Galen advanced no closer.
“You think I’m an agent of the Nemesis? An assassin?” Saeed raised a black eyebrow.
“I think you stink of river water and sweat, two odors of which I’ve had enough.” Galen’s smirk made its return. “But…give me a sword and I’ll sit wherever you like.”
Saeed belted out a laugh. Galen had read him rightly. The so-called king of Persi had rarely been mocked in his life, and it turned out he rather appreciated a man with spine enough to challenge him.
“If only I’d some steel to give you.” Saeed rolled his massive shoulders. “But that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? You and I and everyone else in the Kingdom of Earth…we’re not allowed swords. Or hammers. Or medicine. Or life. Only He is allowed these things, He and His army.”
Galen folded his arms across his chest.
Now seemed the moment of truth.
“You want me to kill Menkaur?” he asked.
“Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to do all these years?” rumbled Saeed. “My father said you’ve been chased by the Nemesis your entire life…for no other crime than existing. But I know the real reason. You’re a threat to Him. The Nemesis is too much of a coward to take his father’s place—he’s always hiding behind his ships and his knights. But you…you’re a man of salt and fire. You could take His throne and sit a thousand years upon it.”
…or ten-thousand, thought Galen.
Galen had always despised flattery. From a man seated on a chair of sticks and calling himself king, every word rang hollow. The better part of him cried out inside his heart, urging him to leave the hulking king and his pitiful island.
And finish this myself.
And yet…
“If I do this thing for you, what’s your endgame?” he probed, though he already knew the answer.
“You waste little time,” said Saeed. “Is it not customary for us to sit and to drink? We know little of each other’s—”
“I don’t drink,” Galen’s eyes went dark. “And I rarely sit. I’ve travelled a thousand miles, and many thousand more before that. Let’s be rid of customary things. Now tell me—what do want to happen once Menkaur is in the grave?”
“Why, to raise you up as Pharaoh.” Saeed lifted his arms as if in triumph. “The old tyrant will fall, and a new age will be ushered in…by you.”
Galen’s next smirk was nothing like all those that had come before it. The torch’s light shined in his pupils, the smoke gathering around him like a halo.
For all Saeed’s size, Galen knew the big man’s lies were paper-thin.
I see it in him.
He’ll get me to do his dirty work.
And then knife me in the ribs.
These and many more truths, he already knew. For instance, he knew of the men gathering outside, ready to storm in to kill him if he refused Saeed’s offer. He knew also Saeed had a weapon hidden beneath his ugly sackcloth shirt-sleeve.
A dagger, perhaps.
Maybe even a dark-lance.
Something taken from one of Nem’s knights.
None of these truths played a part in his decision. In Saeed’s offer, he saw something for which he’d waited centuries.
A way in.
“Your offer…” He shrugged. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Saeed pushed himself out of his chair and waved off the smoke tendrils writhing from the torch. “If the throne doesn’t tempt you,” he boomed, “perhaps something else will. I know what you need, immortal man. You’re not looking as spry as my men thought you would. There’s grey on you, immortal man, and there’s something you’ve a taste for. I know what Menkaur did to Japas, to the factory hidden there. And I also know he didn’t destroy the Vials. Leastways, not all of them. They’re not destroyed. They’re moved.”
In all his years, Galen couldn’t ever remember betraying his emotion. But there in the smoke, he was sure his eyes glittered with accidental hope.
“The throne and the Vials,” continued Saeed. “For a dead Pharaoh. His son, too, if he’s there. Do we have an arrangement?”
“I assume you have a plan.” Galen shrugged again. “Some way of crossing the Grand Canal, some way of marching across the desert without dying. And then of course, you must have some way of cracking open the Pyramid doors.”
“Will you stay and listen?” said Saeed.
Galen’s journey had been long. His feet were tired, and his beard, as Saeed had noted, contained more than a few strands of grey. If he’d closed his eyes then and there, he reckoned he might fall asleep, a true sleep, and dream again of his mother.
His mother, who had died for him
Of Elly, who’d done the same.
But most of all, he knew he would dream the same thing as five centuries ago, the same thought pumping through his mind at all times, no matter whether he was awake or still.
“I will listen,” he said to the king.
And make this plan my own.
25
On a straw bed, Thessia awoke.
She lay in a small room.
Windowless.
Gloomy.
Alone.
Someone had carried her here. They’d spread a ragged coverlet atop her skinny, scabby body. They’d washed her, chopped away most of her hair, and stitched up the hundred little rips in her pallid skin.
She closed her eyes. Perhaps for a few seconds. Perhaps for many hours. She couldn’t tell the difference.
And she opened her eyes again.
A fire crackled in a stone hearth, and a crude metal pot full of liquid simmered above the flames. For a long while, she fixated on the pot and the fire, using them to recognize she was still alive. Except for the hearth and her bed, the tiny room was empty. A hanging sheet in the room’s only doorway blocked out the rest of…
…what?
A house?
A cellar?
This isn’t the Pyramid.
Where am I?
She tried to sit up. Pain lanced her ribs, and she sank back down with a groan. As long as she lay utterly still, her injuries felt remote, almost absent. But whenever she moved, whether a twitch of her toes or a glance to a different part of the room, everything hurt again.
