In his short life, Corporal Hull believed he had faced every form of fear. Before he was seventeen, Corporal Hull fought in the Red River Wars against his own people, and he had tracked down the Texarkana Walking Snake only a year before, so he was no stranger to bad medicine. But in his experience, the dead did not walk, and nothing stood up to a well-aimed Winchester rifle. What crept ever closer to him with fumbling axes and groping, ragged claws was not only an inescapable death, but the crumbling of the last pillars of certainty in Inigo Hull’s world.
At last, he saw a face in the advancing, headless horde, and a familiar one. The stranger smiled knowingly as he pushed to the front of the mob and he mockingly bowed to Hull, as if in surrender. He laid down an ornately carved tube of dull blue-gray metal like a blunderbuss, but with no hammer or moving parts. “You came almost before I called you. It must be Fate.”
Hull shot from the hip and blasted the teeth out of that smile just before the howling death-wind returned and snatched away his light.
Something slashed at his face and tore his hat off. Hull retreated as he emptied his rifle. The downward sloping passage offered the only escape, but the slope soon became a slippery chute, and Hull rolled and tumbled down a polished stone slide.
He lost his rifle when he fell away from the slide completely, clawing through empty space and crashing into a bed of canvas and wire hoops. Bruised and shaken, he crawled out of the wreckage and struck a match.
He had landed on a wrecked Conestoga wagon that rested upon a mountain of broken rigs that spread out beyond the reach of his fire. Stagecoaches, buckboards and a pathetic scattering of burst luggage added variety to the landscape. Empty gingham dresses and longjohns lay splayed out over the wreckage like shed snake skins. He could see no floor beneath the mound of wagons, and had no idea how high they were piled. Hundreds, thousands of people had come over the frontier in search of a home, of fortune and a fresh start, and instead, they came to this.
The match burned his fingers, but when he threw it out, the awful wind came again, roaring out of a deeper crevice in the far wall of the ghastly dumping ground. Though it reeked of death and decay, he sensed that the breeze came from something very much alive though it feasted on death, and had the queasy hunch that it was not a wind at all, but breath.
Fear paralyzed his mind, but his body took over with hard-won and deadly reflexes. Drawing his Colt, Hull hunkered down and waited out the torrential death-wind, then made a fresh torch and began to leap from one junked wagon to the next in search of an exit. He thought he heard rushing water ahead when he felt a wind at his back.
His legs were kicked out from under him. He fell headfirst into a steamer trunk filled with blank tombstone samples. Thrashing in the dark, he caught an arm and tried to snap it at the elbow, only to have it dissolve into cold smoke in his grip, and then wrap around his throat.
Powerful hands slammed him against the polished marble tombstone. “You are blind now. Wait, and it will all come clear. This is what your eyes were made for.”
Hull was startled to see a glint of what he took to be metal, shining in the absolute dark. His eyes were adjusting, but what he saw was the subtle blue inner glow of the eyes of his enemy.
Hull threw out an arm and grabbed the stranger’s face. His thumbs dug for the eyes, but the head twisted until his fingers got caught between gnashing teeth. He found the gap where he’d shot three back teeth out, peeled the bullet-split cheek back to the ear and squeezed as he was bit, digging his nails into the raw holes in his enemy’s jaw.
His enemy screamed and spat out Hull’s hand. The bloodcurdling cry was pure exultation. “Oh, thank you for that! Why would any man not want to feel such quickening bliss?”
Hull took back his hand and tried to unsheathe his bayonet. “I am a Union Army scout. When I do not return, they will come in such numbers—”
The stranger’s baying laughter turned to sneering words in his mind. They’ll come for a redskin scout? “And what will they find?”
He did not see, but keenly felt, the chopping blows to his throat, liver and kidneys that dropped him to his knees. His left hand was crushed under a heel until he dropped his knife. Stunned and helpless, he lay prone on the tombstone slab. A foot shod in a moccasin of leather too fine to be anything but human pinned his head to the marble, while an iron grip snapped his other arm at the wrist.
“How old are you, boy?”
