by David Drake
Khamwas paused, then rubbed his hands together and said, "Well, we'd best look the place over, hadn't we? I've examined the temple before, of course. But it's very different now that I know Prince Nanefer is buried here."
"A moment, friend," said Samlor, checking Khamwas with a touch. "We'll need food, the camels'll need fodder-and I think we'd best take care of those things at the village-" he nodded in the direction of the palm fronds and squealing water wheels " – before we settle in here."
"Just a look-"
"It's waited a thousand years, you tell me," said the caravan master with a tight grin. "It'll wait for tomorrow better'n dealing with the-living surroundings-will."
"Well, I rather thought you'd, ah, take care of such things without my presence," said Khamwas. His expression was hooded and his voice careful, because he didn't understand why he had to state the obvious. Samlor was not only competent to deal with mundane cares of food and campsite, those were the reasons the Napatan scholar had hired him.
"I can take care of that, sure," said Samlor gently. "But I can't do that and watch you at the same time… which is why you hired me."
Khamwas blinked, suddenly aware of parallel truths, his and his companion's.
"The fellow down there," Samlor continued. "He doesn't like us a bit, and he may have friends who feel the same way. I'm not leaving you here alone."
"The Priest?" Khamwas said. He straightened and faced the distant figure, arms akimbo. The men were scarcely more than blobs of color to one another, but the challenge was as obvious as a slap in the face. "He's harmless."
The Priest of the Rock turned and disappeared within his shadowed doorway like a sow bug scurrying back beneath a rotting log. The panel closed behind him. It was so massive that the curving rock brought the sound of the door slamming all the way to the men watching it close.
"He's old," said Khamwas. "He lives in the temple and he'd like to think he owns it, owns them both. But he knows he's there on sufferance of the crown of Napata. All the ancient monuments are property of the state. If a peasant like him ever interferes with visitors, he'll die chained to a water wheel on a prison farm."
"Honor the old men in your heart," said Tjainufi, his posture matching the stiff arrogance of the man on whose shoulder he stood, "and you will be honored in the hearts of all men."
Khamwas jerked his head around, though the manikin must have been too close for his eyes to focus on it.
"This is far too important for the wishes of some mud-dwelling hermit to be consulted," Khamwas snapped. For the first time since Samlor had met them, he saw the scholar angry at Tjainufi. "I did him no harm when I was here before, unless you call clearing away the filth in which he lived harm. I'll do him no harm now. But he will not keep me away from this prize because he doesn't like other men examining these temples!"
Tjainufi did not speak or change his stance. After a moment, Khamwas turned his head away.
Samlor looked at the facing reliefs, grimaced, and looked down at the temple his companion intended now to explore. It must be cut back into the rock directly under them-a vaguely unsettling notion, though the footing here was certainly more secure than that of an ordinary building's floor. They would have to reach the temple door by the sand slope to the left, awkward going down and damned difficult coming up. Maybe he could rig a knotted rope as an aid. .
"I'm going to go down to the temple," said Khamwas, transferring the angry challenge in his voice from the manikin to Samlor. "You may leave or stay as you choose."
"Always true," agreed the caravan master with a smile which threatened more than the words did. Khamwas read the expression correctly and paused.
Idly, half pretending that he wasn't doing what he knew full well he was, Samlor slid the coffin-hilled dagger from its new sheath. The bright sun bathed the whole blade in a shimmering surface reflection which had no color or form but that of white light. But turn the flat slightly, and there crawled the whorls and quavers of black metal on white, a meaningless design-
Which spelled SAFE for a moment before becoming iron again and alloys of iron rippling coolly with reflected light.
"That is-" began Khamwas, abashed.
Samlor sheathed the weapon. Not that he trusted it, but… Khamwas ought to be able to handle himself against one old man, even without his magic. He knew the place, had been here before, after all.
"No, that's fine," said Samlor. "I was just letting my imagination go, that's all. Foolish. I'll off-load the camels and take one to see about supplies."
