The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Caitlín R. Kiernan has been quoted as feeling “too many people are obsessed with Lovecraft’s monsters, tentacles and polyps and shoggoths . . . I think they’re missing the point. At least, they’re missing the part that has played the greatest influence on me, and those elements would be the importance of atmosphere, the found manuscript as a narrative device, and his appreciation of what paleontologists and geologists call deep time. Deep time is critical to his cosmicism, the existential shock a reader brings away from his stories. Our smallness and insignificance in the universe at large. In all possible universes. Within the concept of infinity. No one and nothing cares for us. No one’s watching out for us. To me, that’s Lovecraft.”

With “The Peddler’s Tale, Or, Isobel’s Revenge,” Kiernan uses oral storytelling rather than a discovered palimpsest for a story told (in the fabled city Ulthar) of Lovecraft’s vast Underworld, a universe as indifferent to humankind as the rest of the cold, remorseless cosmos.

Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards. Her recent novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and, to date, her short stories have been collected in fourteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. The most recent collections are Beneath an Oil Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume 2) (Subterranean Press) and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales (Centipede Press). She also wrote Alabaster, an award-winning, three-volume graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics. She recently wrote her first screenplay and is currently working on her next novel, Interstate Love Song.

The Peddler’s Tale or Isobel’s Revenge

“If you are very sure that’s the story you wish to hear,” said the peddler, the seller of notions and oddments, to the tow-headed girl child who called her Aunty. They were not related, by blood nor marriage, but very many people in Ulthar called the peddler Aunt or Aunty or the like. Few people living knew her right name or her history. Most felt it impolite to ask, and she never volunteered the information.

“You should be certain, and then be certain you’re certain, before I begin. I’ve come a long, long way. And tomorrow I leave the city and will not soon return. So, be sure this is the tale you wish to hear.”

“Aunty, I am very certain,” said the girl impatiently, and the other two children — both boys — agreed. “I have no doubt whatsoever.”

“Well, then,” said the old woman who wasn’t her aunt. She sat back in her chair and lit her pipe, then squinted through gray smoke at the youngsters who’d arranged themselves on the floor between her and the crackling hearth fire. Also, there were five cats, none of whom seemed the least bit interested in peddlers’ yarns.

She took a deep pull on her pipe, then began.

“You’ve all heard the name of the King of Bones, and you’ve heard the tales of how he came to power. And of his Queen, his twin sister, Isobel.”

The children nodded eagerly. And the peddler paused, because she knew that the making of beginnings is, as many have noted, a matter not to be undertaken lightly. And, too, the girl had requested of her a very grim tale, which made the beginning that much more delicate an undertaking. The old woman watched her audience, and they watched her right back. She was well versed at hiding exhaustion, disguising an aching back and sore feet behind a pleasant demeanor, not letting on how her weary sinews wished for the rare luxury of a soft mattress. Duty before rest. This tale was the price of her night’s lodging and board, and she was a woman who paid her debts.

Shortly after dawn, the peddler had led the strong draught pony that pulled her wagon over the ancient stone bridge spanning the River Skai, that wild path of meltwater gurgling down from the glaciers girdling Mount Lerion and flowing northwards towards the Cerenarian Sea. She’d lingered a while on the bridge, admiring the early autumn sunrise, the clean smell of the river, and the view to the east. This was always a welcome sight, the cottages and farms speckling the hills beyond the bridge. Behind her lay Nir and Hatheg, neither of which had proven as profitable as she’d hoped. With so many merchants and craftsmen — and it seemed there were more every year — few in the villages and cities had use for a traveling tinker and a seller of oddments and notions, a peddler of medicinals and salves, a woman up to almost any menial job for a few coins. She’d become an anachronism, but at so advanced an age it was hardly practical to seek some other more lucrative trade.

Out beyond the farmland, just visible in a gauzy mist starting to burn away beneath the new day, she had been able to discern the suburbs of Ulthar. She was born in the town and hoped to spend her last years there, fate willing. She did not ever think gods willing, as she had long since learned the folly and dangers of placing one’s hope in the hands of gods and things that fancy themselves gods.

“Isobel and Isaac, the earthborn ghouls,” said the girl, prompting the peddler to continue.

“Yes, well,” said the peddler. “But they were not true and proper ghouls, only mongrels, birthed of a mostly human mother. They were fair, some even say beautiful to behold, their skin white as milk, their eyes clear and blue as sapphires. Their Ghūl heritage barely showed, excepting in their appetites and ruthlessness. Still, they wished to rule as ghouls. By the procurement of a powerful, terrible artifact, they raised an army and threw down the rightful King and Queen of Bones and Rags, and—”

“The Qqi d’Tashiva and Qqi Ashz’sara,” the tow-headed girl interrupted. “And the artifact is the Basalt Madonna — Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb — and, Aunty, I’ve heard—”

The old woman raised an eyebrow and scowled, silencing the girl.

