Muni squatted, crossing his hands in front of him like a big cat. "Javin, your son approaches."

Javin glanced up sharply to see Cheyne striding as quickly as he could manage through the deep sand, a look of alarm upon his face.

"Shall I greet him below?" asked Muni.

"No. Let him come on up. I want him to chart the room under the slab right away, while we are both here. He's more than twenty now, and he can take care of himself, but…"

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"But you are still his father," said Muni, almost smiling, his dark eyes half closed against the hard desert light.

Javin nodded, a little undone. Muni had a way of disarming all pretense.

Cheyne cleared the last step, panting from the effort in the blazing noon heat. His face was dry despite the exertion-perspiration evaporated as quickly as it formed here. He gratefully accepted the water jug, threw it back native style across his shoulder, and took a long pull on it.

"Zu said you wanted roe up here fast, Javin. What's going on? Did you find the Collector?" Cheyne gasped before he was quite through with the last swallow. He flashed a brilliant smile as the cooling water trickled down his neck, finding a quicker path along a leather thong at his throat.

Javin gestured to the dead man.

"Oh. I suppose not." Cheyne frowned, instantly comprehending the ramifications. "Not one of the crew," he breathed in relief. "But… who?"

"We don't know. Muni found him under this slab, in what looks like part of a house. As you can plainly see, he has been murdered. We have no idea who killed him or why. But we must keep this quiet, or we won't have a job by the afternoon bells. And watch out for yourself. The body can't be more than a few hours dead. Whoever did this is in sharp habit, from the looks of his method. The murderer could still be close," said Javin.

Cheyne lifted his broad-rimmed hat and ran his fingers through a thatch of dark blond hair, resettling the hat in exactly the same place. He stooped to examine the piece of marble that had been the dead man's crypt cover. "No scraping or pry marks around the slab-"

"We know." Javin slid his eyes over to the crew in warning.

Cheyne nodded and took out his bound tablet and a bit of charcoal. "Have you been down?" he asked Javin.

SONG OF TIME

4 5

"No. But the Collector isn't there." The disappointment was written plainly on Javin's face. "I want you to go in and draw before anything else is disturbed. One of us needs to remain up here with the ropes," Javin replied.

He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched the last of the workers leave the site. "You know what to do, and I'll be right here. Muni will go in with you to hold the torch. Be careful. That body got in there somehow, and likely not by magic." / hope, he added silently.

"What about you up here alone?" Cheyne glanced around at the suddenly vacant site.

"I'll be fine. Just do your job and get back up here fast," said Javin.

Cheyne signaled for Javin to lower him and Muni with the plaited fiber ropes, which always looked too flimsy to take any weight, but had, for centuries, helped move the entire Sumifan civilization.

Inside the room, it was much cooler than on the sand, but the air was stale and thick and smelled of limerock. A fine layer of dust covered the several inches of sand on the floor, except for the wide stain of dark, fresh, dried blood. Cheyne carefully examined the sand around the stain, but found no disturbance. Muni stood exactly where he had first touched down, holding a lantern as Cheyne went over the room. Following the dim glow of the lamp, Cheyne sketched a window and a wide doorway, but they were packed with sand. The whole room, thought Cheyne, had likely been filled with it. A dark scar ran along the walls about head level, where the wooden frame of a roof had been. That structure had perhaps fallen into this story, a possibility that would explain the several roof tiles scattered on the floor. Dust became visible in the air as Muni moved the lantern around, swirling in thick currents and eddies with Cheyne's movements, but otherwise the place looked completely undisturbed.

Muni pointed to one corner of the room, where a three-foot-wide hole had been hacked in the wall, proba4 6

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bly centuries ago. Looters had obviously excavated the room long before them, taking everything of value, but at least removing most of the sand as well. No footprints marred its smooth surface. Cheyne resisted his first urge to explore the hole and where it could possibly lead, instead placing his measuring stick down by the wall and then drawing the shape of it to scale. He touched the stone, its coolness soothing his sunburned hand.

"Marble," he muttered. "Always eleven hagon degrees cooler than the room temperature." The wall was smooth and polished, hardly snowing its great age at all. One large crack, directly over the hole, ran from ceiling to sand, but the other large slabs still stood straight and square.

"Workmanship of the highest order," Cheyne said softly. "It must have taken some doing to break through that."

Not given to idle chatter, Muni only nodded. He held the lantern out toward the broken wall until Cheyne had drawn a texture sample and gotten a quick sketch of the details of a collapsed set of marble shelves.

After a long look around the room, Cheyne decided they could move on to the tunnel. As Muni knelt beside it, something bright caught Cheyne's eye and he held up his hand.

"Muni-look. Broken glass. Looks like it was a mirror."

Muni waved the lantern over the fragments again, and Cheyne set down his stick, drew them, and then picked up one of the longer pieces. Its silvering had gone black long ago, but the front of the glass was uniform in thickness and had few scratches. Fine work, again. Cheyne started to place the jagged glass in his pack when Muni touched his arm.

"Let me have a look at the edge. I think I saw something else."

Cheyne turned the fragment over and, sure enough, a dark brown substance filled some of the hairline cracks in the glass. When he touched the edges, the powder flaked away and fell to the ground.

SONG OF TIME

4 7

"More blood?" Muni queried.

"If it is, it didn't come from our unfortunate fellow above. Look at the texture of the dust. The particles are far too fine to be only a day old," said Cheyne. He wrapped the glass in a clean cloth and put it in the pack.

"Let's see where this passage leads," he continued, bending into the dark hole.

"Your father…" Muni began, caution in his voice.

From the time Javin had taken Cheyne on his first dig, more than ten years ago, Muni had watched the odd, pensive child, a gifted artist even then, grow into one of the best young diggers he had known. Javin had insisted, partly because of the way he had found the boy-a subject favin never discussed-and partly because they traveled to any number of less than safe places, that Cheyne leam the ten Argivan open-handed fighting forms and also to use a blade. lavin's care had made Cheyne deadly accurate with a dagger and better than most with a sword. Nonetheless, when things got dangerous, Muni tended to forget that Cheyne was grown up.

Cheyne let out a deep sigh, reminding him of that fact, and stirring several hundred years worth of dust into a small cloud, causing Muni to sneeze, which caused more dust, which caused more sneezing.

"My father is up there. We are down here. We have to do this," said Cheyne, laughing. "Are you afraid, Muni?" he teased.