Paula Guran: The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“The Qqi d’Tashiva and Qqi Ashz’sara,” the tow-headed girl interrupted. “And the artifact is the Basalt Madonna — Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb — and, Aunty, I’ve heard—”

The old woman raised an eyebrow and scowled, silencing the girl.

“Now, which of us is telling this tale?” she asked. “And, besides, I’d not guess your ma and pa would think so highly of your palavering in the corpse tongue.”

One of the cats, a fat tabby tom, leapt into the peddler’s lap, stretched, then curled up for a nap. She stroked its head. In her wanderings far and wide from the cobblestone streets of radiant Ulthar, the cats were, perhaps, what she missed above all else. For an age, the citizens of the city had been forbidden to harm any cat for any reason, upon pain of death or banishment. There were not many laws of man she counted wise and unquestionably just, but that surely was one of the few.

“Yes. Those were the titles that the Snow twins took for themselves when all the forces of Thok had fallen before them and the fire they wielded, after even the city of the gugs and the vaults of Zin lay at their feet, after even the great flocks of night gaunts had surrendered. In the days that followed the war, when I was only a very small girl myself, there was fear even here that Isaac Snow might not be content to rule the shadows of the Lower Dream Lands, that he might have greater ambitions and rise up against the world of men.

“You know, of course, no such thing happened. We’d not be sitting here, me telling you this story, if matters had gone that way. We were, all of us, fortunate, for many are the generals who’d believed the might of the twins was so awful that none could ever stand against it. It is written that the Snows were content to remain below, and that they still — to this day — rule over and enslave the creatures of the Lower Dream Lands.”

“But—” began the tow-headed girl, and this time the peddler interrupts her.

“But, child, though this is what most count as the truth, there are those who whisper a secret history of the Ghūl Wars. And if this other account is to be believed — and I warrant there are a few priests and scholars who will swear that it is so — the twins were never of one mind. Indeed, it is said that Isaac greatly feared his sister, for the same prophecy that had foretold their victory also spoke of the birth of a daughter to them.”

“He feared his own child?” asked the boy seated to the tow-headed girl’s right.

“He did.”

“But why?” the boy asked.

“If you’ll kindly stop asking questions, I was, as it happens, coming to that.”

The peddler chewed the stem of her pipe a moment and stroked the tabby tom’s head. It purred, and she briefly considered changing horses in the middle of this stream and insisting they hear some other tale, one not populated with ghouls, half ghouls, and moldering necropoleis, and not a tale of war and the horrors of war. Likely, if she continued, it would end in nightmares for her and the children both. The plains of Pnath and the peaks of Thok might lie far away, and the battles in question long ago, but neither space nor time, she knew, could be depended upon to hold phantoms at bay.

Still, this was the tale they’d asked for, and this was the tale she’d promised, and the peddler was not a woman to go back on her word.

“The prophecy,” she continued, “had been passed down since the ghouls were defeated by the Djinn and cast out of the wastes of the Arabian deserts into the Lower Dream Lands, so thrice a million years before the first city of humankind was built. It foretold that someday a daughter would be born to half-ghoul twins, half- modab albino twins, and this daughter would grow to be a savior, a messiah, who’d be more powerful by far than even her terrible parents. She would, so said the prophecy, lead the Ghūl through the Enchanted Wood and up the seven hundred steps to the Gates of Deeper Slumber and through the gates into the Waking World. Once above, the mighty Djinn would find their doom by the same hellish weapon her mother and father had wielded in Thok. But . . .”

And here the peddler paused for effect and puffed at her pipe a moment. The air in the room had gone as taut as a harp string, and the three children leaned very slightly forward.

“But?” whispered the tow-headed girl.

“But,” continued the peddler, smoke leaking from her nostrils, “the rise of the ghouls would also be the downfall of the father of their champion. Because first, or so went the prophecy, the daughter would have to murder the father and claim both thrones for herself. She would spare her mother, but never again would there be a king and a queen in Thok. Those immemorial titles would vanish into memory and then pass from all recollection.

“The King of Bones and Rags, he did believe the prophecy, for, after all, had it not foretold of his and his sister’s birth and their coming to the Underworld and of their ascension? Sure it had, and if that portion of it was not false then how could he not fear those passages that had yet to be realized? Sure he was terrified, because even so great a monster as he may fear his own undoing at the hands of such unfathomable mysteries as soothsaying. And, what’s more, he soon learned that Isobel Siany Snow — for that was her earthborn name in full, given by their mother Hera — that Queen Isobel was already pregnant. That she had become so shortly before the war began, when she and he were hardly more than storm clouds gathering on the horizon.”

And here the peddler departed briefly from her simple narrative, for the bare bones of a tale are a dull affair and should be dressed appropriately in the attire of atmosphere and the garb of mood. Too easily might this story become a dry recitation of perhaps it was , and so they say, and might have been. So, with words she deftly painted images of the perpetual twilight that lay over the dreaded Vale of Pnath, where gigantic bholes burrowed through unplumbed strata of gnawed bones heaped into the wide valley. She told of towering forests of phosphorescent fungi that pressed in all about the borders of that land in the shadow of the ragged peaks of Thok, mountains so lofty they reached almost to the rocky, stalactite-festooned ceiling of the Lower Dream Lands. It was the ghouls, she explained, who’d made Pnath a plain of dry ribs and broken skulls, for they’d spent untold years tossing the leavings of their unspeakable feasts over the cliffs into the abyss below. In those lands, the peddler assured them, every breath of air was redolent of death and rot. For it was the realm of the grave. It was the abode of nightmares beyond reckoning.

“Oh, and the ghasts,” she nodded. “I shouldn’t neglect to mention them. Terrible, vile, creeping beasts with a bite so venomous none can survive it. The gugs, the architects of Zin, hunted them, and probably hunt them still. But the gugs fear them as well.”

Now the eyes of the children were wide, and occasionally they glanced over their shoulders towards the fire or upwards at the autumn night pressing against the windows of the room.

“Oh, but I have strayed terribly, haven’t I,” said the peddler, and she frowned and knitted her brows, feigning mild exasperation with herself. “Must be the wind brushing around the eaves of the house making my mind wander so.”

“Aunty, we don’t mind,” the tow-headed girl whispered, and the other children nodded in unison.

“That’s all well and good, but, we’ll be here until cock’s crow if I keep nattering on that way. Where was I?”

“Isobel was already pregnant,” said the boy who’d spoken before.

“Yes. Yes, that was it. Isobel, the Queen of Bones and Rags, was pregnant by her brother, and when Isaac Glyndwr Snow learned this he feared it would be the death of him. Everything was unfolding precisely as the prophecy had promised. For the first time ever he grew distant from his sister and withdrew from her, becoming ever more secretive, spending long hours alone or in the company of his concubines. He took to drink and to chasing the Dragon, trying to smother his worries in the embrace of opium. As Isobel’s belly swelled, his scheming, anxious mind swelled with plots and designs by which he might prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy and cheat his own undoing.