Tyfar’s color rose up into his cheeks.
“I think I know where honor-”
“Honor!” She laughed, and, even then, even in all that thumping racket from below, and the peril in which we stood, that laughter rose, pure and untrammeled, and exciting.
“Go on, Tyfar,” I said. “There is time to get across into the shadows of the bakery.”
“I shall not precede this — lady.”
“Then,” I said, and if you are surprised you still do not understand that old reprobate, Dray Prescot,
“then I shall go at once myself and leave you two to wrangle it out between you.”
And, with that, I jumped down onto the adjoining roof and crabbed deuced swiftly across to follow the others as they clawed their way down a crumbling wall to the alley. I had no compunction. I knew Tyfar’s honor would make him follow me, wasting no more time. If the woman wished to be last, no doubt following some obscure honor code or discipline of her own, then we’d only hold things up by further wrangling.
Tyfar breathed down my neck as I jumped for the alley.
“That woman! Insufferable! Vosk-headed! Stubborn as a graint!”
“Charming, though, you must agree.”
“Yes, yes, of course. I noticed her at once. Although I would not say charming — in fact, charming is the last word I’d use. Attractive, alluring, beautiful — yes, she’s all those. But who can put up with seductiveness cloaked with superciliousness?”
I peered suspiciously at Tyfar. “Isn’t that San Blarnoi? Although, to be sure, I think the quote phrases it somewhat differently from ‘put up with’.”
“San Blarnoi knew what he was talking about. That woman!”
“Yes?” came that smooth mellifluous voice, sweet as honey and sharp as a rapier. “What woman would that be, horter?”
Tyfar spun about. I was facing him, and he swung back to stare accusingly at me. His whole stance, his shining face, screamed out: “You might have warned me!”
I said, “Why, some shrewish fishwife who landladied it at our last inn. Now, we had best hurry. Those paktuns looked as though they know their job. And if Sorgan did betray you they’ll know we have an injured man.”
“Yes,” she said, instantly forgetting the pettiness of impending annoyance at Tyfar’s incautious words.
“We must get on. Kaldu! Make for Horter Rathon’s.”
“Quidang, my lady.”
We all ran down the alley, and we ran away from Blue Vosk Street and headed for the thick stand of tall timber.
“There is a section of bog in here, lady,” said Nod the Straw. “No one ventures here.” His eyes rolled.
“I do not like to go in — but-”
“Needs must when you come to the fluttrell’s vane, Nod.”
“Aye, my lady.”
“This Rathon,” I said, “to whom we are all running like a flock of ponshos. Did Sorgan know of him and his house?”
“No,” said Kaldu.
Tyfar wanted to bristle up at the incivility. But I restrained him with a quiet word. How odd it is that a prince will stand for uncouthness when an arrow is aimed at his heart, and prickles up when it is not!
Although, to give Tyfar his dues, he wasn’t the least afraid of arrows in the normal course of things. That a beautiful and well-formed woman had been the person aiming the shaft at us — that, I think, had thrown him off balance.
The trees closed over us, a mixture of the beautiful as well as the ugly in Kregan trees. The path became distinctly moist. I looked back. Our footprints were perfectly legible to the eyes of a tracker.
“It gets a lot stickier ahead,” said Nod. “Unfortunately.”
“There is a boat,” said the woman. She spoke briskly. “We can cross the river without trouble, and lose ourselves in the Aracloins.[2]Horter Rathon will give us shelter.”
“Why did you not go there first, instead of to Blue Vosk Street?”
She gave me a withering look.
“That was nearest. We did not know who Barkindrar and Nath were when the watch tried to take them up. When we realized they were Hamalese, of course, we stepped in.”
“You are revolutionaries?”
The moment I spoke I heard the fatuity of my question.
She said, “Kaldu! Watch your step.”
He did not answer but plunged on with Barkindrar slung over his back. The Bullet had taken a nasty cut along the leg. The wound was bound — and bound expertly, too, the handiwork as I guessed of this surprising woman.
Along by the edge of the river where this boggy section was difficult to tell from river itself, we threaded along the narrow path. Nod the Straw led, and he was not at all happy. In any niksuth, any small marshy area, of Kregen you are likely to find uncooperative life. Teeth and fangs, spines and stings, they hop up out of the bog and seek to drag you down for a juicy dinner. Even in a city like Khorunlad. Aware of this delightful fact of Kregan bogs, I loosened my thraxter in the scabbard.
“If no one comes here,” I said. “The watch will not think we have. There is no need to hurry, they will not know how long we have been gone from the stables.”
“There was a quantity of blood spilled on the straw,” she said.
“I see. Then we had best hurry.”
“Jak,” called Tyfar.
I swung about to look.
He was half off and half on the path, and one leg was going deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling stink of blackness. Tendriliferous vines snaked over the oozing mud. But he got a grip on a clump of weed and arrested his sucking-in.
He had been following up last. The girl at my side said, “The oaf!” She spoke tartly. Tyfar got a better grip and started to haul himself in.
A head appeared over his shoulder, one of those snouting, fanged heads of Kregen, all scale and tendrils and gape-jaws. The eyes were red slits. It hoisted itself a little free of the ooze with two broad paddle-like forefeet. In the next instant it would open and close that fearsome set of jaws, and Tyfar’s head would provide the dinner the thing craved.
The girl took a single step forward. She was splendid.
The bow came from her shoulder as a skater comes off the ice. The arrow nocked, was drawn back -
to the ear — and the shaft flew. Straight and strongly driven, that shaft. It pierced cleanly through one of those red slit eyes. The steel point must have gouged on, deep into the minuscule brain. I could not watch the death throes of the beast any more. A mate to the first appeared almost soundlessly beside me and the jagged- fanged jaws thrust for the girl in her russets, who stood ready with a second shaft aimed for the monster by Tyfar.
My thraxter swept around and then straightened. Point first it drove into a red-slitted eye. The thraxter would not have cut the thing’s scaly neck deeply enough. But the solid steel punched through eye and head and into brain. I jerked back. Like its mate, it thrashed and screeched. The girl gave a single convulsive jump back.
Her bow lifted, the arrow pulled — then she summed up the picture and did not loose.
“I give you my thanks for saving Tyfar,” I said.
He was off the ooze now and safely on the path. His leg sheened with the muck. He waved his sword at us and then started to run along the treacherous path to catch us up. I own I felt enormous relief knowing that he was safe.
The woman looked at me. Woman? Girl? She was young, around Tyfar’s age, I judged, although men and women change so slowly over their better than two hundred or so years of life on Kregen. Sometimes she had the airs of a queen, and at others those of a roistering tavern wench, and both were nicely calculated. She was controlled in her emotions; but her emotions were real and could break out fiercely-
