On their way up the center of the ramp—whose sides were lined with Kushites, Nubians, Siwadis and freed slaves alike, all cheering Khai and his companions on and forming a crowd behind them as they climbed ever higher—they hurdled bodies where they lay sprawled in death’s poses and stepped over discarded, gore-slimed weapons. Never once did they accord this grisly debris a moment’s consideration; their goal was to reach Pharaoh and his cordon of guardsmen on the summit, and nothing could distract them from it. Only upon climbing to the doorway, which still issued a little smoke, did they pause for a moment to gain strength for the final assault.
As the last few puffs of smoke belched out from the dark doorway and began to drift away over the city, Khai stared up at the two dozen or so remaining steps to the summit and stiffened. Seeing his look of disbelief, Kindu and Nundi peered upward through the rapidly dispersing screen of smoke. Khasathut’s litter stood at the very rim of the flat summit, with its forward shafts projecting. Between the shafts, his head and shoulders hidden from view, Anulep kneeled with his back to the steps. Members of the Black Guard flanked the litter, spears at the slope in their right hands, curved swords at the ready in their left.
“What is it, Khai?” Kindu asked. “Why do you pause?”
For answer, Khai gazed once more out over the city, then turned his eyes upward yet again to the litter’s shafts and the figure of the Vizier where he kneeled in seeming obeisance between them. The expression on the young general’s face quickly changed from a look of disbelief to one of purest loathing. Shocking pictures flooded his mind, pictures of lovely girls skinned alive while Anulep brought the Pharaoh to a climax with his hideous mouth, and Khai knew what was happening even now beneath the gold-embroidered canopy of Khasathut’s litter-throne.
It had been girls before—beautiful girls giving up their lives in agony and crimson horror to facilitate an orgasm in the hybrid monster called Khasathut—but now? Now it was an entire city I Suddenly, while Khai still stood frozen in disbelief, there came a drawn-out shriek which rose to an almost painfully intense pitch before gurgling into gasped obscenities. At first, Khai thought that the cry signalled Pharaoh’s climax, but as the cursing continued there came a sudden and frantic billowing of the litter’s curtains. And now Anulep stood up and laughed long and loud—the laughter of a man made mad with terror—the baying of a crazed hound. The Vizier turned as he laughed, throwing his head back and his arms wide as he roared his lunatic mirth, and even Khai shrank back from the sight of the madman’s face: his gaping, crimson jaws that dripped blood even as he laughed!
Confused, the cordon of guardsmen turned inward, made as if to leap upon the Vizier … but too late. Pharaoh himself tore aside the canopy of his litter to stand naked, twisted and deformed behind Anulep, a curved dagger gleaming in his one good hand. With a downward sweep of his arm, he cut short the Vizier’s laughter and sent his skeletal, black-sheathed figure stumbling and staggering down the steps toward Khai. The high priest almost made it, but at the last moment, he tripped over his own spastically lurching feet and crashed down on his face. Pharaoh’s dagger was lodged deep in the top of his spine. He flopped on the steps for a second or two and flailed his limbs, then somehow turned over onto his back, snapping off the dagger’s handle and driving its blade deeper yet. His face was full of blood, and as his death rattle sounded so his scarlet mouth fell open and released a pair of hinged bronze teeth which clattered onto the stone steps. Then he lay still. Khai still did not understand all of it— would never fully understand—but as finally he lifted his eyes from the body of the dead Vizier so he became conscious of a concerted gasping from his lieutenants and the warriors who crowded behind them. Again he turned his gaze toward the summit, and finally a glimmering of understanding came.
For there Khasathut stood, supported now by two members of his Black Guard, with blood flowing freely down his legs from his terrible wound. In that one region where once he might have claimed a certain kinship with men, he no longer laid claim to anything at all. And now Pharaoh saw Khai—saw him through those octopus eyes of his and knew him for the force which had guided Khem’s enemies to victory. He threw off his guardsmen and somehow staggered to one side of his heavy litter, then indicated that the ornately-carved throne should be hurled from the summit.
In another moment, the litter came crashing down from above. Leaping to one side, Khai and his lieutenants somehow avoided its cartwheeling mass, but many of the warriors crowding behind them were not so lucky. Now, galvanized into action and snarling his hatred, the blond giant threw himself up the steps and as he went heard an almost hysterical command from above:
“Let him come!” screamed Pharaoh, his voice full of that remembered whooshing effect but higher pitched, like that of a breathless woman. “Let him come all the way. As for the rest: hold them back. Do not let them interfere before this thing is finished!”
Khai held his sword before him and made to defend himself against the Black Guard as they swarmed past him down the steps. One of them parried his thrust and lunged at him with a massive shoulder, sending him flying. He sprawled on the steps, losing his bow and quiver of arrows from his shoulder before he could regain his balance and spring to his feet. But the Nubians, obeying Khasathut’s command, simply ignored him and formed a treble rank below him, defending the summit against any further incursions.
They were almost zombie-like, those blacks, glazed of eye and expressionless—but with no apparent loss of coordination or dexterity—so that Khai suspected them to be acting under some hypnotic spell or other. Counted against his own army, however, and despite their massive size and cold savagery, the Nubians could not hope to hold the summit for more than a minute or two at most.
Now, as Khai mounted the last few steps to the roof of the pyramid, Khasathut staggered backward away from him until he stood center of the summit. Naked, almost pitiful, stood the crooked figure of Pharaoh as the blond warrior advanced upon him high over ravaged Asorbes. Khai’s blue eyes glared their message of loathing and red revenge, and his iron sword was half-lifted in a promise of swift, merciless death. But now Khasathut began to laugh, and the man who faced him was so astounded that he paused momentarily to listen to the lunatic’s words.
“Once before I was told that you would not return to Khem, Khai Ibizin,” said Khasathut. “That was when you fled me as a boy. But there’s that about you which can’t be stopped. So, when last I had you in my power, I did more than merely allow my Dark Seven to send your fa down the centuries. I suspected not even that would stop you. A stricture was placed upon you, Khai of Kush, a trance of fascination, that if you should return a second time, it would only be to obey my every command! You have seen such a trance working, for my Black Guard is similarly molded to my will. Even now they give up their lives for me, for how may they question the commands of their God-king?”
“You’re no more a god than the stone blocks of your great tomb— Pharaoh,” Khai spat out the last word as if it were poison. “Why, you’re no longer a man—if ever you were one in the first place—let alone a god! As for ‘molding me to your will’: there are no more black magic spells you can cast over me. Now you die, Khasathut,” and he lifted his sword up higher. “For my murdered family, for Khem, for an entire world which you would have destroyed. Now ... you die!”