The body she’d once inhabited was ruined.
From somewhere beyond the hanging sheet, she heard a noise. At first, it sounded like a bird singing. Hope swelled inside her chest, aching in her bones. She listened closer, and the noise drew nearer.
Whistling.
Someone’s whistling.
He pushed aside the sheet and slid into her room. The hearth-light glimmered on his cheeks, and though she didn’t recognize him, she believed she saw kindness in his eyes. He was young and ebon-haired, his jaw cut the same as the stones on the floor beneath his bare feet. He wasn’t here to kill her.
“You?” Her voice sounded meek.
“Me.” He sank to his knees near the hearth and sampled the broth with a wooden spoon. Whatever he cooked smelled like nothing, but he seemed to enjoy its taste. “You remember me, Thessia?”
She blinked hard. Somehow, she hadn’t expected to hear her name spoken aloud ever again.
“No,” she stammered. “I mean…I don’t think so.”
He produced a clay bowl from the floor, ladled it full of broth, and brought the steaming thing to her bed. She tried, but she still couldn’t smell it. In fact, she couldn’t smell anything. It seemed existing for so long in the Pyramid’s underchamber had stolen most of her senses.
“I’m Azid-Dah, Azid-Raul, Azid-Mosha.” He waved his palm through the rising steam. “You can call me Azid. You’re lucky to be alive, Thessia. It’s not every day someone escapes the Lord’s dungeon.”
She peered up at him with tired eyes. Even in the half-light, she caught his smile. How long had it been since someone had smiled at her like that? Had it been her mother? Her little sisters?
She couldn’t remember.
“How?” she managed.
“H
ow did I get you out?” He lifted a spoon of broth to her lips and gently tilted it in. “Well…it’s known there are many ways in and out of that vile place. And they keep it so dark, it’s not as if it’s hard to hide. The man who wailed, he covered up my sounds. Escaping was…easier than I expected.”
“The man? Who wailed?” Her voice sounded like a child’s.
And then she remembered him—the man who wailed. He’d wept and shouted and cried out every time the torturers had come. His voice had echoed in the dark for hours, his wailing fading only when the Pharaoh’s men were finished with their awful work.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“Him?” Azid shook his head. “No, no, not him. His crime was worse even than yours, they say. He was the soldier whose key you stole. He’ll live many months in pain until they extinguish him.”
In the small spaces between her broken thoughts, she realized she had always known the wailing man’s identify. They’d put the unlucky soldier down in the dark at the same time as her. She’d taken advantage of his youth, his naivety, and his lust, and she’d used his key to unlock the armory.
“I meant him no malice.” She felt near to weeping, but swallowed it back and let her anger rise into her throat. “It’s His doing. Him…the Pharaoh. He willed it. For my crime, the boy will die.”
“Yes.” Azid shrugged and spooned more broth into her mouth. “But he was a Lord’s knight. He took an oath to serve our enemy. And for it, we must not pity him.”
She let him feed her. The warm, tasteless stuff slid into her belly, satisfying her none at all. The entire bowl, she sipped in silence. As she lay there, helpless and hurting, Azid explained many things:
He’d rescued her on a moonless night. Weaponless and alone, he’d carried her out of the Pyramid using a secret tunnel, and had brought her to his house in the village.
She’d lain unconscious in his cellar for nearly six days, during which he’d stitched her up, fed her drips of water and soft rice, and washed her body with rags. He told her of many wounds she’d forgotten, and of the dozens of scars which would never heal. Her face, the torturers had left untouched, but the rest of her was a tapestry of ruin.
During the six days, he’d set and bandaged her wrists, which she’d believed were broken, but had been merely dislocated. In a hundred places, he’d lanced her infections, pried out poisoned flechettes, and plucked scorpions’ stingers from their hiding places beneath her skin.
“This would’ve gone on for months,” he told her. “The Pharaoh’s men…it’s what they do. But their mistake is in believing you had nothing to give them, no information worth the Pharaoh’s time.”
“Did I?” Her eyes felt glassy. “The Lord…he came to me...said he already knew. He said there was no plan I could make he hadn’t already thought of. He said—”
Azid squeezed her hand. His palm felt warm around her fingers. No one had ever touched her with such kindness.
Ever.
“Why did you save me?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”
He squeezed her hand once more, and then touched her forehead. She was still feverish, she knew. He pushed aside her beaded sweat and dried his palm on his sackcloth shirt.
“Wasn’t really me who saved you,” he said. “It was Babar. The old man’s been aiding the rebellion for a long while now. He knew something wasn’t right when you stopped visiting. When he and I talked, we both thought the same thing. We knew what happened. It was obvious.”
“You saw Babar?” She felt suddenly drowsy. “Was he…is he…alive?”
“Of course.” Azid smiled. “He’s still in his basement. We’re only a few houses away. Perhaps when you’re better…”
She closed her eyes, and Azid’s voice chased her into sleep.
* * *
Her dreams were agony.
Of dead faces, of skinless bones hanging from chains, and of the Pharaoh himself shambling like a ghoul through a lightless abyss, she imagined while asleep. Even here, down in the depths of her drowsing mind, she despised herself.
