The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 14

Sweat ran down Ruiz Aw’s face, though the air was now quite cool. He found himself unprepared for the play to end so soon. The phoenix lay still on the gilded stage, a cast away blossom. The audience seemed to hold its collective breath. A black curtain swirled up from the stage apron, concealing the scene.

Moments later it dropped to reveal Hashupit, both hands wrapped carefully in rainbow gauze, waiting at the vast table of her father, the god of gods, Canesh.

She stood well back from her father’s huge devouring mouth. He would never consume her purposely, but his mouth was so vast and his hunger so great that accidents were possible. Her father’s arms, long and knotty as thorn trees, swept the sacrifices into his maw. As fast as he cleared the table, new heaps magically appeared, bullocks, bushels of sweet fruit, countless fowl, piles of ripe grain, pigs large and small — all sent to him by his priesthood, who saw value in keeping the most powerful and capricious of the gods fully occupied. Everything disappeared down her father’s throat, but though his jaws worked ferociously, he never quite caught up with the flow. Some of the food spilled and was carried away by mortal servitors, tiny as insects under the table of the god.

“Father,” she greeted him, intending to confess her foolish actions and rely on his power to set things right.

“Daughter, it’s pleasant to see you,” replied Canesh, in rumbling tones.

Hashupit felt an unpleasant tingle in her wounded hand. “Father,” she began, “a very strange thing has happened to me.” She stifled a shriek as her hand spasmed in agony. She held it below the table edge, where her father couldn’t see, and looked. Creeping up her wrist was a hideous line. Above was the polished skin of the goddess; below was the liverish withered flesh of age.

She remembered the demon’s warning.

“I… I might have an ache — a stomachache, the mortals call it. Is this possible, Father?” The line of corruption halted just above her wrist, but gave none of its ground back. Hashupit felt close to fainting again.

Her father eyed her for a long moment, his jaws slowing slightly. Then he smiled. “It’s only because you’re such a picky eater that you’ve never noticed that gluttony takes vengeance even on the gods.” Canesh rumbled a laugh. A belch enveloped Hashupit in a pungent cloud, and she held her breath. “Too much amberberry nectar, eh?”

“Perhaps that’s it,” she said. She managed a wan smile and withdrew from his dining hall.

Ruiz watched the phoenix, back in her chambers, unwind the rainbow gauze from her hand, slowly and methodically. He shuddered with disgust and pity as she raised her disfigured hand, though the datasoak told him that she’d been painblocked before the hand had been deep-fried in hot oil and then desiccated in a crude vacuum dryer. The hand was a hideous claw, and the phoenix looked at it in disbelief before fainting again.

The curtain fell on the first act — though in this case it fell upward from the stage, magically suspended from the night air.

During the brief intermission, Ruiz fixed his eyes on the ground and tried to think of anything but the phoenix and her pain.

The curtain dropped to begin the second half of the play. The phoenix knelt at the feet of the senior conjuror, his god-mask still concealed in black silk. At the far corners stood the two other mages, also masked. The torches around the perimeter of the stage alternated darkness and light, pulsing through no visible agency. The tableau held motionless for a long, long moment before Bhas raised his arms in jerky greeting.

Hashupit found Bhas waiting for her at the edge of the world. She lay her head against his feet, sobbing. “Oh please,” she said, “please, what can you want of me?”

The dry voice of power spoke gently. “Ah, lovely Hashupit, I only mean to help. The pain is necessary — necessary to ensure your future happiness. It’s true!”

Hashupit wordlessly raised the claw, shaking.

Bhas was silent for a long moment, looking down on her, as if with fondness. Then he spoke, and his voice resonated with curiosity and pity, or so it seemed to Hashupit. “Hashupit,” he asked, “how is it that you’ve never mated? Never in these long eons?”

For a moment she forgot the pain, and she straightened her back into a haughty line. “How can this be your concern?”

Bhas seemed to grow taller, wider, darker. His voice rolled over her, suffocating her under its power. “You forget yourself, Hashupit. My concerns are what I make them.”

On the stage the torches fluttered faster, and from the orchestra rose a low discordant wail, a raw sound that scratched at Ruiz’s nerves.

The sons of Bhas sidled closer. In the tracks of Thethri, god of famine, tufts of withergrass sprang up, writhing with a spastic urgency. From the footprints of Menk, god of slavery, grew a rank tangle of corpsewort, and the perfume of that ugly flower rolled out over the audience, a musty putridity. The goddess rose and drew back, noticing the two for the first time.

“And these weirdlings, who are they?” she asked, with as much of a sneer as her trembling lips allowed.

