“That was the moment Mormoroth was born. That was the moment from which I date my first success. From that small beginning grew the period of my greatest fame, the period of Phandiol and Lophar and other exploits you know nothing of, the period that gave me access to the council rooms of princes and the treasure vaults of kings. Yet even this success did not satisfy me. I soon grew tired of using my knowledge to advance the ambitions of other men. I was increasingly impatient to apply it toward an ambition of my own. Indeed, my public works were never more than a way to finance my private ones. Once I had made this way redundant I put them all behind me. Ten years ago I turned my back on the crowded cities of the southern lands, and set my eyes on the relative solitude of the north. For the last ten years I have been here in this tower, pursuing my work in secret.
“And now you will want to know the nature of that work. If my early career had taught me nothing else, it had taught me the value of power. The misery of being without it. The anxiety of having enough of it to wake the envy of those with less and the distrust of those with more. The youth and wealth that so impressed you were to me only secondary matters. Above all things I lusted after power. But how was I to obtain it? I knew that I could not create it. To create power where none exists is already to possess it. And if I could not create it, then there was only one other option left to me. I must seek it out where it already existed and transfer it to myself. The transfer of power is hardly a novel concept. You have only to look at the world around you to see that this is so. Small men trade their sweat and blood for the favor of greater men. Great men trade their goods and gold for the friendship of greater men still. My innovation, if I may call it so, was to carry this one step farther. To deal with those who are greater than the greatest men who ever lived. To barter with the very gods themselves.
“You have seen for yourself how successful this has been. It has given me every reason to hope that the next stage will be successful, too. For there is a next stage. I have climbed a mighty mountain, but it is only the first peak of a towering range whose every peak is higher than the last. Yet I have already carried my researches as far as one man can take them. To carry them farther I must have an assistant. Of course he must be the right kind of assistant. He must possess a strong working knowledge of all the major branches of magic and most of the minor ones. He must burn with the desire to expand that knowledge. And he must not be too particular about how he does it. It is rare to find a man with even one of these qualifications. How much rarer must it be to find one with all three? Yet I have managed to find just such a man. That man, Eibon, is you.
“Does that surprise you? It did not me. I realized the truth of it almost from the moment I recognized my need. You will realize it too if you will but give it a moment’s thought. I know how keen is your intellect, how great your talent, how energetic your application. I know how well you have invested these qualities to earn the reputation you enjoy today. But I also know how little you have accomplished against the scale of what is possible. Why live in poverty when you can be wealthy? Why grow old and feeble when you can be young and strong? Why settle for being a mortal man when you can be a god? Yes, a god! Why not? You have already seen something of what I can do alone. That is nothing to what we may do together. Alone I can barter with the gods. Together we may become as gods ourselves!
“I do not expect you to answer now. How can you, when you still have no real knowledge of what you are being asked? Let me give you a demonstration. Let me show you what our art is truly capable of. Then I know what your answer will be. But perhaps you are too tired to witness a demonstration? Perhaps you still need to refresh yourself after your arduous journey?”
“Your words have refreshed me already,” I said. “I am prepared to witness anything that you are prepared to show me.”
“Very well. Then come with me to the roof.”
Here he rose and, taking a torch from a convenient sconce, conducted me behind the dais to an arras-covered door. He guided me through the door and up a steep and narrow stair, around a wide and sweeping curve that surely followed the inner curve of the tower’s outer wall. At last he pushed back a wooden trap door and led me out onto the roof. This was a flat and empty platform in a circle of tall stone battlements. There was little to see within the circle and even less to see without. With the heavy clouds hanging over it and the deep shadows spread around, the platform was a tiny isle in the midst of a sea of darkness.
But the platform was not as empty as I had supposed. For now I saw that there was another circle within the circle of battlements, a circle of shallow braziers set at regular intervals around the floor. Mora went from brazier to brazier, igniting them with his torch. Their contents took fire almost at once yet burned slowly and quietly thereafter, burned with a pale and smokeless flame and the faintest hint of musky perfume.
The burning braziers barely sufficed to light the wide space between them. But as my eyes grew accustomed to their feeble glow, and as more braziers were fired to increase it, I saw that there was a third circle contained within the second, as far from the circle of braziers as that one was from the circle of battlements. This third circle was drawn in soft white chalk directly upon the leaden floor. While it conformed to a circle in its general shape, it was far more intricate in design, being in fact a chain of symbols interconnected and interlaced. I cast my eyes round the whole chain without finding any symbol that I recognized. I marveled at the learning as well as the ingenuity that had gone into its creation.
“Behold the circle of Mormoroth!” said Mora, returning to my side. “Of all my works it is the one of which I am most proud. It is based on the common wizard’s circle, and it serves the same dual purpose: to focus and direct the wizard’s power, and to turn aside the unfriendly powers that might be directed against him. But I have added several new features of my own devising, features that increase and amplify its strength beyond anything known before. It has taken me years to bring it to its present state of perfection. If you look closely you may see how thoroughly I have revised it, how extensively I have erased and redrawn it to incorporate various improvements and refinements. I do not say corrections, for he who makes errors in such a work does not live to correct them.
