Lords of the Black Sands Read online

  LordS

  of the

  Black SandS

  J Edward Neill

  Cover and Interior Art ‘The Varwarden’ & ‘Desert Strider’ by J Edward Neill

  Tessera Guild Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 J Edward Neill

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1720769361

  ISBN-10: 1720769362

  More by J Edward Neill:

  Fiction:

  The Hecatomb

  Hollow Empire

  Machina Obscurum

  Eaters of the Light Series

  Darkness Between the Stars

  Shadow of Forever

  Eaters of the Light

  Tyrants of the Dead Trilogy

  Down the Dark Path

  Dark Moon Daughter

  Nether Kingdom

  Coffee Table Philosophy:

  Reality is Best Served with Red Wine

  Life & Dark Liquor

  The Ultimate Get to Know Someone Quiz

  101 Questions for Humanity

  The Little Book of BIG Questions

  Breaking Up is EASY to Do

  444 Questions for the Universe

  How can I sleep?

  Under black clouds, through cities long abandoned, across deserts salted with bones, the Nemesis and his legions pursue me.

  If only they’d abandon the chase.

  The world would be better for it.

  And I could claim what’s rightfully mine.

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  One Last Journey

  Part 1

  Nemesis versus Prey

  1

  Galen hadn’t meant for everyone to die.

  He hunkered in his hole, bobbing his head to the falling rain’s beat.

  He tasted the ashes of the dead in the air.

  And he knew it was his fault.

  If I hadn’t come here, they’d be alive, he thought.

  I guess I did them a favor.

  Little streams of warm water slid across the broken streets overhead and plunged into his hiding spot. He hated the feel of the rain squelching in his boots, and he grimaced when the foul liquid peppered his hood. He hadn’t been this uncomfortable in weeks, not since the time he’d cut the fingers off a man who’d tried to steal his one and only apple.

  My last apple. He shook his head.

  Did he have to bleed on it?

  Down in the muck and shadows, Galen waited for the rain to snuff the fires. The stench in his pit was already unbearable. Two others had crawled down into the hole with him, but they’d been too slow, and had gagged to death moments later. The poisonous air in the city above had been more than enough to kill them.

  He wanted out.

  But he knew if he poked his head up too soon, someone was likely to nip it off.

  So he waited. Ashes from the burning city mixed with the rain, which in turn plummeted down into his hole, painting his cloak, his weathered pants, and his skin a sickening shade of grey. He didn’t look like a living man anymore.

  He looked like death.

  I’m the Ash Man, he thought. Can’t catch me if you can’t see me. Can’t kill me if I’m already dead.

  He whistled softly to himself, and he couldn’t help but grin. Ash Man sounded like a nickname he might’ve liked. But someone had once told him he wasn’t allowed to give himself nicknames.

  Too bad, he thought. Ash Man would be better than Prey.

  When the storm was at its strongest and the thunder began to break the sky, he climbed out of his pit. Soggy, his face grey as charcoal, he pulled himself above street level and emerged into the half-light of the ruined day. The shanties and crude brick houses that had made up most of Cedartown lay in crumbled heaps around him. The smoke from human corpses curled into the air despite the rain.

  He slithered down a street and ducked behind a pile of smoldering wood beams and bricks blackened by fire. An hour ago, he’d been standing inside a house in the very same spot, conversing with the doctor who’d lived there.

  The ashes staining the wall a dozen feet away?

  The good doctor’s, he imagined.

  At least he finished before he died.

  Clutching his cloak around his shoulders, he hunkered in the house’s ruin. The hole in the back of his neck, which the doctor had installed and lovingly termed a ‘skin-port,’ itched worse than his toes inside his rancid boots. But he didn’t dare scratch.

  Doc said not to, he recalled. Needs a few hours to heal up.

  He slowed his breathing, just like his mother had taught him. He snapped his eyes shut and listened to the sounds between raindrops, the rolling thunder, and the wind beating against broken walls. Somewhere, maybe a few hundred feet away, another building collapsed. And somewhere else, the rain crackled as it peppered a burning wooden beam.

  No. Not those sounds.

  The footsteps.

  Hear them?

  Soundless, still barely breathing, he made a shadow of himself and slipped out of the doctor’s crumbling abode. When he passed the wall onto which the doctor’s ashes had burned a vaguely human shape, he couldn’t help himself. He stuck out his finger and scrawled a ‘G’ in the ash.

  It was a stupid thing to do, he reckoned.

  But was it?

  The ones hunting him would know he’d survived.

  They always knew.

  He crept into the alley behind the doctor’s house. Some of Cedartown’s houses were still half-standing, and some walls still high enough to provide cover. He moved from ruin to ruin, and he stepped so lightly through puddles black with ash no one would’ve heard him even without the thunder and rain.

  Through one house, he moved like the wind. A woman and her child knelt on what he supposed had been the kitchen’s dirt floor. Their bodies were flesh no longer, just sculpted dust soon to be washed away by the rain.

  He moved on.

