Tales of Alhazred Read online

  Tales of

  ALHAZRED

  ü

  Donald Tyson

  Dark Regions Press

  2016

  First Trade eBook Edition

  Dark Renaissance Books - an imprint of Dark Regions Press LLC.

  Text © 2015 by Donald Tyson

  Cover art © 2015 by Frank Walls

  First Published and Edited by Joe Morey

  ISBN: 978-1-62641-150-0

  Interior design by F. J. Bergmann

  Dark Regions Press, LLC

  6635 N. Baltimore Ave. Ste. 245

  Portland, OR 97203

  www.darkregions.com

  List of Illustrations

  Frontispiece

  His punishment of me had been creative.

  Uto rose from his fighting crouch and came to me.

  Out of nowhere, a kind of face formed in the sky.

  She raised her arm and began to gesture while intoning a barbarous word.…

  … the black creature pulsed, and something flowed … into the corpse.

  … at no time did that forward motion of its great white body cease.…

  It sent forth slender filaments that were like long black threads.…

  I cast the dice. “Ten,” the half-djinn said with vindictive delight.

  When he saw what came toward him, he stumbled backward.…

  … her eyes no longer appeared even remotely human.

  “You will be the first of your age to face the fury of my wrath.”

  Table of Contents

  Ghoul Bane

  Mountain of Shadows

  Brazen Vessel

  Isle of the Dead

  Dance of Durga

  The Caliph’s Necromancer

  Revenge of the Djinn

  Hand of Nilus

  Red Claws

  Ancient Evil

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  Ghoul Bane

  1.

  “You are ugly, Alhazred.” The voice was deep and rough, but the tone was not unkind.

  I looked up from the letter I was drafting to a seller of acids disputing his recent price increase. Beyond the glow from my oil lamp, my library lay in deep shadow. I smelled a scent like damp earth. “Thank you for that sentiment, Uto. I’ll cherish it always.”

  The patch of darkness I spoke to detached itself from the wall and took the form of a crouching naked ghoul. The manhood that dangled between his black thighs was impressive, but not as impressive as the hooked talons on the ends of his long fingers. “There was gossip that your face is disfigured, but I did not imagine how severely. The glamour you usually wear hides it well. My heart is sad for you.”

  By reflex, I raised my hand and touched the place where my nose should have been. There was only a hole there now. My nose had been cut off along with my ears, and my cheeks deeply scarred, by the late ruler of Sana’a in Yemen, land of my birth. In my foolish youth I had served as the royal poet, and had committed the indiscretion of lusting after King Huban’s beautiful daughter, Narisa. His punishment of me had been creative. After disfiguring me, castrating me, and feeding me my own body parts, he had cast me out in the desert to die. Yet here I was, in my house on the Lane of Scholars at Damascus. And the king? He had suffered an unfortunate accident, the result of a falling roof tile.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of having you break into my house, Uto, leader of the White Skull Clan?”

  I used a formal address as a matter of politeness. It is good to be polite when a ghoul stands near you in the shadows with his claws spread. So far as I knew, I was on good terms with Uto, who from time to time supplied me with fresh corpses for my necromantic experiments from the burying ground he and the members of his clan inhabited.

  He made the harsh, rasping noise that is laughter for ghouls. “Do not fear, my friend. I have come to you for help.”

  Setting my goose-quill pen in its onyx holder, which was carved in the shape of a little owl, I regarded him for several moments. It was unheard of for a ghoul to admit that he might need the help of a man. The situation, whatever its nature, must have been dire indeed to bring Uto on such an errand.

  I indicated a chair on the opposite side of my desk. “Sit and tell me what it is you need.”

  He came forward, blinking against the brightness of the lamp flame, and settled his buttocks awkwardly into the seat of the chair. This in itself was also a remarkable event. Uto was the only ghoul I had ever known who used a chair. He had acquired this and several other human habits from his frequent interaction with the necromancers who lived in the Lane of Scholars. His clan was the primary source of raw material for their experiments.

  Around his neck hung a string of beads made from polished bone, and on one wrist, a copper circlet of twisted wire. It is a curious contradiction in the nature of ghouls that even though they prefer to walk naked, all wear little bits of jewelery as adornment. Some find leather belts useful for carrying various objects, but Uto seldom wore a belt.

  I moved the brass lamp to the far corner of the desk so that it would not shine between us. The eyes of ghouls are extraordinarily sensitive to light, so much so that they cannot bear the rays of the sun but move about on the surface of the ground only at night.

  “Something is taking my people,” he said without preamble. “I want you to find it and kill it.”

  “Taking them where?”

  “They vanish. There is no trace to show what happens to them.”

  “From whence do they vanish?”

  “From the Place of Skulls. From our warren beneath the graves. Even from their own dens.”

  “No one has seen the thing that takes them?”

  “No one.”

  I sat back in my chair and mulled this over in my mind. “Why have you come to me?”

