The desert was very, very angry.

A sandstorm usually howled for less than a day, often much less. But this storm snarled on and on, through the end of one day, and across an entire night, and then into the beginning of another day.

Krrsh, buried in the hard earth on the leeward side of the stone, waited for the storm to end. What other choice did he have? Krrsh was strong, and fierce. Krrsh was clever. But Krrsh was also learning patience. Learning was hard, though, even for one as clever as he.

If he had been more patient, perhaps he would not have been cast out. Slowly, as he waited out the storm’s fierce breath, he began to understand that it did not matter if he was right about splitting the pack. Being clever and right had led to Ngrum pissing all over him. Now the pack would eat, and its numbers would grow. And another day, the food would be gone, and the pack would suffer. Some would die from hunger. Then Ngrum would be forced to lead them to a place of humans in search of food. Lesser carrion would not sustain so many. And then more would die. Perhaps all. And then there would be no more Ironclaws.

All because Krrsh had been clever and right, but not patient. Because Ngrum was cunning, but stupid.

The place of the dead held much food. But it was so close to the river. It was… exposed. Open. Ghouls were stealthy, creatures of the night. But Men were clever. They saw much and noticed small things. Ngrum would not make the pack hide their spoor, not well enough. He was stupid, and lazy.

All the Ironclaws could smell that the place of death had been a Place of Men, many Men, for a long time. And where Men lived, they would almost certainly return to, sooner or later. Krrsh knew this.

Ngrum, maybe he knew. He was old enough; he should know. If so, the older ghoul chose to forget when faced with so much food.

Krrsh did not know how long it would take for Men to realize the presence of ghouls. This place was far from the living places of Men. But the river carried Men up and down. And Men had sharp eyes in the day.

Krrsh would have had the Ironclaws retreat further into the desert, if he had won his challenge. They could always bring meat with them, and return when they needed more. Ngrum would never consider such a ‘pointless’ task.

If Krrsh had been more patient, if he had waited for one of Ngrum’s bad decisions to cause disaster for the Ironclaws, he could have taken the survivors and led them. No need to challenge, if none chose to follow Ngrum. No need to force the pack to split, if some chose to follow Krrsh and others to stay with Ngrum.

Krrsh should have waited, and let what he was sure would happen, happen. And then he could have taken what was left, and started again.

But.

Now Krrsh was outcast. And strong, fierce, clever would not save him. Ghouls were pack creatures. They kept each other safe. One claw on its own could do nothing. And the desert was not kind.

An outcast ghoul would not live long.

Already hunger had begun to gnaw at his belly. He could survive for a month or so without eating, it was true, but the curse of his people was their terrible hunger. Slowly, it would drive him mad, rob him of his cleverness. This he knew. When he was fed, he could think. But when the hunger began in earnest, Krrsh would soon be little different than any other desert predator, acting only as his instincts told him. Krrsh, once of the Ironclaw pack, would disappear, and in his place would be an animal.

Krrsh was fierce and strong. But Krrsh feared hunger, and the descent into mindlessness that it brought. It felt… it felt like dying, but not. Not his body, but his… self. Not what he was, but who he was.

No claw of iron could fight hunger. Only cleverness had a chance against it. Maybe that was why hunger attacked thinking first, and then stole strength. Krrsh did not know. He only knew that ghouls had two natural enemies – Men, and hunger.

Men had shining iron, swords, sharper than claws, and some wore Iron skin, tougher than any ghoul hide. Men had flying iron, arrows, faster than any ghoul. Men had magic. And while Men were not as strong as ghouls in their bodies, Men had numbers. So many numbers. They were a bad enemy.

Hunger was more terrible than Men. You could not hide from it, or run from it, or fight it.

He had a few more days before hunger began to steal his thoughts. A few days to find a new food source. The place of death across the river was closed to him, now. If he swam back across the river, the pack would beat him, claw him, perhaps kill him if he returned to feed there.

He had found the magic hole at the top of the cliffs by following his nose. Somewhere beneath the stone was food- much food. He had found the hole where the scent came from… a strange thing the likes of which he had never seen. A sandless place on the desert floor, reflecting the stars like the clearest, stillest water, but hard, like stone. And, as he had discovered when he tried to touch it, magical. It had thrown him away like he was a pup. He still felt a twinging ache in his claw.

Two places with more food than he had ever dreamed of. Two places that he could not get at.

