Dagger (мир воров)

by David Drake

  Star put a foot down daintily, just short of the victim's outflung arm, then skipped by in a motion that by its incongruity made the scene all the more horrible. The ball of light she had formed drifted behind her for a moment. Its core shrank and brightened-from will o' the wisp to firefly intensity-while the whirling periphery formed tendrils like the whorl of silver-white hair on Star's head.

  The child turned back, saw the set expression on Samlor's face, and jerked away as if he had slapped her physically. The spin of light blanked as if it had never been.

  "Is he…?" asked Khamwas as he stepped over his mind's image of where the body lay. "One of those we- met a moment ago?"

  "The gang who came after us with chains, sure," said the caravan master as he followed with a long stride. The passageway was wide enough for him to spread his arms without quite touching the walls to either side; in the Maze, that made it a street. It held only the normal sounds of feral animals going about their business and, from behind shutters, bestial humans. "They're all dead, the two who ran off as sure as the one who didn't. Turn left here."

  "The House of Setios is more to the-"

  "Turn fucking left," Samlor whispered in a voice like stones rubbing.

  "Do not be a hindrance, lest you be cursed," said Tjainufi on the Napatan's shoulder. The manikin bowed toward Samlor, but the caravan master was too angry to approve of anything.

  Mostly he was angry at himself, because he'd killed often enough during his life to know that he really didn't like killing. Especially not kids, even punk kids who'd have dished his skull in with weighted chains and raped Star until they sold her to a brothel for the price of a skin of wine. .

  Sanctuary might be incrementally better off without that particular trio, but Samlor hil Samt wasn't Justice, wasn't responsible to his god for the cleansing of this hellhole.

  If he really wanted to avoid killing strangers, he should have kept out of Sanctuary, and he surely should have avoided the Vulgar Unicorn, even though it had looked like the best place to learn what he needed to know. There were many cities where merchant guild offices would supply information to a stranger. In a few there were even licensed municipal guides. But this place. .

  "All I wanted was a guide to the house of Setios," the caravan master said.

  "Khamwas will take us there, Uncle," said Star. Her voice was falsely bright to suggest that she didn't remember having disobeyed Samlor a moment before. She tucked her hand into that of the Napatan scholar.

  The exchange frightened Samlor, because he hadn't meant to speak aloud.

  "First," the caravan master said to his companions now that they could walk abreast, "we're going to get out of the Maze. Then we'll worry about a safe route to where we want to be."

  Khamwas murmured assent. Star, glad to be included, patted her uncle's arm.

  Samlor should have explained sooner instead of snarling orders and expecting to be obeyed because-because, in unvarnished truth, he was a dangerous man in a foul mood, and the long knife in his hand had killed at least once this evening. Maybe he did belong in Sanctuary.

  Or dead.

  "What would you do without me, hey, kid?" the caravan master said cheerfully to his niece. His left hand tousled her hair beneath the hood. "Hope the legacy Setios's keeping for you's worth the effort."

  Hell, Samlor didn't want to die. And the rest, well-he'd worry about innocent bystanders, but he wouldn't lose sleep over punks who'd known the rules of the game they lost.

  "Ah, legacy?" asked Khamwas, caught between an unwillingness to intrude and a near necessity of knowing what was going on.

  "My mommie left me something," said Star, falling into the sing-song by which children remember information whose import is still beyond their grasp. Samlor let her prattle on. Light through warped shutters up the street had blanked and brightened as it would if someone moved in front of it.

  "She's dead, my mommie," the child continued, "but she gave somebody a message to give to Uncle Samlor when I'm seven which I am, so now we have to find Setios who has my mommie's present."

  Samlor stepped in front of his companions and stopped, crying to the darkness, "Try it, fucker, and see what it buys you!"

  He didn't know how many there were or whether there might be somebody behind him. He'd back away if he had to-and had the chance-praying that Khamwas would be alert enough to warn of trouble in that direction.

  The Napatan whispered something. An ill-timed question, Samlor thought, but the words weren't meant for him or for anyone human. Khamwas' staff glowed as it had when the caravan master first saw the man; then the glow detached itself from the wood and began to grow into a manlike figure that staggered down the street in front of them.

  The figure didn't really walk, didn't move at all in the normal sense. At the intervals of a heartbeat, the shape displaced forward, limbs at changed angles as if it had stepped from one point to another, though it had not visibly crossed the intervening space. Beyond the figure hung its afterimages, fading slowly from the transparent orange of the original through stages of a violet that was itself almost an absence of light.

  As it advanced, the figure made an angry hissing like that of a firebrand flung into a puddle.

  Two men crouched in a doorway three yards away. One of them wore a cavalryman's back-and-breast armor; both had helmets of military weight and pattern. Between that protection and the swords ready in their hands, Samlor would have been a dead man had he tried to stop their rush-and he couldn't flee without abandoning Star.

  The muggers' eyes burned like those of beasts trapped by the light of a hunter's lantern.

  The shape's arm reached-was-toward them. One man

  screamed and both bolted down the street in a clash of falling equipment. The glowing figure stopped and disappeared as slowly as a lampwick cooling to blackness.

  "Heqt be praised," muttered Samlor hil Samt. His left hand had fumbled for the silver medallion hanging from his neck. He could not feel the embossed features of the toad-faced goddess beneath the fabric of his tunics, but the unintended homage had been answered by a feeling of cool stability.

  Stability was worth a lot just now to Samlor.

  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.

  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.

  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 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?"

  "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.

  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

  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 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.