by David Drake
The wax boat coasted. The yacht scraped along also, its inertia overcoming friction in this strange land.
The portside oarsmen began to stroke while their fellows held their blades horizontal, bringing the bow around again the same way they had aligned it with the bank of the River Napata a lifetime ago.
This time the vessel was swinging toward a notch in the crater rim which was otherwise a waist-high barrier whose jagged top was sharper than the best steel. They were high enough that when Samlor glanced around him he could see far across a landscape pocked like human skin-but gray and black and the white of surface reflection of the beams of the unforgiving sun.
This was a dead place, and no place for men.
The oarsmen took up the stroke in measured unison, snatching the slack from the hawser and bringing the yacht's bow around in what should have been a squeal of protest- but was soundless here. They drove toward the wall.
CHAPTER 17
THE WAX BOAT slid between edges of glass so close that had the oars been in mid-stroke, the oarblades on both sides would have been sliced away. Ah were's hand and arm were firm on Samlor's waist, but where their hips pressed together he could feel the rest of her body trembling.
So was his own.
The wax boat and its towed companion had entered a bowl the size of a great city. Its shallow surface was as smooth as warm grease.
The wax boat pulled down the slope at its regular speed. The yacht slid easily behind it.
Something waited at the bottom.
The other craters were broken and leveled by the frequency with which they had been battered by later fellows. Smooth floors shattered; crisp rims pulverized and recongealed into another crater's floor; and the same repeated a hundred times again so that the surfaces had the jumbled formlessness of an ash pit.
The crater which the wax vessel had entered under its own direction was greater than any other in the landscape around it, and no later impact had disturbed its perfection. The floor was marked with pressure waves, undetectable in themselves but marked by the multiple dazzling images of the sun which they reflected.
The thing in the center of the bowl moved restively. Samlor could not be sure of its shape until it raised its head and began slowly to uncoil.
"What…" whispered Ahwere, suppressing the rest of the question and almost the word itself so as not to show fear before her husband.
The mind of Samlor warmed for the first time to this woman who was neither his sister nor his wife. She knew that it was all right to be afraid-but that one must never admit it…
"Only a worm," said the body that was Samlor's for this lifetime. "We'll take the book from it very soon now."
Very soon now.
The distance from the rim to the center of the bowl was deceptive, for there was nothing to provide scale except the worm. Its apparent size increased while the crater rim slowly diminished over the stern of the vessel.
Ahwere took her arm away from her husband and tried to wipe off sweat against her own body. She was not successful, and the absence of her touch chilled Samlor more than did the perspiration evaporating from his suddenly-uncovered skin.
Both ends of the worm's body were briefly visible as coils flowed across one another like quicksilver. They were indistinguishable until the head rose ten feet and the end cocked over at a right angle aligned with the oncoming vessel.
A blue circle glowed where the worm's mouth should have been. Samlor expected to feel something, a blast or a tingling, but the glow only trembled up and down through indigo and colors beyond the spectrum.
"I think," said Ahwere in a voice as emotionless as that of a housewife measuring cloth, "that it must be a hundred feet long, my husband."
Very close, thought Samlor whose mind was jumping with the emotions of a prince who had not faced physical death on a regular basis. And about the diameter of a man's torso-the torso of Samlor hil Samt, and not that of the royal body he rode now.
He wondered what would happen to him when the worm killed Nanefer. "There is a price. .," Ahwere's ghost had warned them in the tomb.
The wax boat swung from its direct course when it was three lengths from the waiting guardian. The worm's head rotated on the column of its smooth, gray neck as it tracked them. Samlor looked back at the blue glow, but the woman kept her eyes straight forward as if she were unaware of the creature sharing this desolation with them. Aloud she said, "If this is the realm of the gods, then…"
The wax oarsmen paused in midstroke. Their backs straightened slowly, the way grass stems return to vertical after being trodden down by a bare foot. The boat drifted to a halt, settling until it rested on the crater floor as if it were no more than it had been-a toy of wax, crewed by waxen lumps.
