Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

“I take it you intend to pursue them?” asked Malik.

  “It’s our first real lead on these invisible marauders.”

  “Good. I look forward to it, but I’ll need a good night’s sleep if I am to kill so many kaffir,” the Pathan said, and rolled over to return to sleep.

  The next morning Captain Conder addressed the assembled expedition. Having heard Conder’s intention to travel to the Russian camp and track the bandits down, the two Tibetan guides were unhappy but resigned. Their Uyghur translator, Qasim, was utterly despondent and could not seem to make himself useful or sit still. The seventeen Kashmiri Sepoys were hard-faced and grim. The six Gurkhas, however, seemed utterly indifferent. They packed their gear with the carefree cheer one would expect for a short walk to the creek for an afternoon of fishing. The Cossack remained under guard, hands tied, weapons secured.

  The expedition moved with a dreary monotony, only differentiated from the days before the Cossack’s arrival by the knowledge that they were edging ever closer to a terrible danger. Shkuro had taken nearly two weeks to catch up with the English expedition, but he was just a single horseman. Moving twenty-nine men and sixteen horses meant a lugubrious crawl. The towering Kulun Shan were cold, dry, and devoid of trees. The ground was broken, rocky, and bad on horses. Conder marveled that Shkuro had avoided injuring his pony during his weeks in the saddle.

  The journey left plenty of time for the men to ruminate on the impending threat. Save for the Gurkhas, the Cossack, and Conder, everyone else, even the Tibetan Baltis, were Mohammedans. Malik Khan read to them from the Koran at night, paying extra attention to those suras that exalted the struggle against polytheists and devil worshippers. Certainly, Malik assured the men, these savages could not be of the Umma, and killing vile poisoners would be righteous Jihad. His words had the desired effect.

  At the end of each day’s march, Conder interrogated Uryadnik Shkuro about the conditions they would find as they backtracked his trail. Shkuro responded to Conder’s questions, but his answers were terse and guarded. Conder suspected the Cossack hadn’t yet accepted his ignorance of the dangers posed by the pygmy inhabitants of the Tsang Pass. On the third night Conder ordered the Cossack’s hands untied. On the fifth, he returned the Cossack’s weapons to him. Thereafter Shkuro answered the captain’s questions as completely as their limited ability to communicate would allow.

  Yet what Shkuro told Conder didn’t make much sense, even accounting for the unevenness of his Russian. The Cossack described twin statues of dead, bat-winged dogs, carved from dark stone. He spoke of abandoned villages of stone huts, surrounded by rings of menhirs. He described the massive bones of unidentifiable animals. When Conder spoke with his Balti guides and his Uyghur translator, none of the men would admit any knowledge of such things, but the fear on their faces was obvious. Conder decided not to excite them further and kept the Cossack’s descriptions to himself.

  On the sixteenth day of their march, Havildar Thapa announced the expedition was under surveillance. Without making any physical move to indicate the location of the observers, Thapa described their hiding place in terms that even an Englishman could understand.

  “Excellent work, Havildar,” Conder said, blowing on his tin cup brimming with yak-butter tea. “Bring me some prisoners after dark.”

  “Most assuredly, my Captain,” Thapa beamed. “A distraction would be most helpful during the approach on their position.”

  “Yes,” said Conder. “I think that can be arranged.”

  Several hours later, as the last traces of light faded from the sky, Gurkha Naik Rai launched into an uneven performance of “Garryowen” on his bagpipes, followed by a very credible rendition of “The Campbells are Coming.” Rai had just finished a fine performance of “The Minstrel Boy” when everyone in camp heard the screams. Seconds later Havildar Thapa blew the all clear on his whistle. Thapa and the four other Gurkha Riflemen emerged from the darkness, dragging two limp figures and prodding a third along at the point of their kukris.

  “Any of them get away, Havildar?” Conder asked.

  “No, my Captain, not a one,” Thapa responded cheerfully.

  “Any casualties?”

  “No, my Captain, not a one.”

  “Excellent work, Havildar.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s always better to have music when we work.”

  “Now,” said Conder more seriously, “let us get a look at — good lord, Havildar! Where are his clothes?”

  Thapa’s smile dropped into a scowl. “This soldier must report that the enemy is clothed.”

