The Ultimate Weird Tales Collection - 133 stories - Clark Ashton Smith (Trilogus Classics) (221 page)

Ahmet folded the letter again and sealed it with the wax. He viewed his work with great satisfaction, for to his eye there was absolutely no difference between its present appearance, and the appearance in which it had been. "That was well-done," he said, with a sigh of satisfaction as he replaced the whole in the wallet, and the wallet in its hiding place.

Then he went on, thinking of the treasure and keeping a sharp outlook for the cave in which it was hidden. At last he saw it.

"What harm can there be in taking a look at the treasure itself?" He said. His curiosity overcame him, and he dismounted and tied his horse to a tree. Then he entered the cave. It was large enough for him to stand upright [inside, but at] a distance of twenty feet from the mouth it grew smaller and he was compelled to crawl on his hands and knees. The floor was dry and no reptiles were visible. That, he reflected, was one advantage. Everything was dark and he could no longer see. He stopped for a moment, drew a taper from under his caftan, and lit it.

Then he went on and at last reached the end of the passage. It was a small chamber, seemingly cut out in the solid rock, and perfectly square as to shape.

Ahmet stood up and examined it. It was evidently the end of the cave. In the corner opposite to him, he perceived ten great earthenware jars, each large enough to hold three or four gallons.

Concluding that these contained the treasure, he crossed to them and removed the lid from the first that met his hand. It was full to the top with golden coins. Ahmet hastily replaced the cover and opened the next. It was full to the brim with silver.

The third was half-full of diamonds and rubies, and all manner of jewels. One particularly large one caught his eye, and he picked it up to examine it more closely.

"Why should I not keep it?" he exclaimed half-aloud. "Who should be the wiser?"

"I would," said a deep and well-known voice from behind him. Turning, he beheld the Shah standing in the entrance and regarding him fixedly.

"Ahmet," he said, coldly, "what are you doing here?"

Ahmet turned pale and stammered out some excuse.

"Come with me," replied Genghis shortly, and he led the way out of the cave. In the road without, the unhappy messenger saw the Shah's escort, all mounted and evidently waiting for them.

"Ahmet," said Genghis, "give me Amurath's letter." Ahmet, trembling with fear, produced it and gave it to his master. The Shah broke the seal and read the contents. "It was a remarkable coincidence that you happened to enter this cave," he said, suspiciously. Then he examined the seal.

"This wax was made in Bagdad." He announced. "The Sultan's wax is always made in Istanbul, and by a man employed especially for this purpose. It has a much different smell from the wax that forms this seal. It seems to me, Ahmet, that you are guilty of disobeying the Sultan's orders, for I am sure that he enjoined you not to open this letter. Besides, it is a serious crime to open any letter sent to me. In addition to this you were about to steal part of the treasure, and would undoubtedly have done so, had I not caught you in the act. It is very plain that you deserve either death or banishment from Persia. I give you the choice. Which?"

"Death, your Majesty!" said Ahmet, his face full of shame and fear.

"Bring the treasure to me," said Genghis to some of his retinue. They dismounted and hastened to execute his orders.

"Now, Ahmet," said the Shah, "perhaps you would like to know how I found you here. I grew impatient for your return and set out with a number of my servants to meet you. When we came to this hill we espied your horse tied to a tree and knew that you were somewhere near. I perceived the cave, and instantly divined that you had entered it for something or other, what, I did not then know. I followed, and found you about to remove a diamond from the treasure. That is all."

"Your Majesty," said Ahmet, "I beg your forgiveness. If the Sultan had not told me not to open the letter, all these unpleasant things could never have happened. Morally, all the fault lies with him. My curiosity did the rest, not me. I was helpless under its influence."

"Your reasoning is all very pretty, but it would never do before a cadi," replied the Shah, with an amused smile.

Ahmet bowed his head in resignation to his fate, and said: "Very well, your Majesty. If you say so, it must be so."

"Seek not to soften my verdict by flattery," said Genghis, "If you do so it will be all the worse for you."

