CHAPTER 5
WITH HIS COMPANIONS shuffling ahead because the passageway was too strait to let him by, Samlor returned to the front of the house. The two adjacent buildings, Setios' and the one beside it, were of similar construction, but they felt radically different to the Cirdonian as he stood between them. Neither showed signs of life or activity at the moment, but a hand on the other building's stonework transmitted hints of movement. Something was alive there.
But not in Setios' house.
"If he thinks," said the caravan master in a conversational tone, "that he can skip to avoid paying over Star's legacy, then that's something we'll discuss when I find the gentleman.
"Which I will."
Samlor shrugged, settling his cloak and disengaging his mind from a doubtful future. There was the present to deal with, and that was quite enough.
"Ah, Samlor… ?" Khamwas said.
"Just wait here," the Cirdonian repeated. "I'm going across the street to talk with the watchman there." He nodded toward the guard shack on the construction site opposite.
"Yes, of course," Khamwas said with enough disinterest to hint at irritation. "But what I wanted to say was—Setios, you see, may not be avoiding you. There's been a recent upheaval in the structure of, you see—magic. He may have been frightened and fled from that."
The Napatan grinned. "He'll have left behind the stele I want to read, surely. Probably his whole collection, if that fear is why he left. And, as for this child's legacy—" he touched Star's cheek affectionately "—if we don't find it here, I'll help you locate it. Because you've helped me. And because I am honored to help someone as talented as your niece."
"The plans of god are one thing," said the manikin on his shoulder. "The thoughts of men are another."
"Yeah, well," said the caravan master as he slipped the dagger back under his belt. It was the least obtrusive way to carry the weapon until he got a proper sheath. "Best get on with it unless we want't' grow roots down into the pavement."
He strode across the street with a swaggering assurance which immediately set him apart in a city where lone men habitually slunk. The watchman edged back from his window so that his eyes no longer reflected light.
"Ho, friend," Samlor called a half step back from the high iron fence. He spoke loudly enough for the watchman to hear him without difficulty; but he didn't want to arouse the entire street. There was a lot he had yet to do around here, and the last thing he needed was for somebody to start hammering on an alarm gong.
"Git yer butt away er I'll stitch ye right through the middle wi' me crossbow!" crackled a terrified voice from within the guard shack.
The air was dead still now, under heavy clouds, and noticeably warmer than it had been during the early evening. Samlor shivered, though the concern did not show on his face.
It wasn't likely the watchman had a crossbow; that was an expensive piece of equipment and not at all suited to the job for which he had been hired.
Besides, if the nervous bastard had a missile weapon chances were he'd've cut loose at the caravan master as he crossed the street. There were a lot of people who hadn't any business being armed. Through some sort of cosmic balancing of accounts, they tended to be the folks who most wanted enough hardware to equip an assault company.
"All I want to do is buy a little information, friend," said Samlor, reaching deliberately into the purse which balanced the long knife on the other side of his belt. He hoped the lantern on the guard shack illuminated his movement clearly. The sky'd gotten dark as a yard up a pig's ass, and he really didn't want this jumpy fathead to think that the threat level was going up.
Samlor carried five pieces of Rankan gold wrapped in chamois to keep the mint marks sharp and the metal bright. They were useful in just this sort of situation, where you had to convince somebody unmistakably that his best interests were your interests.
Now Samlor spilled the coins from his right hand to his left, letting them fall far enough through the air to wake shivers of light. Not even brass could mimic that color or the particular music of gold ringing on gold.
"Buy it at a pretty good rate, too," the caravan master added, relieved beyond measure to hear a sigh of wonder from the guard shack. There were enough people who wanted Samlor hil Samt dead that being killed by accident would be ridiculous.
"Here," he added. "Catch."
The Cirdonian spun one of the gold coins off the thumb of his left hand, aiming it between the bars of the fence and into the dark rectangle of the shack's window ten feet beyond.
There was a crash of objects within, a thump, and then the barely distinct pinging of the coin bouncing onto the floor despite the watchman's desperate attempts to catch it in the air.
