Lords of the Black Sands

by J. Edward Neill

  “Do it.” She trembled. “Kill me. I deserve it. God will judge me. Please...just do it.”

  “God?”

  She heard the fourth man say the word.

  And she felt warm urine run down her leg.

  He emerged from his shadows, and with a wave of his hand shooed away the three torturers. In the cold lantern light, his eyes were sharp, catlike, and as gold as sunlight shimmering upon still water. She couldn’t look at him for longer than a second. To look longer might’ve killed her.

  “There are no gods.” The Pharaoh came to her, and she saw nothing beyond his darkness. “None but me, alas. Though it comforts you to beg for divine aid, the only one who can set you free is standing right before you.”

  “Please…I’ll tell you anything. Just kill me,” she begged.

  His indifference unsettled her. Oh, how she hated him. For all the evils her lover Eadunn had worked, all of it germinated from his father, from Menkaur, Lord of the Sands. He was the puller of all strings. The world was burning, and all who lived knew who had lit the flame.

  “Do you know why I haven’t had you killed?” he asked.

  Wordless, she shook her head. The movement made her chains rattle, which made agony sing up and down her arms.

  “He still loves you, did you know?” He showed a false smile. “My son, for all his talents, finds it in him to care for you. And look at you. Even before we caught you, you’re not the beauty you were. You’re so…mortal. You’ve become soft. You’ve grown lines in your skin, Thessia. Chains or no chains, death’s shadow lies heavy upon you.”

  He walked closer. He didn’t seem to care that his boots pattered in her urine. He didn’t appear to mind the smell of her blood and sweat. With his fingers—fingers so eerily like her lover’s—he reached out and stroked her cheek. She couldn’t even turn away. At his touch, all she could do was shiver.

  “I’ll tell you whatever—” she tried.

  “Shhhhh.” He pressed his finger against her mouth. “I don’t care about your secrets, Thess. There’s no plan you or anyone else in this world can conceive I haven’t already thought of.”

  “Then kill me,” she whispered.

  “Don’t worry. I will.” His face was without expression. “But not until my son finishes. He’s been so very busy earning my forgiveness, did you know? And the reason, of course, is you. He hopes when his work is done, you’ll be waiting.”

  “No…” She shuddered. “No, he’s forgotten me.”

  “Were only it true.” A flash of emotion danced through the Pharaoh’s eyes. He backed away from her, at last seeming displeased by her smell. “But all these things, all the work he does, he does in the hope of returning here and sweeping you into his bed. It’s romantic, no? He’s willing to kill hundreds of thousands just for the promise of sparing one.”

  The coward in her wanted to ask why, if her life had earned so much loyalty from Eadunn, her death was required. But she didn’t dare. Death was the price of her betrayal, she reasoned. She had sworn in childhood to help the Prey defeat Menkaur and destroy the Nemesis.

  And I’ve failed. I’ve tried…God knows…but I’ve failed.

  “I see your suffering.” The Pharaoh knew her thoughts. “Eadunn is a good man—honest, strong, as full of intellect as any man in my kingdom. But who he is in the bedroom with you is at great odds with the other Eadunn. I never intended him to be the Nemesis. But…as talent goes…one must acknowledge he is the best in the world at what he does. He wants what I’ve promised. And he’ll do anything—he’ll destroy anything—in order to earn it.”

  Limp from her chains, she hung. She closed her eyes and glimpsed her ancestors, her mother and grandmother, and all her sisters. Their faces were black, their gazes full of anguish. Yes, she’d worked in subtle ways to undo the Pharaoh. But how many times could she have killed the Nemesis? How many nights had he lain asleep beside her, and rather than cut his throat, she’d clung to his warmth as if he were the only source of heat in the world?

  Everything might’ve been different if not for her cowardice.

  My sister…she might still be alive.

  This monster in front of me might be dead.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why are you here? You don’t want answers. You don’t care about anything. Why?”

  He smirked again. To her, it was the ugliest sight in the world.

