pleading, that they did not have their hands outstretched like the beggars they claimed to be; far from it, they held their wands in their hands in combat readiness.
They were like figures in a nightmare to Ben, and just like in a real nightmare he couldn’t run, frozen to the spot by his desperate desire to get away.
‘What about your other three companions hiding over there?’ Nicholas asked with a vague wave of his left hand. ‘Do they need money also?’
There was a harsh laugh from the shadows to their right and three figures emerged, their wands in their hands pointing at Nicholas.
‘You’re a smart one, aren’t you?’ said the ringleader. ‘Now empty your pockets!’
Ben was trembling from head to foot but as he looked across at Nicholas he saw something so astonishing that his fear momentarily left him. Nicholas, his hand resting on the hilt of his wand, was actually smiling! He seemed to see nothing at all threatening in his current circumstances. It was as if he was in a perfectly ordinary, even amusing, situation which required only the most casual of attention, but even Ben, who was not well versed in such things, could see that his stance was the fighting stance of a wandfighter. ‘My pockets are already empty,’ Nicholas said calmly, ‘so how can they be emptied? I fail to see your logic.’
The ringleader was obviously an impatient man who required his commands to be carried out without delay, because on seeing Nicholas fail to comply with his earlier request he shouted, ‘Take them down!’ and the fight began.
Wandfighters wore bracelets called karns around their wrists and ankles; these karns were made of leather straps lined with magnetised metal; by use of their wands acting on these karns they could move their bodies through the air at astonishing speeds with enormous agility. They also had mobile karns, usually four each, which could be brought out and used against their enemies in a wandfight, as to fasten these karns onto your opponent’s body was to be able to move your opponent’s body wherever you chose. Furthermore, if a wandfighter could gain direct control of an opponent’s karns already fastened to their body the same result obviously followed, but this required breaking the connection between the opponent’s wand and their karns, which alone was the subject of many extensive volumes of wandlore.
Ben took out his wand and backed away until his back bumped into the wall at the side of the alley. He tried to adopt a posture of defence, but luckily no-one was paying any attention to him as the gang of robbers were finding Nicholas more than enough to be dealing with. Nicholas was moving so fast, and the robbers were so confused and scattered around the alley that Ben was having trouble seeing everything even from his priviledged position as a spectator standing right next to the action. Nicholas was taking the robbers down one by one, their hands and feet bound by their own mobile karns, their wands flying through the air into Nicholas’s left hand. Nicholas then dragged the robbers into the brightly moon-lit centre of the alley and stood over them with his wand outstretched, while in his left hand he held a bundle of five wands. The fight from start to finish had taken about thirty seconds.
Ben cautiously walked over to them, his wand still in his hand.
‘Am I to understand that I have been the subject of an attempted robbery?’ Nicholas asked the ringleader with his eyebrows raised.
The ringleader said nothing, too angry to speak.
‘I only ask,’ Nicholas continued, ‘because no-one has ever attempted to rob me before. I am therefore obliged in these unprecedented circumstances to proceed by inference. I see no other explanation of these events other than that you have attempted to rob me. But perhaps you will protest that I have misjudged you.’
‘Oh, no, we wasn’t robbing you,’ said the man with the scar who had first spoken to Nicholas, ‘not at all, guvnor, def’nly not.’
‘Ah, then I have assigned the wrong interpretation to the request that I empty my pockets. Why then was I requested to empty my pockets?’
There was a long silence which was broken by the man with the scar, ‘It was just a bit of a laugh, guvnor.’
‘I am glad to learn that you have a sense of humour,’ said Nicholas, ‘because you will need it. You see, I am minded at the moment of the ancient saying which is Judge not unless you be judged for with what measure you put forth it shall be returned to you again. I trust I have made myself perfectly clear?’
It was clear from the faces of the robbers that all they had understood from what Nicholas had said was the word judge and this word made them a little apprehensive due no doubt to a past acquaintance with magisterial figures. ‘It’s just a laugh, guvnor,’ the scarred man said again, stubbornly repeating the only defence he could think of, ‘just a bit of a laugh, we was all going to laugh about it all, we was, yes, guvnor, that’s how it was.’
‘You have tried to rob me,’ Nicholas told them coldly, ‘so I am going to rob you in return. You may either refer to your sense of humour, which you claim to be your governing motivation in this matter or you may refer to the poetic nature of this particular administration of justice. It is your choice and I cannot say that I am particularly interested one way or another.’
Nicholas searched the men and removed from them all the money they had on them. Nothing escaped his attention, not even coins sown into the lining of their clothes which he ripped open in order to remove the coins. Ben watched this in complete and utter disbelief. He was so astonished he could not say a single word, nor could he move a single muscle. Nicholas then freed them from their bonds and walked a few steps away, and stopped to watch them as they clambered back to their feet.
The ringleader had said nothing while all this was going on, but now he spoke. ‘You’ll regret this,’ he snarled.
‘There is no need for you to be subject to a long delay,’ Nicholas said and flipped the ringleader’s wand back to him. With another movement of his wand, Nicholas’s disc appeared on the ground before him. ‘Take out your disc,’ Nicholas told him coldly.
The robber took a firm grip of the wand in his hand but did nothing more than watch Nicholas with an expressionless face.
‘You have attempted to rob me but now you no doubt feel that I have treated you wrongly,’ Nicholas told him in an icy rage, ‘because you have been robbed in turn. How do you think the victims of your robberies feel? Do you care? No, you don’t. You are the scum of the gutter and you are incapable of having such thoughts precisely because you are scum. You should thank me for the lesson I have taught you. Now you know from experience what you were unable to understand before by the use of your imagination. But now you have caused me much greater offence. You have threatened me, and I do not like to be threatened.’ Nicholas’s words became like shards of ice. ‘Let me put this to you very simply: take out your own disc or be branded a coward. Now, make your choice.’
The robber had been watching Nicholas more than listening to him and what he had seen, namely that Nicholas was getting ready to kill him, was obviously giving him pause for thought. ‘All right, we’re even, I got no grudge against you,’ he said reluctantly, as if saying these words caused him great pain.
This seemed to Ben like a very good time to wrap everything up and leave, but Nicholas did not seem to think so. ‘I see you are a coward,’ Nicholas told the robber, ‘because you refuse to fight.’
‘I got no chance against you,’ the robber said in reply. ‘I know that.’
‘Then why threaten me?’ Nicholas asked. ‘I mean, what is the point? You are not just a coward, you are also
