Dagger

In a similar frame of mind, Khamwas extended his staff before them and clothed it with phosphorescence so pale that it was more identification than illumination.

"Ah, I suppose you'll want to get started clearing sand from the tomb entrance?" the caravan master said. "I'll round up a crew from the village with scoops and torches. They probably won't want to come out in the dark, but we can make it worth their while.

"And-and it might be as well they didn't see what the statues there look like until they'd been on the job for a bit. Could be they wouldn't react real good to that."

"I'll take care of the sand myself, Samlor," said the Napatan scholar. "The Priest of the Rock was blocking me-that's why I wasn't able to locate the tomb before. But it'll be all right now."

"There isn't any body, you know," said Samlor to the darkness. "He. . He fell apart, or…"

"Someone left to watch," Khamwas said reassuringly. The fallen statue loomed ahead of them, visible after all. The female head had broken away from the bulbous hairy body.

"A priest," Khamwas continued as they skirted the rubble, leaving deep prints in the soft margin of the river. "But human, and alive. He was just older than we thought. Even older."

"Everything's relative, I guess," Samlor remarked with studied calm. He resisted the urge to grind sand between his palms in order to clean them of any trace of the Priest of the Rock.

Samlor paused at the lower end of the rope. "I'll get a lamp," he said. "I suppose you'll want light while you, while you work?"

Khamwas smiled broadly in the dim light of his staff. "What I really want, I think," he said-and / think had the weight of genuine consideration in its syllables-"is a good night's sleep, for a change. After a hot meal. Would that-" he gestured at the darkness " – be possible now?"

"Just watch me," said Samlor with a smile as wide as his companion's. He began to mount the slope briskly, lifting himself hand over hand along the rope.

He much preferred daylight for whatever it was Khamwas intended to do.

CHAPTER 10

BY DAYLIGHT FROM the escarpment, the lesser temple looked like the wreckage of time rather than of an evening. The man-headed thing lay in a hundred pieces. Its spider legs had proved unequal to their task without the support of the cliff face as well. When one leg gave way, the others followed with a sudde

Near it were the toppled forms of the other pair of composite creatures. They had been in balance when night fell like an axe blade. The muddy ground let them tilt. Without life or its counterfeit to right them, the statues crashed down and broke under their own weight.

Spring floods would roll the. fragments against one another. In a few years the small bits would be gravel and the large ones indistinguishable lumps of sandstone with no signs of human working.

Samlor had never liked ruins. They reminded him that very soon his own bones would bleach or feed desert mice.

But this particular ruin was an impressive monument to the fact that he'd done his job very damned well.

On the slope below the caravan master, Khamwas cried out.

Samlor's face went blank. If he used the rope to support him, he would have come down on top of Khamwas, who was kneeling at the spot marked by the cornel wood wand.

Instead Samlor slid down on a parallel course, braking himself with boots and his left hand.

His right hand did not touch the slope. It held his dagger ready for any problem that steel and ruthlessness could solve.

Khamwas didn't look at him, despite the cloud of dust and sand which Samlor sprayed before him. The Napatan was chanting. He held his staif between the palms of his hands, rotating it slowly back and forth on its axis. Every time the direction of rotation changed, he gave a yelp in a high falsetto, and it was this which Samlor had mistaken for a cry of alarm.

As soon as Samlor understood the situation, he tried to slow himself. He still couldn't halt before he was on a level with his companion, halfway down the slope. Much good he'd have been if there really were a problem. He worried too much.

Tjainufi turned around to face the caravan master instead of the slowly-turning staff. "He who scorns matters too often," he said in a tone of reminder, "will die of it."

Samlor smiled but did not reply lest the conversation distract Khamwas. Though Khamwas appeared to be as surely set in his course as the sun ascending the sky. The Napatan scholar had since dawn been kneeling in the sand, muttering to himself, his staff, or his gods.

Now something seemed to have answered him.

The staff began to spin faster and in one direction, blurring itself into the smooth brown ideal of a staff. All its individuality of grain and usage melted together. Khamwas was no longer chanting or holding the staff, though its ferule was several inches above the ground.

The spin accelerated. Khamwas stepped back. A line of dust rose beside the comelwood marker. The dust paused, spread a hand's breadth at the top, like a cobra lifting itself from a conjurer's basket. Then it shot upward faster than Samlor could have thrown a rock, roaring and expanding into a whirlwind with uneasy similarities to the tornado which had cleansed Setios' house of its demons.

Khamwas bent and plucked Samlor's wand out of the way a moment before it would have been lost in the fu

"The cosmos abhors imbalance," murmured Khamwas as he walked to his companion. Soft sand flooded over his feet and at every step poured back past the straps of his sandals. He handed the cornelwood wand to Samlor.

The point it had marked was a dip in the slope. It was not yet a cavity because sand refilled it, oozing from all sides like viscous oil.

The whirlwind lifted its load twenty feet in the air in a brown column as thick as Samlor's chest. At its peak, the column disintegrated in a plume driven by the breeze over the escarpment. The heavier particles settled out further down the slope, but the lightest of the dust drifted over the river and marked the opposite bank with a yellow stain.

"That's. . quite a job, you know," said Samlor while his eyes continued to track the dust plume.

Khamwas nodded with satisfaction. "I was at a disadvantage in Sanctuary," he said, rubbing his hands in a physical memory of the task they had just performed. "Several disadvantages. But here-"

He lifted his jaw as he surveyed the river and the irrigated fields beyond it. "This is my land, my friend. By right, and by the right of the book's power when I hold it."

He met Samlor's eyes with a gaze as imperious as that of an eagle. "I swore that the day my brothers sold me as a slave," he added.

"Huh?"

Khamwas smiled. His face fell back into the familiar lines of humor and placid determination. "Ifdoesn't matter now," he said, clapping his companion on the shoulder. The stone-chiseled visage was back for an instant. "But soon it will matter to my brothers. Very much."

Samlor raised an eyebrow, then chuckled. "A guy never knows what he's signed on for, does he?" he said.

Khamwas looked at the caravan master sharply and said, "Your commitment's ended. You promised me nothing beyond getting me to-" he pointed at the whirlwind " – this point."

"Sure I did," Samlor replied. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and kept his eyes on the column of sand. "Anyhow, I didn't say I was complaining."

The slopes had flattened near the tip of the fu