Брайан Ламли - Khai of Khem

“Dead, eh, boy? Dead and falling into decay, returning to dust. Ah, but they have known the touch of the Dark Seven! They are not incorruptible, no—but neither are they wholly dead—not yet. Look!” And from a pocket he took a tiny golden whistle which he put to his lips. He blew a single note, an eerie, undulating note … and at once the air was full of a leathery creaking, the suffocating stink of death—and motion!

“Come!” the Vizier’s voice fell to a whispering quaver as he hurried Khai back along the way they had come. “We cannot stay here now. These are the slaves of Nyarlathotep—whose very essence the Dark Seven invoked to perform their black magic, defying even Anubis himself—and as such, they are dangerous. See how they awaken?”

Outside in the corridor the high priest quickly locked the gate, and beyond its heavy bars gaunt and leathery figures began to stumble and flail about in the darkness while their stench welled out in ever-thickening clouds. Half-rotten fingers tore at the bars and fleshless skulls grinned and bobbed.

“I could make them dance for you if I so desired,” the Vizier said, once more in control of himself, “but theirs is not dancing for eyes such as yours. It amuses the Pharaoh, of course, but he is not as other men. No, and this is not the kind of immortality he sought.”

Even as he spoke, from somewhere up above there came the boom of a great gong. Looking up, Anulep remarked: “The afternoon is already one-third fled. Well, I have my duties, Khai Ibizin, and so we must hurry.” He blew one more warbling note on his whistle and the stumbling things behind the bars instantly crumpled into their previous immobility.

Again Anulep took Khai’s shrinking hand. “I have one more thing to show you,” he continued. “A hiding place, a peephole, from which you shall soon gaze out upon rare and wonderful things—marvelous things, your very future—and then I will take you to your room.” He held the boy’s hand in his own bony claw and lowered his face to smile a ghastly, toothless smile; and Khai could not help but notice again the small, circular gape of his mouth.

“Ah?” the Vizier opened his eyes wide. “Don’t you like my little empty mouth, then? A pity, for you yourself must visit the dentist in just a day or two.” He nodded his skull of a head. “You will see why ... tomorrow night. But now, can you walk? Or must the guardsmen drag you? Ah, the resilience of the young! I see you can walk. Come then, and hurry, hurry....”

It was now some thirty hours since Khai last saw Anulep. Thirty hours spent alone in his room three or four stories above the temples and living areas of the ground level, hanging onto his sanity as best he might while his mind turned over and over again those monstrous events which had so utterly destroyed his world. But the hideous pictures were no longer clear in the eye of his memory—they had become strangely and mercifully blurred—and the more he tried to concentrate on them the more indistinct they became. The mind soon forgets or obscures that which it cannot bear to contemplate. Anulep’s instructions, on the other hand—those monotonously delivered, almost hypnotic orders he had given Khai before leaving him in his dimly-lighted cell of a room—had remained crystal clear. Khai’s mind had been bruised, even wounded, but not irreparably crippled.

As for his physical condition: since his ordeal on the pyramid’s east face, he had taken no food and had managed to snatch only a little sleep—catnaps from which he was invariably driven back to the waking world by shrieking nightmares—so that he was steadily growing weaker. It was not that he had been deprived of food, on the contrary, for slaves had brought food to him on three separate occasions … only to be sent away by one whose appetite seemed to have died within him. He was, however, a boy on the verge of manhood, with youth’s almost boundless energy, and it would be a long time before privation completely incapacitated him.

So he waited for the appointed hour and the reverberating tones of a gong struck five times; and when at last that gong sounded, signifying the approach of the midnight hour, he almost automatically took up his small lamp, slipped from his room and made his way through deserted, cramped and cobwebby corridors of rock toward the secret place where Anulep had told him to conceal himself. Not once had it crossed Khai’s mind to run away; as of yet he was simply too stunned to contemplate or even imagine doing anything of his own volition. He knew only that he must do as he was bidden or suffer the Pharaoh’s wrath, and that the living god’s wrath was terrible indeed!

This was just about the sum total of Khai’s knowledge concerning Pharaoh, but on the other hand, his knowledge of the pyramid was not at all inconsiderable. No one but his father, so cruelly murdered, had been better informed on the subject of the pyramid’s internal construction. No one, that is, except for the pyramid’s dwellers, and even they had not gone where their duties did not require their presence. Thus, even in Khai’s dazed condition and assisted by so feeble a light as that of his little stone lamp, still he was able to make his way swiftly and surely to the secret place.

Soon enough he found himself peering down into that crevice shown to him by Anulep, from which vantage point he was to watch the chosen maidens become brides of the Pharaoh. Anulep had told him that during the ceremony he must pay particular attention to those duties of the high priest which he himself would soon be called upon to perform; duties of a secret, personal and intimate nature in the service of the Pharaoh himself.

Despite his torpor of mental exhaustion, Khai found himself wondering just what these intimate duties might be, when it was common knowledge that no man’s hand might ever fall upon the Pharaoh’s person or even touch him. For the Pharaoh was a god, strange and cold by mortal—no, by any — standards, and divorced from the mundane ways of men. His ways must be strange indeed, thought Khai; and yet Anulep’s duties, whatever they were, were soon to be transferred upon him? It was all so very hard to understand… .

Still and all, the high priest had told him that Khasathut found him pleasing in his sight, and perhaps taking Khai into his service was the God-king’s way of balancing matters. Since he had been instrumental in the destruction of Khai’s family, perhaps it was now his intention to atone by drawing the boy to his own bosom. But what, Khai wondered, was to become of Anulep when finally the time came for him to hand over his duties?

With thoughts such as these crowding each other in his shrinking and fearful mind, the boy lowered himself into the hole until his feet touched bottom. Straightening up, his head came just level with the floor of the passage above. He blew out his lamp where its flame now flickered before his face, then crouched down and searched for the peephole that Anulep had mentioned. And sure enough the peephole was there: an uncemented horizontal slot three inches long and a quarter-inch wide, giving Khai an almost completely unobstructed view of the chamber behind the limestone wall.

At this particular spot, the wall was at its thinnest, built of soft-grained slabs as opposed to massive blocks, so that Khai’s angle of vision was a wide one. Now he forced himself to concentrate, giving his undivided attention to whatever was about to occur in the bridal chamber. First, however, he would acquaint himself with the chamber itself, a room of which he had no previous knowledge.

It was essentially bare, that room, containing only one or two items of furniture. The principal piece was a golden throne of small-seeming dimensions, with two tiny steps in front. A single lamp, standing on a slender pedestal in the center of the room, lighted the high-ceilinged, hexagonal chamber with a dully flickering glow that caused the throne to gleam and coruscate from the many precious stones set in its arms and headrest. The light from the lamp also reached the walls, highlighting their bas-reliefs with lines of black shadow that moved flowingly with the continual flickering of the flame.