“Are you saying that we’re doomed?” Khai asked, aghast.
“All that is green—all that moves!” the mage’s voice repeated, more faintly, echoing as down a long, long tunnel. The giddiness passed and Khai opened his eyes. Now, too, the sounds of his men broke in on his consciousness, their cries of awe as they pointed south and skyward.
For the sky was alive with a great black blot of a cloud that shut out the light even as it descended like a mighty blanket out of heaven. The men began to panic; horses reared and stamped; the heaviness of the air became oppressive, and fear was a living thing which tittered and ran through Khai’s warriors tapping each man lightly on the shoulder.
“Listen to me,” Khai roared above the sudden moaning of his men. “Blindfold the horses. Do it now, and quickly! Let them see nothing. Then, when the horde descends, stand still. Remain still if it lasts all night. If you are stung, do not jump. If you are bitten, do not cry out. This is the word of the seven mages. If you would live—obey!”
His words spread like wildfire through the massed thousands. Blankets were brought out and thrown over hurriedly blindfolded horses; men covered themselves as best they might and sought shelter beneath carts or in the buckets of chariots; for minutes which sped by quick as seconds the army was a scurrying shouting mass of humanity. And the sky grew dark before its time and the air began to hum with a vast stirring of wings.
“Don’t move!” Khai yelled one last time, and his cry was taken up and passed on echoingly in the leaden air. Then he crouched at the base of his palm and covered his head. Nundi, running up to him, threw a horse blanket over him and crouched down with him inside its folds. In another moment the roar of millions of wings blotted out all else and beneath the blanket it grew suddenly black as night.
Things landed on the blanket, many things, large and small, until their weight became intolerable. “Don’t move,” Khai hissed in Nundi’s ear. “Not an inch!”
Then, after a matter of a few moments there came a sound like the trampling of feet, a crunching and sloshing as of an army marching over swampy ground. Amazed and horrified, Khai listened for a second or two, then said: “By all the many gods they’re eating!”
Somewhere a horse screamed, a cry of dreadful fear, of agony. There was a commotion, a wild burst of animal movement, a frenzied whinnying and then another scream—but this time human! Nundi jerked in shock when he heard that hideous, fear-frenzied shriek, and jerked again and began to tremble violently when the scream subsided to a suffocated gabbling which was snuffed out beneath a vast whirring of wings and a more noisy recommencement of the feeding sound.
Khai’s hand found Nundi’s throat and he whispered: “Nundi—be quiet, keep still—or by your teeth you’ll remember why I’m called Khai the Killer!” After that the Nubian grew silent and motionless.
For an hour or more, they crouched like that, until Khai was sure his joints were coming apart and his muscles liquifying. Throughout all of that time, the awful munching went on, and occasionally—sometimes close by, at other times more distant—there would be the screams of a stricken horse, or the nerve-wrenching shrieking of a man in mortal agony. And just as Khai was beginning to believe that he could endure it no longer, then the weight lifted from his blanket and in an instant the sound of millions of wings again filled the air. The intolerable whirring went on for a minute, two, then slowly receded and died away in the distance.
Many more minutes passed in total silence before Khai moved the blanket a fraction and breathed fresh night air through the gap he had made. With arms that creaked like those of an old man he pulled the blanket aside and peered at stars overhead. A thick white mist lay on the river. Silence lay everywhere.
“Get up!” Khai hoarsely shouted, clambering stiffly to his feet. “Light fires, many fires.” His cry was taken up and passed on, and all about him the night stirred as his army came back to life. Nundi stamped about in darkness, pumping blood to legs which no longer had any feeling. There was a vast clearing of lungs, a drawing of air, a concerted sighing of utmost relief.
Close by, Khai found the skeleton of a horse, its bones dry and clean. The white bones of a man, his arm about the horse’s neck, lay intermingled with those of the animal. Moonlight glittered on the remains in their stark whiteness. . . .
One of Khai’s men, drawing close, grasped his elbow and made him jump. “Lord Khai,” the man said in a whisper. “Of what shall we build the fires?”
