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.