Dagger (32 page)

He began a gesture which jerked to a halt short of the hedge. Thorns already plucked his robe, and he began to remove them with patience and concentration.

"What are you doing here, my father?" Khamwas asked, relaxed by the interruption. If it turned out somebody had used the fellow to draw fire, though—

that somebody would answer for it.

"Oh, all the commotion," the old man said. He tugged gingerly at his worn hem, then bent to remove the remaining thorn. "Muck-de-mucks from acrost the river, don't ye know? Used to play in this garden—

as it is now, but it wasn't, don't ye

know? Slipped by in the confusion, I did. Wouldn't 'e hev conniptions if 'e knew I was here, the Prefect?"

The old man turned and straightened. He had begun to laugh again, but now his face turned stern. "They shouldn't build here, ye know. It's sacred. There was a temple here,

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right here—

" he stepped forward so that his sleeve wouldn't snag again when he gestured "—

and the ground's sacred."

"You remember when the temple was here, ah, my father?" asked Samlor, copying his companion's use of the local honorific. He spoke with a flash of sudden hope, but Khamwas' wistful smile warned him even before the gesture was complete that it was vain. The time scale they were faced with was much longer than human memory could illuminate.

"Ah, that were long since," said the old man, capping his words with a laugh that disintegrated into a spell of coughing. "D'ye know," he went on when he could raise his head, "that everything you see were swamp long since? But they drained the land, they did, and now there's a city acrost the river—

and nobody

left as knows there was a temple here as my father's father kept the grounds of."

Neither Samlor nor Khamwas moved.

"Heh-heh-heh," laughed the old man.

"Did your grandfather ever talk to you about the grounds of the Temple of Tatenen?" Khamwas asked in a voice from which he had rigorously purged hope.

"My father did, bless his memory," the old man said proudly. "Many a time, he did that."

"Did anyone ever mention to you the tomb of Princess Ahwere and her son Merib?" Khamwas went on while Samlor tried to blank his mind of the prayer he would have spoken—

except that the gods would surely dash this possibility if they were aware of it.

"Aye, aye, so 'e did, my father," said the old man with a nod of cracked solemnity. "It were a terrible thing, 'e said, that they'd build a house on the sacred ground of a temple and set the south corner on the very tomb of that sad young princess ez they did."

He pointed beyond the chrysanthemum terrace. "The very house the Prefect lives in now and thinks 'imself too good to let an old man walk about 'is garden harming no one."

"You're lying," said Samlor quietly. He walked toward the old man with his hands at his sides as if it required all his control not to batter the fellow to a pulp.

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"You're lyingl" he shouted, inches from the old man's face. "You think you'll get back at the Prefect by having his house down around his ears, don't you?

Don't you?"

"If you doubt my word," said the old man, with unexpected dignity and an even more surprising absence of fear, "then hold me for execution if the tomb is not as I say it is."

"We'll do just that, you know!" Samlor shouted, though by this time the noise was self-reassurance. He was disconcerted by the old man's attitude . . . and by the information which if true—

as he would not believe was possible—

meant the

search here was over.

With his hand gripping the other's fragile shoulder, Samlor frog-marched the old man up the path toward the house. He was too intent on his business to look back and see how Khamwas was reacting—

or even whether he was following them.

This couldn't work, but by Heqt! if it did. ...

There was a lily pond in the Prefect's garden, but neither it nor the two-story mansion beyond resembled Tabubu's except in basic function. The Prefect, looking stiff in his robes of office, paced beside the pond. He was throwing in bits of a flower his fingers worried. His wife was seated in the nearby gazebo between two of her maids, all dressed in their best.

At a little distance from the pond were two distinct clots of servants—

household

personnel and those wearing the indicia of the Prefect's office. One of the latter, the messenger, screamed and threw himself behind a rose arbor when he saw Khamwas again.

The Prefect was an obtuse man and much the happier for it. He brightened and came forward, saying, "I trust your highness has met at last with success?" though nothing in the tableau hinted at that possibility.

