“Then he can wait until I have finished the tankard.”
“He is — he will have your skin off, master—”
“You are sure it is me he is waiting for?”
“Oh, yes. He was sure.”
“Who is he? What is he like? Tell me about him?”
I started to pull out a silver sinver. Her face went white. She drew back, trembling, terrified.
“No, no, master! No money! They are watching — they know what you are asking—”
She backed off, her hands wide, and then she ran away, her naked feet making soft shushing sounds on the sawdust. I glanced up under my eyebrows at the balcony. Up there any one of a hundred knot holes could hold a spying eyeball.
I shifted on the settle against the wall. A tiny sound, no more than the furtive sounds a woflo makes scratching in the wainscoting, made me look down.
A small slot had opened in the wall. A pair of scissors on extending tongs probed from the slot. They moved gently sideways toward me. Had I not moved, the fellow operating the tongs would have snipped away to get at my purse. As I had now vanished from his gaze the tongs drew back, the scissors vanished and the slot closed. I waited, intrigued.
Presently another slot opened close to me. The scissors probed out again, silently, ready to snip most patiently.
I picked up the half-f ale tankard.
No doubt the cramph had a whole array of tools he could fix to the tongs. A curved knife would slice away leather clothing. With all the noise of the taproom that usually created such a massive sound barrier, he could probably even use a drill to get through armor, and not be heard.
With a smooth motion I swiveled and slung the ale clean through the slot.
A splash, a yell of surprise, a series of choked squishing gulpings gave me a more general feeling of well-being. Petty — of course. But it was all a part of the rich tapestry of life — or, as this was Kregen, of death.
I bent to the slot and said in that fierce old biting way: “Thank Opaz it was only ale and not a length of steel.”
With that I stood up, hitched the blanket coat around me, and stalked off to the blackwood stairway.
Over my left shoulder I had arranged snugly a quiver of six terchicks. The terchick, the little throwing knife of the clansmen, is often called the Deldar, and a clansman can hurl them right or left-handed from the back of a galloping zorca and hit the chunkrah’s eye. Of course, the women of the Great Plains of Segesthes use the terchick with unsurpassed skill.
The drinkers in the area below watched with some curiosity as I climbed up. This Ball and Chain might be situated close to the walls of the Old City and the Gate of Skulls; I fancied the Aleygyn of the Stikitches, Nath Trerhagen, had packed the place with his men. Deep rivalries no doubt split the people of Drak’s City, as they do in most places, unfortunately, and Nath the Knife would have chosen the meeting place carefully. I went up and I was ready to leap aside, to draw and to go into action, or to fashion a smile and a Llahal and listen.
The third door opened onto a narrow corridor that led via a rain-swept open walkway to the next-door building.
I had not envisioned this.
Barty could watch The Ball and Chain to no avail.
I pressed on. I remained firmly convinced that the stikitches did not mean to kill me. All this rigmarole would not then have been necessary — I had dealt with assassins before.
Two men in tatty finery met me at the far door and I was able to duck in out of the rain. They wore three purple feathers, all curved the same way, ostentatiously pinned to the breasts of their tunics. They carried their rapiers loose in the scabbards. Their faces, dark and lowering, with strips of dark chin beard, were entirely unprepossessing; but they greeted me cheerfully enough, evidently assigned merely as guides.
“Laygon the Strigicaw?” I said.
“He is waiting, dom. This way.”
We went into the building and along dusty and unused passages to the far side. We descended a flight of stairs. The slope of the land here meant we were still one story above the street; but all the windows were covered with torn sacking.
Mineral oil lamps illuminated the dusty, half-wrecked room into which I was ushered. Houses were often left to fall down in the Old City, or knocked down. Rebuilding was on an entirely casual basis.
The air smelled musty. Dust hung in the beams of the lamps.
A table had been pulled across a corner and a tall-backed chair positioned before it. At the table sat three men and one woman. All wore steel masks. Their clothes were unremarkable, save for the badge of the three purple feathers.
My two guides indicated the chair and I sat down.
For a moment a silence ensued.