Khamwas relaxed visibly and nodded. Tjainufi mimicked the Napatan's motions, but Khamwas either did not notice or refused to notice.
"Hey, but look," Samlor added. He glanced away, embarrassed at what he was about to say and uncertain whether he could control his expression when he said it. "Ah. Don't-you know, don't do anything, you know, major, while I'm gone, will you? I don't know that I'd be a lot of help with, you know, magic. But if I'm supposed to be supporting you in this whole business, then. . well, you're paying me to be around."
"Thank you," said Khamwas. "Friend. I know how much you dislike the idea of my scholarship."
He cleared his throat before he continued. Neither man was looking at the other. "But no, nothing significant will happen while you're gone-even if I intended it. A few minor location spells, perhaps. That didn't help me before, but now that I know the general whereabouts of the tomb, I'm sure the rest will follow.
"But nothing important will happen. I promise you."
CHAPTER 9
THE MOST IMPORTANT thing that happened in the next three days was that Samlor shaved the price of millet by a couple coppers per peck. The villagers were beginning to treat the newcomers as long-term residents, not travellers.
Samlor didn't consider that good news. As for Khamwas, natural gentility kept his frustration from blazing out-but his mild personality was growing spines beneath the veneer.
The caravan master paused at the temple entrance and rubbed his palms against one another to clear them of fragments of the coarse rope by which he had descended the slope. The four reliefs ignored him, staring southward across the river and the horizon. The figures were of seated men-or rather, a man, thick-featured and facing stiffly forward. The four copies were distinguished from one another only by the degree to which sand swirling off the escarpment had worn them.
Frowning at his own hesitation to look, Samlor glanced over his shoulder toward the other rock-cut temple. The monstrous carvings did not face him directly but the Priest of the Rock, a smudge in the angle of'the doorway, did. He squatted there, scarcely visible in the distance, during every daylight moment that Samlor chanced to look in that direction.
The priest was harmless. He was accomplishing as little as Khamwas was. Samlor stepped into the temple, rubbing his eyes to ease the shock of stepping from sunlight into darkness almost as solid as the rock above.
The temple's extent had surprised Samlor when he first entered it, expecting a low adyton and nothing beyond except a cult statue or-since they were searching for a tomb-a sarcophagus.
Instead, the central corridor of the temple was cut more than a hundred yards into the interior of the outcrop. Two large halls broadened from the main corridor, peopled with statues which would have been colossal were it not for the much greater reliefs on the temple facade. The walls and ceilings-twenty feet high in the first hall, fifteen feet in the second-were covered with incised writing and low reliefs of pomp and battle. Each relief was complex by itself and, considered as parts of a whole, staggeringly beyond the ability of a man to comprehend.
Besides the main halls, there were ten or a dozen obvious side chambers, some of them five yards by twenty in size. All were covered with their own carvings. Several of the chambers had been sealed with slabs of stone mortised so neatly that they appeared to be part of the living rock. The slabs had been broken out in the ancient past by men searching for treasure or the treasure of wisdom.
But t
here could be no assurance that all of the hidden chambers had been opened.
Samlor's hobnails sparked as he strode through the darkness of the great hall. The doorway cut sunlight into rigid edges which rolled across the dark stone like a knife cutting cloth. Perhaps-and probably only for minutes, one day a year-the sun stabbed to the further end of the central corridor, illuminating the altar and painted reliefs there in a dazzling triumph of astrology and engineering.
But for most of the year, the halls were barely relieved by scattered reflection and the side chambers were as dark as if they had never been excavated from the stone.
There was a glimmer of light through the opening into the second side chamber. Samlor stepped between a pair of lowering, kingly figures who helped support the ceiling on their ornate headdresses. They were set far enough in from the wall that the carved script behind them could have been read under the proper conditions. Samlor had neither the light, the knowledge nor the interest to do so.
