Dagger (21 page)

" and her arm tightened around his bare waist, but

they needed one another for physical support for the moment. It was no more than that, support, without a hint of panic.

The blue flames licking from every side were as real as the angry light they cast, but they spread and dodged away from an invisible barrier. Neither the wax boat, its crew, nor the two naked humans clutching one another in the bow were touched by the snarling blaze.

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Samlor glanced behind them. The royal yacht pitched and yawed like a living thing which the flames were tormenting. The railings were beginning to scorch, while the towline blackened except for orange sparks where tufts of rope flashed into miniature fires themselves.

"How long—

" Ahwere said, forming great syllables so that they would be heard over the echoing furnace-roar of the flames.

Before she could complete the sentence, the wax vessel lurched again and surged from the tunnel into surroundings which resembled the fire only in that both were hellish.

It was a swamp, but the sky above was so overcast that the noon sun was a red disk. It was nothing like the landscape anywhere along the River Napata. Ahwere's mouth was open with the words she did not need to speak. The mouth of a beast standing belly-deep in ten feet of muck opened and blatted at them in surprise.

Samlor felt his wife's arm clamp around his waist, but her fear was only reflexive. She thrust her jaw out as she faced the monstrous head that swung closer. Samlor's mind was reminding itself that they could not be harmed—

not

here, not yet—

so long as they remained in the wax boat.

It would have been very easy to hurl himself over the side in a mad attempt to escape. Ahwere's warm presence kept him calm where intellect could only have controlled him.

In size the beast was less like an elephant than a whale roiling the thick waters of a cycad-fringed swamp. Its neck was long and serpentine—

slender for

the body but still too large for Samlor to have encircled it with both arms. The head was in scale with the neck. The teeth fringing the jaws were peg-like, not shears. Even so, the bass screech the beast directed at the boat was loud enough to drive the couple in the bow half a step back by its physical impact. The monster's breath smelled of pinebark and turpentine, pungent but not unpleasant.

The oarsmen continued to stroke, as unaffected by the monster as they had been by the tunnel of flame. The boat's course slid it under the rounded snakelike head. The beast jerked up its neck, then pulled a foreleg from the swamp

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and pawed with it. The blunt claws dripped mud and scraps of vegetation which splashed and streamed away in the air a few feet over Samlor's head. The claws themselves hit a barrier there also, though there was no sound of impact nor did the vessel rock under the blow.

The monster gave another blat of deafening amazement and bolted away from the wax ship. Waves the color and almost the consistency of mud surged across the swamp, but the oarsmen pulled obliviously and the wax prow slid on without feeling the shock of the water.

Behind them, the yacht jerked and staggered. Waves broke over it and streamed away from railings which the touch of the blue flames had left asmolder. The monster the boats had startled was threshing toward the firmer ground in the distance. It sounded like a traveling waterfall. The volume of viscous muck its legs churned up was enough to rate a place in the landscape. Another creature like it roared from somewhere in the haze.

The wax boat bucked, stern down and then rising, as fiercely as it had when they penetrated the tunnel of flames. The landscape did not change. Ahwere turned around and screamed briefly before her own hand clamped over her mouth. The monster that had surged away from them was a creature of imagination only, nightmarish but for that reason easy to disregard when the nightmare was past. Something had-just crawled half onto the deck of the royal yacht, and it was a terror familiar to any Napatan.

Only the head and forequarters were visible above the surface of the reedy water, but they alone were longer than the full length of the biggest crocodile Samlor had ever seen. Its jaws opened in laughter or challenge as one of its eyes glittered at the humans on the wax boat.

The oarsmen continued to stroke, fighting the mass which held the yacht in its clawed grip, but the hawser between the vessels was humming with strain.

"Ahwere," Samlor's lips were murmuring. "My love, my sister, my only love," and he could hear her scarcely-voiced, "Nanefer . . . ," as well. 15C

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The crocodile clawed more of its broad, bone-armored body into the yacht. The over-ballasting of sand was suddenly an advantage, because even a beast the size of this one could not overturn the heavy vessel.

