by Неизвестный
Kamose again.
“He is a man, noble prince. Men are evanescent.”
“This man less so. He has lived a hundred and fifty years or thereby.”
N’yarlat-hotep was politely skeptical. “Then perhaps he has lived too long.”
“You speak as though you do not know of him. That must be pretense. All know of him, all…and speak his name with care. You imply that you could make an end of him? Dangerous boasting. Go forth and do it then. You would certainly be heard with attention once you had achieved that! Until you have…” The prince glanced at the bronze fetters lying powerless on the floor. “Until then, you may go free, so long as you depart the Southern Sycamore Nome at once.”
“Noble prince, I comply. I have no pressing need to remain.”
The scribe bowed low. He concluded that in the prince he had an inferior tool for any of his purposes, save a small demonstration and lesson. He carried it out. Then he left. The five magicians, rushing to their lord’s audience chamber, stood aghast at the spectacle before them.
A boneless toad-like organism wallowed and squelched on the floor, hampered by the prince’s garments. It struggled to escape from their defiled, oozing bondage, even as the magicians goggled. The object’s larynx and quivering mouth remained sufficiently human for it to rasp words through flabby, ulcerated lips.
“The Black Pharaoh…the Black Pharaoh…”
Being magicians, though rather poor ones, they knew the significance of that phrase. They fled with one mind. They vanished from the nome and thereafter from Egypt. Behind them, the batrachian object called piteously, “Do not leave me like this!”
They ignored him. The prince moved in lurching hops from his palace foyer, down through the gardens to the river. Distraught cries bubbled from his throat as he progressed, and servants fled from him, shrieking. He crashed through the reeds at the water’s edge, attempting to drown himself in the river.
In his grotesque form, it was difficult. Crocodiles spared him the trouble. They eschewed him as food, but they tore him asunder.
N’yarlat-hotep considered that he had sought sufficient contemporary knowledge from human beings. He traveled to the sealed valley of Hadoth, west of the Nile, locale of the catacomb of Nephren-Ka, whose existence was now denied. Therein, the usurper had enacted a fearful mass sacrifice long ago, at the behest of the Black Pharaoh.
Now the catacomb lay empty except for dust. Nothing lived in the shunned valley but a horde of ghouls. They dared not leave. A mighty interdict had been placed upon them, and each night they howled vainly to the stars for release. Natural things would have perished of famine in the first year, leaving their bones to whiten.
“Who has done this?” N’yarlat-hotep asked.
They groveled and fawned instead of rending him as they would have done a man; they knew the Black Pharaoh. Their skeletal ribs and deeply shrunken bellies showed starkly through hides resembling grayish-white suede. Eyes the color of putrescence shifted sidewise at the question. Only one ghoul, the gaunt leader, dared speak the name through his dry, buff-yellow tusks.
“Kamose, the priest of Anubis. He pent us here in the twentieth year of the Pharaoh Usermare’s reign, that we might gain our sustenance from graves no longer. For that, he was appointed archpriest and lord of Abdu.”
The ghoul-chieftain spoke of a time eighty years previous.
“And Kamose lives yet?”
“He lives yet.”
From a man, N’yarlat-hotep had doubted it. From this quasi-immortal creature with such cause to know, he gave the claim credence. And the archpriest’s name had now been mentioned too often.
“Why does he care for your despoliations?”
“He must keep the favor of Anubis, lord. He must. Kamose lives under the displeasure of Thoth, and his patron Anubis protects him, else the Lord of the White Disk would…would…I know not. A thousand years of scaphism, without dying, perhaps, for a mere beginning.”
N’yarlat-hotep looked pensive. “The ibis-headed one is so greatly in ire against him?”
“Indeed,” croaked the dry-mouthed ghoul.
