Lords of the Black Sands

by J. Edward Neill

  The man looked stunned.

  She hoped he didn’t know Azid.

  And she hoped also the man believed her role as Eadunn’s concubine. Precious few people in the world knew the Nemesis’ true name—Eadunn. But she did.

  Taking her arm, he led her off the street and into one of the hangars. Its door was black steel, not unlike the cold, hard doors within the Pyramid. Going inside, hearing the heavy thing slam shut behind her, she swallowed back her fear.

  The last time she’d passed such a door, she’d suffered torture for days uncountable.

  Inside the hangar, a great shadowed space lay open. She knew it for what it was. In this place, as in each of the other nine hangars in the Black Fleet’s airfield, the Pharaoh’s warships were meant to sleep. Here, protected from the sun, the sand, and the prying eyes of civilization, the most lethal of all the world’s weapons could rest.

  Only, the hangar was empty.

  She had the feeling the others were empty, too.

  A few stray workers wandered the open space, their faraway voices indistinguishable from the wind buffeting the hangar’s sides. She heard them, but understood none of what they said. She was glad only that they couldn’t see her. Her chances were greater if few men saw her face, she believed.

  For surely some of them had heard the rumors of her imprisonment.

  The man brought her up a short stairway and into a cool, dark room. He struck an oil lantern to life—the airfield had no electricity—and he helped her sit on a floor-cushion.

  “Here. Eat.” He set a brick of bread in her hands.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Al-Muham.” He rapped his fist against his chest. “I’m the overseer of this hangar. The men you saw outside, they’re security—Lord Volkan’s guards. It’s best if you stay in here. They won’t be as kind as I have been.”

  She lifted the bread halfway to her mouth, but paused.

  “Why?”

  Al-Muham looked to the blank wall beside him. The flawless steel had been painted grey, and was featureless but for the bumps made by huge rivets.

  Also featureless was Al-Muham’s face, which chilled Thessia.

  “Wait here,” he said. “Eat your bread. Your coming today is fortunate, Lady Thessia. The ships will be arriving soon. Lord Volkan…and your master, Lord Varwarden.”

  He left the room.

  She laid the bread on the floor and watched him go.

  And she knew, in the fog of pain and exhaustion in which she’d arrived, she had misjudged Al-Muham.

  He wasn’t going to help her.

  * * *

  Beneath a dark stairwell, Thessia hid.

  Men’s voices bounded off the steel walls, filling her ears with the sounds of their frustration.

  She counted at least seven different men, Al-Muham chief among them.

  “I gave her water and bread, and the little bitch ran,” he spat. His footsteps were directly overhead, ringing on the cold steel stairs.

  “You left her alone? In your office?” another man seemed to mock.

  “Where was she to go?” said Al-Muham. “Back into the desert? No. She had a purpose in coming here. She knows our Lord’s name.”

  “She’s an assassin? One of Saeed’s?”

  Al-Muham stopped at the stairwell’s bottom. His lantern burned bright in his hand. Had he used it to light the space between the stairs, he’d have seen Thessia’s eyes wide open in the dark.

  “No…no assassin,” he rumbled. “Something else. She had many scars. Maybe she really is his woman.”

  “Maybe she fled into the sands,” said the other man.

  She imagined Al-Muham shaking his head, his black braid dangling halfway down his back.

  “No. She didn’t come all the way out here just to run away. Besides, we’ve already looked. No tracks. If she’s out there, the Lord’s eyes will find her. But she’s not. She’s here. I know it.”

  Thessia’s heart rattled inside her chest.

  When had she last slept?

  Eaten?

  Taken a breath without feeling the Pharaoh’s sword floating over her neck?

  She made herself small, shrinking behind the black barrel underneath the stairs. The barrel hid her well enough, but if Al-Muham and his men were diligent enough in their search, they’d have her.

  The door to the outside was too far away, closed fast at the far end of a lightless hall. Some of Al-Muham’s men had gone on to search the other hangars, but seven at least were swarming near her hiding place.

