by John Shirley
“Kjeljuk!” Borsk cried, and forgetting himself, he stepped into the mine. When the flickering light of his yuka torch fell upon the slowly approaching soldier, Borsk let out a gasp. Kjeljuk’s face was covered in grime, his bushy beard completely matted with blood. The once fearsome giant walked unsteadily, one hand on a wall for support, eyes glazed and unfocused, feet dragging. But still, the amazing northerner had somehow fought his way free of the shadows that had pulled him down.
Suddenly remembering the black horrors, Borsk waved his torch about to cast the light in all corners and crevices around him in case an ebony nightmare was creeping towards him. He saw nothing. He strained his ears for the soft whispers of the things, but only heard Kjeljuk’s shuffling approach.
“How?” Borsk asked, when he was within arm’s reach. “What happened back there?”
Kjeljuk stopped for a moment, his head lolling on his neck to look down at the little man while his eyes rolled in their sockets. The giant did not reply, probably could not speak for all the blood on his lips, but he did stretch back an arm and point behind him. Then Kjeljuk continued his slow, uneven gait out of the mine.
Borsk silently watched the man pass, then turned and peered into the deeper darkness.
What was he pointing at? “Who cares, time to leave this place for good,” He said to himself, but Borsk’s restless mind continued, Wait, listen; no whispers. And look; no slithering shadows. The darkness has returned below.
Then his torchlight reflected back on something golden and coppery spilled from a rough-hide bundle.
“Kjeljuk,” Borsk called out. “Your orichalcum, you left it behind.”
The large Polarian did not answer, slow or even turn around. Kjeljuk just kept slowly plodding forward, out of the mine.
Quickly, go and retrieve the orichalcum. The Darkness has gone back down to the lightless hell that spawned it. You are safe and those few rocks alone are worth a fortune.
“Damn it all.” The little man said, but he cautiously moved forward, deeper into the mine.
He did not have to go far.
In the middle of the mineshaft, his torch-light reflected not only off the spilt orichalcum, but from a wet, misshapen, and still steaming mound next to it. Borsk had hunted his share of deer, so he recognized a gut-pile when he saw one; he could make out lungs, liver, heart, and seemingly endless coils of dripping intestines. There were also bits that no one saw in a pile after a hunt: bones. Dozens of dull white shards poked out of the red mess here and there. Most of the bones were fragments but some were intact. He could identify a curved rib and the knobby end of a thighbone.
“Yhoundeh protect me,” Borsk prayed for the first time since his early childhood. He had no idea what the gruesome sight before him meant, but he knew he did not want to be near it. He turned and ran back out of the mine, scurrying from the mouth of the Pit and into the fading gloom of twilight outside. There he spied Kjeljuk on his knees, head bowed, the barbarian’s long hair hanging over his blood-covered face. The warrior looked too exhausted to continue on.
Borsk knelt next to the Polarian and then straining, he hauled the silent soldier to his feet.
“Let us leave this cursed place.” The barkeep said, dragging Kjeljuk several paces forward. The pair stepped over the silver barrier carved into the ground and that’s when a new horror was born.
Kjeljuk began to convulse, arms flailing, and one mighty limb struck Borsk on the face, sending him sprawling. Upon landing, Borsk’s hand went up to find his nose bleeding, but his eyes were held fast on the jittering barbarian. Then came a horrible ripping sound and in a blink Kjeljuk fell backwards at the waist, bending in a way impossible to man. The front of the warrior opened up like a worn coat and out spilled several globs of writhing darkness.
The living shadows hit the ground and elongated into ropy tendrils as Kjeljuk toppled from his feet. The ebony creatures slithered forth at incredible speed, leaving glistening trails behind them in the fading light of approaching night. Within the span of three of Borsk’s terrified heartbeats, the dark things were gone.
As for Kjeljuk, what was left of him lay crumpled and deflated like an empty wineskin. The red pool that formed around the flattened corpse had nothing to do with grapes.
“Wine…” Borsk tittered as the horrible truth of what he had witness became clear to him. The dark, formless monsters from below had indeed been clever. They had known that they could not cross the silver line carved in the earth by the priests of Yhoundeh, not without the proper disguise. Once on the other side of the barrier, they discarded the remains of the man and now, after untold years…
The darkness below was free.
