reputation is a sham, a bolstered creation because you are the Prince Majister. Of course, the most puissant prince of Vallia must be a great warrior, a High Jikai, for anything less would demean the empire.”
“It’s a theory,” I said.
“So you will pay five thousand gold talens and you may live. It is settled.”
I pondered. It seemed clear they believed the story. They would never have taken out the contract to kill me if they did not. I have amassed a certain unsavory reputation, as you know, and there were places on Kregen where no one — not even a raving idiot — would even contemplate trying to kill me. But, here in Vondium, the capital of the Vallian Empire, I was not in one of those places. The four people at the table believed this business was settled. They began to stir, ready to take their leave. The two guides shuffled their feet and stepped back. I put my feet under me, ready for the leap, and looked across the table.
“Settled? Why, you onkers, I wouldn’t pay you a single clipped toc!”
The four figures stiffened as though I’d jammed a polearm up each one of them. These four formed the High Council of the Assassins of Vondium. Their powers were frighteningly great. For that single betraying heartbeat they could not believe they had heard aright.
The woman let out a gasp and leaned forward on her forearm and her hand splayed against me. Jewels flashed. Nath the Knife put a hand to her hand, and restrained her. Laygon the Strigicaw started to curse, his hand reaching to his belt. The fourth man, who had not spoken, yet remained silent. It struck me then that these assassins couldn’t see the funny side of all this. They didn’t think it was funny. To me, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, it was hilarious. What my ferocious Djangs would say of it — their King of Djanduin solemnly being asked to pay someone for being kind enough not to kill him! They would bellow their mirth!
In the instant of the ensuing silence, when everyone in the musty room remained fixed, static, enwrapped with their own personal turmoil of emotions, the heavy beating of rain pelted against the closed windows. The mineral oil lamps nickered.
Then, and only then, speaking in that iron voice, Nath the Knife said: “You will pay. You will pay — or you are dead.”
“Not,” I said, “a single clipped toc.”
As the instant action followed I commented to myself that my rhetoric was entirely false. A toc is a tiny coin, one sixth of an ob, and who was going to bother to clip that?
Then the chair groaned and grated and flapped back into a black and cavernous hole and I spring-heeled up and onto the floor, and naked steel flashed in the lamplights. This, then, was more like it. .
Five
The trick chair vanished with an almighty crash into the black maw gaping in the floor like the mouth of a chank. The two guides, flustered by my non-disappearance, flicked out their rapiers. They were stikitches and therefore expert with weapons. They rushed on me, silently, determined to cut themselves a little of Laygon’s fee.
My feet hit the wooden floor and dust puffed up. The whole floor groaned; the place was as rotten as the worm-eaten hull of the Swordship Gull-i-mo.
“Cut him down!” grated that iron voice. ‘“He refuses an accommodation in honor, now he must pay the penalty.”
My own rapier ripped out — a nice blade but not a top-quality brand in its decorations, serviceable, well-used, the kind of rapier a fellow might wear in Drak’s City — and the steel jangled and slid as the blades crossed.
The two assassins brought their four blades into play at once. I ducked and weaved and fended them off with the rapier alone. I did not draw the matching main gauche.
Before Barty and I had ventured in here I had insisted that he wear one of the superb mesh-steel shirts Delia and I owned. We kept them particularly well-cared for, on formers, well-oiled, safe in the armory of our Valkan villa in Vondium. One of those shirts cost more than even a relatively well-paid working man could earn in his entire lifetime.
The blades clashed and the lamplight glinted from the steel.
I vaulted back, slashed away, foined, and kept one eye on the four chief assassins at the table. They were the real danger.
One of the guides thought to play it clever and slid in below his fellow. His dark face glared up at me. He tried to hold his left-hand dagger up so as to parry any downward cut I might make, and thrust me through with his rapier. At the same time his companion pressed in strongly, seeking to pin me. I leaped, thrust, landing a high hit along a shoulder above any armor they might be wearing under their drab tunics, brought a yell of agony, withdrew, and so kicked the clever one in the nose as I went by. His blade hissed past. He sprawled back, his nose a crimson flower, spraying blood. I hit them both with the hilt — left and right, one two — and sprang away from the spot. A dagger whistled through the air where I had been standing.
The two guides sprawled on the floor. The woman still stood in the pose of throwing as I whirled to face the table in the corner.
One of the stikitches had gone. A door was just closing in the left-hand angle of the walls. He was the silent one. Laygon and Nath had drawn their blades. They stood, clearly expecting the woman’s dagger cast to finish me. Now I waggled my rapier at them admonishingly.
“I do not wish to kill any of you. Though, Opaz knows why not, for you are all ripe to die. But I am willing to spare you and so save future trouble.”
I know. I know. That was weak. But I had work to do in Vallia and I didn’t want a pack of rascally stikitches on my neck, interfering. If they could be convinced they had no future trying to assassinate me, then I would have achieved a great deal.
That was the new Dray Prescot talking, of course. .
“You will die, here and now.” The iron voice of Nath the Knife held not a single note of hesitation. Inflexible, he could not understand why what he wished had not already occurred. A mocking thought occurred to me.
The two men, Nath and Laygon, rounded each end of the table to get at me. They were quite clearly hyr stikitches, top men, superb with weapons. Killing was their trade and they would have made of it an art.
“If I have to slay you, I will,” I said. “But think. If you kill me, here and now, you will never have the chance of another client. No one else will offer you gold for my death.”
As I say, I mocked them.
They did not reply but bore on.
The woman was the danger, now. She’d have another dagger or three stuffed down her bodice. I’d have to skip and leap and against these two my attention was likely to be fully engaged. Time for Remberee. .
The window, probably. .
It would be nonproductive to attempt to return across the rain-swept walkway to The Ball and Chain. The door through which Silent Sam or Tongueless Tom had disappeared would open to a trick lock, and there wouldn’t be time. So it would have to be the window.
The woman came back to life. Her hand raked out. Steel glinted.
My left hand flicked up to my neck, the fingers gripped, twisted, withdrew and the terchick flew. Like a homing bee it buzzed clean into the woman’s upper right arm. She let out a hoarse gasp, never a scream, and staggered. The dagger fell from her nerveless fingers.
“I would crave your pardon, lady,” I said. “If you were not a stikitche. As you are, you may rot in a Herrelldrin Hell for my talens.”
Then the two men were on me and I ripped out the left-hand dagger and we set to. Even as the blades crossed a thought so shocking occurred to me that I faltered, and stamped back, and then backpedaled most rapidly around the room aiming for the window. What an onker I was!
These men believed I was a warrior of the imagination, a figment of the Vallian Empire’s publicity machine. They had seen me enter the tavern, no doubt of that, and they took me at face value. The woman had been
