The sorcerer began to hum, deep in his throat, an inchoate sound that reverberated in the floor and the walls. Khadames felt weak again, and managed only though an effort of total will to remain standing. The sound, which had seemed so low and quiet, grew, filling the air and the world.
The light flickered in the pit and then went out.
Khadames blinked again, and squinted. In the complete dark, his eyes began to play tricks on him, summoning up odd white flashes and sparkling lights before his eyes. A slow rain of burning motes passed before him. The air itself seemed closer, and the walls of the room, even unseen, pressed against him.
In the darkness, the sorcerer moved and the hum changed, rising in pitch. High up, almost beyond hearing, Khadames began to hear a whistling sound, or an odd piping. Despite himself, he fell to his knees, kneeling at the edge of the pit, staring down into the utter darkness. The piping and whistling echoed in the room, though in his mind- almost paralyzed by fear- the general realized that though he heard those sounds, they did not come from the air. The knife grew heavy and began to slipfrom his fingers.
The sorcerer spoke, and that single syllable smote the air, ringing like a massive gong.
Khadames felt the floor rush up and crash against his face. His nose buckled and broke on the lip of the pit, and blood spattered into the air, freezing into tiny spheres and then cracking against the floor. Smoke boiled up from his exposed skin. He tried to cry out, but then all sound ceased and he stared into the pit in horror.
Darkness parted and showed abyssal black. Ten thousand tiny points of light burned in an ebon firmament. The cold that had gone before was swallowed up in icy darkness. Khadames clutched at the lip of stone, screaming in fear that he would be thrown off into that void of night. Great clouds of hanging fire burned and boiled in the titanic realm beyond the door that now yawned wide.
Khadames could feel the stones ripple and contort under his fingers as the door opened, flexing the world around him. There was a massive rushing sensation, and the pit inverted. Khadames clung to the stones, though they writhed like living flesh under him, and the pit became a sky above. At his side, the sorcerer remained standing, though now he did not look down, but out, into the void.
Something was coming, rushing across the abyss of space, there between the dead suns.
Something that blotted out whole constellations with the shadow of leviathan tripartite wings.
It came on, searching, seeking for the door that now stood ajar. Khadames could feel it, though it was still unguessably far away, hunting in the sea of night. Hunting for the scent of living men and a green world under a yellow sun, where blue seas surged against a white shore. Planets cracked into powder in its passage, shattered by the beat of its wings. Suns, bloated and red, withered and were snuffed out, guttering down to coal-black cinders. Khadames scrabbled on the living stone, feeling the heat of blood pulsing under the rock, searching for the glass knife.
The sorcerer swayed, reaching out with a hand for support. Khadames forced himself to stand, though the reptile mind hiding at the base of his skull gibbered and screamed that they would fall up into the sky. Dahak clutched his shoulder, digging sharptalons into the general's jacket.
"The knife," the sorcerer breathed, turning away from the vast impossible shape that rushed closer and closer. The yellow eyes were lit with fire, and Khadames felt the knife pressing into his hand, cutting at the edge of his thumb. Over the sorcerer's shoulder, the sky was blotted out. Something writhed there, in that darkness.
Khadames reversed the knife, the hilt nestling into his palm.
He stabbed, twisting his body into the thrust, feeling the hot breath of the sorcerer on his cheek.
The flint blade met resistance, doughy and stiff, then something parted wetly, and the world inverted. The black sky was below, and the living stone cracked and shattered in the cold. An invisible fist slapped Khadames away like a siege engine's arm, and he felt stone crack against his back. There was rushing air and a shrieking wail. Then Khadames fell forward to sprawl on the stone floor of the room.
The sorcerer staggered back from the lip of the pit, wreathed in cold blue fire. Then he raised an arm, and fire crawled across his chest and upper arms to collect, pooling like mercury, in his open hand. He turned, his lean face lit by the glow. Khadames levered himself up, feeling every muscle and bone groaning in agony. The black knife jutted from the sorcerer's chest, a dark trail of blood seeping down his waist.
Dahak smiled and seemed to swell, filling the room.
"Oh, bravely done," the sorcerer cooed. "Now let us begin."
Nothing human remained in the burning yellow eyes, only an echo of the vast shape that had blotted out the stars.
But the stone door was shut.
The next day, the body that had lain on the slab in the cold room was carried to the height of Damawand, and priests anointed the corpse with oils and spices. Though their eyes had been put out, they labored diligently, laving the withered flesh with scented waters and daubing paint upon it. They worked in great haste, for the desire of their master was like a whip. Jagged stone surrounded the open space where the body lay, and the sky above was filled with troubled clouds. The sun rarely shone down upon the old mountain now, and the valley below was filled with dirty gray mist and smoke.
The Zam-Zam, Southern Arabia Felix
This is an abomination!"
Scowling, Mohammed pushed through the crowd, the hulking shapes of the Tanukh at his back. Hundreds of men and women crowded into the square, dressed in their holiday finest. Mohammed pressed on, though the crowd was getting thicker and thicker as he approached the gates of the shrine. Around him, turbaned men carried tall poles with offerings and painted cloths hanging from them. Women, dressed in heavy dark dresses, held plates of grain and salt over their heads. A constant noise rose from the crowd like the surf on the distant shore. A tight wedge of Tanukh in black robes, Jalal among them, flowed after their commander. Their swords, still sheathed, held back the crowd like a steel fence.
Within fifteen feet of the temple, all movement ceased, and Mohammed was forced to step back and stretch, looking over the heads of those in the press before him.
Two great doors rose above him, each three times the height of a man, set into a large square brick building. The bricks had been polished smooth and then painted; first black, and then with thousands of tiny white, yellow, and blue stars. Above the doors a great yellow-white disk had been painted- the eternal sun- to signify the center of the vault of heaven. From his youth, when he had spent much time to little end in the precincts of the temples, Mohammed knew that on the opposite side of the building, a moon was painted. At the side of each door, statues loomed, carved from the desert stone in the shape of the gods of distant Greece. Apollo stood on the left, holding a great sundisk, and Hermes on the right. The likeness was crude and stiff, nothing like the graceful marbles in Caesarea or Damascus, but that had not mattered to the artisans who had labored on them for years.
Jalal shouldered past his master and cracked the man in front of him on the head with the heavy iron pommel of his saber. The man slumped soundlessly to the ground, and Jalal stepped forward over the body. The other Tanukh pushed into the gap, shoving men and women aside. Mohammed opened his mouth to shout a command, but then a way cleared to the foot of the steps before the doors. He shut it with a snap and slid sideways into the gap.