A Victory for Kregen (11 page)

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 restrained 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.

“If no one comes here,” I said. “The watch will not think we have. There is no need to hurry, they will not know how long we have been gone from the stables.”

“There was a quantity of blood spilled on the straw,” she said.

“I see. Then we had best hurry.”

“Jak,” called Tyfar.

I swung about to look.

He was half off and half on the path, and one leg was going deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling stink of blackness. Tendriliferous vines snaked over the oozing mud. But he got a grip on a clump of weed and arrested his sucking-in.

He had been following up last. The girl at my side said, “The oaf!” She spoke tartly.

Tyfar got a better grip and started to haul himself in.

A head appeared over his shoulder, one of those snouting, fanged heads of Kregen, all scale and tendrils and gape-jaws. The eyes were red slits. It hoisted itself a little free of the ooze with two broad paddle-like forefeet. In the next instant it would open and close that fearsome set of jaws, and Tyfar’s head would provide the dinner the thing craved.

The girl took a single step forward. She was splendid.

The bow came from her shoulder as a skater comes off the ice. The arrow nocked, was drawn back —

to the ear — and the shaft flew. Straight and strongly driven, that shaft. It pierced cleanly through one of those red slit eyes. The steel point must have gouged on, deep into the minuscule brain.

I could not watch the death throes of the beast any more. A mate to the first appeared almost soundlessly beside me and the jagged-fanged jaws thrust for the girl in her russets, who stood ready with a second shaft aimed for the monster by Tyfar.

My thraxter swept around and then straightened. Point first it drove into a red-slitted eye. The thraxter would not have cut the thing’s scaly neck deeply enough. But the solid steel punched through eye and head and into brain. I jerked back. Like its mate, it thrashed and screeched.

The girl gave a single convulsive jump back.

Her bow lifted, the arrow pulled — then she summed up the picture and did not loose.

“I give you my thanks for saving Tyfar,” I said.

He was off the ooze now and safely on the path. His leg sheened with the muck. He waved his sword at us and then started to run along the treacherous path to catch us up. I own I felt enormous relief knowing that he was safe.

The woman looked at me. Woman? Girl? She was young, around Tyfar’s age, I judged, although men and women change so slowly over their better than two hundred or so years of life on Kregen.

Sometimes she had the airs of a queen, and at others those of a roistering tavern wench, and both were nicely calculated. She was controlled in her emotions; but her emotions were real and could break out fiercely—

“By Krun, Jak! That beastie nearly had me — and you!”

“You were busy saving Tyfar, for which my thanks again.”

“You are his father?”

“No, no. He is a good comrade.”

“Then you have my thanks, for what they are worth, for my life—”

“Do not, I beg you, say, for what that is worth.”

“Sometimes my life has meant a great deal to me, and sometimes nothing at all.”

Tyfar panted up then, and started in at once thanking the girl. Then he said, “And I do not know to whom I owe my life.”

“You may call me Jaezila.”

We started off along the path again, and I felt it prudent to hang back. I did this to guard against pursuit and, also, as I realized with a sly amusement, so that they might have it out between them.

“Jaezila,” said Tyfar, rolling the syllables around his mouth as though they were best Jholaix. “And is that all — my lady?”

“No. It will do for you — Jikai.”

She cut him with that great word, used as she used it, in mockery of his warrior prowess.

“Jaezila,” persisted Tyfar, and I own I was impressed by his refusal to become warm. After all, he was a prince. “And no more — you are Hamalese?” He sounded doubtful.

I thought I detected a wary note in Jaezila’s voice.

“Hamalese — does it matter? I seek to aid you, who are Hamalese. Is not that good enough?”

“I accept that.” Tyfar passed on, following her beyond the end of a screen of curly-fronded ferns where the dragonflies, as big as chickens, flitted and flurried on diamond wings. “And what brought you to Khorunlad?”

“Your breeding left much to be desired, dom.”

Tyfar bridled up like a spurred zorca. To be accused of poor breeding, and a Prince of Hamal! And to be addressed so familiarly as dom, the common greeting! I watched it all, enthralled.

Then I jumped forward.

My Val! We had been growing very chummy with these people, with stubborn Kaldu and this enigmatic woman styling herself Jaezila. But we did not know them. I didn’t want Tyfar labeling himself a prince —

particularly a Prince of Hamal — until we knew them a great deal better.

“You may be surprised to know—” Tyfar was saying with his voice as frosty as the caverns of the Ice Floes of Sicce. He was going to put Jaezila properly in her place by telling her that she had the honor of addressing a prince, I didn’t doubt that. I burst in, quite rudely.

“Come on, come! Don’t stand chaffering. I think there were sounds of pursuit along the path.”

Tyfar immediately swung about and lifted his sword.

Jaezila simply looked at me. “You think there is pursuit?”

She missed nothing, this girl, nothing...

“And if there is not, that is still no reason to stand lollygagging about. By Krun! Let us get out of this bog and onto firmer ground.”

“Fifty paces will bring us to the bank. If you can call it a bank. I scouted this area—”

I said, “You are not from Khorunlad, Jaezila. Hamalese? Maybe. But I do not inquire why you help us from Hamal.”

“Do you think that the Empress Thyllis will conquer all the Dawn Lands, Jak?”

That was a confounded question!

It suited my purposes to be thought a Hamalese. Yet it went against the grain to have to say that, yes, mad Empress Thyllis would overrun all the Dawn Lands, one after the other.

“She might,” I said. “If her throat is not cut first.”

She drew her breath in. The others showed up ahead waiting under a grove of drooping missals. Beyond them the river glimmered blue as the summer sky.

“You spoke of revolution,” said Jaezila. “Now, I see—”

I interrupted, swiftly but courteously: “My lady Jaezila, do not misunderstand me.” Zair knew, I’d taken long enough getting myself accepted as a Hamalese, and this girl quite clearly was more than she appeared. She could go running back to Hamal with a tale that would destroy my plans. I had to dissimulate. “I spoke figuratively. We all serve the empress, do we not? Hamal is set on the road of conquest, is not this so?”

“By Jehamnet! Hamal is set on the road to conquest!”

Her voice contained emotions I couldn’t fathom. She swore by Jehamnet, a spirit of harvest time associated with crop failures and similar disasters, and who is known as Jevalnet in Vallia, and Jegrodnet and Jezarnet in the Eye of the World. But she had said Jehamnet, which is Hamalian. He is known as Jehavnet in most of Havilfar. I fancied she was Hamalese and therefore, down here, out doing skullduggery for Thyllis. I held my tongue.

We gathered by the boat, a little skiff that would just about take us all and give us a hand’s-breadth freeboard. The river rippled gently in a small breeze. On the opposite bank the walls and roofs of the jumbled Aracloins offered shelter. We pushed off and Kaldu and I pulled the oars, taking it gently. There were a sizeable number of other boats on the river. A low pontoon bridge spanned the river lower down, and this impediment assisted in the formation and continuance of the boggy area upstream.