  Conder looked again. The prisoner’s exposed genitals were plainly obvious. The squat, dirty figure could not have been taller than four feet. The first thing that stood out was how black he was — his face, his hair, even his skin. Not naturally black, but stained with a kind of pigment, perhaps to make his naked skin less reflective for night fighting. Pale gray eyes shone brightly from his darkened face. His limp black hair was cut into a bowl that sat high atop his slightly oversized head, leaving the area above his temples and ears completely shaven. Conder was unable to place the man’s race, even under the illumination of an oil lamp. He seemed disturbingly Caucasian, only with deeply wrinkled features and skin that made him appear greatly aged. Around his neck hung necklaces of bone, and leather trinkets and fetishes, including a large leather pouch on a thong. As Conder stared, he realized that the pouch was made from the skin peeled from a human head, the eyes, nose, and mouth sewn shut to keep the bag’s contents from spilling onto the ground. Then Conder saw the seams. The pygmy was not naked. It was wearing the hide of a man, tanned and cured and sewn into a buckskin-like garment.

  “Bloody hell,” Conder whispered. The pygmy sensed Conder’s revulsion and giggled in amusement. It sat on the ground smiling, blood running down its face from a gash delivered by the flat of Havildar Thapa’s kukri. The disgusting creature turned its bloodied head to smile at everyone in turn, and show the pointed teeth that adorned its too-wide mouth.

  Filed, perhaps? Conder wondered. “Get Qasim over here. I have some questions for this… thing.” But the Uyghur translator would not approach. He sat by a low fire and kept his back to the prisoner.

  “Qasim!” Conder called, but the man would not budge. Conder strode over and struck his best authoritarian pose. “Qasim!” he said in the Pathan tongue they shared, “you have a job to do.”

  “No,” Qasim responded flatly. The blunt refusal in the face of the expedition’s leader left the rest of the men exchanging worried looks.

  “Qasim, you’ll either do your job or you’ll lose your pay.”

  “Take my pay,” said Qasim. “I’ll keep my soul.”

  Besides Khan, some of the Kashmiri also spoke Pathan. Not wanting them to overhear, he waved them off. Conder squatted down next to Qasim and lowered his voice to a whisper. “You know this man’s tribe?”

  “It is no man. It only wears the skin of a man.”

  Conder took a moment. Out east, men took their ju-ju very seriously indeed. It was not something Conder could dismiss. “Do you mean its garment?”

  “No. Beneath that skin there is no man. Only al-Shayṭān. Only Iblīs.”

  “Is this a thing permitted to be spoken of?”

  Qasim looked around, as if to ensure that no one was close enough to overhear. “It is not safe,” Qasim hissed. “There are things that hear their names if you speak them.”

  “Then we won’t speak its name.”

  “No. It has seen me. You spoke my name in front of it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Malik Khan interrupted. “That little monster can’t answer our questions.”

  Conder leapt to his feet, fearing that one of his men had prematurely pushed a knife through the pygmy. “Did someone — ”

  “No. This happened a long time ago. Come and see for yourself.”

  Malik had discovered it while examining the teeth of the two dead pygmies to determine if they were filed or naturally malformed. I
n point of fact, they were artificially shaped. Prying the corpses’ jaws open, Malik showed Conder the more disturbing discovery.

  “Their tongues have been cut out.”

  Conder recoiled at the strangely empty mouths, ringed with triangular incisors. “And the live one?”

  “The same.”

  “Anything of note in their kits?”

  “Not particularly. Crudely forged iron knives. A few darts covered in a foul-smelling paste. Their dart-throwers are carved from human thighbones. Their… clothes seem useless against cold. Their footwear is little better than sandals. They didn’t even have blankets. They must be impervious to the cold.”

  “Did you find rations? They do eat, don’t they?”

  “Some dried smoked meat. Hard enough that you’d need teeth like that to get through it. I fear that it may be… unnatural.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Conder. He tipped out one of the dead pygmies’ small leather pouches onto the ground. Its contents filled him with revulsion. There were a number of feathers, glass beads, shaped stones, finger bones, dried human ears, and a mummified tongue. Upon giving it a second look, Conder realized the pouch itself was a human scrotum.

