The vertebrae resisted more like cartilage than bone as Samlor drove his steel in a berserk determination to finish the business once and for all.
The priest's head fell away and powdered when it hit the stone, like a seashell burned to lime but able to retain its shape untiUit receives a shock. The body slumped but did not thrash in the shawl which confined it. An arm slipped to the floor, separated when the elbow joint crumbled. No other part of the Priest of the Rock retained its shape.
Samlor flung the garment toward a far corner in the kind of convulsive motion a man makes when he finds something loathsome crawling on his hand. The shawl flapped open in a cloud of dust and bone splinters. They settled into a lighter-colored blotch on the filthy floor.
Samlor moved toward the door, shaky- with reaction and the fatigue poisons in all his muscles. Some of the dust from-from the shawl, leave it at that-some of the dust was still drifting in the air. Samlor wanted very badly to get out of the temple before he drew in another breath.
He had to crawl through the doorway because of the long, pincered arm reaching through it and the sculptured human face bent close as if its blank stone eye were trying to look into the temple.
Khamwas caught Samlor by the wrist and shoulder at the entrance to the lesser temple. The knife still in the caravan master's hand almost gashed Khamwas, who seemed untroubled in his enthusiasm to hug Samlor.
"I was sure you were, well…" Khamwas said to his companion's shoulder. "I prayed for you. There didn't seem to be any use for the, for the crows after you were inside yourself. So there wasn't anything I could do to help."
"Do not weary of calling to the gods," said Tjainufi sharply. "They have their hour for hearing petitions."
Samlor squeezed the Napatan firmly, then stepped away and straightened. He ducked his head again immediately because the lizard belly of the thing which clawed into the temple was still above them like a low roof.
"Let's get away from here, huh?" he said, muttering so that the queasiness he suddenly felt would not be evident in his voice.
When the damned things were threatening his life, he'd had no time to be disturbed at their supernatural provenance.
The reliefs, now free-standing statutes, were scattered between the entrances to the two temples. The woman-headed monster was a hump on the riverbank where it had toppled when the Priest of the Rock tried to regain control of his creatures. The other three were immediate obstacles as the two men began to walk toward the larger temple.
Light was pouring toward the West like blood into a sacrificial bowl.
"Hey, look," Samlor said quietly. He was glad that the shadows, deepening with every step the men took, hid his face. "Maybe I said some things when it got tense, you know. I don't remember. But I wouldn't be here if I didn't, you know, respect you."
"My brother is useless," said-replied? – Tjainufi, "if he doesn't take care of me."
"I don't remember anything either," said Khamwas. Then-not that there was any doubt that he did remember- he added, "There wasn't time to stand on ceremony, while you were saving both our lives that way."
"Save?" Samlor jeered. "Never thought I'd be so glad to see a couple birds, buddy."
It was becoming so dark that Samlor began to fear that he would be unable to distinguish the fallen monster from shadows when they reached it. Nobody alive would be amused if he managed to break his nose on a pile of stones after coming through the past crisis with nothing worse than a few scrapes and strains.
In a similar frame of mind, Khamwas extended his staff before them and clothed it with phosphorescence so pale that it was more identification than illumination.
"Ah, I suppose you'll want to get started clearing sand from the tomb entrance?" the caravan master said. "I'll round up a crew from the village with scoops and torches. They probably won't want to come out in the dark, but we can make it worth their while.
"And-and it might be as well they didn't see what the statues there look like until they'd been on the job for a bit. Could be they wouldn't react real good to that."
"I'll take care of the sand myself, Samlor," said the Napatan scholar. "The Priest of the Rock was blocking me-that's why I wasn't able to locate the tomb before. But it'll be all right now."
"There isn't any body, you know," said Samlor to the darkness. "He. . He fell apart, or…"
"Someone left to watch," Khamwas said reassuringly. The fallen statue loomed ahead of them, visible after all. The female head had broken away from the bulbous hairy body.
"A priest," Khamwas continued as they skirted the rubble, leaving deep prints in the soft margin of the river. "But human, and alive. He was just older than we thought. Even older."
"Everything's relative, I guess," Samlor remarked with studied calm. He resisted the urge to grind sand between his palms in order to clean them of any trace of the Priest of the Rock.
Samlor paused at the lower end of the rope. "I'll get a lamp," he said. "I suppose you'll want light while you, while you work?"
Khamwas smiled broadly in the dim light of his staff. "What I really want, I think," he said-and / think had the weight of genuine consideration in its syllables-"is a good night's sleep, for a change. After a hot meal. Would that-" he gestured at the darkness " – be possible now?"
"Just watch me," said Samlor with a smile as wide as his companion's. He began to mount the slope briskly, lifting himself hand over hand along the rope.
He much preferred daylight for whatever it was Khamwas intended to do.
CHAPTER 10
BY DAYLIGHT FROM the escarpment, the lesser temple looked like the wreckage of time rather than of an evening. The man-headed thing lay in a hundred pieces. Its spider legs had proved unequal to their task without the support of the cliff face as well. When one leg gave way, the others followed with a suddenness which reduced the carving to rubble.
Near it were the toppled forms of the other pair of composite creatures. They had been in balance when night fell like an axe blade. The muddy ground let them tilt. Without life or its counterfeit to right them, the statues crashed down and broke under their own weight.
Spring floods would roll the. fragments against one another. In a few years the small bits would be gravel and the large ones indistinguishable lumps of sandstone with no signs of human working.
Samlor had never liked ruins. They reminded him that very soon his own bones would bleach or feed desert mice.
But this particular ruin was an impressive monument to the fact that he'd done his job very damned well.
On the slope below the caravan master, Khamwas cried out.
Samlor's face went blank. If he used the rope to support him, he would have come down on top of Khamwas, who was kneeling at the spot marked by the cornel wood wand.
Instead Samlor slid down on a parallel course, braking himself with boots and his left hand.
His right hand did not touch the slope. It held his dagger ready for any problem that steel and ruthlessness could solve.
Khamwas didn't look at him, despite the cloud of dust and sand which Samlor sprayed before him. The Napatan was chanting. He held his staif between the palms of his hands, rotating it slowly back and forth on its axis. Every time the direction of rotation changed, he gave a yelp in a high falsetto, and it was this which Samlor had mistaken for a cry of alarm.
As soon as Samlor understood the situation, he tried to slow himself. He still couldn't halt before he was on a level with his companion, halfway down the slope. Much good he'd have been if there really were a problem. He worried too much.