Dagger (мир воров)

by David Drake

  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.

  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.

  There was no sign of life through the slit intended to give a guard inside a look at whoever was calling.

  "Perhaps I'm wrong," said Khamwas uncertainly. "This should be the house of Setios, but I-I can't be sure I'm right."

  He made as if to bend over his staff again, then straightened and said decisively, "No, I'm sure it must be the house-but perhaps he doesn't live here anymore." The Napatan stepped to the street-level door and raised his staff to rap on the panel.

  "Ah-" said Samior.

  The caravan master held the long dagger he had taken from the man he had killed in the Vulgar Unicorn. The weapon belonged in his hand when they prowled through the Maze, but it wasn't normal practice to knock on a stranger's door with steel bare in your fist.

  On the other hand, this was Sanctuary; and anyway, the new knife didn't fit the sheath of the one Samior had left in the corpse.

  "Go ahead," he said to Khamwas. The Napatan was poised, watching the caravan master and waiting for a suggestion to replace his own intent.

  Khamwas nodded, Star mirroring his motion as if hypnotized by tiredness. He rapped twice on the door panel. The sound of wood on wood was sharp and soulless.

  "Won't be anybody there," said Samior. His own eyes were drawn to the watermarked blade of the knife,his

  knife, now; the owner wasn't going to claim it with a foot of steel through his chest. The whorls of blended metals, iron black against polished steel, were only memories in the distant lamplight. There was no way Samlor could see them now, even if they began to spell words as he had watched them do-in defiance of reason-twice before.

  The caravan master shook himself out of the clouded reverie into which fatigue was easing him. He needed rest as badly as his niece did, and it looked as though there was no way he was going to clear up his business tonight anyway.

  "Look," he said, irritated because Khamwas still faced the door as if there were a chance it would open. "There's nobody here, and-"

  Metal clanked as the bar closing the door from inside was withdrawn from its staples. The door leaf opened inward, squealing on bronze pivots set into the lintel and transom instead of hanging from strap hinges.

  "No one will see you," said the voice of the figure standing in the doorway. Whatever else the doorkeeper might be, it was not human.

  The creature was far shorter than Star. Fur clothed its body and long tail in ashen luster, but the frame beneath was skeletally thin. Its features had the pointed sharpness of a fox's muzzle, and there was no intelligence whatever in its beady eyes.

  "Wait," said Samlor hil Samt as the doorkeeper began to close the portal again. He set his boot against the iron-strapped lower edge of the door. "Your master holds a trust f-for my niece Star."

  "No one will see you," the creature repeated. Behind it was another set of door leaves, reinforced like the first. They combined to form a closet-sized anteroom which could probably be flooded with anything from boiling water to molten lead.

  If there were anyone alive in the house to do so. The doorkeeper spoke in a thin, breathy voice, but its chest did not rise and fall.

  "It isn't real," Khamwas said, speaking in some different universe in which Samlor was not focused in terrified determination on the unhuman-unalive-doorkeeper of this house. "It's a simulacrum like the-"

  "No one will see you," the doorkeeper repeated without emphasis. It swung the panel shut, thrusting Samlor violently backward even though he tried to brace himself by stiffening his supporting leg behind him.

  "I will have Star's legacy!" the caravan master shouted as he hurled himself against the door, slamming into it with the meat of his left shoulder.

  The panel thumped but did not rebound. The bar crashed into place.

  "I willl" Samlor cried again. "Depend on it!"

  His voice echoed, but there was no sound at all from within the house.

  "It wasn't really present," said Khamwas, touching the other man's shoulder to calm him.

  "It's there enough for me," said Samlor grimly, massaging his bruised shoulder with the faceted knife-hilt. "Might've tried t' stop a landslide for all I could do to keep it from slamming the door."

  At a venture, he poked his daggerblade through the slit beside the door, in and out quickly like a snake licking the air. Nothing touched the metal, nor was there any other response.

  "He who shakes the stone," said-warned? – Tjainufi, "will have it fall on his foot."

  "I mean," said Khamwas hastily to deflect possible wrath from his manikin, "that it's no more than a part of the door. A trick only, without volition or consciousness. It's carrying out the last order it was given, the way a bolt lies in its groove when the master releases it. No one may be present."

