Beneath Strange Stars

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  Something moved within the vault, diamond eyes flashing. It had crustacean appendages and a suggestion of wings. Iridescent skin glistened like oiled leather. Harkness sent a round into the nest of eyes. The creature dropped across the rim of the vault.

  “The Mhi-Gho,” Miles explained. “Servitors of Great Cthulhu, locked into the blackness with their slumbering lord, sustained over long aeons by his telepathic emanations.”

  Another beast showed itself, and Miles dispatched it with a bolt of aether-energy that burst its form.

  “They have adapted to darkness,” Miles explained. “Once they filled the skies and hunted Martians for food, but the surface world is no longer their natural habitat. They emerge only because they cannot resist the lure of blood.”

  Once inside the vault, they discovered the walls encrusted with a kind of lichen that flourished when Mars was a hotter, wetter world. It gave off a sickly green illumination. The Mhi-Gho attacked en masse but they were no match for the percussion and energy weapons of the Nineteenth Century. The ichor flowing along the rocky floor was a testament to how mankind had advanced the technology of death since the days when men defended themselves from Mhi-Gho predations with bone and flint.

  Abruptly they entered a vast chamber. While each of the Mhi-Gho was bigger than a man, the creature of the chamber made its servitors seem as termites.

  There was about its vast bulk an aura of antiquity. Its wings, or perhaps they were fins of a sort, seemed miles long, and the tentacles that squirmed outward from its head were like titanic serpents writhing slowly in dream. It could have been an aerial creature, though it might have been just as much at home coursing through the deeps, feeding upon Earth’s whales as if they were plankton, or the Martian leviathans that now existed only as fossils. Gazing upon its nightmarish bulk Harkness sensed its true habitat might be the soundless deeps of outer space; not the aether-filled sweeps between the planets known to man, but the lonely wilderness between the stars and the terrible void of the outer darkness between island universes.

  It was Cthulhu, and it slumbered, dreaming dreams of burning stars and of the deeps where the Old Ones walked. Harkness could feel the dreams in his own mind. How they seared! Overcome by the ancient creature’s mental emanations, he sank to his knees. Miles looked at him with contempt.

  “I was unprepared the first time I entered this chamber, both physically and mentally,” Miles said. “The Mhi-Gho tore me to pieces, but that was nothing compared to what peering into Great Cthulhu’s dreaming mind did to me. How the servitors delighted in once again roaming the surface, hunting and feasting as they did of old, destroying our aethership before returning to the vault.”

  “I don’t understand,” Harkness said.

  “It was they who resealed the vault,” Miles explained. “Not me. They left me for dead, and I would have died had not that patrol come along when it did. I played my part, the noble sole survivor of a doomed expedition. I kept the maddening truth from them.”

  “The Mhi-Gho could have escaped.”

  Miles shook his head. “They cannot leave Cthulhu, and Cthulhu cannot awaken from his slumber. He can only dream, and they can only bask in his madness.”

  Miles clambered down the slope into the sleeping chamber, leaving Harkness behind. With a tremendous effort the explorer stood, but he could not follow the dwindling form of Professor Miles, any more than he could step into the inferno of a blazing building. He watched Miles make his way through Cthulhu’s ancient retainers, who were helpless to stop him.

  What chance did the wretched creatures have, Harkness thought. They were but beings of flesh and ichor, no match for a clockwork madman powered by the fires of delirium and the naked fury of the aether.

  He watched with eyes white from fear and madness as Professor Miles met his ultimate fate, then screamed, flung away the elephant rifle, and fled that accursed place.

  Harkness did not recall fleeing the chamber, sealing the vault, or anything of the mad dash up the trail to the surface.

  He did not remembering running, but he must have because the air patrol that eventually rescued him found him many leagues from the crash site. Though the search continued for days, the Royal Aerial Service, assisted by their Martian, German and American counterparts, found no other member of the Harkness Expedition, and it was assumed they had all either perished in the aethership crash or died from exposure in those cold wastes.

