THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (26 page)

~

It was then that I learned—we
all
learned—that I had been followed into the mosque, by shadows all unseen.  The watchers of the desert, ever hopeful for my success and for my safe passage unto Babylon, had hidden themselves and walked from the wasteland at my side.  I knew it not, but the revelation of their presence was to come in that very moment.

There was a chorus of horrific voices, rasping hatred and the hungering.  Gray forms of Ghuls scuttled down from the ceiling, spider-walking down the pillars.  From the stairs, more of the gaunt things rushed past the mercenaries of Omuz and prowled upon all fours.

The pack of the Shattered Jaw, the sandstorm daemons, the hunters of Naram-gal had come for me.  So arose the Deathless Ones, and their wrath was terrible to behold.

~

Of the slaughter, only a little will I tell.  None of the men were slain at first, but all were bloodied by tooth and claw as the Ghuls overwhelmed them.  Tashet died of fright, crumpling to the floor with a gout of choking foam bubbling from his lips.  His eyes flickered white then rolled and saw no more.  Men released their bowels, and wept, beholding the truth of the supernatural for their first and only time.

But these mercies proved only to be a taunting.  For all of these men, death had come.

Two warriors who had managed to wound the Ghuls with their own blades had their bellies opened and the cords of their intestines pulled out in meaty and wild spools onto the floor.

None escaped.  Only Omuz remained untouched.  One of the Ghuls, too wounded to journey far, was devoured in solemn honor by his brethren.

There was a great feast that night, as all the Ghuls of Naram-gal made a banquet of the fallen within the Undervaults.  Only Omuz was given the honor of being eaten alive and filled with the essence of Naram-gal before he could die screaming.  So was Omuz reborn a reluctant Ghul, and he became a silent one, a stalker within the pack of Naram-gal.  In later years, he was to become the worthy apprentice of Anata, my successor and my friend.  Such is a tale for another codex, should I live so long as to write it.

I thanked Naram-gal for saving me, and he smiled sadly as he looked to me and said, “O child.  The shadow is now upon you.  You called upon the Lord in Ebon to show you the way, and you let him carry you upon the wind.  Did you find the Nameless City?  Did you find any of the discs of Anar’kai?”

I had, and I did show these treasures to him.  And he said to me, “Go forth, then.  Go forth into Babylon, and find the tombs of the shadow priests who lie buried in the tombs beneath the Tower of Babilu.”

And so I did.  Rushing forth from the mosque, praying that none would see me, I did take some few supplies from my panicked camels and race on into the ruined city itself.  As I did so, I could see the denizens of Babylon’s ruin beginning to wake.  Some were looking to the mosque, others covering their eyes.  But no one chose to cry out or to behold me, and no one spoke.  It was then that I knew that those few who dare to live in the ruins of Babylon were no strangers to the horrors of the night.  However blind the mercenaries may have been, those who lived within the city itself knew not to interfere with the ways of the dark things which could be seen by the believer, the things which stride in deepest night along the streets.

None of these poor souls deigned to find me, or to “see” me.  To these wise souls I did not exist.  None touched me.

~

So did I enter Babylon, and so did pass Akhri the Unworthy from the Kingdom of Men.  The pack of Naram-gal secured my way, and legends still are told now in the time of my elder years here in Damascus, of the tongued and claw-stretched blood smears which were discovered beneath the Mosque of the Undervaults.

No one, you see, shall come between myself and my love of the dead Adaya.

SCROLL XLI

My Journey

Unto the Earthly Paradise No More,

The Hanging Gardens

Having been given their feast, the Ghuls of Naram-gal did depart, neither my own brethren nor my destroyers.  I pondered long if I would repay my debt to Naram-gal by coming to sit in my elder days among them and allowing them to take me, to make one with them.  Would my Adaya embrace such an eternity?  Or would she turn away in horror?  I reflected on how changed I had become since she had known me.  In becoming strong, I had carved away the weaker aspects of myself; in vowing that I would bring Adaya back, I had shorn from her the choices of the afterlife.  Whatever she might want, I wanted her.

What was I becoming?

But the greater part of me that survived, the strongest of me which endured and allowed me to slay and live on and never be a victim of the depraved, that part of me was now the ruler of my soul.  There was no choice; I would find the tunnels into the tombs of the shadow priests of Babylon.  I had come too far.  The lesser discs would be mine.

