Брайан Ламли - Khai of Khem

Map by Mark Stein Studios

Ashtarta—dark-eyed, raven-haired Ashtarta, with skin of a pure, light-olive complexion—knelt by the Holy Pool of Yith-Shesh in a cave high in the foothills of the Gilf Kebir Plateau. The pool, which did not contain water but a thick liquid seeped at the dark of the moon from a crack in the floor of the cave, was black as Ashtarta’s huge, slanting eyes and still as her face. Its surface, like her outward appearance, was calm ... for the present.

But beneath that surface ...

Mirrored in the pool, the queen’s face stared back at her with eyes in which the shiny jet of the pupils was almost indistinguishable from the flawless ebony of the irises. Her eyelashes, painted blue, were long and curving; and above them her thin eyebrows, which like her hair were so black as to be near-blue, tapered to the point where they almost touched the square-cut fringe that decked her brow. At the back of her head and at its sides, falling so as to cover her small flat ears, her hair looked almost metallic in its lacquered sheen. Parted at the nape of her neck, it was drawn forward over her shoulders and caught together again with a clasp of crimson gems in the hollow of her long neck; from where it fell in a wide flat band to be cut square just above her navel. Her nose, small and straight, was perfect in its symmetry and given to a haughty lift; when tiny nostrils would show dark, tear-shaped and occasionally flaring. Her chin was small but square and firm, and it too could tilt warningly when Ashtarta was angry.

The facial features at which she gazed—her own—were utterly beautiful, classic as those of another woman whose face would grace the pages of textbooks thousands of years in the future; but Nefertiti would be a Queen of Khem (or Egypt, as Khem would become before Nefertiti’s time) while Ashtarta was a Candace of Kush. And Khem and Kush were enemies poles apart, had been so for hundreds of years and would continue to be until one was finally destroyed—or until both were swept away by time and the ravages of war.

It was because of the present war between Khem and Kush that Ashtarta was here in the cave, kneeling by the side of the black Pool of Yith-Shesh. Her army, under command of the generals Khai Ibizin and Manek Thotak, had gone down from the Gilf Kebir into Khem, to the waters of the Nile itself to strike at the very heart of the Pharaoh Khasathut’s kingdom. They had laid seige on the massively walled slave-city Asorbes—whose center was Khasathut’s future tomb, a great pyramid forty years in the building and almost ready now to receive his mummy when at last the tyrant died—and by now the Candace should have received news of their victory.

Could it be, she wondered, that the Pharaoh’s wizards and necromancers had turned her army back? Surely not. And yet she had seen enough in the five years of her reign to know better than to discount such an idea out of hand. That was why she was here now, waiting for Imthra, the mage who had promised her a vision. But Imthra was old now and could not climb the mountain of the pool as fast as he used to. It seemed to Ashtarta that she had been waiting for him for a long time. Now, as finally she heard the wheezing rattle of the old magician’s breath and the shuffle of his sandaled feet, she looked up.

The old man, whose flowing white hair and long white beard seemed to burn golden as they trapped the mid-afternoon sun before the shadow of the cave’s mouth fell over him, shuffled at last into his sovereign’s presence. The golden glyphs of his wide-sleeved, black mage’s robe continued to glow even in the gloom of the cool cave, while a redder light burned through the holes in a tiny firepot which hung from his wrist on a leather thong; and as his ancient eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, so they saw Ashtarta where she kneeled at the edge of the pool.

He saw her and held his breath. For frail with years as he was and most of the fire burned out of him—indeed, and the Candace the great granddaughter of his own long-dead brother—nevertheless her beauty was such as to lend even his old heart wings. It was a beauty, he thought, which might wake the very dead.

She wore a clinging scarlet sheath of a shift with one clasp at her left shoulder. Her arms, neck and right breast were bare. But however simply attired, her beauty seemed almost immortal to the old man; like a perfect pearl in the dark flesh of an oyster, so Ashtarta stood out in the gloom of the cave. She looked more a goddess than a mere queen, thought Imthra, except that he no longer believed in the old deities. No, for they were dead as the recently green Sahara, mocked at, spat upon and murdered by Khasathut’s black cruelties, destroyed by his necromancers and wizards.

Imthra prostrated himself, ancient joints creaking as he went down on one knee, then to all fours in the dust of the cave’s floor. Ashtarta made no attempt to stop him. It would be pointless. Too late now to protest a love, loyalty and devotion that spanned eighty years, which the old magician had given Ashtarta, her father and his father before him.

He touched his head to the floor and she put her hand on his white locks. “Up, father,” she said, “and let’s be at the seeing. It seems to me that if all were well we should surely have heard from Khai and Manek by now.”

“Aye, Candace, you could well be right,” he answered, kneeling beside her at the pool’s edge. “But I must warn you that the Pool of Yith-Shesh is no longer the bright crystal it once was. Its pictures may no longer wholly be trusted, and their meanings are often obscure.”

“Still,” she told him, “we shall see what we shall see.”

They turned to the shiny black surface of the pool and Imthra flicked upon it the contents of a small leather pouch. Then, beckoning the queen back a little from the pool, he commenced an invocation handed down immemorially from his magician ancestors. Strange and alien the cadence of his old voice, and weird the energies that soon began to fill the air of the cave.

Then, at the height of his chanting, he began to whirl the firepot by its thong about his head. Soon it issued a scented smoke, at sight of which Imthra caught the jar in his free hand and unstoppered its perforated top. Done with his invocation and as its echoes died away to be replaced by an eery wind that filled the cave, the old man stretched out a trembling hand and tipped the glowing contents of the small vessel onto the surface of the pool.

At once the pool caught fire, burning with a lambent blue light formed of a million tiny flickering flames that danced on the dark surface and turned it a luminous blue. The herbal substances that Imthra had scattered on the pool burned, issuing heady, scented fumes that immediately assailed Ashtarta’s and the mage’s own senses.

There where they kneeled amidst softly flickering shadows, the minds of the old man and the young queen suddenly reeled—whirling chaotically for the space of a half-dozen heartbeats—then steadying as the little flames began to die on the surface of Yith-Shesh’s pool. And as the flames flickered and died, so the play of blue fires upon the dark mirror surface seemed to form moving pictures.

The two sighed as one, leaning forward the better to read the message of the flames. They looked and … they saw. And as the rising fumes thickened in the cave, at last Imthra and Ashtarta succumbed— just as the old mage had known they would— falling into drugged dreams of ethereal figures and formless phantoms....