He made to follow, glanced upward once at the square base of a massive block that moved gratingly in the ceiling and poised itself, then closed his eyes and hurled himself forward. Full length in mid-air, Khai flew, willing himself across the deadly threshold and feeling the rush of air suddenly compressed by sheer bulk as that gigantic door fell.
And as he sprawled in the dust, so the earth jarred mightily beneath him and shuddered into immobility. Clouds of dust billowed up at once, obscuring everything, and when they settled Khai turned his head to look back. There, mere inches from his feet—where moments ago a huge doorway had gaped—now a massive wall of impenetrable rock stood solid and impassive.
In another moment—while yet he strove to convince himself that indeed he still lived and had escaped that horrible death of deaths—Kindu and Nundi were anxiously helping him to his feet. . . .
IV
A SPELL OF FASCINATION
While Khai and his body of men completed their task in the base of the pyramid and made their escape, the fighting in the city was furious and bloody. Ashtarta’s warriors were winning inexorably through, however, and had closed in on Pharaoh’s forces until the great majority of survivors were clustered in the streets close to the base of Khasathut’s mighty monument. There they fought and died, hewn down by the iron swords of the invaders.
To any observer, the battle would have presented an awe-inspiring spectacle whose center was the great pyramid itself. From its base, which now gleamed yellow where patches of beaten gold overlaid the fine white skin, its sides rose steeply colossal to a now tiny summit. Its dizzy steps and hugely sloping ramp were splashed red with blood and obscured by a rising haze of sweat, dust and the steam of spilled entrails. Overlooking all, the sun, too, was shrouded, appearing as a bruised and bloodied orange eye.
But through all the chaos, it could plainly be seen that the war was over. Khem was the loser, her wizards and warriors defeated, her forts and now her fortress city brought down. Only the pyramid remained as refuge for those hundreds of desperate defenders who yet fought on, retreating ever higher up the steps and the great ramp as the invaders, swollen by thousands of blood-crazed slaves, poured after them in relentless waves.
Flanked by his Nubian lieutenants—gory with blood-slimed sand—Khai ran from the base of the pyramid to join that thronging, victorious horde. Pausing at the foot of the steps, he sheathed an iron sword, cast about with worried eyes and sniffed at the reeking air. Then he grimaced, turned to his comrades and said:
“It’s Khasathut I want. I won’t rest until he’s dead. He wasn’t in the pyramid’s lower quarters, which means that he must be somewhere up there—” and he pointed at the great ramp where it joined the sloping east face of the pyramid. “There will be soldiers in there, too, quite a few, I’d guess. But if our lads go in after them they’ll be forced into the open sooner or later, and Pharaoh with them. Since the lower entrances are blocked, there’s only one way in or out. Right there!” And again he pointed, this time at a dark square doorway high in the pyramid’s face.
The entrance was at the very top of the ramp. Flanking it were wide steps cut into the face of the pyramid itself and rising to the flat summit. Even as the three gazed up at that dark doorway, suddenly there was movement in and about it. One, two of Pharaoh’s Black Guards emerged—then four more, a dozen, and—
“Look!” Khai hissed through clenched teeth. He used a blood-streaked forearm to brush blond hair from his steely blue eyes. “Do you know what that is? That curtained chair they’re carrying? It’s Pharaoh’s litter.”
“And see,” said Nundi, pointing. “There’s the reason why the drones are fleeing their hive. Those fires we set are spreading.”
As the last members of the Black Guard came pouring out of the high doorway, for all the world like angry bees or ants from a threatened nest, black clouds of smoke followed them, roiling out from the pyramid’s single remaining doorway in ever-thickening ropes. Eight of the huge blacks struggled with the litter up the steps to the summit, somehow managing to keep the canopied chair on an even keel, while the rest, perhaps fifteen or sixteen of them, followed their laboring colleagues with curved swords drawn, forming a barrier against any attack from below.