Then the woman said: “Llahal, Dray Prescot.”
I said: “I do not like stikitches. You have asked me here. I am to meet Nath the Knife. Is he here, hiding behind a mask?”
The man on the extreme left said in a voice like breaking iron: “I am here. But you will talk with Laygon the Strigicaw.”
“Which one is he?”
The man on the right said: “Here.” His voice sounded mellow, full of the rotundity of roast beef and old crusty port.
“Well, Laygon, speak up.”
“You are the Prince Majister of Vallia. The writ of Vondium and Vallia does not run in Drak’s City.”
“I have never cared much for laws that cannot be enforced. Spit out what you want. I am due at the Temple of Opaz the Nantifer two burs after midday.”
“We do not much go in for temples, here in the Old City,” said the woman. Her voice gasped just a little, as though she had difficulty in breathing. Maybe it was just the stale air. “And you had best keep a seemly tongue in your mouth—”
‘Tell me what you want, now, and stop this shilly-shallying.”
Nath the Knife nodded his head, and the steel mask caught the lamplight. All the masks were perfectly plain, and covered the whole face. I looked at the other parts of the bodies of these four, studying their hands, the way they held themselves, the angles of their heads.
‘Tell him, Koter Laygon.”
“The position is, Dray Prescot, the bokkertu has been signed and sealed upon you. You are accredited a dead man and due for the Ice Floes of Sicce.”
“I think twelve of you tried, and there were twelve holes in the canal. I, too, can write a fine bokkertu.” The word bokkertu, as you know, can mean any number of legal arrangements.
Laygon plunged on, and if he grew warm, I, for one, felt pleasure.
“I have taken out the assignment upon you. You are my kitchew. But—” He paused.
The chill menace of the situation was inescapable.
These men were assassins, dangerous, feral as leems. They would unhesitatingly kill — but they liked to get paid for their work.
Now Layton the Strigicaw said heavily: “Half the money was paid to me. So far I have not completed the assignment.” He paused again, as though expecting me to comment. Again I remained silent. “The irregularity is that the person hiring us is dead. We will not be paid the balance of our fee.”
I shifted back in my chair and leaned to the side a little, so I could get the exact position of the two guides fixed.
“That is nothing to me. Stikitches can be killed like anyone else.”
He went on, and again I detected the note of suppressed anger. “The Aleygyn is not pleased with the situation. The Stikitches of Vondium possess the highest possible reputation. Our honor is in question.”
“I will not ask you with whom this precious reputation is held in such great esteem.” I waved a casual hand. “Probably the rasts of the dunghills.”
They did not react. I give them credit for that, at least.
“You are a dead man, Prince Majister—”
I interrupted. “Ashti Melekhi is dead. Would you work for nothing?”
Nath the Knife, clearly a most important man here, letting Laygon do the talking because it was Laygon who had taken the contract but prepared to step in with all his authority, said harshly, bending the mask toward me: “We do not mention names.”
“You may not. But the fact remains. You are working for nothing.”
“Precisely. The offer is this: Pay us the balance of the fee and the contract is then closed. If you do not pay, we shall fulfill it ourselves.”
The instant intemperate indignation that flooded me had to be squashed. I took a breath. I said: “You have not mentioned the amount.”
“Ten thousand gold talens.”
I didn’t know whether to be impressed by the value put on my life or insulted.
“My life is worth more than ten thousand.”
“We abide by the legal contract. Pay us five thousand in gold and the contract is fulfilled and you live. Otherwise—”
I shifted on the chair again. It seemed to have a spongy feel to the legs, as though it was not firmly anchored to the floor. Probably it was a trick chair, with a trapdoor below. I’d have to be quick.
“I am not in the habit of paying gold to cramphs to save my life.”
“You can always start.”
This Nath the Knife was an intriguing fellow. He spoke evenly enough. He took no offense from my crude remarks. He wanted his money, or he would kill me.
“When do I pay?”
“At once.”
“I am due at the Temple of Opaz the Nantifer, as I told you—”
“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. . .
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.