E. Hoffmann Price's Fables of Ismeddin MEGAPACK®

by E. Hoffmann Price

  She now was very close to Kane. The silence of that high place brought them closer together. Though her arms were still at her side, it seemed to Kane that she was clinging to him.

  Azadeh was a fine figure of a woman, full blown and luxurious. Moonglow and the heavy fragrance of the attar that scented her hair made Kane’s pulse hammer. His voice trembled. She evaded his questions about her servants and led him to the awning.

  “It is chilly,” she whispered, snuggling closer.

  Kane remedied that. Her soft, luxurious flesh yielded to his embrace. Those full blossoming curves were maddening. Her breasts were masked by metal guards, and she wore no jeweled girdle.

  “Your servants,” he resumed, his voice strained from the effort his throat made to swallow his heart. “One of them is playing a ghastly jest on the master.”

  Azadeh’s laugh was soft and bitter.

  “All my women are black and very ugly. Otherwise he would be hard to manage…

  “The basha,” submitted Kane, tentatively fondling a fold of the gauzy jacket, “must be singularly unappreciative. But since they are all hags—”

  Another laugh; then, “That’s the point. It’s some Gurjestani wench he’s keeping here and getting away with it by calling her one of the night-prowling lilin.”

  She shuddered. Then he realized that that was because he had involuntarily drawn her closer… The contact inflamed him… For a moment their breathing was audible in the silence…

  Azadeh’s eyes were gray green. Her long lashes hid them when he kissed that over-ripe mouth, her breath caressed his lips…he was amazed how tightly those sleek soft arms held him. Azadeh’s native costume was baffling—

  Finally she reached out and took a flask of Shirazi wine from a tabouret. Kane drank it at a gulp. It was heavy and powerful, like honey blended with fire. It had a strange bouquet and it did stranger things to his senses. Whatever it contained, Azadeh was planning to make the most of visiting archeologists…

  Her kisses were none the worse for being wine-inflamed. Neither noticed the evening chill of Kurdistan…neither thought of the prowling demon. The night became a languorous enchantment…

  The moon-glow for an instant blazed into blue-white eye-searing radiance. There was no sound; only that split second flicker. It was gone before Azadeh could start or catch her breath.

  A contented languor was seizing Kane. The flash puzzled but did not alarm him. It might be distant lightning, or the passing of a meteor.

  “Maybe you’d better go,” Azadeh finally whispered in answer to his renewed queries about the specter. “I’ll help you. There’ll be no more night prowling lilin to amuse the basha!”

  He scaled the parapet. He was dizzy from wine and kisses. His entire body tingled, strangely, unaccountably, pleasantly.

  If Azadeh was right, Eisenbaum was not responsible for the apparition.

  And then, as he lowered himself to the inner gallery, a dark form cropped out of the gloom at his side. Kane whirled; but a firm hand caught his wrist, and a masculine voice whispered in his ear, “Very nice, Herr Kane. Now let us confer for a moment.”

  Eisenbaum’s voice was triumphant.

  Once in Kane’s room, the rival archeologist resumed, “I envy your approaches to mystery. I watched and followed you. I brought a camera and a flash bulb, hoping to get a picture of the female demon. A specter would not photograph, being an image of the imagination.”

  He paused. Kane licked his lips. He was strangely dizzy.

  “But you know what I photographed there on the roof. That soundless, smokeless flash, only a hundredth of a second in duration, was scarcely noticed by either you or Mrs. Daoud Basha.”

  “You damn’ stinkin’ rat!” grated Kane. “Why—what—I’ll—”

  “Please don’t throttle me,” mocked the doctor. “I had the forethought to tell the basha that I took a picture which I will develop when chemicals arrive from Bagdad. As a matter of fact, I have chemicals in my trunk.

  “But if I were to be seriously injured in the meanwhile, Daoud Basha would send the films to Bagdad without delay. Once he saw what I recorded, there might be digging, but mainly of graves. Yet if you gracefully retire, I will discover that the films were ruined.”

