Steven Brust: Hawk

“Yeah, I know.”

“And why the guardsman?”

“Norathar. I mean, the Dragon Heir, not the boy. I’ll bet you six dead teckla she arranged for that gold-cloak to be there, to keep Cawti and the boy safe.”

I chuckled a bit to myself as I imagined just what Cawti must have said about being protected. I’d have loved to have eavesdropped on that conversation. Probably psychic, though. Too bad you can’t listen in on someone else’s psychic conversations.

For now, I kept myself hidden, I studied, and considered. I discovered that my right hand had gone to the hilt of Lady Teldra, about whom more later. I relaxed and let the hand fall to my side while I thought.

Yeah, sometimes I think. It isn’t what I do best, but occasionally I just give it a shot anyway.

If I were the assassins, and there was an Imperial Guardsman right in front of where I thought the target would be, what would I do? That was easy-find a different place to “take my shot,” in the idiom of my homeland. Where? Well, ideally, a place where there weren’t any Imperial Guardsmen? But okay, if I wanted the guy really, really bad, and I couldn’t find anywhere else? Maybe- maybe -I’d try to arrange for the guard to be distracted long enough for me to make the attempt anyway. It would be complicated, tricky, expensive, and risky; but maybe.

Well, no, to be more precise, I wouldn’t do that, but it was possible these guys would. After all, there were two of them doing a job that usually only one did-assassins usually work alone. Having two of them waiting for me was, to be sure, an honor of sorts. But like the guy on the Executioner’s Star said: Except for the honor, I’d have preferred to skip the ceremony.

“What do you think, Loiosh?”

“You know what I think, Boss. You should walk away right now.”

“Yeah. Talk me into it.”

“If I had to talk you into it, you wouldn’t be asking me to. Let’s go already.”

There was nothing to say to that. Loiosh landed on my right shoulder, Rocza on my left, and I turned and walked back the way I’d come. After a few hundred feet, I stepped off into an alley, and took back streets all the way to the Stone Bridge, which leads back to the City. Instead of taking the bridge, however, I cut north on a street whose name I never learned. In a few minutes, I saw a dilapidated building off to my right that had the vertical parallel lines-drawn or painted above the door-that indicate, in the Easterners’ district, a place that lets out rooms for the night.

“The street would have fewer vermin than that place,” said Loiosh. “And probably be safer.”

I didn’t answer him.

I paid for a room from the fat, grizzled woman in the chair next to the door. She grunted a number at me.

“Are there actually numbers on the rooms?” I asked her.

She squinted at me, and opened her mouth. She didn’t have many teeth.

“Up the stairs, second door on the right. If you have a bag, carry it yourself,” she added, which wasn’t necessary because she could see I didn’t have one, and because I wouldn’t have trusted her with it if I had. It was the kind of place the lower order of prostitutes avoid as too disgusting.

She glowered at me, I think just on principle; but when I started moving, my cloak shifted, and she could see the hilt of my rapier, and she stopped glowering, and I knew if we had any more conversation she would be very polite.

The room was about what you’d expect. I tested the bed. I’d slept in worse. Of course, that was on the ground, but still. There was an empty water pitcher, which indicated a pump room nearby, so it could have been much worse. There was a window big enough for Loiosh and Rocza to fit through, but no way to close it, or even to block any light that came through unless I drove a nail into the wall above it and hung my cloak there. I considered going out to find a blacksmith. There was a chair and a small table with a washbasin on it. The chair looked safe, so I sat in it, and relaxed for half an hour or so while I considered nails and other matters.

“Boss, there really is a lot of insect life in here.”

I grunted and stood up.

You could say that I was unable to perform any witchcraft because of the amulet I wore that made me invisible to magical detection, but it wouldn’t be strictly true. I took a selection of herbs from my pouch, put them in the tin water basin, and lit them. Just because I couldn’t invoke any power didn’t mean I couldn’t use what I knew, and what I knew was how to drive at least most of the insect life out of the room. After that, it was just a matter of leaving the room for a couple of hours while the herbs did-

“Boss! There’s someone in the hall.”

I froze, my hand on the doorknob.

There’d been occasional people walking up and down the hallway all along, but Loiosh wouldn’t have mentioned this one without reason.

“Check the window.”

He flapped over there, stuck his head out. “No good, Boss; two of them out there.”

“Two? Two outside, and one inside? Three of them? What is this organization coming to?”

“There might be more than one outside the door, Boss. I can’t tell for sure.”

I looked around for a place to hide. I mean, there wasn’t one, and I knew there wasn’t one, but I looked anyway, because you do. I could jump out the window where I knew there were two of them, and, with any luck, Loiosh and Rocza could distract them while I recovered from the jump enough to, you know, not die. But aside from any other problems, I wasn’t sure I could fit through the window. I could wait and deal with the unknown or unknowns who, I presumed, were getting ready to smash my door down, and-well, same problem. If it were me on the other side of the door, I’d blow the damned thing up and rush in before the dust settled. Crap. If I were in a farce, I’d hide under the bed. In a play full of exciting fake violence I’d …

Hmmmm.

The room didn’t have a real ceiling, just bare rafters with the roof a few feet above them.

“Boss, seriously? That’s what you’re going with?”

“Got a better idea?”

I stood on the bed frame and jumped, catching hold of one of the rafters. I pulled myself up, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Either I’d gained weight since coming back to Adrilankha, or else the extra hardware I’d picked up recently was weighing me down. But I got there, stood on the beam, and put my other hand on the slanting roof for balance.

Loiosh and Rocza flew up next to me and door blew in, almost knocking me off the beam in spite of my grip.

From above, all I could tell was that there were two of them, one of them holding a dagger and the other a Morganti broadsword. I mean, you don’t exactly see that it’s Morganti, unless you’re in light bright enough to notice that there’s no reflection from the metal, but it doesn’t matter. You know it’s a Morganti weapon. Even wearing a Phoenix Stone amulet, which pretty much makes you deaf to both sorcery and psychic phenomena, if you’re that close to a Morganti weapon, you know.

They charged into the room ready to kill, stopped, looked around. I took a deep breath and a grip on the rafter. After a moment, they went over to the window and looked out on the street. The one with the dagger shrugged his shoulders. The other one turned around, looked up, saw me, opened his mouth, and got both of my boots in his teeth. He didn’t go out the window, which is what I’d been hoping for, but I could hear the crack when his head hit the sill; I didn’t think I’d have to worry about him for a bit.