Bhas touched her hand and punished her with pain, pain that seared up her arm and clutched at her heart. She fell to the ground, rolling from side to side, striking at her claw with her good hand, as if to punish the source of her torment. When finally the pain eased, she sat up and looked at Bhas with eyes that held no more rebellion.

Bhas smiled beneath his mask, and it was as if the black silk was disturbed by the scurry of maggots. “These are your choices, Hashupit,” he said, gesturing to his sons. “One will be your mate, the mate that was promised you when the world was young. As you were promised, lovely Hashupit, to us. Your father never told you of that bargain, did he?”

“No,” she said. She could not bear to look at the awful trio, but their godly emanations touched her like a hot dirty wind; the black intensity of Bhas, the empty greed of Menk, the hopeless desperation of Thethri.

“But it’s true, oh yes.” Bhas stepped to her side. Twisting his thin powerful hand in her hair, he jerked her to her feet. She was too weak to resist, or even to support her own weight, so she hung from his hand like a trophy. “May I,” said Bhas, “present my beloved sons?” He gestured with his free hand. “This is my firstborn, Menk.”

Menk executed a servile bow, as stiff as a reanimated corpse. Hashupit shuddered, and Bhas gave her a small shake of admonishment. “And this,” he continued, “is Thethri, the younger of my children.”

Thethri didn’t bow; rather, he stretched his arms out in a pleading gesture. Where the robe fell away from his arms, they appeared almost fleshless, bone covered with tightly stretched skin, and his fingers were talons.

Hashupit finally found the strength to stand, and Bhas released her and stepped behind, resting his elegant hands on her shoulders. “You must choose,” he whispered in her ear. “You have no choice but to choose. If you resist me you won’t die, but you will wish to. You’ll be forced to hide your hideousness in the deepest cavern you can find, lest those who once praised your beauty destroy you in a fury of loathing. Eh?”

Hashupit found it impossible to doubt him. “Are there no brides for your sons in Hell?” she asked, in a tiny defeated voice.

Bhas laughed, and his hands clenched on her shoulders, digging into her flesh. But the small pain was like a caress, compared to the agony of her hand. “Oh, perhaps there are,” he answered, “but the Hellmaids are hard and rough in comparison to you, ripe Hashupit.”

As if to punctuate his words, the pain in her hand flared, so that she almost passed out again. “Yes,” she said. “I will choose.”

Ruiz shivered in the increasing chill. He watched, completely absorbed, as the play progressed.

He watched as she chose Thethri. He watched as the gods unmasked, and Hashupit swooned yet again. In a swirl of blue glitter, the scene changed to the palace of Hashupit’s father. The action of the play accelerated as Hashupit allowed Bhas and his sons within the gilded halls, where sweet fruit hung from branches that grew from the cool white stone, where new wine flowed from every courtyard fountain. The conjurors performed marvels of deception, shifting the scene as deftly as in any pangalac holodrama, while the beauty of the phoenix grew ragged, pressed between pain and horror. Her face bleached whiter with each passing moment, her hair grew lank with sweat. The Dry God and his sons prowled the corridors and gardens, and where they passed, death followed, stilling the fountains and withering the blossoms.

Ruiz felt a cold dread. Despite his conditioned detachment, he had begun to see the phoenix as something… human. Something more than an anonymous victim on a backwater client world. As she twisted and struggled, moving down the narrowing corridor of the plot, closer and closer to her death, it became more and more difficult for Ruiz to watch. Her eyes seemed to turn inward, the fullness of her lips was cramped into a tight line of misery, but through it all, she performed her role flawlessly, admirably, still the foolish sweet goddess.

The climax of the play approached. Ruiz stirred himself, descended from his vantage point. He began to slide through the crowd, as if in a trance, encountering no resistance from the citizens of Bidderum, who were even more caught up than he. Ruiz worked his way closer to the stage, his training taking over, while his mind continued to be held by the play and its marvels and terrors.

In the palace of Canesh — where before all had been cool delight — dry ruin spread. Bhas moved at will, corrupting all within, even the sacrifices on which Hashupit’s father fed, so that the greatest of gods grew deathly ill. Canesh had barely enough strength to scrape the decaying scraps into his maw, and as Canesh weakened, all of Pharaoh approached death. Menk and Thethri stalked the land, infecting the world with their own special horrors.

As for the goddess Hashupit, she sat at the far end of her father’s feasting table and watched, thinking of her mating ceremony on the morrow. She had no faith that she would survive long after that, after Bhas had secured his triumph, and in any ease, Pharaoh would be dust, utterly and forever.

