Tales of Alhazred

by Donald Tyson

  Craning my neck and standing on my toes, I tried to find the men who spoke, but the throng of the marketplace crushed against me and turned me around, knocking the cursed packages from my arms. By the time I got another view, whoever had spoken had moved onward.

  I knelt to pick up my wares. From the corner of my eye I noticed a kind of blurring of the air. It moved down the line of stalls. I stared at it in puzzlement. My eyes said there was something there but my mind said there was not. As I struggled with this conflict, the blur moved toward Martala.

  The packages scattered as I ran toward the girl, shouting her name. The babble was so loud, she did not hear until I was close. It was enough. She turned, and as she did so a man dressed in black with his face wrapped in a black cloth so that only his eyes were visible beneath his turban seemed to materialize from nowhere beside her. He raised his dagger. The girl moved as quickly as a striking serpent. Her little dagger flashed out and sank itself into the assassin’s side and back as she moved past him. He staggered and dropped his weapon. Then he melted into the air and was gone as mysteriously as he had come.

  “Are you hurt?” I took her shoulders in my hands and stared into her pale eyes.

  “The dog did not touch me. He was slow; I was quick.”

  Bending, I picked up the dagger and examined it. There was nothing remarkable about it, other than a bluish cast to the steel at the end of its curved blade. I raised it to my face. The odor was unmistakable.

  “Poison. An extract of the black lotus.”

  “What does this mean, Alhazred?”

  Reluctantly, I drew her aside beneath an awning and told her about the apparition in the night. “Whoever sent it means to get to me through those near me. He does not want me dead or he would have sent his assassin against me. He wants me to make a futile investigation, so that the one who stole the Egyptian salts will not fall under suspicion.”

  “Oh, the packages! Look at them!”

  I resisted the urge to curse the packages, and instead helped her pick them up and dust them off. Only two were missing. The citizens of Damascus were either more honest than I believed, or the fatherless children who made their bread by stealing from the merchants were all on hajj.

  4.

  “I want you to stay at Martala’s side at all times when she is outside this house.”

  Altrus grunted at me with amusement. “From what you told me about what happened in the marketplace today, I judge the girl can take care of herself.”

  “I was able to shout a warning. That’s the only reason she is still alive.”

  “Very well, I’ll become her bodyguard. She won’t like it. You know how independent she is.”

  “Until this matter of the missing Egyptian salts becomes clear, I want the two of you together.”

  It was fortunate the girl did not like to go out that often. She enjoyed overseeing the running of my household. My servants knew to go to her when they had a dispute between themselves. The house was her domain, and for an Egyptian street urchin who had lived most of her life in a dirty shack, it was paradise. Altrus would be bound to the house because she was in the house, which he would hate, but that could not be helped.

  “Just keep her safe. And watch your own back.”

  “I always do, Alhazred.”

  The girl could not have a more able bodyguard. More than this, I could not do. It was necessary that I focus my own attentions on the matter of the stolen supplies. I had sent out messengers to ask all those I knew if they had heard rumors about a back garden filled with Egyptian jars. Thus far, all those who responded claimed to know nothing.

  Borka, one of my manservants, entered my study as Altrus was leaving. “There is a man at the door who wishes to see you,” he said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “He said for me to tell you that the Hound has words for you.”

  This was interesting. I knew Chigaru el-Masri well enough to nod to him in the street, but except for the Council meeting of the previous day, he had never before come to my house.

  “Show him into the study, Borka.”

  The bald Egyptian entered, his round, beardless face beaming a smile. After him trailed a boy of eight or nine years of age whose dark eyes had a hunted look.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Alhazred. I know you must be occupied with the affair that concerns us all.”

  “I always have time to talk with a man of your accomplishments, Chigaru.”

  This seemed to please him.

  I looked at the boy. “Who is this you have brought with you?”

  He put his chubby white hand on the boy’s head. The boy did not flinch. He merely stared at me.

  “This is Abdullah, my seer. He goes everywhere with me. He is my eyes in the other world.”

  “You use a child for a seer?”

  “It is an ancient custom of necromancers in my country. Children see into the spirit realm more easily than adults. When I work a ritual to call forth the spirits of the dead, Abdullah tells me what appears in the triangle, and what they say in response to my questions.”

  I remembered that when I first met Martala in Bubastis, she was being forced by an elderly street juggler to read the future in a pool of black ink which he poured into the palm of her hand.

  “Do you wish to tell my future?”

  The Egyptian laughed. “I doubt you could afford our services, Alhazred. Little Abdullah is in great demand in all the noble houses of Damascus.”

  The boy looked at me with empty eyes that had seen too much and no longer wished to see.

  “Then why have you come, Chigaru?”

  The Egyptian spread his chubby hands to show me their pink palms. “In every adversity there is opportunity. As you may have heard, there was been a falling out between myself and the Merchant.”

  “Fayyad al-Majid? What has he to do with anything?”

  “He cheated me.” His dark eyes narrowed. “He stole a rich client out from under my foot. Such impertinence must be punished.”

