The price of victory- - Thieves World 13 (21 page)

He ripped the hangings down and dangled them from the window for his companions. Samlor no longer cared what damage they did to this place—so long as they got out of it soon.

The window was scarcely visible as a rectangle, and the still air smelled of storm.

There was a discussion below. Star came up the tapestry, flailing her legs angrily behind her. There was a pout in her voice as she demanded,

"What is this old place? I don't like it."

Maybe she felt something about the house—and maybe she was an overtired sever-year-old and therefore cranky.

There wasn't time to worry about it. The caravan master gripped the child beneath the shoulders with his left arm and lifted her into the room. Star yelped as her head brushed the transom, but she should've had sense enough to duck.

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"My staff. Master Samlor," said Khamwas.

The Cirdonian leaned forward and caught the vague motion that proved to be the end of an ordinary wooden staff when his fingers en closed it. Behind him, the room lighted vaguely with pastel blue.

Star shouldn't have done it without asking; but they needed light, and a child wasn't a responsible adult. Samlor slid the staff behind him with his left hand while supporting the tapestry with his right hand and his full weight to pin the end to the floor.

The Napatan scholar mounted gracefully and used Samlor's arm like the bar of a trapeze to swing himself over the lintel. Only then did the caravan master turn to see where they were and what his niece was doing.

Star had set swimming through the air a trio of miniature octopuses made of light. A blue one drifted beneath the ceiling frescoed with scenes of anthropomorphic deities; a yellow one prowled beneath the legs of a writing table sumptuous with mother-of-pearl inlays.

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The third miniature octopus was of an indigo so pale that it barely showed up against the carven door against which it bobbed feebly.

"Where's . . ." Samlor said as he looked narrowly at Khamwas. "You

know, your little friend?"

Tjainufi reappeared on the Napatan's right shoulder. The manikin moved with the silent suddenness of an image in an angled mirror, now here and now not, as the tilt changes. "The warp does not stray far from the woof," he said in cheerful satisfaction,

"Khamwas," the Cirdonian added as he looked around them, "if you can locate what we're after, then get to it. I really don't want t' spend any

longer here than I need to."

"Look, uncle," Star squealed as she pranced over to the writing desk.

"Mommy's box!"

Samlor's speed and reflexes were in proper form after his exertions, but his judgment was off. He attempted to spring for the desk before Star got there, and his boots skidded out from under him on the wet marble. Because he'd swept the long dagger from his belt as part of the same unthinking maneuver, he had only his left palm to break his fall. The
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shock made the back of his hand tingle and the palm bum.

Khamwas had retrieved his staff. He stopped muttering to it when the Cirdonian slapped the floor hard enough to make the loose bars roll and jingle among themselves. "Are you . . . ?" he began, offering a hand to

the sprawling bigger man.

"See, Uncle Samlor?" said the child, returning to the caravan master with an ivory box in her hands. "It's got mommy's mark on it."

"No, go on with your business," said Samlor calmly to the Napatan. He felt the prickly warmth of embarrassment painting his skin, but he wouldn't have survived this long if he lashed out in anger every time he'd made a public fool of himself. "Find the stele you're after, and then we'll see what Star's got here."

He took the box from the child as quickly as he could without letting it slip from his numbed fingers. Even if it were just what it seemed—a casket of Samlane's big enough to hold a pair of armlets—it could be extremely dangerous.

Much of what Samlor's sister had owned, and had known, fell into that category, one way or another.

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Khamwas's face showed the concern which any sane man would feel under the circumstances, but he resumed his meditation on—or prayers

to—his staff.

Star's palm-sized creatures of light continued their slow patrol of the room. The caravan master seemed to have broken into a large study. There was a couch to one side of the door and on the other the writing

desk with matching chair. The chair lay on its back, as if its last occupant had jumped up hastily.

"Open it, uncle'" Star demanded.

Khamwas still murmured over his staff, so the caravan master got up with caution born of experience and walked over to the writing desk. A triple-wicked oil lamp hung from a crane attached to the desk top. It promised real illumination when Samlor lit it with the brass fire-piston in his wallet.

"There's no oil, Uncle Samlor," said Star with the satisfaction of a child who knows more than an adult. She cupped her hand again and turned it up with a saffron glow in the palm. The creatures of light still drifting about the room dimmed by comparison. "See?"
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The bowl of the lamp was empty except for a sheen in its center, oil beyond the touch of the wicks. Only one of the three wicks had been lighted at the lamp's last use. When the flame had consumed all the oil, it reduced the twist of cotton to ash. The other wicks were sharply divided into black and white, ready to function if the fuel supply were renewed.

Setios had really left in a hurry.

"Fine, hold the light were it is, darling," Samlor said to his niece as calmly as if he were asking her to pass the bread at table. The casket wasn't anything which the Cirdonian remembered from his youth, but the family crest—the rampant wyvern of the House of Kodrix—was enameled on the lid. Beneath it was carved in Cirdonian script the motto

AN EAGLE DOES NOT SNATCH FLIES.

Samlor's parents had never forgiven him for running high-risk, high profit caravans like a commoner instead of vegetating in noble poverty. But they'd lived well—drunk well, at least—on the flies he snatched for them, and the money Samlor provided had bought his sister a marriage with a Rankan noble.

