Ghouls did not do kindnesses for each other. They gave each other no gifts. They were not, not in any way, considerate when it came to the small things in life. Almost never. They worked together, as a pack, to survive. It was necessity, not affection. Almost never affection.

Mates, or those seeking to mate, might give choice pieces of meat in order to curry favor, or they would groom each other. Mothers would rend and tear to ensure their cubs got enough meat, or to rescue them from danger. That was the sum and pinnacle of ghoulish consideration and affection.

So it was not surprising that Krrsh did not really understand the concept of ‘helping’. It was a hazy, alien idea to him. He had followed logic while thinking on the new Man tool – he understood that it was meant to make it easier for him to get at the meat. There Krrsh’s grasp on the situation ended, there the solid footing of understanding stopped, leaving only shifting sands and uncertainty. He understood, or at least thought he understood the what of it. But the why?

No.

Did the thing in the place with no bones seek to… to mate with him? It boggled his mind when the thought occurred to him, and Krrsh ran around in circles on the moonlit sand, shuddering and thinking cannot cannot no no CANNOT for a goodly amount of time. Then he collapsed on the sand and stared up at Mother Moon until his heartbeats slowed.

“No. No no. Cannot be that. Not if Krrsh is lucky, and Krrsh is lucky, yes, Mother?”

Mother Moon didn’t answer, but Krrsh decided she agreed with him.

So. Not mating. The only other reason to help get food was… Did the thing in the place with no bones want… want… want to join his pack? Or want him to join its pack?

In some ways the thought was just as disturbing as the thought of mating with the thing that could take all the bones from carrion.

Krrsh tried to imagine being part of a pack with the Bone Taker, the Watcher. He could not. The idea was too big. Too strange.

Maybe it was… trap. Sometimes Men would make traps for ghouls, yes. In places of the dead. Heavy stones falling, or bad air that choked and killed, or flying claws. Krrsh had never seen such things, but old Wrna had, and he told of such things. This new Man tool could be like that. Krrsh would pick it up, and then- and then- something would happen. Something bad. The Bone Taker would guard its meat from clever ghouls who stole it and kept their bones, yes?

Maybe.

Then Krrsh had a thought that made his blood run cold.

The new Man tool was inside the tunnel. Not in the place with no bones.

The Watcher, the Bone Taker did not have to stay in the place with no bones. It could go in the tunnel. He dug at the sand with his claws. Three times he had been in the tunnel. Three. The second time for most of a night.

And the Bone Taker could have taken his bones any one of those times.

Krrsh did not beat at his head. He just shook and stared up at the night sky. Above him, Mother Moon was laughing at him, he was sure.

“Quiet, Mother,” Krrsh growled, then sighed.

“Krrsh is not so clever, no. More clever than another ghoul. Not more clever than Bone Taker.” It was not hard to admit, though it was a disappointing realization. Ghouls did not tend to lie, even to themselves.

“But Krrsh is very lucky. Maybe lucky is better than clever?” Krrsh brightened momentarily at the thought. Then his mood darkened once more. He still had to decide what he was going to do.

It took him half the night to decide.

~ ~ ~

Anomus had watched with great interest as the ghoul descend the tunnel, noticed the pitchfork, and then fled. The creature was as wary as any wild animal, he supposed, but Anomus was fascinated by it. He had many questions, starting with just how intelligent the ghoul actually was. Was it on the same mental level as a human? He thought not, but conceded the fact that he didn’t know. It, or rather he, might simply be lacking any of the refinements of civilization. But the fact that it could learn to intelligently use tools meant, to Anomus’s thinking, that whatever gap there was in mental ability between ghouls and humans, it was a small one. Functionally speaking. The empire was constantly at war with surrounding peoples of lesser cultural advancement, or at least what the Subori considered so. Nomadic desert tribes ruled the sands to the west, and powerful kingdoms held and defended the lands from which the Great River sprang – powerful despite the fact that they did not much build with stone or cultivate many crops, as the Subori did.

