by John Shirley
Then, ragged as he was, burnt almost black by the heat of ten million suns, he climbed slowly and painfully the highest, jagged peak on the world of the gods, the axis of All at the very center of all things.
Somewhere, far off, demon-pipers played mindlessly, shrilly, madly, but their sound was like the distant susurrus of waves at ebb-tide, and he did not allow himself to be distracted. He attained the summit, and there found a pavilion of purest crystal, wherein, upon a dais, was placed a single, thick book.
There he dwelt for an aeon – or perhaps only a few seconds, for his sense of time was completely confounded – while he and his beautiful-faced companion, who seemed completely unsullied by their adventures, guided him as he turned the pages of the book. He came to understand that it was that very book in which the names of gods and worlds are written, so that when he turned to a new page, he called a new god or a new world into existence; but when he turned to another page, that former god or world passed away, like day overtaken by night, light and dark, dark and light, life following death and death following life. Sometimes in a waking dream he heard the cries of gods and of the myriad peoples of the worlds as he extinguished them. That they called out to him and worshipped him as he brought them into being was of little import. It was over in an instant. He could have gone on forever, drunk on the wonders he beheld in that book.
At the very end, though, he turned one more page, and came to a portrait of himself. He could only look on it and ask himself, was this the picture of a god, or of a philosopher, a poet, or a fool?
Was there any difference?
He could only sit and stare and ponder and desperately hope that this might somehow be a dream.
Then his beautiful companion reached over with a hand like living, carven, purest marble, and closed the book.
“It’s time to go,” he said.
~*~
And suddenly Paliphar Vooz awoke with a shout. He sat up, streaming sweat, all the more bewildered to find himself not on the couch among the orgy-hall, but in that humble, private bed with his mistress, who seemed in the dim light to be as she had always been, soft and beautiful as he had known her in his youth, for all that he was now a scraggly, naked old man burnt black by the fires of a million suns.
Or at least that was how he thought he saw himself. His senses were confounded. Perhaps he was still that boy who had come into this bed for the first time with such expectations and the sun-blackened old man was no more than a delirious nightmare. Perhaps nothing had happened at all. Perhaps nothing ever would, and he was trapped, like an insect in timeless amber, in this single moment of illusion.
He sat up on the side of the bed, weeping, trying to recall in his mind something he could not quite grasp, something he had seen in the book perhaps, the one perfect image or idea or phrase which expressed precisely the summation of all his visions, from which the philosopher might derive complete enlightenment.
But like some detail in a fading dream, he could not remember it.
His mistress sat up beside him and put her hand gently on his shoulder.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I suppose it is nothing after all.”
He got up. He wrapped a cloth about his middle, although in Commoriom there was no particular taboo against going naked.
His mistress kissed him gently on the cheek. “Leave the door unlatched,” she said.
Outside, his companion waited for him. They joined hands, and once more the scene changed. They were in a vast cavern, and somehow he knew – for surely he had learned something in the course of living so many lives, of sharing so many dreams – that the bubbling, shapeless protoplasm before him, an oily mass like a living, formless ocean susurrating at ebb-tide, was none other than Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source of life not merely upon Earth but throughout the entire universe, without mind, without entity, yet, in the end, the only true thing in existence.
This he had read about in the book of creation and un-creation, on the only page which did not go out of existence when he turned it.
He saw that his companion was sinking down, fading into the mass of Ubbo-Sathla.
For one last time that beautiful face like living marble, which might have been a boy’s, or a maiden’s, or a demon’s spoke to him, and told him how sometimes a bit of Ubbo-Sathla splatters out among the worlds, an inchoate mass that takes on shape and even the illusion of consciousness, and fancies itself man or monster or god.
The beautiful one shrugged his shoulders and smiled wanly and said, “But it’s all pretension. They’re only fooling themselves.” And then he added, “Oh, by the way, you’ve still got that phial I gave you. Now would be a good time to use it.”