  “That is an affair between you and Fayyad. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “But it could have a great deal to do with you, Alhazred, if you wish it.”

  He took a leather purse from his belt and extended it to me.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “This is a hundred gold dinars, which I will give to you if you blame the Merchant for the stolen supplies.”

  “I have no evidence against the Merchant.”

  “It was him,” he said with impatience. “It has to be him. He intends to hoard the salts and sell them at an inflated price, claiming that he has found a new supplier from Egypt.”

  “Have you proof of this?”

  He scowled, and shook his head. “Rumors, only rumors. But why should such rumors come to be unless there is truth behind them? I have never trusted that oily, fat maker of potions.”

  This interested me. “Where did you hear these rumors?”

  “It was the boy who heard them.” Chigaru tugged the child’s sleeve and nodded toward me.

  The child turned and began to talk in a toneless voice. “I was walking along the street outside the yellow door when the Merchant came forth with the Celt. They were arguing and didn’t notice me.”

  The yellow door was the door to Fayyad’s house in the Lane of Scholars. All the doors in the lane bore different colors, and by these colors their residents were known.

  “The Celt told the Merchant that he knew what the Merchant had done, and that unless he confessed it to the Council, his secret would be betrayed.”

  “That’s not a confession, that’s an accusation, and it’s not even at firsthand,” I told Chigaru. “Coming from you, it carries little weight. Everyone in the Lane knows you hate Fayyad.”

  “It’s true: I do despise that oily cheat and liar. He has shown malice toward me more than once, for no other reason than his unreasoning hatred of foreigners. The Celt cares nothing about him. What other thing would the Celt want
Fayyad to confess, but the theft of the salts?”

  He extended the purse of gold.

  I waved it down. “Put your gold away, Chigaru. I will investigate what you’ve just told me, but I have sworn to the Council to find guilt impartially.”

  “This gold is not a bribe,” he said with a forced laugh. “It is an inducement for you to examine the Merchant closely.”

  “I examine everyone closely, even you.”

  5.

  The Celt’s manservant was gone from his street door for so long a time that I was about to turn away, when the door opened and he ushered me in with the unreadable expression of all good servants. He was uncommonly tall, with a cadaverous face, close-cropped hair and a scant beard on the end of his elongated chin. Those who look after the needs of necromancers tend to be unusual. It is a position shunned by the average man or woman.

  I looked around the courtyard with curiosity as he led me to the front door of the house. It was smaller than my own, received less sunlight, and had an air of neglect. The Celt’s house was located at the far end of the Lane where the houses are less opulent and the grounds not so extensive. I wondered if this tall, silent man did all the work of the house.

  Dannu had come to live in Damascus a month after my own arrival. This made him the most recent of the necromancers to take up residence in the Lane of Scholars. Rumor had it that he came from a distant land far to the west, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. He had made a living as a traveling juggler, performing a mixture of magic and deception for crowds in the marketplaces of all the larger towns, before taking up the serious study of the black arts. His primary discipline was said to be demonology. He had come to Damascus for the same reason the rest of us live here: it is the center of the world where the arts of magic are concerned.

  The interior of the house told the same tale as the courtyard. It was well appointed, but the marble was unpolished, the wall hangings dusty. Minor damage to one of the window screens had gone unrepaired. Dannu was not nearly so prosperous as most of his neighbors.

  I was led to the back of the house, into a little workshop. The Celt sat on a stool, bent over a small iron anvil on a work table. He was hammering a gold medallion with a tiny hammer that had a rounded end the size of a pea. The hammer made a tink-tink-tink as it struck the gold. The workmanship of the medallion was superb. All around its edge were intertwining creatures with long necks and beaked heads. In the center was set a large ruby cut with flat facets. It caught the light from the back window each time he turned the medallion on the anvil.

  “What do you wish to say to me, Alhazred?” he asked without looking up from his work. “As you can see, I’m busy.”

  “It’s a beautiful piece,” I murmured in appreciation.

  “A charm to bring good fortune. The man who commissioned it is wealthy. He has two houses, three wives, and a fleet of caravans. Why he thinks he needs more good fortune is beyond my ken, but the fool pays well, and that is all that matters.”

  “I’ve come to speak with you about the missing salts.”

  He set down his hammer and turned to study me with his keen gray eyes. There was intelligence there, even though it lay half hidden beneath his bushy red eyebrows. “Why do you think I can add to the statement I gave you when you last interrogated me?”

  “It was scarcely an interrogation,” I said with a smile.

  “Call it what you wish. What do you want?”

  Taking a stool down from its peg on the wall, I sat upon it. “You were observed talking with the Merchant outside his door in the Lane. The one who overhead you claims that you told Fayyad that you knew what he had done, and that if he didn’t confess it to the Council, you would be forced to betray his secret.”

  Dannu nodded.“There are spies everywhere in this pestilential city. Sometimes I wish I had stayed in Albion.”

  “Is the White Isle your home?”

  “It is where I was birthed. I have no home. I have wandered the world since I was a small child, eking out a living by doing tricks for fools in marketplaces and at country fairs. The world is my home, or I have no home. I don’t know which it is.”

