And if she were truthful, the city itself fascinated her. The smells were so different, the texture of the mortared stone, the sounds of the voices. The way the crowd broke around her armored form: no one raised their eyes to her helm but the men strode past as if she were invisible and they had simply missed striking her fortuitously, the women scuttling by in groups with their eyes downcast behind their veils. Even the taste of the dust was strange.
At last, the city’s many sweet-sounding bells tolling the half hour before her appointment with the caliph, Samarkar turned toward the palace. Finding herself alone in one of the narrower stair-alleys, she glanced over her left shoulder—back down the slope—and raised one hand to the wall. The gauntlets of the armor were designed to preserve a wizard’s dexterity for magic in combat; they attached to the backs of the hands and fingers with straps, leaving the palms and pads bare—a design also used by archers. When she touched the red stone she was surprised at how it gritted, and at how some sand rubbed free beneath the pressure to roll between her fingertips and the wall.
The walls had been patched many times, with mortar and brick and newer stone, and reinforced with planks of bolted-on wood worn black by centuries in the desert heat that had nevertheless preserved them. She could just reach up and touch one such if she stood on the tips of her toes, which she did hastily, curiously, hesitant that someone might see. From the slick texture, she was not the first.
As she dropped her heels again, she caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye, an indigo flash in a shade that left her with a crawling chill of recognition.
The Rahazeen assassin had just emerged from the cover provided by a kink in the street and was closing on her quickly. Not at a run, but with confident strides that flared his loose white trousers and left the ends of the sash through which his pistol and scimitar were thrust licking the air behind him. Samarkar glanced right—forward—upward—again.
Two more stood just before the next twist in the stair. Overhead, the balconies did not meet—the left wall showed a scaled scar where one had ripped away—and three more veiled faces peered from the rooftops overhead.
Six, then. And probably two or four more out of sight, if she ran.
All right, Wizard Samarkar. Wizard your way out of this one.
The assassin coming up the stairs behind her—the tallest and broadest of the ones she could get a good look at—was drawing the pistol from his belt. It was a flintlock, the striker held back on a pin curved like a swan’s neck. He leveled it at Samarkar and tilted his head to aim.
“Put your hands up, Wizard Samarkar,” he said in her mother tongue. “We’d rather have you alive.”
One of Samarkar’s hands was already raised, still stretching after that age-polished board she’d been investigating. The other was extended for balance, reaching toward the far wall.
She thanked the six merciful stalwarts that the Rahazeen had pistols rather than bows. If someone like Temur had been with them, Samarkar would have had the choice of surrender or death—unless she could have managed a very tricky bit of fire-summoning on very short notice. But this: she had options.
She kicked her right foot out to the far wall, hooked the toes of her left boot over the edge of a hewn stone that protruded from the mortar on the near wall, and pushed herself upward as fast as she could go. The left hand hooked the top of that board again: there was just enough purchase for her cantilevered fingertips to take her weight when she pressed hard to the right. That let her move the left foot up, using the opposition between the two facing walls—and she climbed half again her height before the assassins even realized they should be reacting.
Something to be said for their overexposure to cloistered Uthman harem girls, she thought. They seem to forget that women can climb and fight.
The helm impeded her vision; the fingertip overlap on the gauntlets scraped stone. Samarkar cursed them as she climbed, ignoring the shouts from above and below. The Rahazeen above were scrambling down to that one remaining balcony. She heard the scrape of a sulfur stick and caught the acrid scent as one lighted his matchlock, but she wasn’t worried about the gunmen above. It was extremely hard to shoot at a sharp downward angle, or so she’d been told. They would only hit her by luck, and they’d be as likely to hit their friends below.
A moment later the explosion followed, deafening in the confined space. Her helm was some protection—not enough, her ears rang and the shouts of the Rahazeen seemed strangely muffled afterward—but more than they were getting from their veils. She glanced down; one leapt to try to catch her and she snatched her ankle up just in time. The biggest one was still tracking her with his flintlock, and he might have a chance of hitting—the range wasn’t great—and now another had his scimitar out. She didn’t think her climbing skills, honed in the crags of the Steles of the Sky, would avail her if somebody chopped her foot or hand off.