“Go scratch,” Glendower sneered, without much heat. Even now, the mere mention of Ypres, where half their regiment had met an end unspeakable, drove Glendower to touch one of the charms discreetly secreted on his person.
“You know it’s true. They’re content to let the Empire pass into history, the ones who’d never shed a drop of blood to keep it.”
The only relief Glendower found from the bitterness of old wounds was digging into new ones. Taking out his briarwood pipe and loading it with a bowl of honest Georgian tobacco, he said, “Old Gunn never saw what killed him. Saved my life at Ypres and a dozen worse spots, only to stop a thug’s knife on a ferryboat.”
“Nothing could’ve been done. They’re not just hired cutthroats. They’re hell-bent on death in the service of their master.”
“One wonders why we’re still alive, then. If they’re so inescapable, how’d you and I thin their numbers and get clear?”
“The ones we faced were bare initiates. They’re not what they were eight centuries back, but if you could only see—”
“I’ve seen plenty, boyo. That explosion and fire. It wasn’t their line of evil, now was it?”
Morrison nodded. “They prefer to strike in the dark, in silence. We foiled their plans, though.”
“Didn’t we, though?” Glendower absently cast about for a less-than-empty bottle. What were those plans?”
“To stitch up a delegation of Turk nationalists bound for the coast to shore up support for a Turkey without a sultan.” From a false pocket in the lining of his conductor’s coat, Morrison took out a chamois pouch and a small, curious dagger. The pommel of yellowed ivory was hollowed out for use as a pipe. “Dressed as they were, they must’ve hoped to provoke another diplomatic row, wedge the Turks against the meddling Triple Entente. The Assassins have been working rather unsubtly of late to keep their neighbors unstable.”
“Rubbish! Whatever this lot call themselves, the real Assassins were wiped out seven hundred years ago, same as the Templars.”
“Ah, Marion, I forget how no superior officer could ever lecture history around you for fear of that infamous Welsh memory.” Into the dagger’s shallow bowl, Morrison stuffed a pinch of a tarry, purplish brown bhang-like substance that looked unlikely to combust under the most strenuously applied flame. “But as anyone who applied oneself in the Scottish Rite might have adduced, the Templars and Assassins were not enemies. At worst, they were merely rivals for the same forbidden knowledge and power.”
Striking a match off the flocked velvet wall, Morrison applied the flame to the nugget, causing it to bubble and hiss and emit an oddly heavy, silvery-blue smoke. “Furthermore,” he added, “we know that the Templars fortunate enough to inhabit Great Britain were not exterminated but driven underground in the north, where they formed the first Scottish Masonic orders. What, then, did the Assassins become?”
“Gobs of goddamned lies and stories,” Glendower said. “Mongols wiped ’em out, full stop. Mohammedans seem to split every time an imam drops dead. The Nizarites serve the Aga Khan, but they’re no—what the hell is that horrible shite?”
Morrison let out a palpable stream of blue, fluidly twisting smoke. “You know so much of the history, I’m surprised you never tried their sacrament.”
“Oh, pull the other one,” Glendower sneered to cover his alarm. He opened the window to let the stupefying cloud of smoke out into the Turkish night. “That’s the stuff that makes them think they’ve died and gone to Paradise… ?”
Nodding slyly, Morrison offered the smoking knife. “Like to try it?”
Glendower shook his head, but this afforded him a sad review of their compartment. The dining car had left them a meager fifth of Scotch. Being a French outfit, Wagons-Lits’s selection tended to run to brandy, wine, and champagne, none of which seemed appropriate for the circumstances. Damn it all. Good old Gunn… just like that. Damn it all, why couldn’t I—?
This whole mess, and his old mate from the Regiment, suddenly back from the dead just when it all threatened to boil over….
“Give it here,” he said. He struck a match with his thumb and touched it to the oily stuff, making it crackle and sweat before it burned. The gust of smoke that filled his lungs seemed to expand in his chest and flood his brain and burn the backs of his eyes. A surge of languid pleasure atomized him. He was nothing but a breath, and then he let it out and saw himself in the whorls of smoke that floated before him and then were sucked out the open window. Glendower thought, when he could finally form and hold onto one, that it was hardly mysterious that the stuff gave the Old Man of the Mountain such absolute control over his killers. “Seven hundred years is a long time, too, boyo.”
