by John Shirley
His maiden bride awaited, locked in artificial slumber. He gazed upon her beauty and saw that he had created perfection. A suitable mother in some distant age, but for now an irresistible and alluring mate. She had been prepared for him by her handmaids, themselves now locked away in secure adjacent galleries to which the demonic cold had been cleverly diverted. The warrior breed had also been frozen into their holding cells; with the chiefest of them, and her most perfect protector, cast into stasis in this same chamber, nearest to wake should she require protection.
All was utterly, completely still. The demon’s howl was inaudible.
Sarn Kathool, despite the elderly gasping that his hurried plunge had elicited, felt a youthful quickening in his blood. And as he beheld his maiden matron, primed to receive him, the quickening came to a point.
Erect, flush with his life’s masterwork and the pride of his achievement, he advanced on his maiden receptacle, the vessel who would carry him into whatever future awaited, and entered her like an old man easing himself gingerly into a rocking boat.
That was not quite the last sensation he felt, nor quite his last awareness of existence. For although his spine broke instantly, there was enough life left in his eyes to see the grinning face of the warrior protector as his fierce creation twisted the wise old head entirely backwards on its neck; and with another half-turn, continuing the revolution, he was able to gaze into the wide-awake eyes of his no less ferocious maiden-but-not-mother, who was pleased beyond measure by what she saw in his expression. And even as their laughter rose in his ears, and as the obscene noises of their twinned passions commenced, to intimate exactly what form of race he had visited upon the future as the mother and father of mankind’s newest iteration, there came a storm of deafening white sound flooding his awareness, boastfully and wordlessly, mindlessly gloating— informing him how in all ways he had failed: the insane, incomprehensible, and purely witless tittering of the ice.
The Debt Owed
Abhoth
By Robert M. Price
Among the hoary pterosaurian leaves of the addenda to the fabled Codices of High Uzuldaroum one finds a legend, deemed apocryphal and spurious by those few scribes who even know of it, but which is, nonetheless, of some interest. It may indeed contradict most other accounts of sacred saga, but perhaps it is the more famous and fully attested narratives which are in error. There is no way to know for certain, at least as the question presently stands, and it is likely to remain in doubt till someone chances to unearth (or fabricate) a seminal manuscript either confirming or condemning the episode.
For the tale concerns an invasion long forgotten, and a hero who came from Outside in that hour when all seemed lost, and how he stemmed the tide of what seemed irrevocable doom.
Even in the early days of the first frost, how ancient was the internecine enmity between the squat and hirsute Voormi savages––scarce evolved beyond the pitiful state of ape-men, for all their cruel cunning––and our own forbears, who proudly walked upright with clean, straight limbs and partook of the written word, and yet had little sense of their own self-preservation. None recalled the origin of that feud, whether it was the lustful coveting of our females by their drooling, tusked troglodytes, or a petty dispute over territory, or some dim, ill-remembered insult. But the old argument had come to an unsustainable boil with the fall of the northern reaches to the breath of the White Worm. And the kings and barons of the surviving Hyperborean realms had reason to shiver with fear, for the very civilization of which they were so proud proved a mortal hindrance in the impending crisis. Cultured men are ever soft and porous, susceptible to corruption and ambition. The congregated worthies found it a near-insurmountable labor to set aside their petty interests and claims to primacy and privilege over each other, and thus they could never easily forge a bond of cooperation.
Their semi-human foes, by contrast, had precious little to lose by combining their forces. When Zurazgha, the chief shaman of the Voormi clans, issued a summons to amass and go forth from the stygian precincts which tradition had assigned them, and to sweep down upon the pastoral provinces of the Hyperboreans, there was no room for argument. Simple instinct provided clear purpose, even if none of the skulking, noisome devils was capable of articulating what it might be.