Samlor waited, his face neutral, while the hidden watchman shuffled on his hands and knees and bumped the walls of his shack repeatedly. There was no light inside beyond what slipped between thoboards, and the coin—the price of an excellent donkey or a horse that might or might not carry an adult twenty miles—was not large physically.
The noises stopped. The watchman reappeared at the window and stuck his arm out so that he could see the coin in the light of the lantern on the shack's front. It winked, and Samlor winked cheerfully at the amazement of the man whom he saw for the first time.
Money was generally the best way to approach a stranger.
"What d'ye wanna know?" said the watchman. His voice was no less suspicious than before, but now it was pitched an octave lower. The coin disappeared somewhere out of sight as soon as he realized that he was flashing it to the world.
"How long you been here?" Samlor asked. Then, realizing that he knew exactly what answer he would get—Huh? Since sundown—he added, "How many weeks, I mean?"
The watchman's hands reappeared in the light. He was counting on his fingers while his lips mouthed one, two, three—
He paused. "Pay me," he demanded.
"When I'm satisfied," the caravan master said, "you get all the rest of this. If I'm not satisfied, I'll take back the first, and I'll have your guts for garters."
Gold danced from one hand to the palm of the other in time with Samlor's broadening smile. The mixed message suddenly got home in the watchman's brain. He jumped back away from the window.
"No problem, friend," said Samlor. "I want to give you this money."
"Three weeks. An' a day," came the voice from the dark. "Look—"
"And have you seen any signs that anybody lives in the place opposite?" Samlor continued, trampling steadily over the notion that the watchman had something useful to say that wasn't an answer to a direct question. "People going in or out? Food deliveries? The lantern by the door lighted?"
"Gods and demons," the watchman mumbled, leaning forward again in his shack. "Well, I dunno, I—what was that last thing again?"
Like working with a camel, thought Samlor, except that a good camel was probably smarter. "The lantern by the doorway there," he repeated gently, pointing with the hand which held the money. "Has it ever been lighted while you're on duty here?"
"There's no lantern," said the watchman, stretching as far forward as he could from the window. He was a scrawny man, and the effect was rather that of a turtle trying to grasp a berry hanging well above it. "Say, but yer right, there was a light over there back… Well, I dunno for sure, but there was a light."
That was going to have to do, the caravan master realized. There had been at least some evidence of occupancy at Setios' house three weeks ago, and now there wasn't. Samlor'd never been a big one on finesse if it looked like a quick and dirty way was going to accomplish the job.
"Fine," he said aloud to the watchman. "Now you bring me that screw jack over there—" he pointed "—and I give you this.
"Better yet—" he went on, because he saw the watchman's mouth drop open before the fellow skipped out of sight again in fear "—I'm going to drop the gold right here."
Samlor reached inside the grating and let the coins fall with a glittering song. "Now," he repeated. "All you have to do is bring me that jack. Then I'll go away, and you can scoop up the money safe as can be. Right? Look at it."
Despite himself, the watchman did peer out of his shack again. "But if they miss a tool…" he said in a tone of desperate pleading.
"I'm paying you more than you'd make in a year doing this," said the caravan master reasonably. The coins shone on the ground as invitingly as the eyes of the most beautiful whore in the world. "For that matter, I'll bring the jack back if I've got a chance—but what d'you care?"
The watchman sidled out of his shack. As the caravan master had suspected, the fellow's weapon't was not a crossbow but a pike which had been sawed off—or broken and smoothed—to a total length of about five feet, butt to point. It was useless except for prodding away a drunk who tried to climb into the site, but serious trouble was for soldiers summoned by the alarm gong—not for the cretin to deal with by himself.
"I dunno," the fellow muttered, but he picked up the heavy jack with as much assurance as he managed with anything.
"The bar too," Samlor directed. "To turn it."
The watchman blinked, fumbled, and then laid down his pike to bring the iron rod which drove the mechanism.
The jack was a solid iron screw which the contractor's men were using to drive into place the quarter-ton blocks which had to interlock with the existing fabric of the structure being renovated. A frame clamped to the front of the building provided a base from which the jack could be screwed. Its steady thrust would move stones smoothly, instead of shattering them as would result from an attempt to hammer them into place.
