“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.