Dagger

Besides the main halls, there were ten or a dozen obvious side chambers, some of them five yards by twenty in size. All were covered with their own carvings. Several of the chambers had been sealed with slabs of stone mortised so neatly that they appeared to be part of the living rock. The slabs had been broken out in the ancient past by men searching for treasure or the treasure of wisdom.

But there could be no assurance that all of the hidden chambers had been opened.

Samlor's hobnails sparked as he strode through the darkness of the great hall. The doorway cut sunlight into rigid edges which rolled across the dark stone like a knife cutting cloth. Perhaps-and probably only for minutes, one day a year-the sun stabbed to the further end of the central corridor, illuminating the altar and painted reliefs there in a dazzling triumph of astrology and engineering.

But for most of the year, the halls were barely relieved by scattered reflection and the side chambers were as dark as if they had never been excavated from the stone.

There was a glimmer of light through the opening into the second side chamber. Samlor stepped between a pair of lowering, kingly figures who helped support the ceiling on their ornate headdresses. They were set far enough in from the wall that the carved script behind them could have been read under the proper conditions. Samlor had neither the light, the knowledge nor the interest to do so.

He ducked his head-even a shorter man would have had to do so-to enter the smaller chamber at right angles to the hall. It smelled of burned oil. Though the atmosphere was breathable, it made Samlor's stomach roil after the clean, hot air of the escarpment and the central corridor.

Khamwas sat cross-legged in the center of the floor, his face toward the doorway but his eyes unfocused until Samlor stepped into view. A tripod of reeds tied with bast held a lamp near the ten-foot ceiling; the flame illuminated the reliefs there, but the poor-quality oil cast a permanent sooty shadow across them as well.

"I'm no closer than I was this morning," said Khamwas in a flat voice. "I'm not sure that I'm any closer than I was twenty. . three years ago, when I first came here."

Samlor shrugged. He didn't need words to understand what Khamwas' face had made evident. "I've bought supplies," he said. "No fresh vegetables, I'm afraid, but I think I'll be able to get a flitch of bacon soon. Be a nice change from the fish."

He bobbed his head toward the lamp above them.

"Want me to add some oil to your lamp? Move it?"

Khamwas shook his head sharply, then relaxed the angry moue into which his lips had pursed themselves. "Sorry," he said, apologizing for the retort he had not spoken. "It's beginning to seem pointless. 1 find no reference to a tomb of Nanefer. . And others who've gone over all the reliefs here in past years, past centuries, none of them found anything either."

"I sort of thought," said Samlor carefully, dropping into a squat himself so that their eyes were nearly at a level, "that you'd be using your magic to locate the tomb." He nodded toward the staff lying beside Khamwas and felt rather pleased with himself that he had kept his voice from trembling when he made the suggestion.

"My servant is useless if he does not do my work," chirped Tjainufi in obvious agreement.

Khamwas nodded. "I'd expected that, too. Location should have been relatively easy, even though I hadn't had any success when I was here before."

"You've sharpened your skills," said the caravan master approvingly. His belly was flip-flopping at the possibility Khamwas meant instead that he had come to new arrangements with those who could grant such powers. Nothing came without cost.

"Yes," agreed Khamwas, too calm to have been aware of any other possibility. "But mostly because I know the tomb is here, and that assurance gives me a, a base to probe more precisely than I could otherwise."

He paused. "Except," he said, "I'm losing my assurance. If the tomb were within a mile of this temple, I should have a hint of it. But there's nothing."

"Look," said Samlor, surprised at the way his voice echoed here when anger raised and whetted it. "We didn't go through that in Sanctuary for a no-show. You found what you needed. By Heqt and all the gods, you're going to learn to use what you got if it takes till we're both old and gray!"

Khamwas blinked, his face turned upward. Only then did Samlor realize he was standing again.

Tjainufi was nodding. "It is in battle that a man finds a brother," he said.

"Dunno that this is exactly a battle," said Samlor wryly, embarrassed at the way he'd spoken out. He hadn't been shouting, had he?

"In any case. ." said Khamwas, accepting the hand Samlor offered as he started to rise. "In any case, you're acting as a brother. No, I'm not-we're not-going to give up. There's something odd about the results of my location spells. It's as though the tomb didn't exist at all."

Samlor cocked an eyebrow.

Khamwas shook his head forcefully. "No, there's no question whatever of Nanefer's death and burial. He might not be in the tomb, but the tomb exists."

He bent and retrieved his staff from the floor. "I think I'll learn why that's happening."

The lamp was guttering near the end of its oil. Samlor nodded toward it and asked, "Are you coming out? Or do you want me to fill it?" His greater strength and dexterity made it easier for him to collapse and lower the tripod without disaster.

"Neither, I think," said the Napatan with a smile. "The darkness may prove a benefit."

Samlor ducked his way into the great hall and strode past the royal caryatids. They had stem, solemn features now that his eyes were adapted to the amount of IjghLspilling through the doorway.

Outside he sneezed, even though his eyes were slitted. He slid his cornel-wood staff from his belt to give his hands something to do. Probably he ought to busy himself with meal preparations, but there was no way to judge how long Khamwas would want to remain in the temple. Good that he had,his enthusiasm back. Without it they were-

Well, not lost. But Samlor certainly didn't want to spend the rest of his life in a place where he, at least, had nothing in particular to do.

The sun was low, hammering a golden oval across the brown river. The landscape was almost as bright as that of noon, but there would be no twilight to separate it from the darkness to come.

Samlor walked slowly cross the great facade of the temple. Sand blown around the cliff stung his cheeks and the back of his hands. His eyes had readjusted to the light, but now he slitted them against the grit.

Shadows thrown by the low sun gave texture to what seemed smooth surfaces earlier in the day. The sandslope which had drifted across the feet, then knees, of the eastern pair of reliefs provided the path to the top of the escarpment. Samlor toiled up to it, more hindered by the soft footing than the gentle angle.

There was a slight swale in the sand beside him, next to the stone.

Samlor paused, his left hand on the knotted rope which took enough of his weight that his feet didn't slide him back toward the river. Pursing his lips as he wondered what he was trying to accomplish, Samlor reached across his body with the wand in his right hand and probed the swale.

The iron ferule slipped through drifted sand, then scraped to a halt a foot or so beneath the surface. A pock in the stone, reasonable enough and of no interest. . but Samlor shifted his stance slightly, wiggling the slender staff; and, when he put his weight on it again, the tip slid until Samlor's hand touched the sand.

Samlor withdrew the wand so that the black handle stood out against the gold sand while he considered the situation. If there were a hole that deep in the rock face, it wasn't natural. Nor was it very large, because his probe had wedged against the side until he shifted it to get the angle just right. Unless-

The caravan master grasped his wand again and this time tried to work it down in a sawing motion as if cutting a vertical line in the rock face. The sand resisted, shifting like a heavy fluid away from the thrust of the wood. Occasionally the ferule scraped rock, but only sand hindered the general downward motion of the wand.

Samlor had found a crack in the rock, and it was damned likely that he had broken their impasse as well.

Leaving his wand as a stark marker, Samlor slid the twenty feet back down the slope at a rate controlled only by his willingness to kick his feet forward more quickly than his body's impetus could topple him head over heels. Sand and gritty dust sprayed in a dry parody of a duck landing on the water.

"Khamwas!" he shouted, even before he reached the entrance. "Khamwas. Come here!"

The Priest of the Rock was no longer huddled in his doorway. Samlor blinked when he noticed that. It should have been good news-in a small way-because of the way the priest bothered him.

Somehow it didn't seem good, though.

He had to stop when he plunged into the hall of the temple. He was too excited to trust himself to run through the darkness when a misstep into a caryatid would batter him as thoroughly as running into the cliff from which the statue was carved.

"Khamwas!" Samlor bellowed and began to shuffle forward, his hands stretched before him.

"Samlor!" bellowed Khamwas, so shockingly close that Samlor's hand cleared his fighting knife by instinct. "I've found it! It's east of the main temple just a little ways."

"Buggered Heqt," muttered Samlor under his breath. In a more normal voice, he said, "Yeah, I found it too-on the ground. Let's go take a look."

He tried to sheathe his dagger, but the darkness and the way adrenalin made him tremble prevented him. After he-pricked his left index finger twice while it tried to steady the mouth of the sheath, he lowered the blade instead so that a flat was along his. right thigh.

Khamwas had the advantage of seeing Samlor against the lighted doorway, so he had been able to dodge from the collision course the two of them were otherwise following. He put his hand on Samlor's shoulder and guided or directed his companion outside with him.

"All that it took," Khamwas bubbled happily, "is one more try. If you hadn't braced me, my friend, we'd…"

"It's up the slope," said Samlor, pausing briefly to put his weapon back where it belonged when talking to his friend and employer. In slightly different circumstances, that reflex could have caused a very nasty incident indeed.

"Oh," he added, pointing across the curve of the cliff to the smaller temple. "Our friend's finally gone away."

Khamwas, already grasping the rope as he strode slushily up the slope, glanced in the direction of Samlor's gesture. As a result, they were both looking toward the relief when the spider-limbed monster shuddered away from it. The movement came a fraction of a second before the echoing crackle of rock breaking.

"Earthquake!" cried Samlor. He turned to be sure the escarpment and carvings towering beside them were not also toppling to crush them across the sand and into the nearby river.

The cliff above was as solid as it had ever been. The river was a brown stream. It was vaguely streaked by its current, but it had not become a mass of whitecaps dancing to the rhythm of the underlying strata.

The monster had not fallen from the other relief. It had walked. And it was walking toward Samlor and his companion.

Khamwas slid back to firmer footing, where sunbaked mud cemented the sand into a narrow shoreline around the face of the cliif. "Don't worry," he said with structured calm. "I'll stop it."

He braced his staff and crossed his left arm over the end as he had done in the crypt beneath Setios' house.

The relief with a woman's head and a bear's body also began to stretch itself shatteringly away from the cliff of which it had been part.

The spider/lizard/man-thing moved with the awkwardness of a knuckle-bone bouncing in slow motion. Its legs splayed so broadly-thirty feet or more-that the four of them on the outside roiled and gurgled well out into the stream.

"I can't hold two of-" Khamwas began.

A third creature, the fish-headed one, shifted in a patter of gravel.

Samlor crouched. "We've got to-"

"Run," he had been about to say, but he was quite certain that the progress of the stone creatures was faster than he could manage for more than an hour.

Saddle a camel? The animals would have broken their hobbles and run by now, as surely as the fourth beast-thing was tearing itself from the facade.

Gods! but he wished Star were here.

While his mind echoed with that thought which he would rather have died than entertained, Samlor drew his coffin-hilted dagger. His body was cold with awareness that he'd been willing to risk the child's life because he wasn't man enough to live without her to save him.

At least he could die fighting.

DISTRACT HIM said the blade of the dagger as it flicked through the periphery of Samlor's vision. His mind was so focused on the next minutes-which he expected to be his last-that the words did not register until he was three shuffling steps.past the desperately chanting Khamwas.

Were the stone joints of the leading creature softer than the shanks, the way those of a normal crab would be?

Would a twelve-inch blade penetrate-if it could penetrate-deeply enough to injure creatures the size of these coming on?

The woman-headed monster was beginning to clamber over the thing with a man's head and arthropod legs. It had frozen again, two of its pincered feet raised as the river! lapped close to the plates of its lizard belly.

"Distract him!" Samlor cried as he skidded to a stop. He turned, wolfish joy on his broad, worn face. "That's it. Distract him, Khamwas!"

"I can't distract them!" the Napatan cried in frustration.

The man-headed thing profited from Khamwas' broken concentration to lurch forward again, half-carrying the creature which had started to climb over him. The other two statues continued to trundle along behind, laughably clumsy on troll legs and bull legs-except that those legs spanned four human paces at a stride.

" You idiot!" Samlor screamed. "Distract the fucking priest!"

Then he turned again and sprinted toward monsters and the other temple. If Khamwas couldn't understand-or couldn't perform-they were both dead very soon. It was as simple as that, and therefore Samlor had to proceed on the assumption that his companion would carry his load.

The woman-headed thing had pushed the creature on eight legs farther away from the cliff face so that the two of them advanced in tandem. The river was low at this time of year, but the strand between the rock and water was so narrow that the monster with the head of a man was forced almost completely into the water.

The male head growled like millstones grating. When the female mouth opened to snarl back, it displayed a maw of hooked teeth like a shark's.

Samlor was twenty feet from the leading monsters when a pair of crows swept past him, cawing angrily and slapping their pinions at one another.

The woman-headed creature swatted at the birds with a blunt-clawed forepaw. The motion was swift and precise, eliminating Samlor's faint hope that the monsters of stone would prove too awkward to catch him as he dodged between their legs.

The doglike paw hit the noisy birds. They flowed through the stone with a green flash and continued to clatter their swift course toward the smaller temple. One or both the trailing monsters clawed and bit at the crows as they passed, with no greater effect.

"All right, you bastards," Samlor whispered, pausing in a crouch for an instant. His left hand was empty and spread wide, while his right was cocked to hold the knife in position for a disemboweling stroke. His body faked to the right, toward the man-headed creature which reached forward with a pair of limbs. Their pincers sprang open like shears.

There was a distant flicker of green, visible only because the closed doors of the lesser temple were in such deep shadow. The female head turned snarling toward the creature beside it whose eagerness to get at Samlor was crowding her/it against the cliff.

All four of the monsters set into place like the statues they had been moments before, though their poses were now contorted by recent motion.

Samlor sprinted, ducking his head beneath one of the gaping pincers. The shadow cooled his skin and froze his soul.

The legs of the two leading monsters had splayed across one another as they struggled for position. Samlor laid his hand on one of the arthropod limbs to swing himself through the maze without slowing. It was warm and gritty to the touch, the feel of sun-struck stone and not that of anything which could have been alive.

There was room to pass between the third creature and the cliff without touching either, but as Samlor did so, the feathered body moved and the grotesque stone breasts swayed above his head.

He pushed off from the wall. The change of direction and the sudden impetus it gave him saved Samlor from being crushed. A limb, shaped like a bull's foreleg and the size of a large tree, stamped an impression six inches deep in the hard ground.

Samlor dived beneath the grasshopper body that wobbled between the bovine hind legs, rolled, and came up running while the creature turned, froze, and started to move again in jerky fashion. Stone ground on stone as others of the creatures shifted and fouled one another like storm-tossed boats in a narrow harbor.

Running on foot wasn't a particular talent of Samlor's, but he had the lungs and leg muscles to pound toward the smaller temple fast enough to pull him away from m'ost human pursuers.

These pursuers weren't human.

Wind in his ears and the pounding of his blood cloaked the noisy movements of Samlor's opponents behind him. Stone hit stone with hollow echoes, like those of great fish sounding. There was a hiss as loud as steam venting through a geyser.

He didn't glance behind him to see whether or not the stone monsters were tangled with one another because of the distraction Khamwas had supplied. He could only hope that they were-

And that the discomfort of lungs burning with exertion quelled fear of what was about to happen to him. He'd noticed before that aggravating discomfort was the best antidote to panic. .

The door leaves had long since disappeared from the larger temple. Samlor assumed the panels closing the temple in which the Priest of the Rock lived were wooden, sun-dried and flood-warped-vulnerable to the fury and determination of a man as strong as Samlor hil Samt.

It was a shock when he realized that the double doors set into the stripped facade were of the same fine-grained sandstone as the cliffs around them.

Samlor slapped one leaf with the flat of his left hand, more to bring himself to a halt than from any expectation that the doors would fly open. The stone panels rattled the wooden bar within which held them closed, but there was no hint of real weakness.

The ground trembled as one or more of the carved monsters began to stagger back toward Samlor.

The doors rotated on pins carved from the upper and lower edges of both panels. They were sheathed in bronze and set in massive bronze sockets inlet into the transom and threshold of the temple. The metal was verdigrised and worn. It almost certainly dated from the original construction of the temple a millennium before.

But the pivots weren't going to break under any stress Samlor could bring against them without a stone-cutter's maul.

The crows cawed and clashed with beaks and pinions from the interior of the temple. Their racket came not through the thick stone panels but around them: use of rock in this way required that moving parts be fitted more coarsely than would be needful with material which was easily worked.

It was incredible that the Priest of the Rock could concentrate amid the racket the birds made, but the slow, thudding footsteps from behind proved the bastard could.

Sometimes you met somebody who was just too good for you.

And sometimes, that was the last fellow you met.

Samlor put his mouth to the crack between the door leaves and bellowed, hoping to startle the priest within. There was enough gap between the panels to squeeze in the first joint of his little finger, but the stone plates were four inches thick. Not even a wrecking bar would give him enough leverage to shatter a pivot with side thrust.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

CHAPTER 10

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.

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."

Samlor raised an eyebrow, then chuckled. "A guy never knows what he's signed on for, does he?" he said.

Khamwas looked at the caravan master sharply and said, "Your commitment's ended. You promised me nothing beyond getting me to-" he pointed at the whirlwind " – this point."

"Sure I did," Samlor replied. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and kept his eyes on the column of sand. "Anyhow, I didn't say I was complaining."

