Dagger by David Drake

Author:David Drake [Drake, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-04-28T17:47:11+00:00

CHAPTER 10

BY DAYLIGHT FROM the escarpment, the lesser temple looked like the wreckage of time rather than of an evening. The man-headed thing lay in a hundred pieces. Its spider legs had proved unequal to their task without the support of the cliff face as well. When one leg gave way, the others followed with a suddenness which reduced the carving to rubble.

Near it were the toppled forms of the other pair of composite creatures. They had been in balance when night fell like an axe blade. The muddy ground let them tilt. Without life or its counterfeit to right them, the statues crashed down and broke under their own weight.

Spring floods would roll the. fragments against one another. In a few years the small bits would be gravel and the large ones indistinguishable lumps of sandstone with no signs of human working.

Samlor had never liked ruins. They reminded him that very soon his own bones would bleach or feed desert mice.

But this particular ruin was an impressive monument to the fact that he'd done his job very damned well.

On the slope below the caravan master, Khamwas cried out.

Samlor's face went blank. If he used the rope to support him, he would have come down on top of Khamwas, who was kneeling at the spot marked by the cornel wood wand.

Instead Samlor slid down on a parallel course, braking himself with boots and his left hand.

His right hand did not touch the slope. It held his dagger ready for any problem that steel and ruthlessness could solve.

Khamwas didn't look at him, despite the cloud of dust and sand which Samlor sprayed before him. The Napatan was chanting. He held his staif between the palms of his hands, rotating it slowly back and forth on its axis. Every time the direction of rotation changed, he gave a yelp in a high falsetto, and it was this which Samlor had mistaken for a cry of alarm.

As soon as Samlor understood the situation, he tried to slow himself. He still couldn't halt before he was on a level with his companion, halfway down the slope. Much good he'd have been if there really were a problem. He worried too much.

Tjainufi turned around to face the caravan master instead of the slowly-turning staff. "He who scorns matters too often," he said in a tone of reminder, "will die of it."

Samlor smiled but did not reply lest the conversation distract Khamwas. Though Khamwas appeared to be as surely set in his course as the sun ascending the sky. The Napatan scholar had since dawn been kneeling in the sand, muttering to himself, his staff, or his gods.

Now something seemed to have answered him.

The staff began to spin faster and in one direction, blurring itself into the smooth brown ideal of a staff. All its individuality of grain and usage melted together. Khamwas was no longer chanting or holding the staff, though its ferule was several inches above the ground.

The spin accelerated. Khamwas stepped back. A line of dust rose beside the comelwood marker.

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