Chapter 3

Thomas barred the door, dragged the heavy chest out with a thunder, sneezing of dust, , propped up the door with it, piled up the broken fragments of the table, heavy banks and chairs. Oleg laid the coiled rope on the broad windowsill next to him. He smelled the dirty air below, heard a clatter of hooves dying away. Across the wide street, there was a tall gloomy building with lights in three of its guarded windows.

“Sir wonderer!” Judging by the knight’s face, as grey as ashes, he grasped where his strange friend was going to shoot a bolt. His weakened fingers unclenched, the sword all but slipped out of the iron hand.

Oleg drew the bow string with force, aimed. His face went crimson, his teeth flashed in a grimace of torment. Thomas heard a ringing click against the leather glove: the wonderer had put it on providently. The heavy bolt vanished, the rope started to uncoil rapidly.

In perfect silence, both heard a barely audible, distinct ringing sound of broken glass. At once, the wonderer seized the end of the rope and pulled. There was a loud knock on the door, an impatient hoarse shout. “Hey, Fish!.. Antonio, Opudalo!..”

Thomas took his sword with both hands, stood near the door. The wonderer stretched the rope, tied its end quickly to the hook that fastened the shutters to the windowsill. They heard an impatient bang on the door. The bar cracked, the heads of thick nails moved out of their sockets.

Oleg jumped off the windowsill, put on his wide baldric with a huge sword hastily, snatched the bag. “Sir Thomas! You first!”

Thomas was squatting at the side of the door, his legs half-bent, as if in ride, his sword raised overhead. The knight’s eyes were fixed on the bending board of the door, pieces of dry paint and small splinters flying sideways from it. In the corridor, there were harsh voices, clang of steel, trample of heeled boots.

“Sir Thomas,” Oleg called again in an angry whisper, “even the Holy Virgin would have commanded retreat. Why the hell she’d need a dead knight? She doesn’t know what to make of him live! Your life’s worth less than a damned thing, I agree, but who will take your cup to Britain then? I have no need of it. And who will marry Krizhina?”

Thomas shifted his perplexed gaze between the wonderer and the door shaking and bending like a sail. Oleg seized him by elbow, dragged to the window. Thomas looked out and recoiled, as though kicked by a horse between his eyes. The night was pitch-dark, the lit end of the rope – so thin! – disappeared in the creepy dark only seven feet below. A fathomless pit! Several floors to fell down to the earth, and no soft grass below, only the street paved tightly with stone slabs, a fool he was to admire it the day before…

Oleg looked back angrily, as he heard the heavy pounding. With a ringing sound, the bar flew out of hinges, crashed down in the middle of the room. Oleg tore his belt off, made Thomas climb on the windowsill, fastened the belt quickly on both him and the rope. “Quick!” he hissed. “Or we’ll die, like Sveys without butter…”

Thomas peered into the scary darkness with fear. He had been standing on the brink of abyss before: on the Tower of David, the tall wall of Jerusalem, but that was in a fury of storm, a fever of battle… and in a sunny day, after all! His muscle began to turn water, his knees bent, unable to bear the weight of armor.

Oleg hurried him, pushed on his back. “Quick! Move it! They’re breaking in!”

“Sir wonderer… And you?”

“I’ll follow!”

Thomas hurried to climb down from the windowsill, feeling his courage and manly strength back to him. “Sir wonderer, I am insulted! The duty of any warrior, a knight in particular, is to protect civilian people. And you are a priest, though I hate your faith!”

The door was shaking. A crack emerged in it, wide enough to drive a finger, but the heavy chest, with its edge stuck in the hollow between the floor boards, prevented it from flying open. Someone squeezed his fingers through the crack, fumbled around in search of the obstacle to remove it. Oleg snarled, grabbed Thomas with both arms.

“Sir wonderer,” the knight protested in great indignation, “I can’t leave you!”