The slopes had flattened near the tip of the funnel. Though a little sand still trickled in, it could no longer hide the square stone door in the cliff face. The whirlwind's color faded to a gauzy white now that it was no longer charged to opacity with sand.

Samlor eyed the portal through the wavering column of air. "We'll have to break it down," he said in professional appraisal. "They'll have set wedges t' fall when they slid the door down the last time."

"Wait and watch," replied Khamwas with his old smile. "The door couldn't fit tightly enough in its grooves to keep sand from seeping through over the ages and filling the passageway beyond."

"You want the villagers with baskets after all…?" Samlor asked in puzzlement, trying to follow the other's train of thought. "Or-"

He blinked and glanced up at the sky, visualizing a thunderbolt from its pale transparency striking the stone door and blasting it to shards.

Khamwas shook his head gently and pointed toward the door again.

The staff had seemed to be slowing its rotation; certainly it had dipped an inch or two nearer the ground. Now it rose and accelerated again.

The tip of the little whirlwind twisted like an elephant's trunk and explored the edge of the stone door. The panel quivered. As Khamwas had said, the grooves in the cliff face in which it slid had to have considerable play. Tiny grit with the persistence of time was certain to have free access through the cracks.

The trunk of moving air sharpened itself wire thin. It was black again with whirling sand. It began to scream with the fury of a saw cutting far faster than a stonecutter's arms could drive it.

The speed of the whirlwind increased by the square of the lessened diameter. The tip was now moving so fast that it would have been opaque even if it were only air.

The sand which it dragged from the interior of the tomb blasted against the edges of the door and the cliff, grinding them back to the sand from which they had been formed beneath the sea in past eons. The mating surfaces eroded in a black line climbing upward as the whirlwind followed the same pattern a human sawyer would have used.

The dust that reached the upper funnel was so finely divided that it gave a saffron, almost golden, cast to the trembling air.

Khamwas looked at Samlor with quiet pride. Samlor squeezed his companion's shoulder again.

"The wealth of a craftsman," said Tjainufi in what might have been intended as a gibe, "is in his equipment." His voice had almost the same timbre as the wind howling as it ate rock, but his words were nonetheless quite audible.

As the line of black-shadow replacing what had been rocky substance-coursed along the upper edge of the door, the panel began to shift. A handful of gravel-sized hunks flew out and pitched into the river loudly, fragments of a stone wedge.

The whole door, a slab six inches thick, fell out on its face with the heavy finality of a man stabbed to the heart.

Instantly, uninstructed by Khamwas, the tip broadened. The funnel blurred brown with the sand it sucked from the passageway beyond. The sound of the wind lowered into a drumnote instead of the high keening with which it had carved solid stone. Sorted by weight, the debris dropped again far beyond the cavity from which it had come.

The passageway was square and polished smooth. It was easily big enough for a man, but he would have to crawl on his hands and knees. Samlor had been in tighter places, but the one certainty about this one was that there wouldn't be another way out.

Khamwas must have been thinking the same thing, because he said, "I'll leave my staff at the entrance. It will prevent problems like… the slab-" he gestured at what had been the door " – rising up and wedging itself into the tunnel again. For instance."

Samlor raised an eyebrow. "You expect that?" he asked.

"Not if I leave my staff at the entrance," Khamwas answered calmly.

The whirlwind had been clearing gradually until only the inevitable dust motes danced in it. Khamwas' staff dropped to the ground so abruptly that its ferule thrust an inch or two into the soft sand. Khamwas' hand snatched the instrument while it was still wobbling upright.

A breeze fanned Samlor hard enough to slap the dagger-sheath against him. The whirlwind dissipated by flinging itself outward. Nothing of it remained but a dry odor and the passageway it had uncovered. The whole shape of the sandslope had been changed by the removal of what must have been hundreds of tons of material.

"Well," said Samlor carelessly. "Don't guess there's much left but for me to get a lamp and lead the way in. Be interesting to see what we find."

Khamwas quirked the left side of his face up in something like a smile. "Nothing inside will have a knife, my friend," he said. "Get the lamp, but I'll be going first."

Samlor nodded curtly and gripped the rope for what had suddenly become a steep climb to the top of the escarpment. There was a touch on his arm. He turned and met his companion's eyes.

"There's no need for you to come into the tomb with me," Khamwas said. "You'd really be no more than a, than a… Well. Any real use you'd be could be performed if you wait out here by the entrance."

"Balls," said Samlor without emotion.

He turned his face away and cleared his throat before he continued in the same flat tone. "I'll be back with a lamp. Maybe we can rig it to the end of my wand so I can hold it in front of you. Leave your hands free for whatever business you've got. Right?"

"Right, my friend," said Khamwas softly.

As Samlor began to climb the rope, finding footholds on the rock which sand no longer covered, he heard Tjainufi below him saying, "A man's character is his destiny."

It didn't strike Samlor as a particularly reassuring comment.

CHAPTER 11

THE PASSAGEWAY SLANTED upward at a scarcely perceptible angle. The rise was enough to have trapped entering sand fairly close to the entrance. The floor and a slanting line down both sidewalls had been polished by the grit to a finish much smoother than that which the workmen had left.

That circumstance, brought out by the way light reflected from stone as the lamp wobbled forward, made Samlor feel the age of this tomb as nothing else had done.

He almost bumped Khamwas again-and almost cursed aloud. The Napatan scholar shuffled forward at an irregular pace-halting repeatedly for no reason Samlor could discern, and then sliding on another ten feet or more as blithely as if his only concern were the strait surroundings.

Khamwas knew what he was doing-Samlor had accepted that as an article of faith when he agreed to enter the tomb. Samlor didn't know what his companion was doing, though. It made it a bitch of a job to follow closely enough to keep the lamp bobbing ahead of them and still to avoid stumbling into the man in the lead.

He should have found a larger pole on which to hang the lamp, so that he needn't stick so close to the Napatan. He should have stayed back at the entrance. He should have stayed in Cirdon and gotten on with his own life.

And he really shouldn't think about what was waiting at the far end of this passage. The little quibbling frustrations, about the way Khamwas moved and about how hard the stone was on his knees, were just what Samlor needed to keep in a state of murderous readiness without dwelling on the sort of major threats that could make him panic. He knew how to handle himself from having spent most of his life in the business.

The business of taking damn-fool risks for no good reason.

"There. .," said Khamwas in a tone of wonder and satisfaction. He had stopped again.

Samlor grimaced and leaned to peer past Tjainufi on his companion's shoulder.

The lamplight wavered over the intricately painted wall of a room. They'd reached the end of the passageway at last.

Samlor held his breath, fearful of disturbing his companion.

Instead of going through an involved procedure-a chanted spell, a progressive unveiling of some amulet or talisman-Khamwas stepped directly into the tomb chamber. There, where there was enough room to stand upright, he shrugged his shoulders and straightened the folds of his cloak. It was the sort of motion a man makes before he has an important interview.

With a superior.

"Put your trust in god," said Tjainufi, looking back at Samlor still hunched in the passageway.

"Bloody well have, haven't I?" muttered the caravan master. "Coming this far?" But he twisted himself upright in the painted chamber, the lamp bobbing on the end of the wand in his left hand.

His right fist was empty, for he would have looked a fool to threaten supernatural opponents with a knife. .

But the hilt of the long dagger wasn't far from his hand either.

Samlor's first thought was that he'd misunderstood. They were in a temple, not a tomb, with a man-sized idol seated across from them.

The walls were covered with a brilliantly white plaster which brightened the chamber beyond what Samlor thought was the ability of a single-wick oil lamp. The plaster had been used as the base for frescoes whose bright primary colors had been achieved with pigments, of cinnabar, Sapis lazuli and finely-divided gold.

The paints showed men and women carrying out all the ordinary tasks of a village or a great household: food production and preparation; weaving and building construction; unfamiliar sports and war in unfamiliar armor and chariots. Each scene was labeled in delicate script which was as unintelligible to Samlor as the paintings were obvious without it.

The entrance was in one of the longer walls. Large storage jars were lined up along it. Samlor dipped his hand into the nearest, brushing aside the lid whose wax seal had crumbled with time. The jar was filled with millet which still looked and felt wholesome.

"Heqt!" Samlor blurted as his eyes glanced over the furniture aligned with the other wall. His eyes jerked back to the cult statue in the center of the array. "That's a body."

"This is Nanefer," said Khamwas.

Samlor couldn't tell if the statement were agreement or correction.

There was no smell of death in the chamber; only of dryness and a memory of incense too faint to have been noticed under any other circumstances. Khamwas was waiting as if he expected to be summoned. Samlor swallowed his questions and his nervousness, examining the seated corpse as carefully as he could without going closer.

Nanefer had.been a man of average height and slight build in life. His frame was particularly obvious now that desiccation had drawn the skin back against all of his bones, including the ribs which were not covered by the linen kirtle hung from the left shoulder. The garment was cinched with a wide sash of gold brocade, while the straps of the sandals-

"Heqt!"

Samlor didn't recognize the corpse's face, since its skin was sunken in and darkened to the color of fire-hardened wood even though age had not brought decay. But the clothes he did recognize.

They'd been on the stranger who attacked him in the Vulgar Unicorn.

Samlor had the watered-steel blade of his dagger half clear of its sheath before he remembered just where that blade had come from. He shot the weapon home again as if it were red hot. For a moment, he stood so still that no further motion disturbed the regular swinging of the wand and lamp which he held.

Finally, he let his body slip back, not to relaxation but at least to a state of loose watchfulness. Besides the coffin-hilled knife, he had the choice of the boot knife or the push dagger at the back of his collar.

The right choice was to leave his weapons where they were. But locking up like that was a real good way to get killed.

One of the real good ways. Getting neck deep in wizards was even better.

Nanefer's black, wizened hands were crossed in his lap over a parcel wrapped in red cloth. Khamwas looked at it, pursing his lips as he came to a decision.

He stepped forward slowly.

Ten feet, the width of the room, separated Nanefer's corpse from the men who had just entered. The floor was covered with the same dazzling plaster as the walls and ceiling, and there were no frescoes to dim its fire.

When whorls of blue sparks appeared in the center of the room, their reflection from the floor doubled their angry intensity.

Khamwas halted in mid-step, then backed in a perfect reversal of his previous motion. He squared his shoulders and bobbed his chin up and down as if to be sure that it was set in the correct position, firm but not outthrust in challenge.

Samlor was worried about position also. He stooped, setting the lamp on the floor with a delicacy which belied the fact that he never took his eyes off the sparks which grew and, with their afterimages, were beginning to sketch a figure. When the earthenware lamp-bowl was safely

down, Samlor dropped the wand also and rose with his boot knife half-concealed by his palm and thigh.

It was something to throw for a distraction. By now he had enough data to know that they might want a distraction which permitted them to get out of the chamber again.

Fast.

The sparks hissed like hot grease as they spread in tight arcs which wove into surfaces. They were not forming a figure but rather two figures; a slender, imperious woman and the babe in her arms nuzzling her bare right breast.

The woman was dressed in much the same fashion as Nanefer's corpse, and her features were similar to those of the stranger in the Vulgar Unicorn.

Similar also to those of Khamwas.

"You cannot prevent me, Ahwere," Khamwas said in a clear voice that bespoke enormous control. "Your fate is accomplished."

The popping griddle sound ceased, but the silence which replaced it was unnatural. When the woman began to speak, her voice did not echo. It was as if they all stood on a mighty plain instead of in a stone chamber from which sound dissipated only after hundreds of reverberations.

"Go back, man of my house," she said. She was a statue of blue fire whose face alone moved as she spoke. The infant squirmed against her and began to cry in a thin, hopeless voice. "The price of what you seek is too high."

"Your fate is accomplished, Ahwere," Khamwas repeated gently. "The price you paid is no part of me. You must stand aside."

He made no attempt to step forward.

Ahwere, who would have been attractive if she were a woman and alive, laughed. The sound began as something nearly human and ended in a clucking, like arpeggios played on dried vertebrae. "You do not think the price is for you to pay, oh man of my house? But nevertheless, you must leam just what the price is, mustn't you?"

Her mouth opened, wide and then wider than life or protoplasm would allow. "Watch!" screamed a voice from the cavern that was enveloping the world. .

CHAPTER 12

"DON'T STAND THERE with yer bleedin' thumb up, Ipis!" screamed Shay, the bosun, to the sailor at the bow line. "Belay the bloody line!"

Shay glanced with a subservient expression toward the woman beside him and the man who Samlor now was. "Beggin' yer pardon sir, madam." he muttered perfunctorily. Then the bosun's face reformed itself into a snarl as he bellowed, "And you lot! Lower the bleedin' mast, don't drop it through the bleedin' bilges!"

At the mainsheets, six squat crewmen-naked except for their breechclouts-hunched themselves against the weight they were supporting. They had furled the sail against the upper yard as the richly-appointed craft neared the quay. The fitful breeze was still making it hard enough to dock that Shay decided to lower the twin-pole mast as well. One of the temple servants on the quay had managed to get a line aboard, but the boat was drifting outward despite the efforts of the three oarsmen at either gunwale.

The baby at Ahwere's breast began to squall because of the shouting. She crooned to comfort the child; and Samlor-whose body knew he was named Nanefer, and which acted outside the control of his Samlor mind- stepped closer and put an arm around both his wife and his son.

Sailors and men on the shore began to haul the vessel firmly to its berth.

The quay was stone-built, not wooden. Though unoccupied at present, it projected far enough into the river to dock a pair of vessels the length of Samlor's on either side, i A causeway, also stone, led a hundred feet inland to the! walled courtyard and temple which stood on the firmer ground at that distance from the riverbank. Drums were beating in the courtyard, and already a group of regally-garbed priests were hurrying to join the handful of servants on the quay.

The vessel edged against the downstream side of the dock. Sailors snubbed it while Shay bawled orders and horrible threats.

"Hush, dearest," murmured Ahwere. "Hush, sweetness. Soon it will stop."

The bank to either side of the stream was a rich green backdrop of palmettoes and reeds in their Spring colors, before the sun and the lowering river dried them golden. The temple's extensive fields were hidden behind the screen of natural vegetation.

Not far upstream from the quay was a massive wall built against the bank for no evident purpose. Like the temple and its outworks, the wall was stone: but the blocks comprising it were cyclopean and of immense age. In the center of the wall-a dam backed against a section of riverbank no different from those to either side of it-was a bas-relief which seemed to be a stylized face, though mud from recent flooding and the patina of age made it impossible to be sure.

A gaggle of musicians had run to the dock with the priests. A plump man with an image of the god Tatenen on his breast gestured to them. They broke into a flute-and-drum tattoo whose timing suffered from the fact most of the performers were panting from the haste with which they'd run from the temple enclosure.

The priest shut them off with another gesture and an angry glare which smoothed to buttery slickness as he turned and bowed toward Samlor. "Prince Nanefer," he said. "Princess Ahwere, little prince Merib-come ashore, please. 1 am Tekhao the chief priest, and I offer you the full hospitality of the Temple of Tatenen."

Six other priests with scarlet sashes-Tekhao's whole tunic was dyed red-bowed in shaky unison behind their chief.

Samlor nodded to them and handed his wife to the rail ahead of him. Temple servants steadied her as she stepped to the dock, though the babe in her arms and the servants' determined obsequiousness made the job even more awkward than it needed to be.

Takhao himself offered Samlor a hand as he followed Ahwere. "Your father is well, Prince Nanefer?" he asked.

"Certainly, very well," Samlor responded. His current body did not have the aches which had accumulated with the years in his own form, though they were noticeable only now that he lived in their absence. On the other hand, stepping up to the dock was an unexpected effort: Samlor/ Nanefer wasn't fat, but neither was he used to efforts more strenuous than strolling through the gardens of his palace.

He was only socially truthful, also. King Merneb hadn't been at all well when they sailed from the capital… but that was no business of a temple functionary.

Besides, the king would cheer up as soon as they returned. His present state was mostly because of his concern about his only son and daughter, and their child, his grandson. Samlor was utterly sure that his knowledge was equal to this undertaking, but his father, King Merneb, refused to believe that.

The musicians resumed playing as the party walked toward the temple. "The banquet we have-" Tekhao began.

"And have you assembled the quantity of wax 1 require?" said Samlor, at close enough to the same time that both men could pretend the prince had not broken in to silence a yammering priest.

"Why yes, your highness," said Tekhao without dropping a beat. "That is to say, most of it is on hand at this moment, and the rest should arrive by-" he glanced at the

sun, a finger's length above the reedtops " – well, by early tomorrow at the latest. You must realize that the, ah, the size of the levy was unexpected, though of course the Temple of Tatenen never hesitates to carry out the desires of the King."

"Yes, you've done quite well, then," said Samlor with an attempt to make the words sound appreciative rather than ironic. Tekhao was a toady, but he had carried out a difficult task in a short time.

They stepped beneath the arch into the temple enclosure. Two-story buildings were built along the right and left sides of the courtyard, while the facade of the temple closed the end facing the gate and the river beyond. Four caryatids representing aspects of Tatenen, the Creator, supported the temple pediment whose reliefs showed the Court of Heaven over which Tatenen presided.

The courtyard was crowded with folk ranging from those who cultivated the temple fields to priests' wives garbed as richly as the functionaries themselves. They began to cheer when Samlor and his family entered the enclosure.