“Now, which of us is telling this tale?” she asked. “And, besides, I’d not guess your ma and pa would think so highly of your palavering in the corpse tongue.”

One of the cats, a fat tabby tom, leapt into the peddler’s lap, stretched, then curled up for a nap. She stroked its head. In her wanderings far and wide from the cobblestone streets of radiant Ulthar, the cats were, perhaps, what she missed above all else. For an age, the citizens of the city had been forbidden to harm any cat for any reason, upon pain of death or banishment. There were not many laws of man she counted wise and unquestionably just, but that surely was one of the few.

“Yes. Those were the titles that the Snow twins took for themselves when all the forces of Thok had fallen before them and the fire they wielded, after even the city of the gugs and the vaults of Zin lay at their feet, after even the great flocks of night gaunts had surrendered. In the days that followed the war, when I was only a very small girl myself, there was fear even here that Isaac Snow might not be content to rule the shadows of the Lower Dream Lands, that he might have greater ambitions and rise up against the world of men.

“You know, of course, no such thing happened. We’d not be sitting here, me telling you this story, if matters had gone that way. We were, all of us, fortunate, for many are the generals who’d believed the might of the twins was so awful that none could ever stand against it. It is written that the Snows were content to remain below, and that they still — to this day — rule over and enslave the creatures of the Lower Dream Lands.”

“But—” began the tow-headed girl, and this time the peddler interrupts her.

“But, child, though this is what most count as the truth, there are those who whisper a secret history of the Ghūl Wars. And if this other account is to be believed — and I warrant there are a few priests and scholars who will swear that it is so — the twins were never of one mind. Indeed, it is said that Isaac greatly feared his sister, for the same prophecy that had foretold their victory also spoke of the birth of a daughter to them.”

“He feared his own child?” asked the boy seated to the tow-headed girl’s right.

“He did.”

“But why?” the boy asked.

“If you’ll kindly stop asking questions, I was, as it happens, coming to that.”

The peddler chewed the stem of her pipe a moment and stroked the tabby tom’s head. It purred, and she briefly considered changing horses in the middle of this stream and insisting they hear some other tale, one not populated with ghouls, half ghouls, and moldering necropoleis, and not a tale of war and the horrors of war. Likely, if she continued, it would end in nightmares for her and the children both. The plains of Pnath and the peaks of Thok might lie far away, and the battles in question long ago, but neither space nor time, she knew, could be depended upon to hold phantoms at bay.

Still, this was the tale they’d asked for, and this was the tale she’d promised, and the peddler was not a woman to go back on her word.

“The prophecy,” she continued, “had been passed down since the ghouls were defeated by the Djinn and cast out of the wastes of the Arabian deserts into the Lower Dream Lands, so thrice a million years before the first city of humankind was built. It foretold that someday a daughter would be born to half-ghoul twins, half-modab albino twins, and this daughter would grow to be a savior, a messiah, who’d be more powerful by far than even her terrible parents. She would, so said the prophecy, lead the Ghūl through the Enchanted Wood and up the seven hundred steps to the Gates of Deeper Slumber and through the gates into the Waking World. Once above, the mighty Djinn would find their doom by the same hellish weapon her mother and father had wielded in Thok. But . . .”

And here the peddler paused for effect and puffed at her pipe a moment. The air in the room had gone as taut as a harp string, and the three children leaned very slightly forward.

“But?” whispered the tow-headed girl.

“But,” continued the peddler, smoke leaking from her nostrils, “the rise of the ghouls would also be the downfall of the father of their champion. Because first, or so went the prophecy, the daughter would have to murder the father and claim both thrones for herself. She would spare her mother, but never again would there be a king and a queen in Thok. Those immemorial titles would vanish into memory and then pass from all recollection.

“The King of Bones and Rags, he did believe the prophecy, for, after all, had it not foretold of his and his sister’s birth and their coming to the Underworld and of their ascension? Sure it had, and if that portion of it was not false then how could he not fear those passages that had yet to be realized? Sure he was terrified, because even so great a monster as he may fear his own undoing at the hands of such unfathomable mysteries as soothsaying. And, what’s more, he soon learned that Isobel Siany Snow — for that was her earthborn name in full, given by their mother Hera — that Queen Isobel was already pregnant. That she had become so shortly before the war began, when she and he were hardly more than storm clouds gathering on the horizon.”

