Whatever might be said, in a mur or two he’d be dead.
The angle of the aqueduct had taken me out farther into the center of the Lane. Directly below passed a cart loaded with sharp-looking objects under a tarpaulin, the edges creased and unfriendly looking. To jump down on that would invite a punctured hide and a snapped backbone. Further along swayed the palanquins with their colored awnings. I eyed them savagely. The largest one — of course. It had to be the biggest and best to take the weight and the velocity of my fall.
I ran along the edge of the brickwork, ducked out of the archway right over the palanquin below, and launched myself into space. As I jumped I saw the soldiers at last break ranks and advance on Barty and the assassins. Just before I revolved in the air, falling, I glimpsed the assassins running off, and Barty twisting in the grip of a Deldar.
Then, rotating, I came down with an ear-splitting crash on the striped awning. It ripped. I went on through trailing tatters of cloth. The blue and green striped material had broken my fall and I landed with a thump on the wooden bed of the palanquin. I spat out a chunk of the blue and green banded cloth, and a strip of the white striping between the colors caught in my teeth. I ripped it out furiously and dived for the cloth-of-gold curtains.
The three women in the palanquin stared at me, petrified.
I took in their appearance at a glance — two handmaidens and a great lady. She was half-veiled, and she looked lushly beautiful, and dominating, and her color was rising and she was getting all set to spit out a mouthful of invective. You couldn’t really blame her. Here she was, sitting quietly in her palanquin being taken along with all her people, and some hairy odoriferous blanket-coated oaf falls in from the sky.
I became aware of my obnoxious pong as the stink cut through the scents of the palanquin.
The Womoxes carrying the poles had yielded to the sudden extra weight; but one pole broke and the whole lot came to a shuddering crash, tip-tilted on a corner. The great lady was flung across the cloth-of-gold canopied space. She fell into my arms. I couldn’t move. Her dark, intense face wrinkled up, the whiteness of the skin emphasized by the kohled eyes and the artful patch of color in the cheeks. Her flared nostrils widened. Her mouth, hidden by the veil but its outline visible as the silver gauze pressed back, curved down.
“You stink!”
“Get off, lady, I am in a hurry—”
“You dare—”
Somehow the longsword had not done any damage to the occupants of the palanquin — yet. I tried to twist it around to make it safe. She was screaming invective at me now and I half-turned to shove her off, so that she saw me. Only then I realized the medium-sized brown beard had been ripped off somewhere along the way.
She saw my face.
“Oh,” she said.
“I am in a hurry, lady. Men are trying to kill me and I must—”
“Yes, you must run away. Well, let me sit up and you may run away — run to the Ice Floes of Sicce, and you will.”
“Mayhap I will,” I said.
She struggled to sit up against the slope of the palanquin. Her two handmaidens went on screaming. A soldier stuck his head in the opening of the cloth-of-gold curtains and saw me.
Instantly his rapier whipped in.
The longsword was still stuck somewhere down in among the cushions, the point jammed in the woodwork. I just hoped this great lady wouldn’t sit back too heavily.
“Keep your damned rapier out of my face!” I yelled. The guard swept the curtains aside and started to reach for me.
“Do not kill him, Rogor!” snapped the lady.
“Yes—” began this guard Hikdar, and I twisted my foot around and kicked him in the guts through the curtains. I got the sword free. The lady stared at me with those fine dark eyes filled with a blaze of contempt.
“Run — go on, run! That is all you are good for!”
The Hikdar was whooping in great draughts of air. I stood up and hit my head on the awning post and cursed and started to climb out. The lady suddenly laughed. She trilled silver malicious laughter. She pointed.
“Is that what you run from?”
Her guards had caught one of the weasely fellows and they dragged him, all a-yelling and a-squawking, up to the canted palanquin. He was in a frightful state. He screamed as they twisted his arm up his back and the knife dropped with a clatter unheard in the din. His thin face contorted with his terror, and spittle slobbered. He looked thin and frail and ridiculous as a would-be murderer, all the weasely deviltry washed away in his fear.
“That was one of them,” I said.
She laughed at me, hard, hating, hurtful laughter.
She did not hurt me, mind; but she would hurt Barty and wound him deeply, if he heard her.
