Брайан Ламли - Khai of Khem

Khai’s hand found Nundi’s throat and he whispered: “Nundi—be quiet, keep still—or by your teeth you’ll remember why I’m called Khai the Killer!” After that the Nubian grew silent and motionless.

For an hour or more, they crouched like that, until Khai was sure his joints were coming apart and his muscles liquifying. Throughout all of that time, the awful munching went on, and occasionally—sometimes close by, at other times more distant—there would be the screams of a stricken horse, or the nerve-wrenching shrieking of a man in mortal agony. And just as Khai was beginning to believe that he could endure it no longer, then the weight lifted from his blanket and in an instant the sound of millions of wings again filled the air. The intolerable whirring went on for a minute, two, then slowly receded and died away in the distance.

Many more minutes passed in total silence before Khai moved the blanket a fraction and breathed fresh night air through the gap he had made. With arms that creaked like those of an old man he pulled the blanket aside and peered at stars overhead. A thick white mist lay on the river. Silence lay everywhere.

“Get up!” Khai hoarsely shouted, clambering stiffly to his feet. “Light fires, many fires.” His cry was taken up and passed on, and all about him the night stirred as his army came back to life. Nundi stamped about in darkness, pumping blood to legs which no longer had any feeling. There was a vast clearing of lungs, a drawing of air, a concerted sighing of utmost relief.

Close by, Khai found the skeleton of a horse, its bones dry and clean. The white bones of a man, his arm about the horse’s neck, lay intermingled with those of the animal. Moonlight glittered on the remains in their stark whiteness....

One of Khai’s men, drawing close, grasped his elbow and made him jump. “Lord Khai,” the man said in a whisper. “Of what shall we build the fires?”

“Of branches, fool!” Khai snapped, his nerves twanging.

“Branches, Lord?”

“Aye, branches and leaves and—” his words tailed off and he looked all about him into the night. And at that moment Khai knew himself for a very small thing in a very large and largely unknown universe.

“What branches, Lord?” inquired the man….

In the morning, Khai saw the full extent of the horror: where for miles about not a leaf, not a blade of grass, nothing showed green at all, and only the largest branches, stripped even of their bark, remained attached and uneaten on the chewed and pitted trunks of the trees. He could see through the forest of naked, motionless timber for hundreds of yards; and the very soil beneath his feet, inches deep, was powdery, dry and void of life. No foliage showed on the banks of the Nile, no weeds, no fringing ferns or nodding papyrus reeds. A huge ribbon of water, unobstructed as far as the eye could see, the river curled away into the north; while in the south it rolled down silently, no longer green but gray, from mist-shrouded Asorbes. Asorbes… .

Khai gritted his teeth with bitter rage as he thought of Asorbes, of Pharaoh, of Anulep and the Black Guard, and of Khasathut’s Dark Heptad of necromancers. He wondered how Manek Thotak had fared: whether or not the plague of flying death had also found him in the twilight. And what of Genduhr Shebbithon?

Manek had received and reacted to the Syran mage’s warning in much the same way as had Khai, and thus his losses were relatively few. Genduhr Shebbithon, on the other hand, had thought himself the victim of an encroaching madness. A simple man, however great a chief, his reaction had been violent and had taken the form of a fit. His men had seen him rushing to and fro with his sword, cutting at thin air, at phantoms! Those phantoms had become all too real all too soon, however—but far too late for Genduhr Shebbithon.

As fortune had it, ten thousand of his men were away from the main camp at the time, engaging a probing force of Khemites between Phemor and Asorbes. This had left twenty-five thousand warriors in the camp to face the twilight horror ... which had caught them and Genduhr Shebbithon in the middle of his fit. The result was seen the next morning when ten thousand victorious Kushites returned to camp—to find a vast wasteland and an army of skeletal remains! Something less than two thousand horses had escaped the carnage, having fled out of the area of the aerial attack, but many of these had to be destroyed.

Of Genduhr’s twenty-five thousand, however, only one man survived. He had been very drunk, wrapped in a blanket, asleep when the winged death descended. Now he was awake and sober, or as sober as his slobbering insanity would permit. A very young man, he simply sat among the tumult of bones and drooled, or occasionally laughed and shook his shock of pure white hair….

Later that same day, riders arrived at the new camp of Genduhr’s son, Gahad. They came from Generals Manek Thotak and Khai Ibizin, with orders to report back to their commanders with word of Genduhr’s losses. Meanwhile, Khai had moved closer, poising his forces on the river less than five miles to the north of Asorbes, and Manek had deployed his army at a like distance to the south of the city. By mid-afternoon, the armies had taken up positions along a curving front which enclosed Asorbes in a huge semicircle of iron, and Gahad Shebbithon’s numbers had been supplemented by ten thousand of Khai’s men and ten thousand more of Manek Thotak’s. East of the river, having crossed the Nile north of Mer-ow-eh to cut through Khem’s southern forests in a two-hundred mile push, N’jakka and five great impis lay in wait for any Khemites who might choose to flee to the east. And so at last, Asorbes lay under siege. …

It was as Manek Thotak went among his warriors where they were camped that he came across four huge Nubians known to him as one half of Ashtarta’s eight-man guard, brought out of Nubia by Khai Ibizin. Ashtarta had kept the other four with her in Kush, but these men had begged to be allowed to go to war against Khem. Since Manek had been going into Nubia, the Candace had used the blacks as couriers to carry her pledge of friendship to N’jakka and to wish him well in the great war to come. Now Manek spoke to them, and when he would have passed on one of them followed after him and called:

“Lord Manek! Now that we are here in the heart of Khem, will your forces join with those of Khai the Killer?”

“In the final assault, aye,” Manek answered. “Why do you ask?”

The huge black, a man of truly awesome dimensions, grinned his appreciation. “We have many friends among Khai’s impis,” he explained. “Soon we shall share with them stories of our battles.”

“Aye,” Manek grinned. “We Kushites do much the same thing.”

“Waugh!” the black exclaimed. “The Lord Khai will have many marvelous tales to tell his children—when he is King of all Kush!”

The smile slipped from Manek’s face in an instant. He took the Nubian’s arm and stared at him. “Khai? King, did you say?”

“Ah! You need not pretend for my sake, Lord Manek,” the black man whispered confidentially. “Since you are The Killer’s brother-general, you must know well enough that he courts the Candace.”

As best he could, Manek hid the sudden rage that threatened to suffuse his dark features. Somehow he managed to force a smile and answered: “Of course I know, certainly! But now ... how do you know?”

“Why, have I not seen him myself, going to her tent in the night? Indeed I have—and not by the front door!”

“You saw him?” Manek continued to smile, his face frozen in a grin which was almost a grimace. “You saw him—and yet you did not stop him?”