Morrison closed the window and took the pipe from Glendower’s absently trembling hands. Reloading it with long, adept fingers, he said, “After the Crusades, the League simply went underground. They never went away, and they never stopped exerting their will within their old territories in Iran and Syria.”
The pipe came back to Glendower, who declined. “The stories we heard of your death were rather detailed.”
“They had to be. I wouldn’t have been much use as a faithful servant of His Majesty, otherwise. Did you believe them?”
“A few of us didn’t. Two out of three from the old regiment gone and you sent away before the end. Maybe that was why some said you’d gone over …” Glendower’s speech slurred and trailed off, but it was hardly because of what he’d drunk and smoked. Looking out the window, he left off talking and leapt to part the curtains and stare out into the dark.
“It’s not just dark out there, is it, Morrison?”
“Very perceptive, old man. Yes, you’re right. It’s gone.”
“And how long have we been stopped?” Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t recall the train braking or even coasting to a stop, yet the compartment was still and silent.
Glendower groaned, a low, sad sound that came up from the toes of his boots. It never seemed to be the simple thing, the possible thing, anymore. He undid the latches on the window and threw his back into forcing it up a few inches before he jumped back, spitting Welsh curses.
The darkness poured in to pool on the carpet. Fine black sand, piled much higher than the window, it threatened to fill their compartment like an hourglass.
Morrison smiled like he’d heard a familiar tune in a strange place. “It appears we’ve reached our destination.” He went to the door and jerked on the latch. It twisted and came off its hinges with a relieved squeal of rotten mahogany and crumbling rust. Black sand spilled into the compartment in a wave that soon came up to their ankles.
Glendower wrenched the rusted husk of the door aside. The wave of sand slowed and a ray of silvery moonlight cut through the clouds of dust.
“After you, old boy.” Glendower stepped aside and stared into Morrison’s hooded, deep green eyes. “You seem to know this country better than I.”
“Indeed,” Morrison said, barely hiding his bemused half-smile. He ducked under the doorway and crawled up over the dune that engulfed their car, then reached back to help Glendower up.
The Welshman scoffed at the hand and came up on his own, then stopped and whistled, looking about him. “Hardly Ploesti, is it?”
The train lay half-buried in a black desert under a too-full, too-large moon. Windows and doors hung open, but nowhere did he see any sign of the other passengers.
Glendower shook his head and considered punching himself. “What was really in that pipe?”
Beyond the abandoned train, the desert overran the horizon and a sky with only the constellation stars visible through the light of that overripe moon. Just over the next dune, there arose a mountain, but when they started to climb it, sand sifted away in great sheets, revealing the steps of a buried pyramid.
The view from the summit offered no comfort. Minarets eroded to tortured pillars, faceless colossi of luminous marble, crumbling ziggurats with great brass idols wreathed in thickets of hum
an skeletons, polished to a dull gleam by the scouring simoom.
“None of this is real,” Glendower said, hating the quaver in his voice. He started walking down the face of the next dune. Even if this were a nightmare, it felt real enough, and standing around wouldn’t get him out of it. “We’re still on the train, and you’ve slipped me a finn. Or else your friends …”
“You’re most typically half-right, friend Marion.” Morrison walked alongside him. “Marco Polo’s stories of the Assassins’ initiation, the garden of milk and honey and virgins and all that rot, fired the imagination, but no one ever found them. But they were real enough. You see, the bhang opens a door in the back of every human mind, one that leads to deeper dreaming. Under the spell of this particular smoke, the dreamer comes to this place. These are not the lands of Dream, but a memory palace, forged over centuries by fanatical adepts, until it has attained its own shadow reality. Our bodies are still on the train, but you and I are walking and talking here.”
“And where is ‘here’?” Glendower snapped.
“An Assassin’s Heaven,” Morrison said, “and Hell.”