“But it was not to show you this that I brought you here. My circle is only a means to an end, only a tool to assist me in the performance of my real work. It is that work I would show you now. But I must preface it with a word of warning. The ritual you are about to witness is first and foremost a chant. Its effect depends on rhythm and tone as much as it does on meaning. Any interruption of the chant will spoil the ritual. No doubt you will have questions concerning what you are about see. I will be happy to answer all of them once the ritual is finished. But until then I must ask you to keep them to yourself. And pray do not, for any reason, step outside the circle while the ritual is in progress. I cannot answer for the consequences if you do. Have I made myself clear?”
“You have,” I answered.
“Then let us begin.”
We took our positions in the center of the circle, facing away from the open trapdoor and the extinguished torch lying beside it. We assumed a balanced and easy stance, with our feet a little parted and our hands folded inside our sleeves. For a brief moment we stood thus, still and silent, while Mora settled into the frame of mind most conducive to his work. And then he began his chant.
What can I say of Mora’s chant? How shall I describe it? It began slowly and deliberately and very low in tone, as if the chanter were drawing it from the profoundest depths of his being. But the meaning he sought to express with it I had no way to know. Mora had not revealed it to me, and it was too late now to ask him. The chant itself could tell me nothing. As the symbols that made up the circle were all unknown to me, so were the words that made up the chant. But perhaps I could glean some meaning from its effects.
These began as the chant did, slowly and deliberately.
First there was a slight tremor in the floor beneath my feet. This then grew in intensity, until it rose in continuous waves up my legs and spine. I briefly wondered if there was an earthquake in progress, or if some structural deficiency was causing the tower to shake itself to pieces. Other manifestations followed fast: a sinking sensation in my stomach, a coolness and dampness on my face and a curious dullness in my ears. Even my eyes began to darken. The light of the braziers became blurry and dim as if viewed through smoke or heavy fog. Mora’s circle alone grew sharper and brighter, until it looked less drawn in chalk than poured in liquid fire.
The shaking and sinking suddenly ceased, so that only the darkness remained. And then the darkness itself fell away. The lights grew crisp and clear. The stars, which had earlier lain hidden behind heavy clouds, blazed forth in all their glory. Yet the clouds were with us still. Only now they lay under the top of the tower, lapping like waves below the battlements, and rolling outward like a leaden sea to reach the far horizon. I beheld this sight with awe and wonder, awe and wonder that only increased as I understood its cause. The clouds had not sunk below the platform. The tower had grown to raise the platform through and above the clouds!
The chanting changed in rhythm and tone, becoming both faster and higher. And now I noticed something strange about the clouds. Heretofore they had been as still and peaceful as a field of snow. But now those in the middle distance began to roil and rise. At first they rose only in a line of separate hillocks. But as they grew taller they grew wider too, until their bases almost touched. Maybe this was due to some disturbance of the upper air. But what disturbance could make them rise in such a perfect circle around us? And what disturbance could make them close the airy distance between us, to come together in a ponderous wall within a dozen yards of our flimsy battlements? It was as if we had drawn the attention of mountains, and they were pressing in on every side to examine us more closely.
Were these Mora’s gods? It was hard to imagine that they could be anything else. Without betraying their cloudy nature, they yet maintained a consistency of form that was more in keeping with solid matter. Their forms suggested nothing so much as the broad blank faces and high domed heads of giant mastodons. But where mastodons are covered with coarse dark hair, these were smooth and gray. Where mastodons are not twice the height of a human being, these were many times higher. Their size alone suggested godhood. Never before had I felt so keenly the littleness of man. And never had I felt so frightened as when, a moment later, they put forth cloudy members like mastodontic trunks, when they rolled them slowly and gracefully over our fragile battlements, to investigate everything within the reach of their delicately fingered ends. One hovered before me even now, opening and closing like a vaporous flower within a yard or two of my face. I felt that it would have come closer if it could. But Mora’s circle was too strong.
The chanting changed again, rising to a pitch and speed that no longer seemed sustainable by a human throat and tongue. And the motion of the trunks changed with it. Now they struck like angry serpents, struck and arched and struck again. But they did not strike at Mora and me. They struck down through the sea of clouds that was all that lay between them and the earth. They plunged deep beneath the clouds, only to withdraw again with terrible burdens in tow. Burdens that writhed with tiny limbs and wailed with tiny voices as they were thrust into the eager mouths that opened to receive them. Burdens that I could not fail to recognize as the bodies of living human beings!
