Lords of the Black Sands

by J. Edward Neill

  The thought of his mother dying moved like cold electricity through his body. He stood in a sea of white-coated scientists, stunned and aching. His thoughts flashed to another place, to a crucifix in the sand and a great pyre licking his mother’s blackened bones.

  He hadn’t seen her execution.

  But just like the creation of the immortality-granting chemical, he knew. Others had told him. It was all so very clear.

  “This is the beginning of the end,” he said to his mother. “Ah…god…if only I could see your face.”

  The scientists interrupted his reverie with applause. The baby had survived the initial injection, and its cries were loud and full of fury. He could only barely hear the clamor, however. Everything in his dream was muted, drowned out by shadows he couldn’t see.

  He blinked.

  And awoke again in a cold, white room.

  At a small round table, with barren walls surrounding him, he sat in a chair opposite a woman. She was a scientist—her white coat and specialized glasses gave her away. She looked utterly calm, yet somehow grave.

  When she spoke, it wasn’t her voice.

  But Galen’s mother’s.

  “Had they known…had they only known.” She shook her head. “Two immortals were made in the beginning, yet with the promise of millions more. And then a scientist—his name was Hasib—he didn’t believe. He saw what the rest of them could not. He contaminated the Blue Liquid with subtle chemical changes, and the project died. Hasib was jailed, the project decommissioned, and the laboratory shut away into darkness. They let it all go, and yet they never could’ve known what Menkaur would do when he grew up. Even I, the ever-trusting one…I didn’t see it coming. Everyone thought we were gods. How could we have known Menkaur would take it to heart? How could we have seen his mind, what he planned for the world?”

  Galen reached across the table to touch the woman’s hand, but remembered she was not his mother, only a ghost who’d stolen her voice.

  “Why am I dreaming this?” He pulled his hand away. “I know these things. I know what happens next.”

  “The world burned, and you, my firstborn, were just a baby.” Tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks, yet she looked no less placid. “For two centuries, Menkaur planned it. And what mind has ever been so perfect as his? Love, they called me. But him, they only called Lord. He would accept no other title—he told me the same on the day he killed me.”

  Galen felt a crack in his stoic self. His neck felt cold, his fingers frozen to the table. He might have risen to shatter his dreamed-of walls, but his mother, or her simulacrum, reached out for him.

  “Galen…” she said his name.

  “I will bury him.” He clenched his teeth. “Beneath the sand he so cherishes to burn and rule, I will bury him a hundred miles down. Watch me, Mother. Watch.”

  “Galen, Love.” Her voice remained impossibly calm. “I brought you here for a reason. Don’t do this thing you’re planning. You don’t have to. Kill him if you must, but don’t do it for me. Don’t follow your dream...your black dream. You know the one of which I speak. Walk away from it. Turn…and walk forever away.”

  She knows, he thought.

  Even in death, even here, she knows.

  He rose from the table and backed away from the woman. It was all a lie, he knew. She wasn’t real. Nothing was real here. The laboratory, the children they’d sacrificed on the altar of science, even his mother—they were all gone.

  Everyone was dead.

  Except Him.

  “I’ve things to do.” He tugged his hand out of his mother’s. “You know what they are. You’re gone. You’re all gone. There’s only one way this can end.”

  “Galen…” she called to him. “Galen, please.”

  “Galen…”

  “Galen, listen…”

  “Please—”

  * * *

  He woke in the grass well before sunrise.

  The wind bent the frosted grey reeds, and they danced all around him, paled by the starlight, crackling like a sea of bones.

  It was winter here, but Galen couldn’t feel it as he had in past centuries. He’d spent so many years in the north, so many decades in places far colder, far deadlier, the cold here felt almost pleasant. The flat, dry expanse of the Tabuk plain, tortured by winds that came from every direction, offered no hint of the warmer seas to the west.

  But to Galen, Tabuk was just another road.

  The stars were no different here than anywhere else. The dry, cold winds were no worse than crawling closer to mortality with each day. Unbothered, he sat up and rubbed the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes. Saeed and his servants had given him boots and a cloak, and in his ragged grey garments he looked wild—a desert wolf, a scorpion in a man’s skin.

