THIRTY-FIVE

The Wu farm was at the end of a valley, at the end of a cart track nine kilometers from Lü-Gu, the district’s principal village. More than a kilometer up the road was the next clearing, where several farms centered around a hamlet of ten or a dozen farm homes. From there to Lü-Gu, the valley land was mostly cleared and cultivated, the farmers living in a series of tiny hamlets. Their houses, like Wu’s, were log huts.

It was unlikely that Wu would ever have close neighbors. Above the last hamlet, the valley narrowed to little more than a ravine, at its end widening into the small bowl where Wu had built; there was only land for one farm there.

In country at the edge of a wilderness, Wu’s choosing to farm where he did, out by himself, verified for Nils what reading the man’s aura and mind had already indicated: that he was independent, self-reliant, and not much given to pampering his fears. Seemingly Jik was growing up to be the same.

The brook meandered, and to avoid repeated fords, the cart road followed along one edge of the valley bottom, where forest overhung it. Nils and the two Chinese met no one on the road, nor overtook anyone. Late and early were the times for that, not afternoon. The people in the fields paid little or no attention to them. Their attention was on their work, which would either feed them through the winter or fail to.

The road skirted one final wooded hill, low and flinty, a point that intruded somewhat into the valley. When they’d rounded it, Nils could see the village a kilometer and a half ahead. It might have held five hundred people.

He stopped and shook his head emphatically. “I cannot go there,’ he said in Mongol.

Wu frowned; the barbarian’s meaning was plain. Actually he’d already thought of stopping where they were. Beyond this point the road left the shelter of the forest’s eaves; it was the last best place to hide the barbarian. And to be seen in the village with him would be risky. But would Chen come so far to talk with him?

“Chen here!” Nils said, and pointed to the ground where they stood. “Chen! Chen here!” he repeated.

“He is saying Chen, father!”

“I heard! I heard! I’m not deaf!” Wu pursed his lips. “But what is the rest of it?”

“I think he wants us to bring Chen here. I think he doesn’t want to go into town.”

“Huh!” And the giant barbarian had already said something about the emperor, or had seemed to. He must indeed be a fugitive, Wu decided, and afraid of being recognized.

Nils pointed at himself, and then at the woods beside the road. He walked his fingers in that direction, then squatted down for a moment.

“He wants to go in the woods and wait for us! He wants us to bring Chen here! He must know him!”

Wu nodded. If the barbarian knew anyone here at all, it would be Chen. Fugitives were rumored to come to the old blacksmith for the things they needed: an ax, arrowheads, even swords.

Chen’s beautiful but headstrong daughter had married the bailiff, Lo Pu-Pang. People said she’d agreed not because she was afraid of Lo, but because he was the only man in the district who could buy her the nice things she wanted. And her aging father being so willful and unruly—increasingly so with age—it was no doubt her influence that had kept him from prison or worse.

Wu didn’t intend to involve himself in such matters. He’d leave things to Chen. Chen had been a smith with the army on the frontier when he was young. Had hobnobbed with Mongol mercenaries, learned their language, and even now would sometimes speak it at one and all when he’d been drinking. Sounding much like the big barbarian. And it seemed to him . . . 

He nodded. “Stay with him. I will go into the village and talk to Chen.”

The smith didn’t see Wu come in, but he was aware when the farmer’s body blocked the light through the door, which was open for the breeze. He quenched the sickle blade he’d been hammering, making the water hiss, then wiped sweat with a forearm, and turned.

“Ah! Wu! It is you! I was afraid it was that worthless son-in-law of mine!”

Chen had only one daughter, and therefore only one son-in-law. Wu told himself that to call the bailiff worthless, even privately, was foolish. Someday, unless events intervened, Chen would offend the official one time too many. One day a squad of the bailiff’s hoodlums would come in with their cudgels and swords and beat him, put chains on him and take him away. The smith’s well-known strength would avail him nothing; they’d cut off his head if he fought them. And the common people needed him, for who else would make cane knives with thick, strong, sword-like backs—swords shaped like cane knives really—or broad-axes suitable for fighting when the time came? Many farmers had one of those, with a long handle he could fit to it.

Wu stepped close to the smith and spoke in an undertone. “A barbarian has wandered onto my farm. Speaking what sounds like the Mongol tongue. He is wary of being seen by people. I left him in the woods outside of town, at the Pine Point.”

Chen also spoke quietly. “What is your interest in this barbarian?”

