The last dregs of sunlight spilled in bloody pools over his shoulders. Soon night would fall, bringing a marrow-deep chill to the lands about Carthmesh. But by then, Karoth reasoned, his horse would be stabled and his bones warmed by ale and a hearthside in one of the city's many inns.
Wind weasled between the folds of his garment, bringing with it a shudder and the growing of a subtle apprehension. Certain aspects of his approach to the city had been unusual, if not portentious. The roadways had been deserted for leagues. No stragglers companioned him, no late caravaneers, no lovers returning from afternoon trysts in the autumn countryside.
The famous Cemetery of Carthmesh, so ancient and extensive that its population surpassed that of the city itself, bordered the western edge. There no mourners wandered, paying obligatory respects to the dead, placing the last flowers of the season upon graves of loved ones.
Unconsciously he prodded his horse to a quickened pace.
Ahead towered the walls of the city. The Keeper, an old man, bent over like some back-broken insect, was even now shoving the massive gates together, to seal and secure them for the night.
At Karoth's approach, the Keeper shoved the gates violently together. The grating was as audible as the clamor of battle swords against shields.
"Hold!" Karoth shouted.
He threw himself from his mount, rushing toward the greybeard, repeating his words. "Wait! Old man! Hold!"
Karoth had no chance to announce his business in the city, to adjure the Keeper to summon Thorgarth the leweller to identify and vouch for him.
Long before he could speak, the bolts were flung and secured. The gatekeeper rushed wordlessly away, vanishing like some frightened thief into the purple and cinnabar shadows of the city.
Karoth's repeated outcries did little to elicit his return, or summon anyone else to attend him at the gate.
Karoth bent forward, hands braced on knees, panting. Already his limbs were weary from the journey, and his frantic but abortive rush to detain the gatekeeper left them stinging with exhaustion.
In months and years past, Karoth's meanderings had carried him to Carthmesh upon more than one occasion. And yet never had the gates been so early locked. The sky still glowed with pink and purple clouds. Darkfall was yet many minutes away.
He leaned against the thick bars of the gate, peering forlornly, bearing the look of one who stares through dungeon bars to freedom beyond. Again he pondered the unusual stillness of the city.
Not a soul moved within view. The bazaars and market shops, so renowned for their vast array of goods, were closed. Several displayed windows on their upper stories. But he could detect no lamp burning, or form visible.
Carthmesh was shut and tightly sealed as water jars of those who cross the Desert of Zobarth, or vampire coffins in daylight.
Surely the Keeper had seen him. The old man was not blind, for it was at Karoth's very approach that he had hastened to bolt the gate. Was he fearful of enemy spies? Had some outbreak of hostilities arisen between rulers of the realm? If so, he reasoned, why then were there no archers pacing above? And why were there no guards to shout down, demanding his identification and purpose in travelling to Carthmesh?
Farther down the walls, he saw the watchtower. Why did no lights burn in the tower windows to silhouette guardsmen and lookouts and trumpeteers? Those windows, seen dimly in the distance, appeared as closed as the rest of the city, silent as the sepulchers of the graveyard nearby.
Something was greatly amiss. But Carthmesh was not deserted. Snaky spires of smoke began to drift zenithwards from countless chimneys in the city, sure evidence that its inhabitants were there, enkindling their fires in preparation for the night. For it was well known to Karoth that the nights of that land descend with the abruptness of death. And long before midnight, the land shivers as if blasted by gusts of northern hailstorms, or the exhalations of tombs.
Perhaps he should not have parted ways with Jathan and Obernon. He could easily have accompanied them through the ruins of Zahltha, rather than taken the fork conveying him to Carthmesh. But no. He was glad to be out of their company, away from their vicissitudes and heated squabbling. They had joined him in the quest for King Yoral's Treasure for mere greed, for gain, and not for any love of adventuring. True, their services had proved useful, they had fulfilled their portion of the compact, received their share of the rewards. But now the affair was done. And something in his nature had had its fill of such partners.
Karoth longed for solitude.
By this time, Karoth's horse had made its way to the gate of its own accord. Karoth turned and gently patted the cheek of the animal.
"Well, old girl," he said with evident reluctance. "It appears we shall spend this night in the forest. Our welcome has been withdrawn and our pleas ignored. Perhaps at dawn we shall have some answers."
So saying, he turned back along the road which now led him away from the city. He abandoned thoughts of discovering some isolated house or cottage. For he knew that the farmers and tillers and the few herdsmen of Carthmesh tended to their fields or plots of landlords by day, but returned to the fortified city at night. The practice had been instigated long ago for protection in times of war, and the people of Carthmesh were well known for their resistance to change, their tenacious clinging to old ways, old beliefs.
He resolved, therefore, to search for a glen or partially sheltered glade to bear out the night unless his desperation proved great enough to impel his breaking into one of the nearby mausoleum vaults, there to count the hours before dawn in company with rotting liches.