Then he was gone and Paliphar Vooz got out the phial in one last frenzy of terror and despair or even, just possibly, absurd hope. If he drank from it, could some incomprehensible magic still cause him to awaken yet again in his mistress’s bed and find that nothing at all had happened and no time had passed?
He pulled out the stopper with his teeth and spat it away.
But the phial was empty. He put it in his mouth and sucked desperately, but there was not even air inside. Nothing.
That was when he realized that he could not feel his legs, because he was standing knee-deep in the mass of Ubbo-Sathla and he too was no more than a splattering of that oily mass, which had learned to delude itself with pretensions.
After a moment, he knew nothing more.
Yhoundeh Fades
By Ann K. Schwader
Her inquisition chambers wait
In vain. Too silent, now; too clean,
Exquisite blades & pain-machines
Teach no more innocents the fate
Of heresy. The high priest’s gate
Sags webbed in ebon silk, pristine
As dust upon his chalice green
With verdigris & mithridate.
Throughout the fanes of Mu Thulan
A strange & bitter incense burns
Once more to desecrate its sky
With daemon-rites not meant for man,
Unless to herald the return
Of Him who squats in dim N’ kai.
Coils Of The Ouroboros The History Of Avasquiddoc The Apprentice
By Cody Goodfellow
Mockingly do the fuligin shades recount the tale of Avasquiddoc of Cerngoth, the feckless apprentice who abandoned wisdom in his greedy quest for arcane knowledge; and of his master, the renowned sorcerer Varka Zhom of Commoriom, who held his vaunted wisdom too dearly to spend it to save himself.
Though it was not in his nature to share with others the fruits of his eldritch delvings, and all those previous acolytes under his stewardship had met one or another obscure fate by disobedience or misadventure, yet did Varka Zhom eagerly accept young Avasquiddoc as his ward. His reasons for doing so were hardly altruistic, for Avasquiddoc was himself a learned and erudite adept, having studied for three lustrums under the venerable Squarvash-Yun, the foremost conjuror of Cerngoth, who had only recently perished under a cloud of ill rumor.
Herein did cynics believe lay Varka Zhom’s ulterior motive for taking on Avasquiddoc; for so notoriously miserly was Squarvash-Yun with his own secrets, that Varka Zhom himself had never succeeded in prying out the least of them by bargaining or stealth, and hoped to extract from the student what he failed to glean from the master.
The same jaundiced idlers who tarred Varka Zhom thusly also speculated that Avasquiddoc had been totally unsuccessful at mastering Squarvash-Yun’s hermetic practices, and had poisoned the ancient Cerngothic necromancer to absorb his close-held knowledge by other means, which even their cynical musings dared not frame, even in darksome whispers.
On the first day of the Year of the Red Serpent did Varka Zhom take into his home the moon-pale Avasquiddoc. He arrived afoot, clad in road-grimed rags and bearing only a curious bag made of the cured carcass of a giant toad. Though the first meeting was cold and almost wordless, it was a gi
ddy occasion for both, as each hoped to learn more from the other than he might be forced to teach.
Avasquiddoc was quartered in a closet in the cellar of Varka Zhom’s tower, a singular edifice hewn out of the fossilized shell of some colossal Cambrian mollusk, which loomed out of the Jungles of Zesh, just beyond the edge of the capitol. Though the closet was too short for a man half Avasquiddoc’s stature, it was richly appointed with a myriad of creature comforts, which had belonged to one or another of the master’s previous apprentices, of whose manifold fates the master was brusquely dismissive.
For his part, Avasquiddoc proved a quick study of his new master’s niggling lessons, so much so that he soon became disdainful of the Commorian’s arcana. Thereafter, he shirked the toilsome chores his new master heaped upon him, and tumultuous clashes were often heard from within the sorcerer’s cloistered retreat.
Frequently did the heated exchanges of venomous words escalate into salvos of wantonly destructive sorcery, the defiant apprentice retorting only with his new master’s easily mimicked defenses, which inevitably died in stalemate, and betrayed nothing.
