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Overview
Considered by many to be among Brian Lumley's greatest works, the exciting Khai of Khem is little-known in the US. This time-traveling adventure story spans centuries and cultures in Lumley's trademark mix of horror and science fiction, much like his internationally-bestselling Necroscope series. Like the Necroscope novels, Khai of Khem is packed with fast-paced action, hair's-breadth escapes, all-consuming love, endless horror, and, in the person of Khai himself, quick wits and bravery in the teeth of danger.
Khai begins life in ancient Egypt as the son of Pharaoh Khasathut's chief architect. Believing Pharaoh to be a god, Khai is stunned to learn that the supposedly great and wise leader is a shriveled, ancient fossil of a man whose chief desires are to deflower young virgins and achieve eternal life through the powers of his black magicians. When Khai dares to raise a hand to Pharaoh, he is condemned to be a slave.
Escaping, Khai flees to neighboring Kush where he earns the rank of general in the army of Queen Ashtarta . . . and a place in Ashtarta's bed. In the heat of battle against Pharaoh's armies, Khai is betrayed by his best friend and falls victim to the evil spells of Khasathut's magicians, who send his soul winging centuries into the future.
In modern America, Khai searches for the reincarnated souls of his love, Ashtarta, and of his betrayer. Khai is amazed by many of the wonders of the modern world-television, air conditioning, and especially guns, bombs, and other weapons.
Returning to his own time, Khai uses the technologies he saw in the future to rewrite the past. But will he and Ashtarta be in time to prevent Khasathut from attaining immortality and using newly-gained alien powers to destroy all of Khem and Kush?
Originally published in the US in mass market in the early 1980s and unavailable for nearly twenty years, Khai of Khem is one of Brian Lumley's most sought-after novels. Tor Books is pleased to bring it to a new generation of Lumley's readers.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429913331 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Brian Lumley is the author of the bestselling Necroscope series of vampire novels. The first Necroscope, Harry Keogh, also appears in a collection of Lumley's short fiction, Harry Keogh and Other Weird Heroes, along Titus Crow and Henri Laurent de Marigny, from Titus Crow, Volumes One, Two, and Three, and David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer, from the Dreamlands series. Recently, a volume of critical analysis and popular responses to Lumley's work, The Brian Lumley Companion, was published.
An acknowledged master of Lovecraft-style horror, Brian Lumley has won the British Fantasy Award and been named a Grand Master of Horror. His works have been published in more than a dozen countries and have inspired comic books, role-playing games, and sculpture, and been adapted for television.
When not writing, Lumley can often be found spear-fishing in the Greek islands, gambling in Las Vegas, or attending a convention somewhere in the US. Lumley and his wife live in England.
Brian Lumley is a Grand Master of Horror and a winner of the British Fantasy Award. His many novels, including Necroscope, have been published in more than thirteen countries around the world. He lives in England with his wife, Barbara Ann.
Read an Excerpt
Khai of Khem
By Brian Lumley
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 1980 Brian LumleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1333-1
CHAPTER 1
AT THE POOL OF YITH-SHESH
Ashtarta — dark-eyed, raven-haired Ashtarta, with skin of a pure, light-olive complexion — knelt by the Holy Pool of Yith-Shesh in a cave high in the foothills of the Gilf Kebir Plateau. The pool, which did not contain water but a thick liquid seeped at the dark of the moon from a crack in the floor of the cave, was black as Ashtarta's huge, slanting eyes and still as her face. Its surface, like her outward appearance, was calm ... for the present.
But beneath that surface ...