Behind them, the royal yacht slid to its own resting place. Its greater inertia brought the wooden bowsprit almost into contact with the wax stern.
Samlor hugged his wife, then kissed her fiercely. "Not until I call you," he said. "Don't take any chances until I call you."
As he spoke, Samlor realized what Nanefer had hidden from his wife and suppressed so far below his mind's surface that only now was it clear: Nanefer knew what he needed to gain the book. But he didn't know why he was bringing the paraphernalia-and one companion-which were with him now.
The reason for the weapons was clear enough.
Samlor jumped to the ground, then steadied himself on the rail of the wax boat as his bare feet started to slip out from under him. The glass surface forgave no imbalance, and his body did not move as it ought to. He didn't weigh what he should, though he hadn't noticed the difference until he left the boat.
The worm watched, rotating its head to follow him as he walked carefully to the yacht and the equipment aboard it. Half the creature's length was in loose coils and the pillared neck, but the rest of the worm was a tight, shimmering mound in the center of the crater.
Samlor hopped aboard the yacht, aided by his lessened weight (though the change made him clumsy). He began to don his armor, a task made more difficult by the damage it had received in the tunnel of fire.
The helmet was now useless. It was a cap of bull's hide, and the leather had shrunk and warped under the kisses of the blue flame. Samlor tossed it aside, less regretful than was the prince whose eyes were for the moment his eyes. It hadn't been an impressive piece of battle armor to the caravan master anyway; though Heqt alone knew what would be useful against the worm.
The shield was a solid piece, though of unfamiliar construction. The back reinforcement of thin boards had cracked, but its metal rim continued to stretch the facing of thick crocodile hide firmly in place. The bony scutes weren't quite as effective as metal, but Samlor was glad to heft the shield by its bronze handgrip and measure the worm again over the rim.
Instead of a sword, he had an axe with a thick crescent blade, pinned to the shaft at both horns as well as in the center. The blade was a foot long across the horns, almost half the total length of the weapon. It didn't balance as well as a sword of the length and weight, nor did it have the penetration of a narrow-bladed axe which concentrated its impact on an edge a few fingers broad. It would have to do.
Or not, as the case might be.
The painted leather over the wooden daggersheath had emerged black and tattered from the tunnel, but it and the belt to which it was fastened would serve. Samlor slid the blade out to check it and be sure that the warped sheath wasn't binding.
The watered steel blade would have brought a curse to his lips-if the lips had not been for Nanefer to rule.
Well, it was a good dagger, thought Samlor as his body buckled the belt around its bare waist and felt its tender skin protest at the feel of seared leather. Tunics would never have survived the tunnel, though he would trade the shield now for a simple linen kirtle. The fact of being clothed might help him more than the shield's physical protection.
Armed and as prepared as he could be, Samlor turned to step from the yacht's bow and collided with
his wife.
They had spoken normally on the vessel that brought them here, but nowhere else in this desolation was there sound. Ahwere's mouth worked, blurting a tearful apology for being in the way, but the words were only in her eyes and her husband's heart.
Samlor held Ahwere as she backed away, clasping her with his elbows because his hands were filled with weapons. "My love, my-" he murmured, but his voice did not ring even within the chambers of his skull. This hellish place!
But he had known it would not be a place for men.
He kissed Ahwere's hair, the lobe of her ear, and last her tear-wet lips.
When he turned again to battle the worm for its hoard, a part of his mind kept remembering that he and his wife could return now with no cost or further danger.
Samlor's own mind and emotions jarred often against those of the royal prince whom he now was, but in one respect their personalities were stamped from the same die: they had not come this far in order to turn back.
The worm let him approach, angling its head as he drew nearer. The height of its neck did not change, so that it became a tower threatening him more at every step.
