Kalam looked straight up. The underside of a wooden balcony was directly overhead, the two paint-chipped braces about seven and a half feet above the ground. A jump might allow him to reach one, but that would be a noisy affair, and success would leave him helpless.

He drew the tongs from their loop. Gripping the bloody knife in his teeth, he slowly straightened, reaching up with the tongs. They closed over the brace.

Now, will the damned thing hold my weight?

Gripping the handles hard, he cautiously tensed his shoulders, drew himself up an inch, then another. The brace did not so much as groan – and he realized that the wooden beam in all likelihood extended into a deep socket in the stone wall itself. He continued pulling himself upward.

The challenge was maintaining silence, for any rustle or whisper of noise would alert his hunter. Arms and shoulders trembling, Kalam drew his legs up, a fraction at a time, tucked his right leg even higher, then edged it, foot first, through the triangular gap above the brace.

He hooked that leg, pulled, and was finally able to ease the strain on his arms and shoulders.

Kalam hung there, motionless, for a long minute.

Claws liked waiting games. They excelled in contests of patience. His hunter had evidently concluded that this was one of those games, and he intended to win it.

Well, stranger, I don’t play by your rules.

He slipped the tongs free, held them out and lifted them towards the balcony’s floor. This was the greatest risk, since he had no idea what occupied that floor above him. He probed with the tongs in minute increments until he could reach no farther, then he lowered the tool down and left it there.

The knife stayed clenched between his teeth, filling his mouth with the taste of his own blood. With both hands freed, Kalam gripped the balcony’s ledge, slowly pulled his weight away from the brace and drew himself up. Hands climbing the railings, he swung a leg over and, a moment later, crouched on the balcony floor, the tongs at his feet.

He scanned the area. Clay pots housing various herbs, a moulded bread oven on a foundation of bricks occupying one end, the heat radiating from it reaching the assassin’s sweat-cooled face.

A barred hatch that a person would have to crawl to get through offered the only way into the room beyond.

His scan ended upon meeting the eyes of a small dog crouched at the end opposite the bread oven. Black-haired, compactly muscled and with a foxlike snout and ears, the creature was chewing on half a rat, and as it chewed it watched Kalam’s every move with those sharp, black eyes.