The crocodile got one of its hind legs onto the yacht's rail. Hooked black claws gouged long splinters from the wood.

The mind in which Samlor resided was terrified though steadfast. The caravan master had shut down all his emotions when wax simulacra had begun working as if they were men and more than men. This, though ... a crocodile, monstrous in size but a natural thing-It could be fought, even if he couldn't defeat it, and he was wondering what to use for a weapon while the body he did not control crooned to a woman and awaited death.

Streaks of light, unburnt cord were popping out on the surface of the hawser as its skeins stretched under the strain. In a moment they would begin to give way. The rope would part with a crack like stone shearing, and^^

The wax boat lurched. In front of theni was not swamp but gray waste, a membrane of change through which the bow slipped, the humans and the not-human oarsmen, the sternpost with the stretching hawser—

The crocodile threw itself over the side of the royal yacht. The beast's mouth was open. Past its ragged teeth Samlor could see its corpse-white throat contract as if the crocodile were bellowing at them. No sound penetrated, not even the slap of the waves that the fifty-foot body hurled up as it struck the water and all the landscape disappeared into the gray diaphragm which sealed behind the yacht.

The oarsmen continued to stroke. The vessels moved forward as if the oarblades were not pulling through the air—

or something more empty than air.

There was no sky, only stars like needle points, and the horizon was an etched jumble of gray stone against blackness. The wax boat surged ahead, never less than six inches above the surface.

Samlor thought at first that the ground was of finely-divided sand studded with jagged volcanic boulders. By squinting and looking at a point far enough ahead that

motion did not blur it, he corrected his error. The ground was glass or glassy slag, and the appearance of sand came from the crazing of the smooth surfaces which threw back light in a myriad of directions.

They were not on a plain but a complex of broad craters, shouldering into one another like the pattern raindrops start to make on a beach. The sharper boulders rimmed craters which had not been battered by latter hammerings. Without guidance or need for a man on the rudder, the wax crewmen slid between these obstacles the way human boatmen would avoid treestumps turning in a flood-swollen river.

The yacht skidded along the ground behind them, grinding away bits of shattered glass which spun and glittered as they fell back. The fragments did not tumble as quickly as they should have, and the pitching of the wooden vessel was of curiously long duration. Laden as it was, the yacht ought to have smashed its hull to splinters each time it hit the ground after bounding over an irregularity.

This was not a place Samlor had ever heard of before.

But then, he shouldn't have expected that it would be.

The wax boat was skirting a crater so fresh and extensive that its rim was a glassy sawblade slashing through half the horizon. They were ascending the slope as they rounded it, though the ultimate direction was confused by the shattered landscape of crater flattening crater in dikes and gulleys. The sun above had no compromise. Its light fell in knife-edge shadows, though sometimes long cracks drew feathers of illumination through the glassy surface. When Samlor tried to look up at the orb, squinting past the edge of his hand as he would normally do on a bright day, he was almost blinded. There was no halo round the sun here: the sky was either blackness or radiance, with no gradations between.

The rim was close enough to starboard that Samlor thought he could, with care, spit the distance—

though perhaps not in this slender royal body.

The crewmen paused. Samlor glanced back at the wax figures, but he could see only their humping shoulders and bull necks. Their faces would have told him nothing about

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assuming they had

their feelings, their intentions . either.

The wax boat coasted. The yacht scraped along also, its inertia overcoming friction in this strange land.

The portside oarsmen began to stroke while their fellows held their blades horizontal, bringing the bow around again the same way they had aligned it with the bank of the River Napata a lifetime ago.

This time the vessel was swinging toward a notch in the crater rim which was otherwise a waist-high barrier whose jagged top was sharper than the best steel. They were high enough that when Samlor glanced around him he could see far across a landscape pocked like human skin—

but gray and black and the white of

surface reflection of the beams of the unforgiving sun.

