A coil buffeted Ahwere as she stepped past her trapped husband and poured a shovelful of sand into the cut he had just torn.
Minuscule lightning sealing the wound touched sand and flashed it into glass that spattered volcanically. Instead of healing the cut puckered, then swelled into an abscess boiling with power insulated from its proper use.
The pain in Samlor's legs was momentarily dizzying that he did not realize the worm had dropped him.
The worm's snout brushed the surface of the abscess. Near the swelling the creature's body spasmed uncontrolled, but the slither of its tail out of its protective coil was deliberate.
The worm had twitched its body a dozen feet from its attacker. Samlor tried to stand but his legs failed him. He slid himself across the crater floor, using his numb left hand as a flipper.
The worm's head twisted from the wound to Samlor. The glow of its snout was still blue but shot through with sparks of sullen red. Samlor twisted his arm. The long blade jutting from the heelside of his fist pointed up, ready to meet the creature if the creature dared to strike.
Ahwere, running up with more sand, flickered in Samlor's peripheral vision. He drove his knife into the worm's side again with a bloody joy that more than balanced the shock of the creature's snout against his unprotected upper chest. The pain shuddering across his nerves ripped the watered steel blade in a jerky zig-zag across the shimmering hide which exploded as Ahwere poured sand into the wound.
This time Samlor's legs worked well enough for him to leap astride the creature as it tried to escape him. He stabbed downward, and the worm's flowing body dragged itself along the pitiless blade of the dagger. The edges of the wound shone like iron as a bellows strokes the hearth, but they did not arc or meld together.
When Ahwere thrust her shovel into the wound, the third load of sand sank through the worm's flesh like lead in hot wax. The creature writhed upward in a great loop that flung Samlor away. As it twisted in the air, the unscarred skin on the underside of its body blackened and sloughed to spray bubbles of molten glass onto the crater floor.
The worm's head and tail were battering the ground. The snout melted a patch of the crater the first time it struck. Then the glow turned inward and the worm's head began to collapse around a bead of orange fire.
Samlor limped over to the worm's body and began methodically to hack it in half. The skin was powdery, and the flesh beneath began to mottle when it was exposed.
The sand which Ahwere shoveled onto her husband's butchery clung to the flesh. There were only a few sparks to fleck the surfaces with glass.
When Samlor finished his work, the two parts of the worm were as still as the sun above. The creature's head had melted several feet back along its body, leaving tarry sludge on the crater floor.
Ahwere held a final shovelful of sand. When she saw that it was needless, she turned the shovel over with royal hauteur, scorning the worm and the glittering crater where it lay dead.
Samlor's dagger was nicked by tiny serrations near the crossguard where the worm's skin had resisted edge-on cutting. They would polish out when he next sharpened the blade, just as his scrapes and bruises would heal and the terrible fatigue-produced trembling would leave his muscles.
The worm's snout had not marked the arm and shoulder where it gripped him, but there was blue fire deep in his bones in those places.
Samlor walked to the iron box with painful deliberation. Ahwere followed him with the bronze shovel raised like a sceptre. She had understood the use of the shovel and sand when her husband had been too enveloped by the imminence of battle to imagine anything further.
You must have a companion whom you trust to the point of your very life, the spirits he commanded had whispered to him as he made preparations.
He had brought the right companion. He had brought weapons and armor-and a shipload of sand when a basket would have been sufficient.
But nothing is excessive when it results in triumph.
Samlor squatted down before the iron box, a cube whose plain sides were the length of his forearm. It had no lock or hinges, but the mind of Prince Nanefer smiled at it. Samlor's finger traced a sign on the glass of the crater floor while his lips mimed words.
The edges of the box broke apart as cleanly as the sections of an orange pried by careful fingers. One side flopped toward Samlor. When he hopped backward to avoid it, pain blasted both his knees and reminded him of the bruising the worm had given them. He fell to his buttocks on the glass and got up gingerly.
The top of the iron box lay on an inner container of richly-chased copper. Samlor pushed the iron away and squatted to survey the copper. On its sides were engraved hunting scenes-smiling gods striding over cities and fields, lifting men on their tridents like gigged frogs.
Samlor's mind grew cold and Nanefer lost his scornful smile. His finger drew a different glyph between his splayed knees.
A shaving of metal like the waste from a graver's tool began to lift along the upper edge of the copper, at first slowly and then at the speed of flame devouring chaff. The copper was thin as foil, but it would have been proof against material tools-even the watered steel of the dagger which had ripped apart the box's guardian.
The copper twisted as Samlor's spell sheared it into plates. The face of Tatenen, the Great God, seemed to wink as the front fell to display an inner casket of juniper wood.
Prince Nanefer was wholly sunk into his magic, but Samlor's mind processed differently the data from the senses which they shared. Samlor saw Ahwere standing spearshaft straight beside them, pretending that she did not know what her husband was doing.
There were tears on her cheeks, but to wipe them off would be an admission.
Samlor's finger moved against the ground. The box puffed into smoky fire as enveloping as a wrapping of silk that lifted toward the sun and disappeared in a black train.
The fire ceased as abruptly as it had ignited. The juniper box was wholly consumed, and the box within-for of course there was a box within-was an intarsia of ivory figures on an ebony ground.
The figures were of men and women, carved so perfectly that their features were recognizable even though the panels were less than a foot in either dimension. They were palace functionaries and generals of the Napatan army, and they marched in procession behind the funerary symbols of the royal house. The sarcophagus of King Merneb was being carried at the bottom of the panel.
Samlor drew a glyph and spoke a silent word. His mind put blinders on his eyes so that he could not, would not, see if his wife had noticed the design.
The box fell apart, ivory separating from ebony and the whole tumbling to the ground like the sides of a trench cut in sand. Within was a still-smaller casket of silver.
The progress continued in polished figures against an oxidized background. There were two sarcophagi on the silver, clearly identified by the symbols borne high before each. Ahwere and Merib were being carried to their tomb.
The time for doubt is before you start a course of action which has certain death as the price of failure. Nanefer spoke and drew the articles of his spell. Samlor would have done the same if he controlled the body in which his mind now resided.
A litter of previous containers lay where Samlor had been working, plates and parts and ash that his hands swept aside to open the next box. The silver casket did not crumble or fall apart. Instead its surface became translucent, then transparent, and at last wholly insubstantial. It vanished as utterly as if it had never enclosed the box of gold which remained.
There was no need of magic to open the gold casket. Unlike the other containers, this one had a mechanical catch.