"Ah, your highness," Tekhao murmured with his lips to Samlor's ear. "It's our understanding that the temple's contribution to the royal granary this year will be reduced by the value of the wax. May we assume that the wax will be valued at the rate prevailing in the capital on the date contributions are due?"

Merib, startled by the cheering crowd, began to wail again, but his cries were lost in the enthusiasm.

"You may assume that the affairs of scribes will be handled by scribes," Samlor retorted loudly enough that he did not need to bend close to the chief priest. "No doubt they will be aware that goods turned over to the king are valued at the place where they come into the hands of the royal agents."

"Of course, Prince Nanefer, of course," boomed Tekhao, smiling so that all his subordinates could see how well he was getting along with the king's son. "We'll conduct you to your chambers, now, and perhaps at the banquet later we can discuss some of the special problems with which a temple estate in this district must deal."

"Of course," said Samlor, irriated at having been so tart a moment before.

The crowd cheered, and Ahwere glanced at her husband across the crying visage of their son.

CHAPTER 13

"WE'RE SO HONORED by the presence of your highness," said Tekhao's wife-for at least the third time during the course of the banquet-while her beaming husband served Samlor the dessert, a compote of limes and white grapes, with his own hands. The other priests, temple administrators, and wives watched the two couples at the high table with expressions of awe and envy as their temperaments dictated.

"Perhaps you can tell me, Tekhao," said Ahwere as she accepted the ladleful of fruit the chief priest was offering. "There's an odd-looking wall next to the dock. Well, near it. What do you use that for?"

Tekhao sat down and filled his own cup from the serving bowl. "An involved question, your highness," he answered with a smirk in his voice. "In a manner of speaking, we don't use it; but in another way it is the reason a temple of Tatenen is located here."

He had forgotten to serve his own wife. Her scowl was one that would wake thunder later when the couple was alone, but now she said sweetly to Samlor, "A child is always such a responsibility, Prince Nanefer, and for you, knowing that your lovely boy will succeed you as king, well. . The State is fortunate that such a responsibility is in hands so capable."

Samlor managed a smile. His mouth was full of fruit and his attention was focused on the explanation the priest was giving Ah were.

"You see, your highness," Tekhaosaid, "we didn't build the wall. That is, human beings didn't. It was placed on Earth by Tatenen himself when he created the cosmos."

Tekhao permitted himself a brief smile to indicate to his visitors that he was too sophisticated to believe such a myth-if they were-but without committing himself to heresy if Ah were and her husband took a rigidly accepting approach to their religion.

Ah were's nod was no certain indication either way, so the chief priest went on in factual neutrality. "The wall is only a hundred feet long, to be sure, but the stones in its fabric are of exceptional size. There are a few buildings in the capital as massively constructed, but nothing whatever here on the Lower River. And even in Napata, the close fit between the individual stones would be considered remarkable. It is-"

Tekhao paused to consider his words. "It is said," he continued, "that Tatenen made the stones soft for a moment after he put them in place, so that the surfaces flowed together. Despite weathering, there is no place in the wall that a knife will slip further than a fingertip between the layers."

"But there's a face on it, isn't there?" Ahwere asked. "Was that always there?"

Samlor couldn't tell whether Ahwere were just making conversation, or if she had a suspicion of what he intended-but would not ask her husband directly.

"Yes indeed, your highness," Tekhao said. "The face of Tatenen himself, ah-it is said. Stamped onto the stone with his, ah, seal ring as his final act of creation."

The chief priest's wife stood up and stumped heavily across the front of the table to reach the fruit compote. One of the servants standing behind the diners' chairs would have served her had she flicked a finger toward him-but that wouldn't have given her the opportunity to glare straight into her husband's eyes.

"There was once a ceremony," continued Tekhao. Only a tic of his right cheek betrayed his awareness of his wife's displeasure. "The Cleansing of the Face, it was called.

Every year the nearby villages brought offerings which they cast into the river, and they scrubbed the face clean. Horrible waste. Ah, the offerings, that is."

"Now the ceremony is held here in the temple," said Tekhao's wife brightly, joining the conversation as a better way of getting attention than glowering from her end of the table. "It's much nicer. Though still very colorful, of course."

"Ah, yes," agreed Tekhao with a hint of well-deserved embarrassment. "It seemed more fitting that the ceremony be held here in the temple enclosure. Of course, we know that Tatenen is everywhere, not in an idol or a, or a face on a wall. But it makes it easier for the common villagers to carry out their duties to the god if they associate him with the, ah, house where their offerings are deposited."

"The wall," said Samlor, "is thought to be the dam which Tatenen built to separate the realm of men from the realm of gods."

Tekhao blinked and turned to face Samlor. "Yes, your highness," he said. "That is said. Though-" his round face became as neutral as an expanse of flooring " – nothing is behind the stone except earth. There have been, ah, examinations. Muddy earth."

Samlor nodded calmly.

Ahwere was looking at him past the chief priest's head. Her face was gray with fear.

CHAPTER 14

MERIB WAS ASLEEP, but they could hear the nurse singing to him in the room beyond the doorway screened by reed matting.

Ahwere began to cry softly.

Samlor touched her shoulders from behind, then began to massage them gently as he moved closer.

She turned, throwing her arms around him and burying her face against his chest. "Oh, Nanefer," she said through her sobs. "My prince, my brother, my only love…"

"Don't be afraid," Samlor whispered, bending to kiss her forehead and eyelid. "There isn't anything to fear."

"We're going to enter the realm of the gods, aren't we?" she said, looking up at him. Her eyes, her jewels, and the tears on her cheeks were all that was visible in the screened moonlight.

"Yes," said Samlor simply. "I am. There's no need for you to go with me, though. Shay will do as I order, and-"

"Would you leave me behind then?" Ahwere demanded fiercely. "Watch you go off to die and never return? Is that what you want?" Fresh tears were welling up even though she was so angry that Samlor thought she might strike him.

"I'm not going to die, my darling," he said, trying to ease her close to him again. She resisted only for a moment. "I'm going to come back with the Book of Tatenen. I just don't want to force you to help me in this if you'd rather not."

"Rather leave you?" Ahwere said, but this time wijhra lilt of joyous remembrance in her voice. "The way I left you when our father would have married you to a governor's daughter and me to a general?"

Samlor smiled and quoted King Merneb, " 'Shall I marry my son to my daughter and risk all my happiness at once? No, I don't dare risk the gods' envy that way."

"And it was 1 who made him change his mind," said Ahwere, "so that you and I could find happiness with the only souls on earth who could make us happy. I will not leave you now."

They kissed. Lips still joined, they moved toward the bed, shedding their clothes with increasing urgency.

CHAPTER 15

SAMLOR WAS so engrossed that he did not notice when Ahwere entered his work area, the flat roof of one of the temple buildings-now screened so that direct sun would not melt the hard yellow wax. He had shaped a section of the bow and was reaching for another block of material when he realized that his wife was watching him with a slight smile.

He started, dropping the baton with which he formed the wax into a perfect simulacrum of a wood surface.

Ahwere's face clouded. "I'm sorry," she blurted, turning toward the stairs again. "I didn't mean-"

Samlor caught her in his arms. "No," he said, "don't go. You should see this, if you want to. 1 was just- concentrating on what I was doing."

The smile that returned was shaky, but Ahwere allowed herself to be drawn close to what Samlor was constructing.

It was a boat, small but otherwise similar to the vessel which was docked at the temple quay-except that this one was built of wax. Samlor had fitted the flat bottom, shaping the pyramidal cakes of wax into a perfect duplicate of irregular, pegged-together planks of sycamore wood. Now he was raising the slanting wales, starting from the bow.

Ahwere stretched out her finger but did not touch the «planks» until her husband had nodded approval. The

material had the grain of wood, but it retained the feel of wax as well as its yellow translucence.

"Watch," he said, anticipating the question she might not have been willing to ask. He picked up his baton, a section of hollow reed the length of his forearm, and took a fresh block of wax which he held against the end of one of the blanks.

When Samlor drew the baton across it, the wax flowed like paint before a brushstroke. Instead of taking the texture of the baton, it formed another "plank" – perfect in its irregularities, even to the trenails pinning it to the pieces it abutted.

Samlor smiled to Ahwere, but he could feel the sweat of concentration on his brow.

"Shay came to tell you that the fittings have been removed from our ship," she said, nodding toward the edge of the roof. The vessel on which the royal party arrived was just visible past the line of the dock, riding on its cables. "He says they'll begin loading the sand after midday. But-"

Ahwere frowned. "But why, my husband? Why don't we just use the real ship instead of-" she gestured. "Though it's very wonderful, what you're doing."

Samlor smiled so that the implication of danger wouldn't be the first answer his wife received. "The real boat might be able to-enter the realm where we'll find the book," he explained, "But nothing alive could travel with it for the entire distance. We'll be perfectly safe in this vessel-" he patted the waxen side, without quite touching it " – and the other will carry the equipment we need."

Ahwere hugged him but would not meet his eyes as she said, "Well, I shouldn't have disturbed yotl'll go now."

"You don't disturb me," Samlor said.

Ahwere started to turn away. Samlor seized h^r and said fiercely, "My love, I need you! You don't disturb\me. And you mustn't worry."

She nodded, her face against his chest, but Samlor was sure he heard her sobbing as she climbed back down the stairs.

He took another block of wax, set it in place, and began to shape it. His princely face was as calm as the wax itself, but his mind was filled with images of fire and terror.

After he finished the boat, he would form the six oarsmen to drive it. …

CHAPTER 16

SHAY CARRIED A rope knout as he oversaw the transport of the wax boat to the water, but he repeatedly slapped his own thigh with it instead of the workmen.

The wax vessel was a light burden for so many hands, temple servants as well as Nanefer's sailors, but it was also fragile. The bosun had no intention of making someone stumble with a flick of the rope-end-and Samlor would have flayed Shay if he had taken that risk.

"Easy, then," the bosun ordered, stepping backward ahead of the procession.

Rather than use the stone quay, Samlor had ordered the priests to build a temporary ramp of bundled reeds across the swampy stretch and down into the river. At first the end of the new ramp floated. The reeds undulated down into the muck as they took Shay's weight. The team of men and the boat they carried would submerge the ramp, permitting the vessel to bob in the water without the risk of damage that any other launch would entail.

Beside Samlor stood Ahwere. Her bright smile could have been sculpted in stone for any movement it had shown. He touched her hand and realized the grin he flashed her was almost as false.

"Come on, come on, ye buggers!" roared Shay. "Are ye afraid the fishies'll eat yer bollocks?" The bosun was in knee-high water, but the loaded men behind him were driving the ramp deeper even though they were nearer the bank.

"Your highness," said Tekhao, rubbing his sweaty hands together. "And you, your highness," he added with a nervous nod to Ah were. "I trust the arrangements are to your satisfaction?"

Samlor was keyed up to the point that the question, intruding into his imagined future, had the impact of a blow. His face went pale and he opened his mouth to rip out a curse at the fat priest.

Before the words came awareness and contrition. He gripped Tekhao, forearm to forearm as if they were brothers taking leave, and said truthfully, "More than satisfactory, Tekhao, from beginning-" he nodded toward the temple enclosure. Another ramp of reed fascines led down from the roof where Samlor had constructed the wax boat.

"- to now."

"Now hold it, ye buggers!" roared Shay, dog-paddling against the sluggish current. "Don't let it float to bugger-all down the bloody river!"

"But now you'll have to excuse me," Samlor continued, "because it's time for my wife and I to-proceed."

"Oh, Prince Nanefer," mumbled the chief priest in a voice thick with emotion. "Oh, your highness. You don't know what that means to me. .»

As Samlor and Ahwere strode quickly down to the stone quay, he wondered what sort of man Tekhao would have been if he could give his god the sort of devotion he reserved for human superiors. A saint, very likely.

And very likely a much worse administrator of the temple and the land which it governed on behalf of the king.

Sailors splashed in the water to keep the boat from slamming into the quay. The wax vessel rode higher than a boat of wood, so the breeze was a greater danger than the current near the shore.

By contrast, the royal yacht sagged very low and the men who were swinging its bow to the stern of the wax vessel had to struggle hard. The mast, oars, and all moveable tackle had been stripped from the yacht, but it was now loaded with loose sand carried from beyond the edge of the river's annual flooding.

Samlor's armor and weapons lay atop the sand near the bow along with a bronze shovel. There was no other cargo.

Samlor unlatched the gold pin which bound the ends of his sash, then handed the garment to a waiting temple servitor. He pulled his richly-embroidered tunic over his head and tossed that to the man also before stepping out of his sandals.

The stone was warm and a welcome reminder of the cosmos as he walked to the edge of the quay. Ahwere, nude also and regally beyond self-consciousness, was beside him.

Shay had pulled himself aboard the royal yacht and was waiting in the bow with a coiled line. One end of the line was tied to the support of the forward steering oar. The bosun was eyeing the sternpost of the other craft doubtfully, since it too was made of wax.

Samlor stepped down into the wax boat, supporting his weight on his arms as long as possible so that his feet touched rather than slammed the planking. The wax slipped beneath the pressure of his toes. The men treading water to keep boat and dock from smashing together cursed as the hull wobbled and thrust them beneath the surface.

Ahwere followed with the natural grace of a gull banking through the air. Samlor reached a hand out to her, but he found the best help he could provide was to lean toward the other side of the high-floating vessel so that it did not tilt so much.

"Nanefer, are you sure. .?" called Shay from the bow of the other vessel. The bosun's concern for the situation had driven normal honorifics from his vocabulary.

"Yes, yes," Samlor agreed, making his way cautiously to the stern between the lumpish pairs of wax «crewmen» with fragile oars in their ill-formed hands. The steering sweep in the stern was becoming increasingly transparent as full sunlight raked through it, evidence that the wax was softening and would soon begin to sag.

"Throw me the rope!" Samlor ordered as the bosun hesitated.

"Sir!" Shay muttered and tossed the hawser expertly to his superior. The coil opened as it flicked across the water, so that Samlor caught only the final loop; just enough to take a turn around the wax sternpost and bind the vessels together.

Ahwere hugged herself, not in modesty but as if she stood naked in a cold rain. The sunstruck hull shifted greasily beneath Samlor's toes. He bound off the hawser with a face as emotionless as the clear sky above them.

"Jump out now, Shay," Samlor called to the man in the other vessel.

"Nanefer, I-"

"Jump out!" Samlor cried in a voice thin with fear. "On your life!"

Shay nodded and obeyed by leaping like a baboon to the quay where sailors fended the vessel from the stone with poles.

The wax boat wobbled. Its sternposts started to give as the current put strain on the hawser. The six wax oarsmen bent forward, then leaned back against the drag of their oars. Ahwere cried out as the vessel surged away from the quay despite the inertia of the sand-laden boat it towed.

The sternpost held. There were real planks beneath Samlor's feet as he took the steering oar.

The oarsmen were no longer crude parodies but humans in all but color and their stony lack of expression. They stroked at a measured rate, plunging their blades so deep in the water that real oars would have fractured under the strain. The wax shafts held, and the waxen torsos bent and lifted, driving the linked vessels against the current.

The oarsmen's faces were turned toward Samlor by necessity of their position, but the blank eyes paid him no attention.

Ahwere stood near the bow, facing her husband. She was afraid but no longer crying. He had thought when he asked her to join him that she would prove steadfast where no one else could be trusted. Now, looking into the love in her eyes, he knew he was right.

The crowd on the quay were watching the vessels, but the few who tried to walk along the bank beside them were stopped at once by the swamp. Reed bracts waved sluggishly in a breeze that did not touch the sun-hammered surface of the water.

They had reached midstream. The Wall of Tatenen was a black stroke between the river and the vegetation beyond it on the starboard side.

Samlor leaned against the steering oar. The starboard oarsmen feathered their blades for the space of three mechanically-powerful strokes by the wax figures on the port side.

The vessel's bow came around while the towed yacht eased closer, slackening the hawser between them.

All oars striking together, the wax boat drove for the bank. The hawser thrummed taut and the yacht unwillingly obeyed its pull.

Samlor let go of the steering oar, needless now that they were committed whether he would or no. He walked forward, between the wax men who cared nothing for him or for anything, and put his arms around his wife.

The face in the middle of the stone wall was beginning to blaze. It was already brighter than the sun, and its color was the blue of lightning crashing in the heart of a storm. The linked vessels were stroking toward it as fast as a man could walk on level ground.

Ahwere put her arm around Samlor's waist so that they stood side by side, watching the visage of Tatenen grow into a glaring tunnel that pierced the stone and the swamp and all the universe beyond.

They plunged into the tunnel. Hell roared around them.

Where the wax prow should have flattened on stone, the vessel bucked. Samlor heard Ahwere murmur, "Nanefer-" 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.

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 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.

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 them 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 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.

CHAPTER 17

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.

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 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-and one companion-which were with him now.

The reason for the weapons was clear enough.

Samlor jumped to the ground, then steadied himself on the rail of the wax boat as his bare feet started to slip out from under him. The glass surface forgave no imbalance, and his body did not move as it ought to. He didn't weigh what he should, though he hadn't noticed the difference until he left the boat.

