Tales of Alhazred Read online

  “That makes a kind of sense,” she said. “How do you suppose it came to eat all the original residents of the monastery at once?”

  “They must have gathered together on the mountaintop before their shrine for a sacrifice or some other ritual,” Altrus said. “When the talisman was activated, they were all in front of it.”

  “That is my thinking on the matter,” I agreed.

  “But how could the Brothers of Saint John have removed it from the stone without meeting a similar fate?”

  “You saw what happened when I held it. After a short time it ceased to function. It must deplete its occult virtue within seconds, and then lie dormant until deliberately activated. They removed it during its dormant phase.”

  Martala took my arm and helped me to my feet. I stood swaying until my dizziness began to diminish, and noticed a blackened hole burned through the side of my boot. I raised my hand to the top of my skull and winced. Whatever knocked me to the ground had left a scorched patch on my head as it entered my body, and a similar burn as it exited my foot.

  “There’s one last thing that puzzles me,” the girl said as we continued along the path down the mountain. “Why did Yog-Sothoth allow the monks to keep the talisman?”

  “You ask too many questions,” I said with irritation. The roots of my teeth ached.

  “I know you, Alhazred. Don’t tell me you haven’t already considered the matter.”

  “Will it make you happy if I tell you my idle speculation?”

  “It will make me less unhappy.”

  “It may be that the monks learned of the existence of the talisman from written records left by the former inhabitants of the monastery, and were so afraid of its power that they did not dare to use it. If Yog-Sothoth was never summoned by them, he would have no reason to become wrathful.”

  She considered this for a time in silence.

  “Then it isn’t because Yog-Sothoth hates you?”

  “On the contrary, I suspect he is fond of me.”

  “He has a strange way to show affection,” Altrus said dryly.

  “If Yog-Sothoth hated me, I would not be alive. Only one Old One hates me, and we do not speak his name.”

  ¼

  Brazen Vessel

  1.

  It began when I awoke in the middle of the night with something tickling my lips. I brushed my fingers across my mouth and turned on my side to go back to sleep. Then I cursed softly, sat up, found my tinderbox by touch on the table next to the bed, and struck a spark to light the oil lamp.

  Martala was sleeping on the other side of the bed but she did not wake. This should have alerted me—the girl is a light sleeper—but my mind was elsewhere.

  I held the oil lamp close to the bed sheets and carefully turned the top sheet this way and that. For good measure I checked under the bolster. The tickle on my lips could have been a spider. It could even have been a scorpion. My many nights sleeping on the desert sands beneath the stars had taught me to pay attention to such warnings.

  There was no spider in the bed, and no scorpion. Setting the lamp down in disgust, I started to slide my naked body beneath the sheet once again, then stopped. I was fully awake. On a sudden impulse I decided to take a stroll around my walled garden.

  I threw on my boots and thawb, and did not neglect my belt with my sword and dagger and Gor’s white skull. Another thing I had learned from my days alone in the Empty Space was never to go anywhere without weapons. As for the skull, it went with me everywhere to remind me that I was still a ghoul.

  I might wear the body of a man, or what was left of a man’s body after King Huban of Sana’a had finished mutilating it, but in my heart I was a ghoul. The Black Spring Clan had adopted me and taught me ghoulish ways when I was alone on the sands, and the leader of the clan, Gor, had given me his friendship. It was not a bond that I would ever forget.

  I left through the rear door of the house. All the servants were asleep, for the hour was late. The night was mild, with a cooling breeze, and the sliver of waning moon cast enough light to show me the white gravel along the paths and the dark shapes of my fruit trees. The air was laden with their scents.

  At some point in my stroll along the paths I became aware of a dark shape sitting on the bench in my rose bower, near the wall at the rear of the garden. I pretended not to notice, and idly worked my way nearer while studying the flowers my gardener had spent so many hours pruning earlier in the week.

  I turned my back to the bower and bent over a flowering shrub. As I did so, I put my hand on the hilt of my dagger. I felt the shadowy figure approach silently behind me. Without betraying my intention by any motion or sound, I suddenly whirled and raised the curved steel blade to strike.

  The intruder clutched me close, so that I could not strike for the heart as I intended. I found myself wrapped in filmy layers of silk and spinning like a spindle. The night air, before so silent, began to roar all around me. I was lifted up bodily off my feet and could not breathe. I clutched the slender shoulders of my attacker and gasped in a futile effort to fill my lungs. All murderous intention left me in my panic. I began to suffocate.

  How long this went on, I cannot judge. It seemed a long time but when you are gasping and cannot get air, time extends itself so that a minute becomes an hour. At last my assailant released me, and I batted the folds of dark silk away from my face and drew in a shuddering breath.

  I turned a complete circle, my dagger raised defensively. No longer was I on the gravel path of my back garden. Desert sands stretched away in all directions, undulating in dunes to the starry horizon.

  “Fear not, Alhazred, for we intend you no harm.”

  The voice was that of a woman, deep and musical, a voice so lovely that my ears ached when it ceased.

