Lords of the Black Sands

by J. Edward Neill

  But it soon turned black.

  “I will not go before my father,” Eadunn boomed down at Volkan. “Not with you. I have done everything I swore—my oath is finished. I will take this ship and set down at Father’s door. He and I will have words—words which have nothing to do with you.”

  Volkan seemed to consider it. After all, many of his knights had taken several steps back. Even Al-Muham’s men, lanterns swaying in their grasps, had been silenced by the power of Eadunn’s voice. A great semi-circle of men stood in the night, surrounding the contest of wills between their commander…

  …and their Lord.

  With an ugly grin, Volkan plunged his fingers into the small gap between his breastplate and the black shirt underneath. What he retrieved glistened blue in the lanterns’ pallid light.

  A vial.

  Flush with blue liquid.

  “I am to give this to you.” He sneered at Eadunn. “But only as we stand at your father’s side, only as you kneel and declare your contrition. Throw down your weapons, son of Menkaur. The dark-lance in your belt. The dagger on your waist. The disc on your shoulder. Drop them in the sand and step off my ship.”

  Thessia’s grip tightened. Eadunn couldn’t feel it through his armor, but he sensed it nonetheless. At first, he presumed she meant to hold him back. She’d done so a thousand times before, urging his restraint, dulling his killing edge every time he’d set out to slaughter her allies.

  He looked down at her. Through the grime, the scars, and the shadows in her eyes, he saw otherwise.

  She desires no restraint.

  He slid his hand into his belt, and tossed the dark-lance over the ramp’s side.

  Untying his scabbard, he did the same for his black dagger, the blade he’d carried for nearly a century.

  He loosed the small Scimitar disc from its strap upon his shoulder and dropped it at his feet.

  Volkan watched it all. Vial held aloft, the commander of what remained of the Black Fleet glared up the ramp and waited for Eadunn to trot down. Slowly, Eadunn descended. He left Thessia behind, along with everything his life had become. When he reached the bottom, Volkan held the Blue Vial up between them. The hawkish man showed a raptor’s smile, teeth yellow and crooked in the half-light.

  “When we arrive at the Pyramid, this will be your—”

  Eadunn reached for Volkan’s hand and snared it. No man had ever moved so quickly. Even with just three fingers, he held Volkan’s fist and the vial therein as though they were air.

  And he squeezed.

  The vial ruptured, and the sacred blue liquid oozed between Volkan’s fingers, mixed with blood seeming black in the night.

  Volkan reached for the sword at his waist. The hawk-nosed man was quick, jerking the blade halfway from its scabbard.

  …before Eadunn balled his armored right hand and smashed Volkan’s nose.

  To Volkan’s credit, he didn’t cry out. Blood welled from his shattered nose. He let go of his sword, and the oiled thing slid right back into its scabbard. He slapped at Eadunn’s breastplate.

  Still, Volkan didn’t cry out.

  Eadunn locked Volkan’s hand within his own, squeezing with five-hundred years of anger. Shards of tiny glass made ribbons of Volkan’s palm. The last of the blue liquid pattered on the dark ground. Squeezing still harder, hearing the bones pop in Volkan’s fingers, Eadunn looked to the others.

  No one raised a weapon against him.

  No one dared.

  Volkan sputtered. A pinwheel of blood struck Eadunn’s arm. Volkan went to his knees, and still Eadunn held on, squeezing until every bone in Volkan’s hand fractured, each finger crackling like kindling in a fire.

  Neither man spoke. Eadunn stood in impossible silence, while Volkan clawed with his unbroken fingers at Eadunn’s unbreakable hand. Eadunn hit Volkan again. Volkan’s hawkish nose was sharp no more, but bulbous and blood-swollen. With a second sputter, Volkan’s eyes rolled. Eadunn saw the pallid whites and balled his armored right fist yet again.

  No one else moved.

  Not Hanzo, who gazed with eyes wide as moons.

  Not Thessia, who took no joy in watching the cruel commander suffer.

  Not even Al-Muham, who had long been Volkan’s lieutenant, and who blinked not once as his master’s blood ran red and copious.

  Eadunn supposed he could’ve made it cleaner. He could’ve used Volkan’s sword, his dagger, or the obsidian Scimitar disc strapped to Volkan’s shoulder.

  Instead, with rage until that moment hidden, he struck Volkan thrice more in his swollen, broken face. When it was done, Volkan fell against him. Pieces of glass and ropes of blood made a mosaic on the airfield pavement. And Volkan, lifeless as a puppet, collapsed in a jumble to the ground.

  * * *

  For a long, long while, Eadunn stood over Volkan’s body. Behind him, the dawn chiseled out cracks in the night, glittering on the Black Fleet’s only remaining warship. Before him, the airfield spread out in desolate silence, thirty men in a half-ring gazing in disbelief.

  Quietly, Eadunn suffered.

  Thessia floated down the ship’s ramp and stood beside him, but she dared not touch him. Shivers wracked his body, each quake a new emotion he’d never before endured. He hurt so hard he thought he’d die.

  I deserve it. He looked down at Volkan.

  Of all the living things left in this world, I should be next to fall.

  And yet, despite himself, there was one other he believed deserved it more.

  He thought it and gazed out at the men’s faces. Their lanterns had paled in the coming dawn, but their eyes were dark and unknowable.

  “Dusk will come again,” he said to them. “When it does, the very moment the sun disappears, I will take this ship to the Pyramid. And I will do what I should have done centuries ago.”

  The men gazed long and hard at him.

  None so powerfully as Hanzo.

  “Any of you may go,” Eadunn boomed. “And no one will pursue you. Go home. Leave your weapons here. Walk the desert sands at night and vanish into forever. But—those of you who wish to join me, any among you who wish this world to be something other than what we’ve made it—bring your weapons and leave your fear behind.

  “Tonight, we change everything.”

  33

  He came to the ruins at daybreak.

  A shadow, he was, barefooted, bare-chested, a naked blade in his hands.

  After submersion in the Canal and a treacherous march across sands turned glossy and black by the Pharaoh’s weapon, the skin-port in the back of his neck itched fiercely.

  But he never scratched.

  Nor tended to his feet, whose soles bled in the sand.

  Nor paid any mind to the thousand whispers in his head.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ she pleaded to him.

  ‘A thousand other ways,’ she begged.

  ‘I love you,’ said another voice.

  ‘Please, Galen. Please turn back.’

  The voices fell on deaf ears.

  The dwellings in the ruins were centuries old. Beige and bleached stones stood at sharp angles alongside roads half-buried in sand. Roofless houses lay barren, open to the rising sun, drowning in miniature dunes. In some places, flat bricks marked ancient pathways through the vacant metropolis, but in others the desert reigned, and the drifting sands made sarcophagi of what few buildings had survived.

  It was strange, in a way, for Galen to see the city again. Even his powerful memory had forgotten the once vibrant place, whose bazaars had ages ago lit up the desert at night, and whose streets had been alive with color, movement, and life.

  But in the end, Galen saw no city.

  Nor did he see its ruins.

  As he skulked between the dry houses, dancing where the shadows were thickest, he saw only another obstacle.

  He knew the knights would be there.

  He heard their voices flutter through a valley of sand that had once been a market thoroughfare.

&n
bsp; They were loud, profane, and quite possibly drunk despite the early hour.

  In a long shadow stretched out behind a stone pillar, he hid. His shawl hung around his waist, rotten and falling apart after its time underwater.

  Time for new clothes, he thought with a grimace.

  Have to dress the part.

  Galen had no smirks any longer. His skin dusted with sand, his eyes black as obsidian, his was a face stripped of emotion. He felt more automaton than human, cold despite the warm wind striding up and down the ruins.

  Empty, no matter the voices in his head.

  His dream propelled him now. The vision his sleeping mind had carried across the centuries was the only thing for which he cared.

  There were four knights in the ruined, roofless house. They’d swept out most of the sand and torn down huge rectangular rocks for use as chairs and a table. They were scouts of the Pharaoh, watchers for survivors of Saeed’s host. Galen glanced into a window slit and saw them sitting, a pitcher of liquid between them, a deck of cards splayed out in no particular order.