The watchman had approached within six or seven feet of the fence. Then he lobbed the pieces of the jack underhand in the direction of Samlor and skipped back like a keeper who had just fed a restive lion. Iron bounced from the ground into iron with exactly the sort of clangor which Samlor had hoped to avoid.
"Idiot!" the caravan master snarled under his breath as he tried to damp the ringing bars by squeezing them in his hands. It didn't help a lot—the grating vibrated in a hundred separate harmonies—but it was a good release for the fury that wrapped Samlor for the moment. As well get mad at a dog for barking…
He reached through the grate and lifted the screw jack. Maybe the watchman, holding his pike again in the terrified certainty that he would need it, wasn't as frail as he looked. The bar and screw weighed a good thirty pounds, and the handle was solid enough to be a crushingly effective weapon in a strong man's hands.
The noise hadn't aroused any obvious interest. It wasn't exactly that residents of this district minded their own business. Rather, they were wealthy enough that noise in the night implied criminality of too trivial a nature to be profitable to them.
"Spend it wisely, friend," said Samlor as he tucked the jack under his cloak. No point in giving a view of the proceedings to anyone who chanced to be peering through a window. He backed a few paces away from the fence and bowed sardonically to the watchman, who was hopping from one foot to the other as if executing a clumsy dance with his pike.
Samlor turned and strode back to his companions. Behind him, he heard the fellow diving for the gold which he could at last safely retrieve.
Well, the fool had already outlived the caravan master by a couple decades, so it wasn't absolutely certain that possession of that much money was the kiss of death. They'd made a bargain, and Samlor had kept his part of it. The results beyond that weren't a concern of his.
"If't a fool follows his heart," said Tjainufi from the Napatan's shoulder, "he does wisely."
Samlor started, looking at the manikin with appraising eyes. "Do you think so?" he asked, then grimaced to find himself talking to the unnatural little—thing. "Khamwas," he said gruffly, "come help me with the window."
Star was curled in the corner of the door alcove, dozing with the Napatan's cape for a pillow. Khamwas stood in front of her, watching the street as well as the caravan master. He was very slim without the bulk of the outer garment, and his bare chest was no garb for this night.
"I, ah," he said, looking down at the child. "I thought it would be good if she got some rest, so… She's very like my own daughter, you know."
"Wish I had more talent for what she needs," said the caravan master quietly, staring at the child also. "Wish I knew what she needs, what any kid needs. But you do what you can."
He grimaced again. "Bring 'er along, will you? I need you at the side to hand me this jack when I'm ready for it—" he fluffed his cloak open to display the tool "—and I don't want her in plain sight on the street, even though it means getting her up again."
The sky had closed in above the passage between the two buildings. It was as dark as a narrow cave, and for the time being the air was as motionless as that of a cavern miles below the ground. Samlor found his location by subconscious memory of the six cautious paces which had brought him beneath the window when he could see it.
He put down the jack and began the task of ascending the wall.
The houses were built close enough to one another that the caravan master could brace himself against opposite walls, first with his hands and then by wedging his hobnails into narrow cracks in the masonry. He mounted to the second floor window like a frog swimming, his legs lifting him each time his arms had locked on a fresh hold.
When Samlor's left palm touched the window ledge, he explored it by touch with all the care required of a possible trap with razor edges. Beneath him he heard his companions, Khamwas murmuring a response to Star's whine. He was glad he had the other man along on this business, not least because Khamwas could look after the child.
The bars were set solidly into stone lintels, and they were just as tight together as Samlor had thought. There were glazed windows within, swung back in sashes and apparently hooked to keep breezes from banging them to and fro.
There was no light in the room beyond, and utterly no sound.
Samlor set both his feet against the wall of Setios' house and braced his back on the adjacent building. If he'd thought things through, he might have redoubled his cloak before he set his shoulders on the rough stone, but he'd be all right for the brief while he expected to cling here. The important thing was that his hands were free.
