Khai of Khem

I The Nuptial Chamber

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.

These bas-reliefs immediately caught and held Khai’s attention, for they were especially erotic in nature and showed coition between naked men and women and all manner of birds and beasts. Moving with the action of the lamp-cast shadows, the figures seemed so full of lustful life that Khai soon became aroused by the sight. Finally, fighting his excitement, he forced himself to look away.

His eyes found the dark mouths of twin passages where they entered like huge nostrils into the bridal chamber through the wall directly opposite his vantage point. Between these tunnels, the buttress of the inner wall supported a bracketed, unlighted torch. Peering round the room, Khai noted that similar flambeaux were set in the other walls, including, it seemed likely, the wall through which he even now gazed. If these torches were to be lighted, Khai would have to be careful that his eyes were not seen shining through the peephole.

For the time being, however, he might as well make himself comfortable. Wedging himself into position, Khai waited in darkness until he heard sounds echoing through the thin limestone wall from the chamber beyond. Then, gazing once again through his peephole, he was at last rewarded by the sight of Anulep leading three girls into the chamber from one of the passageways. The Pharaoh’s high priest looked once, pointedly and with narrowed eyes, directly at the spot where Khai’s own eyes stared back at him, and then he turned to the girls.

To each of the three Anulep gave a taper which they lighted from the lamp atop its pedestal. Then, as they went about the hexagonal room lighting the flambeaux, the Vizier bade them wait and strode from the room into the second passageway. He returned a few moments later with six members of the pyramid’s Black Guard. The latter were dressed in leather sandals, red kilts and tall bronze helmets. On their wrists they wore wide golden bracelets, and they carried long, curving and wickedly sharp daggers in their black leather belts.

As for the girls: they were dressed in flowing, virgin-white robes, their features almost completely hidden behind gauzy veils. It was an odd sight, Khai thought: these small, slender female figures, two Khemish girls and one Nubian—a girl of high birth, Anulep had told him, stolen from her homeland by Arabban slavers in a secret raid—surrounded by vast and nightmarish walls of massively lewd limestone; and the Pharaoh’s men: tall, black and powerfully muscled, their sharply filed teeth showing white behind thick, grinning lips. Frowning in the darkness of his hideaway, the boy felt the short hairs at the back of his neck rising in a sudden and nameless fear.

II Enter the Pharaoh

Now the girls were led to one of the walls, a guardsman at each shoulder, and there their arms were lifted up and their wrists locked in manacles above their heads. As this happened, Anulep, in a voice soft and oily, explained to the girls that they now symbolized total subjugation, offering themselves in abject bondage to Pharaoh, their Lord, Master, God, and Husband-Extraordinary. None of them seemed in the least concerned about being manacled in this fashion, and as Khai peered at their veiled faces he wondered what was going on in their minds.

Were they terrified, he wondered, at this ceremony, where soon they would become the brides of Khasathut and enter into his harem? If so, they did not show it. Perhaps they had been made to inhale the hen’ay fumes, of which Khem’s high elite were currently enamored and which it was rumored the Pharaoh himself had introduced from lands beyond the islands of the Sea-Peoples. The hen’ay was a resin which when burned made sweet waking dreams for all who inhaled its heady smoke. The magicians of Khem had used opiates for as long as Khem had existed, but recently Pharaoh had added several refinements of his own.

Of one thing Khai was certain: the maidens would all be beautiful. Pharaoh’s brides were always beautiful, his entire harem, which by now must be vast. Indeed, the pyramid must be a veritable beehive of queens. Khasathut had taken his first trio of wives seven years previously, at the onset of his reign, and thereafter at regular quarterly intervals. Employing his considerable knowledge of mathematics while he waited for the midnight hour (at which time, according to Anulep, the Pharaoh would make his appearance), Khai determined the current strength of the harem. He calculated that since this was the third quarter of the seventh year, Khasathut now had a total of eighty-one wives!

Eighty-one wives? As far as Khai knew, no one had ever seen them and he wondered where they could all be. There were many rooms in the heart of the pyramid, no one knew better than he, but sufficient to house eighty-one wives? And who did their cooking? And where did they eat? For that matter, where did they bathe? The pyramid simply wasn’t equipped for it. And wouldn’t they expect a degree of privacy, as befitted the wives of a great ruler? Of course they would; but they would surely never find it in the pyramid. For all its size, the open spaces inside the vast monument were not unlimited. …

As he was puzzling over the problem, Khai heard the bronze gong sounding from deep within the pyramid. It was a sepulchral sound in these stony confines, whose echoes seemed to linger ominously; but its effect upon Khasathut’s huge Nubian guardsmen was immediate. Before the echoes of that single note had died away, the great blacks had backed off from the manacled girls until they flanked the jeweled throne three to each side. There they stood rigidly to attention, filed teeth hidden now behind tight lips, while Anulep took up a position directly behind the throne. Tall man that he was, the high priest dwarfed the throne; but he, too, stood to attention while he waited for Pharaoh to enter.