He ducked his head-even a shorter man would have had to do so-to enter the smaller chamber at right angles to the hall. It smelled of burned oil. Though the atmosphere was breathable, it made Samlor's stomach roil after the clean, hot air of the escarpment and the central corridor.
Khamwas sat cross-legged in the center of the floor, his face toward the doorway but his eyes unfocused until Samlor stepped into view. A tripod of reeds tied with bast held a lamp near the ten-foot ceiling; the flame illuminated the reliefs there, but the poor-quality oil cast a permanent sooty shadow across them as well.
"I'm no closer than I was this morning," said Khamwas in a flat voice. "I'm not sure that I'm any closer than I was twenty. . three years ago, when I first came here."
Samlor shrugged. He didn't need words to understand what Khamwas' face had made evident. "I've bought supplies," he said. "No fresh vegetables, I'm afraid, but I think I'll be able to get a flitch of bacon soon. Be a nice change from the fish."
He bobbed his head toward the lamp above them.
"Want me to add some oil to your lamp? Move it?"
Khamwas shook his head sharply, then relaxed the angry moue into which his lips had pursed themselves. "Sorry," he said, apologizing for the retort he had not spoken. "It's beginning to seem pointless. 1 find no reference to a tomb of Nanefer. . And others who've gone over all the reliefs here in past years, past centuries, none of them found anything either."
"I sort of thought," said Samlor carefully, dropping into a squat himself so that their eyes were nearly at a level, "that you'd be using your magic to locate the tomb." He nodded toward the staff lying beside Khamwas and felt rather pleased with himself that he had kept his voice from trembling when he made the suggestion.
"My servant is useless if he does not do my work," chirped Tjainufi in obvious agreement.
Khamwas nodded. "I'd expected that, too. Location should have been relatively easy, even though I hadn't had any success when I was here before."
"You've sharpened your skills," said the caravan master approvingly. His belly was flip-flopping at the possibility Khamwas meant instead that he had come to new arrangements with those who could grant such powers. Nothing came without cost.
"Yes," agreed Khamwas, too calm to have been aware of any other possibility. "But mostly because I know the tomb is here, and that assurance gives me a, a base to probe more precisely than I could otherwise."
He paused. "Except," he said, "I'm losing my assurance. If the tomb were within a mile of this temple, I should have a hint of it. But there's nothing."
"Look," said Samlor, surprised at the way his voice echoed here when anger raised and whetted it. "We didn't go through that in Sanctuary for a no-show. You found what you needed. By Heqt and all the gods, you're going to learn to use what you got if it takes till we're both old and gray!"
Khamwas blinked, his face turned upward. Only then did Samlor realize he was standing again.
Tjainufi was nodding. "It is in battle that a man finds a brother," he said.
"Dunno that this is exactly a battle," said Samlor wryly, embarrassed at the way he'd spoken out. He hadn't been shouting, had he?
"In any case. ." said Khamwas, accepting the hand Samlor offered as he started to rise. "In any case, you're acting as a brother. No, I'm not-we're not-going to give up. There's something odd about the results of my location spells. It's as though the tomb didn't exist at all."
Samlor cocked an eyebrow.
Khamwas shook his head forcefully. "No, there's no question whatever of Nanefer's death and burial. He might not be in the tomb, but the tomb exists."
He bent and retrieved his staff from the floor. "I think I'll learn why that's happening."
The lamp was guttering near the end of its oil. Samlor nodded toward it and asked, "Are you coming out? Or do you want me to fill it?" His greater strength and dexterity made it easier for him to collapse and lower the tripod without disaster.
"Neither, I think," said the Napatan with a smile. "The darkness may prove a benefit."
Samlor ducked his way into the great hall and strode past the royal caryatids. They had stem, solemn features now that his eyes were adapted to the amount of IjghLspilling through the doorway.