  In another shanty whose roof had burned away, he glimpsed an old man half-buried beneath a mound of smoking timbers. The poor creature sucked in short breaths, looking little different than a fish plucked from his bowl and tossed on the floor. But was he really an old man? In this place where no one lived longer than forty years? Or had the bomb aged him, withering the flesh of a much younger man?

  It didn’t matter, Galen supposed.

  Whoever the man was, he wouldn’t be alive much longer.

  And it was a good thing, he reckoned.

  He reached Cedartown’s boundary, if such a thing existed in the weary old hamlet. The last few shanty huts, erected in no particular order on the directionless cobblestone streets, had made a noble stand against the bomb’s fury. A few were merely blackened, but not quite felled. One or two looked almost untouched, shielded from the blast by some miracle of physics.

  Someone might’ve survived in these houses, he imagined. Someone might still be hidden inside one of the shanties, ticking away the last few minutes of their life.

  If it were true, he pitied them.
>
  Wouldn’t be a pretty life here. He crouched beside a house of sticks. It’ll soon be sand. Just like all the rest.

  In the shadows, he waited. The fields beyond the hamlet had ceased burning, and the smoke was no longer black, but pale and wispy. Galen kept his hood close to his cheeks, his neck still itching. If anyone had seen him, they’d have said he was a ghost with ashes for skin, black opals for eyes, and a cloak so weathered it must’ve been ripped from the grave of a corpse twenty years dead.

  And if that someone had seen him, gasped in terror, and run screaming into the barren fields, Galen would’ve smiled. He was good at frightening people, and better at being alone.

  The foul, humid wind whipped up across the grass. Galen didn’t move. Between flurries of smoke, curtains of rain, and the charnel smells of Cedartown, he hunkered low and listened to the world.

  He wasn’t alone.

  The Nemesis and his soldiers had come from the east, having followed him from the steel cities near the ocean all the way across the rusted, blackened graveyards dotting the shores of grey-watered lakes. Always, they were the shadow on his back, the knife in the darkness.

  And always, he escaped them.

  The enemy warrior, clad in scaly black armor, trod through the mud at Cedartown’s edge. He walked alone, Galen knew. Only ten of the Nemesis’ knights had come here, and this one, a beast of muscle and black steel, believed himself unstoppable.

  Maybe he was right.

  Maybe, in a fair fight, no swordsman in the Kingdom of Earth could outduel the black-armored warrior.

  But then, Galen didn’t care for fair fights.

  When the black knight clattered to the end of the street and halted at the beginning of the fields beyond, he didn’t know he was being watched.

  Two swords, Galen counted.

  Two knives.

  Other, deadlier weapons.

  He’s a pretty one…he is.

  It’s a shame.

  The wind rose again, and with it Galen moved. Gliding between breezes, he closed the distance between himself and the knight. His only weapon, a knife scavenged from the steel cities of the east, flashed in his hand.

  The knight never heard him, never saw him.

  And with the wind, Galen floated behind the knight, buried his dagger in the tiny gap between armored plates, and eased the armored titan down into the mud.

  Even before Galen helped his limp body to the ground, the knight died. Galen’s dagger, wet with heart’s blood, splashed into a puddle, where the scarlet stain spread through grey water.

  “Sorry for that,” Galen whispered into the dead man’s ear. “You lived a good life…better than most of us. I’ll honor you by keeping one of your swords.”

  He rolled the dead knight onto his back. It felt funny to him that a man with so many weapons and so much armor could be felled by a simple handmade knife. Shaking his head, he loosed a black-steel dagger from the knight’s waist and sliced the straps crisscrossing the dead man’s chest.

  Quite by accident, he glimpsed the knight’s other weapons. They were marked with the Pharaoh’s seal, and were among the deadliest devices ever made. One looked like a wand, short and slender. The other was an obsidian disc polished to a mirror shine.

  These, he didn’t touch.

  Another day, old friend, he thought.

  For now, just your sword.

  He tugged one of the knight’s scabbards loose from the straps and pulled the sword halfway out. More than a century ago, he’d had a similar blade—three feet long, ebon steel polish, sharp enough to clip a man’s head from his shoulders without him feeling a thing.

  With the dagger and sword, he crouched over the knight and peered back into Cedartown. Fell shapes moved though the city, hunting with weapons drawn. The Nemesis and his men were dressed all in black, and the rain glinted atop their armored shoulders.

  “Should’ve paid more attention.” He patted the dead knight on his arm. “Might’ve seen me before you died.”

  No, he knew.

  Even at his best, he never had a chance.

  He sprang to his feet, tucked his new weapons under his armpit, and darted into the field beyond Cedartown. He’d picked right. The grasses here were scorched by fire, but still tall enough to hide him. Like a snake—an animal no one in Cedartown had seen in centuries—he slithered through the grass and vanished.

  The Nemesis and his men, even had they looked in his direction, would’ve thought they’d seen nothing more than the wind.

  In minutes, Galen stood a full half-mile away. A blackened tree jutted from the dirt, and he leaned against it. His neck itched worse now. He considered ripping the skin-port out, if only to ease his irritation. He would’ve done it, too, had he not spent the last hundred years searching for the right man to install it.