Mirrored in the pool, the queen's face stared back at her with eyes in which the shiny jet of the pupils was almost indistinguishable from the flawless ebony of the irises. Her eyelashes, painted blue, were long and curving; and above them her thin eyebrows, which like her hair were so black as to be near-blue, tapered to the point where they almost touched the square-cut fringe that decked her brow. At the back of her head and at its sides, falling so as to cover her small flat ears, her hair looked almost metallic in its lacquered sheen. Parted at the nape of her neck, it was drawn forward over her shoulders and caught together again with a clasp of crimson gems in the hollow of her long neck; from where it fell in a wide flat band to be cut square just above her navel. Her nose, small and straight, was perfect in its symmetry and given to a haughty lift; when tiny nostrils would show dark, tear-shaped and occasionally flaring. Her chin was small but square and firm, and it too could tilt warningly when Ashtarta was angry.
The facial features at which she gazed — her own — were utterly beautiful, classic as those of another woman whose face would grace the pages of textbooks thousands of years in the future; but Nefertiti would be a Queen of Khem (or Egypt, as Khem would become before Nefertiti's time) while Ashtarta was a Candace of Kush. And Khem and Kush were enemies poles apart, had been so for hundreds of years and would continue to be until one was finally destroyed — or until both were swept away by time and the ravages of war.
It was because of the present war between Khem and Kush that Ashtarta was here in the cave, kneeling by the side of the black Pool of Yith-Shesh. Her army, under command of the generals Khai Ibizin and Manek Thotak, had gone down from the Gilf Kebir into Khem, to the waters of the Nile itself to strike at the very heart of the Pharaoh Khasathut's kingdom. They had laid seige on the massively walled slave-city Asorbes — whose center was Khasathut's future tomb, a great pyramid forty years in the building and almost ready now to receive his mummy when at last the tyrant died — and by now the Candace should have received news of their victory.
Could it be, she wondered, that the Pharaoh's wizards and necromancers had turned her army back? Surely not. And yet she had seen enough in the five years of her reign to know better than to discount such an idea out of hand. That was why she was here now, waiting for Imthra, the mage who had promised her a vision. But Imthra was old now and could not climb the mountain of the pool as fast as he used to. It seemed to Ashtarta that she had been waiting for him for a long time. Now, as finally she heard the wheezing rattle of the old magician's breath and the shuffle of his sandaled feet, she looked up.
The old man, whose flowing white hair and long white beard seemed to burn golden as they trapped the mid-afternoon sun before the shadow of the cave's mouth fell over him, shuffled at last into his sovereign's presence. The golden glyphs of his wide-sleeved, black mage's robe continued to glow even in the gloom of the cool cave, while a redder light burned through the holes in a tiny firepot which hung from his wrist on a leather thong; and as his ancient eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, so they saw Ashtarta where she kneeled at the edge of the pool.
He saw her and held his breath. For frail with years as he was and most of the fire burned out of him — indeed, and the Candace the great granddaughter of his own long-dead brother — nevertheless her beauty was such as to lend even his old heart wings. It was a beauty, he thought, which might wake the very dead.
She wore a clinging scarlet sheath of a shift with one clasp at her left shoulder. Her arms, neck and right breast were bare. But however simply attired, her beauty seemed almost immortal to the old man; like a perfect pearl in the dark flesh of an oyster, so Ashtarta stood out in the gloom of the cave. She looked more a goddess than a mere queen, thought Imthra, except that he no longer believed in the old deities. No, for they were dead as the recently green Sahara, mocked at, spat upon and murdered by Khasathut's black cruelties, destroyed by his necromancers and wizards.
Imthra prostrated himself, ancient joints creaking as he went down on one knee, then to all fours in the dust of the cave's floor. Ashtarta made no attempt to stop him. It would be pointless. Too late now to protest a love, loyalty and devotion that spanned eighty years, which the old magician had given Ashtarta, her father and his father before him.
He touched his head to the floor and she put her hand on his white locks. "Up, father," she said, "and let's be at the seeing. It seems to me that if all were well we should surely have heard from Khai and Manek by now."
"Aye, Candace, you could well be right," he answered, kneeling beside her at the pool's edge. "But I must warn you that the Pool of Yith-Shesh is no longer the bright crystal it once was. Its pictures may no longer wholly be trusted, and their meanings are often obscure."