“I’m still waiting for my seventy-two virgins,” Glendower growled.
The dreamlike landscape went on forever under the frozen silver moon, but past the graveyard of abandoned gods, he saw the gilded blossoms of minarets to dwarf the Hagia Sofia, Saint Peter’s, or the Taj Mahal. Vast pleasure gardens spread out for miles in every direction, and the narcotic perfume of their flowers was wafted under his nose on the wind. Sparkling unnaturally in the darkness with the luminosity of a beacon, they promised pleasures unimaginable to mortal men, and wisdom unattainable in any earthly school.
“Ah, but temptations of the flesh are lost on you, aren’t they, old boy?”
Glendower flinched, hesitating until his anger subsided. Any man who knew him less well would never dare … but Morrison had been at Ypres, and knew what happened to him there. “A man may lose the capacity for pleasurable distractions, but it sharpens his focus upon what truly matters.”
“‘What truly matters’?” Morrison nodded his head gravely. “Poor fellow, if only you were susceptible to such simple rewards,” Morrison said, “how much simpler all of this would be.”
A stiffer, colder wind drove them down into a narrow defile between a headless sphinx and a shattered Roman basilica, its vaulted dome broken like an eggshell. The walls were jumbles of crushed Corinthian columns and dismembered statuary.
“You seem to know enough about them,” Glendower said.
“It’s been a long few years, that’s true.”
“Once you tumbled to their game, they shared their bhang with you and fed you all this rot?”
Morrison started to open his mouth to pull the other one, but Glendower forestalled him. “How’d you get them to take you? You’re hardly a practicing Mohammedan.”
Now Morrison’s grin broke out full on his face. His teeth looked long and yellow in the moonlight. “Neither are they, quite frankly. They never really were. They have need of men of all persuasions, now. They know the war of faiths is a Punch and Judy show. They’ve set their sights higher.”
“The Ottoman Empire? They’re welcome to it.”
Morrison stopped and took Glendower by the arm, pulled him close and whispered. “You heard of that unpleasantness last year at the Hajj in Mecca?”
“More pilgrims trampled than usual, if memory serves. Some furor over the Ka’aba being defiled.”
“That was our work, Marion. The pilgrimage came to bloodshed because the Black Stone at the heart of the sanctuary was stolen.”
“Incredible … and absurd even if true, but to what end?”
“The Ka’aba was a holy site long before Islam. It was home to all the three hundred and sixty gods of the Arabs. When Mohammed retook Mecca, he smashed them all and replaced them with the Black Stone, which the Koran claims he received from an angel.”
“Ah, yes. When he got it, the stone was white, but thanks to the sins of man …”
“Quite. And like most fables, this one had a grain of truth in it. The stone came from on high, all right, but no angel had a hand in it. We took it, Marion.” He held out his hand, palm up, and half-clenched it. “It fit in my hand.”
Glendower pulled away, but he still felt Morrison’s fingers digging into his biceps. “What for? Just to provoke the Arabs to bloodshed?”
Morrison turned to walk on. “The Hajj went off the rails because the axle upon which it has turned is gone. We replaced it with a counterfeit, but the stone itself has been an object of ritual worship for nearly fifteen centuries. It’s almost like the Curies’ deadly radioactivity, really. It’s absorbed a charge of faith that a clever adept could harness and use to do miracles.”
At last, Morrison had given him something to push against. “You were always too clever for your own good, boyo.” Glendower rubbed his burning, tired eyes. He’d had a bellyful of the scenery, and he couldn’t bear to look at Morrison a moment longer. “They weren’t after any ‘Turk nationalists,’ were they? They were hunting you. So now, you’ve returned to sell your new friends’ mystical secrets to Whitehall?”
Chuckling indulgently, Morrison sauntered on down the path. “Nothing so mundane. I’ve learned things, Marion, that they’d happily go to war for. I’ve gone to places and learned things that even the current Old Man of the Mountain hasn’t grasped. When the Templars and the Assassins first clashed in the Crusades, it was clear that they had more in common with each other than with anyone on their own ‘sides.’ The Assassins of old could move unseen through cities and strike at their enemies anywhere, at any time. At the final level of mastery, they could not be killed at all.
