Elminster's Daughter

The nearest of those heads stared down at Narnra over a tray of fresh-made, raw eel pies. Narnra rammed one arm against an ankle and shoved at the other ankle with her other hand—and the tray and its holder toppled over her like a over-tall tree severed by a woodsman's axe, crashing into the kicking cook.

He stumbled back, almost falling, and flung his empty scraps-bucket at Narnra's head. It whanged off one waving boot of the man who'd been holding the tray—then Narnra was on her feet and sprinting hard into the midst of three fat, shrieking women and their small host of half-finished eel pies.

They lurched and scuttled in all directions, and she darted this way and that through them, hip-slamming the last woman headfirst into a cart of dirty pots, ladles, and pans.

The crash was both deafening and spectacular, as the Silken Shadow left it behind, charging around a cutting-table toward the door out of this place, within sight at last.

Ahead, there was a serving-counter in the way. It came equipped with a grizzled, startled-looking cookshop owner frozen in the act of wiping it with a bit of dirty rag to gape at her. Narnra ran right at him, intending to veer away at the last moment.

Across the busy kitchen, on the far side of other cutting-tables, cooks were cursing. The racing thief had ignored them as being safely out of her way, but she'd reckoned without the swift-tempered and forearmed nature of most Marsembans. Cleaver after cleaver was snatched and thrown at her racing figure. Now in swift succession they crashed into bowls, other howling cooks, oven doors, and the faces of startled stoking-lads who'd just straightened up to catch sight of whatever was causing all the excitement.

One whirling blade caught Narnra on the arm, bruising rather than cutting her, and sent her reeling into the grizzled counter-cleaner, who embraced her with an incoherently wordless gabble of amazement and swiftly mounting fear.

Narnra pumped three swift punches into the stained and reeking apron covering the man's bulging belly. He spewed whatever he'd just finished eating over her racing body into the face of the first cook, who—lightened by the lack of his scraps-bucket—had managed to mount a clumsy pursuit of this destructive intruder.

Blinded and snarling in disgust, the cook reeled and elbow-skidded along a counter, spilling and scattering eel pies by the dozens ... as the green-faced owner of the cookshop folded aside with a groan, and Narnra vaulted the counter with grace enough to freeze one of the young stokers where he stood, staring in awed lust—which got him smashed flat to the floor by a snarling Glarasteer Rhauligan.

The Harper and Highknight had already weathered almost a dozen flung pots on his own charge through the cookshop kitchen, cleavers being in suddenly short supply—but someone found one last black-bladed monster somewhere and sent it whirling with shrewd aim as Rhauligan rounded the cutting-table for his run toward the counter.

The Harper saw its deadly flicker out of the corner of his eye and flung up his arm to ward it away from his face. It bit deep into his shoulder and banged harmlessly away off his scalp rather than laying open his face or cleaving his skull in twain.

Rhauligan roared out his pain, not daring to slow, and the vomit-covered cook sagging on the counter took one look at his furious face and the streaming blood and fled, sobbing a frantic way aside.

Bleeding—again. Oh, this little hunt just gets better and better.

The Harper burst out of the cookshop door into the wet mists in time to see Narnra halfway up the wall of the building, clinging to a drainpipe. She was slipping often in the wet and going slowly as she tried to work her way past a balcony jutting out from the floor above the cookshop—but she was already well out of his reach, and he couldn't climb any faster than she could. To say nothing of whether or not any drainpipe would prove sturdy enough for the weight of two, all the way to the roof. . . .

Just inside the cookshop door, in the open space in front of the serving-counter, was a side door. It would be the way up some cramped, dark stairs to the loftier levels of this building.

Rhauligan turned and raced back inside, frightening a fresh howl of alarm from the kitchen. The side door proved to be locked, but Rhauligan carried a prybar—good as a cudgel, stouter than a sword and boasting some saw-teeth besides—sheathed to one leg, and he took out the frustrations Narnra was building in him on that door.

The defenseless wood offered little resistance, and the Harper boiled up the stairs like a storm wind and put his shoulder to the door on the first landing.

It cracked like a thunderstroke, broke in half, and gave way inward, spilling him onto a half-asleep man and his only-slightly-more-awake wife who lay on a straw mattress on the floor. Their sons were already awake and peering out the lone, filthy window at the gloomy mists of slowly brightening dawn. They whirled, wide-eyed, as Rhauligan's stumbling boot came down on their father's stomach. The winded man sobbed for breath, flinging out his arms convulsively—one of them across his wife's throat, silencing her in the first meeping moment of an emerging scream.

"Morning!" the Harper rapped grimly, never slowing in his charge across the room. "Balcony door! 'Way in the name of the King!"

One boy gawked mutely, and the other, eyes shining, shot a bolt and flung wide the balcony door. Rhauligan thanked him with a fierce grin and plunged out into the mists, whirling to face the drainpipe in time to see Narnra's boot lifting just out of reach.

He grabbed for it anyway, knowing as he did that he was going to be about a fingerlength short. He was.

Well, he'd almost laid a hand on her. He slapped it onto the pipe instead and swarmed up it after her, grunting at the pain each pull stabbed into his cloven shoulder. He had to get close enough that she wouldn't have the time to turn on the rooftop and dagger his face or hands—aye, he had to be that close to her, or ...

Narnra glanced down, hissed out a curse—he was close enough to almost feel her breath, as he clawed his way hastily upward—and wasted no time on trying to kick at him or deal him any wounds. Instead, she fled up the pipe like a little girl ru

She landed hard, knocking her breath from herself, and spun around on one knee to keep an eye on her pursuer as she panted to get her wind back.

Rhauligan was hauling himself up onto the roof she'd just left. Narnra snarled 'wordlessly, fought her way to her feet as he straightened—then thought of something and bent to her other boot to snatch another knife to hurl at him. Its sheath was empty.

Either she'd lost it during this chase, or he'd taken it while healing her. Hissing a curse at him instead, she spun around, ran, and leaped onto the next roof through the thickly rising, scented steam of someone's laundry, coming up from a skylight.

Beyond, the roof was flat, all of metal sheets sealed and patched with thick pitch, ankle-deep in slippery, bird-dung-dotted water— and . . . and Narnra found herself with nowhere she could safely leap to, on a building with wide streets on two sides, Rhauligan grimly approaching on the third, and a barge heaped high with spear-like, jagged salvage-wood on the last side that it would be sheer suicide to jump onto. She glared around at treacherous Marsember for a moment in the lightening dawn, then spun around and raced back to the open skylight.

Rhauligan was just launching himself at her over its billowing murk. Narnra sat down in her run and skidded over the edge moments before his boots crashed down through where she'd just been.