The Conquest of
Rhizopium
By Dieter Meier
Before the pungent coronal oil of his anointing had even dried, Zyzotha the Fourth of Commoriom did begin to hatch schemes to consolidate and expand his mighty empire. In the fullness of time, all of Mhu Thulan had fallen beneath the Commorion banner––all save one lesser treasure, which had resisted and bedeviled his avaricious ancestors. Rhizopium, the secluded city of the tree stones, lay but three days’ ride from the capital, though the empire extended beyond the reach of daylight to the west. For a score of red lustrums, Commoriom had thrown its armies at the defiant city, yet still it stood, implacable as death itself.
Until one day, when a sorcerer of Tscho Volpanomi, vulpine of aspect and cloaked in glossy ebon-green diatryma feathers, came to court and issued such a claim as made Emperor Zyzotha’s royal blood sing with dreams of epochal bloodshed.
“With a bit of knowledge I have,” proclaimed Uvumbra Ovis, “I might achieve for you in a day that which has been denied all your ancestors.”
Zyzotha took care not to hear the magician’s proposal in open court, but ordered his vizier to lead the beetle-browed ancient to his private chambers, for the worldly people of Commoriom had always mistrusted sorcery in those crude, bloody days of the empire’s first age, and the intrusion of dark arts into the imperial city’s martial affairs was unthinkable.
The emperor was loath even to entertain thoughts of magical subterfuge, for legend told that the crown of Commoriom would never rest on the head of a coward; but would fly from his shameful head to seek the strong brow of the one destined to lead the empire to greater conquests. And even if the legend proved false, the crime would be swiftly and mercilessly avenged by his younger brother, Uzotha, the jealous general of Commoriom’s armies.
If Zyzotha had set more stock in his brother’s military prowess, or if he did not so brazenly desire to add the neighboring city-state to his empire, he would have prudently rendered his decision with a headsman’s sword.
But the sorcerer was most eelishly persuasive, and repute of his thaumaturgical prowess had already reached the court.
Some twelve lustrums past, the barbaric mountain nomads of Polarion raided their lowland neighbors’ lands at harvest and escaped into the mist-bound northern mountains, where they wintered in a high, secluded valley impassable most of the year. Hunting sorties lost their way in the fog, only to be ambushed and driven into bottomless chasms. Uvumbra Ovis’s solution demanded enormous sacrifice, but it was unsettlingly elegant.
From a perch atop the summit of Mount Ghorthigromm, he invoked and betrayed two conflicting schools of elementals, and let the feud run its course. The rampaging primal forces transmuted the valley’s protective cloak of mist into a shroud of solid stone. The thunderclap of the petrified clouds falling to earth was heard and felt on the shores of benighted Lemuria and savage Atlantis, and added an hour to each calendar round thereafter. Of the ferocious Polarian raiders and the secluded valley they called home, no sign was ever discovered.
In more civilized and pragmatic lands, such feats of sorcery would have earned the mage incalcuable fame and fortune, and a lifelong sinecure from a grateful ruler. But in the vulgar adolescence of Commoriom, to call upon dark forces was the most craven and blasphemous strategy imaginable.
While no earthly solution could pry the intractable Rhizopians out of their vaunted aerie, yet some more subtle enchantment would be needed, to bring them to heel.
The scholarly city of Rhizopium perched atop a forest of sheer, towering pillars of basalt connected by tunnels, spiral ramps and suspended bridges, so that a single shepherd-monk could easily hold it against an army. Though they spurned warfare and cared only for the contemplation of the heavens and the tending of their drowsy ceratopsid flocks, the defiant citizens of Rhizopium had reluctantly mastered only such knowledge of warfare as would hold their neighbors at bay.
For a considerable fee in orichalcum ore and first pick of the loot from the famed libraries of the city, Uvumbra Ovis proposed to do away with every last citizen of Rhizopium, leaving the gates open for the conquering armies of Commoriom to march in and raise the imperial banner.