  “Because, Thess,” he said too calmly, “I want you to know. You and your family…you’ve always believed your secret is safe from me. Nothing could be more untrue. Even now, my son hunts the last of your matriarchs. Your sisters, your cousins, from the eldest woman to the smallest little girl in training, they are all doomed.”

  She swallowed hard.

  Blinking, she held back her tears.

  How? she wanted to ask. How do you know? For centuries, we’ve—

  “And your hopes of supplanting me with…the other…” Menkaur looked disgusted. “…you and I both know it’s ended. He may be hidden. He might be dead. It matters none. He is alone, and all his guardians annihilated.”

  She couldn’t speak. Her breath caught in her throat, and her skin crawled with an agonizing feeling of cold.

  Mariya…oh God.

  They didn’t just catch me stealing the armor.

  They captured Keshiaa. They found my letter.

  Ten-thousand years from now…this monster will rule the world.

  She wondered if he knew her thoughts, but this time he said nothing. He looked upon her one final time, and she understood she would not see him again. The horror of his wordless intent was written in his eyes:

  ‘When my son returns, you’re dead.’

  The Pharaoh swept away in a whirl of copper robes.

  And Thessia’s torturers began their work.

  * * *

  Days removed from her encounter with the Pharaoh, Thessia sagged in her chains and waited to expire.

  Her torturers had come to her many times, and had inflicted upon her every imaginable form of suffering. Scars welted her calves and shoulders where they’d burned her with heated wires. The skin on her thighs was pocked with dark abscesses from their tiny injections of poison. Her wrists had dislocated from her body’s weight, her toenails had been split, and her lower back wore the scarlet lines of a thousand flechette perforations.

  Still, she lived.

  Every time her torturers inflicted ghastly pain upon her, they also did their best to heal her and prolong her suffering. Ointments and salves, they applied to the worst of her wounds. The weals on her back, they stitched and cauterized. And though she desired nothing more than to die, when they ladled gruel between her lips, she swallowed the foul-tasting stuff without resistance.

  She hated herself.

  In her mind, she was the most wretched creature alive, worse even than Menkaur and his murderous son.

  The longer she dwelled alone in the dark, the more crystalline everything became.

  The Pharaoh hadn’t kept her alive to motivate his son. She could’ve died her very first night in the dark, and Eadunn would’ve never known. The father could’ve spun any tale he wanted—the son had no chance of seeing the truth. The Nemesis was out in the world, busy with his work of butchering the innocent.

  And so she realized:

  The Lord lets me linger for punishment’s sake.

  For his pleasure.

  He blames me for distracting Eadunn.

  For the Prey still being alive.

  Perhaps the Pharaoh was right to punish her. In her years beside the Nemesis, she had worked in subtle ways to ensure the Prey’s continued survival. She had dulled Eadunn’s wits with long nights of lovemaking, conversation, and more than a few droplets of sedatives in his water. She had urged him to send out smaller groups of knights, reassuring him that no one man—not even the Prey—could defeat the Nemesis’ finest warriors. And more than once, she’d sneaked into his ship’s engine room and made what she liked to think of as ‘small adjustments’ to
the dark machinery therein.

  In the end, none of it had mattered.

  And yet…

  While hanging from her chains, even as her life ebbed, she wandered into bottomless thought and emerged with an idea: The Pharaoh hadn’t always known she was among the Sisterhood oath-bound to protect Galen. If he’d known earlier, he’d have captured her sooner, and she would’ve died years ago.

  He’s only just learned.

  He lied to me. He couldn’t have killed them all. Not so quickly.

  He said those things to make me despair.

  The thought gave her hope. However unlikely, however far-fetched, it seemed possible that Mariya, perhaps the most important of the Prey’s protectors, was still alive.

  It could be so, she told herself.

  My letter, it might’ve reached her.

  To this tiny hope, she clung. If little Mariya yet lived, perhaps Saeed’s rebellion stood a chance. If somewhere out in the darkness the Prey survived, he might arrive and overthrow Menkaur once and for all.

  Please.