With an angry groan, Oleg hurled him out through the window. Terrified, Thomas felt falling into the black abyss. He clutched convulsively at the rope, felt a forceful jerk at his iron collar behind: the wonderer kept him from coming down upon the thin rope with all his weight at once….

The last thing Thomas heard was a crack of boards followed by triumphant screams of legionaries. He slid on, suspended by his belt to the fine thread. It quivered, hardly able to bear his weight. His thick gauntleted fingers slid, as though soaped, on the smooth rope, which ringed like a tightly drawn crossbow string. Thomas felt sick as he imagined the thread bursting with a crack and him, a noble crusader knight in his steel, collapsing from the height of the fifth floor on the stone slabs, crunching against them like a lobster, his brain splashing around…

In terror, he took a firmer grip and dragged himself on into the darkness, along the invisible salutary thread, his eyes burnt with sticky, disgustingly bitter sweat. Then he was thunderstruck by a dreadful thought: was he moving in the right direction? The turns and tugs before… He had to hurry: the rope was too thin to endure two men. Sir wonderer is beating off the legionaries who broke into the room! He may already be wounded or killed. It’s all my fault!

He howled with terror and impotence of a noble Angle who felt lost in the night over a street in Constantinople. Almost a barbarian city as compared to Rome. He bowed his head, trying to see the wall of the house, but his metal collar, made to protect the neck from swords, impeded to turn it. He heard a patter of high heels far below, a playful woman’s giggle answered by a deep-voiced laughter of a well-fed Romay. Thomas swung over them, his head gurgling, as well as his stomach. He imagined himself falling down before those strolling clods and felt so sick he couldn’t help vomitting. Below, there were still giggles, jokes, clatter of high heels. With the last of his strength, Thomas dragged himself along the rope. Even if the direction was wrong, he would help valiant sir wonderer in his last mortal battle, instead of hanging on that damned rope like a dump caterpillar in a spider’s web!

His body struck against a hard surface. He felt it, found iron rods, wriggled to grip the salutary metal, which the Romays used to guard their windows, with both hands. His foot found a crack between the stone blocks that formed the house. The heart beat frequently, thumping not on his ribs but on his iron armor.

On the other side of the metal rods, , there was a dark shape of thick iron bolt pressed tightly against them. The stretched rope was tied to it! Thomas sobbed, leaving his terror behind, muttered a slack curse for the wonderer who told him nothing, gave no warning, so he was pursued all the way by the vision of the arrowhead coming out of the wall and him, Thomas Malton of Gisland, falling like a toad, with his limbs spread wide apart, in the middle of the street… Foolishly, he thought the bolt should have been stuck into the wall, and he could not imagine the force needed to drive it so that to endure a big man in full knightly armor!

Suddenly, the rope started to shake violently. The figure of the wonderer emerged from the darkness, running on a tightly stretched rope, as if it were a log, his outstretched arms rocking from side to side, the two-handed sword and stuffed bag in hands.

He took a running jump on the grating, clung to it for a moment, the sword flashed and hid behind his back, the bag shifted onto his shoulders. Thomas wanted to undo the belt that fastened him to the rope but he dared not to release the rods. He tried to drive away the very thought of him, an expert in jousting, hanging on the wall on fifth floor, like a March cat, above the stone-paved street.

A knife flashed in the wonderer’s hand, the rope burst under the blade, fell into the dark. Across the street, there was a shriek, then a heavy stroke on stone, as if a sack of wet clay dropped on the pavement.

“What’s now?” Thomas asked in a scared whisper. “Gnaw at the grating?”

“What are we to do in a woman’s bedroom?” Oleg grimaced. “If there was the daughter of procurator… but it’s his granny! We’ll better get into the window below.”

“The daughter of procurator there?”

“Shame on you, Sir Thomas! Krizhina waits for you. Poor girl! If only she knew what you are dreaming of…”

He vanished in the dark. Thomas heard a screech below, as if rust was scratched away, then an irritated whisper. “Sir Thomas, wake up. Stop dreaming of the procurator’s daughter!”