“Khasathut’s in that litter,” Khai snapped, “and he’s mine! And look—there’s Anulep, the Pharaoh’s Vizier, too. Tall and thin, like a praying mantis. He’ll be the one who turned the sand on us. The two of them together. I don’t know which one has the blackest heart, Anulep or his master. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’ve got them.
“I’ve got them!” he roared, clenching his fists and shaking them over his head. “You there, out of my way,” and he raced up the steps with Kindu and Nundi doing their best to keep pace with him. As they climbed higher, so the massed warriors made way for them; and Khai’s orders—that Khasathut was not to be touched, that his cordon of blacks on the summit was not to be attacked—preceded him, were relayed ahead by the booming authoritative voices of his chiefs.
The fighting was almost over by the time the trio reached the ramp. Pockets of desperate resistance were still being encountered in the city’s streets and squares and on its perimeter walls, but the desperation of the Khemite soldiers was born of the sure knowledge that they were finished. Khai and his lieutenants looked back once—gazed out over a city which already gouted flame and smoke from a myriad blazing fires, at streets overrun with rampaging slaves and warriors howling their victory as they hunted down the last remnants of Pharaoh’s army—and then they made for the summit itself.
On their way up the center of the ramp—whose sides were lined with Kushites, Nubians, Siwadis and freed slaves alike, all cheering Khai and his companions on and forming a crowd behind them as they climbed ever higher—they hurdled bodies where they lay sprawled in death’s poses and stepped over discarded, gore-slimed weapons. Never once did they accord this grisly debris a moment’s consideration; their goal was to reach Pharaoh and his cordon of guardsmen on the summit, and nothing could distract them from it. Only upon climbing to the doorway, which still issued a little smoke, did they pause for a moment to gain strength for the final assault.
As the last few puffs of smoke belched out from the dark doorway and began to drift away over the city, Khai stared up at the two dozen or so remaining steps to the summit and stiffened. Seeing his look of disbelief, Kindu and Nundi peered upward through the rapidly dispersing screen of smoke. Khasathut’s litter stood at the very rim of the flat summit, with its forward shafts projecting. Between the shafts, his head and shoulders hidden from view, Anulep kneeled with his back to the steps. Members of the Black Guard flanked the litter, spears at the slope in their right hands, curved swords at the ready in their left.
“What is it, Khai?” Kindu asked. “Why do you pause?”
For answer, Khai gazed once more out over the city, then turned his eyes upward yet again to the litter’s shafts and the figure of the Vizier where he kneeled in seeming obeisance between them. The expression on the young general’s face quickly changed from a look of disbelief to one of purest loathing. Shocking pictures flooded his mind, pictures of lovely girls skinned alive while Anulep brought the Pharaoh to a climax with his hideous mouth, and Khai knew what was happening even now beneath the gold-embroidered canopy of Khasathut’s litter-throne.
It had been girls before—beautiful girls giving up their lives in agony and crimson horror to facilitate an orgasm in the hybrid monster called Khasathut—but now? Now it was an entire city!
Suddenly, while Khai still stood frozen in disbelief, there came a drawn-out shriek which rose to an almost painfully intense pitch before gurgling into gasped obscenities. At first, Khai thought that the cry signalled Pharaoh’s climax, but as the cursing continued there came a sudden and frantic billowing of the litter’s curtains. And now Anulep stood up and laughed long and loud—the laughter of a man made mad with terror—the baying of a crazed hound. The Vizier turned as he lau
ghed, throwing his head back and his arms wide as he roared his lunatic mirth, and even Khai shrank back from the sight of the madman’s face: his gaping, crimson jaws that dripped blood even as he laughed!
Confused, the cordon of guardsmen turned inward, made as if to leap upon the Vizier . . . but too late. Pharaoh himself tore aside the canopy of his litter to stand naked, twisted and deformed behind Anulep, a curved dagger gleaming in his one good hand. With a downward sweep of his arm, he cut short the Vizier’s laughter and sent his skeletal, black-sheathed figure stumbling and staggering down the steps toward Khai. The high priest almost made it, but at the last moment, he tripped over his own spastically lurching feet and crashed down on his face. Pharaoh’s dagger was lodged deep in the top of his spine. He flopped on the steps for a second or two and flailed his limbs, then somehow turned over onto his back, snapping off the dagger’s handle and driving its blade deeper yet.
