by Mike Lee
Hashepra sighed, wiping dirt from his hands, and glanced over his shoulder at the low cave gaping on the far side of the gully wall.
“There’s a spring inside, thank the gods, but only eight jars of grain,” he said.
Akhmen-hotep fought to hide his disappointment. Beside him, Memnet shifted silently on his haunches. The Grand Hierophant had lost a great deal of weight over the course of the campaign. His once-round face was sunken-cheeked, and his wide girth had shrunk so quickly that the skin hung from his waist like a half-empty sack. Though he could have claimed a greater share of the food as his proper due, the high priest had taken even less than the king. If anything, the nightmarish journey across the sands seemed to have made the Grand Hierophant stronger and more assured than ever before, and Akhmen-hotep had found himself depending heavily on his brother as the situation worsened.
“The caches are getting smaller,” the king said wearily. Hashepra nodded.
“Honestly, I don’t think the Bhagarites expected to live long enough to worry about a return trip,” he said. “I expect we exhausted the major caches on the way to Bel Aliad. All that’s left are bandit hideouts like this one.”
Akhmen-hotep ran a wrinkled hand over his face, wincing as he brushed the sores on his forehead and cheeks.
“Eight jars won’t last us more than a couple of days. How far to the next cache?”
The Hierophant of Geheb grimaced, and said, “Three days, more or less, but the Bhagarites say it lies north of here, not east.”
“And the closest one further eastward?”
“A week at least, they said.”
The king shook his head.
“We’ll have to kill more of the horses. How many are left?” he asked. Hashepra paused, trying to think. Memnet raised his head and cleared his throat with a hoarse cough.
“Twelve,” he said.
“Twelve horses, out of a thousand,” Akhmen-hotep murmured, musing bitterly on so much lost wealth. The retreat had been more ruinous than any battlefield defeat. The king couldn’t imagine how his city would recover.
“The Bhagarites still have twenty,” Memnet replied. “We could start with them instead.”
“The horsemen would sooner give up their right arms,” the king said, “and the horses are the only thing we have that ensures their cooperation.”
Hashepra sank down onto his haunches beside the king.
“The men won’t see it that way,” he said quietly. “They already grumble that the Bhagarite horses are being fed while the army goes hungry. Soon you might be forced to put a guard upon them as well.”
Akhmen-hotep glanced worriedly at the priest, and asked, “Have things got as bad as that?” Hashepra shrugged his powerful shoulders.
“It’s hard to tell,” he said. “My acolytes have heard some talk here and there. The men are hungry and afraid. They don’t trust the Bhagarites, and they resent your protection of them.”
“But that’s madness,” the king hissed. “I don’t like it any better than anyone else, but without the Bhagarites we won’t make it out of the desert alive.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with logic, great one,” Hashepra said, shaking his head. “The men are barely rational at this point.”
“No.” Memnet interjected. “It’s not the men who are the problem. It’s Pakh-amn. He’s turning them against you, brother, and you’re letting him do it.”
Akhmen-hotep scowled at the ground between his feet. He hadn’t seen very much of the Master of Horse since their first night in the desert. The young nobleman kept to the back of the army, claiming that he maintained a rearguard in case Nagash attacked the column in force, but it had been weeks, and such a threat had yet to materialise.
Hashepra eyed Memnet dubiously, and said, “Pakh-amn is an arrogant rogue, perhaps, but no traitor. He’s served the king ably since we left Ka-Sabar.”
“Has he? I wonder,” the Grand Hierophant said. “He enjoys the admiration of the warriors, without being forced to make the difficult decisions to keep the army alive. Has he made any effort at all to curtail the men’s resentments?”
Hashepra had no answer to the priest’s question. Akhmen-hotep set his jaw stubbornly. “A mutiny wouldn’t improve our odds of survival,” he protested.
“Pakh-amn doesn’t want an army; he wants a throne,” Memnet said. “He wouldn’t care if he walked out of the desert alone, so long as Ka-Sabar was his.”
