Dagger (5 page)

"I see," said Khamwas, and maybe he did. "Well." 26

David Drake

He shook himself, to settle his cape and to settle himself in his resolve.

"Well, Master Samlor," the Napatan continued, "I must be on." He nodded past Samlor toward the head of the alley.

"Not that way," said the caravan master wryly, though he did not move again to block the other man.

"Yes, it is," Khamwas replied with a touch of astrin-gence. He stiffened to his full height. The manikin on his shoulder mimicked the posture, perhaps in irony.

"The direction of Setios' house is precisely—

" he extended his arm at an angle

toward Samlor; hesitated with his eyes turned inward; and corrected the line a little further to the right "—

this way. And this passage is the nearest route to

the way I need to follow."

"Do not do a thing you have not first considered carefully," Tjainufi suddenly warned.

The caravan master began to chuckle. He clapped a hand in a friendly fashion on Khamwas' left shoulder. "Nearest route to having your head stuck on a pole, I'd judge," he said. The Napatan felt as fine-boned as he looked, but there was a decent layer of muscle between the skeleton and the soft fabric of his cape.

"Look," Samlor continued, "d'ye mean to tell me you don't know where in the city Setios lives, you're just walking through the place in the straightest line your—

friends, I suppose—

tell you is the way to Setios? Are these the same

friends who gave you wisdom?"

The caravan master nodded toward Tjainufi.

"I think that's my affair, Master Samlor," said Khamwas. He strode forward, gripping his staff vertically before him. His knuckles were white. The manikin said, " 'What he does insults me,' says the fool when a wise man instructs him."

Khamwas halted. Samlor looked at the little figure with a frown of new surmise. There was no bad advice—

only advice that was wrong for a given set of

circumstances. And, just possibly, Tjainufi's advice was more appropriate than the Cirdonian had guessed.

"All I meant, friend," Samlor said, touching and then removing his hand from the other man's shoulder, "was that

27

maybe there aren't any good districts in Sanctuary—

but your straight line's sure

as death taking you through the middle of the worst of what there is." Star had stood up when Khamwas started to walk away. The light which now clung to her left palm had put out tendrils and was fluctuating through a series of pastels paler than the colors of a noontime rainbow. Impulsively, she hugged the Napatan's leg and said, "Isn't it pretty? Oh, thank you!"

"It's only a—

little thing," Khamwas explained apologetically to the child's uncle. "It—

I don't know how she learned it from seeing what I did." Samlor noticed that the staff glowed only when Khamwas could concentrate on it, but that the phosphorescence in Star's hand continued its complex evolutions of shape and color even while his niece was hugging and smiling brightly at the other man.

The light glinted on the bare blade of Samlor's new dagger, harder in reflection than the source hanging in the air seemed.

The caravan master blinked, touched his tunic over the silver medallion of the goddess Heqt on his breast, and only then slid the weapon back from its temporary resting place beneath his belt. The twisting phosphorescence gave the markings a false hint of motion; but they were only swirls of metal, not the script he thought he had again seen.

Khamwas watched with controlled apprehension. Deciding that it was better to go on with his proposal than to wonder why Samlor was staring at the knife whose guard still bore dark stains, the Napatan said, "Master Samlor, you understand this city as I do not. And you're clearly able to deal with, ah, with violence, should any be offered. Could I prevail on you to accompany me to the house of Setios? I'll pay you well."

"Do not walk the road without a stick in your hand," Tjainufi said approvingly.

"We need to find Setios, Uncle Samlor," said the child in a voice rising toward shrill. She released Khamwas and instead tugged insistently on the elbow of her uncle's right sleeve. "Please can we? He's nice." 28

David Drake

Cold steel cannot flow, twist, parse out words, thought the caravan master. The nick in the edge was bright and real: this was no thing of enchantment, only a dagger with an awkward hilt and a very good blade.

Star pulled at Samlor's arm with most of her weight. He did not look down at her, nor did his hand drop. That arm had dragged a donkey back up to the trail from which it had stumbled into a gulley a hundred feet deep.

