In the event, he was looking the other way when his man finally came out, an uncharacteristic piece of carelessness that he could only attribute to the extreme comfort of his surroundings. It was the flash of the silver lining of the man's gown as he pushed back his sleeve that caught the offcomer's eye-a brief, subliminal moment of information that he absorbed unconsciously, the way a circling hawk notices the first, tiniest movement of his prey on the ground below. He pushed himself away from the pillar with his elbows and sauntered across the street on an interception course, delicately plotted so that he'd carelessly blunder into his man just before he turned the corner.
The man was deep in some complicated discussion with another, almost equally Serious trader; they were walking arm in arm like an old married couple (it was a tradition that tended to disconcert offcomers until they found out it was quite normal and simply indicated trust), and both men's bodyguards were holding back a respectful three paces or so. Bodyguards were only for show in Weal Bohec, of course; one wore them in the same way that one wore a jewelled and enamelled sword or a lovely but useless wafer-thin gold breastplate. Cheapskates' bodyguards were often just their clerks dressed up in fancy padded gambesons, but Serious Men hired serious thugs simply as an exercise in the art of wasting money gracefully.
The offcomer knew exactly what he was doing. The moment of collision gave him just enough time to grab his man's sleeve with his right hand, as if stopping himself from going off balance and falling over, while the fingers of his left hand drew back the hem of his robe and the thumb located the hilt of his sword, twisted round in the sash so as to be unobtrusively hidden under his armpit without showing through the line of his coat. While he was graciously apologising to his man for his clumsiness, he was letting go of the mark's lapel with his right hand, while his left thumb had found the guard of the sword and was easing it half an inch out of the tight mouth of the scabbard. At the precise moment that his man opened his mouth to say that it was an accident, perfectly all right, his left fingers tightened round the scabbard throat and gave the little sideways twist that brought the hilt to exactly the right angle for the best draw, and his right hand swooped, a perfect, totally economical gesture. He drew his knuckles down the hilt like a man stroking his lover's cheek until his little finger encountered the guard. Then he flipped his hand over, wrapped his fingers round the hilt, and drew.
Moments make up everything, the way potsherds and bits of broken glass make up a mosaic, but the draw is the supreme moment, the one piece of the mosaic that incorporates the whole pattern, the ultimate fraction. In religion, the perfect draw doesn't even happen. There is no interval between the sword's quiet slumber in the scabbard and the start of the cutting process. In practice, of course, there has to be a moment, and a moment is a thing susceptible of quantification, capable of being measured with a pair of calipers. There has to be a moment between peace and violence, between one version of history and another, a piece of time in which the thing could go either way. The knack is to make it as small as possible.
The offcomer knew exactly what he was doing, and so his man was still talking at the moment when the top inch of the upswinging blade sliced through his throat, cutting his last word neatly in half.
Job done.
There remained the rather more demanding issue of getting away with it, so, as soon as he was certain he'd made the kill, he put the dead man out of his mind entirely and quickly assessed the remaining obstacles; this process took about as long as it takes for a raindrop to fall from your hair to your nose, or for a cat to hear a footstep.
While the blade was still following through, he moved his back foot through ninety degrees in the direction of the other Serious Man, so that he was lined up for the second-position downwards cut ('dividing the earth from the heavens', as the religious rather charmingly call it). The cut followed on from the initial slice so quickly and fluently that it looked to be part of the same movement, but of course it was an entirely separate moment, the clearing away of an inconvenient body. The third and fourth movements cut down the bodyguards before they'd noticed anything was the matter-three perfect diagonal slices, severing the neck to the bone. All four men were still standing when the offcomer, having flicked the blood off his sword blade, looped it back and slid it elegantly into the scabbard.
'Thank you so much,' he said in a calm, clear voice, then he nodded politely, took two steps back, and slipped back between the columns of the portico just as the dead bodies toppled over and slid to the ground. It was two or three heartbeats before anybody noticed, and by then the offcomer was on the other side of the street, having quietly snuck through the portico arcade and emerged in the gap between two stalls. By the time the first woman screamed he was examining the base of a small brass jar for casting flaws.
'Yes, well,' the stallholder replied, when he pointed them out, 'they all have those. But you can't see them, and what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over. Tell you what,' he added, suspecting that his moment was passing too quickly, 'you can have them both for seven.'
The offcomer frowned. 'Six and a half.'
'All right.' The stallholder nodded, like a guilty man accepting the court's verdict. 'You want them wrapped? Wrapping's a quarter extra.'
The offcomer shook his head. He'd noticed a spot of blood, about the size of a small fly, on the back of his left hand, and he eased it off against his right wrist as he replied. 'No thanks,' he said. 'I'll have them as they are. Oh, and while I'm at it, what'll you take for the inkwell? That's north country work, isn't it?'
When the fuss had died down, he walked back to the inn, bolted the door of his room behind him and lay down on the bed. He didn't get the shakes any more. That was an indulgence he'd gradually learned to do without by absorbing the trauma and filing it away in the back of his mind to be dealt with on a rainy day. Instead he calmly accepted the passing of the moment, the transition between one sequence of events and another, the comforting fact that he'd got away with it again. Already the fear had been contained and subdued and lived only in his memory, along with all those close shaves and embarrassing childhood misdemeanours that made him cringe when he thought about them. The ability to accept, to digest, to be nourished by one's own fear was one of the great joys of religion, or so he liked to believe. It was, after all, rather more spiritually respectable than admitting he was just addicted to the draw, like some dangerous freak in a street gang.
Being classically trained and thorough, he hung around Weal Bohec for the rest of the day, keeping his ears and eyes open, gathering potentially useful background information and local colour. After a thoroughly enjoyable dinner at the Blaze of Glory, a place he'd always wanted to try but had never had time for during any of his previous visits, he went to bed early and slept well before making an early start the next morning. The innkeeper told him that he hoped he'd enjoyed his stay in Weal Bohec and would come again. He replied that it was more than likely.
His journey home was long and tiresome. For some reason, the rain had chosen to come nearly a month early, and the first big storm caught him out on the road in the back of an uncovered carrier's cart halfway between Weal Bohec and Bealvoy. In the time it takes for a good cook to peel an onion his coat and hat were so completely saturated that he could feel the water trickling down his skin. The bed of the cart was flooded a finger-joint deep, and the smell of drenched cloth was overpowering. Fairly soon he stopped trying to cower under the brim of his hat-it was thoroughly waterlogged anyway, with the result that he was getting wetter wearing it than he would've been bare-headed. Instead he sat upright, blinked rain out of his eyes and tried to pretend he was in a nice, deep bath that he hadn't had to pay for.