And here the peddler departed briefly from her simple narrative, for the bare bones of a tale are a dull affair and should be dressed appropriately in the attire of atmosphere and the garb of mood. Too easily might this story become a dry recitation of perhaps it was, and so they say, and might have been. So, with words she deftly painted images of the perpetual twilight that lay over the dreaded Vale of Pnath, where gigantic bholes burrowed through unplumbed strata of gnawed bones heaped into the wide valley. She told of towering forests of phosphorescent fungi that pressed in all about the borders of that land in the shadow of the ragged peaks of Thok, mountains so lofty they reached almost to the rocky, stalactite-festooned ceiling of the Lower Dream Lands. It was the ghouls, she explained, who’d made Pnath a plain of dry ribs and broken skulls, for they’d spent untold years tossing the leavings of their unspeakable feasts over the cliffs into the abyss below. In those lands, the peddler assured them, every breath of air was redolent of death and rot. For it was the realm of the grave. It was the abode of nightmares beyond reckoning.

“Oh, and the ghasts,” she nodded. “I shouldn’t neglect to mention them. Terrible, vile, creeping beasts with a bite so venomous none can survive it. The gugs, the architects of Zin, hunted them, and probably hunt them still. But the gugs fear them as well.”

Now the eyes of the children were wide, and occasionally they glanced over their shoulders towards the fire or upwards at the autumn night pressing against the windows of the room.

“Oh, but I have strayed terribly, haven’t I,” said the peddler, and she frowned and knitted her brows, feigning mild exasperation with herself. “Must be the wind brushing around the eaves of the house making my mind wander so.”

“Aunty, we don’t mind,” the tow-headed girl whispered, and the other children nodded in unison.

“That’s all well and good, but, we’ll be here until cock’s crow if I keep nattering on that way. Where was I?”

“Isobel was already pregnant,” said the boy who’d spoken before.

“Yes. Yes, that was it. Isobel, the Queen of Bones and Rags, was pregnant by her brother, and when Isaac Glyndwr Snow learned this he feared it would be the death of him. Everything was unfolding precisely as the prophecy had promised. For the first time ever he grew distant from his sister and withdrew from her, becoming ever more secretive, spending long hours alone or in the company of his concubines. He took to drink and to chasing the Dragon, trying to smother his worries in the embrace of opium. As Isobel’s belly swelled, his scheming, anxious mind swelled with plots and designs by which he might prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy and cheat his own undoing.

“He would kill his sister. Yes. That’s exactly what he had to do. Even though he truly did love Isobel, and even though he knew full well he’d never, ever, ever love another woman, he had to do murder against her. Because, you see, he loved himself far more. Still, the King of Bones also understood that he must take care to proceed with the utmost caution. For though it was true there was no end of ghouls so fanatically loyal to him they’d gladly turn assassin even against their queen, it was also true he had enemies. The inhabitants of Thok were, by and large, a conquered, broken lot, and many were the ghouls who despised the twins and named them usurpers and conspired in secret, drawing plots against the Crown. Isaac Snow’s advisors warned him even the fires of the Basalt Madonna might not save him should there be open revolt. For before, he and Isobel had possessed the element of surprise. They’d never have that advantage again.

“Worse, there were rumors that some among the dissidents had begun making sacrifices to — well, I’ll not say that name here, but I mean the dæmon sultan who serves the blind, insane chaos at the center of the universe. No one ought ever speak that name.”

The children looked disappointed, and the tow-headed girl muttered to herself.

“Anyway, the King of Bones had made up his mind,” continued the peddler, “and nothing could dissuade him from the cold and heartless resolve of his decision. He would see Isobel dead, and he chose the method, and he chose the hour. It was with an especial shame that he cowardly set another to the task. At first he’d intended to do the deed himself, which only seemed right and good to his twisted ideas of right and good. But his advisors convinced him it was much more prudent to order her death by another’s hand. Then, afterwards, he could have the killer tried and publicly executed, and there would be fewer questions about the queen’s sad fate. If it were discovered that the Qqi d’Tashiva had murdered the mother of the child who would deliver all Ghūl-kind and lead them to victory against the Djinn—”

“There’d have been a terrible count of angry ghouls,” the tow-headed girl said.

The peddler nodded, not bothering to complain about yet another interruption.

“Indeed. It’s no small thing to destroy the hope of an entire people, even if the people are so foul a bunch as the ghouls.”

One of the children yawned, and the peddler asked, “Should I stop here? It’s getting late, after all, and you three by rights should be in your beds.”

