Dagger (16 page)

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

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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

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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.

"///m, 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.

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"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

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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.