Dagger

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 ru

"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 fu

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 fu

The fu

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 tu

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 fu

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 preparing 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 ca