The Burning Altar

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘I’m not supposed to take girls,’ said Grendel. ‘Touaris wouldn’t want girls. And you aren’t pretty. But you’re nice. You have a face people like to look at. You have a face I’d like to paint. I’d paint you against a thunderstorm or a sun sinking into an ocean.’ He came closer, slowly, like a stalking cat, and for ten dreadful seconds Elinor was caught in mesmerised terror. At any moment he’ll leap forward. He’s going to kill me. He’d like to paint me, but he’s still going to kill me. He isn’t sane, of course. He’s scarcely even human. I didn’t really see his features blur like that, did I? And that lovely voice – that cultured voice – it’s treacly with madness and blood lust. He sounds educated – I don’t know why that should be odd, because you can as easily be torn to bits by an educated maniac as by an illiterate one. One hand on a Shakespeare sonnet, the other on a dripping axe. I think I’m becoming hysterical. Can I stun him with the candlestick, I wonder? I could run, but there isn’t anywhere to run to. I don’t think I can even move.

  Grendel leaped and Elinor fell back, lifting the candlestick ready to strike.

  There was the cold slither of iron on the floor and Grendel was jerked back. He’s chained! thought Elinor incredulously. He’s chained to the wall!

  Only the cold scrape of the chains on the concrete floor stopped Elinor from descending into complete hysteria. She fell back against the wall, Grendel’s screams of rage ringing about her head.

  He had rounded on the chains, dragging at them in fury, and Elinor sank in a shivering huddle on the ground, wrapping her arms about her body in fear.

  The chains were holding and he could not reach her. This was instantly apparent. He spent several minutes fighting the restraints, his lips drawn back in a snarl and his hands pulling against the links so ferociously that Elinor began to fear he might actually snap them. Keeping her eyes on him she reached for the heavy candlestick again.

  But wherever the chains were anchored they were held firmly and after what seemed an age, Grendel gave up. The madness in his face and his eyes dimmed and he lifted his head and looked about him in a bewildered manner. Elinor felt an unexpected tug of pity because quite suddenly he was like a puzzled child. The resemblance to Lewis was so strong that her heart twisted.

  He looked across at her and she thought he was about to speak. But then he turned his head, listening. At the same instant Elinor heard the sounds of footsteps below the trap door. Someone was coming along the tunnels.

  Hope warred with panic – someone coming to rescue me? or someone coming to catch me! – and the trap door began to lift. The monstrous cat-head was grotesquely silhouetted against the sick rippling twilight of the tunnels.

  He came up into the warehouse, bounding forward with terrifying swiftness, and sprang on Elinor at once, knocking the candlestick from her hand with a sharp blow across her wrist bone, and twisting her arms painfully behind her. Elinor fought, struggling and kicking, trying to bring one leg sharply up in the time-honoured ruse of a knee in the groin, but he overpowered her easily and pulled her across to the wall. There was the cold scrape of steel and Elinor felt with horrified disbelief a chain circle her waist. There was the click of a padlock snapping home.

  He threw her to the ground and although she scrambled to her feet at once, he was already out of her reach, crossing to the gas jets and reaching up to adjust them. Stronger light leaped up, sending the shadows scurrying back into the corners, and the man finally turned to survey Grendel.

  Grendel said, ‘Timur. Have you come to prepare for the feast?’

  Timur. The pronouncing of the name reduced the man’s sinister aura a little. Elinor waited, and presently the cat-headed man spoke for the first time. The mask muffled his voice only a little.

  ‘The feast will be on Sunday night,’ he said. ‘That is the day after tomorrow, and also the ancient Feast of Sekhet, the lioness-headed goddess of war.’

  ‘War,’ said Grendel softly.

  ‘Yes. War between our people and the people of Tashkara. That is why the day has been chosen,’ said Timur. ‘The League of Tamerlane will assemble here and you will be given homage.’ He spoke in English, but there was a foreign intonation that Elinor could not place.

