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an icon shop. Not the wisest choice for a Bassanid, perhaps, but he did
succeed in spilling a table full of Blessed
Victims into the muddy street, scattering the beggars gathered around it,
creating further disruption behind them. Pardos glanced over; the doctor was
grim-faced, his legs pumping hard.
As they ran, Pardos kept looking for one of the Urban Prefect guards-
surely they would be about, in this rough neighbourhood? Weren't swords
supposed to be illegal in the City? The young patricians pursuing them
appeared not to believe so, or to care. He abruptly decided to make for a
chapel, a larger one than the nondescript little hole in which he'd been
chanting the morning invocation after arriving in the city at sunrise and
weaving his way down from the triple walls. He'd been planning to take an
inexpensive room near the harbour-always the cheapest part of a city-and then
head for an encounter he'd been thinking about since leaving home.
The room would have to wait.
There were heavy morning crowds now, and they had to twist and dodge as best
they could, earning curses and a tardy blow aimed at Pardos from one off-duty
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soldier. But this meant that those chasing them would surely be stringing out
by now, and might even lose sight of them if Pardos and the doctor-he really
was moving quite well for a greybeard- managed to take a sufficiently erratic
path.
Glancing up constantly to get his bearings, Pardos glimpsed-through a break in
the multi-storied buildings-a golden dome larger than any he'd ever seen
before, and he abruptly changed his thinking, even as they ran.
'That way!' he gasped, pointing.
'Why are we running?' the Bassanid burst out. 'There are people here!
They won't dare-'
'They will! They'll kill us and pay a fine! Come on!'
The doctor said no more, saving his breath. He followed as Pardos cut sharply
off the street they were on and angled across a wide square.
They hurtled past a bedraggled Holy Fool and his small crowd, hit by a whiff
of the man's foul, unwashed odour. Pardos heard a sharp cry
from behind-some of the pursuers still had them in sight. A stone whizzed past
his head. He looked back.
One pursuer. Only one. That changed things.
Pardos stopped, and turned.
The doctor did the same. A fierce-looking but extremely young man in green
robes, eastern-styled, with earrings and a golden necklace and long, unkempt
hair-not one of the original group-slowed uncertainly, then fumbled at his
belt and pulled out a short sword. Pardos looked around, swore, and then
darted up to the Holy Fool. Braving the maggoty, fetid stench of the man, he
seized his oak staff, snapping an apology over his shoulder. He ran directly
at their young pursuer.
'You idiot!' he screamed, waving the staff wildly. 'You're alone!
There's two of us!'
The young man-belatedly apprehending this significant truth- looked quickly
over his shoulder, saw no immediately arriving reinforcements, appeared
suddenly less fierce.
'Run!' screamed the doctor at Pardos's side, brandishing a knife.
The young man looked at the two of them and elected to follow the advice. He
ran.
Pardos hurled the borrowed staff back towards the Holy Fool on his small
platform. 'Come on!' he rasped at the doctor. 'Head for the
Sanctuary!' He pointed. They turned together, crossed the square, and raced up
another laneway on the far side
It wasn't far now, as the lane-blessedly level now-gave suddenly onto an
enormous forum with arched porticoes and shops all around it.
Pardos swept past two boys playing with a hoop and a man selling roasted nuts
at a brazier. He saw the looming bulk of the Hippodrome on his left and a pair
of huge bronze gates in a wall that had to be the one guarding the Imperial
Precinct. There was an enormous equestrian statue in front of the gates. He
ignored these splendours for now, running for all he was worth diagonally
across the forum towards a long, wide, covered porch with two more huge doors
behind it and a dome rising above and behind that would have taken away his
breath if he'd had any breath left to lose.
He and the Bassanid leaped and dodged among masons and masonry carts and brick
piles and-familiar sight!-an outdoor oven for quicklime near the portico. As
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