“Then you had best start packing it there, and spare your landlord a sneezing-fit when he mucks out this grotto of antiquated fancies."
One of tonight's specimens would serve Mr. Entwistle as a substitute for the bailiff, although the three of them put together fell short of that boor's swinish girth. All were slight, one was missing its head and one had not even been wrapped.
He removed the wrapping from the others before examining this naked mummy that, on close inspection, hardly seemed a mummy at all. Its fists were clumped together at its groin in a most un-Egyptian pose, and it showed no marks of evisceration. If not for its obvious antiquity, he would have taken it for a common corpse.
Unlike a proper mummy's, the hands were not brittle. He had to work the wrists vigorously before they tore free. A sluggish flow of pink liquid approximated bleeding. The specimen would make poor dust unless he baked it first.
Examining the hands, he made a discovery that set his knees trembling: a gold ring with a stone that might have been a sapphire if it had not been so impossibly big. He wrenched it off.
He hurried to the front of his shop, planning to scrutinize the gem under a magnifying-glass, but he found his way blocked by three intruders, cowled and draped in black. Their stillness was terrible. Mr. Entwistle had not expected to feel such guilt and helplessness until his meeting with the Final Judge; a meeting, he feared, that might not be long deferred.
“Who—?"
“We have come for Rhanthus, secret ruler of the world these past ten thousand years.” This whisper was more fearsome than any bailiff's roar.
“You must have the wrong shop, and this one is closed. How you managed to gain access—"
No one lifted a finger, but a massive blow hurled the apothecary back. He upset his workbench and fell among the mummies.
“His ring!” whispered one of the intruders as it rolled from Mr. Entwistle's grasp. “Rhanthus! Where are you?"
Mr. Entwistle squeaked in panic as he felt a faint stirring among the dead limbs around him. He sprang to his feet only to be flung down by another invisible blow. He curled into a gibbering ball while the dark figures stood over the mummies for what seemed an age.
“He meditates,” one of them mused, and rounded on Mr. Entwistle: “Which one had the ring?"
He knew they would not look charitably on his abuse of their master. He pointed at one of the ordinary mummies, the one still possessed of its head. After conferring, they slipped the ring onto its finger and lifted it reverently.
“Spare me!” Mr. Entwistle pleaded.
“When he wakes, your fate will be in the hands of Rhanthus.” Their chuckles rattled like dead leaves on the floor of a crypt as they glided out. “Rhanthus the Revengeful."
The apothecary forced his eyes toward the true Rhanthus, whose lips now quivered on the brink of speech. Seizing his ax, he hacked the bogus mummy in pieces despite feeble efforts at resistance that continued even after dismemberment. He gathered up the wiggling parts and shoved them into his oven.
Angry clanging resounded as the fragments bounced against the iron door. The temperature in his workroom plummeted for an instant, and dogs outside set up a fearful howling. But before long it was cozy and quiet again as the oven progressed in its slow work.
Mr. Entwistle would not dispense any of this horrible dust to the public. When he decamped later tonight, he would leave it wrapped as a gift to the bailiff.
* * *
Another Night
When he was old (Scheherazade said), Abdul Muhammad took a wife who shone among the stars of his harem like the noonday sun. I could go on about the glories of her eyes, of her breasts, of her hair, of her buttocks, but other women have such things, and one would go astray by thinking of other women while trying to picture the perfections of Farashah. Only a man who had seen her glories unveiled could summon them to his mind's eye, and the only man who had so seen them was Abdul Muhammad.
Or so he hoped.
He was fat and ugly, but he also fancied himself wise because he knew this, and because he knew that her protestations of love must be false. She was even younger than his favorite mare. She must want a young stallion. He did his best to be one, but this made him wheeze and see spots. When Farashah urged him to moderate his passion lest he should do himself harm, he took this for proof that her love was feigned.