  Grendel drew in a quick breath of delight and Elinor saw that the faintly bewildered look had vanished and the mad alter ego was surfacing. Mr Hyde sliding into carnivorous mode; nice Dr Jekyll sloughing his skin again. And this time I’m chained and if he reaches me I won’t be able to run away.

  ‘The day after tomorrow,’ said Grendel, his eyes on Timur. ‘Sekhet’s Feast.’

  ‘Yes. Our feast also.’

  The masked face turned to regard Elinor and when Grendel said greedily, ‘It must be a worthy feast – a great feast,’ Elinor almost believed that the cruel cat-mouth smiled.

  Timur said, ‘It will be a very worthy feast. It will herald the start of our plan to overturn the old tired regime of our people and bring Tashkara to the world’s notice.

  ‘At midnight on Sunday we will chant the time-worn ritual that was once used inside the stone palace of Tashkara; we will pay homage to Touaris, and we will fire the Burning Altar of our ancestors.’ And then, turning back to where Elinor crouched against the wall, he said, softly, ‘And you will have all the victims you wish.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Extract from Patrick Chance’s Diary

  Tibet, June 1888

  If the gorge leading to the ancient stone palace is awe-inspiring at night, it’s breathtaking by day. Have never seen such towering splendour, although even with the early morning sun pouring over the crags – a rose and gold river of pure light and impossibly beautiful – I’m aware of a dark menacing undercurrent.

  Theodore has decided to paint watercolour of scene before we set off – ‘As a record,’ he says solemnly, as guileless as if he thinks I don’t guess he’s trying to delay our arrival at the mysterious palace, if not avoid it altogether.

  Pointed out we had not come four thousand miles to paint mountain vistas, and in any case secretly doubt Theo’s ability to capture scene, since his forays into the world of art so far have been solely botanical. Making anatomically correct studies of snowdrops and Calendula officinalis (pot marigold to the rest of us), hardly ideal training for doing justice to the sweeping grandeur of the Himalayas or the dark romance of a Tibetan mountain palace, several centuries old and probably drenched in pagan religion. Also, he left his paintbox in Lhasa.

  Left him furrowing his brow over precise little charcoal sketch, and went off to inspect rope bridge which seems to be only way across gorge. Even from a distance it looks extremely perilous and I have an uneasy suspicion that walking on it will be very nasty indeed.

  Later. I was right. The bridge is suspended across the gorge, and a ramshackle affair of cables and ropes and bits of brushwood it is. The least breath of wind sends it swinging creakily back and forth, and if you missed your footing or a rope snapped you would be smashed to pieces below. The river hurls itself along the bottom of the gorge directly beneath, crashing against the rocks and sending up spume and misty vapour so that the swaying bridge is constantly enveloped in clouds of fine spray.

  Am beginning to regret very much indeed that last grandiloquent gesture that drove me across two continents, when probably a couple of months in Kitzbühel or Monte would have satisfied Father and old Inchcape, to say nothing of Thos. Cook’s man. The thing is, I had not really visualised quite such massive desolation. I would feel a whole lot better if the Sherpas had not run away last night: all very well for Theo to say they were probably frightened by some local superstition. Sherpas not given to excess of sensibility, or not that I ever heard about.

  Am writing this in stone chamber with stub of candle made from yak fat (or something equally repulsive) as only means of light. We’re inside the stone palace at last, and I think the setting down of what has happened may be a calming exercise. God knows I need something to calm me.

  Must do Theo the justice to adm
it he has not once said, ‘I told you so.’ What he has said is that it might be sensible to record everything in the diary in hope that someday someone will find it – clutched in our blackened skeletal fingers, presumably.

  But if I’m writing a diary at all, I’m writing it so that my descendants (whoever they might be) will be able to have some fun out of it.

  Between Theo’s reluctance (he managed to make his sketching last until noon), and my reconnaissance, we set out across the gorge much later than we – that is, I, – had intended. Theo had never intended to set out at all if he could help it.

