Read Star of Cursrah for Free Online

abominably.
    The cutthroat shoved her downward. A thief banged her hip dashing one way, then thumped her again in retreating. Star wondered how her rescuers fared. Assassins, wrapped in gauze or light cloaks, flashed knives or hurled what looked like big copper coins—until Star saw a soldier’s arm gashed to the bone. The coins were razor-edged quoits. The palace chancellor, who studied the methods of assassins, would find that fact interesting—if Star lived to tell it.
    Darkness engulfed her. Dragged inside the doorway, Star had an impression of a narrow, low corridor, probably lined with murder holes. Tafir was down on his back, and her captor tripped over him. Was her friend dead? Would she to follow?
    The black smoke suddenly parted like a sandstorm, and through the rent charged a big sergeant with a strawberry birthmark—Tafir’s friend, Star thought. Rosey streamed blood from a dozen cuts on arms and hands and face.
    Outraged, he roared, “Save her highness!”
    The veteran threw a knotted fist, too fast to see, that whistled by Star’s head. The man-killing blow crunched on something soft. Star felt the garrote loosen, and she yanked it free of her throat. Hard hands clutched her against a man’s sweaty, bloody chest. She smelled wine and onions and knew Rosey had rescued her—a good thing, for her legs went weak as jelly, her feet too numb to stand.
    Five stumbling steps brought light piercing the gloom. More hands caught and lifted her from the smoke that coiled like death’s touch. Star’s legs gave out, and her knees banged stone as she collapsed in the street, rubbing her throat and retching. Rosey hadn’t followed, and Star wondered why.
    Shadows flickered as someone hurtled over her head. Like sheep over a fald, five more bodies vaulted down the stairs. Star’s spinning vision couldn’t identify them.
    Noise exploded from below: shouts, screams, a rampaging trumpet like an elephant’s call. Forcing her eyes open, Star saw a woman in a blue tunic and kilt smash a spear haft against someone’s head. On her breast was painted an eight-pointed star—Amenstar’s own emblem. Her royal bodyguard had arrived.
    The trumpet blared again, and Star cried for joy. As the smoke dimmed, she beheld a ten-foot monster looming over cowering humans.
    The creature’s upper half was a black woman with a fist-sized bump on her broad nose and breasts like watermelons encased in a harness of blue leather. From the waist down, extending more than twelve feet, was the street-filling bulk of a rhinoceros draped with a star-painted mantle like a tent. M’saba, formerly of the bakkal’s heavy cavalry, was the biggest of Amenstar’s thirty bodyguards. Seeing the rhinaur’s savage fury directed at the assassins gave the samira a twinge of shame. She shouldn’t have ditched her faithful guards just to lark with her common friends.
    The smoke was exhausted. Amenstar’s bodyguards searched the thieves’ den while M’saba blocked the street in one direction and more guards blocked the other end. Captain Anhur, chief of Star’s bodyguards, snarled, “Everyone lie down immediately or I’ll personally ram a spear through your guts!”
    Citizens and soldiers dropped flat. Some people were already down, streaked with blood, dead or dying or wounded. Some thieves looked like bundles of rags soaked in blood, so viciously had they been pounded and stabbed.
    Yuzas Anhur crouched beside her mistress and gently offered a calloused hand. Still weak, Star rose meekly to distinguish friend from foe. Friends were hustled at spear point past the huge rhinaur to where the local populace goggled. Gheqet and Tafir went quietly. One by one Star tolled off the soldiers from the tavern, and they were also released. She felt a pang when her guards exited the thieves’ den dragging two of the bakkal’s soldiers by the heels. One was Rosey, slashed across the throat by a long curved knife, his blood redder than his birthmark. The man had given