A shame, he thought.
Mother was the only immortal.
But this one…so beautiful…she’d have worn the mantle well.
She woke just as he dabbed the last of the sand from her cheek. Even in the shadows, he could see the light had returned to her eyes. When she sat up, she looked startled.
“Galen?”
“Still here,” he said. “No, you’re not in the afterlife. Not yet.”
She looked at him with questions on her lips. Before she could say another word, he explained everything:
“…five and a half days.”
“…you talk in your sleep.”
“…hope you don’t mind the beetles I fed you.”
“…no sign of the Nemesis.”
Afterward, she sipped a long draught from her canteen and gazed into the starlight creeping through the holes in his cloak-curtain.
“I’m…cured,” she said.
He shook his head.
“The damage is done, Elly. You feel better now, but you’ll carry the sickness with you always. Whoever brings you your water pills had better have a stash waiting.”
“She will.” A slender smile cracked her lips. “By now, she’s waiting for us.”
Again, he felt the shadows roam within his heart. Someone was waiting for him, and someone knew where he was going. The thought of it pulled a black screen over the small kindnesses he’d done for Elly.
“Tell me where,” he said.
Elly caught his tone and looked afraid. She was still waking, still bleary.
“West of here.” She gulped. “Across the desert. Through more mountains. A valley. A city…a giant dead city. And then, the ocean.”
Every word she said was true.
She knows where I’m going.
He stood and stripped his cloak off the rock. In a flash, the black fabric lay upon his shoulders once more, and with it, his sword.
“When the moon breaks the horizon, we’re moving out,” he said. “And you’re going to tell me all about who’s waiting for us.”
Elly lowered her head and said no more.
11
“I don’t know what stories your grandmother told you, but the world wasn’t always like this.”
On a mountainside at dusk, among the spearing white rocks and grey shrub-grass, Galen crouched across from Elly. Wind from places higher up caught his cloak and made a ghostly thing of his body. The first stars, only now piercing the heavens, glimmered in the blacks of his eyes.
He was a fearsome thing, and Elia was rapt with him.
“In the first years after they exiled me, it was hardest,” he said while gazing into nothing. “They executed mother—I knew it even before the Habiru man told me. She’d helped me escape, and paid for it with her life. A few years later, the Nemesis and his hunters were after me. What did I know about survival? I’d lived a sheltered life. Water, food, a soft bed to lie on—I’d had it better than everyone else. And then it was gone. All of it…gone.”
Elly looked at him. She sat in the dirt, propped against a pine tree—a living pine tree. This was the story she’d waited all her life to hear.
“It all started when they came for the Pharaoh. If not for that, things might’ve been different,” he continued. “But they couldn’t have known. He’d spent centuries building his plan. Everything was in place. For every bomb they dropped, he dropped twenty. His doppelgangers were everywhere—how many times did they think they’d killed him, only to find bodies that were never his? I don’t know how he did it…how he convinced so many to follow his madness. In a matter of months, the world was destroyed. Oceans were poisoned. Fields turned to dust. Every city, not just the big ones…reduced to ashes.”
Elly leaned forward. She looked like she wanted to reach out, but she dared not touch him.
“While the skies were still black and he sat in his fortress, he made his laws.” Galen made a disgusted face. “No machines, he decreed. No tools. No weapons. No livestock, no wheels, no farms. ‘Hide in the sand,’ he told the world. ‘This is my world now.’”
“How did anyone survive?” Elly gazed at the dirt. “It sounds…impossible.”
Galen shrugged. Night was fully upon him now, and he was a shadow darker even than the great blackness of the mountain rising behind him.
“I can’t say,” he admitted. “What the war didn’t take from the people, the Nemesis did. He was unbridled back then. The monster people fear today…he’s nothing compared to the mass-murderer he was.
“But now that I’ve had weeks to push it through my mind, I know how I survived. You’re real, Elly. You and your foremothers. Your oath…I can see it now. All those early years, I thought it was me saving myself. But I remember the faces in the night. A woman here, two there…gliding always at the edge of my life. You were right—Mother arranged it. She must’ve loved me.”
On Elly’s face, he saw something resembling pride. She was a humble creature, quiet and solemn as stone, but as she hunkered beneath the lonely pine tree he swore he saw her cheeks flush scarlet.
“They made us learn about you,” she said at length. The starlight had reached her under her tree, and the glow made moons of her eyes.
“How far back?” he asked.
She gazed into the dark branches above. He knew she searched for a memory.
“You spent almost eighty years in Japas,” she said. “And that was…what? Three centuries ago? Grandmother said you learned the ‘old ways’ – whatever those were.”
“Swordsmanship.” He smirked. “How to move in the night. How to hunt, how to hide, how to focus. These were the traditions of the people who’d lived in Japas long before the days of the Pharaoh. A cunning people, they were. They taught me how to survive. They showed me how to kill.”
“But you left—”
“I shouldn’t have.” He shook his head. “The Pharaoh’s men landed with their ships, and up went their secret factories. If I’d have stayed, I could’ve stolen the Blue Vials. I wouldn’t have had to worry about time, not ever. But I didn’t know. I was ignorant, and I couldn’t foresee what they meant to make.”
