Dagger (мир воров)

by David Drake

  Samlor stepped forward and swung at the demon again. He wasn't going to abandon Khamwas to the creature unless there were no other choice.

  He chopped for a wrist. Instead of slipping through like light in mist, the caravan master's steel clanged as numbing-ly as if he had slashed an anvil. The demon seized the blade and began to chitter in high-pitched laughter.

  All of the demon but its right leg had pulled free of the wall. That leg was still smokily insubstantial, but the claws of the left foot cut triple furrows in the concrete as they strained to drag the creature wholly out of the stone. The left hand-forepaw-was reaching for Samlor's face while the right gripped his knife.

  Samlor's mouth had dropped open as he breathed through it, oblivious of the dust that would have made him cough another time. He jerked straight down on the dagger hilt, ducking from the swipe that started slowly as a boulder rolling, but completed its arc at blinding speed.

  The blade screeched clear. If a man held it, his fingers would have been on the floor or dangling from twists of skin.

  The demon's paw was uninjured, and its claws had streaked the flat of the blade against which they were set.

  Samlor caught the throatclasp of his cloak. He could throw the garment like a net over the creature and-

  – and watch the claws shred it as the demon, steel strong and more than iron hard, leaped free to dispose of the men before it. The creature's eyes had no pupils and glowed orange, a color which owned nothing to the urchin which still tumbled innocently around the room.

  "Khamwas!" the caravan master shouted, because the demon was already in the air and perhaps Khamwas could get up the ladder while the Cirdonian occupied the creature with the process of being slaughtered. .

  The demon halted in midair, its left foot above the concrete and its right leg, spindly and terrible as that of a giant spider, lifting to deliver a kick that would disembowel Samlor. Dust settled and the urchin of light rolled jerkily forward, one spine at a time. The demon hung frozen like an idol of ravening destruction.

  Its eyes were as bright as tunnels to Hell.

  Samlor started another cut at the demon. Light reflecting from the triple scratch on his blade reminded him how useless that would be, so he turned instead to Khamwas.

  Who had not moved since last Samlor had leisure to glance at him.

  Khamwas hunched slightly forward, his left forearm crossing the top of his staff and his eyes fixed on the demon ~with a reptile's intensity. Tjainufi still perched on his shoulder.

  The Napatan's lips had been moving soundlessly, but now he said in a cracked whisper, "Go on. . quickly."

  The demon was not quite frozen. The movements the creature began before Khamwas' spell took effect were still going on. The leg that stretched toward Samlor at a glacial pace quickened noticeably when the Napatan spoke, and the demon's mouth gaped slowly to display interlocked arrays of teeth like needles in the upper and lower jaws.

  "But how can you," the caravan master began as he slipped a step back, beyond the present arc of the claws. The demon bent at its girl-slim waist as it leaped, because otherwise its flat skull would have banged the ten-foot ceiling.

  "Samlor," said the Napatan scholar, "get out I brought you here!"

  The demon had trembled back to near stasis for a moment. Now it lurched far enough forward in its unsup-

  ported motion that it was clear one hand was reaching for Khamwas' head even as the kick extended toward the Cirdonian.

  "There is none who abandons his travelling companion whom the gods do not call to account for it," said Tjainufi.

  "Fuck your gods," said Samior, who was already sliding the knife back under his belt to free his hands. He encircled the Napatan's waist, underneath the cape for a firmer grip, with his left arm.

  "No" said Khamwas desperately.

  "Do your job. ' Samlor snarled back as he lifted the smaller man. The air swirled with the demon's renewed movement, but the claws now behind the caravan master did not rend him as he stepped with regal determination to the ladder.

  Focusing on the creature from the stone was for Khamwas. Samlor hil Samt had the responsibility of getting them both back up the ladder while his companion did that job, eyes, arm and staff locked into their duty.

  Khamwas' body was muscular, but weight wasn't the problem. Carrying him upright while Samlor's right hand needed to grip the ladder for balance was brutal punishment, and it reminded him of how badly he had strained himself getting into this damned house.

