“Then immediately your kow-towing is done."
With genuine curiosity, I said: “It is clear you know who I am, for your bowman delivered the message correctly. Yet I think perhaps you do not know me."
This trembled on the brink of boasting; but I am who I am, Zair forgive me, and I was intrigued.
“We know your reputation is very high in certain quarters,” said the woman. She leaned forward and I caught the lamplight's sparkle from her eyes in the eye-slots of the mask. “But we have certain information that this great reputation is a sham, a bolstered creation because you are the Prince Majister. Of course, the most puissant prince of Vallia must be a great warrior, a High Jikai, for anything less would demean the empire."
“It's a theory,” I said.
“So you will pay five thousand gold talens and you may live. It is settled."
I pondered. It seemed clear they believed the story. They would never have taken out the contract to kill me if they did not. I have amassed a certain unsavory reputation, as you know, and there were places on Kregen where no one—not even a raving idiot—would even contemplate trying to kill me. But, here in Vondium, the capital of the Vallian Empire, I was not in one of those places.
The four people at the table believed this business was settled. They began to stir, ready to take their leave. The two guides shuffled their feet and stepped back. I put my feet under me, ready for the leap, and looked across the table.
“Settled? Why, you onkers, I wouldn't pay you a single clipped toc!"
The four figures stiffened as though I'd jammed a polearm up each one of them. These four formed the High Council of the Assassins of Vondium. Their powers were frighteningly great. For that single betraying heartbeat they could not believe they had heard aright.
The woman let out a gasp and leaned forward on her forearm and her hand splayed against me. Jewels flashed. Nath the Knife put a hand to her hand, and restrained her. Laygon the Strigicaw started to curse, his hand reaching to his belt. The fourth man, who had not spoken, yet remained silent.
It struck me then that these assassins couldn't see the funny side of all this. They didn't think it was funny. To me, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, it was hilarious.
What my ferocious Djangs would say of it—their King of Djanduin solemnly being asked to pay someone for being kind enough not to kill him! They would bellow their mirth!
In the instant of the ensuing silence, when everyone in the musty room remained fixed, static, enwrapped with their own personal turmoil of emotions, the heavy beating of rain pelted against the closed windows.
The mineral oil lamps nickered.
Then, and only then, speaking in that iron voice, Nath the Knife said: “You will pay. You will pay—or you are dead."
“Not,” I said, “a single clipped toc."
As the instant action followed I commented to myself that my rhetoric was entirely false. A toc is a tiny coin, one sixth of an ob, and who was going to bother to clip that?
Then the chair groaned and grated and flapped back into a black and cavernous hole and I spring-heeled up and onto the floor, and naked steel flashed in the lamplights.
This, then, was more like it...
* * *
Five
I Drop in on a Great Lady
The trick chair vanished with an almighty crash into the black maw gaping in the floor like the mouth of a chank. The two guides, flustered by my non-disappearance, flicked out their rapiers. They were stikitches and therefore expert with weapons. They rushed on me, silently, determined to cut themselves a little of Laygon's fee.
My feet hit the wooden floor and dust puffed up. The whole floor groaned; the place was as rotten as the worm-eaten hull of the Swordship Gull-i-mo.
“Cut him down!” grated that iron voice. ‘"He refuses an accommodation in honor, now he must pay the penalty."
My own rapier ripped out—a nice blade but not a top-quality brand in its decorations, serviceable, well-used, the kind of rapier a fellow might wear in Drak's City—and the steel jangled and slid as the blades crossed.
The two assassins brought their four blades into play at once. I ducked and weaved and fended them off with the rapier alone. I did not draw the matching main gauche.
Before Barty and I had ventured in here I had insisted that he wear one of the superb mesh-steel shirts Delia and I owned. We kept them particularly well-cared for, on formers, well-oiled, safe in the armory of our Valkan villa in Vondium. One of those shirts cost more than even a relatively well-paid working man could earn in his entire lifetime.
The blades clashed and the lamplight glinted from the steel.