  He slunk from one side of the window to the other. There were no snakes anymore, not in this desolate place, and yet Galen moved as if he’d studied vipers his whole life, sidewinding along the outer wall, making no more sound than the breeze.

  The knights weren’t drunk, though they would’ve been had they continued sipping from the decanter of wine. In years prior, Galen would’ve waited them out, hovering outside the square door until drunkenness overcame them and they walked out one-by-one to relieve themselves…and die in the shadows.

  But his patience had died somewhere in Japas, in the crags of the far east, and in the wastelands between Saeed’s delta and the ocean of ashes left behind by the Pharaoh’s bomb.

  He tugged his sword off his shoulder and set his cheek against the warm stone wall.

  And he rounded the corner.

  At first, only one of the knights saw him. The others were laughing and their backs were to the door. Galen supposed he should’ve smiled—it had always pleased him to put the Nemesis’ knights out of their misery. But when he swung his sword and clipped the head off the one who sat closest, he felt no sense of anything.

  The man might as well have been a reed.

  Or a blade of too-long grass.

  The others stood too slowly. They hadn’t expected an intruder, meaning their armor and weapons lay in useless heaps in the house’s far corner. By the time the one to Galen’s right stood and shouted, Galen opened his throat without making a sound.

  The Japas sword was sharp.

  It was meant for taking men’s lives, but when wielded by Galen, it might’ve split mountains asunder and laid the Earth’s belly open to the sun.

  The man on the left managed to pick up the half-filled decanter and throw it, dashing the clay thing to wet pieces against Galen’s thigh. With his left hand Galen tossed a fistful of sand in the man’s eyes, leapt atop the table, and split the man’s skull down the middle.

  Only one knight remained. Fumbling, the half-armored man tore a dark-lance from his belt and powered it on. He swept the invisible beam toward Galen’s legs, lashing a straight horizontal line. If it had caught Galen, his legs would’ve fallen off at his thighs, and the rest of him would’ve toppled off the table.

  But Galen was fast.

  Five-hundred years fast.

  He jumped, and the searing beam cauterized a line in the dwelling’s wall behind him. The sand embedded in the wall cooked to black glass, and the hiss of hot, cracking stone echoed in the empty space.

  Galen landed in front of the knight, locked his fingers around the man’s forearm to trap the dark-lance, and drove his sword through sternum and spine. The dark-lance clattered to the floor. Galen eased the dying man gently down, pulling the sword from the knight’s body as smoothly as a branch from water.

  The knight lay on the floor, sputtering, only seconds from his end.

  Galen regarded him.

  Skinny. Half-starved. If he’d been healthy, he might’ve been fast enough to kill me.

  The others…the same. Their faces are pale. They’re young, but already sick.

  Already dead.

  When the last knight let out his death rattle, Galen stood for a moment in the silence that remained. The wind had died and the sun seemed reluctant to leap above the horizon. Nothing stirred inside the roofless dwelling, just as had nothing had stirred there for centuries.

  Is this your kingdom, Menkaur? He gazed out the western window-slit, beyond which lay the Pyramid, not thirty miles away.

  Leprous children for foot soldiers?

  Ashes in your own desert?

  Left out here to guard what? Rocks and sand?

  A radio, rarest of objects, crackled to life on one of the knight’s waists. The radios of the Pharaoh’s kingdom were far cruder than those of the ancient world, and yet as Galen walked to the house’s rear and began fitting himself inside pieces of armor, he was able to hear much of what was said:

  “…all watch-groups, retreat to central village.”

  “Repeat, all watch-groups, reassemble at central village.”

  “Invasion force destroyed. No survivors.”

  “Disarm at Pyramid gate zero-one-seven.”

  “Standby for next orders.”

  “Repeat…after disarmament, standby for next orders.”

  More crackling.

  Distant voices.

  And then nothing.

