Khai of Khem

I “Take the Pyramid!”

Down into the riven pastures of Asorbes thundered the hordes of Kush, their iron swords invincible, their chariots devastating, their hearts bursting with the savage joy of meeting the foe here, now, face-to-face in his heartland, beneath the walls of Asorbes itself, whose name was now synonymous with that of the detestable Pharaoh and all that was evil. In streaming thousands, they cut through the remnants of the lightning-blasted defenders, flinging them down on the scorched earth in red and tattered ruin.

To give them their due, the Khemites fought back, but they were quite simply overwhelmed and swept under, as by some mighty wave. And when they were drowned, that wave did not pause but swept on—on and in through the shattered gates of the city.

Surprisingly, the rain of arrows from atop the walls was not as heavy as was expected. Later it became known that this was chiefly due to the activities of Adonda Gomba and his army of resurgent slaves. Though the slave king had received and understood Khai’s message, he had known that he could not help in the matter of the gates: that in the hour of Asorbes’ direst peril, his men simply would not be allowed anywhere near the gates. Therefore he had determined to help Khai in other ways.

One hour after receiving Khai’s message, as night drew its dark cloak over the city, Pharaoh’s elephants were poisoned in their pens. They would not be brought into action against the invaders. This was one way in which Adonda Gomba cut at the heart of Khem, but there were others. Since many slaves had been assigned re-supply tasks on the city’s high, wide ramparts, the slave king had decided that this was where he must strike his heaviest blow for Kush. Thus, when Ashtarta’s armies drove on Asorbes, the slaves working atop the walls had turned on the very Khemish archers they were supposed to support! And so the invaders’ losses were minimal from what must otherwise have been a veritable rain of death.

Immediately inside the gates, all was scarlet chaos. Khemish reinforcements had massed there, had been torn to shreds when the green lightnings shattered the gates inwards. Khai saw this first, for his chariot was first under the massive arch of the north gate and so into the city. Close behind drove Kindu and Nundi, their vehicle leaping and jolting as it flew over shattered timbers and heaped bodies, while behind them ... behind them came the bulk of Khai’s warriors, and leading them a sight to strike terror in even the bravest hearts.

For while the charioteers and horsemen had been busy mopping up the Khemites outside the walls, Khai’s impis had ran—literally ran!—down across the scarred fields and into the city.

Some of those black giants bore clubs, others assagais, and all were painted like demons from men’s blackest nightmares. Five thousand Nubians, huge men all, and each one of them trained to a peak of killing efficiency. Their shields went up together to meet whirring swarms of arrows; their voices chanted together as they advanced at the trot; and their message was one of grim and terrible resolution:

“Waugh! Kill for Khai! . “Waugh! Kill for Khai the Killer!

“We are N’jakka’s strength. We are his mighty heart! “Khai is his white brother, and they are mighty above all men! “Waugh! Kill for N’jakka, in the name of Khai the Killer. In the name of Killer Khai!”

The wall of Khemites broke before them, broke and was trampled underfoot; and in through the gates poured the rest of the charioteers, the horsemen and warriors of Kush. By now the slaves of Asorbes were in uproar, arming themselves en-masse and turning on their overseers and guards, causing a hundred diversions in all quarters of the city. Many of them were starting fires, burning their old, verminous houses in the slave quarters; and others were climbing the stone stairways built into the walls, pouring onto the high ramparts and joining their brothers there, dealing with the Khemite archers wherever they found them.

All was a cataract of noise, a tumult of rushing, furiously brawling figures, of screaming, dying men and beasts. The streets were full of blood and crumpled figures, where bronze swords broke on iron swords and clubs rose and fell to the pounding rhythm of war-hammers. And through all of this Khai rode, his sword a scarlet wand which brought death in near-magical fashion to any Khemish soldier who strayed too close to his chariot; and close behind rode Kindu and Nundi, black and golden and red with blood as the sun rose over Asorbes.

With the majority of the action taking place in and around the gates, the center of the city was comparatively quiet. Breaking through the rear ranks of the defenders, Khai headed for the great ramp and followed the line of its base west toward the pyramid. He had not forgotten the dream-warning of the seven mages in Kush, and his priority now was to find the Dark Heptad and deal with them in short order. Racing parallel with his own chariot was that of his Nubian lieutenants, and a thousand of his most fierce horsemen rode behind.

Several bodies of Khemish troops broke and scattered before the charge of Khai’s party, only to be picked off individually by the mounted swordsmen. The pyramid’s largest body of defenders waited at the base of that vast monument itself, however, and there Khai spied them as he raced his vehicle beneath the sheer cliff of the great ramp. Ordering his driver to rein back a little, Khai gave his men time to draw level with him until they formed a solid front.

The ranks of crack Khemish infantry stood six deep at the base of the pyramid, with archers to the fore. Now, as the warriors and charioteers of Kush urged their mounts to the gallop, Pharaoh’s archers lifted their bows and sent a concerted sleet of arrows leaping toward them. Khai knew how devastatingly effective those archers could be, for he himself had trained with them as a boy; but he also knew their limitations.

His timing was perfect as he roared: “Up shields!” And as bucklers were raised, so the long-shafted Khemish arrows struck home. Horses fell screaming and riders with them; chariots slewed and snapped their axles, flinging their drivers down to be trampled under razor hooves; men died scarcely realizing they were hit… but the rest thundered on without pause and seconds later struck the Khemites even as they lifted their bows a second time. Outnumbered the riders of Kush were, for the main body of Khai’s force was still some hundreds of yards to his rear and diffusing through the city, but so ferocious were his warriors and so superior their weapons that Pharaoh’s troops fell like grass before the scythe. It was no contest, but a slaughter, and in very few minutes, the Khemish defenders were bowled over and trampled down.

It was then that Khai’s driver took an arrow in the eye, whose force was such it came out the back of his head and knocked him clean out of the chariot. Before Khai could grab the reins, the horses ran wild. Then one of them felt the razor edge of a bronze sword across its hamstrings. Down went the proud beast, tripping its fellow and tumbling the chariot in blood and dust. Khai leaped free of the broken vehicle and rolled, springing to his feet in the heart of the melee.

