Khai followed him shakily down the first few steps and then paused. The last of his warriors were streaming down the ramp and the rout of fleeing humanity through the streets of Asorbes was now at its full. “Come on,” Manek shouted again, taking his arm. “Why do you linger?”
Khai shook himself free of the other’s hand. “You go,” he told Manek. “I … I have to know!” He turned to stare at the summit’s center where Khasathut now kneeled with his hideous face turned up to the golden, sky-floating pyramid.
“To know what?” Manek cried, lifting his voice against a wind that sprang up from nowhere to blow his hair in his face.
“Go!” Khai shouted, almost in anger. “I’ll follow—when I can.”
Manek argued no longer, but went bounding down the steps and followed the others where they fled. Khai, alone now, stepped up again onto the roof of the pyramid and turned his wide blue eyes up to gaze at the vast golden menace which hung cold and alien over Asorbes.
VI
A City Doomed
“Strike him down!” screamed Khasathut, pointing at Khai where he stood. “Strike them all down and take me up, quickly, for I am surely dying. Take me up, my ancestors, for I am one of you and have suffered. Why do you wait? Do you not know me?”
Without warning, an area of the golden pyramid’s base glowed brighter yet and Khai staggered and shielded his eyes as a beam of yellow light struck downward and fixed upon the lofty summit, trapping two lives within its perimeter and binding them like flies in honey. Khai would have fled then, if he could, but he could not. Through a haze of golden particles, he saw Khasathut—his mouth working in a sort of slow-motion, his octopus eyes bulging, pleading—but he could hear nothing at all through the screen of potent energies which now surrounded him.
It seemed to Khai that he floated in the void between golden suns, where a myriad motes of glittering gold dust blinded him and baffled his senses. The sensation lasted for a moment only, and then, out of the silence, a Great Voice seemed to speak— not to Khai but to Other Beings of equal potency.
He heard no words, neither saw nor yet felt anything at all, and yet somehow he was party to a conversation. There were Beings in that shape in the sky, certainly, and indeed They recognized Khasathut. But They saw him as an error—a failed experiment—that and nothing more. There was puzzlement, too, that such a creature could ever have come to power, could have caused to happen the earthshaking events whose reverberations had been detected at the very corners of space and time, calling Them down from far journeyings, from temporal and trans-dimensional investigations of times and spaces.
Then … a decision was made. Khai knew it, and so did Khasathut.
“No!” the naked monster’s mouth formed silent words as the golden beam from above narrowed to enclose him and exclude Khai. “No, you can’t! I’m one of yours. I’m one of—”
For a moment, the beam brightened to such an intensity that Khai threw up his hands before his face. Then that solid-seeming rod of golden light blinked out and the brightly glowing spot on the flying pyramid’s base quickly dulled and faded into its soft yellow surroundings. The vast mass in the sky began slowly to revolve, rising straight up into thin air until it reached a certain altitude. There it paused and its revolutions ceased, and Khai took his hands from his eyes and craned his neck to gaze up at it. Then he looked at the small heap of yellow dust at the summit’s center—dust which had recently been the Pharaoh Khasathut. …
The wind sprang up again, blowing Khasathut’s last remains in Khai’s face. He choked and covered his nose and mouth, then turned and stumbled down the steps, going back the way he had come as quickly as he could.
At the foot of the ramp, Manek waited with a commandeered chariot. He bundled Khai onto his vehicle’s platform and lashed his horses to a gallop, and a few minutes later they clattered out through the west gate and raced for dried up mud flats which were once a swamp.
Eight miles from the city’s walls, a low hill rose up from mud baked hard as brick. Recently it had been green, grown with trees, grasses and ferns, a paradise of living things. Now it was dead. A few blackened stumps littered the crest where Manek brought the chariot to a halt. Many warriors were already there—horsemen and charioteers, mainly—waiting for their generals; and for … something else.
The panic was largely over now. Between the city and the hill streams of chariots, horsemen and foot soldiers like ants on the march still hurried west, leaving the doomed city behind them, not looking back. The ordinary citizens of Asorbes were there, too, many thousands of them, loaded down with their belongings and fleeing from the ravages of war. Khai and Manek had driven through them, urging them on, but now they waited as the army caught up. In another half-hour, there would not be a single soldier of Ashtarta’s forces within five miles of Asorbes—which was just as well, Khai thought, for something was surely going to happen. No one said anything, but everyone knew it. It was in the air, a tension, an electric feeling. And the eyes of each and every soldier on the hill were now locked on Asorbes and the golden shape that stood in the sky over the city like some silent sentinel.
After a long while, Khai said to Manek, “It will be soon now.”
They stood side by side on the hill, amidst thousands of bloodied, battered warriors whose triumph was all but forgotten. All was unnaturally quiet. Even the clatter of late-arriving chariots, the whinnying of lathered horses, the moaning of wounded men and the low mutterings of chiefs and captains as they counted their losses seemed muted.
“What is it, Khai?” Manek asked, his eyes on the distant shape in the sky, a frown etched deep in his forehead. “What will it be?”
For answer, Khai shook his head, then stiffened as he focused his eyes on sudden motion about the vast vessel hovering over the deserted city. The golden pyramid seemed to be pulsating, glowing bright and pale in an ever quickening cycle. A shimmering yellow haze, similar to the beam Khai had experienced at first hand, but more diffuse and spreading out at a wider angle, fell like a diaphanous curtain from the pyramid’s base over the entire city, covering it wall to wall. The pulsating continued, quickened, and the massive vessel began to lift into the sky. Amazingly, impossibly, most of Asorbes began to lift with it!
Caught in tractors of fantastic power, vast segments of the city’s walls broke loose and shuddered into the sky; towers, buildings and temples became airborne; anything that was not deeply rooted in the bedrock of the earth itself was slowly, irresistibly drawn skyward. But most of the power was concentrated centrally, on Khasathut’s tomb, on the pyramid itself. …
A vast sigh—a concerted gasp of awe and disbelief—went up from thousands of throats as finally that tremendous monument rocked and broke free of its base and millions of tons of stone were drawn bodily aloft. It seemed as if every man of Ashtarta’s army held his breath then, as the city of Asorbes rose up and up. And as the golden pyramid exerted its incredible energy on the uprooted city, so that raw power was made visible in the lightnings that leapt between sky-floating stone and scarred and pitted earth.
Huge tongues of fire licked at the ground in electrical greed, and dust clouds like the dark breath of demons rose everywhere. A low rumble, rapidly growing louder, filled the air and clouds began to form in the sky, racing outward from the epicenter which was the shattered, elevated city.
Khai, Manek and their armies heard that rumble, felt it in the ground, in their bones, and knew that the end was near. Thus it was something of an anticlimax when suddenly, in an instant, the huge inverted funnel of golden haze blinked out—the beam and the golden pyramid, too, disappearing as if they had never existed—leaving the revenant fragments of Asorbes suspended in thin air. For a second it seemed as though those millions of tons were to remain frozen in the sky forever, but then they began to fall.