  One foot above the other, each step a deliberate one because a jolt at the wrong time might break Khamwas' concentration irrevocably. No way to tell what was happening behind him, and nothing to do about it if things weren't well. One foot and then the other.

  A gust of wind shocked Samlor as his head lifted above the floor of the reception hall. Fabric, a curtain or a counterpane, had been snatched from a room on the upper floor and was flapping from the railing.

  Star was calm as molten glass as she watched her uncle struggle up the ladder with the other man clamped to his side. At his first wild glance, Samlor thought the whorl of white on the child's temple was one of the creatures of light which pulsed through the reception hall. It was so bright. .

  He couldn't bend over to balance with his palm on the floor as he neared the top of the ladder, so the caravan master mounted the last three rungs at a quickened pace. Toppling backwards would mean the floor killed them if the demon didn't, but if Samlor sprawled on his face the result would be no better. He'd seen the creature start to move; it would be on them in an instant if Khamwas were flung out of his concentration.

  Samlor stepped from the top rung to the marble floor, sucking in his lips as he strove to move as smoothly as a duck gliding on water. He set the Napatan down, conscious of the man's weight only after he was free of it, and with same motion strode for the wall and the latch mechanism.

  Khamwas' voice was audible again, breaking with strain as he chanted over and over again a dozen or so words. Sweat from the Napatan's face had splashed Samlor's left forearm as he climbed.

  The caravan master's boot skidded when he tried to slide back the piece of marble which was half withdrawn beneath the molding. Instead of trying again with his hobnails, Samlor knelt and scrabbled at the black stone with both sweaty palms. It moved into position with the same greasy certainty with which it had opened.

  The pond of mirror-smooth water slipped down to cover the demon soundlessly.

  Samlor skidded as he ran from the sidewall to the front door. Hobnails weren't the footgear for these polished stones. . and this house wasn't a place for humans. Not now, and probably not before Setios' pet got loose.

  There was no inside door latch.

  "You didn't let them out, Master Khamwas," said Star, patting the hand of the scholar who had knelt and was sobbing with exhaustion. "They're playing with us."

  "Come on," Samlor shouted. There was certainly a way to open the inner and outer doors from here, but he didn't have time to fool with it. "We're leaving the way we came!"

  "There's six of them, Uncle Samlor," said Star. "They're playing with us."

  Something emerged from the pilaster beside the stairs to the second floor. It was a clawed hand like that of the demon below. Instead of streaming like smoke from the stone, it broke free as a chick emerges from an egg. Rock shattered away from the groping limb, and a section of the wall started to lift.

  Khamwas rose to his feet. His face was blank and his body swayed with fatigue. He crossed his arm over the staff again and began a whispered chant.

  The wall from which the demon crashed, already formed, was load-bearing. Tortured roofbeams squealed as plaster in chunks of up to a hundred pounds broke away. A big piece hit the center of the pond and blasted water out across the reception hall.

  Samlor caught his niece with one arm and Khamwas with the other. He flung them, all three together, to the floor against the nearer sidewall. A block of stone, notched for the butt of a
crossbeam, tumbled from the roof to the rail of the second-floor walkway. It caromed to the floor in a shower of dust and chips.

  "We'll get out through the back!" said the caravan master who doubted that they would. The wall beside where they hunched under cover of the walkway was crumbling as gray claws harder than the stone emerged from it.

  Across the reception room, the other sidewall was disintegrating into bits and blocks. They hid but did not disguise the cause of the destruction. One of the demons was clasping a dismembered human leg. Samlor figured he knew where Setios and his servants had gone.

  Six of 'em, Star'd said. Likely five more than they'd need, but you didn't quit just because you couldn't win. .

  The three humans rose and scuttled for the room's back wall and the door there. They were bent over because the walkway's partial roof was no protection against blocks bouncing from the floor at crazy angles.

