This was no business of mine.
No business whatsoever. The best thing to do was simply to step back around the corner and then walk off. The Rapa cutpurse had long since vanished and among the throngs there was now no chance of finding him.
Tiri’s purse must be consigned along with many another votive offering to the greater glory of Diproo the Nimble Fingered.
So I stepped back around the corner into the slanting shadows where Zim and Genodras, all flushed crimson and deep emerald light upon the opposite buildings, pooled darkness in doorways and windows. The ferociously angry lad rounded the corner and hurled headlong down on me.
Beyond the jut of the building and for the moment out of sight the hue and cry howled on making an unholy racket. The boy staggered. The rapier slash must be paining him now and his head must be ringing where he’d clouted his skull against the hard wood of the barrow. The muck coating his legs plastered the blood into a paste so that he did not leave a betraying trail of blood drops.
Sink me! I said to myself in vast annoyance. By the Black Chunkrah! No business of mine or not, this despicable frame up and the ugly pursuit smelled to the highest heaven or the lowest hell of Kregen.
Like a wrestler catching his opponent bouncing from the ropes, I stuck out my arm and clothes lined him in.
He came reeling in like a shining sliptinger hooked from the torrent. I swiveled with his momentum like a weathervane and bundled him into the slot of darkness and turned about and pressed my back against him in the cleft of shadow.
“Stand still, lad!” I snarled. “Make not a sound if you value your life.”
They were lines from a famous play he’d probably never heard of let alone seen, and melodramatically colored though they were, they fitted this tempestuous situation. He made a single effort to wriggle out and run off and I shoved back hard and growled: “Stay still, you fambly. The damned Kataki’s on his evil way.” His slight form lurched against me and then he stilled, panting softly.
The shouting pack led by the Kataki guard stormed into view.
Their blood was up. There was a thief to be caught. This was a hunt, they had the scent and they were out for the kill.
Innocence before guilt had absolutely no part in their thought processes. The Kataki stared hotly down the street where people were turning to look enquiringly for the source of all this hubbub. To my great satisfaction the Whiptail saw no sight of his quarry. He hauled up opposite me and the crowd piled on abaft. He saw me, leaning negligently against the wall. His eyes squinted.
“Where did he go?” he rapped out in that ugly Kataki way.
“Who?” I said, quite pleasantly, considering the circumstances. “Oh, you mean the lad running.” I gave a casual gesture with a languid hand. “He dodged down the next alley I think.”
“By Chezra-Gon-Kranak! I’ll jikaider the blintz!” He gave me a hard stare. Then: “What d’ye mean, you think?”
I returned that hard stare with interest. Some spark of that evil expression folk call the Dray Prescot Devil Look must have flashed into my face for his dark brows drew down and he sucked in a sudden quick breath between his snaggly teeth. I spoke levelly.
“What I said.” My voice hardened. “Why?”
He got the message all right. If he hadn’t been in hot pursuit he’d have loved to have taken up the challenge. As it was he simply swung away and started running off towards the next alley with the mob following him all a-yelling and a-waving of fists and daggers. The rout caterwauled down the next alleyway.
A voice in my ear said: “What in the sweet name of the Lady Balsitha is going on, Drajak?” The voice was light and mellifluous and tart, oh, yes, by Zair, very tart.
“Your purse is stowed away in the bronze-bound chest of Diproo the Nimble Fingered, Tiri,” I said, without turning around. “I lost the Rapa. I found a lad who needs our assistance.” Then I turned to face her.
At that moment an Aephar woman walked past with her daughter, both of them incredibly beautiful as Aephar women are. They saw the filthy and blood-smeared boy as he emerged from the shadows. The beauty of their faces changed only in a subtle fashion to express pity. Their smoothly undulating walk did not falter. The Aephar women went on around the corner into the bedlam of the market.
Tiri and I exchanged glances. Beauty of outward form is not the only beauty possessed by Aephar ladies.
With an eel like squirm and a sudden dart the lad tried to run off. That, by Krun, was a perfectly natural reaction. A fist in his collar hauled him up.
“Whoa, lad. You’re safe now. And the muck you have in that wound must be attended to.”