  Eisenbaum’s voice now seemed to be coming from a great distance. Kane was too stunned to react. He felt as though he were floating on air. He knew that his face must look gaping and stupid. It surprised him even more than Eisenbaum when he did act, almost without volition.

  Sock! That hard fist, slow as its motion seemed to Kane, caught Eisenbaum off guard and on the button. It froze him. He was stiff before he flopped across Kane’s camp bed in the corner.

  Something urged the American to throw Eisenbaum down into the courtyard, and trust to luck to get the roll of film. But though he hesitated at murder, the thought did not horrify him. Azadeh’s kisses and wine had done strange things to him. Yet something kept him from killing.

  He tied Eisenbaum to the camp bed, taped his lips together. He turned, tripped on a heavy Khiva rug, and lay there, clawing the deep, woolly, goat-scented nap. He tried to get up, but could not. Damn Azadeh’s treacherous wine!

  His last thought was, “That dirty louse of an Eisenbaum will be discovered before I can snap out of it… God…what…a mess…”

  He fought his way toward the door. He slumped across the threshold…

  Kane did not stir until something ice cold and very soft caressed his forehead, and a chilly breath sighed into his ear. His clouded senses were betraying him.

  Though he lay on a stone floor, it seemed that he was floating as on a bank of cold mist. The woman kneeling beside him was likewise suspended in space. Frosty wind blew soundlessly past him, biting his cheeks. It penetrated his tingling body but did not dissipate the fever of his flesh.

  Terror and wonder grappled for a deadly instant; then her beauty numbed every other emotion.

  Agrat Bat Mahat was smiling. She was not quite nude, yet he could scarcely tell how much of her was veiled in mist gauze, how much was bare. His bemused senses penetrated all that she wore.

  He was too numb for fear.

  She kissed him full on the lips. Her cold arms twined about him like serpents of frost. She seemed tenuous, unsubstantial as a mist, yet somehow, she was a succession of entrancing roundnesses and long, sleek curves that a man could admire and his arms embrace…

  “Solomon called me from the moon glamour of the desert. I and all those who serve me danced before him,” she whispered.

  Her ghostly voice shook him to the marrow. Her icy touch was more inflaming than any desert sun.

  “Not here,” she murmured, evading his out-stretched hands. “Follow me to the dark land where the lilin live between moons.”

  Her voice was a promise of unearthly delights. Seemingly treading on air, he struggled to his feet. Some far off insistent voice warned him that Eisenbaum would escape and blackmail him out of Kurdistan.

  “No,” his thick lips croaked. His tongue betrayed him. “There is work to do—My enemy—the traitor—”

  She answered, “Your enemy will perish without your hand.”

  Kane believed her because he wanted to. Because as she paused at the threshold, beckoning, the moonglow sifted through the woven mists that clung to her hips, revealing their ivory sleekness, and the gracious sweep of her legs; and it touched to life the myriad of demons that danced in her eyes.

  Nothing mattered but to probe the mysteries whose outer whiteness invited him. Be damned to archeology…it now seemed very real, descending into the land of the lilin…

  He followed her down into the courtyard and toward the audience hall.

  Agrat Bat Mahat led the way into its murky shadows. The solid wall did not block their advance; and Kane was not certain whether the
re were stairs or clouds beneath his feet, nor what caused the tingling, shuddering thrills that tormented his skin and burned in his blood…

  Kane needed no eyes in the blackness that enveloped them. The senses that suffered for lack of light were compensated by those that did not…

  When Kane’s scattered wits assembled, he was alone with dismay. Every muscle ached from the stone flags on which he lay, from the ardor with which he had embraced that phantom of frost and fire. A pale grayness invaded a barred window of the crypt. He was far beneath the foundations of the old castle.

  “I was walking on clouds!” he thickly muttered as the truth made him shudder. “I’m nutty as the basha…”

  His teeth gritted. He dared not believe that a night prowling demon had entranced him. He staggered up and down the crypt, stared at the dusty steps. An age old massive door resisted his tugging.

  Then he saw a pair of golden anklets joined by a heavy chain that would keep the wearer from taking more than a mincing ten inch pace: the adornment of a highly prized concubine.

