10 – Aftermath by Asprin, Robert

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.