Dagger

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 begi

"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 spa

" 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.

"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 ru

Ru

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 mille