The mental torture that Ahmet underwent during the next week is entirely beyond my powers to describe. It is sufficient to say that by the time he and his captors entered Ispaham, he had lost many pounds of flesh.

The Shah watched him closely and began to pity the poor fellow. On the day set for Ahmet's death, he called the man before him.

The headsman and his block were in the room. Two guards stood on either side of the prisoner. Otherwise, the apartment was empty. Silence prevailed for a moment, and then the Shah spoke.

"Ahmet," he said, "I think you have died a thousand deaths during the last few days, from fear. I said that you should die but once. Is that not true?"

"Yes, your Majesty," said Ahmet, seeing a thread of hope and grasping it eagerly.

"I do not think that you will be inclined to break the law again," spoke Genghis, "after all that you have suffered. Remember, my dear Ahmet, that a mental death is much worse than a material one. You may go free."

THE STAIRS IN THE CRYPT

It is told of the necromancer Avalzaunt that he succumbed at length to the inexorable termination of his earthly existence in the Year of the Crimson Spider during the empery of King Phariol of Commorium. Upon the occasion of his demise, his disciples, in accordance with the local custom, caused his body to be preserved in a bath of bituminous natron, and interred the mortal remains of their master in a mausoleum prepared according to his dictates in the burying-grounds adjacent to the abbey of Camorba, in the province of Ulphar, in the eastern parts of Hyperborea.

The obsequies made over the catafalque whereupon reposed the mummy of the necromancer were oddly cursory in nature, and the enconium delivered at the interment by the eldest of the apprentices of Avalzaunt, one Mygon, was performed in a niggardly and grudging manner, singularly lacking in the spirit of somber dolence one should have expected from bereaved disciples gathered to mourn their deceased mentor. The truth of the matter was that none of the former students of Avalzaunt had any particular cause to bemoan his demise, for their master had been an exigeant and rigorous taskmaster and his cold obduracy had done little to earn him any affection from those who had studied the dubious and repugnant science of necromancy under his harsh and unsympathetic tutelage.

Upon their completion of the requisite solemnities, the acolytes of the necromancer departed for their ancestral abodes in the city of Zanzonga which stood nearby, whilst others cloigned themselves to the more distant Cerngoth and Leqquan. As for the negligent Mygon, he repaired to the remote and isolated tower of primordial basalt which rose from a headland overlooking the boreal waters of the eastern main, from which they all come for the funereal rites. This tower had formerly been the residence of the deceased necromancer but was now, by lawful bequest, devolved upon himself as the seniormost of the apprentices of the late and unlamented mage.

If the pupils of Avalzaunt assumed that they had taken their last farewells of their master, however, it eventuated that in this assumption they were seriously mistaken. For, after some years of repose within the sepulchre, vigor seeped back again in the brittle limbs of the mummified enchanter and sentience gleamed anew in his jellied and sunken eyes. At first the partially-revived lich lay somnolent and unmoving in a numb and mindless stupor, with no conception of its present charnel abode. It knew, in fine, neither what nor where it was, nor aught of the peculiar circumstances of its untimely and unprecedented resurrection.

On this question the philosophers remain divided. One school holds to the theorum that it was the unseemly brevity of the burial rites which prevented the release of the spirit of Avalzaunt from its clay, thus initiating the unnatural revitalization of the cadaver. Others postulate that it was the necromantic powers inherent in Avalzaunt himself which were the sole causative agent in his return to life. After all, they argue, and with some cogence, one who is steeped in the power to effect the resurrection of another should certainly retain, even in death, a residue of that power sufficient to perform a comparable revivification upon oneself. These, however, are queries for a philosophical debate for which the present chronicler lacks both the leisure and the learning to pursue to an unequivocal conclusion.

Suffice it to say that, in the fullness of time, the lich had recovered its faculties to such a degree as to become cognizant of its internment. The unnatural vigor which animated the corpse enabled it to thrust aside the heavy lid of the black marble sarcophagus and the mummy sat up and stared about itself with horrific and indescribable surmise. The withered wreaths of yew and cypress, the decaying draperies of funereal black and purple, the sepulchral decor of the stone chamber wherein it now found itself, and the unmistakable nature of the tomb-furnishings, all served alike to confirm the reanimated cadaver in its initial impressions.

