Then, as he began to lift the heavy cover—
Runes graven in the onyx pedestal caught his eye, and he let the cover fall back upon pages unseen. The glyphs were rare, obscure as the ages, and writ in a cypher to bedazzle the mind of any but a master cryptographer born. Such was Exior K’mool.
Brows drawn together in concentration, lips moving silently as they traced strange words, by the light of his fitful torch he read the runes. Then, lighting yet another torch the better to see, he read them again—and snatched back his hand from where it rested upon the sorcerer’s book. For the message was very clear: that without a certain protection, the essence of any man brash or foolish enough to read the book would be torn from him, leaving him empty and foolish and bereft of mind, will and soul!
The protection, however, was comparatively simple: it was a moon-rune, rare but well enough known to Exior, designed to propitiate the protective power of Mnomquah, God of the Moon and of Madness, known commonly as Gleeth. And now the youth knew that indeed the book’s secrets were marvellous and monstrous, for Gleeth is a god who from his celestial seat sees and therefore knows all; and his moon-runes are correspondingly powerful.
Without hesitation Exior said the rune out loud, and when the echoes of his voice had died away he opened the forbidden volume to the first page. There, in rubric pigments which yet glowed despite the inexorable trickle of time’s sands, the warning was repeated: that Gleeth’s protection be sought before reading. Since he had already availed himself of the necessary precaution, Exior turned the next page, which bore no signature but commenced straightway with words of baleful might, and with bated breath he began to read . . .
FOR LONG AND long Exior read the book, and when his torches were finished he carried it up to the light; and for two days he read on and for two nights he sat and considered and did not sleep. He gave the patient yak his last crust, the last of his water, and on the morning of the third day closed the book and locked it. Then he stood up beside the ruined tower and looked all about at the drear desert and the sand-sundered city.
His eyes were pale now and chill, with shadows beneath, which were dark above the parchment of his cheeks. And his hair, no longer jet but grey; and his entire mien that of an old man heavy-burdened with wisdom and knowledge and sin, while yet his back was straight and his limbs young.
For an hour he stood thus, then turned to his yak. Alas, the poor beast lay dead and a vulture picked at its eye, which was torn by the bird’s beak. Angered, Exior said a word—a single word—and the vulture gave a startled cry and sprang aloft, falling lifeless in the next instant. And the yak shook its head, got to its feet and gazed upon its master. It gazed with one dim old yak’s eye, and one which was sharp and bright and that of a vulture.
Then Exior tied the book to his saddle and mounted himself upon his beast’s back, and so he left the Desert of Ell and made for home . . .
III
Three months and three weeks later, a stranger in a cowled cloak and riding upon a blinkered yak arrived at the gates of Humquass beneath its beetling walls. Without any of the usual formalities (for which gross inefficiency he must later make blustered and only half-believed excuses) the Commander of the Guard raised the gate and let the stranger in; and Exior—for such it was, as well you know—went straight to the palace of Mylakhrion.
There the gate in the wall opened at his approach and he passed through without hindrance, tethering his beast in the wizard’s courtyard. And where beyond the city’s walls all was early spring and the trees budding and flowers burgeoning into bloom, here a midsummer sun blazed down and the heat was stifling where lizards lazed atop white walled gardens of gardenias.
Exior paused not before this wonder nor even considered it, but entered the main tower where waited Mylakhrion’s familiars. They gazed upon them, and he upon them; and then they bowed down low before him and let him pass. And so he mounted the stone-hewn stairs to seek out Mylakhrion in his lofty lair.
On this occasion, however, he had no need of ascending to so great a height, for Mylakhrion pottered in his room of repose. There Exior found him, and there the mage gave him greeting of a sort.
“Ho, Exior K’mool! So, you are returned to me at last, and just as I began to suspect that some ill had befallen you. And do you bring me the fruits of your quest?”
