Emmis leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair. "Where are they?"
"Where are who?" Annis asked, startled.
"Neyam and his assassin! I have to stop them!"
"No, you don't," Annis said. "Sit down. Don't be silly."
"Yes, I do," Emmis said. "It's murder! Where are they?"
"I don't know. The Lumethans are doing this, it's not my idea – well, mostly not…"
Emmis turned away and ran out the door onto Commission Street, where he turned left and headed for Shiphaven Market at a trot. If he had been certain where he was headed he would have run, but he wasn't sure yet. Should he just go to the house in Allston and warn Lar?
That assumed it wasn't already too late. He hoped it wasn't already too late. He had sat there listening to the Ashthasan madwoman far longer than he should have, he told himself. He should have run to help as soon as she mentioned assassination.
But it hadn't seemed real. People didn't talk openly about such things! Hadn't she realized that Emmis worked for Lar, that he liked Lar? Did she think that just because he had taken her money, he had no loyalty at all to his employer, not even the basic consideration he would give any human being?
He couldn't imagine thinking like that.
The market was uncrowded this time of day, and he was able to make it through and onto Twixt Street quickly. He picked up his pace; he still didn't know whether he was heading to Allston or the Wizards' Quarter, but either way, he would have to cross the Old Merchants' Quarter and the New City to get there.
A little belatedly the possibility of recruiting help among friends and family in Shiphaven occurred to him, but he immediately dismissed the idea; there might not be time, and it would just sound so ridiculous to them, running halfway across the city to stop an assassination!
He broke into a run, even though he knew he couldn't maintain it all the way to Allston.
He was almost to Canal Square when he realized he had left all his belongings on the floor of the Crooked Candle. He cursed, but did not slow down.
He did slow down in Canal Square, though, as the crowds were thicker here. He almost tripped over a small child, brushed awkwardly against a woman, and had to slow to little more than a walk as he squeezed past a clump of people at the south end.
Kolar had said his spell would take an hour, and it was perhaps half an hour's walk each way between Through Street and the wizard's shop; allow a little time for other matters, and the ambassador still would have needed no more than three hours to complete his errand and return to the house to begin writing his protocol. Emmis glanced up at the sky, trying to estimate how long it had been since he had headed back toward Shiphaven. The sun was hidden behind rooftops to the west as he jogged down Commerce Street. How long had he spent at the rooming house? How long with his family? The walk back had taken almost an hour all by itself…
He was fairly sure he had been in Shiphaven for hours. Lar might already be dead.
This might be partly his fault, he thought as he trotted up the slope toward High Street. If he hadn't talked to Annis, she and the Lumethans might not have been so quick to decide Lar had to be killed.
Or they might have been even quicker – who knew? They had been following Lar in any case. He hadn't told them anything about planning conquest. He hadn't told them anything about apprenticing to warlocks; they had heard that from Ishta. It wasn't his fault.
Still, he felt somehow responsible. He turned the corner onto High Street and broke into a run again.
As he crossed Merchant Street into the New City he began worrying about what he would do if he encountered the assassins. He was big and strong, but he had no training in how to fight, no weapon except his belt-knife. He glanced at the headquarters of the Council of Warlocks as he passed, and wished he had a warlock to help him – or any kind of magician, really.
And he hoped that the assassins Neyam had hired were just thugs, and not magicians. There were magical assassins, he knew that; some demonologists were said to specialize in assassination. Warlocks could kill without a trace, and it was rumored that some of them would do that for a price. Wizards were picky about who they killed, but they, too, had lethal magic at their command.
Witches never killed anyone, so far as he knew, and he had never heard of ritual dance causing anything much worse than a headache. To the best of his knowledge the gods no longer answered prayers to kill people under any circumstances, so priests and other theurgists couldn't be assassins. Herbalists had a wide variety of poisons on hand, everyone knew that, but he couldn't see how anyone could use those against Lar. Scientists, well, who knew what scientists could do?
And sorcerers – during the Great War, Northern sorcerers had been the subject of nightmares and terrified whispers. No one knew how many of the horrible old weapons modern sorcerers might still have hidden away.
Emmis tried to remember all the other kinds of magic he had ever heard of. Most of them seemed harmless – prestidigitation and prophecy and the rest had no obvious lethal applications – but who knew what a clever magician might do? He estimated that at least half the schools of magic could definitely be used for assassination, and except for theurgy he couldn't be sure any of them were entirely safe.
Annis had said Hagai was a theurgist, so he was relatively harmless; he might have used his magic to help find Lar, but beyond that, Emmis didn't think Hagai was anything to worry about. Neyam, though – was he a magician, too? If so, what kind? Or the third Lumethan, whatever his name was – he could be anything.
Morkai, that was it.
He made the turn onto Arena Street, and almost collided with a woman eating a sausage. "Sorry," he said, a little breathlessly, as he pushed past her.
If the Lumethans had hired magicians to kill Lar, Emmis didn't think there was anything he could do. It took magic to fight magic. That was why the Small Kingdoms had banned using magic in their endless little wars; it would have made their regular armies useless, and you couldn't trust magicians. They weren't reliable. They might change sides, or decide they wanted to be in charge themselves, or they might simply die, and then where would you be, if your entire military depended on their magic?
The sun was almost down, the shadows stretching the full width of the avenue, the sky starting to darken when he turned onto Through Street and slowed to a stop, panting.
The yellow house was still there, unchanged. The door was closed. The street was largely deserted; a cat sat in a neighbor's window, a woman several doors down was puttering with her doorway shrine, and a man sat slumped against a stoop, apparently asleep.
There were no obvious assassins to be seen, no ominous sword-wielding figures in black cloaks. There was no brown-robed Lumethan, either. But there were dozens of places where they might be concealed, in doorways and alleys or behind corners – not all the houses were built directly against one another, or with their facades aligned.
Cautiously, Emmis crossed the street to the door of the rented house. He fished the key from the purse on his belt, thanking whatever gods or fates might be responsible that he hadn't left that on the floor of the Crooked Candle with all his other belongings.
The door was locked, just as it should be, and the key turned in the lock, just as it should. He opened the door slowly and carefully, and looked inside before stepping through, making sure there was no assassin lurking there.
Then in a sudden moment of inspiration he turned, and found the man from the stoop not asleep at all, but on his feet, belt-knife drawn, and hurrying across the street toward him.
Emmis snatched his own knife from his belt and stepped backward into the house. He slammed the door in the other man's face, but before he could latch it he heard footsteps.
He whirled, the knife in his right hand raised, just in time to duck a swinging blow from a walking stick. The stick smacked into the wall above Emmis's head, and he heard plaster crack.