by Donald Tyson
“There is another matter you may be able to help me with,” I said as I slid the coins from the table into my open purse.
He merely raised his brows and spread his fat hands in invitation.
“I am seeking information about a deadly type of poison, or more specifically, about the antidote to the poison, which I have reason to believe is manufactured above the Second Cataract.”
“There are so many poisons.”
“This one is used by the Order of the Sphinx. Have you heard of them?”
His body stiffened for an instant as I spoke the name, then relaxed.
“Rumors only. I have no dealings with them.”
“You are wise,” I murmured, and a look of understanding passed between us. “Do you know where the antidote to their poison may be found?”
“Unfortunately, no. However, I know of someone you might ask, if you are not a man timorous in heart.”
His eyes wandered to my belt, where hung Gor’s polished white skull. I had worn it so long, I no longer noticed its weight.
“Are you acquainted with the feeders on the dead?”
“I am of the Black Spring Clan,” I said, and was surprised to note that proclaiming the words still carried with it a feeling of pride.
“That clan is unknown to me. Even so, you are clearly a man who would not shirk from confrontation with these creatures of the night. Their knowledge is vast on matters pertaining to death and burial customs both modern and ancient.”
“Tell me how to find them. I will pay for the information.”
“They frequent a valley that lies between steep hills no great distance from the city. It is said that many ancient and noble tombs are hidden in this valley, though it is perilous to search there, for the Stone Valley Clan, as they name themselves, claim it as their hereditary territory, and have dwelt there since before the rise of the pyramids, or so they boast.”
“You seem uncommonly knowledgeable about ghouls.”
He laughed, so that the slabs of fat hanging from his cheeks jiggled.
“You would be surprised what precious objects are found in forgotten graves, and those who find them always have need to sell them.”
Less surprised than you imagine, I thought to myself, but said nothing. I took five large dirhams from my purse and laid them on the table. He slid three toward him and let the other two remain. I returned them to my purse. In a few words he described how to find the valley of the dead. It was near enough to be reached on foot.
I left the house of the red door and returned to the marketplace. The sun hung low in the west, indicating that more than an hour had passed, but to my surprise Martala was nowhere to be found. Since I had no idea which inn she might have chosen, or what might have delayed her, I waited in the market until the sellers began to close up their awnings and put away their wares for the night.
I stood in the lengthening shadows, watching the fitful wind blow sheets of dust around the hem of my coat, and the red gleam from the dying sun crawl its way up the eastern walls. Should I begin a search of all the inns in Thebes, with the hope of finding Martala? If she was at the inn she had chosen, she was in no danger, I reasoned, and if she was not at the inn, there was scant chance that I would find her. Perhaps she had been delayed by some harmless necessity, although it seemed likely that she would have sent word to me by messenger.
Cursing silently, I set off in the direction I had seen her walk with that arrogant swagger of her hips, which now seemed more endearing than insolent. I was surprised to feel genuine concern over her safety, and wondered at my sudden weakness. If she were killed, what of it? I told myself. She was only a servant.
At the fifth inn where I made inquiry, the proprietor admitted to renting a room to the young woman I described. She had paid for the room with silver, told him to prepare hot water for two baths at nightfall, and had departed. He had not seen her again, nor had his wife or any of their servants. He asked me what he was to do with the water boiling in kettles on the fire, and I told him to let it cool. No one in the vicinity of the inn had noticed Martala either coming or going. It appeared that she had rented the room, then vanished from the earth.
Chapter 27
I wasted another hour searching for the girl before I forced myself to admit the futility of it. She had vanished completely, and not one man or woman I questioned had seen how. Time was short. Since I could not find Martala, I decided to make my way to the valley of the dead alone, and resume my search after my conversation with the ghouls, for I had no doubt that they would be easy to locate at night in the confines of their own valley. They would undoubtedly seek to kill me as soon as I strayed into their territory.
It was fortunate that the moon rose early. The path to the valley did not show signs of recent use, but was well cut into the stone-covered ground by countless centuries of the feet of those who had traveled to and from Thebes along its serpentine length. The valley was as the Roman gem trader had described, narrow and hemmed in by looming walls that rose steeply to pyramidal hills of broken rock. To walk into it during the day would have been like crawling into a bread oven, but already the heat was departing from its scattered stones, which littered the floor of the valley in such a multitude that it was scarce possible to take a step without risking a twisted ankle or a stumble.
My footfalls echoed like the vacant laughter of a lunatic from the hills. I made no attempt at stealth. They waited until I reached the midst of the valley floor, making a hasty retreat impossible, then showed themselves as shadows that moved. Only their motion enabled me to distinguish them from the dark shapes of boulders. They slid beneath the moon with no sound at all, and I found myself admiring their skill. No doubt they knew the location of every stone in the valley with their eyes shut. Swiftly they closed their ring around me. Moonlight glinted on their eyes, their barred teeth, their black claws.