Thomas hung on the tips of his fingers and toes, playing a spider. He was hot in his armor, like in the Hell’s stove, his limbs trembling, numb fingers about to unclench. Suddenly some hooked paw emerged from the darkness below, seized him by leg. He all but fell off in panics, but managed to slide down, with a support from below.

The wonderer was on the windowsill. He got a better grip on the knight’s belt and dragged him, with a screech of iron on iron, through the ruined grating: only the topmost and the lowest of its horizontal rods were undamaged, while all the vertical ones had either vanished or got terribly bent sideways.

They collapsed into the dark room and stiffened. The house was silent, save for muffled bangs on a copper caldron far below, and a dog barking: an old and lazy one, judging by the sound.

“The hirelings are now running upstairs,” Thomas supposed. With effort, he got up to his shaking feet, brought his trembling hands to his face. He felt cold and heavy in stomach as if he’d swallowed a block of ice or a frozen sheatfish. Meanwhile, Oleg ran about the room, stepping as silently as a giant cat, touched the door, set it ajar to look out. A strip of crimson light fell in from the corridor. They smelt smoke of a tar torch.

“They don’t hear,” Oleg said. “First they should guess where we are. I’ve cut the rope! Its end reaches the ground. That’s what they see from the room – and think we’ve climbed down the rope. And silence below, no shouts nor noise, means their sentries have missed us, or we bribed them. While they sort it out and whack the guilty ones, we can take a breath and get away.”

“Sir wonderer, I’d rather get away without taking a breath!”

“Is something up?” Oleg wondered.

“Yes. When you cut the rope, someone was climbing it!”

Oleg shook his head in astonishment. “Oh, brave they are… You, sir knight, are a different pair of shoes: a true hero. Another man like you can hardly be found in all the Britain, and I can’t believe in more of such heroes found in two thousand miles away… Well, you’re right. We must get away.”

Thomas felt flattered, even his legs stopped trembling. Oleg opened the door wider, looked out and stepped there. The sack on his back made him a likeness of a giant turtle, and the sword hilt and the bow, sticking out on a level with his ears, changed that into a scary creature of night.

Thomas slipped out after the wonderer, glancing at him with shame. He has taken the bigger part of our common load again.

They walked along the broad corridor lit by oil lamps in copper bowls on the walls decorated with colored panels, its floor of expensive marble with intricate patterns. On both sides, there were massive doors of valuable sorts of wood, with decorative carving, ornate copper handles, gleaming nails with broad patterned heads. Behind one of them, they heard laughter, merry voices of women. Oleg stopped there and listened – a hermit indeed! – while Thomas all but died of anxiety, glancing back at the long empty corridor, where, despite the late night, a guard, a servant, or a late guest could show up at every moment…

The stairs were seen at the very end. Thomas ran up to them after the wonderer, trying to be silent the same, but his iron feet made a terrible thunder that caused the whole great bulk of a stone house to shake, the lamps to twinkle with fear, the splendid portraits of noble ancestors to jump and drop pieces of paint.

Thundering like an avalanche coming from the peak of Himalayas, Thomas darted after the wonderer to the floor below. They hid in a draped niche to let some dark figures pass by. It was hot and stuffy there, fine dust filled their nostrils. Thomas tried to hold his nose, but the gauntlet banged, very loud in that deathly silence, on his lowered visor. Thomas froze, not daring to move, heard the steps stop near him. His nose was itching unbearably, and he sneezed with all his might, thinking of nothing in the world but the excruciating itch. I just couldn’t help it.

In the faint light that penetrated through the heavy curtain, he saw a flash of sword nearby, heard the wonderer’s constrained breath. The steps on the other side came close. “Ektius, did you hear it?” a soft voice said in astonishment.