The worm watched, rotating its head to follow him as he walked carefully to the yacht and the equipment aboard it. Half the creature's length was in loose coils and the pillared neck, but the rest of the worm was a tight, shimmering mound in the center of the crater.

Samlor hopped aboard the yacht, aided by his lessened weight (though the change made him clumsy). He began to don his armor, a task made more difficult by the damage it had received in the tunnel of fire.

The helmet was now useless. It was a cap of bull's hide, and the leather had shrunk and warped under the kisses of the blue flame. Samlor tossed it aside, less regretful than was the prince whose eyes were for the moment his eyes. It hadn't been an impressive piece of battle armor to the caravan master anyway; though Heqt alone knew what would be useful against the worm.

The shield was a solid piece, though of unfamiliar construction. The back reinforcement of thin boards had cracked, but its metal rim continued to stretch the facing of thick crocodile hide firmly in place. The bony scutes weren't quite as effective as metal, but Samlor was glad to heft the shield by its bronze handgrip and measure the worm again over the rim.

Instead of a sword, he had an axe with a thick crescent blade, pinned to the shaft at both horns as well as in the center. The blade was a foot long across the horns, almost half the total length of the weapon. It didn't balance as well as a sword of the length and weight, nor did it have the penetration of a narrow-bladed axe which concentrated its impact on an edge a few fingers broad. It would have to do.

Or not, as the case might be.

The painted leather over the wooden daggersheath had emerged black and tattered from the tunnel, but it and the belt to which it was fastened would serve. Samlor slid the blade out to check it and be sure that the warped sheath wasn't binding.

The watered steel blade would have brought a curse to his lips-if the lips had not been for Nanefer to rule.

Well, it was a good dagger, thought Samlor as his body buckled the belt around its bare waist and felt its tender skin protest at the feel of seared leather. Tunics would never have survived the tunnel, though he would trade the shield now for a simple linen kirtle. The fact of being clothed might help him more than the shield's physical protection.

Armed and as prepared as he could be, Samlor turned to step from the yacht's bow and collided with his wife.

They had spoken normally on the vessel that brought them here, but nowhere else in this desolation was there sound. Ahwere's mouth worked, blurting a tearful apology for being in the way, but the words were only in her eyes and her husband's heart.

Samlor held Ahwere as she backed away, clasping her with his elbows because his hands were filled with weapons. "My love, my-" he murmured, but his voice did not ring even within the chambers of his skull. This hellish place!

But he had known it would not be a place for men.

He kissed Ahwere's hair, the lobe of her ear, and last her tear-wet lips.

When he turned again to battle the worm for its hoard, a part of his mind kept remembering that he and his wife could return now with no cost or further danger.

Samlor's own mind and emotions jarred often against those of the royal prince whom he now was, but in one respect their personalities were stamped from the same die: they had not come this far in order to turn back.

The worm let him approach, angling its head as he drew nearer. The height of its neck did not change, so that it became a tower threatening him more at every step.

The crater floor felt dry but neither hot nor cold. It was adequate footing so long as he remembered to watch his balance-which not even the gods themselves could do in the midst of battle.

Was the worm a god?

It struck when he was ten feet away from it, so close that Samlor would have begun his rush when his foot next left the ground.

Nanefer's reflexes were not what they should have been, but this place permitted him to interpose his unnaturally-light shield to the creature's hammerblow. The blue glow of the worm's snout struck just below the upper rim and clung there like a lodestone to steel. Samlor's legs flew out from under him, but he used the torque of the creature's impact to help swing his own counterblow.

The axe cut helve deep. Samlor felt the crunch of a hard surface, though the worm's body rippled like free-flowing water. When he dragged the blade free, the edges of the long cut sprang away from the wound and made it gape still wider. The interior glistened without color or definite features.

The worm lifted. Samlor had been thrown onto his hips and shoulders, bruised but not seriously injured. His left hand held the shield in a deathgrip so that the creature picked him up as it recovered itself.

A loop of the worm's body wrapped itself about his legs and began to flow upward. The creature was glass-smooth and as powerful as a boulder rolling downhill.

Samlor cut at the worm's neck. His grip on the shield anchored him, but the blow was awkward and crossed the previous wound at a slant. Again the flesh gaped when the axe crushed its way through the surface.

The coil was around his thighs. He felt the flesh tear over the points of his hips. Only the thickness of the worm's body prevented it from crushing his bones. The ring of pressure slipped higher, and a second loop wound itself over Samlor's ankles.

He chopped at the creature's neck with hysterical fury which made up for lack of strength or skill in the physical arts of war. His vision blurred as the upper coil squeezed against his diaphragm, but he did not need to aim the blows. He was swinging at the full length of his arm, and the worm's hold froze it and the man into the same relationship for every stroke.

A jerk of the worm's head snatched the shield away and flung it upward as paired images which merged and spread and merged again while Samlor tried to follow their tumbling arc.

He didn't realize how high he was until the coils dropped him. He was as limp as a sack of millet when he fell, so exhaustion saved him from serious injury when he hit the ground. The worm had lifted him thirty feet in the air-if air was the word-and he would surely have broken bones on the glass surface if he had been tense.

Ahwere's touch more than her strength helpe'd Samlor rise. Her right hand still held the bronze shovel with which she had vainly battered the worm's flank. Her face held no emotion, but that coldness and the fierceness with which she tugged at her husband's shoulders showed that she feared she was trying to lift a corpse.

The worm's body wobbled in curves like those of surf on a low shoreline. Samlor hugged his wife with his free hand as he staggered to his feet. The burning sensation on his left hand meant either blisters or skin stripped when the worm's convulsions tore loose the shield for anything human strength could do.

The creature's head-the first two or three feet of a body which was the same diameter throughout-hung by a thread of glittering skin. It did not move when the body thrashed, and the glow that had licked across the end was gone.

Motioning Ahwere to stay back, Samlor stepped to the worm. He was having trouble breathing because of the way his ribs were bruised, but that was only one more pain in a body which hurt all over. He had open skin on his right elbow and left knee, from friction with the worm's coils or the way he sprawled to the ground.

He heard his blood pounding but not the rasp of air being dragged into his lungs. Everything else about the way he breathed in this place was normal-including the way his chest hurt when he did it-but there was no air.

The only thing in this place which mattered was the Book of Tatenen-and the fact that the book's guardian was dead. Samlor stepped close to the worm; paused as he measured the distance; and brought the axe' down on the skin which still joined the two sections of the creature.

He used both hands for the blow. Powdered glass and shards of the axeblade sparked away from the impact, numbing Samlor's hands and leaving a white scar on the crater's floor while the worm's motion settled into a gelatinous trembling in both parts of its body.

Ahwere touched his arm from behind. Samlor threw down the useless axe helve before he turned to embrace his wife again.

All he had to do now was to retrieve the book.

When the worm died, its body uncoiled into a sprawl dwarfed by the size of the crater. The rim, jagged as the fangs of a wolf-fish, gleamed beneath the rays of a sun which had remained precisely overhead throughout the battle.

The gray iron box which the worm had encircled until it died was now visible.

Ahwere grabbed Samlor by the arm and turned him with a strength which surprised him as much as what she was doing. There was a scream on her face. His eyes were already looking beyond her.

The two pieces of the worm had shivered into contact. A blue glare that hurt Samlor's eyes was spluttering between the ragged edges of the creature's skin. Where the arcs touched, they welded the portions together as if Samlor had not shattered his axe in making sure the separation was complete.

The worm's tail moved in a series of water-smooth curves, covering the box again. The head lifted, its tip glowing lambently as it searched, then focused on the pair of humans.

Samlor drew his dagger with fingers made clumsy by despair, but the instinct with which the prince stabbed hilt deep into the nearest loop of the body was one which the caravan master could applaud. Cutting the head off had done nothing permanent, but perhaps there were vital organs somewhere else in the creature's length.

Not that there was so much as a hope of finding a vital spot in a squirming hundred feet of body.

A loop of the worm knocked Samlor down and slithered across him. The coils couldn't encircle a victim until the head had a grip to anchor them.

Samlor let the creature's own motion draw the blade clear in a long gash. He stabbed again. The steel gleamed with clear ichor. There was no resistance to its passage after the point dimpled the metallic skin.

Samlor pulled himself from beneath the slick weight of the worm's coils and the creature's head slammed onto the ground again. The blue/violet flicker of its snout burned like the heart of a glacier.

The shock left him with no other feeling in the arm he had thrown out to meet the impact. The worm's body cast itself around his ankles with the accuracy of a cattleman's rope.

Blue sparks played dazzlingly across the worm as the long gash began to arc itself closed.

Samlor screamed soundlessly. His weapon tore along the creature's flesh, so deeply the hilt bobbed against the skin like a shearwater's beak scoring the sea.

The blade parted the worm as easily as it would the pulp of a ripe melon-and the top of the cut began to regrow in blue arcs that made the hair stand upon Samlor's head. A loop was crushing his knees together. The touch of the worm's snout drove icy needles through his left arm and into his face and chest.

A coil buffeted Ahwere as she stepped past her trapped husband and poured a shovelful of sand into the cut he had just torn.

Minuscule lightning sealing the wound touched sand and flashed it into glass that spattered volcanically. Instead of healing the cut puckered, then swelled into an abscess boiling with power insulated from its proper use.

The pain in Samlor's legs was momentarily dizzying that he did not realize the worm had dropped him.

The worm's snout brushed the surface of the abscess. Near the swelling the creature's body spasmed uncontrolled, but the slither of its tail out of its protective coil was deliberate.

The worm had twitched its body a dozen feet from its attacker. Samlor tried to stand but his legs failed him. He slid himself across the crater floor, using his numb left hand as a flipper.

The worm's head twisted from the wound to Samlor. The glow of its snout was still blue but shot through with sparks of sullen red. Samlor twisted his arm. The long blade jutting from the heelside of his fist pointed up, ready to meet the creature if the creature dared to strike.

Ahwere, running up with more sand, flickered in Samlor's peripheral vision. He drove his knife into the worm's side again with a bloody joy that more than balanced the shock of the creature's snout against his unprotected upper chest. The pain shuddering across his nerves ripped the watered steel blade in a jerky zig-zag across the shimmering hide which exploded as Ahwere poured sand into the wound.

This time Samlor's legs worked well enough for him to leap astride the creature as it tried to escape him. He stabbed downward, and the worm's flowing body dragged itself along the pitiless blade of the dagger. The edges of the wound shone like iron as a bellows strokes the hearth, but they did not arc or meld together.

When Ahwere thrust her shovel into the wound, the third load of sand sank through the worm's flesh like lead in hot wax. The creature writhed upward in a great loop that flung Samlor away. As it twisted in the air, the unscarred skin on the underside of its body blackened and sloughed to spray bubbles of molten glass onto the crater floor.

The worm's head and tail were battering the ground. The snout melted a patch of the crater the first time it struck. Then the glow turned inward and the worm's head began to collapse around a bead of orange fire.

Samlor limped over to the worm's body and began methodically to hack it in half. The skin was powdery, and the flesh beneath began to mottle when it was exposed.

The sand which Ahwere shoveled onto her husband's butchery clung to the flesh. There were only a few sparks to fleck the surfaces with glass.

When Samlor finished his work, the two parts of the worm were as still as the sun above. The creature's head had melted several feet back along its body, leaving tarry sludge on the crater floor.

Ahwere held a final shovelful of sand. When she saw that it was needless, she turned the shovel over with royal hauteur, scorning the worm and the glittering crater where it lay dead.

Samlor's dagger was nicked by tiny serrations near the crossguard where the worm's skin had resisted edge-on cutting. They would polish out when he next sharpened the blade, just as his scrapes and bruises would heal and the terrible fatigue-produced trembling would leave his muscles.

The worm's snout had not marked the arm and shoulder where it gripped him, but there was blue fire deep in his bones in those places.

Samlor walked to the iron box with painful deliberation. Ahwere followed him with the bronze shovel raised like a sceptre. She had understood the use of the shovel and sand when her husband had been too enveloped by the imminence of battle to imagine anything further.

You must have a companion whom you trust to the point of your very life, the spirits he commanded had whispered to him as he made preparations.

He had brought the right companion. He had brought weapons and armor-and a shipload of sand when a basket would have been sufficient.

But nothing is excessive when it results in triumph.

Samlor squatted down before the iron box, a cube whose plain sides were the length of his forearm. It had no lock or hinges, but the mind of Prince Nanefer smiled at it. Samlor's finger traced a sign on the glass of the crater floor while his lips mimed words.

The edges of the box broke apart as cleanly as the sections of an orange pried by careful fingers. One side flopped toward Samlor. When he hopped backward to avoid it, pain blasted both his knees and reminded him of the bruising the worm had given them. He fell to his buttocks on the glass and got up gingerly.

The top of the iron box lay on an inner container of richly-chased copper. Samlor pushed the iron away and squatted to survey the copper. On its sides were engraved hunting scenes-smiling gods striding over cities and fields, lifting men on their tridents like gigged frogs.

Samlor's mind grew cold and Nanefer lost his scornful smile. His finger drew a different glyph between his splayed knees.

A shaving of metal like the waste from a graver's tool began to lift along the upper edge of the copper, at first slowly and then at the speed of flame devouring chaff. The copper was thin as foil, but it would have been proof against material tools-even the watered steel of the dagger which had ripped apart the box's guardian.

The copper twisted as Samlor's spell sheared it into plates. The face of Tatenen, the Great God, seemed to wink as the front fell to display an inner casket of juniper wood.

Prince Nanefer was wholly sunk into his magic, but Samlor's mind processed differently the data from the senses which they shared. Samlor saw Ahwere standing spearshaft straight beside them, pretending that she did not know what her husband was doing.

There were tears on her cheeks, but to wipe them off would be an admission.

Samlor's finger moved against the ground. The box puffed into smoky fire as enveloping as a wrapping of silk that lifted toward the sun and disappeared in a black train.

The fire ceased as abruptly as it had ignited. The juniper box was wholly consumed, and the box within-for of course there was a box within-was an intarsia of ivory figures on an ebony ground.

The figures were of men and women, carved so perfectly that their features were recognizable even though the panels were less than a foot in either dimension. They were palace functionaries and generals of the Napatan army, and they marched in procession behind the funerary symbols of the royal house. The sarcophagus of King Merneb was being carried at the bottom of the panel.

Samlor drew a glyph and spoke a silent word. His mind put blinders on his eyes so that he could not, would not, see if his wife had noticed the design.

The box fell apart, ivory separating from ebony and the whole tumbling to the ground like the sides of a trench cut in sand. Within was a still-smaller casket of silver.

The progress continued in polished figures against an oxidized background. There were two sarcophagi on the silver, clearly identified by the symbols borne high before each. Ahwere and Merib were being carried to their tomb.

The time for doubt is before you start a course of action which has certain death as the price of failure. Nanefer spoke and drew the articles of his spell. Samlor would have done the same if he controlled the body in which his mind now resided.

A litter of previous containers lay where Samlor had been working, plates and parts and ash that his hands swept aside to open the next box. The silver casket did not crumble or fall apart. Instead its surface became translucent, then transparent, and at last wholly insubstantial. It vanished as utterly as if it had never enclosed the box of gold which remained.

There was no need of magic to open the gold casket. Unlike the other containers, this one had a mechanical catch.

Samlor picked up the box, knowing that Ahwere's eyes were on him. The casket was heavy, even in this place.

There were two figures on the box. One was a perfect semblance of Nanefer, molded into the sliding bolt of pure gold. The other shape was the head of a great crocodile covered with lustrous black niello. All he had to do to open the box was to slide the bolt into the jaws of the crocodile.

Ahwere was crying silently. Samlor's hand moved while his mind concentrated on void and the purity of his intention.

He felt the click as the gold disappeared into black jaws. The lid of the box rose by itself.

The sun and stars watched coldly as Samlor lifted the silk-wrapped object from the final box.

It was not precisely a book, though there was no obviously better way to describe it. It was a flat crystal a palm's breadth square on the major surfaces and the thickness of a finger on the sides. The edges looked sharp enough to cut, but they felt safely rounded when Samlor touched them.

He looked up at Ahwere in triumph with the Book of Tatenen in one hand and its red silk wrapper in the other. The grief on her face hardened his visage and brought a flash of anger to his eyes. Even though she was a part of the victory. Ahwere was unwilling to admit that her husband had been right in the course she had opposed from the beginning. .

But he was above anger. He had won against the very gods!

Gesturing in brusque command, Samlor led his wife back to the vessel that had brought them here. His weight was normal again, and sound returned-though for the moment it was only the sound of Ahwere's suppressed sniffles.

He squatted to examine the object his courage and learning had gained.

The Book of Tatenen was so clear that Samlor could see the whorls of his hand through it, but there were more fires sparkling in the heart of it than the light of this harsh place should have wakened in a diamond's facets. Samlor raised the dense crystal slowly and held it to his forehead. It was cold, not as the worm's snout had been but rather as one bare hand feels to the other in a winter storm.

He spoke the first Word of Opening which his spirits had taught him back in the realm of men.

