Dagger (14 page)

"

The Napatan's mouth broadened in a cool, knowing grin. "If I succeed," he continued, "I will become King of Napata. And that is the very least of what the

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make available to me. You will be well compensated, I assure you. You'll have your heart's desire."

Samlor's mouth quirked in a smile which was either wistful or mocking, depending on how the shadows fell across the harsh planes of his face. "Before you offer me that," he said softly, "you'll have to tell me what it is." The three of them waited unmoving while the storm rumbled its way toward silence. Star was asleep, and Khamwas looked toward the barred window, wise enough to know not to push his companion—

patient enough to follow the path of

wisdom.

Samlor mused, dark thoughts sometimes rolling volcan-ically brighter with moments of rage and frustration. He had every confidence in himself, absolute certainty that he could get what he wanted.

But he didn't know what that was. His words to Khamwas had not been any sort of joke.

Moving slowly enough that it was not a threat, Samlor drew the coffin-hilted dagger from his belt. He held it point high, an edge toward him and one of the flats of scribbled metal facing the Napatan scholar.

"Master Khamwas," Samlor said, "how do you like this dagger? The pattern in the iron?"

Khamwas shrugged. "Very pretty," he said. Innate good manners saved him, barely, from snapping at the frivolity.

"What d'ye suppose it'd tell me I should do if I looked at it now?"

"Pardon?" said Khamwas. This time the question didn't seem frivolous, but it was completely unintelligible to him. Either Samlor had a fund of knowledge closed to his companion, or Samlor was going mad.

The Cirdonian caravan master was not acting particularly like a man with special

.knowledge.

"Well, it doesn't really matter," said Samlor in a bantering voice. He slipped his dagger carefully under his belt again. "I've already decided I'm going along with you. After all, that way one of us is going to know what he wants."

"I'm very glad to hear that," said Khamwas. He stood up and clasped Samlor's hand in token of the bargain they had just struck. Khamwas didn't have the faintest notion of what had gone through Samlor's mind in the past few minutes, but neither did he care. Khamwas knew exactly what he wanted, just as Samlor implied.

It didn't occur to him that he might be mistaken in his desire. And he certainly didn't understand what Tjainufi meant when the manikin chirped,

"A remedy is effective only through the hand of its physician."

THE WIND WAS hot and charged with sand. Though it swept for hundreds of miles up the valley of the River Napata, the shimmering air brought no hint of moisture with it to the nostrils of Khamwas and Samlor.

"This is the place," Khamwas croaked to his companion. He turned as he started to speak and, convinced of his inattention, the camel on which he rode snaked its head around to bite.

"Child of Hell," Khamwas snarled as he kicked the beast's muzzle. The motion had become almost instinctive through long practice on the road from Cirdon. The beast gave an angry bleat, not so much pained by the boot sole as frustrated at its failure to clamp its square yellow teeth on its rider's calf. Samlor was logy with the motion of his own beast. He had reined to a halt when his companion did, but it was a moment before Khamwas' words had any more meaning than did the rasping wind that surrounded them. The camel's shambling pace did not rock a man drowsy but rather hammered him to semi-consciousness. Being familiar with the process, as Samlor had been now for decades, did not change it from the physical punishment it had been the first time he rode one of the beasts.

Children of Hell indeed.

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Coughing to clear his throat before he ventured a reply, Samlor said, "The temple we're looking for? Where then?"

Instead of giving an immediate response, Khamwas began to dismount with the care required by stiff muscles and a camel whose ill will had been demonstrated over several hundred miles of travel. Samlor remained where he was, taking advantage of the saddle's height to survey their surroundings.

There was nothing very prepossessing about them.