“Of branches, fool!” Khai snapped, his nerves twanging.
“Branches, Lord?”
“Aye, branches and leaves and—” his words tailed off and he looked all about him into the night. And at that moment Khai knew himself for a very small thing in a very large and largely unknown universe.
“What branches, Lord?” inquired the man. . . .
IV
SIEGE ON ASORBES
In the morning, Khai saw the full extent of the horror: where for miles about not a leaf, not a blade of grass, nothing showed green at all, and only the largest branches, stripped even of their bark, remained attached and uneaten on the chewed and pitted trunks of the trees. He could see through the forest of naked, motionless timber for hundreds of yards; and the very soil beneath his feet, inches deep, was powdery, dry and void of life. No foliage showed on the banks of the Nile, no weeds, no fringing ferns or nodding papyrus reeds. A huge ribbon of water, unobstructed as far as the eye could see, the river curled away into the north; while in the south it rolled down silently, no longer green but gray, from mist-shrouded Asorbes.
Asorbes. . . .
Khai gritted his teeth with bitter rage as he thought of Asorbes, of Pharaoh, of Anulep and the Black Guard, and of Khasathut’s Dark Heptad of necromancers. He wondered how Manek Thotak had fared: whether or not the plague of flying death had also found him in the twilight. And what of Genduhr Shebbithon?
Manek had received and reacted to the Syran mage’s warning in much the same way as had Khai, and thus his losses were relatively few. Genduhr Shebbithon, on the other hand, had thought himself the victim of an encroaching madness. A simple man, however great a chief, his reaction had been violent and had taken the form of a fit. His men had seen him rushing to and fro with his sword, cutting at thin air, at phantoms! Those phantoms had become all too real all too soon, however—but far too late for Genduhr Shebbithon.
As fortune had it, ten thousand of his men were away from the main camp at the time, engaging a probing force of Khemites between Phemor and Asorbes. This had left twenty-five thousand warriors in the camp to face the twilight horror . . . which had caught them and Genduhr Shebbithon in the middle of his fit. The result was seen the next morning when ten thousand victorious Kushites returned to camp—to find a vast wasteland and an army of skeletal remains! Something less than two thousand horses had escaped the carnage, having fled out of the area of the aerial attack, but many of these had to be destroyed.
Of Genduhr’s twenty-five thousand, however, only one man survived. He had been very drunk, wrapped in a blanket, asleep when the winged death descended. Now he was awake and sober, or as sober as his slobbering insanity would permit. A very young man, he simply sat among the tumult of bones and drooled, or occasionally laughed and shook his shock of pure white hair. . . .
Later that same day, riders arrived at the new camp of Genduhr’s son, Gahad. They came from Generals Manek Thotak and Khai Ibizin, with orders to report back to their commanders with word of Genduhr’s losses. Meanwhile, Khai had moved closer, poising his forces on the river less than five miles to the north of Asorbes, and Manek had deployed his army at a like distance to the south of the city. By mid-afternoon, the armies had taken up positions along a curving front which enclosed Asorbes in a huge semi-circle of iron, and Gahad Shebbithon’s numbers had been supplemented by ten thousand of Khai’s men and ten thousand more of Manek Thotak’s. East of the river, having crossed the Nile north of Mer-ow-eh to cut through Khem’s southern forests in a two-hundred mil
e push, N’jakka and five great impis lay in wait for any Khemites who might choose to flee to the east. And so at last, Asorbes lay under siege. . . .
It was as Manek Thotak went among his warriors where they were camped that he came across four huge Nubians known to him as one half of Ashtarta’s eight-man guard, brought out of Nubia by Khai Ibizin. Ashtarta had kept the other four with her in Kush, but these men had begged to be allowed to go to war against Khem. Since Manek had been going into Nubia, the Candace had used the blacks as couriers to carry her pledge of friendship to N’jakka and to wish him well in the great war to come. Now Manek spoke to them, and when he would have passed on one of them followed after him and called:
“Lord Manek! Now that we are here in the heart of Khem, will your forces join with those of Khai the Killer?”