"Khamwas," he called softly, "hand me up the jack. And don't let the handle fall out of it, right?"
"Just a mo—oh," said the Napatan. "There…"
Samlor twisted his torso against the wall and reached down as far as he could with his left hand. He could not see Khamwas, but the scrunch of wood suggested that the Napatan had wedged his staff between the walls and was using the slant to raise himself, even though one of his hands was full of the heavy jack.
"Hold it," Samlor whispered. His fingers brushed one of the crossholes by which the jack was turned. By squeezing down a fraction further, the caravan master managed to hook the rod between his index and middle fingers, though the strain on them and the web of his hand was agonizing.
"There, you bitch!" he snarled at it as he lurched up against pain that he had to ignore for the instant before his right hand closed on the barrel of the jack and took the strain. Straightening up was difficult—at one angle, the chain closure of his cloak threatened to throttle him—but it felt so good not to have a tearing weight on his fingers that he could easily ignore lesser problems.
He set the jack sideways on the window ledge, angling it so that the screw top touched a bar while the base was firmly against the tone sash. The handle rotated the screw slightly before binding against the ledge. Samlor removed the handle, set the end into the other crosshole (offset ninety degrees from the first) and cranked the screw up another quarter turn. The base scrunched and the top gave an iron-to-iron squeak.
The caravan master grinned and began pumping the screw higher. The bars protecting the window were sturdy, but Samlor's powerful arm muscles were multiplied by the handle's leverage and the shallow-pitched threads of the housejack. The combination would have torn apart the stone sash if that were necessary.
It wasn't, but chips of cement spalled away before the bar set in it fractured. The jack slipped. Samlor swore and clamped it with the hand that had been resting on the barrel more for his support than its.
"Are you all right?" Khamwas whispered in concern.
"Yeah, it's all right," the caravan master replied. He didn't want to arouse people in the house behind him—by this time he was convinced that Setios had decamped with all his household in the past three weeks—but explaining the situation to his companion calmed both of them. "The bars're brittle, cast instead of worked. It surprised me when it broke, but it makes the job simpler.
"A single plowing does not produce the crop," said Tjainufi.
"Don't get your bowels in an uproar," the caravan master grunted back.
He began levering more furiously, each stroke requiring him to reset the jack handle. The crack of metal breaking had been unexpected; and right now, the things the caravan master did expect included some that were really unpleasant.
The bar had broken at its lower end, where it took the strain of the jack. The top, where the displacement was less acute, remained in its stone transom—but it was just a matter of time before that gave way as well.
Each thrust of the handle now was against increased resistance. Samlor's shoulders were more than equal to the job, but the palm of his right hand felt as if it might be starting to bruise under the strain. The calluses were no help in this.
The second bar, driven by the broken end of the first, bent ahead of the jack's thrust until it touched the third. Samlor continued to crank.
Cement pattered down from the transom in bits ranging as large as fingernails. The bars were crushing their setting under a sidethrust which they had not been designed to resist.
The bar which had broken initially pulled free. Only luck and Samlor's reflexive grab kept it from dropping to the ground with enough inertia to crush any skull it met in its path.
"Heqt," the Cirdonian muttered as he found himself with a firm grip on the length of iron. "Heqt be praised." Before he resumed work, he pulled the silver medallion and its thong outside his tunic, so that the embossed face of the toad goddess could watch his eiforts.
After a moment's consideration, he slid the bar inside Setios' house instead of trying to pass it on to Khamwas. The clunk-cling! it made on the hard flooring within was less noticeable than the squeal inevitable as the screw jack forced its way onward.
The grill was beginning to collapse. The bars were set in a trough in the hard limestone of the sill and transom. Any attempt to hammer the iron inward would be resisted by three inches of rock. The daubs of cement which held the bars apart within the trough were not nearly as strong.
Only the integrity of the whole construct preserved its strength. That ended when the jack inexorably tore out the first bar.
For the next few minutes, Samlor's major problem was to avoid dropping a bar or, worse, the jack itself. When the fifth bar came out, he gripped the next with his left hand instead of advancing the screw again. The bar quivered, then toie loose to his mighty tug.
