The sill was rotten and I shoved the wooden leaves open cautiously. The interior of the place stank. The floor was cumbered with shadow-shrouded impedimenta of the animal trade. Stalls lined both walls with a ladder beyond. Most of the stalls were empty. In the one nearest to the ladder a freymul, the poor man’s zorca, suddenly looked splendid as he tossed his head in a shaft of the suns’ light breaking in through a crack in the dilapidated walls. His fine chocolate-colored coat with those brave streaks of tromp beneath gleamed, and he showed his teeth and neighed.
“That’s done it,” I said. “Up the ladder!”
I sprang up the ladder four rungs at a time. If one of the treads snapped beneath my boots… But they held. I reached the landing at the top and faced a half-open door in which the light of a mineral-oil lamp glowed. Shadows moved.
In the hayloft, Quienyin had said.
Tyfar sprang up the ladder after me.
Three paces took me to the door.
My hand reached out to push the door open.
Abruptly, it was snatched back.
I stared into the oil lamp’s radiance. Hay piled up to the pitch of the roof. A woman stood facing me, the bow in her hand bent and the steel head of the arrow aimed directly at my breast. The man who had flung the door open appeared. It was nicely done. In a single instant the bow could loose and the arrow drive through me.
“Hold still, dom,” said the man. He was apim, strongly built and with a brown beard, trimmed to a point. His eyes were dark and his face, big-boned, powerful, held a look of such savage anger I knew I would have to treat him with the utmost caution. “One move — one — and you’re spitted.”
“Stand quite still,” said the woman.
Her voice was mellifluous, very pleasing in other circumstances. She wore a russet tunic and russet trousers, cut tightly, and her slender waist was cinctured by a wide brown belt, and the gold buckle glittered in the light. As to her face, that lay in shadow; but I caught the impression of a firmness there, the shape conveying that sense of strength as her head half-turned to stare along the shaft. Her eyes fastened upon me, large and brown and luminous above the bar of shadow from her left arm.
“We shall all have to move very-” I began.
The man spat out a curse.
“You speak when you are spoken to, dom, not before. You are very near death.”
“Oh, aye,” I said. “And so are we all-”
The man lifted his fist. His nostrils pinched in.
“Kaldu!” The voice of command as the woman spoke smoked into the room. She was used to telling people what to do and seeing them do it. “Quiet, Kaldu. No chance has brought these two horters here.”
“They mean us mischief, my lady. Let me-”
I said, “Stop clowning about, Kaldu. Listen to your mistress. And we must all get out of here. The watch is on the way. Where are — where is the injured man and his comrade?”
The bow was held in a grip that did not tremble by so much as an eyelash. The bow was a big, compound reflex weapon that pulled enough to let a man know he held a bow; the girl gripped it and held the arrow in such a fashion that told me she knew exactly what she was doing. One thing was sure, this mysterious woman was a superb archer.
“You know? How could you? The watch-?”
“Come on, Kaldu,” I said. “Close your mouth. We must get out of here at once.”
“I believe you,” the woman said. She lowered the bow.
I heard Tyfar let out a shaky breath. He did not put as much trust as I did in the bowmanship of this girl.
“Which way is the watch coming?”
“In the direction of the Avenue of a Thousand-”
“Very well. We must go over the roof to the bakery beyond. Kaldu, fetch Barkindrar. Tell Nath.” She swung to face Tyfar and me. “I do not know who you are — yet. But if you are traitors-”
“Barkindrar and Nath are my men,” spoke up Tyfar. “Lady. I trust they are not badly hurt-”
“They can run.” Tyfar flinched back.
“Then,” I said, “for the sake of Havil the Green, let us all run!”
The girl flashed me a look. “Havil,” she said. “You are Hamalese?”
“Yes-” began Tyfar.
I said, “Havil is known over all Havilfar. Now enough shilly-shallying.” Barkindrar and Nath appeared, helped along by Kaldu. He loomed over them. “Come on, you two famblys. We must run for it.”
They started to speak and an enormous battering began on the door. The noise burst up from front and back of the building.
“The watch!” said Kaldu. “We are too late!”
“No!” flared the girl. She looked like an enraged zhantilla, fiery, incensed, splendid. “It’s never too late, until you’re dead!”
Chapter eight
The bakery leaned against the stables for mutual support. They propped each other. The aroma of baking bread fought with the dungy whiffs from the yard at the back of the barn. As we prepared to run through the opposite door to the bakery, the woman looked at Barkindrar. The Brokelsh was clearly in pain; but in that sullen, mulish, Brokelsh way he refused to acknowledge the fact. The woman placed her hand on Barkindrar’s forehead.
The hand was shapely, firm, clearly the hand of a woman and yet I knew that hand could accomplish warrior deeds. Her face relaxed for a betraying moment from her tough no-nonsense pose and revealed the compassion she felt. Then she swung back to us, hard and imperative.
“They take their time. They will never see us past the bakery.”
She wore a rapier and main gauche. The bow went up on her shoulder out of the way. Her brown hair, trimmed neatly and rather too short, shone bravely in the light of the suns. I looked past the jut of the stable roof as we went out. If some damned inquisitive mercenary took it into his head to move well out into the yard, he could not fail to see us. Once they had broken into the building they’d be up the stairs like a pack of werstings, all fangs and ravagings. The bakery was a single-story affair and we ought to scramble down easily enough. I judged there would be no need to set a rear guard, and Nod the Straw, out on the roof, would have warned us if a mercenary did stroll out too far.
Nod the Straw, a wispy little fellow who worked in the stables, waited for us on the roof. His pop-eyes and thick-lipped mouth expressed no surprise that there were two more people suddenly appearing from the shelter of his barn. But he was savagely annoyed and kept brandishing a cut-down pitchfork.
“I know who it was,” he raved. “That crop-eared, no-good kleesh of a Sorgan! He must have betrayed us — and they’ll give him a dozen stripes quicker’n a dozen silver sinvers.”
“Never mind about who betrayed us now, Nod,” said the woman. “Help get Barkindrar down off your roof.”
Tyfar said, “Do you all go on. I shall hold the roof and delay them-”
The woman threw him a glance that I, for one, would not welcome. Although, by Krun, that self-same look that says what a great ninny you are has been thrown at me in my time.
“Leave off, Nod,” said Kaldu. “I will take Barkindrar on my back.”
“You great dermiflon!” jibed Nod the Straw. But he desisted in his efforts, and Kaldu took Barkindrar up and bore him swiftly down over the roof of the bakery. Nath the Shaft followed with Nod the Straw.
“What are you waiting for?” said Tyfar. He drew his sword. “I can hold them off for long enough-”
“You think, then,” said this woman in her imperious way, “that you are some kind of Jikai?”