Which couldn't save Samlane from herself, but was the best effort possible for a brother who didn't claim to be a god.
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The lid did not rise under gentle pressure from his left thumb. There was no visible catch or keyhole, but the little object had to be a box—it didn't weigh enough for a block of solid ivory. Samlor put his dagger down on the desk to free his right hand . . .

And read the superscription on the piece of parchment there, a letter barely begun:

"To Master Samlor hi! Sami

If you are well. it is good. I also am well.

I enclose w

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The script was Cirdonian, and the final letter trailed off in a sweep of ink across the parchment. Following the curve of that motion, Samlor saw a delicate silver pen on the marble floor a few feet to the side of the

desk.

Samlor set down the ivory box, and he very deliberately kept the

weapon in his hand. From the look of matters, Setios might have been
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better off if he'd been holding a blade and not a pen a week or so earlier. Instinctively, the caravan master's left arm encircled Star, locating the child while he turned and said, "Khamwas. This is important. I think I've been doing Setios an injustice, thinking he'd ducked out to avoid

me."

The other man was so still that not even his chest moved with the

process of breathing. The absolute stillness was camouflaged for a mo ment by the fact that the octopuses threw slow, vague shadows as they circled the room-The manikin on Khamwas's shoulder was executing some sort of awkward dance with his legs stiff and his arm akimbo.

"Khamwas!" the caravan master repeated sharply. "I think we need to

get outta here now."

Tjainufi said, "Do not say, 'I will undertake the matter,' if you will

not."

Almost simultaneously, the Napatan shook himself like a diver surfac ing after a deep plunge and opened his eyes. He stood, wobbling a little and using the staff for support. His face broadened with a smile of bright

relief.

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"Samlor," he said, obviously ignorant of anything that had happened

around him since he dropped into a trance. "I've found it—or at least we

need to go down."

"We need to—" began the caravan master angrily. Tjainufi was watch ing him. The manikin's features were too small to have readable expres sion in this light, but the creature must think that . . .

"Look," Samlor resumed, speaking to—at—Tjainufi, "I don't mean I want to get out because we found what / wanted, I mean—"

"Oh!" said Star. There was a mild implosion, air rushing to fill a small

void. "There's nothing inside."

She'd opened the box, Samlor saw as he turned. His emotions had gone flat—they'd only be in the way just now—and his senses gave him frozen images of his surroundings in greater detail than he would be able to imagine when he wasn't geared to kill or run.

A narrow plate on the front of the ivory box slid sideways to expose a spring catch. When the child pressed that—the scale of the mechanism was so small that Samlor would have had to work it with a knifepoint—

the lid popped up.

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To display the inner surfaces of the ivory as highly polished as the exterior; and nothing whatever within.

Star was looking up at him with a pout of disappointment. She held the box in both hands and the ball of light, detached from her palm, was shrinking in on itself and dimming as its color slipped down through the spectrum.

For an instant—for a timeless period, because the vision was unreal and therefore nothing his eyes could have taken in—Samlor saw blue white light through a gap in the cosmos where the whorl of white hair on Star's head should have been. It was like looking into the heart of the thunderbolt . . .

And it wasn't there, in the room or his daughter's face—for Star was that, damn Samlane as she surely was damned—or even as an afterimage on Samlor's retinas when he blinked. So it hadn't really been there, and the caravan master was back in the world where he had promised to help Khamwas find a stele in exchange for help locating Star's legacy.

Which it appeared they had yet to do, but he'd fulfill his obligations to the Napatan. He shouldn't have needed a reminder from Tjainufi of that.
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"Friend Khamwas," Samlor said, "we'll go downstairs if you want that. But"—his left index finger made an arc from the parchment toward the fallen silver pen—"something took Setios away real sudden, and I wouldn't bet it's not still here."

Khamwas caught his lower lip between his front teeth. He was wearing his cape again, but the caravan master remembered how frail the Napatan had looked without it.

"The man who looks in front of him does not stumble and fall," said the manikin with his usual preternatural clarity of voice.

"Samlor," said the Napatan, "I appreciate what you say ... but what I seek is here, and I've made a very long—"

"Sure," the caravan master interrupted. "I just mean we be careful, all right?

"And you, child," Samlor added in a voice as soft as a cat's claws extending. He knelt so that Star could meet his eyes without looking up.

"You don't touch anything, do anything. Do you understand? Because if the only way to keep you safe is to tie you up and carry you like a sack of flour—that's what I'll do."

Star nodded, her face scrunched up on the verge of tears. The drifting
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glows dwindled noticeably.

"Everything's going to be fine, dearest," the caravan master said, giv ing the child an affectionate pat as he rose.

It bothered him to have to scare his niece in order to get her to obey—

while she remembered—but she scared him every time she did something

114 AFTERMATH

innocently dangerous, like opening the ivory box. Better she be fright ened than that she swing from his arm, trussed like a hog.

Because Samlor didn't threaten in bluff.

Khamwas said something under his breath. His staff clothed itself in the bluish phosphorescence it held when the caravan master first met him in an alley. With the staff's unshod ferule, the Napatan prodded the study door, lifting the bronze latch. When nothing further happened, he pulled the door open with his free hand and preceded Samlor and Star into the

hall beyond.

Samlor touched the latch as he stepped past it. Not a particularly sturdy piece—typical for an inside door, when the occupant is more
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