The Book of Tatenen would see to that.
The bosun had been waiting for Samlor. "Ah, didn't want t' bother you while you was thinkin', sir," he said. "But 1 figured we'd tie up along the bank about now." He would not meet his master's eyes.
"We'll go on," Samlor retorted sharply. "I want to reach the capital before-" He broke off, unwilling to say,
180
"Before my father hears of his grandson's death from someone else."
"Yessir, yessir," agreed Shay, bobbing his head. "It was only-the wind what made us heel the other, the other bloody dusk. Didn't know for sure what you'd want."
No one but Samlor had seen the crocodile, not even Ahwere. But his fingers now touched gouges which had not been in the railing when the yacht first sailed back from the Temple of Tatenen. It had not been wind that flung Merib to his death-nor had it been chance.
Shay strode forward, bawling his orders. Still standing, Samlor raised the crystal to his forehead again and became all life in the cosmos as color drained from the sky above the River Napata. There was nothing more dangerous near the yacht than the gnats which twilight drew from the reed beds anywhere. He would continue checking all the way to the capital.
If the gods sent another messenger, Samlor would blast it with enough violence to pay in a small way for what had happened to Merib.
"We'll sail through the night," Samlor said as he seated himself again beside Ahwere. "It'll be safe, and we'll-"
The worm came over the starboard rail behind Ahwere and snatched her into the water before she had time to scream. Samlor screamed instead.
"Oh, she's jumped, "she's jumped!" he heard the nursemaid crying as he commanded the cosmos through the book. "Oh, the grief of her poor darling son!"
All the forces in the cosmos balanced on a point, the Book of Tatenen and the mind of Samlor hil Samt. The currents that rolled Ahwere's body, the gurgle of air still trapped in her lungs-the minuscule scrape of sediment across her sightless eyes-all were his to know and to change.
The worm that seized her with its blue-glowing snout did not exist in the present cosmos.
Ahwere flashed back onto her couch with a slap of sodden garments. Only the dim light and confusion kept her reappearance from throwing the excited crewmen into blind panic.
She stirred, and for a moment Samlor thought he had been mistaken. He embraced Ah were while the nurse babbled and Shay gave orders to bring the vessel around to where he thought someone was still in the water.
Ahwere's eyes blazed blue when she opened them. Samlor's mouth drew back in a rictus of horror-and hope that still denied reality.
"Rejoice, my husband, my only love," said Ahwere's body. "Soon the cosmos will be in balance again."
"Who's overboard?" Shay demanded. "What's happened?"
A late-returning marsh hawk began to screech in dismal satisfaction.
CHAPTER 22
"SHE DIDN'T KILL herself," Samlor muttered. He had washed his hands a score of times since Ahwere's interment, but his mind told him his skin still was scented with the camphor and incense of her embalming. "They sent the worm to take her. The gods."
"Well," said Shay uncomfortably, "We'll be back soon. The palace should be in sight any time now."
Samlor looked down at the sun-bronzed water curling past their hull. "But I'd killed it. Though I suppose it was never alive."
"So it couldn't be killed," said the bosun, making conversation because his master demanded conversation to take his mind off the past-and the future. "Well, the gods set all our terms of life, sir. Yourselves as well as the like of-" he nodded forward " – me 'n the boys."
"Not me!" Samlor said, anger breaking through his despair like lightning in storm clouds. "They can't harm me-not since I drank the Spell of Safety."
"Well, I'm sure your father'll be glad to have you safe, at least, sir," Shay said, flicking splinters from the rail with his horny thumb. "He ain't well, I'd heard."
"No, he's not well," agreed Samlor. The blood was draining from his face as he imagined greeting King Merneb in a few more minutes, "Father," he said in his mind, "your daughter is dead, and with her the grandson whom you loved more than life itself. But don't worry: I, who carried them to their deaths, have returned."
"He'll want you to marry again," Shay was saying. "The daughter of one of the neighboring princes, I guess. Well, you may come to love her as much as you did your, well, the Princess Ahwere."
"I can't protect them," Samlor said, his eyes staring at water that they did not see. "I can't protect anyone but myself. A bolt of lightning, the collapse of a building- earthquake. Whoever I marry will die. Perhaps after we have children to take also."
"Well, sir," said the bosun with a strained chuckle. "I can't imagine things are so bad that the whole cosmos is turned to punish one man. Things don't work like that."
"Your highness!" called the lookout at the masthead. "The palace is in sight, and your father's on the wharf to greet us!"
"Go forward, bosun," Samlor ordered curtly. Shay bowed and obeyed.
The stern anchor, its wooden stock reeved through a hole bored in a large stone, hung from the rail opposite the steersman. Its line was bent around a deadeye and tied off.. The coffm-hilted dagger which Samlor carried in this life as the other severed the lashings easily.
He sheathed the knife and lifted the anchor from its hooks. The stone felt light-as light as Ahwere the first time he carried her to their couch. He turned around twice so that anchorline wrapped him.
"Your highness!" cried the steersman in horror. "Shay! Shay!"
The book was a hard outline clamped against him by his sash. It promised him all the powers in the cosmos.
Except the power of ever again being happy.
Samlor lurched against the rail and went over. The entangling line bound his legs together like a fish's tail, and the stone anchor carried him down as inexorably as a sword stroke.
The last thing he saw was the face of the bosun, staring over the side at him. Shay was smiling.
And his eyes were glowing blue.
CHAPTER 23
THE ANCHOR DRAGGED Samlor head first toward the bottom, but he was standing upright in Nanefer's tomb. The dissonant realities made him flop to the stone floor on all fours.
He bounced to his feet again at once. His skin was aflame with shock and embarrassment. Khamwas swayed but had not fallen.
"You cannot take the book," whispered the ghost of Ahwere. "We have bought it with our lives, all our lives."
The ghost of the infant murmured softly against her.
"I have come for the book, Prince Nanefer," said Khamwas. He held out his hand slowly, though he did not step toward the mummified figure as yet. The tremor in Khamwas' voice assured Samlor that Khamwas too had shared Nanefer's triumph-and its aftermath.
"I would have said the same, Prince Khamwas," said the corpse in a voice like a leather bellows creaking. The withered hands crossed on his lap moved. First tentatively and then with increasing smoothness, they began to unwrap the parcel which lay beneath them.
Samlor was dusting his palms carefully on his tunic'. His body had aches and strains in it that Nanefer would never have known in a full, royal, lifetime.
But it was Samlor's body, and he prayed he would never again wear another.
The corpse lifted the crystal from its silken cover. For a moment the Book of Tatenen was dimly outlined by flecks of color in its heart.
Nanefer's thin lips bent in a smile. Light flooded from it with the certainty of the sky brightening at sunrise. The tomb was flooded by it-white and as cold as frozen bone. Ahwere's sparkling ghost drifted or was driven back against a sidewall, so that nothing but bare floor separated the Napatan princes.