He and his tribe received a favor from N’yarlat-hotep for this intelligence. The Black Pharaoh went away from Hadoth, and in five days returned, followed by an entire community of folk worshipping in ecstasy—men, women, and children to the number of more than two hundred. They bounded and capered to the rhythms of a long sable drum, on which the Black Pharaoh beat constantly with his palms, and they never wearied. They climbed indefatigably over the sheer rock barriers that had long closed every entrance to the valley of Hadoth, though their hands and feet were rent by the escalade. Visions of never-failing cool water and crops that grew from the lightest exertion filled their minds.
They found more dust and rock—and the ghouls. Famished, the beings fell onto the Black Pharaoh’s dupes with rending teeth and paws. Horror replaced dreams, and the drum pounded exultantly as the entranced folk awakened to an attack by the monsters. A mother screamed as she beheld three ghouls tearing her son limb from limb, but her shriek gurgled into silence as cynocephalic jaws crushed her throat. A brother sprang to defend his sister, and a leering ghoul dislocated his arms with a swift double grab and wrench. Another man turned to flee, leaving his wife to her fate, and fared no better than the braver one as a flung stone shattered his head. They perished in utmost terror and pain; none escaped.
Before there was silence, even before their victims were dead, the ghouls devoured some of the plentiful meat; such was their hunger. The rest they left to ripen until it suited their tastes. Gathered in circles, they bayed the praise of N’yarlat-hotep to the sky. He accepted their worship with grace and then left the accursed valley again.
He was determined to meet with the Archpriest of Anubis.
To many, it would have appeared strange if Kamose had not been aware of the Black Pharaoh’s advent. Major supernatural events in Khem did not occur without his knowledge. Besides, his patron, the jackal-headed Lord of Tombs, knew the fates of men and was a master of divination, a skill in which his archpriest, as a matter of course, was expert. Yet Kamose carried out his normal duties as though oblivious. On a certain morning in Abdu, he was supervising procedures in the Pharaoh Usermare’s funerary temple—a fane, like the one to Usermare’s father, that was Kamose’s express responsibility. Offerings, rites, prayers—all were carried out to perfection. The ghouls had spoken the truth. Kamose was meticulous in retaining the auspices of his jackal-headed lord.
He was alone…and then he was not.
A man-bodied being with the head of a black jackal appeared, speaking his name with a lolling red tongue. Kamose, most unusually, made a spasmodic motion in his astonishment. The sand, brushes, and ink with which he had been writing were scattered across the floor. Then he kowtowed to the floor himself in complete obeisance.
“Mighty lord and patron! Opener of the Ways! I am to be commanded!”
The figure trod forward with a loping gait. Its feet, like its head, were those of a jackal. Arms, torso, and thighs, however, were human.
“I bring a warning more dire than the Two Lands have needed since King Djoser’s day, my archpriest,” the god said without preamble. “A being blasphemous and wicked beyond measure has come again. He wishes to infect all Khem with rebellion and madness. Unless men remain true to their godking and their gods, he may succeed.”
“We mortals do not live at a time when men remain true to their godking and their gods,” Kamose answered. “What being, lord and patron?”
“The Black Pharaoh.”
Kamose remained, for a few breaths, as silent as he was prostrate.
“It is said,” he responded at last, “that the Black Pharaoh came to Egypt one hundred years ago. That the river ran poisoned and red on that occasion, the fish dying in great multitudes. Frogs departed the water for the land until their hordes filled the cities. Then they perished and bred great swarms of flies.”
“It is said and it is
true. These dire events attended upon the Black Pharaoh’s mere passing visitation. Should he manifest himself strongly in Khem—as once he did—they would appear as trifles. Riots, disorder, and madness would attend him, as they ever had, and none except those who entered his service would profit. The worship of the gods would suffer an eclipse. The temples might stand and the priesthoods remain, as pretentious shells, but behind the names of Egypt’s gods, one unspoken name would hold power—that of N’yarlat-hotep, the Black Pharaoh.”
“A dreadful prospect,” the archpriest uttered thoughtfully. “How may it be averted?”
