“That’s him!” Seregil murmured. “He got a good look at me in this getup, though. You two take the lead and I’ll keep out of sight until you need me.”
As they started off to track the tall swordsman, Micum gave Alec his arm as he had Seregil, so as to attract less attention. Strolling along, they mingled in the afternoon crowd and stayed just close enough to keep their mark in sight. Presently the man paused at a small knot of people, children mostly, all clamoring around a stooped old woman with a long nose and stringy grey hair. She wore a shapeless tunic over a striped skirt, and a belt from which hung the sort of things Kepi and the Mycenian woman had noted.
“That’s got to be her,” whispered Alec, looking around for the swordsman. He stood a little way off, seemingly paying no attention to the commotion.
As they watched, the old woman smiled and laughed with the children, and made her odd trades for valueless things. Among her wares were a few of the yellow stones like the one Alec had seen before, and something she claimed were dragon’s milk teeth. As much as he wanted to get a closer look, he knew better than to make a trade, given Thero’s concerns about such items.
So instead he and Micum waited until she was done and toddled off, then continued to follow her at a distance. There was no sign of the tall man now, and Alec inwardly berated himself for not keeping a closer eye on him.
“Did you see which way he went?” he whispered to Micum.
“No. The bastard slipped off when I wasn’t looking. Do you think he spotted us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Seregil is trailing him.”
Just then the old woman turned down a side street. Micum and Alec hurried to the corner in time to see her disappear down another side street. The crowd was thinner here, and they had to hang back a bit more. By the time they reached the second turning, there was no sign of her or the man in the nearly empty street. Tenements leaned over them, any one of which the woman could have entered.
An old man sat across the unpaved street smoking a pipe.
“Did you see an old woman come by here?” asked Micum. “My mother has wandered off again.”
“The mad woman with the things on her belt?” the old fellow asked.
“Yes, that’s her.”
The man pointed the stem of his pipe across the street at a two-story tenement. “That one there, with the blue door. I seen her here before, you know.”
“She’s a slippery one,” Micum said with a laugh. “At least now I know where she gets off to. Many thanks, old father. Come along, Sana.”
He gave Alec a wink and they went to the house in question and tried the latch. It was not locked, and opened into a small entrance area with a stairway leading up to the rooms. On the second floor they found most of the doors open-the occupants tried to encourage a sea breeze to dissipate the stale funk of the place. There was no sign of their woman, so they hurried up to the next floor, where things were much the same.
A one-eyed young tough with a bandage covering half his face and hair that might have been the same color as Alec’s if it were ever washed lounged in a doorway at the end of the corridor. “What’s the hurry, friends?”
“I’m looking for an old woman who just came in,” Micum told him. “Grey hair, bits and bobs hanging from her belt.”
“I know who you mean. The old raven woman, right?”
Alec hid his excitement as he asked, “Does she live here?”
The man gave him a measuring look and a slanted grin. “What’s it worth to you, missy?”
Alec reached into the little purse at his belt and took out a copper.
“That the best you can do?” the tough asked derisively.
Micum handed him another. “We’re poor folk. Please, won’t you help us?”
The man pocketed the money. “She lives below, third door on the left.”
“Much obliged,” Micum said, and followed Alec back downstairs.
Atre breathed a sigh of relief as Alec and his companion disappeared down the stairs. Brader stepped out from the empty room he’d hidden in.
“Now, that was very interesting,” Atre murmured, scratching under the bandage.
“How so?”
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, that was young Lord Alec under that kerchief and dirt and that forced falsetto. Seems he’s more of an actor than he let on.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“No, of course not.”
“I’ve never seen the big fellow with them.”
Atre gave him a thin smile. “I have. He was at Lord Alec’s party.”
The door in question was one of the few that was closed. Micum knocked, but there was no answer. With a quick look around to see if anyone was watching, he tried the latch, but it was locked.
The door directly across the corridor was closed, as well, and no one in the rooms on either side seemed to be paying any attention. Micum shielded Alec as best he could while he pulled a pick from under his kerchief and jiggered the simple lock. No sooner had he touched the latch, however, than the door was jerked violently open and Micum jumped back just in time to miss being brained by an iron poker. As it was it caught him a glancing blow across the left shoulder, the barb
on the end of the poker tearing his shirt but missing the skin below.
He thrust Alec out of the way and blocked the next swing with his stout cudgel.
“Thieves!” the man cried, trying to drive Micum back but hampered somewhat by the door frame. “Housebreakers!”
Micum knocked the poker from his hands and gave the fellow a light thump in the belly with the end of the cudgel, just enough to set him back on his ass. A woman screamed. Alec looked around nervously. They were attracting far too much attention.
“Where’s my mother!” Micum bellowed. “I know she’s here!”
The man blinked up at him. “Mother? What in Bilairy’s name makes you think I’ve got your damn mother here?”
“I have it on good authority that she was brought to this place,” Micum growled, apparently using aggression in place of making any sense. Giving the man a shove in the chest with his foot, he stepped into the room and the woman screamed again.
“Help!” the man shouted.
“What’s going on ’ere?” a very large man with a stout, spiked club demanded from down the hall.
Micum backed quickly from the room and faced him down. “My own mother has been carried off, and I was told this man had her.”
“Nakis? What would he be doing with your poxy mother?” The man started down the corridor after them, club at the ready. “Get out of here, the pair of you, before you get your heads stove in!”
Other men were emerging from other rooms, some of them armed. Micum and Alec beat an ignominious retreat back to the street, but with the knowledge that the old woman had eluded them.
“Go on, git!” the man shouted down from his room, shaking his fist. “I’ll have the bluecoats on you!”
“Damnation!” Micum muttered as they hurried off the way they’d come. “Seregil isn’t going to like this.”
As they rounded the corner behind the house they very
nearly collided with the man himself, who was carrying a basket containing a few bruised pears and pippins.
Seregil noted their expressions and Micum’s torn garment. “I take it things didn’t go well.”
“I doubt she was in there in the first place,” Alec growled. The man with the pipe who’d given them directions was nowhere in sight.
“Did you see a blond man with a bandaged head, by any chance?” Seregil asked.
“Yes. He told us-” Alec gave him a rueful look. “Blond hair! Damn, do you think he was a raven?”
“He was someone who didn’t want to linger,” Seregil told him. “I was at the back of the building, trying to find my man, who’d slipped down this direction, and saw One Eye climbing out of an upstairs window and up the back stair to the roof like a scalded cat. By the time I got up there he’d disappeared among the chimney pots and gables. I cast around but couldn’t find any sign of him.”
“And the masked swordsman?” asked Micum.