  The setting sun was unfurling thousands of oriflammes that blazed across the skies: banners of crimson and burning gold that streamed over the entire horizon, so that the sky itself seemed close enough to touch and we both remembered about being on the roof of the world. Directly in front of us the mountain fortress was drenched in pouring fire, and for a moment I could have believed we were looking on the rose-red city half as old as time, except that Petra could never have been nearly so beautiful. Far below us the swirling river was a torrent of molten bronze so that as we crossed the bridge we might have been fording Kubla Khan’s ancient sacred Alph, or travelling through the fire-streaked skies of Aegia. (Refuse to apologise for outbreak of rhetoric, since have never seen anything to equal unearthly beauty of Tashkara on that sunset evening.)

  ‘The river turns that colour because of the copper salts in the rocks,’ said Theo unnecessarily.

  Two-thirds of the way across the rope bridge began to shudder and creak ominously (the rope floor was all of two feet at the widest part), and Theo became convinced it was about to snap and deposit us in the river, so we abandoned poetical rhapsodies and dived for the far end. It was certainly remarkably eerie that the sun sank behind the peaks at that precise instant, plunging the entire crag into shadow as we stepped on to it, and it was unfortunate that a section of the bridge did indeed fall away.

  ‘Impassable.’ said Theo, surveying it. ‘We can’t go back.’

  ‘We don’t want to go back, we want to go forward.’

  ‘It’s an omen, Patrick, mark my words.’

  ‘Oh, balls.’

  At the centre of the ancient palace we made out huge stone pillars with iron gates, approached by a roughish path with the cliffs rising steeply on each side, shutting out the last slivers of daylight. I summoned up a few rallying calls as we went, to cheer Theo along, but only got as far as, ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George’ (I left out ‘Into the Valley of Death/Rode the six hundred’ on grounds that it was a bit too close to home for comfort), when Theo suddenly said, ‘Patrick. There’s someone watching us.’

  Have to say this was the most chilling thing yet. The watcher was standing above us on a narrow shelf of rock, and with the sheer cliff-face behind him and the shadows enshrouding him like a ghostly mantle he was an extraordinarily sinister sight. He was clad in a long grey cloak with a deep hood hiding his face and wide full sleeves, which added to his air of mystery.

  ‘Is he one of the lama monks, do you suppose?’ whispered Theo. ‘I thought they all wore yellow robes and carried prayer wheels.’

  ‘They do.’

  The figure had turned away from us and was touching a glowing taper to bronze – or maybe even gold – wall sconces that seemed to have been hammered into the rockface. Light flared up, flickering wildly in the night wind that was scurrying in from the mountains, and the flames cast fantastical silhouettes. Could not forbear thinking of all those unpleasant legends where sinister anonymous beings lure unsuspecting humans into mountain fastnesses for any number of grisly reasons.

  But the bridge was down and the bitter Tibetan night was already stealing over the mountains, and there was nothing for it but to go forward. In any case I was curious by this time; I wanted to know who these people were who hid themselves away in their desolate mountain citadel, because whatever else they were they were certainly not lama monks. We had met several of these on our journey: some had been small travelling parties of twos and threes, others had been hermits eking out a sparse existence in caves, living partly on charity, partly on scavenging and partly on nothing at all. We had shared our food with them – Buddhist monks are forbidden meat and alcohol but nuts and fruit seemed always welcome – and communicated by means of signs and the odd word of each other’s language picked up along the way, and by goodwill. They are an interesting people, these monks, gentle and philosophic and remarkably happy. I had said to Theo that there seemed to be a good deal in favour of a contemplative life, to which he had replied uncompromisingly, ‘What about the celibacy?’ Think he may have formed an exaggerated idea of my sexual requirements, although suppose he can’t be blamed.

  But whatever this grey-robed figure above us was, he was clearly not a monk.

  It was at this stage that I began to have the uneasy feeling that we might have disturbed something better left alone, but it was too late now and we followed the cloaked figure along the narrow path until we came to the palace entrance.

