Page 32 of Khai of Khem


  “Now?” he answered. “Why, now we take the pyramid! Into the hive, men,” he roared. “Let’s burn the vermin out!”

  II

  MAKERS OF MADNESS

  The light in the lower levels of the pyramid was as dim as Khai remembered it. Surging through corridors which were still familiar to him despite the intervening years, he and some fifty of his warriors engaged many small parties of Khemites in those eerie, half-lighted tunnels and temples, but their Nubian steel quickly conquered all.

  “Clean the place out and then set it ablaze,” Khai ordered, his voice echoing loudly over the magnified tramp of feet and distant sounds of battle from outside. “These wall hangings will carry the flames, and the smoke will drive any scum in the higher levels up through the pyramid to its top. There’s a fresh-air system, but it won’t be able to cope with that. Only don’t set your fires until you’ve searched these lower levels through and through. If you come across anything that looks like a wizard—kill it! Kill all seven of them, if you find them. Now go, scatter. Kindu and Nundi—you stay with me. I know the whereabouts of the Dark Heptad’s den. With luck, we’ll find them at home.”

  Reaching a spot where steps descended steeply into black bowels of rock, Khai snatched a torch from its bracket and led his two lieutenants down into dank and claustrophobic depths. He had been this way before, with Pharaoh’s Vizier, Anulep, and he shuddered involuntarily as he recalled the terror the place had held for him then. Even now, he felt a strangling of his soul as he plumbed this pit beneath the great pyramid. But he was driven by something greater than fear: a craving for red revenge!

  These seven necromancers for whom he searched were responsible for the grisly end of far too many of Khai’s friends and fellows, and if and when he found them they would pay the price in full. Except that they would die cleanly, not stripped to the bone by bats and insects, gnawed by plague-ridden rats or blasted in a holocaust of green lightnings. They would die by the sword, and steel was cold, sweet and swift.

  The footsteps of the three echoed hollowly, and the sounds of their colleagues where they sought and slew above had grown very faint when the stone steps ended in a corridor whose roughly hewn walls and reeking atmosphere told Khai that he had reached his destination. This was that nethermost level where the Dark Heptad had its lair of bubbling vats; where they performed their black magics in accordance with Khasathut’s schemes. Khai put a finger to his lips to indicate stealth, and then, sure-footed in the flickering light of his torch, he led his Nubians along the winding corridor. As they went, Kindu and Nundi pressed very close on his heels indeed.

  Along the way, they passed an array of jars, boxes and containers of various shapes and sizes—the morbid chemicals and mordant liquids of the Dark Heptad’s infernal work—all piled against the walls, and here the stench of nameless experiments filled the air to such a degree that even Khai’s sputtering torch seemed to dim a little, as if from lack of good clean air. Then, faint at first, but rapidly growing louder, they heard the low mouthings of an interminably chanted invocation, and Khai’s scalp prickled as he recognized the oft-repeated and monstrously evocative name of Nyarlathotep!

  Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. The Howler in the Night. The Dark Messenger of Demon Gods trapped and chained in vaults of space and time since the earliest ages of Earth; master of all the world’s imps of insanity, hatred and despair; and here the Dark Heptad called upon Him to come to their aid!

  “This is it,” Khai whispered to his friends as they approached a huge archway in the corridor’s wall, from which issued a flicking blue glow. “And if that chanting is anything to go by, I’d say they’re in!” And stepping forward, he thrust his torch before him into the room to light his way.

  The oddly shimmering glow came from a large sunken vat situated centrally in the floor of this den of sorcerers, and as Khai’s torch lit that awful cave, so the unnatural radiance seemed to dim a little. Seated cross-legged on the floor about the vat, hands touching, the Dark Heptad slowly turned their cowled heads to gaze at the intruders. In faces shaded beneath seven cowls, their eyes were luminous and poisonous as they stared. Then—

  Before Khai and his Nubians could take a single step forward, the blue light sprang up like a shimmering wall and spread outward from the vat, pushing them back and out of the room! They fought against it, fought to win through that ethereal but seemingly solid wall of light, but to no avail. And all the time, the chanting of the Dark Heptad went on, gaining in volume and racing ever more rapidly from their lips as they hurried to bring it to a climax.