"Still," she told him, "we shall see what we shall see."
They turned to the shiny black surface of the pool and Imthra flicked upon it the contents of a small leather pouch. Then, beckoning the queen back a little from the pool, he commenced an invocation handed down immemorially from his magician ancestors. Strange and alien the cadence of his old voice, and weird the energies that soon began to fill the air of the cave.
Then, at the height of his chanting, he began to whirl the firepot by its thong about his head. Soon it issued a scented smoke, at sight of which Imthra caught the jar in his free hand and unstoppered its perforated top. Done with his invocation and as its echoes died away to be replaced by an eery wind that filled the cave, the old man stretched out a trembling hand and tipped the glowing contents of the small vessel onto the surface of the pool.
CHAPTER 2THE DREAMS IN THE POOL
At once the pool caught fire, burning with a lambent blue light formed of a million tiny flickering flames that danced on the dark surface and turned it a luminous blue. The herbal substances that Imthra had scattered on the pool burned, issuing heady, scented fumes that immediately assailed Ashtarta's and the mage's own senses.
There where they kneeled amidst softly flickering shadows, the minds of the old man and the young queen suddenly reeled — whirling chaotically for the space of a half-dozen heartbeats — then steadying as the little flames began to die on the surface of Yith-Shesh's pool. And as the flames flickered and died, so the play of blue fires upon the dark mirror surface seemed to form moving pictures.
The two sighed as one, leaning forward the better to read the message of the flames. They looked and ... they saw. And as the rising fumes thickened in the cave, at last Imthra and Ashtarta succumbed — just as the old mage had known they would — falling into drugged dreams of ethereal figures and formless phantoms. ...
"Candace, majesty, please wake up! And you, magician — you, Imthra — rouse yourself!"
"What? Who is this?" mumbled the old man, shaken awake at last by none-too-gentle hands. He looked up from the cave's floor and saw a young warrior kneeling beside him. The youth wore the insignia of a charioteer, but his left arm was in a sling. That was why he had not gone with the army three months ago, down from the mountains to do battle with Khasathut's troops in the valley of the Nile.
"Wake up, Imthra. It is I, Harek Ihris. Up, old man, and bring the queen awake. A rider comes, two or three hours away. The mirrors signal his coming."
"What? A rider? A messenger!" Assisted by Harek Ihris, the old man sat up. The queen, too, awakened by their excited voices, stirred herself.
"Candace," Imthra wheezed, "a rider comes from Asorbes, from the battleground. Doubtless he brings news. The mirrors foretell his coming, which will be in a few hours' time. At the onset of night, then he will be here."
Ashtarta stood up and Harek Ihris assisted Imthra to his feet. They passed out of the cave into the cool air of early evening. Low in the western sky hung the ball of the sun, and away to the east something flashed briefly, brightly, reflecting the golden glow of the slowly sinking orb.
"See," said Imthra, pointing a trembling finger. "The mirrors of our watchers speak to us with Re's own voice."
"Re is a god of Khem, old man," the Candace sharply retorted, frowning. "And we are children of Kush. The sun is the sun, no more a god than the so-called 'sacred' crocodiles that the Pharaoh's people also worship."
"Just so, Queen," the old magician mumbled his agreement, though deep inside he felt that there would always be a godliness about the blazing solar furnace. He turned to Harek Ihris. "You go on ahead, young man. We will follow in our time. We have things to talk about."
As the young soldier started off quickly down the steep mountain path, Ashtarta called after him: "And when the rider comes, make sure he knows that he is to be brought straight to my tent. And let there be meat and wine ready. ..."
An hour later, as they neared the foot of the mountain — more a high, steep foothill than a mountain proper — finally Ashtarta and Imthra found time to talk. Until then they had saved their breath, assisting each other in those places where the path was at its steepest or its surface loose and treacherous. Now, as the slope gentled toward the tents of the encampment, which lay about a pool surrounded by trees, palms and green shrubs, Imthra asked: "Did you see anything, daughter, in the black crystal Pool of Yith-Shesh?"
She looked at him and frowned, then nodded. "Yes, I saw something — many things. But they were to me a nonsense. Come, Imthra, you are the magician. What did you see in the pool?"
"Candace, I —" He hesitated, then quickly went on: "But as I have explained, often the pool's pictures lie, or at best they present an obscure or confused —"
"You saw evil, is that it?"
Imthra looked down at his sandaled feet and appeared to pick his way most carefully. "I saw ... something. Its meaning may not be easy to explain. Therefore do not ask me, Ashtarta, for my vision would only disturb you — perhaps unnecessarily. Young eyes, however, often see far more clearly than old ones. What did your eyes see in the Pool of Yith-Shesh?"
For all that she was young, Ashtarta was wise. She did not press the magician for an answer but told him instead of her own visions. "I saw carts without oxen, without horses, moving fast as the stars that fall from the sky," she began, her great slanted eyes filling with wonder. "The carts carried many people, all dressed in a strange and wondrous garb. I saw great birds that served these people, carrying them in their bellies without eating them; and ships that went without sails on the ocean, which were as long as the side of Khasathut's pyramid! Aye, and I saw vast encampments greater by far than all of Kush and Khem camped together, with dwellings of stone taller than mountains and teeming with peoples of all kinds and colors in their millions. Then —"
She turned quickly, catching Imthra off guard, her troubled eyes searching his face. "Then I saw the general Khai, my future husband, who came to me as a boy out of Khem. Did you, too, see Khai, Imthra?"
"Khai? Khai the general? The Warlord?" He did his best to look surprised.
"Do you know of any other?" She peered at him suspiciously through silk-shuttered eyes, like a cat at the cautious pattering of a mouse.
"No, Candace, of course not," Imthra mumbled. "And no," he lied, "I did not see Khai in the Pool of Yith-Shesh. My visions were of no consequence compared with yours. Now please continue, daughter," he urged. "Go on, tell me what else you saw. Tell me of Khai the general."
For a moment longer, the Candace peered into Imthra's lined old face. Then she relaxed and said: "There is little more to tell. He had wings; he stood on a green mountain in a wild, craggy and alien land; he flew. Then ... something swooped on him out of the sky like a great hawk. He crashed to the ground. After that I saw no more."
They were walking now through tufts of spiky, coarse grass between the tents. Directly in front of them, beside the springfed oasis pool, Ashtarta's large, pavilion-like tent stood scarlet and gold in the last rays of the sun as it sank down between twin peaks. Silhouetted against the tent, whose color merged with that of her dress, Ashtarta's flesh seemed almost green, exotically beautiful.
A handmaiden at the tent's entrance bowed low and kissed the hand that the queen held out to her. Before entering, Ashtarta turned to where Imthra had paused. "When the messenger comes, you will bring him to me?"
"Of course, Candace." Bowing, the old magician began to back away.
"And Imthra —"
"Majesty?"
"While we are waiting, perhaps you would give some thought to the meaning of my vision?"
"Majesty," he bowed his obedience.
"And to the meaning of your own —" she continued, piercing him through with her gaze, "whatever it was. ..."
As the queen turned from him and entered into the scented luxury of her tent, Imthra bowed one last time, shivering as he felt the first chill of evening creeping into his old bones. He should consider the meaning of his vision, should he? Little need of that when the messenger, who would be here soon enough, would doubtless be able to explain it for him. And not, he was sure, to his liking.
So the old man turned away from Ashtarta's tent and made for his own less sumptuous apartment, a low, black affair with four poles, numerous silver symbols sewn into the walls, and black tassels hanging from each corner. He supposed he might look into his shewstone; there might just be something to see in there, but he doubted it. His eyes were of little use now for the scrying of mysteries, and his mind not much better. As for the vision he had seen in the pool: what interpretation could he possibly place on it except the obvious one?
