This couldn't work, but by Heqt! if it did…
There was a lily pond in the Prefect's garden, but neither it nor the two-story mansion beyond resembled Tabubu's except in basic function. The Prefect, looking stiff in his robes of office, paced beside the pond. He was throwing in bits of a flower his fingers worried. His wife was seated in the nearby gazebo between two of her maids, all dressed in their best.
At a little distance from the pond were two distinct clots of servants-household personnel and those wearing the indicia of the Prefect's office. One of the latter, the messenger, screamed and threw himself behind a rose arbor when he saw Khamwas again.
The Prefect was an obtuse man and much the happier for it. He brightened and came forward, saying, "I trust your highness has met at last with success?" though nothing in the tableau hinted at that possibility.
"You've been directed to afford my master every facility, have you not?" said Samlor brusquely.
The Prefect looked unwillingly from Khamwas to the underling-the foreigner who was addressing him. "Yes, yes, of course. Any help I can give." He paused, frowning as he looked at the old man in Samlor's grip. "But who is this?" he asked. "Was he with you? I don't-"
"We want you to hold him, " Samlor ordered. "Someplace he can't get away."
"At once," the Prefect agreed. He snapped his fingers. A pair of official servants stepped forward with the nervousness of men who had seen their fellow raining toads. "Take this fellow," continued the Prefect imperiously, "and lock him in my basement storeroom."
"Someplace other 'n that," the caravan master said, grinning in spite of himself. "Also, we'll need a hundred men equipped for a digging job. Demolition job, in fact."
"At once," the Prefect repeated. "Where do you want them to assemble, my good man?"
Khamwas said, "At the south corner of your house, my good man." He gestured with his staff. "We're going to demolish it."
For some long seconds, the Prefect blinked and waited to hear the rest of the joke. Only when his wife began to scream did the man realize his lord was quite serious.
CHAPTER 33
THE INNER WALL was too far back to be a threat to the diggers, but it blocked the route up which baskets of earth and rubble were handed to clear the excavation. The mud brick structure toppled backward with a crash and a cloud of white dust from the molded plaster covering.
The team of workmen cheered as they coiled their ropes. The Prefect's wife broke into a renewed set of wails. She had refused to allow her bedroom at the south corner to be emptied in the few minute Samlor allowed for salvage. She might regret the decision later, but Samlor had to admit that when your home was being devastated, there'd be small comfort in preserving your wardrobe.
"You've got that old man locked where he won't get loose?" Samlor asked the military officer standing beside him.
"Yes, sir," the soldier agreed. His ostrich plume headdress trebled the height of his nod. "We put him in an empty cistern-" his short spear pointed toward a back corner of the garden " – and there's a guard at the mouth of it."
"Stone!" called a man from the pit. "Smooth stone!"
"Then bloody clear it!" Samlor bellowed. "That's what we're about, ain't it?"
Khamwas stood silently with his hands clasped and the staff held upright between them. He was facing the excavation, but his eyes were closed. No one came near him. Raised voices dropped if the speaker chanced to glance across the scholar's forbidding figure.
"My lord," the Prefect said to Samlor, wringing his hands. "You have to believe that I wouldn't have occupied a temple site. There must be some mistake."
"That's between you and the Office of Religious Works," Samlor replied with a shrug. "Though. . if it turns out to be what we hope, I think you'll find the Prince-" he nodded toward Khamwas " – is real well disposed toward you."
"We've found a sarcophagus!" called the foreman from the pit, his voice an octave higher than during the previous announcement.
"Oh, I'm ruined!" moaned the Prefect, but Samlor was running toward Khamwas at the edge of the excavation.
It had seemed quickest to collapse the house into its basement and then to cart away the rubble while digging further. As a result, there were plaster chips, fragments of storage jars and even a forlorn piece of statuary at the bottom of the pit.
The house was built on a-brick foundation, but below the corner which had been ripped down was an angle of polished red sandstone, the remnant of previous construction. Samlor whispered a prayer, remembering the lamplit interior of the tomb which Tekhao had offered for the burial of his lord's child and wife. He could almost smell the incense again…
Khamwas pointed his staff.
The crew in the pit was six men whose shovels and mattocks filled baskets for a hundred other men and women. The earth was handed out in long, snaky lines until it could be safely dumped. The diggers scrambled up the sides of their excavation in near panic to avoid whatever the magician was going to do.
Green light flared at the base of the pit.
There were two stone slabs, though only a corner of the second had been uncovered as yet. They were of the same fine-grained sandstone as the blocks of the walls, a striking contrast to the yellow clay in which they were now imbedded.
The cold light which followed the line of Khamwas' staff made the carvings on the stones stand out despite being worn shallow and covered with clay still baking dry in the sun.
"May the god Tatenen be merciful to the spirit of Merib," Khamwas read, chanting the revealed glyphs as loudly as a priest before his god. "May his innocence find peace in the god."
Samlor gripped his friend's shoulder in triumph, then strode back to the soldier to whom he'd spoken earlier. Behind him, Khamwas was reading out the inscription of the second sarcophagus while green symbols blazed through clay and uncleared rubble.
"We're going to let the old bastard go," Samlor said, gesturing sharply enough to catch the soldier's attention and start him moving without hesitation. "I don't guess he's owed much of an apology, but he'll get one. . and he'll get whatever bloody else he wants, or 1 miss my bet."
The guard stood in a nook shaded by Rose of Sharon. The insects buzzing in the rich purple flowers had lulled him into a doze, but he snapped to full alertness when Samlor and the plumed officer stepped into view. "Sir," he said crisply.
"How's your prisoner?" Samlor asked. The cistern's pottery lid was ajar. He bent to remove it.
"Just fine, sir," the guard said to Samlor's back. "Hasn't said a word since we put him down there, except to ask that I put the lid back partway so the sun didn't cook him."
The cistern was a buried terra cotta jar, eight feet tall and five feet at its greatest diameter. Its interior was plastered to hold the water which could be fed in through pipes around the rim. Empty, it was the perfect prison for a frail old man who couldn't climb out unaided.
But the cistern was completely empty now.
Samlor backed away.
The military officer glanced in and gasped. He began shouting threats at the guard who defended himself with blurted astonishment.
But when Samlor thought about it, he realized that the proper place to search for the old man would be in a rock-cut tomb near the ancient capital of Napata.
Which is where he and Khamwas were about to return, bearing the bones of Merib and Ahwere. .