Lords of the Black Sands

by J. Edward Neill

  But Galen was no stranger to fighting armored foes.

  And in seconds the two Japas men were floating away with the river, their throats cut and their hearts forever cold.

  No others emerged. Deathly silent, Galen slipped through the wide-open doors and into the grotto beyond. The air was somehow warmer in the cave, but the absent starlight left everything without color or depth.

  He was no fool.

  He guessed the Japas folk had seen the ship descend into the trees atop the mountain.

  He knew they’d sent the two men out as a distraction.

  When the guardians, decked in oil-cured armor and curved swords, stepped out of their hiding places within the grotto, he was ready. They came from the dark, four men with faces like ghosts. The first two charged him, one low and one high. Rather than be skewered between them, he dashed aside and lunged at one of the men who’d waited back. He swung his black blade at the seam in the man’s armor nearest his neck, and although the brave fool lifted his sword, the Nemesis’ blade cut the weaker weapon in half.

  With another stroke, Galen severed the guardian’s leg at his knee and left him writhing on the floor.

  One.

  The three remaining guardians came at him all at once. They were trained fighters, quick as the wind, and they were ready for him. They hemmed him in, lashing out with their giant, curved swords, driving him back toward the grotto wall.

  But one made a mistake.

  He hurled a six-pointed star at Galen, which Galen snatched from the air and sent spiraling at the closest man. The steel star whistled through the warm cavern air and hit its target in his forehead. The sound of the dead man’s sword clattering on the stone echoed in the darkness. With a thud, his limp body crashed right beside it.

  “Two,” Galen said aloud.

  He hated to make so much noise. Swords breaking, bodies falling, and the legless man’s continued screams drove him into a fury. The last two guardians stood on his either side, and even in the near-perfect dark he saw their eyes glitter.

  He remembered who he was.

  And he slew them within seconds, driving the Nemesis’ blade through their armor and into their hearts.

  …before easing their bodies to the floor.

  Four. He stood above the wounded, legless man.

  And delivered his mercy with a single stroke.

  In the dark, he stood in silence.

  His heart slowed.

  His breaths went from ragged to calm.

  And his mind raced.

  He looked up from the carnage and saw the tunnel. It lay at the grotto’s far end, a corridor cut into the stone by some machine of the Pharaoh’s. How deep it ran beneath the mountain, he could only guess.

  Miles, he supposed.

  All the way down to what I’m looking for.

  Sword dripping red, he walked toward the tunnel.

  Whether one man or a million awaited him down in the dark, he no longer cared.

  17

  Galen had never seen so hollow a space.

  Light fixtures, long dead, hung from wires like bodies from a ceiling too high to see. The stone floor, paved to flat perfection, stretched to walls buried in shadow. Whatever machines had once occupied the great dark cavern were gone.

  He’d entered a tomb, not a laboratory.

  His heart thumped cold inside him. Through his eyes, the world looked gauzy grey. His vision of the Blue Vials, of striding through the Pyramid doors full of immortal fire felt suddenly delicate.

  And it hurt.

  He strode to the room’s center. None but he could see in such vast darkness, and so he walked without care, his boots clapping hard on the stone. In the room’s heart, he sheathed his sword and knelt to the floor.

  A puddle, pale blue and sticky, spread out beneath his fingers. He breathed it in, and he recognized it as the smell that had lured him to the cavern’s heart.

  A spill? An accident?

  No.

  But…

  Impossible for them to have evacuated so quickly. We stole Eadunn’s ship only two days ago.

  For all his wisdom, he was slow to arrive at the truth. He balled his fingers into black leather fists, and he willed himself not to shout.

  He remembered the tales told to him by the few who had known of the Japas laboratory.

  ‘…endless vats of sweet-smelling liquid.’

  ‘…men in dark scrubs, conversing in secret tongues.’

  ‘…all of it…everything…just to make Blue Vials. A thousand, they were to make, that the Lord of the Sands might forever rule.’

