Nanefer waved a hand. Samlor's lamp, forgotten in the greater illumination, guttered out in what might have been a stray breeze down the length of the tunnel.
"Will you fight me with magic, Khamwas?" asked the corpse in a wheezingly jocular voice. "Or shall we play a game?"
"You are dead, Nanefer," said Khamwas. "You have no magic and no power to keep the book from me. But-" there was the least quaver in the voice which had been calmly steadfast " – I will play a game with you."
"Then let us play, my kinsman," said the corpse. "Since you have magic and 1, who am dead, have none."
Nanefer crooked a blackened index finger toward one corner of the chamber. The table there was set with a cross-hatched game board and two bowls of dried beans-black and white. Following the motion of the corpse's finger, the table slid just above the floor in an arc that ended with it resting before Nanefer's throne. The bowl of white beans faced Khamwas.
"I offer you the color of life, kinsman," said the corpse. "Savor it while you can."
Khamwas strode to the game board without glancing aside to see what the ghosts of Nanefer's family were doing. Samlor eyed them, ready to shout a warning if Ahwere attacked Khamwas' back. . but the veils of blue light that were her figure moved only to pat the insubstantial form of Merib.
Khamwas placed a white bean at an intersection near the Center of the board. Nanefer, moving with the assurance of an old man instead of an ancient corpse, set a black piece on an adjacent intersection.
Piece and piece, patterns began to fill the board. Beans clicked softly against the cross-hatched alabaster. None of the adults spoke, but the infant Merib began to whimper again.
The light blazing from the Book of Tatenen was as cold as that which the sun had thrown over the cratered emptiness where the book had been concealed.
Khamwas' face was masked by an expression of controlled emotion. The corpse set a piece and then, instead of withdrawing at once, picked up a quartet of white counters which his pieces had surrounded and captured. Khamwas placed another bean.
Samlor thought his companion was hunching to look shorter. Then he noticed that Khamwas' feet had sunk so that only his ankles showed above the solid concrete.
Nanefer set a counter and swept up more white beans.
The air in the tomb was so dry that sweat droplets sparkled only for a moment on Khamwas' forehead before they disappeared-to be replaced by more sweat. He placed a bean on the alabaster. Khamwas stood bolt upright, and his knees had sunk below the level of the floor.
Under the pitiless glare of the crystal, Samlor noticed a piece shade from white through a dusky gray, then gleam black. Nanefer reached forward with the counter that would close the circle on three more white beans isolated when the one changed color.
"Khamwas!" Samlor shouted. "He's cheating you. They're turning to black, your pieces!"
Khamwas' thighs were sinking into the ground as his opponent scooped up the captured pieces. "Light," Khamwas said in a choked voice. "Bring me my staff!"
Samlor plunged down the tunnel on all fours, as heedless of its constraint as a rabbit bolting from a fox. Khamwas was lifting another bean toward the alabaster. From his fixed expression, he seemed to be fighting the necessity of playing out the game to which he had agreed.
The sunlight at the tunnel's end was dim by comparison with the tomb chamber-but the sunlight was warm, and at the touch of it Samlor shuddered with memory of the bone-chilling blaze from the crystal.
Earth tones-brown and ochre and the ruddy sandstone cliffs-stood in welcome contrast to the white ground and primary colors of the tomb. The squall of distant irrigation wheels was an earthly sound and a suddenly blissful one.
Khamwas' staff lay across the tunnel entrance as they had left it. Samlor wondered whether Khamwas thought there was no longer a risk of them being entombed by sand-or whether he was willing to take that risk to keep from slipping into solid concrete first.
Didn't matter. Couldn't matter. Samlor grabbed the staff and twisted himself around in the tunnel. He heard Khamwas scream something from the tomb chamber, but he did not understand the words.
Partly because most of Samlor's mind froze in shocked appreciation of the crocodile filling the tunnel before him.
The beast was not as large as the monster which waddled aboard the yacht in his dreamlife as Nanefer, but it was as large as the stone corridor. The tips of its open jaws touched the floor and ceiling.
Its breath was foul and as cold as Death.
"Will you, by Heqt?" Samlor whispered as he drew his dagger again. He could wedge the jaws with the staff, and then the watered steel blade would carve the beast's palate and white gums like cheese-
Or the staff would shatter and the ragged teeth would crush Samlor's armbones as easily as they tore his flesh. But he could not forget the way Merib, his son in all but present reality, had catapulted into waiting jaws like these.
The crocodile dissolved into whorls of blue sparks. They reformed as the wraith of Ahwere, which swept up the tunnel toward the tomb chamber. The air was still and cold, and the ghost's wail was as bitter as the wind over high peaks.
Hunched over-unable to run on all fours because he carried the staff and dagger-Samlor scuttled toward the blazing white square of the tunnel's nether end. He couldn't hear his companion's voice, but the corpse's hacking laughter had the sound of breaking twigs.
"Kham-" Samlor cried as he burst into the chamber.
Khamwas had sunk shoulder deep in the floor. He twisted
his head despairingly toward the opening, but his arm was reaching up against his will to place another bean on the gameboard.
Samlor slapped the staff into Khamwas' lifted hand. Light from the Book of Tatenen seared through him, making the scarred flesh of the caravan master's fingers translucent so that the bones showed gray against pink encasement.
Ahwere glittered into a tigress and leaped at Samlor. He slashed with the dagger in a frenzy of despair and madness burned into him by the white glare.
Khamwas spoke a word. The stone chamber^ glowed green like the moss of a woodland at summer noon, \vjien all the light is filtered by leaves above. The tigress disappeared. Ahwere's ghost was a woman weeping as she rocked the babe in her arms.
The crystal was dark. There was nothing white in the tomb except the pieces on the game board, each of which gleamed with the purity of fresh-cut walrus ivory.
Khamwas rose out of the ground as if the staff crosswise in his hand was lifting him. The glow it cast was so uniform that the staff almost disappeared in the perfection of what it created.
"The game is mine, Prince Nanefer," Khamwas said. He struck the board and table aside. The pieces spilled across the floor. All of the beans were white. "Give me the book."
Nanefer did not move or speak.
Khamwas swallowed. He lifted the staff higher, then reached out with his free hand and took the crystal.
Nothing changed, not even the tempo of Ahwere's sobbing.
"We will trouble you no more, great prince," said Khamwas as he backed with formal steps away from the seated corpse. Glancing aside to Samlor, he added, "Precede me. Quickly."
As Samlor scrambled down the tunnel, he heard Ahwere crying, "Our light is gone, our all is gone."
And he thought, though he could not be sure, that he heard Nanefer reply, "Do not grieve, my sister, my love. They will return."