He ran, too, but only as far as the door. It was locked. He backed up and hurled his weight at it. It sagged, hinges ripping. He backed up to try again, ignoring throbs of protest from his ribs.
"What the demons do you think you're up to?" bellowed one of the men. "You, yon big Highlander!" yelled another.
"Fire!" he shouted, charging the door again. Another scream from overhead. This time the door collapsed, and he stumbled over it into a butcher's shop, smelling of blood, buzzing with flies. Lumps of meat in grotesque shapes hung on hooks over the counter. Hearing shouts of "Fire!" outside, he crossed the room, threw open another door, and found the stairs.
He met a crowd of people descending, eight or nine of them: children, women carrying babies, all fleeing from the stench of smoke. Most of them screamed at the huge clansman coming racing up at them, waving a dirk. Whether they saw a fiery sword, as Toby did, hardly mattered at that point, for they probably registered only his plaid. Highlanders had a well-earned reputation for havoc and slaughter. These Lowlander burgh dwellers would assume that he was the first of a horde and Dumbarton was being sacked.
He pushed by them or over them, shouting at them to clear the building. Only when he was past them did he realize he had forgotten to speak English, and they were unlikely to understand Gaelic. He did not think they would linger for a repeat. In a passageway at the top, several doors stood open, one with a very old man peering out in confusion.
"Fire! Leave! Get out!" Toby charged past him and kicked open the door he wanted without checking to see if it was even latched. Most of the chamber was filled by a bed, its curtains open just enough to show that it was unoccupied. The owner lay on the floor near the window. Toby was too late to save him, or perhaps it had been a her. The flickering blue shape of Oswood crouched over the corpse as it had crouched over Lady Valda. The bed and floor and walls were bright with blood; the air reeked of it.
Oswood reared up in a glowing blur of hatred and sharpness, chittering anger in a sound that was half insect and half clinking of jewels. It advanced on the intruder.
Toby's Inverary training leaped to his aid. He put his right foot forward and this time tried a saber slash of his green-shining sword. Again he felt resistance, and a slice of blue fire curled off the hellish thing and faded out. With an ear-piercing, inhuman cry, the demon sprang away, faster than a cat, landing on the bed. As he turned to fend off attack from there, the entire room exploded in flame — bed, clothes chest, rug, and even the door. Then the demon was gone, flicking out through the doorway, a blue glow in the smoke.
Toby leaped after it, gasping and trying to protect his eyes with his arm. If it could do that to a room, why couldn't it do the same to him? If he had thought of it, when would it? Were demons even dumber than he was, or did the sword protect him? The old man was tottering toward the stairs. Oswood enveloped him and dismembered him in a cloudburst of blood. He died without making a sound, falling in fragments to the floor, but his death had delayed the monster just long enough for Toby to catch up with it.
He flailed at it with the burning green blade. Its screams drilled agony through his head, but again he spalled chunks off it. It was growing smaller. Again it fled from him. It struck the door at the far end of the corridor and burned right through it, vanishing into the room beyond, showering flaming splinters of wood.
He was balked. He could not cross that fiery floor with bare feet. Shouts from downstairs told him a mob was gathering. Hamish was right — he would never escape from a crowd without being recognized, and that meant he would never escape. Never mind. The main thing now was the fight with Oswood. He must catch the demon and reduce it to nothing at all.
He waved the dagger until a flash of green told him he had it pointed where he wanted to go: upward!
He dashed into the nearest room, dropping the dirk in the folds of his plaid to give him two free hands. He was in luck, for alongside the four-poster bed stood a wooden chest. He jumped up on it, laid his hands against the ceiling boards, and pushed. Timber creaked and snapped, nails pulled free. Muscle! He gained a grip and pulled downward. The plank snapped with a reluctant crack. Smoke poured down from the hole.
After that it was a matter of seconds before he had ripped a gap big enough to pull himself through. The attic was furnished with straw and discarded clothes, but it was also chokingly full of smoke, for the fire below had burned through to the sky. He braced his shoulders against the battens between the rafters and heaved bodily. The thatch above was old and rotten, else even his strength would not have been able to rip it open, but it yielded. With the aid of the dagger, he ripped a hole to daylight. The straw around his feet was already smoking.
Gripping the rafters, he pulled himself up and stuck his head out through the hole. Only when he had done so did he realize the demon might be waiting for him up there. It wasn't, fortunately. The apothecary's house was a pillar of fire, and this one was already shooting flames up into the fog. He dragged himself out onto the steeply sloping thatch, then scrambled to relative safety on the ridge while he fumbled for the dagger.
"There he is!" roared voices below. "Up yonder — the hexer! The demon-raiser. Five thousand marks!"
He turned the dagger until it glowed faintly green. Oswood was either too small or too far off to raise much reaction from the blade — and it had apparently crossed the street.
Toby would have to cross also. The burgh's roads were narrow. He had jumped farther than that in the Glen Games. But then he had not faced a bone-smashing drop and had been landing on sand, not a steeply pitched slope of hard and slippery thatch. The house on the far side was slightly higher than the one he was on — but he didn't need to run all the way to the eave.
If he didn't jump, the crowd or the fire would get him.
He pulled the amethyst from the fold of his plaid. "Hob!" he said. "Fillan, I'm talking to you. If you want to see the world with me, then you'd better put some spring in my legs!"
He popped the gem in his mouth for safekeeping, bounded down the roof, and leaped out into the fog. For a moment he seemed to hang in the air above the crowd.
He landed, pitching forward on hands and knees, and then flat on his belly. He began to slide. He thrust the dagger into the straw and came to a stop with his legs hanging out over the drop. With fingers and blade, he scrambled up the slope to the crest. Then he was on his feet, running along the ridge.
What followed was a mad chase across the rooftops of the burgh. Jumping streets and alleys, he soon outdistanced the angry, roaring mob below. He caught up with the demon. It was wounded, or just diminished. Perhaps it was dying, but he dared not count on that. He cornered it against a chimney, his demon sword blazed joyfully, and he hacked the monster away to nothing. The light in the blade faded out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
So much for Oswood! The next problem was to save Toby Strangerson.
He leaned for a moment against the chimney, catching his breath and prodding his wits. The fog swirling around him was hardly thicker than the fog inside his head. The mob had lost him for the moment, but word would race through the burgh that the wanted hexer was at large. Every sword and kitchen cleaver would be after him.
He could not see the spire of the sanctuary, which would have been a useful landmark, nor could he locate the presence of the tutelary itself, as he had the previous evening. He had no idea of the way to Fergan's house. He was lost.
However, the roofs that faded off into the mist like miniature mountains did not extend very far to his right. Either the harbor or open country must lie in that direction. There was certainly no point in waiting around on the housetops until the fog lifted. He found a low eave overlooking a cramped little yard, clambered down to the roof of a privy, and jumped. Then he went out into the street, trying to move with the confident stride of the innocent. A high-piled wagon was heading the way he wanted to go; he walked alongside it, accepting the horse's deliberate pace, keeping back from the driver's notice.