Outside in the street rain started to drift down, a fine drizzle that quickly spread a shining patina across everything.
A girl brought across a jug of ale and filled a tankard for me. I gave her a copper ob. I stretched my feet out and prepared to relax and then jerked my boots back quickly. They were first-quality leather boots and someone would have them off me sharply, with or without my consent, if I advertised them so blatantly. I was a stranger. Therefore I was ripe game. I fretted about Barty. I should have run him back to the Gate of Skulls first.
This Nath the Knife, the chief assassin, had arranged to meet me here, so close to the walls of the Old City, clearly as a gesture of trust. His bolt-holes would all be deeper in Drak’s City. He ventured within a stone’s throw of the walls and this gate so as to show me he meant to talk. That, I understood. If they were going to try to assassinate me, they would not have requested this meeting. My plan, a usual one in the circumstances, misfired.
Before I could get into conversation and so ease my way in and then seek a back entrance to the upper floor, the serving wench pattered across. Already, this early in the day, she looked tired.
“Koter Laygon the Strigicaw is waiting for you upstairs, master.” She looked nervous. “The third door.”
My imbecilic expression altered. I had put on a medium-sized beard. Now I stroked it and looked at her owlishly.
“Koter Laygon is waiting, master.”
“Then he can wait until I have finished the tankard.”
“He is — he will have your skin off, master-”
“You are sure it is me he is waiting for?”
“Oh, yes. He was sure.”
“Who is he? What is he like? Tell me about him?”
I started to pull out a silver sinver. Her face went white. She drew back, trembling, terrified.
“No, no, master! No money! They are watching — they know what you are asking-”
She backed off, her hands wide, and then she ran away, her naked feet making soft shushing sounds on the sawdust. I glanced up under my eyebrows at the balcony. Up there any one of a hundred knot holes could hold a spying eyeball.
I shifted on the settle against the wall. A tiny sound, no more than the furtive sounds a woflo makes scratching in the wainscoting, made me look down.
A small slot had opened in the wall. A pair of scissors on extending tongs probed from the slot. They moved gently sideways toward me. Had I not moved, the fellow operating the tongs would have snipped away to get at my purse. As I had now vanished from his gaze the tongs drew back, the scissors vanished and the slot closed. I waited, intrigued.
Presently another slot opened close to me. The scissors probed out again, silently, ready to snip most patiently.
I picked up the half-full ale tankard.
No doubt the cramph had a whole array of tools he could fix to the tongs. A curved knife would slice away leather clothing. With all the noise of the taproom that usually created such a massive sound barrier, he could probably even use a drill to get through armor, and not be heard. With a smooth motion I swiveled and slung the ale clean through the slot. A splash, a yell of surprise, a series of choked squishing gulpings gave me a more general feeling of well-being. Petty — of course. But it was all a part of the rich tapestry of life — or, as this was Kregen, of death.
I bent to the slot and said in that fierce old biting way: “Thank Opaz it was only ale and not a length of steel.”
With that I stood up, hitched the blanket coat around me, and stalked off to the blackwood stairway. Over my left shoulder I had arranged snugly a quiver of six terchicks. The terchick, the little throwing knife of the clansmen, is often called the Deldar, and a clansman can hurl them right or left-handed from the back of a galloping zorca and hit the chunkrah’s eye. Of course, the women of the Great Plains of Segesthes use the terchick with unsurpassed skill.
The drinkers in the area below watched with some curiosity as I climbed up. This Ball and Chain might be situated close to the walls of the Old City and the Gate of Skulls; I fancied the Aleygyn of the Stikitches, Nath Trerhagen, had packed the place with his men. Deep rivalries no doubt split the people of Drak’s City, as they do in most places, unfortunately, and Nath the Knife would have chosen the meeting place carefully. I went up and I was ready to leap aside, to draw and to go into action, or to fashion a smile and a Llahal and listen.
The third door opened onto a narrow corridor that led via a rain-swept open walkway to the next-door building.
I had not envisioned this.
Barty could watch The Ball and Chain to no avail.
I pressed on. I remained firmly convinced that the stikitches did not mean to kill me. All this rigmarole would not then have been necessary — I had dealt with assassins before. Two men in tatty finery met me at the far door and I was able to duck in out of the rain. They wore three purple feathers, all curved the same way, ostentatiously pinned to the breasts of their tunics. They carried their rapiers loose in the scabbards. Their faces, dark and lowering, with strips of dark chin beard, were entirely unprepossessing; but they greeted me cheerfully enough, evidently assigned merely as guides.
“Laygon the Strigicaw?” I said.
“He is waiting, dom. This way.”
We went into the building and along dusty and unused passages to the far side. We descended a flight of stairs. The slope of the land here meant we were still one story above the street; but all the windows were covered with torn sacking.
Mineral oil lamps illuminated the dusty, half-wrecked room into which I was ushered. Houses were often left to fall down in the Old City, or knocked down. Rebuilding was on an entirely casual basis. The air smelled musty. Dust hung in the beams of the lamps.
A table had been pulled across a corner and a tall-backed chair positioned before it. At the table sat three men and one woman. All wore steel masks. Their clothes were unremarkable, save for the badge of the three purple feathers.
My two guides indicated the chair and I sat down.
For a moment a silence ensued.
Then the woman said: “Llahal, Dray Prescot.”
I said: “I do not like stikitches. You have asked me here. I am to meet Nath the Knife. Is he here, hiding behind a mask?”
The man on the extreme left said in a voice like breaking iron: “I am here. But you will talk with Laygon the Strigicaw.”
“Which one is he?”
The man on the right said: “Here.” His voice sounded mellow, full of the rotundity of roast beef and old crusty port.
“Well, Laygon, speak up.”
“You are the Prince Majister of Vallia. The writ of Vondium and Vallia does not run in Drak’s City.”
“I have never cared much for laws that cannot be enforced. Spit out what you want. I am due at the Temple of Opaz the Nantifer two burs after midday.”
“We do not much go in for temples, here in the Old City,” said the woman. Her voice gasped just a little, as though she had difficulty in breathing. Maybe it was just the stale air. “And you had best keep a seemly tongue in your mouth-”
‘Tell me what you want, now, and stop this shilly-shallying.”
Nath the Knife nodded his head, and the steel mask caught the lamplight. All the masks were perfectly plain, and covered the whole face. I looked at the other parts of the bodies of these four, studying their hands, the way they held themselves, the angles of their heads.
‘Tell him, Koter Laygon.”
“The position is, Dray Prescot, the bokkertu has been signed and sealed upon you. You are accredited a dead man and due for the Ice Floes of Sicce.”
“I think twelve of you tried, and there were twelve holes in the canal. I, too, can write a fine bokkertu.”
The word bokkertu, as you know, can mean any number of legal arrangements. Laygon plunged on, and if he grew warm, I, for one, felt pleasure.