“Up, Barty,” I said, and took his arm and fairly hurled him up onto the hay of the rearmost wagon. He started to protest at once and took a mouthful of hay, and spluttered and then I was up on the high cart with him and urging him along. Reluctantly, he allowed me to help him over the somnolent form of the driver, with a couple of steps along the broad backs of the krahniks, to reach the next cart along. So, prancing like a couple of high-wire artists, we darted along the line of hay-filled wagons. The massed crowds below showed little interest in our antics; a few people looked up, and laughed, and some cursed us; but most of them were content merely to push on in the wake of whatever was holding up progress.
The rain stopped and the twin suns shone with a growing warmth. The clouds fanned away, dissipating, letting that glorious blue sky of Kregen extend refulgently above.
We hopped along from wain to wain, leaping the drivers and the krahniks. The animals were hardly aware of the footsteps on their backs before we had leaped off and so on. The assassins followed us.
Ahead the sense of a mass moving ponderously along the Lane turned out to be a large body of soldiery, all marching with a swing. The glint of their weapons showed they were ready for an emergency, which surprised me, although it should not have, seeing the troubles through which Vallia had just come — and was still going through, by Vox. Everybody followed the troops, either unable or unwilling to push past. A number of loaded and covered carts were visible within the ranks of the formed body, and there were palanquins there, too, with brightly colored awnings against the rain or the suns. Barty missed his footing and I had to haul him up off the head of a sleepy driver, whose brown hand reached for his bolstered whip, and whose hoarse voice blasted out, outraged, puzzled, alarmed at this visitation from heaven. I shouted.
“On with you, Barty. The rasts gain on us.”
Ahead along the line of hay wains the purple shadow of an aqueduct cast a bar of blackness. That could cause us problems. We leaped the next two carts and Barty again slipped. He turned on me, then, thoroughly put out by my inexplicable insistence on running away. He held onto the high rail of a hay wain and spoke furiously.
“In my island they used to speak with hushed breath of the Strom of Valka — Strom Drak na Valka. But I have heard stories, rumors, that the great reputation is all a sham, a pretense, something to color the marriage with the Princess Majestrix. By Vox! I do not believe it — but your conduct strains my belief, prince, strains it damnably!”
The hay wains were lumbering forward again, slowly, rolling, and the purple shadows of the aqueduct fell about us.
“Believe what you will, Strom Barty. But you will go on to the next wagon and then jump down. You will mingle in the crowds. You will do this as you love my daughter Dayra.”
“And? And what will you do?”
“I will go up.” The aqueduct’s brick walls presented many handholds. “They will follow me. That is certain. I will meet you-”
“I shall go up, also!”
I lowered my eyebrows at him. He put a hand to his mouth.
“You go on under the aqueduct and jump down, young Barty. Dernun?”
Yes, cracking out “dernun?” like that at him was not particularly polite. Dernun carries the connotation of punishment if you do not understand, meaning savvy,
The bricks were old and here and there irregular patches of new brickwork had been inserted. The emperor liked to keep his aqueducts efficient. Even so, sprays of water spat in fine arcs out across the heads of passersby. I climbed up to the first row of brick arches and clung on and looked back. The assassins were almost up with the aqueduct, leaping like fleas over the backs of the hay wains. I waved my arm at them and then made a most insulting gesture.
The slant of the brickwork ran the water channel out over the Lane at an angle. I climbed through the lower tier of arches into a dark cavernous space, lit by the semi-circles of brilliance in serried rows, feeling the looseness of old mortar and brick chipping below, the glimmer of random puddles showing up like unwinking eyes. Water splashed down from the leaded channel above my head. The stikitches clambered up after me.
The plan was to run diagonally along the first tier of arches all the way across the Lane and so free myself of the encumbrance of Barty. I had ideas on the mores and honor of the stikitches, and if Laygon the Strigicaw was among those pursuing me — as he must almost inevitably be — then I could finish this thing cleanly.
That time-consuming altercation with Barty had afforded the pursuers the chance to catch up. They ran fleetly across the strewn ground at me, spraying water from puddles, yelling, incensed, confident they had me now and uncaring of what noise they made in this arched space, knowing it would be lost in the greater noise from the procession which passed by below.
They were good. Well, of course, to be employed as an assassin on Kregen you have to be good. Quite apart from the fact that if you are not good you won’t last, you will also starve. The shadowy effect of the brick buttresses and the shafts of brilliant light through the arched openings lent a macabre air of theatre to that fight. The blades rang and scraped and the first two went down. The others pressed in confidently enough and at the first pass with a large fellow wearing a ring in his ear, my rapier blade snapped.
Do not think it odd if I say I felt relief that the rapier snapped. Only eight of the rogues had clambered up the arches and followed me. So I was in a hurry, and with the rapier useless I could hurl the hilt in the face of the earring fellow, and then rip out the longsword.
“By Jhalak,” one of the stikitches ground out. “That bar of iron will not serve you.”
It served him through the guts, and the next fellow spun away with his steel mask shattered and blood spouting through. Two tried to run and two terchicks finished them. I was left facing the man who by his clothes and mannerisms I knew to be Laygon the Strigicaw. Time was running out. I had to be quick.
“When you are dead, Laygon,” I said cheerfully, “no stikitche will pick up your contracts without payment. But Ashti Melekhi is dead, also. So that business will be settled, with full steel-bokkertu and in all honor.”
He knew what I meant. Steel-bokkertu is a euphemism for rights gained by the sword and retrospectively legalized. So he leaped for me, snarling, and he died, like the others, and I ran to the edge of the arched space and looked down.
I might have guessed.
The procession was in an uproar.
The two weasely fellows had chosen to go after Barty because they were not stikitches and fancied he, as a Koter of Vallia, would carry a goodly sum on his person. After the assassins had finished with me, the rasts calculated, there would be no pickings for them. The rest of the stikitches must have decided to chance the ranked soldiery. Barty had spitted one of them, clearing a space among the onlookers as the procession passed, and was tinkering away with two more.
It was a long way down.
People broke away from the fight, screaming. In those first few moments of action when all was confusion, no one turned instantly to assist Barty. But he did look a sight, clad in his old clothes, bedraggled, red-faced, swearing away, thoroughly worked up. One might almost be forgiven for believing he was the murderer and the soberly-attired assassins his victims. They had removed their steel masks and now wore only the polite public half-mask often seen on Kregen, a useful adjunct to gracious living, as it is said with some irony.
Whatever might be said, in a mur or two he’d be dead.
The angle of the aqueduct had taken me out farther into the center of the Lane. Directly below passed a cart loaded with sharp-looking objects under a tarpaulin, the edges creased and unfriendly looking. To jump down on that would invite a punctured hide and a snapped backbone. Further along swayed the palanquins with their colored awnings. I eyed them savagely. The largest one — of course. It had to be the biggest and best to take the weight and the velocity of my fall. I ran along the edge of the brickwork, ducked out of the archway right over the palanquin below, and launched myself into space. As I jumped I saw the soldiers at last break ranks and advance on Barty and the assassins. Just before I revolved in the air, falling, I glimpsed the assassins running off, and Barty twisting in the grip of a Deldar.
Then, rotating, I came down with an ear-splitting crash on the striped awning. It ripped. I went on through