  “Will you speak to me about the Merchant’s secret?”

  He hesitated long in thought, his expression stony. “Know this, Alhazred. When I came to Damascus, I had no friends. Fayyad made a loan of gold to me so that I could begin to make amulets and talismans to sell to the nobles. All that I have here, small though it is, I owe to that loan. I would not willingly betray him.”

  “Surely you have repaid the loan by now.”

  “Yes, the gold is repaid.”

  “Then you owe Fayyad nothing. He lent gold to you only because he judged you a good risk. You were an investment to him, nothing more.”

  “That may be so, but without his gold—without his trust in me—I would have nothing today. It is a serious matter to betray his secret.”

  “We must think of the well-being of all who live in the Lane. This affair has hurt us all, and it is not just the theft of the salts, it is the suspicion that grows between us.”

  He nodded and took his bristling red beard into his fist. “You are right. I have remained silent long enough, and I have given Fayyad many chances to confess his crime before the Council.”

  “His crime? So it was Fayyad who stole the salts?”

  “I know nothing about the thefts of the salts.”

  “Dannu, I ask that you reveal to me what you do know. I will not use it against the Merchant unless there is no choice in the matter. We must resolve these thefts.”

  “Yes, I am decided. I will tell you what I know.”

  He rang a silver bell attached to the wall by pulling a cord. The manservant appears so quickly, he must have been listening just outside the doorway.

  “Tea.”

  The man bowed and withdrew.

  “While I was repaying my debt to the Merchant, I helped him with a few trifling matters. I acted not so much as his servant as his assistant. I procured the parts of corpses he needed for his potions. You probably know that Fayyad’s potions and unguents depend for their efficacy on necromantic materials such as mummy dust, human hair, and human bone.”

  “I confess I know nothing of the Merchant’s manner of working.”

  “Now you know.” Dannu smiled. “I wonder how many rich ladies who drink his potions realize they are drinking the dead.”

  “A sausage-maker is wise not to tell his customers how his sausages are made,” I observed.

  “Indeed. In any event, my assistance to Fayyad brought me to his house on many occasions at odd hours of the night. His servants became accustomed to my comings and goings, and even started to leave a small side door unlocked so that I could enter without disturbing them.”

  “I presume you saw something,” I murmured to encourage his speech.

  “Yes, that is right.” He hesitated, then took a deep breath and committed himself. “I came upon Fayyad in his cellar, working the Egyptian ritual of Yog-Sothoth to raise the dead and reconstitute them into living flesh from their essential salts.”

  “Many of us have worked that ritual. I myself—” I stopped talking.

  “Yes?” He studied me with curiosity.

  “I myself have worked that ritual, but I confess I had no great success with it.”

  “It is a difficult necromancy,” he agreed. “I have never even attempted it.”

  “Few of us have a need for it. Usually it is enough to raise the shade of the dead and feed it so that it can speak. It is unnecessary to rebuild the body from its salts.”

  He nodded agreement. “I have never found a need for it in my own work.”

  The manservant returned with a silver tray on which rested a tea service. He set it on the workbench and poured from the pot, and I saw that the tea was green.

  “Green tea is one of my few indulgences,” Dannu said. “I find it restores my concentration when I become weary.”

  I sampled the tea from the tiny cup I
was offered, and found it hot and strong.

  “What is the significance of the Merchant experimenting with the Egyptian ritual, when so many of us have attempted it?”

  “With unmarked salts?”

  I set my cup down before I spilled my tea. “The salts were not labeled?”

  “They are less expensive to get when unlabeled,” he said.

  “Yes, but the risk. What precautions did Fayyad take?”

  “None.”

  I stared at his gray eyes with incomprehension. “None? You mean, nothing? He took no precautions at all?”

  “Nothing. When I came upon him, he was working the ritual without assistants, without a circle of containment, without magical wards.”

  It was difficult even to comprehend such recklessness.

  “In the names of all the gods, why? Why would he take such a risk?”

  The Celt shrugged his broad shoulders beneath his stained work shirt. “Who can know? Arrogance. Expediency. Reckless haste.”

  “Did you confront him?”

  He frowned and dropped his gaze. “That is what I should have done. But remember, Alhazred: I was newly arrived in Damascus, and I was still in the man’s debt.

  “What did you do?” I could not keep the censure from my voice.

  “May the ancient ones forgive me, I helped him. When he saw me in the entranceway at a critical moment in the ritual, he beckoned me to him, and I went. I helped him complete it.”

  “What was the result?”

  “Nothing, I swear it. The ritual was not successful. The salts may have been contaminated with extraneous matter, for what we raised up was a misshapen monster. I killed it quickly with my axe and we buried it outside the walls of the city.”

  “I sense that this is not the end of your story.”

  “Would that it were. Would that Fayyad had taken my gentle advice and ceased his experiments with the unmarked salts. Would that I had made my objections more strenuous at the time, although I do not think he would have heeded me.”

  The sense of an ominous dark mass hanging over the room was almost palpable.