She remembered how it had come to this.
On a cloudless day, as the Nile’s water had churned through her dangling toes, her mother had come to her.
‘It’s time,’ she’d said to Thessia.
Thessia had leapt up from the shore and followed her mother through the sand. She’d waited for this day all her life. As one of many daughters, she’d always known her destiny, and she’d embraced it.
We are sisters, all of us.
We are beacons in the night, candles still burning.
We are many. We are sacred. We are soldiers in a war yet to be waged.
The Lord of the Sands must die.
And we must make it so.
In a house of woven reeds and dry timbers plucked from the thickets beside the river, she’d spoken her oaths before her family. Her youngest sisters, some tottering behind her, others still mewling, looked on with wide eyes as she recited the same words her mother, grandmother, and countless generations had uttered before her.
She’d taken her words with grave seriousness. She’d meant them. In her heart, she believed she would be the one to end the Pharaoh’s reign and help another rise to the world’s throne.
When her mother, knowing full well the sacrifice, had laid the trap and summoned the Nemesis with contraband machines, Thessia had stood with her sisters on the shore. Many men had died that day, and many others had lost everything.
But the trap had worked. Thessia and a few of her sisters, as rare in beauty as they were in intellect, had been snatched up as prisoners and spirited away in the hands of those they were to destroy.
Only…
Nothing else went according to plan.
In the Nemesis’ presence, whether aboard his ship or tucked away in his Pyramid chambers, she stirred with something other than her oath. She listened to Eadunn’s angst, heard him weeping at night, and she understood that although he’d worked more horrors than any man who’d ever lived, he was still human.
Immortal.
Cruel.
Evil…perhaps.
But not the monster my family made him out to be.
She’d wrestled with it for years. Her mother had warned her many times not to accept the Nemesis’ small kindnesses. But love him she did. And the more she learned of his father’s abuse, of the lies the Pharaoh told, and of the black deeds Eadunn worked in the fragile hope of ending the war and returning the world to peace, the more she believed she understood.
The things he does…he does for a greater good yet unspoken.
She’d believed it then, and for many years thereafter. Hopelessly in love, her family scattered and lost, her oaths were forgotten. She’d succeeded in every way, gained access to the Nemesis’ secrets, earned countless opportunities to kill him and his lieutenants as they slept.
And yet…
She never grasped her final moment of courage.
Perhaps she’d known all along. Her family, along with all the others in the Sisterhood, believed in the rise of the Prey, as if another immortal were the key to everyone’s salvation. The Sisterhood’s oaths were wise, their goal of driving out the Pharaoh as noble a cause as any.
But why him? Why the Prey? Thessia had always wondered.
Why, if we are not slaves, are we bound to anoint another immortal to be our ruler?
Why not one of us?
Why not…no one at all?
With such thoughts in mind, she’d stayed her dagger from the Nemesis’ throat.
She’d worked in subtler ways, following her oath in smaller, quieter ways. But her doubt had spoiled her, and although the things she did often benefitted the rebellion and the Prey, she began not to believe.
Why? she’d wondered countless nights.
Why am I here?
What have I become?
The answer had never come.
In her dreams, she encountered the ghosts of all her indecisions. No matter the setting, whethe
r blighted desert or crumbling, prehistoric city, she arrived at the same vision.
The Pharaoh forever reigning.
The world dying…because of what I couldn’t do.
* * *
She felt better upon waking.
Her fever had dried up, and the swelling in her wrists was lesser than before.
Azid pushed past the curtain and entered her room. She said nothing, just watched as he stoked the fire, hung a fresh pot in the hearth, and looked at her with another of his abundant smiles. She’d lain in the room for a full ten days, and although she despaired during sleep, her waking hours were full of accidental hope.
“How deep does it go?” she said at last. “The rebellion, I mean.”
Azid sat on the floor beside her. He looked weary as if from a full day’s work, the sand and sweat still gleaming on his skin. She had the distinct feeling it was night beyond his walls.
“Deeper than you know,” he answered. “Something’s happening soon, Thessia. It will take place in Alexandria, as you know. When the Lord’s caravans arrive for early inspection, it will begin. It’s been decades in the planning, this war. God be blessed I’m alive in the days of its arrival.”
“They’ll cut off his supplies, his food, and he’ll be forced to come out of the Pyramid,” she reasoned.
“Yes. And when he does, we’ll be waiting,” said Azid.
She retreated into thought. Azid went to the hearth and stirred her broth. She was tired of the tasteless stuff, having grown used to the Pyramid’s elegant fare, but she admitted she always slept well after eating. The broth had the effect of making her forget her worries and her pain, for which she was grateful.
“Why me?” she asked. “You still haven’t said. You’re putting an awful lot of effort into healing me. But who am I to the rebellion? My chances to matter are all used up.”
Azid shook his head and grinned. “Hardly, Thess. In a way, you’re the key to all this. There’s a secret in need of protecting. You’re in the Sisterhood, and you’re one of very few the Pharaoh hasn’t sent his son to butcher.”
Lords of the Black Sands Page 21
