timer’s hands, and dashed across to the steps leading up to the balcony. Reloading the weapon on the run, I thought to myself that Bolt certainly deserved his nickname. Anyone who could hit the target at that distance, even in the shoulder, and without really taking aim, when he was as drunk as a lord, was a real master.
Meanwhile Paleface went dashing away from me into one of the dimly lit corridors on the second floor. I rushed after him.
The assassin was gone. One of the second-floor windows was wide open. I reloaded my weapon, walked up to the opening, and cautiously leaned out, ready to pull back at any moment if Paleface hadn’t run away, only hidden. But the night street was deserted, with only a few lamps burning, and I hastily slammed the window frames shut so that nothing else could stick its head in from out of the darkness. After expressing aloud my wish that the son of a bitch Paleface would be eaten by some especially hungry brutish creature that very night, I went back down the steps.
“Did the ogre get away?” asked Bolt, throwing up his arms.
He had already pulled the arrow out of the book, and now he was showering choice expletives on the entire tribe of ogres for damaging the old manuscript.
“He won’t get far. You winged him,” I reassured the old man.
Apparently Markun had given up waiting for Harold to join the guild and had decided to dispatch him to Sagot, to make sure the others wouldn’t rebel.
“Yes, I got him good,” the old-timer said with a solemn nod of his head, hiccupping and swaying in the gusts of an invisible wind.
“Thanks, Bolt, you’ve been a great help. It’s getting late, I’ll be going home.”
I’ve found out everything I needed and now, before I take my trip to the forbidden part of the city, I have to get a good night’s sleep.
“Come round again, old buddy,” said the ancient custodian.
I thrust a gold piece into the old man’s hand, hoping that none of the city’s petty rogues would ever learn of my shameful generosity, and went out into the night.
5 NIGHTTIME SURPRISES
Question: What can be worse than an enraged Doralissian? Answer: The only thing worse than an enraged Doralissian is a bunch of enraged Doralissians. And there were an entire dozen of those half men, half goats howling furiously as they pursued me through the dark night streets of Avendoom, yelling with all the power of their far from feeble lungs.
As soon as I got back from the Royal Library and opened the door of my new and—dare I say it?—secret lair, the Doralissians came at me in a rush out of the darkness, bleating balefully and holding their spiked cudgels at the ready. I was saved only by my own naturally rapid reactions and the stupidity of my attackers: the goat-men tried to push each other aside in the hope of being the first to get at my unfortunate head. As a result a jam formed in the doorway, and I was out of there.
And now, exhausted, furious, and short of sleep, I had been trying for twenty minutes to shake off my pursuers, but the brutes were still yelling and bleating somewhere behind me.
No one leapt out at me from the dark gateways of the city, demanding my purse. All the drunks and midnight ramblers who hadn’t managed to take refuge at home before the onset of night had spotted the chase and the roads had cleared as if by magic. Even the creatures of the night had heard the furious cries of my pursuers and decided not to emerge into the light, for fear of attracting the hot-tempered goats’ attention.
The Port City came to an end, and I plunged into the network of narrow streets in the Artisans’ City, skirting round the magicians’ districts. Magicians are a capricious and cantankerous crowd. The first thing they’d do would be to zap the howling mob that had woken them up with some heavy-duty spell, and then they’d start figuring out who was to blame, and what to do about the wall of that house over there that had been damaged accidentally by the magic, and whether they ought to clean off the ashes that were all that was left of the screeching stampede.
So that I could run more easily, I gave a sharp tug on the string of the cloak covering my shoulders and the black material slid off, falling onto the road. I really felt like dumping the crossbow and the knife, too, but the thought of how valuable they were prevented me from committing an act of financial stupidity in order to save myself.
If I’d stopped, of course, I could have brought down a couple of goat-men with the crossbow, but the others would still have caught up with me and given me a drubbing. So there was nothing else for it but to run. I heard gleeful, surprised bleating behind me: The beasts had obviously found my cloak and stopped to wonder where I could have got to. Fortunately for me, Doralissians are not good runners, despite the fact that they have hooves. And they are also quite incredibly stupid. The only real reason these quarrelsome creatures were tolerated was for their horses.
Horses of the Doralissian breed had more stamina and speed than any others in the world. Buyers in the Sultanate and the elfin noble houses paid really big money for them.
On the Street of the Butchers I came to a sharp halt and caught my breath. I thought I’d heard the creatures shout something as I entered my den. Something like: “Give us back our horse!” Their brains must have completely turned to mush. I’m a master thief, I don’t steal horses. Either this was simply a woeful mistake, or someone had set me up. But exactly which ill-wisher could it be, out of the hundreds of possible candidates? From round the corner I heard bleating and the clatter of hooves drawing closer. The Doralissians must finally have realized that I couldn’t be hiding in the cloak, and continued the pursuit. Should I try to conceal myself in the shadow? I would have done it long before, if not for the goats’ excellent sense of smell.
But this can’t go on for much longer—I’ll run out of steam soon, and the brutes will grab me, alive but weakened. Or those wild howls will attract unwanted attention to my humble person. From the creatures of the night, for instance. I’ll have to resort to extreme measures. I stuck my hand inside my shirt and tugged out the scroll with the battle spell that I had recently borrowed from the library. Ah, and I’d been planning to hold on to it until the Palaces of Bone and use it there.
I hastily ripped off the black ribbon and unrolled the scroll. I didn’t know how the spell worked, but I had to hurry. The howls of the Doralissians were drawing closer now. Screwing up my eyes to make out the small, fancy letters of the spell by the light of the moon, I began reading:
