Lords of the Black Sands

by J. Edward Neill

  Half the fleet gone.

  In twenty seconds.

  Which ship belongs to Eadunn?

  Of the five remaining warships, four banked hard to the east. Galen imagined their crews’ surprise. The Nemesis and his soldiers must’ve believed the night would be an easy one—just an hour or two of scouring the sand against nothing deadlier than stones and peasants’ shouts. Knowing the Nemesis’ preferred manner of soldier, Galen reckoned the knights had made a game of it.

  Who can kill the most?

  Fresh water and clean concubines for the crew who’s best at murder.

  For a half-breath, he watched the ships wheeling toward the Canal and wondered if they’d see him. He dared not risk being spotted, not now so close to the end. Slithering along the sand, he crawled to the water’s edge and sucked in a vast breath

  And then went under.

  The water felt bitterly cold. He bristled as he sank, tasting salt, oil, and death, and he tumbled without resistance to the bottom. Down in the black, his feet sticking to the cold silt, he closed his eyes and listened to the muted cataclysm above.

  The next several explosions were so powerful, he felt them ten feet down. Ripples thundered through the water, while tiny chunks of metal splashed over his head. He heard one warship erupt, then another, then two more. The night was alive with fire. Sickly red light glimmered atop the Canal, a crimson glaze on the water’s surface lasting a full minute before fading to black.

  Balled up at the Canal’s bottom, Galen counted to one-hundred in his head before kicking himself back to the top. When he surfaced, he gulped the night air. He hadn’t been down for longer than three minutes, and yet his breaths were ragged things, his throat raw and hurting in the frigid night.

  First thing to go…my lungs, he mocked himself.

  Nine explosions. He was sure he’d counted nine. Drifting closer to the shore, he stuck his head high enough out of the water to see the fires littering the ground. Nine, indeed. His beard dripping, he glimpsed three ships on the eastern bank, their pyres licking the night. Six more dotted the western sands, farther away but still powerful enough to illuminate the earth for many miles.

  In the center of it all, Saeed’s army cheered. Their shouts, raw and exhilarated, must’ve reached all the way to the Pyramid.

  Galen knew Saeed’s desire. The so-called king wanted silence from his subjects, obedience until the very moment Menkaur was cast down.

  And yet…

  Even he must enjoy this.

  In five centuries, no one had felled a single one of the Pharaoh’s warships. And now, in one night, nine had been knocked from the sky. The army’s roar made a thunder far louder than any ship, the cries of five-hundred years’ oppression released in a spasm that shook the desert for miles.

  Galen might’ve cheered with them.

  After all, how many times had the Nemesis tried to kill him?

  How many of the Pharaoh’s weapons had he evaded?

  How many seconds of peace had he enjoyed between the decades of terror?

  One thing stuck out amid the army’s joyous shouts.

  Nine ships.

  Not ten.

  One of Saeed’s sleeper agents has failed.

  He clambered to his feet, yet remained close to the water. He dared not cross, not yet. His life had honed his intuition to a razor, and he knew in his heart something was wrong.

  Something screamed in the sky.

  It whistled, then screeched, and finally tore a scar in the night.

  The tenth ship, a vessel larger than the rest, whipped over the Canal, soaring east to west. Just ahead of it, a silver capsule sped, propelled by a smoking blue flame.

  Warhead, Galen knew.

  A big one.

  You destroyed one ship too few, Saeed.

  The giant warship sped up and into the clouds. In an instant, it was gone, vanished into a place even Galen had never climbed.

  Far below, the silver missile cut through the dark, entering the airspace just above Saeed’s army. The soldiers were still reveling, their faces lit red by the fires of the fallen warships. They couldn’t hear the missile, so lost were they in the ecstasy of triumph.

  Galen averted his eyes. He tried to think of something else, something peaceful to pass the coming moment, but he’d cast his mother and Elia out, and all he could think was—

  This is how it has to be.