Now, when the thought of seeking asylum within the tombs first entered his mind, instinct bade him to recoil. But as a sudden chill wind began rustling through his hair like icy witch fingers, the idea returned to plague his thoughts again and again.
Night had descended all too quickly about him, like the sudden falling of an executioner's scythe. The last warmth of daylight had now vanished. Not even an afterglow remained over the hills which stretched before him.
His path twisted and curved, carrying him between stands of woodland thick and dark as seas of wizard ink. He squinted at the pathway before him, barely able to distinguish his way. During a brief respite from the wind, Karoth paused to enkindle a torch, reluctantly directing his horse to seek out the cemetery. As loth and hesitant as he was to violate tradition and his own instinctive dreads, even less was he desirous of facing the night exposed and shelterless.
Shivers passed over him in waves. The wind commenced swirling wickedly about him. It spoke. And in icy whisperings it told him of a night to come to rival polar hoarfrost. It snatched leaves, whose color had not yet turned, from the trees, and blew them about like fluttering bats, striking Karoth in the face, dancing like phantoms before his mount.
In his upraised hand, the lanthorn-flame whipped first one way, and then the next. So that, about him, the shadows shifted wildly, flung far by gaunt trees, and soon by rows of grey headstones. For many moments he hesitated at the outskirts of the necropolis. Ultimately, he proceeded.
The moon had not yet risen to attenuate the darkness, and yet even so, the Wanderer needed no aid in locating the larger vaults and mausoleums. He had seen them earlier as he had passed by the cemetery, their outlines being visible from the main roadway to Carthmesh like grim sentinels.
He now directed the horse off the graveyard's principal avenue, choosing instead one of the many arteries which would convey him to his goal. Karoth did not pause to glance at the curious headstones or funerary statues, the small marble monuments and gravemarkers which glared palely at him in the torchlight. He forced such contemplations from his mind, knowing that, were he to dwell on thoughts of the myriads of corpses planted all about him, he would have difficulty enduring the night.
Instead he thought of the cold, which required no effort at all. For it stung his flesh like an icy baptism. He huddled on his horse, head bowed low, body bent close to the animal for warmth.
Karoth was no stranger to biting winds. He had been with Prince Prostis of Yadir, on his deathmarch across the frozen slopes of Chakon Kalth, in search of the reappearing city of Kath Liinth. He had wandered icy slopes where no tree or shrub lay to refuel the fires. And he had left behind comrades frozen blue in the night, and had passed them again on the return trek. He had seen their purple faces, their forms half-submerged in ice, set in eternal poses, like death sentinels, their black lips conveying grim and silent warnings to those who in future days might pass by on the hopeless quest for Kath Liinth. Verily he was no stranger to cold. And accordingly he abhorred it, its power, its deadliness. Karoth, too, was no longer young. His muscles, which had seen over forty winters, now ached from the chill wind. And although his arms were agile and able to wield a sword with all the speed and strength of former days, his leg throbbed from an old injury, from a wound where he had been bone-sliced by the final thrust of one whom he had mistaken for dead. And the recurrence of the aching only added to the burden of his plight.
At length he located what appeared to be a suitable vault. It lay before him the size of a small house, and doubtless served as the burial crypt of some populous and wealthy family of Carthmesh. Its rows of statuary in the form of lions and chimerae bespoke of ancient elegance. A burial place, perhaps, of monarchs, or so his reckonings told him.
Fronting the vault were wide rows of descending stairs. Dismounting, he led his horse down elaborately carved steps, down to the mausoleum portal. With the doorway being sunken thusly, a full eight feet below the level of the grounds above, Karoth felt assured its walls would provide sufficient protection for his horse against the wind's ravages.
He had no difficulty in tethering the animal to one of the iron rings which adorned, not only the doorway, but also the mouths of stone statues upon either side of the crypt's entrance.
The door itself was fashioned, not of iron, but of thick wood, though its pitted and gouged surface betrayed the extreme age of the vault. He drew his short sword, twisted it through the chain. In a moment brittle and rust-green metal lay upon the stone doorstep, the chain a broken limp snake at his feet.
"Of a truth, we have known better accomodations," he joked to the horse. "But as the inns are full, they will have to suffice." The jest turned stale in his mouth even as the words fell.
And so, with torch in one hand, and saddle pouch in the other, he sucked in his breath to steady himself. Karoth shoved with his shoulder upon the door to enter the vault.
The brilliance of the torch preceded him, casting its amber light throughout the chamber, and revealing a spacious room furnished with articles of wood and stone, and richly carved mahogany benches. An orator's podium was visible at one end, flanked on either side by tables adorned with lampstands, wax tapers, and slot-eyed lanterns of metal.
Above, inlaid in walls at heights which stretched higher than the grounds outside, were windows, of intricate and detailed stained glass. Webs of spider silk and dust layered their sills, filmed the chamber and clung in recessed corners and ceiling jointures, undisturbed and unprinted for countless years.