“How could I not love you?” she asked. “You have seen all, you have done all, your mind is vast and various as the world. All eyes look to you, and they see one who knows who he is and where he stands just as surely as a mountain. The words of youth are as feathers to the gold of your speech, and all hoard it greedily. You remind me of my father."
He was pleased with this little speech until the end of it, for her father was a twittering boy of forty. Yet he smiled and began to toy with her in the hope of proving himself an even younger boy.
Whenever he came upon her unawares, Farashah would be singing softly or smiling. Commanded to explain these quirks, she confessed that she was in love, but she flung herself in his arms before he could even begin to roar, “Aha!” and cried, “With you!"
He charged her ladies and eunuchs to watch her and one another with redoubled vigilance. After pondering these interviews, he banished a woman who sported a nascent mustache and sent two of the eunuchs back to the surgeon for refreshment.
When no one reported any suspicious conduct, he concluded that the servants were conspiring with her to make a fool of him. He must put her love to a test.
In a far corner of his gardens stood a bell-tower, last vestige of a structure raised by infidels. He imported workmen to the ruin and had them labor quietly by night. The gold he gave them was more than enough to smooth their frowns of puzzlement.
When the work was done, he showed Farashah the key to the tower. “Urgent business calls me to Basrah, and I must entrust you with my life,” he said. “When my ancestors confounded the Franks, they laid a virulent curse on my house. If anyone pulls the rope in their tower and rings the bell, the ruler of the house dies."
“Why don't you remove the bell?” she asked.
“One mustn't trifle with sorcery."
“Why don't you take the key with you?"
“Basrah is crawling with thieves. The only safe place for the key is here—” he hung the key from a hook in her chamber—"where I know you will guard it as you would my life."
After leaving the city and camping by a remote oasis for a few days, Abdul Muhammad secretly returned and went straight to his wife's chambers. That she was absent was unsurprising, though it hurt. That the key was gone, too, devastated him.
Fearing the worst, cursing himself for putting his love to such a test instead of accepting blissful ignorance, he ran to the tower and entered with a duplicate key. He found only an empty room with a hanging rope.
Vowing revenge on the workmen, he tiptoed inside and gave the rope a tentative tug to see what had gone wrong. But the workmen had done their job well. Before he could regain the door at his liveliest waddle, the roof fell on him.
When Farashah returned from the baths with her ladies, she took the key from her neck and hung it in its place. She hated to flout her lord's wishes, but she didn't dare leave it unattended for some idle rogue of a eunuch to play with. Her husband was far too trusting.
* * *
The Benevolent Emperor
I am page
To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years
—Clark Ashton Smith:
The Hashish-Eater
“I had the most horrible dream,” Aubrun said upon waking. He added a little laugh to show that an Emperor of Tasuun cannot be all that greatly distressed by the horrors of dreams, but the dry raspiness of the laugh distressed him. Even more distressing was the absence of an eager clamor from his concubines and eunuchs and chamberlains to hear a full account of the horrors he had endured.
He shifted on his silken cushions and shuddered, unprepared for their abrasive texture. Courtin
g sleep on such a bed was an ordeal no emperor should ever be made to suffer, requiring ever stronger wines with ever more potent infusions of opium, which in turn provoked nightmares and an intolerable prolongation of the night they haunted. The potions made him forget the doom that had befallen his empire, but when he woke, the grit would be there to remind him.
Not long ago at all, no more than a few years ago, surely, Aubrun had always sprung out of bed with the dawn and sluiced himself with water that had been ice on the far-off mountains only the day before, rushed to his palace by couriers who spared neither themselves nor their dromedaries to provide the wherewithal for their ruler's ablutions. Now, forcing open a dry eyelid, he saw that it was the dull rays of the declining sun that struggled to make the interminable sifting of black dust-motes in his bedchamber glitter against a background of funereal curtains and cryptic frescoes. The curtains had once been purple, had they not? And those frescoes—they had pictured nymphs, he seemed to recall, and satyrs, frolicking in a fantasy of color that made real fruits and flowers seem wan. Now they were but lurkers in the universal murk.