I vaulted back, slashed away, foined, and kept one eye on the four chief assassins at the table. They were the real danger.
One of the guides thought to play it clever and slid in below his fellow. His dark face glared up at me. He tried to hold his left-hand dagger up so as to parry any downward cut I might make, and thrust me through with his rapier. At the same time his companion pressed in strongly, seeking to pin me.
I leaped, thrust, landing a high hit along a shoulder above any armor they might be wearing under their drab tunics, brought a yell of agony, withdrew, and so kicked the clever one in the nose as I went by. His blade hissed past. He sprawled back, his nose a crimson flower, spraying blood.
I hit them both with the hilt—left and right, one two—and sprang away from the spot. A dagger whistled through the air where I had been standing.
The two guides sprawled on the floor. The woman still stood in the pose of throwing as I whirled to face the table in the corner.
One of the stikitches had gone. A door was just closing in the left-hand angle of the walls.
He was the silent one. Laygon and Nath had drawn their blades. They stood, clearly expecting the woman's dagger cast to finish me. Now I waggled my rapier at them admonishingly.
“I do not wish to kill any of you. Though, Opaz knows why not, for you are all ripe to die. But I am willing to spare you and so save future trouble."
I know. I know. That was weak. But I had work to do in Vallia and I didn't want a pack of rascally stikitches on my neck, interfering. If they could be convinced they had no future trying to assassinate me, then I would have achieved a great deal.
That was the new Dray Prescot talking, of course...
“You will die, here and now.” The iron voice of Nath the Knife held not a single note of hesitation. Inflexible, he could not understand why what he wished had not already occurred.
A mocking thought occurred to me.
The two men, Nath and Laygon, rounded each end of the table to get at me. They were quite clearly hyr stikitches, top men, superb with weapons. Killing was their trade and they would have made of it an art.
“If I have to slay you, I will,” I said. “But think. If you kill me, here and now, you will never have the chance of another client. No one else will offer you gold for my death."
As I say, I mocked them.
They did not reply but bore on.
The woman was the danger, now. She'd have another dagger or three stuffed down her bodice. I'd have to skip and leap and against these two my attention was likely to be fully engaged. Time for Remberee...
The window, probably...
It would be nonproductive to attempt to return across the rain-swept walkway to The Ball and Chain. The door through which Silent Sam or Tongueless Tom had disappeared would open to a trick lock, and there wouldn't be time. So it would have to be the window.
The woman came back to life. Her hand raked out. Steel glinted.
My left hand flicked up to my neck, the fingers gripped, twisted, withdrew and the terchick flew.
Like a homing bee it buzzed clean into the woman's upper right arm. She let out a hoarse gasp, never a scream, and staggered. The dagger fell from her nerveless fingers.
“I would crave your pardon, lady,” I said. “If you were not a stikitche. As you are, you may
rot in a Herrelldrin Hell for my talens."
Then the two men were on me and I ripped out the left-hand dagger and we set to.
Even as the blades crossed a thought so shocking occurred to me that I faltered, and stamped back, and then backpedaled most rapidly around the room aiming for the window.
What an onker I was!
These men believed I was a warrior of the imagination, a figment of the Vallian Empire's publicity machine. They had seen me enter the tavern, no doubt of that, and they took me at face value. The woman had been devastatingly contemptuous. And here I was, at last beginning to warm up, freed from talk and intrigue and into the business of bashing skulls, and taking that evil joy from it that sometimes overcomes me—to my shame. But—but! If they realized I could handle a sword that would make life far more hazardous in the future. And it was to the future that all my efforts had been directed.
All this talk, and inanity, and inaction—all had been designed to give me breathing space in Vallia. I did not wish to take on the work I had to do with a gang of cutthroat stikitches dogging my heels all the time.
If I slew all these, there would be more...
The very correctness of my estimation of the situation was borne out as Nath and Laygon charged on.
“It is true!” bellowed Laygon in his rich voice. “We had a report from our spies. The twelve who were slain and of whom you boast, you rast, were killed by your friends. You did not even draw your blade."
