The House of Cthulhu: Tales of the Primal Land Vol. 1

by Lumley, Brian

  The House of Cthulhu

  How Kank Thad Returned to Bhur-Esh

  FOREWORD

  WHEN THELRED GUSTAU originally invited me to read what was then his latest translation from Teh Atht’s Legends of the Olden Runes, with an eye to my preparation of the work for publication, he also placed in my hands some associational information about the locale of the story and certain of its participants. This information follows:

  Long before Klühn ever became the capital city of Theem’hdra—indeed, at a time when Klühn was little more than a fishing village—then, to the extreme west of the continent at the edge of the vast Unknown Ocean, in a valley girt round by the Ghost Cliffs of Shildakor, lay the city of Bhur-Esh. Two thousand years later when Klühn had grown up, Bhur-Esh, its valley, and the Ghost Cliffs too were long gone, buried beneath a lava desert, and out in the Unknown Ocean a new volcanic island stood grey, forbidding and still silently smoking . . . But we are only interested in Bhur-Esh in its heyday.

  For then the streets of the city were crowded and narrow and crooked so as to be almost labyrinthine. They were lined with shops and bazaars and brothels where merchants from all over the known world thronged to barter, buy and vend any and everything that could possibly be vended, bought or bartered. And in Bhur-Esh such merchants could carry on their businesses in almost perfect safety; because of its topography the city had very few thieves—it will be seen that they had nowhere to run!

  As a self-supporting seaport and city (the inhabitants considered themselves collectively as a “nation” in their own right), Bhur-Esh was and had ever been neutral, neither attacking its neighbours nor being attacked. The pincerlike arms of the bay reaching out to the Unknown Ocean were high and sheer oceanward and well fortified within, with turrets, ramparts, arrowslits, and quarters for hundreds of soldiers; a regiment was kept there permanently. Too, in strategic places, ballistae loomed in impregnable rock-cut bastions on top of those arms, with hundreds of heavy boulders ready for the hurling.

  That was one of the reasons why Bhur-Esh was neutral; the other, apparently, was the Ghost Cliffs of Shildakor. As Teh Atht himself has written: “What army except an army of wizards might broach such insurmountable barriers?” But these same barriers also worked in another way, explaining Bhur-Esh’s deficiency of criminals and why, once discovered, there was no sanctuary to which they could flee. The cliffs were unscalable, the narrow mouth of the bay constantly guarded and equipped with a toll bridge.

  The bay was wide at the landside and the cliff-enclosed valley was by no account small, so that while Bhur-Esh itself was a sizeable city with suburbs sprawling eastward almost to the very feet of the sheltering Ghost Cliffs themselves, nevertheless it occupied only a twentieth part of the “kingdom.”

  Between the calm waters of the bay and the city’s west wall, fields stretched in green expanse, with farmhouses and barns scattered here and there and cattle enclosures and patchworks of growing crops; and lining these fertile fields at north and south hard-packed roads lay beneath the beetling rocks. These roads led from the barracks and quarters of King Vilthod’s soldiers, on the outskirts of Bhur-Esh, to the battlements of the rocky bay arms.

  The King’s palace stood magnificent and serene, “a pinnacled splendour to the eye of the beholder,” at the city’s hub. Its walls were surrounded by cropped, luscious-green grass imported from the barbarous North, and archers sat atop the walls with crossbows of eastern design to ensure that no man walked, sat or stood upon King Vilthod’s grass. For the King’s grass was his pride and joy—its seed paid for grain by precious grain, nurtured to lush life and maintained by a bevy of gardeners—and the like of its northern green was unheard of elsewhere on the shores of the Unknown Ocean. Teh Atht tells us that: “Many an unwary stranger, perhaps fancying a juicy blade of grass to chew, had discovered a flighted bolt growing in his chest or throat before the grass could dangle from his lips . . .”

  Likewise prized by the King, for its architecture and yellow-walled beauty (not to mention the money it doubtless provided his coffers, which was probably why he had built it directly behind the palace), was the High-Court of Bhur-Esh. The High-Court stood tall and golden, but not nearly so splendid as the palace, in a plaza of white-walled gardens and winding pebble paths, “between delicate fountains and airy marble statues of gods and heroes long gone.” Within its spacious halls the worst members of Bhur-Esh’s criminal element—few, as explained—were tried by Thamiel, Chief Seeker of Truth to the King.

