Dagger (25 page)

The eyes closed.

Samlor did not catch his wife when she slumped to the floor, because his own limbs were trembling too badly.

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"THERE'S SOMETHING BIG going past on the surface," thought the carp as they snuffled the mud near the bank, "but it doesn't matter to us." Lesser fish formed lesser thoughts, while birds bouncing among the reedtops chirped of food and the day's ending. Lizards stalked insects while a snake moved with glacial slowness toward a frog.

There were no crocodiles anywhere near the royal yacht.

Samlor lowered the Book of Tatenen with a sigh.

Ah were had been watching him from her couch. She touched her husband's hand and smiled, though her expression was almost lost in the dusk. Samlor squeezed her hand fiercely and kissed her, but he did not put away the crystal.

"I need to talk to Shay," he murmured as he stood and ducked from beneath the awning. The mast creaked as the fitful breeze strengthened. Tonight the sky was cloudless and the wind would stay fair all the way to the capital. The Book of Tatenen would see to that.

The bosun had been waiting for Samlor. "Ah, didn't want t' bother you while you was thinkin', sir," he said. "But 1 figured we'd tie up along the bank about now." He would not meet his master's eyes.

"We'll go on," Samlor retorted sharply. "I want to reach the capital before—

" He

broke off, unwilling to say,

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"Before my father hears of his grandson's death from someone else."

"Yessir, yessir," agreed Shay, bobbing his head. "It was only—

the wind what made

us heel the other, the other bloody dusk. Didn't know for sure what you'd want." No one but Samlor had seen the crocodile, not even Ahwere. But his fingers now touched gouges which had not been in the railing when the yacht first sailed back from the Temple of Tatenen. It had not been wind that flung Merib to his death—

nor had it been chance.

Shay strode forward, bawling his orders. Still standing, Samlor raised the crystal to his forehead again and became all life in the cosmos as color drained from the sky above the River Napata. There was nothing more dangerous near the yacht than the gnats which twilight drew from the reed beds anywhere. He would continue checking all the way to the capital.

If the gods sent another messenger, Samlor would blast it with enough violence to pay in a small way for what had happened to Merib.

"We'll sail through the night," Samlor said as he seated himself again beside Ahwere. "It'll be safe, and we'll—

"

The worm came over the starboard rail behind Ahwere and snatched her into the water before she had time to scream. Samlor screamed instead.

"Oh, she's jumped, "she's jumped!" he heard the nursemaid crying as he commanded the cosmos through the book. "Oh, the grief of her poor darling son!" All the forces in the cosmos balanced on a point, the Book of Tatenen and the mind of Samlor hil Samt. The currents that rolled Ahwere's body, the gurgle of air still trapped in her lungs—

the minuscule scrape of sediment across her

sightless eyes—

all were his to know and to change.

The worm that seized her with its blue-glowing snout did not exist in the present cosmos.

Ahwere flashed back onto her couch with a slap of sodden garments. Only the dim light and confusion kept her reappearance from throwing the excited crewmen into blind panic.

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She stirred, and for a moment Samlor thought he had been mistaken. He embraced Ah were while the nurse babbled and Shay gave orders to bring the vessel around to where he thought someone was still in the water.

Ahwere's eyes blazed blue when she opened them. Samlor's mouth drew back in a rictus of horror—

and hope that still denied reality.

"Rejoice, my husband, my only love," said Ahwere's body. "Soon the cosmos will be in balance again."

"Who's overboard?" Shay demanded. "What's happened?" A late-returning marsh hawk began to screech in dismal satisfaction.

"SHE DIDN'T KILL herself," Samlor muttered. He had washed his hands a score of times since Ahwere's interment, but his mind told him his skin still was scented with the camphor and incense of her embalming. "They sent the worm to take her. The gods."

"Well," said Shay uncomfortably, "We'll be back soon. The palace should be in sight any time now."

Samlor looked down at the sun-bronzed water curling past their hull. "But I'd killed it.vThough 1 suppose it was never alive."

"So it couldn't be killed," said the bosun, making conversation because his master demanded conversation to take his mind off the past—

and the future.