"Please," said the child.

"Friend Samlor?" said the Napatan doubtfully. The knife was only that, a knife, so far as he could see.

Go with him, spelled the rippling steel at which Samlor stared. The words faded as the glow in Star's hand shrank to a point and disappeared.

"I was ready," said the caravan master slowly, "to find a guide in there." He did not gesture toward the tavern. He was speaking to himself, not to the pair of living humans with him in the alleyway. They stared at Samlor, his niece and the stranger, as they would have stared at a pet lion who suddenly began to act oddly.

"So I guess," Samlor continued, "we'll find Setios together. After all—

" he

tapped the blade of the coffin-hiked dagger with a fingernail; the metal gave a musical ping.

"—

we're all four agreed, aren't we?"

Star leaned toward her uncle and hugged his powerful thigh, but she would not meet his eyes again or look at the knife in his hand. Khamwas nodded cautiously.

"We'll circle out of the Maze, then," said Samlor matter-of-factly. "Come on." The way down the alley meant stepping over the body of the youth he had just killed.

This was Sanctuary. It wouldn't be the last corpse they saw.

THE BODY SPRAWLED just inside the alley would have passed for a corpse if you didn't listen carefully—

or didn't recognize the ragged susurrus of a man

breathing while his face lay against slimy cobblestones.

"Mind this," said Samlor, touching first Star, then Khamwas so that they would notice his gesture toward the obstacle. Human eyes could adapt to scant illumination, but at this end of the alley the dying man's breath was all that made it possible to locate him.

The manikin on Khamwas' shoulder must have been able to sense the situation, because he said, "There is no one who does not die." His voice was as high as a bird's; but, also like a bird's, it had considerable volume behind it. The Napatan "scholar" reached toward his shoulder with his free hand, a gesture mingled of affection and warning. "Tjainufi," he muttered, "Not now. . . ." Samlor doubted that Khamwas had any more control over the manikin than a camel driver did over a pet mouse which lived in a fold of his cloak. Or, for that matter, than Samlor himself had over his niece, who was bright enough to understand any instructions he gave her—

but whose response was as likely to be

willful as that of any other seven-year-old.

Now, for instance, a ball of phosphorescence bloomed in the cup of the child's hand, lighting her way past the dying

29

30

David Drake

man despite the caravan master's warning that illumination—

magical or

otherwise—

would be more risk to them than benefit, at least until they got out of the Maze.

Star put a foot down daintily, just short of the victim's outflung arm, then skipped by in a motion that by its incongruity made the scene all the more horrible. The ball of light she had formed drifted behind her for a moment. Its core shrank and brightened—

from will o' the wisp to firefly intensity—

while the

whirling periphery formed tendrils like the whorl of silver-white hair on Star's head.

The child turned back, saw the set expression on Samlor's face, and jerked away as if he had slapped her physically. The spin of light blanked as if it had never been.

"Is he ... ?" asked Khamwas as he stepped over his mind's image of where the body lay. "One of those we—

met a moment ago?"

"The gang who came after us with chains, sure," said the caravan master as he followed with a long stride. The passageway was wide enough for him to spread his arms without quite touching the walls to either side; in the Maze, that made it a street. It held only the normal sounds of feral animals going about their business and, from behind shutters, bestial humans. "They're all dead, the two who ran off as sure as the one who didn't. Turn left here."

"The House of Setios is more to the—

"

"Turn fucking left," Samlor whispered in a voice like stones rubbing.

"Do not be a hindrance, lest you be cursed," said Tjainufi on the Napatan's shoulder. The manikin bowed toward Samlor, but the caravan master was too angry to approve of anything.

Mostly he was angry at himself, because he'd killed often enough during his life to know that he really didn't like killing. Especially not kids, even punk kids who'd have dished his skull in with weighted chains and raped Star until they sold her to a brothel for the price of a skin of wine. . . . Sanctuary might be incrementally better off without that particular trio, but Samlor hil Samt wasn't Justice, wasn't responsible to his god for the cleansing of this hellhole.