The journey from Sanctuary to Cirdon had been along a regular caravan route—

an

easy trip for Samlor and not overly grueling for Star and Khamwas. They'd placed Star in the hands of family retainers—

as safe as she could be away

from Samlor and probably safer' than anyone else was around a child with the powers Star controlled. Then Samlor began really to earn his fee. He and Khamwas followed the east bank of the River Napata for a hundred miles that seemed an eternity. A reef of hard sandstone cut across the desert on a course nearly parallel to that of the river. Where rock finally met water here, it formed a bluff sixty feet high.

The path had risen for a mile or more, but the ascent was so gradual that Samlor had been unaware of it until now when he found that by looking to his left he could see well past the other bank. The river's course was brown, golden where the sun reflected from it and gleamingly muddy to either side. The hills in the distance were dark brown, and the plains they enclosed were dun except where green marked village plots, irrigated with water lifted by water-wheel from the river below.

Even the foliage was dulled by dust.

There was a village nearby on their side of the river as well, indicated by the tops of date palms a quarter mile ahead. Nothing could be grown on the sandstone, but beyond it there must be a fold of earth suitable for irrigation.

"Yeah, hasn't been so very bad a way," said Samlor, thinking back on the completed journey with already a touch of longing. He had liked working for Khamwas, being responsible for carrying out tasks in the best way 96

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possible—

but letting somebody else decide what those tasks should be. Khamwas knew what he wanted. . . .

And Khamwas was a good man with whom to share a journey. Not especially skilled, but willing and intelligent. Cheerful within reason, but not a maniac who redoubled the unpleasantness of storm or baking heat with bright chatter. Not so very bad a journey though, now it had ended.

"It is on the road that a man finds a companion," said Tjainufi. In dim light the manikin was more visible than he should have been. Conversely, the sunlight that flooded the travellers now blurred around Tjainufi so that the manikin seemed to have been molded from translucent wax. His voice was no less wingedly clear at one time of day or another.

Khamwas ignored Tjainufi. He bent at the waist and twisted, legs spread and tense as he tried to work the cramps from his muscles.

"We should have hired a boat and crew as soon as we reached the river," he said. His reproach was made impersonal by the fact that he did not turn to face his companion as he spoke. "We would have been here as soon, and been in better shape."

Convinced at last they had arrived, Samlor lifted himself from the saddle of his own camel and dropped heavily to the ground. He could have alighted more gently, or even forced his beast to kneel and halve the distance; but that would have added insult to Khamwas, who already felt injured by the choice of conveyance on which the caravan master had insisted.

"The wind's been in our face all the way down the river," said Samlor, loosening the rust from both mind and tongue as he fitted them to the thought. "A boat couldn't drift against it, not as sluggish as the current is. We'd still be a hundred miles upstream. Not as stiff, mayhap. But not in very good humor by now, I'd judge."

"That's very unusual," said Khamwas as he walked to the edge of the bank. From cracks in the sandstone grew bushes, low and seemingly as dry as the rock and sand around them. They were attractive enough to the camels that both began to browse instead of bolting or making further attempts to use their teeth on their riders.

"I don't trust the weather, ever," said Samlor. "And I don't know enough about boats to feel comfortable about k." He grinned and squeezed his companion's biceps. "I'm responsible for getting you here, remember? And, unusual wind or not, we've gotten here, haven't we?"

Khamwas grinned back though there was a gray tinge of fatigue behind his expression. "So we have," he agreed. "What do you think of them?" He gestured downward, over the bank. Samlor stepped forward and followed the gesture with his eyes.

"Heqt and her waters!" he blurted, realizing for the first time that there was something here to see.

The river had cut a scallop in millennia of battering against the sandstone reef. Human labor had then modified the smooth, water-sculpted, curve into an array of huge statues.

