Read Online The Fourth Rome by David Drake, Janet Morris - Free Book Online

her own pistol
     beneath a similar short traveling cape, but using it openly might cause the very sort of anomalies ARC Riders were tasked
     to prevent.
    “Landlord!” she shouted as she strode toward the counter separating private from public areas of the single room. “There’s
     a man hit his head on your door beam!”
    Germans crushed into the inn behind the two Riders. Their angry hurry made the doorposts creak and delayed them while Rebecca
     and Gerd joined the heavyset man coming out from behind the counter.
    “Hold it right there, Osric!” he shouted to the leading thug in German with a Rhenish accent. His hands were beneath his leather
     apron.
    “Fuck off, Lothar!” Osric replied. He raised a knobbed club, thumping one of the beams that supported the loft. Rebecca prepared
     to shoot him and worry about the consequences later.
    Lothar stepped forward, bringing his right hand out in a straight punch to the club-wielder’s face. His fist was wrapped in
     a bronze-studded leather strap, a professional boxer’s cestus that added several pounds to a punch. He broke the thug’s nose
     and cheekbone, flinging him backward.
    Other members of the inn staff appeared. A woman advanced with a grinding pin and a pair of cook boys carried turnspits from
     the central hearth.
    “Which of you dog turds is next?” Lothar said, breathing hard. “Which fucking one?”
    Rebecca guessed the innkeeper was in his late forties; obviously a gladiator who’d retired on his earnings. He might not be
     the man he once was, but that punch proved he was still a man
once.
    “Hey,” muttered one of the thugs. “They knifed Hilderic. You can’t let them—”
    “Well it’s about time somebody knifed him!” cried the woman, waving the stone grinder under the thug’s nose. “All of you out!
     Out now and stay out. We don’t need your sort in this inn!”
    Two men came down the ladder from the better class of sleeping accommodations in the loft. The first was a big, graying fellow
     who could possibly have been born on this time horizon. His slight blond companion was certainly a revisionist. Rebecca didn’t
     need Gerd’s confirming nod as he glanced—even now!—at the sensor in his palm.
    “What’s this?” the gray man demanded. He spoke German but his accent must have been almost unintelligible to the others. The
     Russians had prepared themselves as carefully as possible in their time, but they wouldn’t have been able to study the actual
     dialects in use on this horizon.
    “They knifed Hilderic, Master Hannes,” said the same thug who’d spoken before. “We was just—”
    “Wha happen?” Hilderic demanded muzzily, supporting himself on a doorpost. His head must be solid bone. A point-blank microwave
     pulse could easily be fatal.
    “Get your trash out of here, Hannes,” the innkeeper said in a low growl. His hairy left hand massaged the muscles of his right
     shoulder. His loaded fist twitched sideways. “Get them out or you’ll go with them!”
    “Tomorrow we will go, brother,” the slight Russian said. “When the army leaves.”
    “You know we need bodyguards and handlers for the slaves we will buy,” the older man added. He threw back the right flap of
     an embroidered cloak. “Come, Lothar, how much to settle this?”
    “What the hell happened?” Hilderic repeated, still hugging the door frame. “Osric, have I been drinking?”
    “I said I didn’t want you!” Lothar said. “Get your trash out or get out with them!”
    “And if we don’t choose to do that?” the younger Russian asked coolly. Both his hands were under his cloak, and Rebecca didn’t
     figure they were on his purse. She moved to the side so that she wouldn’t be hit by bullets aimed at the innkeeper.
    Lothar looked around the big room and smiled with real humor. “So,” he said, “there’s twice as many of you as there is us,
     Istvan? That’s what you’re counting on? Sure, you all can stay. Until my