“I must do something about the dust,” he said, not for the first time, and not for the first time he admitted that he prattled empty words, for nothing could be done about it.
The sands of Tasuun's deserts had once been golden, the poets said, although less fanciful observers had described them as red, and the most prosaic had allowed them nothing more than a generally pinkish cast. Whatever they had been, they had been beautiful in a thousand-thousand different ways, under a thousand-thousand transmutations of sunlight and the shadow of his galloping stallion, in a myriad varieties of moonlight and storm. Now everyone agreed that they were black, and black only.
Along with the change in color had come, by similarly slow and initially unmarked degrees, a change in substance. Everyone in the empire had known the size of a grain of sand, the weight of a handful of sand, the discomfort of sand in a shoe, and presumably one's great-great grandmother to an infinite remove had subscribed to exactly the same standards. But as they darkened, the grains got smaller. One hardly even heard the word sand anymore, for the sand of the empire was dust.
Although it might drift and spume and rearrange itself in mutable dunes, although it might sometimes even rise up to destroy armies and bury cities in cataclysmic storms, sand generally had the decency to stay put. The black dust that had fallen upon Tasuun, or that had perhaps wafted up from one of the less pleasant of the Seven Hells, needed no provocation of wind or footfall to levitate and hang in clouds, to rise and spire and dance in elongated shapes suggesting the sarabands of wraiths who wished humankind no good. It would whisk itself away from the black bones of the rocky earth or hide them, reshaping the landscape in new configurations with unfamiliar landmarks. Lost in this shifting shadow-show, Aubrun and his subjects felt ill and dizzy most of the time.
The evil effects were innumerable, each worse than the last. The delicately fitted pieces of the cosmologist's orrery and the soldier's arbalest, despite the most sedulous cleaning and oiling, despite the protection of the tightest wrappings and hermetic casings, would be ground out of shape overnight by the penetrant dust. It scoured the edge from the scimitar and the gleam from the goldpiece, it withered the vineyard and clogged the well, it dried the dew of love. Mobs ran wild in the streets on the day when the increasingly unreliable hour-glasses stopped measuring time altogether, when the black dust that had infiltrated the most ancient and trustworthy and tightly-sealed instruments would slip from the upper chamber to the lower in one blink of a dry, red eye.
The horologes had served symbolic notice that time had run out, for not long after that the dust began to stop the breath of life in thousands, in tens of thousands. The plague and famine attending the coming of the dust had claimed many, but now it grew eager to claim lives on its own as even the youngest and healthiest of Aubrun's subjects would drop dead with no more notice than palpitations, nausea and a brief struggle for breath.
Aubrun sat bolt upright in his dusty nest of cushions. Palpitations, nausea, shortness of breath—had he not suffered those symptoms last night, before his drugged stupor became total, or were they parts of the nightmare? His eagerness to tell that nightmare to someone, to find shape for it in the telling and sift the true from the false, burned in him, but his chamber was most uncharacteristically empty.
It was late, of course, later even than was his wont to rise in these latter days. His subjects, their faith and loyalty unfairly tested by current events, had grown weary of waiting for him to wake and had stolen from his chamber. Avoiding windows and their panorama of drifted streets and eroded domes and spires, he went to the door in nothing but his nightshirt for the first time in many, many years, opened the door for himself for perhaps the first time in his life, and peered into the dim hallway.
The Imperial Guardsman who lounged slackly outside was so gray in his face and uniform as to escape notice at first, and the emperor cried out in startlement when his eye separated the figure from its dusky surroundings. He hastily smoothed his sparse locks over his pate in an effort to look more regal as the guardsman struggled to stand erect and look more martial.
“I had the most horrible dream,” Aubrun said.
It would have been most improper for the guardsman to stare at him. He stared straight ahead, his glaive at the ready. But even though he was looking elsewhere, all his attention was clearly focused on his lord. Nevertheless it was a distracted kind of attention, a disinterested sort of attention. Aubrun couldn't say exactly what was wrong with the man's demeanor. Perhaps he was ill.
