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Authors: David Drake

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BOOK: Dagger
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Star was chattering to Khamwas, her words those of a young child but her intent clearly that of an artist who wants to learn a new technique. It was pitch dark in the street when the last of the lurching figures disappeared. A thing like a minnow of lambent red fluttered from Star's hand.

"Not now," the caravan master snarled, terrified by the implications of what Star had done.

The tiny fish gave a half turn in the air and collapsed inward to a point of light and nothingness. Star looked cautiously toward her uncle.

"Let's get on," said Samlor quietly, gesturing up the darkened street.

"The strength of an army is its leader," squeaked Tjainufi from Khamwas'

shoulder.

Seeing the heavily-armed men flee in panic explained—

or might explain—

how the

Napatan had strolled into the heart of the Maze alive. It still seemed incredible that anyone would be naive enough to leave the caravan encampment and walk in the straightest possible line toward the house he wanted to visit. Khamwas' god—

or a demon—

might point him unerringly toward Setios' house, but the

knowledge would do him little good if he were dead and stripped in a gutter. Still, Khamwas might have done just that. He was . . . if not incredible, then a very strange man.

And the Napatan scholar was not nearly as strange as Samlor's niece. The Maze had administrative boundaries which were of no more real significance than property lines on a swamp.

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David Drake

Samlor did not relax until he heard cracked voices up the street ahead of them. Two scavengers were pushing a handcart over the cobbles, pausing occasionally to scrabble for booty in the muck. They were singing, each of them a separate song, and from their voices the caravan master presumed they were either senile or very drunk.

But they were alive. If nobody had slit their throats for pleasure or the groat's worth of garbage they had scavenged, then Samlor had led his party out of the zone of most immediate danger.

Not that the caravan master was about to put away the long dagger he carried free in his right hand.

At the corner of a three-story building, locked and shuttered like a banker's strongbox, Samlor paused and said, "All right, Khamwas. Now you can point us toward Setios' house."

"Uncle, I want something to drink," said Star. "I didn't like the milk in that place."

"To the right, I think," said Khamwas, gesturing with his staff. The manikin had seated itself crosslegged on the Napatan's shoulder. The little figure was lounging with a hand leaned against Khamwas' neck as if it were the bole of a huge tree.

More than the level of risk had changed when Samlor's party got free of the Maze. The pavements were wider and somewhat more straight, and a number of door alcoves were illuminated by lamps in niches—

closed against pilfering by screens

of iron or pierced stone. The lights were intended to drive undesirables away from the building fronts, but they speeded travel without need for the drifting foxfire which Samlor's companions could provide.

"Why didn't you want me to light our way before, Master Samlor?" the Napatan asked.

Samlor stumbled, sure his mind had been read. Before he got out the threat that leaped to his tongue in response—

"If you ever do that again—

" reason reasserted

itself.

Lamps on the buildings had made him think about the difficulty of staggering through the Maze in darkness. Therefore Khamwas might have thought the same thing, and spoken.

DAGGER

35

It didn't prove that the Napatan didn't read minds, but at least it permitted Samlor to continue believing that his thoughts were his own. He preferred a world in which that was true, and he didn't intend to go searching for proof that it wasn't.

"I suppose because it's, ah, a trick and not true light," Khamwas continued uncertainly. The other man's silence made the Napatan think that he'd said something wrong, and he was trying to smooth over the rift by closing the conversation that Samlor seemed unwilling to join. "It would have called attention to us."

A decent fellow, that one, thought the caravan master, for all his magical

"scholarship" . . . and the fact that his face looked eerily similiar to that of the stranger whose dagger Samlor carried.

Since he'd been unable to free his own fighting knife after ramming it through the stranger's chest.

"No, not that," the caravan master replied. He chuckled. "I might've told you that, though. Truth is, I'm just scared of it. I figured things back there were tense enough without me scared and mad as blazes at you because of it."