“You are the mightiest and most lordly of all magicians who have taken service in my priesthood. Yea, or any other. This the Black Pharaoh will discern, and you may be sure he will manifest himself to you, O Kamose, as he has to lesser men, as he wends upstream. He may not be slain as men are slain. But his presence in the Two Lands can be destroyed if he be shot with such arrows as these, and then his essence, his most dreadful ka, must return to the chaos at the center of infinity whence he came, where the One whose soul and messenger he is, resides.”
The jackal-headed figure held out a fistful of arrows that appeared to be shafted of ebony and pointed with broad sharp heads of glittering silver.
“You have Kushite bowmen in your service who seldom miss their mark,” the god continued. “Be sure they do not hesitate. They will have only one chance, O my archpriest.”
Kamose nodded slowly. He did nothing so puerile as boast of his archers’ abilities. The prospect of having them shoot such a fiend as N’yarlat-hotep, and the penalties for failure, caused his tongue to shrink like a corpse buried in desiccating desert sands. He knew something of the being’s stature. Like all high-ranking priests in the Two Lands of Khem, he had perused the secret records that dealt with the Black Pharaoh’s activities at the close of King Djoser’s reign. They were daunting even to one who had just been rightly called “the most lordly of all magicians.”
“What if my bowmen miss, chief of all the necropoli? Or if this being with his great command of magic should avert their shafts, be they never so truly sped?”
“Then they and you will infallibly perish as few meet death. And the young pharaoh will need a strong heart without you. The votaries of all Egypt’s gods will have to forget their differences and be one in integrity before this foul trespasser. To that purpose, they must have leadership, and if you fail, none but the Archpriest of Amun-Ra can provide it. Without leadership, resistance will collapse. Egypt will subordinate itself to a reign of horror in which only those who vow fealty to this herald of chaos will prosper.”
“I make oath on my heart it shall not be!” Kamose exclaimed. “Yet I require guidance, divine lord. Through divination…in my dreams…”
“You shall have it. I hold you to that vow.”
Turning, the figure of Anubis moved to the doorway, and in that doorway faded from Kamose’s sight. The archpriest rose. With a sardonic grimace, he realized that his knees were shaking. It was a lamentable sign that he remained human, for all his assiduous efforts in other directions.
Only those who vow fealty to this herald of chaos will prosper, he thought. By the Serpent! You might almost have been recommending the course! As for the notion that the Archpriest of Amun-Ra could be effective where I was not …
He actually laughed, for all the somber portentousness of the tidings the god had imparted. But following that one short peal, he knit his brows in a frown of concentration, gazing at the ebon arrows in his hand. Doubt as to their efficacy entered his skeptical soul. He wanted rather more than these on which to depend—more than his Kushite archers, for that matter, trusty and courageous though they had proven.
Kamose apprehended rather more of the other gods, and the Crawling Chaos who was their soul and messenger, than he shared with the devout or the conventional. He also possessed the secrets of various potions that could extend a man’s natural perceptions and abilities. After a hurried return to his mansion beyond Abdu, he swiftly decocted and drank one of them, knowing its dangers, in a precise dose. For about an hour thereafter, which was the effect’s duration, he made observations and measurements that would not have been possible with his senses in their normal condition. This he achieved despite harrowing distractions and the stress of knowing how limited was his time.
At least, once he was finished, he hoped he had achieved it.
In his library, he perused certain papyri from the reigns of Djoser and Snefru. They amply confirmed the hideous legends of Nephren-Ka’s reign and of his master, the Black Pharaoh, N’yarlat-hotep. Kamose’s messengers, which included birds, beasts, and the fish of the Nile, brought him news that verified N’yarlat-hotep’s coming in this current time. Great changes were toward, and the magician must decide how to respond.
A superfluous reflection. He knew he had already decided. Summoning his craftsmen, he ordered renovations to the huge open chamber where he characteristically divined events or received oracles. His estate possessed hundreds of carven screens, framed in cedar with many mica panes, adaptable to various uses. He ordered them brought from storage, and patterned grooves were to be prepared in the floor to receive them. Under the remorseless supervision of his eunuch major-domo, servants worked to perfect the techniques of swiftly manipulating them. Other beings subordinate to Kamose—beings not human at all—labored to create a structure humans could not have produced in the time available. The archpriest smiled between his teeth and wondered if he, even he, would be able to prepare everything before N’yarlat-hotep arrived. There was a certain appallingly make-shift quality to his activities.