Outside he sneezed, even though his eyes were slitted. He slid his cornel-wood staff from his belt to give his hands something to do. Probably he ought to busy himself with meal preparations, but there was no way to judge how long Khamwas would want to remain in the temple. Good that he had,his enthusiasm back. Without it they were-
Well, not lost. But Samlor certainly didn't want to spend the rest of his life in a place where he, at least, had nothing in particular to do.
The sun was low, hammering a golden oval across the brown river. The landscape was almost as bright as that of noon, but there would be no twilight to separate it from the darkness to come.
Samlor walked slowly cross the great facade of the temple. Sand blown around the cliff stung his cheeks and the back of his hands. His eyes had readjusted to the light, but now he slitted them against the grit.
Shadows thrown by the low sun gave texture to what seemed smooth surfaces earlier in the day. The sandslope which had drifted across the feet, then knees, of the eastern pair of reliefs provided the path to the top of the escarpment. Samlor toiled up to it, more hindered by the soft footing than the gentle angle.
There was a slight swale in the sand beside him, next to the stone.
Samlor paused, his left hand on the knotted rope which took enough of his weight that his feet didn't slide him back toward the river. Pursing his lips as he wondered what he was trying to accomplish, Samlor reached across his body with the wand in his right hand and probed the swale.
The iron ferule slipped through drifted sand, then scraped to a halt a foot or so beneath the surface. A pock in the stone, reasonable enough and of no interest. . but Samlor shifted his stance slightly, wiggling the slender staff; and, when he put his weight on it again, the tip slid until Samlor's hand touched the sand.
Samlor withdrew the wand so that the black handle stood out against the gold sand while he considered the situation. If there were a hole that deep in the rock face, it wasn't natural. Nor was it very large, because his probe had wedged against the side until he shifted it to get the angle just right. Unless-
The caravan master grasped his wand again and this time tried to work it down in a sawing motion as if cutting a vertical line in the rock face. The sand resisted, shifting like a heavy fluid away from the thrust of the wood. Occasionally the ferule scraped rock, but only sand hindered the general downward motion of the wand.
Samlor had found a crack in the rock, and it was damned likely that he had broken their impasse as well.
Leaving his wand as a stark marker, Samlor slid the twenty feet back down the slope at a rate controlled only by his willingness to kick his feet forward more quickly than his body's impetus could topple him head over heels. Sand and gritty dust sprayed in a dry parody of a duck landing on the w
ater.
"Khamwas!" he shouted, even before he reached the entrance. "Khamwas. Come here!"
The Priest of the Rock was no longer huddled in his doorway. Samlor blinked when he noticed that. It should have been good news-in a small way-because of the way the priest bothered him.
Somehow it didn't seem good, though.
He had to stop when he plunged into the hall of the temple. He was too excited to trust himself to run through the darkness when a misstep into a caryatid would batter him as thoroughly as running into the cliff from which the statue was carved.
"Khamwas!" Samlor bellowed and began to shuffle forward, his hands stretched before him.
"Samlor!" bellowed Khamwas, so shockingly close that Samlor's hand cleared his fighting knife by instinct. "I've found it! It's east of the main temple just a little ways."
"Buggered Heqt," muttered Samlor under his breath. In a more normal voice, he said, "Yeah, I found it too-on the ground. Let's go take a look."
He tried to sheathe his dagger, but the darkness and the way adrenalin made him tremble prevented him. After he-pricked his left index finger twice while it tried to steady the mouth of the sheath, he lowered the blade instead so that a flat was along his. right thigh.
Khamwas had the advantage of seeing Samlor against the lighted doorway, so he had been able to dodge from the collision course the two of them were otherwise following. He put his hand on Samlor's shoulder and guided or directed his companion outside with him.
"All that it took," Khamwas bubbled happily, "is one more try. If you hadn't braced me, my friend, we'd…"
"It's up the slope," said Samlor, pausing briefly to put his weapon back where it belonged when talking to his friend and employer. In slightly different circumstances, that reflex could have caused a very nasty incident indeed.