“He is a giant.” The farmer gestured, indicating height and shoulders. “Very big and strong, and wears scars. He must be good for something beyond more ordinary men.” Wu’s eyebrows suggested the rest of it. The district was not far short of armed revolt. Meanwhile he said nothing about the barbarian’s eyes. “But I cannot understand what he says,” he added, “nor he I. Perhaps I can bring him in tonight and . . . ” He shrugged.

“Hmm!” Chen examined Wu as if looking for something that wasn’t plain to see. “Well.” He thought for a moment. “You can’t bring him here. My son-in-law distrusts me. Lately he has someone watching my shop when I’m here, and my home when I’m there.” He paused. “A big Mongol who is a fugitive, you say. Is he armed?”

“With the biggest sword I ever saw. He is the biggest man I ever saw.”

Chen pursed scarred lips. “Such a one might indeed be useful.” He stepped to a comer, and from a shelf took a jar, removed the lid and drank a long swig of whatever it held. He was thinking. The bailiff’s most important duty was to collect the emperor’s taxes, and the taxes continually grew. There was nothing to be done about that. But the bailiff’s collection fee also grew. Now it added one-third to the taxes. His wealth was said to exceed that of everyone else’s in the village—everyone’s combined.

Even as a boy, grandson of the old bailiff, Lo Pu-Pang had been greedy, and boastful of his possessions, displaying them. They had to be the best, and everyone must know it—the best kite, the finest pony . . . And at last the most beautiful wife.

Lo knew he was deeply hated, and kept an ever increasing company of mercenaries to protect him and enforce his demands. These armed men had become a law onto themselves, doing whatever pleased them. They abused both villagers and farmers, and the cost of their pay and maintenance—“district defense cost”—was added to the taxes and his fee. Another story—and this from Kwong the grain merchant, who did much business in the capital—was that Lo recruited his mercenaries from the prison at Miyun. It was easy to believe.

But if there was an armed revolt, a successful one, the army would be sent. Heads would roll then, no doubt including his. Though it might be worth it, depending on what kind of man the new bailiff was.

He also remembered how daring and reckless some young Mongols could be, and what fighters! Surely one that had gotten this far from home, and had so offended the authorities that they might follow him into the hills, must be reckless indeed. If he could somehow get him inside the bailiff’s fortress, perhaps into the same room with him . . . 

With an abruptness born of decision, Chen stepped to a pile of scrap iron and selected three pieces. Then he pumped his bellows till the fire in the forge was white not. With the tongs he thrust in one of the pieces, after a long moment withdrew it, and began to hammer. Heat, hammer, and quench! Heat, hammer, and quench! The hisses were explosive, and the place smelled of steam and hot metal. He kept it up till he held a finished grappling hook in his tongs, with a ring to take a rope, then took a file to its three hooks till they were pointed. Finally he wrapped it in a cotton towel that hung by the quenching tank, to conceal what it was and eventually to muffle the sound it might make. This done, he laid it aside, grinned at Wu and bowed slighty. The farmer thought he knew what the smith had in mind.

The smith took another swig from the crock. “I will talk to this Mongol,” he said softly, “and see what he is like. At the Pine Point, you say. And your son is there with him?”

“I will take you,” said Wu.

“No,” Chen replied. “You stay here. You will help ensure that the man who is watching, the man of my son-in-law, stays, and doesn’t follow me.”

“I?”

The smith wasn’t listening. He hung up his leather apron, his thick, muscular forearms flecked with scars from hot flakes of metal sent flying by his hammer. Then strode to the door, stepped outside, and called back for anyone to hear. “I’m expecting a farmer to come. If I’m not here when he arrives, tell him I’ll be back when Doctor Liang is done sticking needles in me. You don’t know what it’s like to stand all day at my age. My knees are killing me.”

Pretending to limp, he walked to his home then, fifty meters away, in the front and out the back, to the shed where he kept his horse. There he took down a ten-meter coil of rope and tied on the grappling hook. Then he saddled the animal, rode it along behind a mulberry hedge to an alley, followed the alley to another street, and headed south out of town.

As he rode, he thought about his daughter, the bailiff’s wife. It ground him to think that at first he’d been pleased with the marriage. But she’d been a difficult girl, passionate, willful, dissatisfied. With an eye for young men; he and his wife had had to watch her like a hawk! Marriage, they thought, would calm her. And it had, but . . . Sometimes, when he saw her, he could tell she’d been crying. And three years with no pregnancy! He wondered if Lo was impotent, or preferred unnatural acts.

