Dagger (мир воров)

by David Drake

  THE FESTIVAL OF THANKSGIVING going on in the temple courtyard was an enthusiastic background, even in the royal suite facing the river. Rushlights on the roof made the reed tops shimmer and turned the stone causeway into something softly metallic.

  A single lamp lighted the room where Samlor made his preparations and Ahwere crooned to Merib in a chair across from her husband.

  Samlor brushed the final glyphs onto his parchment with a sure hand. He used sepia, cuttlefish ink, for his medium because its animal nature-and that of the parchment- would add to the virtue of the spell he was creating.

  The Book of Tatenen could not be committed to human memory. In use, the mind became a facet of the book instead of the reverse.

  But portions of the book could be excerpted by a man of the proper skills and powers; and one portion was enough to safeguard him against attack by men or gods.

  "There. .," Samlor breathed as he contemplated the page of writing. He felt soggy, weighted down as if he had eaten salty food and drunk heavily. It was merely his reaction to returning to the Realm of Men after another excursion in the dazzling acuity of the Book of Tatenen.

  Merib was asleep. Ahwere got up, cradling the infant with an ease which belied the slenderness of her form. She took the jug of beer from the sideboard and carried it to her husband.

  Samlor smiled wanly at her and set the jug on the table beside his brush and parchment. "Next you'll do this, too," he said, reaching up to take her hand.

  Ahwere shrugged, resigned and bitter, though she made an effort to pretend otherwise. "You're the scholar, my husband," she said. "I'll never learn-" her chin nodded toward the parchment. "Any more than you'll ever bear a child."

  Merib whimpered softly.

  Salmor didn't let his face set in anger, but animation of a hard sort prodded through his weariness. "There's no reason you can't learn to read and write," he said. "Just as Merib will. It's very important now."

  "Yes, in time," said Ahwere in what a different tone could have made agreement. She walked back to her chair and sat.

  Samlor poured beer into the mug which served as the jug's cover. "When I've drunk this," he said, though he had tried to explain the process before, "the spell of protection will be a part of me. Nothing will be able to harm me again."

  He rolled the parchment and set it on end in the mug. The pale beer began to darken as it dissolved the ink. Fluid climbed the parchment cylinder slowly by osmosis.

  "Yes," said Ahwere. "That must be why everything is out of balance. Because of what we've done."

  Samlor turned the rolled document carefully and set it back in the beer with the other end down. The remainder of the symbols added their substance in swirls of color that merged with earlier glyphs and lost definition. The fluid was now the color of the yacht's cedarwood rail after the tunnel had seared it.

  "Don't be foolish," he said sharply. "We are part of the balance. Nothing's wrong. And you will learn the glyphs so that the book protects you as well."

  He dropped the soggy parchment on the table. It oozed a mixture of beer and ink and power. Without looking at his wife, Samlor lifted the mug and drank down its contents. "Yes, my husband," said Ahwere. "I will learn the glyphs. If there is time."

  CHAPTER 19

  THERE WERE CLOUDS both on the western horizon and high in the east, but the sky directly above the yacht was clear and perfectly framed by the sunset. The west was a mass of boiling red with only one opening. The beam which escaped through that gap flared in a great keyhole across the opposite cloudbank.

  "Unlocking the cosmos," said Samlor cheerfully. Ahwere looked down as if he had slapped her.

  Pursing his lips, Samlor got up from his couch and walked to the rail, ducking beneath the deck awning. Merib scooted across the polished planks and caught him by the ankle, gurgling, while Ahwere and the nurse watched cautiously.

  Shay stumped toward him from the bow. "Sir," he said, "there'll be a moon t'night less it clouds over. The wind's fair, and anyhow there's no place t' tie up on this stretch as isn't open as a cabin boy's bum. I've said we'll go on s' long as the sky holds, keepin' two men by the sweeps for safety's sake. Ah, with your permission."

  Samlor played with Merib's thin hair while the boy pulled himself upright, using his father's leg as a brace. The women, shaded by the awning, were part of the dusk. Muted voices and the odor of leeks drifted back from the crewmen forward.

  "All right," said Samlor. "Do as you think fit."