I drew my sword. The ring of its steel on the brass guard of its scabbard made them pause. Slowly I turned in a circle, seeking the leader.
“I am not food,” I said clearly in the language of the Black Spring Clan. “I am a ghoul.”
A murmur of surprise stirred the air. They glanced with uncertainty at each other. One who was taller than the rest stepped forward, his shoulders hunched and taloned hands spread wide to slash. I pointed the tip of my sword at his naked breast.
He was strongly built, bigger and heavier of limb than the members of my own desert clan had been. This told me that food was not in short supply. These ghouls were fat with meat, and unaccustomed to having to hunt to survive. His dark skin had a yellow cast, as did the skins of the others. Their scent was strange, and made the skin tingle along my spine. One wrong word would mean death. They would kill me and leave my corpse in the sun for a day to putrefy, until it was fit to eat.
“We understand you, but the sound of your words is strange,” he said at last. “What clan are you?”
“Black Spring Clan. I am Alhazred.”
They murmured at the name.
“We know nothing of this clan,” the chief said, and crouched to leap at my throat.
“It lies across the sea to the east,” I said quickly. “The leader of my clan is Gor. Here is his skull.”
I pulled the knotted cord tied to Gor’s skull from my belt and held the skull up in the moonlight, so that he could see its eye sockets.
He leaned forward until his misshapen face was a hand’s-breadth from the skull. His eyes and the vacant sockets of the skull seemed to regard each other. The stillness of the night was marred by the sound of sniffing as he tested the scent of the skull.
“It is the skull of a ghoul,” he said, more for the benefit of his clan than for my benefit.
The tension in the crouching shadows eased. The leader stood taller and allowed his fingers to curl and his arms to return to his sides. When
I saw that he was no longer in the fighting stance of ghouls, I lowered my sword, but kept it naked in my hand. The skull I returned to my belt.
“Come with us, Alhazred of the Black Spring Clan. We will feed and talk.”
He led the way, and the ring of ghouls parted for him, then closed behind me and guarded me on both sides, so that I had only one way of walking. The unspoken meaning was plain. Only a ghoul could tolerate the food of a ghoul. I must pass this last test before being acknowledged one of their race. They knew I was human by my scent and did not trust me.
The leader led me to a vertical fissure of shadow in the side of a hill. Turning his body sideways, he slid between the lips of stone. The others of the clan pressed close behind me and stood on either side of the cave to prevent my retreat. As a show of trust, I sheathed my sword, then slid my body between the rocks. It was an easier fit for me than for the ghouls who silently followed. Their chests were deeper than mine.
The cave ended after only a few paces. The leader had vanished. I stared around in the uncertain moonlight that shone through the gap at my back, looking for a bend in its length, but found nothing. The ghoul behind me made a harsh noise in his throat that I recognized as a bark of laughter, and pointed past me at a dark shadow at the end of the cave. When I bent close I perceived that it was an opening. Falling to my hands and knees, I crawled through.
The smell alone would have informed me that it was a ghoul’s communal lair, even had I been blind. As it was, enough moonlight filtered down from a fissure in the roof of the cavern to let me see its general dimension. The roof was high, and the cavern shaped like a fish, sharp at its entrance and tapering toward the back, but wider in its middle. At some time in the dim past, rocks had fallen in at the center of the roof, and littered the floor of the space, forming a kind of elevated stage of irregular slabs that lay one on the other like a stack of books carelessly thrown together. Looking up, I saw stars through the opening. I sniffed the air, and above the putrefying stench smelled something else. Water. It came from the dark shadow at the rear of the cavern.
The leader waited until I satisfied my curiosity, then gestured for me to follow him. He mounted the pile of irregular blocks. I climbed after him, and saw that the top was flat. Gaps between the slabs had been filled in with sand, and the surface leveled and swept. The corpse of a woman lay naked in the center of the elevated floor, its intestines and viscera torn open and strewn around it. From the rotten odor I judged it to be three days old, perhaps four. Something moved in the cavity of the body, and I saw that maggots had made it their home.
He sat on the left side of the corpse, which lay twisted on its back, and gestured for me to sit on the opposite side. Other ghouls that I judged to be the strongest of the clan gathered round and formed a ring with the three of us at its center. On the cavern floor below I noticed several females and young ghouls staring up at me with hostile curiosity. It was almost certainly the first time a human being had entered their world. Unless my responses were exact, I would never leave it.
“Eat,” the leader said, his eyes glittering.
I nodded to show my appreciation for his courtesy and lifted a blackened section of small intestine from the squirming mass of white maggots in which it lay. They shone silver under the moon, and had a curious beauty. There was no need to draw my knife. The flesh had putrefied to such an extent, that even without the claws of a ghoul I was able to tear off a section. I raised it to my face without hesitation and began to chew on it. The taste of rotten flesh brought back to me in an instant all the memories of my life among the Black Spring Clan, and at once I was no longer Alhazred the man but Alhazred the ghoul.