The irony of talking to Elly about time and mortality wasn’t lost on him. She was a temporary thing, and doomed to perish like all the rest.
No doubt earlier for her choice to follow me.
“They say the caverns on Japas are as formidable as the Pharaoh’s pyramid.” Elly gazed into the same nothingness as he. “There will be men. Swords. Weapons we haven’t seen yet.”
Galen glanced over his shoulder.
Westward.
As if Japas and its treasure were just beyond the mountain.
“The caverns, yes,” he murmured. “And beyond them, beyond Japas, a more perilous journey than any man has ever undertaken.”
“Yes. That.” Elia shuddered.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He searched his heart for the fear she spoke of.
But found none.
* * *
The mountains were no easy thing.
During each of the next seven dusks, Galen and Elia arose from hiding and walked into the night. Up in the crags and treacherous peaks, the wind sharpened itself against their cloaks, while the rain clattered on their shoulders, beating at their bodies like tiny Habiru knives. The desert heat fell from memory. Even Galen, for all his strength, found time to shiver at night, when the gales slid down and whipped his still-wet hood from his soggy hair.
Elia made it bearable.
By the small, crackling fires they made beneath the rocks and daggerlike cliffs, she warmed her hands and told Galen her many stories.
When was the last time he’d listened to tales of someone else’s life?
Had he ever cared to?
No.
Weary, hungry, and clinging to herself within her cloak, she told him what her youth had been like, and he supposed in some ways her life had mirrored his own.
She hadn’t be
en but six years and a few months old when the Nemesis’ ship cast its long shadow over her village. She’d been scaling fish by the great Nile, hunkered with her sisters in the late afternoon light. She hadn’t seen the Nemesis himself, only his knights, who walked in a line from Elia’s village all the way down to the water.
Machines. They’d caught someone bartering in machines. Tools for fishing. Chisels. Hammers. Batteries. And the most flagrant violation of the Pharaoh’s law—a stamp meant for printing ink onto paper.
No one in the village had confessed to the deed, and so the knights had doled out their punishment. Three of the Nemesis’ men rounded up twenty males from Elia’s village, and after shouting the Pharaoh’s decree into the coming dusk, one of the knights removed his black helmet, tugged a small cylindrical wand from his waist, and waved it across the line of men.
Elia remembered the device’s ominous hum, the horrid sound it made. After the knight waved it, the men fell to pieces on the Nile’s shore. Heads thumped against severed arms, which rolled to a stop against piles of legs and smoldering torsos. Elia spoke of the smell, and her face paled beneath her hood.
Dark-lance, Galen knew. Short-range weapon. Invisible light. Carves flesh like daggers through paper.
Elia had lost two sisters that night, whom the knights took as tribute.
But…
Not all her stories were of terror and death. She spoke also of her voyage across the great western continent, whose deserts flowed with sand untouched by the Pharaoh’s ancient weapons, and whose secret villages prospered without need of weapons or machines. She spoke of the first time she had come to the ocean, of how its great dark waves crashed against a shore covered in shells. She passed through cities half swallowed in sand, glass towers spearing heavenward and catching the sun. She swam in cold-water lakes, and looked upon great beasts and birds who by some stroke of chance had carved out a life away from the horrors wrought by humanity.
“Mother told me to find a reason,” she said, still clutching her cloak to her arms. “A personal reason. Something for myself to make a lifetime of chasing you worthwhile. And out there in the wilderness, where the grassland meets the ocean, and great horned beasts roam free, I think I found it. I want the world to be like that again. Green grass. Golden desert sand. Shells by the ocean. People who live without fear of the Pharaoh.”
For once, Galen had joined her on the same side of their tiny fire. He glanced at her, and though her hood was low, he caught the flames dancing in her eyes.
“And you think I can deliver this world?” he said. “That when I’m done, everything will be the way you dream it?”
The flames grew brighter in her pupils. She looked at him, for the first time emboldened.
“These weren’t dreams,” she declared. “These things were real. I saw them. And no, I don’t think you’ll kill the Pharaoh and suddenly everything will be right. But it could be. A hundred years from now…or a thousand. It could be. But not with him still on his throne. He’ll live forever, and his world will become everyone’s world. How many people even remember what it used to be? The light has almost gone out. How much longer until it’s all forgotten? Someone has to make it right. And it could be you, Galen.”
He leaned back against the dark mountain stone. The stars were hidden behind black clouds, and the winds picking up at night’s precipice. It was almost time to walk again. The mountains would soon be behind him.
And then, the city of bones.
“It’s a lot to put on one man.” He held his palms open above the fire. “The whole world.”
Elly nodded. Her eyes were invisible now, shrouded beneath the rim of her hood.
“It is,” she said. “My mother even said so. ‘Look at it this way,’ she told me. ‘He’s going for the Pyramid on his own. Let the rest of the world tag along.’”
He closed his eyes and pulled his hands away from the fire.
He knew what Elly’s mother had meant.
I’m not doing this for them, and they know it.
But anyone is better than the Pharaoh.
