by John Shirley
Emperor Zyzotha observed the decline in morale with a bewildering blend of pique and admiration. So heedless of their own safety were his dogs of war, that a host of apparitions that would have driven lesser men shrieking from the city, had only served as petty distractions from the gloomy war-lust that haunted them. Zyzotha initiated another campaign of harlots and cycad wine. And before they could return to brooding, calamity struck again.
From every gutter and sewer-sluice in the columnar city of Rhizopium, there emerged a noisome fetor, as if the bowels of the earth itself had split asunder, and its infernal waste oozing out onto its moonlit skin in an unspeakable reversal of the natural order. The noxious miasma had all but incapacitated every adopted civilian of Rhizopium, leaving them helpless before the authors of the unbearable stench, when they finally burst forth into the twisting staircase streets of the beleaguered city.
A gluttonous flood of bubbling black protoplasm erupted from the sewers of Rhizopium in implacable waves, sweeping the streets clean of human flotsam with a rapacious hunger that betrayed an awful sentience about the flailing fuliginous breakers and bludgeoning tentacles, for the catastrophic flood was not any mere deluge of terrestrial effluvium, but a massed horde of Tsathoggua’s abominable spawn, endowed with monstrous sentience and a will to purge the city of its despised, two-legged occupiers.
Swords, clubs and arrows alike could get no purchase upon the squamous, rubbery hides of the lapping, formless atrocities, while battering pseudopods smashed all but the stoutest defenses into kindling. Their insidious, fluid forms could penetrate any opening larger than a keyhole, and so sought out and devoured all but the most vigorously protected human prey.
Only when an enterprising captain of the guards thought to douse the anthropophagous black wave with the city’s stores of lamp oil and palm wine and set them alight, was the awful invasion turned back. Engulfed by licking tongues of blue-white fire, the waves subsided and dispersed into squirming rivers of sizzling, shrieking amoebae, streaming over the city’s bridges and igniting them as well, severing the city’s outer districts from the central court of the Emperor.
A ragged but lusty cheer shuddered the tree-stones of Rhizopium, tempered by the bleak realization that the city was all but empty of women, and completely bereft of wine.
Morning broke upon Rhizopium with disquieting silence. Those few survivors who could walk had all flown in the night, leaving half the army skulking in the shadowy arcades of Rhizopium, with no enemy to curse save their emperor. The situation had become untenable.
Uvumbra Ovis approached the Emperor with yet another proposal, but he was intercepted by the bold captain whose quick wit had saved the city from the spawn of Tsathoggua. He ordered Uvumbra Ovis placed under arrest and confined to his tower. A canny ensign in the Emperor’s court had tumbled to the wizard’s suspicious behavior, and accused him of treason by sorcery.
Infuriated by the usurpation of his powers, Emperor Zyzotha ordered Uvumbra Ovis released, and in turn arrested the captain, whose popularity had begun to gnaw at Zyzotha’s hereditary mantle of command. When dissent over the order began to percolate up even to the Emperor’s ears, he had the rest of his officers taken, as well.
Uvumbra Ovis, as always, had a solution.
The problem all along had not lain with the occupation or the Emperor’s plans, but with his men, and not in their hearts or hands, which were unswerving in their loyalty, but in their heads. Therefore, Uvumbra Ovis, proposed an elegant response.
Chop off the problems.
One by one, the shackled officers were driven to the chopping block, and the weary executioner dutifully lopped off their treasonous heads. And one by one, the headless cadavers rose up and drew their swords to follow their emperor to victory.
~*~
At last, peace and order reigned in Rhizopium. The few citizens unable to flee hid in bricked-up boltholes night and day from the patrols of headless corpses puppeteered by an exhausted Uvumbra Ovis.
But Emperor Zyzotha gnawed at his own nerves, for the fear of remaining in thrice-damned Rhizopium was only checked by the unbearable shame of abandoning it. His warrior spirit demanded a clean outcome, to prove his mettle once and for all before his openly mocking army, before he could retire in honor to the capital.
So pervasive was his terror of failing the crown of Commoriom was Zyzotha, that he bound the golden, corundum-studded diadem to his careworn head, lest the myth come true, and the crown fly away of its own accord, to seek a more fitting monarch.