  He knew it could not have been a lie. Hundreds, he’d talked to, and many at the edge of his sword. That the lab was now empty, scoured clean of everything, made no sense. Each Blue Vial took nearly a decade to blend, distill, and perfect.

  Meaning, he’s only made twenty, maybe thirty.

  Enough to live ten-thousand years.

  But it’s not enough.

  Not for Him.

  He clambered to his feet in the dark, standing above the puddle. Had he not been so full of nameless emotion, he might have awakened to the shadows stirring in the room’s far corners. Two-hundred men, Japas warriors to the last, slid from the gloom into the open dark. Their lanterns winked to life one by one, each light a star blazing in the void.

  Galen turned.

  He’d never imagined the lab could be empty.

  He’d expected a trap, but nothing like this

  Where are the machines?

  Where are the scientists?

  What did he do with the Vials?

  A grand circle, the Japas men made. In their hands, they held red-glowing lamps and curved swords. They wore masks of the old kind, with faces like demons and horns carved of bone. Their armor, red, blue, and gold, hung from their bodies in articulated scales, which shimmered in the growing light.

  Galen ripped his sword from its scabbard. Never had he felt so foolish.

  All because he’d daydreamed so deeply.

  All because he’d willed the future to become the now.

  “Well? What’s it going to be?” he shouted into the room. He knew the Japas language well, and his voice echoed like thunder in the void. Some of the men hesitated. Even with such overwhelming numbers on their side, they feared him.

  But the rest closed in, and soon their brothers grew bold. Galen looked to the light fixtures—the dangling lamps were too high for even him to reach. He looked to the way he’d come, the black tunnel at the room’s far end, and he narrowed his vision.

  “I’ll have to kill at least fifty of you,” he shouted, and again the circle of men paused. They were within twenty steps, lamps swaying before their demon masks, swords hanging in their sweating grasps.

  He sensed their terror.

  “No Vials?” he bellowed. “Not even one? Not for poor Galen?”

  They didn’t answer, only drew closer.

  “You serve the Lord of Ashes?” He spun with his sword leveled at the men’s masks. “From ten-thousand miles away, you’re his slaves? You’re not the men I knew. You were dragons, but now you’re mice. Cowards, to the last.”

  From the ring of red lanterns, a single soldier emerged. His mask was most fearsome—a six-horned demon with silver teeth. He carried no light, and his twin khatans, giant curved swords, hung from his shoulders in great scabbards.

  Galan understood.

  He recognized the mask, the red armor, and the khatans. The soldier was master of the Japas colony.

  “You first?” He scraped the Nemesis sword along the floor, rutting a shallow line in the stone. “I’m waiting.”

  The man lifted his demon mask. In the red light, Galen saw his face, his long black hair, the rope of beard climbing down his chin. He might’ve been a brother to the men who’d trained Galen centuries ago, for all that he resembled his kin.

  “You should not have come,” said the soldier in his heavy Japas accent. “We do not want this. You should have known bet
ter.”

  Galen sneered, and yet he knew the man was right.

  I knew.

  I came anyway.

  “What’s your name?” Galen asked. “What happened here?”

  “Ishidi,” said the man. His fellow soldiers bristled, sensing Galen’s defiance. Ishidi calmed them with a wave of his hand. “You’re too late,” he said to Galen. “The Pharaoh, he knew you would come. The Blue Vials are not here anymore.”

  “The Nemesis came here?” Galen stared down Ishidi’s men. “And made cows of you?”

  “No,” Ishidi snapped. “Not the son. The father. He took the Vials.”

  Galen closed his eyes and descended into a moment’s thought.

  He came to it swiftly.

  A plan long-laid.

  Even Eadunn didn’t know.

  “They moved the laboratory long, long ago, didn’t they?” he said to Ishidi. “The moment I emerged from hiding. The Lord knew I’d make it here.”

