“The same.”
“Anything of note in their kits?”
“Not particularly. Crudely forged iron knives. A few darts covered in a foul-smelling paste. Their dart-throwers are carved from human thighbones. Their… clothes seem useless against cold. Their footwear is little better than sandals. They didn’t even have blankets. They must be impervious to the cold.”
“Did you find rations? They do eat, don’t they?”
“Some dried smoked meat. Hard enough that you’d need teeth like that to get through it. I fear that it may be… unnatural.”
“How do you mean?” asked Conder. He tipped out one of the dead pygmies’ small leather pouches onto the ground. Its contents filled him with revulsion. There were a number of feathers, glass beads, shaped stones, finger bones, dried human ears, and a mummified tongue. Upon giving it a second look, Conder realized the pouch itself was a human scrotum.
“I am going to execute that thing right now,” he said, standing and wiping his hands on his trousers.
“That would be good and proper, Henry,” Malik said.
Conder fetched his Navy cutlass from his tent. He had never done well on sword drills with the standard British Army officer sword, but the broad, heavy blade of the cutlass had proved brutishly effective more than once. He drew the blade and tossed the scabbard aside. As Conder approached the grinning pygmy, the creature thrust a hand into its pouch, pulled something out, and popped it into its mouth. Conder raised the cutlass to split the fiend’s skull.
“I welcome you,” the pygmy said in perfectly accented French.
Conder let the cutlass fall to his side. The rest of the party stirred in consternation.
“You have no tongue,” Conder blurted in his schoolhouse French, his thoughts forming words before he could stop himself.
“I have many tongues.” The filthy pygmy smiled, shaking his grisly pouch. With the eyes and mouth sewn shut, the upside-down visage adorning the bag looked twisted in agony. “I am pleased you have chosen to visit our sacred land of Leng. You and your kind bring rare gifts of bone, skin, and meat to the Unspeakable Lama of the Tcho-tchos. Such gifts would be nigh impossible to obtain without your steadfast efforts to deliver yourselves to our larders. The Lama is pleased by your offering.”
The trick was disturbing, but Conder had seen more inexplicable things performed by fakirs in the markets of Calcutta. At least, that was what he told himself. He was grateful that no one else in the party spoke French, but even if the meaning of the pygmy’s words were lost, the impossibility of them did no good for the men’s morale. Seizing the initiative, Conder asked, “What are you called?”
“I am the one who will enjoy shitting you out onto the cold rocks of Leng. What more do you need to know?”
“How many of you are there?” Conder continued.
“Enough that the meat of all your fellows will still leave our bellies wailing. But know that before you are divided among the faithful, the High Priest Not to Be Described will gobble your souls and vomit them into the mouths of the gods of chaos, like a vulture feeding her chicks,” the pygmy tittered.
“That’s very brave talk,” Conder said.
“We love death more than you could ever love life.”
“And yet you surrendered.”
“Because the Lama wanted me to tell you that before you die we will cut new holes in you in which to rut. We’ll use them long after you are dead.” The pygmy’s gray eyes sparkled with a nauseating delight.
Conder sighed, bored with the posturing. “I’ve quite enjoyed our conversation,” he said gently. “But I think the part I like the most about talking with you is that I’ll never have to do it again.”
The pygmy’s sardonic expression collapsed into a lifeless mask as Conder drove his cutlass down through the top of its skull, splitting the bridge of its nose. The mummified tongue the pygmy had put in its mouth rolled down its chin and onto the ground. Conder set his boot in its face and wrenched the blade free.
“This thing,” he roared in English, brandishing the bloody blade, “ate the flesh of men. It wore their skins. It boasted of abominations, as if we would turn and run. But we will not run. We are men of war. And what do men of war do with cannibals and man-skinners?”
“We tell them the Gurkhas are coming!” shouted Havildar Thapa, raising his kukri knife. “Ayo Gorkhali!” His five men followed suit and repeated the traditional battle cry: “Ayo Gorkhali! Ayo Gorkhali!”
Malik and the Sepoys drew their khyber knives and took up the takbir: “Allāhu Akbar! Allāhu Akbar!”
Even the Tibetans joined in. Only Qasim the Uyghur and Shkuro the Cossack remained silent. Qasim turned his back on the whole affair and hugged his knees. Shkuro simply watched the heathens cheering for blood.
The next day they entered the Tsang Pass. Along the way they found no bodies where Shkuro said he’d shot down his pygmy pursuers, nor did they find the body of the poisoned Cossack that allegedly fell from the back of Shkuro’s saddle. Not even bones were found. Shkuro could offer no explanation except to shrug and say, “Maybe they eat their own dead, too?”
Three days later they found the hounds. The two statues were mounted on titanic pedestals higher than the tallest man in their party could reach. The elephantine granite statues were an unwholesome chimera of Chinese fu-dog, Egyptian sphinx and jackal-headed Anubis, and Assyrian winged bull. Their lean and putrid forms were as realistically depicted as the artist’s crude ability could manage. The Sepoys lobbied energetically to pull them down with the horses, but Conder ordered them on. Time enough for that later.
Every day the expedition passed abandoned villages composed of round stone huts, like granite igloos scattered across the valley’s upper slopes. In their forlorn state they bore more resemblance to tombs than homes. The rings of menhirs and rough obelisks surrounding the ruins only compounded the impression of a vast cemetery. The carvings adorning the stones depicted horned figures engaged in unnatural acts of copulation and murder.
The unidentifiable animal bones the Cossack had mentioned were also in evidence. Although they bore some resemblance to the fossilized remains of flying reptiles Conder had seen in the British Museum, they were larger by orders of magnitude — and as bones, not stones, they represented a creature that had darkened the skies in Conder’s lifetime.
On the sixth day, sentries reported the expedition was once again under observation. Conder’s orders were to take no action against the surveillance. Show no sign of awareness. Let them get comfortable.
On the morning of their tenth day in the Tsang Pass, they came upon the wreckage of the Russian expedition. The site matched the reports Conder had read in Srinagar — inexplicably empty villages and vanished caravans. Clothing lay strewn about. Tools, weapons, ammunition lay discarded and smashed. The attackers had gone to great effort to ruin the Cossacks’ Berdanka carbines, splintering their stocks and beating their barrels against rocks. Even the Cossacks’ ponies and goats lay abandoned, stripped by vultures and scoured by ants. Yet no human corpses were found. Not even bones.
Shkuro set about scrounging for undamaged .42 caliber cartridges for his own Berdanka. Conder didn’t interfere. Looking about, he found Eichwald’s camera, an 1886 Improved Model Le Merveilleux, flattened, and the photographic plates smashed to shards. A leather-bound folio, perhaps Baron Savukoski’s expedition notes, had been burned in a campfire, its contents lost forever. Then Conder found a small crate marked опасность динамит, its contents scattered about on the ground. Most of the sawdust packing had blown away, but the sticks appeared dry and undamaged. A search produced no caps, but plenty of safety fuse. As to why Baron Savukoski had included dynamite in his provisions, Shkuro pleaded ignorance.