The Forlorn(9)

The thin-lipped Blis dropped the spike, and took a dagger from his highly polished boot. He began to advance, very slowly. "You can scream all you like now. We've secured the palace," he said. His voice, just above a whisper, was full of almost palpable anticipation. He licked his lips, his eyes glowing with an evil inner brightness.

For the first time in her life the Princess knew real fear. Nervously her hands strayed across the golden bangles as she edged further away. The wall was behind her. She tried to press herself into it. She looked around, desperately seeking some avenue of escape. All that she could see was the majordomo's head, the eyes staring vacantly. Bilberries . . .

Blis lunged toward her suddenly, seizing her arm. She screamed in pure panic, and grabbed her own arm with the other hand as she lurched forward. Her fingers closed on a jewel-adorned golden bangle, which abruptly became a lump of dry ice . . .

A bilberry is an innocuous thing on its own. Dusty purple and the size of a fingernail. However, several hundred thousand of them, if they materialize inside someone's body, are more deadly than any toxin can be. Blis didn't even scream. There was no air in his lungs to do so.

For long moments she simply stared at the remains of the man lying in a pool of his own blood into which was slowly seeping a deep purple juice. Then she looked at her own purple and red splattered arms, staggered away, and threw up. For a while she simply wept and shivered. Gradually a measure of emotionally washed-out calm descended on her. She looked at the door. The guard would be expecting sounds of pain. She screamed. It was not difficult to put real anguish into that scream. She tiptoed across and bolted the door as quietly as she could. The door was a heavy oak one, and the bolt a solid bar of steel. It was intended to isolate her apartment from possible assassins, but it would never stop a determined assault with a battering ram. She knew she had very little time.

Her father, on one of those occasions when he had been pleased with her, had said that she had a scalpel mind. She was accustomed to thinking herself far more intelligent than everybody else. It didn't feel that way now. She dithered.

Could she bribe the guards? But if she failed, they'd break in here. She hugged herself in desperate self-pity. Could she hide? If she was not apparent, they'd tear this place apart. Under the bed or in the wardrobes, the only hiding places she could think of, would be the first places they'd search. Could she escape? Her apartments were six stories up. Could she arm herself, at least? She looked across at Blis's dagger, which lay in a pool of swirled purple and red, and retched. It took her a good few more minutes to decide what to do. She tore strips of sheet and knotted them, screaming occasionally for good measure. She would hang the sheet rope out of the window, and then hide.

She opened the window, kicking off her jewelled slippers and climbing onto the broad sill. There were bars on the outside. For a moment her heart fell. She'd forgotten those. Careful inspection suggested that she could get through them. She tied the sheet rope to them and dropped it down. It was still a long way short. She'd better just try and see if she could actually squeeze between the bars. Resolutely not looking down, she searched for the best way. The bars were welded into a sort of outwardly bulging box, allowing the window to swing open to the outside. Where the bars were attached to the wall there was just a little more space. She'd just see if her head and shoulders could go through . . .

She was committed, and more than halfway through when the door to her apartments was blown apart in a burst of purple fire. Fear made the rest easy. She was perched on the window ledge outside the bars and out of direct sight when the Morkth burst into what had once been her withdrawing room. A few moments later there were the sounds of combat, but this too lasted only seconds. Then there was silence.

Suddenly, just as she was thinking about going in again she heard more sounds. Running footsteps came to the open window, and then she heard the rasping sibilant speech of the Morkth. The words, as always, were hard to make out. But they definitely included the order to search below. She looked down for the first time since she'd begun to squeeze out between the bars. She could see the streets from here. They were full of fighting. The black-clad Morkth-man brigades were everywhere. She didn't want to be down there, even if her frail sheet rope had reached. Perhaps she could go sideways or . . . up. And she'd better make up her mind, quickly. At the moment folk were too busy to look up, but even now searchers were running down the stairs.

Sideways was simply too far for her to reach. But up was plausible. Climbing the bars on this window she could reach the bars of the next, and from the top of them the gutter was within reach. She pulled herself onto the roof just before the Morkth troops spilled into the gardens. A few feet away was a low ornamental curlicue, with a gargoyle at the head of a down pipe. She slithered to lie behind it. Her thin arms were shaking, making the bangles tinkle faintly. Without real fear she could never have done such physical feats. She'd never done any manual labor in her life, and her only muscular training had been for bed arts, which had rather neglected her arms and shoulders. She lay in the gutter behind the stone gargoyle and shivered. It would be more than an hour before she dared to move enough to look out.