  “I am going to execute that thing right now,” he said, standing and wiping his hands on his trousers.

  “That would be good and proper, Henry,” Malik said.

  Conder fetched his Navy cutlass from his tent. He had never done well on sword drills with the standard British Army officer sword, but the broad, heavy blade of the cutlass had proved brutishly effective more than once. He drew the blade and tossed the scabbard aside. As Conder approached the grinning pygmy, the creature thrust a hand into its pouch, pulled something out, and popped it into its mouth. Conder raised the cutlass to split the fiend’s skull.

  “I welcome you,” the pygmy said in perfectly accented French.

  Conder let the cutlass fall to his side. The rest of the party stirred in consternation.

  “You have no tongue,” Conder blurted in his schoolhouse French, his thoughts forming words before he could stop himself.

  “I have many tongues.” The filthy pygmy smiled, shaking his grisly pouch. With the eyes and mouth sewn shut, the upside-down visage adorning the bag looked twisted in agony. “I am pleased you have chosen to visit our sacred land of Leng. You and your kind bring rare gifts of bone, skin, and meat to the Unspeakable Lama of the Tcho-tchos. Such gifts would be nigh impossible to obtain without your steadfast efforts to deliver yourselves to our larders. The Lama is pleased by your offering.”

  The trick was disturbing, but Conder had seen more inexplicable things performed by fakirs in the markets of Calcutta. At least, that was what he told himself. He was grateful that no one else in the party spoke French, but even if the meaning of the pygmy’s words were lost, the impossibility of them did no good for the men’s morale. Seizing the initiative, Conder asked, “What are you called?”

  “I am the one who will enjoy shitting you out onto the cold rocks of Leng. What more do you need to know?”

  “How many of you are there?” Conder continued.

  “Enough that the meat of all your fellows will still leave our bellies wailing. But know that before you are divided among the faithful, the High Priest Not to Be Described will gobble your souls and vomit them into the mouths of the gods of chaos, like a vulture feeding her chicks,” the pygmy tittered.

  “That’s very brave talk,” Conder said.

  “We love death more than you could ever love life.”

  “And yet you surrendered.”

  “Because the Lama wanted me to tell you that before you die we will cut new holes in you in which to rut. We’ll use them long after you are dead.” The pygmy’s gray eyes sparkled with a nauseating delight.

  Conder sighed, bored with the posturing. “I’ve quite enjoyed our conversation,” he said gently. “But I think the part I like the most about talking with you is that I’ll never have to do it again.”

  The pygmy’s sardonic expression collapsed into a lifeless mask as Conder drove his cutlass down through the top of its skull, splitting the bridge of its nose. The mummified tongue the pygmy had put in its mouth rolled down its chin and onto the ground. Conder set his boot in its face and wrenched the blade free.

  “This thing,” he roared in English, brandishing the bloody blade, “ate the flesh of men. It wore their skins. It boasted of abominations, as if we would turn and run. But we will not run. We are men of war. And what do men of war do with cannibals and man-skinners?”

  “We tell them the Gurkhas are coming!” shouted Havildar Thapa, raising his kukri knife. “Ayo Gorkhali!” His five men followed suit and repeated the traditional battle cry: “Ayo Gorkhali! Ayo Gorkhali!”

  Malik and the Sepoys drew their khyber knives and took up the takbir: “Allāhu Akbar! Allāhu Akbar!”

  Even the Tibetans joined in. Only Qasim the Uyghur and Shkuro the Cossack remained silent. Qasim turned his back on the whole affair and hugged his knees. Shkuro simply watched the heathens cheering for blood.

  The next day they entered the Tsang Pass. Along the way they found no bodies where Shkuro said he’d shot down his pygmy pursuers, nor did they find the body of the poisoned Cossack that allegedly fell from the back of Shkuro’s saddle. Not even bones were found. Shkuro could offer no explanation except to shrug and say, “Maybe they eat their own dead, too?”

  Three days later they found the hounds. The two statues were mounted on titanic pedestals higher than the tallest man in their party could reach. The elephantine granite statues were an unwholesome chimera of Chinese fu-dog, Egyptian sphinx and jackal-headed Anubis, and Assyrian winged bull. Their lean and putrid forms were as realistically depicted as the artist’s crude ability could manage. The Sepoys lobbied energetically to pull them down with the horses, but Conder ordered them on. Time enough for that later.