More Khemish troops had appeared, racing out in their hundreds from the many doors that led to the pyramid’s lower levels, and Khai found himself hemmed in by furiously battling men who strove to bring him down. Chariots wheeled about him and horses reared over him; blood spattered his face and hair as his iron sword rose and fell inexorably; his breath rattled hoarsely as he gulped air to fuel his straining muscles. Then—

He could almost sense the shock wave that ran through the ranks of the Khemites facing him. He read horror in their eyes and saw it stamped on their faces as they fell back.

“Waugh!” came the roar of his impis, an explosion of sound made deafening by four thousand assagais and clubs rattled on shields; and “Waugh!” came that cry once more.

“We kill for Khai!” the Nubians roared as they ploughed forward, an invincible black mass. “For Khai the Killer—for Killer Khai! Waugh! Waugh!”

By now Kindu and Nundi were on foot, fighting alongside Khai, and the three of them snarled their savage fury through gritted teeth as they hacked a path through the pyramid’s defenders. Others of Khai’s warriors joined them from the flanks, and in a momentary lull a chief shouted: “What now, Khai?”

“Now?” he answered. “Why, now we take the pyramid! Into the hive, men,” he roared. “Let’s burn the vermin out!”

II Makers of Madness

The light in the lower levels of the pyramid was as dim as Khai remembered it. Surging through corridors which were still familiar to him despite the intervening years, he and some fifty of his warriors engaged many small parties of Khemites in those eerie, half-lighted tunnels and temples, but their Nubian steel quickly conquered all.

“Clean the place out and then set it ablaze,” Khai ordered, his voice echoing loudly over the magnified tramp of feet and distant sounds of battle from outside. “These wall hangings will carry the flames, and the smoke will drive any scum in the higher levels up through the pyramid to its top. There’s a fresh-air system, but it won’t be able to cope with that. Only don’t set your fires until you’ve searched these lower levels through and through. If you come across anything that looks like a wizard—kill it! Kill all seven of them, if you find them. Now go, scatter. Kindu and Nundi—you stay with me. I know the whereabouts of the Dark Heptad’s den. With luck, we’ll find them at home.”

Reaching a spot where steps descended steeply into black bowels of rock, Khai snatched a torch from its bracket and led his two lieutenants down into dank and claustrophobic depths. He had been this way before, with Pharaoh’s Vizier, Anulep, and he shuddered involuntarily as he recalled the terror the place had held for him then. Even now, he felt a strangling of his soul as he plumbed this pit beneath the great pyramid. But he was driven by something greater than fear: a craving for red revenge!

These seven necromancers for whom he searched were responsible for the grisly end of far too many of Khai’s friends and fellows, and if and when he found them they would pay the price in full. Except that they would die cleanly, not stripped to the bone by bats and insects, gnawed by plague-ridden rats or blasted in a holocaust of green lightnings. They would die by the sword, and steel was cold, sweet and swift.

The footsteps of the three echoed hollowly, and the sounds of their colleagues where they sought and slew above had grown very faint when the stone steps ended in a corridor whose roughly hewn walls and reeking atmosphere told Khai that he had reached his destination. This was that nethermost level where the Dark Heptad had its lair of bubbling vats; where they performed their black magics in accordance with Khasathut’s schemes. Khai put a finger to his lips to indicate stealth, and then, sure-footed in the flickering light of his torch, he led his Nubians along the winding corridor. As they went, Kindu and Nundi pressed very close on his heels indeed.

Along the way, they passed an array of jars, boxes and containers of various shapes and sizes—the morbid chemicals and mordant liquids of the Dark Heptad’s infernal work—all piled against the walls, and here the stench of nameless experiments filled the air to such a degree that even Khai’s sputtering torch seemed to dim a little, as if from lack of good clean air. Then, faint at first, but rapidly growing louder, they heard the low mouthings of an interminably chanted invocation, and Khai’s scalp prickled as he recognized the oft-repeated and monstrously evocative name of Nyarlathotep!

Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. The Howler in the Night. The Dark Messenger of Demon Gods trapped and chained in vaults of space and time since the earliest ages of Earth; master of all the world’s imps of insanity, hatred and despair; and here the Dark Heptad called upon Him to come to their aid!

“This is it,” Khai whispered to his friends as they approached a huge archway in the corridor’s wall, from which issued a flicking blue glow. “And if that chanting is anything to go by, I’d say they’re in!” And stepping forward, he thrust his torch before him into the room to light his way.

The oddly shimmering glow came from a large sunken vat situated centrally in the floor of this den of sorcerers, and as Khai’s torch lit that awful cave, so the unnatural radiance seemed to dim a little. Seated cross-legged on the floor about the vat, hands touching, the Dark Heptad slowly turned their cowled heads to gaze at the intruders. In faces shaded beneath seven cowls, their eyes were luminous and poisonous as they stared. Then—

Before Khai and his Nubians could take a single step forward, the blue light sprang up like a shimmering wall and spread outward from the vat, pushing them back and out of the room! They fought against it, fought to win through that ethereal but seemingly solid wall of light, but to no avail. And all the time, the chanting of the Dark Heptad went on, gaining in volume and racing ever more rapidly from their lips as they hurried to bring it to a climax. Now, narrowing his eyes to squint through the haze of blue shimmer into the den, Khai saw that the magic was working. Shapes were forming in that room, hovering over the vat, writhing and taking on substance. A kaleidoscope of wraithlike forms—and each one a little more solid than the one before—towering and leaping up from the vat like genies to sway over the hysterically chanting figures of the Dark Heptad. And they were shapes of purest evil!

All the horrors of universal insanity were there, the unclean spirits of Man’s blackest nightmares, and Khai saw ghouls, afreets and ogres come and go in the ever-changing nimbus that rose over the vat. As for Kindu and Nundi: they saw their own demons, the night-things of the jungles and the leering familiars of witches and black M’gangas. And as each leering or frothing shape melted into the next, so it took on firmer form.

The chanting voices of the Dark Heptad were now reaching a crescendo. Khai knew that whatever was coming must come soon, and so he threw himself once more against the wall of blue light that filled the doorway and forbade him entry. Such was the energy he expended that his muscles corded and the veins stood out on his straining brow as he shoved against nothing; until his very mind grew numb with the effort. Only then, when the one thought in his head was an overriding determination to break through, did he hear that whispering voice in his mind, that voice he knew of old and which he had learned to trust.

It was the voice of the wind-carved, sun-scorched Syran mage—the Mage of Mentalism—and Khai fastened desperately upon it and forced himself to listen.