“You carry a monstrous great sword and you run so hard you fall into my chair and ruin it — and
that
is what you run from, what so frightens you.”
“If you like,” I said. Barty? What had happened to him? I fretted, not giving this great lady much attention and, to be truthful, not much respect, either.
“Get out!” she screamed, suddenly letting her anger boil over. “You stink! You are an abomination! Get out! Get out!”
“I’m going as soon as I—” I started.
Then I saw Barty, bawling into the ears of a guard Hikdar and gesticulating, and so I knew he was safe. I own, I felt a great flood of relief, and let out a breath.
“Go on running,” spat the great lady. “There are a lot more rasts like this one for you to run from. Take your stupid great sword and clear off. You are not a real man. You are just a fake, an apology for a Jikai, a puffed up bag of vomit!
Run!”
The Black and Whites Make a Promise
The separate wing of the imperial palace in Vondium given over to the private apartments of the Prince and Princess, Majister and Majestrix, have been decorated with Delia’s faultless taste, and yet, as she would exclaim, flinging up her hands in mock despair, you could never get any life into the place. Still, this austere, frowning pile with all its fantastic traceries of balconies and colonnades, of spire and tower, of concealed grottoes and secret gardens, was where, for the moment, we were living. The villas belonging to the various estates in Vallia kept up in Vondium — those of Delphond and the Blue Mountains, and of Valka, Zamra and Veliadrin — were preferred by us. So I took a bath — a quick, scalding hot bath and not the Baths of the Nine — in the imperial bathroom and changed into the flummery of grand clothes demanded for the ceremony at the Temple of Opaz the Nantifer.
Truth to tell, I was heartily sick of all these endless ceremonies. Perhaps I have not stressed them enough in my narrative. Certainly, they bored me out of my skull. But I was the Prince Majister and the emperor my father-in-law still reigned and I was constrained to attend whenever I was in Vondium.
That seemed to me one perfectly good explanation for my frequent absences from the capital, quite apart from the periods spent in our estates.
“And she spat at you?”
“Well, my heart,” I said as I struggled into the swathing bands of a ghastly pink robe. “Almost. She was uncouth, if that is the word. Crude in a gentlelady.”
“And who was she?”
Delia smiled as one of her handmaids pulled up the long laypom-colored dress. We were never sticklers for the protocol that demanded a husband and wife dress in their own rooms miles apart. Mind you, I had always to keep my mind on my own clothes when Delia was thus engaged.
“Some great lady or other. She was not, I think, of Vallia, for she had violet eyes.”
Delia gave me a quick duck of the head, a fast look and then that graceful turn as she looked away and said: “Not of Vallia, as you say, my heart.”
Well, I imagine I know my Delia and so at the time I fancied she had more than an inkling who this bitchy great lady might be. Being Delia, and therefore a tease as well as the most gracious lady of two worlds, she forbore to tell me. And me, being me, I forbore to inquire.
“Hurry, my love,” said Delia, hauling her jeweled belt tight around that slender waist and buckling up the gold clasp. “We shall be late in two flicks of a leem’s tail.”
“Grab that mazilla,” I said to the palace servant loaned to us to take care of our garments. “The very largest, most ornate and ludicrous one in the whole wide world of Kregen, I do truly think.”
Each rank of nobility of Vallia has its corresponding rank of mazilla it may wear; the tallest and widest and grandest by the emperor, the next size by any kings of Vallia who might happen to be living at the time, then the princes, the kovs, the vads and trylons, and so on through the Stroms down to the ordinary haughty private koter. The koter — gentleman is only an approximation to the ramifications of meaning to koter — wears a neat curved mazilla, rather like a tall collar, of a dark color, usually a distinguished black, relieved only by braiding of his allegiance. The Koters of Vallia are proud of their neat trim mazillas. As I squirmed into the enormous magnificence of the monstrosity I had chosen to wear, I wondered if the game was worth the candle. Might the insult not better be conveyed by wearing a koter’s mazilla in lustrous black velvet?
No time to worry over that now. We buckled on our weapons, slung our scarlet and golden cloaks on the zhantil-bosses, gave a last quick look in the mirrors, and then hared off down the marble staircases and along the rug-strewn corridors to the zorcas we would ride to the Temple of Opaz the Nantifer.