  The front half of the house staggered forward into the street with a roar that was not loud until Samlor realized that he could not shout with enough volume to be heard by the two companions he had dragged with him into the temporary safety of the door alcove.

  Skeletal, inhumanly tall figures minced toward the trio, shrugging off the tons of rubble that had thundered down on them. There were four, and the mound of stone and timber covering what had been the floor of the reception room heaved as the creature in the room beneath rejoined its fellows.

  Sheets of pain flapped across Samlor's body from a center where his right hip had blocked a ricocheting chunk of stone that weighed as much as he did. The crosswall dividing the house was built as solidly as the exterior. It remained essentially undisturbed when the emerging demons had shattered the front of the house. That portion of the building had demolished itself as brittle stone shifted in a vain attempt to find new foundations.

  The door in front of Samlor was locked or possibly jammed when ruin made the house twist, but the panel was only thin wood inlaid with horn and ivory in patterns which were probably significant as well as decorative. Khamwas pounded it with the ferule of his staff, breaking off scales of ivory without doing anything to get them through the doorway.

  Samlor would have kicked the latchplate, but he was pretty sure that his right hip would neither support him alone nor lift his boot high enough for the purpose. Wondering how many seconds they had before a demon lunged onto them, he rotated on his left heel and grabbed a torso-sized block from the wreckage that had spilled inward during the collapse.

  The demons were advancing with tiny steps, chittering in self-satisfaction. When they chose to, they picked their way over the piled rubble, but one of the four figures strode through the tons of jumbled rock like a man wading in the surf. The fifth of the creatures heaved itself into sight with the ease of a toadstool bursting pavement to reach the open air.

  "Care-" cried Samlor, turning with the block in his hands. The movement was so painful that he could feel only his scalp, his palms, and the ball of his left foot.

  "- full"

  The stone splintered the door and carried on, crashing on the floor of the hallway beyond and then bouncing harmlessly from the legs of the sixth demon poised there with its arms spread across the passage.

  The air was dead still. The caravan master turned again, no more conscious of his pain than a fox is conscious of the way its lungs burn from running when the hounds encircle it for the last time.

  "The sky," Khamwas said hoarsely. "Look."

  Samlor drew the long dagger from his belt and lifted Star to his chest with his free arm. The semicircle of demons waited, crouching slightly, with their spindly, steel-strong arms interlocked. They were close enough that if one of the creatures leaned forward, it could rip the caravan master's face away in its pointed teeth.

  "Look" Khamwas screamed, and even so his voice was smothered by a sound like the scream of a giant snake.

  Samlor looked up. He could see almost a mile into the sky, up the lightning-lit throat of a descending tornado funnel.

  The lower end was shaggy with tentacles of water vapor condensing in the lowered pressure surrounding six separate suction vortices. They extended toward the ruined house.

  "Down!" cried the caravan master, but Star twisted like an eel from his arms and stood while the two men tried to flatten themselves.

  One of the demons leaped away, covering twenty feet of the distance toward the street before being caught by a suction vortex. The creature reeled upward into the main funnel, like a crab being lifted into an octopus's crushing beak. Blue-white lightning licked soundlessly but with coronal radiance from one side of the void to the other.

  The funnel hovered at the level of what remained of Setios' roof. A miniature vortex snaked past Star's erect head, so close that it should have touched her hair but didn't. It was no more than the diameter of a wine jar, spinning widdershins though the main cloud rotated with the sun.

  Samlor lay on his back, clutching the medallion of Heqt in his left hand as he watched transfixed. The broken door panel exploded into splinters. They cleared themselves up the shaft of the screaming vortex. The demon flashed out in the grip of the wind, upright and battling momentarily while its hind claws gouged pieces the size of a man's fist from the stone of the doorjambs. Then the creature was gone, falling upward into the sky in a helix so tight that its limbs had been plucked from its body before it disappeared into the tunnel of lightning.