It was as if he had stepped from a tomb into a garden on a golden summer day. He was all life in the cosmos, plant as well as animal-and doubtful things he could not describe but which he was while the book lay cool against his skin.

All their senses were his senses, all their speech was as clear to him as the voice of Ahwere when they lay together for the first time making love.

There was no confusion. His knowledge was godlike; and, for the time the crystal touched him, Samlor hil Samt was a god.

He lowered the book. Reality shrank back to a glass-floored crater and the wide, wet eyes of his beloved. The blessed wonder of his expression cooled the fear with which she watched her husband, certain of disaster though triumphant by every indicator save instinct.

Samlor lifted the Book of Tatenen and spoke the second Word of Opening.

If the first spell had brought him Summer, the second put him in the heart of clear, dry Winter glittering on an icefield. Every force of the cosmos focused on him, matrices so intricate and perfect that they were beyond understanding.

But he understood.

The injuries his body had sustained while battling the worm-the forces and balances that caused fluids to move or rest, solids to touch but not mingle-were his to know and to change by that knowledge. He knew that his bruises and scrapes were gone, that his cracked ribs had knitted and the torn ligaments in his knees were whole.

And in the same way and with the same control, he was aware of the patterns of light, motion and attraction unifying all matter in the cosmos into whirling order.

He was god, and there could be no god greater than him.

Samlor was aware that he was lowering the crystal in the same way he knew bits of debris were blazing into shooting stars in the night sky of Napata. The matrix of the cosmos faded and vanished, leaving nothing behind more substantial than the memory of a breeze.

Ahwere waited with the tense calm of a soldier before battle, savoring every instant which has not brought disaster. Samlor reached out and put the Book of Tatenen in her hands.

"Go on," he said quietly. "Raise it to your forehead. I'll speak the word."

She obeyed, but she moved with the same hopeless resignation that a condemned man walks to the gallows. When the crystal touched her forehead, Samlor smiled toward her closed eyelids and spoke the first Word of Opening.

Ahwere's face seemed transfused by an inner light, though the emotion which silhouetted there was not joy. Her eyes opened as she lowered the stone.

"You see," Samlor prompted. "We've won. Ours is the cosmos."

"There's no life here," said Ahwere. "Here." She swept an arc of the horizon with her spread fingers. "Only you and I… and we don't belong here."

Though she was not chiding him deliberately, Samlor could not mistake the awareness that there were no absolutes. His wife still saw a cost that not even gaining the cosmos justified.

"Put the book against your forehead." he ordered curtly, and he spoke the second word when she obeyed.

This time Ahwere's eyes remained open. For a moment Samlor thought he saw ice crystals forming within the pupils, replicating the pattern of nodes and forces which balanced the cosmos.

But Ahwere put the book down, and her eyes were only sad. "Here," she said, returning to Samior the object for which he had risked all. "Everything is teetering. The world, the heavens. It will have to fall soon, won't it?"

"Don't be foolish!" he responded, snapping at Ahwere for the first time since they had become lovers. "The cosmos is balance. What is, must be."

But there was a nagging doubt in Samlor's mind. He and Ahwere had seen-had been-the same thing, but the minds with which they viewed it could hold different truths.

"We'll go back now," he said, rising to his feet in preparation to setting on the oarsmen. Before he could give them the order, their backs hunched as they drew powerfully on the oars. The wax boat rose and, with the yacht in train, began to slide back toward the crater rim.

They should not have moved until he ordered them to do so. Frowning, then with a professionally blank expression, Samlor began to wrap the Book of Tatenen in the silk in which he had found it. Everything was going as he wished it to.

But he was less certain that events were moving under his control.

They slipped through the knife-edged opening in the crater's rim as flawlessly as they had entered. The very precision bothered Samlor obscurely, for the wax oarsmen acted more perfectly than he could ever have imagined. It shouldn't matter. He couldn't tell the complex of his muscles how to walk, either, or explain to the palace baker how to create the loaves of bread.

The disturbing aspect of the oarsmen's competence was the fact that they were lumps of wax, and the skill poured into their empty forms did not come from the princely magician who had created them.

The linked vessels slid swiftly across the ruined craters of this world. Now that his mind was no longer fogged by anticipation, Samlor could see that the angle of the shadows changed as they moved. The sun hung permanently over the place from which he had stolen the Book of Tanenen. Despite himself, he shivered. He put his arm around

Ahwere both for his own comfort and in sudden appreciation of what she felt.

There was no more of a visible separation between this place of craters and the swamp than there had been in the opposite direction. The wax boat staggered as if the yacht behind had caught again on a lip of rock. Then they were plunging into muggy softness wholly different from the sterile purity of the landscape which the worm had guarded.

Ahwere gasped softly, but Samlor's heart had leaped also and his arm tightened on Ahwere's waist. If the crocodile were waiting for them, he would raise the book and blast the creature with a word. .

But the great carnivore had disappeared, and the still greater beasts which had splashed and bellowed in the swamp were gone as well. Nothing remained but the soggy heat and the reeds nodding dimly beneath a red sun that seemed to be nearing the horizon. Here, at least, time passed as it did in Napata.

"The. .," said Ahwere. Swallowing so that her voice did not catch during the words, she went on, "The fire is next, then?"

"It can't hurt us," said Samlor.

Water curling around the hulls of the linked vessels gurgled like a drowning giant.

Sarnlor gave the lie to his own statement by lifting the crystal toward his forehead in case-

The invisible membrane separating the swamp from the tunnel shimmered across them like a curtain into night. The flames that had clawed the vessels when they first entered the tunnel now glowered like the eyes of a whipped dog. The oarsmen stroked forward, so shadowy that they could have been no more than the lumps of wax which Samlor had formed.

One bubble of fire spat toward them, but it was no more than a spark flung from a collapsing backlog. Even before it reached the barrier which should still protect the wax boat, the spot of blue fire disintegrated into a thousand scintillae and vanished.

The vessel lurched again and, straining the charred hawser behind, splashed thunderously into the current of the River Napata.

"We're safe," said Ahwere.

The tone of her voice reflected the fear which ruled Samlor's own feelings. Returning to the Realm of Men meant that the sun hammered them and that the gnats which buzzed from the marshy banks were used to preying on humans. There was a brightly-colored crowd waiting on the temple quay, folk whose questions would not cease even though they were directed at a man who had become a god.

And for all Ahwere's stated confidence, neither she nor her husband really felt safe.

Samlor looked back. The ancient wall was solid again, and the relief of the god's face was anonymous beneath its coating of silt.

The priests of Tatenen were a scarlet and gold bloc at the end of the quay, but Shay the bosun had elbowed his squat form into their midst. As the boat neared the quay, the crewmen backed water so fiercely that spray flew over Samlor and Ahwere in the bow-and reminded them that they were still naked. Ahwere murmured in despair, reminding her husband that they remained human and members of society despite the powers he had gained.

Shay tossed a line, ignoring the shouts of greeting and benediction from the remainder of the crowd. Samlor snubbed the rope off one-handed on the wax bowsprit-and found the bowsprit was only wax which pulled away in white fractures when it took the first strain.

The bosun swore, then bellowed to bring forward more of his sailors. The royal yacht drifted with the momentum of the sand still filling it. The wooden prow crushed the wax stern with no more sound than the gasp of air bubbling out through broken seams.

Ahwere glanced at her husband, then reached for the stone coping. She didn't have a chance to touch it because Shay's broad hand snatched her from the crumpling boat and then reached for her husband.

Samlor had a sudden vision of branching timelines as his bosun jerked him to safety. If he dropped the Book of Tatenen here, it would sink into the mud at the bottom of the river. He would never find it again, though he had all the resources of the temple-and the kingdom-with which to dredge and drain. .

He did not drop the silk-wrapped crystal.

The wax boat, crushed and already slumping with the sun's heat, began to drift downstream while Shay leaped aboard the yacht and called for more help. His curses at the charring and claw-marks which defaced the vessel were heartfelt.

Tekhao and several other priests were babbling oratorical-ly while servitors offered clothing and refreshments, but Samlor had a mind only for his wife and their infant now nestling again at Ahwere's breast.

He put his arms around them both and said, "This is the beginning of a new age for mankind, and we three are its leaders."

But when the silken parcel in his left hand brushed Merib, the child began to wail.

CHAPTER 18

THE FESTIVAL OF THANKSGIVING going on in the temple courtyard was an enthusiastic background, even in the royal suite facing the river. Rushlights on the roof made the reed tops shimmer and turned the stone causeway into something softly metallic.

A single lamp lighted the room where Samlor made his preparations and Ahwere crooned to Merib in a chair across from her husband.

Samlor brushed the final glyphs onto his parchment with a sure hand. He used sepia, cuttlefish ink, for his medium because its animal nature-and that of the parchment- would add to the virtue of the spell he was creating.

The Book of Tatenen could not be committed to human memory. In use, the mind became a facet of the book instead of the reverse.

But portions of the book could be excerpted by a man of the proper skills and powers; and one portion was enough to safeguard him against attack by men or gods.

"There. .," Samlor breathed as he contemplated the page of writing. He felt soggy, weighted down as if he had eaten salty food and drunk heavily. It was merely his reaction to returning to the Realm of Men after another excursion in the dazzling acuity of the Book of Tatenen.

Merib was asleep. Ahwere got up, cradling the infant with an ease which belied the slenderness of her form. She took the jug of beer from the sideboard and carried it to her husband.

Samlor smiled wanly at her and set the jug on the table beside his brush and parchment. "Next you'll do this, too," he said, reaching up to take her hand.

Ahwere shrugged, resigned and bitter, though she made an effort to pretend otherwise. "You're the scholar, my husband," she said. "I'll never learn-" her chin nodded toward the parchment. "Any more than you'll ever bear a child."

Merib whimpered softly.

Salmor didn't let his face set in anger, but animation of a hard sort prodded through his weariness. "There's no reason you can't learn to read and write," he said. "Just as Merib will. It's very important now."

"Yes, in time," said Ahwere in what a different tone could have made agreement. She walked back to her chair and sat.

Samlor poured beer into the mug which served as the jug's cover. "When I've drunk this," he said, though he had tried to explain the process before, "the spell of protection will be a part of me. Nothing will be able to harm me again."

He rolled the parchment and set it on end in the mug. The pale beer began to darken as it dissolved the ink. Fluid climbed the parchment cylinder slowly by osmosis.

"Yes," said Ahwere. "That must be why everything is out of balance. Because of what we've done."

Samlor turned the rolled document carefully and set it back in the beer with the other end down. The remainder of the symbols added their substance in swirls of color that merged with earlier glyphs and lost definition. The fluid was now the color of the yacht's cedarwood rail after the tunnel had seared it.

"Don't be foolish," he said sharply. "We are part of the balance. Nothing's wrong. And you will learn the glyphs so that the book protects you as well."

He dropped the soggy parchment on the table. It oozed a mixture of beer and ink and power. Without looking at his wife, Samlor lifted the mug and drank down its contents. "Yes, my husband," said Ahwere. "I will learn the glyphs. If there is time."

CHAPTER 19

THERE WERE CLOUDS both on the western horizon and high in the east, but the sky directly above the yacht was clear and perfectly framed by the sunset. The west was a mass of boiling red with only one opening. The beam which escaped through that gap flared in a great keyhole across the opposite cloudbank.

"Unlocking the cosmos," said Samlor cheerfully. Ahwere looked down as if he had slapped her.

Pursing his lips, Samlor got up from his couch and walked to the rail, ducking beneath the deck awning. Merib scooted across the polished planks and caught him by the ankle, gurgling, while Ahwere and the nurse watched cautiously.

Shay stumped toward him from the bow. "Sir," he said, "there'll be a moon t'night less it clouds over. The wind's fair, and anyhow there's no place t' tie up on this stretch as isn't open as a cabin boy's bum. I've said we'll go on s' long as the sky holds, keepin' two men by the sweeps for safety's sake. Ah, with your permission."

Samlor played with Merib's thin hair while the boy pulled himself upright, using his father's leg as a brace. The women, shaded by the awning, were part of the dusk. Muted voices and the odor of leeks drifted back from the crewmen forward.

"All right," said Samlor. "Do as you think fit."

The weight of the crystal wrapped against his bosom concentrated Samlor's awareness. He could use the Book of Tatenen to ensure fair weather; to jerk the sun back in the sky to light their way; to transport himself, those with him, and the very ship to the capital in an instant.

But there was no purpose in any of those things. Nothing, at least, to justify subverting the powers of the cosmos. Now that he had gained his end, Samlor's viewpoint was changing.

His left hand idly fitted and withdrew from the notches across the rail. Samlor was unaware of what he was doing, but Shay followed the action and grimaced.

"Sorry about that, sir," the bosun muttered. "Have t' replace the bloody section, there and farther forrard. Got the bloody sand out and burnished the bloody burn marks out, but them bloody gouges…"

Where the crocodile had clambered aboard the yacht, Samlor realized. Four parallel scratches in the cedar, each of them so broad and deep that his index finger fit loosely within the slot.

"That doesn't matter, bosun," Samlor said sharply. "The boat served its purpose, so the damage is of no account."

He would not be chided by a commoner for harming- trivial harm! – a vessel he owned. Just because Shay was responsible for the vessel, that didn't mean the prince its owner could not use it any way he pleased! Why-

The flood of unspoken anger halted. Samlor blinked at himself in amazement. He was as a god in his power, in immortality and in knowledge. But still he thought as the man he had been since birth. Not a bad man, but human, despite the Book of Tatenen carried beneath his girdle.

The yacht rolled so steeply that the rail against which Samlor leaned slapped the water.

Shay was gripping the awning's framework with a sailor's instinct that never left him without a handhold when aboard a vessel. He bellowed, "Stand to\" forward to his men, most of whose cries indicated they were as shocked as Samlor was.

When the yacht tilted sideways, Samlor hugged the rail with both arms. His torso hung over what should have been water. Instead, he was looking into the open jaws of a crocodile whose head was longer than Samlor was tall.

The eye turned to him did not wink with pale reflection, it burned blue like the tunnel of flame or the snout of the worm.

Samlor screamed, but his desperate grasp was too late to save Merib. The infant catapulted past his father and wailed as the jaws closed over him.

The crocodile sank as suddenly as it had appeared. When its black claws released the rail, the yacht rolled sharply to the other side, bouncing Ahwere into the covered deckhouse again.

"My son!" she cried. "Save my son!"

Samlor had the crystal out of its wrappings even before the vessel had ceased to bob violently back and forth. He spoke the word that found Merib and brought him back to the arms of his mother while the woman cried and sailors shouted in terrified confusion.

But not even the Book of Tatenen could bring the dead to life.

"OH, THIS is so terrible," muttered Tekhao lugubriously. "He had royal eyes, your highness, royal eyes. He would have been a great king."

Then he sneezed echoingly in the tomb chamber.

"My wife and I appreciate your sacrifice, Tekhao," said Samlor, bitterly amused to find that grief had reduced his mind to banalities. "If you would leave us with our-with our. . For a mom-"

"But of course, your highness," the chief priest blurted. "Your highness," he added with another bow to be sure that he had not slighted Princess Ahwere.

Tekhao had made a sacrifice: his tomb, excavated and lined with red granite brought from desert cliffs south of the capital. It was an exceptionally fine burial place for anyone below royal rank.

And even for a royal infant, if he drowned five hundred miles north of the family tombs across from the capital. The weather was hot and the air at the river's surface almost as humid as the water itself. No type or degree of embalming would permit the tiny corpse to be transported to the capital-except as a mass so putrescent that the bones would slosh within it.

Samlor could not hear Ahwere weeping, but the tear streaks on her face swelled regularly as yet another drop

slipped toward her chin. He put his arm around her waist and, with an urging that was barely short of force, he moved her with him to the edge of the bier.

The only lights within the tomb were the blotches of red from the perforated incense burners at each corner. In this enclosure the fumes had a sharpness that would have passed unnoticed in the open air.

Samlor did not need that to remind him of the bitterness of death.

"Farewell, my son," Ahwere whispered.

The lid of the inner wooden casket waited beside the bier. It was painted with a lifelike representation of Merib, a hasty job which spoke well of the skill of the temple craftsmen. The stone sarcophagus was unfinished and far too large for its burden, but there had been no time to carve one to the size of an infant.

Merib's eyelids flickered.

Samlor was sure the motion was a trick of the bad light, but his free hand snatched at the book in his girdle.

The lids opened. Instead of the painted shells which covered the eyeballs and would retain their roundness when protoplasm slumped, Merib stared at the world through blue fire shivering down into the violet. "Do not grieve, my mother," said the lips which were already withering. "Rejoice, for the cosmos is returning to balance."

The eyes closed.

Samlor did not catch his wife when she slumped to the floor, because his own limbs were trembling too badly.

CHAPTER 21

"THERE'S SOMETHING BIG going past on the surface," thought the carp as they snuffled the mud near the bank, "but it doesn't matter to us."

Lesser fish formed lesser thoughts, while birds bouncing among the reedtops chirped of food and the day's ending. Lizards stalked insects while a snake moved with glacial slowness toward a frog.

There were no crocodiles anywhere near the royal yacht.

Samlor lowered the Book of Tatenen with a sigh.

