Dagger

Arched doorways to the left gave onto a formal audience chamber with frescoed walls and stone pillars cut to resemble shocks of reeds. Khamwas strode on past the empty hall, toward the door directly before them. His fingers drummed at the bowl. This door opened also with a squeal of its metal hinges.

The corridor beyond was high and lighted with clerestory windows. A servant-unarmed, but dressed and adorned in evidence of high rank-lolled in near somnolence on a stool. He lurched to his feet as the intruders approached.

"Who do you think-" he bleated.

"Don't make me hurt you," said Samlor, one finger on his dagger's buttcap.

Khamwas stroked his bowl. "Don't make us hurt you," rang the gold medallion on the servant's chest.

The man screamed and ran down the corridor. Before he ducked into a side door, his arm jerked and flung away the medallion with its broken chain.

A few heads, mostly female, popped out of other doors to see what was going on, but no one else tried to halt Samlor and Khamwas as they strode, side by side, to the gold-plated door at the end.

Samlor was no longer surprised when this door admitted them as the others had done.

There were three men at the table within, all of them in their thirties. The insignia of rank they had put aside-gold-shot shoulder capes and crowns whose bands bore central emeralds carven into reed bracts-left no doubt as to who they were.

"Who's this priest?" one of them demanded with birdlike glances toward his fellows. "Why's he here?"

The door closed behind the intruders, shutting off the growing babble of voices in the corridor.

There were cups on the table, and on the stand beside it was a wine jug with a dipper hanging from its rim. There were no servants present, not even a girl to fill the cups. Khamwas had tramped straight into a private meeting of the joint rulers of Napata.

"Do you recognize me?" he asked in a tone that would have been coquettish in a woman. It was the first time Samlor's companion had spoken since they confronted the guards in the outer court.

"What do you think you're doing, you two?" asked the heavy-set man at the center of the table in a gravelly voice. Formal headgear would have concealed the fact that he was already nearly bald.

Khamwas stroked his begging bowl. The heavy-set man's cup said, "Once there were four brothers-Osorkon, Patjenfi-" all three of the seated men jumped when the cup spoke in plangent tones, then jumped again as their names rolled from its golden tonguelessness " – Pentweret, and Khamwas. . and Khamwas, who was the eldest, should have reigned when their father died."

While the room still rang with the cup's last word, the crown lying on the table beside the rabbit-featured man who'd first spoken took up the story by saying, "But the other brothers seized Khamwas while he was in the desert searching for inscriptions on ancient monuments. They sold him as a slave to a caravan trading with Ranke-and they stained his cloak with blood to prove to their father that a lion had killed Khamwas."

The man in the center of the table was motionless, but he gripped his mug fiercely enough to blotch his knuckles with strain. The rabbit-featured fellow was staring at his crown.

His mouth opened and shut with little plopping sounds, but he did not speak.

The dagger which the third man had drawn spoke instead. It said, "But the brothers forgot that a slave who has learned certain arts from his studies can find his way to freedom quickly."

The man holding the dagger dropped it onto the table. He flapped his hand through the air as if it had been burned.

All together the mug, crown and dagger chorused, "Khamwas could not return home until he had gained further knowledge, greater powers. But nothing was more certain than that someday he would return to confront his brothers-"

Alone, the mug added, "Osorkon."

"Patjenfi," said the crown.

"Pentweret," the dagger concluded.

Khamwas threw back the hood of his cloak.

"We wronged you, my brother," said Osorkon at the center of the table. He was forcing the words through a block of emotions more varied than Samlor could identify.

"Not we, not me," babbled Patjenfi, glancing nervously from Khamwas to the brothers with him at the table. "I said-"

"Fool," said his crown as Khamwas touched the bowl.

Patjenfi fell silent.

"We wronged you," Osorkon repeated. "And it may be that we wronged our father. He would rather-" the bitterness was clear in his rasping voice " – anything in the world than that he lose you, my brother. But-"

Osorkon met Khamwas' eyes with a regal glare of his own. "But much as I regret our action, it~was necessary. The country would not have survived your kingship, Khamwas."

"After your wife died," said Pentweret, speaking for the first time since Khamwas entered the room, "you didn't care for anything except your stones. Buildings ruined for a thousand years. What would have happened to Napata if its king wandered in the desert every day and took rro account of the business of state?"

Samlor kept his face emotionless as he looked toward his companion. Khamwas wore a cool smile which could indicate amusement, or approval-or nothing at all.

"And my children?" asked Khamwas softly. "Didn't I care for them?"

"I misspoke," said Pentweret. "Of course, of course."

"Nobody doubts that," insisted Osorkon. "But that wouldn't have kept Napata from fragmenting into as many petty kingdoms as there're villages along the river. And you wouldn't have cared. You.stopped caring when your wife died!"

"Our father couldn't see that," said Patjenfi, no longer trying to distance himself from his fellows. "Wouldn't see it, I suppose. So what were we to do?" The whine in his voice didn't detract from the sincerity of the question, though it gave it an ugly cast.

"What of my children, then, brothers?" Khamwas said, as gently as a breeze touching the edge of the headsman's axe.

Osorkon blinked. "Pemu and Serpot?" he said. "Oh, they're fine."

"My own are of an age with them," added Patjenfi, "so they're fostered in my apartments. Why-" a look of horror drew across his rabbity visage. "You didn't think we'd have hurt them, did you?"

"If you'll give me leave to go to the door," said Pentweret, "I'll summon them. They can be here in a few minutes at most."

Khamwas nodded. His youngest brother slipped past them to the door-which opened to a thrumming of Khamwas' fingers on the bowl. Samlor watched as the man spoke urgently through the opening. Pentweret had been the one to draw a weapon at the first intrusion, and he was wise enough to ask before stepping toward the door.

That meant his instincts were enough like Samlor's that he could be a real problem.

Pentweret seated himself again. He had left the door ajar. Noise from the corridor became a backdrop as omnipresent as the hiss of a waterfall. The crowding servants were nervous, but they were too interested in events to leave unordered.

The noise grew louder until it was cut by a voice of authority. "Your highnesses?" called someone in pear-shaped tones. "The prince and princess are here, as you commanded."

Khamwas turned and snatched the door open with his hand. Samlor glanced from side to side, trying to cover the seated kings as well as whatever waited in the hall. A functionary with gold ornaments, a spotless tunic, and enough fat to prove he did nothing strenuous for a living, waited with a child to either side of him.

Khamwas dropped his bowl with a clang echoed by every metal object in the room and corridor. He knelt and held out his arms to the children.

Their faces blanked. They didn't move.

"Pemu!" Khamwas said. "Serpot! I'm your father. I'm Khamwas."

The boy looked to be nine, the girl perhaps seven-the age of Star-though both children had the coppery complexions and straight hair of their father. For a moment they poised, unwilling to trust the news that they weren't orphans after all, living on their cousins' sufferance. Then they ran to the waiting arms, the boy first, sobbing and crying, "Daddy!"