Well, these were his resources and this was all the time vouchsafed him.
Nothing he knew or surmised of the Black Pharaoh reassured him. The demon or deity’s most celebrated attributes were malicious humor, deceit, and a proclivity for inducing madness—in the individual person or in whole populations. Whether the being did this for its own sake, for some larger purpose, or whether the effect came merely as a byproduct of some process incomprehensible to mortal human beings, had remained opaque down the ages.
Kamose remained, apparently desperate, in his chamber of divination, poring over ancient scrolls. Three palisades of ornate screens surrounded him, arranged as squares, one within another. The innermost had eighteen screens on a side, the second twenty-three, the outermost thirty. They were mere walls as they had been disposed now. Their potential was another matter.
Kamose waited in the chamber. His omens, divinations, and auguries—not to mention his wit—assured him that the being’s approach was an immediate prospect. He feared little, but to be blasé in the face of the Crawling Chaos would require mere sodden folly.
At his pleasure, simply and without fuss, N’yarlat-hotep manifested himself.
“I perceive that I am expected,” he said politely.
“You are,” Kamose agreed with matching aplomb. What the display of calm cost him, only he knew. “You are, if I address, N’yarlat-hotep?”
“I am he.”
The being wore his human aspect of a slim, youthful, and comely pharaoh in ebon and silver regalia. Kamose, who had commanded demons and lamiae, gazed into N’yarlat-hotep’s eyes and felt the chill of transmundane gulfs. In that moment, he knew that this person was all that the arcane, interdicted writings had averred that he was—and much more, concerning which they were discreet. But he did not abase himself as he had to the apparition of Anubis.
“I remember you now,” the stranger said in his light, mellifluous voice. “Yes. We have met.”
“I cannot recall, manifold one.”
“Your cap hides nothing from me.”
Moving so swiftly that Kamose, a trained wrestler and stick fighter, could not forestall him, he swept the linen coxcomb from the archpriest’s head.
“I have seen much worse,” N’yarlat-hotep assured him. “Still, it is somewhat distinctive. You did filch and study Thoth’s forty-two scrolls of magic, I s
ee, and he did compel you to take them whence they came, one by one, wearing a brazier of coals on your head.”
“That is the least of what he did.”
The hatred in his voice was escharotic. It appeared to be equally shared between Thoth and N’yarlat-hotep. The latter offered an unperturbed smile.
“I traveled your way a hundred years ago. You were dwelling in squalor among the western wastes, a disfigured recluse. Yea, and a mad one. Without your magic and an ability to command birds and beasts, you would have perished there. I passed a rather tedious hour in your company. You were of little interest then.”
Kamose made no foolish attempts to cover his appallingly seared crown. “Are you merely passing now?”
“Oh, no. I, N’yarlat-hotep, am in Khem for a lengthy sojourn this time. You will know the name of Nephren-Ka, whom I once made king? How if I perform the same elevation for you? Your reign, unlike his, would be long.”
“What sort of reign would it be for Khem?”
“Eventful,” the Black Pharaoh said blandly. “I would demand your complete fealty. It would mean renouncing your service to Anubis. No doubt the jackal can raise his leg against walls without your aid.”
“Without his protection I could not survive the continued malice of Thoth. May his heart shrivel and his name be erased.”
“I can bring that about, O Kamose! I could destroy Thoth with one hand and your patron Anubis with the other. You know these meager little godlets are sustained by men’s belief and worship, and they perish when that fades? I, and those whose soul and messenger I am, have no such limitations. The jackal ran yelping in fear to you once he was apprised of my coming, did he not?” The youthful figure gave Kamose a moment to ponder these assertions. Then he added casually, “I can heal that scarring, if you wish. The token of Thoth’s displeasure is within my competence to efface, though I see it has been beyond yours.”