Now Khai was more puzzled than ever, for it would seem that this tiny bejeweled chair was fully intended to represent Khasathut’s royal seat. Why not a real, man-sized throne? Surely Pharaoh could never cram his massive frame into—

But there Khai’s thoughts came to an abrupt, astonished end, for suddenly he saw something which could not possibly be. A figure had emerged from one of the passageways. A figure wearing Khasathut’s long-headed crown and clad in his royal, golden-yellow robes, which in turn were embroidered with his double-looped cross, the tai-ankh. To all intents and purposes, this then must be the Pharaoh himself... but how could it be? The man (was it truly a man? Khai wondered) was barely five feet tall, grotesque and limping, quite alien in its lop-sided, crippled-insect movements.

The Pharaoh—or Pharaoh’s exotic pet? An ape, perhaps? But no, it was no ape. It was indeed ... Khasathut!

Khai knew it as soon as the creature spoke, recognizing the voice of this travesty immediately. Though less powerful than the magnified whoosh and gasping roar which Pharaoh’s subjects were used to, the voice was nevertheless his. Quickly recovering from his shock, without giving himself time to ponder the meaning of what he was seeing, Khai looked closer. He now desired to see—to know—everything.

The features beneath the long crown were much the same as had been the old Pharaoh’s. Khai had been only seven years old when Thanop’et died, but he remembered the previous ruler’s face: the long jaw; small, round, piercing eyes—_slit down the middle like a cat’s—with their thin, straight eyebrows; the sharply sloping forehead whose line was carried on by the long, backward sloping crown. All of these features were visible in Thanop’et’s son, Khasathut. There was something of his mother in him, too: her smallness, for one thing, and the paleness of her skin….

How old would Khasathut be? His father had been immensely old: one hundred and fifteen years, it was rumored. Since Khasathut had been born before the old man was forty, he, too, must now be well advanced in years. Yet his actions—something in his ways—reminded Khai of a child: a very old, very powerful and malignant child.

There was nothing childlike about his awful voice, however; and now, as he moved forward with a swirling of his loose yellow robes across the stark and stony chamber, he commented on the girls. “Beautiful,” he said to each one in turn, peering at their eyes above their veils as he passed before them. “Beautiful. Charming. Oh, yes, Anulep—I am well pleased!” But while Khasathut’s comments were warm, his tone remained as cold as a deep, rock-cut tomb.

“The Pharaoh’s pleasure is mine,” Anulep intoned, bowing from the waist until his forehead touched the back of the throne.

Now the diminutive Pharaoh approached his throne—moving, Khai thought, almost like a Nile crab, sideways—and mounted the tiny steps to turn and seat himself facing the manacled girls. As he took his seat, Anulep straightened up, then bent momentarily to whisper something in Khasathut’s ear. Khasathut uttered a weirdly baying laugh. His and the Vizier’s eyes went back to the three girls.

By this time, the Nubian girl, whose white-gowned figure was flanked by the two smaller, golden-skinned Khemish girls, was beginning to take an interest in things. The three had quite obviously been drugged, for so far they had simply leaned against the wall with their arms made fast over their heads. The one closest to Khai where he crouched in darkness had even appeared to fall asleep, her head hanging limply against her arm.

They were all awake now, however, and by their uncomfortable movements, Khai judged them to be feeling the strain of their awkward positions. The blood must have completely drained from their hands and arms by now, and the drug was beginning to wear off. The black girl was recovering much faster than her white sisters and her eyes were large as they stared about the room. Finally those brown eyes of hers found Khasathut’s where they stared back at her.

Pharaoh licked his pale, thin lips and stood up. He seemed to tremble as he stepped down from his throne and sidled across the floor to where the girls were chained to the wall. He went to the Nubian girl and stared up at her, his octopus eyes unblinking and his tongue constantly licking at his lips. Staring down at him, the girl’s eyes seemed to reflect—disgust? terror?—as they focused on Pharaoh’s own yellowish orbs.

“Beautiful,” Pharaoh said. Khai took his eyes quickly from Khasathut and the girls to peer for a moment at Anulep and the guardsmen. They had not moved, seemed frozen as they gazed across the room, their attention unwaveringly upon Khasathut and what he was doing. Something was going to happen, Khai knew, and he returned his eyes to the yellow-clad form of the God-king….

III The God-Monster

Khasathut had just reached up his left hand to remove the black girl’s veil; and now the terror could plainly be seen in her flaring nostrils, her drawn face, the film of moisture on her black brow. He stared at her a moment longer, and his tongue was like that of a snake. It flickered in and out of his mouth, licking back and forth ceaselessly over his lips. Pharaoh’s hand reached up again, fingers crooked, to catch at the neck of the girl’s gown.

Watching, Khai held his breath. Clearly this was no ordinary ceremony … no ceremony at all but something terrible, a parody of whatever the boy had expected. And now the two girls flanking the Nubian bride were also watching, their faces turned inwards to follow Khasathut’s every motion. He looked from one to the other of them, the vertical slits of his eyes unblinking, then turned his attention back to the black girl. His hand tightened on the material of her dress close to the hollow of her throat, then, swift as a striking cobra tore downward.

The fine linen ripped wide open as, with sudden frantic tearing motions, Pharaoh stripped the girl to her waist, pausing only when her gown hung in tatters. Now the sight of the half-naked girl seemed to incense Khasathut. He stepped back and stared at her for a long moment, the trembling of his body clearly visible through the folds of his yellow robe. The girl’s large breasts were heaving as she began to writhe, fighting to tear her wrists free from the manacles that held them. Sweat glistened on her breasts and naked belly.

Again Khasathut uttered his baying laugh, more highly pitched and breathless than before and full of a weird excitement. He lifted his hand to his own neck and plucked out the bronze pin that held the folds of his royal robe in place. Freed, the robe fell about his feet, leaving him naked except for his crown, which he now removed and tossed down upon the floor. The Nubian girl at once ceased her struggling and her mouth fell open in sheer horror as she stared at the Pharaoh through bulging brown eyes.

Peering through his peephole, Khai too gasped with shock at sight of Khasathut naked. Not because the mere thought was blasphemous, which it surely was, but because the God-king was far more monstrously deformed and alien than ever the boy might have guessed. Until now his only visible limb had been his left arm and hand, which had seemed normal enough. Beneath the yellow robe, however, things were hideously different.

Indeed, the only thing that seemed normal about Khasathut was his penis. But even this, because it was the organ of a full-grown man and firmly erect, looked inordinately large and freakish on the shrivelled, twisted body of Pharaoh. His right arm was only half the size it should have been, with the elbow correctly placed but having a forearm no more than six inches long. The hand at the end of that freakish arm was a stump of webbed fingers that lay twisted across his breast.

His legs, too, were deformed, the right being several inches longer than the left, which accounted for his crablike walk. His body, with skin so smooth and pink it was almost translucent, was completely hairless; and between his shoulder blades there showed the taut mound of a small hump.

Worst of all, however, as if the list of loathsomeness were not already long enough, was Khasathut’s head. That incredibly long head—like the skull of some ancient, evil bird—which sloped backward and carried on the sloping line of the forehead for at least a further fifteen inches. No wonder he wore the great crown!

In short, with all of his deformities, Pharaoh was a completely and utterly alien monster!

And now the monster stood up straight as he could and leaned forward. His crippled, webbed right hand fell forward almost of its own accord and for a moment caressed the Nubian girl’s left breast, then caught and held her large, squarish nipple. Quick as thought, his good left hand, which still held the long bronze pin from his discarded robe, rose up to thrust the metal sliver lengthwise through the center of the girl’s nipple and into her breast. Only the ball of the pin, which instantly turned red and began to drip blood, protruded: a scarlet berry on a black velvet background. It seemed that time stood still and for a split second nothing further happened. Then—

All three girls began to scream—screams of desperation, of all hope lost—and the black girl commenced a wildly agonized threshing, banging her head again and again on the solid wall behind her. And as their screams rang deafeningly loud in that hollow chamber of torture, so Khasathut clapped his good hand to his ear and bent his head until his right ear pressed against his shoulder. In this position, shutting out the sounds of their screaming, he staggered back across the stone floor and almost fell into his throne.

“Now—now!” he said, motioning to his blacks, directing them to commence some prearranged play. The huge Negroes leapt forward at Pharaoh’s command, two of them clapping hands to the shrieking mouths of the Khemish girls where they flanked the now-unconscious Nubian. Khai, his eyes glued to the crack in the wall, would remember what next happened to his dying day. For the sight was such as to freeze him, so that however much he desired to look away he could not tear his eyes from that scene of absolute cruelty and horror.

