niceties of his official position. Fortunately I do not have the same
restraints. I am going to ask you the same questions that he did, but
this time you will answer them."
He took the dead cheroot from his mouth and examined the tip. Then he
threw the butt into a corner of the room and took a flat tin from his
hip pocket. From it he selected a fresh cheroot, long and black, and lit
it carefully, holding the match to it until it was drawing evenly. Then,
amid a cloud of pungent tobacco smoke, he waved the match to extinction
and asked, ",Ihere is Mek Nimmur?"
She shrugged and looked away, out of the side window of the hut.
Abruptly, without signalling the blow in any way, he hit her open-handed
across her face. It was a savage blow, delivered with a force that
snapped her head around, Then, before she could recover, he swung back
again and slammed his knuckles across her jawline. Her head was thrown
back violently in the opposite direction and she was knocked flying from
her chair.
Nogo stooped over her and seized her arms, twisting them up behind her
back. He lifted her back into the seat and stood behind her. He held her
in such a surprisingly powerful grip that she could feel the skin of her
upper arms bruising beneath his fingers.
"I have no more time to waste," Helm said quietly, taking the burning
cheroot from his lips to inspect the glowing tip. "Let us start again,
Where is Mek Nimmur?" Tessay's left eardrum felt as if it had burst with
the ferocity of those blows. Her hearing buzzed and sang. Her teeth had
been driven halfway through the flesh of her cheek, and her mouth filled
slowly with her own blood.
"Where is Mek Nimmur?" Helm repeated, leaning his face closer to hers.
"What are your friends doing with the dam in the Dandera river?"
She gathered the blood and saliva in her mouth, and suddenly and
explosively spat it into his face.
He recoiled violently and wiped the bloody mess from his eyes with the
palm of his hand.
Hold herV he said to Nogo, and seized the front of her blouse. With one
heave he ripped it open down to her waist, and Nogo giggled and leaned
forward over her shoulder to look at her breasts. He giggled again as
Helm took one of them in his hand and squeezed out the nipple between
his finger and thumb. It was the dark purple colour of a ripe mulberry.
He held her like that, pinching her flesh with his nails until the skin
tore and a droplet of blood welled up and trickled over his thumb. Then
with his other hand he took the burning cheroot from his lips and blew
on the top until it glowed hotly.
"Where is Mek Nimmur?" he asked, and lowered the cheroot towards her
breast. "WHAt are they doing in the Dandera river?
She stared down in horror as he brought the burning cheroot closer, and
tried to wriggle away from him. But Nogo held her firmly from behind.
She screamed once, on an agonized drawn-out note, as the glowing coal
touched, the tip of her nipple and the delicate skin began to blister.
inter," said Royan, spreading the enlargement of the fourth face of the
stele from Tanus's tomb under the bright glare of the floodlamp. "This
is the side that contains Taita's notations, which I am postulating are
those of the bao board. I don't understand all of them, but by a process
of elimination I have determined that the first symbol denotes one of
the four sides, or as he terms them the castles of the board., She
showed him the pages of her notebook on which she had made her
calculations.
"See here, the seated baboon is the north castle, the bee is the south,
the bird is the west and the scorpion the east." She pointed out to him
the same symbols on the photograph of the stele. "Then the second and
third figures are numbers - I believe that they designate the file and
the cup. With these we can follow the moves of his imaginary red stones.
The reds are the highest-ranking colours on the board."
"What about the verses between each set of notations?" Nicholas asked.
"Such as this one here, about the north wind and the storm?"
"I am not sure about those. Probably merely smoke, screens, if I know
Taita. He is never one to make life too easy for us. Perhaps they do
have significance, but we can only hope to unravel them as we work
through the moves of our stones."
Nicholas studied her figures a while, then grinned ruefully. "Just think
how remote was the possibility that anybody would ever be able to
decipher the clues he left behind. The first requirement is that the
searcher must have access to both chronicles, the seventh scroll and the
stele of Tanus, before he had any chance of understanding the key to the
tomb."
She laughed - a throaty, well'satisfied sound. "Yes, he must have
believed that he was perfectly safe. Well, we will see now, MasteTTaita.
We will see just how clever you really were." Then, sober and
businesslike once more, she looked up the stone staircase that led to
Taita's maze.
"Now we have to see if my figures and theories fit into the hard stones
and walls of Taita's architecture. But where do we start?"
"At the beginning," Nicholas suggested, "the god plays the first coup.
That's what Taita told us. If we start here in the shrine of Osiris, at
the foot of the staircase, then perhaps that will give us the alignment
of his imaginary bao board."
"I had the same idea," she agreed immediately. "Let's postulate that
this is the north castle of Taita board. Then we work the protocol of
the four bulls from here."
It was slow and painstaking work, trying to work their way into the mind
of the ancient scribe by probing the labyrinth of passages and tunnels
that he had built four thousand years previously. This time they moved
into the maze with more circumspection. Nicholas had filled his pockets
with lumps of dried white river clay, and he used these like a
schoolmaster's stick of chalk to write on the stone walls at each branch
and fork of the tunnels, setting out the notations from the winter face
of the, stele and marking a signpost to enable them not only to find
their way through the maze but to relate it to the model that Royan was
drawing up in her notebook.
They found that their first assumption that the shrine of Osiris was the
north castle of the board seemed to be correct, and they happily
believed that with this as the key it would be a simple matter to follow
the moves of play to their conclusion. But these hopes were soon dashed
as they realized that Taita was not thinking in the simple two
dimensions of the conventional board. He had added the third dimension
to the equation.
The stairway leading up from the shrine of Osiris was not the only link
between the eight landings. Each of the passages leading off from it was
subtly angled either upwards or downwards. As they followed the twists
and turns of one of these tunnels they did not detect the fact that they
were changing levels. Then suddenly they reemerged on to the central
staircase, but on a landing higher than the one they had entered from.
They stood there and stared at each other in horrified disbelief.
Royan spoke first. "I didn't even have the feeling that we were
ascending," she whispered. "The whole thing is infinitely more complex
than I first assumed."
"It must be constructed like one of those nuclear models of some
complicated carbon atom,'Nicholas agreed with awe. "It interlinks on all
eight planes. Quite frankly, it's terrifying."
"Now I have some- inkling what those extraneous symbols signify," Royan