“No, Aunty, please,” said the tow-headed girl, and she thumped the boy who’d yawned smartly on the back of his head. “We’re not tired, not at all. Please, do go on.”

“Please,” murmured the boy who’d yawned, who was now busy rubbing his head.

“Very well then,” said the peddler, and she set her pipe aside, for it had gone out partway through her description of the Lower Dream Lands. “So, the king commanded that his sister die, and he chose the ghoul who would cut her throat while she slept. He told none but those closest to him, a handful whom he trusted and believed were beyond any act of treachery. But he was mistaken. The Qqi Ashz’sara was every bit as wicked and distrustful and perfidious as her brother, and she’d taken precautions. She’d placed a spy, a ghoul named Sorrow, within her brother’s inner circle. Sorrow was as noble a ghoul as a ghoul may be, which is to say not particularly, but he was in love with his queen, and Isobel did not doubt that he would gladly perish to protect her, should it come to that.”

“That’s a very strange name,” said the tow-headed girl.

“He was a ghoul,” replied the peddler. “Would you expect he’d be named George or Juan Carlos or maybe Aziz? His name was Sorrow, a name he’d found on a gravestone stolen from a cemetery in the World Above and brought into the World Below.”

“But you said,” cut in the boy who’d yawned, “that the Djinn had banished the Ghūl to—”

“—as a whole, yes. I said that, and they did. However, always have there been those few who braved the wrath of the Djinn, hiding among women and men of the Waking World, infesting catacombs and cemeteries.”

“Oh,” said the boy, clearly confused.

“As I was saying,” the peddler began again, “Isobel Snow trusted this one ghoul to bring her word of her brother’s doings, and as soon as Sorrow learned of the plot to murder the queen, he scampered back to her with the news.”

“Scampered?” asked the tow-headed girl.

“Yes. Scampered. Ghouls do that. They lope and they creep and they scamper. And as the latter is the more expedient means of getting about, Sorrow scampered back to Isobel to warn her she and her unborn child were in very terrible danger. Isobel listened, not desiring to believe it was true, but also never supposing that it wasn’t. The twins were, as is generally the case with twins, two peas from the same ripe pod, and she admitted to Sorrow that in her brother’s place she likely would have made the same decision. Sorrow advised her that she had two options. She could try and make a stand, possibly rallying the very ghouls who would see the King and Queen both deposed, currying their favor with promises that she would abdicate and by pointing out that she was, after all, the mother of the prophesied messiah. Or she could run.”

“I’d have run,” said the boy who’d yawned.

“But you’re a poltroon,” replied the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right. “You always run from a fight.”

“Yes, well, have you never heard that discretion is the better part of valor? The greater wisdom lies in knowing when the odds are not in your favor, and Isobel Snow knew the odds were not in hers. So she dispatched Sorrow to enlist the aid of another earthborn ghoul, one who had once been a man of the Waking World, a man named Richard Pickman. In the century since Pickman had arrived in Thok, he’d risen to a station of some prominence among the ghouls, and during the Ghūl War he’d fought against the Snows. Afterwards, he’d gone into hiding, but Sorrow knew his whereabouts, and he knew also that Pickman possessed the influence to arrange the queen’s hasty escape, and that for the right price he would help.”

“But wasn’t he afraid?” asked the tow-headed girl.

“Undoubtedly, but he didn’t believe the prophecy and was convinced that the coming of the albino twins was no more than a coincidence. He was of the opinion that the two were grifters and humbugs who’d seen a chance to exploit ignorance and superstition, and they’d seized it. He certainly did not believe that the infant who’d be born of their union would be the ghouls’ deliverance. In fact, Richard Pickman doubted that there ever had been a war with the Djinn. He was a heretic of the first order, an unbeliever through and through. It wasn’t that he was sympathetic to Isobel’s plight. No. More that he was convinced that as long as her child lived, Isaac Snow would be weakened by his fear of their off spring. And, too, Pickman conjured that the brother’s confidence would be weakened if he failed to murder his sister. Neither of the Snows were accustomed to failure.

“They were extremely arrogant,” said the boy who’d yawned. He rubbed at his eyes and petted a ginger kitten that was curled on the floor near him.

“Sure he was,” nodded the peddler, “and more than words ever can convey. It did not cross his mind that his plot would be foiled, once he set it in motion. They say that the first thing he felt upon receiving the news that one of his confidants, a ghoul named Sorrow — and not George or Juan Carlos or maybe Aziz — had lain in wait for the King’s butcher and gotten the upper hand, the very first expression Isaac Snow’s face showed that night was not rage, but amazement that he could possibly have failed.”

“Serves him right,” says the tow-headed girl.

