Dagger (23 page)

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

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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

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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.

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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?"