It had taken an unseemly amount of time even to negotiate a war council in which all the Hyperborean potentates would agree to participate, for there was much haggling among sub-ministers over the proposed site of such a meeting, which prince or baron should be accorded the honor of hosting it, what shape the table should be; and who should have the honor of building it; what variety of wood of which it ought to be built; and who should supply it. And all the while, the slavering Voormis marched steadily and tirelessly into the defenseless heart of Uzuldaroum, impeded only by the despoliation of such small villages as they found along their way, looting and pillaging them and making kindling of such scientific and spiritual treasures, goods and artworks as they could not use to wipe their matted, monstrous hindquarters.
As scarcely sensationalized reports filtered in of the mayhem and chaos rampant across the land, the assembled princes of Hyperborea shivered, though they had long been acclimated to the creeping frostiness of their continent. Several of the individual nobles had fielded batches of defenders, but they had at once been swept away by the advancing hordes. The lords of the beaten kingdoms of men came together by rally at the same spot, a crumbling keep on the desolate plains adjoining the eastern face of the Eiglophian Mountains.
As the days passed, with the princes and barons exchanging half-hearted and useless stratagems, the castle and the serfs’ hovels within the collapsing outer wall rapidly filled up with refugees who had blindly followed their fleeing rulers. It was a small and sorry assemblage. And no one had reason to believe there were any other such enclaves in all of Mhu Thulan, so great was the animal fury of the half-men headed their way.
~*~
All the men, women and children left of the great cities of Hyperborea huddled close and shuddered around their meager fires. And as time ticked away and provisions dwindled and the priests composed new rituals of expiation to new gods whose names they invented with dice, a strange rider appeared within their desperate defenses. He was mounted on a griffin, its chimerical anatomy replete with wings, though none could attest to having witnessed it in flight. Ignoring the curious throngs whose bleary eyes followed him, the stranger rode confidently through the camp and into the castle. He dismounted, leaving his beast in the care of a threadbare squire who gaped, agog and overmatched by the remarkable creature. For his part, the squire knew not which was the greater wonder, the griffin or its stately rider.
The grand rulers of Mhu Thulan stopped their bickering at the sound of his footsteps, looking at him as with a single eye. At first they supposed him a fellow royal, arrived too late to the ill-starred war party. Nor were they altogether wrong. A tall, slender man with finer features than the relatively gnomish, beetle-browed folk of Hyperborea, swathed in an ebon cloak against the eternal cold. Beneath it could be glimpsed black links of chain mail. His polished helm at first appeared to be the skull of a small styracosaur, cleverly forged of some glossy black alloy into a regal diadem of lethal horns. Once he removed his headgear, his true visage looked scarcely less outlandish, for the unmarked skin of his hollow cheeks, aquiline nose and high forehead all but glowed in the dim-lit room with a silvery, bloodless pallor. Was this, too, a mask? Heedless yet of the awe and desperate hope he’d already ignited in them, he brushed back his snow-white tresses and began to speak to those awaiting his word.
“My true name must never be spoken in your tongue, though I am possibly known to some of you as an agent of Disorder, and to others as a champion of Law.” And he withdrew from its jeweled scabbard a great long sword fashioned of black volcanic glass. “Some of you may know of me as a sorcerer. And it is true: I am both. I count myself no man’s slave. Certainly not yours. And yet I am here to serve.”
One of the faded princelings––unnamed in any version of the tale––spoke up. “Do you mean to say you have come to our aid, to the aid of Mhu Thulan? What gods do you serve, O stranger?”
“For many years did I serve the Old Ones until the day I realized there was no profit in self-destruction, for they offered no better reward than eternal chaos. From that day I have reversed myself and now serve the Elder Gods, though hardly as an acolyte. Sometimes they serve me. They did not send me here to you, but it may be that I must needs send for them.”
These words puzzled the company, nor was their bafflement at an end. The least cowed of the aristocracy asked, “Does an army follow you, O Prince?”
“Not such as you, or the Voormis, imagine. Yet I am not alone.” At this he raised the black sword before his eyes as if no more answer, nor any more of an army, was needed.