  He only wished he had a sword.

  For a week, they’d marched north and west across the Tabuk. The deltas in the south had given way to deserts, and the deserts had tumbled into scrublands. Each night had grown chillier—even so many centuries removed from the Pharaoh’s war, the Kingdom of Earth suffered winters far colder than before.

  Several dozen among the scattered hundreds of Saeed’s men had died along the way.

  Rameses had been among them.

  His cloak catching the wind, Galen stood. In the darkness, he glimpsed black clouds racing across the stars, waging war against the fragile moonlight in the north.

  Men slept in the grass all around him. Alone and in pairs, they dozed like corpses. And corpses they might soon be, if not from marching sixteen hours per day, then surely from what awaited them in the west.

  Galen was no fool.

  Though Saeed promised an army gathering at the western Tabuk shores and ships enough to carry them across the Great Canal to the Pharaoh’s land, Galen knew better than to hope.

  The Pharaoh’s eyes may have missed me.

  Maybe even our scattered band.

  But if Saeed’s thousands come together, how long can we hide?

  He looked to the west. The shadows were deepest there, blanketing the land in darkness thick enough to defeat even his immortal eyes.

  But he knew.

  He closed his eyes and imagined.

  Two more days of walking, maybe three.

  Then the Great Canal.

  And beyond, the Pharaoh’s desert.

  Mother’s cross will be buried under an ocean of sand by now.

  He heard the grass snap out of rhythm at his back. One of Saeed’s lieutenants, a skinny young man named Tablii, shuffled across the scrub and stopped a few feet to Galen’s right. Galen and Tablii had spoken at times during the long march. The two would never be friends, but Tablii was far less hostile than most of Saeed’s men, and so Galen tolerated him.

  “Do you believe it? In the army? In defeating the Lord,” asked Tablii. The young man’s voice nearly melted in the night’s wind.

  “Your master would kill you for asking such questions.” Galen smirked. “Yet here you are. Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

  Tablii followed Galen’s watchful gaze into the west. The wind buffeted the boy, nearly toppling him.

  “I’m not tired,” he said to Galen. “I’m afraid. Of the desert. Of the Nemesis. Even of you.”

  Galen shrugged. “I’m not much danger without a sword—the wind will sooner kill you than anything I do. And the desert? We’ll march by night and hide during the day.”

  “What about the Nemesis? And his ship?” Tablii worried. “My sister, she says she saw it once. In the Umbali, when the Lord’s men came to kill Lord Saeed’s family, she said they carried strange weapons. Some could melt whole houses. Others could cut men in half from a hundred paces without making a sound.”

  Galen shook his head. “A hundred paces? No. At a hundred paces, a dark-lance would burn you, but not cut you in half. As for the Scimitars…most of Nem’s knights don’t have them. They’re expensive to make and easy to destroy. Hit one square with a rock, and you’ll shatter it. Besides, Sa
eed tells me the men coming down from the north have bows and arrows. The arrows won’t break the knights’ armor, but a good shot could crack a Scimitar.”

  “Oh…” Tablii didn’t sound convinced.

  “Are you a coward, Tablii?” Galen asked.

  The young man retreated into thought. Galen gave him credit where he’d given Saeed’s other men none. The others would’ve bristled at being called a coward, and might’ve reached for one of their wooden clubs, mallets, or stick knives. They’d yet to learn proper respect.

  But they will.

  And soon.

  “I’m afraid, but I’ll fight,” said Tablii. “I don’t like the idea of the boats. The only boats I’ve ever been on were the little rafts we used for island-hopping on the river. This Great Canal, it’s big and deep, says Lord Saeed. He says—”

  “Great metal ships long ago sailed it.” Galen cut in. “Vast giant hulls filled with things to trade across the world. Some could fit hundreds of people inside. Others had weapons that could strike cities and armies a thousand miles away.”

  “You…you saw these?” Tablii’s eyes widened.