  “You are a master of magic. We need your arts to find this thing so that we can kill it.”

  It was flattering to be called a master of magic, but scarcely accurate. True, I was doing my best to acquire the art of necromancy, but there were many older necromancers in the Lane of Scholars more skilled.

  “Why did you not go to Harkanos?”

  The ghoul shrugged. “He is a good man, but he is only a man. You are a ghoul, Alhazred of the Black Spring Clan. You know our ways.”

  After being cast forth by King Huban into the great desert known as the Empty Space, I was adopted into a clan of ghouls known as the Black Spring Clan. It was due to their acceptance of me that I survived. Alas, my clan was no more, but I still thought of myself as a ghoul.

  “You were right to come to me. I will do all in my power to help you.”

  “When will you come?”

  I stood from my chair. “Now.”

  “What of your companions? Will they help us?”

  It was widely known that I shared my house with a young girl and a mercenary.

  “They are not here at present. I will come alone.”

  “It is good,” he said, standing in his usual slouching crouch. “This is a matter for ghouls, not for men.”

  2.

  We went silent and unseen through the lampless and almost deserted streets of Damascus, moving through the darkness as only ghouls can move. I was not as skillful as my companion, but my time among the Black Spring Clan had taught me how to creep in stealth in a manner beyond the abilities of normal men. The drunken revellers returning home from the alehouses and the occasional pair of armed soldiers on patrol did not see or hear us as we passed. I wore a black desert thawb, and on the belt around my waist my dagger, sword, and the bleached white skull of Gor, the ghoul who had been leader of my clan and my closest friend. I had sworn an oath always to wear his skull lest I should ever forget amid the palaces a
nd streets of men that I am a ghoul.

  When we reached the gate of the city nearest the Place of Skulls, Uto showed himself in the light, and the gatekeeper silently allowed us to pass through the wall without challenge.

  “He has been well bribed,” I murmured as we left the city behind us.

  “He knows it is better for the health of his wife and children that he let us pass when we will,” Uto muttered without turning his head.

  He led the way. The burying ground was no great distance from the wall of the city. It occupied a hollow between several low hills that were bare stone on their crowns, and resembled the bald heads of giants projecting just above the surface. The graveyard was large. Hundreds of low mounds with stones at each head and foot lay scattered both inside and outside its low stone wall, for the burying ground had spread beyond its original boundaries until there were more graves outside the wall than within it.

  My eyes are uncommonly good, but I was thankful for the crescent of waning moon that rode in the eastern sky. Apart from the stars, it was our only light. The crowns of the surrounding hills and the stones on the graves shone silver-gray in its glow. If we came upon the thing we sought, at least I would have some illumination by which to use my sword.

  For his part, Uto needed no such aid. He led me to a section of the burying ground that was older than the rest, and occupied by small crypts and graves completely covered with slabs of cut stone rather than merely marked with rough stones at the head and foot. Centuries ago it must have been the place of burial for the wealthy merchants of the city. Now it was overgrown by rank weeds and brush.

  Standing beside one of these ancient slabs, I stared about me. The burying ground was deserted. Not even a small animal moved across the graves.

  Do you see anything, my love?

  Sashi stirred within me at this silently voiced query.Nothing, dearest one. We are alone with the ghoul.

  I realized Uto’s large black eyes were on me, and wondered if he had heard gossip about my familiar spirit, a djinn of the desert who had united with me and presently dwelt within my body.

  “I thought you were taking me to your clan.”

  He grunted and bent over the grave. Grasping a corner of the rectangular slab in his powerful hands, he slid it aside. It rotated on a concealed pivot to reveal the dark mouth of a tunnel. I descended a flight of stone steps, and he followed, after replacing the slab in its former position.

  The ghoul warren ran beneath the level of the graves and was lofty enough that I could straighten my back. At intervals it was lit by small flames that burned in crude bone lamps. Although ghouls could see in light that was too dim for a man to even notice, they could not see in total darkness. The fat that fuelled the lamps was probably human, I thought. Ghouls used the remnants and products of human corpses wherever possible for their needs.

  I followed closely after Uto’s hunched back through the bewildering maze of passages, the smell of the ghoul warren strong in my throat. It was strangely reassuring, reminding me as it did of the security I had felt while part of my own clan. From time to time we passed other ghouls, squeezing by their naked bodies in the narrow tunnels. They stared at my disfigured face but none of them spoke.

  “Where are we going?”

  “There is someone you must meet who will tell you more about the vanishings.”

  He led me into a den with rounded earth walls, its floor covered with straw. An ancient ghoul hag sat on her haunches beside an oil lamp, threading beads onto a string with a needle. Her breasts sagged like empty sacks over ribs that stood forth under the black skin of her chest, and her wizened face was like that of an octogenarian ape. In spite of her advanced age, her fingers were nimble enough. She glanced up as we entered.

  “You’re an ugly one,” she said, her voice dry as a wood rasp.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  We settled ourselves on our haunches opposite her.