“Lemme go!” He spat it out, wriggling and squirming. His injured leg jarred up as he tried to break free and scamper off. His face, already twisted in the anger suffusing him, contorted with the sudden stab of pain. This sobered him. Panting only a little he ripped out: “I know why you saved me. Slaver!”
“Oh, no!” broke in Tiri. “You do us an injustice.”
He sagged in my grip. “Not slavers? You really saved me? Then may Mother Saphira of the Gutters bless you with my thanks. But I must go back—”
“You’re going nowhere my feller me lad until that leg is seen to.”
At least he had spoken his thanks with a courtesy not often found in the stews. He relaxed even more in my grasp so that I was forewarned. With an abrupt and defiant leap he tried suddenly to break away as my attention and hold on him, as he supposed, slackened.
Even as I halted that last desperate surge, Tiri took his arm.
“Best come along with us. We’ll soon have that leg fixed.”
Do not ask why I thus persisted in the attempt to aid this young lad. Perhaps it was the cut of his jib, perhaps the injustice he had suffered. Opaz knew, hadn’t I been just such a youngster harshly treated by an insensitive world? Even though that world was four hundred light years away from Kregen. He wore sandal-like shoes, it is true, where I had gone barefooted. The lad himself settled the argument. Like a sack of flour dumped down into the bakery he slumped and would have fallen but for our supporting holds. After that it was a mere matter of swathing my shamlak as a cloak over him and assisting him along. We went the other way avoiding any further meetings with the unpleasant Whiptail and the mob.
Having said that I realize the tautology. Who ever knew a pleasant Kataki? Well, perhaps I had, once, far away in the Eye of the World in Turismond.
I looked at my two companions. They were of an age. Tiri had reacted in the way I had come to expect of her in our relatively short acquaintance after she had first flung a jeweled dagger at my head. Her fair hair was neatly combed back and gleamed golden. As a temple dancer she walked with the grace of an Aephar girl, her lithe whipcord tough body rounded and beautifully graceful. Her bright face with that determined little jut of chin would do the business for many and many a poor love-besotted oaf under the Suns of Scorpio. Oh, yes, a most wonderful young madam full of high spirits and a bubbling aliveness that enchanted and a tongue as sharp as a rapier. She danced to the greater glory of Cymbaro the Just and of that religion I had formed a higher opinion than many upon the face of Kregen.
Then a thought occurred to me that made my old beakhead of a face scowl and then crease into a grimace that could have been mistaken for a smile.
“Your guts paining you, Drajak?” Oh, how sweet the words!
“I was just thinking what our comrade Fweygo will say when we report we lost your purse to a—”
She tossed that imperious little head. “As a Kildoi, Fweygo will surmise — aloud — how we could be so easily gulled and where was the Watch. They believe in law and order.”
“Sometimes.” I thought of Mefto the Kazzur...
What Tiri didn’t know was that Fweygo and I were kregoinyes sent to Tolindrin to protect the numim twins. She thought we worked for Princess Nandisha who employed the numim twins’ parents to care for her and for her twins, lady Nisha and lord Byrom. The intrigues fomented by the death of the king and the appointment of his successor had not been resolved. Rather, they had grown worse and would become diabolically more troublesome in the immediate future.
Right in the middle of it all, for our sins, stood Fweygo and I.
We paid the few coppers for our fare in the cable car from Barter Hill. I had heard the place referred to as the Hill of Dancing Ghosts but I had not pursued the question as to why. We reached Nandisha’s palace without incident and the moment we were inside, here came Fweygo, clad in armor and wearing swords, a most sullen annoyed Kildoi expression on his handsome Kildoi face.
His tail hand, I saw, grasped a dagger of which he was particularly fond. A great deal of shouting and screaming echoed from further inside the palace.
“What—?” began Tiri.
“The young prince, lord Byrom. He is missing. It is certain sure he has been kidnapped.”
Instantly I saw why my comrade was so annoyed. Our task, given to us by the Star Lords, was to protect the numim twins. Now, though, we would have to divert all our efforts into rescuing the little lord for whose mother, nominally, we worked.
“The princess?” Tiri showed her concern.
