THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (15 page)

And this is why I named Gauhar as caravan master, despite the conclave’s strength.

By Gauhar it was commanded:  we would dig and shelter and bear the storm.

The three exasperated merchants who had been overruled were beside themselves; one shouted that we were near to the great battlefield, where the God-warrior Ibn Hatim the Undefiled had fallen in battle with the Sindhi some hundred moons ago.  The land to our immediate north was said to be filled with corpses, unconsecrated and therefore the forsaken vessels of a thousand restless spirits.

How could we dare, even in the face of death, encamp near such a place?

The cry of the Jinn, the sibilance of Al Azif, began to rise as the great storm came near and turned all of the southward sky to scarlet and to darkness.

I believed I had suffered a sandstorm when I had saved the Caravan of the White Stallion near Yathrib; that was nothing.  The maelstrom which tore over us near to the Sindhi graveyard was a daemon of wind and claw.

Led by Gauhar we sheltered in a perfect place, where a low cliff wall gave bulwark to the south.  There we tethered the camels and covered them in tarps, while the tents were strutted low and men with staff and spade waited at either end of the encampment to dig and keep the sanctuary from being devoured by the sand.

But the Jinn-cry became a chorus of moans, deep and low roars of fury more felt than heard.  Needles of sand tore at flesh and left traces of blood where they pelted hand and face.  The digging was furious, the animals began to panic and to rise.  In chasing them into the vicious storm, one of the most daring men lost an eye.

The storm was so great that despite all our preparations, waves of sand began to trickle and then cascade over the cliff, collapsing our tarps and tents and sending all the camels into flight.

Virtually all were lost.

The terrified merchants shouted in one another’s ears.  I could hear nothing but the roar of wind and the screams of the digging men; but Gauhar, in a wild argument, at last threw up his hands and was defeated by the six.

By their command, the conclave united against the master.  The Seeking Vulture was to move, fleeing from the storm while trapped inside it.

~

That night was a horror I shall ever remember.  The tents were pulled, what few we could tear away from the tumbling sand-waves.  Wrapped in these, we ran and even crawled to the north, all dreams of treasure made as nothing as we prayed for our survival.  The night was spent dragging our shelters behind us, crying out as we lost sight of others three paces away, fleeing from the death-cries of the pleading lost men and women as the sands tore them apart.  Somehow, through it all, Fatimah stayed beside me.

There was no sleep; half of the men had been lost or died.  Of the women, only Fatimah was still with us.  One of the merchants had perished, drowned in sand.

For four days we searched for survivors and found none.  Some few of the camels we did find, and some of the sacks of relics and tablets were still strapped upon the carcasses.  But all else was lost.  With scarcely enough water to reach the next eastward oasis, the caravan’s remnant headed east on foot in the midst of night, silent beneath the orange carving of the moon.

~

For Fatimah, such times are meant for abandonment.  She needs only a guide.  It is the way of ashes.  It is
her
way.

The night we were to depart, Fatimah came to me.  Her face was wrapped in cloth for travel, and she carried an improvised sackcloth face-mask for me as well.  I asked her when we would be leaving; she replied, “The caravan will leave when they waken within the hour, but I have paid the sentry to be silent of our fate.”

Our fate?

“For the Seeking Vulture, this is the night of flight.  But for you and I, Al-Azrad,” said Fatimah, “this night is one of destiny.  We go forth into the graveyard of the Sindhi.  Let us go unto the Rest of Ibn Hatim, and there partake of the water-gifts of the mighty Naram-gal.”

SCROLL XXV

Of My Initiation

As the Chosen of Aharon and Fatimah

Into the Cabal of the Ghul

It was time.

I did understand the grim implication in what Fatimah was not telling me.  This would be the one and only time in my life when I might speak with the Watcher of the Oasis of Zarzara, the great Ghul Naram-gal.  From all that I had learned from Fatimah in our scavengings of the desert, I believed with all my heart that he alone—lord of the Deathless Ones, keeper of the secrets of fallen kingdoms—could share with me the arts of necromancy which would bring my beloved Adaya as a miracle resurrected, back into my arms.

And still, there in my shredded tent with the masked and blind Fatimah standing over me, her sightless eyes glittering like silver crescents with the moon’s reflections, I sat in a torment of dismay.

