Elminster's Daughter - Ed Greenwood [54]
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 running from all the nightmares life could muster, panting and clawing with almost frenzied speed, and raced across a roof of loose and shifting tiles to spring out and down onto the roof of the next building.
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