Robert Asprin - Aftermath

Khamwas was whispering to himself and his gods Samlor looked at him, looked at the dagger-saw that the watered steel blade was only that, only metal, probably all it ever was, except in his mind.

"Star?" he called toward the rectangular opening. "You all right, sweetest?"

He could barely hear the reply, "All right . . ," but a couple of the pastel jellyfish were drifting over him in placid unconcern. She'd be fine, Star would.

If any of them were, she'd be fine.

Samlor squatted and squeezed up dust from the floor on the tip of his left index finger It was colorless (save for the mauve light it reflected) and much too finely ground for him to be able to tell the shape of the individual crystals

A caravan master has plenty of opportunity to examine decorative stones, jewels and bits of glass cut and stained to look like Jewels in the dim light of a bazaar The dust could be anything, powdered diamond even, but most likely quartz, spread in a smooth layer across all the flat surfaces in the room ...

Except for streaks-shadows, almost-stretching from the reading stand and the legs of the bronze censer. The dust seemed to have been sprayed violently from the direction of the pentacle in which Khamwas was almost standing

"K-" Samlor began in sudden surmise.

The Napatan had been whispering, but now his voice rose in a cre- scendo Khamwas's eyes lifted also, they were wide open but obviously not fixed on anything in the room.

Stucco shattered away on all sides, raining over Khamwas and the caravan master who reached for the ladder with his left hand and swung his blade at anything which might have slipped behind him as he crouched.

Nothing had. The choking flood of sand and lime dust filling the air as the walls cleared themselves made Samlor pause where the attack he feared would only have driven him to swifter motion.

The slow tumble of the mauve light source continued, though the mineral-laden air absorbed the illumination. A ball a few feet in diameter glowed in place of the urchin's sharply limned spines and carapace. As dust settled out, the glow spread and paled while the features of the source at its heart slowly regained definition.

"Khamwas," said the caravan master. His eyes were slitted and a fold of his cloak covered his mouth and nose, a response made reflexive by years of dry storms whipping across his caravan routes. "Where did Setios keep his demon in a crystal bottle?"

"The gods preserve me from such knowledge, friend!" said the Napatan as his eyes swept the upper levels of the walls which could already be viewed with sufficient clarity. He filtered the air through his cape; a desert-dweller himself, Khamwas must have more experience with dust storms than Samlor did. "Believe me, Setios was mad to keep such a thing by him-and you and I would be even madder to carry it off ourselves."

"That's not what I mean," the caravan master said. He raised his voice so that it could be heard through the muffling cloth-and because he was at a desperate loss to know what he should do next. He would have climbed out of this place at once, except for his fear of what might follow him to where Star stood shivering.

No wonder the child had been terrified into a near coma. She must have known ...

"Here it is!" cried Khamwas, brushing the reading stand as he swept closer to a wall. "Here it is!" he repeated, then sneezed.

The walls of the sunken room were formed entirely of inscribed stones, but the pieces had little commonality beyond that. Some were squared columns, set with one face flush and the other three hidden even now that the stucco had fallen away.

A few bore symbols which were not writing at all. One of them was a small block of peridotite. polished smooth before a single diagonal was cut across its coarse crystals. The block had marked the victim's place in a temple ofDyareela. Samlor could not imagine anyone removing it from its original location-or being willing to have it close to him thereafter.

The Napatan was brushing his left palm across the face of a slab of gray granite, cleaning it of dust that had settled there after the spell of release. The stele was about three feet high and half that across. Figures -presumably gods-filled the upper portion, and there were about twenty vertical lines of script beneath them.

"-to the blessings of Harsaphes," Khamwas said, his index finger pausing midway down one of the later columns. "Harsaphes. not Somptu as I'd always assumed, and the ruins of the temple of Har-"

"Khamwas, listen to me!" Samlor shouted. He gripped the scholar with his left hand, though that meant dropping his cloak while there was still dust in the air. "You say something happened to magic a little bit ago. Would that have broken the crystal that held Setios's demon?"

"The townsman," said the manikin who was not in the least affected by the choking atmosphere, "is not the one who is eaten by the croco- dile."

And men who leave magic alone, translated Samlor as he whirled toward glimpsed motion, aren't destroyed by its creatures.

A hand was emerging from a slab of limestone on the far wall. It was tenuous enough that the settling dust coexisted with the limb, which was so thin that it would have been skeletal were it not for the gleam of a scaly integument.

The three fingers each bore a claw an inch long and sharp as shattered glass.

"Get up the ladder!" Samlor shouted as he leaped for the apparition behind the watered steel blade of his dagger. The hilt was adequate for his big hand when he slashed with it, though it was shaped wrong and would have been uncomfortably short had he chosen to thrust ... Which would have done as much good; as much, and no more. The clawed hand twisted to grip the blade while an arm as wire-thin as the hand continued to extend from the wall. Steel parted the limb like smoke, and the claws slipped through the whisking dagger as if it in turn had no substance.

Another hand was reaching through the stone beside the first. The blur above and between them was growing into a narrow reptilian face.

"Get out!" the caravan master shouted again when a glance toward the ladder showed him that Khamwas stood where he had. He had crossed the top of his staff with his left forearm.

"No, run!" Khamwas replied. He had been chanting under his breath, and his face spasmed with the effort of breaking back into normal speech. "I released it again, but I can hold it for long enough."

The demon's head and torso had emerged from the wall. One leg was striding forward in slow motion. The creature was half again as tall as Samlor, and it was thinner than anything could be and live.

One hand shot out and snatched the sea urchin which shattered be- neath the claws into a cascade of mauve sparks. As the demon's arm withdrew, the sparks formed again into their original shape. The creature of light continued to pick its way through the air. Samlor was quite sure that if the claws closed on his niece, their effect vould be permanent.

"Run. Star!" he shouted, afraid to turn from the demon. It continued to pull itself from the stone.

Khamwas hadn't moved, though his mouth resumed its unheard chanting. Maybe Samlor could jump for the ladder himself since the fool Napatan refused to do so. Slam the lid back over this hellish room-if the lid would close without a search for another mechanism. Run out the front door with Star in his arms, praying that he could work the bolts swiftly enough ... praying that the doorkeeper would ignore them as they left, the way Khamwas had said it would ...

Samlor stepped forward and swung at the demon again. He wasn't going to abandon Khamwas to the creature unless there were no other choice.

He chopped for a wrist. Instead of slipping through like light in mist, the caravan master's steel clanged as numbingly as if he had slashed an anvil. The demon seized the blade and began to chitter in high-pitched laughter,