  “This is the one I told you about, old mother,” Uto said.

  She stopped threading her beads and stared at me intently for several seconds. One of her eyes was wider than the other, and she turned it forward to look. I saw that the other eye had a milky whiteness across it.

  “He’s no ghoul.”

  “I am Alhazred of the Black Spring Clan.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It was a clan of the Empty Space, many hundreds of leagues from Damascus.”

  “Was? What happened to it?”

  “A merchant took offense and poisoned our meat. My clan died.”

  “Yet you lived?”

  “I lived.”

  “Enough idle talk,” Uto said with impatience. “Tell Alhazred what you know of the thing that takes our people.”

  She set her necklace aside.“Learn this, Alhazred of the Black Spring Clan, I am not of Uto’s blood. Before his clan came here, another clan of ghouls occupied the warren beneath the Place of Skulls and harvested the dead, as is our way since before time began. I was young then, and beautiful, and many ghoul males desired me.”

  Uto grunted.

  “You doubt me? Well, so you may; it is not important. There came a time when members of my clan began to vanish from the warren and from the burying place above. One by one they were taken, at first only a few in every cycle of the moon, then more, until at the last several were taken each night.”

  Uto turned to me. “When my clan came here, in the nights when my father’s father was a young ghoul, they found only her, living in the warren.”

  “All were taken except you?”

  She nodded, peering at me with her good eye.

  “Why were you spared?”

  “At the end, when only a few of us remained, I left the warren and hid in the burying ground. There was a newly dug grave awaiting its corpse. I crawled into it and covered myself with dirt. The thing did not know I was there. I heard the screams as it took the last of my clan. Then it left this place, and I dwelt alone for many years before Uto’s clan came and made me one of them.”

  “Did you ever see this thing?”

  “Never.”

  “Is this unseen thing that has recently taken ghouls the same that carried away your clan so many years past?”

  The old female shrugged her bony shoulders in the gesture so typical of ghouls, a blend of fatality and acceptance. “How am I to know that? It takes them in the same way it took them when I was young and beautiful, more in each new cycle of the moon.”

  “If it is the same bane, it will take more and more until the White Skull Clan is destroyed,” Uto said. “We must stop it.”

  “We will bait a trap,” I told him.

  “A trap? Good. What will we use as bait?”

  “Me.”

  3.

  The crescent moon stood higher in the starry sky, but several hours yet remained until the first light of dawn. I sat on the stone at the head of one of the graves in the burying ground. Around the grave I had scratched a pentacle of protection, using the most potent words and symbols of power I knew. Uto sat on the stone at the foot of the grave. From some tree, an owl sounded a soft and mournful cry.

  “Are you certain all your ghouls are gathered together?”

  “I told you already, Alhazred, I ordered them to remain in the main feasting hall for the rest of the night.”

  “Then we are the only easy prey of your ghoul bane.”

  “Are you certain your circle will protect us?”

  “No.”

  “It is no matter. I am ready to die, if only I get a chance to rend this thing with my claws.”

  “Let us hope it does not come to that.”

  We sat in silence for many minutes, listening to the night wind in the leaves of the trees.

  “How do you suppose this thing is able to move through my warren unseen by anyone?” Uto murmured.

  “This I have been thinking about. It may be a creature of the outer spheres, not of flesh. It may move between our world and the next, invisible to u
s because it is not wholly of our reality.”

  “Then how are we to fight it?”

  “It must assume form and substance before it can carry off your people. At that time it may become vulnerable.”

  The moon climbed higher. In another hour the first rose of dawn would tint between the eastern hills. In my heart, I gave up hope that we would confront the creature this night.

  Be on guard, my love.

  Sashi? What do you see?

  Something approaches.

  “Something comes,” I murmured aloud to Uto.

  He leapt to his feet, his fingers spread to strike, and turned this way and that. “Where? Where is it?”

  Beside the large cypress tree, Sashi said in my mind.

  What does it look like? I asked her.

  Like mist, or smoke, with tendrils trailing behind it as it moves. It floats above the ground. There is a churning at its center.

  I relayed this description to Uto.

  “How can you see it? I see nothing.”

  “The djinn who dwells in my body sees it.”

  “Ahhh. I have heard of your djinn.”

  It hesitates. It seems to wait. Now it is gone.

  “Gone? Gone where?” I said aloud.

  It vanished into the air, my love.

  When I told this to Uto, he cursed in the colorful way of ghouls for several minutes. “How are we to fight what we cannot see?”

  We remained on our guard, but the thing did not return.

  “I fear the night has been wasted—” I began.

  Uto cocked his bald head. “Do you hear that?”

  I listened but heard nothing other than the night breeze.

  “It comes from below. The sound of a battle. I must go there.”

  He rushed forward and rebounded from the invisible barrier above the circle. Cursing, he pressed against it before realizing the futility of his efforts, then began to kick dust over the circle.

  “Stop, you fool; you’ll leave us without a defense.”