Exior said nothing but merely stared at the master mage, observing him curiously and with mixed emotions through his changed eyes. He threw back his cowl to show locks grey as Arctic oceans above a face almost pale as that of Mylakhrion himself. Then he approached a table and brushed its surface free from clutter, placing his linen-wrapped parcel centrally and untying its fastenings. And laying back the coverings he displayed the Great Book, and as Mylakhrion drew nigh he gave him the key.
Now the sorcerer’s silver eyebrows rose a little; and without questioning Exior’s silence or his strangely altered appearance, he took the key, opened the book and turned back its jewel-crusted cover. Then—
Mylakhrion frowned and his briefly risen eyebrows fell down low again over suddenly narrowed eyes. He turned his gaze to Exior and gloomed upon him, saying: “Youth, the first page is torn out! Do you see the broken edge, the riven vellum?”
And now, in a voice fully frosty as that of his master, Exior answered, “Aye, I have noted it.”
“Hmph!” The enchanter seemed disgruntled and a little disappointed, but in another moment his curiosity returned. “So be it,” he said, “for what is one leaf on the tree of all dark knowledge?”
Now during his journey home Exior had made a diabolic decision. As can be seen, he had determined to be done with Mylakhrion and so had torn out from the book the opening admonition. He reasoned thus: that having read the book he now had power to become mighty above all men, even above Mylakhrion himself. There would be no room for two such sorcerers in Humquass, wherefore the greybeard must go. And what better instrument of an abrupt assassination than this fearful, ruin-recovered volume of morbid magicks?
Unsuspecting and unprotected, Mylakhrion would read, and the book would bind him in its spell, crush him, destroy him utterly. For if the power of the thing were such as to seize upon Exior’s spirit, sap the colour from his hair and flesh and sear his very soul—and him protected!—how then would the venerable Mylakhrion fare, all frail with age and weighted down with the burden of his unguessed years?
Well, he had lived long enough, and his release would be a kindness of a sort. And anyway, the awakened Exior would make a poor apprentice, who possessed power at least the equal of his supposed master. So let Mylakhrion read and bid him farewell, and then announce to the city the presence of a new and still more powerful mage in the palace of the sorcerer.
Thus had Exior plotted and now he stood upon the threshold of his destiny; and the book was open and Mylakhrion sat before it at the table; and as that self-confessed necromancer began to read out loud, so Exior shuddered as were he dead and felt the furtive tread of ghouls on the soft earth above. An icy fist seemed closed around his heart and a question burned in his brain. How then was he brought to this? A murderer most foul, Exior K’mool, who once was a dreamer and mixed love potions for pennies? Even as Mylakhrion’s voice made its sepulchral booming and rolled the work’s rare words, so Exior gave a little cry and started forward; at which the sorcerer looked up.
“Is aught amiss, Exior?” There seemed a certain slyness in his question. “Do you fear to hear these marvels and monstrosities? Shall I read them to myself then, in silence?”
Exior shook his head. Was he afraid? Nay, for he had said again Gleeth’s moon-rune and feared not. Not for himself. “Read on, master,” he answered; but there was a catch in his voice which he had believed extinct.
Mylakhrion nodded. “So be it,” he said, his voice fallen to the merest whisper. For a little while, in silence, the two gazed into each other’s eyes; and those of the elder were narrowed now and very bright. Finally they fell once more to the written page.
“Stop!” he cried as the page began to turn. “Look no more, Mylakhrion! If you would save your sight, your mind, your very soul, be still! . . . For I have deceived you—”
Slowly Mylakhrion looked up and smiled. Even Mylakhrion, he smiled! And it was a real smile, banishing much of his customary coldness as the morning sun lifts rime from spring flowers. Exior saw that smile but did not understand; and Mylakhrion asked, “Do you fear for me, Exior K’mool, or for yourself? For your conscience, perhaps?”
“For both of us, if you will,” answered the other harshly. “Whichever way you would have it—only read no more. There is a protection, lacking which the book’s blasphemies will blast you! The warning was writ on the first page, which I tore out . . .”
“Oh?” Mylakhrion’s smile diminished somewhat. Deliberately he turned the page, and when Exior made to snatch the book from him he held up a hand of caution. “Peace, young man. Watch—and learn!” And without further pause he read the page to its end.
