The caravan master grasped his wand again and this time tried to work it down in a sawing motion as if cutting a vertical line in the rock face. The sand resisted, shifting like a heavy fluid away from the thrust of the wood. Occasionally the ferule scraped rock, but only sand hindered the general downward motion of the wand.
Samlor had found a crack in the rock, and it was damned likely that he had broken their impasse as well.
Leaving his wand as a stark marker, Samlor slid the twenty feet back down the slope at a rate controlled only by his willingness to kick his feet forward more quickly than his body's impetus could topple him head over heels. Sand and gritty dust sprayed in a dry parody of a duck landing on the water.
"Khamwas!" he shouted, even before he reached the entrance. "Khamwas. Come here!"
The Priest of the Rock was no longer huddled in his doorway. Samlor blinked when he noticed that. It should have been good news-in a small way-because of the way the priest bothered him.
Somehow it didn't seem good, though.
He had to stop when he plunged into the hall of the temple. He was too excited to trust himself to run through the darkness when a misstep into a caryatid would batter him as thoroughly as running into the cliff from which the statue was carved.
"Khamwas!" Samlor bellowed and began to shuffle forward, his hands stretched before him.
"Samlor!" bellowed Khamwas, so shockingly close that Samlor's hand cleared his fighting knife by instinct. "I've found it! It's east of the main temple just a little ways."
"Buggered Heqt," muttered Samlor under his breath. In a more normal voice, he said, "Yeah, I found it too-on the ground. Let's go take a look."
He tried to sheathe his dagger, but the darkness and the way adrenalin made him tremble prevented him. After he-pricked his left index finger twice while it tried to steady the mouth of the sheath, he lowered the blade instead so that a flat was along his. right thigh.
Khamwas had the advantage of seeing Samlor against the lighted doorway, so he had been able to dodge from the collision course the two of them were otherwise following. He put his hand on Samlor's shoulder and guided or directed his companion outside with him.
"All that it took," Khamwas bubbled happily, "is one more try. If you hadn't braced me, my friend, we'd…"
"It's up the slope," said Samlor, pausing briefly to put his weapon back where it belonged when talking to his friend and employer. In slightly different circumstances, that reflex could have caused a very nasty incident indeed.
"Oh," he added, pointing across the curve of the cliff to the smaller temple. "Our friend's finally gone away."
Khamwas, already grasping the rope as he strode slushily up the slope, glanced in the direction of Samlor's gesture. As a result, they were both looking toward the relief when the spider-limbed monster shuddered away from it. The movement came a fraction of a second before the echoing crackle of rock breaking.
"Earthquake!" cried Samlor. He turned to be sure the escarpment and carvings towering beside them were not also toppling to crush them across the sand and into the nearby river.
The cliff above was as solid as it had ever been. The river was a brown stream. It was vaguely streaked by its current, but it had not become a mass of whitecaps dancing to the rhythm of the underlying strata.
The monster had not fallen from the other relief. It had walked. And it was walking toward Samlor and his companion.
Khamwas slid back to firmer footing, where sunbaked mud cemented the sand into a narrow shoreline around the face of the cliif. "Don't worry," he said with structured calm. "I'll stop it."
He braced his staff and crossed his left arm over the end as he had done in the crypt beneath Setios' house.
The relief with a woman's head and a bear's body also began to stretch itself shatteringly away from the cliff of which it had been part.
The spider/lizard/man-thing moved with the awkwardness of a knuckle-bone bouncing in slow motion. Its legs splayed so broadly-thirty feet or more-that the four of them on the outside roiled and gurgled well out into the stream.
"I can't hold two of-" Khamwas began.
A third creature, the fish-headed one, shifted in a patter of gravel.
Samlor crouched. "We've got to-"
"Run," he had been about to say, but he was quite certain that the progress of the stone creatures was faster than he could manage for more than an hour.
Saddle a camel? The animals would have broken their hobbles and run by now, as surely as the fourth beast-thing was tearing itself from the facade.
Gods! but he wished Star were here.
While his mind echoed with that thought which he would rather have died than entertained, Samlor drew his coffin-hilted dagger. His body was cold with awareness that he'd been willing to risk the child's life because he wasn't man enough to live without her to save him.
At least he could die fighting.
DISTRACT HIM said the blade of the dagger as it flicked through the periphery of Samlor's vision. His mind was so focused on the next minutes-which he expected to be his last-that the words did not register until he was three shuffling steps.past the desperately chanting Khamwas.
Were the stone joints of the leading creature softer than the shanks, the way those of a normal crab would be?
Would a twelve-inch blade penetrate-if it could penetrate-deeply enough to injure creatures the size of these coming on?
The woman-headed monster was beginning to clamber over the thing with a man's head and arthropod legs. It had frozen again, two of its pincered feet raised as the river! lapped close to the plates of its lizard belly.
"Distract him!" Samlor cried as he skidded to a stop. He turned, wolfish joy on his broad, worn face. "That's it. Distract him, Khamwas!"
"I can't distract them!" the Napatan cried in frustration.
The man-headed thing profited from Khamwas' broken concentration to lurch forward again, half-carrying the creature which had started to climb over him. The other two statues continued to trundle along behind, laughably clumsy on troll legs and bull legs-except that those legs spanned four human paces at a stride.
" You idiot!" Samlor screamed. "Distract the fucking priest!"
Then he turned again and sprinted toward monsters and the other temple. If Khamwas couldn't understand-or couldn't perform-they were both dead very soon. It was as simple as that, and therefore Samlor had to proceed on the assumption that his companion would carry his load.
The woman-headed thing had pushed the creature on eight legs farther away from the cliff face so that the two of them advanced in tandem. The river was low at this time of year, but the strand between the rock and water was so narrow that the monster with the head of a man was forced almost completely into the water.
The male head growled like millstones grating. When the female mouth opened to snarl back, it displayed a maw of hooked teeth like a shark's.
Samlor was twenty feet from the leading monsters when a pair of crows swept past him, cawing angrily and slapping their pinions at one another.
The woman-headed creature swatted at the birds with a blunt-clawed forepaw. The motion was swift and precise, eliminating Samlor's faint hope that the monsters of stone would prove too awkward to catch him as he dodged between their legs.
The doglike paw hit the noisy birds. They flowed through the stone with a green flash and continued to clatter their swift course toward the smaller temple. One or both the trailing monsters clawed and bit at the crows as they passed, with no greater effect.
"All right, you bastards," Samlor whispered, pausing in a crouch for an instant. His left hand was empty and spread wide, while his right was cocked to hold the knife in position for a disemboweling stroke. His body faked to the right, toward the man-headed creature which reached forward with a pair of limbs. Their pincers sprang open like shears.