  “No.” Galen smirked again. “I mean, yes…I’ve seen their corpses. Rotten and rusted giants, they were. Most were destroyed in their harbors. Others, the Pharaoh sank to the bottom of the sea. But no, I’ve never seen one alive. Someone told me about them when I was child. I have only her stories.”

  He’d told himself upon waking to forget his mother.

  And yet here she is.

  “The ships we’ll use won’t be metal giants,” he continued. “Little wooden things, with paddles, not so different from island hoppers. Your master says each one will have a mirror to protect against dark-lances. He stole the mirrors, he says, from a warehouse belonging to the enemy.”

  “Do you…do you think the mirrors will help?” asked Tablii.

  No, he wanted to say.

  Nothing will help.

  “You’ll be fine, boy.” He shrugged. “The Great Canal isn’t even a mile across. The boats we’re using, we’ll only be aboard for a minute or two. And then we’ll storm the other side. You might even get lucky. If Saeed’s right, the Pharaoh’s soldiers won’t see us coming.”

  Tablii shivered and fell silent. Most of Saeed’s other men wore their bravado like a shield, but Galen sensed Tablii was wiser than the rest.

  He sees the storm coming.

  Like me, he knows.

  “I should go,” said Tablii after a long while of waiting for dawn to break the night.

  “Yes. You should.” Galen nodded. “See those rocks over there? The little stones covered with frost?” He pointed to a patch of scrub grass in which a handful of rough stones were hiding.

  “Yes.” Tablii squinted in the starlight.

  “Take a few,” said Galen. “Hide them in your clothes. If one of Nem’s knights points a black disc at you, throw the stone. Throw it hard…and pray.”

  Grateful, Tablii shuffled off and knelt to gather three half-fist sized stones. Galen watched him for a while, then gazed west again, where the clouds danced in an endless black line. They looked ready for war, the clouds, and he couldn’t help but crack a secret grin.

  When Tablii was gone and the night quiet once more, Galen knelt and lifted one stone. He studied it in the starlight for a moment, tossed it up and caught it, and laid it down in the dirt.

  28

  He lingered at the crater’s edge.

  And he watched the burning of the world’s dead.

  Smoke from several hundred flattened houses danced in the bitter wind. The largest of the fires had gone out and most of the dust had settled, but a deadly grey broth roiled in the crater’s bottom, curling like the fingers of all those who’d died.

  The great hollow stretched at least a hundred yards in diameter, a black bowl of death created by a single miniature warhead.

  It had been overkill.

  The village had only been two or three-hundred people, with just a handful of machines between them all.

  But Volkan had insisted.

  ‘We’ll use a mini-nuke,’ the Pharaoh’s servant had sneered. ‘Why not? This is our last target before we go home.’

  Eadunn knelt and snared a handful of ashes in his armored fingers. Children had been playing nearby when the bomb had struck. They’d no notion of machines or Pharaohs or fear of death from the sky. They’d been chasing each other through the alleys of a city made of rocks and mud.

  And they’d been laughing.

  He wondered if it was their ashes tumbling between his fingers.

  “Lord?” One of Volkan’s knights arrived behind Eadunn. “Sir Volkan wishes to leave now. We’ve checked. Everyone’s dead here. No survivors. No machines remain.”

  Eadunn looked skyward. The final ashes slid between his fingers, and the wind turned them into nothing.

  These people…they made shovels and axes, he recalled.

  And a wagon.

  And a hand-driven mill for their grain.

  To reward their ingenuity…

  …we turned them into ashes.

  “Lord?” the knight said again. The voice behind the black mask was young and deferential. For as hard as Volkan had tried to ensure none of the men respected him, Eadunn remained the Nemesis. He was his father’s son, after all. No edict or law or petty warlord could contain the image he’d worked so hard to create.

  He’d killed more people than any man who’d ever lived.

  And Volkan’s men, on all ten of the Black Fleet’s ships, knew it.

  He stood and faced the young knight. The boy was clad in ebon greaves and a dark mask. His Scimitar disc hung from his shoulder, while two short swords dangled from his waist. Had any villager seen him, they’d have run in terror.