  Robert Harkness babbled wildly when they found him, then, for a full week said nothing. After that said little. He was mad, of course, driven over the edge by the unbearable guilt of losing all members of his expedition, and the added guilt of being the sole survivor. He spent two months under close medical care and alienist observation in Syrtis Major before he was pronounced fit for the journey back to Earth.

  After returning to Earth, Harkness retired to his Kent estate, where he lived a solitary life until his death fifty-three years later.

  In a dusty government archive in Syrtis Major there is a file on the Harkness Expedition of 1883. In amongst the rosters of the lost and damned, the maps and logs, the lists of supplies and materials, there is a spool of thin wire, a recording made by the commander of the aerial flier that rescued Robert Harkness from the barren and unpeopled plateau. At first, it was of great interest, played often by the doctors and alienists assigned to Harkness’ case, but interest waned as they realised just how badly his mind had been shattered by the ordeal, and it was eventually put away with the other artefacts, a footnote in the exploration of Mars, a reminder that the cost of knowledge is not always figured in pounds sterling, but in lives lost and men broken.

  The wire is scratchy, the voice thin, but the words are still discernable:

  “Professor Miles was mad! Madness! Dreaming! Down he flew, how the clockwork man flew! Cthulhu dreams! Oh the searing spaces! The stars sing! Sleep never waking! The gibbering wastes between the stars! Dread Cthulhu! With long ages death dies! Miles! Miles! The opening eye! The dreaming eye! The star-filled eye vast as the whole universe! No, Miles! The dreaming eye is the portal! Miles adrift in the infinitude of time and space, trapped by the closing eye! Poor, poor Professor Miles lost in the dreaming eye of Lord Cthulhu…he was quite mad, you now.”

  The evil repute of crossroads has been a part of our culture a very long time, but it has faded somewhat in the modern world. Speak of “dirty work at the crossroads” now, and you will more often get a confused look rather than a knowing nod. Used to be, we hanged criminals at crossroads and if you wanted to vex your enemy into the next world you buried him where lonely roads crossed. Now, most of us live in cities and crossing roads are just intersections. Still, there are old places where elder forces yet hold sway, where roads cross far from interstates or the habitations of men, and when, in our travels, we come to such a place we might still want to quickly put it behind us, though we might not quite know why.

  Where Paths Cross

  A Tale of the Age of Bronze

  Hecate ascendant, Kira came upon a man hanged at the crossroads, hung from a gnarled oak. He turned with the night’s breezes, copper bright in the sockets of his eyes.

  Kira prepared her own small offering. She did not often seek the Crone’s countenance, but it was not prudent to ignore Hecate in her own realm. Kira’s hymn rose with the acrid-sweet smoke of spices and herbs.

  The hanged man moaned.

  Kira cut the rope and eased him down, too late considering the peril of taking away a sacrifice already given. She did not pause. In her journeys, she had at times killed, but had never murdered. If she did not save him, she would be his murderer. If she were damned for not leaving this man to the embrace of the Lady of All Nights, then damned she would be. It would hardly be the first time.

  She slipped off the noose and felt his neck. It was welted and gashed by the rope. It should have broken. She pulled the ball of healing fungus she kept in her pack and lightly rolled it over his rope-gashed wound. It would stave off any infect
ion or fester, she knew from experience. As far as putting demons to flight with its magick, a tale told by the old wiccan woman who had given her it, Kira had her doubts.

  She removed the coins pressed into his eyes and placed them in a palm too soft to be that of a laborer. Perhaps a thief, Kira thought, or a murderer, for it was common to execute criminals in the wilderness where roads crossed. Maybe he had a dark past, but there was a gentle, aesthetic cast to his features, undiminished by the gruesomeness of his wound. Meeting him under circumstances less dire, she could easily have taken him for a scholar or someone’s favorite uncle.

  His eyes fluttered open.

  “Emissary?” The croaked word required a tremendous effort to force it out his nearly crushed throat. “The Goddess’ dark gaze o’erflows us.”

  Kira glanced at the rising horned moon and shook her head. “I’m Kira. Just a traveler upon the road.”

  “Daughter of the phasing moon,” he hissed hoarsely. “Your bronze. The hymn I heard you sing. They harken to elder ways, ways that are passing out of the modern world.”