"Well, the gods set all our terms of life, sir. Yourselves as well as the like of—

" he nodded forward "—

me 'n the boys."

"Not me!" Samlor said, anger breaking through his despair like lightning in storm clouds. "They can't harm me—

not since I drank the Spell of Safety."

"Well, I'm sure your father'll be glad to have you safe, at least, sir," Shay said, flicking splinters from the rail with his horny thumb. "He ain't well, I'd heard."

"No, he's not well," agreed Samlor. The blood was draining from his face as he imagined greeting King Merneb in a few more minutes, "Father," he said in his mind, "your daughter is dead, and with her the grandson whom 183

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you loved more than life itself. But don't worry: I, who carried them to their deaths, have returned."

"He'll want you to marry again," Shay was saying. "The daughter of one of the neighboring princes, I guess. Well, you may come to love her as much as you did your, well, the Princess Ahwere."

"I can't protect them," Samlor said, his eyes staring at water that they did not see. "I can't protect anyone but myself. A bolt of lightning, the collapse of a building—

earthquake. Whoever I marry will die. Perhaps after we have children to take also."

"Well, sir," said the bosun with a strained chuckle. "I can't imagine things are so bad that the whole cosmos is turned to punish one man. Things don't work like that."

"Your highness!" called the lookout at the masthead. "The palace is in sight, and your father's on the wharf to greet us!"

"Go forward, bosun," Samlor ordered curtly. Shay bowed and obeyed. The stern anchor, its wooden stock reeved through a hole bored in a large stone, hung from the rail opposite the steersman. Its line was bent around a deadeye and tied off.. The coffm-hilted dagger which Samlor carried in this life as the other severed the lashings easily.

He sheathed the knife and lifted the anchor from its hooks. The stone felt light—

as light as Ahwere the first time he carried her to their couch. He turned around twice so that anchorline wrapped him.

"Your highness!" cried the steersman in horror. "Shay! Shay!" The book was a hard outline clamped against him by his sash. It promised him all the powers in the cosmos.

Except the power of ever again being happy.

Samlor lurched against the rail and went over. The entangling line bound his legs together like a fish's tail, and the stone anchor carried him down as inexorably as a sword stroke.

The last thing he saw was the face of the bosun, staring over the side at him. Shay was smiling.

And his eyes were glowing blue.

THE ANCHOR DRAGGED Samlor head first toward the bottom, but he was standing upright in Nanefer's tomb. The dissonant realities made him flop to the stone floor on all fours.

He bounced to his feet again at once. His skin was aflame with shock and embarrassment. Khamwas swayed but had not fallen.

"You cannot take the book," whispered the ghost of Ahwere. "We have bought it with our lives, all our lives."

The ghost of the infant murmured softly against her.

"I have come for the book, Prince Nanefer," said Khamwas. He held out his hand slowly, though he did not step toward the mummified figure as yet. The tremor in Khamwas' voice assured Samlor that Khamwas too had shared Nanefer's triumph—

and

its aftermath.

"I would have said the same, Prince Khamwas," said the corpse in a voice like a leather bellows creaking. The withered hands crossed on his lap moved. First tentatively and then with increasing smoothness, they began to unwrap the parcel which lay beneath them.

Samlor was dusting his palms carefully on his tunic'. His body had aches and strains in it that Nanefer would never have known in a full, royal, lifetime. But it was Samlor's body, and he prayed he would never again wear another. 185

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The corpse lifted the crystal from its silken cover. For a moment the Book of Tatenen was dimly outlined by flecks of color in its heart. Nanefer's thin lips bent in a smile. Light flooded from it with the certainty of the sky brightening at sunrise. The tomb was flooded by it—

white and as cold as

frozen bone. Ahwere's sparkling ghost drifted or was driven back against a sidewall, so that nothing but bare floor separated the Napatan princes. Nanefer waved a hand. Samlor's lamp, forgotten in the greater illumination, guttered out in what might have been a stray breeze down the length of the tunnel.

"Will you fight me with magic, Khamwas?" asked the corpse in a wheezingly jocular voice. "Or shall we play a game?"