“Tell it me, my lord emperor,” the guardsman said at length in a strangely hollow and distant voice, adding as if by afterthought, “I pray you."
This was not at all the audience he had envisioned for telling his dream. He had anticipated the eager attention of Ataglutisia, his principal leman, as she coaxed the details out of him with intimate caresses and pretty exclamations of surprise and horror. Instead he had this lout, this block, this drab excuse for a shining warrior, who seemed almost to be dallying with the temptation to mock him.
But everyone looked drab nowadays; discipline had succumbed to plague, famine and dust; and mockery was the only sane response to a mocking universe. At least the man was at his post, unlike the emperor's other servants, and at least he was making an effort to stand up straight and feign interest. Admitting that this was the best he could hope for, Aubrun said, “I dreamed that those dead who died of the dust were returning from their graves with a frequency and persistence that alarmed even the most irresponsible necromancers."
Waiting for a response and muttering a curse when he got none, the emperor went on testily, “The occasional resurrection of a god or a prophet is to be expected, of course, and we all still have hope that the great Emperor Agramendax will fulfill the prophecy and return in our hour of direst need, though why he hasn't at this present juncture, I have no idea, but this was an indiscriminate return of every sot and slut in the empire, at least all those who had died of the dust. Those who had died by the sword did not return, nor yet could those who had returned be slain by the sword.
“A miserable example of a child-raping cannibal named Seferis Crod was seized by an angry mob. The malefactor told them politely—that was the most exasperating thing about the dead people in my dream, you see, their insufferable politeness, their unflappable courtesy!—he told them that he had died of the dust, and he was sorry, but it would be useless to kill him. He tried to comfort them with the assurance that he no longer had any desire to do much of anything, least of all rape and eat children.
“They wouldn't listen, of course. When they pulled off his arms, black dust, not blood, spouted from his shoulders. Many ran screaming away, for the dust of a dead man was thought to spread the mysterious illness, but the more outraged citizens cut off his head, provoking a pumping fountain of dust. They, too, ran. Seferis waited a decent interval—politely, you understand, s
o as not to hurt their feelings—before reassembling himself as well as he could and going on about his business, whatever dark business a dead man might be said to have."
A sickly feeling had crept over Emperor Aubrun as he told this story, and he was not entirely surprised when the guardsman coughed dryly and said, “My lord emperor, it gives me great pain to tell you this, but that was no dream. I was foremost among those who apprehended Seferis Crod, and it was I who tore off his left arm."
“Yes,” Aubrun said dully. “I only dreamed that I dreamed it, for I remember now that one of my ministers told me the tale yesterday. He thought it inappropriate that a guardsman should have led a mob."
“I was prone to far more passionate urges yesterday,” the guardsman said, “and you can be sure I will never act that way again. It is apparently true that the dust from the dead can spread the disease, for I was sprayed with it, and I had traveled no more than a hundred paces from the scene of the impromptu execution before I grew short of breath and died. Forgive me, lord, if this confession offends you."
“Not at all, young man,” Aubrun muttered, backing away as quickly as his imperial dignity would allow, but soon abandoning decorum for a barefoot sprint down the long, empty corridor, until the guardsman behind him had faded completely into the pervasive obscurity.
Aubrun deeply regretted that sprint as he stood clutching his nightshirt to his chest and gasping for breath in the workshop of Destevard Hooven, the infamous but useful Court Necromancer. He believed he could clearly read his diagnosis in the other's pitiless eyes, if not hear it in his own, wheezing breaths. Compounding the emperor's terror, he had blundered into a room where a disordered body on the table leaked black dust. Every breath drew the contagion deeper into his lungs, but he could run no longer. He could barely stand.
“The dust—you—breathe it—sick—"
“Nonsense!” Destevard snapped, adding, “Your Imperial Majesty."
“But I spoke—to a dead man—just now. He said the dust from another made him ill."
Even More Nasty Stories Page 13