  She looked down at her garments of leather and bronze, at her bronze sword of Keltic crafting and daggers in their oiled sheaths. They were relics of a time slipping away, anachronisms in the fledgling age of iron. Kira clung to them and her beliefs as a drowning man might cling to a log, even as he knew he was being swept to a precipice. Born out of time, Kira wanted nothing to do with this age of iron, this timid new world.

  “You need rest, friend, but not here,” she said. “I’ll help you get away. When I make camp, you’ll share my fire’s warmth.”

  With Kira’s help, he stood and gazed eastward, along the roadway beneath the shadow moon. “I must return to Abastis.”

  Kira knew of walled Abastis on the Colchis by reputation only, but that reputation was enough to keep her treading southward.

  “If you return to Abastis, you’ll die for your crimes.” She looked to the hanging tree. “This time your fate won’t be trusted to the vagaries of a rope.”

  “Crimes?” He stepped away, stood shakily on his own. “I’m no criminal! I am Valerius, Keeper of Secrets in the Temple of the Moon. I serve the Goddess.”

  Kira looked uneasily to the moon. Of all the aspects of the Goddess, the one called Hecate, whose face is the dark of the moon, was the most dire. And demanding.

  “The moon can be a harsh mistress,” she said.

  “This was not the Goddess’ will but Shalisha’s, usurper of the temple!” Valerius cried. “The world is cindered by change-winds hotter than a forge’s breath. Those loyal to the Goddess are murdered or bent before strange altars!” He shook his head. “Strange days are upon us. Apostasy and religious fire. Alien gods are upon the people’s lips. Hecate finds favor in the pantheons of conquerors, but now thirsts continually for the dark wine she once demanded only in her season. It’s the curse of the new metal, iron.”

  “Good reasons to pass Abastis by,” Kira said. “And it’s infested with magick-workers—another good reason to move on. I’ve too often sold my sword arm to fools on magickal quests just to earn the silver to make me dependant upon no one but myself.”

  “Nevertheless, I must return,” Valerius insisted.

  “You don’t,” Kira said. “I’m bound for Zinj and the kingdoms beyond the Styx. I’ll find Beastmen and terrors as old as time, but I won’t have to grub silver from madmen seeking control of the cosmos. There, I will carve out a life for myself, by my own efforts. Journey with me, Valerius. You’d make an interesting companion, a scholarly man favored of the Goddess. I’m not unlettered, not merely a barbarian with a good sword arm and a taste for blood. What I do, I do to survive, but I dream of so much more.”

  Valerius shook his head. “The Goddess spared my life, but not so I could run away. I must return to Abastis and cleanse the Temple of the Moon.”

  “And how will you do that, Valerius?” Kira challenged, though not with an unkindly tone. “You’re no weaponeer.”

  “That may be, but I must return,” Valerius said. “And I must do so while Hecate gazes earthward. Do what you will, Kira. My path is chosen. The Goddess will provide.”

  Valerius turned and walked eastward, unsteadily at first, then with footfalls as determined as they were resigned. Within moments he became a vague figure upon the roadway, small beneath the ascending crescent moon and its halo of stars.

  It was unlikely he would reach the city, she decided. It was far more probable he would awaken in some ditch, or not at all. If, by some miracle he did attain the gates of Abastis, he would be cut down. His quest was as hopeless as any she had seen. Sighing, Kira shook her head and turned her own steps eastward.

  They gained sight of Abastis by the middle of the night. Watchfires flared atop the beetling walls. Above the riverport there hung a miasmic cloud, connected to the city by thin plumes of smoke. It was ruddily underlit by the never-ceasing forges, churned by alchemical currents and shot through with flickerings of magickal energies. A foul stench rose from the river, produced by runoffs from myriad alchematoriums and iron smelters. The river swarmed with boats, lanterns at their prows, competing for berths. Stone quays and warehouses were lit nearly daybright by scores of pitch-burning torches.

  Beyond the river was the blackness of the Tarkan Highlands and the kingdom of the Hittites, gateway to the home of iron.