“I’m damned if I didn’t!” a different voice replied. It seemed to belong to an older man. “I have told you! And you, with your modern ideas… The other world does exist, and our old house is haunted. Though only at night.”

“Who can that be? Do you have any ideas?”

“A great-grandfather of our master, judging by his beastly bellow. And also a clank of iron, did you hear? He was the curator of Southern moorings and ended his life in chains, beheaded for misappropriation of the duties paid. Or maybe his father who met the same end…”

Thomas slapped on his visor again, trying to hold his nose. The wonderer’s fingers removed the iron plate quickly, squeezed the bridge of his nose painfully. Surprised, Thomas felt that the unbearable itch stopped abruptly. Like a scream ceased by a sword blow.

“They live own life there…” a thoughtful voice said on the other side of the curtain. “I think… no, it seems to me that ghosts are strolling about this empty house at night, just like you and me, and one asks another, ‘Do you think we should believe in those tales of live men?’”

Thomas felt his legs numb, his nose itching desperately again. The bitter sweat gnawed at his eyes, tickled his neck ruthlessly, ran down his back in hot acrid streams, his feet bathed in the hot. Probably a strange puddle was forming around him. And the two insomniac philosophical fools would discuss its origin in a long and tedious way, based on the existence of the other world and the features of ghostly life.

“I think… no, it seems to me it’s definitely not our master’s grandfather,” the voice said thoughtfully. “He was hanged, I now remember that exactly! Hanged in accordance with his noble origin: on a silk rope! And this one, I think… no, it appears to me…”

Thomas was about to collapse: standing on one foot is very difficult, especially when you are choking with dust and gushing with sweat. He heard the wonderer sigh nearby, then felt a light push on shoulder. Thomas took a deep breath and heard, “I think… no, it seems to me…”

The knight tore the curtain off in a jerk, saw two faces recoiling in fright. “What seems to you, fool?” he yelled fiercely. “A bum? If you thought rather than it seemed to you, you wouldn’t be such an ass!”

The wonderer stepped ahead. “Your Grace,” he told Thomas loudly, “who knew your great-grandson would degenerate into such an ass? I warned you to have less excesses…”

Thomas’s fist darted forward. The poor man flew silently across the corridor and slipped down the opposite wall. The wonderer waved his hand carelessly, the second philosopher gasped and sprawled, like a frog, in the middle of the corridor.

“Run!” Oleg whispered. They darted downstairs, thundering like a herd of shoed horses. Thomas gasped, gripped the walls in abrupt turns, his iron fingers left deep scratches. Oleg rushed like a huge bear, jumped over stairs, came running into the walls, wheeled round silently and dashed on.

It seemed to Thomas they had reached the cellars when Oleg stopped abruptly. “The last flight of stairs ahead,” he said softly. “But the entrance is closed… and guarded. By two.”

Thomas gasped for air, his mouth wide open. “We crush…” he said hoarsely. “Overrun!.. Only two?”

Oleg shook his head, looking sad and accusing. “Innocent people? In their own house?”

Thomas wiped sweat off his face with his iron palm, turned away, feeling a bit ashamed. He breathed heavily, shot anxious glances around: at any moment, someone could come and see them on that noticeable spot – in the middle of the stairs!

Oleg took a golden dinar out of a small pocket in his belt, swung his arm broadly. Thomas could not see the coin vanished in the dim light, but the far guards alerted, one took his axe and walked briskly along the wall, bending like a predator. He disappeared in the shade. For a long time, nothing happened. Thomas got all fidgety when, finally, there came the guard’s surprised voice. Another guard cried back, they exchanged few words. The second guard checked the door bars quickly, glanced out at the window to see whether some important guest was coming upstairs from the street, and hurried to his comrade, his drawn crossbow with him.

Oleg waited for the guard to disappear in the corridor shade, then made a sign to Thomas. They darted quickly across the hall, Oleg removed the hooks and bars in a flash. When he flung the door open, there was an angry shout behind, a click of steel bowstring. Thomas recoiled instinctively, a short crossbow bolt went into the massive door near his head. He shook his fist, leaped out into the night street after Oleg.

