Napoleon Must Die by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Bill Fawcett Page A

try to reach the door.”
    “We don’t want him seeing us,” she reminded the Mameluke.
    His gesture was resigned. “Then we will wait until he is gone.” He glanced around again. “If we are permitted to.”
    “Have the followers found us?” she asked, still not wholly convinced they existed anywhere but in Roustam-Raza’s imagination.
    “I have seen only one.” He shocked them both by taking hold of her elbow. “Come. We must distract them or they will be able to surround us, and then we will have no recourse but to fight, and that would be ... foolish.”
    She wondered what he was going to say instead of foolish, but she kept the speculation to herself. “What do you plan to do?”
    “Cause an upset,” he answered, and made his way through the merchants and patrons toward a little square at the end of the street where bundles were stacked in large pyramids almost as tall as a grown man. “Those are their supplies, the material for making incense,” he explained as he pointed at the stacks.
    “What are you going to do?” asked Victoire, more curious than frightened.
    “Stay back and you’ll see,” said Roustam-Raza as he moved quickly, his shoulder slamming into the most top-heavy of the pyramids. He grunted as the stack wavered, toppled, and gave way, crashing into the pyramid beside it and breaking it apart as well.
    A loud wail of protest went up throughout the market and men lurched and stumbled out of their booths to save their precious materials.
    “There they are,” said Roustam-Raza, moving backward to Victoire’s side. He pointed to the far side of the little square; four men were emerging from the narrow side street, all of them armed with cutlasses and two pistols in leather belts. “They aren’t Egyptians.”
    “I can see that,” said Victoire, astonished at the methodical way the men started to make their way through the newly erupting chaos to where she and the Mameluke were.
    “We’d better leave,” said Roustam-Raza, pointing to an opening in the crowd. “Go to the right and then we will be able to return to the district of cloth merchants. We’ll get away.”
    “So will Berthier,” said Victoire heavily. “We’ve come so close.”
    “As have the men following us,” Roustam-Raza said with urgency. “Move. Hurry.”
    “But Berthier—” she protested, then did as he required of her.
    They reckoned without the incense merchants, for the shouting and confusion was spreading, and what had been a disruption was fast becoming a riot.
    The men behind them began to push harder through the crowd. As they did, an elderly man whom they thrust aside fell against another pyramid of baskets. It rumbled to the beaten dust of the street; one basket broke open and spilled a red powder onto the ground. At that several merchants yelled in despair and rushed toward the chaos. Another, fearing the clamor was a thief’s intended distraction or lucky opportunity, raised a cry which Victoire later learned merchants used to warn each other that there was a thief in their midst. Blocked by the crowd, one of the men fired a pistol into the air. Rather than clearing a path, this stirred the natives to greater excitement. Knives began to appear and the Mameluke kept his hand on his scimitar.
    The four Europeans had just cleared the fallen baskets when a young man in a yellow robe broke out of a knot of milling men and charged their pursuers. As he ran he drew a wicked-looking knife from his belt. He rose to strike, but fell away when another of the four men shot him in the chest. Suddenly the small square was filled with cries of outrage. Several more men began running toward the four Europeans, while calmer men tried to restrain them.
    Victoire did not object when Roustam-Raza shielded her body with his own and started a very slow progress along the wall. He had drawn his scimitar now that the fighting had grown so fierce.
    The four men had ceased trying to push after Victoire and the Mameluke