Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “You, who have failed to carry out my orders, dare to advise me whom to spare and whom to kill?”

  And then Chullunder Ghose, before the copper-colored individual could answer:

  “Slay the right ones at the right time. Do we follow the Lord Dorje because he is either fierce or merciful? Or because he is wise and daring?”

  “Light!” Grim commanded. “You — set a light in the Great Chamber!”

  Hesitating — slowly, because he feared some ghastly fate awaited him — the copper-bellied man advanced up the ramp, feeling his way through shadows cast by the light behind him. When he reached Grim he went on his hands and knees and crept through the low opening into the Great Chamber where the so-called sarcophagus stands. There was long silence until light at last streamed and vanished into it. Then copper-belly came on hands and knees and called down:

  “He says everybody come!”

  Jeff sent Baltis first. I followed last, behind the last of Dorje’s men. But I had not taken two steps up the ramp before I heard a sound behind me. It seemed to come from the so-called Queen’s Chamber, which is reached through a narrow opening that turns off the ascending entrance passage before it reaches the Grand Gallery. Lantern in hand, I turned back to investigate.

  I looked into the so-called Queen’s Chamber and explored the entire length of the passage, drawing a blank, before turning back at last to see what Grim was doing and to help if I were needed.

  In the Great Chamber Grim was standing with his back to the stone cistern which antiquarians insist on calling the sarcophagus. It does not resemble one; it never was one; it was never intended to be one. Dorje’s men had used it as a tank to hold their drinking water, and that, at any rate, was something more like its original purpose than the use that the word sarcophagus suggests. In fact, allowing for different costume, and for the absence of the wood-wind music that was probably essential to the rites, the scene as I saw it may not have been so vastly less impressive than it was in the days when they initiated priest-kings in the same room — five, six, seven thousand years ago.

  To my mind, that is the most solemn and the grandest place on earth. It is not large, but its proportions are so perfect that the actual dimensions don’t much matter; and the workmanship is so simply magnificent that no human hand has ever been able to equal it anywhere. Light from a dozen candles, set in a circle on what looked like a nail-keg in the middle of the floor, cast velvet shadows on the smooth, red granite walls. Baltis, still wearing her hooded cape in spite of the heat, was standing facing Grim. She might have been a priestess seeking the hierophantic blessing. Most of Dorje’s men stood stripped to the waist, with their backs against the wall on Grim’s right, although the copper-bellied man was on his left hand. Chullunder Ghose had shed most of his clothing and looked exactly like a priest of some occult religion, albeit a fat priest given to not too much austerity. Jeff Ramsden in his shirt-sleeves stood near the entrance. Until I came in and stood beside him Jeff was the only genuinely modern touch, because Grim, in that mood and that turban, might have stepped out of a Persian picture; leaping shadows, warmed by the granite background, dimmed the outline of his suit until he might have fitted almost any age and any setting.

  Copper-belly spoke: “It is good yew come. She ball it all up. Can’t get messages.”

  “Why not?” Grim demanded.

  “How? How get them? Too much worry! How make brain blank, and all that excitement? Sit still — sit still — sit still — nothing!”

  Said Grim: “What is worse than a fool?”

  “Nothing,” the man answered. “Nothing.”

  Then, although I did not realize it at the moment, Grim took hold of and began to follow up the thread that was to lead to all the information he needed:

  “You accuse her. But you are a fool, and I know she is not one. Answer now — and don’t let me catch you lying. Have you forgotten the general orders?”

  “No, no. I forget nothing — nothing!”

  “It is easy to say that. Prove it.”

  “Lord of men, he said—”

  “Who said?”

  “Lung-ten Rim-po-che, your councilor. He came to me and said—”

  “Where did he come to you? When?”

  “In Baghdad. Now it is nearly four months since he came to me, in the house between the shops of Gabriel de Sousa and the Parsee Jamsetjee. He came by night. He said: Now! He who calls himself Mahdi Aububah takes a dhow-load of the thunderbolts and—”

  “Whence? From what port?”