“Enough!” the king snapped, cutting off his brother with a curt wave of his hand. “I’ve heard this all before. If Pakh-amn means to move against me, let him come. In the meantime, let’s clean out this cache and move on. We’re wasting precious time.”
The king climbed unsteadily to his feet. As one, his Ushabti rose gracefully from the shadows and followed along in Akhmen-hotep’s wake as he made his way back to the army’s remaining chariots. Hashepra watched the king go, his expression thoughtful.
“There is something sinister at work here,” he mused. “The acolytes of Neru have found places where their nightly wards have been tampered with. Someone is stealing out of the camp late at night, but so far the sentries have been unable to catch who it is.”
Memnet glanced up at Hashepra, his expression intent.
“Have you told the king?” he asked.
“Not yet,” the hierophant said. “I have no interest in starting a witch hunt. The army’s morale is fragile enough as it is. My acolytes and I are investigating the matter quietly. Tell me, do you have any evidence of Pakh-amn’s intentions?”
“No,” Memnet said, shaking his head. “The Master of Horse is too clever for that. All we can do is watch for signs that he is about to make his move. I fear that we will have little warning, which is why I have begged my brother to take action before it is too late.”
Hashepra nodded.
“Well, now at least I have a direction to look in,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’ll keep a close eye on Pakh-amn and see what the man is up to. Perhaps I can uncover enough evidence to expose him.”
“I will pray to the gods for your success, holy one,” Memnet said, nodding, but the Grand Hierophant did not sound too hopeful.
Three days later, Hashepra was dead. His acolytes found him in the early hours of the morning, wrapped tightly in his cloak. When they unwound the tattered fabric they discovered a giant black scorpion nestled in the hollow between the hierophant’s shoulder and neck. He had not been the first man to perish in such a way since the retreat began, for Sokth’s children were fond of taking refuge among the living and tormenting them with their terrible stings. The venom of the black scorpion turned the body as rigid as stone, and Hashepra had died in agonising silence, unable to make a single sound as the poison worked its way to his heart.
The news of Hashepra’s death filled the rest of the army with superstitious dread, and men took to giving offerings to Sokth from their already meagre rations, in the hope that the God of Poisoners would spare them. Akhmen-hotep tried to prevent the practice, arguing that fear was a poison all its own, but the men would not listen, and thus grew weaker still.
In the end, the king was forced to slaughter four more of the precious horses and ration the meat and blood carefully to get the army to the next bandit cache, only to find that the caves had been emptied a long time before. The anger and despair among the men had been palpable, and resentment against the Bhagarites nearly led to a riot. Only the king’s Ushabti managed to keep the desert guides alive. That night, however, two of their horses were killed and butchered, evincing wails of horror and bitter curses from the desert horsemen when the bones were discovered the following morning. The perpetrators of the deed remained a mystery.
On the night of their fifteenth day in the desert, the acolytes of Neru and their exhausted bodyguards were slain in a brutal ambush just before dawn. The men, well-practised in watching for signs of mounted attackers, were caught unawares when a dozen skeletal archers rose from the sands on the other side
of the camp’s protective ward and fired into their midst. The heavy infantry were the first to die, shot through the throat or pierced in the back at nearly point-blank range. Then the ambushers turned their bows on the fleeing acolytes. By the time reinforcements arrived the skeletons had disappeared, and the army had lost what little protection it had against the hungry night.
From that point forward, Akhmen-hotep was forced to keep half the army awake while the other half snatched a few hours’ sleep, rotating the groups every four hours. Attacks from the skeletal horsemen continued, and casualties mounted. Warriors who were caught sleeping on watch forfeited their food ration for the next day, which was tantamount to a death sentence. With so few chariots remaining, men who could no longer march had to be left behind.
Slowly but surely, the spirits of the desert closed in. Nightmares plagued the sleeping men, and strange figures stalked the edges of the camp beneath the moonlight. Men sometimes rose from sleep and tried to walk off into the sands, swearing they heard the voices of their wives or children. Those who succeeded were never seen again.