  The weight of the crystal wrapped against his bosom concentrated Samlor's awareness. He could use the Book of Tatenen to ensure fair weather; to jerk the sun back in the sky to light their way; to transport himself, those with him, and the very ship to the capital in an instant.

  But there was no purpose in any of those things. Nothing, at least, to justify subverting the powers of the cosmos. Now that he had gained his end, Samlor's viewpoint was changing.

  His left hand idly fitted and withdrew from the notches across the rail. Samlor was unaware of what he was doing, but Shay followed the action and grimaced.

  "Sorry about that, sir," the bosun muttered. "Have t' replace the bloody section, there and farther forrard. Got the bloody sand out and burnished the bloody burn marks out, but them bloody gouges…"

  Where the crocodile had clambered aboard the yacht, Samlor realized. Four parallel scratches in the cedar, each of them so broad and deep that his index finger fit loosely within the slot.

  "That doesn't matter, bosun," Samlor said sharply. "The boat served its purpose, so the damage is of no account."

  He would not be chided by a commoner for harming- trivial harm! – a vessel he owned. Just because Shay was responsible for the vessel, that didn't mean the prince its owner could not use it any way he pleased! Why-

  The flood of unspoken anger halted. Samlor blinked at himself in amazement. He was as a god in his power, in immortality and in knowledge. But still he thought as the man he had been since birth. Not a bad man, but human, despite the Book of Tatenen carried beneath his girdle.

  The yacht rolled so steeply that the rail against which Samlor leaned slapped the water.

  Shay was gripping the awning's framework with a sailor's instinct that never left him without a handhold when aboard a vessel. He bellowed, "Stand to" forward to his men, most of whose cries indicated they were as shocked as Samlor was.

  When the yacht tilted sideways, Samlor hugged the rail with both arms. His torso hung over what should have been water. Instead, he was looking into the open jaws of a crocodile whose head was longer than Samlor was tall.

  The eye turned to him did not wink with pale reflection, it burned blue like the tunnel of flame or the snout of the worm.

  Samlor screamed, but his desperate grasp was too late to save Merib. The infant catapulted past his father and wailed as the jaws closed over him.

  The crocodile sank as suddenly as it had appeared. When its black claws released the rail, the yacht rolled sharply to the other side, bouncing Ahwere into the covered deckhouse again.

  "My son!" she cried. "Save my son!"

  Samlor had the crystal out of its wrappings even before the vessel had ceased to bob violently back and forth. He spoke the word that found Merib and brought him back to the arms of his mother while the woman cried and sailors shouted in terrified confusion.

  But not even the Book of Tatenen could bring the dead to life.

  "OH, THIS is so terrible," muttered Tekhao lugubriously. "He had royal eyes, your highness, royal eyes. He would have been a great king."

  Then he sneezed echoingly in the tomb chamber.

  "My wife and I appreciate your sacrifice, Tekhao," said Samlor, bitterly amused to find that grief had reduced his mind to banalities. "If you would leave us with our-with our. . For a mom-"

  "But of course, your highness," the chief priest blurted. "Your highness," he added with another bow to be sure that he had not slighted Princess Ahwere.

  Tekhao had made a sacrifice: his tom
b, excavated and lined with red granite brought from desert cliffs south of the capital. It was an exceptionally fine burial place for anyone below royal rank.

  And even for a royal infant, if he drowned five hundred miles north of the family tombs across from the capital. The weather was hot and the air at the river's surface almost as humid as the water itself. No type or degree of embalming would permit the tiny corpse to be transported to the capital-except as a mass so putrescent that the bones would slosh within it.

  Samlor could not hear Ahwere weeping, but the tear streaks on her face swelled regularly as yet another drop

  slipped toward her chin. He put his arm around her waist and, with an urging that was barely short of force, he moved her with him to the edge of the bier.

  The only lights within the tomb were the blotches of red from the perforated incense burners at each corner. In this enclosure the fumes had a sharpness that would have passed unnoticed in the open air.

  Samlor did not need that to remind him of the bitterness of death.

  "Farewell, my son," Ahwere whispered.