The wall behind the black girl’s head was now red with the blood that dripped from her fuzz of black hair. But for all that she was unconscious, still two of Khasathut’s blacks pinioned her body while a third held her jaws open. As for the fourth and last, he reached into her mouth, took his curved, thin-bladed dagger and sliced out her tongue even as Khai began silently to gag and choke on bile in his secret niche.

By the time he had regained control of himself and once more pressed his watery eyes to the slot, all three of the girls were hanging unconscious from the wall, blood slopping from gaping jaws; and now the blacks tore away their red-spattered robes before turning to face Pharaoh.

Khai, too, turned his horrified gaze upon Khasathut where he sat naked upon his jeweled throne. Anulep had gone down on his knees before him, was shuffling toward him with his forehead touching the floor, his hands behind his back. He kept his hands there, Khai knew, because no man’s hand might ever touch Pharaoh; for a mortal’s hand to touch him would be to defile him.

And yet… could one possibly defile this monster? Khai doubted it.

Finally, Anulep’s polished head rested on Khasathut’s knees, and there the high priest paused. Ignoring him for a moment, Pharaoh said to his blacks: “Get on with it. Wake them!”

One of the massive guardsmen took out a small stone bottle from a pocket in his kilt. He unstoppered it and held it under the noses of the girls until they jerked their heads and regained consciousness. Only the Nubian girl failed to respond. Khai thought—he hoped—that she must already be dead. The other girls stirred weakly after their initial response, moving their heads from side to side and making awful gurgling noises. They continually spewed blood and bile.

Ignoring for a moment the black girl, the guardsmen formed two teams, three men to each of the flanking girls. They took out their knives and began to skin their victims, peeling down wide strips of skin from their necks to their waists until only the girls’ faces and breasts stood out white against the welling red horror of their upper torsos. Mercifully, before the blacks were half finished, the girls were once more unconscious.

Khai, too, had momentarily passed out, and only the feel of the cold and abrasive wall against his fevered brow woke him as he slumped down in cramped darkness. Weakly wiping his mouth free of sickness and blinking his eyes to rid them of stinging tears, he straightened himself up again until his eyes came level with the peephole. He no longer looked at the girls, however—not at those dangling travesties of raw meat which had been girls, no— but at Pharaoh. He looked with horror, with fear, with hatred!

Boy that he was and quite helpless, nevertheless Khai vowed there and then that the Pharaoh, and Anulep—yes, and all of Pharaoh’s guardsmen, too—they would pay! Someday, somehow. They would pay for his family, for these poor tortured girls, for all Khem enslaved by this deformed creature that the people called a god! He looked, he glared his hatred out through the crack in the wall, a hatred so raw and red that his very vision was blurred with its passion.

Dimly, he was aware of Anulep’s head moving slowly up and down between Pharaoh’s thighs, and of Khasathut’s left hand tapping out the time on the high priest’s head. As if from a million miles away, he heard Pharaoh’s panted command that the guardsmen should finish it, and in the very corner of his eye he saw knives flash, saw bellies open from crotches to rib cages as viscera poured out steaming upon the bloodied floor. He was aware of all of these things, but primarily he saw Khasathut’s face.

That hideous face whose octopus eyes bulged as their owner tapped faster and faster upon the high priest’s bobbing head, until suddenly Khasathut uttered a shrill scream and jerked spastically in his jeweled chair. Now his legs gripped Anulep’s waist and his good hand clutched at the high priest’s head, which had become almost a blur of motion. For a moment longer it lasted, then—

With a second shriek the Pharaoh drew back his legs, placed his feet on Anulep’s shoulders and thrust the man away from him. As the Vizier sprawled on the stone floor, his hands still clasped in position behind his back, Khai saw the distended knob of Pharaoh’s penis throbbing and discharging a few last drops of yellow slime. Then once again the boy was violently ill; but it was more the sight he saw with his mind’s eye than the depravity of the actual scene which sickened him. He had simply remembered the way Anulep had smiled at him—the Vizier’s toothless, circular smile—and the fact that tomorrow he himself was to visit the dentist!

IV Plot for Freedom

Of the rest, of whatever else passed in that hidden chamber of horrors deep in the heart of the great pyramid, Khai saw nothing at all. For when the blacks carried Khasathut’s sexually expended, naked figure out of the hexagonal room in his jeweled throne, and long before they returned with Anulep to commence the cleaning-up of the place, he had already flown. Possibly that was as well, for as yet he knew nothing of the pyramid’s deepest horrors and had not even questioned the reason why Pharaoh’s blacks had filed teeth… .

But a flame had sparked in Khai’s breast, the red flame of revenge, and his one desire now was to live to grow into a man—a great warrior—and then, somehow, one day, to drag Pharaoh down and destroy him. Just exactly how he might achieve this he did not know, but certainly he could do nothing here. Since there was nowhere in Asorbes for him to hide, perhaps no hiding place in all of Khem, then obviously he must flee Khem. First, however, he must escape from the pyramid.