Ah were had been watching him from her couch. She touched her husband's hand and smiled, though her expression was almost lost in the dusk. Samlor squeezed her hand fiercely and kissed her, but he did not put away the crystal.

"I need to talk to Shay," he murmured as he stood and ducked from beneath the awning. The mast creaked as the fitful breeze strengthened. Tonight the sky was cloudless and the wind would stay fair all the way to the capital.

The Book of Tatenen would see to that.

The bosun had been waiting for Samlor. "Ah, didn't want t' bother you while you was thinkin', sir," he said. "But 1 figured we'd tie up along the bank about now." He would not meet his master's eyes.

"We'll go on," Samlor retorted sharply. "I want to reach the capital before-" He broke off, unwilling to say,

180

"Before my father hears of his grandson's death from someone else."

"Yessir, yessir," agreed Shay, bobbing his head. "It was only-the wind what made us heel the other, the other bloody dusk. Didn't know for sure what you'd want."

No one but Samlor had seen the crocodile, not even Ahwere. But his fingers now touched gouges which had not been in the railing when the yacht first sailed back from the Temple of Tatenen. It had not been wind that flung Merib to his death-nor had it been chance.

Shay strode forward, bawling his orders. Still standing, Samlor raised the crystal to his forehead again and became all life in the cosmos as color drained from the sky above the River Napata. There was nothing more dangerous near the yacht than the gnats which twilight drew from the reed beds anywhere. He would continue checking all the way to the capital.

If the gods sent another messenger, Samlor would blast it with enough violence to pay in a small way for what had happened to Merib.

"We'll sail through the night," Samlor said as he seated himself again beside Ahwere. "It'll be safe, and we'll-"

The worm came over the starboard rail behind Ahwere and snatched her into the water before she had time to scream. Samlor screamed instead.

"Oh, she's jumped, "she's jumped!" he heard the nursemaid crying as he commanded the cosmos through the book. "Oh, the grief of her poor darling son!"

All the forces in the cosmos balanced on a point, the Book of Tatenen and the mind of Samlor hil Samt. The currents that rolled Ahwere's body, the gurgle of air still trapped in her lungs-the minuscule scrape of sediment across her sightless eyes-all were his to know and to change.

The worm that seized her with its blue-glowing snout did not exist in the present cosmos.

Ahwere flashed back onto her couch with a slap of sodden garments. Only the dim light and confusion kept her reappearance from throwing the excited crewmen into blind panic.

She stirred, and for a moment Samlor thought he had been mistaken. He embraced Ah were while the nurse babbled and Shay gave orders to bring the vessel around to where he thought someone was still in the water.

Ahwere's eyes blazed blue when she opened them. Samlor's mouth drew back in a rictus of horror-and hope that still denied reality.

"Rejoice, my husband, my only love," said Ahwere's body. "Soon the cosmos will be in balance again."

"Who's overboard?" Shay demanded. "What's happened?"

A late-returning marsh hawk began to screech in dismal satisfaction.

CHAPTER 22

"SHE DIDN'T KILL herself," Samlor muttered. He had washed his hands a score of times since Ahwere's interment, but his mind told him his skin still was scented with the camphor and incense of her embalming. "They sent the worm to take her. The gods."

"Well," said Shay uncomfortably, "We'll be back soon. The palace should be in sight any time now."

Samlor looked down at the sun-bronzed water curling past their hull. "But I'd killed it. Though I suppose it was never alive."

"So it couldn't be killed," said the bosun, making conversation because his master demanded conversation to take his mind off the past-and the future. "Well, the gods set all our terms of life, sir. Yourselves as well as the like of-" he nodded forward " – me 'n the boys."

"Not me!" Samlor said, anger breaking through his despair like lightning in storm clouds. "They can't harm me-not since I drank the Spell of Safety."

"Well, I'm sure your father'll be glad to have you safe, at least, sir," Shay said, flicking splinters from the rail with his horny thumb. "He ain't well, I'd heard."

"No, he's not well," agreed Samlor. The blood was draining from his face as he imagined greeting King Merneb in a few more minutes, "Father," he said in his mind, "your daughter is dead, and with her the grandson whom you loved more than life itself. But don't worry: I, who carried them to their deaths, have returned."

"He'll want you to marry again," Shay was saying. "The daughter of one of the neighboring princes, I guess. Well, you may come to love her as much as you did your, well, the Princess Ahwere."

"I can't protect them," Samlor said, his eyes staring at water that they did not see. "I can't protect anyone but myself. A bolt of lightning, the collapse of a building- earthquake. Whoever I marry will die. Perhaps after we have children to take also."

"Well, sir," said the bosun with a strained chuckle. "I can't imagine things are so bad that the whole cosmos is turned to punish one man. Things don't work like that."

"Your highness!" called the lookout at the masthead. "The palace is in sight, and your father's on the wharf to greet us!"

"Go forward, bosun," Samlor ordered curtly. Shay bowed and obeyed.

The stern anchor, its wooden stock reeved through a hole bored in a large stone, hung from the rail opposite the steersman. Its line was bent around a deadeye and tied off.. The coffm-hilted dagger which Samlor carried in this life as the other severed the lashings easily.

He sheathed the knife and lifted the anchor from its hooks. The stone felt light-as light as Ahwere the first time he carried her to their couch. He turned around twice so that anchorline wrapped him.

"Your highness!" cried the steersman in horror. "Shay! Shay!"

The book was a hard outline clamped against him by his sash. It promised him all the powers in the cosmos.

Except the power of ever again being happy.

Samlor lurched against the rail and went over. The entangling line bound his legs together like a fish's tail, and the stone anchor carried him down as inexorably as a sword stroke.

The last thing he saw was the face of the bosun, staring over the side at him. Shay was smiling.

And his eyes were glowing blue.

CHAPTER 23

THE ANCHOR DRAGGED Samlor head first toward the bottom, but he was standing upright in Nanefer's tomb. The dissonant realities made him flop to the stone floor on all fours.

He bounced to his feet again at once. His skin was aflame with shock and embarrassment. Khamwas swayed but had not fallen.

"You cannot take the book," whispered the ghost of Ahwere. "We have bought it with our lives, all our lives."

The ghost of the infant murmured softly against her.

"I have come for the book, Prince Nanefer," said Khamwas. He held out his hand slowly, though he did not step toward the mummified figure as yet. The tremor in Khamwas' voice assured Samlor that Khamwas too had shared Nanefer's triumph-and its aftermath.

"I would have said the same, Prince Khamwas," said the corpse in a voice like a leather bellows creaking. The withered hands crossed on his lap moved. First tentatively and then with increasing smoothness, they began to unwrap the parcel which lay beneath them.

Samlor was dusting his palms carefully on his tunic'. His body had aches and strains in it that Nanefer would never have known in a full, royal, lifetime.

But it was Samlor's body, and he prayed he would never again wear another.

The corpse lifted the crystal from its silken cover. For a moment the Book of Tatenen was dimly outlined by flecks of color in its heart.

Nanefer's thin lips bent in a smile. Light flooded from it with the certainty of the sky brightening at sunrise. The tomb was flooded by it-white and as cold as frozen bone. Ahwere's sparkling ghost drifted or was driven back against a sidewall, so that nothing but bare floor separated the Napatan princes.

Nanefer waved a hand. Samlor's lamp, forgotten in the greater illumination, guttered out in what might have been a stray breeze down the length of the tunnel.

"Will you fight me with magic, Khamwas?" asked the corpse in a wheezingly jocular voice. "Or shall we play a game?"

"You are dead, Nanefer," said Khamwas. "You have no magic and no power to keep the book from me. But-" there was the least quaver in the voice which had been calmly steadfast " – I will play a game with you."

"Then let us play, my kinsman," said the corpse. "Since you have magic and 1, who am dead, have none."

Nanefer crooked a blackened index finger toward one corner of the chamber. The table there was set with a cross-hatched game board and two bowls of dried beans-black and white. Following the motion of the corpse's finger, the table slid just above the floor in an arc that ended with it resting before Nanefer's throne. The bowl of white beans faced Khamwas.

"I offer you the color of life, kinsman," said the corpse. "Savor it while you can."

Khamwas strode to the game board without glancing aside to see what the ghosts of Nanefer's family were doing. Samlor eyed them, ready to shout a warning if Ahwere attacked Khamwas' back. . but the veils of blue light that were her figure moved only to pat the insubstantial form of Merib.

Khamwas placed a white bean at an intersection near the Center of the board. Nanefer, moving with the assurance of an old man instead of an ancient corpse, set a black piece on an adjacent intersection.

Piece and piece, patterns began to fill the board. Beans clicked softly against the cross-hatched alabaster. None of the adults spoke, but the infant Merib began to whimper again.

The light blazing from the Book of Tatenen was as cold as that which the sun had thrown over the cratered emptiness where the book had been concealed.

Khamwas' face was masked by an expression of controlled emotion. The corpse set a piece and then, instead of withdrawing at once, picked up a quartet of white counters which his pieces had surrounded and captured. Khamwas placed another bean.

Samlor thought his companion was hunching to look shorter. Then he noticed that Khamwas' feet had sunk so that only his ankles showed above the solid concrete.

Nanefer set a counter and swept up more white beans.

The air in the tomb was so dry that sweat droplets sparkled only for a moment on Khamwas' forehead before they disappeared-to be replaced by more sweat. He placed a bean on the alabaster. Khamwas stood bolt upright, and his knees had sunk below the level of the floor.

Under the pitiless glare of the crystal, Samlor noticed a piece shade from white through a dusky gray, then gleam black. Nanefer reached forward with the counter that would close the circle on three more white beans isolated when the one changed color.

"Khamwas!" Samlor shouted. "He's cheating you. They're turning to black, your pieces!"

Khamwas' thighs were sinking into the ground as his opponent scooped up the captured pieces. "Light," Khamwas said in a choked voice. "Bring me my staff!"

Samlor plunged down the tunnel on all fours, as heedless of its constraint as a rabbit bolting from a fox. Khamwas was lifting another bean toward the alabaster. From his fixed expression, he seemed to be fighting the necessity of playing out the game to which he had agreed.

The sunlight at the tunnel's end was dim by comparison with the tomb chamber-but the sunlight was warm, and at the touch of it Samlor shuddered with memory of the bone-chilling blaze from the crystal.

Earth tones-brown and ochre and the ruddy sandstone cliffs-stood in welcome contrast to the white ground and primary colors of the tomb. The squall of distant irrigation wheels was an earthly sound and a suddenly blissful one.

Khamwas' staff lay across the tunnel entrance as they had left it. Samlor wondered whether Khamwas thought there was no longer a risk of them being entombed by sand-or whether he was willing to take that risk to keep from slipping into solid concrete first.

Didn't matter. Couldn't matter. Samlor grabbed the staff and twisted himself around in the tunnel. He heard Khamwas scream something from the tomb chamber, but he did not understand the words.

Partly because most of Samlor's mind froze in shocked appreciation of the crocodile filling the tunnel before him.

The beast was not as large as the monster which waddled aboard the yacht in his dreamlife as Nanefer, but it was as large as the stone corridor. The tips of its open jaws touched the floor and ceiling.

Its breath was foul and as cold as Death.

"Will you, by Heqt?" Samlor whispered as he drew his dagger again. He could wedge the jaws with the staff, and then the watered steel blade would carve the beast's palate and white gums like cheese-

Or the staff would shatter and the ragged teeth would crush Samlor's armbones as easily as they tore his flesh. But he could not forget the way Merib, his son in all but present reality, had catapulted into waiting jaws like these.

The crocodile dissolved into whorls of blue sparks. They reformed as the wraith of Ahwere, which swept up the tunnel toward the tomb chamber. The air was still and cold, and the ghost's wail was as bitter as the wind over high peaks.

Hunched over-unable to run on all fours because he carried the staff and dagger-Samlor scuttled toward the blazing white square of the tunnel's nether end. He couldn't hear his companion's voice, but the corpse's hacking laughter had the sound of breaking twigs.

"Kham-" Samlor cried as he burst into the chamber.

Khamwas had sunk shoulder deep in the floor. He twisted

his head despairingly toward the opening, but his arm was reaching up against his will to place another bean on the gameboard.

Samlor slapped the staff into Khamwas' lifted hand. Light from the Book of Tatenen seared through him, making the scarred flesh of the caravan master's fingers translucent so that the bones showed gray against pink encasement.

Ahwere glittered into a tigress and leaped at Samlor. He slashed with the dagger in a frenzy of despair and madness burned into him by the white glare.

Khamwas spoke a word. The stone chamber^ glowed green like the moss of a woodland at summer noon, \vjien all the light is filtered by leaves above. The tigress disappeared. Ahwere's ghost was a woman weeping as she rocked the babe in her arms.

The crystal was dark. There was nothing white in the tomb except the pieces on the game board, each of which gleamed with the purity of fresh-cut walrus ivory.

Khamwas rose out of the ground as if the staff crosswise in his hand was lifting him. The glow it cast was so uniform that the staff almost disappeared in the perfection of what it created.

"The game is mine, Prince Nanefer," Khamwas said. He struck the board and table aside. The pieces spilled across the floor. All of the beans were white. "Give me the book."

Nanefer did not move or speak.

Khamwas swallowed. He lifted the staff higher, then reached out with his free hand and took the crystal.

Nothing changed, not even the tempo of Ahwere's sobbing.

"We will trouble you no more, great prince," said Khamwas as he backed with formal steps away from the seated corpse. Glancing aside to Samlor, he added, "Precede me. Quickly."

As Samlor scrambled down the tunnel, he heard Ahwere crying, "Our light is gone, our all is gone."

And he thought, though he could not be sure, that he heard Nanefer reply, "Do not grieve, my sister, my love. They will return."

CHAPTER 24

"BACK IN THE, you know," said Samlor as the sun glanced from the polished limestone walls of the outer courtyard of the Palace of Napata. "In the tomb. I thought I wouldn't ever get warm again.

"I suppose," he added, fluffing the sweat-soaked tunic away from his chest, "I'm glad I was wrong."

Khamwas turned, but the hooded cloak he was wearing | still covered half his face. He tried to smile, but tension made his expression a frosty one when his intention was warm. "For the way you stood by me then, my friend," he said, "you'll never want for anything. Anything at all."

"I figured you knew what you were doing," Samlor said, looking away. It was easier to tell a half lie than the real truth, that he'd been afraid to think about what he was doing. He'd just plunged ahead on the course he'd set himself when there was time for calm reflection. "Anyway, I told you I'd help."

And that was purely the truth.

Almost no one except Samlor and Khamwas was in the courtyard. The royal levee closed in the hour before noon, and the peddlers who would later turn the courtyard into a fair were held off by the sun though there were no guards to stop them.

There were two guards at the copper-clad doors to the inner palace, but they were more concerned with finding shade in the recessed doorway than they were with loiterers. Samlor avoided staring at them, but he wondered what his companion's next move would be.

Khamwas' face reverted to stony calm. He was too lost in his own plans to care what Samlor had said-or even to have listened to it.

The cloak of a priestly mendicant covered Khamwas to the ankles. It must have been uncomfortable in this heat, but Khamwas noticed discomfort as little as a true religious ascetic would have done. His fingers toyed with the rim of a copper begging bowl which must itself have been hot enough to cook food.

The Book of Tatenen was bound to his bosom, the way Nanefer had carried it when he plunged over the yacht's rail.

A fuzzy glow appeared on Khamwas' shoulder. "If your enemy seeks you," it said clearly in Tjainufi's voice, "do not avoid him." The glow faded as simply as it had appeared.

The copper bowl rang softly as Khamwas tapped it with his fingertips. "Now we will see my brothers," he said.

This moment seemed to Samlor the same as any other in the half hour since they first entered the courtyard, but he was glad to be moving again.

The guards straightened as Khamwas and Samlor strode up to them. They carried long-bladed halbards and wore armor of silvered iron scales.

"Admit us," Samlor said as he had been instructed. He spoke with the assurance of authority-which made him feel that the guards were going to obey, though he couldn't imagine why. "We have business with the kings."

The guards were taken aback, bracing themselves as they would while being inspected by a superior officer, but their orders were clear. "Audience hours are over for the day, yokel," said the senior man. "Come back at dawn-or before, if you want a real chance of getting in."

"And no weapons," added the other guard, nodding toward Samlor's dagger.

Khamwas tapped his bowl. The doors and the guards' armor rang in sympathy. There were sharp clacking sounds from within the doorleaves as the locking bolts withdrew.

The doors opened inward, carrying the bellowing guards with them. Their body armor was stuck to the metal facing. As the men struggled, their halbards touched the copper also-and stuck as if welded.

Khamwas walked on without glancing to either side. Samlor followed with the caution of uncertainty as to just how long the guards would stay trapped.

Long enough, as it turned out. The doors swung themselves closed and bolted again.

There was another courtyard on the other side of the doors, smaller and shaded by a loggia surrounding it on three sides. A few servants glanced from their own affairs toward the intruders, but the fact that Khamwas and Samlor had come this far implied they were where they should be. None of the servants seemed to want to investigate the commotion beyond the gates.