"It's simple, Uncle," said Star, raising her hand with the palm cupped toward Samlor. "You just—

"

"Not now, child," Samlor said, tensing again. Not ever, his mind added. A party of six—

or perhaps two parties of three, gravitating toward one another in a subconscious calculus of safety—

were approaching them from the opposite

direction.

"Star, in the middle," the Cirdonian caravaner muttered as he brushed the wall with his right shoulder. "And both of you behind me. Watch it." He heard Khamwas whispering to his staffer to the powers the scholar could key through it, but no apparition or—

other sending—

capered before them.

There was no need for that, nor for the water-marked steel of Samlor's dagger. The others edged by against the other side of the street. Samlor felt suicidally outnumbered, but he looked to those who saw him in shadow-streaked lamplight like certain death if anybody started something.

Which was no more than the truth, not that he'd be alive

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David Drake

at the end himself. Not that he'd care about that either, so long as he died with his teeth in a throat.

"A man's character is on his face," said Tjainufi, but Samlor was motioning his companions ahead of him, poised and wholly concentrated on the men disappearing down the street behind them.

They probably weren't dangerous, just people with somewhere of their own to go. Sure. Probably headed for the meeting of a charitable order, where they'd divide all their possessions among the poor. Nobody in Sanctuary was too busy to prey upon the helpless.

"When are we going to be there?" Star whined. Her voice rose to a clear note that sounded like a shout in the general stillness. "I'm tired." Nothing physical the child could do would force her uncle to her will—

but by speaking

loudly, she could call attention to their presence and threaten all their lives. A sure way to get attention, and a normal human technique, sometimes modified for greater subtlety by adults.

Samlor scooped his niece up with his left hand, resting one of her hips against the jut of his pelvis. It was a gentle movement and answered her complaint of being tired—

she could rest her head on his shoulder as they strode along, if she cared to.

But it also reminded her of just how strong her uncle was, and of how quickly he could move if he chose to.

"We'll get there, Star," Samlor said. "Don't fuss."

"Serve your father and mother," peeped Tjainufi, "that you may go and prosper."

"Your friend," the caravan master remarked to Kham-was, "could get on a fellow's nerves."

The manikin, at eye level between the two adults, suddenly disappeared. Khamwas smiled sadly and replied, "Yes, but he was a useful warning to me. I asked the gods for wisdom and—

got him. I was young, and I was so sure I could force my

will on the gods. . . . What if I had asked for something more dangerous than wisdom?"

DAGGER

37

"Luck turns away destruction by the great gods," called Tjainufi from the opposite shoulder, out of Samlor's sight,

"Besides," added Khamwas, cupping his hand on his empty shoulder. The manikin popped back there again, though with a nervous glance over the protective fingers toward the Cirdonian. "I'd miss him by now." He smiled. Samlor smiled back in understanding, past the fluffy hair of his niece.

DAGGER

39

CHAPTER 4

KHAMWAS DIRECTED THEM up one arm of a five-way intersection, past a patrol station. The gate to the internal courtyard was lighted by flaring sconces, and there was a squad on guard outside. An officer took a step into the street as if to halt the trio, but he changed his mind after a pause.

They were in the neighborhood of the palace now, a better section of the city. The residents here stole large sums with parchment and whispered words instead of cutting wayfarers' throats for a few coins.

And the residents expected protection from their lesser brethren in crime. The troops here would check a pair of men, detain them if they had no satisfactory account of their business; kill them if any resistance were offered. But two men carrying a young child were unlikely burglars. Most probably they were part of the service industry catering to Sanctuary's wealthy and powerful

... and the rich did not care to have their nighttime sports delayed by uniformed officiousness. Samlor had no need for the bribe—

or the knife—

he had

ready.

"We're getting close, I think," Khamwas remarked. He lifted his head as if to sniff the air which even here would have been improved by a cloudburst to ram the effluvium from the street down into the harbor.

Samlor grimaced and looked around him. He wanted to know how Khamwas found his directions ... but he

38

didn't want to ask; and anyway, he wouldn't understand if they scholar/magician took the time to explain.

