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."
"There's no life here," said Ahwere. "Here." She swept an arc of the horizon with her spread fingers. "Only you and I… and we don't belong here."
Though she was not chiding him deliberately, Samlor could not mistake the awareness that there were no absolutes. His wife still saw a cost that not even gaining the cosmos justified.
"Put the book against your forehead." he ordered curtly, and he spoke the second word when she obeyed.
This time Ahwere's eyes remained open. For a moment Samlor thought he saw ice crystals forming within the pupils, replicating the pattern of nodes and forces which balanced the cosmos.
But Ahwere put the book down, and her eyes were only sad. "Here," she said, returning to Samior the object for which he had risked all. "Everything is teetering. The world, the heavens. It will have to fall soon, won't it?"
"Don't be foolish!" he responded, snapping at Ahwere for the first time since they had become lovers. "The cosmos is balance. What is, must be."
But there was a nagging doubt in Samlor's mind. He and Ahwere had seen-had been-the same thing, but the minds with which they viewed it could hold different truths.
"We'll go back now," he said, rising to his feet in preparation to setting on the oarsmen. Before he could give them the order, their backs hunched as they drew powerfully on the oars. The wax boat rose and, with the yacht in train, began to slide back toward the crater rim.
They should not have moved until he ordered them to do so. Frowning, then with a professionally blank expression, Samlor began to wrap the Book of Tatenen in the silk in which he had found it. Everything was going as he wished it to.
But he was less certain that events were moving under his control.
They slipped through the knife-edged opening in the crater's rim as flawlessly as they had entered. The very precision bothered Samlor obscurely, for the wax oarsmen acted more perfectly than he could ever have imagined. It shouldn't matter. He couldn't tell the complex of his muscles how to walk, either, or explain to the palace baker how to create the loaves of bread.
The disturbing aspect of the oarsmen's competence was the fact that they were lumps of wax, and the skill poured into their empty forms did not come from the princely magician who had created them.
The linked vessels slid swiftly across the ruined craters of this world. Now that his mind was no longer fogged by anticipation, Samlor could see that the angle of the shadows changed as they moved. The sun hung permanently over the place from which he had stolen the Book of Tanenen. Despite himself, he shivered. He put his arm around
Ahwere both for his own comfort and in sudden appreciation of what she felt.
There was no more of a visible separation between this place of craters and the swamp than there had been in the opposite direction. The wax boat staggered as if the yacht behind had caught again on a lip of rock. Then they were plunging into muggy softness wholly different from the sterile purity of the landscape which the worm had guarded.
Ahwere gasped softly, but Samlor's heart had leaped also and his arm tightened on Ahwere's waist. If the crocodile were waiting for them, he would raise the book and blast the creature with a word. .
But the great carnivore had disappeared, and the still greater beasts which had splashed and bellowed in the swamp were gone as well. Nothing remained but the soggy heat and the reeds nodding dimly beneath a red sun that seemed to be nearing the horizon. Here, at least, time passed as it did in Napata.
"The. .," said Ahwere. Swallowing so that her voice did not catch during the words, she went on, "The fire is next, then?"
"It can't hurt us," said Samlor.
Water curling around the hulls of the linked vessels gurgled like a drowning giant.
Sarnlor gave the lie to his own statement by lifting the crystal toward his forehead in case-
The invisible membrane separating the swamp from the tunnel shimmered across them like a curtain into night. The flames that had clawed the vessels when they first entered the tunnel now glowered like the eyes of a whipped dog. The oarsmen stroked forward, so shadowy that they could have been no more than the lumps of wax which Samlor had formed.
One bubble of fire spat toward them, but it was no more than a spark flung from a collapsing backlog. Even before it reached the barrier which should still protect the wax boat, the spot of blue fire disintegrated into a thousand scintillae and vanished.
The vessel lurched again and, straining the charred hawser behind, splashed thunderously into the current of the River Napata.
"We're safe," said Ahwere.
The tone of her voice reflected the fear which ruled Samlor's own feelings. Returning to the Realm of Men meant that the sun hammered them and that the gnats which buzzed from the marshy banks were used to preying on humans. There was a brightly-colored crowd waiting on the temple quay, folk whose questions would not cease even though they were directed at a man who had become a god.
And for all Ahwere's stated confidence, neither she nor her husband really felt safe.
Samlor looked back. The ancient wall was solid again, and the relief of the god's face was anonymous beneath its coating of silt.
The priests of Tatenen were a scarlet and gold bloc at the end of the quay, but Shay the bosun had elbowed his squat form into their midst. As the boat neared the quay, the crewmen backed water so fiercely that spray flew over Samlor and Ahwere in the bow-and reminded them that they were still naked. Ahwere murmured in despair, reminding her husband that they remained human and members of society despite the powers he had gained.
Shay tossed a line, ignoring the shouts of greeting and benediction from the remainder of the crowd. Samlor snubbed the rope off one-handed on the wax bowsprit-and found the bowsprit was only wax which pulled away in white fractures when it took the first strain.
The bosun swore, then bellowed to bring forward more of his sailors. The royal yacht drifted with the momentum of the sand still filling it. The wooden prow crushed the wax stern with no more sound than the gasp of air bubbling out through broken seams.
Ahwere glanced at her husband, then reached for the stone coping. She didn't have a chance to touch it because Shay's broad hand snatched her from the crumpling boat and then reached for her husband.
Samlor had a sudden vision of branching timelines as his bosun jerked him to safety. If he dropped the Book of Tatenen here, it would sink into the mud at the bottom of the river. He would never find it again, though he had all the resources of the temple-and the kingdom-with which to dredge and drain. .
He did not drop the silk-wrapped crystal.
The wax boat, crushed and already slumping with the sun's heat, began to drift downstream while Shay leaped aboard the yacht and called for more help. His curses at the charring and claw-marks which defaced the vessel were heartfelt.