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asked Khamwas, caught between an unwillingness to intrude and a near necessity of knowing what was going on.
    "My mommie left me something," said Star, falling into the sing-song by which children remember information whose import is still beyond their grasp. Samlor let her
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    David Drake

DAGGER
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    prattle on. Light through warped shutters up the street had blanked and brightened as it would if someone moved in front of it.
    "She's dead, my mommie," the child continued, "but she gave somebody a message to give to Uncle Samlor when I'm seven which I am, so now we have to find Setios who has my mommie's present."
    Samlor stepped in front of his companions and stopped, crying to the darkness,
    "Try it, fucker, and see what it buys you!"
    He didn't know how many there were or whether there might be somebody behind him. He'd back away if he had to—
    and had the chance—
    praying that Khamwas would
    be alert enough to warn of trouble in that direction.
    The Napatan whispered something. An ill-timed question, Samlor thought, but the words weren't meant for him or for anyone human. Khamwas' staff glowed as it had when the caravan master first saw the man; then the glow detached itself from the wood and began to grow into a manlike figure that staggered down the street in front of them.
    The figure didn't really walk, didn't move at all in the normal sense. At the intervals of a heartbeat, the shape displaced forward, limbs at changed angles as if it had stepped from one point to another, though it had not visibly crossed the intervening space. Beyond the figure hung its afterimages, fading slowly from the transparent orange of the original through stages of a violet that was itself almost an absence of light.
    As it advanced, the figure made an angry hissing like that of a firebrand flung into a puddle.
    Two men crouched in a doorway three yards away. One of them wore a cavalryman's back-and-breast armor; both had helmets of military weight and pattern. Between that protection and the swords ready in their hands, Samlor would have been a dead man had he tried to stop their rush—
    and he couldn't flee without abandoning
    Star.
    The muggers' eyes burned like those of beasts trapped by the light of a hunter's lantern.
    The shape's arm reached—
    was—
    toward them. One man
    screamed and both bolted down the street in a clash of falling equipment. The glowing figure stopped and disappeared as slowly as a lampwick cooling to blackness.
    "Heqt be praised," muttered Samlor hil Samt. His left hand had fumbled for the silver medallion hanging from his neck. He could not feel the embossed features of the toad-faced goddess beneath the fabric of his tunics, but the unintended homage had been answered by a feeling of cool stability.
    Stability was worth a lot just now to Samlor.
    Star was chattering to Khamwas, her words those of a young child but her intent clearly that of an artist who wants to learn a new technique. It was pitch dark in the street when the last of the lurching figures disappeared. A thing like a minnow of lambent red fluttered from Star's hand.
    "Not now," the caravan master snarled, terrified by the implications of what Star had done.
    The tiny fish gave a half turn in the air and collapsed inward to a point of light and nothingness. Star looked cautiously toward her uncle.
    "Let's get on," said Samlor quietly, gesturing up the darkened street.
    "The strength of an army is its leader," squeaked Tjainufi from Khamwas'
    shoulder.
    Seeing the heavily-armed men flee in panic explained—
    or might explain—
    how the
    Napatan had strolled into the heart of the Maze alive. It still seemed incredible that anyone would be naive enough to leave the caravan encampment and walk in the straightest possible line toward the house he wanted to visit. Khamwas' god—
    or a demon—
    might point him unerringly toward Setios' house, but the
    knowledge would do him little good if he were dead and stripped in a gutter. Still, Khamwas might