Already a plan had formed in Khai’s mind, a wild and daring plan but by no means impossible. It would be sheerest folly to try to escape through the lower labyrinths and out into the city via the pyramid’s ground-floor entrances; any one of Pharaoh’s hundreds of guardsmen might see him and take him to Anulep. Doubtless, orders had already been given to that effect: that if he tried to escape he must be brought back. Well then, by what other route might he make his escape?

For anyone else the task might have seemed impossible, but to Khai, whose father had built the vast monument and shown him many of its secrets, it was not even improbable; though certainly it would be very dangerous. As he hurried back to his tiny cell of a room through the inky blackness of the cramped corridors that formed the pyramid’s interlocking mazes, he worried at the problem until the solution was crystal clear.

By the time he regained his room and struck flint to his tiny lamp, he knew exactly what he must do. The tools of his escape were to hand—a pair of woven rush mats on the floor, and the pallet he had been given for a bed— so that without more ado he formed these into a tight cylindrical bundle which he strapped lengthwise to his back.

Five years ago, Harsin Ben Ibizin had shown his son the Pharaoh’s water supply and how it worked: the system of huge exterior surfaces of stone high in the pyramid’s faces which sluiced droplets of condensation into narrowing watercourses that flowed in turn into brick pipes within the pyramid, where they descended steeply to the cisterns of the lower levels. Each single drop of moisture which formed on mighty sloping surfaces eventually found its way to the pyramid’s kitchens, its bathrooms and ablutions. And Khai had been allowed to climb up to one of these watercourses until he had peeped out from a height of over four hundred feet to gaze in awe across the rooftops of Asorbes.

At that time, Khai had thought to ask his father if it would be possible to slide down the steeply sloping outside wall from such an inlet. Oh, most surely it would, Harsin Ben Ibizin had replied—if one had the hide of a hippo! Otherwise the stone, however fine-grained and smooth it might appear, would strip away flesh from bones like a huge file. Indeed, of those many workers who had fallen from the monument during the long years of its construction, many had slid down the sloping faces to the bottom, but none of them had survived.

Khai remembered his father’s words to this very day. Well, he did not have the hide of a hippo, but he did have these rush mats and a linen pallet full of shredded straw. Also, if he could divert a little water from the mouth of the inlet and down the sloping face, perhaps that would lubricate his way to excellent effect. For a moment, as he retraced his steps by the light of his tiny lamp to a place where a narrow chimneylike flue appeared in the ceiling over his head, Khai was so afraid that he almost abandoned his plan there and then. But only for a moment. Death was far more to his liking than the life he would be forced to lead if he remained here.

And so he climbed into the flue and wound his way upward, pushing his lamp before him and placing it in whichever niches he could find while he used his hands and feet for climbing. It was not a hard climb but seemed interminable, just as it had five years ago. Hand and footholds were plentiful, a stairway almost, designed to give maximum assistance to any workman called upon to inspect the watercourse up above; and there were places where Khai could actually pause and rest, sitting on tiny ledges while his feet dangled into the black throat of the flue.

So he progressed, and within an hour of leaving his room he crept over the lip of the chimney and felt a cool breeze blowing from ahead. Rounding an awkward bend, he saw the stars of night set in a jet sky, and a moment later, his light sputtered and was blown out. Crawling on all fours with his head occasionally scraping against the low ceiling, Khai felt the rim of the brick pipe that descended into the bowels of the pyramid. Beyond the pipe, he followed the channel of the gutter that fed it with water and was pleased when his hands felt a trickling of cool liquid. So efficient was the system that water began to collect and flow soon after the sun went down, the flow increasing all through the night until, with the dawn, the gutters and pipes would be veritable rivers and waterfalls in miniature. Khai knew he must be gone long before then, however, and so hurried forward, eager now to put his plan into operation.

At last, he reached the end of the inspection tunnel where it narrowed to a circular opening high in the pyramid’s sloping face. From here he looked out, as he had done five years ago, on the sleeping city of Asorbes. He had emerged on the south face and to his left could see the night-shining Nile wandering down from its vastly distant sources. The moon was thin-horned and gave little light, which was just as well. The air he breathed was full of familiar odors, of fires and cooking and spices, and other smells which seemed wafted to him from lands beyond. Lands of mystery and adventure.