The crater floor felt dry but neither hot nor cold. It was adequate footing so long as he remembered to watch his balance-which not even the gods themselves could do in the midst of battle.
Was the worm a god?
It struck when he was ten feet away from it, so close that Samlor would have begun his rush when his foot next left the ground.
Nanefer's reflexes were not what they should have been, but this place permitted him to interpose his unnaturally-light shield to the creature's hammerblow. The blue glow of the worm's snout struck just below the upper rim and clung there like a lodestone to steel. Samlor's legs flew out from under him, but he used the torque of the creature's impact to help swing his own counterblow.
The axe cut helve deep. Samlor felt the crunch of a hard surface, though the worm's body rippled like free-flowing water. When he dragged the blade free, the edges of the long cut sprang away from the wound and made it gape still wider. The interior glistened without color or definite features.
The worm lifted. Samlor had been thrown onto his hips and shoulders, bruised but not seriously injured. His left hand held the shield in a deathgrip so that the creature picked him up as it recovered itself.
A loop of the worm's body wrapped itself about his legs and began to flow upward. The creature was glass-smooth and as powerful as a boulder rolling downhill.
Samlor cut at the worm's neck. His grip on the shield anchored him, but the blow was awkward and crossed the previous wound at a slant. Again the flesh gaped when the axe crushed its way through the surface.
The coil was around his thighs. He felt the flesh tear over the points of his hips. Only the thickness of the worm's body prevented it from crushing his bones. The ring of pressure slipped higher, and a second loop wound itself over Samlor's ankles.
He chopped at the creature's neck with hysterical fury which made up for lack of strength or skill in the physical arts of war. His vision blurred as the upper coil squeezed against his diaphragm, but he did not need to aim the blows. He was swinging at the full length of his arm, and the worm's hold froze it and the man into the same relationship for every stroke.
A jerk of the worm's head snatched the shield away and flung it upward as paired images which merged and spread and merged again while Samlor tried to follow their tumbling arc.
He didn't realize how high he was until the coils dropped him. He was as limp as a sack of millet when he fell, so exhaustion saved him from serious injury when he hit the ground. The worm had lifted him thirty feet in the air-if air was the word-and he would surely have broken bones on the glass surface if he had been tense.
Ahwere's touch more than her strength helpe'd Samlor rise. Her right hand still held the bronze shovel with which she had vainly battered the worm's flank. Her face held no emotion, but that coldness and the fierceness with which she tugged at her husband's shoulders showed that she feared she was trying to lift a corpse.
The worm's body wobbled in curves like those of surf on a low shoreline. Samlor hugged his wife with his free hand as he staggered to his feet. The burning sensation on his left hand meant either blisters or skin stripped when the worm's convulsions tore loose the shield for anything human strength could do.
The creature's head-the first two or three feet of a body which was the same diameter throughout-hung by a thread of glittering skin. It did not move when the body thrashed, and the glow that had licked across the end was gone.
Motioning Ahwere to stay back, Samlor stepped to the worm. He was having trouble breathing because of the way his ribs were bruised, but that was only one more pain in a body which hurt all over. He had open skin on his right elbow and left knee, from friction with the worm's coils or the way he sprawled to the ground.
He heard his blood pounding but not the rasp of air being dragged into his lungs. Everything else about the way he breathed in this place was normal-including the way his chest hurt when he did it-but there was no air.
The only thing in this place which mattered was the Book of Tatenen-and the fact that the book's guardian was dead. Samlor stepped close to the worm; paused as he measured the distance; and brought the axe' down on the skin which still joined the two sections of the creature.
He used both hands for the blow. Powdered glass and shards of the axeblade sparked away from the impact, numbing Samlor's hands and leaving a white scar on the crater's floor while the worm's motion settled into a gelatinous trembling in both parts of its body.
Ahwere touched his arm from behind. Samlor threw down the useless axe helve before he turned to embrace his wife again.
