Lords of the Black Sands Read online

  Two-hundred people each…maybe twelve teeth between them all.

  And not a single bath to be seen.

  For hours unknown, he marched. He stomped through whip-grass, plodded across lakes of sand, and sauntered alongside smelly, stagnant water-holes. Here and there he found berries, which he dumped into his pack, and wild corn, which he chewed raw off the cob. He even spotted a heron, whose meat he’d have loved to shuck and roast over a flame. But without a bow and arrows, he could only watch the great bird float off beneath the evening sky.

  Living such a life for as long as he had would’ve killed any other human.

  But not Galen.

  He felt just fine.

  Seven days removed from Cedartown, he found a tree at dusk and made his camp beneath it. Trees were a rare thing, and rarer still was to find one alive and in possession of most of its leaves. He’d seen the mighty thing from miles off, and he’d picked his way across a shallow swamp to reach it.

  He arrived. With no one to see him do it, he knelt before the tree, giving the towering thing its due. Afterward, he hunkered beside its barreled trunk, peeled off his muck-filled boots, and gazed skyward into its leaves, which were dark against the sky.

  Somehow, his mother’s voice slipped into this thoughts.

  ‘Maple,’ she whispered to him. He was only a little boy again, and walking beside a great river someplace far from desolation. ‘See the way the leaves are shaped?’ She pointed. ‘Red-brown. These kinds of trees like the soil wet. I say ‘like’ but I mean ‘liked.’ Not many maples left in the world. This one’s a treasure.’

  * * *

  Galen rarely dreamed.

  In truth, he rarely slept.

  But while lingering beneath the maple, he risked a quiet moment, closing his eyes to the world for what he imagined would be only a few minutes. If the Nemesis had been near, Galen would’ve been an easy mark, plucked out of his life the same as a leaf from the maple above his head.

  He tumbled deeper than a few minutes.

  In his dream, a dark river moved. Its banks were far apart, its waters slow and deep. On the near shore, grass-roofed houses sat among dry, decaying reeds. The houses were empty. The people who’d lived on the eastern bank had vanished only days ago.

  Galen hadn’t seen it, and yet he knew.

  The dreamed-of sky roiled at a rate too swift to be real. Lavender clouds moved like feathered wings, and the stars pricked the sky long before nightfall.

  Galen blinked.

  Still asleep, he knew.

  Looking down at his hands, he realized he was a young man again. He’d only just been stripped away from his mother an hour ago. She’d hired a man to row him across the Nile on an outlawed canoe, and as the man had dipped his oars into the dark water, Galen had watched his mother’s face grow smaller and smaller.

  He’d blinked.

  And she’d been gone.

  Back then, he hadn’t wept.

  ‘Don’t cry for me,’ she’d told him. ‘Run. And when you think you’ve run far enough, keep running.’

  She’d hugged him fiercely, but she’d said nothing more. No ‘I love you.’ No ‘Goodbye, my sweet boy.’ She’d pushed the boat into the water and stood to watch him with the daylight dying behind her.

  He’d wanted to cry out to her, and for once in his life to allow himself the freedom of emotion. But the man rowing the canoe had growled at him, and Galen’s pleas to his mother had never made it past his lips.

  Now she was gone. The dwellings beside the river—emptied. The people who’d lived in the nearest villages—executed. Anyone who’d seen Galen that day had been murdered.

  …but none so brutally as his mother.

  He dreamed himself near the empty shore. The clouds continued their wild race into oblivion. He squinted across the water, and he wondered whether the distant mound beyond the western shore was the place they’d crucified and burned her.

  No, he knew. It’s just a mound.

  She died in the desert. Beneath the cruel sun. While the Pharaoh’s men laughed and cast stones at her.

  He might’ve cried then. He was still a little boy, alone on a vast and desolate plain.

  But he couldn’t allow it.

  No tears for Galen. Not ever.

  He gave the water his back, and he walked into forever.