Arched doorways to the left gave onto a formal audience chamber with frescoed walls and stone pillars cut to resemble shocks of reeds. Khamwas strode on past the empty hall, toward the door directly before them. His fingers drummed at the bowl. This door opened also with a squeal of its metal hinges.

The corridor beyond was high and lighted with clerestory windows. A servant-unarmed, but dressed and adorned in evidence of high rank-lolled in near somnolence on a stool. He lurched to his feet as the intruders approached.

"Who do you think-" he bleated.

"Don't make me hurt you," said Samlor, one finger on his dagger's buttcap.

Khamwas stroked his bowl. "Don't make us hurt you," rang the gold medallion on the servant's chest.

The man screamed and ran down the corridor. Before he ducked into a side door, his arm jerked and flung away the medallion with its broken chain.

A few heads, mostly female, popped out of other doors to see what was going on, but no one else tried to halt Samlor and Khamwas as they strode, side by side, to the gold-plated door at the end.

Samlor was no longer surprised when this door admitted them as the others had done.

There were three men at the table within, all of them in their thirties. The insignia of rank they had put aside-gold-shot shoulder capes and crowns whose bands bore central emeralds carven into reed bracts-left no doubt as to who they were.

"Who's this priest?" one of them demanded with birdlike glances toward his fellows. "Why's he here?"

The door closed behind the intruders, shutting off the growing babble of voices in the corridor.

There were cups on the table, and on the stand beside it was a wine jug with a dipper hanging from its rim. There were no servants present, not even a girl to fill the cups. Khamwas had tramped straight into a private meeting of the joint rulers of Napata.

"Do you recognize me?" he asked in a tone that would have been coquettish in a woman. It was the first time Samlor's companion had spoken since they confronted the guards in the outer court.

"What do you think you're doing, you two?" asked the heavy-set man at the center of the table in a gravelly voice. Formal headgear would have concealed the fact that he was already nearly bald.

Khamwas stroked his begging bowl. The heavy-set man's cup said, "Once there were four brothers-Osorkon, Patjenfi-" all three of the seated men jumped when the cup spoke in plangent tones, then jumped again as their names rolled from its golden tonguelessness " – Pentweret, and Khamwas. . and Khamwas, who was the eldest, should have reigned when their father died."

While the room still rang with the cup's last word, the crown lying on the table beside the rabbit-featured man who'd first spoken took up the story by saying, "But the other brothers seized Khamwas while he was in the desert searching for inscriptions on ancient monuments. They sold him as a slave to a caravan trading with Ranke-and they stained his cloak with blood to prove to their father that a lion had killed Khamwas."

The man in the center of the table was motionless, but he gripped his mug fiercely enough to blotch his knuckles with strain. The rabbit-featured fellow was staring at his crown.

His mouth opened and shut with little plopping sounds, but he did not speak.

The dagger which the third man had drawn spoke instead. It said, "But the brothers forgot that a slave who has learned certain arts from his studies can find his way to freedom quickly."

The man holding the dagger dropped it onto the table. He flapped his hand through the air as if it had been burned.

All together the mug, crown and dagger chorused, "Khamwas could not return home until he had gained further knowledge, greater powers. But nothing was more certain than that someday he would return to confront his brothers-"

Alone, the mug added, "Osorkon."

"Patjenfi," said the crown.

"Pentweret," the dagger concluded.

Khamwas threw back the hood of his cloak.

"We wronged you, my brother," said Osorkon at the center of the table. He was forcing the words through a block of emotions more varied than Samlor could identify.

"Not we, not me," babbled Patjenfi, glancing nervously from Khamwas to the brothers with him at the table. "I said-"

"Fool," said his crown as Khamwas touched the bowl.

Patjenfi fell silent.

"We wronged you," Osorkon repeated. "And it may be that we wronged our father. He would rather-" the bitterness was clear in his rasping voice " – anything in the world than that he lose you, my brother. But-"

Osorkon met Khamwas' eyes with a regal glare of his own. "But much as I regret our action, it~was necessary. The country would not have survived your kingship, Khamwas."

"After your wife died," said Pentweret, speaking for the first time since Khamwas entered the room, "you didn't care for anything except your stones. Buildings ruined for a thousand years. What would have happened to Napata if its king wandered in the desert every day and took rro account of the business of state?"

Samlor kept his face emotionless as he looked toward his companion. Khamwas wore a cool smile which could indicate amusement, or approval-or nothing at all.

"And my children?" asked Khamwas softly. "Didn't I care for them?"

"I misspoke," said Pentweret. "Of course, of course."

"Nobody doubts that," insisted Osorkon. "But that wouldn't have kept Napata from fragmenting into as many petty kingdoms as there're villages along the river. And you wouldn't have cared. You.stopped caring when your wife died!"

"Our father couldn't see that," said Patjenfi, no longer trying to distance himself from his fellows. "Wouldn't see it, I suppose. So what were we to do?" The whine in his voice didn't detract from the sincerity of the question, though it gave it an ugly cast.

"What of my children, then, brothers?" Khamwas said, as gently as a breeze touching the edge of the headsman's axe.

Osorkon blinked. "Pemu and Serpot?" he said. "Oh, they're fine."

"My own are of an age with them," added Patjenfi, "so they're fostered in my apartments. Why-" a look of horror drew across his rabbity visage. "You didn't think we'd have hurt them, did you?"

"If you'll give me leave to go to the door," said Pentweret, "I'll summon them. They can be here in a few minutes at most."

Khamwas nodded. His youngest brother slipped past them to the door-which opened to a thrumming of Khamwas' fingers on the bowl. Samlor watched as the man spoke urgently through the opening. Pentweret had been the one to draw a weapon at the first intrusion, and he was wise enough to ask before stepping toward the door.

That meant his instincts were enough like Samlor's that he could be a real problem.

Pentweret seated himself again. He had left the door ajar. Noise from the corridor became a backdrop as omnipresent as the hiss of a waterfall. The crowding servants were nervous, but they were too interested in events to leave unordered.

The noise grew louder until it was cut by a voice of authority. "Your highnesses?" called someone in pear-shaped tones. "The prince and princess are here, as you commanded."

Khamwas turned and snatched the door open with his hand. Samlor glanced from side to side, trying to cover the seated kings as well as whatever waited in the hall. A functionary with gold ornaments, a spotless tunic, and enough fat to prove he did nothing strenuous for a living, waited with a child to either side of him.

Khamwas dropped his bowl with a clang echoed by every metal object in the room and corridor. He knelt and held out his arms to the children.

Their faces blanked. They didn't move.

"Pemu!" Khamwas said. "Serpot! I'm your father. I'm Khamwas."

The boy looked to be nine, the girl perhaps seven-the age of Star-though both children had the coppery complexions and straight hair of their father. For a moment they poised, unwilling to trust the news that they weren't orphans after all, living on their cousins' sufferance. Then they ran to the waiting arms, the boy first, sobbing and crying, "Daddy!"

The seated kings looked at one another. Samlor wondered if he ought to clear his knife, but the others were uncomfortable rather than hostile. Osorkon was perspiring freely. He hadn't moved from his chair, but tension was working his muscles hard.

Khamwas turned and stood, holding a child by either hand. His foot thrust out behind him to slam the door closed.

The sound of the door thumping against its jamb-and the fact that it had been closed physically-relaxed the atmosphere within the chamber. Patjenfi looked toward Osorkon and said peevishly, "Well, does that mean he'H be joining us?"

"Don't act like a greater fool than the gods made you," Pentweret snapped from across the table. "If he comes to us this way-" his eyes flicked toward Khamwas and were forced back by conscious effort of will " – he comes as our king."

The only sound in the room was the murmuring of the children as they hugged themselves closer to Khamwas coarse robe. The three seated men held their breath while they waited for their brother to speak.

Khamwas fluffed his daughter's hair. His fingers paused briefly at the comb of gold filigree at Serpot's temple, then dropped back to her upraised palm. "You saved your lives," he said calmly, "by the way you cared for these while I was-gone."

Samlor could see that Pemu and Serpot didn't understand what was happening, but the tenseness of the situation was clear enough to silence them. Pemu braced himself, threw his chest out toward his uncles and tried to look as much a man as his age permitted.

"And you saved your throne, my brothers," Khamwas continued, "by the way you've ruled Napata since our father died. Together and for the country's good, as you claimed when you sold me into slavery. You've done well. I'm sure you'll continue to do so."

Pentweret's hands began to tremble as his lips stammered through the prayer which his mind had silently rehearsed. Patjenfi tried to jump up, babbling thankfulness, but his legs caught between his chair and the table. Osorkon stared at him disdainfully, until the rabbit-faced man subsided.

"How can you say that," asked Osorkon slowly, "after the way we treated you six years ago?"

Khamwas smiled. "Because you were correct, my brother. I would have been a disastrous king-but I would have demanded my rights as eldest son, because then I would have all the resources of Napata to aid me in my search."

"We never knew just what it was you were looking for," said Pentweret, being as careful as he could to avoid a negative connotation. "We should have tried harder to understand. .»

His eyes begged Khamwas for understanding.

"I was looking for the source of all power," Khamwas replied with a smile that made sense only to Samlor, who had also been Nanefer in another age. "I found it at last."

Khamwas touched the bulge over his heart where the crystal book lay bound, but before he resumed speaking, he gripped Pemu's hand. "I also found that the only power I really wanted, the power of bringing the dead to life. . is beyond the ability even of the gods."

Again there was silence.

"Well," said Patjenfi at last, "you'll have to live somewhere, if you're back. I think-"

"You'll move into my apartments here in the palace at once," Osorkon interrupted. "I'll leave my servants in place until you can arrange matters to your own satisfaction, elder brother."

"I'll send over clothing from my suite," added Pent-weret. "It will fit you, I think." He glanced at the massive Osorkon and grinned coolly. "Again, until you make other arrangements."

"The children will need their things, too," said Patjenfi with a frown. "I do hope that-" He paused, pursing his lips, and finally continued, "Well, if you want to separate them, of course, that's your right, whatever you want. But they've grown up with my three, haven't you, darlings?"

Serpot nodded determinedly. Pemu, less convinced of the question's simplicity, looked from his uncle to his father- who was smiling-and nodded agreement himself.

Khamwas leaned down, kissed each child on his forehead, and said, "Go back and get your things together, darlings," he said as he hugged them. "My brothers and I have one more thing to discuss."

The children went out into the corridor. Before the door closed behind them, Samlor heard Pemu saying in a clear, princely voice, "Take us back to our rooms, Tery. We'll be-"

"One more piece of business," Khamwas paraphrased. As he eyed his brothers, his expression reverted to the icy hardness with which he had first entered the inner palace. Samlor thought of his dagger and thought about the three seated men. . and wondered what was about to happen.

"Six years ago, my brothers," said Khamwas, "one of you-let's pretend that I don't remember who-said that if I were killed instead of being sold into slavery, I wouldn't come back later to make trouble."

Samlor now understood the look and the tone.

Patjenfi looked down at his hands, making attempts to smile that each time lapsed into terror. Osorkon met Khamwas' eyes as stolidly as a mirror, but sweat glittered on his high forehead.

Pentweret was looking up also. His eyes were blank and the angle of his chin suggested that he was offering his throat to a slaughterer's blade. His larynx hobbled as he tried to swallow, and hobbled again.

"You didn't take that advice," Khamwas continued, "and perhaps you think you made a mistake."

There had been a tone of playful banter, cat and mouse rather than cat and kitten, in Khamwas' voice. Even that false humor dropped away as he continued, "Don't be certain that I wouldn't have returned, my brothers. I was a scholar even then, though I hadn't a fraction of the powers I have now."

He paused before he concluded, "Believe me, you would be even less pleased to see me now if you had chosen murder."

"Then we can all rejoice to be the men we are," said Osorkon calmly. He stood up and reached across the table to clasp the hand which Khamwas slowly extended to him.

"Welcome home, my brother," Osorkon said. "It's good to have you with us again."

CHAPTER 25

THE WALL OF the terraced garden overlooked the river, but from inside even the enclosure was screened by lush greenery. Expert tending preserved the appearance of untrammeled nature without the dankness and the impossible tangles which «natural» implied in reality. /A fountain played in the near distance, noticeable for its babble and the sheen of mist in the air beyond a border of straight-stemmed bushes with flowers of glowing magenta.

Broad-leafed vines-gourds rather than grapes-had been trained to cover the arbor in which Samlor sat with Khamwas, watching the flock of royal children playing a game with bats and a feather-filled ball on the lawn. Servants stood nearby with refreshments and in case of accident, but the arbor's narrow doorway and curved walls gave it the privacy of a camera obscura.

"I can't offer you more than you've earned already, Samlor," Khamwas said. Both men found it easier to speak when their eyes were on the squealing children than they did while searching each other's expressions. "You'll leave here a rich man-"

"I do all right," Samlor interrupted. "I never doubted you'd keep our bargain-and I've never asked anybody for more 'n that."

Khamwas laid two fingers on Samlor's knee and brought the other man's eyes to meet his.

"You have helped me gain the cosmos," Khamwas said softly. He patted the crystal book beneath his sash, using the same touch with which he had demanded Samlor's attention. "To an extent, I'm wondering what I'll do with the power now that it's mine. . but don't ever doubt that the power is at your service, or that you've earned that service."

"If I need your help, I know it's here," said Samlor as he turned his head again. "You know. .," he added.

On the grassy area, Pemu made a goal amid great squealing from the older children.

"You know, it could be that I'd want Star to have a place she could be that wasn't Cirdon. That's a lot-"

"Of course," interrupted Khamwas.

"That's a lot to ask," Samlor repeated sharply. "And it's going to be more as she gets older, the way she, you know, learns things."

"Yes, I do know," Khamwas agreed with a smile. He plucked one of the gourds hanging beside him and turned it in his hands, letting the yellow and green stripes shine alternately in a spike of sunlight through the leaves massed above. "I would be honored."

"You were going to say," remarked Samlor to change the subject-and not to change it- "that you wanted something from me."

"Yes, I was," Khamwas agreed drily. "I was going to ask if you'd stay here with me for a little while, perhaps a month."

"You don't trust your brothers?" Samlor said with mild surprise. He twisted a gourd from its cap also. The rind felt waxy and cool in his hands, artificial rather than alive.

"I do trust them," Khamwas corrected, smiling. "And I don't-how shall I say it, fear for my life. But I'd like there to be one person who is-" he looked away, looked back, and smiled again " – my friend, in the next few weeks while I set up my household."

"You can order wax statues to row," said Samlor, picking up a memory the two of them shared from another age. "But you can't tell them how to do it."

"Exactly."

Samlor laughed. "People worry about the gold plate in the strongroom, but they forget about the eggs in the pantry till there's nothing for supper," he said. "Sure, I'll hang around for a while and help you get organized. Anyway, I haven't seen much of your city here."

"I need to get reacquainted myself," Khamwas said. "We'll go out together in the morning."

He rubbed the hidden book with the knuckle of the thumb hooked over the gourd. "It-" he began, then started over with, "We risked much, you and I, to win the book. But despite the difficulties, the dangers, I must admit it was easier than I had expected."

"Don't call your life blessed," said Tjainufi sourly, "until it has ended."

But the men's attention was absorbed by the children, Serpot running toward the arbor in a grass-stained tunic shouting, "Daddy! Daddy! We won!"

CHAPTER 26

"Is THE DISH to your taste, your highness?" said the priest, adding with a nod to Samlor, "Excellency?"

Samlor mumbled agreement while Khamwas continued to peer with rapt attention at the scene in the temple forecourt beneath them.

The bowl of mixed fruit slices had been chilled somehow. At least it felt cool after a day of ambling through Napata with a minimal entourage-Khamwas, Samlor, and the two footmen whom Khamwas' borrowed major domo absolutely insisted must accompany the prince. The inner loggia of the Temple of Tatenen was a good place to rest and view the crowd of late-afternoon customers visiting the expensive shops in the court below.

One thing that Samlor had already decided about Napata was that the religious institutions here continued to do as well as they had in the time of Prince Nanefer. The silver spoon with which he ate his fruit was molded into delicate vine arabesques more estimable than even the metal itself.

"Samlor," Khamwas whispered urgenty. "Do you see her? There, going-"

He pointed. The priest who was acting as personal servant to the temple's guests craned his neck to follow the gesture but fell back two steps in embarrassment when he realized what he was doing.

Samlor leaned against the thick stone rail of the loggia and frowned in concentration at the bustle in the forecourt. A woman wearing a cape and headdress of shimmering red silk had just disappeared into one of the shops, accompanied by several maids. A pair of staff-bearing footmen remained outside, suggesting that they would use force if necessary to prevent their mistress from being jostled within.

"Somebody you know?" Samlor asked, cautious because he could sense Khamwas' agitation. He hadn't seen the woman's face, nor would it have meant anything to him if he had. But his companion had a lifetime of history in Napata, not a few weeks in the desert and two days in the capital. .

"I must learn who she is," Khamwas said, still whispering. He stared at the foreshortened doorway across the court as if intensity would give him clear vision of what went on inside. One of his hands clasped the rail while the other squeezed Samlor's knee hard enough to be disconcerting.

The whole situation was disconcerting.

