a fashion that told me she knew exactly what she was doing. One thing was sure, this mysterious woman was a superb archer.
“You know? How could you? The watch-?”
“Come on, Kaldu,” I said. “Close your mouth. We must get out of here at once.”
“I believe you,” the woman said. She lowered the bow.
I heard Tyfar let out a shaky breath. He did not put as much trust as I did in the bowmanship of this girl.
“Which way is the watch coming?”
“In the direction of the Avenue of a Thousand-”
“Very well. We must go over the roof to the bakery beyond. Kaldu, fetch Barkindrar. Tell Nath.” She swung to face Tyfar and me. “I do not know who you are — yet. But if you are traitors-”
“Barkindrar and Nath are my men,” spoke up Tyfar. “Lady. I trust they are not badly hurt-”
“They can run.” Tyfar flinched back.
“Then,” I said, “for the sake of Havil the Green, let us all run!”
The girl flashed me a look. “Havil,” she said. “You are Hamalese?”
“Yes-” began Tyfar.
I said, “Havil is known over all Havilfar. Now enough shilly-shallying.” Barkindrar and Nath appeared, helped along by Kaldu. He loomed over them. “Come on, you two famblys. We must run for it.”
They started to speak and an enormous battering began on the door. The noise burst up from front and back of the building.
“The watch!” said Kaldu. “We are too late!”
“No!” flared the girl. She looked like an enraged zhantilla, fiery, incensed, splendid. “It’s never too late, until you’re dead!”
Chapter eight
The bakery leaned against the stables for mutual support. They propped each other. The aroma of baking bread fought with the dungy whiffs from the yard at the back of the barn. As we prepared to run through the opposite door to the bakery, the woman looked at Barkindrar. The Brokelsh was clearly in pain; but in that sullen, mulish, Brokelsh way he refused to acknowledge the fact. The woman placed her hand on Barkindrar’s forehead.
The hand was shapely, firm, clearly the hand of a woman and yet I knew that hand could accomplish warrior deeds. Her face relaxed for a betraying moment from her tough no-nonsense pose and revealed the compassion she felt. Then she swung back to us, hard and imperative.
“They take their time. They will never see us past the bakery.”
She wore a rapier and main gauche. The bow went up on her shoulder out of the way. Her brown hair, trimmed neatly and rather too short, shone bravely in the light of the suns. I looked past the jut of the stable roof as we went out. If some damned inquisitive mercenary took it into his head to move well out into the yard, he could not fail to see us. Once they had broken into the building they’d be up the stairs like a pack of werstings, all fangs and ravagings. The bakery was a single-story affair and we ought to scramble down easily enough. I judged there would be no need to set a rear guard, and Nod the Straw, out on the roof, would have warned us if a mercenary did stroll out too far.
Nod the Straw, a wispy little fellow who worked in the stables, waited for us on the roof. His pop-eyes and thick-lipped mouth expressed no surprise that there were two more people suddenly appearing from the shelter of his barn. But he was savagely annoyed and kept brandishing a cut-down pitchfork.
“I know who it was,” he raved. “That crop-eared, no-good kleesh of a Sorgan! He must have betrayed us — and they’ll give him a dozen stripes quicker’n a dozen silver sinvers.”
“Never mind about who betrayed us now, Nod,” said the woman. “Help get Barkindrar down off your roof.”
Tyfar said, “Do you all go on. I shall hold the roof and delay them-”
The woman threw him a glance that I, for one, would not welcome. Although, by Krun, that self-same look that says what a great ninny you are has been thrown at me in my time.
“Leave off, Nod,” said Kaldu. “I will take Barkindrar on my back.”
“You great dermiflon!” jibed Nod the Straw. But he desisted in his efforts, and Kaldu took Barkindrar up and bore him swiftly down over the roof of the bakery. Nath the Shaft followed with Nod the Straw.
“What are you waiting for?” said Tyfar. He drew his sword. “I can hold them off for long enough-”
“You think, then,” said this woman in her imperious way, “that you are some kind of Jikai?”
Tyfar’s color rose up into his cheeks.
“I think I know where honor-”
“Honor!” She laughed, and, even then, even in all that thumping racket from below, and the peril in which we stood, that laughter rose, pure and untrammeled, and exciting.
“Go on, Tyfar,” I said. “There is time to get across into the shadows of the bakery.”
“I shall not precede this — lady.”
“Then,” I said, and if you are surprised you still do not understand that old reprobate, Dray Prescot,
“then I shall go at once myself and leave you two to wrangle it out between you.”
And, with that, I jumped down onto the adjoining roof and crabbed deuced swiftly across to follow the others as they clawed their way down a crumbling wall to the alley. I had no compunction. I knew Tyfar’s honor would make him follow me, wasting no more time. If the woman wished to be last, no doubt following some obscure honor code or discipline of her own, then we’d only hold things up by further wrangling.
Tyfar breathed down my neck as I jumped for the alley.
“That woman! Insufferable! Vosk-headed! Stubborn as a graint!”
“Charming, though, you must agree.”
“Yes, yes, of course. I noticed her at once. Although I would not say charming — in fact, charming is the last word I’d use. Attractive, alluring, beautiful — yes, she’s all those. But who can put up with seductiveness cloaked with superciliousness?”
I peered suspiciously at Tyfar. “Isn’t that San Blarnoi? Although, to be sure, I think the quote phrases it somewhat differently from ‘put up with’.”
“San Blarnoi knew what he was talking about. That woman!”
“Yes?” came that smooth mellifluous voice, sweet as honey and sharp as a rapier. “What woman would that be, horter?”
Tyfar spun about. I was facing him, and he swung back to stare accusingly at me. His whole stance, his shining face, screamed out: “You might have warned me!”
I said, “Why, some shrewish fishwife who landladied it at our last inn. Now, we had best hurry. Those paktuns looked as though they know their job. And if Sorgan did betray you they’ll know we have an injured man.”
“Yes,” she said, instantly forgetting the pettiness of impending annoyance at Tyfar’s incautious words.
“We must get on. Kaldu! Make for Horter Rathon’s.”
“Quidang, my lady.”
We all ran down the alley, and we ran away from Blue Vosk Street and headed for the thick stand of tall timber.
“There is a section of bog in here, lady,” said Nod the Straw. “No one ventures here.” His eyes rolled.
“I do not like to go in — but-”
“Needs must when you come to the fluttrell’s vane, Nod.”
“Aye, my lady.”
“This Rathon,” I said, “to whom we are all running like a flock of ponshos. Did Sorgan know of him and his house?”
“No,” said Kaldu.
Tyfar wanted to bristle up at the incivility. But I restrained him with a quiet word. How odd it is that a prince will stand for uncouthness when an arrow is aimed at his heart, and prickles up when it is not!
Although, to give Tyfar his dues, he wasn’t the least afraid of arrows in the normal course of things. That a beautiful and well-formed woman had been the person aiming the shaft at us — that, I think, had thrown him off balance.