“In their mystical explorations, they came across a true deity who answered prayers and rewarded his faithful in this world and the next. All he demanded was a sacrifice of the very type soldiers are specifically trained to yield up on demand: kill in His name, and never die.”
The shadows crept and waxed and waned under the guttering, cloud-shrouded moon, giving a spark of fitful, unwholesome life to the deadfalls of ruined monuments. Shattered idols, Glendower thought with a sour glance back at Morrison, who had quite completely disappeared.
“Cachau bant,” Glendower snarled in his native tongue, crude yet labyrinthine in its wealth of profanities. His holster and gun were gone, though he was quite sure he’d not removed them, but a short, curved fighting knife was sheathed in its place, and the stiletto in his boot was still there.
Their place—memory palace, he corrected himself—their rules. He didn’t care for it, but worse was thinking of this nine-hundred-year-old nightmare as a place. Some deeply buried sense in the back of his brain made him suspect that it was acceptance of the dream that made it real to start with.
He tried to reject it and will himself back into his body on the couch in the special compartment on the Simplon Orient Express as it hurtled across the empty, bandit-haunted Thracian countryside. Morrison would be there, hanging over him like a cat and guiding his trance, hoping to bludgeon Glendower into pledging his allegiance to whatever abominable hedge-deity he’d gone native for.
Under the moaning wind, he fancied he could hear the metronomic clatter of steel wheels and the low, sonorous tolling of a bell. Brighter and flatter than church bells, more like a ship’s bell, or a train … but it faded away when he tried to follow it.
Feeling eyes on the back of his neck, he whirled around and around, but saw no sign of Morrison or anyone else.
“You still doubt your senses, old boy. But this is bigger than nations … beyond life and death.”
Glendower started at the booming voice, which seemed to come from directly overhead. He lifted his own voice to a shout that echoed through the sandy arcades of triumphal arches and headless emperors. “You’d bring us the same protection that serves them so well, and all we’d have to do is worship their god. I wonder: have you come to sell them to us, or us to them?”
&n
bsp; Morrison’s face hove into view. It was as big as the moon, leering down into the monument-choked canyon like a mischievous child over an anthill. “Will your masters in Whitehall mourn for you, old friend? Whenever they sit down to write themselves into history, they use soldiers’ blood for ink. Well, we needn’t die for their iron whims. We needn’t die at all!”
His hand came swooping down, nearly the size of a Sopwith Camel and open wide to seize Glendower as it would a cowering mouse—if only Glendower could be made to cower.
Drawing his knife, he evaded the enormous grasping hand and drove the blade into the index finger’s tip, burying it to the hilt under the great horny plate of the fingernail.
Morrison roared and tried to smash Glendower with his wounded hand. A torrent of blood left Glendower floundering blind in a red deluge.
He had only just crawled into a niche between two toppled caryatids when the downpour ceased. “You will see what He can offer those who are useful.” Now the voice was a low, hissing whisper that seemed to come from all around him. “Such rewards as even a eunuch can appreciate.”
Glendower lashed out with his other knife but found no target. And still he could hear Morrison, like the bastard was in his own head with him.
“Queen and country don’t matter any more to you than they do to me. There’s no East and West. Nations and faiths, kings and even gods … all are puppets.”
Glendower itched all over. He raked his hair with his fingers and gasped with disgust. His hair was plastered to his scalp with cold, clotting blood, but it was also alive with wriggling things. Morrison’s blood had coagulated into plump red larvae that squirmed from his grip or clung to his ruined suit. Clenching his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut, he brushed them violently off his body. He willed himself to awaken, for if this were a dream, surely he would have shocked himself awake. Surely he was still asleep and dreaming under the influence of that damned drug. He strove to feel the leather couch beneath his supine body and not the sensation of teeming, boneless bodies bursting under his hands and feet. This was nothing more than a hideous trick concocted by Morrison to drive him mad … but why? “You and your god have it all sewn up,” he said. “What do you fancy me for?”
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 16