Free Captive Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers

relax and then jerked my boots back quickly. They were first-quality leather boots and someone would have them off me sharply, with or without my consent, if I advertised them so blatantly. I was a stranger. Therefore I was ripe game. I fretted about Barty. I should have run him back to the Gate of Skulls first.
    This Nath the Knife, the chief assassin, had arranged to meet me here, so close to the walls of the Old City, clearly as a gesture of trust. His bolt-holes would all be deeper in Drak’s City. He ventured within a stone’s throw of the walls and this gate so as to show me he meant to talk. That, I understood. If they were going to try to assassinate me, they would not have requested this meeting.
    My plan, a usual one in the circumstances, misfired.
    Before I could get into conversation and so ease my way in and then seek a back entrance to the upper floor, the serving wench pattered across. Already, this early in the day, she looked tired.
    “Koter Laygon the Strigicaw is waiting for you upstairs, master.” She looked nervous. “The third door.”
    My imbecilic expression altered. I had put on a medium-sized beard. Now I stroked it and looked at her owlishly.
    “Koter Laygon is waiting, master.”
    “Then he can wait until I have finished the tankard.”
    “He is — he will have your skin off, master—”
    “You are sure it is me he is waiting for?”
    “Oh, yes. He was sure.”
    “Who is he? What is he like? Tell me about him?”
    I started to pull out a silver sinver. Her face went white. She drew back, trembling, terrified.
    “No, no, master! No money! They are watching — they know what you are asking—”
    She backed off, her hands wide, and then she ran away, her naked feet making soft shushing sounds on the sawdust. I glanced up under my eyebrows at the balcony. Up there any one of a hundred knot holes could hold a spying eyeball.
    I shifted on the settle against the wall. A tiny sound, no more than the furtive sounds a woflo makes scratching in the wainscoting, made me look down.
    A small slot had opened in the wall. A pair of scissors on extending tongs probed from the slot. They moved gently sideways toward me. Had I not moved, the fellow operating the tongs would have snipped away to get at my purse. As I had now vanished from his gaze the tongs drew back, the scissors vanished and the slot closed. I waited, intrigued.
    Presently another slot opened close to me. The scissors probed out again, silently, ready to snip most patiently.
    I picked up the half-full ale tankard.
    No doubt the cramph had a whole array of tools he could fix to the tongs. A curved knife would slice away leather clothing. With all the noise of the taproom that usually created such a massive sound barrier, he could probably even use a drill to get through armor, and not be heard.
    With a smooth motion I swiveled and slung the ale clean through the slot.
    A splash, a yell of surprise, a series of choked squishing gulpings gave me a more general feeling of well-being. Petty — of course. But it was all a part of the rich tapestry of life — or, as this was Kregen, of death.
    I bent to the slot and said in that fierce old biting way: “Thank Opaz it was only ale and not a length of steel.”
    With that I stood up, hitched the blanket coat around me, and stalked off to the blackwood stairway.
    Over my left shoulder I had arranged snugly a quiver of six terchicks. The terchick, the little throwing knife of the clansmen, is often called the Deldar, and a clansman can hurl them right or left-handed from the back of a galloping zorca and hit the chunkrah’s eye. Of course, the women of the Great Plains of Segesthes use the terchick with unsurpassed skill.
    The drinkers in the area below watched with some curiosity as I climbed up. This Ball and Chain might be situated close to the walls of the Old City and the Gate of Skulls; I fancied the Aleygyn of the Stikitches, Nath Trerhagen, had packed the place with his men. Deep