Although there were nine such water-inlets—three to each face except the incomplete east face which overlooked the Nile and faced the rising sun-god, Re, reborn each day—the boy had deliberately chosen this one, set central in the south face. He had done so for a number of reasons. He knew there was a massive pile of soft sand at the base of the monument at this spot, soon to be used for filling in a disused subterranean vault; he knew also that the southern quarter of the city housed the vast majority of slaves of foreign origin— Nubians and Siwadis, a few Theraens, Syrans and Kushites—and that Pharaoh’s guards and patrolmen rarely entered such areas at dead of night; and furthermore, beyond the slave quarters and close to the city’s south wall, there dwelled his father’s old friend Arkhenos. Arkhenos of Subon, a fortress city on the Khem-Therae-Nubia border. If anyone could help him flee the city, he was sure that Arkhenos would be the one….

V Escape from the Pyramid

Cupping his hands at the limestone lip where the dripping water gathered, Khai spent almost an hour diverting the steadily increasing rivulet down the pyramid’s exterior face. When he could see the thin moonlight reflected in a silvery path that reached almost to the ground far below, then he knew he was ready. Quickly, he soaked his pallet and rush mats in what little water had escaped his hands to fill the gutter, then tied the bundle at its corners so that the mats lay beneath the pallet.

Now he pushed the entire contraption out through the water inlet, holding on to it and edging forward until he sat on the lip of the inlet with his legs outside. Then he pulled the reinforced pallet up under himself until he could hook his sandaled feet into the forward corners while his hands grasped the knots slightly to his rear. In this position, with his head and shoulders slightly raised, he once more bumped and edged his body forward until, in one hair-raising moment, he felt his backside bump over the lip of the inlet onto the sloping surface of the outside face.

At first, it seemed that he was stuck there, immobile, but then, with a jerk and a slither, he felt the stone begin to slip by beneath him and almost immediately he started to gather speed. In the space of a few heartbeats, it was as if a wind blew upon him, though he knew the air was almost completely still. Then, too, his sled began to rotate, so that in a moment, he was riding side-on and could feel the pallet beginning to buck beneath him, threatening to spill him. A moment more and he was speeding backwards down the steep wall, then rotating the other way until he was back in his original position.

Feeling the pallet bucking again, he lay his head and shoulders back to flatten his profile and watched the stars overhead turning as he continued to rotate. And all the time he accelerated and the wind blew more wildly upon him, showering his face with rush fragments from the disintegrating mats as he thundered down the side of the pyramid, until he smelled smouldering linen and knew that his pallet must soon burst into flames!

Rotating faster and faster, while the stars above seemed to form a vast heavenly wheel, Khai felt a hideous sickness welling inside and closed his eyes. In another moment, the pallet bucked wildly and Khai guessed that he had reached the lower part of the pyramid, where his diverted stream of water had petered out. Again the battered, disintegrating sled bucked and rose up beneath him, this time leaping free of the stone face and tumbling over and over in mid-air.

Now he clung desperately to his smoldering pallet, his eyes tightly shut, expecting at every moment to feel the bite of the pyramid’s stone face. Instead, he was dashed down in soft sand made hard by his rate of descent.

Mercifully, he had landed on the outward sloping side of the sandpile with the remains of his pallet still beneath him, breaking his fall. Wildly, he rolled and bounced, still falling and now completely out of control, but by the time he reached bottom, his speed was greatly reduced. At last, with a jolt that knocked the last remaining ounce of air out of him, he came to a halt on firm ground.

His first thought was to be up on his feet and feeling to see if anything was broken; but even the act of sitting up made him feel dizzy and sick, so that for the moment he lay still. Eventually, when the roaring had gone out of his head and the stars had steadied in the sky, he propped himself up on one elbow, gazing about at night’s black shadows and wondering if his escape had been witnessed. It was unlikely, he knew, for the south face overlooked only the slave quarters, but nonetheless he could not stay here.

He forced himself to his feet and staggered for a moment while once more the night sky seemed to revolve. Then, crouching low and heading south, he ran as fast as he could over rough and pitted earth. In a matter of minutes he had left the shadow of the pyramid behind and the jagged silhouettes of the tumble-down slave quarters loomed ahead. At last Khai began to breathe more freely and he had to repress a mad urge to shout for joy. He was free of the pyramid, free—at least for the moment—of the Pharaoh, and in his freedom his heart soared like that of a small bird.

His mind was so full of plans that its thinking was no longer completely lucid, so that soon only the wild joy of freedom remained, and a natural directional instinct which took him straight through the heart of the rambling slave quarters. Part of his mental fatigue sprang from the fact that his stomach was empty, had been empty for much too long, and the rest of it was rooted in the mind-wrenching horror of his recent experiences, which surely would have stunned far more mature minds than Khai’s.