Jik recognized the blacksmith and came out of the woods to meet him. “Honorable smith! Where is my father?” he asked.

The smith rode the horse into the edge of the trees before answering. “He is watching my shop. Where is the Mongol?”

Mongol? The boy felt uneasy at that; the giant was no Mongol, though who knew what he was. “He is back where no one can see him from the road. Come! I will take you to him.”

Nils had not climbed the slope, but simply hiked back along its foot, to settle behind a sapling thicket. As the smith rode toward him through the trees, he stood up and stepped out, Mrs. Wu’s hat in hand, blanket over an arm, exposing his blond hair, long braids, and sword.

“What?!” began the smith, for clearly this was no Mongol. Then Nils spoke.

“You are Chen, who speaks Mongol?” He put it as a question, though he knew.

“I am. But you . . . ”

“I am a Northman from far to the west, who has been among the Mongols. My name is Nils.”

“Ah!” Chen stared, taking in not only Nils’s size and musculature, but now his eyes. “You are blind!”

“I am not blind. I have wizard eyes, and see by night as well as day.”

Breath hissed out of the old smith, like air from a bladder. “A wizard!”

Nils nodded, grinning.

A wizard, Chen repeated to himself. One who can see in the dark. His plan took new reality for him, and with sudden energy he began describing it.

Chen sent Wu home at an hour when he’d be seen alone on the road headed south.

Chen himself was a widower and alone, who sometimes took his supper in the tavern. This night he would eat there and spend the evening drinking with old friends, to deflect possible suspicion. Drinking more than usual, and pretending to be more affected by it than he actually was. Happily Dr. Liang came in. They were friends, and Chen drank with him. Doctor Liang, who with his wife and youngest daughter was also the village candle-maker and seller, was considered a conservative and proper man whose primary eccentricity was his friendship and occasional drinking with the smith. As such he provided a particularly suitable alibi.

Chen remained sober enough to worry. Not for himself; it seemed to him he’d taken care of that. But he didn’t want the barbarian to get killed; that, it seemed to him, would add to his own karma. Of course, any karma earned should the bailiff be killed, or any of his guards, he would happily accept, because someone needed to do something about Lo Pu-Pang.

It was a slow evening in the tavern, and after awhile, Chen and Liang were almost the only customers there. Finally the tavern keeper announced that no more drinks would be served. Liang asked Chen to come home with him and spend the night. Actually the doctor wanted the muscular smith’s protection between the tavern and his own door; otherwise some ruffian might ambush and rob him. And his wife wouldn’t scold him if the smith was there.

Chen readily agreed. Apparently the deed had not yet been done; he’d heard no uproar from the bailiff’s compound, or report of one. And agreeing with Liang’s request would extend his alibi through the whole night. Meanwhile he was a little edgy that something had gone wrong, and that the plan would come to naught.

It was so dark out that Liang went back into the tavern and borrowed an oil lamp from the tavern keeper, to help him find the key holes in his gate and door.

Jik and the giant barbarian had napped off and on through the day, waiting till well after dark, as Chen had directed. Hopefully they’d meet no one on the road. Nils had left shirt and boots behind, as well as bow and quiver, wearing only breeches and harness, carrying only sword and knife, and the coiled rope with its grapple. He’d be climbing, and unnecessary gear would be nuisances.

It was more than night-dark; it was like being in a sack of charcoal. The moon had not risen yet, and a thick overcast cut off even the starlight. Jik’s problem in leading Nils to the village was to keep from blundering into the ditch. Or so he thought. He didn’t realize that Nils saw as well in the dark as by day. Thus it took them considerably longer to reach Lü-Gu than Jik had expected, Nils keeping cheerfully to the Chinese youth’s pace.

Jik intended to avoid village lanes, where they might encounter villagers. Instead he followed the mud-and-straw brick walls of householders’ back vegetable gardens, walls which formed a mostly continuous outer skirt around the village. Indeed, most village yards were surrounded by such walls, commonly higher than a man. As Jik groped his way along, dogs barked, but in Lü-Gu, dogs barked off and on every night.

The youth was not intimately familiar with the village. They should have stayed outside the skirt of garden walls, circling till they came to the much higher, stronger wall of the bailiff’s compound. When they encountered a ditch filled with irrigation water, he became confused. Thus they slipped through a gap between two garden walls and he felt his way through an orchard to a village lane.

