Dagger (мир воров)

by David Drake

  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 tunnel.

  "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 tunnel on all fours, as heedless of its constraint as a rabbit bolting from a fox. Khamwas was lifting another bean toward the alabaster. From his fixed expression, he seemed to be fighting the necessity of playing out the game to which he had agreed.

  The sunlight at the tunnel's end was dim by comparison with the tomb chamber-but the sunlight was warm, and at the touch of it Samlor shuddered with memory of the bone-chilling blaze from the crystal.

  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.

  Khamwas' staff lay across the tunnel entrance as they had left it. Samlor wondered whether Khamwas thought there was no longer a risk of them being entombed by sand-or whether he was willing to take that risk to keep from slipping into solid concrete first.

  Didn't matter. Couldn't matter. Samlor grabbed the staff and twisted himself around in the tunnel. He heard Khamwas scream something from the tomb chamber, but he did not understand the words.

  Partly because most of Samlor's mind froze in shocked appreciation of the crocodile filling the tunnel before him.

  The beast was not as large as the monster which waddled aboard the yacht in his dreamlife as Nanefer, but it was as large as the stone corridor. The tips of its open jaws touched the floor and ceiling.

  Its breath was foul and as cold as Death.

  "Will you, by Heqt?" Samlor whispered as he drew his dagger again. He could wedge the jaws with the staff, and then the watered steel blade would carve the beast's palate and white gums like cheese-

  Or the staff would shatter and the ragged teeth would crush Samlor's armbones as easily as they tore his flesh. But he could not forget the way Merib, his son in all but present reality, had catapulted into waiting jaws like these.

  The crocodile dissolved into whorls of blue sparks. They reformed as the wraith of Ahwere, which swept up the tunnel toward the tomb chamber. The air was still and cold, and the ghost's wail was as bitter as the wind over high peaks.

  Hunched over-unable to run on all fours because he carried the staff and dagger-Samlor scuttled toward the blazing white square of the tunnel's nether end. He couldn't hear his companion's voice, but the corpse's hacking laughter had the sound of breaking twigs.

  "Kham-" Samlor cried as he burst into the chamber.

  Khamwas had sunk shoulder deep in the floor. He twisted

  his head despairingly toward the opening, but his arm was reaching up against his will to place another bean on the gameboard.

  Samlor slapped the staff into Khamwas' lifted hand. Light from the Book of Tatenen seared through him, making the scarred flesh of the caravan master's fingers translucent so that the bones showed gray against pink encasement.

  Ahwere glittered into a tigress and leaped at Samlor. He slashed with the dagger in a frenzy of despair and madness burned into him by the white glare.

  Khamwas spoke a word. The stone chamber^ glowed green like the moss of a woodland at summer noon, vjien all the light is filtered by leaves above. The tigress disappeared. Ahwere's ghost was a woman weeping as she rocked the babe in her arms.

  The crystal was dark. There was nothing white in the tomb except the pieces on the game board, each of which gleamed with the purity of fresh-cut walrus ivory.

  Khamwas rose out of the ground as if the staff crosswise in his hand was lifting him. The glow it cast was so uniform that the staff almost disappeared in the perfection of what it created.

  "The game is mine, Prince Nanefer," Khamwas said. He struck the board and table aside. The pieces spilled across the floor. All of the beans were white. "Give me the book."

  Nanefer did not move or speak.

  Khamwas swallowed. He lifted the staff higher, then reached out with his free hand and took the crystal.

  Nothing changed, not even the tempo of Ahwere's sobbing.

  "We will trouble you no more, great prince," said Khamwas as he backed with formal steps away from the seated corpse. Glancing aside to Samlor, he added, "Precede me. Quickly."

  As Samlor scrambled down the tunnel, he heard Ahwere crying, "Our light is gone, our all is gone."

  And he thought, though he could not be sure, that he heard Nanefer reply, "Do not grieve, my sister, my love. They will return."

  CHAPTER 24

  "BACK IN THE, you know," said Samlor as
the sun glanced from the polished limestone walls of the outer courtyard of the Palace of Napata. "In the tomb. I thought I wouldn't ever get warm again.

  "I suppose," he added, fluffing the sweat-soaked tunic away from his chest, "I'm glad I was wrong."

  Khamwas turned, but the hooded cloak he was wearing | still covered half his face. He tried to smile, but tension made his expression a frosty one when his intention was warm. "For the way you stood by me then, my friend," he said, "you'll never want for anything. Anything at all."

  "I figured you knew what you were doing," Samlor said, looking away. It was easier to tell a half lie than the real truth, that he'd been afraid to think about what he was doing. He'd just plunged ahead on the course he'd set himself when there was time for calm reflection. "Anyway, I told you I'd help."

  And that was purely the truth.

  Almost no one except Samlor and Khamwas was in the courtyard. The royal levee closed in the hour before noon, and the peddlers who would later turn the courtyard into a fair were held off by the sun though there were no guards to stop them.

  There were two guards at the copper-clad doors to the inner palace, but they were more concerned with finding shade in the recessed doorway than they were with loiterers. Samlor avoided staring at them, but he wondered what his companion's next move would be.

  Khamwas' face reverted to stony calm. He was too lost in his own plans to care what Samlor had said-or even to have listened to it.

  The cloak of a priestly mendicant covered Khamwas to the ankles. It must have been uncomfortable in this heat, but Khamwas noticed discomfort as little as a true religious ascetic would have done. His fingers toyed with the rim of a copper begging bowl which must itself have been hot enough to cook food.

  The Book of Tatenen was bound to his bosom, the way Nanefer had carried it when he plunged over the yacht's rail.

  A fuzzy glow appeared on Khamwas' shoulder. "If your enemy seeks you," it said clearly in Tjainufi's voice, "do not avoid him." The glow faded as simply as it had appeared.

  The copper bowl rang softly as Khamwas tapped it with his fingertips. "Now we will see my brothers," he said.

  This moment seemed to Samlor the same as any other in the half hour since they first entered the courtyard, but he was glad to be moving again.

  The guards straightened as Khamwas and Samlor strode up to them. They carried long-bladed halbards and wore armor of silvered iron scales.

  "Admit us," Samlor said as he had been instructed. He spoke with the assurance of authority-which made him feel that the guards were going to obey, though he couldn't imagine why. "We have business with the kings."

  The guards were taken aback, bracing themselves as they would while being inspected by a superior officer, but their orders were clear. "Audience hours are over for the day, yokel," said the senior man. "Come back at dawn-or before, if you want a real chance of getting in."

  "And no weapons," added the other guard, nodding toward Samlor's dagger.

  Khamwas tapped his bowl. The doors and the guards' armor rang in sympathy. There were sharp clacking sounds from within the doorleaves as the locking bolts withdrew.

  The doors opened inward, carrying the bellowing guards with them. Their body armor was stuck to the metal facing. As the men struggled, their halbards touched the copper also-and stuck as if welded.

  Khamwas walked on without glancing to either side. Samlor followed with the caution of uncertainty as to just how long the guards would stay trapped.

  Long enough, as it turned out. The doors swung themselves closed and bolted again.

  There was another courtyard on the other side of the doors, smaller and shaded by a loggia surrounding it on three sides. A few servants glanced from their own affairs toward the intruders, but the fact that Khamwas and Samlor had come this far implied they were where they should be. None of the servants seemed to want to investigate the commotion beyond the gates.

  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 m
ore 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?"