Now the low, dark brick buildings had closed in on him and he trotted silently through winding alleys awash with filth and crawling with vermin. In all Asorbes, this was the one region where sanitation had been allowed to fall so drastically into disrepair, so that the sewers situated immediately beneath the streets functioned poorly and the water supply was just as unsafe as was its continuity uncertain. An eerie, unnatural silence shrouded the place, whose stillness was such that the patter of Khai’s feet sounded clearly audible in his fear-sensitized ears.

He must by now be in the center of this region from which, through countless generations, the Pharaohs had drawn their polyglot work-force of menials and laborers. Just how much blood, he wondered, had these people given to raise Khasathut’s monument to the sky? And with his thoughts returned morbidly to the pyramid once more, Khai paused in his running to cast an anxious glance back at that monstrous moonlit tomb whose silhouette loomed over the rooftops. One day, he promised himself, he would see that now-hated symbol of perverted power reduced to tumbled ruins. But for now—

He turned his face to the south once more—and ran straight into the arms of a huge black man!

VI King of Slaves

“Oh? And what’s this?” the great black rumbled, holding Khai’s head and turning it until the moonlight shone on his pale face. “A boy, running in the night streets with the rats? Aye, and a boy with meat on his bones at that. No slave’s son this one, I’ll warrant, but the well-fed pup of some bitch of Khem! Who are you, boy?”

At first Khai had thought himself caught by one of Pharaoh’s black guardsmen, but now he could see that his captor wore only the threadbare rags of a slave and that he bore the ankh brand on his forehead. “Let me go,” he gasped, wriggling and squirming, trying desperately to free himself from the man’s grasp. “Let me go!”

“And where would you be going, young master? Hasn’t your father warned you against entering the slave quarter at night?” The black man’s voice was full of a wry cynicism, as if he already knew the answers to his questions and much more.

“I’m on my way to the house of Arkhenos of Subon,” Khai answered, trying his best to sound affronted and failing miserably. “I decided to take a short-cut.”

“A short-cut, indeed!” Again the black peered into Khai’s face, a grim smile playing at the corners of his thick-lipped mouth. “And why, I wonder, did I see you pausing to shiver and tremble and look back over your shoulder—as if you feared that perhaps you were followed? Hardly the act of a boy brave enough to enter the slave quarter late at night, eh? And how is it you come from the direction of the pyramid?—but then, why shouldn’t you. After all, it was your father built the thing!”

Khai shrank back in shock and astonishment, unable to believe his own ears. Had Anulep already discovered his absence, then, alerting all of Asorbes to keep watch for him? Were people already searching for him in the city? It did not seem possible. And yet, how else could this black slave know of him ?

The Nubian chuckled as if reading his mind. “It’s in your eyes, lad,” he said, “written all over your face. Damn me, but you’re a poor liar! Oh, I know you all right, Khai Ibizin, and I know of you. Didn’t I spend a whole week building a wall around your father’s garden? Ah, I see you remember me now.”

Khai’s mouth had fallen open. He did indeed remember the man. He and one other slave had been given the task of constructing a many-arched wall around the perimeter of the garden, so as to partially seclude it from the view of tradesmen coming into the courtyard. They had been tasked by virtue of their skill at stoneworking. It was a job which could have been completed in two or three days, but Harsin Ben Ibizin had gone very easy on the slaves and had made sure that they got their rest and were well-fed.

“Yes,” the black continued, “you surely know me now. Well, I’ve been waiting for you since first I noticed you preparing your escape route.”

“What?” Khai gasped again. “But how could you possibly have seen—” he began.

“Look!” the other commanded, cutting him off, forcibly turning his head in huge hands until the boy’s eyes stared back the way he had come. At first, he saw only the littered street, the crumbling walls, huddled buildings and black shadows. Then his eyes went above and beyond these to the looming man-made mountain that was Khasathut’s pyramid.

“The south face,” said the black man by way of explanation. “It’s in shadow now, but when the moon was on it—why!—at first I thought that the pyramid wept! It was the water that gave you away, Khai, the water you used to make your slide smooth and cool. It crept down the south face like a little silver river, like the tears of the moon!”

“But if you saw it,” Khai gasped, “then perhaps—”

“Others?” The Nubian shook his head. “A few slaves, perhaps, but they would most likely come to me before doing anything or telling anyone else. As Pharaoh is the king of Khem, I, Adonda Gomba, am king of the slaves. You were wise, Khai, in choosing the south face, for it overlooks the slave quarter and little else.”

The boy nodded. “I know. But you said you knew who I was before you saw me. How could you have known?”

