The newcomer’s glance followed the workmen’s; he looked at the piece of statue, then raised his eyes to Cashel’s. “I believe you have some property of mine, my man,” he said. His tone held a thin skin of politeness over fury. “I’ll take it now, if you please.”
“It’s not yours,” Cashel said. Tenoctris had stepped behind him, but he didn’t know just where. He hoped she’d be clear if things started to happen, as they might. “I bought it, fair and more than fair.”
“Yes, well,” said the stranger, looking over Cashel appraisingly. He reached into the folds of his twisted silk sash. “I’ll buy it from you, then.”
“No,” said Cashel, his voice husky. His hands were going to start trembling soon if he didn’t do something, either spin the quarterstaff into the stranger’s face or pick up the statue and run.
The stranger’s hand came out of the sash with three broad, thin pieces of gold. He fanned them into the light between his thumb and two well-manicured fingers. “Look at this, my man,” he said. “Yours for a bit of old stone.”
“No,” Cashel said. There was going to be trouble if Cashel didn’t move away, but he couldn’t leave the stone, and he didn’t want to be holding it if the stranger came at him with a knife.
Instead of attacking, the stranger swept the spread of coins under the foreman’s nose. “Bring me the piece of marble,” he said, pitching his voice so that all the workmen could hear, “and these are yours. Twice this, a gold piece for each man!”
The foreman scowled his forehead into even deeper ridges than before. The gangling, scar-faced workman beside him snatched a pole from the bundles of scaffolding and stepped forward. “Ansie, Blemm…” he called in a matter-of-fact voice. “All you guys. That’s enough money to set us up for life.”
“Right!” said the foreman, reaching for his hammer.
Cashel stepped forward, driving the tip of his quarterstaff into the foreman’s gut. The fellow saw it coming and tried to jump back. He wasn’t fast enough, but the move may have saved his life. The iron-shod hickory flung him into the kiln, spewing his breakfast of bread sopped in wine lees, but it didn’t punch through the muscle walls as it could’ve done if Cashel was really trying.
The stranger had ducked behind the stack of quarrystone. Cashel ignored him and the shouting spectators both. It might be that a section of the City Watch would arrive, but Cashel doubted that. He sure wasn’t trusting his safety and Tenoctris to that hope.
The workman with the pole swung at Cashel. The bamboo would’ve made a decent weapon if the fellow’d known what he was doing, but he didn’t. Cashel blocked the stroke with the ferrule nearer his body, then spun the other end into the workman’s side. He heard ribs crack.
Two of the men who’d been hesitating when things started to happen now backpedaled. Another had pulled out his chisel to use as a sword; he flung it as a dart instead. The heavy bronze tool caught Cashel on the right shoulder, a solid blow but not a dangerous one because the edge was sharpened to split rock rather than to shave wood.
Cashel grunted with anger and stepped forward, recovering the staff so that both his hands gripped the wood at the balance. The workman squealed and dodged behind the partner who held a heavy maul up in the air like a torch.
The fellow with the maul couldn’t have been more open to a stroke from the quarterstaff if he’d turned his back and begged to be hit. Didn’t anybody in Valles know how to fight? Cashel rapped him where he gripped the helve, breaking fingers on both hands and flinging the maul into a cart hard enough to tip it over.
Cashel kicked the screaming man he’d just crippled out of the way and went after the fellow who’d thrown the chisel at him. That one was scrambling off by now. Most times Cashel would’ve left him be; but his shoulder throbbed, and he knew that except for the bulges of muscle there he’d have had a broken collarbone.
The workman tripped on his leather apron and skidded into the stack of scaffolding. Cashel raised his staff for a straight-arm thrust that would’ve been fatal—then grimaced and instead gripped the apron’s neck loop with his right hand to jerk the fellow upright.
“You like to throw things, do you?” Cashel bellowed. The workman’s eyes were screwed shut: he couldn’t change whatever was coming, but he didn’t have to watch it.
Cashel straightened his arm and put his shoulders in it too, hurling the fellow over the basement excavation to slide through debris at the back of the lot. The man’s arms and legs were moving before his body came to a halt. He hopped over a mound of dirt saved for backfill and continued running.
There was a blue flash from the other side of the pile of quarrystone. The stranger who’d started the trouble sprang into view with a shriek. His robe was on fire. Instead of the grudging, halfhearted flames Cashel expected from wool, these were vivid and tinged with the same blue as the flash: wizardlight.
The stranger bolted down the street, tugging his garments off as he ran. Spectators lurched out of his way, pushing a path violently through their fellows the way they’d have done to escape a runaway horse—
Or maybe more violently yet. Wizardry scared lots of people worse than death did.
Tenoctris stood alone at the edge of the street, swaying and so weak she was about to fall over. Cashel, gasping with his own efforts, stumbled to his older friend and put his arm around her. His shoulder hurt as badly as it had the day Scolla’s ill-tempered lead ox had flung its head around while Cashel was trying to yoke it.
“Are you all right, Tenoctris?” Cashel asked, speaking the words between one deep breath and the next. “You did a spell to send the fellow off, is that it?”
He’d split the back of his undertunic when his shoulders bunched; it looked like he’d broken his sash too. Well, it hadn’t been a proper bout where he’d have had time to get ready.
“I interfered with his own spell,” Tenoctris said, panting like a snared rabbit. Cashel had seen before now the wonders that wizards could do; but it took real effort to guide their powers, as sure as it did to use a quarterstaff the way Cashel used one.
Still clinging to Cashel’s arm, Tenoctris hobbled around the stack of squared blocks. Spectators kneeling in the dirt there scattered like startled quail, looking over their shoulders at the old woman. Cashel guessed that the stranger had dropped the gold he’d offered. People in this district weren’t going to let a gold coin go to waste, no matter how much wizards frightened them.
Tenoctris pointed to symbols drawn on the ground where the stranger had been hiding. “He was going to send dust into your eyes, Cashel,” she said. “I just opened his circle of protection before he’d directed the stroke.”
Cashel felt a surge of warmth for the old wizard. Tenoctris was quick to say that she had very little power; but she knew things, knew what she was doing, and generally knew what other wizards were doing better than they did. Cashel trusted Tenoctris the way he trusted his own ability to put an axe into a tree trunk where he meant it to go.
Strength was fine, but control was a better thing if you had to have only one.
“What’s this made of, do you suppose?” Tenoctris said in surprise. She bent closer to the greenish-yellow rod lying beside the symbol the stranger had drawn with it. It was his athame, abandoned like the coins when he fled—and to a wizard, far more valuable than that gold. “It looks like the shell of an insect. A very large insect.”
Cashel reached toward it with a bare toe. He could see the blurred texture of the soil through the athame, as though it was a sheet of mica.
“No, I don’t think we’d better touch it,” Tenoctris said, moving her slippered foot to block Cashel’s. She scuffed the athame sideways, onto the cobblestones. “The wagons tonight will grind it to powder; I suspect that’s the best choice. And I’ll burn this slipper when we’ve gotten home.”