and the bustle. They wound among the hagglers, the fast-handed merchants, the poorer patrons eyeing goods too costly for them. Quickly their tiny entourage was out of sight of the sentries at the Registry's entrance.
Ahead there was a stall with a red and yellow canvas awning. A large man with a brimmed hat pulled low over a blemished face was tending it. A few nondescript goods were on display.
Radstac let out a breath, drew another, slowly, smoothly. She fell a further deliberate step behind Aquint and Abraxis. As the pair reached the stall, she stooped and snapped the blade from her right kidskin boot. At the same moment, Tyber grabbed up a piece of pottery and stepped out from the stall, directly into Abraxis's path.
'Now, here's a person of obvious taste and refinement!' Tyber cried with the false merriment of a vendor. 'Surely you, my friend, can appreciate the precious quality of this—this—this fine thing here in my hand! As to the price, well...'
Abraxis halted. Aquint stepped ahead to brush aside the impertinent merchant, but Tyber wasn't budging easily. Radstac moved forward, senses primed, the knife balanced in her hand.
'Were it not for the completely justified but godsdamned murderous taxes imposed by our righteous Felk visitors, I might be able to offer you a true bargain. Nevertheless, you'll find the price I ask so astonishingly reasonable that a man as wise and perceptive as yourself will jump at—'
Radstac reached for the red carrying bag's strap. She would cut it, like a common sneak thief, and make off with the prize. Before she could reach the bag, however, Abraxis's tall bony frame stiffened, and the mage spun sharply about.
She had done nothing to betray herself. Her stealth had been impeccable. Magic. Some sort of protective spell cast over the bag. It made sense.
Abraxis's cold eyes came alive. Aquint was still pretending to hold off Tyber, who had cut short his spiel, seeing that Radstac's gambit had failed.
Radstac saw it all with the honed clarity of
Tyber roughly shoved aside Aquint. His brimmed hat tumbled off his head. He had insisted on having a part in this today, despite the fact that, as Radstac had learned, he was already wanted by the garrison. Something about an attempted bribing of a Felk officer. The Minstrel, initially opposed to Tyber's participation, had eventually relented.
Lifting the piece of cheap pottery the full extension of his arm, Tyber brought it slamming down on Abraxis's skull. It shattered into unrecognizable shards, and the mage staggered heavily, mouth gaping in pain, interrupting whatever incantation he was reciting.
Tyber had done it without the least hesitation, once he'd seen that Radstac was in danger.
Abraxis stumbled a further step, doubled over, trying to stay on his feet. Radstac made a second grab at the bag, but the wizard twisted out of the way with surprising litheness. There was of course nothing for it. She was going to have to kill him. Already a commotion was growing around this scene, vendors and patrons looking to see what was happening. The tumult was going to call the attention of the Felk soldiers very soon.
Radstac would swing the blade up into Abraxis's abdomen, gutting the wizard. She saw he was already bleeding from his scalp, dark droplets flecking the ground. She planted her feet, seized a handful of his robe and cocked back her arm, muscles pulling taut.
At that moment Tyber's face erupted into flame. A sharp maddened shriek accompanied this, as Tyber reeled to one side, hands clawing at the licking tongues of fire that had appeared so suddenly and impossibly, without any combustion. He blundered hard into Aquint, who in turn crashed against the stall with the red and yellow awning, tumbling the rest of its wares to the ground.
Radstac smelled the terrible cooking meat on the air.
She swung with the blade, but the fire had been an effective distraction. Abraxis took advantage of it, twisting himself once again, so that the knife sliced through the robe's fabric, glancing off flesh, then bone, but not cutting deeply enough to bring the wizard down.
She knew that she was going to be the next thing to burst into flame. She let go of the blade, rather than trying to pull it out of the tangle of Abraxis's robe. Tyber fell, his head roaring with fire, as thick and bright as the head of a torch. He writhed and made more awful noises. Aquint was trying to scramble back onto his feet.
Abraxis was grimacing, but his lips were working again, his hands in motion. Radstac felt a heat gathering over her, harsh and dry and smothering. In another eye blink, she knew, she would be enveloped in the fiery magic.
The bolt struck Abraxis in his back, just to the left of his backbone. He reared up to his full height. Deo had smuggled the crossbow into the marketplace, wrapping it in a small rug. He had taken up a sniper's vantage near the edge of the market. Radstac hadn't expected that they would require his services. She had, frankly, foreseen this episode much differently from how it was turning out. A fast cut and run. Abraxis not knowing what was happening until it was too late. She had put much faith in her own abilities.
The heat around her was climbing. But she was faster than this magic. She had survived so very many battles by simply being faster than her enemies.
Her heavy combat sword seemed to leap eagerly from its sheath into her ready hands, an ominous weight, the blade glinting sinisterly. She swung it as she had swung it many times before, a hard clean hack, backed by her sinewy strength and the tenacity of her simple philosophy. Survive. Always survive. Beat the enemy, whoever it may be.
Radstac's blade caught the mage's throat just below the ear. The metal went into the flesh, did not pause for the bone it met and came back out into the air, showering blood in a wide thick spray.
The head dropped to the ground, rolled wetly, came to a stop. The body held itself upright an instant, acting now without any directives, then collapsed gracelessly.
Radstac sheathed her sword and tore the red bag from the headless corpse's shoulder. With her other hand, she seized and wrenched Aquint onto his feet. His eyes were wide and horrified. On the ground, Tyber had gone silent.
It had all happened quite fast, as such things often did. But it was most certainly time to flee the scene.
Deo had already disappeared from the market. Radstac held the bag hard to herself as she and Aquint sprinted off. It was, quite possibly, the fate of the Felk war that was inside this bag. And Radstac found she did indeed have an opinion about that war.
PRAULTH (5)
These weren't maps of ancient engagements, celebrated by fastidious military scholars and studied with compulsive exactitude by University students. She had been one of those students, one of the most astute and promising, in fact. War studies had consumed the bulk of her intellectual interest. Master Honnis had been her caustic mentor, a man she had judged to be as intent and single-minded as herself. She had been wrong. Honnis had lived a life she knew nothing of, a life that included the active practicing of magic and participation in a vast scouting network that had kept track of this war since its inception.
Not faded brittle papers, these. Not testimonials of warfare that had occurred a hundredwinter and more before her birth, and which absorbed her strictly as an intellectual abstraction, without any true thought ever given to the unruly bloodshed and final human cost of the events.
No.
And like many things that occurred in the here and now, these events were not going as planned.
Praulth was on her feet, staring down at the maps as Merse delivered them, the ink still glistening. The Far Speak magician was apparently receiving field intelligence from a number of different sources, which was serving to give Praulth a clearer picture of what was happening north of this city of Petgrad.
