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.
Ahwere touched his arm from behind. Samlor threw down the useless axe helve before he turned to embrace his wife again.
All he had to do now was to retrieve the book.
When the worm died, its body uncoiled into a sprawl dwarfed by the size of the crater. The rim, jagged as the fangs of a wolf-fish, gleamed beneath the rays of a sun which had remained precisely overhead throughout the battle.
The gray iron box which the worm had encircled until it died was now visible.
Ahwere grabbed Samlor by the arm and turned him with a strength which surprised him as much as what she was doing. There was a scream on her face. His eyes were already looking beyond her.
The two pieces of the worm had shivered into contact. A blue glare that hurt Samlor's eyes was spluttering between the ragged edges of the creature's skin. Where the arcs touched, they welded the portions together as if Samlor had not shattered his axe in making sure the separation was complete.
The worm's tail moved in a series of water-smooth curves, covering the box again. The head lifted, its tip glowing lambently as it searched, then focused on the pair of humans.
Samlor drew his dagger with fingers made clumsy by despair, but the instinct with which the prince stabbed hilt deep into the nearest loop of the body was one which the caravan master could applaud. Cutting the head off had done nothing permanent, but perhaps there were vital organs somewhere else in the creature's length.
Not that there was so much as a hope of finding a vital spot in a squirming hundred feet of body.
A loop of the worm knocked Samlor down and slithered across him. The coils couldn't encircle a victim until the head had a grip to anchor them.
Samlor let the creature's own motion draw the blade clear in a long gash. He stabbed again. The steel gleamed with clear ichor. There was no resistance to its passage after the point dimpled the metallic skin.
Samlor pulled himself from beneath the slick weight of the worm's coils and the creature's head slammed onto the ground again. The blue/violet flicker of its snout burned like the heart of a glacier.
The shock left him with no other feeling in the arm he had thrown out to meet the impact. The worm's body cast itself around his ankles with the accuracy of a cattleman's rope.
Blue sparks played dazzlingly across the worm as the long gash began to arc itself closed.
Samlor screamed soundlessly. His weapon tore along the creature's flesh, so deeply the hilt bobbed against the skin like a shearwater's beak scoring the sea.
The blade parted the worm as easily as it would the pulp of a ripe melon-and the top of the cut began to regrow in blue arcs that made the hair stand upon Samlor's head. A loop was crushing his knees together. The touch of the worm's snout drove icy needles through his left arm and into his face and chest.
A coil buffeted Ahwere as she stepped past her trapped husband and poured a shovelful of sand into the cut he had just torn.
Minuscule lightning sealing the wound touched sand and flashed it into glass that spattered volcanically. Instead of healing the cut puckered, then swelled into an abscess boiling with power insulated from its proper use.
The pain in Samlor's legs was momentarily dizzying that he did not realize the worm had dropped him.
The worm's snout brushed the surface of the abscess. Near the swelling the creature's body spasmed uncontrolled, but the slither of its tail out of its protective coil was deliberate.
The worm had twitched its body a dozen feet from its attacker. Samlor tried to stand but his legs failed him. He slid himself across the crater floor, using his numb left hand as a flipper.
The worm's head twisted from the wound to Samlor. The glow of its snout was still blue but shot through with sparks of sullen red. Samlor twisted his arm. The long blade jutting from the heelside of his fist pointed up, ready to meet the creature if the creature dared to strike.
Ahwere, running up with more sand, flickered in Samlor's peripheral vision. He drove his knife into the worm's side again with a bloody joy that more than balanced the shock of the creature's snout against his unprotected upper chest. The pain shuddering across his nerves ripped the watered steel blade in a jerky zig-zag across the shimmering hide which exploded as Ahwere poured sand into the wound.
This time Samlor's legs worked well enough for him to leap astride the creature as it tried to escape him. He stabbed downward, and the worm's flowing body dragged itself along the pitiless blade of the dagger. The edges of the wound shone like iron as a bellows strokes the hearth, but they did not arc or meld together.
When Ahwere thrust her shovel into the wound, the third load of sand sank through the worm's flesh like lead in hot wax. The creature writhed upward in a great loop that flung Samlor away. As it twisted in the air, the unscarred skin on the underside of its body blackened and sloughed to spray bubbles of molten glass onto the crater floor.
The worm's head and tail were battering the ground. The snout melted a patch of the crater the first time it struck. Then the glow turned inward and the worm's head began to collapse around a bead of orange fire.
Samlor limped over to the worm's body and began methodically to hack it in half. The skin was powdery, and the flesh beneath began to mottle when it was exposed.
The sand which Ahwere shoveled onto her husband's butchery clung to the flesh. There were only a few sparks to fleck the surfaces with glass.
When Samlor finished his work, the two parts of the worm were as still as the sun above. The creature's head had melted several feet back along its body, leaving tarry sludge on the crater floor.
Ahwere held a final shovelful of sand. When she saw that it was needless, she turned the shovel over with royal hauteur, scorning the worm and the glittering crater where it lay dead.
Samlor's dagger was nicked by tiny serrations near the crossguard where the worm's skin had resisted edge-on cutting. They would polish out when he next sharpened the blade, just as his scrapes and bruises would heal and the terrible fatigue-produced trembling would leave his muscles.
The worm's snout had not marked the arm and shoulder where it gripped him, but there was blue fire deep in his bones in those places.
Samlor walked to the iron box with painful deliberation. Ahwere followed him with the bronze shovel raised like a sceptre. She had understood the use of the shovel and sand when her husband had been too enveloped by the imminence of battle to imagine anything further.