  “From Karachi, All-wise. Whither, I know not, but some place north of Bab- el-Mandeb. The meeting place, he said, is this place. Huh. Me, I am to wait for others, who will come and obey me. But I am to obey her. Huh. Because she knows it all. Huh. Orders — he said shall come as usual to me. But I am to tell her. Huh. Obey her. Huh. Couldn’t get orders. Couldn’t hear um. Huh. She said—”

  Grim made a sign of impatience. “She shall speak for herself in her turn. I perceive the fault is yours. Have you been drinking?”

  “Water. Hot. Too little. Out of that. We filled it half-full. Huh. All gone now.” He pointed at the cistern.

  “You say you can’t get messages?”

  “Huh. I said, too much disturbance. Can’t make brain empty. Can’t listen.”

  Grim took another long shot in the dark: “There is no disturbance. This is the best place in the world. What is the matter with you? Have you forgotten the key?”

  “No.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “No.”

  “Have you not had enough training?”

  “Huh. That may be. High there — low here. Hear it all in mountains.”

  “Couldn’t you hear in Baghdad?”

  “Not much.”

  Then the longest shot of all. It was a shot that saved civilization:

  “I will have you tested. If the fault is not yours, then you shall be employed on other business. Otherwise—”

  The man was trembling. “Lord Dorje—”

  “Go to my place.”

  “Which place?”

  “Perhaps I had better rid the earth of such an idiot!”

  “But how — Huh — how I get there? Officers all on lookout — Bombay? No chance. Karachi? No chance. Sikkim? Bhutan? Nepal? Huh. Not a rat get by — not now — not now this happened. Huh. How you get there?”

  “Do you question me, you bungler!” Grim pointed with his forefinger at Jeff Ramsden. “You will go with that man. He is not suspected. He will take you through all barriers. He will protect you; and you will show him the road to my place.”

  “Huh. I don’t know it.”

  “What is the nearest to it that you do know?”

  “Chak-sam.”

  “That is at the crossing of the Tsangpo, on the way to Lhasa. Go there. I will send word. You will find a guide awaiting you. Give him the signal but answer no questions and ask none.”

  “Which signal?”

  “The same that I have been sending you, these days past, and that you say you can’t hear! You dog, you have forgotten it!”

  “No. Huh. How could I forget that?”

  Grim smiled scornfully. He glanced to his right at the others, who were standing with their backs against the wall. They were frightened. I think they would have backed through the wall if they could. “You are all bunglers! It begins to seem to me some bungler chose you. Do you know anything? Which of you knows the signal?”

  Each man made a different gesture of assent. They all knew it, but none betrayed it. I thought Grim was stumped. But I was reckoning (as Grim was not) without Chullunder Ghose. The babu piped up:

  “Humbly this devoted servant makes salaam — and ventures to remind your Mightiness that the signal was recently changed. Perhaps these miserable people only know the former one. That might account for much of all this thusness.”

  Jeff Ramsden, with a subtlety that one would hardly have expected of him seconded Chullunder Ghose.

  �
�It is against the law to give the signal unless there is need!”

  Grim nodded. “It is a wise law. I will not change it. However, there is need now. I command it. Let them give the signal.”

  “Which way?” demanded copper-belly, and Chullunder Ghose stepped promptly into that breach:

  “Mightiness! This babu bows! Wisdom of sparing this individual was not apparent until now to anyone except the All-wise! But I now perceive what you did — that he has an element of merit, since at least he guards that signal! He is not like the fool who betrayed it to—”

  He stopped abruptly, staring at Baltis, who looked too innocent not to be up to mischief. She was standing naturally, with her hands at her sides, not smiling.

  “Thought so. Old signal! Look here!” He held his hands exactly as the Princess held hers, with his left thumb touching the palm of his left hand. “Four-eh?” He moved his right hand, thumb in natural position, merely to call attention to it.