  By the time the world went silent again, Galen stood tall in a suit of black armor. The suit was too tight, of course, having been constructed for a skinny, sickly knight. But Galen liked the feel no less, the cushioned greaves compressing his arms and thighs, the feel of his fingers encased in articulated steel, the mask shielding his face from the world.

  He stretched, felt several pieces of the armor pop and strain, and knelt beside the knight he’d killed last. The dark-lance lay on the floor. He hated such weapons—they were meant for softer men, for mortals who needed to kill at great speed—lest they themselves be slain before their shallow years were used up. Nonetheless, he slid the little black wand into his newly-acquired belt, grimacing under his mask as he did.

  He took a sword. Forged the same as the Nemesis’ blades, the dark, double-edged thing was much to his liking. A shame, it seemed, that the knight to whom it belonged had left it leaning against the wall.

  Never used. Galen shook his head.

  Not once.

  He searched the dwelling for other things. A canteen of water—he sipped from and then discarded. A satchel stuffed with dried and salted meat-sticks—he plucked one half of one stick, ate it, and dropped the satchel on the floor.

  Despite himself, he looked for a Scimitar disc. On this, his last of journeys, he convinced himself even the Pharaoh’s most vulgar weapon might prove itself useful.

  Alas, the knights were of no particular rank in Menkaur’s army.

  They had only one dark-lance, their swords, and a bundle of food…

  …and of course their lives, which I’ve mercifully ended.

  He stepped out into the sunlight. Little light reached his eyes through his new mask, and what sunshine dared to strike his armor was lesser for it, pooling at his feet more like moon-glow than the desert sun at dawn. Armored, masked, with two swords slung over his shoulder, he gazed one final time into the east. The sky still looked sick, the poison of the Pharaoh’s weapon clouding the new day with a haze only he could see.

  He faced the west.

  In his mind, he envisioned the Pyramid.

  How long had it been since he’d seen it?

  Since he’d stood in its shadow?

  Since he’d listened to the rush of water flowing within its walls?

  Always, he’d thought of his mother when daydreaming of the Pyramid. But this time he failed to hear her voice. Her face was as absent from his heart as rain from the desert.

  He walked west.

  Across the sandy scrubland o
f his ancient home.

  Through ruins unguarded by the Nemesis’ knights. Down ashen streets untouched by children’s sandals for centuries.

  And at last, up stunted hills and over sweeping fields populated by nothing larger than beetles, scorpions, and a lone carrion bird, its wings black and half-rotted, roosting atop a stone older even than Galen himself.

  Although the Nile was near, the desert persisted. Dry, baking sand spread forever north and south, the illusion of water always topping the next hummock of dry earth. The day was not particularly hot, but even had it been, Galen would not have cared. He mounted the dunes as though they were hills of grass, and he walked as sure and steady as a desert cat, the likes of which had long ago gone extinct.

  To the south, at noon, he glimpsed a flat expanse of paved earth. The buildings there were distant, but the shape of the lone-surviving warship marked the place plainly.

  Home of the Black Fleet, he thought.

  But only one bird came back.

  He traded nine ships for the world’s end.

  A fair price.

  He marched beyond the distant airfield. No one saw him pass, for no one was looking. No person other than Thessia had walked this path in decades.

  And no one would ever walk it again.

  34

  While the others slept in the largest of the airfield’s hangars, Eadunn walked alone in the sands.

  He’d left Thessia behind. If she’d wanted, if she’d known how, she could’ve stolen the last ship of the Black Fleet and piloted it unto the ends of the world. She could’ve destroyed what and whom she wanted. No once could’ve stopped her. No one would’ve tried.

  But the ship remained silent.

  And as Eadunn marched several hundred yards beyond the glass panes surrounding the airfield, he faced the early sun and sank to his knees in the sand.

  He had never believed in a god. Or a goddess. Or anything divine. How could any god exist, he’d always reasoned, in a world where men like himself waded unchecked through the ranks of the innocent? He’d seen his father’s perversions of science, the vast efforts put towards warships, weapons, and devices of mass death. Easier, it would’ve been, to spend far fewer resources to cleanse the water, pull the poisons from the earth, and make medicine for the masses.