A Victory for Kregen dp-22 Page 8

  Tyfar put a hand to his sword hilt.

  “Ignore the cutpurses,” I said, “and slit the throats of the cutthroats — first.”

  “What a place! I did not know such a place could exist.”

  “You mean because it is a hundred paces or so from refinement and civilization?” The stink didn’t bother me; Tyfar put a kerchief to his nose with his free hand. “No, Jak. I did not mean that.”

  But I fancied I knew what he did mean. He was a prince and had not rubbed shoulders with the poor of the world. Many of the shacks were simply moldering away. Those built of the soft mud, hardened by a kiss of fire, were sloughing their footings into the mud in which they were set. People moved about their business, and three-quarters of that, I’ll warrant, was highly illegal. I drew my cloak around that splendid mesh mail. Tyfar saw the movement.

  “Do you likewise, Tyfar. We are too brightly decked for this neighborhood. And keep your weather eye open.”

  “Where is this pestiferous hayloft?”

  A string of calsanys blundered past, their backs obscured by swaying lashings of straw. The Rapa leading them shuffled, head down, a wisp of straw sticking out from under the vulturine beak. Farther along a pair of hirvels drew a cart which lurched over the ruts, its fragile wheels appearing as if they would burst asunder at every forward plunge. Slaves were not too much in evidence. The people here were on the breadline, no doubt, and villainy kept their stomachs apart from their backbones. Khorundur was one of the countries of the Dawn Lands in which airboats were manufactured. These fliers were in nowise as splendid or efficient as those made in such secrecy by Hamal or Hyrklana; but they were functional, although small and oftentimes chancy of operation. No doubt the voller builders of Khorundur had not mastered all the secrets of the various ingredients contained in the silver boxes that uplifted and powered vollers.

  Six taverns stood cheek by jowl, so that when a drunk was thrown out of the first, he could work his way along the rest without having to walk too far. Beyond them a cluster of stores displayed dusty goods, and then a hostelry lifted two stories. A beam and ropes jutted from a double door in the gabled front.

  “There,” said Tyfar, and he would have pointed had I not cautioned him swiftly. “Yes, Jak, you are right. They are a cutthroat lot down here.”

  “And quiet. Too quiet. Something is going on.”

  He did not have the ruffianly experience of an old adventurer to give him the scent of mischief. The string of calsanys had gone, the cart vanished up a dolorous side alley. The people were taking themselves off the street. Although the surface was pockmarked with potholes and rutted, this street for these people would serve as their open-air gathering place. One would expect it to be filled with chaffering throngs, and also one would be certain that we two, our expensive cloaks betraying us even though the armor was concealed, would have been subjected to more than simple horseplay. In all probability as many attacks as there were paces would have been launched against us.

  So that meant just one thing.

  You have to have the nose for authority if you wish to stay alive in many of the more raffish and desperate places of Kregen.

  Zair knows, I’d kicked against authority enough in my time.

  “Just rest a moment in the shade of this awning, Tyfar.”

  “But we must press on! Barkindrar-”

  “Watch.”

  He glared at me. Something in my manner showed him I did not counsel thus without reason. More probably, although it pains me to report this, something about my manner must have told him I was in no mood to be argued with. He was a prince; but he subsided and we stood in the shadows, looking keenly out onto that doleful street.

  A neighborhood gets to know when trouble is on its way.

  In a tightly controlled voice, Tyfar said, “We should have gone straight away to the magistrates. Or even the king. His palace may be a moth-eaten dump; but he is a king and would have received me as a prince.”

  About to find a diplomatic way of reminding Tyfar of his country of origin, I closed my mouth. The tramp of iron-studded soles and the swish and clang of a party of soldiers kept us both stock still. I said in a voice that just carried, “This is the reason, Tyfar. Bide you still.”

  The soldiers were paktuns, clearly enough, a mixture of races, all clad in a semblance of uniform. They were a hard-bitten lot. At their head marched their Jiktar, and I can say I did not care for him at first glance. I would not like to serve as a paktun in his pastang. He had not brought his whole pastang, a company which might be eighty strong; but only three audos, three sections of eight men each. The iron-studded boots stomped the rutted road.

