"Jump out now, Shay," Samlor called to the man in the other vessel.
"Nanefer, I-"
"Jump out!" Samlor cried in a voice thin with fear. "On your life!"
Shay nodded and obeyed by leaping like a baboon to the quay where sailors fended the vessel from the stone with poles.
The wax boat wobbled. Its sternposts started to give as the current put strain on the hawser. The six wax oarsmen bent forward, then leaned back against the drag of their oars. Ahwere cried out as the vessel surged away from the quay despite the inertia of the sand-laden boat it towed.
The sternpost held. There were real planks beneath Samlor's feet as he took the steering oar.
The oarsmen were no longer crude parodies but humans in all but color and their stony lack of expression. They stroked at a measured rate, plunging their blades so deep in the water that real oars would have fractured under the strain. The wax shafts held, and the waxen torsos bent and lifted, driving the linked vessels against the current.
The oarsmen's faces were turned toward Samlor by necessity of their position, but the blank eyes paid him no attention.
Ahwere stood near the bow, facing her husband. She was afraid but no longer crying. He had thought when he asked her to join him that she would prove steadfast where no one else could be trusted. Now, looking into the love in her eyes, he knew he was right.
The crowd on the quay were watching the vessels, but the few who tried to walk along the bank beside them were stopped at once by the swamp. Reed bracts waved sluggishly in a breeze that did not touch the sun-hammered surface of the water.
They had reached midstream. The Wall of Tatenen was a black stroke between the river and the vegetation beyond it on the starboard side.
Samlor leaned against the steering oar. The starboard oarsmen feathered their blades for the space of three mechanically-powerful strokes by the wax figures on the port side.
The vessel's bow came around while the towed yacht eased closer, slackening the hawser between them.
All oars striking together, the wax boat drove for the bank. The hawser thrummed taut and the yacht unwillingly obeyed its pull.
Samlor let go of the steering oar, needless now that they were committed whether he would or no. He walked forward, between the wax men who cared nothing for him or for anything, and put his arms around his wife.
The face in the middle of the stone wall was beginning to blaze. It was already brighter than the sun, and its color was the blue of lightning crashing in the heart of a storm. The linked vessels were stroking toward it as fast as a man could walk on level ground.
Ahwere put her arm around Samlor's waist so that they stood side by side, watching the visage of Tatenen grow into a glaring tunnel that pierced the stone and the swamp and all the universe beyond.
They plunged into the tunnel. Hell roared around them.
Where the wax prow should have flattened on stone, the vessel bucked. Samlor heard Ahwere murmur, "Nanefer-" and her arm tightened around his bare waist, but they needed one another for physical support for the moment. It was no more than that, support, without a hint of panic.
The blue flames licking from every side were as real as the angry light they cast, but they spread and dodged away from an invisible barrier. Neither the wax boat, its crew, nor the two naked humans clutching one another in the bow were touched by the snarling blaze.
Samlor glanced behind them. The royal yacht pitched and yawed like a living thing which the flames were tormenting. The railings were beginning to scorch, while the towline blackened except for orange sparks where tufts of rope flashed into miniature fires themselves.
"How long-" Ahwere said, forming great syllables so that they would be heard over the echoing furnace-roar of the flames.
Before she could complete the sentence, the wax vessel lurched again and surged from the tunnel into surroundings which resembled the fire only in that both were hellish.
It was a swamp, but the sky above was so overcast that the noon sun was a red disk. It was nothing like the landscape anywhere along the River Napata.
Ahwere's mouth was open with the words she did not need to speak. The mouth of a beast standing belly-deep in ten feet of muck opened and blatted at them in surprise.
Samlor felt his wife's arm clamp around his waist, but her fear was only reflexive. She thrust her jaw out as she faced the monstrous head that swung closer. Samlor's mind was reminding itself that they could not be harmed-not here, not yet-so long as they remained in the wax boat.
It would have been very easy to hurl himself over the side in a mad attempt to escape. Ahwere's warm presence kept him calm where intellect could only have controlled him.
In size the beast was less like an elephant than a whale roiling the thick waters of a cycad-fringed swamp. Its neck was long and serpentine-slender for the body but still too large for Samlor to have encircled it with both arms.
The head was in scale with the neck. The teeth fringing the jaws were peg-like, not shears. Even so, the bass screech the beast directed at the boat was loud enough to drive the couple in the bow half a step back by its physical impact.
The monster's breath smelled of pinebark and turpentine, pungent but not unpleasant.
The oarsmen continued to stroke, as unaffected by the monster as they had been by the tunnel of flame. The boat's course slid it under the rounded snakelike head. The beast jerked up its neck, then pulled a foreleg from the swamp and pawed with it. The blunt claws dripped mud and scraps of vegetation which splashed and streamed away in the air a few feet over Samlor's head.
The claws themselves hit a barrier there also, though there was no sound of impact nor did the vessel rock under the blow.
The monster gave another blat of deafening amazement and bolted away from the wax ship. Waves the color and almost the consistency of mud surged across the swamp, but the oarsmen pulled obliviously and the wax prow slid on without feeling the shock of the water.
Behind them, the yacht jerked and staggered. Waves broke over it and streamed away from railings which the touch of the blue flames had left asmolder.
The monster the boats had startled was threshing toward the firmer ground in the distance. It sounded like a traveling waterfall. The volume of viscous muck its legs churned up was enough to rate a place in the landscape. Another creature like it roared from somewhere in the haze.
The wax boat bucked, stern down and then rising, as fiercely as it had when they penetrated the tunnel of flames. The landscape did not change. Ahwere turned around and screamed briefly before her own hand clamped over her mouth.
The monster that had surged away from them was a creature of imagination only, nightmarish but for that reason easy to disregard when the nightmare was past. Something had-just crawled half onto the deck of the royal yacht, and it was a terror familiar to any Napatan.
Only the head and forequarters were visible above the surface of the reedy water, but they alone were longer than the full length of the biggest crocodile Samlor had ever seen. Its jaws opened in laughter or challenge as one of its eyes glittered at the humans on the wax boat.
The oarsmen continued to stroke, fighting the mass which held the yacht in its clawed grip, but the hawser between the vessels was humming with strain.
"Ahwere," Samlor's lips were murmuring. "My love, my sister, my only love," and he could hear her scarcely-voiced, "Nanefer. .," as well.
The crocodile clawed more of its broad, bone-armored body into the yacht. The over-ballasting of sand was suddenly an advantage, because even a beast the size of this one could not overturn the heavy vessel.
The crocodile got one of its hind legs onto the yacht's rail. Hooked black claws gouged long splinters from the wood.
The mind in which Samlor resided was terrified though steadfast. The caravan master had shut down all his emotions when wax simulacra had begun working as if they were men and more than men. This, though… a crocodile, monstrous in size but a natural thing-It could be fought, even if he couldn't defeat it, and he was wondering what to use for a weapon while the body he did not control crooned to a woman and awaited death.