“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 fluctuat- ing through a series of pastels paler than the colors of a noontime rain- bow. 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 con- centrate 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 his new dagger, harder in reflec- tion than the source hanging in the air seemed.