Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“Serves him right,” says the tow-headed girl.

The peddler shrugged. “Perhaps, if one excuses Isobel her own crimes and makes of her a hero merely because she’d fallen out of favor with her brother. Regardless, after the assassin was slain, Pickman, Sorrow, and several other ghouls led her from the palace and out of Thok, down narrow mountain trails and across the bhole-haunted Vale of Pnath. At last they gained the vaults of ruined Zin, that haunted city of the gugs, and went straightaway to a mighty central tower, the tallest among twice a hundred towers so tall no one could, from the ground, ever hope to glimpse the tops of those spires. They pushed open its enormous doors, which bore the sigil of Koth — a dreadful, awful bas-relief neither Isobel Snow nor Sorrow dared gaze upon — and I should tell you, children, that the history of that tower is a shuddersome tale in its own right, one all but lost to antiquity.”

“Maybe you’ll tell it next time,” said the boy on the tow-headed girl’s left.

“Maybe,” replied the peddler. “We shall see. Anyhow, beyond that forbidding entryway was a stair that wound up and up and up . . . and up . . . to a massive trapdoor carved of slick black stone. It is said two hard days’ climbing were necessary to at last reach the top of those stairs and that the strength of all the ghouls present was only barely enough to lift open that trapdoor. But open it they did, and so it was that Isobel Snow, Queen of Bones and Rags, Qqi Ashz’sara, slipped through her brother’s icy fingers and fled to the Upper Dream Lands. Of the ghouls, only Sorrow went with her, the others turning back with Richard Pickman, who, as I’ve said, hoped her escape would be the beginning of the end for Isaac Snow’s reign. Pickman had instructed Sorrow to lead the Queen in Exile through the Enchanted Wood to the River Xari, where a barge would be waiting to bear them down to the port city of Jaren, from whence they could book safe passage across the shimmering sea to Serannian. Sure, even Isaac Snow would never be half so bold as to venture so many leagues from the Underworld, much less attempt to breach the high walls of the island kingdom of Serannian.”

“The people of Serannian let them enter?” the tow-headed girl asked skeptically. “A ghoul and an albino half-ghoul?”

“You’d not think so, would you? But, see, the lords of Serannian were kindly,” answered the peddler. “And as I have told you, there were generals and leaders of men who’d learned of the Snows’ discovery of the long lost Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb and of the strife that followed, and how they feared the twins might not be content to rule the Lower Dream Lands. So they saw the arrival of Isobel Snow and news of the division between king and queen as a good omen, indeed. Moreover, there is a thing I have not yet revealed, probably the most important part of the tale, the pivot on which turns its plot.”

Each of the three children sat up a little straighter at that, for how could anything be more important than the ghoul queen’s flight?

“When Isobel Snow departed the peaks of Thok and the palaces of the royal necropolis, she took with her the Basalt Madonna.”

There was a collective gasp from the peddler’s audience, and she felt the smallest rind of satisfaction at that. If she had to tell this story, at least the gravity of it was not being lost on the listeners, and at least she knew she was not slipping in her skill as a spinner of yarns. She wanted to rekindle her pipe, but this was no place to interrupt herself. She was getting very near the end.

“But if she had the weapon, why did she not turn it against her brother?” asked the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right.

“I don’t know,” said the peddler. “No one knows, no one now living. Perhaps she didn’t fully comprehend how, or possibly she was unable to use the Madonna without him. It may have required the two of them together. Or perhaps she simply loved Isaac too much to destroy him.”

“Or she was afraid,” whispered the boy who’d yawned.

“Or that,” said the peddler. “Whatever the reason, she didn’t use it against him. She carried it away with her, and by the time Isaac Snow discovered this she was far beyond his reach. When she arrived at Serannian she and Sorrow were arrested and taken to the Council of Lords to whom she told her story and to whom she revealed the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb. She asked for sanctuary, and it was granted. And this even though she refused to surrender the Basalt Madonna to the men and women of that city on the sea. So, it was there her daughter was born, whom she named Elspeth Isa Snow. There in the shining bustle and safety of Serannian it was that Elspeth grew to be a woman, a strong and fiercely intelligent woman, I should add. Indeed, in the spring of her nineteenth year she was offered a seat on the Council, which she accepted. That same year her mother succumbed to a disease of the blood that had plagued her and her brother since birth, and—”

“Aunty, you didn’t mention that before,” interrupted the tow-headed girl.

“It wasn’t important before. Now it is. Anyway, when Elspeth Snow’s mother died the Basalt Madonna passed into her keeping.”

“And what happened to Sorrow?” the girl asked.

“Oh, he was still there. He was, in fact, ever Elspeth’s dearest friend and confidant. She being one-quarter ghoul herself found his company comforting. But . . . this is not the end of the tale. There’s more.”

“It sounds like the end,” said the boy who’d yawned.

“Very much like the end,” said the tow-headed girl.

“Well, if you wish,” said the peddler, “I can stop here. I am tired, and I—”

“No, no, please,” said the boy on the girl’s right. “Tell the rest. If there is more, then you cannot stop here.”

“And why is that?” the peddler asked him.

“My da says that an unfinished tale in an indecent thing.”

Somewhere in the house a door creaked open and was pulled shut just a little too roughly, and all three of the children started at the noise. The cat in the old woman’s lap opened one eye and looked well and profoundly annoyed at having been awakened.

“So,” said the peddler, who had not jumped at the slamming door, “your da believes that stories have endings, which means he must also believe they have beginnings. Do you believe that, child?”

The boy looked somewhat baffled at her question.

“Well . . . do they not?” he asked her.

“I don’t think so,” she told him. “Then again, I am only a poor peddler who sells oddments and notions and fixes broken wagon wheels and heals warts but . . . no, I do not believe so. Priests and learned scholars may disagree — though I daresay some of them may not. But I would ask you, did our story truly begin when the Snow twins waged their war and conquered Thok and Pnath and all the Lower Dream Lands, or was the beginning when they found the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb in the Waking World, the World Above, where it had been hidden in a cavern known as Khoshilat Maqandeli, deep in the Arabian wastes? But no, more likely we’d have to say the beginning was earlier, the night the twins consummated their incestuous love on an altar they’d fashioned to honor Shub-Niggurath, the All Mother and consort of the Not-to-Be-Named.”

The peddler paused a moment, quietly admonishing herself for having been careless and spoken the name of one of the Great Old Ones, and worse, for having spoken it to three children. She picked up her cold pipe and set the stem between her yellow teeth, chewing at it a moment before continuing.

“Might be,” she said, “or might be, instead, the story began when they were born to Alma Shaharrazad Snow, who went by Hera. Or the night she was led by her mother into a ghoul warren in an earthly city known as Boston to be bedded by a ghoul. Or perhaps it all started much farther back, when the Snows and the Tillinghasts and the Cabots — all the members of that clan — entered into a pact with the ghouls whereby they’d be given riches and power in exchange for bearing half-caste children. Or much farther back still, when the Ghūl foolishly went to war against their ancient enemies, the Djinn. Or—”