The peddler shrugged. “Perhaps, if one excuses Isobel her own crimes and makes of her a hero merely because she’d fallen out of favor with her brother. Regardless, after the assassin was slain, Pickman, Sorrow, and several other ghouls led her from the palace and out of Thok, down narrow mountain trails and across the bhole-haunted Vale of Pnath. At last they gained the vaults of ruined Zin, that haunted city of the gugs, and went straightaway to a mighty central tower, the tallest among twice a hundred towers so tall no one could, from the ground, ever hope to glimpse the tops of those spires. They pushed open its enormous doors, which bore the sigil of Koth — a dreadful, awful bas-relief neither Isobel Snow nor Sorrow dared gaze upon — and I should tell you, children, that the history of that tower is a shuddersome tale in its own right, one all but lost to antiquity.”

“Maybe you’ll tell it next time,” said the boy on the tow-headed girl’s left.

“Maybe,” replied the peddler. “We shall see. Anyhow, beyond that forbidding entryway was a stair that wound up and up and up . . . and up . . . to a massive trapdoor carved of slick black stone. It is said two hard days’ climbing were necessary to at last reach the top of those stairs and that the strength of all the ghouls present was only barely enough to lift open that trapdoor. But open it they did, and so it was that Isobel Snow, Queen of Bones and Rags, Qqi Ashz’sara, slipped through her brother’s icy fingers and fled to the Upper Dream Lands. Of the ghouls, only Sorrow went with her, the others turning back with Richard Pickman, who, as I’ve said, hoped her escape would be the beginning of the end for Isaac Snow’s reign. Pickman had instructed Sorrow to lead the Queen in Exile through the Enchanted Wood to the River Xari, where a barge would be waiting to bear them down to the port city of Jaren, from whence they could book safe passage across the shimmering sea to Serannian. Sure, even Isaac Snow would never be half so bold as to venture so many leagues from the Underworld, much less attempt to breach the high walls of the island kingdom of Serannian.”

“The people of Serannian let them enter?” the tow-headed girl asked skeptically. “A ghoul and an albino half-ghoul?”

“You’d not think so, would you? But, see, the lords of Serannian were kindly,” answered the peddler. “And as I have told you, there were generals and leaders of men who’d learned of the Snows’ discovery of the long lost Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb and of the strife that followed, and how they feared the twins might not be content to rule the Lower Dream Lands. So they saw the arrival of Isobel Snow and news of the division between king and queen as a good omen, indeed. Moreover, there is a thing I have not yet revealed, probably the most important part of the tale, the pivot on which turns its plot.”

Each of the three children sat up a little straighter at that, for how could anything be more important than the ghoul queen’s flight?

“When Isobel Snow departed the peaks of Thok and the palaces of the royal necropolis, she took with her the Basalt Madonna.”

There was a collective gasp from the peddler’s audience, and she felt the smallest rind of satisfaction at that. If she had to tell this story, at least the gravity of it was not being lost on the listeners, and at least she knew she was not slipping in her skill as a spinner of yarns. She wanted to rekindle her pipe, but this was no place to interrupt herself. She was getting very near the end.

“But if she had the weapon, why did she not turn it against her brother?” asked the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right.

“I don’t know,” said the peddler. “No one knows, no one now living. Perhaps she didn’t fully comprehend how, or possibly she was unable to use the Madonna without him. It may have required the two of them together. Or perhaps she simply loved Isaac too much to destroy him.”

“Or she was afraid,” whispered the boy who’d yawned.

“Or that,” said the peddler. “Whatever the reason, she didn’t use it against him. She carried it away with her, and by the time Isaac Snow discovered this she was far beyond his reach. When she arrived at Serannian she and Sorrow were arrested and taken to the Council of Lords to whom she told her story and to whom she revealed the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb. She asked for sanctuary, and it was granted. And this even though she refused to surrender the Basalt Madonna to the men and women of that city on the sea. So, it was there her daughter was born, whom she named Elspeth Isa Snow. There in the shining bustle and safety of Serannian it was that Elspeth grew to be a woman, a strong and fiercely intelligent woman, I should add. Indeed, in the spring of her nineteenth year she was offered a seat on the Council, which she accepted. That same year her mother succumbed to a disease of the blood that had plagued her and her brother since birth, and—”

“Aunty, you didn’t mention that before,” interrupted the tow-headed girl.

“It wasn’t important before. Now it is. Anyway, when Elspeth Snow’s mother died the Basalt Madonna passed into her keeping.”

“And what happened to Sorrow?” the girl asked.

“Oh, he was still there. He was, in fact, ever Elspeth’s dearest friend and confidant. She being one-quarter ghoul herself found his company comforting. But . . . this is not the end of the tale. There’s more.”

