Although they mostly weren’t looking at her like a dog at a porkchop anymore. A couple of them crowed laughter at the sight of her tugging her blade out of the Islander.
“Good work, missy,” one grinned. “The lord here needs someone to look after him.”
She flushed and turned away at the laughter. “What is that stuff?” she asked, nodding at the satchel of round jarlike things at his side, each with its little tail of cord.
“I call them grenades,” Adrian said absently—that seemed to be his usual manner of speech—and patted them. “They’ve got a powder inside that I found in certain . . . ancient records, very ancient. It has a number of uses.”
“Like those thunder sounds we heard earlier?” she asked.
He looked at her, the absent-mindedness blinking away, and passed her the canteen someone had handed to him. She accepted it and took a pull; the wine that cut the water was nearly vinegar, but it was welcome in the gummy dryness of her mouth.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” he said; it was a second before she noticed he’d switched from his Solingian-accented Scholar’s Emerald to a pellucidly pure dialect of patrician-class Vanbert Confed. “It explodes—that is, generates a lot of rapidly expanding gas—and pushes away whatever’s around it. In the grenades, that pushes fragments of the casing out much faster than an arrow or a sling-bullet. If you put some in a bronze tube sealed at one end, it’ll push out a big metal or stone bullet—big enough to smash ships or knock down gates and walls.”
Helga whistled silently. “Now, won’t that be useful,” she said. “My father’s men . . . men of my father’s company, that is . . . would call it cheating, though. Not fighting fair.”
Adrian shrugged. “I don’t like fighting,” he said simply. That made her blink again; not many men she knew would admit that—actual men, that is. The Emerald went on: “When I do have to fight, I fight to win. Fair fights are for idiots and Con— I mean, for those who are strong enough to be sure they’ll win anyway.”
Helga nodded slowly. “You know, that makes a lot of sense,” she said, and felt herself obscurely pleased at the look in the Emerald’s hazel eyes. “Of course, I’m a woman, and we can’t afford some of the idiocies men get involved with.”
“I see your point,” Adrian said, and heaved himself away from the wall he’d been leaning against. “Now, I think there’s a fight we—or I, at least—do have to engage in calling out.”
The noise of combat had died down ahead; she cocked her head. “That’s two men fighting,” she said. “Odd, almost like a duel.” With a quick urchin grin at the Emerald. “And you saved my life, but it looks to me like you need someone by you to return the favor—often.”
“That’s right, missy,” one of the troops said.
“Hear her, lord,” another chimed in.
Adrian straightened. “Let’s get moving,” he said. “Your munificent pay doesn’t come for propping up walls.” His eyes scanned around, and took on a hint of that distant look again. “This way leads to the throne room. Up one more flight, left, and that’s the anteroom—they were probably going to try and get out right this way.”
“How does he know that?” Helga whispered aside to a man with another satchel of grenades as the commander turned and walked briskly towards the landing at the base of a flight of stairs.
“You’ll find Lord Adrian knows most anything he wants,” the man said with unshakeable confidence. “The Gray-Eyed Lady speaks to him, y’see.”
Helga felt her eyes go wide.
Esmond went into a stop-thrust, then recovered smoothly, turning it into a feint as Franzois beat it aside with his buckler and cut, backhand, forehand, boring in with a stamp-stamp-stamp and a whirling pattern that made a silver X of his sword.
Right, let’s see you keep that up, the Emerald thought grimly as he backed. Normally he didn’t think much of the Islander school of swordplay; all edge and dash and no science. Director-for-a-couple-of-hours Franzois was as good a master of that style as he’d come across, though, and thoroughly accustomed to using it against the more point-oriented Emerald blade-way.