THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (27 page)

And yet, one remnant of the Gardens lingered on.  I could see this, hidden by the silhouette of a mighty fragment of wall which stood at its apex thirty feet tall.  This one standing ruin was the gateway to all the rest.  The tides of mud had not shattered
all
of the Gardens’ pillars; they had dislodged many of them and pushed them upright upon a slow-moving river of silt and rubble.  These mud-strangled pillars now stood in a meandering line, grim silhouettes of hollow stone shadowed up against the radiance of the moon.

From the tales of Anata and the tablets of the sages, I knew where best to search for the secret entryway into the Way Unto Shadow.  It was said that the Gardens had been girded on every tier by these great pillars, thirty to a hundred feet high; and interconnecting these pillars were mighty aqueducts, framed by elevated walkways to either side.  Thus did Amytis and the King not only walk the stairs through all the Gardens, but too, they walk
above
them and gazed down upon them.

The surviving pillars were unfractured, but their immense height would not be known to anyone who simply beheld them where they stood.  Conquest and cataclysm, the river’s power and desert sand had all choked the Gardens into the earth, and now there was only a mound of sand and debris, from which jutted these pillared ruins some twelve feet high, like rotted teeth in a dragon’s jawbone.  And that is all.

But I alone was there to brave this particular mound of ruin, whose summit was crowned by the shattered arch of the aqueduct not even six feet off the ground.  This aqueduct, I believed, was the only foundation to the Gardens which had not been shifted by the river of mud.  If there was any chance that the secret Way Unto Shadow could still be reached, the portal into it would be there.

In searching this aqueduct’s two surviving arches, as the sun began to rise, I did find what the tablets had said might still remain:  a seal beneath four feet of sand, which opened to lead into the hollow of the pillar of itself.  This I found only by digging, and by the time I had sweated and toiled for three hours, the echoing cries of merchants and goatherds were to be heard from the ruined city’s fringe.

Around that first pillar I dug two holes.  I could find no seal, no secret entrance into the underworld.  But in digging my third hole at the base of the
second
pillar, I found a seal at last.  I laughed with exhausted relief, breaking apart the mud with the ironshod tip of my walking staff.  I pried more of the mud apart, leveraging its fractures.

The dried mud clumps crumbled as I threw them aside, and the deeper I went, the more sands began to trickle over the hole’s brim and to swallow my work.  In dread I was haunted by a memory of what had happened to me under the Nameless City.  But I would not be overcome by any fear.  Ai, I had come too far.

By digging more quickly and using some of my precious drinking water to harden the hole’s edges above my head, I was able at last to discern and then clear away the entirety of the secret seal cut into the pillar’s flank.

It was a door, tiny and caked with clay.

I carved the clay out of the seal’s border with my
jambiya
.  With the staff, I pried the seal open and a brief, stale gasp of air moaned out of the hollowed pillar’s darkness.

The tales were true!  The Way Unto Shadow certainly lay beneath me.

But my joy was short-lived, for in prying open the seal I found that the pillar’s interior was in ruin.  I could discern carved handholds, where the veiled servants had once climbed up the inside of the pillar to toil wherever there should be need for water or repair.  But now, the chute in the pillar’s hollow was choked with rubble and sand.

I dared not dig my way into it, for surely even if I cleared this secret shaft, it would spiral at least sixty feet down; and already, the sand I had dug out was crumbling my hole’s rim once more.  As I pondered, a great stone of rubble at the hole’s edge tottered and fell.  I dodged aside, but it hit my leg and gashed it.  As I cursed, the void where the falling stone had been decayed, and a torrent of sand and dried mud fell in upon me.

I lifted my hands away from the seal to protect my face.  The sand washed over me and crushed the seal closed again.  Had I kept my fingers upon its edge, my fingertips would have been crushed or shorn off entirely.

The way was shut.  The Way Unto Shadow eluded me.  I had failed.

