Aftermath- - Thieves World 10 (18 page)

It might be a bad time to meet Setios; but again, it might not. He'd been an associate of Star's mother, which meant at the least that he was used to strange hours and unusual demands.

He'd see them now, provide the child with her legacy—if it were here. If it were portable. If Setios were willing to meet the terms of an agreement made with a woman now long dead.

Samlor swore, damning his sister Samlane to a hell beneath all the hells; and knowing as he recited the words under his breath that any afterlife in which Samlane found herself was certain to be worse than her

brother could imagine.

"This is the house," said Khamwas with a note of wonder in his voice. He and the child turned to look at the facade of the building against which the caravan master leaned while he surveyed the rest of the neighborhood.

"Looks pretty quiet," said Samlor. The words were less an understatement than a conversational placeholder while the Cirdonian considered what might be a real problem.

The building didn't look quiet. It looked abandoned.

It was a blank-faced structure. Its second floor was corbeled out a foot or so but there was no real front overhang to match those of the houses to either side. The stone ashlars had been worn smooth by decades or more of sidewalk traffic brushing against them; the mortar binding them could have used tuck pointing, but that was more a matter of aesthetics than structural necessity.

The only ground-floor window facing the street was a narrow slit beside the iron-bound door. There was a grate-protected niche for a lantern

on the other side of the door alcove; the stones were blackened by carbon

from the flame, but the lamp within was cold and dark. It had not been lighted this night, and perhaps not for weeks past.

There was no sign of life through the slit intended to give a guard inside a look at whoever was calling.

"Perhaps I'm wrong," said Khamwas uncertainly. "This should be the house of Setios, but I—I can't be sure I'm right." He made as if to bend over his staff again, then straightened and said decisively, "No, I'm sure it must be the house—but perhaps he doesn't live here anymore." The Napatan stepped to the street-level door and raised his staff to rap on the panel.

"Ah . . ." said Samlor.

104 AFTERMATH

The caravan master held the long dagger he had taken from the man he killed in the Vulgar Unicorn. The weapon belonged in his hand when they prowled through the Maze, but it wasn't normal practice to knock on a stranger's door with steel bare in your hand.

On the other hand, this was Sanctuary; and anyway, the new knife didn't fit in the sheath of the one Samlor had left in the corpse.

"Go ahead," he said to Khamwas. The Napatan was poised, watching the caravan master and waiting for a suggestion to replace his own intent.

Khamwas nodded, Star mirroring his motion as if hypnotized by tiredness. He rapped twice on the door panel. The sound of wood on wood was sharp and soulless.

"Won't be anybody there," said Samlor. His own eyes were drawn to the watermarked blade of the knife. His knife, now; the owner wasn't going to claim it with a foot of steel through his chest. The whorls of blended metals, iron black against polished steel, were only memories in the distant lamplight. There was no way Samlor could see them now, even if they began to spell words as he had watched them do—in defiance of reason—twice before.

The caravan master shook himself out of the clouded reverie into which fatigue was easing him. He needed rest as badly as his niece did, and it looked as though there was no way he was going to clear up his business tonight anyway.

"Look," he said, irritated because Khamwas still faced the door as if there were a chance it would open. "There's nobody here, and—" Metal clanked as the bar closing the door from inside was withdrawn from its staples. The door leaf opened inward, squealing on bronze pivots

set into the lintel and transom instead of hanging from strap hinges.

"No one will see you," said the voice of the figure standing in the doorway. Whatever else the doorkeeper might be, it was not human. The creature was shorter than Star. Fur clothed its body and long tail in ashen luster, but the frame beneath was skeletally thin. Its features had

the pointed sharpness of a fox's muzzle, and there was no intelligence whatever in its beady eyes.

"Wait," said Samlor hil Samt as the doorkeeper began to close the portal again. He set his boot against the iron-strapped lower edge of the

door. "Your master holds a trust f-for my niece Star."

