The Sea Peoples(74)
Weapon? she thought. What weapon?
Then there was a glint of steel in his right hand, held down by the side of his leg. She blinked in surprise; yes, that was an inconspicuous location but surely she should have seen it at once? It wasn’t as if she was a virgin with respect to matters concerning sharp, pointy-stabby things.
“Man with a knife, heading downstairs,” Pip murmured.
“You follow him, I’ll take this side,” Toa said, climbing out the window above the alley, tossing his shovel onto something that made a dull thug and beginning to clamber down the pipes and iron brackets and folded-up staircases outside.
“I’ll lead,” Deor said. “It burns like a fire of skulls.”
Deor went out the door first; Thora came behind him, and Pip brought up the rear. The darkened hallway was full of shadows, their own monstrous on the stained plaster of the walls. They all moved with the slow tense grace of hunters, or cats; by contrast the blundering steps of Vance were thunder-loud. Deor’s stalk grew faster as their quarry almost ran, and Pip followed with an almost inaudible scuff of soft-soled shoes on leather. Both the Montivallans were heavier than she was, Thora by about fifteen pounds and Deor by twice that, but they made no more noise—something that might have annoyed her, if she wasn’t focused on the thought of violence to come.
Speaking of which, she thought.
She pulled the slingshot out of her bag and unfolded it with a shake and toss of the wrist that was completely automatic. A semicircular brace at the end of a light-alloy tube now rested against her left forearm, with the pistol-grip of the weapon in her hand and the U-fork for the rubber cords. Those rested under her thumb, and three of the steel ball-bearings were in the palm of her right hand.
She’d inherited the weapon—minus the cords, which had to be renewed periodically—from her mother, who’d also provided instruction in its use. Lady Julianne Balwyn-Abercrombie—Jules to a select few which didn’t include her daughter—had rarely raised her voice while doing that, but she had been a perfectionist who could quietly flay worse than any of the teachers at Rockhampton, or even her father’s roars and bellows.
Mummy fought her way in and out of half a dozen of the dead cities with this thing, and the kukris, Pip thought. I don’t think she’d think it had fallen into unworthy hands.
The damned brolly was over her back, stuck through the strap that carried her handbag. Vance hadn’t struck her as being any sort of a fighting man, but from what Deor had said he was carrying something like a napalm shell with a lighted fuse, and she’d always been properly cautious around those.
The stairs made one reversal halfway up each story, with a tiny wedge-shaped landing. Deor raised his hand with the fist clenched as he came to it, and then opened the hand and brought it down horizontal: the near-universal symbols for halt and down.
That brought them all together, close enough that their clean body odors were noticeable—Thora’s had a slightly mealy quality that Pip suspected might be some product of early pregnancy, which was odd when you thought about it, but her sense of smell seemed to be stronger in this not-really-a-place.
I’m being catty. Literally catty.
They crouched and peered through the balustrade of the staircase, reminding her of occasions when she’d sneaked downstairs through the hot frangipani-scented nights to peer like this at her parents wrapping presents in the big sitting room of the stationhouse on Tanumgera on Christmas Eve. Which of course was the hottest time of the year in Townsville, though some still made imitation snow out of cotton-bolls for decorations, which she’d always thought absurd.
Vance was hesitating, hidden in the used-bookstore’s entrance—there was a closed sign behind him, with an odd-looking three-armed sign in yellow on black beneath it. Vance’s doughy middle-aged face was gray in a way visible even in this light, and damp with flop-sweat. He looked at the Hawberks’ door; then his eyes darted around as if desperately looking for escape.
They fell on the closed sign, and for some reason he jerked back as if it were spitting red-hot embers. With three hesitant steps he crossed the hallway to the armorer’s front door, and reached for it.
Pip could feel Deor tense, and Thora’s hand came halfway out of her bag with the heavy pistol in it.
“Let me,” she said very softly. “Quiet.”
A steel ball went into the pouch of the slingshot, and she drew just enough to put tension on the rubber. She began to rise and do the quick smooth snatch-and-release that would drive the ball-bearing in a single blurred streak ending in Vance’s temple, when Vance pulled his hand back from the Hawberks’ door and dashed out into the street.
Deor hissed some curse—literally an Anglo-Saxon one, since his odd little homeland used Old English for religion and emphasis—and bounded down the stairs after him calling on Woden under his breath, with the two women at his heels. There was a yell from the outside and an unmusical clanking sound she recognized with her skin and gut as much as her ears.
Steel on steel, with intent to kill.
The sound made her skin prickle, and her claws slide out—
Wait a bit there, I have claws?
—made her come even more alert, but it didn’t cause her any fear. Toa could be asleep under an oxcart after downing three jugs of Bundaberg’s best and still handle that shambolic looney called Vance without working up a sweat.