Hull fought to control his agony before he answered. The words were some time coming to his lips. “Twenty years. If I could track you down, they’ll come—”
“You think you found me? Don’t you know how long I’ve been calling you?”
Before he could answer, a relentless hand dug into his mouth and pried his jaw helplessly wide open. “You are old enough to pay for what you take.”
Hull tried to bite back his screams, but when his back molar was wrenched out of his lower jaw like a cork from a jug, he was too weak with delirious pain to bite the stranger’s hand.
“You could stop this, boy.”
When the prying fingers took the second tooth, he could only moan as the agony engulfed him like the sun. It was a little thing, to lose a tooth, but the exquisite twanging of his nerves with each wrenching twist was like a revelation of how deeply enslaved he was to his body, and how helpless to save it.
“This body, this life, this world, it is all a prison, and it is all a lie. Free yourself!”
He lost a third tooth. A thin, whistling shriek came from Hull’s chest, quite without breath or will behind it. Hull had escaped his body altogether, with its hopeless demands that it all stop, in death, if not in revenge.
“Everything mortal will fail you, boy. And when you die, you will come to us…but there are many roads.”
Pain was a rushing river, but Hull fought against it to strike the stranger even as he was thrown over the shoulders of a beast that carried him on four legs, but stank like a man.
“Tell them to come. Tell them all to come and find me.”
Hull was thrown off a ledge and fell into a chill wind and shrieking darkness. Wrapping his arms around himself, he thought of that awful breath from the deeper abyss and prayed, but before he could choose a god to beg, he smashed into a churning, icy whirlpool. The water restored him to his senses almost too late to save himself, but when he kicked for the surface, his head struck stone and sent him spinning in the lightless current.
He was found floating down the Laramie and dragged to shore by some Arapaho boys, who left him to the vultures when they saw he wore a blue Union jacket.
A fortnight later, he led Colonel Hemphill’s cavalry detachment back to the box canyon. The wall was solid stone, with no trace of any door, or of the missing scouts.
* * *
March 15, 1900
Outskirts of Tsath
While Stickney recovered his wits and breath, Hull rounded up the surviving pack mules and looted their panniers. He kept a string of four, and cut the rest loose.
Gunshots and howled oaths rolled down from high up on the mountainside, but they were muted, muffled by the palisades of undead slaves swarming over them. Hull wasted a few shots on the distant knots of grappling bodies with his buffalo rifle, but he saw no point in going up after them.
Stickney saw it differently. “We have to go back.” He sat on the lead mule with a rifle across the improvised saddle, and his arm in a sling. “Without Major Cawthorne and his men—”
Hull turned and led the mule train back to the causeway that led to the city. “Without them, we may reach our destination before it is too late.”
“You’d leave them to die?”
Without looking back, Hull said, “I brought them here to die. I only hoped they’d make a better show of it.”
They passed huge granaries and warehouses with gaping doors through which the y’m-bhi pushed wheeled carts laden with the deformed harvest, and hurried past the nauseous pall of decay wafting from them.
“All t
hat labor wasted to grow tainted food,” Stickney said, “but who eats it?”
“The people of Tsath have outgrown the need for earthly food. But maybe it tickles them to have slaves wasting themselves in endless work.”
“If they can make the dead walk and fight, then why do they hide down here? They could easily overthrow the Union, and take back the whole damned country.”
“They surely could, if they cared to. They conquered the world and stole the secrets of the gods long ago, but life became an empty game, and now, they care only for dreaming. Only a few still take on flesh and walk in the world, to find fresh food and slaves, and new players for their games.”
“What kind of games?”
“They create suffering and horror as other races have created art, for its own sake. But one among them plays his games with the old gods of the bottomless gulf, that even the mad half-ghosts of K’n-Yan dare not worship.”
“So, he’s brought the Comanche down all this way to teach them to worship this—” Stickney caught himself just short of blurting out the hideous name.
“Only the lowest things that live bow to Tsathoggua,” Hull hissed. “The Comanche are a broken people, but they must still walk the Backward Path to N’Kai to be cleansed. They have much yet to lose—their pride, their pain, and their humanity—before they can become his children. Then it will be too late to save them, or anyone else.”