  Abastis’ main gate was barred till the dawning, but a small river gate was held by a single sentry. Kira took the two coppers that had been intended for Charon and tossed them. The iron-clad soldier stood aside as the tall dark-haired swordswoman entered with her companion, a man whose features were mostly concealed by his pulled-up cloak. The sentry, Xenocrates by name, shuddered as the duo passed into shadow, having glimpsed a wound no man should possess and still live.

  After treading narrow streets populated by shades and silence, they came to a broad way filled with people in colorful garb, shops beneath bright awnings, voices, music, yellow lights out myriad doorways, breaths of perfume and hashish, ironmongers hawking their wares. In every corner, every niche, every byway were magick-makers of all sorts, from astrologers and necromancers to dicers courting luck and typhonists seeking the end of humanity.

  Keeping to shadows, they entered a dark boulevard on the far side of the market. He pointed. “The Temple of the Moon.”

  The ancient temple soared at the terminus of the shadowy street. Its columns were like fire and ice. Wide marmoreal steps swept upward to a portico lined with statues.

  “The statues are headless,” Kira murmured. “Why?”

  “They were raised over untold centuries, generation after generation seeking to capture all the essences of the Goddess,” her companion whispered. “It took Shalisha but an instant to declare them presumptive abominations and defile them.”

  “How did she usurp your priestess’ authority?” Kira asked.

  “By glint of gold, by force of iron.”

  “Was she challenged by anyone?”

  “These are perilous times,” Valerius said. “More perilous than even you can know.”

  Guards patrolled the area of the temple and the portico. By their iron armor and weapons, they proclaimed themselves children of this new age.

  “Only women may guard the Goddess’ shrines,” Kira said. “Their weapons must be of copper or bronze, the fittings of silver.”

  “Shalisha’s first command was to slaughter the Amazonian Corps. It was a night of blood and fire.” He shuddered. “Nothing was the same afterwards.”

  “What about you?” Kira asked. “It’s highly unusual for a man to find a place in the Goddess’ service.”

  “My mother was barren, so she prayed for children,” he replied. “Her firstborn was pledged to the Goddess’ service.” He touched his chest and smiled. “It was I. The priestesses taught me. I have served faithfully. I must serve one last time.”

  “How do we get inside without being seen?” Kira asked.

  “I’ll go alone,�
�� Valerius said. “I must atone for standing by, for hiding when I should have acted. You’ve your own path to follow, and not in the company of a coward.”

  “Weaponless, you go forth against the Goddess’ enemy?” Kira said. “You’re no coward. Show me how we enter unseen?”

  They approached the Temple of the Moon roundabout, taking narrow alleys barely a body wide. Kira took care to not let any of her metal scrape the mud-brick walls lest the noise betray them. She was surprised by the ease of Valerius’ movements—he moved not as a man quickened to life a few hours earlier but as a warrior determined to challenge fate.

  They entered a structure some distance from the temple. At one time it had been a residence, evidenced by faded wall paintings, but had fallen to ruin, as had others in the district. They were homes to the homeless and legions of stray cats, but not this particular one.

  “This is the oldest part of Abastis,” Valerius said. “Few people come here by choice, and even they shun this building.”

  “Why?” Kira asked.

  “It’s said to be haunted by something ancient and terrible.” He cast nervous glances about. “This way.”

  They entered a roofless rear chamber, their way lit by the baleful cloud over the prosperous, unfortunate city. They pulled up a flooring stone, revealing a tunnel. Kira used her flint to ignite a torch and they descended. While Valerius held the torch, Kira pulled the stone back into place.

  “The tunnels predate Abastis,” he explained. “I explored them as a lad, yet still they hold secrets. There are old shrines along the way. Don’t touch them—their makers are long dead, but the gods they served may only sleep.”

  Kira nodded. She knew all too well the danger of awakening slumbering gods.

  They came to an upward incline, then a solid wall. Kira put out the torch and helped Valerius push a section of the wall. It swung on silent hinges. They were in a storage room. The panel closed behind them.

  “This is the back east quarter of the temple,” Valerius said. “The priestess’ chamber is north of the Mysteries. If we are to find her, it will be there. She might be guarded. If we can cut off the head, a creature dies. Her evil will die with her.”