  * * *

  He opened his eyes. He hadn’t meant to sleep so long, to allow the shadows to crawl across the evening. With his waking thoughts, he heard his mother’s voice, and he looked into the night as if hoping to find her.

  ‘The tree,’ she whispered. ‘A treasure, but not the last. It doesn’t have to be this way, Galen. You don’t have to—’

  A treasure. He shut her out. No one believed that but you, Mother.

  In the gloom, he sat for many hours without sleeping. He wasn’t anxious, restless, or tired, just thoughtful for the second time in as many nights. When he closed his eyes again, this time not to sleep, he imagined he could see the far western shore, and beyond it the great, dark ocean. The voyage west would be treacherous, he knew. He’d have to barter for food before long—even he couldn’t go for weeks without eating. Bartering meant talking to people, and talking to people meant arousing their suspicion.

  It always led to the same thing:

  I kill them and take their food in the night.

  Or I trade for a few scraps, and hope no one recognizes me.

  That night, no meteors streaked the sky. The stars pricked the black in small places, gleaming so bright they hurt to look at, but elsewhere the clouds rolled along, blotting out everything.

  The clouds were sick, he reckoned. So very sick. The stars might’ve escaped the great fires of centuries ago, but nothing else had. Not the sky. Not the water. Not the trees. Not long after mankind’s greatest discovery—immortality, the wars had ignited and consumed the world.

  Galen had only been a little boy, just two years and a few months, but he remembered.

  The end of all things.

  Pride, and then the fall.

  Nothing but the stars burned in the night. No lights blazed from distant cities. No vehicles hummed along highways that had long ago turned to dust. Nothing was as it had been. Scattered to the world’s ends, humanity had forgotten everything it had ever learned.

  None remembered the way it once had been.

  None save the Lords.

  None save Galen, lying awake beneath his tree.

  * * *

  He came to life before sunrise.

  He hadn’t slept, only meditated the hours away.

  This time, it wasn’t the sun gleaming through his eyelids, but the sound of leaves moving in the wind. He felt them, and he smelled their life. He wished he could take the maple’s scent with him—or carry the tree from the wasteland all the way to the Pharaoh’s Pyramid.

  But like everything else in his life, he had to leave it behind.

  His march began just after dawn. He splashed through shallow waters, which he’d no choice but to drink, and he arrived in the blighted sands beyond. Signs of human life sprang into view: a hunter’s spear lodged in a rotten tree trunk, a bottomless bucket lying in a puddle, and the remnants of a week-old campfire scattered in a clearing.

  People had been here.

  And they’d had food.

  He wasn’t hungry, not yet. But between the twelve berries tucked in his pocket and the half cob of corn he’d chewed the previous night, he figured he had only a week before the lack of sustenance caught up to him.

  Not that it could kill him.

  He wasn’t afraid of death by starvation.

  He’d gone weeks without water before, and decades ago he’d once lasted forty nights without food. It was the pain he didn’t like, the wrenching, twisting sensation of an empty stomach doubling over on itself. Better to eat rotten berries and half-cooked pigeon than to suffer that pain again, he thought. Better to drink foul water than to feel his insides pucker up and his muscles tighten un
til he walked like an old, old man.

  A village. He gazed south, where a thin line of smoke crawled up between a cluster of black-crowned hills.

  Fine. I’ll do it.

  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, he grimaced. And where there’s fire, there’s meat.

  He started toward the smoke. He climbed one hill, then another. Out there in the lowlands, just beyond a still-watered pond, he spotted the village. The ragged place was no larger than a tenth the size of Cedartown. Its hundred or so shanty hunts were roofed with hay, and its boundary fenced with a low rock wall, outside of which he glimpsed the beginnings of a moat.

  As if anyone wants to get in.

  He took two steps down the hill toward the ugly little village.

  And he froze in his tracks.