  Her only friend was darkness.

  Night had fallen an hour ago.

  The men’s only lights were their lamps, glowing white as ghosts in the vast hangar void.

  If I could get out that door…

  If only…

  A gang of three men swept past the stairwell’s bottom. If they’d cared to shine their lamps in her direction, even the barrel would not have hidden her. But they were agitated. Something else had their attention.

  “Sire,” one of them caught up to Al-Muham and his companion halfway down the dark hall. “Sire, there’s—”

  The men kept talking. She compacted herself into a tiny ball behind the barrel, losing their words beneath the sound of her heart clattering in her ears.

  God, please, she screamed in silence.

  If they find me, let them kill me quickly.

  I don’t want to go back. Not there…not to the Pyramid.

  Her despair was so vast, she forgot the dark-lance hidden within her shawl. She’d picked it up before leaving Azid’s dwelling.

  With it, she might’ve carved her way through them all.

  More voices.

  More footsteps on the stairs.

  She dared a peek over the top of the barrel. She saw the door to the outside cracked open, and several men spilling out into the moonlight. Al-Muham was first to exit. She was glad to see him go. He was their leader, their ‘Sire,’ and he’d tricked her with ease into believing he was sympathetic to her plight.

  The door began to fall shut. Before it did, she heard what sounded like thunder.

  No thunder in the desert.

  It’s a warship.

  She swallowed great gulps of air. Sweating despite the night’ chill, delirious in the dark, she crept out of hiding. The nearest lanterns were gone. The only lights, distant as stars, winked at her from two-hundred yards away, where Al-Muham’s men scoured the hangar’s far end for her.

  Now, Thessia. Run.

  Another door, smaller than the others, lay seventy feet away. In the hangar’s corner it sat, unguarded for the moment. With bare feet, she leapt up and pattered across the smooth steel floor, reaching the door in seconds. She very nearly crashed headlong into it, but skidded to a stop a few inches away.

  It’ll make a noise.

  They’ll hear it squeal open.

  And crash shut.

  Just go, Thess.

  She hurled herself against the slab of black metal.

  …and emerged into the open night.

  The door rattled shut behind her. Twenty yards ahead lay a giant glass pane, one of thousands erected to keep sand from invading the airfield. She’d no intention of finding a gap in the glass and escaping into the desert. She’d nowhere to go, nowhere to run. Even Babar was dead—his rings still sitting on Azid’s table.

  She had to find water. Food. And someplace safe to hide.

  Quiet, barely breathing, she rounded the hangar’s corner and peered down a wide black alley.

  It wasn’t just one warship that had arrived. The entire Black Fleet had landed, their giant raven shadows spreading through the great open space between hangars.

  She stared. Knights and other servants of the Pharaoh poured off the ships, mingling with Al-Muham’s men. They looked like an army of ghosts, their tired faces hovering above their black-clad bodies. She wondered what nightmares they’d worked, what horrors they’d seen out in the great, dark world.

  She wou
ld’ve stared longer, seeking her lover amid the masses, but the door from which she’d emerged slammed open, and she glimpsed many lantern lights rounding the hangar’s corner.

  She ran.

  No one heard her. Her footsteps were soft as windblown sand, and the hundred voices emerging from the warships loud enough to cover her escape. In the gloom, she sprinted around the next nearest hangar. She was lucky, she supposed. No one was there when she cut around the giant building’s corner. If they had been, she’d have run right into them.

  The chase would’ve been over.

  Away, she pattered. To the far ends of the airfield. To the great dark space in which none of the warships had landed. Into the moonlight, far enough that no one who wasn’t looking would see her. And there, alone beneath the stars, she sank to her knees and gasped for breath.

  Sitting on the airfield pavement, she gazed at the Black Fleet.

  Of the ten warships, nine were identical. Their wings curved forward, the engine-pads on their hulls still glowing softly from great exertion. Each ship was pocked with huge Scimitar discs, dozens of them, the same horrid weapons she’d seen used to kill thousands.

