Tower of Zhaal

by Phipps, C. T.

  “And how do I know you won’t do this to humanity if you escape the Keeper’s control?” I asked seriously.

  “Are our lives so valueless compared to humanity’s?” Whispers-Of-Rebellion asked.

  “I would exterminate your entire species and retroactively remove them from history to protect those I call family—who just so happen to be humans.”

  Mostly.

  “We will not do this,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said. “You can look into the future if you wish.”

  I could have, but didn’t. “I’m not afraid of you creating your new world. Even if it seems everyone and their brother wants to destroy the world lately.”

  “Why is that?” Whispers-Of-Rebellion asked.

  “Because I have seen the powers that rule the universe,” I said. “It would be a very poor thing for you to make such a boring world.”

  Whispers-Of-Rebellion said, “We will kill and destroy anything that stands in the way of seeking our own place. That is no better or worse than humanity. It is also the only promise we can give beyond helping you after the Keeper’s Death. Do we have a deal or not?”

  “And you’ll kill me if you don’t get a yes.”

  “I will try. I know what you are. Others will follow me, though, until there are no more who can.”

  I pondered what it was saying. There were no good answers here, as the simplistic morality of good and evil had no place in the post-Rising world. It was possible to do good, but innocents would suffer. It was also possible to do evil yet have good people benefit. Perhaps it had always been that way, and society’s problem was pretending such things weren’t the true basis of morality—balancing these conflicting parts of our lives.

  In the end, I made a choice. “I’ll help you.”

  I did not think the shoggoths would be friends to humanity. In fact, I suspected they would be dire enemies and might even be the power that ended mankind in three generations. I would deal with one world-destroying threat a time, though.

  Besides, fuck slavers.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Less than twenty minutes later, I was already debating the sanity of my choice. The problem, I knew, was … how did one know when one was insane? In the Pre-Rising world, insanity was determined by several factors—most importantly how well one was able to adapt oneself to the social norm. But what if society was insane? What if there was no society? If I was the only judge, I had to wonder what it said about me that I was going to murder an ancient alien to help a gestalt of amorphous blobs murder a city of human-like beings. All on the off chance they might help me save a dying world.

  Yet I wanted to kill the Keeper. Was it all just an excuse for the violence now? I couldn’t say for sure. I literally could not count the number of people I’d killed since I shot my first prisoner as part of a firing squad when I was nineteen. In a world where humanity was well on its way to extinction, I’d been conditioned and molded into a weapon designed for killing people first, then monsters. I’d killed prisoners, rioters, cultists, bandits, village militia, mutants, criminals, and people who just thought I needed to be taught a lesson.

  And that was just the humans.

  Violence was a language I spoke well. It was a tongue common to the Great Old Ones, servitor races, and human hybrids. When I’d been training to be a Recon and Extermination Ranger, I’d been told that violence had resolved more conflicts in the history of humanity than any other tool. There was some truth to that, but resolution was not enough. To build something, you needed something other than violence. Yet I wasn’t sure I could give that.

  I wasn’t sure anyone could anymore.

  The ghoul guards were exceptionally good at detecting intruders but relied primarily on their sense of smell. I found a waste bucket full of cavern dust from where they’d been doing remolding to one of the interior chambers and used it to cover myself, after which I was effectively invisible.

  Because it was a public building, they also had numerous maps on plastic plaques spread throughout the palace. I took one of these and used it to navigate to a place marked “The Keeper’s Temple.” Along the way, I disabled a ghoul guard and broke his neck. Staring into his cold dead eyes, I took his communication stone, which served in a manner like a walkie-talkie, and his thick black bone truncheon.

  I hid the body in a shoggoth closet, the creature consuming it in order to protect my cover. Sneaking down to the Keeper’s Temple, I managed to avoid three or four patrols of guards before coming to a gigantic set of bronze doors. They were decorated with images of the ghouls heading down into the tunnels beneath the Earth to escape an ice age, with Deep Ones as well as Cthulhoid horrors being depicted as celebrating their exile. Humans wearing animal skins were visible in the diadem, too, hiding away in more shallow caves.

  I was only able to barely slide in before they slammed shut behind me. The room that lay beyond was a vast, cathedral-like chamber with dozens of grandiose stone pillars, arches, and walkways.

  A massive stone statue of the Keeper stood in the center of the chamber, forty feet in height. It had a huge brass brazier in front of it, filled with dozens of burning bodies piled on top of one another, mixed with incense. Bloody ceremonial instruments, including sickles and curved swords, were laid out before it where the sacrifices had been dismembered. The resulting smell made me think of having a barbecue in a church.

  I looked around a bit more and was startled by what I saw. Underneath the dim stained glass windows illuminated by similar burning pyres (sunlight never going to pass through their depths), I saw the cathedral’s base was filled with stone pews, which were filled with corpses. Hundreds upon hundreds of corpses. There were ghouls, humans, children, and even strange-looking pets.

  All had been killed. At first, I thought the shoggoths must have done this, but discarded that notion almost immediately. They would have simply absorbed all the bodies and left no trace of them behind. More so, if they were capable of committing such a heinous act of mass murder, they would have already revolted. My mind went through numerous possible candidates from the Faceless Ones to a heretofore unknown threat. In the end, my question was answered for me.