His face was full of blood, and as his death rattle sounded so his scarlet mouth fell open and released a pair of hinged bronze teeth which clattered onto the stone steps. Then he lay still. Khai still did not understand all of it—would never fully understand—but as finally he lifted his eyes from the body of the dead Vizier so he became conscious of a concerted gasping from his lieutenants and the warriors who crowded behind them. Again he turned his gaze toward the summit, and finally a glimmering of understanding came.
For there Khasathut stood, supported now by two members of his Black Guard, with blood flowing freely down his legs from his terrible wound. In that one region where once he might have claimed a certain kinship with men, he no longer laid claim to anything at all. And now Pharaoh saw Khai—saw him through those octopus eyes of his and knew him for the force which had guided Khem’s enemies to victory. He threw off his guardsmen and somehow staggered to one side of his heavy litter, then indicated that the ornately-carved throne should be hurled from the summit.
In another moment, the litter came crashing down from above. Leaping to one side, Khai and his lieutenants somehow avoided its cartwheeling mass, but many of the warriors crowding behind them were not so lucky. Now, galvanized into action and snarling his hatred, the blond giant threw himself up the steps and as he went heard an almost hysterical command from above:
“Let him come!” screamed Pharaoh, his voice full of that remembered whooshing effect but higher pitched, like that of a breathless woman. “Let him come all the way. As for the rest: hold them back. Do not let them interfere before this thing is finished!”
Khai held his sword before him and made to defend himself against the Black Guard as they swarmed past him down the steps. One of them parried his thrust and lunged at him with a massive shoulder, sending him flying. He sprawled on the steps, losing his bow and quiver of arrows from his shoulder before he could regain his balance and spring to his feet. But the Nubians, obeying Khasathut’s command, simply ignored him and formed a treble rank below him, defending the summit against any further incursions.
They were almost zombie-like, those blacks, glazed of eye and expressionless—but with no apparent loss of coordination or dexterity—so that Khai suspected them to be acting under some hypnotic spell or other. Counted against his own army, however, and despite their massive size and cold savagery, the Nubians could not hope to hold the summit for more than a minute or two at most.
Now, as Khai mounted the last few steps to the roof of the pyramid, Khasathut staggered backward away from him until he stood center of the summit. Naked, almost pitiful, stood the crooked figure of Pharaoh as the blond warrior advanced upon him high over ravaged Asorbes. Khai’s blue eyes glared their message of loathing and red revenge, and his iron sword was half-lifted in a promise of swift, merciless death. But now Khasathut began to laugh, and the man who faced him was so astounded that he paused momentarily to listen to the lunatic’s words.
“Once before I was told that you would not return to Khem, Khai Ibizin,” said Khasathut. “That was when you fled me as a boy. But there’s that about you which can’t be stopped. So, when last I had you in my power, I did more than merely allow my Dark Seven to send your ka down the centuries. I suspected not even that would stop you. A stricture was placed upon you, Khai of Kush, a trance of fascination, that if you should return a second time, it would only be to obey my every command! You have seen such a trance working, for my Black Guard is similarly molded to my will. Even now they give up their lives for me, for how may they question the commands of their God-king?”
“You’re no more a god than the stone blocks of your great tomb—Pharaoh,” Khai spat out the last word as if it were poison. “Why, you’re no longer a man—if ever you were one in the first place—let alone a god! As for ‘molding me to your will’: there are no more black magic spells you can cast over me. Now you die, Khasathut,” and he lifted his sword up higher. “For my murdered family, for Khem, for an entire world which you would have destroyed. Now . . . you die!”
“Look!” the crippled monster whooshed with his gasping voice. “Look into my eyes, Khai, and then tell me you can split me with that sword.”
