When he heard me say that, Yargi hesitated for a moment, and I tore the cloak off my shoulder, flung it in his face, and immediately moved in and struck him with my knife. Thug swore viciously behind me.
Yargi dropped his knife, started to wheeze, and grabbed hold of my wrist. I pulled it free with an effort, leaving the knife behind in his belly. Harold was left without his most important and most persuasive argument.
The other two killers came for me without any more talk. I leapt back in a most inelegant manner, on the way flinging the lantern into Thug’s face and sticking my hand into my bag to feel for a magic vial. Thug caught the lantern I’d thrown at him as if it were a ball and clicked his tongue in disappointment.
I fumbled in my bag and tossed a round little bottle of poisonous-yellow liquid at Midge, but he ducked his head and the damned magical bauble smashed against one of the legs of a gigantic set of shelves loaded with books. So instead of the hired killer’s head, it was the wooden leg that dissolved into thin air.
A remarkable stroke of luck!
“Come here, Harold! Time to stop running! I’m going to slice you to ribbons!”
Meanwhile the shelves, having lost their support, started tumbling forward, straight onto the unsuspecting killers. Just one moment longer, and they both would have been crushed, but the sound of books slipping off the shelves attracted their attention. Midge dived aside, but Thug, being rather less bright, started turning round, opened his mouth wide in amazement, and was hit by the hail of tumbling tomes. Then the shelves that were missing a leg collapsed, overwhelming the man and flattening him to a pancake. His final howl was drowned out by a loud rumble.
I glanced round. Midge was nowhere to be seen. Without wasting any more time, I reclaimed my knife, wiped it on the dead man’s clothes, and put it back in its scabbard. Then I loaded my crossbow: I pulled on the lever to tighten the string and set the bolts in their firing position. Then, for extra reassurance, I put another bolt between my teeth so that if the first two missed the target I wouldn’t lose too much time reloading. Having armed myself, I began methodically withdrawing to the exit.
I forced myself not to run, although I wanted to dash through the dark rooms and out into the light as quickly as possible. But to hurry would have been to lose control of the situation and, consequently, to make myself vulnerable.
Eventually the damned bookcases and shelves came to an end and I was left facing the corridor that led to the service door. I stopped, trying to decide how best to sneak along a narrow tunnel where it was hard even to turn round, let alone engage in armed combat with a Wild Heart.
It was his shadow that gave him away. It was pale and weak, almost hidden by shafts of light, but I could still see it. Midge might have been an experienced warrior, but he hadn’t done a very good job of hiding. The killer had climbed up a set of shelves and hung there, waiting for me to pass by below him.
We both made our move at the same time—I spun round, raising the crossbow, and he jumped down onto my shoulders with his knife.
The bowstring twanged. The first bolt just missed my enemy as he fell onto me and struck one of the thick volumes standing on the top shelf. I had no time to take a second shot. Or even to jump aside. The killer slumped on top of me with all his weight, and the only reason I wasn’t killed was that I managed to strike him across the wrist with the crossbow with all my might. His knife and my weapon went flying off to one side.
I fell onto my back, hitting my head against the stone floor, and showers of bright sparks exploded inside it. The accursed killer landed on me and without a second’s hesitation, not disconcerted in the least by having lost his knife, he smashed his fist into my face.
The finale of our epic battle, which was worthy of being recorded in the frescoes in the royal palace, was that Midge’s sinewy hands grabbed the neck of a certain Harold in a crayfish-claw grip and set about choking him in a rather determined fashion by closing off the flow of air to his lungs.
I punched Midge on the ribs with both hands, but that didn’t have any effect, either. He merely tightened his grip like an imperial hound and leaned over me, gritting his teeth. The bolt in his shoulder was no hindrance to him at all.
Someone began wheezing in a most convincing fashion. Then the wheezing began fading away, retreated into the background, and got tangled up in the shadows. When the darkness had completly subdued me, from out of some other world, a beautiful world full of fresh air, I heard the twang of a bowstring, the whistle of an arrow in flight, and a dull thud. Then something very heavy fell on me, finally pinning me to the floor. Amazingly enough it became easier to breathe.
I lay there without opening my eyes, breathing in that priceless gift of the gods—air. Everything inside me was wheezing and whirling and whistling. My neck hurt unbearably, it was even painful to swallow, but I was breathing, and that was the most important thing just at the moment.
“Alive, my lord!” a voice above me said.
“Get him up!” To judge from the angry voice, that was Baron Frago Lanten in person.
Sheer politeness obliged me to part my heavy eyelids and take a look at the new characters in this never- ending comedy. I was right.
The baron, in an unusually dour mood, was standing over me in the company of about two dozen of his faithful dogs. The heavy item that had fallen on me was none other than the dead Midge. They had shot an arrow straight between his shoulder blades, and the hired killer had decided to die right on top of me.
To be quite honest, I must confess that this was the first time in my life I had ever been so glad to see the municipal guard. In my mind I took back all the bad things I’d ever said about their skill and their intellectual capacity, and swore on the health of the leader of the Doralissians that this week I wouldn’t think anything nasty about them even once.
A soldier took a firm grip on me under my arms and set me on my feet. For some reason the floor was
