He gave the fellow some time to get away from the door, and sauntered inside himself.
He almost had his heart stop when he realized the man he had been following was still in the common room, but he steeled himself to show nothing, instead, peering around the room as if to try and find something, then fixing an “aha” look on his face when he spotted the bar. He went up to it, ordered a pint, and then ostensibly looked around for a place to sit.
There were several within earshot of the man he had been following; the best was a single stool against the wall. He wound his way toward it and sat himself down, fixing his gaze on a sturdy serving wench and sipping the potent beer. Clearly it was “Spring Beer,” from the bottom of the barrel; it tasted strong enough to use for brass- polish. As such things went though, it was decent; the common-room here was clean and well-run, and the food smelled all right.
He kept his eyes on the rest of the patrons of the inn, and his face in a faintly pleasant expression. Meanwhile he strained his ears as hard as he could to overhear the conversation—it was in Valdemaran, and the man that the foreigner was talking to seemed to be local. The two of them were making no effort to hold their voices down, so obviously they didn’t care if they were overheard.
“. . . need more help than I can get from ’pothecaries with the crazy one,” the native Valdemaran was saying. “The honest ones won’t sell me what you’re asking me to get, and the others—” he shrugged. “You take your chances. Maybe they’ll sell you what you want. Maybe they’ll sell you poison, or dried grass. Maybe they’ll tell the Guard you’ve been asking for those herbs. There’s just no telling.”
The foreigner muttered something that sounded like a curse. “There must be something—”
“You can tie him up and gag him when you aren’t feeding him. You can keep him dead drunk and hope that doesn’t kill him. You can just let him rave—”
So it sounded as if the fellow that Bear was treating was still with them! They were probably trying to get hold of the same herbs that Bear had been using.
Maybe needing someone to treat the lunatic was why they had kidnapped Bear... and maybe the reason they had kept him in the Archive was because they had no place else to put him, and they needed things to clear out after the blizzard before they could escape. It would have been very hard to move a prisoner and their raving lunatic quietly until the snow cleared off. Maybe they had been hoping no one would bother coming to the Archive. Maybe they had figured on drugging Bear and smuggling him out with their baggage. Maybe—
A sudden shout of unknown words made him glance to the side with alarm. And there, not more than the length of a horse and wagon away from him, was another of the bodyguards. One of the ones who he had humiliated, and who was not likely to have forgotten his face.
The man shouted again, and pointed at him, as the one he had been following shoved the Valdemaran aside and reached for a knife.
Oh hell!
He didn’t have to be told twice. In fact, he didn’t have to be told at all. He was already on his feet and heading for a door he expected led to the kitchen.
It did. With at least one of the two men practically on his heels, Mags ducked between two serving girls, rolled under a table on a floor littered with vegetable peelings, scrambled to his feet and was out the door on the other side of the room before one of the two girls had finished her shriek of outrage and alarm.
The door led to a narrow hallway, with two more doors in it. He gambled and wrenched open the farthest.
He found himself standing on a set of steps above a brick-walled space used for storing things for the kitchen that weren’t wanted yet and could stand weather. And for buckets of garbage. The place stank and was full of flies. There was a wooden gate opposite him, with a lock on it.
Hell. He made a running leap for the gate; his fingers just caught the top, and he hauled himself over it as the door behind him banged open again. He tumbled down into the alley on the other side, and looked wildly in either direction.
And realized he had no idea of where he was.
He picked a direction and ran.
He was in the middle of a rat-warren of walls and out-buildings and alleys going off in every direction, with huge walls and the sides of buildings on either side of him.
The alleys were too narrow to allow anything better than the tiniest of donkey-carts to go by. And he could feel his pursuers right behind him. There was no time to think, no time to do anything other than react. He dodged down every promising escape route he could find, only to discover he was still in the maze. He felt Dallen trying frantically to get to him, but it was a long way down from the Collegium and the streets were packed.
He made another turn, his sides burning, and found himself in a cul-de-sac of windowless walls going up two stories on either side of him. At the back there was a bricked-up privy-aperture right above him. He turned, but it was too late. There was a man blocking the entrance. The same man that had recognized Mags and shouted. He was one of the bodyguards; very big, strong, and trained. And armed, which Mags wasn’t.
Mags rushed the man anyway. Maybe if he took the bodyguard by surprise—
He dropped and rolled when he was almost on top of the man, hoping to knock his feet out from under them, but the foreigner must have been ready for that. The man dodged, and out of nowhere, there was a tremendous thwack to Mags’ head, and he saw stars, then felt himself hauled to his feet by the collar and pinned to the wall by his shoulders.
The look in the man’s eyes absolutely terrified him, because it was both furious and utterly impersonal.
“You, horse-boy,” spat the bodyguard. “What are you doing here? How did you find us? Who sent you?”
“I don’ know nothin’—” Mags began, and the man delivered a blow to his gut that doubled him over, and a second to his face that opened up a painful gash along his cheek. The pain that went through his body and skull drove all thought right out of his head.
“Who sent you?” the man repeated.
“I don’—” This time the blow to his gut was followed by a slam into the wall that rammed his head against it. He saw stars again, and his vision grayed out. He could hardly breathe.
“Tell me!” the bodyguard spat, and slammed his head into the wall again. He couldn’t even think well enough to defend himself.
“You will tell me!” A blow to the jaw loosened his teeth as well and his mouth filled with blood.
The trumpeting of an enraged stallion interrupted the interrogation, and the man whirled, dropping Mags, who slid down the wall, and slumped to the dirt of the alley, dazed.
Dallen’s bulk filled the end of the alley. The Companion shrieked with rage, dancing in place, but unable to wedge himself into the narrow space.
The man spat a curse and wrestled his sword out, banging it against the walls on either side of him. He plunged at Dallen in a fury. Dallen lashed out at him with forehooves, but had to give way. The man must have practiced fighting against a warhorse, if not a Companion, because he kept dodging the lethal hooves and getting in closer and closer with his blows, and it was clear he was aiming to slash open one of the big arteries or veins of the legs.
Mags fought off the dizziness, the dazzle in front of his eyes, and the nausea and pain of the beating, trying to get his breath again, trying to get up and fight back. After all, this wasn’t the first time someone had tried to beat him to death—and Dallen needed him! He fumbled for, and found, his knife. As he had been taught, he weighed it carefully in his hand for a precious moment. Squinting until the double images resolved into one, he flung the little blade at the man’s back.
The man howled and cursed in pain. The knife lodged for a moment in his shoulderblade, then clattered to the ground.
In a fury, he looked from Mags to Dallen and back again, and evidently realized that where there was one Companion, there soon would be more.
He turned back to Dallen, but this time, the whirlwind strikes of his sword were meant to drive Dallen back,