“Good, Khai, Good!” praised that voice, but it carried an ominously sad note. “Now listen and understand. You may not break through this barrier, for it is a mindwall. Their wills are greater than yours, their minds stronger, and so you may not proceed. And this time we cannot help you, Khai, for we, too, are helpless against a mindwall… .”

Khai looked again through the blue haze and saw a fresh shape writhing into view above the vat. And this time the shape was semi-solid, clearly discernible ... and human! Human, and yet inhuman. For this could only be Nyarlathotep in His earthly avatar: a young man with the wickedly proud face of a fallen God, whose great black eyes contained a hideous humor. His mouth was cruel and yet langorous, and His lips had sipped of all the world’s sin. Pschent-crowned, this tall sardonic Being reminded Khai of Pharaoh and of a great task as yet unfulfilled, and aloud he cried out to that dimly receding voice in his head:

“What may I do? What is this mindwall that resists me? Answer me—help me—but don’t desert me now!”

Faint and fading came his answer: “The mindwall is an illusion, Khai, it is not real. But since the barrier exists in your own mind, you may not cross it. No thinking creature may breach a mindwall….” And the voice of the Mage of Mentalism receded and was gone.

“But I must breach it!” Khai howled. “I must!” And again he hurled himself at the blue, impenetrable haze. In another moment, the hands of Kindu and Nundi were on his straining arms, dragging him from the doorway. Then, as he fought them off, his eyes lighted upon a row of large stone jars where they stood along the wall of the corridor.

He shook himself free of the Nubians. “Mindwall?” he gasped to himself. “An illusion!”

“Lord, what ails you?” Nundi asked. “Come, we must leave this place.”

“No, no, wait,” Khai answered, his forehead creasing in concentration. “A mindwall!” he said again, this time in a whisper, and his eyes went wide in sudden inspiration. “Aye, but since when has oil a mind of its own, eh?”

“Lord?”

“Never mind,” he cried. “But quickly—help me!” And together they lifted the jars of oil and threw them against the blue glow where it issued from the door of the Dark Heptad’s den. The jars passed through the glow without hindrance, smashing when they struck the floor within. Instantly thickly cloying, exotically scented fumes flooded from the sorcerers’ den, and on instinct Khai swept his torch forward and sent it spinning into the room.

The searing heat from the holocaust of flame which then spilled out into the subterranean corridor drove Khai and his Nubians back as it scorched the walls. And as the fireball shrank, they heard the terrified shrieking of the Dark Heptad above the roar and crackle of flames. They heard them … and they heard something else, something much worse.

It was laughter—lunatic laughter that turned to a roar of outrage even as it dwindled and died. On the very threshold, Nyarlathotep had been sent back to those mental hells which spawned him. A moment more and two capering, flaming human torches leapt out into the corridor, beating at their blazing bodies in a vain attempt to smother the flames. While still they danced, the trio of invaders cut them down. Khai stepped over their crisped bodies and shielded his face as he stared at the inferno within the den. The heat was blistering and he knew nothing could possibly live in there.

Satisfied, he was turning to his companions when a movement farther down the corridor caught his eye. A tall, spectrally slender figure stared at him, then melted back into the flickering shadows—but Khai had seen him. He would recognize that figure anywhere: that black sheath of a robe and bald dome of a head.

“Anulep!” Khai snarled.

He made to run after the Vizier, but at that moment a fresh ball of fire shot out from the mouth of the wizard’s den and drove him back. For precious seconds the flames licked the corridor, then died away.

Khai beckoned Kindu and Nundi forward and ran along the smoke-filled corridor toward the spot where the Vizier had lurked in the shadows, but scarce had he taken ten paces before he heard a sound which caused his flesh to creep and the short hairs at the back of his neck to stand up straight. It was a single, eerie, undulating note—and Khai knew that it had been blown on a tiny golden whistle….

III Death of Deaths

That single blast of Anulep’s golden whistle almost brought Khai to a halt, for in his mind’s eye, he now saw the sight which must surely meet him around the next bend in the corridor. He remembered the heavy metal gate in the wall, whose bars were thick and strong, and he remembered the inhabitants of that vault, how they had been brought to a moldering and murderous life by the Vizier’s fiendish piping—that same warbling note whose echoes even now rang in his ears.

Khai’s torch was gone, lost in the inferno he had wrought, and now the only light was that which glimmered from tiny lamps placed in wide-spaced niches along the walls. He slowed his run to a careful, crouching walk and spoke to his lieutenants in a voice which barely concealed his trepidation.

“Boys, around this bend will be something to freeze the blood in your veins—a sight you’ll never forget, as I have never forgotten it—but we must not turn and flee. Anulep went this way, and we have to follow him.”

Now Kindu best remembered Khai as the boy who saved his life those long years ago in the forest east of the river, and he was Khai’s senior by almost twenty years, but still he did not mind Khai calling him “boy.” He did object, however, to what he considered a slight on his own and his fellow Nubian’s manliness.

“Flee, Khai?” he protested. “We would not think of—”

“No one doubts your bravery, man,” Khai quickly cut him off. “I’m only trying to tell you that we—” but there he broke off as the horror abruptly lurched into view, coming around the bend toward them where they half-crouched in oppressive gloom.

“Zombies!” Nundi gasped.

“Dead men!” Kindu choked out the words. “But they walk!”

The corridor was full now of stumbling, shuffling corpses whose outlines were aglow with rotten luminescence. Their eyes were pits of balefire and fat, wriggling worms dropped from their crumbling flesh even as they moved silently on the trio of frozen intruders. There were perhaps two, three dozen of these terrible once-men, and the smell of their corruption beggared description.

For all that many of them were in the last stages of putrefaction, disintegrating even as they came, still the speed of their approach was terrifying. Before Khai and his Nubians could force their paralyzed limbs to mobility, the clawing, silently mouthing, greenly glowing horde of cadavers was on them. On the floor of the corridor legless trunks wriggled to trip them, and torsos without arms thrust forward mummied faces with open jaws and chomping teeth.

Khai was the first to pull himself together, and as he began to shout his instructions so his lieutenants started at the shock of his voice in the terror-laden silence. “They’re only dead men,” Khai cried. “Dead and rotting men whose souls scream in hell. They can’t stand against us, so cut them down!”

Still Kindu and Nundi shrank back.

“Leather and bone and worms,” Khai yelled. “Look—” and he swept his sword through two of the advancing creatures with one clean stroke. Down went the zombies, crumbling into dust and rot.