  The warhead never touched the ground. A few thousand feet above the army, it detonated. It was the last in the Pharaoh’s once-mighty nuclear arsenal, and perhaps the most catastrophic. When it ruptured, its fire took the shape of a giant sphere, a hellish orb hotter than the sun itself. The fire was all colors at once, yellow in its heart, crimson at its edges, and burning black as it neared the earth.

  Galen allowed himself a few seconds to watch the horror unfold. He couldn’t look straight at the thing, lest he burn away his retinas. But in his peripheral vision he saw the fireball blossom.

  He imagined the thousands of soldiers beneath it.

  Joyous, and now dead.

  An instant before the fell wind hit the place he’d stood, he plunged back into the water. This time, he didn’t come up after three minutes, when his lungs screamed for air. Nor at five, when his entire body shook. He surfaced only after ten full minutes, and for ten more lay on the sands of the western shore, gasping, retching, and quaking down to his bones.

  When it was done, he looked westward.

  The clouds were burned away, the fires extinguished, and ashes rained down from heavens unseen.

  Nothing lived out there in the dark, nothing but black sand.

  Dead. They’re all dead.

  It’s easier this way.

  Thank you, Eadunn.

  32

  The black vessel touched down in the empty airfield.

  It settled in the dust, birthing thunder in one moment, and falling silent as a coffin in the next.

  When its engines died, and when the dust scattered into the starless night, the world and everything in it went still.

  The Black Fleet, though mostly destroyed, had completed the work Menkaur had envisioned.

  Tens of thousands of people—dead.

  The Habiru—exterminated.

  Saeed and his treacherous army—burned away to ashes.

  Long after the ship landed, Eadunn Varwarden remained within his cabin. Volkan had banged on his door, but Eadunn gave no reply. Other knights had roamed the ship’s hallways, boasting of their final victory, cheering the lie that they would return to their lives and know peace until the end of their days.

  Eadunn heard none of it.

  When the noises passed, and as the ship’s knights stepped outside to the realization that the rest of the Black Fleet had never returned, Eadunn stood in his tiny cabin.

  And gazed down upon Thessia.

  “How?” She begged to know. Kneeling on the grated floor, shadows slanting across her dirty face, she willed herself not to weep. Her shawl was pooled around her knees, and her ragged hair lay in lank strips upon her forehead.

  She was a woman defeated, Eadunn knew.

  “It was a lie,” she said in a broken voice. “The real attack was to be in Alexandria. Not here. Not in the desert. It was a lie. How could the Pharaoh have known? I tore Azid’s letter into pieces. Your Father’s satellites…they could not have seen Saeed.”

  From the moment Eadunn had found her hiding in his cabin one night ago, she’d tried to convince him. With whispers, with quiet pleas, with fists quaking and eyes full of fury, she had tried:

  “…the attack will be upon the Pyramid,” she’d lied.

  “…your ships should go east, not north to Alexandria.”

  “…the Prey will be with them.”

  “Please, you must believe me.”

  And yet, how could she have known?

  The attack upon Alexandria had always been a lie. Eadunn knew it, and Volkan, but Thessia had been tricked. The Pharaoh’s agents had sprinkle
d their misinformation across the years, and had convinced the world, even Saeed, that Menkaur believed in the plot to destroy Alexandria.

  But it was never true.

  Menkaur had always known.

  He had engineered it.

  He had allowed—even arranged for—his enemies to gather in great number against him.

  …for the sheer convenience of annihilating them all at once.

  And so, when Eadunn had countered Thessia’s pleas with the truth, she had died a tiny death on the floor of his cabin.

  “We already knew the attack was to be against the Pyramid,” he’d said.

  Her eyes had lit up, though only for a span of seconds. “Then you believe me?” she’d asked.

  “I do.” His whole body had sagged. “But not for the reason you hope. Father wants Saeed to think his defenses will be at Alexandria. He’s laid the trap—for many years he’s been busy with it.”

  “I don’t understand.” Thessia had sunken. The door was locked, and no others had learned of her presence.

  “The sleeper agents,” Eadunn had continued, “the ones who infiltrated the satellite tower—Father knows. He knows about Saeed, about Galen, about everything. You can’t be surprised, Love. This is the game he plays, and no one plays it better.”