Even Galen. Even me.
* * *
Six days later, with the mountains and the desert far behind them, Galen and Elly crossed a line of black hills in the middle of the night.
The stars were high.
The clouds had burned away.
A dark land lay before them.
Together, they trudged down a black-sanded slope and into a shadowed vale. Even Galen, for all his strength, marched slower than before. The nights had been too long, the days sleepless, and ever his thoughts turned to what lay ahead.
“Stop,” he told Elly. She halted beside him, and they looked out across the sprawling night. Deep in the valley, ghostly lights shined in the dark, tiny pinpoints far more haunting than the stars.
“The City of Bones.” He looked at her.
“I’ve heard of this place.” She shuddered. “Many millions lived here, so my grandmother told us. The ocean on one side, mountains on the other.”
“And death in the middle,” he said gravely. “Those lights are mostly Habiru outposts. But it’s in the darkness we should be wary. Ten-million people died here during the Pharaoh’s attack. Thirty generations later, all that’s left are ghosts, murderers, rapists, and thieves. Not much here to live on, but these people…they know others come this way to reach the ocean. And so they wait. And they hunt.”
“How do we know there’s a—” tried Elia.
“A boat?” he said. “There’s plenty. Just have to know where to look.”
Without another word, he walked down through the sand and into the desolate vale. A graveyard, it seemed. Hollow buildings, most of them crumbled to no higher than his waist, spread out in a black labyrinth before him. Some structures were taller, with twisted, skeletal beams reaching out of the sand like fingers from the underworld.
A few hundred steps deep, he stopped to survey what lay before him. He imagined the shallow rut he stood in had once been a street winding through what had long ago been a happy place to live. But now the street was ashes and grit, and the sand wasn’t just sand, but ground-up bones mixed with the mortar of buildings many centuries dead.
He started walking again.
For all its horror, the City of Bones was nothing to him.
He was glad Elia couldn’t see much. She trailed him in the dark, sometimes needing to reach out and touch his cloak to find him. She wasn’t able to glimpse the black shadows burned into buildings’ sides. She couldn’t see the skulls which had baked in the sand for so very long, and which peered up with empty eyes into the abyssal night sky.
City of Angels, he remembered the name people had given to the city ages ago.
City of the Dead.
In the gloom, they walked. Galen had showed Elly how to move much in the way he did, and so their passage was nearly silent, their footfalls in the sand and bonemeal masked by the wind drifting in and out of tomblike houses.
Many times, he reached out and put his palm on her shoulder. She couldn’t see it, but he many times caught movement in the night. Sometimes he saw rats, and other times men and women dressed in rags and skins, haunting the alleys just ahead.
Smart girl, he thought.
Walks quiet. Stops quick.
Might survive.
He and she walked past thousands of dead houses. Some were little more than mounds of dust, and others heaps of rust and piles of the thing humanity had once called ‘plastic.’
Music had once played in these streets.
Lights had shined atop silver towers.
These people never had a chance.
For many miles, he walked the ghastly carpet of poisoned sand. Elly swept behind him, quiet as the wind. He knew the way. He tasted the ocean salt in the air, and the smell sharpened him.
But it was too late.
Someone was watching him.
12
The Nemesis gazed across the burning flatlands.
The screams had died, and the ashes of many thousand dwellings fluttered into the hot, hazy afternoon.
Behind his mask, his skin felt aflame. His armor was conditioned to keep his body cool at all times, but even the air gliding beneath the black steel plates couldn’t stop the lines of sweat from running down his forehead.
The last of the Umbali men had fought nobly. Facing a line of twenty knights armed with Scimitar discs, hundreds had charged. Two had survived the death-storm and toppled one of the Nemesis’ knights. But just as they tore the knight’s helm from his neck, four of the Nemesis’ soldiers had fallen upon the Umbali men and cut them to ribbons with black-bladed swords.
Now Umbali was quiet. Smoke streamed from the village’s burning foundations. Stray corpses bobbed in the river, faces down in the dark water. Even the children, who’d been playing in the sun-touched streets at dawn, were no more than dust.
The Nemesis knelt and used his cloak to wipe the blood from his sword. His Scimitar disc, still attached to his shoulder plate, wasn’t even warm. He’d used only his blade. Against the unprepared, unsuspecting Umbali people, his sword had seemed the only fair weapon.
But of course, what was fair?
A hundred knights with Scimitars, dark-lance wands, and armor no projectile could pierce had swarmed off his overloaded ship and fanned across the village. Even as the people had breakfasted in their homes and strolled through their gardens, they’d died in clouds of ashes and blood.
Looking at his blade and bloodstained cloak, the Nemesis realized he knew nothing of fair. His oath to use his sword carried no weight with the dead. In truth, death by Scimitar disc seemed merciful when laid against the terror of being butchered by a faceless mass-murderer.
And that’s what I am.
What I’ve always been.
He stood for time unknown, staring into nothing.
The day was too quiet. The soft blues of the morning sky dulled to sickly grey.
His only source of hope?
Thessia doesn’t know.
She’s still in my bed.
Lords of the Black Sands Page 9