  He didn’t know why, but in that moment he glanced over his shoulder. Perhaps he’d smelled it, or perhaps the wind had whispered something across the sand. When he peered across the barren landscape he’d only just left behind, he saw a lone figure in the distance. Like him, the figure was cloaked. And like him, it wore a sword over its shoulder.

  He blinked hard and looked again. The figure remained, striding toward the hills.

  My hills, he reckoned.

  He would’ve ducked down into the tangled reeds on the hilltop to hide, but he didn’t bother. The figure, whoever it was, had already seen him.

  One of the Nemesis’ men?

  Just one?

  He pushed his hood back, and for the first time in days revealed his dark hair to the wind. With the shadow lifted from his eyes, he squinted at the approaching man.

  Wait, he thought.

  That’s no man.

  It’s a woman.

  If she follows me up here, she dies.

  3

  They carried the body to him.

  And the Nemesis sent all but one of them away.

  Behind his mask, hidden in the shadow beneath his black-steel faceplate, his expression was as calm as a dead man’s.

  “Manner of death?” he rumbled.

  The soldier knelt on the floor, the slain knight spread out before him. “A single wound, Lord. Right between his scales. If he’d worn his underplate, he’d have—”

  “The wound was to his heart?” The Nemesis exhaled.

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “And the letter written in the doctor’s house? The initial scrawled in the ashes?”

  “Without a doubt, it was His.”

  The Nemesis turned his back to the soldier. Three steps, he paced, and three steps more. Encased head-to-toe in black, articulated steel, his footfalls should’ve shaken the room.

  Yet he was silent. When he moved, his armor made no noise, and his ebon cape fluttered none. Even his breaths, constricted inside his mask, fell into a soundless place.

  “Then he’s alive,” he said, and the voice echoed inside the chamber. “Incinerate the body. Melt the knife used to kill him. His other weapons, leave in here. No one, especially the Prey, can find them.”

  The kneeling soldier, his own mask raised, looked up to the Nemesis. “Lord, why didn’t the Prey take the other weapons? Why take only a sword and dagger?”

  The Nemesis grunted, and the noise made the soldier shiver.

  “You’re new, and for that I’ll forgive you,” he said. “If you should find yourself before me or my father again, do not dare ask something so foolish. Now go. Join the others. Make sure this city has no survivors.”

  With a shudder, the soldier lifted the fallen knight and carried him down and out of the ship. The soldier’s metal boots clattered on the steel stairs, then squelched in the mud beyond the gate. The Nemesis watched him go, and no one could’ve said whether he was angry about what had happened, or whether he didn’t care at all.

  Now alone, he climbed onto a short platform, strode to the end of a narrow hall, and sat alone in the warship’s cockpit. His men would continue scouring the city until nightfall, but he knew they’d find nothing. The Prey had come to Cedartown, sure enough. He’d killed the two agents put in place to capture him and stolen away after the Nemesis’ ship had dropped the bomb.

  All these plans.

  All these weapons.

  And still he eludes me.

  In the cockpit’s largest chair, he reclined. Rain pattered against the window, and smoke fogged the cityscape beyond. He’d landed the ship in Cedartown’s cratered heart, and as he looked across the destroyed city, he convinced himself he’d done the people who’d lived here a favor.

  Father, for I do only thy bidding—

  He heard footsteps in the hallway beyond the cockpit, and he let his anger subside. The woman slid into the seat beside his and put her fingers on his armored shoulder. Even through the unbreakable steel, he felt her touch.

  She was Thessia—young, wise, and beautiful.

  She had come from a village on the other side of the world.

  After her people had rebelled, he’d spared her life—and hers only—though he’d never told any of his men why.

  “Why are you here?” His mask made his question sound more fearsome than he’d meant.

  “You’re angry,” she said. “The men are away. I thought maybe…you’d want to talk.”

  He looked at her. He supposed with his men away, he could remove his mask.

  If only for a while.