The caravan master's whole body was under strain from the position it had been holding. Some of his large muscles were beginning to tremble. He responded with a burst of nervous energy, dropping the jack within the house to get it out of the way while his hand ripped away the remaining bars on the right side of the window.
If one of them had remained firm, Samlor would have had to pause for an hour or more, shuddering on the ground while his muscles purged themselves of fatigue poisons. There was no need. The cement bonding had been cracked already by asymmetric compression. Bar after bar came away until there were no more in the right half of the window. Metal rang as the caravan master dropped them, but he could no longer hear any sound except the hammer of blood in his temples.
He couldn't stop now, and he certainly couldn't take the time to reconnoiter the room he had just opened. There wasn't a damned thing to see—the room was as dark as the sky above—and the caravan master knew he'd be really lucky if he still had the strength to throw himself directly into Setios' house.
"Heqt help and sustain me in this enterprise which I undertook for my daughter Star," Samlor prayed, though the only sound that came from his mouth was the wheeze of his breath. He gripped the sash with his left hand and a bar with his right, then drew himself into the opening with the clumsy certainty of a toad hopping.
The Cirdonian's hobnails slipped an instant after his shoulders curved away from the adjacent wall, but his torso was already half inside the building. He wriggled, trying to pull himself the rest of the way through the narrow opening. His boots clashed on the wall which had supported his shoulders—and pushed him inside with no trouble at all.
If he'd been thinking straighter, he'd've planned it that way.
A boobytrap—a spring-driven blade or a nest of spikes— would have gone off during Samlor's previous activities, but there was still the chance that someone—human or not— waited in the darkness to spear the intruder as he sprawled totally helpless. The Cirdonian was so played out by the sudden release of strain that he couldn't have moved for the next few seconds if he'd known he'd be slaughtered instead of just fearing it.
"Praised be Heqt in whom the world lives," murmured Samlor as his senses returned him to the world beyond his own effort and necessities. The marble floor beneath him was cold and slick with water. The glazed windows had not been closed the last time it rained; and that, from idle chatter overheard at the caravansary, had been more than a week ago.
Khamwas called from the alley, his words blurred but the worry in them clear.
Samlor rolled onto his right side. There was a sharp pain in his left thigh where the unsheathed dagger had prodded him during his contortions. He didn't think it had drawn blood through the double tunics.
"It's all right," the caravan master said, then realized that he wasn't sure he could understand the croaked words himself. He gripped the window ledge, brushing the scattered bars into muted chiming around his knees.
"It's all right," he repeated, leaning back through the opening by which he had entered. "Just a minute and I'll find—" his hand brushed fabric, curtains or tapestries, beside the window "—yeah, just a second and I'll have something for you't' climb by."
The Napatan might have been able to mount the way Samlor had, but Star was too small to fill the gap as comfortably as either of the adult males. It was risky to bring her into a magician's house, but a worse risk to leave her in a Sanctuary alley.
Life was, after all, a series of gambles which every creature lost on the final throw.
A fastening gave way; cloth tumbled down beside the Cirdonian. It was embroidered, partly with metallic threads that made it stiff to the touch. Something about the feel of the fabric suggested to Samlor that he didn't want to see the design.
He slipped an end of the tapestry out between the remaining bars instead of tossing it directly through the opening he had torn. He no longer felt lightheaded, but he didn't trust his muscles to anchor his companions against a straight pull.
"Come on up," the caravan master directed, speaking through the window. "Star first." The tapestry, belayed around the grill, wasn't going to pull out of his hands.
The window was scarcely visible as a rectangle, and the still air smelt of storm.
There was a discussion below. Star came up the tapestry, flailing her legs angrily behind her. There was a pout in her voice as she demanded, "What is this old place? I don't like it."
Maybe she felt something about the house—and maybe she was an overtired seven-year-old and therefore cranky.
There wasn't time to worry about it. The caravan master gripped the child beneath the shoulders with his left arm and lifted her into the room. Star yelped as her head brushed the transom, but she should've had sense enough to duck.
"My staff, Master Samlor," said Khamwas.