  Even night-prowling demons take pride in the voluntary helplessness of the guarded woman. But there are times when such an adornment would be a serious hindrance…

  A human woman, and no spindle of frost and fire and moon-mist had worn those heavy golden bands! But why had she so hastily left him that she forgot her trinkets?

  He examined the inner surfaces of the bands. They were lined with cloth, and each link of the chain was wound with silk thread.

  He chafed his numbed wrists and ankles. They were faintly greasy with some oddly scented, pungent ointment. The odor set him thinking. His entire body was similarly anointed.

  Kane regarded the window bars far overhead. He had a hunch.

  He kicked off his shoes, took a running leap at the curved wall, contrived to cling to the crevices in the ancient masonry. Another reach, another course gained. He seized a rusted bar and drew himself to the sill.

  He wedged himself, back arched, into the circular casing. Then, with supports for his shoulders, he braced his feet against the most corroded of the bars and heaved.

  It creaked, spattered rust, yielded. But before he could reverse his position to spring the adjoining bar in the opposite direction, he heard the sound of a key slipping into a lock, then the scarcely audible protest of a hinge.

  A shapeless splotch approached the lesser gloom, where the ghost of dawn was thinning the darkness of the vault. Then came the gleam of steel, and the beam of a flashlight slowly probing the shadows.

  “Eisenbaum!” was Kane’s thought. “Knifing me is better than getting in bad himself by trying to crab me with a photo showing up the basha’s wife.”

  His drugged nerves were shaky. He dared not venture an attack. But when the spot of light found the golden anklets, Kane’s teeth gritted. He had been too muddle-headed to pocket that clue to the woman who was playing female demon.

  Kane flung himself from his perch, diving toward the flashlight. He did not land squarely. The impact knocked them both breathless; but the prowler’s first articulate outcry in guttural Arabic: not Eisenbaum, but Hussein!

  Kane, recovering, jerked himself clear of the darting knife as it blazed across the beam of the abandoned flashlight and hurled himself inside the Arab’s guard. The blade raked his back instead of transfixing him. The pain whipped his drugged body to life. He caught Hussein’s throat, jabbed upward with his knee.

  Though he did not lay the Arab out cold, the counterattack was not entirely a failure. Hussein, roaring with pain, lurched against the masonry. Kane snatched the linked anklets and flailed them across the turbaned head.

  That settled Hussein. Kane seized the flashlight; and he hunted the key to the vault, the mystery of the night-wandering demon began clearing up. His first move, however, was to imprison Hussein, then get the damning film from Eisenbaum.

  He had scarcely found the ponderous wooden key when voices echoed from the stairs, and the glare of torches invaded the gloom. Daoud Basha and half a dozen servants bounded into the vault.

  “Seize him!” shouted the governor.

  Kane froze. Eisenbaum must have escaped and developed that damning picture! “Stand back!” bluffed the American, staffing for time. “I’ve found the home of the night-prowling demon. Look at these anklets—they are hers. Hussein is her accomplice. He came down here to slay me lest I betray the secret. How else could I, a stranger, have found this place?”

  Daoud Basha’s expression changed; but his wrath again blazed out: “Father of pigs! You have blackened my face! Bring them both. Bring everything!”

  They closed in, kicking, slugging, throttling Kane into submission. As they carried him up the stairs, he cursed the scruples that had kept him from hurling the treacherous Eisenbaum to his death in the courtyard below.

  And then, in the gray dawn, Kane recognized the room into which the stairs opened: the audience hall, where the phantom had appeared the night before!

  “Wait!” he croaked, recovering his breath. “This is where the phantom disappeared! No evil spirit, but some treacherous servant employed by your enemies! I have kept my promise!”

  “Likewise keep your breath!” growled Daoud Basha. He halted, stroked his beard, then said, “But first see Eisenbaum, brother of a dog.”

  Kane vainly renewed his desperate struggles, but the sturdy negroes mocked his efforts. He would have no chance to prove that Hussein had conspired to hound the basha to madness and thus have him deprived of his position, that the wearer of the golden anklets had with drugs and phosphorescent fabrics tricked the basha as well as Kane. That damning picture would cost him his head.