  Every day the expedition passed abandoned villages composed of round stone huts, like granite igloos scattered across the valley’s upper slopes. In their forlorn state they bore more resemblance to tombs than homes. The rings of menhirs and rough obelisks surrounding the ruins only compounded the impression of a vast cemetery. The carvings adorning the stones depicted horned figures engaged in unnatural acts of copulation and murder.

  The unidentifiable animal bones the Cossack had mentioned were also in evidence. Although they bore some resemblance to the fossilized remains of flying reptiles Conder had seen in the British Museum, they were larger by orders of magnitude — and as bones, not stones, they represented a creature that had darkened the skies in Conder’s lifetime.

  On the sixth day, sentries reported the expedition was once again under observation. Conder’s orders were to take no action against the surveillance. Show no sign of awareness. Let them get comfortable.

  On the morning of their tenth day in the Tsang Pass, they came upon the wreckage of the Russian expedition. The site matched the reports Conder had read in Srinagar — inexplicably empty villages and vanished caravans. Clothing lay strewn about. Tools, weapons, ammunition lay discarded and smashed. The attackers had gone to great effort to ruin the Cossacks’ Berdanka carbines, splintering their stocks and beating their barrels against rocks. Even the Cossacks’ ponies and goats lay abandoned, stripped by vultures and scoured by ants. Yet no human corpses were found. Not even bones.

  Shkuro set about scrounging for undamaged .42 caliber cartridges for his own Berdanka. Conder didn’t interfere. Looking about, he found Eichwald’s camera, an 1886 Improved Model Le Merveilleux, flattened, and the photographic plates smashed to shards. A leather-bound folio, perhaps Baron Savukoski’s expedition notes, had been burned in a campfire, its contents lost forever. Then Conder found a small crate marked опасность динамит, its contents scattered about on the ground. Most of the sawdust packing had blown away, but the sticks appeared dry and undamaged. A search produced no caps, but plenty of safety fuse. As to why Baron Savukoski had included dynamite in
his provisions, Shkuro pleaded ignorance.

  Conder called the men together. He explained his plan. Under the fading light of day, they moved as quickly as possible to the nearest abandoned village and made camp there. Campfires were lit inside the stone huts. No sentries walked the perimeter. The moon was dark. Conder passed the time converting a handful of .303 cartridges into passable blasting caps.

  The pygmies did not keep him waiting long.

  They were fifty yards from the camp when Conder fired the first flare from his Very pistol. The white star shell arced through the night, revealing hundreds of dark, slithering figures belly-crawling up the slope toward the village. Two things happened very quickly. First, the pygmies, to a man, looked up at their first sight of a burning magnesium shell, and their irises slammed shut to keep out the retina-scalding light. And second, Captain Conder gave the order, “Volley fire! Fire!”

  Twenty-eight rifles roared in unison from behind the standing stones that surrounded the ruined village. Save for the single-shot rifles carried by the Cossack, the Tibetans, and the Uyghur, every man in the expedition was equipped with an eight-shot, bolt-action Lee-Metford rifle. The pygmies took the first volley in stunned surprise. They took the second volley in utter disbelief, having never seen rifles that could be reloaded so dizzyingly fast. As Conder ordered the third volley, the spell broke. Dozens scrambled to their feet to knock their dart-throwers. The swarm of .303 rounds punched fist-sized holes and left limbs dangling from shreds of meat. Dozens fell. Some managed to blindly hurl their darts into the night. They were answered by a fourth withering volley.

  A moan rose from the mass of black figures struggling to their feet. A sound of disappointment, as from the mouth of a spoiled child who has found his parents’ largesse wanting. This was not fair. A stronger voice cried out among the pygmies, and they surged up the slope. Conder reloaded and fired his Very pistol as he roared the command, “Rapid fire! Fire at will!”

  For the next three minutes the pygmies died. Perhaps they did love death more than the trespassers loved life, but after enduring two minutes of sustained fire, the pygmies’ love of death proved to be not entirely unconditional. The last minute before Conder called “Cease fire!” they shot the pygmies in the back as they fled. There was no pursuit in the dark.