  Never said it would itch this much.

  Everyone makes out being immortal like it’s a thousand-year party.

  From his safe vantage, he watched Cedartown. The Nemesis and his men scoured the ruins like ants hunting for a last drop of sugar. He saw their weapons flare more than once, their sinister lights somehow darker than everything else. They were killing Cedartown’s last survivors, probably more out of frustration than anything else.

  They knew.

  They hadn’t found his body, and they knew they wouldn’t.

  He’d escaped them yet again.

  Almost got me, boys. He lifted a rotten apple out of his satchel and took a careless chomp. But now what’ll you do?

  The doctor’s dead.

  And I’ve got what I came for.

  He wished he could’ve seen their faces. Before the sunset, before the starless night reclaimed the ruins of a town in the middle of nothing and nowhere, he wanted to see the frustration in their eyes.

  But then, he knew he wouldn’t.

  He’d fled twenty generations of the Nemesis’ men.

  And if he’d learned one thing in the last five-hundred years, it was that they never took off their masks.

  2

  Through a gap in the clouds, Galen watched a meteor blaze a white streak through the night.

  Afterward, in the total darkness, he leaned back in the sand and remembered something his mother had once told him:

  ‘Shootings stars are promises from God,’ she’d said. ‘If you see one, you’ll know you’re blessed. And when you make your secret wish, if you make it with a pure heart, it will come true.’

  Ah, Mother. He grinned with his eyes still shut. I’m still waiting. Five-hundred wishes and counting.

  Had it really been five-hundred years? Anymore, he wasn’t sure. What he did know is that he’d seen more falling meteors than almost anyone else in the world. He doubted the Nemesis even noticed such things. And his mother had died hundreds of years ago.

  No. Not died. Was executed.

  God broke a few promises to her, too.

  It wasn’t often he dwelled on the past. Or his mother. Or rocks falling from the sky. But here in the flat sands, far from Cedartown, far from everything, he supposed he could relax. He’d thrown off the Nemesis’ pursuit days ago, and he’d started the long journey west.

  As ever, the sand was his bed.

  He’d lived with the sand, and in it, for longer than he could recall. Always, it infiltrated his boots, his fingernails, and his slow-to-grow beard. Sometimes he wondered whether he was made of the stuff, and whether his skin and bones were sculpted of the same black dust inhabiting most of the world.

  Of course, the fine, dark grit west of Cedartown wasn’t real sand. Not like the soft grains onto which the ocean waves used to climb. Not like the windblown dunes of the far and beautiful desert.

  This stuff, this plague of black, siliconized grit was a manmade thing. To him, it smelled horrid. The wind didn’t sculpt it into elegant dunes or lift it into great, dark storms. Sand of the new world felt like sharp, sticky ash, like bones ground up beneath a million of humanity’s ugliest machines.

  Hom
e sweet home, he thought as he leaned back into his cradle of bonemeal.

  He supposed, if he were being honest with himself, he yearned to see real sand again. In fact, he knew in his heart he did, and that when he arrived in the desert he’d wade into the soft dunes as if they were crystalline clear water.

  I’ll get there, he knew. Even if it kills me.

  …which it might.

  Despite his sand bed, he slept well that night. He’d every reason to be content, he believed. He’d survived Cedartown. He’d filled his canteen earlier in the day with not-so-poisonous water. Even the skin-port in his neck had stopped itching.

  No one slept well in the Kingdom of Earth anymore.

  No one but him.

  In the morning, the sun peeled back the blackness, and he cracked his eyelids to a clear grey sky. He stood, stretched, and let out a mighty yawn. Despite the fact he’d walked seven days straight, eaten only three scavenged meals, and sipped barely enough water to hydrate a pack of field mice, he felt just fine.

  He gulped down a lone mouthful of warm, stale water and stuffed the canteen back into his satchel. He’d already forgotten the shooting star, his mother, and his five-hundred wishes. Rather than think of the past, he unsheathed the sword he’d taken from the dead knight and laid the bare blade across his knees.

  It was a marvelous weapon, his newest sword. Its weight was perfect, its blade polished to onyx perfection. He wished a few of the Nemesis’ best soldiers were on hand just so he’d have something to carve, just for a bit of fun.

  Made in the far west, he knew of the blade.

  Past the big ocean. Past the little islands. Forged beneath the trees, the stones, down in the shadows.

  Who needs all the Nemesis’ fancy weapons? Better to kill a man up close.

  Better to look him in the eyes.

  Except, he hadn’t looked the knight in his eyes.

  The irony wasn’t lost on him.

  He slid the sword back into its sheath, strapped it over his shoulder, and rose to greet the new day on his feet.

  Out here, there was nothing much to do besides walk. Rolling plains smothered in sharp, unhappy vegetation gave way to treeless, sand-covered hills. Grey-watered streams dripped eastward, gliding across the desolation toward the river south and east of Cedartown. A few hamlets pocked the ugly terrain, the houses fashioned of rocks, mud, and hay, but until Galen needed food he’d no desire to talk to or even look at the people who lived in the filthy little towns.