Dagger (13 page)

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 86

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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.

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.

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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 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."

"Give one loaf to your laborer" said Tjainufi with a sardonic smile. "Receive two from the work of his hands."

"I don't claim to be a charity, Master Samlor." Khamwas retorted sharply, as if the caravan master and not the manikin had spoken. "I need a man like you; and, having seen you in operation, I cannot imagine that anyone else would be more than a pale echo."

There was a deafening crash, and for a moment light sizzled and cracked from all the bolt-heads projecting downward from the roof trusses. Animals stabled in the adjacent courtyard blatted or whinnied.

"Do you think flattery will help you?" Samlor demanded. But of course it would, and the statement was no more than the truth. That wouldn't have been enough by itself to cause Samlor to change his plans, but—

But the stranger from Napata had proved he was willing to sacrifice himself to permit Samlor and Star to escape. How could Samlor refuse to help a man as honorable as that? As honorable as himself.

"Star'll be back in Cirdon," said Samlor loudly, muting his voice as the child stirred restively on his lap. "Back with my parents. With the servants, at least, who know who they'll answer to if anything harms the child while I'm away. There'll be no magic if you hire me, only a man who knows camels and donkeys."

"And the end of a knife that cuts," murmured Khamwas. "Yes, I understand that. Master Samlor."

He paused for long enough that Samlor hoped he was rethinking, preparing to change his mind. Instead Khamwas said, "I wouldn't permit Star to come with us now. Her powers are—

" he shrugged "—

I can't even guess how great. I'm only a

scholar, and she. ..."

He shrugged again. "But for all that, she's a child the age of my own daughter—

at least if she's still alive, my

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daughter Serpot and Pemu her brother. And this will not be work for children." Samlor gave Star a hug, controlled against his fierce desire to squeeze the child until their two forms merged. She could be safe then because he would always be there to guard her. . . . Detaching himself carefully, Samlor left Star curled on the couch while he strolled to the barred windows overlooking the interior of the caravansary.

Travellers ioo poor to hire strongrooms huddled on the floor in informal groups about cooking fires. A few sang or played stringed instruments—

despite the

thunder, or because of it.

"If you're expecting real trouble," said Samlor with his face to the bars,

"There's others you could hire. Soldiers, men with proper armor, swords. Nobody hires me to fight. I just run caravans the easiest way I can." Tjainufi said, "The hissing of the snake is more effective than the braying of the donkey." The thunderclap that began a moment behind him did not drown out his voice.

"Master Samlor," said Khamwas, meeting Samlor with quiet eyes when the caravan master turned from the window. "There may be bandits on our path. Surely there will be cases where the presence of a man of your—

strength and demeanor—

will

prevent trouble that might otherwise arise."

The copper bowls of the lamps rattled against the chains by which they hung, counterpointing the violence of a nearby stroke.

"But the real risks," Khamwas continued as though there had been no interruption, "are of a different nature, and I must face them myself." He waved a hand. "Yes, of course I could hire wizards as easily as I could hire soldiers . . . and perhaps no less reliable ones. But the business is a family one, in this—

era—

and in past time as well. If it's to be accomplished, I must do so myself.

"I would be. ..." Khamwas went on. His eyes and voice dropped in sudden diffidence before he said; "I'd just like to have a friend at hand, Samlor. Not so much for what you'd do, but for the sake of a trustworthy presence." Samlor utterly refused to acknowledge the admission—

and offer—

the other man had

just made. "You say you'll pay," he said in grumbling harshness. "How much then?

And for what?"

"A daily sum," Khamwas responded, emotionless again now that his emotions had been spurned, "equal to your hire for managing a forty-camel caravan. Two Rankan goldpieces."

Samlor nodded. It was interesting to learn that Khamwas, though—

"scattered" was

a far better description than "unworldly"—

had at his fingertips a datum of

Samlor's own trade.

"We will be travelling the Napata," Khamwas went on, "but not—

initially, at

least—

to the capital. We will investigate a temple and tomb, I hope a tomb, near a village named Qui. It's some distance south of Napata City, on the river but upstream. I estimate that it will take us two months, but you will know better than I."

"Longer," Samlor said. "We'll be leaving from Cirdon, remember." He sat down on the couch. Star burrowed toward him in her sleep. "If we."

"After that," said Khamwas with a nod of agreement, "I will examine the tomb and remove from it the object which I. . . ."

His voice and expression lost their coolness, and he choked momentarily before he continued. "There's a book in the tomb, if I'm right. I've been searching for it as long as ... as long as I have conscious memory." The storm had almost played itself out with the last shattering discharges, but a series of muted rumbles now gave Khamwas an opportunity to clear his throat and both men to break eye contact. At last Khamwas said, "There may be danger when I remove the book. Certainly for me, perhaps also for you. I can't claim that any pay would adequately compensate you, Master Samlor, if the risk is yours as well. But—