Avasquiddoc bridled under Varka Zhom’s taciturn instruction, which beat him down under a torrent of menial labor, yet edified him with only a trickle of gnosis. Not allowed to observe Varka Zhom’s nightly conjurations, he was instead consigned to wander the jungle until sunrise, harvesting specimens of night-blooming fungi and carnivorous orchids from an endless list of chores which trailed off behind him most of the way back to the tower, and by which he learned to find his way home.
Varka Zhom distilled the nocturnal blooms into a noisome concoction, which the apprentice supposed was the source of his master’s prolonged longevity, though the subtleties of the purification process were performed, naturally, well out of sight.
Returning home from his harvesting chores a little earlier each night, he would skulk up the spiral corridor to Varka Zhom’s inner sanctum to discover the means by which the master worked his most potent arts, yet he was ever disappointed to discover the sorcerer waiting for him outside the bolted door, a mordant scowl creasing his beetling brow.
By the end of the first fortnight of the apprenticeship, Varka Zhom had abandoned his awkward attempts to civilly draw out his new apprentice’s knowledge of the peculiar arts of Squarvash-Yun, and commanded Avasquiddoc to perform the Voorish Sign or be turned out. Thus commenced a new round of sorcerous sparring, which ended in yet another uneasy stalemate.
Brooding upon this insalubrious state of affairs one moonless night as he hunted down ingredients from the list, Avasquiddoc reflected on how best to extract from Varka Zhom the knowledge he so jealously guarded and move on, for Avasquiddoc was nothing if not ambitious. He had resolved to study under all the greatest sorcerers of Hyperborea, collecting the various schools of conjuration and necromancy, and of one day becoming the wisest, most powerful mortal in the world; then he’d see about working his way up among the ranks of the immortals.
Patiently had Avasquiddoc toiled in the house of Squarvash-Yun, gleaning only crumbs of his grim arts, which the Cerngothic master had himself pried from the antehuman tombs of the Voor, and learnt at the knee of brutish shamans of Thulask and Thuria. When the acolyte had, by his own reckoning, suffered enough, and delivered himself of his unrewarding bondage, the gods remained silent, which Avasquiddoc had taken for approval.
After Squarvash-Yun, Varka Zhom had been the most learned and fat of fame, and Avasquiddoc had appealed to him hard upon his old master’s passing, subtly proffering some illumination of the Voorish practices Varka Zhom had so long coveted in return for his apprenticeship.
Varka Zhom’s renown sprang from a single feat committed in his youth, well over a century past, which had earned him the eternal gratitude of the kings of Commoriom. While only a year older than Avasquiddoc, Varka Zhom had somehow contrived to destroy––nay, to utterly abolish––no less an enemy than the Citadel of the Ouroboros in the shadow of Mount Voormithadreth, that infamous sanctuary of the last and most skilled wizards of the serpentfolk race which ruled the earth in the ages before humans arose from the primal slime.
Exactly how this impressive feat was accomplished varied in the telling from one city to the next, but all agreed that with one spell, the Citadel and the pestilential ophidian warlocks within, and the whole valley in which they abode, were struck out of the grand design of creation, the volcanic peaks to either side of it closing together as if the dreadful place had never existed. Avasquiddoc, bent to the breaking point by his master’s recalcitrance, had come to suspect that only this last bit of the tale was not an outright lie.
Since that storied day when the Citadel vanished––if ever it was, he darkly mused––Varka Zhom had confined himself to less peril-fraught pursuits, practicing divination and necromancy for paying customers from as far as Tscho Volpanomi and barbaric Atlantis. Each night, he collected the demands of his clients and retired to his sanctum, emerging each morning with answers, inventions and new arts inscribed on sheets of mammoth-hide parchment with the ancient ink of a kraken, which he kept locked up in a trunk of adamantine, and retrieved only at the summons of copious djals.