That was true.
“Stand and die like a man,” grated Nath the Knife, and started to work his way around to my back.
“I have had luck with the knife,” I said. I ran backwards, casting a single quick look to see where I was going, aiming for the sacking-covered window. “But you are hyr stikitches—good at your foul work. But, you cramphs, you will not get my gold."
I was at the window.
I spun about, bracing myself.
“Nor my hide!"
And with a single leem-leap I went head-first through the window.
All this idle chatter as I fought—I was really lapsing into some fairy-tale layabout, all silks and graces, quite unlike the hard and vicious and totally practical fighting man I am...
Rain lashed at me as I fell. I went head over heels. I had thought to land on my feet, and back, rolling, and so come up ready to fight.
Instead as I sailed from the window I turned over and fell splat into the back of an overfilled dung cart.
Muck pulsed up around me. The stink sizzled. I scrabbled around in heaving nausea, sloshing about in the odoriferous and sticky collections of a hundred cesspits and stables. Shades of Seg and his dungy straw!
I flailed my arms and heard the squishings and squelchings.
The man on the cart yelled as the brown spray hit him.
I got a knee onto the rotten wood of the cart and heaved up.
Above my head three faces peered out of the shredded sacking. The woman's face was, like them all, hidden by the steel mask; but I fancied she was whiter than usual. I hoped so. The cart lurched and I managed to slide off the back.
Nath let out a yell.
“Seize him up! Tally ho! Stikitches! Slay him!"
The rain slicked across the cobbles. The smell rose despite the rain. The cart lumbered off. Men and women appeared in the shadowed doorways of the street. I was around the corner from the front entrance of The Ball and Chain, and if I went that way Barty would come prancing out of the door of The Yellow Rose ready to fight and ready to be chopped.
So I ran the other way and, by all the confounded imps of Sicce, here came Barty, red-faced, bellowing, running after me with his rapier naked in his fist. By Zim-Zair! I groaned. Now we're in for it!
“I am with you pri—Jak!"
“Well, stay with me!"
The three steel masks vanished from the window. A few men pushed out into the rain. In a few murs we'd be surrounded. Once the hue and cry was up we'd have all kinds of rascals out for a bit of fun and bashing running after us besides the assassins.
“This way, Barty. And put that damned sword away! Run!"
We pelted off through the rain heading away from the Gate of Skulls, along the side street parallel to the walls. The walls of the Old City of Vondium are mostly noticeable by their great age and their state of disrepair. But, for all that, they demarcate a very real line, a barrier between the Old and the New.
People stared after us. The rain was a blessing in one way, in that it had driven a considerable number of idlers into shelter and so we had a pretty clear run. But, in the other way, and a worse way, too, it meant there were far fewer crowds in which to become lost. So—we ran.
I, Dray Prescot, ran.
I told myself that I ran because of Barty. I did not want him killed. I had never yet met my daughter Dayra to talk to her and I did not want our first meeting to be shadowed by the death of her fine young man who ran puffing and red-faced at my side. But Barty was young and tough and filled with ideas of chivalry and valor.
“Let us turn on them and rend them!” he panted out.
“Run."
We cut along the first cross street aiming to get back to the walls and find a loophole out. I had no real idea of the geography of Drak's City—I doubt if anyone had much idea of that crawling maze of streets and alleys and hidden courts as an entirety—and so could do no more than run and follow my nose.
It would be nice if Ashti and her brother Naghan turned up and out of gratitude for the silver sinvers guided us to safety. But, again, that was out of fairy books.
The reality came as a dozen men sprang from an alleyway and brandishing long-knives and cudgels and a sword or two came blustering down on us.
Very carefully I gave my palms a good wipe down the old blanket coat—on the inside. The muck fouled me abominably. But I needed fists that would not slip on hilts for the work that promised. As though Five-handed Eos-Bakchi decided it was time to smile—just a little—upon me, I spotted an abandoned orange-like fruit called a rosha lying in the water-streaming gutter. A single twist ripped it into half and I smeared the tacky juice over my palms and fingers. That would help to give a good grip.