While Krrsh lay in his burrow, first to wait out the storm, and then to wait for the hated day to fade, he debated. Go into the desert, or try to find another way in to the food he smelled? If he wasted too much time searching, he might lose the chance to find sustenance in the desert before the change took him. And if the change took him, alone, he knew that he would likely die without the pack to work with. But the desert was harsh, and offered little even for the cleverest of ghouls.

By the time night returned, Krrsh had decided to try for one more night to find another way to get at the food he smelled inside the cliff. If he failed, he would lope out into the desert, and try to survive on lesser carrion until he found another source of meat. He began to dig his way out of the storm burrow.

Before he had even climbed out of the burrow, his snout was already twitching. Food. It made his stomach cramp, and he began to salivate. Where? Not from the magical, hard water pool. No. The scent came from some place further from the cliffs, from the river. And it was a wetter smell. It did not come from meat dried hard from the punishing sun… it would be rich with maggots and rot.

The flesh of Men had no equal, in terms of the carrion that was a ghoul’s diet. Any flesh, in any state. But some smelled and tasted better than others, to a ghoul’s senses. And old flesh that was not desiccated by the harsh environment was very much a delicacy, one that Krrsh had only ever tasted once before, when he had discovered a corpse on the bank of the river, a Man killed by a river horse and not yet discovered by crocodiles.

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He loped back towards the river from the deeper desert, following his nose.

~ ~ ~

Anomus was taking his first steps in refashioning his wasps, much as he had done to the flies, when he sensed a living thing entering the Tomb’s new opening. Instantly he shifted his awareness there. He knew elation when he saw that one of the ghouls had indeed discovered the way into the Tomb. Anomus studied the creature, fascinated.

It – or rather he, as Anomus saw, since the creature wore not even a loincloth – stood perhaps five feet tall. It was difficult to say just how tall the ghoul was, since its natural posture was something of a crouch. It had a rather pronounced jackal-like face, as he had already seen, but its torso and upper body were humanoid, differing little from the human form except for the fur and claws. The ghoul’s legs were rather more like a dog’s, however, with the telltale stifle and hock rather than a human hip and knee, and the legs ended in paws rather than a foot.

As the ghoul slowly, cautiously made its way through the tunnel towards the undertomb, Anomus did… nothing.

He had already decided that the wisest course of action would be to wait and see what the creature would do, to observe. Of course, he could have tried to claim the ghoul, as he had already done with insects. But reason told him it would be a foolish risk to attempt to dominate a creature that was orders of magnitude more complex than flies and wasps, that might even be, in some limited way, intelligent. Anomus was driven, but he was not a fool.

He would observe the thing, watch its behavior. And when he better understood its nature, then and only then would he determine how best to approach it, and what use, if any, he could put it to.

He did debate whether he wished to trap the creature, once it entered. He was of two minds on the matter. If he trapped the creature down in the undertomb, he could study it at his leisure. It would be a simple enough matter. He merely needed to close off the entrance to the tunnel he had created. To keep the new source of mana flowing, simply making a new entrance in a place the thing could not reach would suffice. Or he could create bars of stone, or even iron – though he had not created any iron, he sensed that he could, since he had claimed the iron catch in the secret door all those days ago. He did not know if the ghoul’s fierce-looking claws would be able to cut through such obstructions, or if so, how long it might take. Part of him was curious to know.

But the portion of him that was still at least nominally Anomus ip Garma rejected such thoughts.

He had been trapped down in the dark. It was a cruel, terrifying experience, and one he would not inflict upon any save an enemy. And the ghoul was not his enemy. Or his slave.

It was a hungry creature that he had lured. If it was not intelligent, then he would claim it as he had the flies and wasps, and even the other creatures, up in the funerary gardens. If it was intelligent – if it could think, then he had deeper considerations to contend with. Considerations that would say as much about himself as the ghoul.

Anomus wanted only to work retribution upon his murder. He viewed himself, for all his bizarre condition, as a living weapon. One that sought to end the life of an emperor; nothing more and nothing less. Well, he was both more and less, but that was unimportant. He had a simple, if difficult purpose that drove his actions and predicated his existence. He most emphatically did not want to wrestle with questions of morality or conscience.

All things considered, it would be simplest if the ghoul was not intelligent.

So. Anomus merely observed. He discovered he could do so and continue to alter the wasps without a deficit in his attention. In some ways he was far more capable than a mortal man.