  “You knew I was lying.” She’d gazed down into nothing. “You knew, but you’re not angry.”

  “No,” he’d said. “Never angry. Not with you.”

  Now she knelt before him, the cold bars in the grated floor biting her knees and shins. Eadunn felt nothing but pity for her, nothing but a vast welling of anger against everything else. Thessia saw it and at last looked him in his tired eyes.

  “Your fingers…what happened to your fingers?”

  He held up his hand. The memory of Galen’s sword clipping through bone and sinew lingered in his mind, and yet he’d all but forgotten his fingers were still missing.

  “The Prey,” he grunted. “It’s a small matter. I lose two fingers. I take a hundred-thousand lives.”

  “You’ll kill me now.” She dropped her gaze to the floor again. “I’ve revealed myself as your enemy. I lied to you. And even if you don’t kill me, your father will. Or that other man, that Volkan.”

  Eadunn regarded her. Her hair was crudely cut, her forearms laced with scars. The lines on her sad yet beautiful face ran deep, while her mouth no longer seemed capable of shaping even the smallest smile. The sharp, youthful girl he’d left behind had been destroyed, and in her place knelt a soul forever lost.

  A woman waiting to die.

  While shivering in the corner of his room, she’d told him much:

  Of the dark place beneath the Pyramid.

  Of the man named Azid.

  Of Babar’s rings.

  She was a betrayer. She always had been. And yet he loved her no less.

  Perhaps even more.

  “Give me the dark-lance,” he said to her. He’d seen it sticking out of her shawl moments after finding her hiding in his cabin. She hadn’t tried to use it against him.

  If she had, he might not have tried to stop her.

  She slid the evil thing out of her cloth belt and handed it to him with trembling fingers. Her shivers were so fierce, she nearly dropped it.

  “I’m not going to kill you.” He tucked the dark-lance away.

  “It doesn’t matter.” She looked up again. Her eyes, half hidden beneath her filthy lashes, were black and empty. “No matter what happened here, even if I succeeded, death was going to have me. If you won’t take my life, someone else will.”

  “Answer me this—” he countered. “You had many chances to kill me. You could’ve done it at any time. You knew I trusted you. So…why not? I’m your enemy. Think of how many you could’ve saved.”

  She shook her head. The last of her tears sloughed away, and he saw at last the darkness within her.

  “I loved you,” she declared without emotion. “You who have slaughtered so many. It was the one thing of which my mother warned me. ‘Do not be seduced,’ Mother said. ‘Honor your sisters. Take one of their beds, but find no comfort therein.’ And I didn’t, not at first. But then I saw the truth. I saw your face when you returned from talking to your father. I felt your pain with my fingers. I knew. I knew…you were not this man he’d made you be.”

  “But I am, Thessia. I am the Nemesis.”

  “The Nemesis.” She looked like she wanted to spit. “And what is that, anyway? It’s a mask any man could wear. And if that man should die, another could wear it, and so on until no one remembered the face behind it. Five-hundred years, you’ve lived, and you still don’t see it. You think your work is done, Nemesis? You think your father will love you now? No. When you tell him what’s happened, when you tally the dead, he’ll see the sorrow in your eyes. He’ll see your humanity and he’ll kill you on the spot. He’s immortal—men who live forever have no heirs. The Sisterhood has long known it. Once every memory of every machine is destroyed, the next pile of ashes will be Eadunn’s. Yours.”

  He’d never heard her speak so harshly. The Thessia he’d known had been a gentle creature, whispering soft wisdom into his ear. But the woman before him burned with the fury of a dying star. She was a powerful thing, and she always had been.

  The Thessia I knew was a lie.

  But she’s right.

  Father…he’ll know my heart.

  He’ll destroy me.

  Wordless, he retreated to his cabin door. Still dressed in his armor—as if he’d needed it to drop a nuclear warhead upon men armed with sticks and arrows—he looked once more upon Thessia and then shambled out into the ship’s central hallway.

  The hall was dark.