Although there were no actual coffins or sepulchers in the room, a doorway stood in a far wall, silently suggesting the presence of burial chambers beyond, perhaps down a stairway, in unexplored niches and passageways below.
In all, the aspect of the room was not unlike that of a small shrine, or temple, where worshippers would gather to listen to words spoken by a priest or sage. And doubtless the chamber served at one time as some sort of ceremonial room, where select friends and relations gathered for final rites, before interring the deceased in vaults beneath.
The absence of coffins inthe space about him pleased Karoth. For though he was not one to allow fear of the dead to gain mastery over him, and he had seen death's face on many and varied occasions throughout his travels, still he was glad that his stay, at least, would not place him in the same room with the rotting remalns of some Cartlnseshi-cadaver.
For, for some reason, perhaps prompted by the ominously closed city gates, and the witch-like whistling of the wind without, or merely his presence in a night-shrouded cemetery and vault, Karoth felt an unease and tension in the air, and he was plagued by a restlessness; an eeriness born of more than the fears of the dead common to humanity.
Something had driven the Carthmeshians to shrink into their city like a crab into its shell. Something had driven them to such inordinate fear of strangers that they had callously abandoned him to the night outside. Tonight, he recalled, was that of the full moon's blooming. And as all men he had heard stories whispered of things which have plagued men on such eves. And as an adventurer, he had seen things beyond ordinary experience, beyond the understanding or explanation of men
Once he had ridden the waves in a ship whose crew sailed close unto the southern Isle of Orobors, and with his own eyes he had seen the things which inhabit that desolate land floating eerily, their feet untouching the misted ground. He had known of curses laid upon tombs of certain sorcerers, and dire fates befalling those in violation. And in many caravans of pilgrims, and round many fires, and in many alehouses, he had heard tales told of corpses who lie not in their proper sleep, but awaken to roam and prey upon the living.
And so, in the tomb, Karoth coud not dispel, from his imaginings, visions of the dead roaming about, vampires and ghouls, and the other spawn of legend and lore.
Closer inspection revealed that the doorway leading to the vaults and burial rooms below was locked and soundly bolted from his side. And by careful wedging of a bench and lampstand whose shaft was of firm polished steel, he barricaded the front entrance door, so that his fears attenuated somewhat, and his breathing passed with greater ease.
His initial search of the temple-like chamber had revealed myriad funeral tapers and lamps which bore candles whose wax was not yet wholly depleted. And so now, with the aid of a brand set afire by his torch, Karoth managed to light a score of the candles, and numerous lampstands whose oil was still sound.
By slow degrees, due to the torch and candle-flame, the chamber warmed until its chill and darkness, at least, were gone, so that Karoth would neither freeze, nor be forced to shiver the night long.
Drowsiness did not visit him in the hours which followed. For the awareness came that the candles eventually would burn down, and the torches die upon the walls. And he cared not for the thought of later waking, cold and shivering, in a shade-engulfed mausoleum. He therefore elected to remain awake, to tend the torches when necessary, and enkindle other candles when their tallow-wax burned low, consumed by the flames like snow melting in a desert.
And so, for moments uncounted, Karoth sat alone in the crypt, leaning upon one of the wooden benches in a posture of strained vigilance.
He heard no sounds of rats scurrying in dark tunnels behind the walls, nor any other save his own breathing and the mournful whistling of the wind outside, like the wailing of women crying in the streets over plague-struck children; wind which, despite the thickness of the walls, managed to weasel into the chamber in scattered icy drafts.
At length, the solitude was broken by the sudden whinnying of his horse, tethered just outside the doorway. Karoth raised his head and sharpened his ears at the noise, but did not rise until, added to the cries of the horse, there came an unusual tinkling sound, fleeting, as of lost incenses, like the chiming of high-pitched bells in far off temples of Xatharthian gods. It vanished as suddenly as it had arisen, like the unpredictable winds of autumn, which blow at that time of year.
Anon, however, it returned. And despite the braying of the horse, grew in both loudness and clarity. Karoth strode to the barricaded portal, and pressed his ear to the ancient wood. The sound flowed distinctly, the tinkling of a hundred small bells, like chimes blowing thinly in the wind to ward off contrary spirits.
He jerked back with a sudden start when there came an abrupt light rapping upon the door. The cries of what sounded like a woman's voice drifted to his ears.
"Please, if anyone is within, open the door to me."
For a moment, Karoth stood immobile, startled into silence by the unexpected occurrence.
"Please," the voice entreated, with softness and frailty evident in the tones. "The wind blows like ice, and I shall surely die in the cold."
Shaking himself like one who wakes suddenly from a dream, Karoth shoved aside the bench, withdrew the lampstand brace, and flung open the door. In a blast, the algid wind struck him in the face, forcing its way into the chamber with hoarfrost hands. And along with it, there came the robed figure of a woman, her hands clutching the folds of her garment tightly about her shoulder, with her head bent low, concealed by the cape's hood.
