10 – Aftermath by Asprin, Robert

Samlor punched the tough in the chest lefMianded, then jerked down on the butt of his coffin-hiked dagger. The youth’s leather vest was sewn with flat metal washers; the narrow point in Samlor’s left hand scratched across the face of one before it sank deep enough into unprotected flesh to prick a lung.

Whether or not the metal in the dagger blade had spelled Samlor a warning, it served well enough for a fighting knife. At the Cirdonian’s swift tug, the edges sawed through the silvered chain and freed them- selves. The severed knob spun to the muck on the alley’s cobblestones with its bit of attached chain twitching like a lizard’s tail.

The thug lost his footing and fell backward. He should have tangled himself with his leader, but the youth with the gilded chain danced clear.

On his toes, buttocks flattening against the tavern wall as his fellow sprawled beneath him, he whirled a spiked knob at Samlor in a down- ward arc that split the difference between vertical and horizontal.

The stranger’s hood had flopped back and his cape was twisted so that its broach closure was at his left shoulder instead of his throat. When the street tough dropped him to deal with Samlor, the man raised a hand and began to stutter words in a language the caravan master did not know. As the spike chain spun at Samlor’s skull in a curve as dangerous as a sword stroke, the stranger stopped talking and prodded the youth be- tween the shoulders with his staff-

Samlor dodged back to avoid the spikes, forgetting the bulge in the wall behind that rocked him to a halt. The knob sparked across the stone and tore the Cirdonian’s left ear as the youth tried to recover from the push that sent him off balance.