If the Emperor felt ill-served by fate––reduced to presiding over a derelict ghost-city and commanding a demoralized army of the living dead––his ire was as a child’s pique, next to the bilious gall nursed by his collaborator in the flawed occupation.
Chief among the wizard’s grievances was the mounting difficulty of finding enemies for the army to slay. The Voormis had come in response to a night of grunting, animal-like incantations at a tunnel off the city’s sewer system. In truth, the “spell” was little more than earthly cursing in the Voormis tongue, which is uncannily suited to carry through miles of subterranean passages.
The resurrected warriors were even easier, as necromancy was Uvumbra Ovis’s prime sphere of expertise. The arousal of the spawn of Tsathoggua had, likewise, been a simple ruse, brought about by casting the city’s idols of the repulsive bat-toad god into the sewer-sluices. But the resulting invasion had been quite out of his control, and he had nearly perished, himself, in the offing.
To summon elementals or other wild supernatural entities, as he had so famously and recklessly done in the past, would betray his own lack of mastery, and surely would destroy, if not himself, then the emperor and his dwindling army.
Worst of all, Uvumbra Ovis had simmered in secret throughout the occupation of Rhizopium over an injustice which he had heretofore shared with no one; for the wealth he had squeezed from the Emperor was trash to him without the other half of his reward, and he had been quite unable to take possession of the treasures of Rhizopium’s libraries.
The secrets he burned to possess––the summoning of demons and spirits of the outer sphere, even the invocations of the Outer Gods––were all inside the library of the monk-magi. Why did he not use them?
Having polished off the last dregs of the imperial stores of cycad wine, the Emperor had Uvumbra Ovis hauled to the central arcade by his own headless henchmen, and brought before the chopping block, which stood before the doors of the library.
Zyzotha flew into a rage at the collapse of his city, at the web of deceit which the sorcerer had spun around him with his treacherous magic. In a fit of vainglorious wrath, he commanded Uvumbra Ovis to produce the monster which had brought the doom to Rhizopium, that he might slay it, and have done with this charade.
Uvumbra Ovis rose from the chopping block with a sardonic grin, but made no move to cast any spells of invocation. Instead, he merely shuffled to the doors of the library of Rhizopium, and unlocked them.
Emperor Zyzotha uttered a blood-chilling oath and charged at Uvumbra Ovis with an ivory-tipped javelin, but he never reached his target.
The sorcerer threw wide the heavy, malachite-scaled doors of the great library, but he did not flee inside, as Zyzotha expected. Uvumbra Ovis retreated and lay flat across the hexagonal paving stones of the arcade just as the emperor hurled his javelin.
No matter how the aging Uvumbra Ovis might have twisted to evade the emperor’s javelin, the keen-eyed Zyzotha could have taken his life with a single throw. He could have, and would have, if the javelin were not arrested in midair, as if it had struck something invisible, yet horribly tangible.
By the frantic flailing in space of the transfixed javelin, it came clear that the unseen interloper was only mildly irritated by the blow, for it was plucked out and shattered, and the shards flung back at Zyzotha.
Any common mortal man might have withered before such an abominable prodigy, but Emperor Zyzotha of Commoriom was not ruled by the sup
erstitions that plagued his lesser cousins and countrymen. He had never seen any foe that could withstand the force of a single blow of his adamant javelin, but he had planned for such a dark day, and stood ready and eager with a response.
He had another javelin.
Before he could fling it, the invisible abomination had engulfed the emperor and begun to bloom into the visible spectrum as it glutted itself upon his imperial body and blood, digesting all but the vaunted imperial crown. Still, the ghastly star-born vampire only seemed to glimmer in and out of sight as Zyzotha’s vital essence pulsed through its alien architecture.
So massive had the amorphous bloodsucker become, so hideously bloated upon the liquid life of an entire city, that even the celebrated violet hue of the royal ichor and the indigestible crown racing through its unfathomable cavities could paint only the barest, mercurial outline of the repellent form of the slavering cosmic lamprey for Uvumbra Ovis’s awestruck eyes; but he saw it all too clearly, for just a moment, as it fed upon him.