“It sounds like the end,” said the boy who’d yawned.

“Very much like the end,” said the tow-headed girl.

“Well, if you wish,” said the peddler, “I can stop here. I am tired, and I—”

“No, no, please,” said the boy on the girl’s right. “Tell the rest. If there is more, then you cannot stop here.”

“And why is that?” the peddler asked him.

“My da says that an unfinished tale in an indecent thing.”

Somewhere in the house a door creaked open and was pulled shut just a little too roughly, and all three of the children started at the noise. The cat in the old woman’s lap opened one eye and looked well and profoundly annoyed at having been awakened.

“So,” said the peddler, who had not jumped at the slamming door, “your da believes that stories have endings, which means he must also believe they have beginnings. Do you believe that, child?”

The boy looked somewhat baffled at her question.

“Well . . . do they not?” he asked her.

“I don’t think so,” she told him. “Then again, I am only a poor peddler who sells oddments and notions and fixes broken wagon wheels and heals warts but . . . no, I do not believe so. Priests and learned scholars may disagree — though I daresay some of them may not. But I would ask you, did our story truly begin when the Snow twins waged their war and conquered Thok and Pnath and all the Lower Dream Lands, or was the beginning when they found the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb in the Waking World, the World Above, where it had been hidden in a cavern known as Khoshilat Maqandeli, deep in the Arabian wastes? But no, more likely we’d have to say the beginning was earlier, the night the twins consummated their incestuous love on an altar they’d fashioned to honor Shub-Niggurath, the All Mother and consort of the Not-to-Be-Named.”

The peddler paused a moment, quietly admonishing herself for having been careless and spoken the name of one of the Great Old Ones, and worse, for having spoken it to three children. She picked up her cold pipe and set the stem between her yellow teeth, chewing at it a moment before continuing.

“Might be,” she said, “or might be, instead, the story began when they were born to Alma Shaharrazad Snow, who went by Hera. Or the night she was led by her mother into a ghoul warren in an earthly city known as Boston to be bedded by a ghoul. Or perhaps it all started much farther back, when the Snows and the Tillinghasts and the Cabots — all the members of that clan — entered into a pact with the ghouls whereby they’d be given riches and power in exchange for bearing half-caste children. Or much farther back still, when the Ghūl foolishly went to war against their ancient enemies, the Djinn. Or—”

“I think we get the idea,” said the tow-headed girl.

“Good,” said the peddler, and she managed a ghost of smile. “Good, for I think that is a very important lesson.”

“So . . . what happened next?” the boy who’d yawned asked. He was now very much awake.

“Well, Elspeth Snow didn’t only grow to be a brilliant woman and a leader of Serannian. She also studied military strategy and became proficient with a sword and a bow and with rifles, too. And she studied the mysteries of the Basalt Madonna as well. She’d learned much of the history of the race of ghouls from Sorrow, who never did come to feel at home in the world of men and longed always to return to Thok. Too much sun. The daughter of Isaac and Isobel Snow loved the old ghoul, and she wished always that he could return, and, for that matter, that she might have a chance to see for herself the lands her mother had once ruled, however briefly. She even desired, they say, to look upon the face of her father. She hated him for the strife he’d caused her mother and Sorrow, but some bit of her also wanted to love him as her mother had. In the end, I cannot say what single thing it was led Elspeth to become a soldier, but become a soldier she did. More than a soldier, she became a captain of the Serannian guard, and, by her thirtieth birthday, she’d risen to the highest rank.

“And it was then that she gathered an army from the people of Serannian to march against the despotic Qqi d’Tashiva and end his tyranny. Also women and men from Cydathria did she rally to her cause, and from Thran Kled, and the tribes of the Stony Desert and Oonai and even the fearsome shi’earya of the faraway hills of Implan. She took up the weapon her mother and father had used to crush the Old Kingdom of the Ghūl, and on a midsummer’s night she led her army down into Zin and across the Vale of Pnath. There she was joined by another army, rebel ghoul soldiers who followed Richard Pickman, the earthborn ghoul and once-man. Pickman had become an outspoken foe of the King of Bones and Rags and had long since fled Thok to avoid the gallows. The night gaunts and what remained of the race of gugs also followed her when she rode out to meet her father’s army in the abyss below the mountains. The battle was brief, for Elspeth Snow chose to unleash the fires roiling inside the Madonna. When she was done, her field of victory was a scorched plain where stone had been melted to slag, and of the bones of her enemies not even ash remained.”

The tow-headed girl stopped chewing her lower lip long enough to ask, “And what of the King? Did she slay her father?”

