Tjainufi turned around to face the caravan master instead of the slowly-turning staff. "He who scorns matters too often," he said in a tone of reminder, "will die of it."
Samlor smiled but did not reply lest the conversation distract Khamwas. Though Khamwas appeared to be as surely set in his course as the sun ascending the sky. The Napatan scholar had since dawn been kneeling in the sand, muttering to himself, his staff, or his gods.
Now something seemed to have answered him.
The staff began to spin faster and in one direction, blurring itself into the smooth brown ideal of a staff. All its individuality of grain and usage melted together. Khamwas was no longer chanting or holding the staff, though its ferule was several inches above the ground.
The spin accelerated. Khamwas stepped back. A line of dust rose beside the comelwood marker. The dust paused, spread a hand's breadth at the top, like a cobra lifting itself from a conjurer's basket. Then it shot upward faster than Samlor could have thrown a rock, roaring and expanding into a whirlwind with uneasy similarities to the tornado which had cleansed Setios' house of its demons.
Khamwas bent and plucked Samlor's wand out of the way a moment before it would have been lost in the funnel. His own staff continued to spin-in the direction opposite to that of the whirlwind.
"The cosmos abhors imbalance," murmured Khamwas as he walked to his companion. Soft sand flooded over his feet and at every step poured back past the straps of his sandals. He handed the cornelwood wand to Samlor.
The point it had marked was a dip in the slope. It was not yet a cavity because sand refilled it, oozing from all sides like viscous oil.
The whirlwind lifted its load twenty feet in the air in a brown column as thick as Samlor's chest. At its peak, the column disintegrated in a plume driven by the breeze over the escarpment. The heavier particles settled out further down the slope, but the lightest of the dust drifted over the river and marked the opposite bank with a yellow stain.
"That's. . quite a job, you know," said Samlor while his eyes continued to track the dust plume.
Khamwas nodded with satisfaction. "I was at a disadvantage in Sanctuary," he said, rubbing his hands in a physical memory of the task they had just performed. "Several disadvantages. But here-"
He lifted his jaw as he surveyed the river and the irrigated fields beyond it. "This is my land, my friend. By right, and by the right of the book's power when I hold it."
He met Samlor's eyes with a gaze as imperious as that of an eagle. "I swore that the day my brothers sold me as a slave," he added.
"Huh?"
Khamwas smiled. His face fell back into the familiar lines of humor and placid determination. "Ifdoesn't matter now," he said, clapping his companion on the shoulder. The stone-chiseled visage was back for an instant. "But soon it will matter to my brothers. Very much."
Samlor raised an eyebrow, then chuckled. "A guy never knows what he's signed on for, does he?" he said.
Khamwas looked at the caravan master sharply and said, "Your commitment's ended. You promised me nothing beyond getting me to-" he pointed at the whirlwind " – this point."
"Sure I did," Samlor replied. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and kept his eyes on the column of sand. "Anyhow, I didn't say I was complaining."
The slopes had flattened near the tip of the funnel. Though a little sand still trickled in, it could no longer hide the square stone door in the cliff face. The whirlwind's color faded to a gauzy white now that it was no longer charged to opacity with sand.
Samlor eyed the portal through the wavering column of air. "We'll have to break it down," he said in professional appraisal. "They'll have set wedges t' fall when they slid the door down the last time."
"Wait and watch," replied Khamwas with his old smile. "The door couldn't fit tightly enough in its grooves to keep sand from seeping through over the ages and filling the passageway beyond."
"You want the villagers with baskets after all…?" Samlor asked in puzzlement, trying to follow the other's train of thought. "Or-"
He blinked and glanced up at the sky, visualizing a thunderbolt from its pale transparency striking the stone door and blasting it to shards.
Khamwas shook his head gently and pointed toward the door again.
The staff had seemed to be slowing its rotation; certainly it had dipped an inch or two nearer the ground. Now it rose and accelerated again.
The tip of the little whirlwind twisted like an elephant's trunk and explored the edge of the stone door. The panel quivered. As Khamwas had said, the grooves in the cliff face in which it slid had to have considerable play. Tiny grit with the persistence of time was certain to have free access through the cracks.
The trunk of moving air sharpened itself wire thin. It was black again with whirling sand. It began to scream with the fury of a saw cutting far faster than a stonecutter's arms could drive it.
The speed of the whirlwind increased by the square of the lessened diameter. The tip was now moving so fast that it would have been opaque even if it were only air.
The sand which it dragged from the interior of the tomb blasted against the edges of the door and the cliff, grinding them back to the sand from which they had been formed beneath the sea in past eons. The mating surfaces eroded in a black line climbing upward as the whirlwind followed the same pattern a human sawyer would have used.
The dust that reached the upper funnel was so finely divided that it gave a saffron, almost golden, cast to the trembling air.
Khamwas looked at Samlor with quiet pride. Samlor squeezed his companion's shoulder again.
"The wealth of a craftsman," said Tjainufi in what might have been intended as a gibe, "is in his equipment." His voice had almost the same timbre as the wind howling as it ate rock, but his words were nonetheless quite audible.
As the line of black-shadow replacing what had been rocky substance-coursed along the upper edge of the door, the panel began to shift. A handful of gravel-sized hunks flew out and pitched into the river loudly, fragments of a stone wedge.
The whole door, a slab six inches thick, fell out on its face with the heavy finality of a man stabbed to the heart.
Instantly, uninstructed by Khamwas, the tip broadened. The funnel blurred brown with the sand it sucked from the passageway beyond. The sound of the wind lowered into a drumnote instead of the high keening with which it had carved solid stone. Sorted by weight, the debris dropped again far beyond the cavity from which it had come.
The passageway was square and polished smooth. It was easily big enough for a man, but he would have to crawl on his hands and knees. Samlor had been in tighter places, but the one certainty about this one was that there wouldn't be another way out.
Khamwas must have been thinking the same thing, because he said, "I'll leave my staff at the entrance. It will prevent problems like… the slab-" he gestured at what had been the door " – rising up and wedging itself into the tunnel again. For instance."
Samlor raised an eyebrow. "You expect that?" he asked.
"Not if I leave my staff at the entrance," Khamwas answered calmly.
The whirlwind had been clearing gradually until only the inevitable dust motes danced in it. Khamwas' staff dropped to the ground so abruptly that its ferule thrust an inch or two into the soft sand. Khamwas' hand snatched the instrument while it was still wobbling upright.