  Normally the main courtroom was sparsely attended; a few chroniclers with their styli and tablets; a bard or two to sing Woes or Delights after the passing of sentence or declaration of innocence; the provost guard; a smattering of out-of-work city types, and the family and friends of the sinned-against and sometimes of the transgressor. On the day of which Teh Atht tells in the following legend, however, things were very different . . .

  I

  Never before had a man the like of Kank Thad the barbarian been brought to trial at the High-Court. His crimes had been many and varied and all sorts of imputations had been brought against him in the hour or so during which his case had been heard. In fact, no case had been heard, merely the basic facts: that Kank Thad was accused of Murder most foul and that, among other sundry offences, he had spat and done worse things on the palace-encircling grass of King Vilthod.

  At the time of the latter blasphemies, some days earlier, the archer who had seen these acts had been nonplussed as to what action to take. There were edicts for sitters on the grass, and for standers or walkers upon it, but Kank Thad had done none of these things—he had merely extruded a gob of saliva grassward from the road where he stood admiring the palace. A passer-by, shocked and thinking to see the barabarian cut down at any instant, had whispered to him from a safe distance of what he did, advising him to move quickly along; whereupon Kank Thad had hailed the archer who still pondered his course of action atop the wall:

  “Hey, archer on the wall!”

  “Move on . . . get on with you!” the flabbergasted archer had returned.

  “Archer,” cried Kank Thad unperturbed. “I am told that one may neither sit nor stand nor walk on the grass. Is this true?”

  “Aye.”

  “And spitting?”

  “There are no orders. No one has—spat—before, on the grass!”

  “And being a good archer of the King,” the Northman grinned evilly up at the flustered man above, “you may only act on written or spoken instructions?”

  “That . . . is true. Now move on!”

  “Not yet, my friend archer,” answered the barbarian, whipping up his clout and wetting with a loud guffaw on Vilthod’s beloved grass.

  Then, before the mortified archer had time to aim his crossbow, the hairy great white savage had turned to stride drunkenly off down a winding street in whose tortuous coils he was soon lost to sight. That archer, a dull fellow as witness the tale, was employed atop the palace walls no longer; for having reported the occurrence to his commander he had been stripped of rank and sent to the High-Court wherein slavish, menial tasks might be found more suited to his talents. There this day he had spotted Kank Thad and brought his charge against him—one of many.

  The barbarian’s debts were legion. He owed taverners for ale by the gallon and meat by the platter, and a hosteler two weeks’ rent for the kennel wherein he’d slept. These were among his heavier debts; his lesser ones were far more numerous.

  Having at length been kicked out by the irate hosteler, he was charged with vagrancy too, and finally he was accused of murder. This being the most heinous of his deeds—barely, remembering the episode of the grass-wetting—it was the murder for which he found himself eventually called to answer.

  “You have heard all against you. How say you then, barbarian? Are you innocent—or guilty of vile murder?” Thamiel asked his all-important question of the huge, chained savage before him.

  Kank Thad, scarred horribly from cheek- to chin-bone do
wn one side of his face, his left eye forever half-closed in a scar-tissue grimace, leaned against one of the carven basalt pillars to which he was manacled and grinned. His grin was evil as his aspect, square yellow teeth leering from behind hard, thin lips. A towering hulk of a man, he spat on the mosaic floor of the courtroom, tossing back his mane of jet hair—which grew, like that of all his race, in a narrow band right down to the base of his spine—before answering.

  “Murder?” he scoffed. “That’s a word I didn’t know before I was washed up on your piddling beach when my good ship sank in the bay. And I’d never have come here if that storm hadn’t forced me to seek safe harbour. Listen: in my homeland to the north, when two men fight and one wins, the victor is no murderer! Aboard my ship, if a man got spitted in a fair fight, his body went to feed the fishes and the one who lived was left to tend his scars! Murder? Of what do you speak, baggy one?”