  He palmed the black-steel plate and pulled it loose. The hiss of pressurized gas broke the quiet, and the humid air touched his face. It tasted so different from the dry, scalding stuff of his homeland. He was accustomed to only one smell: sand. But out here in the wilderness, a thousand odors assailed him.

  Among those scents, he singled out Thessia’s. She was the one soft thing in a world of death.

  “Why won’t you remove it more often, Lord,” she asked. “The other man, the Prey…he’s gone. He can’t get to you here.”

  He very rarely smiled, and caught himself before he did. Thessia was right, of course. On his warship, which had no name, he was safe.

  But then, was anyone truly safe from the Prey? He dwelled on the thought, and he wasn’t so sure.

  “The Prey is deadly,” he said, and the sound of his true voice surprised him. “Right now, he could be out there slaughtering my men. Whole crews, I’ve lost to him. Whole cities, he’s sacrificed to meet his ends. And I would never put it past him to convince someone else to kill me in his stead.”

  He looked at her, and she shrank beneath his stare.

  “No, not you.” He touched her knee. “Never you, my Thessia. Tonight, we will be safe. The Prey is miles from here already, skulking through the marshes. He must be satisfied with himself, having escaped us again.”

  “Did he?” the girl asked.

  “Did he what?”

  “Get what he came for?”

  The Nemesis took his hand away from the girl’s knee.

  Of course he did.

  The doctor lied to us. He took the Prey’s payment.

  And now the doctor is dead.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nor will it ever. The Prey will never reach his prize. He may worm his way across the world, but he can’t cross the sea. All of what he needs…it’s out there across the ocean. So much water…and so deep.”

  He caught himself gazing out the cockpit window and into the storm. He swore he heard a distant scream—perhaps one of his men had found a survivor. Casually, he flicked a switch on the cockpit’s console. The bay doors rumbled shut, and the quiet within the ship became absolute.

  “Lord,” Thessia said after a long silence, “will you come to me?”

  Regarding her, he lifted his steel fingers to his face. He’d been locked away in his armor so long, he’d begun to grow a beard.

  When was the last time anyone had seen his face?

  When had he last touched Thessia?

  He couldn’t say.

  He rose from his chair, and for an instant the girl looked up to him with a hopeful gleam in her eyes.
/>   “No.” He saw her hope deflate when he said it. “Not today. We’ve work to do. Father will be displeased.”

  Holding his mask, he moved toward the hall beyond the cockpit. One step from leaving, Thessia’s voice caught him and held him.

  “Lord, forgive me,” she said. “Do not be angry. It’s just…I don’t understand.”

  He raised the mask to his face, but stopped short.

  “Ask your question,” he said.

  Gaze downcast, Thessia gulped. “Why?” she asked. “Why hunt him? If he’ll never cross the ocean, if he can’t ever get to what he wants, why are we here? Why do so many have to die?”

  If one of his soldiers had asked the same, he’d have executed the man on the spot. Thessia, he forgave without any thought of violence.

  “What Father wills, we do,” he said.

  And only some of us are meant to live forever, he thought.

  Down into the ship, he walked. The great black-steel hulk, only one of its kind in the world, had been his home for countless months, and he’d learned the ship too well. He rounded a corner, ducked through a doorway, and descended two stairs.

  Inside his chamber, he stood in the gloom and breathed. The Prey couldn’t reach him in here, nor could any of the thousands who knew and hated the Nemesis for all the horrors he’d done. He was as safe here as anywhere on the Kingdom of Earth.

  Again he raised his mask to his face, and again he lowered it to his side.

  ‘Why?’ Thessia had asked.

  ‘Why hunt him?’

  He wished he had invited her to bed.

  Instead, he set aside his mask, sat down in the gloom, and reached for the device with which he would speak to his father.

  * * *

  On a road saturated with yesterday’s rain, the Nemesis and three of his knights marched into a small village in the middle of nowhere.