Stickney shook his head with frustration and rifled out more questions, but the half-breed did not deign to answer them.
The road crossed over a flooded cataract on a bridge carved with entwined serpents and spiders. The two men, on occasion, looked down to see the river choked with squirming black toads.
Beyond the bridge, they passed through a district of colossal factories. Most of these were abandoned and buried under centuries of rust, but in the others, monolithic machinery throbbed and roared, and eerie cobalt-glowing furnaces radiated pulses of blinding ball lightning high into the domed sky. Hull saw Stickney raise a hand to shade his eyes against them, and saw the living bones of his hand and arm through his transparent flesh.
Legions of older, badly decayed y’m-bhi slaves tended the furnaces and the infernal engines powered by their unholy fire. Many were mutilated amputees or little more than skeletons, and others were headless, with silver antennae jutting out of their exposed spinal columns. When one tumbled into the titanic, gnashing gears, another pressed forward to take its place.
The insane flurry of mindless activity was just like the mountain farms, Hull reflected, for the factories and dynamos seemed to consume and replace each other in a great circle of waste, and the unbelievable city they served was seemingly empty.
They crossed desolate arcades lined with ebony idols of obscene human-beast hybrid gods, and mirror-lined plazas where hydra-headed spires to dwarf the size of Gizeh or the decadent majesty of Babylon strained up to fuse with the mist-shrouded roof of the great cavern. They detoured into empty amphitheaters and arenas where hapless y’m-bhi gladiators silently battled monstrous automatons, and fled ghostly waves of bodiless applause. They hastened down twisted avenues lined with temples and sacred abattoirs clogged to their golden rafters with unclaimed sacrifices, but they never saw a single living soul.
It was the most magnificent city ever constructed by human hands, and yet its unrelieved blackness and maddening, abandoned density, and the eerie shimmer of dim azure light upon its relentless bas-relief facades, and the drifting indigo mist that seemed to follow them everywhere, made the eyes play tricks on their fevered brains. Stickney told Hull that the exotic otherness of Indian artifacts had always fired his sense of wonder at the infinite variety of human ingenuity, but that he hungered for some proof that these horribly debased, decadent monsters were no kin of humankind. Hull ignored him.
“You said the people of Tsath were dreamers,” Stickney said much later, to break the stifling silence. “Are they sleeping, or are they dead? I just can’t believe that such an advanced society would just die out…. They are dead, aren’t they?”
Hull was visibly unnerved by the city, but he answered in a tight, low voice. After all they’d seen he now needed to talk. “At the height of their power, the shamans of K’n-Yan mastered the secrets of matter and spirit. They used the dreaming engines of Yoth to make wealth and whatever else they desired, and even new bodies when their old ones died.”
“This should have been a paradise,” Stickney said. “Something must have poisoned their minds, like lead poisoned the Caesars of Rome.”
Hull scoffed. “All men carry the seeds of their own ruin. Death—and life—lost all meaning. But immortality did not make them gods.”
“But there were some who rejected this way of life, weren’t there? The lost tribes, like the Moundbuilders and the Anasazi, must have come up from the underworld thousands of years ago. But they were never so advanced—”
Hull nodded. “They worked hard to forget. When the white man came, he found the people spread across the land, speaking many tongues and fighting among themselves. He found them easy to conquer because of their differences, yet everywhere he found the scattered children of the same, forgotten parent. Some came to America by sea, or across the ice from the east, but nearly every tribe recalls that their ancestors simply walked out of a hole in the earth on the day of creation.
“The Olmecs and Toltecs, the Mayans and Aztecs and the tribes of the Plains were the last to leave K’n-Yan, when the great islands of Atlantis and Lemuria sank beneath the sea, and the Seven Cities sealed itself away from the outer world.
“The ones who stayed behind soon grew bored with their paradise, and hungered for oblivion. They began to worship the old gods in the Black Gulf of N’kai, and many took the Backward Path to assume the first forms, before the cult of Tsathoggua was abolished.”