All he had to do now was to retrieve the book.
When the worm died, its body uncoiled into a sprawl dwarfed by the size of the crater. The rim, jagged as the fangs of a wolf-fish, gleamed beneath the rays of a sun which had remained precisely overhead throughout the battle.
The gray iron box which the worm had encircled until it died was now visible.
Ahwere grabbed Samlor by the arm and turned him with a strength which surprised him as much as what she was doing. There was a scream on her face. His eyes were already looking beyond her.
The two pieces of the worm had shivered into contact. A blue glare that hurt Samlor's eyes was spluttering between the ragged edges of the creature's skin. Where the arcs touched, they welded the portions together as if Samlor had not shattered his axe in making sure the separation was complete.
The worm's tail moved in a series of water-smooth curves, covering the box again. The head lifted, its tip glowing lambently as it searched, then focused on the pair of humans.
Samlor drew his dagger with fingers made clumsy by despair, but the instinct with which the prince stabbed hilt deep into the nearest loop of the body was one which the caravan master could applaud. Cutting the head off had done nothing permanent, but perhaps there were vital organs somewhere else in the creature's length.
Not that there was so much as a hope of finding a vital spot in a squirming hundred feet of body.
A loop of the worm knocked Samlor down and slithered across him. The coils couldn't encircle a victim until the head had a grip to anchor them.
Samlor let the creature's own motion draw the blade clear in a long gash. He stabbed again. The steel gleamed with clear ichor. There was no resistance to its passage after the point dimpled the metallic skin.
Samlor pulled himself from beneath the slick weight of the worm's coils and the creature's head slammed onto the ground again. The blue/violet flicker of its snout burned like the heart of a glacier.
The shock left him with no other feeling in the arm he had thrown out to meet the impact. The worm's body cast itself around his ankles with the accuracy of a cattleman's rope.
Blue sparks played dazzlingly across the worm as the long gash began to arc itself closed.
Samlor screamed soundlessly.
His weapon tore along the creature's flesh, so deeply the hilt bobbed against the skin like a shearwater's beak scoring the sea.
The blade parted the worm as easily as it would the pulp of a ripe melon-and the top of the cut began to regrow in blue arcs that made the hair stand upon Samlor's head. A loop was crushing his knees together. The touch of the worm's snout drove icy needles through his left arm and into his face and chest.
A coil buffeted Ahwere as she stepped past her trapped husband and poured a shovelful of sand into the cut he had just torn.
Minuscule lightning sealing the wound touched sand and flashed it into glass that spattered volcanically. Instead of healing the cut puckered, then swelled into an abscess boiling with power insulated from its proper use.
The pain in Samlor's legs was momentarily dizzying that he did not realize the worm had dropped him.
The worm's snout brushed the surface of the abscess. Near the swelling the creature's body spasmed uncontrolled, but the slither of its tail out of its protective coil was deliberate.
The worm had twitched its body a dozen feet from its attacker. Samlor tried to stand but his legs failed him. He slid himself across the crater floor, using his numb left hand as a flipper.
The worm's head twisted from the wound to Samlor. The glow of its snout was still blue but shot through with sparks of sullen red. Samlor twisted his arm. The long blade jutting from the heelside of his fist pointed up, ready to meet the creature if the creature dared to strike.
Ahwere, running up with more sand, flickered in Samlor's peripheral vision. He drove his knife into the worm's side again with a bloody joy that more than balanced the shock of the creature's snout against his unprotected upper chest. The pain shuddering across his nerves ripped the watered steel blade in a jerky zig-zag across the shimmering hide which exploded as Ahwere poured sand into the wound.
This time Samlor's legs worked well enough for him to leap astride the creature as it tried to escape him. He stabbed downward, and the worm's flowing body dragged itself along the pitiless blade of the dagger. The edges of the wound shone like iron as a bellows strokes the hearth, but they did not arc or meld together.