It smelled a little better than I did, too. “We cut through them in one go and keep running,” I told Barty.
When they hit us I did just that. I used the hilt a good deal, for I had no wish to kill these fellows. One or two blades flickered around my ears; but with a bash and a whump or two I was through. I poised to run on. I was through—but not so Barty.
He pranced. He took up the stance. His rapier leaned into a perfect line. He foined. He was thoroughly enjoying himself. Like a student fresh from the salle he handled himself with all the perfection of a star pupil. I sighed.
Many a time have I seen these fine young men fresh from sword-training go into rough and brutal action. If they live they learn and then stand a better chance. But all the universities in two worlds don't teach what a man must know to keep a knife from his guts, a knee out of his groin, a flung chain from around his neck.
They'd have had Barty—had him for breakfast and spat out the pips.
Perfect in poise and lunge and parry, holding himself in the correct rapier-fighting position, he would have been easy meat for them. He was lucky—that I own—when a flung cudgel merely brushed past his brown hair. But he couldn't last.
So I went bashing back most evilly, with a knee here, and a clutch at a raggedy coat here and a jerk and a chunk of the hilt, and a bending-forward so that the attacker went sailing up over me, to be kicked heartily as he hit the ground.
No, if you want to stay alive on many spots of Kregen you do no good trying to fence by the book.
A stout-armed fellow with a kutcherer tried to stab the spiked back of the knife into my eye, and I weaved and kicked him between wind and water, and ducked a cudgel from his mate and elbowed his Adam's apple. My own rapier and main gauche flew this way and that parrying blows and thrusts. I jumped about a fair bit. I got up to
Barty and put my foot into the rear end of the man who was going to slip a long knife into Barty's exposed back and kicked him end-over-end. I had to beat away another kutcherer, careful of that wicked tooth of metal.
Barty had allowed a ruffian to get inside his guard, and with his rapier pointing at the rain-filled skies was dancing around as though the two of them waltzed, neither able to step back to take a slash at the other.
“Barty,” I said, in what I considered a most understanding voice. But Barty jumped, anyway. “Let us get on."
I stuck the main gauche back into my belt, ignoring the scabbard, took the fellow clasping Barty by the ear, ducked a cudgel blow from somewhere, and ran him across the street. He tried to emulate a swifter and rammed head-on into a moldy wall.
I grabbed Barty.
“And this time, young man, do not stop running!"
We took off. They followed for a bit; but I caught a hurtling cudgel out of the air and threw it back. The man who had flung it dropped as though poleaxed. After that the rest of them more or less gave up the pursuit.
But there were others, far more ruthless, who took it up as we reached the walls.
And, as I saw, two thin, furtive, weasel-like fellows remained dogging our footsteps as we ran up to the wall and looked about for the nearest way through or over or under.
The assassins had gathered their strength. Now the mob of men who flowed around a buttress meant to do for us finally.
I took a single look at them and hauled Barty off. We ran fleetly along the wall, dodging refuse, leaping covered stalls, almost treading on a family sheltering under an old tarpaulin. The rain washed away a deal of the muck and stinks; but enough remained for me with my odoriferous clothes to feel at home.
A splendidly orchestrated hullabaloo now racketed away at our heels. Barty kept on laughing. I own the situation amused me; but I am notorious for that kind of perverse behavior and I felt some surprise—pleased surprise, I hasten to add—that Dayra seemed to have found herself a young man of exceptional promise. So we ran along the wall and a gang of kids pelted us with rotten cabbages, green shredding bundles falling through the rain. We ducked into a house built into the wall and leaped over an old fellow who snored in a wicker hooded chair and so rollicked up the blackwood stairs. The upper rooms were filled with all kinds of trash and bric-a-brac indicating the storage places for the junk merchants who thrived on human stupidity and cupidity. Their ruffianly agents scoured around picking up antiques which were then sold at inflated prices to the wealthy of Vondium. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world.
Captive Scorpio [Dray Prescot #17] Page 7
