“I’d have run,” said the boy who’d yawned.
“But you’re a poltroon,” replied the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right. “You always run from a fight.”
“Yes, well, have you never heard that discretion is the better part of valor? The greater wisdom lies in knowing when the odds are not in your favor, and Isobel Snow knew the odds were not in hers. So she dispatched Sorrow to enlist the aid of another earthborn ghoul, one who had once been a man of the Waking World, a man named Richard Pickman. In the century since Pickman had arrived in Thok, he’d risen to a station of some prominence among the ghouls, and during the Ghūl War he’d fought against the Snows. Afterwards, he’d gone into hiding, but Sorrow knew his whereabouts, and he knew also that Pickman possessed the influence to arrange the queen’s hasty escape, and that for the right price he would help.”
“But wasn’t he afraid?” asked the tow-headed girl.
“Undoubtedly, but he didn’t believe the prophecy and was convinced that the coming of the albino twins was no more than a coincidence. He was of the opinion that the two were grifters and humbugs who’d seen a chance to exploit ignorance and superstition, and they’d seized it. He certainly did not believe that the infant who’d be born of their union would be the ghouls’ deliverance. In fact, Richard Pickman doubted that there ever had been a war with the Djinn. He was a heretic of the first order, an unbeliever through and through. It wasn’t that he was sympathetic to Isobel’s plight. No. More that he was convinced that as long as her child lived, Isaac Snow would be weakened by his fear of their off spring. And, too, Pickman conjured that the brother’s confidence would be weakened if he failed to murder his sister. Neither of the Snows were accustomed to failure.
“They were extremely arrogant,” said the boy who’d yawned. He rubbed at his eyes and petted a ginger kitten that was curled on the floor near him.
“Sure he was,” nodded the peddler, “and more than words ever can convey. It did not cross his mind that his plot would be foiled, once he set it in motion. They say that the first thing he felt upon receiving the news that one of his confidants, a ghoul named Sorrow — and not George or Juan Carlos or maybe Aziz — had lain in wait for the King’s butcher and gotten the upper hand, the very first expression Isaac Snow’s face showed that night was not rage, but amazement that he could possibly have failed.”
“Serves him right,” says the tow-headed girl.
The peddler shrugged. “Perhaps, if one excuses Isobel her own crimes and makes of her a hero merely because she’d fallen out of favor with her brother. Regardless, after the assassin was slain, Pickman, Sorrow, and several other ghouls led her from the palace and out of Thok, down narrow mountain trails and across the bhole-haunted Vale of Pnath. At last they gained the vaults of ruined Zin, that haunted city of the gugs, and went straightaway to a mighty central tower, the tallest among twice a hundred towers so tall no one could, from the ground, ever hope to glimpse the tops of those spires. They pushed open its enormous doors, which bore the sigil of Koth — a dreadful, awful bas-relief neither Isobel Snow nor Sorrow dared gaze upon — and I should tell you, children, that the history of that tower is a shuddersome tale in its own right, one all but lost to antiquity.”
“Maybe you’ll tell it next time,” said the boy on the tow-headed girl’s left.
“Maybe,” replied the peddler. “We shall see. Anyhow, beyond that forbidding entryway was a stair that wound up and up and up . . . and up . . . to a massive trapdoor carved of slick black stone. It is said two hard days’ climbing were necessary to at last reach the top of those stairs and that the strength of all the ghouls present was only barely enough to lift open that trapdoor. But open it they did, and so it was that Isobel Snow, Queen of Bones and Rags, Qqi Ashz’sara, slipped through her brother’s icy fingers and fled to the Upper Dream Lands. Of the ghouls, only Sorrow went with her, the others turning back with Richard Pickman, who, as I’ve said, hoped her escape would be the beginning of the end for Isaac Snow’s reign. Pickman had instructed Sorrow to lead the Queen in Exile through the Enchanted Wood to the River Xari, where a barge would be waiting to bear them down to the port city of Jaren, from whence they could book safe passage across the shimmering sea to Serannian. Sure, even Isaac Snow would never be half so bold as to venture so many leagues from the Underworld, much less attempt to breach the high walls of the island kingdom of Serannian.”
“The people of Serannian let them enter?” the tow-headed girl asked skeptically. “A ghoul and an albino half-ghoul?”
“You’d not think so, would you? But, see, the lords of Serannian were kindly,” answered the peddler. “And as I have told you, there were generals and leaders of men who’d learned of the Snows’ discovery of the long lost Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb and of the strife that followed, and how they feared the twins might not be content to rule the Lower Dream Lands. So they saw the arrival of Isobel Snow and news of the division between king and queen as a good omen, indeed. Moreover, there is a thing I have not yet revealed, probably the most important part of the tale, the pivot on which turns its plot.”
Each of the three children sat up a little straighter at that, for how could anything be more important than the ghoul queen’s flight?
“When Isobel Snow departed the peaks of Thok and the palaces of the royal necropolis, she took with her the Basalt Madonna.”
There was a collective gasp from the peddler’s audience, and she felt the smallest rind of satisfaction at that. If she had to tell this story, at least the gravity of it was not being lost on the listeners, and at least she knew she was not slipping in her skill as a spinner of yarns. She wanted to rekindle her pipe, but this was no place to interrupt herself. She was getting very near the end.
“But if she had the weapon, why did she not turn it against her brother?” asked the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right.
“I don’t know,” said the peddler. “No one knows, no one now living. Perhaps she didn’t fully comprehend how, or possibly she was unable to use the Madonna without him. It may have required the two of them together. Or perhaps she simply loved Isaac too much to destroy him.”
“Or she was afraid,” whispered the boy who’d yawned.
“Or that,” said the peddler. “Whatever the reason, she didn’t use it against him. She carried it away with her, and by the time Isaac Snow discovered this she was far beyond his reach. When she arrived at Serannian she and Sorrow were arrested and taken to the Council of Lords to whom she told her story and to whom she revealed the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb. She asked for sanctuary, and it was granted. And this even though she refused to surrender the Basalt Madonna to the men and women of that city on the sea. So, it was there her daughter was born, whom she named Elspeth Isa Snow. There in the shining bustle and safety of Serannian it was that Elspeth grew to be a woman, a strong and fiercely intelligent woman, I should add. Indeed, in the spring of her nineteenth year she was offered a seat on the Council, which she accepted. That same year her mother succumbed to a disease of the blood that had plagued her and her brother since birth, and—”
“Aunty, you didn’t mention that before,” interrupted the tow-headed girl.
“It wasn’t important before. Now it is. Anyway, when Elspeth Snow’s mother died the Basalt Madonna passed into her keeping.”
“And what happened to Sorrow?” the girl asked.
“Oh, he was still there. He was, in fact, ever Elspeth’s dearest friend and confidant. She being one-quarter ghoul herself found his company comforting. But . . . this is not the end of the tale. There’s more.”