Such a prospect was naturally quite tantalizing to Emperor Zyzotha, but fraught with peril. His people were ever a superstitious and fearful lot, and would take the sudden vanishing of their hated neighbors as an ill omen.
To lay blame for the sudden vacancy upon plague or the monks’ own sorcery would unman even his most battle-mad berserkers, the brute-men raised as beasts in his stables and fed on the flesh of the subject races of the empire. None would dare take possession of the land, and the phantom of the empty city would vex him until death and blot his legend forever.
Uvumbra Ovis silkily polished away every fault that the Emperor noted in his plan, until it shone like a perfect, star-born opal in Zyzotha’s diademed head, shining its seductive, crepuscular light into his dreams and making a pale shade of his mundane imperial duties.
At last, he agreed that this was his greatest idea, yet.
That very night, Uvumbra Ovis received a wagonload of orichalcum ore from the Emperor’s mines in the south––prized because they were hundreds of leagues beneath the sea––and yielded up by such of his subjects as dwelled upon the ocean floor.
The sorcerer vanished from the capital the next morning, despite a host of spies and a retinue of elite men-at-arms encircling his apartments. The Emperor set loose his guards to search the city and sent winged messengers to the far corners of the empire, but to no avail. Uvumbra Ovis had vanished, and with him, a preposterous fortune and the Emperor’s pride. He could not rest until the charlatan was returned in red-hot chains to lay his scurrilous head upon the imperial chopping block.
He had nearly dictated an order of execution when he discovered the note which Uvumbra Ovis had left for him. And after having a scribe read it to him and then killing him, Zyzotha declared war upon the city of Rhizopium for the crime of abduction of Commoriom’s beloved and invaluable chief counselor.
Bravely did the kingdom rally to the cause of war, and all the more courageously for all that Uvumbra Ovis was universally despised and feared throughout the kingdom. Then a messenger returned from Rhizopium, claimed that he’d found the impregnable gates of Rhizopium standing open, and the spiral-streets deserted.
The shock of suddenly receiving one’s fondest wish is often the unmaking of a man, but Emperor Zyzotha presently recovered his wits and charged into his imagined destiny at the head of a full legion of infantry and mastodons and cavalry mounted on shrieking diatrymas to engage the alien threat on Commoriom’s border. In his war chariot drawn by a snarling sabertooth, Zyzotha dashed impatiently ahead of the creeping column, which flowed like wax in the sullen tropic sun of Mhu Thulan’s squandered youth.
Stuffed into the unforgiving bronze ceremonial armor of his forefathers––titans on the field, but pygmies, one and all, next to their heir––the Emperor could not hold back his scorn at their desultory progress. Almost as if they knew their prize lay unprotected and, thus, no test of their battle-prowess, they lagged on the road and sulked at his whip. He rode down a flock of refugees fleeing the doom of Rhizopium to raise their spirits, and was rewarded with an impromptu song in his honor, which he did not enjoy.
At the sight of the empty ramparts of Rhizopium, his army levied a dutiful cheer and raced to storm the battlements, but finding the entire city empty, they began to mutter about sorcery, and to burn the pitiful loot they’d pillaged. Well prepared for the unease of their easy victory, Zyzotha plied his army with kegs of cycad wine and wagonloads of dancing girls from the territories, and set his elite brigades of artisans to work redecorating the conquered city with statues of its liberator.
The uneventful occupation soon grew tiresome. Uvumbra Ovis covertly spread blessings and charms against disease and curses, but still the soldiers speculated about what malign force the unholy monks of Rhizopium must have conjured up, only to be devoured by it, and even the sergeants’ fanged whips were not enough to quell whisperings of mutiny.
Emperor Zyzotha well understood the warrior spirit of his men. They would face any enemy of flesh and bone, but the specter of the unseen chilled their bloodlust, and left them as toothless as herd beasts before the fall of night.
The Emperor took Uvumbra Ovis to his tent and made him another offer. Long and lustily did they bargain into the purpling of dusk, but the wily wizard knew he had the Emperor at a disadvantage, and shrewdly pressed it.
In the bowels of the night, the tiny alpine city’s walls were shaken by a barrage of bestial hooting and bombarded with volleys of noxious excrement. The addled imperial army rallied and took to the walls, spears and axes a-quiver with rekindled battle-joy.