Anomus also wondered where the other ghouls were. He had been remiss in sending out his flies to spy the surrounding area, his thoughts taken up with ways to prepare for the emperor’s arrival. But there was definitely at least one more, that much he had seen. And if this ghoul was not one of the two he had spied at the tomb’s main entrance, that meant there were at least three. The stories of ghouls he had been told had never mentioned numbers, only that they ran in packs. Anomus had no idea how many might constitute a pack, but he was fairly certain it should be more than three.

With a thought, he dispatched a dozen of his spies through the well’s entrance and another dozen via the tunnel. It would be tiresome to sift through so many disjointed memories when they returned, but Anomus realized he should have been keeping an eye on the environs around the Tomb far more regularly than he had been. Once he recognized the fault, there was no question about correcting it.

Flies dispatched, he briefly returned his thoughts to the ghoul. One ghoul was a curiosity of limited use, assuming he could somehow persuade the thing to serve him. But to bolster his forces, he needed more of the things. He wondered what the position of ghoul who had entered the Tomb was, in his pack. Was he a scout? A leader? Anomus didn’t know. He only hoped that, assuming he could persuade the ghoul to align with him, that the ghoul would in turn bring others.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Anomus set thoughts of the ghoul aside then, and made a quick survey of the Tomb. The beetles were eating and growing, their shells growing thicker and harder. The geckos were growing as well, though he had reached a natural barrier to size when they were enlarged to the length of an arm from toe to tail. Larger, and they lost the ability to surefootedly traverse ceilings. Their teeth were satisfyingly sharp, though, and now dripped venom – not from a specialized sac or gland, but as part of their saliva.

The only issue he had was a lack of water for his deadly menagerie. The salamanders, the moss, even the insects required a certain amount of fresh water, and there was none to be had in the Tomb, apart from the tiny ornamental pond in the funerary garden above.

Anomus was pleased to be faced with a simple engineering problem, for once. Simple for him, that was. He already had a screw pump connected to a concealed waterwheel that harnessed the river’s power. He had constructed it years before. He had neglected to claim most of it until now; it was separate from the Tomb except where the pump connected to the pond.

It had been a hellishly difficult thing to construct at the time, requiring a hole to be bored into the rock of the cliffs down to the river, and a screw pump to be specially constructed to fit the bore. The water wheel turned the screw, which drew water up to the garden. The wheel was concealed from view by stones and reeds, but was dependent on the river’s current to turn.

He could not claim the wheel – the river was as closed to him now as it had been the first time he had tried to claim the earth near to it. But the bore and the screw pump were easy enough to claim. And now, with his inhuman ability to sense and shape the materials he had claimed down to the finest detail, Anomus was able to make the pump do its job much more efficiently. The input of water was impossible to increase, but he was able to increase the pump’s efficiency enough that he could divert a small portion of its flow from the pond.

It was the work of a few minutes for him to create a small diversion tunnel, about the width of a finger, to bring water to the level of the undertomb. He then split it into three and diverted water to the lairs of the wasps, the salamanders and the beetles.

It wasn’t much water, but then his minions didn’t require much. Not yet, at least. If he were to continue breeding his nightmare menageries for years, he would have to work out a better alternative, a larger source of water. But if he spent that much time making horrors, it would mean he had failed to kill Irobus.

And he would not fail. He could not.

Shortly after Anomus had finished constructing the third and final basin to collect the drips of water from the pond above, he sensed the ghoul return to the tunnel entrance.

He was quite curious to see what the creature would do next. He wondered if it would include beating itself about the head. The ghoul seemed prone to do that, for some reason.

~ ~ ~

The Eternal Guard were all slaves, of course. Their tongues were removed at an early age, and none of them knew how to read or write. They received training – harsh, brutal training that made them the fiercest, most brutal fighting force in the empire, perhaps the world.