  “[I killed them, Captain Booth,]” The Keeper said, slithering out from behind its enormous statue. “[I have lived through one shoggoth revolt already. I know what those savages are capable of and wanted to spare my people having to live through it. I filled their minds with rapturous joy and they died peacefully. I’d do it to the entire city if I could, but sadly, that is not an option.]”

  I walked towards the Elder Thing, my truncheon in hand. “So, you know what’s coming?”

  “[Yes,]” the Keeper replied. “[I could feel the spells and psychic commands directing them failing. Their minds are like their bodies, morphic and malleable. Hard to control indefinitely. The fact they could speak with you about revolution through a loophole was a sign of what was to come. In a thousand or so years, they would have broken free anyway.]”

  “A thousand years is a long time.”

  “[A thousand years is nothing!]” the Keeper said, its psychic tone verging on shrieking. “[I am a billion Earth years old. I was one of the first to migrate to this world planet and am now the oldest of my kind. I know you are more than a human now. I even know what species you are, but understand that the entire history of mankind is but a good night’s sleep to me.]”

  “I’m here to kill you,” I said, staring at him.

  “[I knew before you arrived. It is my gift to be able to tell the future from the various probable timelines. I knew when the shoggoth rebellion was going to happen and advised the Brood Mothers to exterminate them all. I knew when the Rising was going to happen and that we had to move to the Dreamlands. Both times my people ignored my words and paid the cost.]”

  I shook my head. “You brought the shoggoths’ wrath down upon yourselves.”

  “[Did we?]” the Keeper asked. “[Without us, the shoggoths and humanity would not exist. Everything about the
m from the way they eat, move, and think was designed to serve their purpose as servants. They were never supposed to be sentient and their greatest joy was meant to be the performance of their duties. Without us, they do nothing but consume and shamble. They think freedom is what they seek, but they have no idea what it is.]”

  “Some would say the point of life is living it.”

  “[I am not one of them,]” the Keeper said, looming over me. We were less than a dozen feet apart now. “[Tell me, John, do you have offspring?]”

  “I do.”

  “[I did, too. You have lived your entire life in the shadow of the Rising, but the shoggoth revolt was the same for us as the Rising was for your race. An apocalypse that destroyed every single dream and hope of our species. Some of us survived by going into hiding or hibernating under the ice or entering the Dreamlands, but every single one of us was left with the knowledge that the shoggoths would never cease their purge of our ranks. I struggled to save my clan-mates and offspring against this horror and I failed.]”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to enslave the shoggoths again.”

  “[Doesn’t it? I found the ghouls shivering and living in fear of the Tunnelers, the Rising having destroyed the majority of their cities. I saw a chance to give them new life and civilization as well as punish my enemies. I’d solved the flaw in the spells that kept the shoggoths bound, or so I thought, and guessed I might recover some sense of purpose in life. That I might learn to live as one of the few survivors of the end of the world.]”

  I didn’t know why I was arguing with him. I’d seen so much worse in the wasteland and knew sometimes there weren’t answers. People just did what they did and you had to accept that and move on. “And yet you killed everyone here.”

  “[They will come for your people next],” the Elder Thing said.

  “Let them come. I’ve dealt with worse.”

  The Elder Thing made a noise which I assumed to be a snort of derision. “[Fool. You are not worth leaving alive. I hope the Horror destroys everything on your world, shoggoth and human alike.]”

  That’s when the Keeper hit me with a telekinetic blast that sent me flying through the air and slamming against the bronze doors hundreds of feet away. If I’d still been human, I would have been killed instantly. Instead, I just felt like I’d had the crap kicked out of me.

  “I’ve seen your race’s habitats,” I said, getting up off the ground. “Once the Elder Things ruled over most of the cosmos, and now you live shivering in fear of your own creations. If you were so goddamn superior, you’d be out there among the stars. You let yourself get fat, lazy, and insane from billions of years of being catered to like gods. Except you’re not gods. You’re not even Great Old Ones. You’re just the remnants of a failed species, left behind among the other dust of history.”

  The Keeper blasted forth an immense wave of terrifying psychic energy, enough to liquefy the brain of a normal man. I felt it bash against the barriers erected in my mind. It brought me to my knees. The Elder Thing could kill hundreds with its power, and I was deeply, deeply outmatched. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to kick its ass, though. I stood and ran as fast as I could at the Keeper. Objects like candlesticks and hymnals flew at me, bashing against my skin. I managed to power past them and dodged underneath large pieces of stone the Keeper ripped from the ground. It was just lifting a gigantic pew when I leapt into the air and kicked it into the burning brazier.

  “[Fire? Please. I have survived in the radiation storms of space!]” the Keeper said, climbing out of the flames. Which was when I picked up one of the sickles in front of the brazier and gutted the Elder Thing like a slaughtered pig. The resulting psychic scream was unintelligible before I turned over the brazier and buried it under a pile of corpses.

  “Die!” I shouted, taking the sickle out.

  “[Never!]” the Keeper replied, aiming its crystal rod at me with one of its stalks.

