“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.