Khai looked, and in that moment of contact between his own and the octopus eyes of Khasathut, it was as if chains had been wrapped around him from head to foot. He felt turned to stone, and was barely aware of the fact that his sword had fallen from suddenly nerveless fingers.
In the instant before their eyes met, however, he had seen something else. Something that glowed golden in the sky to the west and came silently closer by the second. Khai knew that shape—an impossible shape that should not, could not possibly fly—and even as he froze in the weave of Khasathut’s spell, he knew the thrill of ultimate strangeness, the chill of the immense and awesome unknown.
For the spinning, glowing shape that pulsed ever closer in the sky was of a great, golden pyramid, which could only mean that Khasathut’s own kind had at last returned from the stars!
V
OUT OF THE STARS
Now Khasathut’s eyes seemed huge in his young-ancient face, and with his elongated head he looked more than ever like some great evil bird of prey. Because he had his back to the wonder in the sky, which even now began to climb higher as it approached the titan-walled city, he was as yet unaware of its presence. The warriors fighting their way up the summit’s steps also were ignorant of the approaching marvel; they fought on and died seeking to cut a way through Khasathut’s black defenders. Arrows could have brought the Nubians down, but arrows were scarce now; and the approach to the summit was narrow, treacherous with spilled blood and littered with the stiffening corpses of fallen warriors.
Several of Kush’s mightiest men had struggled their way up the ramp to the steps and the glassy-eyed Nubians were by no means having it their own way. One by one they were falling, and Kindu himself had been responsible for cutting down three of them. He and Nundi had known momentary qualms about standing against fellow Nubians, but face-to-face with them, they had seen that Khasathut’s guardsmen were utterly beyond redemption. They were no longer Nubians—indeed, they were something less than human. Nundi was out of the fight now, having fallen back with a slashed sinew in his sword arm, but Kindu battled on. That was the way things stood when Manek Thotak arrived, bloodied and battle-stained, to fling himself into this final fight.
He was opposed by a huge black, gutted him, then broke through the cordon and leapt for the top of the steps. The sight he saw as his eyes came up level with the pyramid’s roof stopped him dead in his tracks. His mouth fell open as his eyes went from the scene on the summit to the colossal, silently spinning shape which even now reared its bulk over Asorbes until its shadow eclipsed the massive monument itself.
And as that shadow fell over Khasathut, so the Pharaoh turned his face to the sky and saw the golden pyramid for the first time. He, too, was stunned—but only for a moment. Then—
It was as if the sight of this fantastic aerial visitant had tapped some unknown reserve of strength within him. He no longer had
need of the bellow-like amplifiers with which his bizarre, larger-than-life ceremonial effigies were equipped; and weak as he was from loss of blood, still he seemed to swell larger as the spinning of the gigantic craft high above him slowed and finally stopped. Now the thing hung motionless in the sky, its base a mighty square of gold even larger than the base of Khasathut’s pyramid itself, and now too Pharaoh roared out his triumph to a city struck dumb with awe and terror.
“See!” he cried, pointing his one good hand at the incredible vessel poised impossibly in thin air. “In my hour of need, my ancestors have returned to succor me. You who have defiled my temples, my house, my tomb—all of you—” he had moved to stand at the south-east corner of the summit, from where he waved his arm imperiously over the city, “you must pay!”
His voice carried out over a city which, except for a low wind that whistled round the pyramid’s summit and carried Khasathut’s words afar, was suddenly quiet as a tomb. Only that eerie wind and the distant crackle of flames competed with the voice of the triumphant monster as he laughed his maniac glee and beckoned with his one good arm.
“And see,” he roared again, “see what has become of your mightiest general! Did you think he would kill me? Come, Khai, show yourself. Let your warriors see how I have bent you to my will—the fate which they too must share, because they have defied me.”
Khai stepped forward into view—shoulders slumped, arms and hands hanging limp, head low on his chest—Khasathut laughed again as the silence seemed positively to deepen. “Is this the great general?” Pharaoh roared. “Well, then, see how I break him—how you will all be broken.” He pointed to the south and screamed: “Now, Khai—throw yourself down!”