The light glinted for a moment off the tip of the blade and then the Great Pyramid flared.
It did it in absolute silence to begin with, sending up a spire of eye-torturing flame that turned the whole kingdom into a criss-cross of black shadow and white light, a flame that might have turned any watchers not just into a pillar of salt but into a complete condiment set of their choice. It exploded like an unwound dandelion, silent as starlight, searing as a supernova.
Only after it had been bathing the necropolis in its impossible brilliance for several seconds did the sound come, and it was sound that winds itself up through the bones, creeps into every cell of the body, and tries with some success to turn them inside out. It was too loud to be called noise. There is sound so loud that it prevents itself from being heard, and this was that kind of sound.
Eventually it condescended to drop out of the cosmic scale and became, simply, the loudest noise anyone hearing it had ever experienced.
The noise stopped, filling the air with the dark metallic clang of sudden silence. The light went out, lancing the night with blue and purple afterimages. It was not the silence and darkness of conclusion but of pause, like the moment of equilibrium when a thrown ball runs out of acceleration but has yet to have gravity drawn to its attention and, for a brief moment, thinks that the worst is over.
This time it was heralded by a shrill whistling out of the clear sky and a swirl in the air that became a glow, became a flame, became a flare that sizzled downwards into the pyramid, punching into the mass of black marble. Fingers of lightning crackled out and grounded on the lesser tombs around it, so that serpents of white fire burned their way from pyramid to pyramid across the necropolis and the air filled with the stink of burning stone.
In the middle of the firestorm the Great Pyramid appeared to lift up a few inches, on a beam of incandescence, and turn through ninety degrees. This was almost certainly the special type of optical illusion which can take place even though noone is actually looking at it.
And then, with deceptive slowness and considerable dignity, it exploded.
It was almost too crass a word. What it did was this: it came apart ponderously into building-sized chunks which drifted gently away from one another, flying serenely out and over the necropolis. Several of them struck other pyramids, badly damaging them in a lazy, unselfconscious way, and then bounded on in silence until they ploughed to a halt behind a small mountain of rubble.
Only then did the boom come. It went on for quite along time.
Grey dust rolled over the kingdom.
Ptaclusp dragged himself upright and groped ahead, gingerly, until he walked into someone. He shuddered when he thought about the kind of people he'd seen walking around lately, but thought didn't come easily because something appeared to have hit him on the head recently .
'Is that you, lad?' he ventured.
'Is that you, dad?'
'Yes,' said Ptaclusp.
'It's me, dad.'
'I'm glad it's you, son.'
'Can you see anything?'
'No. It's all mist and fog.'
'Thank the gods for that, I thought it was me.'
'It is you, isn't it? You said.'
'Yes, dad.'
'Is your brother all right?'
'I've got him safe in my pocket, dad.'
'Good. So long as nothing's happened to him.'
They inched forward, clambering over lumps of masonry they could barely see.
'Something exploded, dad,' said IIb, slowly. 'I think it was the pyramid.'
Ptaclusp rubbed the top of his head, where two tons of flying rock had come within a sixteenth of an inch of fitting him for one of his own pyramids. 'It was that dodgy cement we bought from Merco the Ephebian, I expect-'
'I think this was a bit worse than a moody lintel, dad,' said IIb. 'In fact, I think it was a lot worse.'
'It looked a bit wossname, a bit on the sandy side-'