Without protest, Khai took a lurching step closer to the rim of the steeply plunging south face. He stood on the very edge, rocking to and fro, threatening at any moment to fall.
“Jump, Khai, jump!” cried Pharaoh, and the blood-spattered warrior bent his legs until he half-crouched at the edge of eternity.
“Stop!” came the bull voice of Manek Thotak. He had recovered at last from the almost supernatural paralysis which still held the rest of the city in thrall, and he had snatched up Khai’s bow and an arrow from his quiver. Now, drawing back the bowstring to its full, he aimed the shaft across the summit’s small space and sighted it upon the two figures where they stood at the corner of the south-facing rim. Manek was aware of the vast mass hanging in the sky above him, so much so that its very shadow seemed to fall upon him like a physical weight. Without a doubt, Khasathut’s own kind had returned from the stars, and it seemed equally certain that they were watching him even now.
“Jump!” cried Pharaoh again, rage written in his bulging eyes; and once again Khai tensed the muscles of his legs as if to spring from the rim. Manek’s hands quivered as he traversed the bow from Khasathut’s naked, pink and twisted form to the broad back of the young general: Khai—who was once Khai of Khem—who might yet be a king in Kush! Manek’s lips drew back in a snarl. He gritted his strong teeth until beads of sweat stood out upon his forehead. But—
“No!” he cried then in self-denial, and in the next instant realigned the bow and released the arrow . . . which flew straight to its target and transfixed Pharaoh’s shoulder, knocking him down dangerously close to the rim.
The shriek which Khasathut immediately vented seemed to break the spell hanging over the city. Brave warriors though they were, the victors could no longer face up to the powers of Beings capable of suspending a pyramid in mid-air. They began to flee the city in droves—rushing madly back down the great ramp in such a stampede that those unfortunate enough to be caught at its edges were sent screaming to their deaths—streaming like myriads of ants through the streets of Asorbes and out through its shattered gates—and as they fled so Manek ran to Khai and dragged him back from the rim, guiding him to the steps.
There Khai’s control returned, and shaking his head as if to clear it of invisible, poisonous fumes, he stared after his fleeing army. Down below him stood the last of Pharaoh’s zombie-like guardsmen, staggering to and fro as they, too, were released from the now broken trance of fascination. They bled from countless wounds and only the spell had kept them on their feet—until now. For even as Khai watched they slumped to the steps which they had defended to the last and the life went out of them.
“Come on, Khai,” Manek shouted in the blond giant’s ear. We have to get away from here!”
Khai followed him shakily down the first few steps and then paused. The last of his warriors were streaming down the ramp and the rout of fleeing humanity through the streets of Asorbes was now at its full. “Come on,” Manek shouted again, taking his arm. “Why do you linger?”
Khai shook himself free of the other’s hand. “You go,” he told Manek. “I . . . I have to know!” He turned to stare at the summit’s center where Khasathut now kneeled with his hideous face turned up to the golden, sky-floating pyramid.
“To know what?” Manek cried, lifting his voice against a wind that sprang up from nowhere to blow his hair in his face.
“Go!” Khai shouted, almost in anger. “I’ll follow—when I can.”
Manek argued no longer, but went bounding down the steps and followed the others where they fled. Khai, alone now, stepped up again onto the roof of the pyramid and turned his wide blue eyes up to gaze at the vast golden menace which hung cold and alien over Asorbes.
VI
A CITY DOOMED
“Strike him down!” screamed Khasathut, pointing at Khai where he stood. “Strike them all down and take me up, quickly, for I am surely dying. Take me up, my ancestors, for I am one of you and have suffered. Why do you wait? Do you not know me?”
Without warning, an area of the golden pyramid’s base glowed brighter yet and Khai staggered and shielded his eyes as a beam of yellow light struck downward and fixed upon the lofty summit, trapping two lives within its perimeter and binding them like flies in honey. Khai would have fled then, if he could, but he could not. Through a haze of golden particles, he saw Khasathut—his mouth working in a sort of slow-motion, his octopus eyes bulging, pleading—but he could hear nothing at all through the screen of potent energies which now surrounded him.