“But there must have been hundreds of thousands,” Stickney’s words raced from his mouth, “in a city this size. What happened to them? Because there’s nobody here.”
Hull stopped the mule train and slipped his Sharps rifle into its scabbard on his back. “They are all around us.”
Ahead of them, the luminous blue mist wound through the columns around a desecrated onyx altar before an empty pedestal. The mist billowed and filled the avenue, but when Hull forged ahead, it recoiled and regrouped until it seemed to hide a solid, breathing form.
Something came lumbering out of the mists on all fours with a rider upon its elephantine back, but the grotesque beast was itself more than half human. Its thick legs ended in stout, spade-clawed digits with spurs of rudimentary thumbs. Its shaggy battering ram of a head sported a stout scimitar-shaped horn, but its broad, snarling face was that of a golden-haired man of saturnine features and a terrible, arrogant fury magnified by its brutish stupidity.
Stickney reined back his pack mule to retreat behind Hull. “Good God in heaven, what is it?”
“A gyaa-yothn,” said Hull, with a grim smile. “Men remade as beasts of burden. And riding them, the masters of K’n-Yan, in the flesh.”
The rider controlled his mount with the whip of his mind, and carried a weapon in each hand: in the left, a broadsword that whined like a buzz saw with a revolving chain of steel teeth, and in the right, a blue-gray tube of otherworldly magnetic metal, like an elephant gun.
Regal of bearing and attired in robes of black leather and armored in silver and onyx jewelry, the rider bore only a distant kinship to the noble savages Stickney proclaimed to know and loved from his books. In the arrogant posture, the rich clothing and bizarre weaponry, the man of K’n-Yan reminded Hull of the alien images of Mayan emperors, mad with their own false godhood and drunk on their own decay, and the fanatical savagery of the Aztecs, in the forbidden manuscripts he’d studied to prepare for this day.
The retreating mist revealed, or created, a host of spectators among the columns all around them. Their jeweled black robes and colorless, leprous faces evanesced in the false blue moonlight. Their huge, crue
l eyes sparkled with jaded lust and unimaginable madness.
The rider spurred his man-beast to rear up on its hind legs, and croaked a challenge. “Kth-khkukak ssh’th ngluh X’n-yian!”
Hull suppressed a chill at the guttural onslaught of alien speech that only seemed louder when he stopped his ears, as if the brittle words directly attacked his brain. But he stood his ground and responded in kind. “N’gluh ul M’l-akai xiu gk-vrsssh N’kai.”
The rider joined the host of spectral courtiers in rasping, indulgent laughter. The snarling gyaa-yothn lowered its horny head to the carved flagstones like a bull. The rider struck his humming sword across his breastplate to make a fan of sparks, dug his spurs into the man-monster’s shaggy flanks, and charged.
Hull feigned ignorance of the attack until it was almost too late, until he felt the man-beast’s fetid breath on his face.
His eyes closed and head bowed, he pivoted to evade the charge. His hands dropped to his belt and the twin ten-inch bowie knives slipped from their sheaths faster than thought. One knife flashed out to parry a speeding spherical bullet from the rider’s silent rifle, while the other flew from his hand straighter than a bullet, like the penetrating gaze of its wielder congealed into steel.
The thrown knife struck the charging rider in his throat and half-beheaded him. He flipped backwards off the man-beast’s back, but his unmanned mount pivoted and charged again.
Hull unholstered his Navy revolver and shot point blank at the monster’s bony skull, but the bullets skated off it like rain off a hot skillet. The enraged gyaa-yothn hurled him aside to get at easier prey.
Too late to save itself, the lead mule bucked and turned under Stickney to meet the charge broadside. The terrified agent swung his shotgun at the onrushing beast and blasted its shoulder, to no effect.
The knurled horn of the gyaa-yothn plunged deep into the mule’s ribcage. Tossing and bellowing in bewildered rage, the creature flung the impaled mule high over its head and dashed it to the flagstones, but couldn’t dislodge it. Stickney was flung head over heels into space.
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