How could I not be horrified by this sight? It was all I could do not to throw myself at Mora’s knees and bury my face in his robe. But Mora was not horrified. He continued his chanting unshaken and unmoved. If his face registered anything at all, it was a kind of fanatical elation. Why should he be horrified? This was what he had intended from the start. To barter with the gods. To trade the lives of his fellow man for the power they would buy him. It did not matter to him how many lives it cost. Hundreds, nay, thousands could be done to death so long as it got him what he wanted. I pictured his tower as the center of an empty land, a desert that grew wider and wider as he sent his gods ever farther afield to find the food they craved. I recalled the line of fugitive farmers I had encountered on the road. No matter how many times I multiplied them in my mind, they were not enough to represent the terrible price of Mormoroth’s aspiration.
I could not be a part of this! Neither could I stand quietly by and allow it to continue. I had to stop it. But how? In my belt I carried the sacred athame, the dagger I used in my own magic rituals of protection and invocation. It was a tremendous desecration to pollute it with human blood, but it was a greater desecration to leave Mormoroth to his work. He was too occupied with what was happening outside the circle to notice what was happening within. He never saw me raise the dagger high above my head, or plunge it down at his defenseless back.
But he was not as defenseless as I had supposed. For the blade snapped in two against some invisible barrier. An instant later an unseen force caught me up in arms of steel and threw me down on the leaden floor, threw me down on my own back within inches of the protective circle, threw me down and pinned me as a beetle is pinned to a card. At the same time the chanting stopped, the gods withdrew behind the clouds and the tower returned to its normal dimensions. And then my victim turned to confront me, his pale face twisted into a hideous mask of rage.
“You disappoint me, Eibon. I thought I had found a colleague worthy of me, who could stand beside me unafraid even in the presence of the gods. Instead I find a craven coward who would rather hide in the safety of night than risk a moment in the sun. But it is not enough for you to hide. First you must try to strike a blow against one who had befriended you, against one whose life is as high above yours as this tower is above the plain. And all for sympathy with a herd of cattle who are not even sufficiently evolved to be called human! How shall I punish such treachery? Shall I strike you dead with a single word? Shall I wave you over the battlements to your death on the stones below? No! Even your shabby life is too valuable to waste. Since you care so much for your fellow men, go out and join them. You will all die together soon enough.”
Here he turned his back on me, as if to show for once and all how little he accounted me. At that moment the force that had held me was suddenly and completely lifted. With all the dignity I could still command, I rolled myself onto my hands and knees and raised myself to my feet. I stepped outside the magic circle and across the roof to the open trapdoor. But there I cast my tattered dignity to the winds. I rushed down the winding stair and through the great hall to the tower door. I raced out the door and across the causeway to the nighted plain beyond. I ran away across the plain, frantic to put any distance I could between myself and Mormoroth’s tower. And even as I ran I heard, from far behind and above me, the first booming syllables of Mormoroth’s chant resumed.
Suddenly his chant was drowned in a shock of violent thunder, a shock that threw me as hard and held me as fast as the earlier force had done. A great wind rushed over me, screaming with the voice of a thousand trumpets. The night around me lit up so brightly that even my arms before my face could not quite shut it out. The light and wind rose quickly in intensity, until both of them teetered on the razor edge of pain.
But it was not my story that would end that night. It was not my shadow that would pass from the world in the days and weeks that followed, burning away from the darkened landscape even as the clouds from the darkened sky. It was not my name that would be forgotten, or be remembered only as a warning to other aspiring sorcerers, whose fanatical pursuit of some lofty goal might otherwise trip on a similar stone in the road to its achievement. With his head so far above the clouds, Mormoroth had not noticed the lowly stone I had laid before his feet. He had not observed how, in arising from the floor where he had cast me, I had contrived to rub, with my little finger, a tiny break in his magic circle. He had not seen, or had seen too late, that I had rendered it powerless to prot
ect him.
As suddenly as they had risen, the light and wind began to fall. And when they allowed me to raise my head and look once more behind me, the last dying glimmer showed me a wonder as great as any that Mormoroth had shown. I saw the plain I had crossed in my flight from the tower. I saw the bay of rocky hills in which the tower had stood. But the tower itself I did not see. It had vanished as completely as if it had never existed.
Cthulhu Mythos fiction has a tradition of utilizing Roman antiquity as story background. Robert Bloch wrote a small set of tales set in Roman Britain and centering upon Druidical mysteries and horrors. Some of these were explicitly Mythos stories (like “The Brood of Bubastis”). Others, like Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” and Frank Belknap Long’s The Horror from the Hills (incorporating Lovecraft’s “Roman dream” account), employ ancient Rome as a background to action in the twentieth century. In the latter case, the use of Roman antiquity intends to show us that the struggle between fragile human civilization and the threat of primordial Chaos returning was already ancient, and that every human victory was merely the latest in a series of battles whose final outcome was yet unknown. Richard L. Tierney and Glenn Rahman (“The Wedding of Sheila-na-gog,” The Gardens of Lucullus) have carried on this tradition. Now here is another sturdy link in that chain.
The Signal Station
Rafe McGregor
Later it developed that he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when Williams tried to talk of the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit that there was anything unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when the subject of the supposed under crypts, hewn out of the solid crag that frowns on the North Sea, was brought up.
Worlds of Cthulhu Page 23
