In size the beast was less like an elephant than a whale roiling the thick waters of a cycad-fringed swamp. Its neck was long and serpentine-slender for the body but still too large for Samlor to have encircled it with both arms.
The head was in scale with the neck. The teeth fringing the jaws were peg-like, not shears. Even so, the bass screech the beast directed at the boat was loud enough to drive the couple in the bow half a step back by its physical impact.
The monster's breath smelled of pinebark and turpentine, pungent but not unpleasant.
The oarsmen continued to stroke, as unaffected by the monster as they had been by the tunnel of flame. The boat's course slid it under the rounded snakelike head. The beast jerked up its neck, then pulled a foreleg from the swamp and pawed with it. The blunt claws dripped mud and scraps of vegetation which splashed and streamed away in the air a few feet over Samlor's head.
The claws themselves hit a barrier there also, though there was no sound of impact nor did the vessel rock under the blow.
The monster gave another blat of deafening amazement and bolted away from the wax ship. Waves the color and almost the consistency of mud surged across the swamp, but the oarsmen pulled obliviously and the wax prow slid on without feeling the shock of the water.
Behind them, the yacht jerked and staggered. Waves broke over it and streamed away from railings which the touch of the blue flames had left asmolder.
The monster the boats had startled was threshing toward the firmer ground in the distance. It sounded like a traveling waterfall. The volume of viscous muck its legs churned up was enough to rate a place in the landscape. Another creature like it roared from somewhere in the haze.
The wax boat bucked, stern down and then rising, as fiercely as it had when they penetrated the tunnel of flames. The landscape did not change. Ahwere turned around and screamed briefly before her own hand clamped over her mouth.
The monster that had surged away from them was a creature of imagination only, nightmarish but for that reason easy to disregard when the nightmare was past. Something had-just crawled half onto the deck of the royal yacht, and it was a terror familiar to any Napatan.
Only the head and forequarters were visible above the surface of the reedy water, but they alone were longer than the full length of the biggest crocodile Samlor had ever seen. Its jaws opened in laughter or challenge as one of its eyes glittered at the humans on the wax boat.
The oarsmen continued to stroke, fighting the mass which held the yacht in its clawed grip, but the hawser between the vessels was humming with strain.
"Ahwere," Samlor's lips were murmuring. "My love, my sister, my only love," and he could hear her scarcely-voiced, "Nanefer. .," as well.
The crocodile clawed more of its broad, bone-armored body into the yacht. The over-ballasting of sand was suddenly an advantage, because even a beast the size of this one could not overturn the heavy vessel.
The crocodile got one of its hind legs onto the yacht's rail. Hooked black claws gouged long splinters from the wood.
The mind in which Samlor resided was terrified though steadfast. The caravan master had shut down all his emotions when wax simulacra had begun working as if they were men and more than men. This, though… a crocodile, monstrous in size but a natural thing-It could be fought, even if he couldn't defeat it, and he was wondering what to use for a weapon while the body he did not control crooned to a woman and awaited death.
Streaks of light, unburnt cord were popping out on the surface of the hawser as its skeins stretched under the strain. In a moment they would begin to give way. The rope would part with a crack like stone shearing, and
the wax boat lurched. In front of them was not swamp but gray waste, a membrane of change through which the bow slipped, the humans and the not-human oarsmen, the sternpost with the stretching hawser-
The crocodile threw itself over the side of the royal yacht. The beast's mouth was open. Past its ragged teeth Samlor could see its corpse-white throat contract as if the crocodile were bellowing at them. No sound penetrated, not even the slap of the waves that the fifty-foot body hurled up as it struck the water and all the landscape disappeared into the gray diaphragm which sealed behind the yacht.
The oarsmen continued to stroke. The vessels moved forward as if the oarblades were not pulling through the air-or something more empty than air.
There was no sky, only stars like needle points, and the horizon was an etched jumble of gray stone against blackness. The wax boat surged ahead, never less than six inches above the surface.
Samlor thought at first that the ground was of finely-divided sand studded with jagged volcanic boulders. By squinting and looking at a point far enough ahead that motion did not blur it, he corrected his error. The ground was glass or glassy slag, and the appearance of sand came from the crazing of the smooth surfaces which threw back light in a myriad of directions.
They were not on a plain but a complex of broad craters, shouldering into one another like the pattern raindrops start to make on a beach. The sharper boulders rimmed craters which had not been battered by latter hammerings. Without guidance or need for a man on the rudder, the wax crewmen slid between these obstacles the way human boatmen would avoid treestumps turning in a flood-swollen river.
The yacht skidded along the ground behind them, grinding away bits of shattered glass which spun and glittered as they fell back. The fragments did not tumble as quickly as they should have, and the pitching of the wooden vessel was of curiously long duration. Laden as it was, the yacht ought to have smashed its hull to splinters each time it hit the ground after bounding over an irregularity.
This was not a place Samlor had ever heard of before.
But then, he shouldn't have expected that it would be.
The wax boat was skirting a crater so fresh and extensive that its rim was a glassy sawblade slashing through half the horizon. They were ascending the slope as they rounded it, though the ultimate direction was confused by the shattered landscape of crater flattening crater in dikes and gulleys.
The sun above had no compromise. Its light fell in knife-edge shadows, though sometimes long cracks drew feathers of illumination through the glassy surface. When Samlor tried to look up at the orb, squinting past the edge of his hand as he would normally do on a bright day, he was almost blinded.
There was no halo round the sun here: the sky was either blackness or radiance, with no gradations between.
The rim was close enough to starboard that Samlor thought he could, with care, spit the distance-though perhaps not in this slender royal body.
The crewmen paused. Samlor glanced back at the wax figures, but he could see only their humping shoulders and bull necks. Their faces would have told him nothing about assuming they had their feelings, their intentions. either.
The wax boat coasted. The yacht scraped along also, its inertia overcoming friction in this strange land.
The portside oarsmen began to stroke while their fellows held their blades horizontal, bringing the bow around again the same way they had aligned it with the bank of the River Napata a lifetime ago.
This time the vessel was swinging toward a notch in the crater rim which was otherwise a waist-high barrier whose jagged top was sharper than the best steel. They were high enough that when Samlor glanced around him he could see far across a landscape pocked like human skin-but gray and black and the white of surface reflection of the beams of the unforgiving sun.
This was a dead place, and no place for men.
The oarsmen took up the stroke in measured unison, snatching the slack from the hawser and bringing the yacht's bow around in what should have been a squeal of protest- but was soundless here. They drove toward the wall.