by Brian Lumley
Not the last? the moon-god sighed his sleepy amaze, but kept it to himself. What? And shall there be more Suhm-yi to worship me after all? They were ever my favourites among the world’s races; but I had thought they were no more, and a god needs his subjects.
His silver rays cut a swath across all the Primal Land – and across the Straits of Yhem, where five boats forged for Shad – even reaching Shadarabar itself. And now the old moon-god started more fully awake, for in Shad he spied that which caused him more than a little of alarm.
It was in the sky, which was his domain of immemorial right, and it was this:
A great black cloud which boiled where no cloud should be, not born of currents of upper air but rising like some diseased puffball of smoke from below, and forming a ring that spun and sucked up the mists of the jungle swamps into the night sky, compressing them there, swirling them as if spun from within, like some dark and evil whirlpool of the skies. Except it was nothing out of the heavens but some subterraneous hell. And even as Gleeth watched, so the flat plateau of the twister grew darker yet – black as the Stygian bowels at planet’s core – and its rim began to glow with the green and writhing phosphorescence of things long rotted. It whirled its weird funnel over all the fabulous city of Shad, but its stalk remained constant, seeming rooted in a ziggurat palace at the wild jungle’s fringe.
Then… out of the whirling mass were shot like stones from a giant’s sling several smaller, even stranger masses, which hurtled meteoric across the skies and out over the Straits of Yhem – and there paused. And now these eerie imps of the underworld curved down and around, fashioning themselves into green-glowing winds which blew on the ships of Yoppaloth and hastened them home.
All of which the moon-god found exceedingly interesting. And he remembered Amyr Arn’s pleading, and he wondered about the fate of a certain Hrossak. But…dawn would soon be here and the sun risen to outshine him, and there was always tomorrow night to consider these strange events and their stranger connections. Tomorrow night, aye, when he’d waxed a little more and grown stronger. It could all wait until then, he was sure …
Dawn.
Yes, it would soon be dawn, and still Teh Atht fretted as he paced to and fro and hither and thither through the halls and corridors of his manse in Klühn.
‘How long, ‘til dawn?’ he asked himself for the tenth time. And answered: ‘An hour at least …’ A whole hour, before he’d dare return to the room of the astrologarium, where he’d left his shewstone. Eleven hours sped by since his magick had gone so disastrously wrong and almost revealed him to Cush Gemal – or rather, to Black Yoppaloth. And in all that time no wink of sleep taken, no morsel of food passed his lips, but only this fretting and gnashing of teeth to occupy him, as he’d paced and prowled and considered his position – which was not an envious one.
Fantastic events were in the offing, and Teh Atht knew it. More, he could feel himself at the centre of whatever was coming, without yet knowing what it would be. The answer, if it could be fathomed, lay in the room of the astrologarium, in the rush and reel of all Man’s astrological moons and planets and stars, but for now Teh Atht dare not return there. Worse, his shewstone remained in that same room, without which even the smallest scrying were out of the question.
But go back into that room? No, not possible, not until he could be sure that Black Yoppaloth had quit searching for him. For all he knew the shewstone remained lethally inverse, only waiting to be activated and thus reveal him to the enemy – who’d sworn to have him! Perhaps that most powerful necromancer waited even now for him, just beyond the crystal ball’s opaque curtains – which he daren’t under any circumstances throw open. And this was Teh Atht’s predicament.
Hopper and flitter, sensing their master’s distress, had spent the long, weary hours with him – the one invariably underfoot and the other always just overhead – but Teh Atht scarcely noticed them as he wandered his mazy manse, wringing his tapering hands and vainly seeking a solution to the problem. He had considered calling his third familiar, that entirely liquid one, out of the astrologarium; but what if something else was there in that magickally sealed room even now – something perhaps of Yoppaloth’s sending – and what if that something should come out with the liquid one?
‘Coward!’ Teh Atht cried, causing hopper and flitter to start with his outburst. He threw wide his bell-cuffed arms in the corridor where he stalked, shook his fists at the stone walls. ‘Oh, coward, Teh Atht! What? And are you not a great wizard in your own right?’