Karoth ushered her hastily in, shut the door, and restored the barricade as before.
The sounds of tinkling accompanied her into the chamber, for Karoth saw that the fringes of her cape were replete with myriad tiny bells, small as the little finger of a songstress, intricately wrought from bronze and gold, and fastened curiously with silver threading. The worth of such a velvet robe was doubtless calculated as a small fortune, and was attire such as might be worn by only the most wealthy families of Carthmesh.
"Tell me what ill fortune causes a young noblewoman to be abroad this night?" Karoth asked as he led her to one of the benches. "Were you, too, barred from the city?"
"Yes," she said at length, hesitating as though dazed, or in a waking dream and barely aware of her surroundings. "Yes. I was late, late in returning to the city. The gates were locked, no one would hear me, recognize me, to allow my entry."
Her words came slowly, and yet they were soft and low, like music played in the quiet hours before dawn.
"I saw the lights. The lights in the window, burning from afar. And I followed them here. I saw the horse, and thought that perhaps someone had been abandoned like me. It was my only hope, my only sanctuary. I am near frozen from the winds."
She looked up into his eyes now, for the first time. And her face bore a distant expression, as if she gazed, not at him, but through him, beyond him. Her gaze was dreamy, almost unearthly.
Karoth drew back the cowl of her cape, and raven hair fell to caress her shoulders and frame her face. Perhaps its contrast against the dark locks made her face seem more pale than it was, but to Karoth, her skin seemed nearly white, as of winter snows or clouds garnishing the sky.
She did not protest or object when he put forth his hand to her cheek, to feel its icy softness, as cold to the touch as the wind outside.
"You are nearly frozen," he said. "It is indeed fortunate that you came here, that you did not allow fear of a cemetery to restrain you."
"I have nothing to fear from the dead," she stated quietly. And well Karoth could believe her, for she was not shivering, or displaying any indications of tremulousness, either from terror or the cold. And although her skin was chill to the touch, he noticed no gooseflesh as he stroked it, endeavoring to warm her as best he could.
Karoth felt surprisingly at ease with the girl, perhaps owing to their common plight, but perhaps moreso because of her demeanor. Her eyes bore such a distant look, her voice so smooth as it flowed from her lips, lips dark almost as her hair. She seemed to radiate a soothing aura, an almost hypnotic calm. So that it was she who stilled his fears, rather than the reverse.
"I am Karoth," he declared, slightly embarrassed for not saying so earlier. "I am a traveller, come to Carthmesh from the Ngholan Steppes, where I and two others sought to uncover the lost treasure of King Yoral. And while the treasure itself eluded us, we did not return empty handed. I bear certain gems to exchange in the city for gold."
Ordinarily, Karoth was tight-mouthed with those he little knew, and especially so when matters pertained to money or finances. Yet he felt no reluctance in vouchsafing to the girl of his treasure.
She seemed so aloof from earthly things,I unconcerned with wealth or gain, and doubtless was rich in her own rights. He turned the conversation back upon the girl.
"What draws you to Carthmesh?"
"I dwell here," she answered, still gazing dreamily away. "Although I was absent for this past month..."
"Do you know, then, what has befallen this place? Why the people are fearful, and why they close the city gates early, and cast strangers to the wind?"
"It is superstition," she explained, with words like crystalline streams, clear and blue. "For many months now, and each month, at the rounding of the full moon, there have been slayings. They lay the blame on the supernatural, and fear that a vampire, or lycanthrope, or lamia haunts these hills. And so, each month when the moon is in its glory, they draw inward, and shut the gates, and shun strangers, and outlay their strands of garlic, their symbols, and charms. I forgot the time, and was locked outside, as you were."
Karoth began to reply, to say more, to ask her name, but was arrested by the uncommon stare of her eyes. Their deepness was so intense, endowed with a bewitching charm, and yet he could not name their color. She was indeed beautiful, he thought - not ravishing, for her features were not unsurpassed by other women he had known. But there was something about the curve of her cheeks, the gentle rounding of her chin, the delicateness of her nose, that was strangely attractive, something indefinable, subtle, intriguing.
Despite what she told him a cloak of mystery clung to her shoulders even as did her cape. For she did not seem to be a Carthmeshian. Her manner, her calm, her quiet bearing bespoke of other places, other realms, realms perhaps beyond even those he had visited. And in her bearing there was expressed an almost unearthly, ethereal quality. And beyond that, even more, he fancied. Staring into her eyes, he attempted vainly to fathom the secrets they held, the mysteries, and shrouded glimpses of otherworldliness.
"Tell me," Karoth finally managed to free the words from his throat, "why does a young woman travel these roads alone? Beyond the chance of some accident, there are highwaymen who lurk in the forest, who secrete themselves behind trees and pounce upon lone travellers who provide easy prey. I have travelled many roads, and met swords with those of such ilk more than once. Even upon this journey I have been forced to do battle to retain my possessions."
