“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 coflin-hilted dagger with a fingernail; the metal gave off 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.
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.