Dagger

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 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.

But the blade of his dagger would slide all the way through.

"We got you, fucker!" Samlor shouted at the door as he slipped the long, watered blade through the crack between the leaves. He would have explained that he was still trying to distract the man inside, but mostly it was just animal triumph finding a vocal outlet.

And, partly, it was a prayer that he had triumphed.

The bar closing the door crossed the gap at waist height. The edge of the dagger met it as Samlor drew the blade up through the crack. If the bar were pi

The blade continued to lift, against the weight of the bar but without any suggestion that the bar was locked into place.

Samlor moved convulsively, gripping the dagger hilt with both hands and jerking the blade upward with all his strength. The bar flipped out of the shallow troughs in which it was laid and fell loudly against a wall, then the floor.

The stone troll's hand reaching for Samlor missed him because he dived into the temple as the doors swung away from his thrusting shoulder.

The room in which Samlor rolled back to his feet, fatigue forgotten, was scarcely half the size of the first hall of the greater temple. Its low ceiling was supported on square-section pillars instead of regal caryatids.

And it stank.

If Khamwas had cleared the chamber many years before while he searched for the Tomb of Nanefer, then that had been the room's last cleaning. The Priest of the Rock used the interior for all his bodily functions. Air blown from the desert desiccated the result, but it could not remove the effluvium.

The priest sat now in the center of the chamber: ankles crossed beneath his thighs, head bowed, and seemingly oblivious to the pair of crows which cawed and yammered in tight circles around his head.

The room darkened as the cobra-headed thing knelt and tried to grip Samlor with a hairy, knotted hand. The creature blocked much of the sunlight flooding through the doorway, but the intruder was beyond its grasp.

Samlor reached the priest in two quick strides. He lifted the old man by the woolen shawl that was his only covering. Even for the caravan master's left hand alone, the priest was an insignificant burden.

"Quit it!" Samlor shouted, giving the priest a shake to reinforce the demand. "You've lost! Don't make me kill you."

The priest's eyes were the only smooth surfaces in the chamber. They reflected the light. His mouth was open but toothless as well as speechless.

The crows vanished abruptly.

"There," said Samlor, sure that he was being obeyed. Deep breaths and the harsh necessity of taking them made the stench bearable but not u

The interior was suddenly brighter again. That was good in itself, but it meant that the creatures outside had not returned to being sandstone carvings. Samlor glanced around.

The cobra-headed thing had moved out of the doorway so that the man-creature could reach inside with one of its longer, arthropod arms.

Samlor's right hand and left moved together like a pair of pruning shears, the one anchoring the priest against the other and the dagger blade that swept across the wizened neck.

The vertebrae resisted more like cartilage than bone as Samlor drove his steel in a berserk determination to finish the business once and for all.

The priest's head fell away and powdered when it hit the stone, like a seashell burned to lime but able to retain its shape untiUit receives a shock. The body slumped but did not thrash in the shawl which confined it. An arm slipped to the floor, separated when the elbow joint crumbled. No other part of the Priest of the Rock retained its shape.

Samlor flung the garment toward a far corner in the kind of convulsive motion a man makes when he finds something loathsome crawling on his hand. The shawl flapped open in a cloud of dust and bone splinters. They settled into a lighter-colored blotch on the filthy floor.

Samlor moved toward the door, shaky- with reaction and the fatigue poisons in all his muscles. Some of the dust from-from the shawl, leave it at that-some of the dust was still drifting in the air. Samlor wanted very badly to get out of the temple before he drew in another breath.

He had to crawl through the doorway because of the long, pincered arm reaching through it and the sculptured human face bent close as if its blank stone eye were trying to look into the temple.

Khamwas caught Samlor by the wrist and shoulder at the entrance to the lesser temple. The knife still in the caravan master's hand almost gashed Khamwas, who seemed untroubled in his enthusiasm to hug Samlor.

"I was sure you were, well…" Khamwas said to his companion's shoulder. "I prayed for you. There didn't seem to be any use for the, for the crows after you were inside yourself. So there wasn't anything I could do to help."

"Do not weary of calling to the gods," said Tjainufi sharply. "They have their hour for hearing petitions."

Samlor squeezed the Napatan firmly, then stepped away and straightened. He ducked his head again immediately because the lizard belly of the thing which clawed into the temple was still above them like a low roof.

"Let's get away from here, huh?" he said, muttering so that the queasiness he suddenly felt would not be evident in his voice.

When the damned things were threatening his life, he'd had no time to be disturbed at their supernatural provenance.

The reliefs, now free-standing statutes, were scattered between the entrances to the two temples. The woman-headed monster was a hump on the riverbank where it had toppled when the Priest of the Rock tried to regain control of his creatures. The other three were immediate obstacles as the two men began to walk toward the larger temple.

Light was pouring toward the West like blood into a sacrificial bowl.

"Hey, look," Samlor said quietly. He was glad that the shadows, deepening with every step the men took, hid his face. "Maybe I said some things when it got tense, you know. I don't remember. But I wouldn't be here if I didn't, you know, respect you."

"My brother is useless," said-replied? – Tjainufi, "if he doesn't take care of me."

"I don't remember anything either," said Khamwas. Then-not that there was any doubt that he did remember- he added, "There wasn't time to stand on ceremony, while you were saving both our lives that way."

"Save?" Samlor jeered. "Never thought I'd be so glad to see a couple birds, buddy."

It was becoming so dark that Samlor began to fear that he would be unable to distinguish the fallen monster from shadows when they reached it. Nobody alive would be amused if he managed to break his nose on a pile of stones after coming through the past crisis with nothing worse than a few scrapes and strains.