The oldest and most wise of the priesthood of Yhoundeh forced a break in the crowd and hobbled up to the stranger. “What will you require in return for the sorcery you mean to work on our behalf?” Suspicion dripped from his raw-throated words, for the priests were not yet convinced they were not interrogating a menace as great as the savage Voormis themselves. His talk was oblique, enigmatic, and it might be a trap.
“You need not fear me, mortal cousins. I seek no reward beyond the survival in this world of humankind capable of recording the stories in which the other gods sleep and dream. Your presence is, I confess, an affront to me, so imagine a world in which my only company is such a herd as those amassed outside. It is no pleasant prospect. The future will need races possessed of your peculiar talents, cowardly buffoons as you are.”
Still unsure if the haughty stranger was friend or foe, the collected aristocracy of Hyperborea watched silently as he took his leave––without, the priests jeeringly observed, partaking of any of the sacrifices left out for any hedge-deities as might stoop to play the savior. What would he do for them and for their world? What could anyone do? For even in these late, decadent days, there were wizards with considerable powers, but they had achieved nothing, no doubt because the prevailing fashion in enchantment depended upon beguiling the minds of those on whom one cast one’s spells, and the Voormis had among them so little in the way of mind that they were not easily enchanted.
~*~
Though most were too busy foraging for whatever greasy scraps they could find, any who cared to look overhead might have beheld the sight of the strange, ivory-skinned rider ascending into the clouds on his griffin. He was headed west to the Eiglophian Mountains, and the great, secret-riddled summit of Voormithadreth.
The sword-bearing sorcerer clearly knew what lay buried within the darkness of the inner caverns, and he knew the secret paths of access. A kind of infernal Olympus, the peak crested above a hive of ancient, largely dormant entities. The sages of later eras would surmise a subterrene realm containing the ghostly archetypes of all material objects, living and unliving. But they would dream of what they did not see. Or rather, their inner eyes saw them, but their inner eyes deceived them. The white-locked warlock out of primordial myth had seen with his fleshly eyes the living creatures that served as both specimens and progenitors of all terrene lifeforms.
As he passed unseen through many noisome catacombs and their dreadful yet intangible inhabitants, the ghostly likenesses of monsters that would remain stubbornly lodged in the ancestral night terrors of mankind, he heard peculiar sounds like the snoring of Things with respiratory apparatus utterly unlike our own, perhaps designed to circulate something other than air. No sunlight or moonlight ever penetrated here. There were no torches, since only visitors from without would require them and such visitors were never welcome. He strode with certainty, though carefully, guided by the peculiar purplish radiance of his unsheathed, rune-encrusted sword, until he arrived somewhere beneath the foot of the terrible mountain, at the echoing cavern of the one that is called Abhoth the Unclean.
A world unto itself, Abhoth (whose name means “father” in the Shemitish tongue) stretched out as far as any mortal eye might see in the pitch-black void. It had the appearance of a bubbling lake of abhorrent slime. Men call Great Abhoth the “Unclean,” for the Old One’s essence was the primal substance of all life as yet unformed, though its infinite fertility had been stilled with the fall of the stars into disharmony.
Of old, the stranger knew from the sorcerous lore of his eldritch race that Abhoth was the last living remnant of Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source from which the First Forms of all living creatures emerged in the dawn of the cooling earth. For all its abominable fecundity, Abhoth moved the stranger to pity. It was a diminished orphan of Ubbo-Sathla, even as the stranger was the last survivor of a race lost to history and that might only ever have existed, in this realm, as figments of legend.
But it was this legendary sorcery that he meant to conjure against the rampaging Voormis: he would awaken Abhoth and restore it to its ancient glory, cause it to expand once more so to regain all that it had lost, to reabsorb all the grand-spawn of the Unbegotten Source, and so become Ubbo-Sathla again. For it was written that, at the end of days, all would return to the primal Oneness from whence it came, and those days had arrived. The stranger’s role was merely to supply the catalyst, and with his dire sword plunged into the shore of Abhoth, did he finally do so.
