Dagger

"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."

CHAPTER 8

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.

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 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 gri

Khamwas gri

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 mille

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.