  Please.

  Please let it be so.

  Hers were fleeting hopes, quickly dispelled when she awoke to the sound of footsteps approaching in the dark. The soft patters on the permanently wet floor drew closer, and she closed her eyes as if doing so might block out the sound. She was certain some new horror approached, and she knew in her heart even if all her hopes came true, she would never live to see it.

  Had she opened her eyes, she would’ve seen.

  The man approaching carried no lantern. No box of instruments. No whips or poisons or pain.

  He was alone. No torturers trailed him. No knives hung from his grasp.

  He hadn’t slipped down into the underworld to hurt her.

  He’d come to rescue her.

  23

  Galen snapped awake to the sound of thunder in the dark.

  In a wet gully between two slate-capped hills, he gazed with bleary eyes into the night, whose ceiling was wracked with lightning, and whose breezes smelled of rain. Thunderclaps shook the wet stones on which he’d slept. He took in a shallow breath, and he knew the storm would arrive in moments.

  Strange it seemed to him—he didn’t remember falling asleep.

  In fact, he’d never intended to close his eyes.

  For twenty days he’d walked with Rameses, and for twenty nights he’d lain awake beneath the stars. He and the little man had wended between countless black hills, through forests of stark, lifeless trees, and across narrow stretches of desert, whose sands were little more than rivers of broken glass.

  He hadn’t slept. During the long, cold nights, he’d found the lowest, darkest places and meditated his hours away. He knew Rameses had every reason to try for revenge, and though the little man was crippled by fear, Galen knew also the power of grief.

  Death changes the living more than the dead, he believed.

  He wants to kill me. A moment of courage is all it will take.

  But on the twenty-first night, returning to consciousness after many hours lost in his dreams, he saw Rameses waking at the same time. The Persi man, his beard huge and dark against his gaunt cheeks, hunkered in the shadows some forty yards away. At such a distance, Galen was all but invisible.

  Ragged lightning scarred the heavens again. Indifferent, Galen shut his eyes a moment longer.

  And remembered.

  He’d dreamed while asleep. Of his mother, her face lined with tears. Of Elia, innocent yet full of quiet wisdom. How long had he talked with them in life, only to realize after their deaths he’d never known them at all? He’d existed for five-hundred years, and yet it seemed he’d never been close to anyone.

  Some small part of him wanted to ache.

  The things he’d forgotten—his mother holding his little hand, the sounds of her laughter and the Nile rushing past, the small kindnesses of women whose names he couldn’t remember—the memories felt as heavy as the night air upon his shoulders.

  If only the rain could wash it all away, the shadow upon him might lift. He might be something other than a hunted man, a scavenger, a monster at night’s edge dreaming always of striding beneath the dawn.

  No.

  The first raindrops pelted him, and he squeezed his eyes shut. He imagined Rameses weeping in the dark, the little man’s heart torn to tatters. He remembered the villagers of Japas, so hopeful to shed the Pharaoh’s yoke they’d broken all their sacred oaths to plan his execution. Ghostlike, the images of a thousand people drifted though his head. They’d died, all of them, some for the tiny sin of sheltering him, and others for merely glimpsing him as he passed—and later falling prey to the Nemesis and his questions.

  Prey. He smirked with his eyes still shut.

  I’m just one, and they hunt me as if I were millions.

  Worthy, I must be.

  The storm arrived.

  Rameses took shelter beneath a tree two-hundred years dead.

  Galen stood in the rain and savored every drop.

  * * *

  On the twenty-first day, beneath skies cloudy and cold, Rameses spoke his first words to Galen since leaving the rotten village.

  “The mountains, they’re behind us,” murmured the little man. Rameses’ skin was so tight against his jaw Galen thought it might tear if he talked too much.

  “Your master waits by the sea,” said Galen. “Is this true?”

  “Very near it. Yes.”

  The two stood side-by-side in a grey and grassless field. To their left, the shadows of distant mountains broke into the cloud bottoms. In all other directions, the vast scrubland stretched out into forever. The rugged landscape was broken by channels of dark water and thickets of stunted trees.