"You've been directed to afford my master every facility, have you not?" said Samlor brusquely.

The Prefect looked unwillingly from Khamwas to the underling—

the foreigner who

was addressing him. "Yes, yes, of course. Any help I can give." He paused, frowning

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as he looked at the old man in Samlor's grip. "But who is this?" he asked. "Was he with you? I don't—

"

"We want you to hold him, " Samlor ordered. "Someplace he can't get away."

"At once," the Prefect agreed. He snapped his fingers. A pair of official servants stepped forward with the nervousness of men who had seen their fellow raining toads. "Take this fellow," continued the Prefect imperiously, "and lock him in my basement storeroom."

"Someplace other 'n that," the caravan master said, grinning in spite of himself. "Also, we'll need a hundred men equipped for a digging job. Demolition job, in fact."

"At once," the Prefect repeated. "Where do you want them to assemble, my good man?"

Khamwas said, "At the south corner of your house, my good man." He gestured with his staff. "We're going to demolish it."

For some long seconds, the Prefect blinked and waited to hear the rest of the joke. Only when his wife began to scream did the man realize his lord was quite serious.

THE INNER WALL was too far back to be a threat to the diggers, but it blocked the route up which baskets of earth and rubble were handed to clear the excavation. The mud brick structure toppled backward with a crash and a cloud of white dust from the molded plaster covering.

The team of workmen cheered as they coiled their ropes. The Prefect's wife broke into a renewed set of wails. She had refused to allow her bedroom at the south corner to be emptied in the few minute Samlor allowed for salvage. She might regret the decision later, but Samlor had to admit that when your home was being devastated, there'd be small comfort in preserving your wardrobe.

"You've got that old man locked where he won't get loose?" Samlor asked the military officer standing beside him.

"Yes, sir," the soldier agreed. His ostrich plume headdress trebled the height of his nod. "We put him in an empty cistern—

" his short spear pointed toward a

back corner of the garden "—

and there's a guard at the mouth of it."

"Stone!" called a man from the pit. "Smooth stone!"

"Then bloody clear it!" Samlor bellowed. "That's what we're about, ain't it?" Khamwas stood silently with his hands clasped and the

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staff held upright between them. He was facing the excavation, but his eyes were closed. No one came near him. Raised voices dropped if the speaker chanced to glance across the scholar's forbidding figure.

"My lord," the Prefect said to Samlor, wringing his hands. "You have to believe that I wouldn't have occupied a temple site. There must be some mistake."

"That's between you and the Office of Religious Works," Samlor replied with a shrug. "Though . . . if it turns out to be what we hope, I think you'll find the Prince—

" he nodded toward Khamwas "—

is real well disposed toward you."

"We've found a sarcophagus!" called the foreman from the pit, his voice an octave higher than during the previous announcement.

"Oh, I'm ruined!" moaned the Prefect, but Samlor was running toward Khamwas at the edge of the excavation.

It had seemed quickest to collapse the house into its basement and then to cart away the rubble while digging further. As a result, there were plaster chips, fragments of storage jars and even a forlorn piece of statuary at the bottom of the pit.

The house was built on a-brick foundation, but below the corner which had been ripped down was an angle of polished red sandstone, the remnant of previous construction. Samlor whispered a prayer, remembering the lamplit interior of the tomb which Tekhao had offered for the burial of his lord's child and wife. He could almost smell the incense again. ...

Khamwas pointed his staff.

The crew in the pit was six men whose shovels and mattocks filled baskets for a hundred other men and women. The earth was handed out in long, snaky lines until it could be safely dumped. The diggers scrambled up the sides of their excavation in near panic to avoid whatever the magician was going to do. Green light flared at the base of the pit.

There were two stone slabs, though only a corner of the second had been uncovered as yet. They were of the same

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fine-grained sandstone as the blocks of the walls, a striking contrast to the yellow clay in which they were now imbedded.

The cold light which followed the line of Khamwas' staff made the carvings on the stones stand out despite being worn shallow and covered with clay still baking dry in the sun.