It is difficult for we, the living, to guess at the thoughts which seethed through the dried and mould-encrusted brain of the lich as it pondered its demise and resurrection. We may hazard it, however, that the spirit of Avalzaunt quailed before none of the morbid and shuddersome trepidations an ordinary mortal would experience upon awakening within such somber and repellent environs. Not from shallow impulse or trivial whim had Avalzaunt in his youth embarked upon a study of the penumbral and atrocious craft of necromancy, but from a fervid and devout fascination with the mysteries of death. In the swollen pallor of a corpse in the advanced stages of decomposition had he ever found a beauty superior to the radiance of health, and in the mephitic vapors of the tomb a perfume headier than the scent of summer gardens.

Oft had he hung in rapturous excitation upon the words which fell, slow and sluggish, one by one, from the worm-fretted lips of deliquescent cadavers, or gaunt and umber mummies, or crumbling lichs acrawl with squirming maggots and teetering on the sickening verge of terminal decay. From such, rendered temporarily animate by his necromantic art, it had been his wont to extort the abominable yet thrilling secrets of the tomb. And now he, himself, was become just such a revitalized corpse! The irony of the situation did not elude the subtlety of Avalzaunt.

Among the various implements of arcane manufacture which the pupils of Avalzaunt had buried in the crypt beside the mortal remains of their unlamented master there was a burnished speculuum of black steel wherein presently the cadaver of Avalzaunt beheld its own repulsive likeness. It was skull-like, that sere and fulvous visage which peered back at the necromancer from the ebon depths of the magic mirror. Avalzaunt had seen such shrunken and decayed lineaments oft aforetime upon prehistoric mummies rifled from the crumbling fanes of civilizations anterior to his own. Seldom, however, had the reanimated lich gazed upon so delightfully decomposed and withered a visage as this bony and wizened horror which was its own face.

The lich next turned its rapt scrutiny on what remained of its lean and leathery body and tested brittle limbs draped in the rags of a rotting shroud, finding these embued with an adamantine and a tireless vigor, albeit they were gaunt and attenuated to a degree which may only be described as skeletal. Whatever the source of the supranormal energy which now animated the corpse of the necromancer, it lent the undead creature a vigor it had never previously enjoyed in life, not even in the long-ago decades of its juvenescence.

As for the crypt itself, it was sealed from without by pious ceremonials which rendered the portals thereunto inviolable by the mummy in its present mode of existence as one of the living dead. Such precautions were customary in the land of Ulphar, which was the abode of many warlocks and enchanters during the era whereof I write; for it was feared that wizards seldom lie easy in their graves and that, betimes, they are wont to rise up from their deathly somnolence and stalk abroad to wreak a dire and ghastly vengeance upon those who wronged them when they lived. Hence was it only prudent for the timid burghers of Zanzonga, the principal city of this region of Hyperborea, to insist that the tombs of sorcerers be sealed with the Pnakotic pentagram, against which such as the risen Avalzaunt may not trespass without the severest discomfiture.

Thus it was that the mummy of the necromancer was pent within the crypt, helpless to emerge therefrom into the outer world. And there for a time it continued to sojourn: but the animated lich was in no wise discommoded by its enforced confinement, for the bizarre and ponderous architecture of the crypt was of its own devisal, and the building thereof Avalzaunt had himself supervised. Therefore it was that the crypt was spacious and, withal, not lacking in such few and dismal amenities as the reposing-chambers of the dead may customarily afford their ghastly habitants. Moreover, the living corpse bethought itself of that secret portal every tomb is known to have, behind the which there doubtless was a hidden stair went down the black, profound, abysmal deeps beneath the earth where vast, malign and potent entities reside. The Old Ones they were called, and among these inimical dwellers in the tenebrous depths there was a certain Nyogtha, a dire divinity whom Avalzaunt had often-times celebrated with rites of indescribable obscenity.