  "If we go in there," said Star distinctly, pointing at the door, "we'll be-krrkl"

  The child cocked her head up as if her neck had been wrung. "Like chickens," she added as she relaxed, grinning.

  Samlor's breath wheezed out. He had thought-

  "Well, Star," said the Napatan scholar, "I might be able to keep the wraith from moving for a time, long enough for us to get past the… zone of which it's a part. 1 might. But I think we'd best not go in by this door until Setios permits us to pass."

  The two of them smiled knowingly at one another.

  Samlor restrained his impulse to do something pointlessly violent. He looked at the blade of his knife instead of glaring at his companions and began in a very reasonable tone, "In that case, we'd best get some sleep and-"

  "Actually," said Khamwas, not so much interrupting as speaking without being aware that Samlor was in the middle of a statement, "neither of us have business with Setios himself, only with items in his possession. I wonder…"

  "I want my gift now," said Star, her face set in the slanting lines of temper. Either she tossed her head slightly, or the whorl of white strands in her curly black hair moved on its own.

  Go in now read the iron letters on the blade at which Samlor stared in anger. There was too little light for the markings to be visible, but he saw them nonetheless.

  "Heqt take you all to the waters beneath the earth!" shouted the Cirdonian in fury. He slashed the air with his dagger as if to wipe away the message crawling there in the metal. "I'm not a burglar, and coming to this damned city doesn't make me
one."

  "When you are hungry, eat what you despise," said the manikin on Khamwas' shoulder. "When you are full, despise it."

  "Anyway," said Star, "it's going to rain, Uncle Samlor." She looked smug at the unanswerable truth of her latest argument.

  The caravan master began to laugh.

  Khamwas blinked, as frightened by the apparent humor as he had been by the anger that preceded it. Emotional outbursts by a man as dangerous as the caravan master were like creakings from the dike holding back flood waters.

  "Well," the Napatan said cautiously. "I suppose the situation may change for the better by daylight. Though of course neither of us were considering theft. I want to look at a slab of engraved stone, and you simply wish to retrieve

  your niece's legacy from its caretaker-who seems to be absent."

  "We don't know what it is," said Star. "My gift."

  "Ah," said Khamwas, speaking to the girl but with an eye cocked toward her uncle. "That shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. If we're inside-" he nodded toward the door " – and the object is there also, I should be able to locate it for you."

  "Will you show me how?" Star begged, clasping her hands together in a mixture of pleading and premature delight.

  "Ah. .," repeated the Napatan scholar. "I think that depends on what your uncle says, my dear."

  "Her uncle says that we're not inside yet," Samlor stated without particular emphasis. "And he'll see about getting there."

  Without speaking further to his companions, the Cirdonian walked to the corner of the building.

  The sidewall of Setios' house was not common to the building beside it. Each was a self-standing structure set back a foot from the property line between them. That air space provided insulation in event of a fire and prevented the occupants of one house from invading their neighbors after tunneling at leisure through a common wall.

  In Sanctuary, the second was apt to be a greater threat than the first.

  There were no ground-floor windows in the sidewall, but the second story was ventilated by barred openings. Samlor stepped through the gap, too narrow to be called an alley anywhere but in the Maze. He ignored his companions, though they followed him gingerly in lieu of any other directions.

  The vertical bars of the window above him were thumb-thick and set with scarcely more room between them. Star might have been able to reach through one of the spaces, but the caravan master was quite certain that his own big hands would not fit.

  "Are there going to be things like that door-monkey waiting by the windows?" Samlor asked the other man

  quietly. He nodded upward to indicate the opening he had studied.

  Khamwas shrugged in darkness relieved only by the strip of clouded sky above them. "I would expect human servants if anything," he said. "They're-more trustworthy, in many ways. And from what I've gathered, Setios is a collector the way I'm a scholar. Neither of us, you understand, are magicians of real power."

  He paused and tucked his lip under his front teeth in doubt, then added, "The way your niece here appears to be, Master Samlor."

  "Yeah," said the caravan master without emotion. His left hand tousled Star's hair gently, but he did not look down at the child. "And he collected a demon in a bottle, among other things."

  Samlor grimaced, then went on. "Let's get out t' the, street again. You wait, and I'll go talk to the fellow across the way there."

  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 1 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?"