"No one will see you," the creature repeated. Behind it was another set of door leaves, reinforced like the first, combining to form a closetsized anteroom which could probably be flooded with anything from boiling water to molten lead.

If there were anyone alive in the house to do so. The doorkeeper spoke in a thin, breathy voice, but its chest did not rise and fall.

•'It isn't real," Khamwas was saying in a universe in which Samlor was not focused in terrified determination on the unhuman—unalive—doorkeeper of this house. "It's a simulacrum like the—"

"No one will see you," the doorkeeper repeated without emphasis. It swung the panel shut, thrusting Samlor violently backward even though he tried to brace himself by stiffening his supporting leg behind him.

"I will have Star's legacy!" the caravan master shouted as he hurled himself back against the door, slamming into it with the meat of his left

shoulder.

The panel thumped but did not rebound. The bar crashed into place.

"I will!" Samlor cried again, "Depend on it!" His voice echoed, but there was no sound at all from within the house.

"It wasn't really present," said Khamwas, touching the other man's shoulder to calm him.

"It's there enough for me," said Samlor grimly, massaging his bruised shoulder with the faceted knife hilt. "Might've tried t' stop a landslide for

all I could do to keep it from slamming the door." At a venture, he poked his dagger blade through the slit beside the door, in and out quickly like a snake licking the air. Nothing touched the

metal, nor was there any other response.

"He who shakes the stone," said—warned?—Tjainufi, "will have it fall on his foot."

"I mean," said Khamwas hastily to deflect possible wrath from his manikin, "that it's no more than a part of the door. A trick only, without

volition or consciousness. It's carrying out the last order it was given, the

way a bolt lies in its groove when the master releases it. No one may be present."

"If we go in there," said Star distinctly, pointing at the door, "we'll be

. . . krrk." The child cocked her head up as if her neck had been wrung.

"Like chickens," she added as she relaxed, grinning. Samlor's breath wheezed out. He had thought . . .

"Well, Star," said the Napatan scholar, "I might be able to keep the wraith from moving for a time, long enough for us to get past the - . . zone of which it's a part. I might. But I think we'd best not go in by this

door until Setios permits us to pass."

The two of them smiled knowingly at one another.

Samlor restrained his impulse to do something pointlessly violent. He looked at the blade of his knife instead of glaring at his companions and

began in a very reasonable tone, "In that case, we'd best get some sleep and—"

"Actually," said Khamwas, not so much interrupting as speaking without being aware that Samlor was in the middle of a statement, "nei-106 AFTERMATH

ther of us have business with Setios himself, only with items in his possession. I wonder . . ."

"/ want my gift now," said Star, her face set in the slanting lines of temper. Either she tossed her head slightly, or the whorl of white strands

in her curly black hair moved on its own.

Go IN NOW read the iron letters on the blade at which Samlor stared in anger. There was too little light for the markings to be visible, but he saw

them nonetheless.

"Heqt take you all to the waters beneath the earth!" shouted the Cirdonian in fury. He slashed the air with his dagger as if to wipe away the

message crawling there in the metal. "I'm not a burglar, and coming to this damned city doesn't make me one."

"When you are hungry, eat what you despise," said the manikin on Khamwas's shoulder. "When you are full, despise it."

"Anyway," said Star, "ifs going to rain. Uncle Samlor." She looked smug at the unanswerable truth other latest argument.The caravan master began to laugh. Khamwas blinked, as frightened by the apparent humor as he had been by the anger that preceded it. Emotional outbursts by a man as dangerous as the caravan master were like creakings from the dike holding back flood waters.

"Well," the Napatan said cautiously, "I suppose the situation may change for the better by daylight. Though of course neither of us were considering theft. I want to look at a slab of engraved stone, and you simply wish to retrieve your niece's legacy from its caretaker—who seems to be absent."

"We don't know what it is." said Star. "My gift."

"Ah," said Khamwas, speaking to the girl but with an eye cocked toward her uncle. "That shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. If we're inside"—he nodded toward the door—"and the object is there also, I should be able to locate it for you."