Now the Nubian warriors took heart, and Khai wondered if he himself would have recovered so swiftly had the roles been reversed. For he had prior knowledge of this blasphemy and should therefore be, in a measure, prepared for it. However that might be, now the trio stood shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the wall of rock, and as the undead horde pressed close so they hacked and hewed until at last they stood in a semicircle of heaped enemies.

Then, stomachs heaving as they gagged on poisonous air, they stepped gingerly through half-liquescent, half-powdery loathsomeness and went on shakily down the rock-cut tunnel. Khai paused at the first small lamp to lift it from its niche, turn and toss it back onto the pile of human debris that littered the floor. His action was one of instinct and not logic, for corpses are not so easy to burn. But these corpses had been treated with rare oils and chemicals, and sure enough they flared up in an instant with a bright and cleansing light. And it was by that purifying light that the three men made their way along the tunnel to the next flight of stone stairs, which they gladly climbed to the saner levels above. There, where dimly cavernous temples and halls loomed beyond every stone arch, many of Rush’s warriors impatiently prowled in the gloom and called Khai’s name. Relieved to see him emerge from below, they now set about to burn every flammable thing in sight; and while some put torches to tapestries and curtains, others poured perfumed oil onto toppled statues of hybrid Khemish gods, or smashed rich chairs and tables into shattered fragments of kindling.

And so, retreating in the face of self-set fires, Khai’s warriors moved out from the pyramid’s center toward the clean air and the light of the outside world. It was then, as they hastened to join the battle which still raged in the streets of the city, that they heard high overhead a rumbling like that of long drawn out thunder. Khai paused in a corridor rapidly filling with fire to turn his eyes to the ceiling. He felt his flesh creep in sudden apprehension. Somewhere up above a great weight had shifted, a massive block of stone had pivoted. But for what purpose?

Khai believed he knew the answer to that question. He saw again his father’s plans of the pyramid, remembering them from so long ago. Those sketches he had so admired as a boy, of gigantic mechanisms designed to operate at the touch of a lever—to spill thousands of tons of sand down into these lower levels. And worse: to seal the base of the pyramid off forever from the outside world!

“Move!” he shouted at once. “Out, quickly—or stay here forever!”

Even as he yelled his warning a stream of fine sand gushed down from an opening in the ceiling, quickly forming a mounting pile as it spilled upon the floor. And now there arose all around the whisper and rush and slither of sand; and yet again, from somewhere high overhead, there came a rumble of great weights in motion. Along all of the many corridors, jets of sand were now erupting from overhead apertures, similarly in the temples and halls, and already the floor was inches deep with fine grains which sifted deeper by the second as the flow of sand increased.

It was not the sand which bothered Khai as he ran, however, but the thought of something else. Even now, at this very moment, great slabs of stone were tilting in the mighty walls of the pyramid, pivoting beneath the weight of sand from above. Before the sand could begin to spill out through the many huge doorways which lined the four sides of the pyramid’s base, these great stone “doors” would tilt into vertical positions and slam down, closing the lower regions off from the outside world for all time.

It was every man for himself now, for quite obviously to linger here would mean a monstrous, choking death. Khai raced with Kindu, Nundi and some fifteen others of his men along one of the square corridors leading to safety. Daylight showed ahead through a haze of yellow dust and flying sand, and Khai urged his warriors on as he listened for a sound other than their cursing and the rushing hiss of sand.

And finally that sound came: of a massive weight slamming down like a hammer of the gods. The ground trembled briefly to the thump of that mighty blow, and Khai began to count as he ran. At a count of ten there came a second thump and shuddering of the earth, and now he knew the worst— that indeed the titan doors were closing, falling into their predetermined places.

Faster he ran, his feet dragging in sand, slipping and stumbling as he kicked at his men and urged them to greater effort. Daylight was a haze of light somewhere ahead, and close by there came a third great thump as another door fell. This time the solid rock beneath the shifting sand actually jumped, telling Khai that his time was almost up. The next door would be closer still, possibly the one which even now shifted above the doorway that loomed ahead. A doorway, yes—glaring white light seen through a mist of sand—but Khai hung back to send the last of his men scrambling and leaping out into the open air.

He made to follow, glanced upward once at the square base of a massive block that moved gratingly in the ceiling and poised itself, then closed his eyes and hurled himself forward. Full length in mid-air, Khai flew, willing himself across the deadly threshold and feeling the rush of air suddenly compressed by sheer bulk as that gigantic door fell.

And as he sprawled in the dust, so the earth jarred mightily beneath him and shuddered into immobility. Clouds of dust billowed up at once, obscuring everything, and when they settled Khai turned his head to look back. There, mere inches from his feet—where moments ago a huge doorway had gaped— now a massive wall of impenetrable rock stood solid and impassive.

In another moment—while yet he strove to convince himself that indeed he still lived and had escaped that horrible death of deaths—Kindu and Nundi were anxiously helping him to his feet….

IV A Spell of Fascination

While Khai and his body of men completed their task in the base of the pyramid and made their escape, the fighting in the city was furious and bloody. Ashtarta’s warriors were winning inexorably through, however, and had closed in on Pharaoh’s forces until the great majority of survivors were clustered in the streets close to the base of Khasathut’s mighty monument. There they fought and died, hewn down by the iron swords of the invaders.

To any observer, the battle would have presented an awe-inspiring spectacle whose center was the great pyramid itself. From its base, which now gleamed yellow where patches of beaten gold overlaid the fine white skin, its sides rose steeply colossal to a now tiny summit. Its dizzy steps and hugely sloping ramp were splashed red with blood and obscured by a rising haze of sweat, dust and the steam of spilled entrails. Overlooking all, the sun, too, was shrouded, appearing as a bruised and bloodied orange eye.

But through all the chaos, it could plainly be seen that the war was over. Khem was the loser, her wizards and warriors defeated, her forts and now her fortress city brought down. Only the pyramid remained as refuge for those hundreds of desperate defenders who yet fought on, retreating ever higher up the steps and the great ramp as the invaders, swollen by thousands of blood-crazed slaves, poured after them in relentless waves.