  Instead of carrying him to Eisenbaum’s quarters, they took Kane to his own room.

  “Look!” thundered Daoud Basha. “You slew this man, your rival. And I am responsible for his safety!”

  Eisenbaum’s throat was slashed from ear to ear. The body and floor and cot were drenched with blood; but gruesome as the spectacle was, Kane regained his courage. He still had a chance to get that film.

  “Would I be fool enough to kill him,” he countered, “when I had only to expose the night-wandering demon and so win the concession?”

  “By Allah! That is right,” admitted Daoud Basha.

  Kane, suddenly jerking his wrists free, took the anklets from his pocket, and said, “Could a phantom wear things so heavy? And your servant has that key to the vault. Where did he find it?”

  “On the floor, effendi, where these two were fighting,” answered the negro.

  The Arab, blinking and groggy, was supported by two of the servants; but he was rapidly appraising the situation.

  Kane resumed, “You discovered Eisenbaum. Then you heard the struggle as Hussein tried to kill me. How did he know of that vault?”

  “What led you to that secret place?” countered the basha.

  “The lady of the moonlight,” answered Kane. “One of your female servants. She drugged me. She smeared me with an ointment containing aconite and other herbs which make the skin tingle and produce a cool numbness so that one can not feel the floor and thus has the sensation of floating on air. Smell this ointment—is it familiar?”

  “By Allah! You are right!” admitted the basha, after a whiff of the grease that still adhered to Kane’s wrist. “I also noted that odor when the terror left me!”

  “My disappearance,” continued the American, “would blacken your face. I came here under the King’s protection. You would be deposed, and your enemy would succeed you.”

  “Hussein,” the basha sternly demanded, “how did you have a key to that vault of which even I knew nothing?”

  The Arab’s face for an instant betrayed his fear; then his piggish eyes gleamed triumphantly, and he answered, “I did not have the key. He was not with any demon. He was with Azade
h Hanoum, may Allah pardon me for saying it! I followed them. She unlocked the vault.”

  As the basha’s face darkened, Hussein fumbled in a pouch fastened to his belt.

  “Look at this picture of them! Eisenbaum took it while they were on the housetop. They slew him so that he could not betray their secret. I followed them. But she escaped.”

  Kane already felt the knife at his throat. There was a dull roaring in the American’s ears, and his legs were turning to spaghetti. In the ruddy, flickering glow of the guttering torches he caught the gleam of celluloid, and the stains on Hussein’s fingers.

  It was all clear now: the crafty Arab had developed the film and killed Eisenbaum to protect Azadeh; and now, cornered, he was betraying her. But even if Kane proved that, he was still damned by his own indiscretion!

  The torchlight was treacherous. Hussein stepped to the balcony railing, beckoned to the governor, and said, “Look through it, ya basha—”

  And then Kane saw the ghost of a chance. The picture was a negative, not a print!

  Catching the amazed negroes off guard, he jerked clear and leaped for-ward, crowding Hussein against the rail and snatching the film from his fingers.

  “Grab him!” roared the startled Arab.

  But his yell was cut short by a spattering of pottery. A heavy earthenware jar crashed down from the edge of the canopy, shattering Hussein’s upturned forehead. As he dropped, temple crushed by the deadly impact, Kane caught a glimpse of a woman’s white hand.

  No need to wonder whose it was!

  “Look, Daoud Basha!” shouted Kane as Hussein shuddered and slumped face down in a gruesome pool of blood and splinters of bone and fragments of pottery, “It is not Azadeh Hanoum. It is a black woman!”

  “Hussein hoped to trick you into slaying me. Then you would have been deposed, and he would have gained your post.”

  He did not add that Azadeh would have been part of the plunder; and for a long moment, he wondered if the dim light and the basha’s ignorance of photography would clinch the bluff. He was drenched with sweat before the Turk finally gestured to dismiss the burly negroes; and Daoud Basha’s words left him too dazed even to move.