~

I knew from all I had learned that Anata had spoken true, that the Tower of Babel was hollowed and the tombs were laid beneath it.  But the sages among the architects had written in their tablets of
another
corridor, a tunnel which passed from the palace of the king and secretly into the nether temple itself.  This, the Way Unto Shadow, was the corridor most likely to remain untouched.

The Way Unto Shadow was said to possess three entrances:  one within the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar itself, which was certainly now buried and in rubble beneath the sands; one in the Nether Temple, which had been deliberately destroyed when the Tower of Babel above it was razed in the Persian age; and a third, near to the palace, a secret entrance which emerged into the Hanging Gardens of paradise.

This was the path which I would first seek.  I had met no living mortal who spoke the language of Akkad, save Fatimah; and she was now among the Ghuls of Naram-gal.  Ghuls and spirits spoke it, yes, and to Naram-gal itself it seemed to be his native tongue.  But as the tablets of the sages had been inscribed in Akkadian as well, I had reason to believe that the secret of the Way Unto Shadow belonged only to me.  No one else alive could read and know of such a thing.

~

Fleeing the Mosque of the Undervaults, I felt an urgent need to come to the Hanging Gardens’ ruins before that dawn.  There would surely be turmoil and panic when the mosque’s undercroft was investigated by the other mercenary soldiers at first light.

I could not be caught.  Defying the demands of sleep, I hid myself in an alley and there I prepared for the journey through the ruined city’s ways.

Waiting for an hour, I stole back to where my camels had been tethered.  One camel remained tied.  Two of them had broken their ropes in the panic and fled into the night, and these I was able to track to the western fringe of the ruined city’s edge.  Reigning them in, cutting free my packs from their flanks and letting the satchels tumble to the sands, I dragged out whatever I could carry which would aid me in my flight.

I packed my clothes, food, water, weapons, and a short ironshod walking staff which I had carried as a goad upon my riding camel.  Thus equipped, I fled toward the ruins in case anyone dared seek vengeance on me.  Such jackals as Akhri have no bravery, but they travel in numbers and name themselves among the bold.  Who can be too careful in such a world?

Making my way east through the unlit streets, I passed from the shadowy hovels of the poor into a cemetery no longer used.  There I hid in a sundered tomb and slept for some few hours.

Before sunrise, I did stride undisturbed into the abandoned city’s heart, where the palace and the Tower were.  There, the river choked itself on rippling hillocks of mud and riotous black reeds which crawled up the stones, crumbling them with their thorny and seeking roots.  The river waters were swollen, filled with moonlight and the silhouettes of fishes.  Bloated strands of grayrushes whorled sleepily beneath the surface.

I crossed the river of Babylon upon the blocks of a mighty tower which had fallen across the water’s breadth.  Leaping from one slippery stone to the next, I made my way near to the pathetic and ravaged remnant of the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar.

The palace was a scorched ruin, completely submerged in tides of black mud and tumbled fragments of itself.  Nature had reclaimed the glory of kings and made of it a swampland.  Stinging insects and tiny scorpions with red sigils emblazoned upon their backs greeted me at every step.  I had sheathed my feet in another pair of leather-strip sandals which I had gleaned from one of my packs, but the mud sucked at my every footstep and centipedes crawled up over my shins.  Once, my foot slipped beneath a cesspool’s edge and stuck down into the mud so far that my toes scraped against an unseen boulder.  Air bubbled up from the void of the shifting stone, the waters roiled, and the collapsing mud started to draw me down.  Stifling a scream, with both hands around my thigh I wrenched my foot free and fell backward.  Blood and mud spattered onto my face.  I wrapped my foot with linens, for I did not want to stop there and cauterize the wound.  There was no time.

Limping, I made my way through the ruined palace’s wild hills and into the forgotten ruin itself, that of the Hanging Gardens.

~

The Gardens, once one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, were lost for a reason.  They dated back to the richest of Babylon’s many golden ages:  they had been the love-folly of King Nebuchadnezzar the Second, he the great one who was regaled by subject and enemy alike as
Nabu-kudurri-usur
,
Bakhat Nasar
, the Seizer of Fate in Victory.   Conqueror of Judaea, besieger of Tyre for thirteen years, defiant enemy of the Khomites, Nebuchadnezzar the Mighty had made Babylon a city reborn upon a tide of blood, a labyrinth born of conquest whose streets were paved in gold.

