The wounded man was rigid. He breathed through his mouth, quick gasps as if a lungful of air would preserve him in the moment the knife-edge sawed through his windpipe. 'They all thought you'd run for Cirdon,' he whispered. 'You'd left your cloak behind. I slipped it away, took it to a S'danzo I know. She's a liar like all of them, but sometimes not... I told her I'd pay her for the truth of where I'd find you, and I'd pay her for nothing; but I'd take a lie out other hide if six of my friends had to hold down her blacksmith buddy. She, she described where I'd meet you. I recognized it, I'd taken the Lady Samlane-'
'Here?' Samlor's voice and his knife both trembled. Death slid closer to the room than it had been since the first slash and scramble of the fight.
'Lord, lord,' the captive pleaded. 'Only this far. I swear by my mother's bones!'
'Go on, then.' The knife did not move.
The other man swallowed. 'That's all. I waited here - I didn't tell anybody. Lord Regli put a thousand royals on your head... and... and the S'danzo said I'd live through the meeting. Oh gods, the slut, the slut...'
Samlor smiled. 'She hasn't lied to you yet,' he said. The smile was gone, replaced with a bleakness as cruel as the face of a glacier. 'Listen,' he went on, rising to one knee and pinning his prisoner by psychological dominance in the stead of his body weight. 'My sister asked me for a knife. I told her I'd leave her one if she gave me a reason to.'
A spasm wracked the Cirdonian's face. His prisoner winced at the trembling of the dagger point. 'She said the child wasn't Regli's,' Samlor went on. 'Well, who ever thought it would be, the way she sniffed around? But she said a demon had got it on her ... and that bothered even her at the last. Being used, she said. Being used. She'd tried to have it aborted after she thought about things for a while, but a priest of Heqt was waiting with Regli in the shop where she'd gone to buy the drugs. After that, she wasn't without somebody watching her, asleep or awake. The Temple of Heqt wanted the child born. Samlane said she'd use the knife to end the child when they pulled it from her ... and I believed that, though I knew she'd be in no shape for knifings just after she'd whelped.
'Seems she knew that too, but she was more determined than even I'd have given her credit for being. She could give a lot of folks points for stubborn, my sister.'
Samlor shook himself, then gripped a handful of the captive's tunic. He ripped the garment with his knife. 'What are you doing?' the retainer asked in concern.
'Tying you up. Somebody'11 find you here in time. I'm going to do what I came here for, and when it's done I'll leave Sanctuary. If I've got that option still.'
Sweat was washing streaks in the blood-flecks on the captive's face. 'Sweet goddess, don't do that,' he begged. 'Not tied, not -that. You haven't been here when ... others were here. You-' the injured man wiped his lips with his tongue. He closed his eyes. 'Kill me yourself, if you must,' he said so softly it was almost a matter for lip-reading to understand him. 'Don't leave me here.'
Samlor stood. His left hand was clenched, his right holding the dagger pointed down at a slight angle. 'Stand up,' he ordered. Regli's man obeyed, wide-eyed. He braced his back against the wall, holding his left hand at shoulder height but refusing to look at its ruin. The severed arteries had pinched off. Movement had dislodged some of the scabs, but the blood only oozed instead of spurting as it had initially. 'Tell Regli that I'm mending my family's honour in my way, as my sister seems to have done in hers,' Samlor said. 'But don't tell him where you found me - or how. If you want to leave here now, you'll swear that.' 'I swear!' the other babbled. 'By anything you please!' The caravan-master's smile flickered again. 'Did you ever kill anyone, boy?' he asked conversationally.
'I was a coachman,' the other said with a nervous frown. 'I - I mean ... no.'
'Once I pulled a man apart with hot pincers,' Samlor continued quietly. 'He was headman of a tribe that had taken our toll payment but still tried to cut out a couple of horses from the back of our train. I slipped into the village that night, jerked the chief out of his bed, and brought him back to the laager. In the morning I fixed him as a display for the rest.' The Cirdonian reached forwards and wiped his dagger clean on the sleeve of the other man's tunic. 'Don't go back on your word to me, friend,' he said.
Regli's man edged to the helical staircase. As he mounted each of the first dozen steps, he looked back over his shoulder at the Cirdonian. When the pursuit or thrown knife did not come as he had feared or expected, the retainer ran up the next twenty steps without pausing. He looked down from that elevation and said, 'One thing, master.' .
'Say it,' responded Samlor.
'They opened the Lady Samlane to give the child separate burial.'
'Yes?'
'And it didn't look to be demon spawn, as you say,' Regli's man called. 'It was a perfect little boy. Except that your knife was through its skull.'
Samlor began to climb the steps, ignoring the scrabbling slippers of the man above him on the twisting staircase. The door at the top thudded, leaving nothing of the hapless ambusher but splotches of his blood on the railing. Should have stuck to his horses, Samlor thought. He laughed aloud, well aware that the epitaph probably applied to himself as well. Still, he had a better notion than that poor fool of a coachman of what he was getting into ... though the gods all knew how slight were his chances of getting out of it alive. If the fellow he was looking for was a real magician, rather than someone like Samlor himself who had learned a few spells while knocking around the world, it was over for sure.
The door at the top of the stairs pivoted outward. Samlor tested it with a fingertip, then paused to steady his heart and breathing. As he stood there, his left hand sought the toad-faced medallion.
The dagger in his right hand pointed down, threatening nothing at the moment but - ready.
He pushed the door open.
On the other side, the secret opening was only a wall panel. Its frescoes were geometric and in no way different from those of the rest of the temple hallway. To the left, the hall led to an outside door heavily banded with iron. From his livery and the mutilation of his outflung left hand, the coachman could be recognized where he lay. The rest of the retainer appeared to have been razored into gobbets of flesh and bone, no other one of them as large as what remained of the left hand. Under the circumstances, Samlor had no sympathy to waste on the corpse.
The Cirdonian sighed and turned to the right, stepping through the hangings of brass beads into the sanctuary of Heqt. The figure he expected was waiting for him.
Soft, grey dawnlight crept through hidden slits in the dome. Mirrors had been designed to light the grinning, gilded toad-face of Heqt at the top of the dome beneath the spire. Instead, the light was directed downwards onto the figure on the floral mosaic in the centre of the great room. The hair of the waiting man glowed like burning wire. 'Did the night keep you well, friend?' Samlor called as he stepped forwards.
'Well,' agreed the other with a nod. There was no sign of the regular priests and acolytes of Heqt. The room brightened as if the light fed on the beauty of the waiting man. 'As I see she kept you, Champion of Heqt.' -
'No champion,' Samlor said, taking another step as casual as the long knife dangling from his right hand. 'Just a man looking for the demon who caused his sister's death. I didn't have to look any farther than the bench across the street last night, did I?'
The other's voice was a rich tenor. It had a vibrancy that had been missing when he and Samlor had talked of Heqt and Dyareela the night before. 'Heqt keeps sending her champions, and I ... I deal with them. You met the first of them, the priest?'