He had seen Khai, yes. He had seen him stretched flat on his back on a bed of funerary black, with baleful blue fumes rising from seven encircling censers while chanting wizards in strangely horned, pschent-like headdress performed an ancient rite. It was a ceremony old as time itself, come down from predawn days before Khem and Kush, Therae and Nubia, before ever the first tribes of the hills and valleys came from the East and the South to settle in and around the valley of the Nile. The time-lost ice-priests of primordial Khrissa had known it and the long-headed Lords of Lemuria — whose alien blood, it was rumored, ran even now in the veins of Khem's pharaohs — and it had been practiced, too, in legended Ardlanthys.
And Imthra had known the ceremony immediately, even though it was not practiced by the people of Kush. He had recognized it despite certain basic anomalies, despite one highly peculiar circumstance. It was that rite with which the Khemites sent the ka of a dead person winging on its way into the next world — except that from the slow rise and fall of Khai's chest, Imthra had known that the young general was not yet dead!
CHAPTER 3MANEK THOTAK
Almost two hundred miles away and a few miles west of the Nile — beyond vast, blasted areas of savannah, marshland and forest, where all the trees were now flattened down or snapped off at their bases and the grass was blackened stubble — there the Pharaoh Khasathut had built Asorbes, his titanwalled city and stronghold.
The heart of the city was a golden pyramid, almost complete now, whose base covered twenty-three acres. Built of fifteen million tons of yellow stone, it towered to a height of almost six hundred feet. In a later age, its tumbled and scattered blocks of vastly-hewn limestone would be floated almost three hundred miles downriver and utilized in building the lesser monument which one day men would call the "great" pyramid, ranking it as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Khasathut's pyramid itself would not survive the ages, no, but if it had then surely it must be the first of all such wonders.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Khai of Khem by Brian Lumley. Copyright © 1980 Brian Lumley. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
PART ONE,I At the Pool of Yith-Shesh,
II The Dreams in the Pool,
III Manek Thotak,
IV In the Queen's Tent,
V Khai's Sickness,
VI Time Capsule,
PART TWO,
I The Dream Lovers,
II Paul Arnott of London,
III Memories out of Time,
IV Arnott's Story,
V The Awakening,
PART THREE,
I Khai's World,
II The God-King's Parade,
III The God-King Commands,
IV The Architect's Apprentice,
V The Time Draws Nigh,
VI The Pharaoh's Wrath,
VII Horror on High,
VIII Inside the Pyramid,
PART FOUR,
I The Nuptial Chamber,
II Enter the Pharaoh,
III The God-Monster,
IV Plot for Freedom,
V Escape from the Pyramid,
VI King of Slaves,
PART FIVE,
I Adhan's Revenge,
II Ramanon's Visit,
III Out of the City,
IV Slave Ship,
V On Mhyna's Barge,
VI The Parting of the Ways,
PART SIX,
I The Slavers,
II The Trap,
III Back to the River,
IV The Mercenaries,
V Red Rape!,
VI The Coming of Khai,
PART SEVEN,
I Deathspell,
II Khai ... of Kush!,
III Run for the Hills!,
IV Melembrin Runs the Gauntlet,
V The Keep at Hortaph,
VI Rain of Death,
PART EIGHT,
I Khai's Progress,
II The Coming of the Mages,
III Message of the Mages,
IV Pharoah's Frenzy,
V Kush Resurgent!,
VI Khai and the Candace,
PART NINE,
I The Iron Invaders,
II Wizards at War,
III The Winged Legions,
IV Siege on Asorbes,
V Black Bargain,
VI Red Arrows,
VII Green Fire!,
PART TEN,
I "Take the Pyramid!",
II Makers of Madness,
III Death of Deaths,
IV A Spell of Fascination,
V Out of the Stars,
VI A City Doomed,
EPILOGUE,