  And it had no end that either of them could see.

  Rameses pointed into the distance. The little man was so exhausted, so beaten down by the journey, his arm shivered as he extended his almost skeletal finger.

  “There. Way out in the delta. The waters are mostly shallow. When the rivers deepen, we’ll use the little bridges. My people…we keep the bridges hidden in the dirt.”

  “Else the Nemesis visits,” Galen remarked.

  The fearful look Rameses shot him told Galen the Nemesis had visited many times already. He imagined how the black warship must’ve looked as it soared over the naked delta, incinerating whole crops of people with its Scimitars and miniature nuclear weapons. The people’s fear must’ve been horrific.

  Watching their brethren die beneath machines they can’t understand.

  Facing down armored men with dark-lances and swords.

  “I’ve been here before,” Galen said to Rameses. “Four-hundred eighty-seven years ago, if I remember right.”

  Rameses stared at him.

  “You wouldn’t know it now…” Galen’s eyes went dark. “But this delta, these plains…there used to be millions of people living here. They built huts on stilts to survive the spring floods. They piloted skiffs up and down the rivers. They fished, planted rice, and lived peaceful lives.”

  Rameses’ eyes were wide. For the first time, his expression was something other than sorrow.

  “They didn’t want any part of the Pharaoh’s war.” Galen nodded at the fields as if the huts, skiffs, and endless rice paddies still existed. “Didn’t matter. A Hindi army a hundred-thousand strong marched through the mountains and moved west across the delta. The Pharaoh had just bombed the Hindi capital into oblivion, and the Kashi, Hindi, and Paki warriors made an alliance. They got it in their heads to cross the sea, float up the Great Canal, and invade the Pyramid.”

  He gazed across the sickly fields. Everything was stunted—the sparse weeds in the corrupted soil twisting toward the sky like starved children grasping for their mother’s teat. Beyond the weeds, grey water flowed in dark channels to the south and west, dumping ancient toxins into a dying ocean.

  It was hard to believe anything had ever lived in such a place.

  “When the Pharaoh found out
about the armies, he dropped his bombs on the delta,” he continued. “They were the last of his arsenal, but he was happy to do it. Most of the people died in the fires. The rest… poisoned by the fallout.”

  “Fallout?” asked Rameses.

  “Death from the sky.” Galen’s eyes were filled with shadows. “Invisible. Silent. Epidemic.”

  Those had been the words of his mother. After all, she had been the one to tell the tale.

  She lived through it—and two-hundred years later told me.

  …and they executed her a few days later.

  Rameses’ face became a blank slate.

  No one had ever told him what had happened to his ancestors. Of the war, of all the horrors that had befallen his forefathers’ lands, he knew nothing.

  “You…you came this way?” Rameses stuttered. “All those years ago?”

  Galen began walking, his ragged sandals scratching on the dry, dusty earth. Remembering his mother had left an ill taste in his mouth. He wished he could forget her. She’d been in his dreams far too often.

  “Looks better than it did five centuries ago,” he called back to Rameses. “Everything was black then, even the water.”

  As he walked away, he felt the weeds crackle beneath him. He splashed through a shallow channel whose waters smelled of death. There were no fish, no reeds on the riverside, no birds singing in the parched, ashen trees whose skeletal limbs clattered in the morning’s breeze.

  Something inside Galen’s heart moved.

  Something told him these lands would suffer again.

  By the Pharaoh’s hands.

  Or another’s.

  * * *

  Long, they walked.

  Across fields bereft of civilization.

  Over troughs of water, sluggish grey rivers, and streams in which only the ugliest, most wretched fish still dared to swim.

  Beneath skies blighted by autumn’s death, the mournful clouds marching across the days as if holding funerary court for the sun.

  Galen rarely shared words with Rameses. The little man, though resilient enough to carry on without sickness or complaint, moved through the hours as though he were a ghost. Galen no longer concerned himself with the possibility of Rameses seeking revenge.