Jik was truly worried now. He had little idea where they were, and this was taking longer than intended.

He looked about helplessly. Then around a corner, a light appeared. Two men turned into the lane, one of them carrying a lamp, and Jik saw both an opportunity and a danger. “Stay here!” he hissed. “Don’t let them see you.” Remembering that his companion spoke no Chinese, he pushed him into a niche they’d just passed, a corner where two neighboring walls failed to align. A tree grew there; it would help conceal the man. Then swallowing his fear, the youth hurried to meet the two men with the lamp.

One of them was Chen! “Excuse me, honored grandfathers,” Jik said. “I am lost. Can you tell me where I can find the temple?” The temple, he knew, was very near the bailiff’s.

Liang peered at the boy. “Who are you?” he asked.

Chen interrupted; it wouldn’t do to have young Wu identify himself “You are young Tung, are you not?”

Jik swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

‘Why do you want to go to the temple?” Liang asked. “It’s not open at this hour.”

Again Chen answered for him, or seemed to. “It’s the darkness; he’s gotten lost.” He pointed. “The temple is just up the lane, boy. Not more than eighty meters.”

Jik bobbed. “Thank you, honored grandfathers.” Only eighty meters! And not far past it was the bailiff’s wall! Alone he hurried past the two old men in the direction Chen had pointed. He could hardly stay and wait till they’d gone on; Liang would ask more questions. He’d go, then hurry back for the barbarian when the way was clear. He could tell from their breath, and indeed by the physician’s speech, that the two men had been drinking. Hopefully they’d fail to notice the barbarian standing in the niche.

He stopped in a gateway and watched the two amble past the barbarian’s hiding place. Not much farther on they stopped at a gate, and after a moment went through it, taking their lamp with them.

Jik went back to find the barbarian and take him to the bailiff’s. The barbarian wasn’t there.

The boy’s stomach sank. Where could he have gone? Then an answer struck him: The barbarian might have gone back the way they came. He might have lost his nerve. The boy shook it off and waited a few minutes, hoping that Nils would pop up after all—that he’d simply found a better hiding place—but the barbarian didnt show. Finally Jik left. Being alone, and knowing now where he was, he made his way through the village to the main road, and turning right, followed it south out of town.

He’d go to the Pine Point, where the blanket was hidden, and his mother’s hat, and the barbarian’s bow and quiver. The road turned almost sharply there; he should be able to find that, at least. And the things were just within the edge of the woods, eighty-three steps from the road; he’d counted. He hardly dared go home without the blanket. If the barbarian’s quiver and bow were still there, he’d wait for him. Otherwise he’d go straight home, as his father had ordered.

As soon as Nils heard, telepathically, Chen’s answer to Jik, he slipped back through the darkness to a cross lane, and waited there. After a minute the two older men entered Liang’s yard, but still Nils stayed where he was. He didn’t want the boy with him at the bailiff’s wall. He’d serve no purpose there, and if something went wrong, Jik might be unwilling to run away soon enough, and be caught.

He watched until the youth left, then moved swiftly past the temple to the compound. There he padded around the wall, scanning telepathically for the locations of any guards.

Four were posted atop the wall and one at the front gate. The men on top had probably been assigned one to a corner, but those for the southwest and northwest corners had met on the middle of the west wall, where they were smoking hemp together, chuckling, and talking in murmurs. Chen had told him there should be no dogs; his daughter had mentioned that her husband despised barking. Nor scanning could Nils sense one, watchdog or lapdog, though there could be one asleep in the house.

The compound’s wall was about six meters high, the compound perhaps sixty wide and eighty long. Nils decided to go over the back wall some meters from the deserted northwest corner. When he reached there, he took the rope from his shoulder and laid the coils on the ground. Then he swung the grapple and tossed it onto the top. Wrapped as it was, it landed with only a dull clunk, not loud, but certainly audible in the night.

Nils stood motionless, scanning. With so few minds awake nearby, his psi reach was sufficient that he could sense even the guard at the front gate. In the quiet of night, three had heard the sound: the two hemp smokers, and the man at the northeast corner. But they weren’t alarmed. The latter told himself it was the guard at the northwest corner; that was the most convenient supposition. The hemp smokers listened hard for perhaps twenty seconds, then dismissed the sound. It was too dark, they were enjoying their conversation, and anyway it was nothing.

