Dagger (17 page)

But the blade of his dagger would slide all the way through.

"We got you, fucker!" Samlor shouted at the door as he slipped the long, watered blade through the crack between the leaves. He would have explained that he was still trying to distract the man inside, but mostly it was just animal triumph finding a vocal outlet.

And, partly, it was a prayer that he had triumphed.

The bar closing the door crossed the gap at waist height. The edge of the dagger met it as Samlor drew the blade up through the crack. If the bar were pinned or run through staples, they were still dead, but—

The blade continued to lift, against the weight of the bar but without any suggestion that the bar was locked into place.

Samlor moved convulsively, gripping the dagger hilt with both hands and jerking the blade upward with all his strength. The bar flipped out of the shallow troughs in which it was laid and fell loudly against a wall, then the floor. The stone troll's hand reaching for Samlor missed him because he dived into the temple as the doors swung away from his thrusting shoulder.

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The room in which Samlor rolled back to his feet, fatigue forgotten, was scarcely half the size of the first hall of the greater temple. Its low ceiling was supported on square-section pillars instead of regal caryatids. And it stank.

If Khamwas had cleared the chamber many years before while he searched for the Tomb of Nanefer, then that had been the room's last cleaning. The Priest of the Rock used the interior for all his bodily functions. Air blown from the desert desiccated the result, but it could not remove the effluvium. The priest sat now in the center of the chamber: ankles crossed beneath his thighs, head bowed, and seemingly oblivious to the pair of crows which cawed and yammered in tight circles around his head.

The room darkened as the cobra-headed thing knelt and tried to grip Samlor with a hairy, knotted hand. The creature blocked much of the sunlight flooding through the doorway, but the intruder was beyond its grasp. Samlor reached the priest in two quick strides. He lifted the old man by the woolen shawl that was his only covering. Even for the caravan master's left hand alone, the priest was an insignificant burden.

"Quit it!" Samlor shouted, giving the priest a shake to reinforce the demand.

"You've lost! Don't make me kill you."

The priest's eyes were the only smooth surfaces in the chamber. They reflected the light. His mouth was open but toothless as well as speechless. The crows vanished abruptly.

"There," said Samlor, sure that he was being obeyed. Deep breaths and the harsh necessity of taking them made the stench bearable but not unnoticed. "We're not going to hurt you or the temples either. We're—

"

The interior was suddenly brighter again. That was good in itself, but it meant that the creatures outside had not returned to being sandstone carvings. Samlor glanced around.

The cobra-headed thing had moved out of the doorway so that the man-creature could reach inside with one of its longer, arthropod arms. 116

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Samlor's right hand and left moved together like a pair of pruning shears, the one anchoring the priest against the other and the dagger blade that swept across the wizened neck.

The vertebrae resisted more like cartilage than bone as Samlor drove his steel in a berserk determination to finish the business once and for all. The priest's head fell away and powdered when it hit the stone, like a seashell burned to lime but able to retain its shape untiUit receives a shock. The body slumped but did not thrash in the shawl which confined it. An arm slipped to the floor, separated when the elbow joint crumbled. No other part of the Priest of the Rock retained its shape.

Samlor flung the garment toward a far corner in the kind of convulsive motion a man makes when he finds something loathsome crawling on his hand. The shawl flapped open in a cloud of dust and bone splinters. They settled into a lighter-colored blotch on the filthy floor.

Samlor moved toward the door, shaky-with reaction and the fatigue poisons in all his muscles. Some of the dust from—

from the shawl, leave it at that—

some of

the dust was still drifting in the air. Samlor wanted very badly to get out of the temple before he drew in another breath.

He had to crawl through the doorway because of the long, pincered arm reaching through it and the sculptured human face bent close as if its blank stone eye were trying to look into the temple.

Khamwas caught Samlor by the wrist and shoulder at the entrance to the lesser temple. The knife still in the caravan master's hand almost gashed Khamwas, who seemed untroubled in his enthusiasm to hug Samlor.