“You’re not the first one to run from the pyramid, boy. But you’re one of the first to make it. Oh, you’re not out of the fire yet, not by a long shot. But at least you’ve made a good start. As to how I knew it was you: you were the pyramid’s most recent prisoner, and one of the youngest. Only a boy would have dared such a wild escape, and it would have to be a boy who knew the pyramid’s innards better than his own.” He shrugged. “Who else could it have been ?”

Khai said nothing, and eventually Adonda Gomba continued:

“Well, boy, and things have gone badly for you, eh?”

Khai could only hang his head and nod. “I… I’ve run away from the pyramid, yes. From the Pharaoh’s high priest, Anulep. He … he is horrible! And Khasathut is a monster!”

“Oh? And you’ve only just learned that, have you?” Sarcasm dripped from the black’s tongue.

“What will you do with me?” Khai asked, his eyes searching the streets and shadows, his mind racing to discover a way out of his predicament.

“That depends on you, boy,” the other answered. “On what you want to do now that you’ve broken out. One thing is certain: you can’t stay in Asorbes, and certainly not here in the slave quarter. And as for Arkhenos of Subon—a friend of your father?—why, his house is the first place they’ll look for you!”

“You won’t hand me over?” Khai could hardly believe his luck.

“Little fear of that,” the other answered. “There are no rewards for slaves—especially black ones. No, I’ll not take you in. But come, we’re out in the open and that’s not wise. While I’m a king of sorts, still there are those who would depose me if they could. They wouldn’t take to you as kindly as I do, Khai Ibizin. You can thank your Khemish gods that your father was good tome!”

“He was good to everyone,” Khai answered, turning his face away.

“Ah, yes,” the Nubian rumbled more quietly. “I was forgetting.” For a moment the two were silent and the black man put his arm about the boy’s shoulders. “I, too, lost my father when I was your age,” he finally said. “A stone turned over on the ramp and trapped him. He was worn out, slow-moving and dull-witted. The stone did him a favor.”

Without another word, the black led the boy into the shadows, guiding him through a jagged gap in a wall and along a narrow alley toward a dimly burning oil lamp fixed over a hide-covered doorway. “I’m a Nubian,” said Adonda Gomba, holding the hide cover to one side. “My ancestors always kept lamps burning outside their houses to light them home. As they did in Nubia, I also do in Asorbes,” but he spat out the last word as if it were poison. “This is my house, Khai Ibizin. Not so grand as your own home, I’ll grant you, but if nothing more it’s a safe place to lie your head down for the night. Before that, though, I’d like you to tell me why you ran. And why do you call Pharaoh ‘a monster’?”

“I’ll tell you anything you wish to know,” Khai answered, “but why are you interested?”

“I’m interested in all such things, Khai,” the Nubian told him, ushering him in through the doorway and lifting down the lamp to bring it with him. By its light the boy saw a small room with a wooden table and three makeshift chairs. The ceiling was of stitched hides sagging from old beams, through which the night sky showed in several places. A second covered doorspace led on to the kitchen, from which came the smell of cooking and the rattle of wooden implements.

Adonda Gomba sat Khai down in one of the crude chairs and crossed to the curtained kitchen door. He parted the curtain and put his head through, saying something in lowered tones to whoever it was who worked by the glowing red light of a wood fire. “My wife, Nyooni,” he told Khai as he rejoined him. “Most other slaves are asleep now for they need all the strength they can muster, but I no longer need so much sleep at nights. I only work when I want to, which is when the work suits me and carries small rewards. My masters trust me, do you see, Khai? It makes life easier and gives me time to make plans, for myself and for all of the others.”

All of a sudden, the boy felt perfectly safe, and with this feeling of security came weariness. He was tired, drained—and he was starving. He sniffed at the air, savoring the odor that drifted to him from the unseen kitchen.

“Are you hungry, boy?” the black asked. “I thought so. You’ll have some bread and a piece of lamb in a moment. One of Pharaoh’s beasts,” he grinned, “that got its head trapped in the hands of one of my men!” Finding Adonda Gomba’s grin infectious, Khai attempted a wan smile.

“However,” the black continued, “you’ll have to pay me for your food. You’ll pay with information. We slaves gather all sorts of information about Pharaoh—about his guards and the pyramid—against the day when we strike back!”

“When you strike ? Slaves ?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. That day will come, Khai, believe it. When the time is right, we’ll rise up against Khasathut, and when we do, there’ll be no holding us!” His voice had grown so grim that the youth could only believe him.

“But there,” the black went on, “I’ve told you my secret, and now you must tell me yours. If you truly hate Pharaoh as much as I think you do, Khai, then you’ll tell me all you can of him and his ways. Now then, what do you say?”