Aye, but white! some inner voice whispered back. My magicks are white, and his are black. I have scruples – some – and he has none. I tried to kill him, and if he discovers me, which he’ll surely try to do, he can and will kill me!
‘Then act now!’ he cried. Following which his voice at once fell to a whisper: ‘While yet there’s time …’
But at night? When baneful spells were that much more likely to succeed?
Teh Atht rushed to a window facing east across the sea, gazed out. On the horizon, the first blush of dawn, or perhaps a false dawn. Day was coming, and the darkness soon to be banished. And he knew in his bones that time was narrowing down. Soon Black Yoppaloth’s renewal would be at hand; soon Tarra Khash would be at greatest peril; and all too soon the lamia Orbiquita would require an explanation. The more he considered the intricacies, the more intricate they became.
‘Hopper, flitter, to me!’ he cried, turning from the window. ‘Enough is enough! I now return to the room of the astrologarium – and you go with me. Three brave hearts together!’ Alarmed, they drew back at once, but he reached out with a simple bind-you-to-me and they were drawn close, flitter obliged to fasten to his high collar while hopper clung to his rune-inscribed robe. And so they proceeded to the room of the astrologarium.
Here it was that the white wizard had brought about the wrecking of Black Yoppaloth’s boat, and his blindness; and here, too, while the astonished necromancer had been hurled into the sea, he’d cursed him with Curious Concretion to make sure he’d sink alas, by virtue of the fact that the last was a sending of some distance, and diluted through the medium of the shewstone, it had been weakened: instead of granite, Yoppaloth had become pumice, a softer stone far. What’s more, a man or creature fixed in a state of Curious Concretion does not breathe or even need to, and so Yoppaloth had not drowned. In a deeper ocean, as marble, say, he’d have gone to the bottom at once; and when the spell was broken, then he’d be flattened by pressure or drowned on the way back up. But that had not been the case.
The spell had been broken, when by chance Teh Atht had been distracted by the blazing kerchief, which same mishap had simultaneously returned Yoppaloth’s sight. The attempt on the necromancer’s life had not been blundered, not by any means, but was simply ill-starred. Perhaps Teh Atht should have used his astrologarium to choose a more opportune moment.
The entire episode must therefore be counted as a failed experiment, which in its failing had produced no small hazard of its own. This had been when Yoppaloth attempted to strike back, as Teh Atht had struck, through the very shewstone itself; and only the speed of the latter’s retreat therefrom had saved him from a painful blistering, and probably from much worse than that.
After that, praying that in the moment of inversion the crystal ball had deactivated, Klühn’s mage had quickly left the room of the astrologarium, locked and spelled shut the door; and now, nearly twelve hours later, he stood once more outside that room, key in hand and chewing his lip. On his way here he’d reinforced by will and rune a handful of personal protections to ward off what might possibly lie in wait for him within; and finally, voice trembling just a little as he unspelled the door, he inserted his key in the lock and turned it, then pushed that portal open.
Inside…nothing was changed that he could see at a glance; driving hopper and flitter before him, he crossed the threshold; no dire apparition sprang out upon him. Teh Atht drew a deep breath, retracted his wand, shot further
quick, cursory glances all about. Then he crossed the room and approached the shewstone – but cautiously, ever ready to jump back at first sight or intimation of unusual activity. Nothing …
He activated the crystal, which at once spat out several bright green sparks – residuum of that earlier, more deadly display – and fell quiescent. Startled by the sudden sputtering, hopper and flitter had taken their departure, but came creeping and winging back as Teh Atht lowered his shielding hands from before his eyes. And there the shewstone reposed as before, milky-deep and vaguely aswirl, and nothing noticeably amiss. That is, nothing amiss with the crystal sphere.
But—
The astrologarium itself was far from right! The infinitely accurate soar and swing of its multi-hued nebulae and simulated stars seemed strangely out of kilter.
Teh Atht remembered the green meteorites which, hurled at him by black Yoppaloth, had erupted from the shewstone to bound and rebound all about the room, and wondered if they could have affected the balance of this miniature, man-made universe. The astrologarium had used up years without number and magicks likewise innumerable in its construction and was his pride and joy. Half dreading to discover damage, he slitted his eyes to peer deep into its lucid plasma infinities.