Flanked by his Nubian lieutenants—gory with blood-slimed sand—Khai ran from the base of the pyramid to join that thronging, victorious horde. Pausing at the foot of the steps, he sheathed an iron sword, cast about with worried eyes and sniffed at the reeking air. Then he grimaced, turned to his comrades and said:

“It’s Khasathut I want. I won’t rest until he’s dead. He wasn’t in the pyramid’s lower quarters, which means that he must be somewhere up there—” and he pointed at the great ramp where it joined the sloping east face of the pyramid. “There will be soldiers in there, too, quite a few, I’d guess. But if our lads go in after them they’ll be forced into the open sooner or later, and Pharaoh with them. Since the lower entrances are blocked, there’s only one way in or out. Right there!” And again he pointed, this time at a dark square doorway high in the pyramid’s face.

The entrance was at the very top of the ramp. Flanking it were wide steps cut into the face of the pyramid itself and rising to the flat summit. Even as the three gazed up at that dark doorway, suddenly there was movement in and about it. One, two of Pharaoh’s Black Guards emerged—then four more, a dozen, and—

“Look!” Khai hissed through clenched teeth. He used a blood-streaked forearm to brush blond hair from his steely blue eyes. “Do you know what that is? That curtained chair they’re carrying? It’s Pharaoh’s litter.”

“And see,” said Nundi, pointing. “There’s the reason why the drones are fleeing their hive. Those fires we set are spreading.”

As the last members of the Black Guard came pouring out of the high doorway, for all the world like angry bees or ants from a threatened nest, black clouds of smoke followed them, roiling out from the pyramid’s single remaining doorway in ever-thickening ropes. Eight of the huge blacks struggled with the litter up the steps to the summit, somehow managing to keep the canopied chair on an even keel, while the rest, perhaps fifteen or sixteen of them, followed their laboring colleagues with curved swords drawn, forming a barrier against any attack from below.

“Khasathut’s in that litter,” Khai snapped, “and he’s mine! And look— there’s Anulep, the Pharaoh’s Vizier, too. Tall and thin, like a praying mantis. He’ll be the one who turned the sand on us. The two of them together. I don’t know which one has the blackest heart, Anulep or his master. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’ve got them.

“I’ve got them!” he roared, clenching his fists and shaking them over his head. “You there, out of my way,” and he raced up the steps with Kindu and Nundi doing their best to keep pace with him. As they climbed higher, so the massed warriors made way for them; and Khai’s orders—that Khasathut was not to be touched, that his cordon of blacks on the summit was not to be attacked—preceded him, were relayed ahead by the booming authoritative voices of his chiefs.

The fighting was almost over by the time the trio reached the ramp. Pockets of desperate resistance were still being encountered in the city’s streets and squares and on its perimeter walls, but the desperation of the Khemite soldiers was born of the sure knowledge that they were finished. Khai and his lieutenants looked back once—gazed out over a city which already gouted flame and smoke from a myriad blazing fires, at streets overrun with rampaging slaves and warriors howling their victory as they hunted down the last remnants of Pharaoh’s army—and then they made for the summit itself.

On their way up the center of the ramp—whose sides were lined with Kushites, Nubians, Siwadis and freed slaves alike, all cheering Khai and his companions on and forming a crowd behind them as they climbed ever higher—they hurdled bodies where they lay sprawled in death’s poses and stepped over discarded, gore-slimed weapons. Never once did they accord this grisly debris a moment’s consideration; their goal was to reach Pharaoh and his cordon of guardsmen on the summit, and nothing could distract them from it. Only upon climbing to the doorway, which still issued a little smoke, did they pause for a moment to gain strength for the final assault.

As the last few puffs of smoke belched out from the dark doorway and began to drift away over the city, Khai stared up at the two dozen or so remaining steps to the summit and stiffened. Seeing his look of disbelief, Kindu and Nundi peered upward through the rapidly dispersing screen of smoke. Khasathut’s litter stood at the very rim of the flat summit, with its forward shafts projecting. Between the shafts, his head and shoulders hidden from view, Anulep kneeled with his back to the steps. Members of the Black Guard flanked the litter, spears at the slope in their right hands, curved swords at the ready in their left.

“What is it, Khai?” Kindu asked. “Why do you pause?”

For answer, Khai gazed once more out over the city, then turned his eyes upward yet again to the litter’s shafts and the figure of the Vizier where he kneeled in seeming obeisance between them. The expression on the young general’s face quickly changed from a look of disbelief to one of purest loathing. Shocking pictures flooded his mind, pictures of lovely girls skinned alive while Anulep brought the Pharaoh to a climax with his hideous mouth, and Khai knew what was happening even now beneath the gold-embroidered canopy of Khasathut’s litter-throne.

It had been girls before—beautiful girls giving up their lives in agony and crimson horror to facilitate an orgasm in the hybrid monster called Khasathut—but now? Now it was an entire city I Suddenly, while Khai still stood frozen in disbelief, there came a drawn-out shriek which rose to an almost painfully intense pitch before gurgling into gasped obscenities. At first, Khai thought that the cry signalled Pharaoh’s climax, but as the cursing continued there came a sudden and frantic billowing of the litter’s curtains. And now Anulep stood up and laughed long and loud—the laughter of a man made mad with terror—the baying of a crazed hound. The Vizier turned as he laughed, throwing his head back and his arms wide as he roared his lunatic mirth, and even Khai shrank back from the sight of the madman’s face: his gaping, crimson jaws that dripped blood even as he laughed!

Confused, the cordon of guardsmen turned inward, made as if to leap upon the Vizier … but too late. Pharaoh himself tore aside the canopy of his litter to stand naked, twisted and deformed behind Anulep, a curved dagger gleaming in his one good hand. With a downward sweep of his arm, he cut short the Vizier’s laughter and sent his skeletal, black-sheathed figure stumbling and staggering down the steps toward Khai. The high priest almost made it, but at the last moment, he tripped over his own spastically lurching feet and crashed down on his face. Pharaoh’s dagger was lodged deep in the top of his spine. He flopped on the steps for a second or two and flailed his limbs, then somehow turned over onto his back, snapping off the dagger’s handle and driving its blade deeper yet. His face was full of blood, and as his death rattle sounded so his scarlet mouth fell open and released a pair of hinged bronze teeth which clattered onto the stone steps. Then he lay still. Khai still did not understand all of it— would never fully understand—but as finally he lifted his eyes from the body of the dead Vizier so he became conscious of a concerted gasping from his lieutenants and the warriors who crowded behind them. Again he turned his gaze toward the summit, and finally a glimmering of understanding came.

