There was no inside door latch.
"You didn't let them out, Master Khamwas," said Star, patting the hand of the scholar who had knelt and was sobbing with exhaustion. "They're playing with us."
"Come on," Samlor shouted. There was certainly a way to open the inner and outer doors from here, but he didn't have time to fool with it. "We're leaving the way we came!"
"There's six of them, Uncle Samlor," said Star. "They're playing with us."
Something emerged from the pilaster beside the stairs to the second floor. It was a clawed hand like that of the demon below. Instead of streaming like smoke from the stone, it broke free as a chick emerges from an egg. Rock shattered away from the groping limb, and a section of the wall started to lift.
Khamwas rose to his feet. His face was blank and his body swayed with fatigue. He crossed his arm over the staff again and began a whispered chant.
The wall from which the demon crashed, already formed, was load-bearing. Tortured roofbeams squealed as plaster in chunks of up to a hundred pounds broke away. A big piece hit the center of the pond and blasted water out across the reception hall.
Samlor caught his niece with one arm and Khamwas with the other. He flung them, all three together, to the floor against the nearer sidewall. A block of stone, notched for the butt of a crossbeam, tumbled from the roof to the rail of the second-floor walkway. It caromed to the floor in a shower of dust and chips.
"We'll get out through the back!" said the caravan master who doubted that they would. The wall beside where they hunched under cover of the walkway was crumbling as gray claws harder than the stone emerged from it.
Across the reception room, the other sidewall was disintegrating into bits and blocks. They hid but did not disguise the cause of the destruction. One of the demons was clasping a dismembered human leg. Samlor figured he knew where Setios and his servants had gone.
Six of 'em, Star'd said. Likely five more than they'd need, but you didn't quit just because you couldn't win. .
The three humans rose and scuttled for the room's back wall and the door there. They were bent over because the walkway's partial roof was no protection against blocks bouncing from the floor at crazy angles.
The front half of the house staggered forward into the street with a roar that was not loud until Samlor realized that he could not shout with enough volume to be heard by the two companions he had dragged with him into the temporary safety of the door alcove.
Skeletal, inhumanly tall figures minced toward the trio, shrugging off the tons of rubble that had thundered down on them. There were four, and the mound of stone and timber covering what had been the floor of the reception room heaved as the creature in the room beneath rejoined its fellows.
Sheets of pain flapped across Samlor's body from a center where his right hip had blocked a ricocheting chunk of stone that weighed as much as he did. The crosswall dividing the house was built as solidly as the exterior. It remained essentially undisturbed when the emerging demons had shattered the front of the house. That portion of the building had demolished itself as brittle stone shifted in a vain attempt to find new foundations.
The door in front of Samlor was locked or possibly jammed when ruin made the house twist, but the panel was only thin wood inlaid with horn and ivory in patterns which were probably significant as well as decorative. Khamwas pounded it with the ferule of his staff, breaking off scales of ivory without doing anything to get them through the doorway.
Samlor would have kicked the latchplate, but he was pretty sure that his right hip would neither support him alone nor lift his boot high enough for the purpose. Wondering how many seconds they had before a demon lunged onto them, he rotated on his left heel and grabbed a torso-sized block from the wreckage that had spilled inward during the collapse.
The demons were advancing with tiny steps, chittering in self-satisfaction. When they chose to, they picked their way over the piled rubble, but one of the four figures strode through the tons of jumbled rock like a man wading in the surf. The fifth of the creatures heaved itself into sight with the ease of a toadstool bursting pavement to reach the open air.
"Care-" cried Samlor, turning with the block in his hands. The movement was so painful that he could feel only his scalp, his palms, and the ball of his left foot.
"- full"
The stone splintered the door and carried on, crashing on the floor of the hallway beyond and then bouncing harmlessly from the legs of the sixth demon poised there with its arms spread across the passage.
The air was dead still. The caravan master turned again, no more conscious of his pain than a fox is conscious of the way its lungs burn from running when the hounds encircle it for the last time.
"The sky," Khamwas said hoarsely. "Look."
Samlor drew the long dagger from his belt and lifted Star to his chest with his free arm. The semicircle of demons waited, crouching slightly, with their spindly, steel-strong arms interlocked. They were close enough that if one of the creatures leaned forward, it could rip the caravan master's face away in its pointed teeth.
"Look\" Khamwas screamed, and even so his voice was smothered by a sound like the scream of a giant snake.
Samlor looked up. He could see almost a mile into the sky, up the lightning-lit throat of a descending tornado funnel.
The lower end was shaggy with tentacles of water vapor condensing in the lowered pressure surrounding six separate suction vortices. They extended toward the ruined house.
"Down!" cried the caravan master, but Star twisted like an eel from his arms and stood while the two men tried to flatten themselves.
One of the demons leaped away, covering twenty feet of the distance toward the street before being caught by a suction vortex. The creature reeled upward into the main funnel, like a crab being lifted into an octopus's crushing beak. Blue-white lightning licked soundlessly but with coronal radiance from one side of the void to the other.
The funnel hovered at the level of what remained of Setios' roof. A miniature vortex snaked past Star's erect head, so close that it should have touched her hair but didn't. It was no more than the diameter of a wine jar, spinning widdershins though the main cloud rotated with the sun.
Samlor lay on his back, clutching the medallion of Heqt in his left hand as he watched transfixed. The broken door panel exploded into splinters. They cleared themselves up the shaft of the screaming vortex. The demon flashed out in the grip of the wind, upright and battling momentarily while its hind claws gouged pieces the size of a man's fist from the stone of the doorjambs. Then the creature was gone, falling upward into the sky in a helix so tight that its limbs had been plucked from its body before it disappeared into the tunnel of lightning.
The tornado was lifting and folding in on itself like a purse whose drawstrings were being tightened. Samlor hadn't seen what happened to the four remaining demons, but they had vanished when he knelt to look around.
"If you are not slack," said Tjainufi in a perfectly audible voice, "then your god will be active for you."
Samlor uncurled his fingers from the amulet of Heqt; but it had not been to the toad goddess that he screamed his prayers in the last instants-
"I thought Mummie's box was empty," said Star as her eyes met the caravan master's. "But it wasn't."
The tornado funnel flattened into the overcast almost a mile above Sanctuary. Only then did the normal wind return, a huge gust of it, and with it the start of a cold downpour. It was as dark again as the inside of a tomb.