The ghoul was a cautious creature. It advanced down the tunnel slowly, stopping often to listen and to sniff. When it finally reached the undertomb, it did not immediately begin to devour the putrid meat that lay before it, a virtually endless feast. Instead, it squatted down there in the tunnel’s mouth and surveyed the room, silent and still. Flies buzzed about the creature, but it did not so much as brush them away when they landed on one of its many open wounds. In fact, the only observable thing the ghoul did as it sat there was to narrow its eyes, which Anomus saw were slit-pupiled, like a cat’s. Anomus thought the expression looked like the ghoul was confused. Or perhaps suspicious.

Eventually, carefully and slowly, it backed away from the undertomb. It did not turn its back to the chamber until it was well up the tunnel, but when it – when he did, he did not run. He simply moved silently to the exit and disappeared into the desert night. Curious, Anomus sent a half dozen of his enhanced flies up the tunnel. He wondered what the ghoul would do next.

The creature was obviously intelligent, at least to an extent. When presented with so much sustenance, it had merely observed, and then withdrawn. No creature driven by its instincts would have done so, Anomus thought. True, the ghoul might not have been hungry, and wild creatures often displayed caution in unfamiliar situations. But Anomus thought it was more than that. He did not know what, but something had made the ghoul suspicious.

With a mental shrug, Anomus returned his full attention to the wasps. His flies would give him at least a partial picture of what the ghoul did next, and he had faith that the creature would return. Every story about ghouls made mention of their prodigious hunger; how they could eat an entire corpse in a few hours, bones and all. Even accounting for exaggeration in such tales, he believed the ghoul would return. Perhaps it would bring more of its kind.

For the remainder of the night, Anomus worked on enlarging his wasps and making their venom more deadly. Enlarging them was simple; he had learned much from the flies. But the poison the wasp made was another matter. He did not know enough about the composition of venoms to know how to strengthen them. He would need living creatures for the wasps to sting – experiments – in order to test the efficacy of his alterations.

As the night ended, Anomus decided that he would breed the jeweled geckos from the funerary garden for the purpose. He did not want to wreck the delicate ecology that he’d spent so long establishing there. In order to preserve it, he would need to proceed cautiously.

~ ~ ~

Krrsh exited cautiously out of the tunnel, thought crowding on thought. So many thoughts! They were like cubs, wrestling and tripping over each other. When he was safely out of the tunnel and on desert sand once more, he put his hands to his head and squeezed.

Food. The thought was the strongest. So much food. It stretched away into the dark, farther than even his keen eyes could see. He did not need much light to see, but the cave was big, very big.

Not cave. That was another thought. No cave was… square. Flat walls. That was a thing of Men, and so the not-cave was a thing of Men, and that meant danger. This was also a strong thought. But he had smelled no Men, saw no movement but for flies. Big flies, but just flies.

But he had smelled something, something more than food. Something not natural. Another thing that made him wary. He had no words for what he had smelled – more than smelled. Felt. He did not have words, and that made him feel frustrated. Krrsh was clever, but not clever enough to explain, even to himself, what it was he had sensed.

But the thought that kept coming back and pushing all the other thoughts away was very simple and very confusing.

So much food. But no bones.

No bones at all. Krrsh had smelled no marrow, saw not a single bone. Not so much as a tooth. And that was something beyond his experience, and beyond his fathoming.

What kind of creature could take bones and leave flesh? What kind of creature could do so to so many bodies?

Krrsh did not know. Krrsh was afraid to find out.

Krrsh feared it might do the same to him.

He beat at the sides of his head with the heels of his hands.

He was afraid to leave the tunnel and enter the place of no bones. But he was hungry, and getting hungrier. Krrsh growled in frustration. He needed something. Something to reach the food, not his arm. His arm with bones that might be taken.

His kind did not use tools. That was a thing of Men. Some ghouls believed only men could use tools, but most never even thought that far. Krrsh himself had never had cause to think of using something other than his claws until now.

He growled again, and loped out into the desert. Moving helped him to think. And he needed food, even if it were only lesser carrion.

By the time the sun returned to the desert, Krrsh had found a single, desiccated lizard – and an idea.

He dug into the sands of the deeper desert, and thought about what he had to do the next night.

It would be dangerous. He might die. But Krrsh was clever and fierce.

His kind did not have the word, but by the standards of ghouls, Krrsh once of the Ironclaw pack, Krrsh the Outcast, would be considered a genius. The next night would prove it.