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 the house had been demolished and was being replaced by a two-story portico with columns of colored marble. The spiked grating which enclosed the lot in lieu of a wall was temporary but looked sturdy enough to protect the gate of a fortress.
Beyond the grating, tools and building materials lay jumbled, awaiting the return of workmen at daylight. There was no sign that the house proper was occupied; it was hard to imagine that anyone who was rich enough to carry out the renovation would also be willing to live through the disruption it entailed. A lamp burned brightly on a shack within the enclosure, and a watchman's eyes peered toward the trio from the shack's unglazed window.
The other houses were quiet, though all, save the one against which Salmor'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.
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 in 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.
Samior swore, damning his sister Samlane to a Hell beneath all 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 Samior. 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 corbelled 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 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 Samior.
The caravan master held the long dagger he had taken from the man he had 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 fist.
On the other hand, this was Sanctuary; and anyway, the new knife didn't fit the sheath of the one Samior 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 Samior. 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 far 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. They combined to form a closet-sized 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 said, speaking in some different 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 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 willl" 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 daggerblade 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-krrkl"
The child cocked her head up as if her neck had been wrung. "Like chickens," she added as she relaxed, grinning.