The bricks were old and here and there irregular patches of new brickwork had been inserted. The emperor liked to keep his aqueducts efficient. Even so, sprays of water spat in fine arcs out across the heads of passersby. I climbed up to the first row of brick arches and clung on and looked back. The assassins were almost up with the aqueduct, leaping like fleas over the backs of the hay wains. I waved my arm at them and then made a most insulting gesture.
The slant of the brickwork ran the water channel out over the Lane at an angle. I climbed through the lower tier of arches into a dark cavernous space, lit by the semi-circles of brilliance in serried rows, feeling the looseness of old mortar and brick chipping below, the glimmer of random puddles showing up like unwinking eyes. Water splashed down from the leaded channel above my head. The stikitches clambered up after me.
The plan was to run diagonally along the first tier of arches all the way across the Lane and so free myself of the encumbrance of Barty. I had ideas on the mores and honor of the stikitches, and if Laygon the Strigicaw was among those pursuing me — as he must almost inevitably be — then I could finish this thing cleanly.
That time-consuming altercation with Barty had afforded the pursuers the chance to catch up. They ran fleetly across the strewn ground at me, spraying water from puddles, yelling, incensed, confident they had me now and uncaring of what noise they made in this arched space, knowing it would be lost in the greater noise from the procession which passed by below.
“Kitchew!” they bellowed, and closed in.
They were good. Well, of course, to be employed as an assassin on Kregen you have to be good. Quite apart from the fact that if you are not good you won’t last, you will also starve. The shadowy effect of the brick buttresses and the shafts of brilliant light through the arched openings lent a macabre air of theatre to that fight. The blades rang and scraped and the first two went down. The others pressed in confidently enough and at the first pass with a large fellow wearing a ring in his ear, my rapier blade snapped.
Do not think it odd if I say I felt relief that the rapier snapped. Only eight of the rogues had clambered up the arches and followed me. So I was in a hurry, and with the rapier useless I could hurl the hilt in the face of the earring fellow, and then rip out the longsword.
“By Jhalak,” one of the stikitches ground out. “That bar of iron will not serve you.”
It served him through the guts, and the next fellow spun away with his steel mask shattered and blood spouting through. Two tried to run and two terchicks finished them. I was left facing the man who by his clothes and mannerisms I knew to be Laygon the Strigicaw. Time was running out. I had to be quick.
“When you are dead, Laygon,” I said cheerfully, “no stikitche will pick up your contracts without payment. But Ashti Melekhi is dead, also. So that business will be settled, with full steel-bokkertu and in all honor.”
He knew what I meant. Steel-bokkertu is a euphemism for rights gained by the sword and retrospectively legalized. So he leaped for me, snarling, and he died, like the others, and I ran to the edge of the arched space and looked down.
I might have guessed.
The procession was in an uproar.
The two weasely fellows had chosen to go after Barty because they were not stikitches and fancied he, as a Koter of Vallia, would carry a goodly sum on his person. After the assassins had finished with me, the rasts calculated, there would be no pickings for them. The rest of the stikitches must have decided to chance the ranked soldiery. Barty had spitted one of them, clearing a space among the onlookers as the procession passed, and was tinkering away with two more.
It was a long way down.
People broke away from the fight, screaming. In those first few moments of action when all was confusion, no one turned instantly to assist Barty. But he did look a sight, clad in his old clothes, bedraggled, red-faced, swearing away, thoroughly worked up. One might almost be forgiven for believing he was the murderer and the soberly-attired assassins his victims. They had removed their steel masks and now wore only the polite public half-mask often seen on Kregen, a useful adjunct to gracious living, as it is said with some irony.
Whatever might be said, in a mur or two he’d be dead.
The angle of the aqueduct had taken me out farther into the center of the Lane. Directly below passed a cart loaded with sharp-looking objects under a tarpaulin, the edges creased and unfriendly looking. To jump down on that would invite a punctured hide and a snapped backbone. Further along swayed the palanquins with their colored awnings. I eyed them savagely. The largest one — of course. It had to be the biggest and best to take the weight and the velocity of my fall. I ran along the edge of the brickwork, ducked out of the archway right over the palanquin below, and launched myself into space. As I jumped I saw the soldiers at last break ranks and advance on Barty and the assassins. Just before I revolved in the air, falling, I glimpsed the assassins running off, and Barty twisting in the grip of a Deldar.
Then, rotating, I came down with an ear-splitting crash on the striped awning. It ripped. I went on through trailing tatters of cloth. The blue and green striped material had broken my fall and I landed with a thump on the wooden bed of the palanquin. I spat out a chunk of the blue and green banded cloth, and a strip of the white striping between the colors caught in my teeth. I ripped it out furiously and dived for the cloth-of-gold curtains.
The three women in the palanquin stared at me, petrified.
I took in their appearance at a glance — two handmaidens and a great lady. She was half-veiled, and she looked lushly beautiful, and dominating, and her color was rising and she was getting all set to spit out a mouthful of invective. You couldn’t really blame her. Here she was, sitting quietly in her palanquin being taken along with all her people, and some hairy odoriferous blanket-coated oaf falls in from the sky. I became aware of my obnoxious pong as the stink cut through the scents of the palanquin. The Womoxes carrying the poles had yielded to the sudden extra weight; but one pole broke and the whole lot came to a shuddering crash, tip-tilted on a corner. The great lady was flung across the cloth-of-gold canopied space. She fell into my arms. I couldn’t move. Her dark, intense face wrinkled up, the whiteness of the skin emphasized by the kohled eyes and the artful patch of color in the cheeks. Her flared nostrils widened. Her mouth, hidden by the veil but its outline visible as the silver gauze pressed back, curved down.
“You stink!”
“Get off, lady, I am in a hurry-”
“You dare-”
Somehow the longsword had not done any damage to the occupants of the palanquin — yet. I tried to twist it around to make it safe. She was screaming invective at me now and I half-turned to shove her off, so that she saw me. Only then I realized the medium-sized brown beard had been ripped off somewhere along the way.
She saw my face.
“Oh,” she said.
“I am in a hurry, lady. Men are trying to kill me and I must-”
“Yes, you must run away. Well, let me sit up and you may run away — run to the Ice Floes of Sicce, and you will.”
“Mayhap I will,” I said.
She struggled to sit up against the slope of the palanquin. Her two handmaidens went on screaming. A soldier stuck his head in the opening of the cloth-of-gold curtains and saw me. Instantly his rapier whipped in.
The longsword was still stuck somewhere down in among the cushions, the point jammed in the woodwork. I just hoped this great lady wouldn’t sit back too heavily.