Worse, Star likely would understand.

"I wonder what Setios is keeping for her," the caravan master whispered, so softly that the child could not hear even though Samlof's lips brushed her fine hair as he spoke.

They paused at a place where the pavement was almost wide enough to be called a square. A median strip, raised to knee height behind a stone curb, was planted with bushes and a tree which spread impressively even though its limbs had been lopped into sprays of young shoots by repeated prunings for firewood. A carriage could pass to either side of the median without threatening to scrape its gilding on the building fronts, though its postillion might have to duck to save his plumed shako from the jutting upper stores.

"Is it going to rain?" Star asked sleepily from the cradle of Samlor's arm. The caravan master glanced at the sky. There were stars, but a scud of high clouds blocked and cleared streaks across them at rapid intervals. The edge in the air might well be harbinger of a storm poised to sweep from the hills to the west of town and wash the air at least briefly clean.

"Perhaps, dearest," the Cirdonian said. "But we'll be all right." They'd be under cover, he hoped; or, better yet, back in a bolted chamber of the caravansary on the White Foal River before the storm broke. Khamwas began to mutter something with his fingers interlaced on the top of his staff. Star shook herself into supple alertness and hopped off her uncle's supporting arm. She did not touch the Napatan, but she watched his face closely as he mouthed words in a language the caravan master did not recognize. Left to his own devices—

unwilling to consider what his niece was teaching

herself now, and barely unwilling to order her to turn away—

Samlor surveyed the

houses in their immediate neighborhood.

It was an old section of the city, but wealthy and fashionable enough that there had been considerable rebuilding to modify the original Ilsigi character. Directly

40

David Drake

across from Samlor's vantage place, the front of the house had been demolished and was being replaced by a two-story portico with columns of colored marble. The spiked grating which enclosed the lot in lieu of a wall was temporary but looked sturdy enough to protect the gate of a fortress.

Beyond the grating, tools and building materials lay jumbled, awaiting the return of workmen at daylight. There was no sign that the house proper was occupied; it was hard to imagine that anyone who was rich enough to carry out the renovation would also be willing to live through the disruption it entailed. A lamp burned brightly on a shack within the enclosure, and a watchman's eyes peered toward the trio from the shack's unglazed window.

The other houses were quiet, though all, save the one against which Salmor's party sheltered, guarded their facades with lamplight. At this hour, business was most likely to be carried on through back entrances or trap doors to tunnels that were older than the Ilsigs . . . and possibly older than humanity. It might be a bad time to meet Setios; but again, it might not. He'd been an associate of Star's mother, which meant at the least that he was used to strange hours and unusual demands.

He'd see them in now, provide the child with her legacy—

if it were here. If it

were portable. If Setios were willing to meet the terms of an agreement made with a woman now long dead.

Samior swore, damning his sister Samlane to a Hell beneath all Hells; and knowing as he recited the words under his breath that any afterlife in which Samlane found herself was certain to be worse than her brother could imagine.

"This is the house," said Khamwas with a note of wonder in his voice. He and the child turned to look at the facade of the building against which the caravan master leaned while he surveyed the rest of the neighborhood.

"Looks pretty quiet," said Samior. The words were less an understatement than a conversational placeholder while the Cirdonian considered what might be a real problem.

The building didn't look quiet. It looked abandoned.

DAGGER

41

It was a blank-faced structure. Its second floor was corbelled out a foot or so but there was no real front overhang to match those of the houses to either side. The stone ashlars had been worn smooth by decades of sidewalk traffic brushing against them; the mortar binding them could have used tuck pointing, but that was more a matter of aesthetics than structural necessity. The only ground-floor window facing the street was a narrow slit beside the iron-bound door. There was a grate-protected niche for a lantern on the other side of the door alcove. The stones were blackened by carbon from the flame, but the lamp within was cold and dark. It had not been lighted this night and perhaps not for weeks past.

BOOK: Dagger
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