"You are dead, Nanefer," said Khamwas. "You have no magic and no power to keep the book from me. But—

" there was the least quaver in the voice which had been calmly steadfast "—

I will play a game with you."

"Then let us play, my kinsman," said the corpse. "Since you have magic and 1, who am dead, have none."

Nanefer crooked a blackened index finger toward one corner of the chamber. The table there was set with a cross-hatched game board and two bowls of dried beans—

black and white. Following the motion of the corpse's finger, the table slid just above the floor in an arc that ended with it resting before Nanefer's throne. The bowl of white beans faced Khamwas.

"I offer you the color of life, kinsman," said the corpse. "Savor it while you can."

Khamwas strode to the game board without glancing aside to see what the ghosts of Nanefer's family were doing. Samlor eyed them, ready to shout a warning if Ahwere attacked Khamwas' back . . . but the veils of blue light that were her figure moved only to pat the insubstantial form of Merib.

Khamwas placed a white bean at an intersection near the Center of the board. Nanefer, moving with the assurance of an old man instead of an ancient corpse, set a black piece on an adjacent intersection.

Piece and piece, patterns began to fill the board. Beans clicked softly against the cross-hatched alabaster. None of the adults spoke, but the infant Merib began to whimper again.

The light blazing from the Book of Tatenen was as cold as that which the sun had thrown over the cratered emptiness where the book had been concealed. Khamwas' face was masked by an expression of controlled emotion. The corpse set a piece and then, instead of withdrawing at once, picked up a quartet of white counters which his pieces had surrounded and captured. Khamwas placed another bean.

Samlor thought his companion was hunching to look shorter. Then he noticed that Khamwas' feet had sunk so that only his ankles showed above the solid concrete. Nanefer set a counter and swept up more white beans.

The air in the tomb was so dry that sweat droplets sparkled only for a moment on Khamwas' forehead before they disappeared—

to be replaced by more sweat. He

placed a bean on the alabaster. Khamwas stood bolt upright, and his knees had sunk below the level of the floor.

Under the pitiless glare of the crystal, Samlor noticed a piece shade from white through a dusky gray, then gleam black. Nanefer reached forward with the counter that would close the circle on three more white beans isolated when the one changed color.

"Khamwas!" Samlor shouted. "He's cheating you. They're turning to black, your pieces!"

Khamwas' thighs were sinking into the ground as his opponent scooped up the captured pieces. "Light," Khamwas said in a choked voice. "Bring me my staff!" Samlor plunged down the tunnel on all fours, as heedless of its constraint as a rabbit bolting from a fox. Khamwas was lifting another bean toward the alabaster. From his fixed expression, he seemed to be fighting the necessity of playing out the game to which he had agreed.

The sunlight at the tunnel's end was dim by comparison with the tomb chamber—

but

the sunlight was warm, and at the touch of it Samlor shuddered with memory of the bone-chilling blaze from the crystal.

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Earth tones—

brown and ochre and the ruddy sandstone cliffs—

stood in welcome

contrast to the white ground and primary colors of the tomb. The squall of distant irrigation wheels was an earthly sound and a suddenly blissful one. Khamwas' staff lay across the tunnel entrance as they had left it. Samlor wondered whether Khamwas thought there was no longer a risk of them being entombed by sand—

or whether he was willing to take that risk to keep from

slipping into solid concrete first.

Didn't matter. Couldn't matter. Samlor grabbed the staff and twisted himself around in the tunnel. He heard Khamwas scream something from the tomb chamber, but he did not understand the words.

Partly because most of Samlor's mind froze in shocked appreciation of the crocodile filling the tunnel before him.

The beast was not as large as the monster which waddled aboard the yacht in his dreamlife as Nanefer, but it was as large as the stone corridor. The tips of its open jaws touched the floor and ceiling.

Its breath was foul and as cold as Death.

"Will you, by Heqt?" Samlor whispered as he drew his dagger again. He could wedge the jaws with the staff, and then the watered steel blade would carve the beast's palate and white gums like cheese—