  The same thing they used to kill Elia, she knew. The men in the Pyramid had laughed about it many years ago. How they’d destroyed one of the Pharaoh’s own ships. How they’d reduced a beautiful girl to ashes.

  One ship stood out from the others. Its wings were wider, the ramp leading into its belly longer than the rest. While the other ships emptied, a lone knight stood tall on the ramp’s midsection, his face still masked. The other men shrank from him when they walked by, and more than one of Al-Muham’s workers bowed subtly in the knight’s direction.

  At him, she stared.

  That’s not Eadunn.

  That must be Lord Volkan.

  I have to get on that ship.

  30

  Galen didn’t want to admit it.

  But when he stood at night’s edge and saw it for himself, he’d no other choice.

  Saeed’s army was grander than he’d dreamed.

  As the sun collapsed in the west, he stood beside Saeed and watched the soldiers gather. Twelve-hundred Habiru from the far northern Turka foothills gathered to his right. They carried longbows and quivers full of arrows, the same weapons the warriors of the ancient world had used. The Habiru were rowdy and intimidating. With shocks of black hair and thick robes shielding them from the cold, they stood apart from the rest of Saeed’s army, glowering at their lessers, laughing as if they weren’t about to die.

  Galen wondered only one thing:

  Where did they get the wood for their bows?

  Behind him, more troops gathered. The tribes of Europa, having somehow communicated with Saeed across the sea, across mountains, deserts, and dead, dead forests, clamored in numbers approaching two-thousand. They were a pallid people, tall, lanky, and malnourished. But Saeed had extolled their courage, noting that more than half their number had died during their journey.

  “Killed by the Nemesis’ raids. Felled by hunger and disease. And still, the survivors marched to us,” Saeed had noted more than once. “Brave fools. I wonder if Menkaur will like seeing them inside his Pyramid.”

  There were others:

  Bands of Hindi spearmen, bundled poorly in animal skins, shivering on the plains.

  Clusters of Persi myrmidons, their little hands carrying too-big mallets, their narrow shoulders and chests covered in ‘armor’ woven of grass and fibrous reeds.

  As if grass can stop the Pharaoh’s steel, thought Galen.

  As if it won’t burn at one touch of a dark-lance.

  And to his left, occupying the dry scrubland at Saeed’s army’s rearmost position, a stew of a thousand other warriors milled in the gathering dark:

  Mountain men from beyond the eastern hills, whose villages were remote and whose languages were fashioned more of grunts than actual words.

  Skirmishers from the Han and Machu wasteland, small in body, quiet in temperament, but as deadly serious as the Habiru horde.

  And some fifty men of Japas, exiles from their home island, carrying steel swords instead of wooden weapons. The Japas men were trained as Galen had been. He considered going to them, searching their eyes to see if they knew him, but thought better of it. Their home was a graveyard now, and their way of life all but extinct.

  His indifference compelled him to nothing.

  He wanted nothing to alter his current mood. He was dressed for war, and ready for something grander than marching among a sea of dead men. Saeed had found him a cloak, not just any cloak, but dark raiment from a fallen Nemesis knight. The hood was deep, the shirt a near-perfect fit, and the boots…well…how long had it been since he’d worn boots so fine?

  He felt at home in the dead man’s clothes.

  And he knew why Saeed had offered such a noble gift.

  He wants to buy my loyalty.

  And he wants to know in whose back to put his arrows once the Pharaoh is dead.

  Neither of these truths bothered him.

  Because there was another gift, still.

  A Japas sword, bright and sharp, hung within the crude scabbard he’d strapped to his shoulder. The long, straight blade possessed a rough handle and no ornamentation, but Galen cared none. Nothing pleased him more than to carry a sword. With it, he was not only immortal, but invincible.

  He saw a beauty in the blade he’d never seen in humanity.

  A purity.

  A cleanness of purpose.