It seemed to Khai that he floated in the void between golden suns, where a myriad motes of glittering gold dust blinded him and baffled his senses. The sensation lasted for a moment only, and then, out of the silence, a Great Voice seemed to speak—not to Khai but to Other Beings of equal potency.
He heard no words, neither saw nor yet felt anything at all, and yet somehow he was party to a conversation. There were Beings in that shape in the sky, certainly, and indeed They recognized Khasathut. But They saw him as an error—a failed experiment—that and nothing more. There was puzzlement, too, that such a creature could ever have come to power, could have caused to happen the earthshaking events whose reverberations had been detected at the very corners of space and time, calling Them down from far journeyings, from temporal and trans-dimensional investigations of times and spaces.
Then . . . a decision was made. Khai knew it, and so did Khasathut.
“No!” the naked monster’s mouth formed silent words as the golden beam from above narrowed to enclose him and exclude Khai. “No, you can’t! I’m one of yours. I’m one of—”
For a moment, the beam brightened to such an intensity that Khai threw up his hands before his face. Then that solid-seeming rod of golden light blinked out and the brightly glowing spot on the flying pyramid’s base quickly dulled and faded into its soft yellow surroundings. The vast mass in the sky began slowly to revolve, rising straight up into thin air until it reached a certain altitude. There it paused and its revolutions ceased, and Khai took his hands from his eyes and craned his neck to gaze up at it. Then he looked at the small heap of yellow dust at the summit’s center—dust which had recently been the Pharaoh Khasathut. . . .
The wind sprang up again, blowing Khasathut’s last remains in Khai’s face. He choked and covered his nose and mouth, then turned and stumbled down the steps, going back the way he had come as quickly as he could.
At the foot of the ramp, Manek waited with a commandeered chariot. He bundled Khai onto his vehicle’s platform and lashed his horses to a gallop, and a few minutes later they clattered out through the west gate and raced for dried up mud flats which were once a swamp.
Eight miles from the city’s walls, a low hill rose up from mud baked hard as brick. Recently it had been green, grown with trees, grasses and ferns, a paradise of living things. Now it was dead. A few blackened stumps littered the crest where Manek brought the chariot to a halt. Many warriors were already there—horsemen and charioteers, mainly—waiting for their generals; and for . . . something else.
The panic was largely over now. Between the city and the hill streams of chariots, horsemen and foot soldiers like ants on the march still hurried west, leaving the doomed city behind them, not looking back. The ordinary citizens of Asorbes were there, too, many thousands of them, loaded down with their belongings and fleeing from the ravages of war. Khai and Manek had driven through them, urging them on, but now they waited as the army caught up. In another half-hour, there would not be a single soldier of Ashtarta’s forces within five miles of Asorbes—which was just as well, Khai thought, for something was surely going to happen. No one said anything, but everyone knew it. It was in the air, a tension, an electric feeling. And the eyes of each and every soldier on the hill were now locked on Asorbes and the golden shape that stood in the sky over the city like some silent sentinel.
After a long while, Khai said to Manek, “It will be soon now.”
They stood side by sid
e on the hill, amidst thousands of bloodied, battered warriors whose triumph was all but forgotten. All was unnaturally quiet. Even the clatter of late-arriving chariots, the whinnying of lathered horses, the moaning of wounded men and the low mutterings of chiefs and captains as they counted their losses seemed muted.
“What is it, Khai?” Manek asked, his eyes on the distant shape in the sky, a frown etched deep in his forehead. “What will it be?”
For answer, Khai shook his head, then stiffened as he focused his eyes on sudden motion about the vast vessel hovering over the deserted city. The golden pyramid seemed to be pulsating, glowing bright and pale in an ever quickening cycle. A shimmering yellow haze, similar to the beam Khai had experienced at first hand, but more diffuse and spreading out at a wider angle, fell like a diaphanous curtain from the pyramid’s base over the entire city, covering it wall to wall. The pulsating continued, quickened, and the massive vessel began to lift into the sky. Amazingly, impossibly, most of Asorbes began to lift with it!