The simian challenges and jeering canine half-speech of the subhuman Voormis horde proved a tonic for the soldiers’ uneasy nerves, and they ripped into them with lusty war-songs and razor-bladed iron.
The brutish invaders managed to wound several careless soldiers, and even killed a captain, knocking the plumed imbecile from the ramparts when he had his back to the enemy to lecture an oafish pikeman. But the loathsome beast-men were routed all too easily, and word began to seep back to the Emperor in Rhizopium’s council hall––the backward shepherds had not even advanced enough to crown a king––that the Voormis leapt onto their spears like tame beasts to the slaughter, as if they were under an enchantment, or a geas.
If Uvumbra Ovis expected to be showered with gratitude for his sorcerous ruse, he was soon rudely disabused of any such illusions. In Commoriom of that age, the hunting of Voormis in the wilds was a sport for unblooded initiates, while the thinning of their numbers in the city’s sewers fell to seedy untouchables, usually cashiered soldiers. Such disgraceful foes were an insult to the perfumed nobles who led the cavalry.
But the sorcerer was far too consumed by his own studies, to worry over Zyzotha’s scolding. With possession of Rhizopium’s libraries, surely, he could have conversed with the gods, but for reasons known only to himself, he instead retired to a crooked tower, as remote as possible from Zyzotha’s court, to peruse his new scrolls and observe the inscrutable stars.
Eventually, Emperor Zyzotha grew weary of ruling a city inhabited only by his own statues, and the army was sent forth to Commoriom’s conquered neighbors, armed with lists of tradesmen and citizens in arrears on taxes. A merry chase was led, but soon the victorious army returned with a new citizenry for Rhizopium. A magistrate and an executioner were chosen, and itinerant priests were assigned to convert the strange local shrines to the fat, happy godlings of Commoriom.
With order, peace and martial parades restored to Rhizopium, Zyzotha would fain have taken his army back to the capital, if only the new citizens of Rhizopium did not prove nearly as superstitious as the soldiers. Deserters were hanged by their feet at the gates for the raptors to feast upon, but the soldiers’ full attention still had to be turned upon the new Rhizopians, for fear they would leave with the next sunset, rather than sleep in the eerie, empty city.
The first colonists were hardly galvanized by pioneer spirit, and no surprise; the subject cities had tithed only their most expendable citizens, padded with any unwary country folk the cavalry caught on the road. There were precious few criminals left after
the first few weeks, for the headsman’s two-handed sword was ever hungry to cut off injustice, but none could be counted upon to occupy the city any longer than they were forced. Thus, the soldiers had to stay and keep the peace.
~*~
The peace lasted for two unbearable days.
Emperor Zyzotha went again to see Uvumbra Ovis in his tower––more a supplicant now, than a ruler, before the vulpine sorcerer. He went away looking more regal than he came, however, and smiling.
That very night, a cadre of armored warriors appeared in the very heart of the city, and slaughtered a score of infantry and their sergeants, and uncounted scores of hapless citizens with such fury that the scattered victims did not notice their assailants had charged out of the city’s museum, or that their fearsome copper and onyx armor was encrusted with nitre and verdigris.
After the panic inspired by the initial ambush, the shambling warriors proved a less than formidable foe; their brittle obsidian-bladed axes splintered against sturdy bronze shields, while the ghastly liches themselves were brought down by blood-mad soldiers with axes and nets, who found that their enemies seemed imbued with an awful, alien vitality that rendered them nigh-invincible until they were totally dismembered. This service the soldiers were only too happy to render, for the invasion had aroused hysterical cries of blasphemy and sacrilege.
The invaders’ weapons and armor were relics from Commoriom’s own first forges, and many of the indomitable fighters were the mummified ancestors of their own victims.
The outraged soldiers soon decided that the Rhizopians had not all died, and that some treacherous magus still haunted the city. Having lured the Commorian army into a trap, he would conjure demons to whittle away their forces. Perhaps, the drunken chorus mused over guttering campfires, the enemy was hiding within their ranks, stabbing them in the back…
