Dagger (18 page)

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 122

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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

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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. 124

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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.

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,

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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

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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.