“In the final assault, aye,” Manek answered. “Why do you ask?”
The huge black, a man of truly awesome dimensions, grinned his appreciation. “We have many friends among Khai’s impis,” he explained. “Soon we shall share with them stories of our battles.”
“Aye,” Manek grinned. “We Kushites do much the same thing.”
“Waugh!” the black exclaimed. “The Lord Khai will have many marvelous tales to tell his children—when he is King of all Kush!”
The smile slipped from Manek’s face in an instant. He took the Nubian’s arm and stared at him. “Khai? King, did you say?”
“Ah! You need not pretend for my sake, Lord Manek,” the black man whispered confidentially. “Since you are The Killer’s brother-general, you must know well enough that he courts the Candace.”
As best he could, Manek hid the sudden rage that threatened to suffuse his dark features. Somehow he managed to force a smile and answered: “Of course I know, certainly! But now . . . how do you know?”
“Why, have I not seen him myself, going to her tent in the night? Indeed I have—and not by the front door!”
“You saw him?” Manek continued to smile, his face frozen in a grin which was almost a grimace. “You saw him—and yet you did not stop him?”
“I guarded the Candace from her enemies, Lord,” the black laughed, “but not from her lover!”
“Her lover. . . .” Manek slowly answered. “Yes, of course.” Then he laughed a high, shaky laugh. “And I believed that I was Khai’s only confidant. How mistaken I was! . . . But come, come you must tell me all about it,” and he led the huge Nubian to a place where they could sit and talk in private. Which they did for quite a long time. . . .
Later that evening, the great gates of Asorbes opened and tens of thousands of Khemish troops and mercenaries moved out from the city for a mile or two and took up defensive positions within the greater circle of the besieging forces, which they outnumbered by at least two to one. Though the Kushite commanders kept a very wary eye upon them, the Khemites made no attempt to attack; so that it looked very much as though they were simply occupying the ground in order to retain it.
When all movement from the city had ceased and the gates were again closed, then the Dark Heptad brought their third occult device into use. This time it came without warning, and Khai was to learn much later why the seven mages had been unable to offer any assistance on this occasion: how the Dark Heptad had worked a spell to counter any possible intervention. As it happened, the new terror was not aimed directly at Khem’s enemies, though certainly it must be effective in the long term.
At first it was thought that the Khamsín had returned, for a great draught of hot, bad air sprang up suddenly from the ground midway between the defending forces and Kush’s encircling warriors and blew outwards in vile gusts that soon had strong men plugging their nostrils and retching horribly. After a little while, as evening drew on, the tomb-like fetor died away and the men in the Kushite lines breathed more easily and were less edgy. Then, just before twilight, the first effects of the Dark Heptad’s injurious magic began to make themselves apparent.
As if the valley of the Nile had not already suffered more than enough, this latest terror seemed designed as one final, crippling blow at a once fertile land. It was a blight—but such a blight as never before had been dreamed of.
Slowly at first, but at an ever accelerating rate, the grasses, shrubs and trees where the foul wind had sprung up began to turn yellow and wither. The poison spread rapidly outward, so that the horses of the Kushites where they cropped green grass soon found themselves chewing on stuff which was dry and lifeless. Before nightfall, the trees were so desiccated that many began to snap off at their bases and topple into dust. Shrubs became powder at the merest touch and the very soil seemed turned to sand. As on both previous occasions, the total devastation could not be assessed until the following morning, but when at last the sun rose on Khem the next day—
A desolation of stumps, toppled boles and wind-blown weeds stretched farther than the eye could see, and the only remaining green land lay behind the Khemish positions and beneath the looming walls of the slave city. And not only the forests and grasslands had gone but the animals with them, so that Pharaoh’s design was now clear as crystal. Working through the Dark Heptad of wizards, he had simply reversed the polarity of the siege!
Which is to say that his forces now occupied the only fit ground, and that the only decent supplies of food lay in Asorbes itself. His herds still grazed green pastures beneath the city’s walls, and his soldiers still drank milk and ate meat and honey. But as for the Kushites: when their immediate supplies ran out, then they would have nothing!
