frame of mind, whether I damned ’em all to the Ice Floes of Sicce, and left it with my clothes bundled up and slung into a bush beneath Casmas’ walls. I did however — and not without a curse of annoyance — don the mask.
Casmas the Deldy’s outer wall was frosted with razor-edged glass. I simply tore up a bush, hurled it onto the glass, handed myself up, and leaped down on the inner side. Without a snarl, without a screech, the great vicious black-and-white form of a wersting launched itself at my throat!
Werstings are bulky, black-and-white-striped hunting dogs of Kregen, lethal in their vicious savagery. I had met them before, but not about the same kind of business I was engaged in now. The wersting leaped. I saw the fangs in his gaping red mouth and I flung myself sideways and the rapier licked up and in, silver bright under the moons, black and greasy as I rolled away, dragging it clear. The beast let out a whining grunt of pure astonished pain. A second thrust finished him. I padded on over the turf, beneath the shade trees, between the graceful fountains, toward the villa of Casmas the Deldy. I held the rapier gripped in my fist.
Lights from mellow samphron-oil lamps still shone from windows. I selected a first-floor window above a balcony and handed up the greenery, peered in past hangings. The room contained Casmas himself playing Jikaida with one of Rosala’s family. Two other men sat drinking and polishing their weapons. So the family was keeping the proprieties before the marriage. Very right and proper, too!
As I watched, Casmas, with a fat chuckle, swept up a swod from his opponent’s central drin. The swod in Jikaida, named for a common soldier, a private, is almost equivalent to the pawn in chess. I chinned myself up, mentally working out the next move I would have made to confound Casmas — his king’s paktun stood perilously exposed — and so worked my way along to the next window. This was in darkness, with a faint moonglow reflecting from the dark panes. My knife eased the catch and I slipped to soft rugs inside.
The room was empty, with a bed ready, and I guessed it was a guest room for one of Rosala’s family of hawks. I padded along the corridor to the back of the house and soon found a door that looked promising. This door was smaller than the usual, and stood in an angle between two larger doors. It was typical of the doors to rooms for body-servants, in instant attention upon their masters or mistresses. The girl in the bed inside awoke to my brown hand across her mouth, a dagger flashing in her eyes, and my evil old face glowering down upon her.
She tried to scream and then to bite, and I showed her the error of her ways.
“Do you know the Hortera Rosala of Match Urt?”
Her eyes, wide with shock, blinked. I tickled her and said, “Blink twice if you know-” She blinked twice. I said, “Very good. Blink twice if you will keep silent if I take my hand away.” Instantly, two more blinks. I took my hand away, ready to slap it back at once if she yelled. She took a breath — she was a slip of a thing with lustrous dark hair in the cheap oil dip’s light — and said: “I am Paline and the lady Rosala is my mistress; have you come to rescue her?”
Those romantic plays and books that are the rage of Kregen with their foolish notions of high passionate love, and excursions and alarms! They have much to answer for.
“How do you know, Paline, that I have not come to ravish you?”
She giggled. She was thoroughly at home and enjoying every minute of it.
“You wear a mask, and you carry a sword, and you are a Notor, sure. These things are not necessary to ravish Paline.”
I did not chuckle. I said, “Where is the lady Rosala?”
She rose at once, clad in a long white nightgown, and on bare feet she led me out of her room and into the one next door. Rosala lay sleeping in the wide double bed, beneath a canopy ostentatiously woven of gold thread, with blue flowers and yellow faerlings embroidered upon it. Paline shook her awake. She sat up, her fair hair gleaming in the light, and saw me, and put a hand to her mouth.
“The great Jikai has come to rescue you, my lady! We must dress and fly! Hurry, my lady, hurry!”
“We?” I said.
Rosala looked at me.
“Surely, you who drew me from the zhyan’s claws would not leave my faithful Paline? You would not desert a defenseless girl?”
Almost — almost but not quite — I laughed at this.
“Get dressed, Rosala, and you too, Paline. I would prefer to leave without a fight.”
At this Paline pouted. She was a vivacious girl, very much a gypsy with her dark hair and brilliant eyes. They dressed and I growled at them to wear dark sensible clothing and, by Krun, to hurry. At which, in a silent twitter — a state very easily induced in the middle of the night when a masked madman storms into your bedchamber, I assure you — they hastily gathered up this and that, knickknacks, combs, brushes, mirrors, silver boxes, shawls, toiletries. Significantly, Rosala had pitifully few poor gems to carry away.
“I will carry these things, Notor,” said Paline. “For, doubtless, you will be engaged in fighting.”
Callous? Brave? Or merely a silly head stuffed with romantic nonsense from millennia-old adventures on Kregen?
We crept out on tiptoe. Paline, it was clear, didn’t mind if we did make a noise. She thirsted for my rapier to tickle the guts of these cramphs of Casmas the Deldy’s household. Casmas employed a sizable retinue of servitors and guards, besides his slaves. They were originally from a variety of social strata and of a jumble of diffs; under the lure of his gold they would serve as reasonably well as one might expect.
“This way, Jikai,” said Rosala. She was, by her use of that great word, now convinced that I was all kinds of hero. I just wanted to get this thing done with and set about my real tasks in enemy Hamal. We went through a rear passage.
I thought we would win free without trouble.
Then, as we came out of the shadows of the last flight of stairs with the rear door bolted and barred before us, Paline let out a squeak and cowered next to her mistress. Both girls huddled, shaken, petrified with fear.
Two guards stepped from a doorway at the side. They were fully armed and accoutered in the fashion of Hamalian swods. They saw the girls and me and they did not hesitate. The Rapa’s big vulturine beak parted as he let out a hoarse shriek of rage, and the stux fairly flew toward me in the lamplight. The Brokelsh, his hairy body huge and ominous under the armor, drew his thraxter and charged up the stairs after the stux.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” screamed Rosala.
Paline licked her lips, recovered. “Now, Jikai!
Chapter Fifteen
Whatever Amak Hamun of Paline Valley would have done was neither here nor there. I knew what Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, would do. The stux was snatched from the air in my left hand, reversed, and in a twinkling sent flying back. It took the Brokelsh in the throat above the collarband of his lorica. He could not shriek, but his eyes glared madly, and he clawed at the javelin embedded in his throat; then he toppled and fell with a smash.
I hurdled his prostrate body, whirling the rapier. As I passed Paline I slapped her bottom with my left hand, and yelled: “Unbolt the door, wench! And jump to it!”
The Rapa faced me bravely enough. These bird-faced diffs are a fierce and predatory folk, serving as mercenaries all over the place, and adept with weapons. Not so cruelly fearsome as Chuliks, perhaps, and Chuliks are devils from hell, but tough adversaries. My rapier crossed with his thraxter, he threw up his shield, and then I had slipped in, and, knocking the shield aside, gripped him by the throat in my left fist and drove the rapier into his body, fatally low. He writhed, but I held his throat, glaring madly into his face, and so prevented an outcry as he died.
Paline was standing watching, her face shining and rapt.
“The door, girl! Or must I whip you!”
She shrieked and fled for the door. Rosala was there to help. Between them they unbolted and lifted the bar, struggling, until I dropped the Rapa corpse and leaped to aid them. The door opened and pink moons-light flooded in.