"I was sure you were, well. ..." Khamwas said to his companion's shoulder. "I prayed for you. There didn't seem to be any use for the, for the crows after you were inside yourself. So there wasn't anything I could do to help."

"Do not weary of calling to the gods," said Tjainufi sharply. "They have their hour for hearing petitions."

Samlor squeezed the Napatan firmly, then stepped away and straightened. He ducked his head again immediately because the lizard belly of the thing which clawed into the temple was still above them like a low roof.

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"Let's get away from here, huh?" he said, muttering so that the queasiness he suddenly felt would not be evident in his voice.

When the damned things were threatening his life, he'd had no time to be disturbed at their supernatural provenance.

The reliefs, now free-standing statutes, were scattered between the entrances to the two temples. The woman-headed monster was a hump on the riverbank where it had toppled when the Priest of the Rock tried to regain control of his creatures. The other three were immediate obstacles as the two men began to walk toward the larger temple.

Light was pouring toward the West like blood into a sacrificial bowl.

"Hey, look," Samlor said quietly. He was glad that the shadows, deepening with every step the men took, hid his face. "Maybe I said some things when it got tense, you know. I don't remember. But I wouldn't be here if I didn't, you know, respect you."

"My brother is useless," said—

replied?—

Tjainufi, "if he doesn't take care of

me."

"I don't remember anything either," said Khamwas. Then—

not that there was any

doubt that he did remember—

he added, "There wasn't time to stand on ceremony,

while you were saving both our lives that way."

"/ save?" Samlor jeered. "Never thought I'd be so glad to see a couple birds, buddy."

It was becoming so dark that Samlor began to fear that he would be unable to distinguish the fallen monster from shadows when they reached it. Nobody alive would be amused if he managed to break his nose on a pile of stones after coming through the past crisis with nothing worse than a few scrapes and strains. In a similar frame of mind, Khamwas extended his staff before them and clothed it with phosphorescence so pale that it was more identification than illumination.

"Ah, I suppose you'll want to get started clearing sand from the tomb entrance?" the caravan master said. "I'll round up a crew from the village with scoops and torches. They probably won't want to come out in the dark, but we can make it worth their while.

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"And—

and it might be as well they didn't see what the statues there look like until they'd been on the job for a bit. Could be they wouldn't react real good to that."

"I'll take care of the sand myself, Samlor," said the Napatan scholar. "The Priest of the Rock was blocking me—

that's why I wasn't able to locate the tomb

before. But it'll be all right now."

"There isn't any body, you know," said Samlor to the darkness. "He. . . He fell apart, or. ..."

"Someone left to watch," Khamwas said reassuringly. The fallen statue loomed ahead of them, visible after all. The female head had broken away from the bulbous hairy body.

"A priest," Khamwas continued as they skirted the rubble, leaving deep prints in the soft margin of the river. "But human, and alive. He was just older than we thought. Even older."

"Everything's relative, I guess," Samlor remarked with studied calm. He resisted the urge to grind sand between his palms in order to clean them of any trace of the Priest of the Rock.

Samlor paused at the lower end of the rope. "I'll get a lamp," he said. "I suppose you'll want light while you, while you work?" Khamwas smiled broadly in the dim light of his staff. "What I really want, I think," he said—

and / think had the weight of genuine consideration in its syllables—

"is a good night's sleep, for a change. After a hot meal. Would that—

"

he gestured at the darkness "—

be possible now?"

"Just watch me," said Samlor with a smile as wide as his companion's. He began to mount the slope briskly, lifting himself hand over hand along the rope. He much preferred daylight for whatever it was Khamwas intended to do.

BY DAYLIGHT FROM the escarpment, the lesser temple looked like the wreckage of time rather than of an evening. The man-headed thing lay in a hundred pieces. Its spider legs had proved unequal to their task without the support of the cliff face as well. When one leg gave way, the others followed with a suddenness which reduced the carving to rubble.