  Thamiel winced at the barbarian’s words. The heavily-jowled, flabbily-bodied Seeker of Truth had put up with the iron-thewed Northman’s insults all through his trial, and Thamiel’s patience was running low. Still, he was a man renowned for the Perfection of his Justice, and he could be just even now—before this sea-rat died!

  “You will say nothing in your defence, then?”

  “I wanted a woman,” the scarface answered with a shrug of his powerful shoulders, “and that one—” he pointed a shackled hand across the courtroom at a brightly daubed slut in the stalls, “was the one I wanted. I’d had her before when my money was good, and what’s wrong with a bit on account, I ask you? She makes a good cushion for a boozed-up body. And I’ll tell you something, you pallid sack of a man: a night with that one—why!—it would add ten years to your miserable life!” He grinned again, reconsidering that last. “—or finish you off for good!”

  Fatty folds of flesh trembling in rage, Thamiel gawped and spluttered, then remembered the Faultlessness of his Justice and brought himself under control. “Wench,” he spoke to the girl, “you have heard all that has gone . . . have you any last words for or against Kank Thad the Northman?”

  Here the barbarian believed himself to be on firm ground. Had he not praised the girl, in his way, and had he not also given her a good night that time?—and paid for it too, by Yib! He had not taken into account the fact that he was now destitute, with only a battle-notched blade to his name; and of what use to a tavern-whore is an ugly barbarian with an insatiable lust, an empty pocket and a too-ready sword?

  “That I have!” Lila the whore shrilled, her hair hanging down over her more than ample, passionately heaving bosom. “I was bought and paid for by Theen of King Vilthod’s Guard, aye, and on our way upstairs in the tavern of Hethica Nid, when this—this latrine slime—took me from him!”

  “Took you from him?” Sitting at Thamiel’s right hand, Veth Nuss the Mousey spoke up in his squeaky, tremulous voice. “Took you from an Officer of the King’s Guard! Didn’t Theen have his sword?”

  “He did, Lord,” Lila answered, “but the barbarian came up behind us and plucked it from his side!”

  “This was not told before,” Thamiel frowned, interested despite himself and his desire to get the thing over with.

  “The questions were not asked, Lord,” Lila protested. “I was asked only if Kank Thad killed Theen—and he did!”

  “Well, go on . . . go on, girl, tell it now,” Thamiel urged.

  “Well, the barbarian took Theen’s sword and flipped it point up into the ceiling of the tavern. Theen attacked him, but—” she glanced grudgingly at Kank Thad, “the northman is—big, Lord. He shrugged Theen off and laughed at him. And then—”

  “So it is true then,” Thamiel broke in, “that Theen was weaponless when the barbarian struck him down?”

  “Aye!” Kank Thad suddenly shouted from between his pillars, “that’s true enough. Tell them, Lila, you ungrateful ratbag—tell them just how ‘weaponless’ the guardsman was—and may your paps rot in the telling!” He hung in his chains and roared with berserk laughter.

  “As Theen—” Lila hesitantly continued when finally the giant’s laughter subsided, “—as he leapt to try to regain his blade stuck high in the ceiling, Kank Thad, he—he . . .”

  “Yes, girl, what did the barbarian do?” Thamiel impatiently pressed.

  “He—he struck Theen a very low blow.”

  “Eh?” Veth Nuss the Mousey frowned and shook his head. “Can you not be plainer, wench?” he squeaked.

  “I lopped away his manhood with Gutrip, my once-true sword!” Kank Thad screamed in hellish derision. “Ripped it away and flipped it to the tavern dogs from Gutrip’s tip. Murder, you say? Why!—I did the man a favour in putting him out of his misery. What good’s a man who can’t—”

  “Silence!” Thamiel thundered, hoisting himself puddinglike to his feet. Even the low muttering and chattering from the galleries had stopped, and white faces peered in awe and horror at the hulking, manacled barbarian in his chains. Thamiel, shaken to his soul at the loathsomeness conjured by the Northman’s admission, his composure utterly shattered now, stood with his finger pointing, trembling. “By your own words—” he finally managed, “you are guilty!—and now I pass sentence . . .” He drew himself up to his full height of five feet three inches and, barely remembering the Unimpeachability of his Justice, said: “Let thy sword be sundered!”