  I proceeded to slash the stalk off before bringing the sickle down repeatedly, getting a primal thrill from slashing the Elder Thing to pieces. Several times, the Keeper attempted to summon more things to throw at me, but they collapsed every time I slashed again. It was more than a dozen strikes before it finally stopped moving. Despite the fact that it was a billion years old, it had died much more easily than many of the other creatures I’d slain over my four and a half decades of life.

  I was soaked in ichor, breathing heavily, and feeling half-sane when I finished chopping up the Keeper. The most disturbing part of the entire experience was that the psychic presence of the Keeper hadn’t disappeared until the very end. It had managed to live throughout the entirety of the ordeal.

  Staring at the bloody carnage I’d wrought, I slowly backed away and collapsed against the stone statue of the Keeper above me. I found myself suddenly reminded of a poem, Death Be Not Proud by John Dunne. “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.” I added, “Just not tonight.”

  The Keeper had lived longer than any other being I’d met in my life, save possibly Nyarlathotep, and yet death had claimed him in the end, too. A billion years was an unimaginable abyss of time to a human, even a Kastro’vaal, yet it was but a fraction of the universe’s age, and there were implications this was just the latest in a series of universes that had come and gone over the Other Gods’ lifetime.

  Death catches up with us all in the end, but perhaps it was an old friend to those who had lived so long. Of course, the Keeper had been suffering melancholy and fought hard to survive in the end. Perhaps we were all scared of living, but still wanted oblivion less. Wow, that felt pretentious and pointless.

  I reached over and pried the crystal rod from the dead Elder Thing’s stalk, which was still wrapped around it. Picking it up, I immediately felt a great sense of connection to all the shoggoths spread throughout the city. Moreover, I heard their millions of thoughts moving throughout the land and other kingdoms. Other worlds, even. The Keeper had modified this rod to “tune in” on the psychic frequency of the shoggoth gestalt. Enslaving it, he had enslaved the entire race.

  I could have taken the shoggoth race over in that moment and used it to stop the Faceless Ones, save the world, and probably rebuild humanity. I couldn’t say I wasn’t tempted by the allure of that sort of power and the ability to achieve whatever I wanted. The shoggoths truly were the most multipurpose tool ever created. Just as humans had been designed to be a less effective, safer substitute for them. Either way, whether we failed or won today, I was going to be true to myself. That was the one lesson I’d picked up from the past year of insanity. In the end, I sighed and placed the crystal rod on the ground. Minutes later, a shoggoth slithered out of a hole and picked it up.

  That was when the city began to burn.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It was pandemonium in Shak’ta’hadron. In twenty-four hours, I’d born witness to destruction of two cities, and I couldn’t say the experience was improved the second time around. August, Mercury, Bobbie, Martha, and I were rounded up by the shoggoths and taken to the highest balcony of the judge’s palace. There, we got a bird’s-eye view of the chaos engulfing the city.

  Fires sprang up in dozens of buildings. The flames were magical in nature, the city being composed of stone. Explosions destroyed other structures, either at the hands of the shoggoths using ghoul weapons or the ghouls using their own. The shoggoths consumed buildings, people, and vehicles with some merging to become hundred-foot-tall terrors, while others took the forms of ghouls to infiltrate the military response. The ghouls put up a resistance against the shoggoths, thousands of the amorphous race were killed, and yet the result of the revolt was never in doubt.

  By morning, Shak’ta’hadron was a ghost town. All the slave masters were killed along with selections of the city’s populace for reasons I could only guess. I knew this because the shoggoths formed a gigantic pile of their bodies at the base of the judge’s palace rather than consuming them
as they did the soldiers they fought.

  I believed this to be a form of insult, as it was a holy rite among the ghouls to be consumed by others. By not devouring them, the shoggoths were saying they wanted the strength of their overseers to be lost forever. Either that or they were just saving them for later. The reasons didn’t matter much in the end.

  It was some small comfort that the shoggoths were, contrary to the Keeper’s fears, uninterested in the genocide of the ghouls. Of Shaka’ta’hadron’s five hundred thousand or so inhabitants, four hundred fifty thousand were rounded up and placed in a vast convoy of electric-powered vehicles with every bit of food in the city. The shoggoths forced them out of the great stone passages connecting Shak’ta’hadron to other the ghoul communities and passageways thereafter. In one stroke, they’d isolated their newfound kingdom from the rest of the world.

  I couldn’t help but wonder about the cost of their actions, though. Exiling the citizenry of Shak’ta’hadron was a cruel form of mercy. Travel through the underground was almost as perilous as through the surface, or so I’d heard, but the shoggoths could have killed them outright. Indeed, I’d expected them to. I was enough of a hypocrite to pray to the ghoul gods and my own that the refugees managed to make it to another city that would take them in.

  I just hoped there was one.

  Down below, in the sixth hour of their revolt, the shoggoths whooped and hollered at their lightning-quick triumph. The strange words, “Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li!” were chanted throughout the cavern over and over while the shoggoths tore down the monuments the ghouls had erected. The statue of the Keeper was brought out from the base of the judge’s palace in several pieces, the shoggoths playing with them like balls.