The Cirdonian leaned forward and caught the vague motion that proved to be the end of an ordinary wooden staff when his fingers enclosed it. Behind him, the room lighted vaguely with blue pastel.
Star shouldn't have done it without asking; but they needed light, and a child wasn't a responsible adult. Samlor slid the staff behind him with his left hand while supporting the tapestry with his right hand and using his full weight to pin the end to the floor.
The Napatan scholar mounted gracefully and used Samlor's arm like the bar of a trapeze to swing himself over the lintel. Only then did the caravan master turn to see where they were and what his niece was doing.
Star had set swimming through the air a trio of miniature octopuses made of light. A blue creature drifted beneath the ceiling frescoed with scenes of anthropomorphic deities, a yellow one prowled beneath the legs of a writing table sumptuous with mother-of-pearl inlays.
The third miniature octopus was of an indigo so pale that it barely showed up against the carven door against which it bobbed feebly.
"Where's—"Samlor said as he looked narrowly at Khamwas. "You know, your little friend?"
Tjainufi reappeared on the Napatan's right shoulder. The manikin moved with the silent suddenness of an image in an angled mirror, now here and now not as the tilt changes. "The waip does not stray far from the woof," he said in cheerful satisfaction.
"Khamwas," the Cirdonian added as he looked around them, "if you can locate what we're after, then get to it. I really don't want't' spend any longer here than I need to."
"Look, Uncle," Star squealed as she pranced over to the writing desk. "Mommie's box't"
Samlor's speed and reflexes were in proper form after his exertions, but his judgment was off. He attempted to spring for the desk before Star got there, and his boots skidded out from under him on the wet marble. Because he'd swept the long dagger from his belt as part of the same unthinking maneuver, he had only his left palm to break his fall. The shock made the back of his hand tingle and the palm burn.
Khamwas had retrieved his staff. He stopped muttering to it when the Cirdonian slapped the floor hard enough to make the loose bars roll and jingle among themselves. "Are you… ?" he began, offering a hand to the sprawling bigger man.
"See, Uncle Samlor?" said the child, returning to the caravan master with an ivory box in her hands. "It's got mommie's mark on it."
"No, go on with your business," said Samlor calmly to the Napatan. He felt the prickly warmth of embarrassment painting his skin, but he wouldn't have survived this long if he lashed out in anger every time he'd made a public fool of himself. "Find the stele you're after, and then we'll see what Star's got here."
He took the box from the child as quickly as he could without letting it slip from his numbed fingers. Even if it were just what it seemed—a casket of Samlane's big enough to hold a pair of armlets—it could be extremely dangerous.
Much of what Samlor's sister had owned, and had known, fell into that category, one way or another.
Khamwas' face showed the concern which any sane man would feel under the circumstances, but he resumed his meditation on—or prayers to—his staff.
Star's palm-sized creatures of light continued their slow patrol of the room. The caravan master seemed to have broken into a large study. There was a couch to one side of the door and on the other the writing desk with matching chair. The chair lay on its back, as if its last occupant had jumped up hastily.
Most of the interior wall space was taken up by cedarwood cabinets for books and scrolls. Even the palely drifting smears of light showed that the works ranged widely in age and quality of binding, but the varied types were intermixed within individual cabinets. Samlor did not doubt that the library was arrayed in a rigid order; but he was willing to bet that he would not be able to discover that order if he spent a year among the shelves.
His instinct about the tapestry he had dropped through the bars had been correct. Its counterpart still hung on the wall. The design worked into it in gorgeous color was religious… depending on one's definition of the term. The border was formed of curlicues, interrupted at regular intervals by nodes.
The indigo octopus pulled itself along the border, illuminating the pattern beneath the groping tentacles. The embroidered nodes were humans contorted with pain. The curlicues were intestines, pulled an anatomically reasonable distance from gaping bellies.
Setios appeared to be exactly the sort of man that Samlane could be expected to meet. "Open it, Uncle!" Star demanded. Samlor still had the coffin-hilted dagger in his hand. His glance around the room had been a professional assessment of the situation, not daydreaming. The child had her own agenda, though, and this casket was—might,be—the thing that had brought them to Sanctuary to begin with.