Because Varka Zhom had never turned away a client without vouchsafing some cryptic yet precious morsel of knowledge––plucked, seemingly, from the lipless mouths of the dead, or from outer spheres beyond the Rim––Avasquiddoc dreamed fervently of acquiring not only Varka Zhom’s arcana, but of using it to divine all bodies of magic forgotten or yet uninvented by men, and so realize the end of that relentless geas which inscrutable fate had set upon him at his birth. Resolving this day to break the stalemate and seize that which he felt was merely destined for him, Avasquiddoc collected the ingredients for a potent, yet tasteless, soporific brew in his basket.
He returned to the tower not long after moonrise, and was gratified to discover the verdigris-crusted copper door to the master’s sanctum locked, and he nowhere in sight. Faint murmuring from within met his ear when he pressed against the door and spied with baited breath. He made out the master’s voice sleepily intoning an alien incantation, as if deep in the throes of a trance. It might have been his imagination, but Avasquiddoc believed he heard a susurrant, whispering response to his master’s voice.
Avasquiddoc hugged himself for delight at his good fortune and superior cunning. Hastily, he decanted the night-blooms into their respective urns, then brewed the soporific and decanted it into the crystal retort from which Varka Zhom would draft his morning tonic. Satisfied, he retired to his closet and an early breakfast.
Hardly had he crawled into his cramped quarters and commenced making his evening ablutions, when the low bronze closet door slammed shut behind him.
With a clangorous shooting of bolts, he was entombed by a cackling Varka Zhom. “Now, insolent whelp, you will teach me what you have learned from Squarvash-Yun, or die most painfully where you lie.”
“Are you so eager to have me for a master, dear Master?” Behind the shield of his prison door, Avasquiddoc freely vented his spleen. “I have victuals within, and potable water. We could be at this for a long time indeed, or have done with it in no time at all. Let me out, and I’ll teach thee a lesson, indeed.”
Varka Zhom barked a death rattle of acid contempt. “Would you be blasted from the tablets of the Unbegotten, rebellious bastard? Would you be consigned to the gray limbo, whereto I cast the Citadel of the Ouroboros, when your grandsires were yet unborn savages, inimical upstart?”
Avasquiddoc laced his reply with poisoned honey. “Master, such exertions would no doubt tire you. Perhaps first, you should have your morning tonic. Then I would be most eager to see you work one of your legendary higher arcana, even upon my most unworthy self.”
Varka Zhom gave no response, but he must have taken his apprentice’s advice to heart, for Avasquiddoc heard no sounds for several hours. He passed the time eating and meditating upon the lessons he’d learned from his departed Cerngothic master. Because of the uniqu
e manner in which he had learned all that Squarvash-Yun had to teach, his memories were as yet unsettled, like the sediment in a rashly decanted flask of palm-wine. A last remnant remained yet unabsorbed, that tempted him still with uncanny promise of power, but he dared not, for there were risks even foolhardy Avasquiddoc would not brave.
Presently, a better notion possessed him. Flashing the Voorish Sign as a prelude to still more abominably potent gestures, he conjured up a mephitic entity from Outside––a nameless starveling from an empty dimension, all mouth and yawning cavities yearning to fill itself and make a body out of any matter it found in this sphere. Avasquiddoc made a minute blood offering from the back of his hand and smeared it across the bronze door, then performed the incantation he’d learned from Squarvash-Yun, and shut his eyes tightly against what was coming.
Presently, he felt a brisk, icy wind as a tiny door into nothingness opened and disgorged an angry emptiness that emitted a keening whine of absolute hunger. Drawn to the blood offering, it devoured the door and part of the surrounding wall before Avasquiddoc could stammer out the incantation of banishment.
Only when the wailing devourer was gone and the last echo of its extradimensional caterwauling had died away, did he open his eyes. The door lay in savaged shreds on the floor, more thoroughly destroyed than by any acid, and insanely looping cavities had been gnawed out of the walls by the devourer before it vanished. Avasquiddoc shuddered at the awesome implications of turning such a force loose upon his master, whom he discovered asleep in a chair in his library, halfway up the tower. A goblet lay spilled on the floor beside his dangling hand.