During the reading Exior saw shadows gather in the room as with the approach of night. There commenced a strange tremor and a muted thunder which had their sources in the air of the room itself. Crystals splintered and phials flew into fragments; finely wrought mirrors shivered into shards and liquids boiled up and overflowed their crucibles; aye, and cracks appeared in the very walls while dust and debris rained down from the ceiling, ere Mylakhrion was done. Then he closed the book and looked up, and still he smiled. Nor was his mien changed at all, and the reading had done him no ill whatever.
“I . . . I—”
“Be silent and listen,” Mylakhrion commanded. “You have done well, Exior K’mool, as I suspected you would. And you will make a fitting mage for Morgath, given time. As for me: now I up and get me gone to Tharamoon. And on that bleak and northern isle I shall build me a tower, as is my wont, and there seek that immortality which ever confounds me. This palace here in Humquass: it is yours. You have earned it, every last stone.”
“I have earned it?” Exior was amazed. “But I am a traitor, and—”
“You were almost a traitor,” Mylakhrion answered, “and that is the difference. You could not know that I am ever protected against dark forces, and that the book would not harm me. Therefore, when you would have stopped me from reading, you showed mercy. I like that quality in a man, Exior K’mool! And you have many qualities. Some humility, a deal of honesty, a little daring—and now, too, wisdom and mercy! All to the good, young man, for without them you could never succeed.
“Moreover, your talents are of the sort Morgath needs above all others. Myself, I was never much of a one for such minor magicks and studied them not extensively. But you? You are a seer and read runes and portents. You reckon well the auspices and faithfully foretell the future. Aye, and the King will be well pleased with you.”
Mylakhrion stood up and took hold of Exior’s shoulders. “Tomorrow you meet him, Morgath the King, and the day after that I leave for Tharamoon. How do you say to that?”
“But—” Exior began. And again: “How . . . why—?”
“Enough!” Mylakhrion lifted his hand. “It is finished.”
“But all of this,” and Exior gazed all about, “mine? I cannot believe it! Will you take nothing with you?”
Mylakhrion shook his head. “All is yours—except I shall take my wand with me, and my familiars three. And the book . . .”
“The book, of course!” Exior nodded. “And with it make yourself mighty above all men. Yes, naturally.”
“No,” Mylakhrion smiled again, “for I am that already. I will tell you why I take these things. My wand because it suits my hand, and my familiars because I am grown used to them. Their faces remind me of my youth, when I defeated them in a wizardly war. As for what I leave behind: these things were never really mine. They were gifted to me, or I purchased them, or won them by use of my magick. They are as nothing. But the book—that is mine.” His eyes gazed searchingly into the other’s face.
And now Exior gasped and his own changeling eyes went wide.
“Ah! I see the truth dawns on you at last,” said Mylakhrion. “Your face grows gaunt with a great wonder and your jaw falls open. Rightly so—” and he nodded. “You are of course correct, Exior K’mool, and now you know all. The rune book is an old friend of mine and I would never leave without it. Not unless my leaving was enforced, as happened to me once long ago in the Desert of Ell . . .
“No, the book goes with me. For who can say when I shall have the time to write another?”
The House of Cthulhu
Where weirdly angled ramparts loom,
Gaunt sentinels whose shadows gloom
Upon an undead hell-beast’s tomb—
And gods and mortals fear to tread.
Where gateways to forbidden spheres
And times are closed, but monstrous fears
Await the passing of strange years—
When that will wake which is not dead . . .
“ARLYEH”—A FRAGMENT FROM TEH ATHT’S LEGENDS OF THE OLDEN RUNES. AS TRANSLATED BY THELRED GUSTAU FROM THE THEEM’HDRA MANUSCRIPTS.