  Now, narrowing his eyes to squint through the haze of blue shimmer into the den, Khai saw that the magic was working. Shapes were forming in that room, hovering over the vat, writhing and taking on substance. A kaleidoscope of wraithlike forms—and each one a little more solid than the one before—towering and leaping up from the vat like genies to sway over the hysterically chanting figures of the Dark Heptad. And they were shapes of purest evil!

  All the horrors of universal insanity were there, the unclean spirits of Man’s blackest nightmares, and Khai saw ghouls, afreets and ogres come and go in the ever-changing nimbus that rose over the vat. As for Kindu and Nundi: they saw their own demons, the night-things of the jungles and the leering familiars of witches and black M’gangas. And as each leering or frothing shape melted into the next, so it took on firmer form.

  The chanting voices of the Dark Heptad were now reaching a crescendo. Khai knew that whatever was coming must come soon, and so he threw himself once more against the wall of blue light that filled the doorway and forbade him entry. Such was the energy he expended that his muscles corded and the veins stood out on his straining brow as he shoved against nothing; until his very mind grew numb with the effort. Only then, when the one thought in his head was an overriding determination to break through, did he hear that whispering voice in his mind, that voice he knew of old and which he had learned to trust.

  It was the voice of the wind-carved, sun-scorched Syran mage—the Mage of Mentalism—and Khai fastened desperately upon it and forced himself to listen.

  “Good, Khai, Good!” praised that voice, but it carried an ominously sad note. “Now listen and understand. You may not break through this barrier, for it is a mindwall. Their wills are greater than yours, their minds stronger, and so you may not proceed. And this time we cannot help you, Khai, for we, too, are helpless against a mindwall. . . .”

  Khai looked again through the blue haze and saw a fresh shape writhing into view above the vat. And this time the shape was semi-solid, clearly discernible . . . and human! Human, and yet inhuman. For this could only be Nyarlathotep in His earthly avatar: a young man with the wickedly proud face of a fallen God, whose great black eyes contained a hideous humor. His mouth was cruel and yet langorous, and His lips had sipped of all the world’s sin. Pschent-crowned, this tall sardonic Being reminded Khai of Pharaoh and of a great task as yet unfulfilled, and aloud he cried out to that dimly receding voice in his head:

  “What may I do? What is this mindwall that resists me? Answer me—help me—but don’t desert me now!”

  Faint and fading came his answer: “The mindwall is an illusion, Khai, it is not real. But since the barrier exists in your own mind, you may not cross it. No thinking creature may breach a mindwall. . . .” And the voice of the Mage of Mentalism receded and was gone.

  “But I must breach it!” Khai howled. “I must!” And again he hurled himself at the blue, impenetrable haze. In another moment, the hands of Kindu and Nundi were on his straining arms, dragging him from the doorway. Then, as he fought them off, his eyes lighted upon a row of large stone jars where they stood along the wall of the corridor.

  He shook himself free of the Nubians. “Mindwall?” he gasped to himself. “An illusion!”

  “Lord, what ails you?” Nundi asked. “Come, we must leave this place.”

  “No, no, wait,” Khai answered, his forehead creasing in concentration. “A mind
wall!” he said again, this time in a whisper, and his eyes went wide in sudden inspiration. “Aye, but since when has oil a mind of its own, eh?”

  “Lord?”

  “Never mind,” he cried. “But quickly—help me!” And together they lifted the jars of oil and threw them against the blue glow where it issued from the door of the Dark Heptad’s den. The jars passed through the glow without hindrance, smashing when they struck the floor within. Instantly thickly cloying, exotically scented fumes flooded from the sorcerers’ den, and on instinct Khai swept his torch forward and sent it spinning into the room.

  The searing heat from the holocaust of flame which then spilled out into the subterranean corridor drove Khai and his Nubians back as it scorched the walls. And as the fireball shrank, they heard the terrified shrieking of the Dark Heptad above the roar and crackle of flames. They heard them . . . and they heard something else, something much worse.