  But the villagers were all dead.

  Eadunn knew the boy as Hanzo, just nineteen and freshly anointed. Hanzo had replaced another knight who’d died of an accidental dark-lance sweep. They never lasted long, Volkan’s knights. Just like the peasants they hunted, they died of violence, sickness, and the poisons still present in everything.

  “How many is it, Hanzo?” he asked the young knight. “How many, since we began?”

  Hanzo pulled off his mask. The truth lay behind the cold, hard steel. The young knight’s pale face, pocked with sores and riven with the shallow confidence of youth, betrayed everything.

  “Sorry, Lord,” said Hanzo. “I don’t follow.”

  “How many machines have we erased?” Eadunn glanced across the crater. “And how many people? Is it ten people for every one hammer and nail? Maybe fifteen? What do you think?”

  Hanzo blinked hard. The question itself was heresy, not that the young knight would dare report the Nemesis.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to answer,” said Eadunn. “It’s funny how immortality works. The people here couldn’t possibly have been a threat for at least a hundred, maybe two-hundred more years. No one should have cared about them, what they did, what they learned or created. But the Pharaoh, he plays the forever game. In his world, no machine is too small to destroy. No idea, however simple, can be allowed to flourish.”

  Hanzo cracked a tiny smile. The young man must’ve mistaken Eadunn’s words for praise leveled at the Pharaoh and his policy of pre-elimination.

  “If we don’t destroy them now, they’ll rise up and forget their place.” Hanzo repeated something Volkan had often said.

  But Hanzo betrayed himself. He didn’t believe it, not really. He did only as fear commanded him.

  Fear of Volkan.

  Of hunger and thirst.

  Of being among the very people he’d pledged to annihilate.

  Behind his mask, Eadunn made a face that might’ve withered Hanzo. But Hanzo divined nothing, knowing only that Eadunn turned and marched away.

  Up the metal stairs and into the hull of Volkan’s mighty warship, Eadunn strode. How many times he’d ascended into the ship’s belly, he no longer counted. It was a steril
e place, all steel and cold and death.

  Few places felt more soulless than the grim corridors of his father’s Pyramid.

  Few places beyond Volkan’s warship.

  As Eadunn ascended, he saw the faces of the men who’d helped maintain the slaughter of peasants across the world. They were mostly young, yet entirely haggard, their broken gazes betraying not courage, but the subtle fear of Volkan’s punishment should they falter. They sat on their steel benches, tearing off their armor, looking gaunt, pale, and far from human.

  Of Volkan’s original crew, only four knights remained. The rest had been replaced multiple times, keeping the warship’s active number between thirty-five and forty.

  We feed them dust. Eadunn looked at them.

  Our water purifier barely operates.

  Half are sick.

  The other half would be the worst of criminals in any other society.

  They hunkered in the ship’s bay, hanging their weapons and armor on racks. Eadunn walked through their ranks without a word. Old or new, sick or exhausted, they stopped whatever they were doing when he passed. He’d saved many of them from death at Habiru hands, and he’d intimidated their enemies with his voice—and his mask—and his presence alone.

  They’d learned to respect him despite what Volkan wanted.

  And they’d learned to fear him.

  On this eve, with the last of many hundred villages smoldering outside, they shrank in his presence. He thundered through the warship’s corridors, and they sensed his disgust, daring no words in his direction. He swept past them and cut into the ship’s inner halls. He ignored their whispers, their shivers, and the ashes stuck to their faces.

  Down he marched, his boots hammering hard as he followed the main hall into his tiny cabin.

  Even Volkan, who stared down his hooked nose as Eadunn opened his door, said nothing.

  Inside his cabin, Eadunn stood in the pale light of a single lantern. He stripped off his armor as though it were poisonous. His mask, greaves, gauntlets, and breastplate collapsed onto the grated floor and fell silent in the aftermath. In his black underclothes, reeking of smoke and death, he shivered. It was a feeling he’d endured for many years.