  The lid of the inner wooden casket waited beside the bier. It was painted with a lifelike representation of Merib, a hasty job which spoke well of the skill of the temple craftsmen. The stone sarcophagus was unfinished and far too large for its burden, but there had been no time to carve one to the size of an infant.

  Merib's eyelids flickered.

  Samlor was sure the motion was a trick of the bad light, but his free hand snatched at the book in his girdle.

  The lids opened. Instead of the painted shells which covered the eyeballs and would retain their roundness when protoplasm slumped, Merib stared at the world through blue fire shivering down into the violet. "Do not grieve, my mother," said the lips which were already withering. "Rejoice, for the cosmos is returning to balance."

  The eyes closed.

  Samlor did not catch his wife when she slumped to the floor, because his own limbs were trembling too badly.

  CHAPTER 21

  "THERE'S SOMETHING BIG going past on the surface," thought the carp as they snuffled the mud near the bank, "but it doesn't matter to us."

  Lesser fish formed lesser thoughts, while birds bouncing among the reedtops chirped of food and the day's ending. Lizards stalked insects while a snake moved with glacial slowness toward a frog.

  There were no crocodiles anywhere near the royal yacht.

  Samlor lowered the Book of Tatenen with a sigh.

  Ah were had been watching him from her couch. She touched her husband's hand and smiled, though her expression was almost lost in the dusk. Samlor squeezed her hand fiercely and kissed her, but he did not put away the crystal.

  "I need to talk to Shay," he murmured as he stood and ducked from beneath the awning. The mast creaked as the fitful breeze strengthened. Tonight the sky was cloudless and the wind would stay fair all the way to the capital.

  The Book of Tatenen would see to that.

  The bosun had been waiting for Samlor. "Ah, didn't want t' bother you while you was thinkin', sir," he said. "But 1 figured we'd tie up along the bank about now." He would not meet his master's eyes.

  "We'll go on," Samlor retorted sharply. "I want to reach the capital before-" He broke off, unwilling to say,

  180

  "Before my father hears of his grandson's death from someone else."

  "Yessir, yessir," agreed Shay, bobbing his head. "It was only-the wind what made us heel the other, the other bloody dusk. Didn't know for sure what you'd want."

  No one but Samlor had seen the crocodile, not even Ahwere. But his fingers now touched gouges which had not been in the railing when the yacht first sailed back from the Temple of Tatenen. It had not been wind that flung Merib to his death-nor had it been chance.

  Shay strode forward, bawling his orders. Still standing, Samlor raised the crystal to his forehead again and became all life in the cosmos as color drained from the sky above the River Napata. There was nothing more dangerous near the yacht than the gnats which twilight drew from the reed beds anywhere. He would continue checking all the way to the capital.

  If the gods sent another messenger, Samlor would blast it with enough violence to pay in a small way for what had happened to Merib.

  "We'll sail through the night," Samlor said as he seated himself again beside Ahwere. "It'll be safe, and we'll-"

  The worm came over the starboard rail behind Ahwere and snatched her into the water before she had time to scream. Samlor screamed instead.

  "Oh, she's jumped, "she's jumped!" he heard the nursemaid crying as he commanded the cosmos through the book. "Oh, the grief of her poor darling son!"

  All the forces in the cosmos balanced on a point, the Book of Tatenen and the mind of Samlor hil Samt. The currents that rolled Ahwere's body, the gurgle of air still trapped in her lungs-the minuscule scrape of sediment across her sightless eyes-all were his to know and to change.

  The worm that seized her with its blue-glowing snout did not exist in the present cosmos.

  Ahwere flashed back onto her couch with a slap of sodden garments. Only the dim light and confusion kept her reappearance from throwing the excited crewmen into blind panic.

  She stirred, and for a moment Samlor thought he had been mistaken. He embraced Ah were while the nurse babbled and Shay gave orders to bring the vessel around to where he thought someone was still in the water.

  Ahwere's eyes blazed blue when she opened them. Samlor's mouth drew back in a rictus of horror-and hope that still denied reality.

  "Rejoice, my husband, my only love," said Ahwere's body. "Soon the cosmos will be in balance again."