  She unwrapped her veil of black silk from her face, and I saw that she was as beautiful as her voice. She stood tall and proud, regarding me with impassive eyes that were like polished jet. Her skin was as white as ivory. I noticed that her feet were bare and decorated with geometric patterns of henna, and that she wore golden rings on her toes. The moon revealed the swell of her hips and breasts beneath the translucent black silk of her robes.

  Have a care, my love. She is not human.

  I did not take her for a woman, I said in my mind to Sashi, my familiar spirit. Is she a djinn like you?

  Not like me. She is much more powerful.

  “To whom do you speak?” the djinn asked. She stared at me intently for a moment then smiled. “Of course. You have a little creature of the desert within your flesh. A chaklah, isn’t it?”

  “She is of the chaklah-i,” I admitted.

  The djinn regarded me for several moments with an expression that might have been amusement, or delight.

  “You are an unlikely coupling.”

  “We are content.”

  She nodded. “I see this is so. But it is not for this that I have carried you hundreds of leagues from Damascus, Alhazred of the Black Spring Clan.”

  “You know my name. May I know yours?”

  She drew herself up still straighter. “I am Allesalasallah, a djinn of the Seventh Circle,” she said with pride.

  I nodded in acknowledgement. Now that I could breathe again, I was regaining some of my poise. “Why have you brought me to this desert waste, Allesalasallah?”

  “Simply this, Alhazred. We have need of your skill as a necromancer.”

  “We?” I looked around at the empty sand dunes.

  The night air wavered and swirled, and was empty no longer. Four great figures towered above me like the massive stone statues of Egypt. They were not stone, but alive. All four were male and of threatening aspect, with attributes not wholly human. Their faces glared and leered down at me, eyes blazing with fire. Strings of human skulls dangled around their necks. Their skin was black and gleamed in the moonlight like oil.

  “My brothers and I have a task for you. If you accomplish it successfully, you will be well rewarded. If you fail
…”

  “What is the nature of this task?”

  “The task is simplicity itself. Others of our brethren are imprisoned near this place. We wish you to free them.”

  “What is the nature of this prison?”

  She rolled her eyes, and even that was beautiful.

  “It is a small thing, a tiny thing, a trifling thing that should not resist a necromancer of your reputation for more than an instant.”

  “If it is so trifling, why have you and your brothers not already done it?”

  “The evil sorcerer who made the prison placed wards upon it that are fatal to my kind. We cannot touch it, or even go to the place it resides. These wards were made for djinn, not for humans. They will offer you no obstruction.”

  “That is good to hear. I ask again, Allesalasallah of the Seventh Circle, what is the nature of this prison?”

  “It is a small thing, a weak thing, a poor thing, a vessel in the shape of an urn or cauldron cast in brass.”

  Something tickled in the depths of my memory. This was not the first time I had heard of such a vessel, but the memory refused to come to the front of my thoughts. It was probably just something I had read in an ancient text, I reflected.

  “What was the name of this sorcerer who gave your brothers such an insult?”

  “He was a king of ancient times. His name was Solomon, and his people surnamed him the Great.”

  2.

  “Solomon the Great,” I repeated, feeling a numbness in my head. “You want me to open the brazen vessel of Solomon the Great.”

  “That is your task, Alhazred.”

  I searched my memory for fragments of the legend. Solomon was a king of the Jews, and a great magician. With his magic he compelled the djinn of the desert to build his Temple at Jerusalem, and then, because they were of evil inclination and held hatred in their hearts toward him, he made a vessel of brass and forced the djinn to enter it before sealing it and casting it into a lake or, as another version of the tale said, into the sea.

  “Isn’t the brazen vessel lying somewhere deep beneath the water?”

  “Such was the case many centuries ago when Solomon completed his wickedness against us, but the lake has dried and turned to desert.”

  “If it is just a matter of opening this vessel, why do you need me? Any laborer could do this with a hammer and a chisel.”

  “The seal upon the lid of the vessel is not a seal that can be broken by force alone,” she said. “It was cunningly made by magic, and only by magic can it be unmade.”

  More of the story of Solomon was coming back to me. The djinn were called demons in the tales told by the Jews. They were reputed to be evil incarnate. Then again, many have said the same about me.

  There was nothing to gain by hesitation. They would kill me if I refused this task. That was plain enough. It was also clear that I could not escape them, or fight them. They were too powerful. I wondered how I was to defeat the magic of an ancient king who had fought their brothers, and beaten them? I had no hesitation in assuming that Solomon’s magic was greater than mine.

  “Of course I accept your trifling task. It will be my pleasure to free your brothers from their long bondage.”

  “It is good. I will go with you as your guide and protector.”

  “I thought you said you could not approach the place?”

  “In my true form I could not go there, but by wearing this human shape and simulating the flesh of a mortal woman I am able to approach quite near, although I cannot touch the vessel itself.”

  What she did not need to say was that she would ac-company me to ensure I did not find a way to flee before completing my task. I could have told her I had no intention of trying to run. How do you escape from beings of such power?

  “Solomon has been dead for a long time,” I said to her. “It may be that the magic of his seal has weakened over the centuries.”

  “It has not weakened for us.”