  One light glimmered at its far end, beyond which voices jostled in the night.

  He walked. It seemed to take forever, his long, slow march away from Thessia and down the metal floor to the ship’s ramp. His armor, the walls, the smell of the vacant, lusterless steel—it all felt alien. With every step, he began to separate himself from the centuries-old beliefs he’d held so dear.

  With his first step, he knew his father had lied. There would be no peace. Menkaur would never suffer a rival, least of all his own progeny.

  With his next steps, he counted his life’s deeds. Had he ever known joy? Could he remember his mother’s face? No. He recalled nothing. His mother had died only a few months after he’d been born. Indoctrinated since his very first breaths, he knew only the sword.

  Had he ever extended his hand not to kill, but to show kindness? Or mercy? Even once?

  Yes.

  Once.

  But that was all.

  Before reaching the ramp, he remembered.

  Down in the dim lights below the ramp, Volkan held court, explaining to a number of men that yes, the rest of the Fleet had been annihilated, but it didn’t matter now that Saeed was dead. The hawk-nosed commander gloated over the victory, giving no credit to anyone but himself…and the Pharaoh’s final bomb.

  Standing beside Volkan, his young, scarred face only barely visible in the lantern-lights, Hanzo glanced warily up to Eadunn.

  Eadunn felt frozen by the young knight’s gaze.

  I let him live.

  I didn’t tell his secret.

  I removed the bomb.

  If I hadn’t…if I’d been brave…if I’d allowed myself to die and the last ship to be destroyed…

  I’d have done the first honorable thing in my life.

  He stood atop the ramp, unmoving. His bones rattled beneath his skin, shaken as if his immortality had chosen that very moment to flee. Again, Hanzo looked up at him. The boy’s eyes seemed to question, ‘Will you sell me to Volkan now? Am I to die?’

  But the only man Eadunn wanted to die…was himself.

  His moment of truth had come and passed him by. His chance to end his father’s reign had slipped through the few fingers remaining on his ruined hand.

  A coward, I am.

  I wanted the bomb to go off.
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  To kill me.

  To save them.

  And I did nothing.

  His jaw tightened. His throat felt full of words he would never be able to say. He wasn’t aware of Thessia’s presence at his side until he felt her fingers close around his armored wrist.

  …and until Volkan looked up and saw them both standing atop the ship’s ramp.

  The two lovers.

  The two betrayers.

  “Whatever happens,” Eadunn whispered to Thessia, “stay on the ship,”

  She showed no reaction, but he knew she’d heard.

  “Lo!” Volkan erected himself at the ramp’s bottom. With one crow-like finger, he pointed up at Thessia and sneered. “There’s the creature. You weren’t wrong, Al-Muham. That’s the one. The Sister. And look, she’s found her lover—the Lord Varwarden, perhaps not as blessed in his father’s eyes as he’d hoped.”

  The knights and the man Volkan had named Al-Muham stared up the ramp. They looked frozen in time, sensing the hostility between Volkan and Eadunn.

  Eadunn glowered at Volkan.

  Who was this gaunt, soulless man his father had conscripted?

  How was it Volkan relished his butcher’s work with such abandon?

  How dare he replace me?

  The last of Eadunn’s pride smoldered beneath his breastplate. A braver man would have killed Volkan years ago, would have cut him down even as he stood laughing upon fields soaked with blood.

  Perhaps it’s not too late, thought Eadunn.

  “I see I’ve offended your Highness,” Volkan laughed. None of the other knights dared say anything. Hanzo paled. Even Al-Muham, ruthless as he was, lacked the nerve to mock the Pharaoh’s son.

  The silence did nothing but inspire Volkan.

  “The witch Thessia.” He crooked his finger at her. “Rebel whore—how did you steal your way onto my ship? Not that it matters. All your dreams are dead. Why do you hide behind Lord Eadunn? Don’t you know where we’re taking him? To the Lord of the Sands, of course. Your Eadunn can’t protect you, not from Him.”

  Thessia stood tall. Eadunn felt something like love swell inside him.