All those nights he’d spent in deep meditation and casting spells, had not been in the service of Zyzotha’s lust for a bigger conquest for his idiotic army. He had come to the emperor with the plan for Rhizopium––the mad, foolish plan––convinced of its perfection, despite his gnawing uncertainty over the spell, itself.
The triangular tablets of the serpentfolk were so treacherously inscribed, as if the ophidian magi knew that their successors would be the hated warmblooded Hyperboreans, and made of all their lore a deadly trap.
For how else to explain the uncanny ease with which the cosmic abortion materialized and descended upon the defenseless city as its due offering… while the prescribed method to dispel the monstrosity, and indeed all his geases and glamours, had done nothing to unseat the engorged parasite of the outer spheres, which had not returned from whence it came, but retired to digest the inhabitants of Rhizopium and hibernate––lightly, as it turned––in the scroll-stacks of the great library.
Thus it transpired that the closely guarded arcane knowledge for which Uvumbra Ovis had sold the lives of a city, an army, an Emperor, and himself, lay open to the elements, for the next passerby to inspect at his leisure. And in spite of the isolation of Rhizopium and its recent ill repute, another traveler came to the empty city, by and by…
~*~
As General of the Imperial Army, Zyzotha’s younger brother was perpetually kept on the frontier of the tropical super-continent, pushing the empire of Commoriom out into backwaters and jungle hinterlands where the subjects could scarcely be told apart from the animals they ate, and that ate them.
To survive his brother’s ambitions, General Uzotha had to be as fierce, as clever and as arrogant as the Emperor, but also far more ruthless. He believed in the legend of the crown of Commoriom as a standard that he must defend against a world seething with usurpers and enemies. The other standard, cherished in the dark of his heart, was the knowledge that his brother was weaker and less crafty than he, and the faith that the legend would come true.
He had left the frontier as soon as he heard of his brother’s victory at Rhizopium, that old thorn in the side of generations of monarchs ever since Commoriom was but a rude settlement. When he heard that the occupation had turned into a parade of catastrophes, he forced his men and beasts to run at full charge. The trail he followed from the upper steppes of Gondwanaland was littered with the bodies of the unfit.
And it must have been destiny that he arrived just when he did, and no later, for he dismounted before the tree-stones of Rhizopium just in time to witness the fulfillment of the legend of the crown of Commoriom as prophecy, and to step into the role of savior.
For what was it, if not destiny, that showed him the crown of the Emperor of Commoriom, stripped from its unworthy pretender and seemingly floating in thin air tinged with a strange red halo, racing towards him, exactly as in so many of his dreams?
Zolamin and the Mad God
By Lisa Morton
As Zolamin drove the wagon bearing the stolen god out of the jungle and onto the main road heading west, she heard the first cries of pursuit behind her.
She’d hoped for a wider lead; the theft had been accomplished quickly and quietly. She’d dragged the carcasses of the four guards and one priest she’d slain into the thick growth near the temple, had maneuvered the god’s heavy box onto a pallet, and loaded it up onto the wagon before the sun had risen. As she’d whipped the reins and urged her team of feathered gastorns through the jungle, she’d dared to hope for an easy escape.
But now, a glance back showed at least a dozen mounted Dulambri warriors giving chase, their spears held overhead as they rode one-handed on their dinictis, fierce predators they’d somehow subjugated. The Dulambri’s oversized cats were faster than Zolamin’s powerful, flightless birds and they had the additional advantage of not pulling a wagon laden with a god. Zolamin knew they’d be on her in minutes, so she considered her options.
The best seemed to be to slit her own throat and avoid the days of torture the Dulambri would inflict for the sacrilege she’d committed.