Their numbers were relatively small; no more than five thousand Eternal Guard were permitted to exist, for fear that their utter loyalty to the emperor might one day prove to be something less than utter. While they were easily capable of defeating a force three or four times their number, or even more given the correct set of circumstances, the Subori rulers had always taken care to make sure they could not overwhelm the regular Suboran military forces. The truth was, as useful and capable as they were, they were neither liked nor trusted. They were simply feared, historically speaking, even by the emperors who commanded them. Sometimes especially by them.

A large part of that fear and distrust sprang from their seeming inhumanity. How could one form a human bond with soldiers who did not speak, who would slay you or themselves or each other without hesitation, at a single command?

Irobus did not fear his Eternal Guard. He did not think of them at all, except as an extension of his will. He was emperor, and they were his sharpest weapon; nothing more or less. He commanded and they executed, without question, without a single tiresome word. Irobus never considered how they might coordinate their actions, or what the life of a single Eternal Guardsman might be like. Of course not. Such thoughts would never have entered his head. To be fair, there would be few in the empire who would have mused on such things.

It was the Greatest of Fifty who was called Nighteyes by his troop - and nothing at all by anyone else – who had been tasked to re-secure the Concubine’s Tomb ahead of the interment. He relayed the command to them using the hand language that the Eternal Guard had developed over centuries, and immediately the barracks room was a hive of activity as the Guardsmen prepared to ride. Only Hummingbird had anything to say.

“Wasteful,” Nighteyes’ second in command signaled.

“Explain,” Nighteyes replied.

“We should have left men there to guard. Instead we decamp and then return a few days later. Wasteful. Poor planning.”

Nighteyes raised an eyebrow. “Did you have something better to do?”

“Sleep,” Hummingbird replied, smiling.

“You are a disgrace,” Nighteyes informed him. But he smiled. A little. Hummingbird had said such things since they were small. When they still had tongues. But only to him. Hummingbird was not stupid.

Nighteyes’ Fifty were mounted and exiting the capital in less than an hour. The Eternal Guard did not dawdle. They followed the river, first along roads of stone and then packed earth, then tow paths, and then, as they rode ever further from civilization and ever deeper into the Great Desert, they rode amongst only rock and sand. Horses were faster than boats, going upriver.

Once the Concubine departed the capital, it would take at least six days for her body and all the grave goods and priests to reach the site of the Tomb, perhaps even longer. The procession would leave in two more days; making it a minimum of eight days before Nighteyes and his troop would see them. The Eternal Guard, riding hard, would reach the Tomb in five. More than enough time to secure the area, to scout for bandits or other threats, and to ensure the Tomb had not been violated in the short time since the emperor had inspected it.

Greatest of Fifty Nighteyes welcomed the assignment. He appreciated the opportunity to be away from the capital, from the loathing and fear he saw in the eyes of the Tongued when they looked on him and his men. It was good to ride in the desert, away from others. And as Hummingbird told him that night when they made their customary fireless camp, it was good to ride towards boredom instead of battle. Nighteyes grunted at that, and called Hummingbird pathetic, but he did not disagree.

He expected nothing like trouble when they reached the Tomb; only a few days of silence and freedom, before the priests arrived with their chants and their charge. Alone in the desert, far, far away from their masters and indeed from any other people, his Fifty would still do everything expected of them, everything they were trained for and ordered to do. But they would also be free to… express themselves, if they chose. In small ways. Ways that weren’t forbidden, exactly, but were never talked about, even with hand-sign, for the most part.

For example, Silverscale would be able to wade in the river and observe the fishes that he so loved, when he was not on patrol or guard duty. Small Scar would carve things into the bits of wood he carried with him, using his belt knife. And Hummingbird would sleep in Nighteyes’ tent.

Nighteyes welcomed this duty, this command, both for himself and his Fifty.

They rested for four hours, the longest the Eternal Guard ever would while en route to a destination in the normal course of events. Then they saddled up and continued their trek.