The Bhagarites led the army to one empty cache after another, and bore the king’s recriminations with looks of sullen contempt. The number of horses dwindled, until by the twenty-fourth day the last of the chariot pullers was dead. According to the guides, the next cache was more than five days away. The Bhagarites would no longer say for certain how many more days it would take for them to reach the far side of the desert.
Days passed, and the rations dwindled. Groups of men began lurking around the picket line where the last Bhagarite horses were kept, despite the warning glares of the Ushabti who had been set to guard them. Desperate as they were, none of the warriors dared to try their luck against the devoted, but the same could not be said of the Bhagarites.
On the thirtieth night of the retreat, while strange, savage creatures paced and howled in the darkness beyond the edge of the camp, the desert raiders commended themselves to Khsar and slipped away from the handful of Ushabti that still guarded them. Though the devoted were more than capable of fending off the advances of their starving kinsmen, their powers were not equal to the guile and stealth of the Bhagarites, who were horse thieves of nearly supernatural skill. The raiders had reached the pickets and climbed bareback onto their mounts before the devoted knew what was happening.
Shouts of alarm rang out across the camp as the desert riders spurred their beloved horses past the surprised bodyguards out into the sands. A few of the men tried to chase after the riders, but none got very far. Khsar’s divine animals were still as swift as the desert wind, and fled like smoke from the warriors’ outstretched hands. Their riders, free at last, threw back their heads and stretched their arms up to the sky, feeling the pounding of the hooves and the whisper of the wind against their skin one last time.
Without food or water, the last men of Bhagar and their beloved horses rode into the trackless desert, commending themselves into the embrace of their faceless god.
After the men of Bhagar were gone, there was nothing left but to march eastwards and pray to the gods for deliverance.
The army dwindled swiftly, like grains of sand spilling from a broken glass. Men died in the night, taken by madness or hunger, or simply fell to the ground during the march and refused to get up again. The hostility of the warriors subsided, along with all other emotions. They had been emptied of thought and feeling by the desert, and now waited only to die.
Then, when the Bronze Host was at its weakest, Nagash’s horsemen struck the deadliest blow of all. On the night of the thirty-second day they slipped easily past the unseeing sentries and left their handiwork to be discovered by the stunned warriors at the first light of dawn.
Ten jars of grain and fifteen jars of water were left in plain sight, distributed evenly around the ragged camp. The men fell upon them in a frenzy. When the jars were empty, they broke apart the thick vessels and licked the insides clean.
Then, with a little food in their bellies, the warriors of the Bronze Host sat down and thought about what the strange gift meant.
Akhmen-hotep awoke with a start. Overhead, the night sky was bright and clear, scattered with a sweep of glittering stars.
He hadn’t meant to sleep. The king sat up, blinking owlishly into the darkness. A handful of his Ushabti surrounded him, staring watchfully around the camp. The rest were walking the perimeter, alert for the enemy’s next move. If the skeletons meant to repeat the tactic of the night before, the king meant to stop it.
His bodyguards were under strict orders to drive off the skeletons and destroy any food or water they left behind. Akhmen-hotep knew that it was the only way to deal with the danger. The rations were deadlier than any spear or knife. With them, Nagash could tear the Bronze Host asunder.
Suddenly, three of the Ushabti rose to their feet, blades at the ready. A figure was approaching, picking his way carefully past knots of sleeping men. As he drew near, the king saw that it was Memnet. Waving for the devoted to relax, the king rose to meet his brother.
Akhmen-hotep saw that the Grand Hierophant was upset. His haggard face was pale, and his eyes were wide with fear.
“The time has come,” he whispered. “They are making their move even now!”
Fear, and worse, a terrible despair, swept through the king.
“Who?” he asked.
Memnet wrung his shaking hands, saying, “A score of lesser nobles and their men, a hundred warriors, perhaps more. The water and food were the last straw. They believe that if they treat with Nagash they will be allowed to return to Ka-Sabar in peace.”