She thought back to everything she knew about the Dulambri, hoping to find some tribal flaw she could exploit, even the smallest advantage – and she felt a tingle at the base of her skull, a prickling like a blade being drawn lightly over skin. She wondered briefly if she’d been hit by something the Dulambri had tossed or shot, and then –
The road before her fell away, replaced by visions that her mind could never have conjured:
A clan of squat, furred Voormis divide over the worship of their gods, and the followers of Y’n-Tharqqua attack their brethren who worship Tsathoggua / they heft primitive clubs, bare their gore-stained teeth, and shriek the name of their god as they attack / the worshipers of Y’n-Tharqqua rip still-beating hearts from the chests of their enemies offering them to the sarcophagus that holds their unreasoning god / the victors build a temple to their god / artisans line the temple walls with intricate, obscene carvings / on a sacred day the priests conduct an orgy before the altar, a tangle of writhing limbs and orgasmic groans / the generation that springs from the ecstatic couplings are different, evolved, hated by their now-distant relations, and Voormis attack not-Voormis / unseen in his sarcophagus, Y’n-Tharqqua screeches as blood spilled in battle within his temple seeps in beneath the sarcophagus lid –
Focus returned, and Zolamin found she was still on the wagon, her wrists bleeding where she’d wrapped the reins around them, the driver’s bench rumbling beneath her as the gastorns pounded down the road. The sun was high overhead now, and a glance back revealed no sign of pursuit. Ahead of her, jungle gave way to veldt; she’d escaped, although she knew the Dulambri would be coming again soon enough.
She stopped the cart to check on the box; it was the size and shape of a child’s casket, cast in some sort of metal that thrummed to the touch. The box was still safe and intact, secured in the cart’s bed by the ropes she’d tied, undamaged by the violent flight…but she viewed it with fresh unease. The priest Nin Zaggadolh, the one who had hired her, had warned her about the mad god’s visions, but she hadn’t quite believed him; nor had she believed that this box – barely large enough to hold the body of a toddler – cradled a god. Now she knew the truth: That a mad deity named Y’n-Tharqqua slept in the box, his dreams sometimes escaping and afflicting any human unlucky enough to be nearby (the effect was permanent on males). She heard a shriek in the distance and looked up to see one Dulambri staggering down the road behind her; she drew her sword, but the screaming man fell to his knees while he was still a hundred meters away. Not yet dead, he crawled off the road into the thick brush lining it, his cries evidence of Y’n-Tharqqua’s ability to inspire madness. She knew the rest were farther behind, sanity lost forever.
She thought herself lucky that the Dulambri warrior caste did not accept women.
~*~
Her gastorns managed to keep up a steady pace until nearly sunset. They’d left the jung
le behind, and now headed southwest over the open country that separated the lush, primeval landscape of the jungle and eastern Hyperborea from the plains near Tscho Vulpanomi. She’d have two days’ ride before she’d reach the city-state of Dhaq Maqqun, home of the Maqqi clan that had hired her to retrieve their god. Then she could receive her final payment, and consider this damnable job done.
Hard to believe that she’d first met the priest Nin Zaggadolh only a week ago, in a crowded, raucous tavern called The Broken Blade at the treacherous north end of the Hyperborean capital city, Uzuldaroum. Zolamin kept a room above the tavern; the owner, Amarkosa, was a former comrade-in-arms who’d turned to bartending after he’d lost one leg in a battle – a battle that Zolamin had pulled him from – and he remained the only man alive whom she truly trusted. He acted as landlord, agent, banker and advisor for her, and she paid him well in return.
Six nights ago she’d returned from a job protecting a shipment of jewels bound to a wealthy moneylender named Avoosl Wuthoqquan, and had just beaten a barbarian from the frozen wastes of Polarion at a dice game. The barbarian, a handsome brute who’d drunk even more than Zolamin, snagged her wrist as she left the table with her winnings. “You can best me at dice, girl, but let’s see how well you do in my bed.”
She’d grinned, but Amarkosa had shouted from the bar, “You, sir, would be well advised to release her arm while you’ve still got one of your own.” The spectators had all guffawed, but the barbarian had flushed and yanked Zolamin close. “I think I can handle this –”
When she broke the bottle of ale over his head, he was only stunned – but when he found the jagged bottleneck pressed to his throat, he’d sobered up quickly. “You can leave like a good boy,” Zolamin told him, “or you can leave like a dead man. Your choice.”
He released her, snarled once, and left.
“Good boy,” Zolamin muttered to his departing back, and those close enough to hear laughed in drunken appreciation.
