“No one will see you,” the creature repeated. Behind it was another set of door leaves, reinforced like the first, combining 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 was saying in a universe in which Samlor was not focused in terrified determination on the unhuman-unalive-door- keeper 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 back 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 will!” 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 dagger blade 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.”