"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.
Samlor's breath wheezed out. He had thought-
"Well, Star," said the Napatan scholar, "I might be able to keep the wraith from moving for a time, long enough for us to get past the… zone of which it's a part. 1 might. But I think we'd best not go in by this door until Setios permits us to pass."
The two of them smiled knowingly at one another.
Samlor restrained his impulse to do something pointlessly violent. He looked at the blade of his knife instead of glaring at his companions and began in a very reasonable tone, "In that case, we'd best get some sleep and-"
"Actually," said Khamwas, not so much interrupting as speaking without being aware that Samlor was in the middle of a statement, "neither of us have business with Setios himself, only with items in his possession. I wonder…"
"I want my gift now," said Star, her face set in the slanting lines of temper. Either she tossed her head slightly, or the whorl of white strands in her curly black hair moved on its own.
Go in now read the iron letters on the blade at which Samlor stared in anger. There was too little light for the markings to be visible, but he saw them nonetheless.
"Heqt take you all to the waters beneath the earth!" shouted the Cirdonian in fury. He slashed the air with his dagger as if to wipe away the message crawling there in the metal. "I'm not a burglar, and coming to this damned city doesn't make me one."
"When you are hungry, eat what you despise," said the manikin on Khamwas' shoulder. "When you are full, despise it."
"Anyway," said Star, "it's going to rain, Uncle Samlor." She looked smug at the unanswerable truth of her latest argument.
The caravan master began to laugh.
Khamwas blinked, as frightened by the apparent humor as he had been by the anger that preceded it. Emotional outbursts by a man as dangerous as the caravan master were like creakings from the dike holding back flood waters.
"Well," the Napatan said cautiously. "I suppose the situation may change for the better by daylight. Though of course neither of us were considering theft. I want to look at a slab of engraved stone, and you simply wish to retrieve
your niece's legacy from its caretaker-who seems to be absent."
"We don't know what it is," said Star. "My gift."
"Ah," said Khamwas, speaking to the girl but with an eye cocked toward her uncle. "That shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. If we're inside-" he nodded toward the door " – and the object is there also, I should be able to locate it for you."
"Will you show me how?" Star begged, clasping her hands together in a mixture of pleading and premature delight.
"Ah. .," repeated the Napatan scholar. "I think that depends on what your uncle says, my dear."
"Her uncle says that we're not inside yet," Samlor stated without particular emphasis. "And he'll see about getting there."
Without speaking further to his companions, the Cirdonian walked to the corner of the building.
The sidewall of Setios' house was not common to the building beside it. Each was a self-standing structure set back a foot from the property line between them. That air space provided insulation in event of a fire and prevented the occupants of one house from invading their neighbors after tunneling at leisure through a common wall.
In Sanctuary, the second was apt to be a greater threat than the first.
There were no ground-floor windows in the sidewall, but the second story was ventilated by barred openings. Samlor stepped through the gap, too narrow to be called an alley anywhere but in the Maze. He ignored his companions, though they followed him gingerly in lieu of any other directions.
The vertical bars of the window above him were thumb-thick and set with scarcely more room between them. Star might have been able to reach through one of the spaces, but the caravan master was quite certain that his own big hands would not fit.
"Are there going to be things like that door-monkey waiting by the windows?" Samlor asked the other man
quietly. He nodded upward to indicate the opening he had studied.
Khamwas shrugged in darkness relieved only by the strip of clouded sky above them. "I would expect human servants if anything," he said. "They're-more trustworthy, in many ways. And from what I've gathered, Setios is a collector the way I'm a scholar. Neither of us, you understand, are magicians of real power."
He paused and tucked his lip under his front teeth in doubt, then added, "The way your niece here appears to be, Master Samlor."
"Yeah," said the caravan master without emotion. His left hand tousled Star's hair gently, but he did not look down at the child. "And he collected a demon in a bottle, among other things."