Samlor looked down at four of them, their feet half buried by sand that drifted over the escarpment to fill again the cavities that men had carved away. There was little to tell of the subjects from this angle, but at the further horn of sandstone was another quartet of statues. They were perhaps smaller than those immediately beneath Samlor, but they were not hidden by sand or the angle. They were monsters of a sort that the Cirdonian hoped were wholly mythical. All were human in some portion of their physiognomy. The nearest had a woman's head beneath a crescent helmet. She snarled, leaning forward over the river on doglike legs and a hairy body that was more like a bear's than that of any other creature with which Samlor was familiar. The statue was cut into the living rock of the bluff, but it—

all four of them—

were in such high relief that only their

heads and feet remained in contact with the stone of which they were a part. The statue on the opposite end of the relief bore a man's head, but in no other way was it the male counterpart of the first. The creature's torso was that of a lizard with traces of

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blue paint remaining in the crevices between its belly plates. Eight legs that could have graced a spider or a crab splayed outward from the shoulder area, gripping the pilasters to either side with clawed feet.

In the center of the array of statues was a doorway cut through a pilaster of double width. It was only by measuring by eye the bluff's height above the river that Samlor could estimate that what seemed to be a low door was really ten feet high—

though only a quarter the height of the statues.

The pair of reliefs immediately flanking the doorway were not without human attributes, which made them the more monstrous. A cobra head, its hood flared, watched coldly from above the body of a grasshopper—

from which dangled a human

phallus and scrotum. The composite creature stood upright, but its limbs were those of a bull.

On the other side of the door, a fish head gaped from a feathered torso with vestigial wings and bare, human breasts. Gnarled, hairy legs, those of a troll or a great ape, completed the grotesque ensemble.

"That's pretty impressive, Khamwas," Samlor said with all emotion purged from his tone. It embarrassed him that shapes in stone could affect him with disgust and more than a touch of fear.

"All things are in the hands of fate and of god," said Tjainufi. Samlor glanced at the manikin. Tjainufi's features displayed nothing beyond bland indifference. The comment didn't mean anything, so far as Samlor could see

. . . which, he had learned, might mean there was something important that he didn't see.

"They're paired temples, you see," said Khamwas'as he peered with satisfaction down at the statues cut from the face of the bank directly beneath them.

"Harsaphes and Somptu, this is Harsaphes under us here. There's always been a belief that Nanefer was buried with his book on the site—

others have been

searching for the book a thousand years before / was born. But it seemed he was in the Temple of Somptu, because the reference in the carving from the Old Palace was to 'a tomb in the smaller temple."

Khamwas gestured across the curving rock face toward

the grotesque reliefs—

a temple?—

facing them. As he did, the door in the center

of the design disappeared into deeper shadow. Samlor blinked at the illusion, then realized that the panel had been opened inward.

A hunched figure stepped into the light. It looked mouse-sized at the feet of the rock-carved monsters, but it was certainly human—

a small man, stooping,

dressed in a robe of black or sooty brown. The hatred in his glance was palpable, even over a distance far too great for Samlor to discern his features.

"But that must have been a mistake. Or perhaps a deliberate deception," said Khamwas, returning his attention to the figures beneath him. At least from this angle they appeared to be a quartet of seated men, monstrous only in that they were even larger than the reliefs on the opposite horn of rock. Sand drifting over the escarpment had covered one figure waist high, lying across the feet of the next and the threshold of the door set between pairs of figures.

"We've got company, Khamwas," said Samlor, touching his companion's arm and nodding toward the distant figure. "Across the way."

"Oh, yes, him," Khamwas replied unconcernedly. "He's been here since, well, long before the first time I came here to examine the temples. The Priest of the Rock, the local villagers call him, some sort of holy man. He actually lives in the Temple of Somptu, praying, I suppose, and the villagers support him with little offerings. Not that his needs are very great." Khamwas paused, then rubbed his hands together and said, "Well, we'd best look the place over, hadn't we? I've examined the temple before, of course. But it's very different now that I know Prince Nanefer is buried here."

"A moment, friend," said Samlor, checking Khamwas with a touch. "We'll need food, the camels'll need fodder—

and I think we'd best take care of those things

at the village—

" he nodded in the direction of the palm fronds and squealing water wheels "—