Shadow gave a curve of his head and a whinny to show he was pleased to see me. He was truly a magnificent animal and I was glad afresh each time I bestrode his back that I’d been able to bring him with me all the way from Ba-Domek.
Delia’s zorca, a fine chestnut, had a somewhat small spiral horn in the center of her forehead; but she was a fine mare and Delia was fond of her Firerose.
The service of propitiation to Opaz, the spirit manifest in the Invisible Twins, passed. I will not dull your senses with a detailed description, for all that, of the many religions and creeds of Kregen, that of Opaz shines the truest. I swear allegiance to Zair, as you know, and to Djan; but these two lack something of the essential spiritual transcendence of Opaz; Zair and Djan — particularly Djan — are Warrior Gods. In Opaz lies a very great part of the future well-being of Kregen.
So I will pass on to the moment when Delia and I walked back to our zorcas where they had been tethered with many others and looked after by hostlers employed by the Temple. My usual traffic with the Racters was so minimal as to be nonexistent; public functions provided them with an opportunity to speak with me. I turned as Strom Luthien approached, very seemly to all outward appearances, his hat being in his hand and his head slightly inclined.
Yet I knew he, at least one Racter, would be only too ready to slip a blade between my ribs and then call for assistance too late. Luthien was one of those nobles without an estate, his Stromnate being gambled away, probably, lost at the Jikaida board. Now he worked for the Racters as a messenger and agent.
He smiled at me under his moustache, a sleek, knowing, and yet faintly patronizing smile. My monstrosity of a brown beard bristled up, almost as though it had been grown by me instead of being hooked on my ears. I looked at him as he relayed his information. Those Racters with whom I had done business in Natyzha Famphreon’s hothouse pleasure gardens wished to converse with me again.
“For, prince,” said Strom Luthien, “much was agreed and yet little accomplished.”
I did not make a scathing remark to the effect that I did not discuss details with errand boys. I said: “The Black Feathers were routed. Where?”
“The same place—”
“No. I remember the chavonths. And, and you will, convey my regards to Kov Nath Famphreon.”
He kept his smile going famously. “Then where?”
“The Sea Barynth Hooked. There is an upper room. Hire it from the landlord. In five burs time.”
I turned away almost before I’d finished speaking, and the springy feathers of the mazilla swished. What Strom Luthien made of my hauteur and my bad manners I didn’t give a damn. I had to lay the foundations here for subsequent action. Delia, though, favored me with a look that was so old-fashioned as to be positively antediluvian.
We mounted up and shook the reins. Of course we drew disapproving glances from the nobles. The Prince and Princess of Vallia, riding alone, without a proper escort — it was shocking. It was also liberating.
“And what have those infamous Racters to talk to you about, husband?”
“More intrigues to kill your father, wife.”
Her face — gorgeous, radiant — drew down, and I felt a pain at her look of sudden apprehension. She spoke quickly.
“You jest, my heart — but take care! There are spies everywhere — and the Racters are powerful. We all know they but bide their time. When they strike—”
“I firmly believe they will attempt to remain true to their own beliefs. They will obey the letter of the law when they chance their collective arms and try to oust your father. They will not order his assassination — not directly. What we have to fear is some lesser light — like Strom Luthien, for instance — taking the law into his own hands. We have come through great perils and your father still lives.” I scratched my nose. “Anyway, where was he in the Temple? It is not like him to miss a religious ceremony that brings political acclaim with it.”
Delia shook back her hair and the lustrous brown ripples flowed with those glorious chestnut tints glinting in the mingled rays of the suns.
“His Grand Chamberlain excused him. An affair of state that could not wait upon even this ceremony. You did not, I may add, stand in very well for him.”
“I would not have done so had he asked. Not when he is in the city. By Zair! All this flummery is his job as the emperor.”
She looked sidelong at me as the zorcas paced along the stone-flagged way, past the fronts of other temples, and buildings housing the University of Vondium Ghat, with the passersby jostling along and some turning to stare at us. All the time as we rode and talked I kept that old sailorman’s weather eye open. I fancied the Stikitches of Vondium would accept as closed the contract Ashti Melekhi had put out on me; but if they had not done so then I would have to convince them all over again.