  II

  “Let the sword Gutrip be sundered!” The words of the Seeker of Truth were echoed to a hall outside the courtroom proper and a man, a minor court attendant but once an archer of the palace walls, clad now in a shift of mean cloth, laboured in under Gutrip’s weight. He was grimly smiling for all his workworn appearance. He placed the weapon on tall marble blocks, its plain-guarded pommel on one, its point on another, its chipped middle suspended. The ex-archer raised a great iron hammer, at which Kank Thad—perhaps remembering better days before swinish habits sank him low—hauled on his chains and roared in an agony as if he himself were being tortured.

  “By Yib, no, the blade is not to blame! Gutrip—” His anguished cry tapered off as the grinning court attendant, also remembering better days, brought down his hammer and shivered the scarred sword into a dozen flying shards.

  “Gutrip—” the great prisoner groaned low in his throat. “Oh, Gutrip . . .”

  “Let the spinning of the Silver Decider commence!” cried Thamiel.

  Again the fallen archer moved, climbing the steps of a dais in the centre of the courtroom where, on a block of faceted crystal, a silver arrow balanced within a ring of rune-inscribed iron.

  “Know you, Kank Thad, of the choice to be made?” Veth Nuss squeaked in his mouse-voice.

  “I have a choice of punishments?” the barbarian brightened. “Yib—but this sounds better! What choice do I have? Is one of them banishment? If so, then ban—”

  “Silence!” Thamiel of the Meritorious Justice thundered again. “The choice is not yours but that of the Silver Decider. If, when the arrow stops its spinning, the point faces into the north . . . then you go north, to the Ghost Cliffs of Shildakor. If the point faces to the south—then you go south, to the Square of the Sundering!”

  “Ghost Cliffs?” The barbarian shuddered ever so slightly and his mane bristled all down his back at this hint of thaumaturgy. “Sundering? I like the sound of neither. Explain, O bulging bilge-barrel.”

  “Gladly,” Thamiel whispered, actually smiling through the barbarian’s irreverence as he thought on the Transcendence of his Justice. “The Ghost Cliffs of Shildakor stand a mile high, sheer and stark, often overhanging and reaching in certain seasons into the very clouds. On a clear day a man might see the top through a good glass, and some day a man might even climb to the top—but this has not happened yet. The bones and tatters of a thousand fallen climbers litter the lower slopes. You, too, Kank Thad, might try the climb, depending upon which way the Silver Decider points.”

  “And the Square of the Sundering?” Little of the Northman’s hairy spirit remained, but h
e managed to retain an almost theatrical bluster even yet.

  “Why, is it not obvious? The dust in the Square of the Sundering is brown with dried blood, barbarian, and yellow and white with the pounded bones of men quartered there between four great horses bred for the task . . .”

  “Hah!” the prisoner snorted. “I’ve yet to see the horses that might rip a son of Kulik Thad in pieces.” He flexed his mighty muscles and the heavy chains and thick manacles groaned.

  “Aye,” Thamiel nodded his head, “we have had such before. We don’t like to see our horses tired, though, by powerful muscles. And why should such be allowed when a couple of sword thrusts in the right places can help the job along a bit? A hack at a tendon here, a thrust at a stubborn joint there—”

  “Ahem . . .” Veth Nuss ahemmed, reminding Thamiel of the Utter Insurmountability of his Justice, telling him not to elaborate. The punishments were surely enough in themselves without graphic descriptions. Thamiel smiled fatly at the barbarian’s new expression—then gave the man atop the dais a signal. With a metallic whisper the Silver Decider began to spin, and eventually its pointer slowed . . . and stopped!

  The arrow balanced delicately, stationary on its pivot—pointing north. Kank Thad was for the cliffs!

  “Away with him!” At Thamiel’s command ten powerful blacks seated on a stone bench rose, split into two parties, released the chains from the pillars and dragged the struggling, cursing Northman out of the courtroom and down a passage from which his fading blasphemies echoed for a goodly while. Away they took him, away to the deepest cells in the deepest dungeons under the white walls, pebble paths, airy statues and delicate fountains of the surroundings of the High-Court of Bhur-Esh.