"Well," said Samlor, shifting as he set down his bowl; his knee straightened, as if by accident, and flexed out of Khamwas' grip. "I'll go down and see what I can find out." He looked at his companion, waiting for a response to the question his tone had implied.

"Yes. .," Khamwas said, focused on the doorway. He turned sharply and added, "But you mustn't disturb her."

Samlor nodded and said with heavy irony, "Oh, you can trust me to handle the business with all the subtlety you would bring to it yourself."

A cloud softened Khamwas' intense features and he stared at the hand which had clasped Samlor so harshly. "I…," he said, looking up again as Samlor rose and shrugged his garments into place. "I'm sorry, my friend. She's very important to me in some way. I'm sure."

"No problem," Samlor grunted as he walked past the priest and lesser servants to the stairs within the temple.

No reason to imagine that it was a problem, and a dead certainty that Khamwas and the Book of Tatenen could handle any difficulty that arose.

But Samlor kept remembering a grinning crocodile.

The forecourt was busy, though from the height of the loggia it was obvious that there was more empty pavement than there were people. From the pavement itself, nothing but moving walls of people were visible.

Shrugging again-the brocade collar of his new tunic chafed him, though the fabric was soft enough-Samlor strode across the area. As he neared the far side of the court, his eye caught a flash of scarlet: not the woman but her tall headdress, leaving the shop and preparing to enter another one. He started after her, then thought again and stepped into the shop his quarry had just quitted.

The maid who waited while the shopowner wrapped a purchase was dressed even more strikingly than her mistress. Her skirt was of pleated linen, cut to beneath her navel in front but rising almost to shoulderblade level in back. Instead of an ordinary blouse or jacket, she wore the skin of a spotted cat pinned to bare her left shoulder.

The head hung over her right breast. The beast's eyes had been replaced by topazes, and the maid's own irises were of the same tawny lambency.

"The cat won't bite," the woman said drily to Samlor.

He blinked, realized that he had paused with his hand resting on the doorjamb-and then realized that his mouth was open.

"Yes, sir, may I help you?" asked the shopman with a tinge of concern underlying his professional brightness. He was folding the second of a pair of carnelian earrings, elephants astride the globe of the cosmos, into a square of velvet.

"Ah, I-" Samlor said. "Ah, my business is with the lady."

"Is it indeed?" said the woman, giving him a look of appraisal as cool as that of a cook pricing fowls in the market.

"The, ah, the lady who was here a moment ago, in red," he plowed on. "I believe you may know her?"

"Know my mistress?" said the woman. When she smiled, her mouth opened as wide as the cat's. "Yes, I should say 1 do."

The shopman was listening to his customers in obvious interest. Samlor gave him a look freighted with the frustration he could not let loose on the woman. The man jumped, then trotted to the back of the shop muttering that he needed better ribbon.

Samlor relaxed. The maid was playing a game, flirting at second-hand as it were, and there was no harm in that. He smiled and said, "Milady, a friend of mine-a high-placed friend of mine-noticed your mistress and was curious about who she is. Rather than make a public production of it, he asked me to check quietly."

That was pretty close to the truth, and it conveyed the threat without stating it. Coquetry was very well and good, but this amber-eyed woman had to know where the real power in the discussion lay.

"I'm sure my mistress Tabubu would thank your friend- her tone made the word 'master' and a slur because Samlor had not used it " – for his solicitude, if he chose to present himself in person," said the maid. "A lady of her position isn't in need of help from others, however highly placed, of course."

She shifted her stance. The false cat eyes winked from her breast.

Samlor raised an eyebrow and one corner of his mouth.

"She is here to make offerings for her father on the seventh anniversary of his death," the maid continued, bowing to the silent goad. "He was the prophet of the god Mnevis.

"I would have thought your highly-placed master would know Tabubu," she added with a tart voice and a flounce of the cat's head. "But-" she smiled again " – her house is in Ankhtawi, across the river, and we don't leave it very often."

"You've been very understanding," said Samlor-an understatement if ever he had made one. "I appreciate it. Perhaps we'll have the opportunity to speak again."

The woman stretched her shoulders back so that her chest arched and the cat slid against her. "And you?" she asked. "Do you have a name, or shall I call you 'Boy'?"

Samlor grinned back, aware of the game she was playing and too controlled to lose at it. "I'm Samlor hil Samt," he said. "But I answer to any name that seems appropriate."

He turned and strode out of the shop, hearing the owner bleat something inconsequential.

The woman called, "My name is Pre," but the words did not bring Samlor back into the shop. He had information to pass on to Khamwas, whose anxious face peered from the loggia opposite.

Besides, Samlor had a nagging fear that if he continued talking to Pre, he would succumb to his growing desire to throw her down on the floor and screw the hell out of her.

"Well, what have you learned?" Khamwas demanded, his discourtesy redeemed only by his obvious agitation. "She'd already left the shop when you went in, you know?"

"Sure, I know," said Samlor, frowning. "Look, you can hire people to snap at. All right?"

Khamwas' left hand touched his sash. His thumb hooked beneath it, toward the Book of Tatenen-but he snatched his hand back as if it burnt, an instant before Samlor would have buried the watered steel blade in his chest, determining for good and all what protection the book afforded.

"My. .," said Khamwas, pale with amazement. He reached out and clasped Samlor's hand, drawing him willingly back into his chair by the rail. "Samlor, I don't know why I'm so jumpy. Please forgive me."

The sincerity could not be doubted. "I'm not my best either," said Samlor, apologizing for what he had been ready to do.

"But what about her, the woman?" Khamwas went on eagerly. Already he had resumed his appraisal of the crowd below. "There, she's still here!"

"Her name's Tabubu," Samlor reported.

He kept expecting Tjainufi to make a comment, but the little manikin wasn't on Khamwas' shoulder. Hadn't been since. . the day before, in the garden, he thought.

"She's the daughter of the Prophet of Mnevis, and she's here to make offerings on the anniversary of his death."

"Good, good," said Khamwas, though his enthusiasm did not cause him to look around at his companion. "That means she's the head of her household and able to make decisions for herself."

Samlor was watching the crowd also. The scarlet garments were easy to spot. Now the woman was leaving a booth selling floral sprays to be laid at the feet of the statues of gods in memory. She didn't hold the caravan master's eyes, though. His concentration was on the maid beside her, as lithe as the cat whose skin she wore.

"Now. .," said Khamwas. "I want you to approach her. Tell her that I'll give her ten gold pieces to spend an hour with me. Only an hour, and no one will ever know about it."

Samlor blinked as if Khamwas had just taken his clothes off and begun to dance on the railing.

"Well?" Khamwas prompted, glancing at his companion with an incipient scowl.

"Ah," said Samlor. "Ah, Khamwas, I'm not-I wasn't born here, so I wouldn't know. But this Tabubu-friend, she doesn't seem to be the kind of woman you'd, you know, offer money to. Not even her servants…"

He didn't realize at once that he had let his voice trail off. He was too engrossed in his imagination.

"Yes, yes of course," agreed Khamwas. "Of course. I told you, I'm not feeling myself today."

He paused, cleared his throat and went on. "She owns property, so she'll have a lawsuit with a neighbor over boundaries or irrigation rights. Tell her I'll have it settled in her favor."

"Ah?"

"Or perhaps she has a complaint over her tax assessment." Khamwas burbled on, oblivious of the wondering look on his companion's face. "There's nothing simpler. All she has to do is tell me what the problem is and it's solved. For just an hour with her."

He beamed.

Samlor shrugged as he got up again. "Well," he said- aloud but speaking to his own doubts, "you're the local. I'll see what I can do."

He might have been more hesitant about his mission were he not looking forward to talking again with Pre. If Khamwas were successful, well-Samlor was going to have an hour to fill also, wasn't he?

CHAPTER 27

PRE CARRIED THE velvet parcel of earrings, but lesser members of the retinue bore the sprays of flowers which would be thrown onto the altar. As they withered, their color and vibrancy would infuse the spirit on whose behalf they were offered.

Tabubu strolled free as a flame, pausing now to examine fabrics racked in an open-fronted shop. Her staff-bearers watched the crowd with their mistress in the corner of their eyes-ready to conform to her movements, protecting her without blundering into her path.

Good men, and they had more than a casual awareness of Samlor hil Samt.

At closer look, Samlor found Tabubu imposing, but the feeling she aroused in him was awe similar to that he felt beneath the gigantic reliefs of the river temple. The red silk of her headdress was diaphanous. Through it he could see that her hair was dressed in multiple braids, each banded at intervals with broad gold rings. Tabubu's bracelets bore complex designs in coral, carnelian and turquoise, all mounted in heavy gold.

The material of her dress was only slightly less transparent than her headgear, and the straps plunged to waist level in front. The pendant dangling across the cleft between her breasts was of metal filigree, gold and electrum-the alloy of gold and silver. It seemed to depict a crocodile swallowing the ball of the world.

Tabubu's eyes glanced across Samlor like sunlight from a glacier. The pendant, rather than the two husky attendants, changed his intention of speaking directly to her. Instead, he approached Pre. She had been watching him with amusement from the moment the caravan master reappeared in the forecourt.

"My friend," said Samlor carefully, using the bustle around them as an active form of privacy, "believes he can be of service to your mistress. It may be that she has a lawsuit that he can have settled to her advantage. Or-"

Pre's eyes had grown as hard as the jewels glaring from the cat on her bosom. "What would your master," she asked, "expect in exchange for these services? If he is merely a generous man, let him help those who have need of it."

"He's a very discreet man," said Samlor, aware that his own desire for discretion had put the situation in the maid's hands. "As discreet as he is powerful."

He could feel Khamwas staring at his back, demanding some indication of success. Damn him, he could handle his own affairs if he was in such a hurry! Where did he get the notion that Samlor was a pimp?

The spotted cat, smaller than an adult leopard, rose and fell with the breasts it covered.

"He would spend an hour with your mistress," Samlor plowed on, proceeding with what he had started, "in the most complete secre-"

"What!" Pre cried, bringing stares from all directions. "Why doesn't he just offer money, then? Does he think my mistress is a whore?"

Samlor trembled. All his emotions were turned to lust for the splendid woman whose harangue was making a public fool of him. He didn't understand it, but he neve/understood much when he was thinking with his dick.

"You there," called Tabubu imperiously. "Samlor. Come here."

Feeling as though he were encased in crystal, Samlor obeyed the scarlet-garbed woman. He remembered that he had intended to speak with her before, but he could not imagine how he had presumed so far. Her voice was contralto, and it reverberated as if it were coming from a hot furnace.

"If Prince Khamwas has something to tell me," said Tabubu, "then he can visit me at my home tomorrow."

She was tall to begin with, and the red silk of her headdress waved above her like the plume of a volcano. Samlor faced the woman as he had faced death many times before.

And not even Tabubu's dominating presence could quell his desire for her maid Pre.

"He should remember," Tabubu added, "that I am a priest's daughter and not a common prostitute. Not common at all."

She turned away with a flash of the pendant swinging between her breasts. The staff bearers moved to block Samlor if he tried to follow their mistress toward the inner court of the temple, reserved for religious purposes.

Samlor didn't notice them. For a moment he stood puzzled, though he knew that Khamwas would begrudge him every instant until he had reported.

Most people in Napata didn't even realize that Khamwas was alive, much less that he was accompanied-served, if you would-by a Cirdonian named Samlor hil Samt. Tabubu's knowledge was as striking as the woman herself. It was something for Khamwas to think about before he decided what he should do next.

As Samlor made his way back across the court, he thought of Pre clasping her arms around his shoulders and crossing her legs behind his buttocks as he thrust within her.

CHAPTER 28

THE STATE BARGE was too reminiscent of Nanefer's yacht for Samlor to find the river crossing pleasant, but Khamwas was so abstracted that he did not appear to recall the disastrous journey of his dream.

"Your highness," said the desperately fat, desperately perturbed major domo who had come from Osorkon with the apartment. "There's still time to reconsider, and I can only pray that you will. It simply isn't fitting for a member of the royal house to visit a commoner at home."

Khamwas continued to stare over the bow toward the approaching pier. He said nothing.

"Well, she's a priest's daughter," said Samlor, speaking because the gurgle of water made him jumpy and because he was trying to convince himself that what they were doing was reasonable. "A prophet's, her maid says."

His voice didn't silence the water bulging around the bow, either.

"A commoner," said the major domo flatly.

Pemu and Serpot had woven their father a chaplet of flowers and presented him with it as he boarded the barge. Khamwas' fingers touched the braided stems absently, then stripped the chaplet off and dropped it over the side. The petals had already begun to wilt in the sun.

The major domo sighed and pressed his lips together in an expression of pudgy disapproval.

Ankhtawi, the suburb across the Napata River from the capital, was not heavily populated, but the bank was divided among mansions whose grounds were more extensive than would have been possible on the east side. The barge had struck across the river in a slant that used the current to bring them downstream in the direction which the servants believed Tabubu's house lay. For some minutes the vessel had been coasting past landing stages of greater or lesser ostentation while servants whispered doubtfully among themselves.

The doubt was over. Pre stood in the midst of a group of gorgeously-attired retainers on the nearing dock. Today her breasts were covered by the skin either of a large monitor lizard or of a small crocodile.

"Welcome, Prince Khamwas^" she called as crewmen scurried around their oblivious master as they carried out the business of docking. "My mistress Tabubu awaits you."

The major domo was hopping from one foot to the other, afraid that the operation would be marred by curses or a crunch of wood on stone-and horrified that it was taking place at all.

"And welcome also to our entertainment, Samlor nil Samt," Pre went on. Her smile was as wicked as Samlor's thoughts.

The three-rung ladder hooked over the dockside for the guests to ascend was of ebony carved with serpentine patterns and gusseted at the joints with gold. Khamwas climbed it with the clumsy deliberation of a sleepwalker. His fumbling delay forced Samlor to suppress an urge to hurl his friend and companion aside into the water.

He was preventing Samlor from standing again beside Pre.

The major domo and the five lesser servants whom that worthy considered the minimum entourage (since the visit had to occur) followed, but Pre left them for the servants of her retinue. The maid strolled through the archway into the mansion's walled garden with Khamwas to one side and Samlor on the other.

Khamwas walked with the fixity of a coursing gaze-hound, but Pre's presence drew Samlor like an arm around his waist. He wanted to touch her, but he did not dare as yet.

The false amber eyes of what was surely a crocodile grinned as the head wobbled with Pre's breast.

The garden between the house and the river was more formal than that of the royal palace. Four narrow reflecting pools reached like sunrays toward the building, giving different aspects of the pillared facade to those on the central walk. Lilies with broad, blue flowers floated in the water, but at certain angles the distorted reflections of the pillars seemed to engulf the plants.

There were birds, hopping among the mandrakes, oleanders and chrysanthemums, but they rarely chirped.

Beside the house and to the right of the paved walk, another pool was almost hidden by a screen of powder-leafed shrubs-wormwood, closely planted against a bronze fence with inward hooks. There was no sound from the water, but the rank odor warned Samlor of what he would see when he peered over the shrubbery.

A crocodile, its head raised by the haunches of another of the reptiles, stared back at him. The nictitating membrane winked sideways across its eye, occluding but not hiding the slitted amber orb.

Samlor's fingers twitched toward the dagger in his belt; but Pre was striding on, and he followed.

The double doors into the house were of louvered wood, broad and high. They sprang inward as the procession approached, causing Samlor's heart to skip momentarily with a different animal emotion. . but they were moved by another pair of servants in scarlet livery. Only instinct had suggested otherwise.

Tabubu stood in the doorway. The hall behind her was double height, but a broad staircase curved from the floor to a railed mezzanine on the visitor's right. Tabubu offered her hand to Khamwas and gestured toward the stairs. "Greetings, noble prince," she said. "I have prepared refreshments for you above."

Tabubu was again dressed in scarlet, but the only item of her costume which had not changed since the day before was her breast pendant. A headband and broad coils of gold shaped and confined her hair into a tapering cascade framing both sides of her face.

A round plaque of red glass fused onto gold fastened either tip of the hanging coiffure and lay on the upper curve of Tabubu's breasts, perfectly mirroring her bare, rouged nipples. The straps of her dress crossed her cleavage to support the high-waisted skirt.

The cloth flowed like wine when she moved and, like wine, was translucent.

"There is a table set for your men," said Pre, gesturing to the side room toward which liveried servants were conducting the major domo and his subordinates. He didn't look especially happy, but even he found no additional reason to protest at the circumstances.

Tabubu and Khamwas led the way up the stairs, the woman's fingertips resting on her visitor's hand in a fashion that managed to be both intimate and reserved. How intimate Samlor did not realize until Pre touched his hand and guided him behind Khamwas.

The stair treads were of onyx in an openwork frame of bronze, but they only hinted at the luxury of the floor above. The floor was blue and dazzling, strewn with crushed lapis lazuli and turquoise. Light from the windows opening onto the garden reflected from the stone in a cooling fire.

A circular table stood in the center of the room, between the rails over the entrance hall and the painted wicker screens from which came muted sounds of food preparation, dishes clinking and muttered commands. Braziers released perfumed smoke which the breeze from the wind-catching vents in the ceiling distributed through the air.

There were only two couches at the table, padded and sloped upward so that a diner could recline on his left elbow and eat in comfort.