face coming down on him with a weight of body a third again his own. It was his
left hand he used on the descending arm, left hand, knife hand, involved with
that, and his battered muscles shook under the strain while he plied his
unaccustomed right hand trying to reach the knife strapped to his leg. His left
arm was buckling.
Suddenly Vis’s weight shifted rightwards and came down on him, pinning his other
arm – a limp weight, and in the space Vis’s grimace had occupied, most
improbably, Cappen Varra stood with a barrel stave in both his hands.
‘Did you want rescue?’ Cappen asked civilly. ‘Or is it all some new diversion?’
Hanse swore, kicked and writhed his way from under Vis’s inert weight and went
for his dagger in fright. Cappen checked his arm and the heat of anger went out
of him, leaving only a sickly shiver. ‘Hang you,’ he said feebly, ‘couldn’t you
have hit him easier and given me a go?’
And then he realized the source of the light which was streaming down on them by
way of the stairs, and that above them was the open door in which two wizards
met. ‘Gods,’ he muttered, and scrambling up, grabbed Cappen by the arm.
And ran, for very life.
‘Not my doing.’
‘No?’ Enas Yorl felt his shoulders expand ever so slightly, his features shift,
and in his pride he refused to look down at his hands to know. Perhaps it was
not too terrible, this form: Ischade’s eyes flickered, but seemed unappalled.
‘None of the killings that interest you,’ she said, ‘are mine. They’re not my
style. I trust I’m somewhat known in the craft. As you are, Enas Yorl.’