The terrible, unholy words he spoke have been lost, as has the alien text from which the silver-countenanced mage read them, though some sages hold that he intoned the now-forgotten upposatha ritual. In any case, who would be foolhardy enough to record his words of power here? In any case, the incantation did not take long. Soon, the stranger was retracing his footsteps by the light of his keening, hungry sword. He could hear the snaking, liquid tendrils of the bubbling pit following him toward the surface, as well as by other routes and cracks and fissures too narrow for him to have taken. He did not fear the universal absorption that should overtake all who dwelt upon earth, for, not being native to this world himself, he owed no debt to Abhoth, to Ubbo-Sathla. He merely hoped to avoid befouling his garments from contact with the viscid stuff.
~*~
The tactics of the stranger transcended the understanding of those whose cause he championed, for they found themselves utterly nonplussed when the black-clad stranger shortly returned to their enclave, not with any glad tidings of victory or of rescue, but with his crackling sword unsheathed and a command to prepare to march into battle. Every face registered shock and betrayal, if it registered anything at all. If all that their savior meant to do was deliver him to the tender mercies of the beasts at their door, then they were better off with no savior at all. None of those on whose behalf he fought survived to witness his victory in their name. Swiftly and silently, he fed them all to his terrible, insatiable sword.
As soon as the stranger took his leave of the last, unmanned outpost of Uzuldaroum’s survivors, he took to the blood-hued skies once more and made for the vanguard of the Voormis horde.
He landed and dismounted in full view of the surging tide of flyblown beast-men, who halted to gawp in puzzled wonder at the spectacle before them. Many fanged muzzles foamed with drool at the prospect of devouring the griffin, though none possessed the courage to attack the mighty steed for fear of its rider.
At some length, a lone figure, slighter of build and taller of forehead than his fellows, perhaps a modicum less hairy, elbowed his way through the packed and snarling crowd. This almost-human, accoutered in colorful rags, caparisoned with strings of finger bones, his muzzle crudely ochred, was Zurazgha, the shaman who had urged his brutish flock to undertake their mindless crusade. When the colorful witch doctor approached with empty paws upraised, the white-haired sorcerer delivered his tidings.
“Hail, high priest of the Voormi clans! I bring you news of your enemies and of your victory! Just now I have saved you the trouble of bearding the aristocrats of Uzuldaroum in their lair, and likewise their servants and their heirs. You may see the aftermath with you
r own eyes. For all I care, you may fill your bellies with their remains, while they are fresh. But I must forewarn you: you have first a debt to repay. The debt is yours, not mine, but I will see you again there once you have fulfilled your glorious destiny.”
Though the grunting shaman, filmy eyes open wide, offered no articulate reply, the stranger felt sure he had understood the rudiments of the message. Withal did he vault once more into the saddle on his griffin and take to the air currents again.
~*~
Atop the summit of Voormithadreth, he waited, lost in meditation. Eventually the chaotic horde came in sight, converging with their shambling gait upon the plain below.
Below him the stranger espied the brightly painted figure of the shaman Zurazgha, standing upon the burly, hunched shoulders of his acolytes. The apish conjurer seemed to be awaiting a new command from his erstwhile ally. And the stranger did speak, though not to him. Instead, he incanted the tongue-punishing syllables of the notorious First Sathlatta, and when he was finished and had plunged his soul-glutted sword into the rocky soil, the earth rumbled in reply.
The first sign that the Voormis suspected something amiss was the universal wrinkling of flat noses and almost canine howls of disgust. To offend such palates as the ghastly proto-humans possessed, it must have been unearthly, indeed. They turned to retreat into the caverns beneath the mountains from what they knew must be some terrible abomination of fell human sorcery, when, from out of the bowls of numerous craters surrounding Mount Voormithadreth, there began to flow a queer and disgusting ooze. From narrow cataracts in the earth, hissing jets of the foul stuff shot out, while from other pits with wide-open mouths the noisome stuff surged with leisurely dignity like lava flowing from a volcano. Little understanding what they saw, the Voormis nonetheless sensed terrible danger and searched frantically for any path of egress. But they found none, for the oozing mouths surrounded them.