There were so many questions.  My doubts flowed over themselves in tides, flowing into one another as I struggled to voice them all.  I whispered, fearful of waking the exhausted laborers sleeping near to me.  How could Fatimah know that the Ghul Naram-gal awaited us?  And yet she was certain, I could see this.  What did this mean?  Had she herself been enthralled to such a one?  Had she feasted on the dead?

And so much more.  Was it prophesied, or planned, that I would meet with Naram-gal within the wasteland, consorted by Fatimah and no one else?  And far more ominous was this:  how could such a mighty storm have risen from the desert on a day of few winds and lapis skies?  Did the Ghuls possess the power to raise such storms?  For Fatimah had spoken of how the Ghuls hunt in raging sandstorms, and how they seem to frequent the few places where the most vicious tempests rise.  Did this mean that Naram-gal could control them?  Worse, had the storm which had destroyed the Seeking Vulture’s fortunes and slain so many innocents been raised solely to separate me, to bring me to my fate before the Deathless One?

These riddles and more I posed to Fatimah, in whispers furious and then gentle.  She gave me the ghosts of answers, but they were elusive as serpent tracks upon the dunes.  At last she said only:

“Child Abd, the Cabal of the Ghul is not answerable to you.  Your pride will be your ruin.  You beg for miracles, and lo, all may be given unto you.  But do you understand the terrible powers you are toying with?  You are blessed to be so chosen.  How much do you believe that you must sacrifice, how much are you willing to surrender to bend the will of nature for your love?  You believe you sacrifice now?  You know nothing.  And your beloved:  would you kill for her?  Would you die for her, and rise again?  Would you live forever at her side?  Do not answer me, for I fear you have yet to fathom such answers even in your heart.  Ask of me no more, or I will leave you behind.  Answer this only, for I risk my life to bring this gift of great moment unto you:  do you trust in me?”

I sighed.  With humility, I did say that of all the peoples in this world, I did trust her most of all.  And I said on:  “Fatimah, for the gifts of wisdom, for all the kindness you have done me, I will follow you to the end of any wasteland.  You are a mother to me, the only one whose name I have ever known.”

And she did hold out her hands, and I rose to her.  And she did embrace me, and silently we strode away into the locust night, with only my
jambiya
, some waterskins, and meager food-scraps as the limits of my burden.  We abandoned the artifacts, the scrolls and all else; for the caravan would have dire need to repair its fortunes.  And while Fatimah was leaving her friends behind, she did not want us to be branded as thieves.

Save for one fleeting glimpse of Gauhar in later days, I never saw any of them again.

There was honor in this, as well as there was exile.  I only hoped that Gauhar and Haidar would understand.

~

We two trudged north, the air still choked with fine dust crystals left in the ethereal wake of the death-storm’s passage.  Devils of dust, the Ukum, whirled and played beneath the orange moon.  Black silhouettes of tattered banners flapped upon the crests of the northern dunes.

And so did we come to the Battlefield of the Saif, the Rest of Ibn Hatim, fallen god-warrior of the trackless emptiness.

It was not far.  In the terror and exhaustion left in the sandstorm’s wake, I had given no thought to how near we must have been to the graveyard of the battlefield.  And in fleeing north from the storm, pulling our tents behind us, we surely had come very near to its fringe.

The blind Fatimah did not need my guidance.  Now that we two were alone, she made no pretense and did not hide the truth:  she had the gift of second sight, eyes without eyes.  She walked alone with all the precision of the Fates, and I did follow her.

We climbed the greatest of the dunes, and looked down upon what seemed to be another haunted world.  The storm had bared the horrible mass graves of the battlefield of old.  Ranseurs, pikes and spears were stabbed into the desert’s exposed and clefted stones, where they had marked the graves of nameless fighters so many years ago.  There were withered cedar poles looped through with the eye sockets of skulls, stacked a dozen high.  And the corpses were everywhere.

The desert is an angel of the afterlife, for even without the rites of mummification or embalming, the bodies of the warriors were contorted in eerie knots and piles where they lay.  Their flesh—while desiccated and worn away to leather which looked like cinnamon, acrid in husk and rind—was nigh perfectly preserved.  The death-wounds borne by the armored and the stripped were black with old blood; cries of agony were frozen on their faces.  Thin papery cheeks were pitted through with holes.  The tongues of the fallen warriors were curled like shriveled flowers, and the eyes either plucked or crumbled away, but all else of their mortal remains endured, immaculate and eternal.