31

If he really wanted to avoid killing strangers, he should have kept out of Sanctuary, and he surely should have avoided the Vulgar Unicorn, even though it had looked like the best place to learn what he needed to know. There were many cities where merchant guild offices would supply information to a stranger. In a few there were even licensed municipal guides. But this place. . . .

"All I wanted was a guide to the house of Setios," the caravan master said.

"Khamwas will take us there, Uncle," said Star. Her voice was falsely bright to suggest that she didn't remember having disobeyed Samlor a moment before. She tucked her hand into that of the Napatan scholar.

The exchange frightened Samlor, because he hadn't meant to speak aloud.

"First," the caravan master said to his companions now that they could walk abreast, "we're going to get out of the Maze. Then we'll worry about a safe route to where we want to be."

Khamwas murmured assent. Star, glad to be included, patted her uncle's arm. Samlor should have explained sooner instead of snarling orders and expecting to be obeyed because—

because, in unvarnished truth, he was a dangerous man in a foul mood, and the long knife in his hand had killed at least once this evening. Maybe he did belong in Sanctuary.

Or dead.

"What would you do without me, hey, kid?" the caravan master said cheerfully to his niece. His left hand tousled her hair beneath the hood. "Hope the legacy Setios's keeping for you's worth the effort."

Hell, Samlor didn't want to die. And the rest, well—

he'd worry about innocent

bystanders, but he wouldn't lose sleep over punks who'd known the rules of the game they lost.

"Ah, legacy?" asked Khamwas, caught between an unwillingness to intrude and a near necessity of knowing what was going on.

"My mommie left me something," said Star, falling into the sing-song by which children remember information whose import is still beyond their grasp. Samlor let her

32

David Drake

33

prattle on. Light through warped shutters up the street had blanked and brightened as it would if someone moved in front of it.

"She's dead, my mommie," the child continued, "but she gave somebody a message to give to Uncle Samlor when I'm seven which I am, so now we have to find Setios who has my mommie's present."

Samlor stepped in front of his companions and stopped, crying to the darkness,

"Try it, fucker, and see what it buys you!"

He didn't know how many there were or whether there might be somebody behind him. He'd back away if he had to—

and had the chance—

praying that Khamwas would

be alert enough to warn of trouble in that direction.

The Napatan whispered something. An ill-timed question, Samlor thought, but the words weren't meant for him or for anyone human. Khamwas' staff glowed as it had when the caravan master first saw the man; then the glow detached itself from the wood and began to grow into a manlike figure that staggered down the street in front of them.

The figure didn't really walk, didn't move at all in the normal sense. At the intervals of a heartbeat, the shape displaced forward, limbs at changed angles as if it had stepped from one point to another, though it had not visibly crossed the intervening space. Beyond the figure hung its afterimages, fading slowly from the transparent orange of the original through stages of a violet that was itself almost an absence of light.

As it advanced, the figure made an angry hissing like that of a firebrand flung into a puddle.

Two men crouched in a doorway three yards away. One of them wore a cavalryman's back-and-breast armor; both had helmets of military weight and pattern. Between that protection and the swords ready in their hands, Samlor would have been a dead man had he tried to stop their rush—

and he couldn't flee without abandoning

Star.

The muggers' eyes burned like those of beasts trapped by the light of a hunter's lantern.

The shape's arm reached—

was—

toward them. One man

screamed and both bolted down the street in a clash of falling equipment. The glowing figure stopped and disappeared as slowly as a lampwick cooling to blackness.

"Heqt be praised," muttered Samlor hil Samt. His left hand had fumbled for the silver medallion hanging from his neck. He could not feel the embossed features of the toad-faced goddess beneath the fabric of his tunics, but the unintended homage had been answered by a feeling of cool stability.

Stability was worth a lot just now to Samlor.