Oleg dragged the knight quickly along the wall, hiding in the shade. They turned round the corner, and that was when Thomas felt the cold air, the closeness of sea, saw the stony space of broad, colossal streets ahead.

They heard a shout behind, a bang of door, a clang of steel. Oleg took an idle pace, swaying slightly, his belly thrust out. Thomas also tried to assume a carefree air of a reveler coming back home, though his heart still beating like a sheep’s tail and some smallest muscle under his knees shaking nastily.

“Now where?” Thomas asked. “Our inn…”

“…said his last cuckoo,” Oleg replied. “Fortunately, we are no Saracen to travel with our harems. I’ve taken all of our things. Is the cup with you?”

Thomas grabbed his bag in fright. His fingers felt the familiar prominence: it resembled a woman’s tight breast or her lusty hip curve. The cup replied with a muffled tinkle. Thomas hurried to take his iron fingers off it. “But Constantinople is big!”

“I know plenty of decent inns and hotels,” Oleg said comfortingly. He thought for a while, then shook his head with regret. “Though decent ones do not fit… We’ll be exposed there.”

“Let’s go to the port,” Thomas offered.

“Sir Thomas, isn’t Krizhina waiting for you? And I’m too old for such things. We need something in the middle of decency and comfort. Such places can also be found in the city, strange as it may seem.”

* * *

Oleg sat in the tavern of the inn where he’d stopped with Thomas. The knight almost never budged from their room, a small and dirty one on the fifth floor. He would sharpen the swords, both own and the wonderer’s, mend the hollows in his armor. Oleg brought him food and beer up. Thomas was too noticeable in his armor, and he refused to take it off. Meanwhile, Oleg, in his barbarian jack of wolfskin, could easily pass for a longshoreman, a sailor from a barbarian ship, or a smuggler, whom the shores of Golden Bay were teemed with.

In order not to stand out at all, Oleg hunched up, thrust out his belly to hide his mighty stature. He never hid his face, but it was now angry, annoyed, with no hint of reclusion and search of high Truth. He swilled beer slowly from a huge mug, shot sulky glances at visitors. He could see himself in their eyes: a shaggy, embittered man, eager to make a scuffle whenever an opportunity presents itself.

He saw dicers in three tables away, felt which side was made heavier. He could win a lot of money before they knifed him. He spotted men who went into the secret door to see the innkeeper: all bronzed, smelling of sea wind, strong in shoulders, sweeping in moves. Each of them wore a strange wide hat, which was tied under his chin with a broad stripe, and a predatory curved Saracen knife in a leather scabbard on his belt. Contraband goods, poisons, maps and precise information of the numbers and positions of imperial hosts, the plans of invasions, big and small conspiracies, robberies – all of it flows into the secret door guarded by those two men who look like arrant drunkards with mugs of beer.

It was the third day Oleg spent in the tavern. He would drink much, due to the heat, have a game of dice in times. For dinner, he always ordered some roast meat with greens: a common food of Slavic shepherds, one of whom he pretended to be. As he came upstairs with food for Thomas, he found the knight nervous and angry. The time flies by, the beautiful Krizhina wrings her hands in the castle on the bank of Don, and the wonderer is drinking like a sponge, goggling at the daubed whores who cluster round every sailor or smuggler.

Oleg already knew all the innkeeper’s spies. He could follow their ways in the narrow city nooks in his mind, could earn a fortune by disclosing the secret contraband stores to the basileus or naming the key figures of the secret net that had spread over the left wing of the Emperor’s palace. However, he’d seen not a single spy of the Seven yet: he would have known them once they appeared on the threshold.