  The gates might have been built for some ancient race of giants: the stone columns flanking them were easily fifteen feet high and, as we approached, night shadows were already wreathing them in violet and indigo. I had the impression of stone gargoyle faces looking down on us but in the gathering twilight it was impossible to be sure. On each side were more of the elaborate bronze torch-holders, each with a flaring cresset of wood. The hooded figure stood framed in the gates, watching us, and when he spoke Theo and I both jumped because he spoke English.

  ‘You wish to enter, travellers?’

  We looked at one another. Then I said, ‘We do. We saw you lighting the path and in our world that would indicate that travellers are welcome.’

  ‘The path is always lit,’ said the cloaked figure.

  ‘By you?’

  ‘Tonight it was my task. The lighting of the boundaries,’ said the figure, ‘is a very old custom out here.’

  Whoever he was he spoke and understood English well. But I was aware of the prickle of fear again, because his voice was harsh and blurred and there was something wrong about it. It was like listening to the notes of a musical instrument, once beautiful and precise in tone, but shut away and forgotten for centuries. The word tarnished formed on my mind.

  Theodore said, ‘You are part of a community? You live in the palace?’

  ‘The palace is a frontier. A gateway.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘The city of Tashkara,’ said the man. ‘But that is a place forbidden to all travellers. No man is ever permitted to enter Tashkara.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of the ancient secrets,’ said the man, which, as I pointed out to Theo later, was the kind of vague sinister remark that sounded as if it meant a good deal but actually said absolutely nothing at all.

  The man said in his spoiled voice, ‘You would do better to return to wherever you come from.’

  ‘We can’t,’ I said. ‘We can’t get back across the gorge. The bridge has collapsed.’ I looked at him, trying to penetrate the deep hood, but there was only the faint glint of eyes within. ‘If you could give us shelter tonight we would be very grateful.’

  ‘And in the morning? You would leave in the morning?’

  Theo and I exchanged glances again. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘By daylight we will probably be able to mend the bridge and return the way we came.’

  This, of course, was a monumental untruth, because I had absolutely no intention of going back the way we had come, even if the bridge was repairable. I wanted to see the inside of the ancient palace, but more than that I wanted to see the city of Tashkara with its ancient secrets, whatever they turned out to be. Forbidden cities and ancient secrets probably litter the whole of Tibet, but they aren’t something you come across in Chelsea very often. So I trod on Theo’s foot just as he was drawing breath to say that the bridge was certainly beyond repair, and said, ‘We would be no trouble to you or your people. We have f
ood with us which we will gladly share, and we could pay—’

  The man said at once, ‘There is no question of accepting payment,’ and for the first time his beautiful distorted voice held a note of arrogance. Whoever he was, he was accustomed to commanding. ‘But it is better that you are not in company with us at all. Even for a single night.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There is danger,’ said the man and although he did not quite shrug, by now he had clearly accepted the inevitable. He stepped back and indicated to us to enter.

  As we passed through the stone pillars flanking the gates a little breath of wind caused the wall torches to flare up, illuminating the leering gargoyles above. It was as well that Theo did not see it, because he would have been sure to think it another evil portent. As things turned out he would have been quite right.

  Directly inside the gates was a large courtyard paved with stone and set here and there with carven idols in niches and alcoves. I made out several portrayals of Buddha, the face expressing that remarkable serenity and wisdom that no other religion ever quite achieves, and there were the squat shapes of stone chortens which are a bit like elaborate cairns, but often house the ashes of dead holy men. These were shoulder-high and in the gathering dusk they looked like crouching monsters waiting to pounce. It was absurd to think they were creeping up behind us as we crossed the courtyard. I remembered about keeping them on our right: the Thos. Cook man had been very explicit about that. ‘Walk clockwise around the halls of all monasteries, and keep shrines and prayer banks and chortens on your right shoulder,’ he had said firmly. ‘It’s important to show respect at all times in Tibet.’ If any of my descendants ever do read these diaries, at least they’ll know that whatever else I was, I was never discourteous.