“Ah, what of the King. This is where our tale begins to fray, for none seem certain precisely what became of him. Sure, some do say that Elspeth slew her father outright. Others claim that he survived and was taken prisoner and locked in the catacombs deep below the throne room where he’d once ruled. Some would have us believe that he was banished simply and unceremoniously to the World Above to live always among human men and women, stripped of all his power. There is, however, another account of his fate and, I believe, one that more likely is nearer the truth of the matter.”

“And what is that?” asked the boy who’d yawned, but who was now wide awake and who, the peddler suspected, might not sleep at all that night.

“There is a story I heard the one time I ventured as far as Sinara — I dislike traveling through the Garden Lands, but that one time I did, and, by the way, it is said that soldiers of Sinara were also among those who joined with Elspeth — there is a story I heard there from a very old woman who once had been a priestess in a temple of the Elder Ones. Before that, she’d been a pirate and a smuggler, and before that — well, as I said, she was very old. She’d lived a long and strange life and knew many peculiar tales.

“We sat together in the back of a tavern on the banks of the River Xari, a tavern that served the wharves and all the shady, disreputable sorts one finds dockside, and she told me another version of the fate of Isaac Glyndwr Snow. She said, between fits of coughing and long drinks of whisky — for she was ill and did, I learned, soon after we spoke succumb to her tubercular sickness — that Elspeth took pity on him, for, at the last she saw before her a father. Sure now, children, I grant this is the oddest of all the twists and turns of my story, but often the course of history is many times odder than any fable or fairy tale.”

The peddler closed her eyes, taking care here to say only that part fit for the ears of youngsters and, too, only that part she would not in days to come find herself ruing having said. When she opened her eyes, the hearth fire seemed much brighter than it had before, and it ringed the three children like a halo.

“C’mon then,” said the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right side. “Aunty, what was it the woman in the tavern told you?”

The girl glared at him. “Don’t be rude, or she might decide not to say.”

“I ought not,” said the peddler. Her voice was rubbed thin by the telling of so long a tale, and it sounded to her ears weak and worn thin. “Sure, I should keep it between me, myself, and I. And the cats, of course, for cats know all, or so proclaim the wizened priests and priestesses of Ulthar.”

“Please,” said the girl. “We’ll tell no one else. I swear. It will be our secret.”

“It has been my experience,” replied the peddler, “that children are not especially good at keeping secrets.” She laughed quietly and chewed at the stem of her pipe. “But I will tell you all I know, which is, I have no doubt, not as much by half as you three would wish to hear.” The peddler shifted in the chair, and her back popped loudly.

“The sickly woman in Sinara claimed that her own father had stood with Elspeth Snow in the Battle of the Vale of Pnath, and that he had ridden with her after the defeat of the King of Bones and Rags, down winding, perilous canyon roads to witness the sundering of the onyx gates of the royal city of Amaakin’šarr. There he watched as the Twilight’s Wrath — this is the sobriquet Isobel had been given by her troops — confronted her father on the torch-lined steps of the palace. His guards bowed before her, praying she would spare their lives. But the Qqi d’Tashiva drew his sword against her and stood his ground. In the decades since his sister’s escape he’d known only loneliness and regret, not one single hour of joy, and what was the loss of his life when he’d already lost the kingdom he’d hoarded at the cost of his only love?

“‘Father,’ said Isobel Snow to him, ‘will you not now cast aside your folly and old misdeeds? Will you not put down your blade that I will not have to cause you further harm than already I have?’

“The King of Bones and Rags, he sneered hatefully and advanced towards her, blue eyes blazing, his sword glinting in the light of the flickering torches. There was naught remaining in him but bitterness and rage. ‘Do not call me Father, whore, for you are your mother’s bitch and none of mine. Now, come down off your horse and face me.’

“Elspeth Snow, Twilight’s Wrath, the Maiden of Serannian — for she was called that, as well — did not dismount, as she desperately did not wish to slay the man who’d sired her, no matter his crimes against her mother and against the ghouls and all of the denizens of the Underworld. In her heart, she knew mercy, which Isobel had taught her, having learned it herself from the actions of Pickman and Sorrow. Did they not have fair cause to slay her, rather than aid in her escape? Sure. She had been half the author of their pain and the subjugation of their race. But even the black hearts of ghouls may feel pity.

“‘No, Father,’ said Elspeth. ‘I have brought too much death this day, and your blood will not also stain my hands. I shall not be the despoiler you have become. That will not be your legacy to me.’