For there Khasathut stood, supported now by two members of his Black Guard, with blood flowing freely down his legs from his terrible wound. In that one region where once he might have claimed a certain kinship with men, he no longer laid claim to anything at all. And now Pharaoh saw Khai—saw him through those octopus eyes of his and knew him for the force which had guided Khem’s enemies to victory. He threw off his guardsmen and somehow staggered to one side of his heavy litter, then indicated that the ornately-carved throne should be hurled from the summit.

In another moment, the litter came crashing down from above. Leaping to one side, Khai and his lieutenants somehow avoided its cartwheeling mass, but many of the warriors crowding behind them were not so lucky. Now, galvanized into action and snarling his hatred, the blond giant threw himself up the steps and as he went heard an almost hysterical command from above:

“Let him come!” screamed Pharaoh, his voice full of that remembered whooshing effect but higher pitched, like that of a breathless woman. “Let him come all the way. As for the rest: hold them back. Do not let them interfere before this thing is finished!”

Khai held his sword before him and made to defend himself against the Black Guard as they swarmed past him down the steps. One of them parried his thrust and lunged at him with a massive shoulder, sending him flying. He sprawled on the steps, losing his bow and quiver of arrows from his shoulder before he could regain his balance and spring to his feet. But the Nubians, obeying Khasathut’s command, simply ignored him and formed a treble rank below him, defending the summit against any further incursions.

They were almost zombie-like, those blacks, glazed of eye and expressionless—but with no apparent loss of coordination or dexterity—so that Khai suspected them to be acting under some hypnotic spell or other. Counted against his own army, however, and despite their massive size and cold savagery, the Nubians could not hope to hold the summit for more than a minute or two at most.

Now, as Khai mounted the last few steps to the roof of the pyramid, Khasathut staggered backward away from him until he stood center of the summit. Naked, almost pitiful, stood the crooked figure of Pharaoh as the blond warrior advanced upon him high over ravaged Asorbes. Khai’s blue eyes glared their message of loathing and red revenge, and his iron sword was half-lifted in a promise of swift, merciless death. But now Khasathut began to laugh, and the man who faced him was so astounded that he paused momentarily to listen to the lunatic’s words.

“Once before I was told that you would not return to Khem, Khai Ibizin,” said Khasathut. “That was when you fled me as a boy. But there’s that about you which can’t be stopped. So, when last I had you in my power, I did more than merely allow my Dark Seven to send your fa down the centuries. I suspected not even that would stop you. A stricture was placed upon you, Khai of Kush, a trance of fascination, that if you should return a second time, it would only be to obey my every command! You have seen such a trance working, for my Black Guard is similarly molded to my will. Even now they give up their lives for me, for how may they question the commands of their God-king?”

“You’re no more a god than the stone blocks of your great tomb— Pharaoh,” Khai spat out the last word as if it were poison. “Why, you’re no longer a man—if ever you were one in the first place—let alone a god! As for ‘molding me to your will’: there are no more black magic spells you can cast over me. Now you die, Khasathut,” and he lifted his sword up higher. “For my murdered family, for Khem, for an entire world which you would have destroyed. Now ... you die!”

“Look!” the crippled monster whooshed with his gasping voice. “Look into my eyes, Khai, and then tell me you can split me with that sword.”

Khai looked, and m that moment of contact between his own and the octopus eyes of Khasathut, it was as if chains had been wrapped around him from head to foot. He felt turned to stone, and was barely aware of the fact that his sword had fallen from suddenly nerveless fingers.

In the instant before their eyes met, however, he had seen something else. Something that glowed golden in the sky to the west and came silently closer by the second. Khai knew that shape—an impossible shape that should not, could not possibly fly—and even as he froze in the weave of Khasathut’s spell, he knew the thrill of ultimate strangeness, the chill of the immense and awesome unknown.

For the spinning, glowing shape that pulsed ever closer in the sky was of a great, golden pyramid, which could only mean that Khasathut’s own kind had at last returned from the stars!

V Out of the Stars

Now Khasathut’s eyes seemed huge in his young-ancient face, and with his elongated head he looked more than ever like some great evil bird of prey. Because he had his back to the wonder in the sky, which even now began to climb higher as it approached the titan-walled city, he was as yet unaware of its presence. The warriors righting their way up the summit’s steps also were ignorant of the approaching marvel; they fought on and died seeking to cut a way through Khasathut’s black defenders. Arrows could have brought the Nubians down, but arrows were scarce now; and the approach to the summit was narrow, treacherous with spilled blood and littered with the stiffening corpses of fallen warriors.

Several of Rush’s mightiest men had struggled their way up the ramp to the steps and the glassy-eyed Nubians were by no means having it their own way. One by one they were falling, and Kindu himself had been responsible for cutting down three of them. He and Nundi had known momentary qualms about standing against fellow Nubians, but face-to-face with them, they had seen that Khasathut’s guardsmen were utterly beyond redemption. They were no longer Nubians—indeed, they were something less than human. Nundi was out of the fight now, having fallen back with a slashed sinew in his sword arm, but Kindu battled on. That was the way things stood when Manek Thotak arrived, bloodied and battle-stained, to fling himself into this final fight.

He was opposed by a huge black, gutted him, then broke through the cordon and leapt for the top of the steps. The sight he saw as his eyes came up level with the pyramid’s roof stopped him dead in his tracks. His mouth fell open as his eyes went from the scene on the summit to the colossal, silently spinning shape which even now reared its bulk over Asorbes until its shadow eclipsed the massive monument itself.

And as that shadow fell over Khasathut, so the Pharaoh turned his face to the sky and saw the golden pyramid for the first time. He, too, was stunned— but only for a moment. Then—

It was as if the sight of this fantastic aerial visitant had tapped some unknown reserve of strength within him. He no longer had need of the bellow-like amplifiers with which his bizarre, larger-than-life ceremonial effigies were equipped; and weak as he was from loss of blood, still he seemed to swell larger as the spinning of the gigantic craft high above him slowed and finally stopped. Now the thing hung motionless in the sky, its base a mighty square of gold even larger than the base of Khasathut’s pyramid itself, and now too Pharaoh roared out his triumph to a city struck dumb with awe and terror.

