Randall Garrett - Too Many Magicians

She stopped suddenly and blinked. “What?” She blinked again.

Lord Darcy, watching Tia’s face covertly from beneath his hood, saw her expression change. Where before it had been stony, now it became wooden. The cold expression became no expression at all.

The Commander suddenly reached over and grabbed Darcy’s wrist.

“Watch it!” he whispered harshly. “They’re going to leave by the back door!”

Lord Darcy smiled inwardly. Lord Bontriomphe had mentioned that Ashley had occasional flashes of precognition, and here was an example of it. Such flashes came to an untrained Talent in moments of personal stress.

As Ashley had predicted, Tia rose to her feet, as did the hooded man, his back still toward the watchers. The hooded man did not turn. Tia did, and the two of them walked directly out the back door, only a few feet away.

Darcy and the Commander were on their feet, heading toward the back door. Then Lord Darcy stopped, his hand on the doorknob.

“What are you waiting for?” Ashley asked.

“I want them to get far enough ahead so that they won’t notice the light when I open this door.”

“But we’ll lose them in this fog!”

“Not with those high heels of hers. You can hear them ten yards away.”

He eased the door open a trifle. “Hear that? They’re moving away toward our right. What street is this?”

“This would be Old Barnegat Road,” said Lord Ashley.

“All right, let’s go.” Lord Darcy swung open the door and the two men stepped out into the billowing fog. The steady clicking of Tia’s heels was still clearly audible.

“Let’s close up the distance,” Lord Darcy said as they walked steadily through the shrouded darkness. “If we walk quietly, they won’t notice our footsteps over the sound of hers.”

The two men said nothing for several minutes as they followed the beacon of sound that came from Tia’s heels. Then, in a low voice, Lord Ashley said, “You know, I didn’t understand much of that conversation back at the pub but I guess I should be thankful I could understand any of it at all.”

“Why?” asked Lord Darcy.

“I had rather assumed it would be in Polish. We know the Einzig girl speaks Polish and the note indicates that the man does, too.”

“Quite the contrary,” said Lord Darcy. “The note indicates that the man has a slight acquaintance with the Polish tongue, but hardly enough to carry on a lengthy conversation in it. The Poles differentiate between a ‘hound’ and a ‘dog’ just as we do. Yet in translating ‘Hound and Hare’ into Polish, he used the Polish word for ‘dog,’ which no one who was conversant with the language would have done. And that tells us a great deal more about the man we are following.”

“In what way, my lord?”

“That he is vain, pretentious, and has an overdeveloped sense of the melodramatic. He could quite as easily have written the note in Anglo-French, yet he did not. Why?”

“Perhaps because he felt that it would not be understood by anyone else who happened to see it.”

“Precisely; and you have fallen into the same error he did. Only a man who is unfamiliar with a language thinks of it as a kind of secret writing. Do you think of Anglo-French as a cryptic language with which to conceal your thoughts from others?”

“Hardly,” said Lord Ashley with a smile.

“But even so,” Lord Darcy said softly, “only a vain, pretentious man would attempt to show off his patently poor knowledge of a language to a person whose native tongue it is.”

At a corner ahead of them, the sound of Tia’s heels turned again to the right. “Where are we now?” Lord Darcy asked.

“If I haven’t lost my bearings, we just passed Great Harlow House; that means they turned on Thames Street, heading roughly south.”

Lord Darcy wished, not for the first time, that he knew more about the geography of London. “Have you any idea where they’re going?” he asked.

“Well, if we keep on this way,” said Lord Ashley, “we’ll pass St. Martin’s Church and end up smack in the middle of Westminster Palace.”

“Don’t tell me they’re going to see the King,” said Lord Darcy. “I really don’t believe I could swallow that.”

“Wait, they’re turning left.”

“Where would that be?”

“Somerset Bridge,” Lord Ashley said. “They’re crossing the river. We’d better drop back a little. There are lights on the bridge.”

“I think not,” said Lord Darcy. “We’ll take our chances.”

“How much longer are they going to keep walking?” Lord Ashley muttered. “Are they out on a pleasant evening stroll to Croydon or something?”

The lights on the bridge did not hamper them in any way. They were widely spaced, and the fog was so dense, especially here over the Thames, that someone standing directly under a gas lamp could not be seen from fifteen feet away. They kept walking at a steady pace.

Suddenly the clicking stopped, somewhere near the middle of the bridge. Automatically the two men also stopped. Then they heard a single sentence, muffled but clearly intelligible: “Now climb up on the balustrade.”

“Good God!” said Darcy. “Let’s go!”

The two men broke into a run. Caution now was out of the question. The hooded man came suddenly into sight, through the veil of fog. He was standing near one of the gas lamps. Tia Einzig was nowhere to be seen. From the river below came the sound of a muffled splash.

At the sound of footsteps the hooded man turned, his face still hidden, shadowed from the overhead light by the hood of his cloak. He froze for a second as if deciding whether or not to run. Then he realized it was too late, that his pursuers were too close for him to escape. His right hand dived beneath his cloak and came out again with a smallsword. Its needlelike blade gleamed in the foggy light.

The Imperial Navy’s training was such that Commander Lord Ashley’s reaction was almost instinctive. His own narrow-bladed sword came from its scabbard and into position before the hooded man could attack.

“Take care of him!” Lord Darcy shouted. “I’ll get the girl!” He was already racing across the bridge to the downstream side, opening his cloak and dropping it behind him as he ran. He vaulted to the top of the broad stone balustrade, stood for a moment, then took a long clean dive into the impenetrable blackness below.

Commander Lord Ashley did not see Lord Darcy’s dive from the bridge. His eyes had not for a second left the hooded figure that faced him in the tiny area of mist-filled light beneath the gas lamp. He felt confident, sure of himself. The way the other man had drawn his sword proclaimed him an amateur.

Then, as his opponent came in suddenly, he felt an odd surge of fear. The sword in the other man’s hand seemed to flicker and vanish as it moved!

It was only by instinct and pure luck that he managed to avoid the point of the other’s sword and parry the thrust with his own blade. And still his eyes could not find that slim, deadly shaft of steel. It was as if his eyes refused to focus on it, refused to look directly at it.

The next few seconds brought him close to panic as thrust after thrust narrowly missed their mark, and his own thrusts were parried easily by a blade he could not see, a blade he could not find.

Wherever he looked, it was always somewhere else, moving in hard and fast, with strikes that would have been deadly, had his own sword not somehow managed to ward them off each time. His own thrusts were parried again and again, for each time the other blade neared his own, his eyes would uncontrollably look away.

He did not need to be told that this was sorcery. It was all too apparent that he was faced with an enchanted blade in the hands of a deadly killer.