'I'm sorry, my lady, but I believe the duke already has his party chosen.'
'But there would be room for me if you put that thing behind your saddle on Anna.'
'That thing' was the sidesaddle I'd had made to fit behind a regular saddle so a passenger, Cilicia for the last few years, could sit comfortably. It was sort of a pillion with a foot rest. Kotcha had given each of Anna's children one of my saddles, every single spare one that I kept for my own personal use, and I had the feeling that it would be awkward getting them back. This way, I could at least save the sidesaddle. I gestured to a groom to switch the thing.
'Then I would be delighted to have you riding apillion, my lady.'
The duke mounted up along with three of his armed guards. They each carried an oversized shield and they'd had brains enough to remove their spurs.
'We'll go out by way of the Carpenter's Gate, then take the outer road to the docks,' the duke announced. 'That should let us give the Big People a good run.'
I gave Lady Francine a lift into the rear saddle. She was a lot fleshier than Cilicia, but in fact she was lighter, not having the dense, muscular dancer's body that Cilicia has.
Once we were out of the city, I told Anna to go at her best speed, to show the duke what running was. We were soon going at a solid run, doing about the speed that a modern thoroughbred can run, but where an ordinary horse might match our speed with a tiny jockey aboard and for a mile, Anna and her kin could do it with two full- sized people on their backs, and keep it up all day!
Nonetheless, Anna was carrying double and her daughters pulled ahead of her. They were two-gross yards ahead of us when the attack occurred.
Suddenly, an armored man stood up in the bushes a gross yards from the road. He leveled a crossbow at the duke and let fly. The guard to the duke's right, a left-hander who carried his shield on his right arm, had remarkably good reflexes. He raised his shield in time to deflect the bolt high into the air.
But at the same time, two other crossbowmen were raising on the left, hoping to catch the duke's party off guard. They didn't. Those guards were on the ball, and Anna's daughters weren't being slouches, either. They had the duke surrounded, and the guards were holding their shields, not to cover themselves, but to cover the duke! It was as though they considered their own bodies as extensions of their shields. The next two bolts were stopped, one by a shield and one by a guard's arm.
The duke's party continued down the road, not knowing how many assassins they faced. But from my vantage point, I was sure that there were only the three of them. Sad experience had taught me that speed was more important than planning. When in doubt, charge straight in! I signaled Anna to attack the two on the left.
They were franticly trying to rewind their crossbows, hoping to get off a second shot. I don't think they saw us coming. Anna can run very quietly when she wants to, although she says that it's a lot more work. We were only a few dozen yards away when they noticed us. I had my sword out, but I wasn't wearing armor or carrying a shield. Heck, I'd started out dressed for a boatride. A knight is always supposed to be ready for emergencies, but that's often hard to do!
Anna passed to the left of the first man, and I found that he had stuck his sword in the dirt so as to have it near if he needed it in a hurry. He dropped his crossbow and swung his sword at me. I wanted to take prisoners, since these men probably had something to do with the old duke's assassination, but all I could do under the circumstances was to chop down at his sword as hard as I could. My sword went right through the crossbowman's blade, and through his helmet and head as well.
Before I could recover from the blow, Anna was already onto the second man. She just went right over him, trampling him flat. She turned and I saw that there were four hoofprints in the assassin's chest. He had squirted out of his armor like toothpaste from a tube hit by a sledgehammer.
We turned to see the last assassin mounting his horse and leaving.
'Catch him, Anna!' I shouted, but she was already on the way.
'This is so exciting!' Lady Francine shouted.
This shocked me. Would you believe that I had actually forgotten that I had a beautiful woman riding at my back? Worse yet, that I had gone into combat without even considering that I was risking her life!
'My lady!' I yelled, and Anna picked up from my body language that I wanted to stop.
'NO, NO!' Lady Francine shouted. 'We must catch him! He must know who had the duke murdered!'
She was right, of course. Her safety and mine were unimportant compared to insuring the young duke's safety. The mystery had to be solved.
Anna picked up speed as she felt my new resolve. The assassin had quite a lead on us, but we caught up with him within half a mile. He ducked into a woods, trying to shake us, but it did him no good.
'We need a prisoner, Anna!' I shouted, as we approached him from the rear. She nodded okay. My thought was to hack off one of the horse's hind legs and then deal with the rider at our leisure. I never had a chance to, since Anna had similar ideas. She broke both of that animal's rear legs with her forehoofs. The horse went down in a heap. The rider flew over its head and stopped abruptly against a big tree trunk.
We dismounted in a hurry. The horse was still alive but the rider was not. He had both a caved-in forehead and a broken neck. One hundred percent overkill.
'Damn! Not a single prisoner.'
'Your sword, Conrad! It went right through that knight's sword, and his helm and head as well!'
'Yes, it's quite a blade. I wish I knew how it was made.' I bent to search the dead knight, hoping to find some clue to who he was.
Interlude Two
I hit the STOP button.
'Hey, Tom, how was that sword made?'
'It happens that I am well informed on that subject, seeing as how I invented the process and made that particular sword myself,' he said smugly. 'First you get a good quality Damascus steel blade, which, by the way, were mostly made in India. Damascus was nothing more than a distribution point. You split the blade in half the hard way, right down the middle, through the edge.'
'How do you do that?'
'Simple. You line up a nonlinear temporal field just right, then send one half of the blade a few minutes farther forward in time than the other. This gives you perfectly smooth surfaces, and since you're working in a vacuum, those surfaces are pretty reactive, chemically. Then you put a thin slice of diamond between them, about a hundred angstroms thick. You get that by slicing it off a larger block, using the same temporal cutting technique as you used on the blade. Then you clamp this sandwich together at four thousand PSI for two hundred years in a hard vacuum at room temperature. This welds the pieces together without harming the crystalline structure of the steel. You end up with as perfect a sword as is possible, with a pure diamond edge.'
'Uh-huh. Where did you get a block of diamond that big?'
'Simple. You just put a block of graphite somewhere at thirty million PSI and two thousand degrees for twenty thousand years. It's not as though you need a flawless, single crystal.'
'Oh. Is that all. I should have known.' I hit the START button.
Chapter Seven
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