  The tornado was lifting and folding in on itself like a purse whose drawstrings were being tightened. Samlor hadn't seen what happened to the four remaining demons, but they had vanished when he knelt to look around.

  "If you are not slack," said Tjainufi in a perfectly audible voice, "then your god will be active for you."

  Samlor uncurled his fingers from the amulet of Heqt; but it had not been to the toad goddess that he screamed his prayers in the last instants-

  "I thought Mummie's box was empty," said Star as her eyes met the caravan master's. "But it wasn't."

  The tornado funnel flattened into the overcast almost a mile above Sanctuary. Only then did the normal wind return, a huge gust of it, and with it the start of a cold downpour. It was as dark again as the inside of a tomb.

  But the whorl of hair on Star's temple burned for a moment like the lightning's heart.

  CHAPTER 7

  THERE WERE OIL lamps in the caravansary, but they could not compete with the blaze of lightning through the clerestory windows beneath the great vaulted roof. Unlike the sun by day, the storm's harsh illumination blasted from any direction-and sometimes from every direction at once. Thunder shook the building and filled its hollows so thoroughly that there was no question of trying to speak except between the echoing peals.

  Star murmured in her sleep, burrowing deeper into her uncle's cloak as he stroked her shoulder.

  "Did you hear the watchman at the gate below as he let us in?" Khamwas asked Samlor. "He looked at the sky and muttered. 'He's back. I wonder who the fellow meant?"

  Samlor shrugged at his companion whose face, lighted for the moment by a blue-white flash, had an inhuman intensity. "All the 'back' I care about is getting myself and Star back out of this hellhole. That'll wait till dawn-but only because they won't open the city gates till then."

  "Be gentle and patient," said Tjainufi, sprawled at his miniature leisure on Khamwas' shoulder, "that your soul may become beautiful."

  Samlor was relaxed as well-he was alive, after all, and that was better than he'd expected for several recent hours. "I'm very gentle and patient, little one." he said, "which is how I'm able to keep from hurling you through a stone wall.

  Indeed, it may be that when I've been apart from you for a few years I'll find I miss your comments."

  "Ah, Master Samlor," said Khamwas diffidently. "That raises a matter that I'd like to discuss with you."

  Fresh thunder silenced the Napatan and left Samlor with time to consider his answer to the question he knew was coming. He was sick with anger-at Khamwas, for p
reparing to make a reasonable request, and at himself for putting so much emotional weight on what should have been a business proposition to which he would decide yea or nay.

  The caravansary was built in two levels. Below, rooms opened onto the hollow interior. These were for merchants to store the goods they brought to Sanctuary behind heavy, bolted doors.

  The rooms in which the merchants slept were on the level above, each chamber separate from the rest. Access was by ladder through the strongroom beneath. When the ladder was drawn up, as now, the occupants were as safe as men could be in Sanctuary.

  After a night of terror like the one he had just survived, all Samlor wanted was safety.

  And Khamwas was about to ask him to take further risks.

  Star's hand, tiny and white, patted her uncle's scarred, wind-roughened, knuckles.

  "You've done me great service tonight, Master Samlor." Khamwas continued when the echoes let him speak. "Helped me find the information I needed-you cannot imagine the importance of those few words-and brought me out alive."

  "We're quits, then." said Samlor, his voice a tiger's growl like the muted thunderclap in the background. "You helped me to what I was looking for too… and as for getting out alive, I don't know that either of us had a great deal to do with that."

  "I-" Khamwas began.

  "Besides," Samlor continued deliberately. "I don't count myself safe until we're back in Cirdon. Which is where I'm headed now with Star."

  "When you have delivered your niece to a place of safety," said Khamwas, "I wish to hire you as my

  companion for the journey I have next to make. You are experienced as a traveller and-" he met and held Samlor's eyes. Blue lightning fingered across them in token of the coming thunder. "And there may be danger, physical dangers, of the sort you proved tonight that you are experienced with also. I will pay you well."