He gazed upon the fringes of her robe as he continued, "... and those bells. Though they are beautiful and unlike any garment I have seen, surely they can be heard from afar, atttracting vandals and reivers who would steal your valuables, and harm you, perhaps, in ways even worse."
She smiled at his concern, a gentle, unaffected smile. Her face did not blossom or beam as she spoke, but like her voice, it was imbued with a quiet, subtle loveliness.
"As you can see, I am untouched. Perhaps I should thank lady fortune. For even as you say, on most nights, there are highwaymen, and others who fare forth beyond the city walls after the closing of the gates. But I saw none tonight. Perhaps now, with the moon full, they fear the one who roams these hills. Perhaps their fear stills their boldness, and stays their hands."
"Well, regardless," Karoth spoke, "hereafter you at least should demand a servant accompany you on your trips to and from the city. And all the moreso if a murderer indeed roams these hills whether truly supernatural or not."
His last remark caught her eye.
"I sense doubt in your words. Do you deny the existence of such... beings?"
His face stilled. A faraway expression overpassed his features even as a shudder moved across his shoulders an unconscious response to recollections unvoiced. Within his mind, images conjured themselves of past encounters, of sights seen and stories heard on his travels.
"No. They exist. I have seen. But I have also seen men, seen what men can do of their own accord, when driven by fires of jealousy, just, or blood-thirst. Men need no demons to impel their actions. And if some rogue is slaying his fellows, he perhaps is laying blame on supernormal beings. Rumor spreads quickly. It would be an easy matter to drain a victim's blood, making the deaths appear the work of a vampire. It would not be the first time such things have been done under the sun, or under the blackness of night as it may be. In either case, you should have a companion when away from the city."
She smiled again, an enigmatic smile.
"My name is Maura," she offered.
And for many moments, she said no more. Karoth, too, was voiceless. So that, in the tomb, there passed between them, softly as the wind of daytime, long periods of silence. It was not the discomfited silence that accompanies a loss for words, the desperate seeking to find conversation, the silence of strangers thrown together with naught but their plight in common.
It was, instead, a comfortable silence, like the silence of old friends, pleased to quietly share company, or the silence of lovers, long separated, but needing no words to bridge the span of years once parting them.
Gently he stroked her face, which shivered not and yet was cold.
"There are drafts here, and you are yet chilled," he said, wrapping his cape about her own.
"Perhaps a lower vault would prove warmer,' she suggested, with ease.
"What of the sepulchers?" he asked, though the question was prompted less by fear than curiosity over the naturalness of her suggestion.
"I have nothing to fear from the dead," she repeated her earlier avowal. And of her own-accord, she rose, and withdrew one of the torches. "Come," she said, striding gracefully to the door in the far wall, while she unbolted it with her pale, long fingers.
Karoth did not recoil at the invitation, his qualms over dwelling in a tomb having eased unaccountably. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he was no longer alone, and his role had changed to that of protector for the maiden. Or perhaps the unworried nature of the girl had somehow infused itself into him, relaxing and assuaging his instinctive fears like a delicate mesmerism, or the allure of siren songs.
Gathering a slot-eyed lantern, as well as several unlit candles and lanthorns, he followed Maura through the portal, down stone-hewn steps into a labyrinth of vaults and passages below. About them, odors of dust-decay and long-accomplished corruption tainted the air. But the girl seemed wholly unaffected. With the ease and sure-footedness of one treading a familiar route, she pathed the corridors, coming at length to a spacious chamber, whose interior was dotted about with sealed stone sepulchers and bronze sarcophagi.
"Here," she stated, "the torch warmth will not fade. And we shall be comfortable for the night."
While Karoth set himself to ensconcing the torches and positioning the candles and lanterns, he noticed that Maura glided about the chamber, consumed by thoughts of her own. She bent low before each sepulcher, reading the names etched on plates of bronze, the appellations of long-deceased and munificent nobles of Carthmesh.
Something in her manner sparked his curiosity, the way she moved and smiled wryly as she bowed before sundry crypts, laughing betimes, and frowning, in turn, before others.
"You have been here before?" he asked, intrigued, puzzled by what other reason there might be for her actions.
"Yes," she replied, somewhat at a loss. "Yes, many years ago..."
"As a child?"
"Yes, in many ways I was then a child. It was a long time ago..."
Something drifted at the fringes of Karoth's consciousness, a vague suspicion which did not formulate itself into coherent thought. For an instant, he wondered if she were not some fair maiden caught up in a lovely insanity, whose only possession was her richly decorated robe, and who dwelt in some cottage hidden in the forest nearby, and who wandered the graveyard at night, her mind affected by the cold.
But no, he reasoned. There was much more behind those features than the innocence of a mere girlish fantasy. There was an amusement, sadness, and perception beyond youth's years. As all women, she seemed an array of contradictions, possessed of a nymph's loveliness, and yet the wisdom of the ages. To Karoth, she bore an elegance as of the last survivor of a rich and noble family, and yet was not fragile and pampered, but sensuous, with her voice exhaling both mystery and a soft vulnerableness. Perhaps all these reflections were the product of phantasies of his own, as if somehow he wished to see such qualities in the girl, as if he wished her to be all things, all the women he had known, and all those never known.