Ruiz stood at the apron of the stage, waiting. His staff trembled in his hand. But he was so transfixed by the play that the staff had to increase its signal to a painful tingle before he responded and dropped his eyes to the indicator. Metal was moving nearby, a mass suggestive of the craft that Ruiz watched for. He looked back over his shoulder, striving to pierce the gloom beyond the cressets, though he knew that such a craft would have excellent visual shielding. He felt a familiar tightening between the shoulder blades, and he should have taken steps to purge the spell of the play from his mind. The indicators zeroed again, and he relaxed minimally. The poachers were evidently willing to wait for the end of the play.

For the last time, Hashupit stood at the south edge of the world, looking down into Hell, her silk slippers touching the crumbling verge, where a heavy man would not dare stand. A hot wind lifted her cloud of fine hair and brought the scent of her body to her. She wore her favorite gown, so fine and sheer that her elegant flesh showed clearly beneath. Her ruined hand was wrapped in satin ribbon, cinched by strings of black sandpearls. She was, again, a magnificent sight, a believable goddess.

From the north came Bhas, to perform the ceremony of joining, the final cementing of his power. From the east staggered Thethri, bridegroom, holding his bloated belly as if it might fall off. From the west came Menk, a jealous witness to the ceremony. They slowly converged on the goddess, who shifted just a bit closer to the edge.

Bhas cried out in alarm, “Take care, beautiful Hashupit; the drop is far. You would not care for the steams of Hell, nor would I care to descend after you.”

Thethri made a faint gurgling sound and extended his skeletal arms toward her.

“You see,” Bhas said, “your husband-to-be is concerned. Please, come away from the edge.”

She held up her hand, the one wrapped in ribbon. “I’m no longer so beautiful, am I?”

“No matter,” Bhas said, edging closer by imperceptible stages. “Thethri is not particular.”

“So I guessed.”

Bhas stopped, just out of reach of Hashupit’s arms. He eyed Hell’s void uneasily, then stepped back a bit. “Menk,” he ordered, “bring her away from the edge.”

Menk folded his massive arms. “No, Father; I have no stomach to begin another million-year climb. You must fetch her yourself, or perhaps Thethri will do it.” Menk laughed, a soft throaty snigger.

The end came swiftly.

Thethri tottered forward with a strangled cry of desire, and the goddess welcomed him with open arms. Bhas darted forward, too late, as the two toppled off the edge of the world, Thethri shrieking fear, Hashupit smiling like a bride, clinging tightly.

On the stage, plinths shot high, carrying Bhas and Menk upward out of the light of the torches, giving the illusion that Thethri and Hashupit were falling. Their bodies, supported by some unseen means, twisted and fluttered in the draft of a wind machine below the stage. In a moment they had “fallen” to the level of the first steams of Hell, represented by colored veils released into the blast. These veils were rippled by rising floods of darker and darker color as the two fell deeper and deeper into Hell — pure white yellowing gradually into pale sienna, darkening into the crimson of arterial blood, the purple of stained steel, and finally, the deepest black. Just before the torches guttered to their dimmest, while Thethri went windmilling on down to disappear into the depths of the stage, the goddess was struck by a ledge that slammed up to meet her. Her body bounded high, limbs loose, then fell back into a motionless heap.

Ruiz hoped fervently that the impact had killed her, or at least rendered her unconscious. He looked on, horrified, as she began to stir feebly on the stone.

Then she jerked, and her eyes bulged, and her face twisted out of that mask of unnatural beauty into the face of an ordinary woman in agony. She began to scream, but the sound was choked by the thorny leafless stem that burst from her mouth. Her body shook in the final moments; then the vines thrust through her abdomen with small geysers of blood.

She lay still, finally. The vines writhed upward and burst into flower, covering the corpse with great, white, sweet-scented double blooms.

Ruiz was shaken. The phoenix had been executed with a stiletto vine, an ephemeral species that grew on the upper slopes of Hell, seeds of which could be won only by slave Helldivers.

The lights came up and revealed the senior conjuror standing above the corpse of the phoenix, flanked by his two fellow performers. He began the traditional coda.

“And so the goddess Hashupit met her doom in Hell. But by her sacrifice we are spared Famine, and by her sacrifice the power of the remaining two of the Awful Three is diminished, so that our lives are bearable. Never must we forget that Thethri is climbing the walls of Hell, and will someday return, if the priests watching at the Worldwall are not vigilant.”