  "Who's overboard?" Shay demanded. "What's happened?"

  A late-returning marsh hawk began to screech in dismal satisfaction.

  CHAPTER 22

  "SHE DIDN'T KILL herself," Samlor muttered. He had washed his hands a score of times since Ahwere's interment, but his mind told him his skin still was scented with the camphor and incense of her embalming. "They sent the worm to take her. The gods."

  "Well," said Shay uncomfortably, "We'll be back soon. The palace should be in sight any time now."

  Samlor looked down at the sun-bronzed water curling past their hull. "But I'd killed it. Though I suppose it was never alive."

  "So it couldn't be killed," said the bosun, making conversation because his master demanded conversation to take his mind off the past-and the future. "Well, the gods set all our terms of life, sir. Yourselves as well as the like of-" he nodded forward " – me 'n the boys."

  "Not me!" Samlor said, anger breaking through his despair like lightning in storm clouds. "They can't harm me-not since I drank the Spell of Safety."

  "Well, I'm sure your father'll be glad to have you safe, at least, sir," Shay said, flicking splinters from the rail with his horny thumb. "He ain't well, I'd heard."

  "No, he's not well," agreed Samlor. The blood was draining from his face as he imagined greeting King Merneb in a few more minutes, "Father," he said in his mind, "your daughter is dead, and with her the grandson whom you loved more than life itself. But don't worry: I, who carried them to their deaths, have returned."

  "He'll want you to marry again," Shay was saying. "The daughter of one of the neighboring princes, I guess. Well, you may come to love her as much as you did your, well, the Princess Ahwere."

  "I can't protect them," Samlor said, his eyes staring at water that they did not see. "I can't protect anyone but myself. A bolt of lightning, the collapse of a building- earthquake. Whoever I marry will die. Perhaps after we have children to take also."

  "Well, sir," said the bosun with a strained chuckle. "I can't imagine things are so bad that the whole cosmos is turned to punish one man. Things don't work like that."

  "Your highness!" called the lookout at the masthead. "The palace is in sight, and your father's on the wharf to greet us!"

  "Go forward, bosun," Samlor ordered curtly. Shay bowed and obeyed.

  The stern anc
hor, its wooden stock reeved through a hole bored in a large stone, hung from the rail opposite the steersman. Its line was bent around a deadeye and tied off.. The coffm-hilted dagger which Samlor carried in this life as the other severed the lashings easily.

  He sheathed the knife and lifted the anchor from its hooks. The stone felt light-as light as Ahwere the first time he carried her to their couch. He turned around twice so that anchorline wrapped him.

  "Your highness!" cried the steersman in horror. "Shay! Shay!"

  The book was a hard outline clamped against him by his sash. It promised him all the powers in the cosmos.

  Except the power of ever again being happy.

  Samlor lurched against the rail and went over. The entangling line bound his legs together like a fish's tail, and the stone anchor carried him down as inexorably as a sword stroke.

  The last thing he saw was the face of the bosun, staring over the side at him. Shay was smiling.

  And his eyes were glowing blue.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE ANCHOR DRAGGED Samlor head first toward the bottom, but he was standing upright in Nanefer's tomb. The dissonant realities made him flop to the stone floor on all fours.

  He bounced to his feet again at once. His skin was aflame with shock and embarrassment. Khamwas swayed but had not fallen.

  "You cannot take the book," whispered the ghost of Ahwere. "We have bought it with our lives, all our lives."

  The ghost of the infant murmured softly against her.

  "I have come for the book, Prince Nanefer," said Khamwas. He held out his hand slowly, though he did not step toward the mummified figure as yet. The tremor in Khamwas' voice assured Samlor that Khamwas too had shared Nanefer's triumph-and its aftermath.

  "I would have said the same, Prince Khamwas," said the corpse in a voice like a leather bellows creaking. The withered hands crossed on his lap moved. First tentatively and then with increasing smoothness, they began to unwrap the parcel which lay beneath them.

  Samlor was dusting his palms carefully on his tunic'. His body had aches and strains in it that Nanefer would never have known in a full, royal, lifetime.