Dagger

"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 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.

CHAPTER 23

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 ca

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.

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 tu

"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 tu

The sunlight at the tu

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.