"Aui!" She had a very attractive way of setting her jaw when she was exasperated. "You talk too much, after all. Just like other men. Here I hoped you were different."
"Oh! Eh!" He laughed, although it hurt his head and his ribs to do so. "Now you've appealed to my vanity. I can't bear to be 'just like other men.' "
He tried to stand but found he was too weak to do it easily. Setting a hand against the wall and one on the ground, he managed to lever himself up, but he had to lean against the wall lest he collapse. He was cold, and then hot, and then cold again, in waves that made him sweat and shiver. "Whew. I'm sorry to say, it'll be hard for me to climb that rope."
She withdrew. A second rope slithered over the lip and its end dropped to the floor. Two bare feet appeared, gripped the rope as she eased her body over the lip. She shinnied down hand over hand at a speed that should have burned her thighs, landed softly, and paused with a hand still on the rope to fetch a tiny globe from her cleavage. It was glass, of a kind. With it balanced in one palm, she blew into it, and it lit with a pretty flame that cast an aura of light before her.
"I'll help you up," she said.
He stared at her tight sleeveless vest and short kilted wrap. The rig showed her figure to advantage, and she knew it. She smiled, amused by his stare.
From above, a snap like the sound of a door slid hard shut cut the quiet.
Her smile vanished as quickly as it had come. She stepped forward to examine him, and the floor of the cell, under the glow of the globe light. He became aware of what he must look like and how he must reek. For the first time, he got a good look at the coating of dried grime that had slicked the floor, every possible thing he could disgorge from his body: blood, vomit, diarrhea, urine, the worst sort of spume.
She lifted the globe to the level of his eyes. "Did they try to poison you?"
"I don't know. I ate a little rice earlier. It-stayed down."
"Follow the light." She moved it slowly from side to side, but she watched his eyes. "Did you take a hard blow to the head?"
"That I did."
"Ah. Sometimes that will make you cast out your stomach. Yes, you've quite a few signs of that illness. You'll want a bath and your clothes washed. We best hurry, for this is taking longer than I had planned for. Can you walk?"
"I don't know."
By the way she tilted her head just a little to the right and then back a little to the left it seemed she was considering options and discarding them.
She touched the globe to those rich lips. Its light extinguished immediately.
"I'll put it back in its warm setting, my sweet," he said hopefully.
She looked at him sidelong in a way that would have set him aflame if he wasn't feeling and smelling and looking like a dead rat well run over and left in the dank to get really ripe. Then she tucked away the globe, slung a strong arm around his waist, and helped him over to the rope. There was nothing seductive in the action. She tied him up in the rope to make it a seat around his hips. He was so dizzy from moving that he couldn't even say what he would like to say about where her hands were working because the words went awhirl and he had enough to do to stay on his feet as she rigged him up and left him standing there. She climbed swiftly up the knotted rope and eased herself gracefully out of the hatch. A moment later, the rope drew tight, strained, and he grasped with all his strength to avoid pitching backward as she hauled him up. He rocked. He shut his eyes, but decided that was worse. His knee rapped the hot surface of the lantern, but not hard enough to shatter anything, by Ilu's mercy.
The room above, which he did not remember, was a holding cell with rings along the far wall where folk could be chained up until ready to be moved. She had used one of these rings as her lever, with the rope pulling over it, and when his head came up past the opening she tied it securely, crossed back to him, and used main force with her arms hooked under his armpits to drag him up and onto the floor. There he sprawled. While he panted, trying not to sway although he wasn't moving, she cut him loose from the rope now tangled around his legs.
"You'll have to walk the next part." She stepped back and pulled up the lantern.
"Where are the guards?"
She knelt beside him. There was a pleasant smell to her, like jasmine, but under that a scent he recognized with a kind of delayed shock: She smelled of eagles.
"You'll need this."
Her hands were cool as she lifted his head enough to slip a leather thong over it, settling it at his neck. He groped at his chest, found the bone whistle. He groaned, would have wept had he retained water enough for tears. "What bell is it?"
"Middle night."
"I can't use this until daybreak. Once they discover I'm gone, they'll search for me."
"Which is why we must hurry." She got an arm under him, and with her help he stood. The whistle gave him strength.
"I can walk on my own." That he was so helpless, and she so competent, irritated him enough that he nudged her away. "Where do we go?"
After all, she was not immune. A smile chased across her lips. Her eyelids drooped, and for a moment she had the sleepy look of a woman woken after a night of passion, smug and certain and well pleased. "Does this mean you trust me now?"
He'd be a fool to try to walk unaided, this close to freedom. He grasped her arm just above the elbow. She had satiny skin, and taut muscle under it.
"I'm Joss, but you already know that. What's your name?"
"Zubaidit."
"Ah! Such poetry! 'Where the axe hewed, the man was stricken.' "
Now she was amused. "Not everyone knows the story of the woodsman's daughter."
He would have leaned in to speak intimately close beside her ear, had he been clean and sweet-smelling, but he was not, and although she had as yet made no slightest sign of finding him foul in his current state, he didn't care to chance seeing a grimace of disgust cross her face. After all, if he survived this, he would recover his strength, and take a bath, and then she would see what it meant to meet her match.
So he smiled at her, as well as he was able. "It's one of my favorite stories from the Tale of Fortune. Especially the ending."
She laughed, a clear sound that she made no effort to muffle or disguise. What in the hells had happened to the guards? But he didn't ask again. It was time to take his chances, and see where this tale of fortune led him.
"You would say so," she said with a smirk. "Come, now. We have to go see someone."
She doused the lantern, led him down the corridor, helped him up a set of stairs and through an open door into a spacious hall swallowed in night but which he recognized by the carved railings at one end as Assizes Hall. She moved smoothly, graceful despite the darkness, and he, leaning on her, was able to stumble alongside creditably. No one was about. It was weird how very quiet it was, all the guards lost. Murdered, maybe. And who in the hells were they going to see?
"It's a strange way to murder me," he muttered, unable to help himself. "Or have you some other more convoluted plot in hand?"
"I do, but you'll need all your powers of persuasion to help me. Now, hush."
They came to the wall of screen doors, all closed. A faint, wavering light could be seen through the papered screens. Nimbly, she slid a door halfway open and eased him onto the wide front porch that ran the length of Assizes Hall. A stocky man carrying a small lantern was waiting at the foot of the steps. Beyond him, Assizes Court was empty, all in shadow, no lamps at all.
"What of the eagle?" she whispered, dropping her voice now that she was outside.
"Without me, he won't fly until it's day. I can't call him until dawn."
She helped him down the steps. The man who waited was master of a handcart, which was empty except for a cloak bundled in the bottom.