  It was laughter—lunatic laughter that turned to a roar of outrage even as it dwindled and died. On the very threshold, Nyarlathotep had been sent back to those mental hells which spawned him. A moment more and two capering, flaming human torches leapt out into the corridor, beating at their blazing bodies in a vain attempt to smother the flames. While still they danced, the trio of invaders cut them down. Khai stepped over their crisped bodies and shielded his face as he stared at the inferno within the den. The heat was blistering and he knew nothing could possibly live in there.

  Satisfied, he was turning to his companions when a movement farther down the corridor caught his eye. A tall, spectrally slender figure stared at him, then melted back into the flickering shadows—but Khai had seen him. He would recognize that figure anywhere: that black sheath of a robe and bald dome of a head.

  “Anulep!” Khai snarled.

  He made to run after the Vizier, but at that moment a fresh ball of fire shot out from the mouth of the wizard’s den and drove him back. For precious seconds the flames licked the corridor, then died away.

  Khai beckoned Kindu and Nundi forward and ran along the smoke-filled corridor toward the spot where the Vizier had lurked in the shadows, but scarce had he taken ten paces before he heard a sound which caused his flesh to creep and the short hairs at the back of his neck to stand up straight. It was a single, eerie, undulating note—and Khai knew that it had been blown on a tiny golden whistle. . . .

  III

  DEATH OF DEATHS

  That single blast of Anulep’s golden whistle almost brought Khai to a halt, for in his mind’s eye, he now saw the sight which must surely meet him around the next bend in the corridor. He remembered the heavy metal gate in the wall, whose bars were thick and strong, and he remembered the inhabitants of that vault, how they had been brought to a moldering and murderous life by the Vizier’s fiendish piping—that same warbling note whose echoes even now rang in his ears.

  Khai’s torch was gone, lost in the inferno he had wrought, and now the only light was that which glimmered from tiny lamps placed in wide-spaced niches along the walls. He slowed his run to a careful, crouching walk and spoke to his lieutenants in a voice which barely concealed his trepidation.

  “Boys, around this bend will be something to freeze the blood in your veins—a sight you’ll never forget, as I have never forgotten it—but we must not turn and flee. Anulep went this way, and we have to follow him.”

  Now Kindu best remembered Khai as the boy who saved his life those long years ago in the forest east of the river, and he was Khai’s senior by almost twenty years, but still he did not mind Khai calling him “boy.” He did object, however, to what he considered a slight on his own and his fellow Nubian’s manliness.

  “Flee, Khai?” he protested. “We would not think of—”

  “No one doubts your bravery, man,” Khai quickly cut him off. “I’m only trying to tell you that we—” but there he broke off as the horror abruptly lurched into view, coming around the bend toward them where they half-crouched in oppressive gloom.

  “Zombies!” Nundi gasped.

  “Dead men!” Kindu choked out the words. “But they walk!”

  The corridor was full now of stumbling, shuffling corpses whose outlines were aglow with rotten luminescence. Their eyes were pits of balefire and fat, wriggling worms dropped from their crumbling flesh even as they moved silently on the trio of frozen intruders. There were perhaps two, three dozen of these terrible once-men, and the smell of their corruption beggared description.

  For all that many of them were in the last stages of putrefaction, disintegrating even as they came, still the speed of their approach was terrifying. Before Khai and his Nubians could force their paralyzed limbs to mobility, the clawing, silently mouthing, greenly glowing horde of cadavers was on them. On the floor of the corridor legless trunks wriggled to trip them, and torsos without arms thrust forward mummied faces with open jaws and chomping teeth.

  Khai was the first to pull himself together, and as he began to shout his instructions so his lieutenants started at the shock of his voice in the terror-laden silence. “They’re only dead men,” Khai cried. “Dead and rotting men whose souls scream in hell. They can’t stand against us, so cut them down!”

  Still Kindu and Nundi shrank back.

  “Leather and bone and worms,” Khai yelled. “Look—” and he swept his sword through two of the advancing creatures with one clean stroke. Down went the zombies, crumbling into dust and rot.