Khamwas still murmured over his staff. The caravan master got up with caution born of experience and walked over to the writing desk. A triple-wicked oil lamp hung from a crane attached to the desktop. It promised real illumination when Samlor lit it with the brass fire-piston in his wallet.
"There's no oil, Uncle Samlor," said Star with the satisfaction of a child who knows more than adult. She cupped her hand again and turned it up with a saffron glow in the palm. The creatures of light still drifting about the room dimmed by comparison. "See?"
The bowl of the lamp was empty except for a sheen in its center, oil beyond the touch of the wicks. Only one of the three wicks had been lighted at the lamp's last use. When the flame had consumed all the oil, it reduced the twist of cotton to ash. The other wicks were sharply divided into black and white, ready to function if the fuel supply were renewed.
Setios had really left in a hurry.
"Fine, hold the light where it is, darling," Samlor said to his niece as calmly as if he were asking her to pass the bread at table. The casket wasn't anything which the Cirdonian remembered from his youth, but the family crest—the rampant wy vern of the House of Kodrix—was enameled on the lid. Beneath it was carven in Cirdonian script the motto An Eagle Does Not Snatch Flies.
Samlor's parents had never forgiven him for running high risk, high profit caravans like a commoner instead of vegetating in noble poverty. But they'd lived well—drunk well, at least—on the flies he snatched for them, and the money Samlor provided had bought his sister a marriage with a Rankan noble.
Which couldn't save Samlane from herself, but was the best effort possible for a brother who didn't claim to be a god.
The light hanging beneath Star's hand did not have clearly defined tentacles like those of the creatures still wandering the room, but there were whorls of greater and lesser intensity within its membranous boundaries. Samlor was determined not to scream and slap at the glow which he needed in this place, but the instinct to do so was very strong.
The lid did not rise under gentle pressure from his left thumb. There was no visible catch or keyhole, but the little object had to be a box—it didn't weigh enough for a block of solid ivory. Samlor put his dagger down on the desk to free his right hand—
And read the superscription on the piece of parchment there, a letter barely begun:
To Master Samlor hil Samt
If you are well, it is good. I also am well.
I enclose w
The script was Cirdonian, and the final letter trailed off in a sweep of ink across the parchment. Following the curve of that motion, Samlor saw a delicate silver pen on the marble floor a few feet to the side of the desk.
Samlor set down the ivory box, and he very deliberately kept the weapon in his hand. From the look of matters, Setios might have been better off if he'd been holding a blade and not a pen a week or so earlier. Instinctively, the caravan master's left arm encircled Star, locating the child while he turned and said, "Khamwas. This is important. I think I've been doing Setios an injustice, thinking he'd ducked out to avoid me."
The other man was so still that not even his chest moved with the process of breathing. The absolute stillness was camouflaged for a moment by the fact that the octopuses threw slow, vague shadows as they circled the room. The manikin on Khamwas' shoulder was executing some sort of awkward dance with his legs stiff and his arms akimbo.
"Khamwas!" the caravan master repeated sharply. "I think we need to get outa here now."
Tjainufi said, "Do not say, "I will undertake the matter," if you will not."
Almost simultaneously, the Napatan shook himself like a diver surfacing after a deep plunge. He opened his eyes and stood, wobbling a little and using the staff for support. His face broadened with a smile of bright relief.
"Samlor," he said, obviously ignorant of anything that had happened around him since he dropped into a trance. "I've found it—or at least, we need to go down."
"We need to—" began the caravan master angrily. Tjainufi was watching him. The manikin's features were too small to have readable expression in this light, but the creature must think that—"
"Look," Samlor resumed, speaking to—at—Tjainufi, "I don't mean I want to get out because we found what I wanted, I mean—"
"Oh!" said Star. There was a mild implosion, air rushing to fill a small Void. "There's nothing inside."
She'd opened the box, Samlor saw as he turned. His emotions had gone flat—they'd only be in the way just now—and his senses gave him frozen images of his surroundings in greater detail than he would be able to imagine when he wasn't geared to kill or run.
