Robert Asprin - Aftermath

Which couldn't save Samlane from herself, but was the best effort possible for a brother who didn't claim to be a god.

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.........

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 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.

"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.

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.

"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 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 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 concerned with privacy than protection. But it had been locked, which meant somebody had paused in the hallway to do so with a key after he closed the door.

Otherwise, it would have to have been locked from the inside by some- body who wasn't there any more.

In the old Ilsigi fashion, a balustraded hallway encircled a reception room which pierced the second floor. There was a solid roof overhead rather than the skylight which would have graced a Rankan dwelling of similar quality.

The stairwell to the ground floor was in the corner to the left of the study door. Khamwas's staff, pale enough to be a revenant floating at its own direction, swirled in that direction.

"The, ah," Samlor said, trying to look in all directions and unable to see anything more than a few inches beyond the phosphorescent staff. "The doorkeeper. It's not ... ?"

"We wouldn't meet it even if we opened the front door ourselves from within," said Khamwas as he stepped briskly down the helical staircase. "It isn't, you see, a thing. It's a set of circumstances which have to fit as precisely as the wards of a lock.

"Though it wouldn't," he added a few steps later, "be a good idea for anyone to force the door from the outside. Even if they were a much greater scholar than I. Ah, Setios collected some ... artifacts ... that he might more wisely have left behind."

The reception room was chilly. Samlor thought it might have some- thing to do with the glass-smooth ornamental pond in the middle of the room. He tested the water with his boot toe and found it, as expected, no more than an inch deep. It would be fed by rainwater piped from the roof gutters. Barely visible in the shadow beneath the coaming were the flat slots from which overflow drained in turn into a cistern.