Dagger (мир воров)

by David Drake

  "Oh," he added, pointing across the curve of the cliff to the smaller temple. "Our friend's finally gone away."

  Khamwas, already grasping the rope as he strode slushily up the slope, glanced in the direction of Samlor's gesture. As a result, they were both looking toward the relief when the spider-limbed monster shuddered away from it. The movement came a fraction of a second before the echoing crackle of rock breaking.

  "Earthquake!" cried Samlor. He turned to be sure the escarpment and carvings towering beside them were not also toppling to crush them across the sand and into the nearby river.

  The cliff above was as solid as it had ever been. The river was a brown stream. It was vaguely streaked by its current, but it had not become a mass of whitecaps dancing to the rhythm of the underlying strata.

  The monster had not fallen from the other relief. It had walked. And it was walking toward Samlor and his companion.

  Khamwas slid back to firmer footing, where sunbaked mud cemented the sand into a narrow shoreline around the face of the cliif. "Don't worry," he said with structured calm. "I'll stop it."

  He braced his staff and crossed his left arm over the end as he had done in the crypt beneath Setios' house.

  The relief with a woman's head and a bear's body also began to stretch itself shatteringly away from the cliff of which it had been part.

  The spider/lizard/man-thing moved with the awkwardness of a knuckle-bone bouncing in slow motion. Its legs splayed so broadly-thirty feet or more-that the four of them on the outside roiled and gurgled well out into the stream.

  "I can't hold two of-" Khamwas began.

  A third creature, the fish-headed one, shifted in a patter of gravel.

  Samlor crouched. "We've got to-"

  "Run," he had been about to say, but he was quite certain that the progress of the stone creatures was faster than he could manage for more than an hour.

  Saddle a camel? The animals would have broken their hobbles and run by now, as surely as the fourth beast-thing was tearing itself from the facade.

  Gods! but he wished Star were here.

  While his mind echoed with that thought which he would rather have died than entertained, Samlor drew his coffin-hilted dagger. His body was cold with awareness that he'd been willing to risk the child's life because he wasn't man enough to live without her to save him.

  At least he could die fighting.

  DISTRACT HIM said the blade of the dagger as it flicked through the periphery of Samlor's vision. His mind was so focused on the next minutes-which he expected to be his last-that the words did not register until he was three shuffling steps.past the desperately chanting Khamwas.

  Were the stone joints of the leading creature softer than the shanks, the way those of a normal crab would be?

  Would a twelve-inch blade penetrate-if it could penetrate-deeply enough to injure creatures the size of these coming on?

  The woman-headed monster was beginning to clamber over the thing with a man's head and arthropod legs. It had frozen again, two of its pincered feet raised as the river! lapped close to the plates of its lizard belly.

  "Distract him!" Samlor cried as he skidded to a stop. He turned, wolfish joy on his broad, worn face. "That's it. Distract him, Khamwas!"

  "I can't distract them!" the Napatan cried in frustration.

  The man-headed thing profited from Khamwas' broken concentration to lurch forward again, half-carrying the creature which had started to climb over him. The other two statues continued to trundle along behind, laughably clumsy on troll legs and bull legs-except that those legs spanned four human paces at a stride.

  " You idiot!" Samlor screamed. "Distract the fucking priest!"

  Then he turned again and sprinted toward monsters and the other temple. If Khamwas couldn't understand-or couldn't perform-they were both dead very soon. It was as simple as that, and therefore Samlor had to proceed on the assumption that his companion would carry his load.

  The woman-headed thing had pushed the creature on eight legs farther away from the cliff face so that the two of them advanced in tandem. The river was low at this time of year, but the strand between the rock and water was so narrow that the monster with the head of a man was forced almost completely into the water.

  The male head growled like millstones grating. When the female mouth opened to snarl back, it displayed a maw of hooked teeth like a shark's.

  Samlor was twenty feet from the leading monsters when a pair of crows swept past him, cawing angrily and slapping their pinions at one another.

  The woman-headed creature swatted at the birds with a blunt-clawed forepaw. The motion was swift and precise, eliminating Samlor's faint hope that the monsters of stone would prove too awkward to catch him as he dodged between their legs.

  The doglike paw hit the noisy birds. They flowed through the stone with a green flash and continued to clatter their swift course toward the smaller temple. One or both the trailing monsters clawed and bit at the crows as they passed, with no greater effect.

  "All right, you bastards," Samlor whispered, pausing in a crouch for an instant. His left hand was empty and spread wide, while his right was cocked to hold the knife in position for a disemboweling stroke. His body faked to the right, toward the man-headed creature which reached forward with a pair of limbs. Their pincers sprang open like shears.

  There was a distant flicker of green, visible only because the closed doors of the lesser temple were in such deep shadow. The female head turned snarling toward the creature beside it whose eagerness to get at Samlor was crowding her/it against the cliff.

  All four of the monsters set into place like the statues they had been moments before, though their poses were now contorted by recent motion.

  Samlor sprinted, ducking his head beneath one of the gaping pincers. The shadow cooled his skin and froze his soul.

  The legs of the two leading monsters had splayed across one another as they struggled for position. Samlor laid his hand on one of the arthropod limbs to swing himself through the maze without slowing. It was warm and gritty to the touch, the feel of sun-struck stone and not that of anything which could have been alive.

  There was room to pass between the third creature and the cliff without touching either, but as Samlor did so, the feathered body moved and the grotesque stone breasts swayed above his head.

  He pushed off from the wall. The change of direction and the sudden impetus it gave him saved Samlor from being crushed. A limb, shaped like a bull's foreleg and the size of a large tree, stamped an impression six inches deep in the hard ground.

  Samlor dived beneath the grasshopper body that wobbled between the bovine hind legs, rolled, and came up running while the creature turned, froze, and started to move again in jerky fashion. Stone ground on stone as others of the creatures shifted and fouled one another like storm-tossed boats in a narrow harbor.

  Running on foot wasn't a particular talent of Samlor's, but he had the lungs and leg muscles to pound toward the smaller temple fast enough to pull him away from m'ost human pursuers.

  These pursuers weren't human.

  Wind in his ears and the pounding of his blood cloaked the noisy movements of Samlor's opponents behind him. Stone hit stone with hollow echoes, like those of great fish sounding. There was a hiss as loud as steam venting through a geyser.

  He didn't glance behind him to see whether or not the stone monsters were tangled with one another because of the distraction Khamwas had supplied. He could only hope that they were-

  And that the discomfort of lungs burning with exertion quelled fear of what was about to happen to him. He'd noticed before that aggravating discomfort was the best antidote to panic. .

  The door leaves had long since disappeared from the larger temple. Samlor assumed the panels closing the temple in which the Priest of the Rock lived were wooden, sun-dried and flood-warped-vulnerable to the fury and determination of a man as strong as Samlor hil Samt.

  It was a shock when he realized t
hat the double doors set into the stripped facade were of the same fine-grained sandstone as the cliffs around them.

  Samlor slapped one leaf with the flat of his left hand, more to bring himself to a halt than from any expectation that the doors would fly open. The stone panels rattled the wooden bar within which held them closed, but there was no hint of real weakness.

  The ground trembled as one or more of the carved monsters began to stagger back toward Samlor.

  The doors rotated on pins carved from the upper and lower edges of both panels. They were sheathed in bronze and set in massive bronze sockets inlet into the transom and threshold of the temple. The metal was verdigrised and worn. It almost certainly dated from the original construction of the temple a millennium before.

  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 pinned or run through staples, they were still dead, but-

  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 unnoticed. "We're not going to hurt you or the temples either. We're-"

  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, "The
re 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.

  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?"