“Badly shaken and upset; but her people are with her. She is resting.” A lion roar battered around our ears. Ranaj, the powerful father of the numim twins was girt for battle like Fweygo, and his energy blazed. “You are ready? Don’t stand gawping, Drajak. What a hulu! Come on, and you, Fweygo. They’ve taken the prince to the Clipped Rhok. A den of ancient evil. Come on! Come on!”
Perforce, willy-nilly, Star Lords or no, we were hustled out to do the duty we owed Princess Nandisha and her son.
“Tiri!” I yelled back over my shoulder. “Look out for our smelly young friend.”
“Yes. You — I hope the young prince is — all right.”
There was no point in recovering my shamlak, that had already pinched in the nostrils of my friends. There was just time to grab a replacement and then we all hurried out and down the steps from Nandisha’s palace. People in the normal course of the day do not walk about clad in full plate armor and carrying an arsenal of weapons; when they do so other folk know they are engaged on urgent business of a lethal kind. All I had was the new shamlak — a tasteful mid-blue in color — and my rapier and main gauche, with the heavy knife over my right hip. Fweygo, Ranaj and the bunch of fighting men from Princess Nandisha’s guard were armored and armed — I assure you — up to the eyebrows rather than merely to the teeth.
The Clipped Rhok, a most unsavory hostelry, was situated on the Hill of Lurking Shadows and we drew only cursory glances of enquiry as we took the necessary cable cars to reach our destination.
Fweygo filled me in on the details of what had happened and, as is often the case in these disasters, simple human error was to blame.
One guard late, another feeling unwell, the prince with just a single guardian, the sudden rush of black-clad forms, one dead guard and the result — here we were hot on the rescue trail.
Fweygo nodded towards one youthful guard running with us.
“At least Sammle the Erkanstater kept his head. He was too late to intervene. He followed the kidnappers, saw where they went, and rushed back to report to Ranaj.”
“Good for him.”
Lurking Shadows turned out to be an apt description of the hill. The slanting rays of Zim and Genodras, here in Balintol called Mabal and Matol, seemed only to draw deep crimson and emerald shadows into the narrow and winding streets. Buildings leaned over us. No-one offered to stop us, an armed and purposeful body of men; had that happened I would not have been surprised.
The impression of these mean streets drove out the mood of farce that had been strong with me since the episode with the young lad despite the underlying seriousness of it all. The kidnap of the prince had merely served to add to that unreal feeling of comicality. Now, the chase was serious, the stakes high — and both Fweygo and I expected that at any moment the Everoinye would reach down and pluck us aloft and so hurl us down to where we should be — guarding the numim twins.
Ranaj didn’t intend to go roaring like a blustering lionman into the tavern. He sent a small party ahead, some pressed on to seal the rear exits, and we stalked on, wary for every shadow.
Although the buildings of the Hill of Lurking Shadows were oppressive enough and the narrow streets winding and treacherous, this place was in no real way comparable with the runnels of the warrens between the hills. Up here might not be heaven; down there was well on the way to hell.
Ranaj with his golden fur and his superb lionman physique performed many functions within Nandisha’s household; butler, major-domo, footman, quartermaster. As her cadade, the captain of the guard, a position of the utmost responsibility in every noble household, he perhaps took this task as his most important. He’d hired on Fweygo and me as temporary reinforcements during a time of particular difficulty, and now, having seen us operate, was evidently reluctant to part with our services. Certainly, he did not treat us like two ordinary swods of the palace guard.
It seemed to me that Ranaj would be as unlikely to accept the human error explanation for the kidnap as I would be in his position. One guard late, one unwell, and the poor devil left on duty murdered? Oh no, by the disgusting diseased liver and lights of Makki Grodno! Those two dubious characters would be up and facing an enquiry instanter. Sammle the Erkanstater, a numim, had been late because he’d been sent along to replace the sick dutyman; no, it was the other latecomer and the fellow with the gut ache who’d be questioned.
From the advance party, Naghan the Twist, a Gon, reported back. He told Ranaj the tavern was only lightly patronized at this time of day, and the best chances were that prince Byrom was being held in one of the upstairs rooms. He gave a rapid rundown on the layout of The Clipped Rhok.
Speed, quite obviously, was essential and Ranaj went for the direct solution. Some of us would keep the patrons entertained whilst others stormed up the stairs. Any escape would be blocked off front and back and all windows would be covered.