There was a distant flicker of green, visible only because the closed doors of the lesser temple were in such deep shadow. The female head turned snarling toward the creature beside it whose eagerness to get at Samlor was crowding her/it against the cliff.
All four of the monsters set into place like the statues they had been moments before, though their poses were now contorted by recent motion.
Samlor sprinted, ducking his head beneath one of the gaping pincers. The shadow cooled his skin and froze his soul.
The legs of the two leading monsters had splayed across one another as they struggled for position. Samlor laid his hand on one of the arthropod limbs to swing himself through the maze without slowing. It was warm and gritty to the touch, the feel of sun-struck stone and not that of anything which could have been alive.
There was room to pass between the third creature and the cliff without touching either, but as Samlor did so, the feathered body moved and the grotesque stone breasts swayed above his head.
He pushed off from the wall. The change of direction and the sudden impetus it gave him saved Samlor from being crushed. A limb, shaped like a bull's foreleg and the size of a large tree, stamped an impression six inches deep in the hard ground.
Samlor dived beneath the grasshopper body that wobbled between the bovine hind legs, rolled, and came up running while the creature turned, froze, and started to move again in jerky fashion. Stone ground on stone as others of the creatures shifted and fouled one another like storm-tossed boats in a narrow harbor.
Running on foot wasn't a particular talent of Samlor's, but he had the lungs and leg muscles to pound toward the smaller temple fast enough to pull him away from m'ost human pursuers.
These pursuers weren't human.
Wind in his ears and the pounding of his blood cloaked the noisy movements of Samlor's opponents behind him. Stone hit stone with hollow echoes, like those of great fish sounding. There was a hiss as loud as steam venting through a geyser.
He didn't glance behind him to see whether or not the stone monsters were tangled with one another because of the distraction Khamwas had supplied. He could only hope that they were-
And that the discomfort of lungs burning with exertion quelled fear of what was about to happen to him. He'd noticed before that aggravating discomfort was the best antidote to panic. .
The door leaves had long since disappeared from the larger temple. Samlor assumed the panels closing the temple in which the Priest of the Rock lived were wooden, sun-dried and flood-warped-vulnerable to the fury and determination of a man as strong as Samlor hil Samt.
It was a shock when he realized that the double doors set into the stripped facade were of the same fine-grained sandstone as the cliffs around them.
Samlor slapped one leaf with the flat of his left hand, more to bring himself to a halt than from any expectation that the doors would fly open. The stone panels rattled the wooden bar within which held them closed, but there was no hint of real weakness.
The ground trembled as one or more of the carved monsters began to stagger back toward Samlor.
The doors rotated on pins carved from the upper and lower edges of both panels. They were sheathed in bronze and set in massive bronze sockets inlet into the transom and threshold of the temple. The metal was verdigrised and worn. It almost certainly dated from the original construction of the temple a millennium before.
But the pivots weren't going to break under any stress Samlor could bring against them without a stone-cutter's maul.
The crows cawed and clashed with beaks and pinions from the interior of the temple. Their racket came not through the thick stone panels but around them: use of rock in this way required that moving parts be fitted more coarsely than would be needful with material which was easily worked.
It was incredible that the Priest of the Rock could concentrate amid the racket the birds made, but the slow, thudding footsteps from behind proved the bastard could.
Sometimes you met somebody who was just too good for you.
And sometimes, that was the last fellow you met.
Samlor put his mouth to the crack between the door leaves and bellowed, hoping to startle the priest within. There was enough gap between the panels to squeeze in the first joint of his little finger, but the stone plates were four inches thick. Not even a wrecking bar would give him enough leverage to shatter a pivot with side thrust.
But the blade of his dagger would slide all the way through.
"We got you, fucker!" Samlor shouted at the door as he slipped the long, watered blade through the crack between the leaves. He would have explained that he was still trying to distract the man inside, but mostly it was just animal triumph finding a vocal outlet.
And, partly, it was a prayer that he had triumphed.
The bar closing the door crossed the gap at waist height. The edge of the dagger met it as Samlor drew the blade up through the crack. If the bar were pinned or run through staples, they were still dead, but-
The blade continued to lift, against the weight of the bar but without any suggestion that the bar was locked into place.
Samlor moved convulsively, gripping the dagger hilt with both hands and jerking the blade upward with all his strength. The bar flipped out of the shallow troughs in which it was laid and fell loudly against a wall, then the floor.
The stone troll's hand reaching for Samlor missed him because he dived into the temple as the doors swung away from his thrusting shoulder.
The room in which Samlor rolled back to his feet, fatigue forgotten, was scarcely half the size of the first hall of the greater temple. Its low ceiling was supported on square-section pillars instead of regal caryatids.
And it stank.
If Khamwas had cleared the chamber many years before while he searched for the Tomb of Nanefer, then that had been the room's last cleaning. The Priest of the Rock used the interior for all his bodily functions. Air blown from the desert desiccated the result, but it could not remove the effluvium.
The priest sat now in the center of the chamber: ankles crossed beneath his thighs, head bowed, and seemingly oblivious to the pair of crows which cawed and yammered in tight circles around his head.
The room darkened as the cobra-headed thing knelt and tried to grip Samlor with a hairy, knotted hand. The creature blocked much of the sunlight flooding through the doorway, but the intruder was beyond its grasp.
Samlor reached the priest in two quick strides. He lifted the old man by the woolen shawl that was his only covering. Even for the caravan master's left hand alone, the priest was an insignificant burden.
"Quit it!" Samlor shouted, giving the priest a shake to reinforce the demand. "You've lost! Don't make me kill you."
The priest's eyes were the only smooth surfaces in the chamber. They reflected the light. His mouth was open but toothless as well as speechless.
The crows vanished abruptly.
"There," said Samlor, sure that he was being obeyed. Deep breaths and the harsh necessity of taking them made the stench bearable but not unnoticed. "We're not going to hurt you or the temples either. We're-"
The interior was suddenly brighter again. That was good in itself, but it meant that the creatures outside had not returned to being sandstone carvings. Samlor glanced around.
The cobra-headed thing had moved out of the doorway so that the man-creature could reach inside with one of its longer, arthropod arms.
Samlor's right hand and left moved together like a pair of pruning shears, the one anchoring the priest against the other and the dagger blade that swept across the wizened neck.