Empire.
Where the devil was I going? I looked around for the obligatory passing hay cart (a staple element of stories like the one I seemed to have wandered into) into which I could safely leap, but it had missed its cue. Five soldiers and the officer were on the stage now, all shooting and trying to shut Rufus up, while Brundage stood there like a sardonic angel of death, sending glances of bitter amusement up with their arrows. For the moment I was safe behind the chimney, but four of the troopers were on their way up after me.
There was still no sign of the hay cart.
There was, however, a house, its roof about ten feet away. The street was about thirty-five feet below. I released the chimney and let another arrow scud past me. Then I rose, setting one foot on each side of the sloping thatch, and began running or staggering to the far end, where I half jumped, half fell across the gap.
The edge of the neighboring roof hit me in the stomach, drove the breath from my body, and almost knocked my wig off. (Don’t ask why I was still wearing it. I have no idea.) There were shouts and the sounds of running feet below. I clawed myself up, that infernal dress making it almost impossible for me to get my legs up. (
I rolled myself out of sight and stared with horrified fascination at the wooden shaft that grew out of the side of my leg, wagging about as I shifted to get a better look. Any sense of pain was temporarily stifled by disbelief. This was a new dimension to my life: Bill the Moving Target, Wounded Will. I pulled at it and gasped as it slid out easily, blood seeping out in a thin trickle. Not much of a wound, I pointed out to myself, vaguely disappointed. The flat arrowhead had gone in at an acute angle, barely under the skin really, but it hurt like. well, like an arrow in the leg, actually, and it served to remind me of what I was doing.
I tore a strip off the hem of my dress and tried to bind it round my leg to staunch the blood, but it fell off as soon as I rose to a crouch (the bandage, not my leg). The pain, which had been dull and smoldering, suddenly reared like a small pony and kicked me irritably. For a second I just sat there, but I knew that while the wound in my leg was pretty minor, if I stayed where I was, they’d give me something to be proud of.
I started to crawl, swearing under my breath at Rufus Ramsbottom, the Empire, the patrons of the Eagle, and, without good reason, Mrs. Pugh. I passed three chimney stacks, my dress snagging constantly on the thatch, and kept going. I knew that this chain of mediocre dwellings led into one of Cresdon Town’s poorer market areas, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was at the end of the terrace. After half a dozen successful (well, reasonably successful) years as a theatrical manipulator of other people’s greed and stupidity, with hardly a brush with the authorities, I was reduced to dragging my bleeding self-in a dress-through filthy, nest-filled, spider-riddled thatch, while members of the dreaded occupation force tried to put pieces of steel through my windpipe. Nice job, Will Hawthorne, you finally got what you deserve. Good old Quick Bill. Another blinding success delivered by Will the Sharp. And all for three lousy silver pieces. Not enough to cover my funeral. Curse Rufus, curse the Empire, curse me.
Then, without warning, the thatch became terra-cotta tile. Now what? I could hear geese and housewives in the street below. I lifted my head a fraction, waited for an arrow through my throat, and, when it didn’t materialize, looked about me.
The town had not fared well since the Empire took control, and this was one of the poorer districts. There were puddles of stagnant, muddy water ranging from mere wheel ruts to large greenish pools across the street, all choked with refuse and buzzing with summer flies. Some of the soldiers were down there, their noses screwed up in disgust, their mud-spattered white cloaks hitched up around their thighs, but they didn’t seem to know exactly where I was. I risked a glance back the way I had come and saw three more working their way across the roof. I had to get down.
I leaned out over the edge, wondering if I could survive the drop, and found myself looking upside down into an open leaded window set in the plaster and timber wall below me. An elderly woman with a bucket of God knows what poised to be dumped into the street met my gaze and held it.
Without a word she pushed the window wider and stepped back. I swung myself down and through in a single movement that only five minutes ago would have seemed impossible.
The woman silently returned to the window, caught the eye of one of the soldiers, and pointedly emptied her bucket into the over-flowing drainage ditch below. A waft of shocking stench reached us before she shut the window.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I babbled.
“Shut up,” she muttered, “you’re not safe yet. They aren’t that stupid. Get a move on. Don’t gape, you idiot, do something. What kind of a fool are you anyway, hopping around on the roof while they shoot at you?”
I looked at her with more irritation than I would have thought possible in the circumstances, and wondered vaguely if she could be related to Mrs. Pugh.
There was an open doorway that led into the house proper, a bed, a small table, and a wall of pine boards where the wing had been built out over the street so it butted up against a house on the other side.
“Got a weapon?” she asked in a businesslike tone. “Sword? Mace?”
I shook my head, temporarily dumbstruck. Of course I didn’t. That would have been illegal. She tutted pointedly, a look of bored exasperation on her wrinkled features, and started rummaging in a battered armoire, from which she produced a heavy-looking felling ax. She heaved it at me haft-first and it swung madly as I struggled to control its weight.
“Go on, you idiot, go on!” she snarled, hobbling away from the swaying ax head. “Cut it down before you kill us both.”
She indicated the pine-boarded wall. I stared at her, wondering if she was serious, then heard the banging and shouting of soldiers downstairs. She made an impatient gesture as if she was dealing with a mentally subnormal baboon and I, suddenly angry at her and pretty much everyone else in the world, swung the ax hard into the wood.
It was faintly satisfying to see the splinters fly. I gritted my teeth and hacked away as the old woman behind me kicked my shins and told me to get a move on. For a moment I was tempted to swing the bloody thing at her, but that desire was replaced by surprise at seeing a middle-aged man on the other side of what was left of the wall, climbing hastily out of a tin bath and staring at me with terrified astonishment.
I turned to thank the crabby old bag but found she was already descending to answer the door and deflect the Empire guards, clearly the only people she hated enough to be of such dramatic assistance to anyone. The man on the other side of the wall backed off with disbelief in his eyes as I set to climbing through the hole. He flashed a look of alarm at the ax, so I dropped it and made pacifying noises that in no way helped the situation. For about the fiftieth time since this nightmare began I wished I wasn’t wearing a dress and a cascade of blond curls. There was only one way out of the room, and I took it, blundering past him onto a landing and down a staircase, while he stood gibbering and staring as before. You couldn’t really blame him: it’s not every day that a cross-dressing ax murderer smashes his way into your bathroom. Not waiting to examine my surroundings, I found the back door and unbolted it.
Probably the best thing to have done would have been to walk calmly and maybe put on a coat or something, but such composure was beyond me. I sprinted aimlessly out into the alley and down the first street I came to, heading as far away from my lodgings as I could and stopped.
Where was I supposed to go? Cresdon just wasn’t that big, and it was entirely walled, all gates heavily guarded. Everyone I knew worked at the Eagle, and those who might still have offered me protection were probably busy worrying about their own necks, possibly from the depths of some imperial dungeon. An unavoidable truth was settling like a rock in my gut, and though I had begun the day worried that I wouldn’t get my life on the stage, I was going to end it with a very different set of priorities. I had to get out of town, perhaps out of Empire territory altogether. I began to run.
SCENE III Desperate Times
