Holofernes Street

Holofernes Street rises at Pseudopolis Yard and extends via New Bridge to Fetters Lane, where it meets the river again. It was a location in Men at Arms, where a helpful gargoyle found a far-flung fragment of the ill-used dragon Chubby, who had been used as an improvised explosive device to attack the Assassins' Guild.

Annotation

In the deuterocanonical* books of the Bible, the book of Judith tells the story of how the invading Persian king Nebuchadnezzar's general, Holofernes, sent to ravage Israel for not submitting to Persian rule, was assassinated by the wiles of the Jewish widow Judith. Basically, she shared his bed, got him drunk, waited for him to drop off, then beheaded him. As few things seem to excite men more than a glamorous female Assassin - as no doubt Alice Band and her colleagues are aware - this has reverberated down the ages in song, literature and art. Mr Mericet would have given Judith the pink slip instantly: recall that the final test for the student Assassin is having to slay a seemingly sleeping body in a bed...

• ie, second-division, accepted as Canonical by some Christian denominations but dismissed as apocryphal by others. The Church of England hedges its bets by including it in its New English Bible, but putting it into a separate box labelled "Apocrypha"