by David Drake
"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'yoit care?"
The watchman sidled out of his shack. As the caravan master had suspected, the fellow's weapon was not a crossbow but a pike which had been sawed ofP-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 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 heav
y 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 1 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.
