Aftermath- - Thieves World 10 (17 page)

"I will pay him well for the look," the Napatan said. "It's of no value to him—not for the purpose I intend it—without other information. It will give me the location of a particular tomb, which is significant to me

for other reasons."

The light in Star's hands was growing brighter, throwing the men's shadows onto the wall of the alley. Khamwas's face looked demonically inhuman because it was illuminated from below.

Samlor touched his niece's head. "Not so much, dearest," he murmured. "We don't want anybody noticing us here if we can help it."

"But—" Star began shrilly. She looked up and met her uncle's eyes. The light shrank to the size of a large pearl, too dim to show anything but itself.

"She didn't know how to do that before," said Samlor, as much an explanation to himself as one directed toward the other man. "She picks things up."

"I see," said Khamwas, and maybe he did. "Well." He shook himself, to settle his cape and to settle himself in his resolve.

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

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"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 astringence. He stiffened to his full height. The manikin on his shoulder mimicked the posture, perhaps in irony. 'The direction of Setios's 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's 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 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 his 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 in 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." 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 coflin-hilted dagger with a fingernail; the metal gave off a musical ping—"we're all four agreed, aren't we?" 100 AFTERMATH

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's shoulder must have been able to sense the situation, because he said, "There is no one who does not die." Tjainufi's

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

101

"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 caved 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.

They got out of the Maze with no problem worse than a pair of thugs

—who fled in terror as Khamwas's staff sent a manlike phantasm of light staggering down the street toward them. Broader pavements made walking easier, and many housefronts were lighted by lanterns in barred niches.

The lanterns weren't an act of charity toward travelers. They were intended to drive lurking footpads into somebody else's doorway. Khamwas paused, then 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.

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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 effluvium from the street down into the harbor. Samlor grimaced and looked around him. He wanted to know how Khamwas found his directions ... but he didn't want to ask; and anyway, he wouldn't understand if the scholar/magician took the time to explain.

Worse, Star likely would understand.

"I wonder what Setios is keeping for her," the caravan master whispered, so softly that the child could not hear even though Samlor's lips brushed her fine hair as he spoke.

"Is it going to rain?" Star asked sleepily from the cradle of Samlor's arm.

The caravan master glanced at the sky. There were stars, but a scud of high clouds blocked and cleared streaks across them at rapid intervals. There was an edge in the air which might well be harbinger of a storm poised to sweep from the hills to the west of town and wash the air at least briefly clean.

"Perhaps, dearest," the Cirdonian said. "But we'll be all right." They'd be under cover, he hoped; or, better yet, back in a bolted chamber of the caravansary on the White Foal River before the storm broke. Khamwas began to mutter something with his fingers interlaced on the top of his staff. Star shook herself into supple alertness and hopped off

her uncle's supporting arm. She did not touch the Napatan, but she watched his face closely as he mouthed words in a language the caravan master did not recognize.

Left to his own devices—unwilling to consider what his niece was teaching herself now, and barely unwilling to order her to turn away—

Samlor surveyed the houses in their immediate neighborhood. It was an old section of the city, but wealthy and fashionable enough that there had been considerable rebuilding to modify the original Ilsigi

character. Directly across from Samlor's vantage place, the front of a house had been demolished and was being replaced by a two-story portico with columns of colored marble. A lamp burned brightly on a shack amid the construction rubble, and a watchman's eyes peered toward the trio from its unglazed window.

The other houses were quiet, though all save the one against which

Samlor's party sheltered guarded their facades with lamplight. At this hour, business was most likely to be carried on through back entrances or

trap doors to tunnels that were older than the Ilsigs . . . and possibly older than humanity.