She examined the sarcophagi, drawing near to him once her inspection had encircled the room. He gazed upon her, fingers striking his temples, as if somehow the action would draw thoughts from within his mind like waters from a well.
"I feel that I know you," he said, when she approached him. "Yes - I know you. Somehow. Though we've never met."
"You know me as you know the night," she answered, quietly.
"No," he said, without pause for reflection upon her words. "More than that."
His eyes fastened upon hers. They did not gleam, glisten, but were subdued and sombre. Still he could not name their color. He framed her face in cupped hands and continued to gaze.
"I see a portion of myself in your eyes. I see a curtain, a veneer. And behind that, a great sadness. A sadness like that of one who has lost her lover to death's merciless hand. But more than that, deeper than that. A sadness beyond the mere loss of some possession, some person. It's as if it were sadness born of some great need, a void which begs and pleads to be filled, but is unable. A hunger. But not as the mere hunger of the flesh, with its cries for food, shelter, comfort. It is a hunger for something which has no name."
She made no response save to return his gaze.
"A void is there. You know not how to fill it, and yet know you must."
He paused for a moment, then continued.
"With me it has been the same. I have travelled, tasted of that which life offers. I have crossed the continent from the northern Ice Caps to isles beyond the navigation of seafarers. I have fought and loved, and stayed with friends and left again. I have not grown weary of life, but still I wander. Still I search... for something. Something elusive, ungraspable as smoke from incense lamps, and yet, like incense, it is there. It is real, urging, whispering, - with voices of its own, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly. Sometimes ignored, but never really forgotten."
He continued, "I do not know whether it could be called love, or acceptance, or other. For I have tasted these before. And yet something drives me to wanderlust. It is akin to loneliness, a loneliness felt amidst a crowd of boisterous people. And yet it is more. I see it in your eyes, a yearning - not ravening, not obvious, but insistent all the same. If it could be named, perhaps it could be satisfied..."
Karoth was silent for a moment, lost in the blending colors of her eyes, now bluish, now flecked with amber and purple. Silently she placed her hand upon his, and raised it to her lips, kissing it gently.
He smiled, suddenly self-conscious.
"Here I am, speaking words I scarcely have admitted to myself, and yet I know little more than your name."
"You know me," she whispered, "as you yourself said."
She rose upon her tiptoes to kiss, not his hand, but his mouth. And Karoth was surprised as her lips fairly sucked his breath out. It was startling, arresting, but not unpleasant, and afterwards, she lay her head upon his chest, holding him, as if they were lovers who had been slowly dancing, and who held their embrace long after the flutes and lyres had ceased their playing.
Karoth spread his cloak across the floor - as a blanket, and for hours, it seemed, they lay in the burial vault, enswathed in a bronze glow from candle and lanthorn flames.
She spoke to him, in her dreamy, lulling voice, soothing as cool waters to a parched soul. Her words were beyond recounting, for they flowed together like notes of a melody, like strains of music so sweetly blending, that the sounds of lutes and strings and bells all merge harmoniously into one.
It seemed that she spoke of strange things, of abstract philosophies of life and death - that neither was truly as it seemed, and that each was but a mask of another reality. She spoke of the eerie beauty of death and things of dissolution, once the barriers of unreason are overpassed.
She spoke serenely of the night, and shroudings of mist, and the beauty of headstones wrapped in nioonglow, and the pale flowers which sprout only at midnight, and fade before the onset of dawn. Her words conjured places whose names and descriptions were of unearthly dreams, and visions and phantasies - things at once both horrifying and sweet, repulsive and alluring.
To Karoth, it was the melody of a siren, the song of an ethereal temple priestess, who dwelt in mountain retreats beyond the roadways of men.
At times, she wandered from sepulcher to sepulcher, and spoke of those whose bleached bones lay secreted within, behind slabs of stone or lids of bronze - spoke of their lives and deaths, their passions and sorrows, as if somehow she knew them, or they had died - but yesterday, though from the markings he knew the crypts to be decades, perhaps centuries, old.
Perhaps she was mad, in some unfathomable manner, her mind unhinged and sweetly deluded. But if so, it mattered not to Karoth. Gladly he would share her delusion, and agree to words obscure and bizarre and impossible. Had she declared the sun to be darkness, and the moon a glass eye, he would have avowed it so, and upheld her words with his life.
Ultimately then, like slow fading ripples in a garden pond, conversation ceased. Like a cat, she lay beside him, resting her head upon his breast, arms about his shoulders, and eyes closed in gentle repose. For many moments, Karoth lay awake in serene quietude, caressing and stroking her hair with his hand - a hand no longer that of a sworder and restless wanderer, but of a tender suitor.