“See!” he cried, pointing his one good hand at the incredible vessel poised impossibly in thin air. “In my hour of need, my ancestors have returned to succor me. You who have defiled my temples, my house, my tomb—all of you—” he had moved to stand at the south-east corner of the summit, from where he waved his arm imperiously over the city, “you must pay I”

His voice carried out over a city which, except for a low wind that whistled round the pyramid’s summit and carried Khasathut’s words afar, was suddenly quiet as a tomb. Only that eerie wind and the distant crackle of flames competed with the voice of the triumphant monster as he laughed his maniac glee and beckoned with his one good arm.

“And see,” he roared again, “see what has become of your mightiest general! Did you think he would kill me? Come, Khai, show yourself. Let your warriors see how I have bent you to my will—the fate which they too must share, because they have defied me.”

Khai stepped forward into view—shoulders slumped, arms and hands hanging limp, head low on his chest—Khasathut laughed again as the silence seemed positively to deepen. “Is this the great general?” Pharaoh roared. “Well, then, see how I break him—how you will all be broken.” He pointed to the south and screamed: “Now, Khai—throw yourself down!”

Without protest, Khai took a lurching step closer to the rim of the steeply plunging south face. He stood on the very edge, rocking to and fro, threatening at any moment to fall.

“Jump, Khai, jump!” cried Pharaoh, and the blood-spattered warrior bent his legs until he half-crouched at the edge of eternity.

“Stop!” came the bull voice of Manek Thotak. He had recovered at last from the almost supernatural paralysis which still held the rest of the city in thrall, and he had snatched up Khai’s bow and an arrow from his quiver. Now, drawing back the bowstring to its full, he aimed the shaft across the summit’s small space and sighted it upon the two figures where they stood at the corner of the south-facing rim. Manek was aware of the vast mass hanging in the sky above him, so much so that its very shadow seemed to fall upon him like a physical weight. Without a doubt, Khasathut’s own kind had returned from the stars, and it seemed equally certain that they were watching him even now.

“Jump!” cried Pharaoh again, rage written in his bulging eyes; and once again Khai tensed the muscles of his legs as if to spring from the rim. Manek’s hands quivered as he traversed the bow from Khasathut’s naked, pink and twisted form to the broad back of the young general: Khai—who was once Khai of Khem—who might yet be a king in Kush! Manek’s lips drew back in a snarl. He gritted his strong teeth until beads of sweat stood out upon his forehead. But—

“No!” he cried then in self-denial, and in the next instant realigned the bow and released the arrow ... which flew straight to its target and transfixed Pharaoh’s shoulder, knocking him down dangerously close to the rim.

The shriek which Khasathut immediately vented seemed to break the spell hanging over the city. Brave warriors though they were, the victors could no longer face up to the powers of Beings capable of suspending a pyramid in mid-air. They began to flee the city in droves—rushing madly back down the great ramp in such a stampede that those unfortunate enough to be caught at its edges were sent screaming to their deaths—streaming like myriads of ants through the streets of Asorbes and out through its shattered gates—and as they fled so Manek ran to Khai and dragged him back from the rim, guiding him to the steps.

There Khai’s control returned, and shaking his head as if to clear it of invisible, poisonous fumes, he stared after his fleeing army. Down below him stood the last of Pharaoh’s zombie-like guardsmen, staggering to and fro as they, too, were released from the now broken trance of fascination. They bled from countless wounds and only the spell had kept them on their feet—until now. For even as Khai watched they slumped to the steps which they had defended to the last and the life went out of them.

“Come on, Khai,” Manek shouted in the blond giant’s ear. We have to get away from here!”

Khai followed him shakily down the first few steps and then paused. The last of his warriors were streaming down the ramp and the rout of fleeing humanity through the streets of Asorbes was now at its full. “Come on,” Manek shouted again, taking his arm. “Why do you linger?”

Khai shook himself free of the other’s hand. “You go,” he told Manek. “I … I have to know!” He turned to stare at the summit’s center where Khasathut now kneeled with his hideous face turned up to the golden, sky-floating pyramid.

“To know what?” Manek cried, lifting his voice against a wind that sprang up from nowhere to blow his hair in his face.

“Go!” Khai shouted, almost in anger. “I’ll follow—when I can.”

Manek argued no longer, but went bounding down the steps and followed the others where they fled. Khai, alone now, stepped up again onto the roof of the pyramid and turned his wide blue eyes up to gaze at the vast golden menace which hung cold and alien over Asorbes.

VI A City Doomed

“Strike him down!” screamed Khasathut, pointing at Khai where he stood. “Strike them all down and take me up, quickly, for I am surely dying. Take me up, my ancestors, for I am one of you and have suffered. Why do you wait? Do you not know me?”

Without warning, an area of the golden pyramid’s base glowed brighter yet and Khai staggered and shielded his eyes as a beam of yellow light struck downward and fixed upon the lofty summit, trapping two lives within its perimeter and binding them like flies in honey. Khai would have fled then, if he could, but he could not. Through a haze of golden particles, he saw Khasathut—his mouth working in a sort of slow-motion, his octopus eyes bulging, pleading—but he could hear nothing at all through the screen of potent energies which now surrounded him.

It seemed to Khai that he floated in the void between golden suns, where a myriad motes of glittering gold dust blinded him and baffled his senses. The sensation lasted for a moment only, and then, out of the silence, a Great Voice seemed to speak— not to Khai but to Other Beings of equal potency.

He heard no words, neither saw nor yet felt anything at all, and yet somehow he was party to a conversation. There were Beings in that shape in the sky, certainly, and indeed They recognized Khasathut. But They saw him as an error—a failed experiment—that and nothing more. There was puzzlement, too, that such a creature could ever have come to power, could have caused to happen the earthshaking events whose reverberations had been detected at the very corners of space and time, calling Them down from far journeyings, from temporal and trans-dimensional investigations of times and spaces.

Then … a decision was made. Khai knew it, and so did Khasathut.

“No!” the naked monster’s mouth formed silent words as the golden beam from above narrowed to enclose him and exclude Khai. “No, you can’t! I’m one of yours. I’m one of—”

For a moment, the beam brightened to such an intensity that Khai threw up his hands before his face. Then that solid-seeming rod of golden light blinked out and the brightly glowing spot on the flying pyramid’s base quickly dulled and faded into its soft yellow surroundings. The vast mass in the sky began slowly to revolve, rising straight up into thin air until it reached a certain altitude. There it paused and its revolutions ceased, and Khai took his hands from his eyes and craned his neck to gaze up at it. Then he looked at the small heap of yellow dust at the summit’s center—dust which had recently been the Pharaoh Khasathut. …

The wind sprang up again, blowing Khasathut’s last remains in Khai’s face. He choked and covered his nose and mouth, then turned and stumbled down the steps, going back the way he had come as quickly as he could.