Only in the evening of the third day, did he see a man whose resemblance to a smuggler was too close to be true. Oleg’s heart got fluttering. He leaned his head to the jug of wine, watching closely, out of a corner of his eye, the face, gait, moves of that man. No urgent need to hear him speaking. Mimics can give out the lock, stock, and barrel of such secret thoughts that one does not suspect himself of.

The “smuggler” sat at a table nearby. While Oleg watched him asquint, over the mug of beer, the door flew open and two more men came in. Oleg almost choked. First no one, then three agents of the Seven at once! All strong and muscular, with cold eyes and exact moves that were adjusted in the exhausting exercise with arms and hand-to-hand combats. The three were not too young but in the most dangerous age: mature, experienced, skillful.

He stooped over the mug to hide the glitter in his eyes. I have to warn Thomas. The knight had got Oleg’s leave to go out. In those minutes, he must be pacing up and down in front of the tavern, cloaked and hooded tightly: not in his cloak with red cross, but in a grey one of a common man. However, it was Thomas who could drive the attention of spies: still in his armor, huge knightly spurs dinging at his every step… And no way to rise from the table at once: spies are on the special look-out at first moments, they’ll spot me…

The last of the three took in the hall at a careful glance, walked along the narrow passage among tables, watching and listening. Suddenly he turned and stopped in front of the table where a lone sulky barbarian of sturdy built, clad in a rough wolfskin, was swelling his beer. The spy made no move to sit down, but set both fists against the table top and peered at Oleg.

Feeling his heart thumping violently, as it forced up hot blood for a brief fierce fighting, Oleg turned his head slowly. “Why are you staring, red ape?” he bellowed angrily. “No alms on weekdays, and don’t beg me for them on holidays… Get out! Don’t stand in my light!”

“Hey, friend,” the agent said comfortingly, “calm down, down…”

“Friend?” Oleg flared up. “Who said I can have a red ape as my friend? An ape with such equine… I mean, such a pig snout! Though I’m no Sar… Sara… Saracen, I hate pigs! Save the ones roast, in the middle of the table, with horseradish…”

He lapsed into drunken mumbling, dropped his head on the table but jerked it up at once, stared at the agent before him with a dim eye, as though trying to recall where the man had come from. The agent did not wince. “Calm down,” he said kindly. “If I have offended you, please forgive me. I owe you a drink. Hey, wench, a mug of good wine!”

Oleg gave a drunken smile, waved his dirty finger before the agent’s nose. “Who told you I… I can’t pay for my own drink? Do you think yourself the only who can get things past harbor rats?”

The woman put before Oleg a big glass of red wine: a cut-glass one, set in thick copper. Oleg sniffed secretly and smelled, apart from the fermented grape juice, a strange sweetly-disgusting fragrance. As beautiful and dangerous as a young viper. The wine had poison in it… a poison or another nasty thing to make a man go out of his wits, blab out everything he concealed before, and then turn up his toes all the same.

Oleg held his breath, strained to make his face filled with blood and his ears crimson. Having put that furious look on, he stood up, a scary shaggy barbarian, started to raise his voice, working himself up, breaking into a shout. “What’s about me… that seems I can’t buy wine myself? I can buy the whole of this hovel if I like! I can buy you – outbid and purchase with your lock, stock, and barrel, your piles and bald patch! You paid your last coin for your pants, fastened your belt at the last hole! Such a worm to treat me? Me, a Viking from Big Serpent?”

The agent gave him an unfriendly once-over, but controlled himself, not allowing the squabble and scuffle with a drunken barbarian who only lacks a good brawl, his mug smashed and his snot bloody to finish his carouse normally and have a good night sleep. Oleg felt the agent suspecting him… but only suspecting. I need to keep up a part. If he had to fight, he would fight as a Viking from Big Serpent, not a peaceful hermit who, however, was not born a hermit.