"May the god Tatenen be merciful to the spirit of Merib," Khamwas read, chanting the revealed glyphs as loudly as a priest before his god. "May his innocence find peace in the god."

Samlor gripped his friend's shoulder in triumph, then strode back to the soldier to whom he'd spoken earlier. Behind him, Khamwas was reading out the inscription of the second sarcophagus while green symbols blazed through clay and uncleared rubble.

"We're going to let the old bastard go," Samlor said, gesturing sharply enough to catch the soldier's attention and start him moving without hesitation. "I don't guess he's owed much of an apology, but he'll get one . . . and he'll get whatever bloody else he wants, or 1 miss my bet."

The guard stood in a nook shaded by Rose of Sharon. The insects buzzing in the rich purple flowers had lulled him into a doze, but he snapped to full alertness when Samlor and the plumed officer stepped into view. "Sir," he said crisply.

"How's your prisoner?" Samlor asked. The cistern's pottery lid was ajar. He bent to remove it.

"Just fine, sir," the guard said to Samlor's back. "Hasn't said a word since we put him down there, except to ask that I put the lid back partway so the sun didn't cook him."

The cistern was a buried terra cotta jar, eight feet tall and five feet at its greatest diameter. Its interior was plastered to hold the water which could be fed in through pipes around the rim. Empty, it was the perfect prison for a frail old man who couldn't climb out unaided.

But the cistern was completely empty now.

Samlor backed away.

The military officer glanced in and gasped. He began shouting threats at the guard who defended himself with blurted astonishment.

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But when Samlor thought about it, he realized that the proper place to search for the old man would be in a rock-cut tomb near the ancient capital of Napata. Which is where he and Khamwas were about to return, bearing the bones of Merib and Ah were. . . .

AHWERE'S REMAINS WEIGHED almost nothing after a thousand years in what had been a swamp till silt pushed the Delta further out into the Great Sea. The casket in which Khamwas placed them was very small, but it was made of thick gold and ivory. Supporting half its weight while holding a lamp in the other hand—

and

crawling up the passage to Nanefer's tomb—

made a damned difficult job.

But Pemu and Serpot were struggling along behind with Merib's similar casket. If they didn't complain, then Samlor surely had no right to.

As before, the sound of music outside the tomb dimmed to silence when Samlor and Khamwas stood within the chamber. The lampflame waved languidly, the only light in the room.

The children staggered out of the passage. They were sweating and the crawl had disarranged their garments of blue and gold, but they did their best to look royal and solemn as they caught their breath within the tomb. Samlor had worried that the chamber would glow in an unearthly fashion, frightening the children . . . and reminding him of their terrified faces as he cut their throats from ear to ear in his dream, only a dream. Perhaps Prince Nanefer had shared the same concern, because the tomb was as cold and dark as a cavity in rock should be.

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Nanefer wouldn't have been a bad guy to know.

Nanefer hadn't been a bad guy to be, though he sure wasn't Samlor hil Samt . . . and anyway, that had been a dream, too.

"Prince Nanefer," Khamwas intoned, "my kinsman, we have come to reunite you with the Princess Ah were."

There was no echo, none at all.

Speaking together—

Serpot starting a half syllable ahead of Pemu, but the two of them coming into synchrony almost at once—

the children said, "Prince Nanefer,

our kinsman, we have come to reunite you with the Prince Merib."

"Your little boy," Serpot said in a piping solo. The children, sagging toward the heavy casket between them, looked at their father. Khamwas nodded, and the party advanced as evenly as possible. The adults set Ah were's coffin to the right of the throne and the seated mummy. Pemu and Serpot managed to put their burden down on the other side without dropping it, but the boy heaved a great sigh of relief and began kneading circulation back into his right palm.

Nanefer's corpse was as still as carven wood. With luck, Pemu and Serpot thought the ill-lit form was indeed a statue.

Khamwas bent over his children and hugged them. "You can go out now, darlings," he said. "Samlor and I will be with you very shortly." Serpot turned, but Pemu tugged her around again. They made deep bows toward—