  “Five, eh? Now reverse it. Right hand, four — left hand, five. Then reverse it again — left hand, four — right hand five. I said it was old stuff, didn’t I? Forty-five, minus forty-five, equals forty-five. They have been making that old signal during last five minutes. Now let us sing hymn ‘Bicycle Built For Two,’ which is appropriately up-to-date!”

  Grim smiled at the Princess. “You, too, Baltis? Are you using the old signal?” I don’t believe he knew, or she either, whether she had done it deliberately in order to help him or half-unconsciously from force of habit. But he was so pleased to have learned it that he offered her a chance to lead into his hand again. She did it.

  “Dorje,” she answered, “don’t show these blunderers the new one. They are too stupid. Send not one, but all of them to Chak-sam.”

  Grim nodded. “Nevertheless,” he said to copper-belly, “when you reach Chak-sam, use the old one. It will serve your purpose.”

  CHAPTER 17. “Harlem!”

  We all have our besetting sins; and almost all our sins, except the cowardly ones, are simply more or less distorted virtues. My one predominant obsession, that has got me into endless difficulties, is a craving to row a bit more than my weight. I don’t know how to await my turn, and stand aside, and let the other fellow do his own job unaided. For a man of my temperament it is not easy to learn to do that. But it sometimes happens that a vice turns inside out and becomes, for the moment, a qualified virtue. It did that night.

  It occurred to me to patrol the pyramid interior again, and discover what McGowan might be doing at the pyramid entrance. There was not going to be any fight in the Great Chamber and I was simply wasting time there as a mere spectator. Besides, Jeff Ramsden could probably lick that whole crew single- handed, to say nothing of Grim and Chullunder Ghose, who are resourceful experts when it comes to rough-house tactics. Baltis, furthermore, appeared to me to be playing Grim’s game loyally at last, so that she did not need any more watching than Grim and Chullunder Ghose could devote to her while Jeff stood sentinel over the only exit from the Chamber.

  So I took a flashlight that Jeff had seized from someone, slipped out, not doubting that Grim would notice me, and groped my way downward toward the entrance. It was a good thing that I am no believer in discarnate entities who haunt this earth of ours; it would be easy for a superstitious person to go crazy, alone, inside that pyramid. The light served perfectly to stir such shadows as not improbably gave birth to all the legends about ghosts and demons, and it seemed to multiply the silence as well as to destroy all sense of earthly time and space. Before I had gone twenty paces down the great ramp I had begun to feel like a dead man in another world. It seemed like an eternity since I left the others in the Great Chamber. I could not hear their voices. My mental picture of them was as dim as of the half-remembered scenes of years ago. Bats added to the weirdness, flitting past me so closely that I could feel the wind they made. I had to remind myself repeatedly that I don’t believe in “spirits”; but I only mention that because it helps to explain what condition of mind I was in before I was halfway to the entrance.

  I hurried, not at all sure I was not hurrying for fear of that dreadful darkness and the solemn echoes of my footfall. Sounds ahead startled me. I switched off the flashlight and slipped it into my pocket to leave both fists free. I had almost reached the point where Al Mamoun’s men dislodged a triangular limestone block a thousand years ago and thus discovered the ascending passage, which is still blocked by a tremendous granite plug. Al Mamoun’s men quarried around that through the softer limestone, so that the passage makes a forced turn and the going is not particularly easy. There I waited, irritated by the ticking of my wristwatch because it sounded to me like the beat of a hammer on brass. I could hear footsteps.

  One by one — there is no room for two at a time — eleven men, each one with a lighted taper in his left hand and a wave-edged dagger in his right, came stealthily around the turn and paused before beginning the ascent. Although I was close to them I was probably quite invisible unless the light from their tapers should gleam on a stud or a button. I closed my eyes as much as I could do and still see, to prevent my eyeballs from reflecting light. And I tried to examine their faces; but that is not easy to do by smoky taper-light that makes incalculable shadows leap and intermingle in the Cimmerian throat of Gizeh.

