David Drake - Dagger

They were not on a plain but a complex of broad craters, shouldering into one another like the pattern raindrops start to make on a beach. The sharper boulders rimmed craters which had not been battered by latter hammerings. Without guidance or need for a man on the rudder, the wax crewmen slid between these obstacles the way human boatmen would avoid treestumps turning in a flood-swollen river.

The yacht skidded along the ground behind them, grinding away bits of shattered glass which spun and glittered as they fell back. The fragments did not tumble as quickly as they should have, and the pitching of the wooden vessel was of curiously long duration. Laden as it was, the yacht ought to have smashed its hull to splinters each time it hit the ground after bounding over an irregularity.

This was not a place Samlor had ever heard of before.

But then, he shouldn't have expected that it would be.

The wax boat was skirting a crater so fresh and extensive that its rim was a glassy sawblade slashing through half the horizon. They were ascending the slope as they rounded it, though the ultimate direction was confused by the shattered landscape of crater flattening crater in dikes and gulleys.

The sun above had no compromise. Its light fell in knife-edge shadows, though sometimes long cracks drew feathers of illumination through the glassy surface. When Samlor tried to look up at the orb, squinting past the edge of his hand as he would normally do on a bright day, he was almost blinded.

There was no halo round the sun here: the sky was either blackness or radiance, with no gradations between.

The rim was close enough to starboard that Samlor thought he could, with care, spit the distance-though perhaps not in this slender royal body.

The crewmen paused. Samlor glanced back at the wax figures, but he could see only their humping shoulders and bull necks. Their faces would have told him nothing about assuming they had their feelings, their intentions. either.

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.