And in the tomb, for spaces uncounted, silence reigned - not the silence of death, but that of tranquillity, the silence of a land after the passing of a summer rainstorm, of early dawn ere a single creature stirs from its comfortable sleep.
For Karoth, there existed a quiet sense of contentment. The corpse bones surrounding them and filling neighboring vaults could well have been leagues away, the two resting like year-long lovers on a divan of velvet and silk. They could have lain anywhere, in a thousand places, a thousand climes, and to him it would have been the same. For to Karoth, there was naught in the universe save himself and the girl.
And so, with arms enfolding her, not caring to awaken her from her peaceful sleep, he, too, fell prey to slumber.
The torches which burned on through the night gradually lessened in intensity, while the candles winked one by one into nothingness, like the closing of golden cat eyes, like the vanishing of stars into oblivion.
When morning dawned upon the land, and its light filtered into the upper chamber through the colored panes of glass, Karoth woke to find himself alone, the torches outburned and the light streaming upon his face in colored beams and rays of gold, azure, and crimson. He did not recall having returned to the upper chamber from the labyrinth below, did not recall the girl leaving him.
He was alone. And for a time he wondered if she had existed only in his dreamings. But there beside him, on the floor, gleaming like electrum or a gemstone of incalculable worth, lay one of the tiny bells from the fringes of her gown. And he knew what he had seen and felt was real, substantial.
He rose, and called to the girl. But only echoes returned his voice. Outside he found his horse safely tethered to the iron ring, calmly awaiting its master.
Squinting like one who has not gazed upon the world for long ages, Karoth emerged from the charnel and dashed up the steps to the grounds above.
The sun had not yet burned away the low-lying mists of morning, so that a fog hovered inches above the ground, blanketing the cemetery as with gauze shroudings. He could detect no sign of the maiden, and the mist concealed any footprints which might have told him which path she had taken.
He called again, and gazed carefully over the silent purheus of the necropole. But no form was visible, and no shadow moved, and nothing stirred at all save the lightly swirling mists below his feet and over the grounds.
As there was naught else for him to do, Karoth mounted his horse after gathering his saddle-pouch, and rode like a phantom through the mists of early dawn, towards Carthmesh.
Although he found the gates to have long been open, the old Gatekeeper seemed to have been the sole early riser. Very sluggishly the city stirred to life, and it was long before moving shapes began to mill and crowd about on the streets and narrowly winding alleyways.
The location of the shop of Thorgarth the Jeweller had not altered, occupying its cubby-hole, wedged between rows of other shops on the obliquely sloping Street of Owls.
Its bell tingled softly as Karoth pushed through the door into the seemingly deserted shop. For an instant, the bell's chiming recalled the girl to mind, though in actuality, she had never truly left his thoughts, constantly hovering like the image of a strange and elusive goddess, like a priestess in a temple of some rare deity.
Under the silent gaze of jasper and onyx idols and statues of gods of both renown and ill-repute, Karoth withdrew his pouch. Quietly he outpoured his gem-stones upon a glass case, wherein lay an array of jewel cases, silver and copper teapots, lamps, swords, and gold-inlaid boxes.
"These are indeed gems of exceeding value!" Old Thorgarth cried, after having emerged from the recesses of his shop. He clasped the shoulders of Karoth warmly. "I am pleased to see them as I am you, Karoth!"
"I'll not waste time bargaining with you," Karoth said, "for I know you'll give me a fair price in gold for these. There is another matter in which you might give me some welcome aidance."
"Oh? Name it, old friend."
"I seek a woman."
"Ahh." The lewellsman grinned lecherously, with eyes twinkling like his gems. A long journey it must have been. I know of just the place..."
"No," Karoth protested with subdued voice. "I seek a special woman. A lady of noble birth. I know her only by the name of Maura."
Thorgarth twisted a handful of his whiskers in thought. "I am sorry, my friend. I know of none by that name. A noblewoman, you say? And you do not know her family name?"
"No."
"Can you describe her, then?"
"She is young, pale, beautiful. Her hair dark as the night sky and lips so red they seerr purple. She wears a robe, a dark velvet robe adorned on the fringes with countless tiny bells."
There came a silence in the room, thick and awful and sepulchral.
"You did not meet such a woman within the city," Thorgarth averred gravely, with a terrorized expression cast upon his face. All his joviality and cordiality vanished as quickly as flame doused with water.
"No," Karoth replied, puzzled at the sudden alteration in the Jeweller's demeanor. "Beyond the gates, last night."
Without a further word, Thorgarth turned and disappeared behind a plicated arras, with the intentness of a sorcerer entering his den. And anon he returned, bearing a small chest which he laid down on the glass counter-top before Karoth.
"Were they fashioned as these? The bells?" Thorgarth asked, slowly, with deliberation, allowing Karoth to open the case and examine its contents for himself.
There lay within the chest perhaps seven of the small ornaments, intricately fashioned from gold and polished bronze, and gleaming with the glow of electrum.