And as he peered, so his third and uniquely liquid familiar came flowing from the spaces between pigmy planets, expanding from mere amoeba to blob of resin, finally into half a gallon of clear, glutinous jelly as ‘he’ or it approached the rim. Teh Atht extended a hand, upon which with a plop the astrologarium ejected the weird, wobbling intelligence into his palm. There that freakish familiar quickly elongated himself slugwise along the wizard’s arm, clinging there like a sheath of sentient slime.
Employed mainly in the maintenance and lubrication of the astrologarium, the liquid one felt and was disturbed by any serious fluctuations therein; and quite obviously (or obvious, at least, to Teh Atht’s practiced eyes) the creature was agitated. Concerned, he comforted his familiar creature, let him seep into a voluminous pocket of his robe, then commenced to search the finite infinity of small worlds for the cause of such perturbation. And now indeed he saw the imbalance, portent of changes vast in the mundane world of men!
Strange dark stars stood in alien alignment; moons and planets were shadowed in eerie eclipses; the astrologarium itself seemed to hold its breath. ‘The stars are…wrong!’ the wizard gasped aloud – and at once, with his own words still ringing in his ears, staggered back from the cosmic display. Staggered, aye; for depending on one’s point of view, the stars weren’t wrong at all; indeed, it could be said that they were very nearly right!
But for whom?
CUSH GEMAL’S STORY
Between times…Tarra Khash had proceeded with Cush Gemal to his black tent in the prow of a roughly repaired boat forging for Shad.
There he accepted a seat on cushions only just dry from their salt water dousing, gazed at his weird host by the light of a small green lantern.
And finally he ventured: ‘Perhaps I’m unwise to accept your hospitality like this. Some come in here who don’t come out again. And others make small splashes in the night, when they go overboard …’
Cush Gemal smiled a strange sad smile, more properly a twisting of his bony features. ‘Would that it could be otherwise,’ he said. ‘But it cannot. I do what I must for survival. I am what I am.’
‘A sorcerer,’ said Tarra evenly, with a slow nod. ‘A necromancer. Indeed, Black Yoppaloth himself! You said you’d tell me all. Well, here I am, and all ears.’
Black Yoppaloth nodded, drew himself up a little straighter where he sat. Then he reached across suddenly to touch Tarra’s shoulder. The Hrossak felt the iciness of that touch, drew back. He shivered and said: ‘Cold as a fjord!’
‘Colder than that,’ the other corrected him. ‘And growing colder all the time! My time approaches, do you see? You don’t see? Then I’ll explain. Except I would ask you, don’t interrupt. Let me tell it all, and then you might understand. Agreed?’
‘Some things I already understand,’ said Tarra. ‘Like how mistaken I’ve been to save your life: once when you lay on the bottom of the sea, where I should have left you, and once when the slaves might have killed you if I hadn’t persuaded them otherwise. What I don’t understand is why I did these things.’
‘Then hear me out and maybe you will,’ said the other. And this is the story he told:
‘First let me tell you, I am not the original Black Yoppaloth. I am the second. Oh, I know there are certain legends which have it that there have been nine Yoppaloths, but that’s a mere myth put about by Theem’hdra’s lesser mages. Most of them desire to keep secret the fact of my immortality; a jealous lot, they prefer not to believe in a superior sorcerer. Rather, they do not wish to lessen their own estates in the eyes of ordinary men. But in their hearts they fear me as a mage without peer. Ah, if only they knew!
‘But in fact there have been only two Yoppaloths: the first – who grew mighty toward the end of Mylakhrion’s time, more than eleven hundred years ago – and the second, myself, lord and master of kingless Shadarabar for the past millennium.
‘But how can this be? I am a man like other men, as you have seen. I have man’s moods and passions, man’s lusts – though burning less fiercely now – and all his normal appetites. In aspect I might appear less like a true wizard than even the lowliest rune-caster! Indeed, only my physical appearance – which sets me aside somewhat, but not I think too far – belies the fact that I am entirely ordinary. Where are my familiars, my cloak of sigils, wand of power and runebooks? What? A wizard? How so? Well, let me tell you that I am not a wizard – not in the common meaning of the word! And yet I am extraordinary. Would you believe it if I told you that I have been what I have been, that I am what I am, because there is no alternative?