Near it were the toppled forms of the other pair of composite creatures. They had been in balance when night fell like an axe blade. The muddy ground let them tilt. Without life or its counterfeit to right them, the statues crashed down and broke under their own weight.

Spring floods would roll the. fragments against one another. In a few years the small bits would be gravel and the large ones indistinguishable lumps of sandstone with no signs of human working.

Samlor had never liked ruins. They reminded him that very soon his own bones would bleach or feed desert mice.

But this particular ruin was an impressive monument to the fact that he'd done his job very damned well.

On the slope below the caravan master, Khamwas cried out.

Samlor's face went blank. If he used the rope to support him, he would have come down on top of Khamwas, who was kneeling at the spot marked by the cornel wood wand.

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Instead Samlor slid down on a parallel course, braking himself with boots and his left hand.

His right hand did not touch the slope. It held his dagger ready for any problem that steel and ruthlessness could solve.

Khamwas didn't look at him, despite the cloud of dust and sand which Samlor sprayed before him. The Napatan was chanting. He held his staif between the palms of his hands, rotating it slowly back and forth on its axis. Every time the direction of rotation changed, he gave a yelp in a high falsetto, and it was this which Samlor had mistaken for a cry of alarm.

As soon as Samlor understood the situation, he tried to slow himself. He still couldn't halt before he was on a level with his companion, halfway down the slope. Much good he'd have been if there really were a problem. He worried too much.

Tjainufi turned around to face the caravan master instead of the slowly-turning staff. "He who scorns matters too often," he said in a tone of reminder, "will die of it."

Samlor smiled but did not reply lest the conversation distract Khamwas. Though Khamwas appeared to be as surely set in his course as the sun ascending the sky. The Napatan scholar had since dawn been kneeling in the sand, muttering to himself, his staff, or his gods.

Now something seemed to have answered him.

The staff began to spin faster and in one direction, blurring itself into the smooth brown ideal of a staff. All its individuality of grain and usage melted together. Khamwas was no longer chanting or holding the staff, though its ferule was several inches above the ground.

The spin accelerated. Khamwas stepped back. A line of dust rose beside the comelwood marker. The dust paused, spread a hand's breadth at the top, like a cobra lifting itself from a conjurer's basket. Then it shot upward faster than Samlor could have thrown a rock, roaring and expanding into a whirlwind with uneasy similarities to the tornado which had cleansed Setios' house of its demons.

Khamwas bent and plucked Samlor's wand out of the way a moment before it would have been lost in the funnel. His

own staff continued to spin—

in the direction opposite to that of the whirlwind.

"The cosmos abhors imbalance," murmured Khamwas as he walked to his companion. Soft sand flooded over his feet and at every step poured back past the straps of his sandals. He handed the cornelwood wand to Samlor.

The point it had marked was a dip in the slope. It was not yet a cavity because sand refilled it, oozing from all sides like viscous oil.

The whirlwind lifted its load twenty feet in the air in a brown column as thick as Samlor's chest. At its peak, the column disintegrated in a plume driven by the breeze over the escarpment. The heavier particles settled out further down the slope, but the lightest of the dust drifted over the river and marked the opposite bank with a yellow stain.

"That's . . . quite a job, you know," said Samlor while his eyes continued to track the dust plume.

Khamwas nodded with satisfaction. "I was at a disadvantage in Sanctuary," he said, rubbing his hands in a physical memory of the task they had just performed. "Several disadvantages. But here—

"

He lifted his jaw as he surveyed the river and the irrigated fields beyond it.

"This is my land, my friend. By right, and by the right of the book's power when I hold it."

He met Samlor's eyes with a gaze as imperious as that of an eagle. "I swore that the day my brothers sold me as a slave," he added.

"Huh?"

Khamwas smiled. His face fell back into the familiar lines of humor and placid determination. "Ifdoesn't matter now," he said, clapping his companion on the shoulder. The stone-chiseled visage was back for an instant. "But soon it will matter to my brothers. Very much."