"Will you show me how?" Star begged, clasping her hands together in a mixture of pleading and premature delight.

"Ah . . ." repeated the Napatan scholar. "1 think that depends on what your uncle says, my dear."

"Her uncle says that we're not inside yet," Samlor stated without particular emphasis. "And he'll see about getting there." Without speaking further to his companions, the Cirdonian walked to the comer of the building.

Setios's house was two feet away from the building beside it. There were no ground-floor windows in the sidewall either, but the second story

was ventilated by barred openings.

Samlor stepped through the gap, too narrow to be called an alley anywhere but in the Maze. He ignored his companions, though they followed him gingerly in lieu of any other directions. The vertical bars of the window above him were thumbthick and set with scarcely more room than that between them. Star might have been able to reach through one of the spaces, but the caravan master was quite

certain that his own big hands would not fit.

"Are there going to be things like that door-monkey waiting by the windows?" Samlor asked the other man quietly. He nodded upward to indicate the opening he had studied.

Khamwas shrugged in darkness relieved only by the strip of clouded sky above them. "I would expect human servants if anything," he said.

"They're . . . more trustworthy, in many ways. And from what I've gathered, Setios is a collector the way I'm a scholar. Neither of us, you

understand, are magicians of real power."

He paused and tucked his lip under his front teeth in doubt, then added, "The way your niece here appears to be, Master Samlor."

"Yeah," said the caravan master without emotion. His left hand tousled Star's hair gently, but he did not look down at the child. "And he collected a demon in a bottle, among other things." Samlor grimaced, then went on, "Let's get out t' the street again. You wait, and I'll go talk to the fellow across the way there."

"Ah, Samlor . . . ?" Khamwas said.

"Just wait here," the Cirdonian repeated. "I'm going across the street to talk with the watchman there." He nodded toward the guard shack on the construction site opposite.

"Yes, of course," Khamwas said with enough disinterest to hint at irritation. "But what I wanted to say was—Setios, you see, may not be avoiding you. There's been a recent upheaval in the structure of, you see,

magic. He may have become frightened and fled from that." The Napatan grinned. "He'll have left behind the stele I want to read, surely. Probably his whole collection, if that fear is why he left. And, as

for this child's legacy"—he touched Star's cheek affectionately—"if we don't find it here, I'll help you locate it. Because you've helped me. And

because I am honored to help someone as talented as your niece."

"The plans of gods are one thing," said the manikin on his shoulder.

"The thoughts of men are another."

"Yeah, well," said the caravan master, then strode across the street with a swaggering assurance which immediately set him apart in a city 108 AFTERMATH

where lone men habitually slunk. The watchman edged back from his window so that his eyes no longer reflected light.

It took five pieces of Rankan gold and ten minutes cajoling the nervous watchman at the construction site before Samlor returned to his companions with the house jack he had borrowed.

"Khamwas," he said gruffly, "come help me with the window." Star was curled in the comer of the door alcove, dozing with the Napatan's cape for a pillow. Khamwas stood in front of her, watching the street as well as the caravan master. He was very slim without the bulk of the outer garment, and his bare chest was no garb for this night.

"I, ah," he said, looking down at the child. "I thought it would be good if she got some rest, so - - - She's very like my own daughter, you know."

"Wish I had more talent for what she needs," said the caravan master quietly, staring at the child also. "Wish I knew what she needs, what any

kid needs. But you do what you can."

He grimaced again. "Bring 'er along, will you? I need you at the side to hand me this jack when I'm ready for it"—he fluffed his cloak open to display the tool—"and I don't want her in plain sight on the street, even

though it means getting her up again."

The sky had closed in above the passage between the two buildings. It was as dark as a narrow cave, and for the time being the air was as motionless as that of a cavern miles below the ground. Samlor found his location by subconscious memory of the six cautious paces which had brought him beneath the window when he could see it.