“‘Thief,’ he growled. ‘Coward and thief, usurper and witch. You come to take my lands from me, but have not the courage to test your mettle against the rightful Qqi d’Tashiva. No whelp of mine would flinch from her final duty, cur.’

“At that, one of Elspeth’s lieutenants drew an arrow from his quiver and nocked it, taking aim at Isaac Snow. But she was quick, and she stayed the man’s hand. Again, her father cursed her as a coward.”

“She should have killed him,” said the boy who’d yawned.

“Of a certain,” agreed the tow-headed girl.

“That may be. In the years to come, said the woman in the tavern in Sinara, Elspeth would sometimes doubt her choice that day, and sometimes she would wish him dead. But the fact, as this woman would have it, is that she did not kill him, nor did she permit any other to bring him harm. She declared that any who dared touch him would suffer a judgment far worse than death.”

“Then what did she do?” asked the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right.

“What she did do, child, was bestow upon him a gift.”

All three children stared back at her now in stark disbelief.

“No,” said the girl.

“Yes,” replied the peddler, “if the woman who had been a priestess in a temple of the Elder Ones, and before that a pirate and a smuggler, if she is to be trusted. Though, of course, it may be she was a liar or mistaken or mad, and sure, you may choose to believe or not.”

“Then . . . what did she do?” asked the boy who’d yawned. “I mean, what manner of gift did she give such a wicked man?”

At that the peddler smiled and slowly shook her head. “The woman in the tavern did not say, because she did not know. Her father had never told her, not specifically, but said only that it was a gift that lifted from the shoulders of Isaac Snow all his bitterness and insanity, all of his fury and grief. Elspeth’s gift, said the woman in the tavern, restored to him that which he’d held so dear, though how this was accomplished we do not know. But he was changed — and changed utterly. Afterwards, Elspeth ordered him escorted to the seven hundred steps and up, up, up . . . and up . . . to the Gates of Deeper Slumber, where he was sent back to the Waking World to live out the remainder of his days and where he may yet dwell, for none in the Dream Lands have knowledge of what became of him. We can say only, by this version of the truth, that he passed beyond the ken of the world.”

“That isn’t a very good ending,” frowned the tow-headed girl.

“It most assuredly isn’t,” said the boy who’d yawned.

“Not at all,” added the boy on the girl’s right side.

The peddler tilted her head, and she said sternly, “Do you imagine this is the way of tales, the way of the world, that it is somehow beholden to come with satisfying conclusions? If, indeed, it comes with any conclusions at all?”

The children didn’t answer the question. The boy who’d yawned peered over his shoulder at the fire, which was beginning to burn down. The tow-headed girl stared down at her bare feet. And the boy on her right picked at a loose thread in his trousers. Only the girl spoke. She asked the old woman, “Aunty, did Elspeth Snow become the new Queen of Bones and Rags?”

“No, child, she did not. She had no taste for power, though the temptation must have weighed heavily on her soul. Elspeth entrusted Richard Pickman and his compatriots with the future of Thok and with the task of rebuilding Amaakin’šarr. She forsook what remained of the prophecy, vowing never again to be a soldier, and she rode away from Thok and back to the Upper Dream Lands. She took with her the Basalt Madonna, which, I have heard, she carried far across the Middle Ocean and even beyond the Eastern Desert and Irem, City of Pillars. It could not be destroyed, and she dared not entrust it to the hands of any being so mighty they could have undone the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb. But she did hide it, and she hid it well. Some say she cast it over the edge of the world, though, personally, I think that is likely an exaggeration.”

“And what became of her after that?” asked the girl, not looking up from her feet.

“Some say that she returned at last to Serannian, where she died many years ago. And others say she went to Celephaïs, and still others that, by wielding the Madonna she’d become undying and was permitted a place among the Old Ones in the shining city of Kadath. But these are all rumors, and no more to be trusted than ever rumors should be,” and with that, the peddler drew a deep breath and said that she’d told all she could tell in a night.

There were questions from the children, but she did not answer them. She sent the three away to their beds, and then went to the garret room she’d been provided for the night — in exchange for a story. Several of the cats followed her, including the tabby tom, and they stood sentry at the top of the stairs. However, despite her great exhaustion, the peddler did not immediately seek sleep. Rather, she opened the shutters of the garret’s single small window, and there in Ulthar, she undressed before the brilliant eye of the moon and before all the icy, innumerable stars that speckle an early autumn evening sky. The night regarded her with perfect indifference, and she regarded it with awe. And the peddler, the seller of notions and oddments, the nameless old woman who wandered the cities on the plains below Mount Lerion, she recalled her mother, and a kindly ghoul named Sorrow, and the last face her father had worn. And she told herself a truer tale than she’d told the children.