left leg just below the knee, hard; Throde reversed the push and pull of his
arms and the staff’s other end rapped the man’s right arm, between shoulder and
elbow. The swiftness of Throde’s assuming the stance and delivering those blows
was not believable, but Tarkle’s pain was. He cried out at the first impact and
moaned at the second. His better arm dropped to hang useless and he was
staggering. Throde was still moving: third stroke high to catch the left side of
Tarkle’s neck with a meaty thup sound. The bully’s only sound was a throaty
noise. He went down. One of his astonished cronies had already started moving
in; the third underwent a sudden attack of intelligence and paused to draw his
dagger. Throde feinted to the right and drove the end of the stave straight into
the stomach of his second attacker. He made a truly ugly noise and bent right
over and Throde whacked him right on the top and back of his head. The fellow
fell onto Tarkle. Tarkle was moving and groaning; his crony wasn’t.
And the third man was coming in from the side, his knife out and held low in the
manner of a man who knew how to use it on other men and had done so before.
His mouth dropped open. The cripple had shown that he could move, and move fast;
now he moved even faster, and in a way and direction not at all believable. The
knife glittered as it rushed in, its wielder partly crouched and extending his
arm, and Throde wasn’t there. He ran several steps right up the wall on his
attacker’s left with all the speed and facility of a frightened cat. Five steps