Sorcery in Shad Read online

  ‘And as each brave (or not so brave) fighter died in his turn, so the monstrous god Yibb-Tstll would wake from the stone of his idol and flow forth, and take his soul. So that even in death there was no surcease of agony, no freedom from horror.

  ‘I have said that I will not describe that – tournament – in its entirety; nor shall I. But I will say this: that my father was the bravest, strongest champion of all. I know for I was witness to it all. I saw him go up against beasts from the deepest jungles of Shadarabar, and monsters from Yoppaloth’s necromantic nether-caves, and rise bloody but victorious over all – until the final bout. For that last grim battle was against Black Yoppaloth himself!

  ‘Black Yoppaloth, aye! That vile creature who’d steeped himself in all the sin of this Primal Land, where sin is usually the way of it, and all the horror of his own necromantic existence, until nothing more than putrescence of mind and spirit were left in him; and at his command all the spells of dark dimensions, which at will he could call to his aid. Against evil and power such as that, how might a simple fisherman win, eh?

  ‘At one end of the arena stood a dais of blood-veined onyx, above which a chimney went up through all the levels of the ziggurat above, to the orchid-scented air of Shad. Ah, that such vileness should be so perfumed! And before the dais a pit whose rim was of green and red glass, fused from the sand of the arena; aye, a pit going down as if toward hell itself, and very likely passing into that or those hells! Up from that pit at the appointed time, up from mazy and menacing bowels of earth undreamed, Yibb-Tstll would call the awesome energies of the Great Old Ones themselves to batten upon Black Yoppaloth and bequeath unto him the final boon – immortality. But only after he himself had dispatched the final champion of champions, and when Yibb-Tstll had taken his soul.

  ‘And so atop that dais – that great black and red sacrificial slab – the two fought, my father and the cheating, lying monster Black Yoppaloth. Aye, and my father might have won; for he remembered his wife and how she had died, and his strength was that of ten men, even though much of his iron blood had now leaked out of him. But the foul, puffed Yoppaloth, seeing the berserker he stood against and feeling the weight of his blows, became afraid and would not fight a clean fight. He used his magick to forge chains about my father, and only when he’d bound him securely moved in for the kill. And seeing that it would soon be finished, Yibb-Tstll called forth his instrument of transfiguration, by which Yoppaloth would be made immortal.

  ‘Up from the slippery throat of the glass pit to hell, and from what caverns of immemorial night below, swept a black, boiling cloud which had its own coherency, its own body and being. Alive with the warp and crackle of green and putrescent fires it was; and it whirled there like a small tornado, nodding over the dais where my father stood in chains of magick, clutching his bloodied, battered sword, likewise impotent, while Yoppaloth advanced upon him with a devastating weapon of his own. It was a pole like a pike, that weapon, but it was not a pike. Driven home in flesh and when its handle was twisted, then its slender head would put out razor grapples and knives inside the victim, making a pulp of all his organs. Twisted the other way, the scythes would retract and the head could be withdrawn, leaving a man mangled on the inside, while outside he might appear only slightly mutilated. It was Yoppaloth’s favourite instrument of torture, which appealed to his perverted brain.

  ‘Above the arena were many tiers of seats going up like some mighty council chamber, in which were seated the puppet officials and “important” persons of Shad, and many insignificant princelings and shamans of Shadarabar’s jungle tribes. I was in the first tier, on a balcony looking down on the dais, and beside me stood a huge Yhemni guard with a long sword in his belt. As below Black Yoppaloth drove his awful pike into my father’s body, so I knew I could restrain myself no longer.

  ‘Not caring whether I lived or died, with my father’s screams of torment in my ears, I drew the guard’s sword and sprang up onto the balcony, and from there down upon the dais – upon the monster himself. But in the moment of time between my father’s scream and the reaction it brought in me – things had happened.

  ‘Yibb-Tstll’s idol, stone no longer, had flowed forward to receive tribute of the toppling cadaver which had been my father; the swirling, whirlpool cloud of alien energies from the pit had spawned emerald lightnings which wove themselves into a mesh about the foul, fat form of Yoppaloth; the entire dais streamed with licking rivers of tomb-fire. You have seen such fires, Tarra Khash.

