Dagger

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.