  The mercenaries approached from the direction we had come, and I said to Tyfar, “Quickly, now!

  Around the back of the stables and in the rear window. Sharp!”

  We ran between the wooden wall of the stables and the sagging mud wall of the nearest store. At the back a lumberyard showed with an adobe wall beyond. Thick trees cut off the view. At the back of the hostelry an aromatic yard piled with dung and straw and a few broken carts gave us access to the back of the building. There were a few calsanys in their stalls and a hirvel twitched his snout at us, his cup-shaped ears flicking forward, his tall round neck curving. The air hung unnaturally quiet, and the buzz of flies sounded like miniature ripsaws.

  “In this window — quick and quiet!”

  The sill was rotten and I shoved the wooden leaves open cautiously. The interior of the place stank. The floor was cumbered with shadow-shrouded impedimenta of the animal trade. Stalls lined both walls with a ladder beyond. Most of the stalls were empty. In the one nearest to the ladder a freymul, the poor man’s zorca, suddenly looked splendid as he tossed his head in a shaft of the suns’ light breaking in through a crack in the dilapidated walls. His fine chocolate-colored coat with those brave streaks of tromp beneath gleamed, and he showed his teeth and neighed.

  “That’s done it,” I said. “Up the ladder!”

  I sprang up the ladder four rungs at a time. If one of the treads snapped beneath my boots… But they held. I reached the landing at the top and faced a half-open door in which the light of a mineral-oil lamp glowed. Shadows moved.

  In the hayloft, Quienyin had said.

  Tyfar sprang up the ladder after me.

  Three paces took me to the door.

  My hand reached out to push the door open.

  Abruptly, it was snatched back.

  I stared into the oil lamp’s radiance. Hay piled up to the pitch of the roof. A woman stood facing me, the bow in her hand bent and the steel head of the arrow aimed directly at my breast. The man who had flung the door open appeared. It was nicely done. In a single instant the bow could loose and the arrow drive through me.

  “Hold still, dom,” said the man. He was apim, strongly built and with a brown beard, trimmed to a point. His eyes were dark and his face, big-boned, powerful, held a look of such savage anger I knew I would have to treat him with the utmost caution. “One move — one — and you’re spitted.”

  “Stand quite still,” said the woman.

  Her voice was mellifluous, very pleasing in other circumstances. She wore a russet tunic and russet trousers, cut tightly, and her slender waist was cinctured by a wide brown belt, and the gold buckle glittered in the light. As to her face, that lay in shadow; but I caught the impression of a firmness there, the shape conveying that sense of strength as her head half-turned to stare along the shaft. Her eyes fastened upon me, large and brown and luminous above the bar of shadow from her left arm.

  “We shall all have to move very-” I began.

  The man spat out a curse.

  “You speak when you are spoken to, dom, not before. You are very near death.”

  “Oh, aye,” I said. “And so are we all-”

  The man lifted his fist. His nostrils pinched in.

  “Kaldu!” The voice of command as the woman spoke smoked into the room. She was used to telling people what
to do and seeing them do it. “Quiet, Kaldu. No chance has brought these two horters here.”

  “They mean us mischief, my lady. Let me-”

  I said, “Stop clowning about, Kaldu. Listen to your mistress. And we must all get out of here. The watch is on the way. Where are — where is the injured man and his comrade?”

  The bow was held in a grip that did not tremble by so much as an eyelash. The bow was a big, compound reflex weapon that pulled enough to let a man know he held a bow; the girl gripped it and held the arrow in such a fashion that told me she knew exactly what she was doing. One thing was sure, this mysterious woman was a superb archer.

  “You know? How could you? The watch-?”

  “Come on, Kaldu,” I said. “Close your mouth. We must get out of here at once.”

  “I believe you,” the woman said. She lowered the bow.

  I heard Tyfar let out a shaky breath. He did not put as much trust as I did in the bowmanship of this girl.

  “Which way is the watch coming?”

