The Napatan was brushing his left palm across the face of a slab of gray granite, cleaning it of dust that had settled there after the spell of release. The stele was about three feet high and half that across. Figures -presumably gods-filled the upper portion, and there were about twenty vertical lines of script beneath them.
“-to the blessings of Harsaphes,” Khamwas said, his index finger pausing midway down one of the later columns. “Harsaphes. not Somptu as I’d always assumed, and the ruins of the temple of Har-“
“Khamwas, listen to me!” Samlor shouted. He gripped the scholar with his left hand, though that meant dropping his cloak while there was still dust in the air. “You say something happened to magic a little bit ago. Would that have broken the crystal that held Setios’s demon?”
“The townsman,” said the manikin who was not in the least affected by the choking atmosphere, “is not the one who is eaten by the croco- dile.”
And men who leave magic alone, translated Samlor as he whirled toward glimpsed motion, aren’t destroyed by its creatures.
A hand was emerging from a slab of limestone on the far wall. It was tenuous enough that the settling dust coexisted with the limb, which was so thin that it would have been skeletal were it not for the gleam of a scaly integument.
The three fingers each bore a claw an inch long and sharp as shattered glass.
“Get up the ladder!” Samlor shouted as he leaped for the apparition behind the watered steel blade of his dagger. The hilt was adequate for his big hand when he slashed with it, though it was shaped wrong and would have been uncomfortably short had he chosen to thrust . . . Which would have done as much good; as much, and no more. The clawed hand twisted to grip the blade while an arm as wire-thin as the hand continued to extend from the wall. Steel parted the limb like smoke, and the claws slipped through the whisking dagger as if it in turn had no substance.