At the foot of the ramp, Manek waited with a commandeered chariot. He bundled Khai onto his vehicle’s platform and lashed his horses to a gallop, and a few minutes later they clattered out through the west gate and raced for dried up mud flats which were once a swamp.

Eight miles from the city’s walls, a low hill rose up from mud baked hard as brick. Recently it had been green, grown with trees, grasses and ferns, a paradise of living things. Now it was dead. A few blackened stumps littered the crest where Manek brought the chariot to a halt. Many warriors were already there—horsemen and charioteers, mainly—waiting for their generals; and for … something else.

The panic was largely over now. Between the city and the hill streams of chariots, horsemen and foot soldiers like ants on the march still hurried west, leaving the doomed city behind them, not looking back. The ordinary citizens of Asorbes were there, too, many thousands of them, loaded down with their belongings and fleeing from the ravages of war. Khai and Manek had driven through them, urging them on, but now they waited as the army caught up. In another half-hour, there would not be a single soldier of Ashtarta’s forces within five miles of Asorbes—which was just as well, Khai thought, for something was surely going to happen. No one said anything, but everyone knew it. It was in the air, a tension, an electric feeling. And the eyes of each and every soldier on the hill were now locked on Asorbes and the golden shape that stood in the sky over the city like some silent sentinel.

After a long while, Khai said to Manek, “It will be soon now.”

They stood side by side on the hill, amidst thousands of bloodied, battered warriors whose triumph was all but forgotten. All was unnaturally quiet. Even the clatter of late-arriving chariots, the whinnying of lathered horses, the moaning of wounded men and the low mutterings of chiefs and captains as they counted their losses seemed muted.

“What is it, Khai?” Manek asked, his eyes on the distant shape in the sky, a frown etched deep in his forehead. “What will it be?”

For answer, Khai shook his head, then stiffened as he focused his eyes on sudden motion about the vast vessel hovering over the deserted city. The golden pyramid seemed to be pulsating, glowing bright and pale in an ever quickening cycle. A shimmering yellow haze, similar to the beam Khai had experienced at first hand, but more diffuse and spreading out at a wider angle, fell like a diaphanous curtain from the pyramid’s base over the entire city, covering it wall to wall. The pulsating continued, quickened, and the massive vessel began to lift into the sky. Amazingly, impossibly, most of Asorbes began to lift with it!

Caught in tractors of fantastic power, vast segments of the city’s walls broke loose and shuddered into the sky; towers, buildings and temples became airborne; anything that was not deeply rooted in the bedrock of the earth itself was slowly, irresistibly drawn skyward. But most of the power was concentrated centrally, on Khasathut’s tomb, on the pyramid itself. …

A vast sigh—a concerted gasp of awe and disbelief—went up from thousands of throats as finally that tremendous monument rocked and broke free of its base and millions of tons of stone were drawn bodily aloft. It seemed as if every man of Ashtarta’s army held his breath then, as the city of Asorbes rose up and up. And as the golden pyramid exerted its incredible energy on the uprooted city, so that raw power was made visible in the lightnings that leapt between sky-floating stone and scarred and pitted earth.

Huge tongues of fire licked at the ground in electrical greed, and dust clouds like the dark breath of demons rose everywhere. A low rumble, rapidly growing louder, filled the air and clouds began to form in the sky, racing outward from the epicenter which was the shattered, elevated city.

Khai, Manek and their armies heard that rumble, felt it in the ground, in their bones, and knew that the end was near. Thus it was something of an anticlimax when suddenly, in an instant, the huge inverted funnel of golden haze blinked out—the beam and the golden pyramid, too, disappearing as if they had never existed—leaving the revenant fragments of Asorbes suspended in thin air. For a second it seemed as though those millions of tons were to remain frozen in the sky forever, but then they began to fall.

A city rained to earth, and the last trace of Khasathut’s influence in the world was obliterated for all time.

The cloud of dust and smoke which then rose up in a mushroom-topped column heralded an earthquake that threw every watcher to the ground, thus saving them from the mad rush of winds that howled outward from the shattered, scattered debris of Asorbes. When it was over, Khai dusted himself down and turned his face to the west.

“Are you thinking, Khai, of the queen who waits for you in Kush?” Manek asked. “If so, you should know I won’t oppose you.”

“If you don’t others will,” Khai wryly answered. “No, a Khemite could never lord it over Kush, Manek. I think you’ve taught me that much. I’ll return to Khem ... eventually. To a new Khem. As for Kush—Kush is yours.”

“Mine?” For a moment Manek showed his astonishment. He tried to speak several times, but could not find the words. Finally he said: “You do this for me, Khai? For me, a proven traitor? One who tried to destroy you?”

“Who else knows it?” Khai asked. “I know it, and already it is forgotten. Yes, you tried to destroy me, but since then you’ve twice saved my life. And are you really such a traitor? A traitor betrays his own country, Manek, and you only wanted to keep yours safe and free. No, because of what you tried to do, I have been made to see that I could never stay in Kush. It’s Khem for me, and Ashtarta will be my Queen here. It might take some time to convince her, and there will be many things to do, but. …

“But what of you? Will you take a Queen, Manek?”

“A Queen?” Manek looked surprised, then showed his teeth in a grin. “That I will! She lives in the village of Thon Emahl, in Kush. She’s Thon’s widow, though I knew her before he did. I gave her up for … for the throne of Kush!”

“Well,” Khai answered, nodding, “now you shall have both.” He clasped the other’s arm. “Now we shall both have our hearts’ desires. Isn’t it enough, Manek?”

“More than enough!” Manek laughed. “Well, come on. What are we waiting for? If we make good time, we can be home in three days!”

“Two!” Khai answered, and he also laughed. And in his mind, he pictured Ashtarta’s marquee and a certain chamber within it where the walls were of purple linen. But what use to dwell on memories when the real thing waited for him at the end of a chariot ride?

The two men climbed aboard their vehicle’s platform and Khai took the reins. He wheeled his horses round and aimed them westward, then shook the reins and laughed again as he gave the animals their head….