The red-garbed Beysib bawled in horror and tried to enfold Star in his cloak, as if that would serve as any protection from what was about to happen. Samlor smashed the Beysib down with the dagger's hilt to his forehead, not from mercy, but because the point might have caught and held the weapon for moments the Cirdonian did not have to lose. Samlor grabbed the screaming child by the shoulder and spun for the tunnel mouth.
A Beysib cavalryman leaped from the crumbling wall. He was aiming a kick at Samlor's head.
The angle was different, but too many camels had launched feet at the caravan master for Samlor to be caught unprepared. The boot slashed by his ear as he pivoted. The Beysib's sword was cocked for a blow that the fellow had to hold until he landed, or he risked lopping off his own feet. The long weapon did nothing to keep the Beysib's momentum from impaling him on the Cirdonian dagger. Samlor slipped the hilt as it punched home. He tossed Star to the trap door and rammed her through as he jumped in himself.
When Samlor tried to bang the stone door to, a Beysib sword shot through the gap and kept the edges from meeting. Instead of tugging against the springy steel, Samlor let the Beysib's own pull open'the trap again. Samlor lunged upward through the opening. Before the sword could be transformed once more from a pry bar into a weapon, the Cirdonian had buried his boot knife in the trooper's throat.
The sword dropped into the tunnel as Samlor shot the bolt which closed the door. The last thing the caravan-master had seen before stone met stone was the face of Lord Tudhaliya turned to a fright mask by fury and speckles of blood. The Beysib noble was lunging to take the place of his dying trooper. His outstretched sword sang against the marble even as the bolt snicked home.
'Come on. Star, I'm your uncle!' Samlor shouted as he grabbed the nearest handful of the child. He did not particularly care whether she obeyed or even understood, for there was no time now to wait on a four-year-old's legs. He let the Beysib sword lie, because he needed his right hand for the lantern. Its unshuttered light seemed shockingly bright in the closeness. Samlor ran bent over, the girl under his arm as the cask had been when he came from the punt.
Even as Samlor's heels hit the floor on his second stride, hands and sword blades wrenched the bronze latch into fragments. A file of Beysib troopers with lamps and swords plunged into the tunnel behind Lord Tudhaliya.
Samlor's plan had been based on the assumption that his sudden assault would startle the gathering of fisher-folk and give him the thirty seconds or so that he needed to block his escape route. This security troop was as well-trained as any force the Cirdonian had encountered, and they were already primed to rip open hiding places. Presumably Tudhaliya thought he was after fugitives from the ceremony, but that mattered as little to him as it did to Samlor.
The Cirdonian smashed open the cask and kicked it over. The naphtha gushed across the stone, darkening it, and began to flow sluggishly back in the direction Samlor was fleeing. Samlor dared not ignite the fluid until he was clear of it. He took a stride and another stride, ignoring Star's wailing as her shoulder brushed the tunnel wall. The Cirdonian turned and flung his lantern towards the naphtha. Lord Tudhaliya batted the light back past the fugitives with the flat of his sword.
Then the second Beysib trooper stumbled over the cask and banged his own lamp down into the naphtha. The tunnel boomed into red life. It singed Samlor's eyebrows, even though Lord Tud-haliya shielded the Cirdonian from the worst of it.
The Beysib noble pitched forward. Samlor ran for the boat, clutching the child now in both arms. The capering fire threw their shadows down the tunnel ahead of them.
Samlor set Star in the stern of the punt and began shoving the vessel back towards the water. The sea had retreated since he dragged the punt out of it. While Samlor thrust at the boat, he glanced back over his shoulder. The blazing petroleum was creeping down the slope of the tunnel. Just ahead of it, his clothes afire but a sword gripped still in either hand, came Lord Tudhaliya. The swordsman's hair and flesh stank as they burned, but there are men whom no degree of pain will turn from a task. Samlor recognized the mind-set very well.
The Cirdonian still had a push dagger sheathed on his left wrist, but it was as useless against this opponent as the knives he had left in bodies cooling on the temple floor. Samlor snatched up the punt pole, sliding it forward in his grip. As Tudhaliya feinted with his left sword, Samlor thrust the pole into the centre of the Beysib's chest. With enough room to manoeuvre, Tudhaliya would have avoided the clumsy attack. Instead, his sluggish reflexes bounced him against the tunnel wall, and the end of the pole knocked him back into the spreading flames.
The Beysib stood up. Samlor poked at his groin, missed, but caught his opponent in the ribs with enough force to topple him again. Tudhaliya's swords snicked from either side, inches short of where Samlor gripped the pole. Chips flew, but the pole was seasoned ash and as thick as a man's wrist. Samlor thrust himself away, and the Beysib recoiled on to his back in the fire.
The naphtha sucked a fierce breeze from the tunnel to feed its flames. The glare flickered now around Tudhaliya's face, as instinct forced him to breathe. There was no help in that influx, only red tendrils that shrank lung tissues and blazed back out of Tudhaliya's mouth as he finally screamed.
'My sweet, my love,' Samlor whispered as he turned back to the girl. 'I'm going to take you home, now.' The punt's flat bottom jounced easily over the stone as if the executioner's death had doubled the rescuer's strength.
'Are you taking me back to Mama Reia?' Star asked. She had watched Tudhaliya die with great eyes, which she now focused on Samlor.
The man splashed beside the boat for a few paces while the shingle foamed. Then he hopped aboard and thrust outwards for the length of the pole. Since the tide had turned, there was no longer need to fend off from the corniche. When they were thirty feet out, the Cirdonian set down the pole and worried loose the lashings of his oars with his spike-bladed push dagger. 'Star,' he said, now that he had leisure for an answer, 'Maybe we'll send for Reia. But we're going back to your real home - Cirdon. Do you remember Cirdon?' Inexpertly, the caravan-master began to fit the looms through the rope bights that served the punt for oarlocks.
Star nodded with solemn enthusiasm. She said, 'Are you really my uncle?'
Poling had raised and burst blisters on both Samlor's hands. The salt-crusted oar handles ground like acid-tipped glass as he began the unfamiliar task of rowing. 'Yes,' he said. 'I promised your mother - your real mother. Star, my sister ... I promised her -' and this was true, though Samlane was two years dead when her brother shouted the words to the sky - 'that I'd take care of oh. Oh, Mother Heqt. Oh, to have brought us so close.'
Lord Tudhaliya had not trusted his men on the shore to sweep up the cultists. Someone in the boat Tudhaliya had stationed off the headland had seen the man and child. The Beysib craft was a ten-oared cutter. It began to close the distance from the first strokes that roiled the phosphorescence and brought the cutter to Samlor's attention.
An archer stood upright in the cutter's bow. His first shot was' wobbly and short by fifty of the two hundred yards. He nocked another shaft, and the cutter pulled closer.
Samlor dropped his oars. He knelt and raised his hands. He did not trust his balance to standing up. 'Star,' he said, 'I'm afraid that these men have caught us after all. If I try to get away, something bad may happen to you by accident. And I can't fight them, I don't have any way to fight so many.'