Caught in tractors of fantastic power, vast segments of the city’s walls broke loose and shuddered into the sky; towers, buildings and temples became airborne; anything that was not deeply rooted in the bedrock of the earth itself was slowly, irresistibly drawn skyward. But most of the power was concentrated centrally, on Khasathut’s tomb, on the pyramid itself. . . .
A vast sigh—a concerted gasp of awe and disbelief—went up from thousands of throats as finally that tremendous monument rocked and broke free of its base and millions of tons of stone were drawn bodily aloft. It seemed as if every man of Ashtarta’s army held his breath then, as the city of Asorbes rose up and up. And as the golden pyramid exerted its incredible energy on the uprooted city, so that raw power was made visible in the lightnings that leapt between sky-floating stone and scarred and pitted earth.
Huge tongues of fire licked at the ground in electrical greed, and dust clouds like the dark breath of demons rose everywhere. A low rumble, rapidly growing louder, filled the air and clouds began to form in the sky, racing outward from the epicenter which was the shattered, elevated city.
Khai, Manek and their armies heard that rumble, felt it in the ground, in their bones, and knew that the end was near. Thus it was something of an anticlimax when suddenly, in an instant, the huge inverted funnel of golden haze blinked out—the beam and the golden pyramid, too, disappearing as if they had never existed—leaving the revenant fragments of Asorbes suspended in thin air. For a second it seemed as though those millions of tons were to remain frozen in the sky forever, but then they began to fall.
A city rained to earth, and the last trace of Khasathut’s influence in the world was obliterated for all time.
The cloud of dust and smoke which then rose up in a mushroom-topped column heralded an earthquake that threw every watcher to the ground, thus saving them from the mad rush of winds that howled outward from the shattered, scattered debris of Asorbes. When it was over, Khai dusted himself down and turned his face to the west.
“Are you thinking, Khai, of the queen who waits for you in Kush?” Manek asked. “If so, you should know I won’t oppose you.”
“If you don’t others will,” Khai wryly answered. “No, a Khemite could never lord it over Kush, Manek. I think you’ve taught me that much. I’ll return to Khem . . . eventually. To a new Khem. As for Kush—Kush is yours.”
“Mine?” For a moment Manek showed his astonishment. He tried to speak several times, but could not find the words. Finally he said: “You do this for me, Khai? For me, a proven traitor? One who tried to destroy you?”
“Who else knows it?” Khai asked. “I know it, and already it is forgotten. Yes, you tried to destroy me, but since then you’ve twice saved my life. And are you really such a traitor? A traitor betrays his own country, Manek, and you only wanted to keep yours safe and free. No, because of what you tried to do, I have been made to see that I could never stay in Kush. It’s Khem for me, and Ashtarta will be my Queen here. It might take some time to convince her, and there will be many things to do, but. . . .
“But what of you? Will you take a Queen, Manek?”
“A Queen?” Manek looked surprised, then showed his teeth in a grin. “That I will! She lives in the village of Thon Emahl, in Kush. She’s Thon’s widow, though I knew her before he did. I gave her up for . . . for the throne of Kush!”
“Well,” Khai answered, nodding, “now you shall have both.” He clasped the other’s arm. “Now we shall both have our hearts’ desires. Isn’t it enough, Manek?”
“More than enough!” Manek laughed. “Well, come on. What are we waiting for? If we make good time, we can be home in three days!”
“Two!” Khai answered, and he also laughed. And in his mind, he pictured Ashtarta’s marquee and a certain chamber within it where the walls were of purple linen. But what use to dwell on memories when the real thing waited for him at the end of a chariot ride?