Now IT HAPPENED aforetime that Zar-thule the Conqueror, who is called Reaver of Reavers, Seeker of Treasures and Sacker of Cities, swam out of the East with his dragonships; aye, even beneath the snapping sails of his dragonships. The wind was but lately turned favorable, and now the weary rowers nodded over their shipped oars while sleepy steersmen held the course. And there Zar-thule descried him in the sea the island Arlyeh, whereon loomed tall towers builded of black stone whose tortuous twinings were of angles unknown and utterly beyond the ken of men; and this island was redly lit by the sun sinking down over its awesome black crags and burning behind the aeries and spires carved therefrom by other than human hands.
And though Zar-thule felt a great hunger and stood sore weary of the wide sea’s expanse behind the lolling dragon’s tail of his ship Redfire, and even though he gazed with red and rapacious eyes upon the black island, still he held off his reavers, bidding them that they ride at anchor well out to sea until the sun was deeply down and gone unto the Realm of Cthon; even unto Cthon, who sits in silence to snare the sun in his net beyond the edge of the world. Indeed, such were Zar-thule’s raiders as their deeds were best done by night, for then Gleeth the blind Moon God saw them not, nor heard in his celestial deafness the horrible cries which ever attended unto such deeds.
For notwithstanding his cruelty, which was beyond words, Zar-thule was no fool. He knew him that his wolves must rest before a whelming, that if the treasures of the House of Cthulhu were truly such as he imagined them—then that they must likewise be well guarded by fighting men who would not give them up easily. And his reavers were fatigued even as Zar-thule himself, so that he rested them all down behind the painted bucklers lining the decks, and furled him up the great dragon-dyed sails. And he set a watch that in the middle of the night he might be roused, when, rousing in turn the men of his twenty ships, he would sail in unto and sack the island of Arlyeh.
Far had Zar-thule’s reavers rowed before the fair winds found them, far from the rape of the Yaht Haal, the Silver City at the edge of the frostlands. Their provisions were all but eaten, their swords all ocean rot in rusting sheaths; but now they ate all of their remaining regimen and drank of the liquors thereof, and they cleansed and sharpened their dire blades before taking themselves into the arms of Shoosh, Goddess of the Still Slumbers. They well knew them, one and all, that soon they would be at the sack, each for himself and loot to that sword’s wielder whose blade drank long and deep.
And Zar-thule had promised them great treasures from the House of
Cthulhu; for back there in the sacked and seared city at the edge of the frostlands, he had heard from the bubbling, anguished lips of Voth Vehm the name of the so-called “forbidden” isle of Arlyeh. Voth Vehm, in the throes of terrible tortures, had called out the name of his brother-priest, Hath Vehm, who guarded the House of Cthulhu in Arlyeh. And even in the hour of his dying Voth Vehm had answered to Zar-thule’s additional tortures, crying out that Arlyeh was indeed forbidden and held in thrall by the sleeping but yet dark and terrible god Cthulhu, the gate to whose House his brother-priest guarded.
Then had Zar-thule reasoned that Arlyeh must contain riches indeed, for he knew it was not meet that brother-priests betray one another; and aye, surely had Voth Vehm spoken exceedingly fearfully of this dark and terrible god Cthulhu only that he might thus divert Zar-thule’s avarice from the ocean sanctuary of his brother-priest, Hath Vehm. Thus reckoned Zar-thule, even brooding on the dead and disfigured hierophant’s words, until he bethought him to leave the sacked city. Then, with the flames leaping brightly and reflected in his red wake, Zar-thule put to sea in his dragonships. All loaded down with silver booty he put to sea, in search of Arlyeh and the treasures of the House of Cthulhu. And thus came he to this place.
SHORTLY BEFORE THE midnight hour the watch roused Zar-thule up from the arms of Shoosh, aye, and all the freshened men of the dragonships; and then beneath Gleeth the blind Moon God’s pitted silver face, seeing that the wind had fallen, they muffled their oars and dipped them deep and so closed in with the shoreline. A dozen fathoms from beaching, out rang Zar-thule’s plunder cry, and his drummers took up a stern and steady beat by which the trained but yet rampageous reavers might advance to the sack.
The House of Cthulhu: Tales of the Primal Land Vol. 1 Page 7