Nils waited several slow minutes, then pulled cautiously. The hook moved a few handspans, then grabbed. He pulled harder; it seemed firmly set. Leaning back, he began to climb.

He reached the top without difficulty. The wall was about two meters wide between embrasured parapets. While he coiled his rope, he looked around. Open stairs led down into the courtyard from each back corner. The bailiff’s manor was a tee-shaped building, itself a minor fortress. The stem of the tee was single-storied and had a number of slot-like windows. A scan of the sleeping minds inside identified it as the barracks, the two-storied crossbar was the manor itself. Its windows were larger, its roof a balustraded garden.

To human eyes, none of it would have been visible from the wall on so dense and dark night.

Cat-quiet, he went to the vacated northwest corner, down the stairs and into the courtyard. It too was largely garden, with fruit trees and flowerbeds. Swift and silent, he crossed it to a door at the base of the tee, and up the several steps to stand outside it. Carefully he raised the latch, but the door didn’t give to his pressure.

Without hesitating, he slipped quietly to the ground again and around the west side of the house to the front. He sensed a guard inside, seated and sleeping beside the door. Carefully carefully he raised the heavy latch. Carefully he pulled, then pushed; the door remained firm, as if barred inside.

Lips compressed, Nils frowned, then continued around the house. On the east side there was a second-floor balcony with a low balustrade, and double doors ajar. Inside was a faint light, as if a candle burned there, or a small lamp. Also inside, he sensed, was the man he sought, asleep beside the smith’s daughter, and no apparent way to reach him except with the grapple. He didn’t hesitate. Uncoiling the rope, he swung and then tossed it.

In itself it made little noise, but the sleeping cat it struck and knocked from the balustrade squalled once indignantly, and raced inside, through the open doors and under the mosquito curtain.

Nils froze, his short hairs rigid at the sound. Upstairs the bailiff stirred, grunted in his sleep and rolled over. His young wife sat stiffly upright beside him, then got up. She listened hard, Nils listening with her. He felt her relax and lie back down, but wide awake now, wondering what could have frightened her cat so. An owl perhaps? As a girl she’d had a cat, and an owl had killed it in the night, killed and skinned and eaten it beneath the plum tree.

Gently Nils drew on the rope. The grapple moved scarce inches before it caught, but the young wife’s senses had been sharpened by the cat’s alarming squall. Thus she heard the slight scraping, and stiffened again in her bed, scalp tight, nerves tingling.

It occurred to Nils that he might better have thrown his grapple onto the roof, almost anywhere along the building. He’d have avoided the disturbance, and had the wall to brace his feet against for climbing. It would have been simple to let himself down to the balcony from there. As it was, he had a wakened woman at the top, and a free hang to climb up. But with his grapple engaged, he was committed.

Meanwhile the darkness was changing, just a little. The half moon, he realized, must be edging above the bordering mountain ridge, casting its first rays across the heavy overcast. Within minutes, visibility for human eyes would improve enough to endanger him. He’d be exposed then to the guard at the southeast corner.

He waited only seconds while the bailiff’s wife began to relax. Then he reached up and began to climb. Even for his muscles it wasn’t easy. Lean as he’d become, he still weighed 114 kilos, and the rope was slender—a centimeter and a half thick—offering little to grip on. It took him a grim half minute to reach the top and hoist his upper body onto the railing. Where he found himself looking into candle flame, and the eyes of the bailiff’s wife, peering at him through the mosquito curtain! In his efforting, he hadn’t sensed her getting out of bed, coming to the doorway to investigate the faint sound she’d heard his effortful breathing.

She stared, her almond eyes wide, almost round.

“Sh-h-h!” he hissed, then pulled himself over the rail and stood. She moved only a short step back, still staring, not at his strange eyes now, but at all of him, huge, bull-muscled, half naked, and utterly foreign. She decided this was all a dream, strange and unreal.

He put a finger to his lips, and parted the curtains. Heart thudding, she stepped aside to let him pass. Lo Pu-Pang still slept; Nils felt the young wife’s unbelieving eyes as he leaned over the bailiff. He reached—clutched! His grip was inhumanly strong. His thumbs crushed the trachea and compressed the carotid as the fingers dug deeply into the man’s poorly toned neck muscles. The bailiff’s eyes bulged open, and for just a moment his body strained upward before collapsing back.