  Ishidi nodded and slid his mask over his face.

  “Take him.”

  A storm of red lanterns and demon-faced men came. Galen snapped his eyes shut and open, and in the small space between he dreamed a thousand things. All his centuries of planning, all the countless moments he’d spent preparing had crumbled. His impatience had become his destroyer. His hunger, for so long tamed, had made a savage fool of the world’s most cunning man.

  He knew his skill in combat, but in his heart he knew he could never defeat so many.

  As the demon tide came for him, he let his sword fall from his fingers. The blade bounced on the cavern floor, singing a solemn tune as it clattered to a rest without killing. Galen shut his eyes again and waited for the feeling of steel in his flesh.

  There’ll be no healing from this.

  Only sleep.

  His final thought before the wave of men washed over him?

  Elia.

  * * *

  Drip. Drip.

  Galen had heard the sound before.

  Water, pure as anywhere in the world, bled down through a quarter-mile of mountain and pattered on the stone.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Galen staggered to his feet in a lightless world and sagged beneath his chains. Finally, here in the deepest of darks, his eyes saw nothing. He felt rusted iron locked in place around his wrists and ankles. The Japas men had beaten him, stripped away his clothes, and bound him in chains thicker than his forearms.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been shut away in the underworld.

  Or is this death, and now I’ll spend eternity in chains?

  He stood for a while, listening to the water’s rhythm before sinking back to the stone floor. He knew the chains he wore. The metal shackles had lain in the dark for centuries, holding prisoners still in the days before their deaths.

  And death it would be, he knew.

  No one wears the chains and lives.

  For time unknown, he hunkered on the cold stone. The floor was damp against his bare skin, and his irons tight enough to make blood seep from his wrists. His body was already healing, wiping away the swells beneath his eyes, the cracks between his ribs, and the bruises decorating him neck to knees.

  But none of it mattered.

  Even at full strength, he could never break the chains or find his way out of the bottomless gloom.

  He’d have to wait.

  Until they arrive for my execution.

  Eyes closed, legs crossed, he sat naked on the floor and retreated into a place even blacker than the room. He meditated, and in his waking dream he faced the most remote parts of his self. In old Japas, the concept of regret was forbidden, and so with this feeling he began, waging a small war to remove it from his heart.

  Do I regret coming here?

  Do I regret five centuries of planning only to hurry to my doom?

  How did it come to this?

  The Blue Vials haven’t been here in a long while.

  My destiny was a lie.

  He dwelled in dark thought for longer than he intended. The image of himself striding across copper floors, his sword in hand and his body flush with immortal liquid, withered to dust inside his mind. He saw only death now. Only ashes. Only emptiness.

  In his haste, his desire had overcome his better self. He tasted blood on his tongue and pain in his bones. He had never believed in hope, only deeds. And so he dreamed of no salvation from his unbreakable chains. No one would come for him down in the dark, none but the skeletal fingers of the Pharaoh, who surely sat laughing atop his throne.

  The more patient man wins.

  And it was not me.

  He heard their footsteps before he saw them. Clattering in the dark, their rhythm at odds with the water’s steady drip, the Japas people advanced upon him. They found him in the lowest place, a grotto beneath all others. When their red lanterns lit the walls, Galen saw he’d been placed atop a stone pillar, silent water surrounding him on all sides, the ceiling above his head crowned with daggers of pallid limestone.

  The Japas men brought a bridge of sorts. Long bamboo poles lashed together with rope, it bounced when they stretched it across the void to reach his rock island. Four men crossed over to him, helmets off, bodies encased in demonic red armor.

  Ishidi was first among them. His black hair hung in cold lashes down his armored chest. His eyes shone red in the scarlet lamplight.

  “Our judgment is passed,” Ishidi declared. “You know what this means, immortal man. Do you not?”

  From his knees, Galen glared up at his captors. Only four stood on his stone isle, yet two-hundred more, including women and children, waited at the bridge’s other side.