The two men climbed aboard their vehicle’s platform and Khai took the reins. He wheeled his horses round and aimed them westward, then shook the reins and laughed again as he gave the animals their head. . . .
epilogue
Wilfred Sommers watched the Egypt-Air jet take off and climb into the sun. He watched it until it was little more than a silver sliver in the sky, then turned and made his way from the airport lounge, through the crowded foyer and out to the car park. As he drove back to the museum, he managed to get his thoughts sorted out a little, so that by the time he climbed the museum’s stairs to the second floor he believed he finally understood something of what had happened. More than that he could not, dared not admit to believing. But the whole thing had impressed him deeply and it was not something he would soon forget.
For the tenth time, he pictured the meeting between Paul Arnott and Omar Dassam as he had seen it less than a week ago. They had met; Dassam had given Arnott a ring which he had slipped onto his finger; then—
Sommers shook his head as he made his way along aisles of relics toward his father’s private rooms. The transformation had been amazing, frightening. There had been recognition in the eyes of the two men, real recognition, and something else. That other something had seemed to span untold centuries of time, had reached out from the past to bind both men in an unbreakable spell. Sommers and his father had felt nothing physical, nothing really . . . tangible. And yet there had been—yes, something.
Arnott had finally broken the spell, when in an instant he changed from a civilized man into—into what? Whatever, his totally unexpected attack on Dassam had been like greased lightning. The other man had not known what hit him, and yet at the same time, he seemed somehow to expect it. Arnott struck two blows, so that his victim was already unconscious and falling when he was snatched up and hurled headlong through the old hardwood paneling of the study into the next room. And still not satisfied, Arnott had been after him with a bound—doubtless to finish the job—when his hang-gliding injury caught up with him. Then he had collapsed against the wall, crumpling in a moment, and all of that primal power had seemed to drain out of him. Just as well, for Sommers and his father had known that he was intent upon killing the other man, the stranger from Egypt.
And what of that exchange between them, before Arnott’s attack? There had been recognition in that, too. They had spoken, nothing in the English tongue, words in a language dead and gone for thousands of years. That was Sir George’s guess, at any rate, and it was that chiefly which had determined the elder Sommers perspective of the thing, his explanation of what he thought had happened. His son had more or less come to agree with his theory, though when first he heard it, he could not help but compare it to Paul Arnott’s own wild fancies. And yet how else could any of it be explained?
But for all the Sommers’s talk of race-memory—of Arnott’s instinctive fear of Egypt, despite his fascination with the subject; of his being a throwback to some forgotten race of men whose homeland had been in or near the Nile Valley—still their concept could only
remain one of purest conjecture. Never in a million years could they have guessed how close they were to the truth of things.
Dassam had not been seriously injured by Arnott’s attack and had recovered a few minutes later when Wilfred Sommers applied smelling salts. Arnott, on the other hand, had been taken back into hospital. He, too, as it worked out, was lucky. He had done himself no permanent damage; indeed something seemed to have clicked back into place, so that within a few days, he was out of hospital permanently and free at last of his “concrete breastplate.”
Moreover, there had been . . . changes.
Changes in both men, inexplicable alterations in memory, character and mood. The one, Dassam, seemed to have lost something: the element of instinctive drive visible in him before was no longer there. He was no longer searching. He could not explain his coming to England, his purpose in approaching the elder Sommers with his find, that prehistoric funerary mask from the foothills of the Gilf Kebir. Indeed, he seemed horrified that he had dared smuggle the thing out of his country and into England in the first place, and he couldn’t wait to take it back and hand it over to the rightful authorities. Sir George could only agree with Dassam’s sentiments in this matter, and he further agreed to say nothing of the affair, but simply pretend that it had never happened.
As for Paul Arnott: paradoxically, he seemed to have both lost and found something. He was much less restless, had lost all of his old moodiness, was no longer continually bothered by dim dreams of far, fabulous places and half-remembered occurrences in a world which existed in an age when saber-tooths still prowled England and the last mammoths still wandered the Siberian plains. On the other hand, he now seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing. He had . . . direction.