A narrow plate on the front of the ivory box slid sideways to expose a spring catch. When the child pressed that—the scale of the mechanism was so small that Samlor would have had to work it with a knifepoint—the lid popped up.
To display the inner surfaces of the ivory as highly polished as the exterior; and nothing whatever within.
Star was looking up at him with a pout of disappointment. She held the box in both hands and the ball of light, detached from her palm, was shrinking in on itself and dimming as its color slipped down through the spectrum.
For an instant—for a timeless period, because the vision was unreal and therefore nothing his eyes could have taken in—Samlor saw blue-white light through a gap in the cosmos where the whorl of white hair on Star's head should have been. It was like looking into the heart of the thunderbolt—
And it wasn't there, in the room or his daughter's face— for Star was his daughter, damn Samlane as she surely was damned—or even as an afterimage on Samlor's retinas when he blinked. So it hadn't really been there, and the caravan master was back in the world where he had promised to help Khamwas find a stele in exchange for help locating Star's legacy.
Which it appeared they had yet to do, but he'd fulfill his obligations to the Napatan. He shouldn't have needed a reminder from Tjainufi of that.
"Friend Khamwas," Samlor said, "we'll go downstairs if you want that. But—" his left index finger made an arc from the parchment toward the fallen silver pen "— something took Setios away real sudden, and I wouldn't bet it's not still here."
Khamwas caught his lower lip between his front teeth. He was wearing his cape again, but the caravan master remembered how frail the Napatan had looked without it.
"The man who looks in front of him does not stumble and fall," said the manikin with his usual preternatural clarity of voice.
"Samlor," said the Napatan. "I appreciate what you say… but what I seek is here, and I've made a very long—"
"Sure," the caravan master interrupted. "I just mean we be careful, all right?"
"And you, child," Samlor added in a voice as soft as a cat's claws extending. He knelt so that Star could meet his eyes without looking up. "You don't touch anything, do anything. Do you understand? Because if the only way to keep you safe is to tie you up and carry you like a sack of flour—that's what I'll do."
Star nodded, her face scrunched up on the verge of tears. The drifting glows dwindled noticeably.
"Everything's going to be fine, dearest," the caravan master said, giving the child an affectionate pat as he rose.
It bothered him to have to scare his niece in order to get her to obey—while she remembered—but she scared him every time she did something innocently dangerous, like opening the ivory box. Better she be frightened than that she swing from his arm, trussed like a hog.
Because Samlor didn't threaten in bluff.
Khamwas said something under his breath. His staff clothed itself in the bluish phosphorescence it held when the caravan master first met him in an alley. With the staff's unshod ferule, the Napatan prodded the study door, lifting the bronze latch. When nothing further happened, he pulled the door open with his free hand and preceded Samlor and Star into the hall beyond.
Samlor touched the latch as he stepped past it. Not a particularly sturdy piece—typical for an inside door, when the occupant is more concerned with privacy than protection. But it had been locked, which meant somebody had paused in the hallway to do so with a key after he closed the door.
Otherwise, it would have to have been locked from the inside by somebody who wasn't there anymore.
In the old Ilsigi fashion, a balustraded hallway encircled a reception room which pierced the second floor. There was a solid roof overhead rather than the skylight which would have graced a Rankan dwelling of similar quality.
The stairwell to the ground floor was in the corner to the left of the study door. Khamwas' staff, pale enough to be a revenant floating at its own direction, swirled that way.
"The, ah," Samlor said, trying to look all around him and unable to see anything more than a few inches beyond the phosphorescent staff. "The doorkeeper. It's not… ?"
"We wouldn't meet it even if we opened the front door from within," said Khamwas as he stepped briskly down the helical staircase. "It isn't, you see, a thing. It's a set of circumstances which have to fit as precisely as the wards of a lock.
"Though it wouldn't," he added a few steps later, "be a good idea for anyone to force the door from the outside. Even if they were a much greater scholar than I. Ah, Setios collected some—artifacts—that he might more wisely have left behind."