  He nodded at Ishidi. He knew what his chains meant. The grotto in which they’d placed him was a sacred place for men to dwell upon their lives.

  …before being taken to the river and beheaded.

  “What is my crime?” he said.

  Ishidi raised a dark eyebrow.

  “You think you are innocent,” the Japas warrior said mildly. “You believe because we have chosen to defend the Pharaoh’s prize, we are betrayers.”

  “Yes.” Galen managed a smirk. “Helping the man who destroyed the world and slaughtered millions of your ancestors with nuclear fire…it does feel a bit like betrayal. Don’t you think?”

  Ishidi walked closer. He leaned close to Galen, so close his black hair curtained out the rest of the underworld.

  “You…” Ishidi sneered. “We know what you are, what you want. Menkaur…yes, he is a demon. And yes, he swore our destruction if we refused his trap for you. But you think us fools, Prey. We know why you spent generations in Japas learning to kill. We know why the world fears you just as much as they do the Lord of the Sands.”

  To that, Galen said nothing.

  Ishidi walked back across the bamboo bridge. Many other men crossed over. When a dragon-masked warrior arrived with an iron key, Galen contemplated resisting.

  Better to die fighting?

  Or throw myself in the darkness to drown?

  In the end, he did neither. They unlocked his shackles, but not before seven men snared his arms, legs, and throat within their gauntleted fingers. They clapped smaller manacles around his wrists and ankles, and then hauled him across the bridge and into the waiting masses.

  From here, they’ll take me to a sacred grotto.

  The Hall of Souls, they call it.

  The place in which men’s heads are separated from their necks.

  You’re a fool, Galen.

  They led him naked through the caverns. A river of red lights, a scarlet serpent in the dark, the procession moved through tunnels he’d never before dreamed. Many of the people wore no masks, and so they stared at him even as he stared back. His name was known to them, he knew. Their whispers, the way the children gazed at him, the way mothers glanced in his direction with both terror and curiosity in their eyes—he knew.

  Japas remembers me.

  Through grottos, across sparkling caverns, a
nd over bridges spanning unfathomable darkness, they took him. When at last they arrived in a place familiar to his eyes, their pace quickened. They marched him past smaller chambers, storage holes, and living quarters graven into the rock. None of them seemed to mind his nakedness, but many glimpsed the skin-port in his neck and made faces.

  He never spoke.

  He kept pace with them, his chains jingling, consuming all their whispers.

  When they brought him into the main grotto, they halted. Hundreds of red lanterns flickered against the stone, clashing against the sunlight spilling through the open gates. He saw the Japas people had removed the bodies of the men he’d killed, and although he felt no remorse, he glimpsed the faces of many who must’ve loved the fallen Japas soldiers.

  Mothers. Wives. Children.

  They don’t even hate me.

  Strange.

  Ishidi came to him again. This time, the Japas warrior’s face was stoic. Whatever anger he’d felt in the prison grotto had gone.

  “The Hall of Souls,” said Galen, “why aren’t we there? Or is it to happen here—where I killed your men? My blood mingling with theirs.”

  “It will not happen beneath the mountain.” Ishidi raised a black eyebrow. “It will happen out there. In the sunlight. Above the valley. Atop the cliffs.”

  Galen narrowed his eyes.

  Five-hundred years of being alive had made no fool of him. He understood what was happening.

  “You want the Pharaoh to see,” he said. “If I die down here, he won’t be able to watch. He wants to know it’s me. He wants it to happen under the sun.”

  Ishidi smiled. It seemed to Galen the Japas man had never before shown such an expression.

  “You have wisdom, Prey,” he said. “And yet, you never should have come here.”

  They led him out into the day. The sun blazed high and bright over the river, near blinding him. He considered making a break for the water and hurling himself in, but Ishidi’s men were cautious. With swords leveled at his naked flesh, they corralled him. Any attempt to escape would’ve left him skewered on their steel.