"You could carry both," Emmis pointed out.
"Then I'd have to think about which to use, and there are occasions when taking time to think about anything is a bad idea."
"Not to mention the cost," Lar said.
"Not to mention that," the guardsman agreed, with a nod and a smile. "Or worrying about bumping into things with it, or whether someone might get it away from me while I'm using the truncheon. If I were posted along the wall, at any of the city gates, I'd have a sword, but on Games Street it just isn't a good idea."
For a few paces the conversation dropped, but then Emmis said, "The man in the blue tunic has a sword. Or a stick with a blade, anyway."
"Blue tunic? You got a good look at this fellow, then?"
"Reasonably good," Emmis said. "It was a bit shadowy and it all happened quickly."
"So what did you see?"
"Curly hair, pointed beard, blue tunic, black breeches, black boots, tall, thin, a bit hollow-cheeked. That's about all."
"What about the other one?" Lar asked.
Emmis shook his head. "Nothing," he said. "Brown tunic, I think, but it might have been gray. Hair and beard could have used trimming. That's all."
"Any idea how one of them got inside the house?"
Lar cleared his throat. "I may not have locked the back door," he admitted.
The soldier grimaced.
"He's a foreigner," Emmis pointed out.
"You aren't," the guardsman said. "You should have warned him!"
Emmis accepted the criticism silently.
"Were your attackers foreign?"
Emmis spread his hands. "I have no idea," he said. "They didn't say anything, so I didn't hear any accents, and they didn't dress any differently than we do. They could have been brought in, or they could have been hired here, I don't know."
The soldier cast a quick glance at Lar's velvet coat and elaborate hat, but did not comment Instead he asked, "You said you talked to the foreigner who hired them?"
"Well, I talked to a foreigner. She said it was one of the others, a Lumethan named Neyam, who did the actual hiring."
"Could you find either of them again? The woman you spoke to, or the one who did the hiring? Would you know them if you saw them?"
"Oh, I'd definitely recognize her. Neyam, maybe not – I only saw him once, and he had a hood up. But Annis the Merchant, the Ashthasan, absolutely, I'd know her if I saw her. We spoke at the Crooked Candle, in Shiphaven, north of the market; I don't know whether that's where she's staying." He frowned. "If she isn't there, I wouldn't know where to find them."
"How determined to you think these people are?"
Emmis turned up a palm. "I don't know," he said.
"How much money do they have?"
"I don't know that, either. Some. They paid me generously, but they dickered about it."
"So if this first attempt fails, do you think they'd try to hire a magician to finish the job?"
"Oh," Emmis said, feeling his guts twist.
"They might," Lar said. He and Emmis exchanged glances.
"Then you'll need to talk to a magician yourselves about some protective spells," the guardsman said.
"That would be reasonable," Lar agreed.
All three fell silent for the next few blocks, in fact none of them spoke again until they turned onto Through Street.
When they rounded the curve, though, Emmis said, "Oh."
Lar said something long and nasty-sounding in Semmat.
The guardsman grinned broadly. "Well, it's been awhile since I've seen a real torch-bearing mob!" he said.
It wasn't really much of a mob, Emmis thought. There were only a little more than a dozen people standing in the street in front of the yellow house, and only four or five of them had torches.
"In the name of Azrad VII, overlord of the city and triumvir of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, what's going on here?" the guardsman bellowed, striding forward. Lar and Emmis hastened to follow him.
A dozen voices replied at once as the entire mob surged toward him. The guardsman held up a hand for silence, then chose a man in the crowd. "You," he said. "What's going on?"
"We don't know!" the man answered. "Earlier today someone came running out the back of that house, and then a man with a sword came running out after him, and another man was at the front, and they all left the doors standing open and ran off. Someone got the landlord, because we couldn't find the tenants…"
At this point he was interrupted by several voices as various people pointed at Emmis and Lar and shouted, "Those two!" or "There they are!" or similar phrases.
"I'm the landlord," someone else said, stepping forward, and Emmis was relieved to see that it was their landlord, and not some further complication. "We thought one of my tenants might have been murdered, or kidnapped."
"We searched the house," the first speaker said, "but we didn't find anyone in there, or any blood or anything, so we talked it over and sent someone to fetch a guardsman from the Palace, and then we were waiting for you, and here you are."
"Except I didn't come from the Palace," the soldier said. "These two found me on Games Street." He turned and looked at the house.
The front door was still standing open. Emmis wondered how many of Lar's possessions had disappeared so far. His own, of course, were probably all gone, left on the floor of the Crooked Candle.
"That's the place?" the guardsman asked.
"Yes," Emmis said.
"Show me what happened."
Emmis nodded. He borrowed a torch from one of the neighbors, since of course no one had lit any candles, and led the soldier inside.
"I was right here when they came at me," he said, pointing. "I slammed the door behind me, and ducked, and the man's stick hit the wall…"
He held up the torch, illuminating a small gash in the plaster of the wall, right at head-height.
"Then I ran into him, and got up and ran out the back, and around through the alley, and then I went to find Lar."
The guard looked at the damaged plaster, then at the floor. He bent down and picked up a black wooden cylinder with a silver cap on one end; it was split lengthwise on one side, a narrow crack that was still fresh, judging by the color of the wood. "What's this?"
"That's off his walking stick," Emmis said. "It hid the blade on the end. It must have come off when it hit the wall."
"He didn't retrieve it? Sloppy."
Emmis turned up an empty palm.
Just then there were shouts from the street; Emmis and the guardsman turned and peered out the door.
Two more guards had just arrived, accompanying one of the neighbors, a woman Emmis vaguely recognized from the courtyard. Lar and the landlord were going to greet them.
"Well," the soldier from Games Street said. "We're all here now, I'd say. Shall we have everyone in for a cup of tea?"
Chapter Thirteen
It was almost midnight by the time the last question had been answered and the last visitor herded out the door. The three soldiers had all read Lar's credentials with interest, and shown him great respect thereafter. Lar had declined their offer to post a guard overnight, on the grounds that no one would be stupid enough to try again after all this fuss, but he had closed the shutters very firmly, and checked the locks on the doors very carefully. He had also unpacked his sword from the bottom of a trunk, and inspected it carefully before sheathing it and hanging the scabbard on his belt.