Wherever men meet to discuss the exploits of fabulous thieves, they speak of Thangobrind and Thish, they do not speak of Muth. But he who practices the art of thievery cares nothing for fame, unless to study how to avoid it. It is those upon whom he practices who make his name immortal. And those upon whom Muth practiced were as silent as the dead, for Muth was a dealer in antiquities.

There are some who follow Muth’s trade who scratch the earth at random, and others, more methodical, who pour a mountain through a sieve. Muth did not work like that. Instead he relied upon books and scrolls to show him where to dig. He could read no fewer than seven ancient tongues, including three that predated man. It might be thought that his learning encompassed the recorded wisdom of many ancient peoples; but alas, he cared only for what he could display in his shop window.

He had read of the tomb of Neb long before he guessed its location. And he had often noticed the round hill in the desert east of Drinen. He had wondered why it never changed in the face of a desert that was always changing, always smoothing out its wrinkles and putting new ones in their place. But it was not until he saw the priests of the Elder Ones repairing it after a sandstorm, that he put two and two together and found that they made four.

Neb was the last priest of the cult of Mlok. That cult promised to be very great in its day, some forty centuries before the time of which I write; but the repeated fissioning of its principal deity enlarged its pantheon beyond the means of any cult to sustain it, and it sacrificed itself into extinction. For the children of Mlok demanded human sacrifices, and the priests of Mlok did all they could to provide them. And when they thought they had no more lives to give, Neb showed them their mistake. He was the last. The jealous priests of the Elder Ones buried him in a desert tomb, and the children of Mlok they buried with him. They destroyed all record of the location of the tomb, so that no follower of Neb should ever find it. Forty centuries later, not even the priests of the Elder Ones knew why they poured out baskets of sand on the round hill east of Drinen.

But Muth knew. And because he knew he made the hill the object of an evening walk. It was sunset when he settled on a spot at the foot of the western slope for the site of his excavation. It was starlight when he set to work to prove the wisdom of his choice. He dug by starlight, because any other light would have been visible from the walls of Drinen, and he feared the prevention of the priests of the Elder Ones. When the full moon rose over the top of the hill it found him resting on his spade before the door of the buried tomb, having uncovered it from lintel to threshold.

The unbroken seal on the stone door was as good as a promise to Muth, a promise of rich rewards for his labor. But when he had broken the seal and opened the door, when he had lit a lamp and driven out the darkness of forty centuries, he saw what the promise was worth. There were no statues of the forbidden gods. There was no mummy of their outlawed priest. There was not even a handful of dust to show where they had crumbled. The floor was as clean as if it had just been swept.

As he was leaving he saw that the seal had come off the door in a single piece. His first though was to trample it underfoot, for he felt his disappointment sorely. But on second thought he took it home with him to use as dressing for his shop window.

That was the night the horror came to Drinen. It came an hour before the dawn to the eastern quarter of the city, when more than one sleeper was awakened by the sound of screaming in the vicinity of the desert gate. When the screaming stopped soon after it began, they decided it was only a neighbor screaming at a nightmare, and went to sleep again. But in the morning, when they found the sentry box empty and the gate standing wide open, they wondered.

On the next night the screaming resumed. But this time it did not wait for the hour before dawn to begin, nor did it stop soon after. No, it began an hour after sunset, and if it fell silent in one place it was only to spring up again in another. Those who heard it on the second night could not dismiss it as easily as they had done on the first. They could only pull their covers over their heads and curse the night watch for doing nothing to stop the screaming. And in the morning they found, for the second time, the sentry box empty and the gate standing wide open. They closed and locked the gate, but none would stay to watch it. And many houses in the eastern quarter did not open their shutters all that day.

Muth’s shop was in the eastern quarter, not far from the desert gate; he was one of the first to hear the screaming, and one of the last to guess what it really meant. Awakened four times on the second night, he only wondered why nightmares had suddenly become so prevalent. But on the third night, when the screaming troubled his own dreams and made sleep little better than waking, he turned to his books for solace. And the first book he chanced upon was the old history of the cult of Mlok.

Neb was the last priest of the cult of Mlok. When he had no more sacrifices to offer the children of Mlok, he sent them out into the streets to find them for themselves. They left their temple secretly and by night, with only the screams of their victims to tell when they were out; but night after night the screaming was heard, and from sunset to sunrise it never stopped. A third part of the population of ancient Drinen fell prey to the children of Mlok before the priests of the Elder Ones intervened. But the priests could not slay the children, for they inherited the divinity of their father. So they shut them in a desert tomb, and sealed it with the potent magic of the seal of the Elder Ones.

When Muth read that his heart sank like a stone. For the seal of the Elder Ones, the seal that had imprisoned the children of Mlok for forty centuries, was the seal he had taken from the door of the buried tomb, the seal that now reposed in his shop window. But that was not the worst. There was a note in the margin in Muth’s own hand, though under what circumstances he had written it he could not begin to guess. “You must put it back,” said the note, “at once!”

He went out by the back door for fear lest the front should be watched. He edged along the house fronts, keeping to the shadows wherever he could. Once he went around a square to avoid a lighted window. And whether he moved more quietly than other men, or whether the horror, grown accustomed to extracting its prey from houses, no longer thought to look for it in the streets, I do not know; but he got all the way to the desert gate without encountering what he feared. He slipped through the gate and out into the desert, where almost at once he came upon a company of things.

The things crouched over the body of a man, breaking the body to get to the soul as dogs break bones for the marrow. They all had their backs to Muth. But then some traitor of a breeze must have carried his scent to where they crouched, for all at once their snouts erected with a sniffing sound. When Muth heard that he knew he was lost. And when they started toward him, running on all fours and chuckling evilly, he closed his eyes and waited for the end.

But the end was long in coming. For the chuckling gave place to a whimpering sound, like the whining of dogs restrained from their prey. And when Muth opened his eyes again it was to see the things standing well apart from him, their blind snouts sniffing cautiously at the seal of the Elder Ones he clutched to his breast. Seeing from this that the seal was repellent to the things it had so long imprisoned, he clutched it a little closer. He took a step toward them. They took a step away.

The things retreated step for step but they did not scatter before him. Rather they increased their number as other things of a similar kind came out of the desert to join them, to join them in forming a living wall between Muth and the tomb. It was as if they guessed his purpose and sought to dissuade him from it. They had to dissuade him with fear alone, but the faces they made at him would have slain a more nervous man.

When he had backed them so near to the tomb that the space between could no longer contain them, they began to back though the very door they sought to keep him from. One by one they backed through the door, until Muth could not believe that the tomb could hold them all. And when the last had passed within, and the night and the desert were clean again, Muth closed the stone door upon them. He laid the seal at the threshold of the door, he heaped sand over it as high as the lintel.

That was the moment Neb chose to announce his presence by coughing softly behind him.