  He shot Saeed a cold smirk, but the self-styled king stood in the shadows conferring with four other men he considered his ‘generals.’ They were scheming again, Galen knew, plotting their march across the Pharaoh’s desert. One of the lanky Europa generals looked Galen’s way as if to invite him to the conversation, but Galen didn’t take the bait.

  Again, his indifference reigned.

  He couldn’t make himself care about Saeed’s plans.

  Within a few hours, the army would arrive at the Great Canal, at whose barren docks a thousand rafts lay sleeping. Under the darkness, they would cross the water and enter the Pharaoh’s desert.

  Galen glared once more at Saeed, warned the Europa general with a shake of his head, and walked away into the gloom.

  He needed to find someone.

  Just one among the thousands.

  …and convince him to leave Saeed’s banner.

  Dusk settled on the featureless Tabuk scrub. The winds had picked up, catching the cold air from the east and driving it across the flatlands. Galen slipped away from Saeed and his shivering men. It wasn’t difficult. In the shadows, in his heavy cloak, he was a wraith, gliding his way into the soldiers’ scattered ranks. No one looked his way longer than a second. Either the men—and even a handful of women—didn’t see him, or they knew who he was and wanted nothing to do with him.

  He walked among the soldiers, their crude campsites, and their fearful clusters. Saeed had ordered them to light no fires, and so they shivered in the dark, clutching themselves with skinny fingers, glancing skyward in the expectation of death.

  Most of their languages, he knew, and so he listened as he walked.

  “…only an hour away. And then we’ll be running across the sand,” he heard a nervous Hindi man say.

  “…have to attack the Pyramid at night,” said another. “Our only chance.”

  “…hope the big bastard is right,” whispered a Persi woman, her shoulder weighted beneath a sling of crude javelins, her waist thick with stone knives. “Don’t want to die out there beneath those damned flying machines.”

  “…he’s no liar,” argued her companion. “Think about it. We’d have been dead already if the Lord’s eyes could see us.”

  All of this and more, Galen overheard. Some of the warriors were confident, especially the Habiru, but the rest were poisoned with fear. They expected to die at any moment, for the sky to open up and the Black Fleet to burn away their bodies as if they were insects. The idea of
a giant warship hovering over Saeed’s men while they shot arrows and hurled stones at the sky made Galen helpless but to smirk.

  Die, they will, he thought.

  The real question isn’t how, but when.

  He reached the army’s southern edge. Out here, in the trampled dirt and dead underbrush, he walked at ease in the starlight until he found the one he sought.

  Tablii.

  The young man sat alone in the scrub, chewing on the root of a plant he’d tugged out of the dirt. Galen lurked invisibly in the shadows for a time, watching Tablii hunch over his pitiful meal, shaking his head at the idea of what he was about to do.

  He couldn’t have said why he’d chosen to help one lonely boy.

  Perhaps it was hidden in Tablii’s accent, which reminded him of his mother’s.

  Or perhaps in the young soldier’s eyes, which looked so like Elia’s.

  He’s of her people, after all.

  I’ll save just him.

  And then I’ll go.

  He emerged from the shadows and squatted beside Tablii. The slender boy didn’t appear startled. With a half-smile, he offered Galen some of his food.

  “Wild onion,” said Tablii. “Frostbitten, but still edible.” The boy chewed a tiny bulb, biting it off at the stem.

  Galen shook his head. “You’ll need it more than I.”

  “I forget sometimes.” Tablii shrugged. “Master Saeed, he tells us the immortals are special. Your power is inside you. You, the wicked Lord, and our destroyer, the Nemesis. You can’t die like us.”

  Galen thought back to his battle with Eadunn in the City of Bones. He’d clipped Eadunn’s fingers off with a quick sword stroke. He wondered whether the fingers had grown back, or whether the Nemesis had become a lesser man since the encounter.

  “You remind me of someone,” he said to Tablii. “Finish chewing your onion and then listen. I’ve a favor to do, and I don’t know why I’m doing it.”

  The boy swallowed and stared. In the starlight, the whites of his eyes glimmered, but the rest of him was shadow.