  Now the Nubian warriors took heart, and Khai wondered if he himself would have recovered so swiftly had the roles been reversed. For he had prior knowledge of this blasphemy and should therefore be, in a measure, prepared for it. However that might be, now the trio stood shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the wall of rock, and as the undead horde pressed close so they hacked and hewed until at last they stood in a semicircle of heaped enemies.

  Then, stomachs heaving as they gagged on poisonous air, they stepped gingerly through half-liquescent, half-powdery loathsomeness and went on shakily down the rock-cut tunnel. Khai paused at the first small lamp to lift it from its niche, turn and toss it back onto the pile of human debris that littered the floor. His action was one of instinct and not logic, for corpses are not so easy to burn. But these corpses had been treated with rare oils and chemicals, and sure enough they flared up in an instant with a bright and cleansing light.

  And it was by that purifying light that the three men made their way along the tunnel to the next flight of stone stairs, which they gladly climbed to the saner levels above. There, where dimly cavernous temples and halls loomed beyond every stone arch, many of Kush’s warriors impatiently prowled in the gloom and called Khai’s name. Relieved to see him emerge from below, they now set about to burn every flammable thing in sight; and while some put torches to tapestries and curtains, others poured perfumed oil onto toppled statues of hybrid Khemish gods, or smashed rich chairs and tables into shattered fragments of kindling.

  And so, retreating in the face of self-set fires, Khai’s warriors moved out from the pyramid’s center toward the clean air and the light of the outside world. It was then, as they hastened to join the battle which still raged in the streets of the city, that they heard high overhead a rumbling like that of long drawn out thunder. Khai paused in a corridor rapidly filling with fire to turn his eyes to the ceiling. He felt his flesh creep in sudden apprehension. Somewhere up above a great weight had shifted, a massive block of stone had pivoted. But for what purpose?

  Khai believed he knew the answer to that question. He saw again his father’s plans of the pyramid, remembering them from so long ago. Those sketches he had so admired as a boy, of gigantic mechanisms designed to operate at the touch of a lever—to spill thousands of tons of sand down into these lower levels. And worse: to seal the base of the pyramid off forever from the outside world!

  “Move!” he shouted at once. “Out, quickly—or stay here forever!”

  Even as he yelled his warning a stream of fine sand gushed down from an opening i
n the ceiling, quickly forming a mounting pile as it spilled upon the floor. And now there arose all around the whisper and rush and slither of sand; and yet again, from somewhere high overhead, there came a rumble of great weights in motion. Along all of the many corridors, jets of sand were now erupting from overhead apertures, similarly in the temples and halls, and already the floor was inches deep with fine grains which sifted deeper by the second as the flow of sand increased.

  It was not the sand which bothered Khai as he ran, however, but the thought of something else. Even now, at this very moment, great slabs of stone were tilting in the mighty walls of the pyramid, pivoting beneath the weight of sand from above. Before the sand could begin to spill out through the many huge doorways which lined the four sides of the pyramid’s base, these great stone “doors” would tilt into vertical positions and slam down, closing the lower regions off from the outside world for all time.

  It was every man for himself now, for quite obviously to linger here would mean a monstrous, choking death. Khai raced with Kindu, Nundi and some fifteen others of his men along one of the square corridors leading to safety. Daylight showed ahead through a haze of yellow dust and flying sand, and Khai urged his warriors on as he listened for a sound other than their cursing and the rushing hiss of sand.

  And finally that sound came: of a massive weight slamming down like a hammer of the gods. The ground trembled briefly to the thump of that mighty blow, and Khai began to count as he ran. At a count of ten there came a second thump and shuddering of the earth, and now he knew the worst—that indeed the titan doors were closing, falling into their predetermined places.

  Faster he ran, his feet dragging in sand, slipping and stumbling as he kicked at his men and urged them to greater effort. Daylight was a haze of light somewhere ahead, and close by there came a third great thump as another door fell. This time the solid rock beneath the shifting sand actually jumped, telling Khai that his time was almost up. The next door would be closer still, possibly the one which even now shifted above the doorway that loomed ahead. A doorway, yes—glaring white light seen through a mist of sand—but Khai hung back to send the last of his men scrambling and leaping out into the open air.