  “In the direction of the Avenue of a Thousand-”

  “Very well. We must go over the roof to the bakery beyond. Kaldu, fetch Barkindrar. Tell Nath.” She swung to face Tyfar and me. “I do not know who you are — yet. But if you are traitors-”

  “Barkindrar and Nath are my men,” spoke up Tyfar. “Lady. I trust they are not badly hurt-”

  “They can run.” Tyfar flinched back.

  “Then,” I said, “for the sake of Havil the Green, let us all run!”

  The girl flashed me a look. “Havil,” she said. “You are Hamalese?”

  “Yes-” began Tyfar.

  I said, “Havil is known over all Havilfar. Now enough shilly-shallying.” Barkindrar and Nath appeared, helped along by Kaldu. He loomed over them. “Come on, you two famblys. We must run for it.”

  They started to speak and an enormous battering began on the door. The noise burst up from front and back of the building.

  “The watch!” said Kaldu. “We are too late!”

  “No!” flared the girl. She looked like an enraged zhantilla, fiery, incensed, splendid. “It’s never too late, until you’re dead!”

  Chapter eight

  An Arrow in the Swamp

  The bakery leaned against the stables for mutual support. They propped each other. The aroma of baking bread fought with the dungy whiffs from the yard at the back of the barn. As we prepared to run through the opposite door to the bakery, the woman looked at Barkindrar. The Brokelsh was clearly in pain; but in that sullen, mulish, Brokelsh way he refused to acknowledge the fact. The woman placed her hand on Barkindrar’s forehead.

  The hand was shapely, firm, clearly the hand of a woman and yet I knew that hand could accomplish warrior deeds. Her face relaxed for a betraying moment from her tough no-nonsense pose and revealed the compassion she felt. Then she swung back to us, hard and imperative.

  “They take their time. They will never see us past the bakery.”

  She wore a rapier and main gauche. The bow went up on her shoulder out of the way. Her brown hair, trimmed neatly and rather too short, shone bravely in the light of the suns. I looked past the jut of the stable roof as we went out. If some damned inquisitive mercenary took it into his head to move well out into the yard, he could not fail to see us. Once they had broken into the building they’d be up the stairs like a pack of werstings, all fangs and ravagings. The bakery was a single-story affair and we ought to scramble down easily enough. I judged there would be no need to set a rear guard, and Nod the Straw, out on the roof, would have warned us if a mercenary did stroll out too far.

  Nod the Straw, a wispy little fellow who worked in the stables, waited for us on the roof. His pop-eyes and thick-lipped mouth expressed no surprise that there were two more people suddenly appearing from the shelter of his barn. But he was savagely annoyed and kept brandishing a cut-down pitchfork.

  “I know who it was,” he raved. “That crop-eared, no-good kleesh of a Sorgan! He must have betrayed us — and they’ll give him a dozen stripes quicker’n a dozen silver sinvers.”

  “Never mind about who betrayed us now, Nod,” said the woman. “Help get Barkindrar down off your roof.”

  Tyfar said, “Do you all go on. I shall hold the roof and delay them-”

  The woman threw him a glance that I, for one, would not welcome. Although, by Krun, that self-same look that says what a great ninny you are has been thrown at me in my time.

  “Leave off, Nod,” said Kaldu. “I will take Barkindrar on my back.”

  “You great dermiflon!” jibed Nod the Straw. But he desisted in his efforts, and Kaldu took Barkindrar up and bore him swiftly down over the roof of the bakery. Nath the Shaft followed with Nod the Straw.

  “What are you waiting for?” said Tyfar. He drew his sword. “I can hold them off for long enough-”

  “You think, then,” said this woman in her imperious way, “that you are some kind of Jikai?”

  Tyfar’s color rose up into his cheeks.

  “I think I know where honor-”

  “Honor!” She laughed, and, even then, even in all that thumping racket from below, and the peril in which we stood, that laughter rose, pure and untrammeled, and exciting.

  “Go on, Tyfar,” I said. “There is time to get across into the shadows of the bakery.”

  “I shall not precede this — lady.”