Nils held his grip long enough to ensure the man’s death, then straightened and breathed a long sigh. He’d been holding his breath. He’d killed many men in fights, and some fighting men by stealth, but this was his first murder. The wife was beside him now with her candle, staring at the corpse’s gaping face. Then she set the candle on the bedside table, threw her arms around the Northman’s waist, pressed her face against him and wept silently.

There was no grief in it, only an upwelling of relief, an unburdening of repression, and she clung to Nils thus for a long minute, her tears wetting his chest. When she stopped, she looked up at him, and he could sense her arousal. She stood on tiptoes, and he bent till they kissed, long and passionately, her fingers pressing his lean flesh.

Then she led him to a couch beside a wall.

Afterward she fell asleep, and he left as she’d expected. She’d already decided: When she awoke, if her husband . . . If this had been real, and no dream, she’d scream, then say she’d wakened to find him dead. No one could accuse her of such a murder; she hadn’t nearly the strength for it.

Nils, didn’t go down the rope. He left it where it hung, and silent as smoke, slipped down the inside stairs. In the entry hall, a single oil lamp burned on a bracket. The guard had been changed while Nils had been with Chen’s daughter, but the new guard already dozed in a chair by the door. Nils killed him with a knife thrust through the eye socket, deep into the brain, avoiding the slippery blood that followed slitting throats.

It seemed to him there’d be a direct connection between the bailiff’s residence and the guard barracks. There was a set of double doors. Before trying them though, he unlatched the front entrance, a possible retreat lane. Then, with sweat starting again, he opened the doors to the barracks wing, just a crack, and looked through.

On the other side, a hall led to another set of double doors, and on each side of the hall were two separate doors. He slipped inside, and very carefully opened one. A candle guttered in the small room, and a man lay sleeping, presumably an officer. A young woman, actually a girl, slept beside him. The man’s breastplate, greaves, and plumed helmet hung on pegs, and his sword belt on another. Without waking the girl, Nils killed him as he’d killed the entry guard, then left, closing the door behind him.

On the other side, a man lay in bed alone. He died the same death. In the third, two men lay sleeping together, legs tangled. Very carefully he killed one, but something, some psychic thread, caused the other to stir, to mutter. The man’s lids fluttered, and the knife slashed deeply across his throat. Blood gushed, then slacked off, and Nils wiped his hands and knife on the bedding. The fourth room was empty. Its occupant was either on duty or had died across the hall.

Next Nils went to the double doors at the hall’s end, and opened one of them. Here as in the entry hall, a single oil lamp flickered, this one by the door. This was the barracks proper, with two rows of long grass-filled mattresses on the floor, about forty in all. He could smell the grass through the odor of lampflame and unwashed bodies. Some of the mattresses were unoccupied. At the head of each was a wicker chest, and on the wall, pegs with gear hanging. Between the rows was abundant room to muster and stand inspection.

Nils snuffed the flame and the room went dark. The only light was faint, cloud-thinned moonlight through small windows in the east wall. He went to the nearest man, then moved crouching down the west row, killing each in turn—

Until, when he’d almost reached the end, he heard a bellow of alarm and rage from the hall outside. The dead guard had been found in the entry hall. Men were springing from their beds at the noise, confused in the blackness, staring toward the sound. Several groped for their weapons on the wall. Nils moved like a giant beweaponed dervish then, slashing, slaying. There were shrieks and shouts. The double doors burst open, and a man stepped in with a lamp. More men were turning toward the uproar; swords were being drawn. Nils’s great blade swept and hewed, and men fell, until only eight or ten still stood, desperate. Seeing death upon them, they rallied.

Nils gave way then, backing quickly toward the far end of the barracks, and the guardsmen, encouraged, pressed him. The foremost he slew, and the second; the rest hung back. One called to bring halberds, another called for a bow. Nils reached the door, slipped the bar, threw it open and ran into the courtyard.

Instantly they were after him, though not too closely.

He raced to a stairway and up the wall. The guard at the corner waited for him, and struck down at him with his sword. Nils fended it as others reached the stairs behind him. His huge left hand shot out, grabbed the guardsman’s ankle, shoved upward, twisted, jerked. The man’s arms flailed to keep his balance, and Nils’s sword thrust up into him. Then the Northman pounced to the top of the wall, spun, and struck down his leading pursuer. The rest hung back again; there were only a handful left, He turned his back to them, hopped onto the parapet, and sword in hand jumped off.

He lit crouching, not falling, and loped off into the night. He was outside the skirt of garden walls, and no one was willing to pursue him.