As soon as Pertrahn locked eyes with me Vaenahma was gone. They slipped over the edge of the roof so quickly that it seemed almost like an accident, and I tensed, waiting to hear the thud of their body against the flagstones of the courtyard. Pertrahn was already shouting. It was from him that I learned that my lieutenant had swung themself into an open window on the upper story. This action seemed rather eery. How could Vaenahma have known that there was a window right there, and that it was open? But I had no time for shivers up the spine. I was too old and creaky to go swinging after them, so I turned and ran back up the roof. I have never been the most agile of men, and I went flailing down the other side. No one was watching, but still, I was embarrassed.

  Regardless, my headlong rush took me to the edge of the roof and I leapt back across the side street without a moment’s thought. But the roof of the building opposite was higher, and I only caught it’s edge with my hands. I swung there, thinking I would die, when a wizened face appeared above me, and the old woman who had been minding the infants grasped my arm and pulled me up with shocking strength. These old women who spend their days wringing out robes and beating blankets have an unseen reservoir of muscle and grit.

  I had no time to thank her, but I did let a few coins slip from my purse, and my last glimpse as I rushed through the door to the floors below was of a silver-haired child picking up a copper penny and biting it. Down I went, almost tumbling along the stairway, and propelled myself into the side street. My idea was this. If Pertrahn had called the guards to go after Vaenahma, then there would be no one at the entrance tunnel. I didn’t count on any of those bored dice players acting under their own initiative, so I felt an unpleasant shock when I turned to run up the street and saw a youth with a drawn sword running down it towards me.

  He was, however, quite inexperienced. He took a broad, ungainly swing at me and I stepped inside of it and tapped him on the forehead with my pommel. Down he went. Even as I ran past him I felt glad that I hadn’t killed him. He looked no older than Nolio, and was no doubt some poor country boy who had been brought from a vineyard and given a sword without thought to his safety or the safety of anyone else. I came to the end of the side street and peered around the corner, and it was clear that he had come alone. That also made me glad for his life. A clever youth, to have thought to go looking for me.

  The rest of the guard were not so clever. Two of them were standing in the courtyard with Pertrahn. I hid in the shadows of the entrance tunnel and watched them. Pertrahn was trying to give them orders and they were resisting. Not his soldiers then, but servants of the household. There were sounds from the wing of the house that Vaenahma had slipped into, indicating that the other guards had been more obedient. The sound of heavy boots on stairs, a yelp, then a scream, then the clash of swords.

  The sound of booted feet was also coming from the street outside. I heard them and tensed. I was trapped there in the entrance tunnel. I gazed back up its long length at the street, wondering if this was the moment of my death, and I swear to you that the tunnel did, at that moment, seem like the dark and threatening entrance of a shrine.

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  A figure appeared there, and then several others. It was dark, but they were carrying torches. They were also carrying the pikes of the city guard. “Come out,” a voice demanded, and I realized that I must be silhouetted by the light of the courtyard. I glanced back. Pertrahn had turned his attention to the entrance tunnel, and he saw me. Lamplight gleamed off of his bald head. He leaned towards me with his small and wiry form, as if he wanted nothing more than to throw himself at me. Instead he turned to run.

  I gave chase. There was a shout behind me and footsteps coming down the tunnel. The two reluctant guards who had been standing with Pertrahn stared at me with their mouths agape. But they made no move to draw their weapons. Pertrahn ran through a door into the kitchen wing and I followed.

  Kitchens are dangerous places, as any guardsman knows. How many times have I had to fight some miscreant in a kitchen? Had pans thrown at me and boiling oil sloshed at me and bags of flour heaved in my direction? I was hit in the eye with a carrot, once, and mocked for weeks by the other guards. Never mind. Pertrahn knew that I was adept at kitchen fighting, and he ran through the room without disturbing it, a gift to some poor cook who would never know that she had been saved from a great deal of clean-up. There was a back door that led into another, smaller courtyard, where beds of herbs glowed in the ambient light of the city. Pertrahn ran between these as well. He was making for the stable at the back of the house. He was my age, but fitter than I was, and he was going to win our footrace. But if he intended to mount a horse, the very act of mounting would slow him. I thought that I could catch him.

  Yaendrid was hiding behind the door of the stable. I crossed the threshold and went sprawling. She had stuck out her foot. I had the wind knocked out of me, so I don’t know if she cast a backward glance as she went running out of the stable. There was a whinny and the sound of Pertrahn’s voice, yipping at a horse, and he was gone too, leaving a tower of dust hanging in the dusky air.

  I lay there, not wanting to get up. I could hear the guard running through the courtyard behind me. Curiously, I found myself pondering a memory. Myself and Pertrahn, mere boys, standing in front of a street magician’s table, watching a pahlopahda tree emerge from a single seed. The magician had very dirty fingernails, and I was more attentive to them than the trick itself. He would swing a cloth in front of the tree and when he swung it back again the tree would have grown by inches. Within moments it had gone from seed to sapling. But Pertrahn hadn’t been fooled. He had smiled in that conniving way of his and told the magician exactly how he was managing the trick, and the man had paid us three coppers to keep quiet about it. We had gotten very drunk that night, the first time I had ever drank too much, and Pertrahn had held my hair back from my face as I vomited in an alley.

  Maybe I thought of it in that moment because Yaendrid had tripped me. I saw a pattern in my life. Friends who turned on me as I grew older. Who used me and then discarded me. It made me so sad that I stayed laying there until someone came and stood over me.

  Copyright KPB Stevens, 2025.

  The Tower of Chadak Ast

  The Essays of Nanatuese