  ‘But for all that had happened, that was happening, I knew only one thing: which was that Yoppaloth must die, here and now! What I could not know was this: that in his dying, another Yoppaloth would be born.

  ‘In my wild plunge from the balcony, I had driven my sword before me; and in the last instant before I struck, then Yoppaloth sensed all was not well and looked up. He was a sorcerer, yes, but even magick takes a little time in the weaving; and dazed by the green lightnings and astonished by the intrusion, the necromancer was at my mercy. Into his gaping mouth I drove my blade, and down that throbbing gullet, until the sword jammed within him! Then my hurtling weight was on it, and the keen edge cut him open like a gutted fish! He was sheared through lip and wobbling black chins, through throat, breast and gut, and fell with me to the dais’ cold stone. Aye, and that stone was cold, preternaturally so! I ignored the alien rime which dusted its surface, leaped up and split Yoppaloth’s head through his skull, shattering his mad and corrupt brain.

  ‘And lo, where the green fires from some subterranean hell had fastened on him, now they enveloped me!’

  Black Yoppaloth II’s voice had fallen to the merest murmur, the veriest shiver of sound. Tarra leaned forward, ears straining, to miss no single word that was spoken. And so fascinated the Hrossak, that he ignored utterly his own possible danger in that tattered black tent on a ship speeding for Shad. ‘The immortality of the Great Old Ones was conferred upon you instead of him!’ he finally gasped.

  Yoppaloth, staring at him with eyes of doom, eventually nodded. ‘Indeed, for after what I’d done to the necromancer no power in all Theem’hdra – neither magick nor medicine – could ever have returned him to life. But the weird green lightning webs of the pit had to expend themselves somewhere. And they did…in me!’

  Black Yoppaloth’s glittery eyes were deep and cold as the black borehole of which he’d spoken, of which he now once more spoke:

  ‘The cold blackened me,’ he said. ‘That coldness of the pit, evil exhalation of alien gods. It blackened my skin and my eyes and my soul, which may never more be purified. I am immortal! Unless by some unknown means a man or wizard slay me, or some accident unforeseen, I shall live forever. But no disease may ravage me, be sure, and time alone shall not prevail.

  ‘In my first hundred years I aged to a man, since when I’ve stayed as you see me now; except I’ve suffered…certain alterations. But while cities of stone have crumbled and been rebuilded, and mummies withered in their sarcophagi, and men have come and gone in their many thousands, I have lived on, must live on – if Yibb-Tstll is not to walk free forever in the world of men!

  ‘Did I say that the necromancer I destroyed was a cheat and a liar? And if he was these things, how then the immemorially evil Old Ones? How then Yibb-Tstll?

  ‘Do you know the legend of the Old Ones, Tarra Khash? I shall tell it:

  ‘Even before this Primal Land was born of a vast volcano – that mighty cone which houses the Inner Isles – and before ever men came to the world, there were Others here seeped down from worlds of antique horror. They came with the Cthulhu spawn, which built their cities in steaming fens before ever the first lungfish crawled out from the sea upon the land. Yibb-Tstll was one of them, Tsathoggua the toad-thing another, Yogg-Sothoth of the shimmering globes a third, and Ithaqua the Wind-Walker, who is worshipped in Yaht-Haal to this very day, a fourth. And yet these are only a handful. They were legion, these beings, a veritable army, and they fastened on the inchoate worl
ds of our sun, and on the worlds of other stars farther afield.

  ‘Authors of incredible sin, they had come here to escape the wrath of others mightier still, who followed them and bound them with awesome magicks, and prisoned them in places beyond Man’s five senses to perceive. Indeed, Man was merely one of nature’s lesser visions, a faint possibility, when all these things transpired. But while the aeons wore on and men came to be, still the prisoned Old Ones waited out their time in dark forgotten corners, sunken sepulchres and alien spheres. The Hounds of Tindalos were trapped in time itself, and the Thromb throbbed in cauldrons of gravity in the hearts of collapsed stars. But down all the ages the Old Ones had retained their dark instinct for evil and certain immundane skills. One such skill which was theirs was mentalism, which now they turned upon the untutored, innocent, sleeping minds of men.