‘More than a thousand years ago, I was a blond-haired, green-eyed lad living in a village south of the Lohr River where it meets the Eastern Ocean. Ah? Astonishment in your face, Tarra Khash? Say nothing, hear me out. A lad, aye, white-skinned – far paler than your bronze hide – and green-eyed, whose mother tended a vegetable patch while her husband fished. That was my family, and twenty more like it in that little village by the sea, at the mouth of the Lohr. But all of this a thousand years ago, Tarra Khash, and Klühn itself no bigger than a small town in those days.
‘I was thirteen when Yoppaloth came up from Shadarabar along the coast with his ships out of Shad. All along the way he’d butchered and raped, looted, burned and taken slaves. His ships were crammed with slaves, and his ship carried a handful of virgins, which he guarded most jealously.’
‘I’ve heard this tale before,’ Tarra could not help but interrupt.
‘Then hear it again!’ cried the other. ‘Yoppaloth came to my village in the night from where he’d anchored his ships down the coast. My mother died that night, horribly! And my father – a bull of a man, for all that he was a fisherman – roared and raved and slew like a berserker, but in the end was taken. And Yoppaloth well-satisfied to have found a fighter like him for his arena of death. I was taken, too, for I was young, and blond and green-eyed; indeed I was a handsome lad…and Yoppaloth was a pederast!
‘And so we were shipped to Shad. On the voyage Yoppaloth took me for himself, and because life was dear I made no real protest. While I pretended to love him, I loathed him. But I learned how to control myself and how not to cry out, how to show no fear and even how to feign enjoyment of his enormities; but inside I had set myself a goal, which was this: one day, by fair means or foul, I’d kill him!
‘The ships arrived in Shad; slaves were put ashore, along with twelve wondrous virgins; all were herded through the gorgeous, sweltering city into Yoppaloth’s palace at the edge of a mighty jungle. In a very little while the necromancer came to trust me. I was given free run of the palace; I could do whatever I wished, go where I pleased – except the slave-quarters, which were forbidden. And that was where I most wanted to go, for my father wa
s there.
‘Out of frustration, I wandered the length and breadth of that great palace: to the topmost roof of its five ziggurat tiers towering above the jungle, and down into the many mazy levels below. And I discovered great wonders and greater horrors! I found Yoppaloth’s sunken arena, guarded by giant statues of all the dark gods and beings of an hundred alien pantheons, and I saw the work in progress there. The floor of that place was of sand turned red with the powdered blood of men; ah! – but now that floor was being freshened, replaced, made clean for—
‘For what? I was soon to find out!
‘Yoppaloth, that great black-skinned, black-hearted beast of a sorcerer, had made a pact with the dark god Yibb-Tstll. The pact was this: that Yoppaloth would worship Yibb and make sacrifice unto him all his days, for which the payment was due now. And so that hell-god had instructed Yoppaloth in his dreams what he must do, and the preparations were these: that he must bring back an hundred slaves to Shad, and a dozen young virgins, all to be used up in the arena of death.
‘Now, I will not describe the ceremonies attendant unto Yoppaloth’s initiation, or the orgy of blood which preceded the hour of that vile rite, but I will say this: that Yibb-Tstll was to be paid well for Yoppaloth’s eternal life, paid in the coin of life itself, and that Yibb-Tstll is an eater of souls!
‘For an hundred years the necromancer had fed that god of outer spheres on the souls of his people – usually miscreants sentenced in his courts, where there was only one sentence: the arena of death – but on this special occasion, the occasion of Black Yoppaloth’s ascendance to immortality, the dark god’s orgy would be that much more prodigious! The way of it was this:
‘The slaves would be set to fight for their lives, but not against other slaves – not even against men. They were to fight monsters out of the jungles and swamps, and others out of necromantic nether-pits, against which only the strongest would survive intact of mind and limb. And to ensure they fought well, they’d be promised that in the event of ultimate victory, then that they’d have their freedom. Ah, but victory would be hard in the winning; and in any case the promise was a lie, as will be seen. Aye, for no man ever escaped with his life from Black Yoppaloth’s arena of death.