"Why yes... I have one in my belt," Karoth answered, astonished, while withdrawing the one he had found beside himself in the vault. "Where did you obtain these?" Karoth added, pointing to the chest.
"My friend," Thorgarth said, when he saw that indeed the bell owned by Karoth was one with the seven others, "You should thank whatever gods there exist that you are alive this day and drawing breath."
"What do you mean," Karoth interrupted, wholly confused by the events of the past few moments.
"One of these bells," the Jeweller explained portentiously, "... was found upon each morning after the full moon. One each month for the past seven months. And they were found lying near the corpses of seven men - seven foully slain men. Their bodies were blood-drained, and entrails torn out.
"At first we suspected the victims had torn the bells from their assailant before they expired. But each corpse was found with a bell nearby, so that we concluded they were left as some mocking reminder, some arrogant signature of the one guilty of working such vileness."
The jewelsman continued, giving voice to speculation and conclusion that all in the city shared with one accord: "A lamia. A demoness, in the guise of a beautiful woman, who devours her lovers upon nights of the full moon. The burial parties gave the bells over to me for safekeeping, as I am the most well-established jeweller in Carthmesh.
"My friend," Thorgarth asseverated, "you have gazed upon the eyes of death itself, and somehow eluded her clutches. Go. Find a room at the Inn and rest. Then celebrate your extraordinary good fortune with all the abandon it deserves."
Karoth listened, dumbfounded. His tongue was frozen in his mouth. In silence, therefore, Thorgarth exchanged the pouch of gems for gold, and bade farewell to his friend who merely nodded, and walked silently out the door.
Karoth felt strangely emotionless, with his heart gripped neither by fear nor frantic relief, but merely by a numbness, as though an ichor of sluggish waters crept through his veins. He plodded the streets, heedless of all those milling about him. He shook his head disbelievingly, vainly endeavoring to fathom what had occurred to him.
Somehow, he could not envision the maiden as malevolent, though the facts were obvious and indisputable as the existence of the sun or the moon, or life and death itself. Her image remained ever in his consciousness, not as a demoness, crouched above corpses of slain lovers, mouth dripping with flesh and crimson tatters in vulturish feasting - but as a goddess, as a lovely mistress of unsurpassed beauty and inviolable mystery.
For many days, Karoth meandered aimlessly along the flexuous streets, half-aware of all about him, scarcely pausing in his wandering to rest or eat or even sleep.
Hours melted obliviously into days, and the days gathered like leaves blown into mounds, until a month had passed. And now, finally, the night of another full-orbed moon found Karoth prepared to depart the city of Carthmesh, his feet ready to seek other paths.
Without a wave, or word of well-wishing, the crouching Gatekeeper closed and bolted the gates even as Karoth rode past him, directing his horse out onto the cobblestone road stretching away from the city.
He knew well where his path led, and followed it without hesitation. Soon, the ground beneath his horse's hoofs sprouted, not grasses and shrubs and gnarled tree-boles, but greyed headstones and mausoleum vaults.
When eventide came, and darkness descended over the countryside like cerements upon a corpse, Karoth once more sought out the huge mausoleum which surmounted the hill. He did not pause long in reflection before his feet descended the darkly-veined steps, conveying him to the ghoul-carven sentinels that stood astride the wooden door and the broken chains.
Within, he found the sanctuary as he had left it, a month past. A yellow glow soon spread throughout the chamber as before.
Time ebbed by as slowly as the melting of winter snows, with no hourglass and naught but the gradual shrinking of tallow-candles to mark its passage. Outside, the wind howled and the horse cried, until ultimately there came the sounding of the bells, drifting sweetly, alluringly, ambrosially to his ears, like an adored melody or lover's song.
Karoth cast open the door even as Maura approached. And as she entered, clad in her beauteous robe, a smile touched his face and words flowed from his lips.
"I am ready," he stated, touching her Raven hair with his fingers. She smiled, and responded to his avowal with a breath sucking kiss, thereafter taking his hand, leading him through the far portal to the crypts below.
With a tinkling of bells, the velvet robe dropped to the floor. She stood naked before him, arms outstretched, lips parted.
And that night, for hours uncounted, as the moon crept zenithward in the sky, she gave herself to him. And he knew ecstasy as never before in his life.
When their embrace was done, and he lay upon his back on the stone floor of the deeper vaults, he, in turn, gave himself to her, wholly and completely, in the ulttimate act of surrender and oblivion.
Upon the dawning of the next morn, Karoth's corpse was found by those who were attracted by the frenzied outcries of his horse. Although his body was bloodless, with neck hanging slackly and chest ripped asunder, there, upon his features, was an unaccounted-for expression of contentment, and a smile of obscure fulfillment.
And after that day, and for years to come, in the shadowed hills about Carthmesh, where the Night Winds blow with marrow-piercing coldness, there were found no more of the intricately fashioned Sepulchral Bells.
Copyright © 1985 by James William Hjort
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