  ‘Thus have the cults of Cthulhu and his minion creatures risen, and thus are they kept alive by his unspeakable dreaming! And always the Old Ones, who are themselves immortal, strive to return; which one day, when the stars are right, be sure they will. Even now Ithaqua strides in partial freedom, mercifully confined to those frozen lands north of the Great Ice Barrier, where men may not live, and to the routes of the winds that blow between the worlds; and Cthulhu lies in his sunken house, which went down in the year of the red moon under the sea. Ghatanothoa is worshipped still in Eyphra, and men have made unto themselves idols in the hideous shapes of Tsathoggua and Yibb-Tstll, one of which glooms even now in my arena of death in Shad. Mine now, aye, as is this undying nightmare which fools crave and call “immortality”!

  ‘Now how many men, even sorcerers supreme, have dealings with beings such as these and go unscathed? The answer is simple: they may not! Mylakhrion, that mightiest of mages, sought Cthulhu’s secrets and perished. A race of lizard-kings dwelled upon a time in the land of Lohmi; they too worshipped the Great Kraken, and where are they now? Gone, extinct! And Yoppaloth? That first Yoppaloth, whom I slew, would he have fared any better? Could he have done any better than the second Yoppaloth, myself, in the thousand years gone by since that time I killed him? No, for he was a coward and mad, and I think he would have let the Old Ones in – while I have done all in my power to keep them out!

  ‘Ah, I see in your eyes that I’ve lost you. What, and have I rambled so? But you are a man I can talk to, Tarra Khash; and talk I must, for these things have burdened my sorry soul long enough. Let me then say on:

  ‘In the moment when I slew Yoppaloth – as the pit-spawned emerald fires withdrew from me and the cloud itself fled back down into the gibbering dark – then the dead sorcerer’s people would have killed me. Oh, they were glad he was dead and no mistake, for now they saw that their own miserable existences were safe, as they’d never been when he lived; but now that he was dead it would be good to show how brave they were, grand sport to come down upon me in the arena and slay me. Indeed, they would have done it – if not for a weird intervention!

  ‘The dark god Yibb-Tstll had spent an hundred years grooming Yoppaloth for the part he was to play in a great resurgence of Old Ones’ power. Most of a millennium yet to go before the necromancer would be – or would have been – ready. And should the god admit defeat and return once more to stone, and begin his search for dark receptacle again? And what of the alien infusions I had received from unthinkable pits of Cthonian horror at Earth’s core? Should they, too, be wasted? I had destroyed Yoppaloth utterly, but in so doing had shown that my own instinct for destruction – even as a boy – was as great, greater than his.

  ‘Moreover, within the limits I have mentioned, I was now immortal; unless I too was somehow slain or fall victim to some shattering cataclysm, I might live forever – or until They were ready!

  ‘Yibb-Tstll “saved” me – as I reckoned it then. Have you ever seen a likeness of him, Tarra Khash? Even an idol made in his image? Better for you if you never know that dubious privilege. And certainly the real thing is far worse! But he saved me and let it be known in several ways that he approved of me. First, when they shook their spears and knives at me, he came to me; and he opened his billowing cloak to let out his gaunts of night, which he set about me as my guardians, to let the men of Shad see that I was their new mage and master, not to be harmed, indeed inviolate. Then, even before those watching thousands, he hunched over the riven carcass of the dead Yoppaloth and took his soul – took it in that singular way of his, with terrible “hands” more loathsome than any weapon of Yoppaloth’s devise – and having done so tossed it, aye, and the corpse of my poor father, too, into that pit itself. And finally Yibb opened his cloak again to embrace me as his newly chosen one, following which I fell upon the dais altar as one seared and dead. But I was not dead, merely depleted. And after that they could not kill me, for he had declared me their master. Master of Shad and Shadarabar, aye, but prisoner too. For no way I could escape from that jungled isle, where now I had become Yibb’s instrument in the world of men.

  ‘In days I was, well again, and days became weeks, weeks months; so time passed…I found myself heir to Yoppaloth’s palace, his slaves; heir to his power, within limits; heir, too, to much more than these things. A man may not be touched by the aura of the inner immensities and remain unchanged. I had been changed. Where were my green eyes, blond hair and pale skin now? Gone! I was black, and not merely in aspect. Evil was in me, and it was growing there.