The agent replied with a patient malice, though the bad blood started to fill him too. “I don’t usually invite every sot to drink with me! And if I do, he should accept! You shall drink it, fool! If you scream, we’ll maim you at first, and then you’ll drink it all the same, even if you gulp down your teeth with this wine!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Oleg spotted the two men coming from both sides. He made blood rush back from his face. Let them see me go pale and sober with fear. He reached for the glass, his arm shaking, gave a begging look to the agent who grinned in triumph, his suspicion gone. The barbarian was only fierce in words, as all men of his sort are, while heated up with wine and swears, but to stand up bravely, face to face…

Oleg’s fingers clenched on the glass, his shaking hand started to raise it. When the glass was on a level with his breast, he flung it at the agent’s face. The spy recoiled, a long curved dagger was in his hand at once, but his eyes poured over with caustic wine, then a mighty blow sent him flying over the table into the depth of the tavern. Oleg elbowed the second one on his belly, without looking there, stooped, as he expected a back header of the third one, lifted a heavy oak bench and brandished it overhead.

He heard two dry thumps, saw the hilts of throwing knives that appeared in the thick seat before it came down on the third agent with a thunder, smashing him, broking his bones. Oleg, still in the part of a drunken Viking, swung the bench, roared, swore in Sveyan and cursed in Norman, but in that mad whirlwind, his eyes caught a glimpse of those few faces that differed in looks or expressions.

Suddenly he was surrounded. Fighting, he put his mask aside, as he saw an elder man in simple clothing who rose from a far table and, in no apparent hurry, walked out. Oleg struck with his feet, elbows, and head. All’s fair that leads to survival. One could learn much of the foul business of maiming and killing if he did not shy away from dirty tricks of Egyptians, Hittites, Arians, Scythes. Up to the present-day warrior monks.

There were seven or eight crawling, moaning bodies on the floor when the door thundered open and Thomas burst in. With a momentary flash of sword in hand, he jumped ahead, cut, for some reason, the oak bench apart at one strike. “You did them alone again?” he screamed indignantly. “Is it fair?”

“They are not worthy of a knight’s sword,” Oleg explained hastily. “All common men, that’s strange!” He ran past Thomas, darted out into the night street. The enormous city was dark, with only crimson fires blazing on the towers and orange lamps lit in the upper windows of rich mansions.

A hunched figure slipped along a dark wall. Oleg alerted but kept smelling the musty city air, listening to rustle, far shouts. In back alleys and streets, he saw quite whores. They felt, with their sharp senses of small predators accustomed to danger, the bloody brawl behind the thick tavern door. “That way,” he pointed at last. “He ran there!”

Thomas kept his curses to himself, sheathed his sword and rushed after the wonderer. Oleg dashed along the wall, as silent as a giant bat, his arms cut the air noiselessly. His feet made neither a crunch nor a click, while Thomas’s steps rumbled and thundered as if he’d galloped into a china shop on his warhorse. “Sir wonderer, whom are we after?”

“A thief. He’s after the cup.”

Thomas felt his bag, which he never left now, in fright. He fell back. When he managed, with great effort, to come up with Oleg again, his eyes had almost popped out, his heart pounded violently.

“Sir Thomas, go back to the inn!” the wonderer cried out on the run, without looking back. “I swear I will only track one odd man and be back at once! We will storm the enemy’s fortress together, I swear it on the beard of Rod! Or on the innocence of Holy Virgin, as you like…” Having said that, he speeded up. In the narrow dark alleys, Thomas lost the sight of his back at once.

The knight spat, feeling his saliva tight and thickened, and stopped. His heart quivered like a small bird in the throat, eager to fly out. Sweat showered down his body, a sound of surf in his ears. He rocked from side to side: it had been ages since he ran in his full armor the last time. He grasped that the wonderer had made a scuffle to scare the unknown agent away and pursue him then. He, Thomas Malton of Gisland, would have done the same: a sophisticated stratagem. But what fortress did he speak of? Were they to storm the castle of basileus, as the Emperor of Romays is named? But why would they need the Emperor?

With no ideas at all, Thomas went plodding back.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 520