The three performers bowed, and Ruiz saw a curious emotion in their eyes. He understood suddenly and strongly that these men expected translation to the Land of Reward. They had given the performance of their lives, the culmination of all their craft and faith, and they knew it. Only the frail magician who’d played Thethri seemed to feel any doubt that he wanted his reward, though emotion was hard to read in the tattooed wilderness of his face.

Ruiz’s staff buzzed insistently. He fought his way through the last layer of the silent crowd.

“As Hashupit herself will rise one day, for not even death is forever,” the conjuror finished, as Ruiz flung himself onto the stage, sprawling before the bier of the phoenix.

Ruiz had time enough to see shock and outrage begin to form on the thin aristocratic face of the senior conjuror. Then the catchbubble formed around the stage, and the stun field struck. The conjurors dropped as if poleaxed, and even Ruiz, despite his conditioning, felt as if unseen hands were stuffing thick cotton into his ears, as if his skin no longer was connected to him, as if his eyes were full of opaque jelly. He lay motionless for what seemed years. Then he stirred, trying to locate his extremities, trying to decide which way was up. After a time, he sat successfully, shoving one of the unconscious conjurors off his legs.

Ruiz moved in a fugue. Had more of his personality remained operative he might have been cursing his stupidity and inattention. As it was, the only strong current in Ruiz’s mind was the emotion with which he’d viewed the conclusion of the phoenix play, a deep melancholy regret, centered on the ravaged body of the phoenix. As his vision cleared marginally, all he could see was her still form.

The light in the transport bubble was pervasive, a hard violet-tinged radiation that allowed nothing to remain hidden. Ruiz found his staff, got unsteadily to his feet, staggering and almost tripping over the body of the mage. Trailing his staff from one hand, he approached the bier where the phoenix lay. His head was filled with a sourceless buzzing, his bones shook in the grip of the slaver’s unshielded drives; thought was impossible. He stood looking down at the phoenix. By no stretch of the imagination could she be considered beautiful now. The blossoms had wilted and fallen over her like coarse yellowing snow, and the vines themselves were already far gone into decay.

Almost absently, Ruiz dropped the staff and began to pull away the vines. They were crumbling into black slime, but the portions rooted in her body were still solid enough to come out in one piece. They made a terrible little sucking sound as they pulled free, but Ruiz noted that the wounds themselves were rather small. There was no great quantity of blood.

He arranged her so that she looked more comfortable, and closed her eyes. He was still not capable of real thought, but it seemed to him that there was more that he could do. Along with that feeling came anxiety, an anxiety that Ruiz somehow related to time. It seemed that there was something that he must do soon, if he was to do it at all. Ruiz chased the thought through the darkened depths of his mind, but it was as elusive as an eel. Finally his eye fell on his staff where it lay beside the bier. The anxiety stabbed deeper. He picked it up, handling the polished wood as if touching it for the first time. His hands made a curious twisting motion, without his prompting, and the staff separated.

Several items fell out of the hollow in the head of the staff, and Ruiz bent to sort idly through them, dropping the staff again as his attention wandered.

Then, obeying some impulse that made only dim sense, he picked out the medical limpet and an ampoule of general-purpose replicant gel.

The buzzing in his head grew louder, and his movements even less certain. Finally, with a frown of ferocious concentration, he laid the medical limpet against the waxy flesh of the woman’s neck, near the site of the worst damage. Read-outs flared crimson, and tendrils shot from the limpet to curl protectively around her skull. A long moment later, other tendrils emerged, to quest into the other wounds made by the stiletto vine.

He broke open the ampoule and smoothed the gray gel gently over the torn flesh. The gel had a sweet smell that mixed unpleasantly with the stench of the rotting blossoms. There was enough gel to coat the disfigured hand as well, so he unwrapped the ribbon and forced himself to do it. He watched, shuddering with weakness, until the gel was absorbed, and then he noticed that the limpet’s angry flash had faded toward amber. The woman’s chest began a shallow rise and fall, and her skin was less gray.

Blood roared in his ears, and his vision darkened. He used the last of his strength to gather the scattered contents of the staff, replacing them in the secret compartment; then he snapped the staff back together. His legs gradually refused to support him and he collapsed to the stage. A moment later the staff rolled from his hand, and he slept with the rest of the cargo.

Ruiz Aw woke first. Had it been otherwise, had some unmodified primitive thrown off the stunfield first, Ruiz would have been astonished.

His naked body rested against warm metal and plastic; above was a glare of light that hurt his crusted eyes. The air smelled of disinfectant and urine. The subliminal moan of the drives was gone from his bones, and that inspired his first fully formed thought. We’re here, he decided, wherever here might be.