  ‘Yibb-Tstll – or his avatar, locked for the main in its stone idol in the arena of death, just as the god himself is locked in alien voids outside this universe – was wont to visit me in the night, in my deepest dreams, to remind me of my debt. For like it or not, I had also inherited the first Yoppaloth’s pact: I had immortality, and Yibb-Tstll must have his worship, his sacrifices. Sacrifices, Tarra Khash – an annual offering of souls – and mine the hand of death which now must point out the victims. Ah, but I did that readily enough!

  ‘They were the ones who’d stood up in their stone tier seats, in their pomp and barbaric splendour, to applaud Yoppaloth’s terrible tournament; the ones who’d roared their heathen approval when he’d thrust that nightmarish pike of his into my father’s side and twisted the handle. And I remembered each and every one of them – each tribal chief or piddling shaman, every personage of estate in Shad – the lot! And by twos and threes as the years slowly passed, so they met their fates in the arena of death. Not slaughter on such a scale as I’d seen that first time, no, but terrible for all that. To see a man taken alive by Yibb-Tstll, and have his soul torn out of him, is…terrible! It is still terrible even now, ten thousand souls later.

  ‘And so I kept down any would-be rivals, enemies, by feeding their souls to Yibb; and so his evil grew in me, a cancer spreading through my entire being.

  ‘I became a man with a man’s needs, took wives and tired of them – or allowed them to grow too close to me – then offered them to my god. Of children there were none. If a woman carried my child, she went to Yibb. My cruelties, all inspired by the monster-god himself, became enormous. Now I could understand why the first Yoppaloth’s acts and appetites had been so gross; for at day’s end and before sleeping, I would lie awake and feel the same fate which took him reaching to engulf me. It was my imagination – or was it?

  ‘Whichever, it could not be allowed: I was immortal and would not be slain, neither by any man, nor by magick or any unthinkable accident. And so I must protect myself…But how?

  ‘I was no magician, no sorcerer or necromancer. I had been a mere youth when taken to Shad. I knew nothing save those vile things Yibb-Tstll had shown me and instilled in me. But the one thing I did have in abundance was time. And given time even an ignorant man may do – may learn – almost anything.

  ‘Magick was the answer. I was already becoming legendary to the Yhemni, and the legend grew as they aged and died and I lived on. They saw me now as a great necromancer, but I was not! And so, since I had now resigned myself to Shad and Shadarabar (where else could I go in Theem’hdra and be
accepted?) I determined to become that legend, to indulge myself in the first Yoppaloth’s legacy and learn all the mazy alchemical and necromantic secrets he’d left behind him. And who could say, perhaps I’d also discover a way to break Yibb’s hold on me, leave Shad forever and cleanse myself, and thus make at least partial return to the innocence of yore.

  ‘Such were my thoughts during periods of high spirits, when on occasion I was given to believe I might rise above the pits I’d already fathomed and others which plunged deeper yet. But when my darker side held sway and I heard Yibb’s call in the night, then I’d sneer at my own childish whimsies. Nevertheless, I set about to discover all I could of the former Yoppaloth’s magicks and mysteries, the full extent of his esoteric and necromantic knowledge.

  ‘In nether dungeons hewn from the bedrock beneath his palace, he had kept creatures of unbelievable hideousness, hybrid things spawned of madness, which he’d used in his annual tournaments. Since some of these – anomalies – were at least part-human and intelligent, I determined to question them as to their genesis: I determined to know how Yoppaloth had created them. The most advanced of these beings, able to converse, told me that the wizard had simply followed Yibb-Tstll’s instructions in this regard, for he himself had not the magickal skills to produce such miscegenies.

  ‘I found it passing suspicious to discover Yoppaloth lacking in such matters, but put this out of mind and proceeded next to explore his laboratory. Here another revelation: such devices as he’d owned were meagre things, in no way complicated but rather crude and unbecoming of a mage of alleged magnitude. Where were his shewstones, his dire familiars, his potions and poisons and other persuasions? Where were his books and, more essentially, his runebooks? No library at all that I had discovered; no tractates, codices, scrolls or inscribed tablets, nor any incunabula whatever! Nothing! A wizard? Even a middling magician? From where I stood, Black Yoppaloth the First had not even owned a wand!