A murmur of appreciation ran around the ring of watchers. The leader took a section of intestine from where I had broken mine and fed on it. He nodded to one of the males in the ring, and the ghoul moved forward on his hands and knees with deference, and tore off a piece of flesh from the thigh of the corpse. One by one the surrounding ghouls approached and got meat. The cave filled with the sounds of chewing.
“I am Hakka of the Stone Valley Clan,” the leader said when both of us finished our meat. He spread wide his arms. “These are my people.”
“You have shared your meat with me,” I said, remembering a scrap of lore I had heard from Gor on one of our long night hunts. “Your courtesy will be told to the young of the Black Spring Clan.”
“Why did you seek us, Alhazred?” Hakka asked.
“I am dying,” I told him without preamble. “Poison flows through my veins. It was brewed above the Second Cataract. There is a cure among those who made it. I seek to live.”
In a few words I described the effects of the poison, and told what I knew about its use. Hakka showed no surprise when I mentioned the Order of the Sphinx.
“The necromancers who dwell beneath the Sphinx and their works are known to us. They possess dangerous arts. When we learn of their presence at Thebes, we avoid their approach.”
“Are there any at Thebes now?”
“Three came up river last night.”
He saw my expression of surprise and pulled his lips away from his yellow teeth in a grin.
“Nothing happens at night in Thebes without the knowledge of my clan.”
“Do you know where the three are lodging?”
“They stay at a private house owned by one who is sympathetic to their work, and who serves the purposes of their order.”
He named a street and described a house in such a way that I would be able to locate it. From his description, I judged it no more than a minute’s walk from the inn where Martala had rented our room. I still held the hope that she had met with some harmless distraction that had prevented her from keeping our meeting in the market place, but it seemed more likely that the three who had tried to burn the Elephant’s Foot had taken her captive, or murdered her and hidden her corpse. They would be seeking my location, so it was possible that they had kept her alive, temporarily. So I told myself, at least.
“Do you know anything of the antidote to this poison?”
“Nothing at all.”
The ghoul spoke without emphasis. Death was not a horrifying stranger to his race, but a nightly companion.
“Then I have come here for nothing,” I said, unable to keep the heaviness from my voice.
“There is one who may be able to guide you. An ancient oracle lost to the memory of men, but known to my people.”
“How may I consult this oracle?”
I listened with attention to his directions. As he spoke, my heart sank further. It seemed little more than a fool’s errand to attempt to consult this oracle.
“I will try to do as you suggest,” I told him. “What choice do I have?”
He stood to indicate that my audience with him was at an end.
“I wish you well on your quest, Alhazred of the Black Spring Clan.”
“If I live, the hospitality of the Stone Valley Clan shall not be forgotten.”
Two of his warriors escorted me to the mouth of the cavern, between rows of gawking and silent women and children. The young were not so bold as those of my own clan, I observed, then corrected my thoughts—my former clan. Beside the exit was a round stone that could be rolled on its edge like a wheel over the opening. When it was in place, no one standing in the shallow cave on the other side would see anything other than a wall of rock. By this clever trick the lair of the ghouls was kept secret from men, even though it was so near the outskirts of Thebes.
My guards, or escorts, allowed me to leave the cave and make my way down the slope of the hill to the valley floor alone. The breeze had died, and the night air hung heavy around my shoulders, almost like a cloak of fine silk. There was nothing to indicate that any living thing other than myself existed on the earth. I felt a twinge at my neck and raised my hand by reflex. Wetness touched my fin
gertips. Drawing my hand away and gazing at it under the moonlight, I saw a smear of blood. Some night-flying insect had bitten me. Another token of the hostility of this valley, which had nothing beautiful in its aspect, even under the moon.
As I walked with care between the loose stones that littered the path, following it back the way I had entered, I became aware of three shadows behind a low ridge. I stopped and gazed at them without attempting to conceal myself. They had already seen me, and even with their eyes closed would have heard my approach over the pebble-strewn ground. The moonlight was clear, and it puzzled me that I could distinguish no more than their outlines, until I realized that each wore a black robe and a caul of black silk over his face. Only the gleam of naked steel from their drawn daggers showed clearly. I made no attempt to unsheath my sword. They were trained assassins. Before I could kill one, the others would take my life. I wondered if the ghouls watched from a safe distance, waiting to see which of us would be their meat for the following night.
“How did you find me?”
The leader stepped forward until he was within striking distance, and answered in Greek.
“I followed you to the house of the trader. He told me where you were going after you departed.”
“What of the other two?” I asked casually, ignoring his dagger.
He turned and nodded to the men behind the ridge. They bent and dragged into view what looked like a sack of old rags. When it stood upright, I saw that it was Martala, hands bound behind her back, her mouth gagged. Her eyes, so white in the moonlight, met mine with an expression of apology.
“She would not tell us where you keep the scroll,” the leader said.
“Has she been damaged?”