The expedition moved with a dreary monotony, only differentiated from the days before the Cossack’s arrival by the knowledge that they were edging ever closer to a terrible danger. Shkuro had taken nearly two weeks to catch up with the English expedition, but he was just a single horseman. Moving twenty-nine men and sixteen horses meant a lugubrious crawl. The towering Kulun Shan were cold, dry, and devoid of trees. The ground was broken, rocky, and bad on horses. Conder marveled that Shkuro had avoided injuring his pony during his weeks in the saddle.
The journey left plenty of time for the men to ruminate on the impending threat. Save for the Gurkhas, the Cossack, and Conder, everyone else, even the Tibetan Baltis, were Mohammedans. Malik Khan read to them from the Koran at night, paying extra attention to those suras that exalted the struggle against polytheists and devil worshippers. Certainly, Malik assured the men, these savages could not be of the Umma, and killing vile poisoners would be righteous Jihad. His words had the desired effect.
At the end of each day’s march, Conder interrogated Uryadnik Shkuro about the conditions they would find as they backtracked his trail. Shkuro responded to Conder’s questions, but his answers were terse and guarded. Conder suspected the Cossack hadn’t yet accepted his ignorance of the dangers posed by the pygmy inhabitants of the Tsang Pass. On the third night Conder ordered the Cossack’s hands untied. On the fifth, he returned the Cossack’s weapons to him. Thereafter Shkuro answered the captain’s questions as completely as their limited ability to communicate would allow.
Yet what Shkuro told Conder didn’t make much sense, even accounting for the unevenness of his Russian. The Cossack described twin statues of dead, bat-winged dogs, carved from dark stone. He spoke of abandoned villages of stone huts, surrounded by rings of menhirs. He described the massive bones of unidentifiable animals. When Conder spoke with his Balti guides and his Uyghur translator, none of the men would admit any knowledge of such things, but the fear on their faces was obvious. Conder decided not to excite them further and kept the Cossack’s descriptions to himself.
On the sixteenth day of their march, Havildar Thapa announced the expedition was under surveillance. Without making any physical move to indicate the location of the observers, Thapa described their hiding place in terms that even an Englishman could understand.
“Excellent work, Havildar,” Conder said, blowing on his tin cup brimming with yak-butter tea. “Bring me some prisoners after dark.”
“Most assuredly, my Captain,” Thapa beamed. “A distraction would be most helpful during the approach on their position.”
“Yes,” said Conder. “I think that can be arranged.”
Several hours later, as the last traces of light faded from the sky, Gurkha Naik Rai launched into an uneven performance of “Garryowen” on his bagpipes, followed by a very credible rendition of “The Campbells are Coming.” Rai had just finished a fine performance of “The Minstrel Boy” when everyone in camp heard the screams. Seconds later Havildar Thapa blew the all clear on his whistle. Thapa and the four other Gurkha Riflemen emerged from the darkness, dragging two limp figures and prodding a third along at the point of their kukris.
“Any of them get away, Havildar?” Conder asked.
“No, my Captain, not a one,” Thapa responded cheerfully.
“Any casualties?”
“No, my Captain, not a one.”
“Excellent work, Havildar.”
“Thank you, sir. It’s always better to have music when we work.”
“Now,” said Conder more seriously, “let us get a look at — good lord, Havildar! Where are his clothes?”
Thapa’s smile dropped into a scowl. “This soldier must report that the enemy is clothed.”
Conder looked again. The prisoner’s exposed genitals were plainly obvious. The squat, dirty figure could not have been taller than four feet. The first thing that stood out was how black he was — his face, his hair, even his skin. Not naturally black, but stained with a kind of pigment, perhaps to make his naked skin less reflective for night fighting. Pale gray eyes shone brightly from his darkened face. His limp black hair was cut into a bowl that sat high atop his slightly oversized head, leaving the area above his temples and ears completely shaven. Conder was unable to place the man’s race, even under the illumination of an oil lamp. He seemed disturbingly Caucasian, only with deeply wrinkled features and skin that made him appear greatly aged. Around his neck hung necklaces of bone, and leather trinkets and fetishes, including a large leather pouch on a thong. As Conder stared, he realized that the pouch was made from the skin peeled from a human head, the eyes, nose, and mouth sewn shut to keep the bag’s contents from spilling onto the ground. Then Conder saw the seams. The pygmy was not naked. It was wearing the hide of a man, tanned and cured and sewn into a buckskin-like garment.
“Bloody hell,” Conder whispered. The pygmy sensed Conder’s revulsion and giggled in amusement. It sat on the ground smiling, blood running down its face from a gash delivered by the flat of Havildar Thapa’s kukri. The disgusting creature turned its bloodied head to smile at everyone in turn, and show the pointed teeth that adorned its too-wide mouth.
Filed, perhaps? Conder wondered. “Get Qasim over here. I have some questions for this… thing.” But the Uyghur translator would not approach. He sat by a low fire and kept his back to the prisoner.
“Qasim!” Conder called, but the man would not budge. Conder strode over and struck his best authoritarian pose. “Qasim!” he said in the Pathan tongue they shared, “you have a job to do.”
“No,” Qasim responded flatly. The blunt refusal in the face of the expedition’s leader left the rest of the men exchanging worried looks.
“Qasim, you’ll either do your job or you’ll lose your pay.”
“Take my pay,” said Qasim. “I’ll keep my soul.”
Besides Khan, some of the Kashmiri also spoke Pathan. Not wanting them to overhear, he waved them off. Conder squatted down next to Qasim and lowered his voice to a whisper. “You know this man’s tribe?”
“It is no man. It only wears the skin of a man.”
Conder took a moment. Out east, men took their ju-ju very seriously indeed. It was not something Conder could dismiss. “Do you mean its garment?”
“No. Beneath that skin there is no man. Only al-Shayṭān. Only Iblīs.”
“Is this a thing permitted to be spoken of?”
Qasim looked around, as if to ensure that no one was close enough to overhear. “It is not safe,” Qasim hissed. “There are things that hear their names if you speak them.”
“Then we won’t speak its name.”
“No. It has seen me. You spoke my name in front of it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Malik Khan interrupted. “That little monster can’t answer our questions.”
Conder leapt to his feet, fearing that one of his men had prematurely pushed a knife through the pygmy. “Did someone — ”
“No. This happened a long time ago. Come and see for yourself.”
Malik had discovered it while examining the teeth of the two dead pygmies to determine if they were filed or naturally malformed. In point of fact, they were artificially shaped. Prying the corpses’ jaws open, Malik showed Conder the more disturbing discovery.
“Their tongues have been cut out.”
Conder recoiled at the strangely empty mouths, ringed with triangular incisors. “And the live one?”