His palace, however, was as nothing compared to the Hanging Gardens themselves.  The tale of the Gardens is this, and I am certain it is true:

They were made for Nebuchadnezzar’s bride, his beloved Persian princess Amytis, so that she would not die of a broken heart.  For King Nebuchadnezzar had borne her away from her father and the lovely forests of her homeland.  Nebuchadnezzar needed her, adored her above all else; but away from the waterfalls of her homeland and her sisters and her father’s love, Amytis did begin to desire the world afar, and her heart to waste away.

My sympathy for the King is great, for I believe that I understand him.  In answer to the plight of Amytis, Nebuchadnezzar swore that he would recreate her homeland as a second paradise in Babylon itself.  In defiance of all possibility and reason, this he did.  It is said five thousand slaves toiled upon the Gardens for three years, and that many of the finer details were placed by the art-gifted hand of Nebuchadnezzar himself.  Amytis, moved by the devotion and sympathies of her King, did watch him from the Palace’s tower balconies as he toiled with his slaves upon the sand.

In time, against all likelihood and the mockery of the gods, the Gardens came to be.  In the name of love, the Seizer of Fate in Victory reigned triumphant once again.  He took his Queen Amytis by the hand, and together they descended into the Gardens and there found joy in an illusory Persia, an earthly paradise.

~

And how were the Gardens in their mien?  They comprised an outdoor palace in themselves, a tiered and labyrinthine monstrosity filled with lush plants and cascading waters.  Such folly, such extravagance of wealth and waste made a mockery of even the most lavish towers raised round the gardens there in Babylon, the greatest city of man.

More was told to me by the Ghul-crone Anata, who did behold the Gardens in her former life with her own eyes, and the wonder in her voice was living still:

A mazework of canals and zigzag rivulets fed the Gardens, defying gravity and pulling the river’s waters through holes cored into the walls of Babylon itself.  Cunning screws made of wood were cranked by hundreds of servants all day
(Whateley has written:  “An early precedent to the Archimedean screw?”)
, and so the waters were drawn
up
to the tiers’ summits, there to cascade down again as waterfalls through the Gardens themselves.  Every day and night, these servants labored to run the waters of the Gardens through their course.

Many of the waters were lost to the day’s desert heat, and so the Gardens were ever sheathed in a crystal mist, forever rising and retreating.  The Pyramids of Khom are a mighty work, but the ingenuity of their craft was as nothing before the vine-laden machinations which drove the Garden’s waterfalls.  The Gardens were the marvel not only of Babylon, but of the world entire.

And they were secret, despite the veiled servants who toiled therein.  Only Amytis and Nebuchadnezzar would frequent the Gardens while the servants crawled and hid themselves, forever toiling, leaving unwalked the paths of solitude where the King and Queen alone would stroll, whispering to one another their songs of love.

~

But too, the Gardens were a gift to the city itself.  They were surrounded by walls and spires, and many a tower balcony would be filled by the speechless nobles and merchants, who gazed in wonder down upon the King and his lovely Amytis as these two walked between the rainbows and the palms.

Such is the glory of woman, and of man.  And now?

~

And now.  Here I will tell of the Gardens in their rediscovery.

I had come, I had killed and suffered the horrors of solitude, near-death and the revelation of That Which Riseth from the tombs of the Nameless City.  By the will of Naram-gal, by the tutelage of Fatimah, the wisdom of Anata and the black mantle of the Lord in Ebon, I alone had endured.  I had come to the Hanging Gardens.  I stood and looked out upon the work of the King of Kings.

How then fared the Gardens’ majesties once I did find them?  Dust and ashes, pillars and aqueducts buried in the waste.  The Gardens had been pushed by the river into a long strand of unrecognizable ruins.  Not only had the river swallowed the Gardens whole, it had recoiled over the centuries and rejected them, creating a serpentine inlet where no plants would grow and the hollow was filled in with a flood of mud and rubble.  This mud had petrified and crumbled, parched over the years until the “entrance” into the Gardens was nothing more than a circular plain floored with broken triangles of dried mud, hiding a subterranean wilderness of silt, pillar and ruin.