Khamwas turned and pointed his staff at the messenger. The man screamed, flung down his baton of office, and ran off. Baby toads were hopping from his hair and bouncing down his face and tunic.
Someone else peered bug-eyed around the terrace, then jerked his head to cover.
"You think I overreacted, don't you?" Khamwas snarled at Samlor, holding the staff crosswise in a white-knuckled
grip-
Samlor shrugged. "Not if you told 'em not to disturb you with search results," he said mildly. He met his companion's eyes without blinking.
"I didn't!" Khamwas said in the same challenging voice.
Samlor shrugged again. "Well, it didn't look like it was permanent. And anyway, life's a dangerous place."
Khamwas' anger melted. The princely scholar sagged without the emotion to sustain him. "It's not permanent," he said. "And of course I overreacted."
Samlor patted the rim of the urn beside the one on which he sat. The broad-mouthed jars made comfortable seats, although they would prove confining after ten minutes or so.
"Your…," Samlor said as his friend did sit down. "Ah, you seem to be in good form. This must be a good place for… what you do."
Khamwas' smile was as tired as that of a man who's carried a hod of bricks all day. "In a way," he said in what was not agreement. "The power in this place is, is beyond…"
When he could not find adequate words, he pointed the end of his staff at the stele he had been examining. The worn surface brightened, then spangled itself with the green, glowing symbols of ancient Napatan writing.
"They're reversed, of course," Khamwas said offhandedly as he peered at the stone. "Everything that was carven on the face shows through the back of the stone. It's easier than ripping it out of the wall."
He grimaced and the glyphs vanished. "Also quite useless. It came from the tomb of a temple scribe who died over a century later than Ahwere. Useless. Like all the others we've found.
"I can do almost anything here," Khamwas went on, letting out his frustration gently instead of in a blast of anger that sent innocent bystanders screaming away. "But I can't look through a, a sea of power like the one that surrounds us."
"There's also the problem," said Samlor carefully, "that most of the tombstones here seem to have been moved. From the tombs."
Khamwas dismissed the concern with a flutter of his hand. "If we find the stele, I can follow it to where it belongs," he said. "If I had some object of Ahwere's, I could find her. But not blindly. It's-"
He paused, then said in an understatement that proved he had recovered his temper, " – an irritating situation."
"I shouldn't have asked, ah, Nanefer what we could do for him," Samlor said lightly. His face crimped, and his mind wondered what price the mumified corpse would exact for failure.
"You did right," Khamwas replied in a tone of certainty. "There has to be retribution for what we did-I did-"
"We did. You weren't alone."
"At any rate. Retribution whether or not Nanefer wills it." Khamwas smiled wistfully. "The cosmos abhores imbalance. That's what Ahwere was trying to show us, but I was too-settled on my course to listen."
Samlor heard a sound and rose quickly to his feet. He stood between Khamwas and the new intruder. Not that Khamwas was likely to blast the fellow in a flash of anger just now, but-he'd feel really bad about it later if he did, and there was no point in that happening.
Instead of a messenger from the Prefect's entourage, an old man whose robe had been pounded to gauze with repeated cleanings'edged cautiously around a hedge of dwarf acacias to the side. Had the Prefect decided to thrust a beggar into view to determine whether or not it was safe to approach Khamwas yet?
"Heh-'heh-heh," said the old man, a laugh because his mouth was twisted into a grin. "Used t' play back here, but that were a long time since. It were all differ'nt then."
He began a gesture which jerked to a halt short of the hedge. Thorns already plucked his robe, and he began to remove them with patience and concentration.
"What are you doing here, my father?" Khamwas asked, relaxed by the interruption. If it turned out somebody had used the fellow to draw fire, though-that somebody would answer for it.
"Oh, all the commotion," the old man said. He tugged gingerly at his worn hem, then bent to remove the remaining thorn. "Muck-de-mucks from acrost the river, don't ye know? Used to play in this garden-as it is now, but it wasn't, don't ye know? Slipped by in the confusion, I did. Wouldn't 'e hev conniptions if 'e knew I was here, the Prefect?"
The old man turned and straightened. He had begun to laugh again, but now his face turned stern. "They shouldn't build here, ye know. It's sacred. There was a temple here, right here-" he stepped forward so that his sleeve wouldn't snag again when he gestured " – and the ground's sacred."
"You remember when the temple was here, ah, my father?" asked Samlor, copying his companion's use of the local honorific. He spoke with a flash of sudden hope, but Khamwas' wistful smile warned him even before the gesture was complete that it was vain. The time scale they were faced with was much longer than human memory could illuminate.
"Ah, that were long since," said the old man, capping his words with a laugh that disintegrated into a spell of coughing. "D'ye know," he went on when he could raise his head, "that everything you see were swamp long since? But they drained the land, they did, and now there's a city acrost the river-and nobody left as knows there was a temple here as my father's father kept the grounds of."
Neither Samlor nor Khamwas moved.
"Heh-heh-heh," laughed the old man.
"Did your grandfather ever talk to you about the grounds of the Temple of Tatenen?" Khamwas asked in a voice from which he had rigorously purged hope.
"My father did, bless his memory," the old man said proudly. "Many a time, he did that."
"Did anyone ever mention to you the tomb of Princess Ahwere and her son Merib?" Khamwas went on while Samlor tried to blank his mind of the prayer he would have spoken-except that the gods would surely dash this possibility if they were aware of it.
"Aye, aye, so 'e did, my father," said the old man with a nod of cracked solemnity. "It were a terrible thing, 'e said, that they'd build a house on the sacred ground of a temple and set the south corner on the very tomb of that sad young princess ez they did."
He pointed beyond the chrysanthemum terrace. "The very house the Prefect lives in now and thinks 'imself too good to let an old man walk about 'is garden harming no one."
"You're lying," said Samlor quietly. He walked toward the old man with his hands at his sides as if it required all his control not to batter the fellow to a pulp.
"You're lying!" he shouted, inches from the old man's face. "You think you'll get back at the Prefect by having his house down around his ears, don't you? Don't you?"
"If you doubt my word," said the old man, with unexpected dignity and an even more surprising absence of fear, "then hold me for execution if the tomb is not as I say it is."
"We'll do just that, you know!" Samlor shouted, though by this time the noise was self-reassurance. He was disconcerted by the old man's attitude. . and by the information which if true-as he would not believe was possible-meant the search here was over.
With his hand gripping the other's fragile shoulder, Samlor frog-marched the old man up the path toward the house. He was too intent on his business to look back and see how Khamwas was reacting-or even whether he was following them.