Akhmen-hotep nodded grimly. If he summoned all of his bodyguards, he could cut the heart out of the conspiracy. A dozen Ushabti had little to fear from a hundred starving warriors.
“Where is Pakh-amn?” he asked.
“Here I am,” the Master of Horse answered.
Pakh-amn and a dozen noblemen were approaching the king and his guards with weapons in their hands. The young nobleman’s face was taut with anger.
“Your men have turned against you, great one,” he declared. “The consequences of your folly have caught up with you at last.”
Akhmen-hotep heard the sounds of fighting and the screams of dying warriors echo from across the camp. His bodyguards were under attack by the men they had been trying to protect.
“Did you think to cut my throat while I slept?” he snarled at Pakh-amn. “Or did you plan to give me as a gift to your new master in Khemri?” The accusation struck the young nobleman like a blow. He paused, his expression stricken. Seizing the opportunity, the king reached for his sword. “Kill them!” he commanded his Ushabti, and the five bodyguards charged forwards without hesitation, their ritual blades flashing.
Shouts of alarm and the clash of blades filled the air as Pakh-amn and the noblemen recoiled from the Ushabti’s fierce assault. Men fell like wheat before the blades of the devoted, cut down by blurring strokes that sliced effortlessly through their armour. Pakh-amn fought furiously, shouting curses as he turned aside one attack after another. A ritual blade landed a glancing blow against his sword-arm, and then another bit deep into his thigh. The nobleman staggered, but fought on, parrying furiously as blood poured over his knee and spattered onto the sands.
Within moments Pakh-amn’s warriors had been cut down. The Master of Horse lasted a few seconds more, but it was clear that the wound in his leg had cut the artery and his life was draining away. He stumbled, and an Ushabti’s sword cut deep into his chest. With a groan, Pakh-amn sank slowly to the ground.
Akhmen-hotep walked over to the fallen nobleman. His heart was heavy, but his face was a mask of rage.
“Go and aid your brothers,” he told the devoted. “Return to me as swiftly as you can.” With a snarl he kicked the sword from Pakh-amn’s hand. “I’ll deal with this one.”
The Ushabti raced silently into the darkness. Akhmen-hotep watched the pulse of blood streaming from Pakh-amn’s leg steadily weaken. The Mas
ter of Horse stood on the threshold between this world and the next.
“You damned fool,” Akhmen-hotep said. “I would have honoured you when we returned to Ka-Sabar. Why couldn’t you have settled for that? Why did you have to try to claim my throne as well?” A strange expression came over Pakh-amn’s bloodless face.
“You’ve gone…” the young nobleman whispered, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth, “You’ve gone mad… great one. The gods have… abandoned you… at last. I came… to save you.”
The king’s angry expression faltered.
“You’re lying,” he said. “I know what you’ve planned. Memnet warned me.” He turned to his brother. “Tell him—”
The knife felt cold as it slid into his chest. The pain was breathtaking. Akhmen-hotep’s mouth opened in shock as he stared into his brother’s eyes.
Memnet, once the Grand Hierophant of Ptra, glared angrily at his brother.
“I tried to tell you,” he said. “I tried. Back at Bel Aliad, do you remember? The old ways are gone, brother. Nagash has become the master of death. He has overthrown the gods! If we are to prosper, we must worship him. Why couldn’t you see that?”
The king’s knees buckled. He fell, dragging Memnet’s knife from his trembling hands. Akhmen-hotep landed on his back, next to Pakh-amn’s body. The Master of Horse was staring skyward, the tracks of his tears drying at the corners of his dead eyes.
The Priest-King of Ka-Sabar turned his eyes to the stars, seeking the faces of his gods.
Arkhan the Black rode out of the desert with a hundred of his horsemen at his back. The fighting in the camp had ended. The Ushabti had wrought a fearsome vengeance for the death of their king before they too had succumbed. Bodies lay everywhere, providing bloody testament to the Bronze Host’s last battle. The vizier bared his black teeth in a gruesome smile.