  “Then,” I said, and if you are surprised you still do not understand that old reprobate, Dray Prescot,

  “then I shall go at once myself and leave you two to wrangle it out between you.”

  And, with that, I jumped down onto the adjoining roof and crabbed deuced swiftly across to follow the others as they clawed their way down a crumbling wall to the alley. I had no compunction. I knew Tyfar’s honor would make him follow me, wasting no more time. If the woman wished to be last, no doubt following some obscure honor code or discipline of her own, then we’d only hold things up by further wrangling.

  Tyfar breathed down my neck as I jumped for the alley.

  “That woman! Insufferable! Vosk-headed! Stubborn as a graint!”

  “Charming, though, you must agree.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I noticed her at once. Although I would not say charming — in fact, charming is the last word I’d use. Attractive, alluring, beautiful — yes, she’s all those. But who can put up with seductiveness cloaked with superciliousness?”

  I peered suspiciously at Tyfar. “Isn’t that San Blarnoi? Although, to be sure, I think the quote phrases it somewhat differently from ‘put up with’.”

  “San Blarnoi knew what he was talking about. That woman!”

  “Yes?” came that smooth mellifluous voice, sweet as honey and sharp as a rapier. “What woman would that be, horter?”

  Tyfar spun about. I was facing him, and he swung back to stare accusingly at me. His whole stance, his shining face, screamed out: “You might have warned me!”

  I said, “Why, some shrewish fishwife who landladied it at our last inn. Now, we had best hurry. Those paktuns looked as though they know their job. And if Sorgan did betray you they’ll know we have an injured man.”

  “Yes,” she said, instantly forgetting the pettiness of impending annoyance at Tyfar’s incautious words.

  “We must get on. Kaldu! Make for Horter Rathon’s.”

  “Quidang, my lady.”

  We all ran down the alley, and we ran away from Blue Vosk Street and headed for the thick stand of tall timber.

  “There is a section of bog in here, lady,” said Nod the Straw. “No one ventures here.” His eyes rolled.

  “I do not like to go in — but-”

  “Needs must when you come to the fluttrell’s vane, Nod.”

  “Aye, my lady.”

  “This Rathon,” I said, “to whom we are all running like a flock of ponshos. Did Sorgan know of him and his house?”

  “No,” said Kaldu.

  Tyfar wanted to bristle up at the incivility. But I restrai
ned him with a quiet word. How odd it is that a prince will stand for uncouthness when an arrow is aimed at his heart, and prickles up when it is not!

  Although, to give Tyfar his dues, he wasn’t the least afraid of arrows in the normal course of things. That a beautiful and well-formed woman had been the person aiming the shaft at us — that, I think, had thrown him off balance.

  The trees closed over us, a mixture of the beautiful as well as the ugly in Kregan trees. The path became distinctly moist. I looked back. Our footprints were perfectly legible to the eyes of a tracker.

  “It gets a lot stickier ahead,” said Nod. “Unfortunately.”

  “There is a boat,” said the woman. She spoke briskly. “We can cross the river without trouble, and lose ourselves in the Aracloins.[2]Horter Rathon will give us shelter.”

  “Why did you not go there first, instead of to Blue Vosk Street?”

  She gave me a withering look.

  “That was nearest. We did not know who Barkindrar and Nath were when the watch tried to take them up. When we realized they were Hamalese, of course, we stepped in.”

  “You are revolutionaries?”

  The moment I spoke I heard the fatuity of my question.

  She said, “Kaldu! Watch your step.”

  He did not answer but plunged on with Barkindrar slung over his back. The Bullet had taken a nasty cut along the leg. The wound was bound — and bound expertly, too, the handiwork as I guessed of this surprising woman.

  Along by the edge of the river where this boggy section was difficult to tell from river itself, we threaded along the narrow path. Nod the Straw led, and he was not at all happy. In any niksuth, any small marshy area, of Kregen you are likely to find uncooperative life. Teeth and fangs, spines and stings, they hop up out of the bog and seek to drag you down for a juicy dinner. Even in a city like Khorunlad. Aware of this delightful fact of Kregan bogs, I loosened my thraxter in the scabbard.