  I thought I could recognize one as the man who was sent by copper-belly to the entrance; and another, I was almost sure, was the man Aububah. If it was he, he knew Grim by sight and probably by name; he also certainly knew Jeff; and though he might mistake the Princess for her sister, it was impossible to imagine him not denouncing Jeff, and Grim too the moment he should set eyes on them. There is no other way out of the pyramid — no possible escape. We were like rats in a trap. I could see the butts of revolvers protruding from more than one cummerbund. And I had no weapon.

  Flocks of thoughts occurred to me, including the exactly accurate, unwelcome one that I was scared stiff. I could not imagine why McGowan had left the place unguarded, or why Grim had not ordered that motor-truck with its officer, searchlight and squad of infantry to keep within hail. Excepting the two faces that I thought I recognized, the others all looked like those of Afghans, or at any rate of Northern Indians; and the only half-likely guess I could make was that these were the guards of “thunderbolts,” to whom Mahdi Aububah had run when we first approached the pyramid. The man whom copper-belly sent to watch the entrance might have gone instead to bring Aububah back; these others might have insisted on coming also. But if so, where was McGowan’s motorcycle Cockney?

  The men at the rear began to talk impatiently, obviously urging the others forward, although their words, in a strange tongue, reached me in a jumble of echoes. I had to stop them somehow. It occurred to me that most of them were probably as scared as I was, and they had no means of knowing I was unarmed.

  “Ya ashab, min di?” I demanded. “Ho there, who are you?” I made my voice as solemnly portentous as I could — not too loud, but sepulchral. And I suddenly remembered the silver case in which I always carry a few concentrated drugs for use in emergency. I snapped the lid. It sounded like the click of a revolver being cocked. Nine of them, in panic, promptly fled around the corner of Al Mamoun’s quarry-hole. However, the other two came forward, which was not so satisfying.

  It was not Aububah. It was not the man whom copper-belly sent to guard the entrance. I had never seen either of them. Holding the flashlight out at arm’s length, so as to remain almost if not quite invisible, I switched it on full in the eyes of the first man. He was no Oriental, although he was dressed in a cotton amami, smock and loin-cloth, and his skin looked almost butter-colored. His features were Negroid, but a lot too intellectual and too nearly like a white man’s not to suggest something other than jungle and desert. His resemblance to Aububah was vague after all; it almost vanished in strong light. His eyes, I thought, were used to spectacles, although he wore none at the moment. I could see one gold tooth.

  “Harlem!” I said abrup
tly. Then, before he could answer, and forgetting for the moment that there are tough men where I did not doubt he came from: “Put that rod down butt-first on the floor where I can reach it!”

  He was scared, or I should have died that instant. But he was as tough as they come. Instead of obeying he pulled his weapon and emptied all six chambers at me. All six bullets clipped the stone within inches of where I crouched. The din in that narrow passage was terrific and I suppose that scared the wits out of the man behind him, who fired too. His first shot almost winged me. His second shot smashed his companion’s backbone. He fired a third shot that seared the skin of my right fore-arm and went out through the sleeve at the elbow. Then he turned and ran. I could hear all ten men scampering like frightened animals toward the entrance. But I could also hear hurrying footsteps behind me. I seized the dead Negro’s revolver and reloaded it with shells that I found in the roll of his loincloth. A man leaped out of the dark. I almost shot him. It was McGowan. He laughed. “I saw those fellows coming, so I hid in the Queen’s Chamber, hoping to surprise them from the rear. However, it can’t be helped now.” We went together to the entrance, but there were a million pitch-black shadows. Any number of men could have hidden within fifty feet of us in the gaps of the pyramid courses. It was several minutes before we dimly saw dark forms hurrying across the sand toward the second pyramid.