David Drake: Dagger

"I don't know," said Khamwas with another shrug. "And I don't need the stele, only a chance to look at it. 'And, ah, Samlor-?"

The caravan master nodded curtly to indicate that he would not take offense at what he assumed would be a tense question.

"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' face looked demonically inhuman because it was being 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 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 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."

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.

CHAPTER 3

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.