David Drake - Dagger

He blinked and glanced up at the sky, visualizing a thunderbolt from its pale transparency striking the stone door and blasting it to shards.

Khamwas shook his head gently and pointed toward the door again.

The staff had seemed to be slowing its rotation; certainly it had dipped an inch or two nearer the ground. Now it rose and accelerated again.

The tip of the little whirlwind twisted like an elephant's trunk and explored the edge of the stone door. The panel quivered. As Khamwas had said, the grooves in the cliff face in which it slid had to have considerable play. Tiny grit with the persistence of time was certain to have free access through the cracks.

The trunk of moving air sharpened itself wire thin. It was black again with whirling sand. It began to scream with the fury of a saw cutting far faster than a stonecutter's arms could drive it.

The speed of the whirlwind increased by the square of the lessened diameter. The tip was now moving so fast that it would have been opaque even if it were only air.

The sand which it dragged from the interior of the tomb blasted against the edges of the door and the cliff, grinding them back to the sand from which they had been formed beneath the sea in past eons. The mating surfaces eroded in a black line climbing upward as the whirlwind followed the same pattern a human sawyer would have used.

The dust that reached the upper funnel was so finely divided that it gave a saffron, almost golden, cast to the trembling air.

Khamwas looked at Samlor with quiet pride. Samlor squeezed his companion's shoulder again.

"The wealth of a craftsman," said Tjainufi in what might have been intended as a gibe, "is in his equipment." His voice had almost the same timbre as the wind howling as it ate rock, but his words were nonetheless quite audible.

As the line of black-shadow replacing what had been rocky substance-coursed along the upper edge of the door, the panel began to shift. A handful of gravel-sized hunks flew out and pitched into the river loudly, fragments of a stone wedge.

The whole door, a slab six inches thick, fell out on its face with the heavy finality of a man stabbed to the heart.

Instantly, uninstructed by Khamwas, the tip broadened. The funnel blurred brown with the sand it sucked from the passageway beyond. The sound of the wind lowered into a drumnote instead of the high keening with which it had carved solid stone. Sorted by weight, the debris dropped again far beyond the cavity from which it had come.

The passageway was square and polished smooth. It was easily big enough for a man, but he would have to crawl on his hands and knees. Samlor had been in tighter places, but the one certainty about this one was that there wouldn't be another way out.

Khamwas must have been thinking the same thing, because he said, "I'll leave my staff at the entrance. It will prevent problems like… the slab-" he gestured at what had been the door " – rising up and wedging itself into the tunnel again. For instance."

Samlor raised an eyebrow. "You expect that?" he asked.

"Not if I leave my staff at the entrance," Khamwas answered calmly.

The whirlwind had been clearing gradually until only the inevitable dust motes danced in it. Khamwas' staff dropped to the ground so abruptly that its ferule thrust an inch or two into the soft sand. Khamwas' hand snatched the instrument while it was still wobbling upright.

A breeze fanned Samlor hard enough to slap the dagger-sheath against him. The whirlwind dissipated by flinging itself outward. Nothing of it remained but a dry odor and the passageway it had uncovered. The whole shape of the sandslope had been changed by the removal of what must have been hundreds of tons of material.

"Well," said Samlor carelessly. "Don't guess there's much left but for me to get a lamp and lead the way in. Be interesting to see what we find."

Khamwas quirked the left side of his face up in something like a smile. "Nothing inside will have a knife, my friend," he said. "Get the lamp, but I'll be going first."

Samlor nodded curtly and gripped the rope for what had suddenly become a steep climb to the top of the escarpment. There was a touch on his arm. He turned and met his companion's eyes.

"There's no need for you to come into the tomb with me," Khamwas said. "You'd really be no more than a, than a… Well. Any real use you'd be could be performed if you wait out here by the entrance."

"Balls," said Samlor without emotion.

He turned his face away and cleared his throat before he continued in the same flat tone. "I'll be back with a lamp. Maybe we can rig it to the end of my wand so I can hold it in front of you. Leave your hands free for whatever business you've got. Right?"

"Right, my friend," said Khamwas softly.

As Samlor began to climb the rope, finding footholds on the rock which sand no longer covered, he heard Tjainufi below him saying, "A man's character is his destiny."

It didn't strike Samlor as a particularly reassuring comment.

CHAPTER 11

THE PASSAGEWAY SLANTED upward at a scarcely perceptible angle. The rise was enough to have trapped entering sand fairly close to the entrance. The floor and a slanting line down both sidewalls had been polished by the grit to a finish much smoother than that which the workmen had left.

That circumstance, brought out by the way light reflected from stone as the lamp wobbled forward, made Samlor feel the age of this tomb as nothing else had done.

He almost bumped Khamwas again-and almost cursed aloud. The Napatan scholar shuffled forward at an irregular pace-halting repeatedly for no reason Samlor could discern, and then sliding on another ten feet or more as blithely as if his only concern were the strait surroundings.

Khamwas knew what he was doing-Samlor had accepted that as an article of faith when he agreed to enter the tomb. Samlor didn't know what his companion was doing, though. It made it a bitch of a job to follow closely enough to keep the lamp bobbing ahead of them and still to avoid stumbling into the man in the lead.

He should have found a larger pole on which to hang the lamp, so that he needn't stick so close to the Napatan. He should have stayed back at the entrance. He should have stayed in Cirdon and gotten on with his own life.

And he really shouldn't think about what was waiting at the far end of this passage. The little quibbling frustrations, about the way Khamwas moved and about how hard the stone was on his knees, were just what Samlor needed to keep in a state of murderous readiness without dwelling on the sort of major threats that could make him panic. He knew how to handle himself from having spent most of his life in the business.

The business of taking damn-fool risks for no good reason.

"There. .," said Khamwas in a tone of wonder and satisfaction. He had stopped again.

Samlor grimaced and leaned to peer past Tjainufi on his companion's shoulder.

The lamplight wavered over the intricately painted wall of a room. They'd reached the end of the passageway at last.

Samlor held his breath, fearful of disturbing his companion.

Instead of going through an involved procedure-a chanted spell, a progressive unveiling of some amulet or talisman-Khamwas stepped directly into the tomb chamber. There, where there was enough room to stand upright, he shrugged his shoulders and straightened the folds of his cloak. It was the sort of motion a man makes before he has an important interview.

With a superior.

"Put your trust in god," said Tjainufi, looking back at Samlor still hunched in the passageway.

"Bloody well have, haven't I?" muttered the caravan master. "Coming this far?" But he twisted himself upright in the painted chamber, the lamp bobbing on the end of the wand in his left hand.