  “I am not a djinn. Solomon would never have imagined it necessary to guard the vessel from human beings. No human in his right mind would even try to approach it, to say nothing of trying to open it.”

  “And for this reason you were chosen. You are human, yet not completely human. You are also a ghoul, and something more that cannot be defined.”

  “Something more?”

  “There is in you an otherness.”

  “It was whispered in my village when I was a small child that a djinn had visited my mother in the night, and that I was the result of their union.”

  “That may be the source of your strangeness. In any event, you are unique, Alhazred. Human, yet more than human.”

  We walked side by side across the dunes. I had no way of knowing where I was, and it seemed pointless to ask. She had brought me here, and when the time came, if she wished she would carry me back. Or kill me. One or the other.

  I wondered if my enemy Nyarlathotep walked the dunes this night. Such was his custom, although he usually preferred the vastness of the Arabian desert known as the Empty Space. How he would laugh to know of my predicament. Opening that vessel, even were it possible, would be like opening the door of a cage filled with starving leopards. After all these centuries there was a good chance that the djinn inside the vessel were completely insane.

  It was some consolation that neither of the companions who shared my house in Damascus had been abducted along with me. Martala had a keen mind and probably knew more of necromancy than I did, but she was still a young girl. Altrus was the finest swordsman I had ever seen, but fighting skill was no use against the wrath of the djinn. I was alone, as I had been so often at critical moments in my life, and I would either solve this dilemma alone, or die alone.

  You are never alone, my dearest.

  Forgive me, Sashi. You are so much a part of me, I think of us as one being. If you find an opportunity, you must leave my body and escape to safety.

  I would never leave you to die alone, my sweet love.

  I had not expected her to accept my offer to release her, but it was one I had to make.

  It comforts me that you will be with me, no matter what may happen.

  It comforts me to be with you, my love.

  Allesalasallah guided me to a small valley, the floor of which was covered by drifted sand. By the shape of the basin in which it lay, formed from the surrounding hills, I could see that in the distant past it might have been filled by a lake that was fed by some river or spring.

  She stopped in the middle of the valley.

  “You must dig here. I cannot help you. If I touch the bronze with my fingers, or even use magic to clear away the sand, it may rebound on me and strike me down.”

  There was something in her manner I could not place for several seconds, and then abruptly I knew what it was. Fear. This made me uneasy. Anything that frightened a djinn of such power was worth fearing.

  I looked around at the barren sand, which was rippled by the wind.

  “With what are I expected to dig? My hands?”

  From the thin air she produced a shovel with a steel blade. One instant her hands were empty, and the next instant she passed me the shovel. It was solid steel and wood, as real as my own bones. Shrugging with the fatalism of ghouls, I began to dig.

  The night paled to morning, and the sun rose to the zenith and began to decline in the west, and all the while I dug deeper into the sand, making my pit wide and throwing the sand as far away as I could so that it would not slide back into the hole. By late afternoon the hole was large enough to swallow an ox cart.

  Periodically, Allesalasallah brought me water to drink. I needed it. The hot sun sweated it out of my body almost as fast as I could swallow it.

  “Are you and your brothers certain this is the place?” I asked at one point.

  “We are certain.”

  “But how can you be sure?”

  “I can hear my brothers screaming.”

  I bowed my head and went back to my digging.


  3.

  The shovel struck something metallic with a sharp clink. Using great care, I scraped away the sand and exposed the rounded edge of a flat bronze plate. I began to dig around it, and saw that the vessel was like an urn with a fat belly, capped by a flat bronze lid. It was canted to one side in the sand. Upon the lid were the raised lines of a pentagram enclosed in a pentagon, both surrounded by a band with Hebrew writing on it.

  During my youth as royal poet at Sana’a I had improved myself by the study of Hebrew and other languages. I have a natural gift for learning foreign tongues.

  “And it came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel; and it was a cloud and darkness to them, but it gave light by night to these: so that the one came not near the other all the night,” I recited.

  I turned to Allesalasallah and saw that the djinn had her hands pressed firmly over her ears. Distress marred her face.

  “Speak not those words aloud, Alhazred.”

  “My apology, Allesalasallah. I did not realize the words would be painful to you.”

  “They are sacred words, and filled with holy might.”

  “It is a verse from one of the books of Moses,” I murmured, studying the seal. “How many djinn are bound beneath this seal?”

  “Seventy-two.”

  “It must be very crowded,” I could not resist saying.

  She did not realize it was an attempt at humor.

  “We do not occupy space as your bodies do. When we subsist in our essential nature, a grain of sand becomes a palace, and a drop of water an ocean.”

  I continued to dig, and succeeded in exposing most of the enormous vessel. It was almost spherical, approximately four cubits tall, without any handles on its sides. The round opening that held the seal was two cubits in diameter. The entire surface of the vessel, which was a dull-brown bronze color, was covered with arcane symbols and lines of Hebrew text. These lines of Hebrew letters wrapped around the body of the vessel as though they were ropes tied around it. The flat seal , which resembled a war shield, was held in place with molten lead that had been poured around the edge and allowed to set in the crack.