It also meant that the siege could not go on as originally planned and that Asorbes must therefore be taken without delay. To this end, before noon, a horseman came and told Manek Thotak that the General Khai was coming to see him. Gahad Shebbithon would also be there, and they must all three make their new plans quickly and effect them without delay.
Manek had meanwhile done some planning of his own, and before Khai arrived, he went forward with a body of his men and called for a parley with the chief of the Khemish commanders. Long, earnestly—and privately—Manek and Pharaoh’s general talked, in a small tent hastily erected on neutral ground, and when at last Manek returned to his own lines he found Khai waiting for him. Since Gahad Shebbithon had not yet arrived, Khai was alone when Manek went to his tent and found him there.
“Wasn’t that a trifle dangerous?” Khai asked after they had clasped arms and exchanged greetings. “Your meeting with Pharaoh’s general?”
“Dangerous? How so?” Manek returned. “There was an honorable Khemish commander, and there was me. We were not armed and I was bigger than he was. In what way dangerous?”
Khai shrugged. “It’s just that you surprise me,” he eventually answered. “Manek Thotak doing a little peaceful chatting with a ‘damned Khemite’—and an ‘honorable’ one at that!”
Manek said to himself: “At least that one doesn’t pretend to the throne of Kush,” but out loud he answered, “There’s been enough innocent blood shed these past months.”
Again, Khai seemed surprised. “Oh? And have you discovered a way to stop the bloodshed?”
“Aye,” said Manek, “I believe so,” and he paused.
“Well then,” Khai prompted him, “say on.”
“You may take exception to the scheme,” Manek finally warned.
Khai was becoming impatient. “Get on with it, Manek, for you really are beginning to worry me.”
“Well then, what would you say to this—” Manek began, and he quickly outlined all that had supposedly passed between himself and the Khemish commander. Except that every word of it was a lie—but the General Khai Ibizin had no way of knowing that. . . .
V
BLACK BARGAIN
“I find the thing incredible,” Khai said when Manek was done.
“You say the Khemish soldiers are mutinous and that they demand a military takeover? And that when this is accomplished, they will open the gates and set free all of the slaves in Asorbes?”
Manek n
odded. “Aye, that is part of it.”
“And that then they will hand over Khasathut, Anulep, the Black Guard and the Dark Heptad to us?”
Again the other nodded.
“And what do they get out of all this?”
“They get their lives, and a better deal under their new ruler—Ashtarta!” Manek answered. “They get rid of Pharaoh, who they all fear desperately for his madness; and also of Anulep the Vizier, whose plotting has threatened all of them at one time or another. They see the end of the Dark Heptad of wizards, whose spells have reduced Khem—and for all we know of it Kush, too—to a wasteland! They will be spared the sack and destruction of their city, spared the inevitable slaughter of innocent thousands within Asorbes and they will once again rise to become a mighty nation—but under Ashtarta’s rule, whose weapons shall make her new empire utterly unconquerable for all time to come. That is what they will get out of it. What more could they possibly ask?”
Khai frowned. “It all seems too good to be true. Are you sure they’re not just playing for time while those damned necromancers of Pharaoh’s work more hell’s mischief?”
“Playing for time? No, for they desire to see you now, as soon as you are ready, to learn of your reactions to their plan. I can arrange a meeting in a moment, as easily as waving a yellow flag, which is the signal I’ve arranged. As you say, to waste time is simply to give the Dark Heptad an opportunity to make more magic. . . .”
“And you will come with me to speak to the Khemite commanders?” Khai asked, still uncertain.
“Of course.”
“Hah!” Khai snorted. “And they will have us both together, caught like rats in a trap!”
The other sighed and Khai began to wonder if perhaps he was being over cautious. “My friend,” Manek said, “even if that were so, still our armies can crush the Khemites without our assistance. There are chiefs enough, as you are well aware. What are we after all but two men? Besides, upon our acceptance to talk they have agreed to a withdrawal of their forces to the very walls of the city! We can ask no fairer than that.”