This was a dead place, and no place for men.

The oarsmen took up the stroke in measured unison, snatching the slack from the hawser and bringing the yacht's bow around in what should have been a squeal of protest—

but was soundless here. They drove toward the wall.

THE WAX BOAT slid between edges of glass so close that had the oars been in mid-stroke, the oarblades on both sides would have been sliced away. Ah were's hand and arm were firm on Samlor's waist, but where their hips pressed together he could feel the rest of her body trembling.

So was his own.

The wax boat and its towed companion had entered a bowl the size of a great city. Its shallow surface was as smooth as warm grease.

The wax boat pulled down the slope at its regular speed. The yacht slid easily behind it.

Something waited at the bottom.

The other craters were broken and leveled by the frequency with which they had been battered by later fellows. Smooth floors shattered; crisp rims pulverized and recongealed into another crater's floor; and the same repeated a hundred times again so that the surfaces had the jumbled formlessness of an ash pit. The crater which the wax vessel had entered under its own direction was greater than any other in the landscape around it, and no later impact had disturbed its perfection. The floor was marked with pressure waves, undetectable in themselves but marked by the multiple dazzling images of the sun which they reflected. 153

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The thing in the center of the bowl moved restively. Samlor could not be sure of its shape until it raised its head and began slowly to uncoil.

"What. ..." whispered Ahwere, suppressing the rest of the question and almost the word itself so as not to show fear before her husband. The mind of Samlor warmed for the first time to this woman who was neither his sister nor his wife. She knew that it was all right to be afraid—

but that one

must never admit it. ...

"Only a worm," said the body that was Samlor's for this lifetime. "We'll take the book from it very soon now."

Very soon now.

The distance from the rim to the center of the bowl was deceptive, for there was nothing to provide scale except the worm. Its apparent size increased while the crater rim slowly diminished over the stern of the vessel. Ahwere took her arm away from her husband and tried to wipe off sweat against her own body. She was not successful, and the absence of her touch chilled Samlor more than did the perspiration evaporating from his suddenly-uncovered skin.

Both ends of the worm's body were briefly visible as coils flowed across one another like quicksilver. They were indistinguishable until the head rose ten feet and the end cocked over at a right angle aligned with the oncoming vessel. A blue circle glowed where the worm's mouth should have been. Samlor expected to feel something, a blast or a tingling, but the glow only trembled up and down through indigo and colors beyond the spectrum.

"I think," said Ahwere in a voice as emotionless as that of a housewife measuring cloth, "that it must be a hundred feet long, my husband." Very close, thought Samlor whose mind was jumping with the emotions of a prince who had not faced physical death on a regular basis. And about the diameter of a man's torso—

the torso of Samlor hil Samt, and not that of the royal body he rode now.

He wondered what would happen to him when the worm

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killed Nanefer. "There is a price. . . ," Ahwere's ghost had warned them in the tomb.

The wax boat swung from its direct course when it was three lengths from the waiting guardian. The worm's head rotated on the column of its smooth, gray neck as it tracked them. Samlor looked back at the blue glow, but the woman kept her eyes straight forward as if she were unaware of the creature sharing this desolation with them. Aloud she said, "If this is the realm of the gods, then.

..."

The wax oarsmen paused in midstroke. Their backs straightened slowly, the way grass stems return to vertical after being trodden down by a bare foot. The boat drifted to a halt, settling until it rested on the crater floor as if it were no more than it had been—

a toy of wax, crewed by waxen lumps.

Behind them, the royal yacht slid to its own resting place. Its greater inertia brought the wooden bowsprit almost into contact with the wax stern. Samlor hugged his wife, then kissed her fiercely. "Not until I call you," he said. "Don't take any chances until I call you." As he spoke, Samlor realized what Nanefer had hidden from his wife and suppressed so far below his mind's surface that only now was it clear: Nanefer knew what he needed to gain the book. But he didn't know why he was bringing the paraphernalia—