Such horrible tranquility.  I had never seen a thing so beautiful.

~

The scavengers, the jackals and the vultures, were not there.  I believed I knew why, for greater predators prowled here than they, and the instincts of beasts are far more finely honed than those of man.  But Fatimah had ushered me to silence from the moment we descended from the dune.  We stepped among the storm-bared graves, and I soon discovered why she held to her silent reverence.

There was one dune which stood amidst all the corpse-pits, born of the storm’s dark passage.  Around this dune hunched a circle of gaunt, horrific things which could only be Ghuls.  Above them, standing upon the height with the crescent moon behind him loomed the one, the Watcher, whose silhouette I had already seen once before.

Fatimah knelt.  The Watcher pointed at me, and I did approach him alone.

So did the great Naram-gal hold audience with me.

Two of the crouching Ghuls crawled aside to allow me passage.  As I looked down and met their gazes each in turn, their upturned faces snarled at me in half-tamed apprehension.  Their features were monstrous, wolfish, with crystal-yellowed fangs which jutted from slender snouts.  One of the Ghul’s faces had been shorn:  where a mortal would have a nose, there were only two dried mushroom-like and pulpy slits.  This one’s eyes were yellow-crimson, double-pupiled, as are the hourglass eyes of goats.

The other Ghuls, unmoving, said nothing, but hunched and watched in silence as I ascended upon the sands.

The Watcher let me approach.  He said in a voice which cast about, a voice which sought and wheeled as the wind-rattling of leaves:

“Grieving one, I am Naram-gal.  You live because Aharon has chosen you as his one.  Grieve not for Aharon, for he has partaken of the feast and now dwells amongst us underground as he desired, his afterlife on earth.  You, having defied one storm but not the last, live only because Aharon beseeched us to speak with you.  He said that you were a soul of love, that you were mad and dreaming.  That you are sick with the dream of a love which never was.  Tell me Abd, exile of Sana’a.  Of what do you dream?”

I was fearful and spellbound as I looked on high to Naram-gal.  What kind of man had he been in life?  I wondered how many centuries had passed since his rebirth.  There was so much I did not know.  But his eyes, shot through with blood and silver-laced with the radiance of the moon, had seen eternity.  There, unblinking and without fear, they gazed through me.  I knew that if I dared to lie, the words I chose would be my last.

What did I dream of, most of all?

I spoke of the nightmare of Cthulhu, and even whispered the name of the dread place, R’lyeh.  One of the Ghuls beside me did whisper,
“ftaghn”
; another whimpered like a jackal.

But Naram-gal himself only nodded and said to me, “It is well.  If you do not alter the path which you have chosen, madness will enslave you in the moons who are to come.  Or will you choose to become one with us?  Should you ever, the nightmares of the
Kulullu
then will cease.  But I sense a greater truth has brought you to me.  And what is this?”

And I spoke of my Adaya and our love.  The reactions from the others were intriguing.  I could see that some of the Ghuls still longed for loved ones they had lived for in another life, another world.  Others held shameless hatred in their eyes, others only the nepenthe, the oblivion of willfully forsaken memory … for love, in the wake of death and centuries, for them could never breathe again.

Or could it?

From Naram-gal himself, I could sense … what?  Was it sympathy?  Was it shame?

When I spoke of Adaya’s resurrection, he did tell me that the Ghuls themselves can never rise from the dead.  Such is the accursed price of their own earthly immortality.  Ghuls are neither dead nor alive in the way that we comprehend it; they are the Deathless Ones.  But they
do
live, in their own curious manner.  They must feast upon flesh when they are living, and cast their incantations of longevity, until they are slain by violence or they crumble into the dust.  And too, Adaya in death could not become a Ghul.  For once a mortal perishes, the realm of death cannot be breached.  Ghuls can be necromancers, and can even animate the dead and make them writhe and dance.  But resurrection?  That was a forbidden path, forbidden by the Lord in Ebon, who Naram-gal did name as Nyarlathotep.