David Drake - Dagger

Samlor's mind grew cold and Nanefer lost his scornful smile. His finger drew a different glyph between his splayed knees.

A shaving of metal like the waste from a graver's tool began to lift along the upper edge of the copper, at first slowly and then at the speed of flame devouring chaff. The copper was thin as foil, but it would have been proof against material tools-even the watered steel of the dagger which had ripped apart the box's guardian.

The copper twisted as Samlor's spell sheared it into plates. The face of Tatenen, the Great God, seemed to wink as the front fell to display an inner casket of juniper wood.

Prince Nanefer was wholly sunk into his magic, but Samlor's mind processed differently the data from the senses which they shared. Samlor saw Ahwere standing spearshaft straight beside them, pretending that she did not know what her husband was doing.

There were tears on her cheeks, but to wipe them off would be an admission.

Samlor's finger moved against the ground. The box puffed into smoky fire as enveloping as a wrapping of silk that lifted toward the sun and disappeared in a black train.

The fire ceased as abruptly as it had ignited. The juniper box was wholly consumed, and the box within-for of course there was a box within-was an intarsia of ivory figures on an ebony ground.

The figures were of men and women, carved so perfectly that their features were recognizable even though the panels were less than a foot in either dimension. They were palace functionaries and generals of the Napatan army, and they marched in procession behind the funerary symbols of the royal house. The sarcophagus of King Merneb was being carried at the bottom of the panel.

Samlor drew a glyph and spoke a silent word. His mind put blinders on his eyes so that he could not, would not, see if his wife had noticed the design.

The box fell apart, ivory separating from ebony and the whole tumbling to the ground like the sides of a trench cut in sand. Within was a still-smaller casket of silver.

The progress continued in polished figures against an oxidized background. There were two sarcophagi on the silver, clearly identified by the symbols borne high before each. Ahwere and Merib were being carried to their tomb.

The time for doubt is before you start a course of action which has certain death as the price of failure. Nanefer spoke and drew the articles of his spell. Samlor would have done the same if he controlled the body in which his mind now resided.

A litter of previous containers lay where Samlor had been working, plates and parts and ash that his hands swept aside to open the next box. The silver casket did not crumble or fall apart. Instead its surface became translucent, then transparent, and at last wholly insubstantial. It vanished as utterly as if it had never enclosed the box of gold which remained.

There was no need of magic to open the gold casket. Unlike the other containers, this one had a mechanical catch.

Samlor picked up the box, knowing that Ahwere's eyes were on him. The casket was heavy, even in this place.

There were two figures on the box. One was a perfect semblance of Nanefer, molded into the sliding bolt of pure gold. The other shape was the head of a great crocodile covered with lustrous black niello. All he had to do to open the box was to slide the bolt into the jaws of the crocodile.

Ahwere was crying silently. Samlor's hand moved while his mind concentrated on void and the purity of his intention.

He felt the click as the gold disappeared into black jaws. The lid of the box rose by itself.

The sun and stars watched coldly as Samlor lifted the silk-wrapped object from the final box.

It was not precisely a book, though there was no obviously better way to describe it. It was a flat crystal a palm's breadth square on the major surfaces and the thickness of a finger on the sides. The edges looked sharp enough to cut, but they felt safely rounded when Samlor touched them.

He looked up at Ahwere in triumph with the Book of Tatenen in one hand and its red silk wrapper in the other. The grief on her face hardened his visage and brought a flash of anger to his eyes. Even though she was a part of the victory. Ahwere was unwilling to admit that her husband had been right in the course she had opposed from the beginning. .

But he was above anger. He had won against the very gods!

Gesturing in brusque command, Samlor led his wife back to the vessel that had brought them here. His weight was normal again, and sound returned-though for the moment it was only the sound of Ahwere's suppressed sniffles.

He squatted to examine the object his courage and learning had gained.

The Book of Tatenen was so clear that Samlor could see the whorls of his hand through it, but there were more fires sparkling in the heart of it than the light of this harsh place should have wakened in a diamond's facets. Samlor raised the dense crystal slowly and held it to his forehead. It was cold, not as the worm's snout had been but rather as one bare hand feels to the other in a winter storm.

He spoke the first Word of Opening which his spirits had taught him back in the realm of men.

It was as if he had stepped from a tomb into a garden on a golden summer day. He was all life in the cosmos, plant as well as animal-and doubtful things he could not describe but which he was while the book lay cool against his skin.

All their senses were his senses, all their speech was as clear to him as the voice of Ahwere when they lay together for the first time making love.

There was no confusion. His knowledge was godlike; and, for the time the crystal touched him, Samlor hil Samt was a god.

He lowered the book. Reality shrank back to a glass-floored crater and the wide, wet eyes of his beloved. The blessed wonder of his expression cooled the fear with which she watched her husband, certain of disaster though triumphant by every indicator save instinct.

Samlor lifted the Book of Tatenen and spoke the second Word of Opening.

If the first spell had brought him Summer, the second put him in the heart of clear, dry Winter glittering on an icefield. Every force of the cosmos focused on him, matrices so intricate and perfect that they were beyond understanding.

But he understood.

The injuries his body had sustained while battling the worm-the forces and balances that caused fluids to move or rest, solids to touch but not mingle-were his to know and to change by that knowledge. He knew that his bruises and scrapes were gone, that his cracked ribs had knitted and the torn ligaments in his knees were whole.

And in the same way and with the same control, he was aware of the patterns of light, motion and attraction unifying all matter in the cosmos into whirling order.

He was god, and there could be no god greater than him.

Samlor was aware that he was lowering the crystal in the same way he knew bits of debris were blazing into shooting stars in the night sky of Napata. The matrix of the cosmos faded and vanished, leaving nothing behind more substantial than the memory of a breeze.

Ahwere waited with the tense calm of a soldier before battle, savoring every instant which has not brought disaster. Samlor reached out and put the Book of Tatenen in her hands.

"Go on," he said quietly. "Raise it to your forehead. I'll speak the word."

She obeyed, but she moved with the same hopeless resignation that a condemned man walks to the gallows. When the crystal touched her forehead, Samlor smiled toward her closed eyelids and spoke the first Word of Opening.

Ahwere's face seemed transfused by an inner light, though the emotion which silhouetted there was not joy. Her eyes opened as she lowered the stone.

"You see," Samlor prompted. "We've won. Ours is the cosmos."