David Drake - Dagger

Samlor hopped aboard the yacht, aided by his lessened weight (though the change made him clumsy). He began to don his armor, a task made more difficult by the damage it had received in the tunnel of fire.

The helmet was now useless. It was a cap of bull's hide, and the leather had shrunk and warped under the kisses of the blue flame. Samlor tossed it aside, less regretful than was the prince whose eyes were for the moment his eyes. It hadn't been an impressive piece of battle armor to the caravan master anyway; though Heqt alone knew what would be useful against the worm.

The shield was a solid piece, though of unfamiliar construction. The back reinforcement of thin boards had cracked, but its metal rim continued to stretch the facing of thick crocodile hide firmly in place. The bony scutes weren't quite as effective as metal, but Samlor was glad to heft the shield by its bronze handgrip and measure the worm again over the rim.

Instead of a sword, he had an axe with a thick crescent blade, pinned to the shaft at both horns as well as in the center. The blade was a foot long across the horns, almost half the total length of the weapon. It didn't balance as well as a sword of the length and weight, nor did it have the penetration of a narrow-bladed axe which concentrated its impact on an edge a few fingers broad. It would have to do.

Or not, as the case might be.

The painted leather over the wooden daggersheath had emerged black and tattered from the tunnel, but it and the belt to which it was fastened would serve. Samlor slid the blade out to check it and be sure that the warped sheath wasn't binding.

The watered steel blade would have brought a curse to his lips-if the lips had not been for Nanefer to rule.

Well, it was a good dagger, thought Samlor as his body buckled the belt around its bare waist and felt its tender skin protest at the feel of seared leather. Tunics would never have survived the tunnel, though he would trade the shield now for a simple linen kirtle. The fact of being clothed might help him more than the shield's physical protection.

Armed and as prepared as he could be, Samlor turned to step from the yacht's bow and collided with his wife.

They had spoken normally on the vessel that brought them here, but nowhere else in this desolation was there sound. Ahwere's mouth worked, blurting a tearful apology for being in the way, but the words were only in her eyes and her husband's heart.

Samlor held Ahwere as she backed away, clasping her with his elbows because his hands were filled with weapons. "My love, my-" he murmured, but his voice did not ring even within the chambers of his skull. This hellish place!

But he had known it would not be a place for men.

He kissed Ahwere's hair, the lobe of her ear, and last her tear-wet lips.

When he turned again to battle the worm for its hoard, a part of his mind kept remembering that he and his wife could return now with no cost or further danger.

Samlor's own mind and emotions jarred often against those of the royal prince whom he now was, but in one respect their personalities were stamped from the same die: they had not come this far in order to turn back.

The worm let him approach, angling its head as he drew nearer. The height of its neck did not change, so that it became a tower threatening him more at every step.

The crater floor felt dry but neither hot nor cold. It was adequate footing so long as he remembered to watch his balance-which not even the gods themselves could do in the midst of battle.

Was the worm a god?

It struck when he was ten feet away from it, so close that Samlor would have begun his rush when his foot next left the ground.

Nanefer's reflexes were not what they should have been, but this place permitted him to interpose his unnaturally-light shield to the creature's hammerblow. The blue glow of the worm's snout struck just below the upper rim and clung there like a lodestone to steel. Samlor's legs flew out from under him, but he used the torque of the creature's impact to help swing his own counterblow.

The axe cut helve deep. Samlor felt the crunch of a hard surface, though the worm's body rippled like free-flowing water. When he dragged the blade free, the edges of the long cut sprang away from the wound and made it gape still wider. The interior glistened without color or definite features.

The worm lifted. Samlor had been thrown onto his hips and shoulders, bruised but not seriously injured. His left hand held the shield in a deathgrip so that the creature picked him up as it recovered itself.

A loop of the worm's body wrapped itself about his legs and began to flow upward. The creature was glass-smooth and as powerful as a boulder rolling downhill.

Samlor cut at the worm's neck. His grip on the shield anchored him, but the blow was awkward and crossed the previous wound at a slant. Again the flesh gaped when the axe crushed its way through the surface.

The coil was around his thighs. He felt the flesh tear over the points of his hips. Only the thickness of the worm's body prevented it from crushing his bones. The ring of pressure slipped higher, and a second loop wound itself over Samlor's ankles.

He chopped at the creature's neck with hysterical fury which made up for lack of strength or skill in the physical arts of war. His vision blurred as the upper coil squeezed against his diaphragm, but he did not need to aim the blows. He was swinging at the full length of his arm, and the worm's hold froze it and the man into the same relationship for every stroke.

A jerk of the worm's head snatched the shield away and flung it upward as paired images which merged and spread and merged again while Samlor tried to follow their tumbling arc.

He didn't realize how high he was until the coils dropped him. He was as limp as a sack of millet when he fell, so exhaustion saved him from serious injury when he hit the ground. The worm had lifted him thirty feet in the air-if air was the word-and he would surely have broken bones on the glass surface if he had been tense.

Ahwere's touch more than her strength helpe'd Samlor rise. Her right hand still held the bronze shovel with which she had vainly battered the worm's flank. Her face held no emotion, but that coldness and the fierceness with which she tugged at her husband's shoulders showed that she feared she was trying to lift a corpse.

The worm's body wobbled in curves like those of surf on a low shoreline. Samlor hugged his wife with his free hand as he staggered to his feet. The burning sensation on his left hand meant either blisters or skin stripped when the worm's convulsions tore loose the shield for anything human strength could do.

The creature's head-the first two or three feet of a body which was the same diameter throughout-hung by a thread of glittering skin. It did not move when the body thrashed, and the glow that had licked across the end was gone.

Motioning Ahwere to stay back, Samlor stepped to the worm. He was having trouble breathing because of the way his ribs were bruised, but that was only one more pain in a body which hurt all over. He had open skin on his right elbow and left knee, from friction with the worm's coils or the way he sprawled to the ground.

He heard his blood pounding but not the rasp of air being dragged into his lungs. Everything else about the way he breathed in this place was normal-including the way his chest hurt when he did it-but there was no air.

The only thing in this place which mattered was the Book of Tatenen-and the fact that the book's guardian was dead. Samlor stepped close to the worm; paused as he measured the distance; and brought the axe' down on the skin which still joined the two sections of the creature.

He used both hands for the blow. Powdered glass and shards of the axeblade sparked away from the impact, numbing Samlor's hands and leaving a white scar on the crater's floor while the worm's motion settled into a gelatinous trembling in both parts of its body.