~

That night I cauterized my wounded foot, as well as the gash in my other thigh.  I bandaged myself, and mused that the Hanging Gardens were forever lost, their secrets of love and illusion buried forever beneath my feet.

Such is the curse of ages; such is the only glory left of ancient love.

But I?  In love, I was no mere King of Kings, and Adaya no mere Queen.  I would triumph in the end.

SCROLL XLII

My Delving of the Tower of Babel

I woke in the morning, sour, hungry and dismayed.  I refilled my waterskins with the questionable waters of the river itself, straining what I could of the straw and grit and algae.  I was running out of supplies, and the legacy of the Undervaults would soon be haunting me.

I was hunted.

Surely the many bloodstains left there in the chambers beneath the mosque had already caused a furor of alarm in the other soldiers; their first cries would tell much, however they kept their silence; and rumors would fly to the Babylonian peasants and merchants themselves.  The soldiers had feared to venture beneath the mosque at night, but in daylight even such men may—in numbers—find and take heart in their own collective semblance of bravery.

All
of the mercenary soldiers would now be on alert.  Where were the bodies of Omuz, Tashet, Akhri and all the rest?  Whose last tethered camel had been found lashed and panicked outside the gate, and why had so much spice and gold been left unattended in its packs?

I
knew, of course; but I wondered how many other soldiers there were outside the ruins, and whether any of the “blind” peasants who had been too afraid to acknowledge me that night would still hold their tongues to silence.  Should those peasants be threatened and questioned by the soldiers, they likely would be tortured and forced to tell all.  The bravest of the mercenaries, however few, surely would already be searching for me.

Would any of those horrified soldiers, searching for the “murderers” who had committed the baffling crimes beneath the Mosque of the Undervaults, dare to venture forth into the central ruins of Babylon?  And if any men
were
to come there, what would they think of a wounded madman hiding asleep in the thickets which crown the ruined Palace of Nebuchadnezzar itself?

I could kill many, if I must.  But I could not kill them all.

And this time, there would be no Ghuls to save me.  Naram-gal and his kith would have returned to the desert, their need for secrecy greater than their love for me.  Such was the creed of the Cabal.

I was running out of time.

~

I waited until long after midnight, keeping vigil and hiding myself and tending to my wounds.  I saw one patrol of seven soldiers, struggling through the swamps between the river and the palace.  But one of their number was stung by scorpions, and the others who watched him die in an anguished fever had seen enough.  They bundled their companion in two cloaks, and with much toil and despairing cries and curses, they crossed the river and then fled back toward the mosque.  I never did see them again.

Songs then rose in the distance, a caravan coming into Babylon’s eastern fringe.  But that was all.  I tended my wounds, I waited.  Night came.

~

And after
that
midnight, I ventured out from the thickets.  I had failed at the Hanging Gardens.  I would not fail again.

My second search would be for the ruined ziggurat itself, for that is where the second entry into the depths of the temple was said to lie.  As has been told, the Tower is properly called in the lost tongue
Etemenanki
, “of Heaven and of Earth”; but it was known to fable as the Tower of Babel.  It was a mighty ziggurat, built higher than wide. 
(Here Al-Azrad tells once again some little of the Tower’s legends, but his details differ slightly. It is likely that this section of the scroll was rewritten in later years~K.)
  Its summit had been crafted of far more fragile stones, pearlescent marble and alabaster, a wonder of delicate pillars where a sun-shrine was raised upon its height; but
that
shrine was lost in a great sandstorm in elder centuries.  And too, the shifting of the river did swallow the base of the Tower hundreds of years thereafter, crumbling and tilting its foundation and causing the entirety to be shot through with fissures in the baking sun of the ages.

It was again Nebuchadnezzar, the lover of Amytis, who was wealthy and mighty enough to seek to rebuild the lost Tower itself.  And thirteen hundred years before my birth, he did so.  He was driven in this endeavor not only by his love for his Queen, but in worship, and in this too I did empathize with the King of Kings.  For he was in truth the beguiled servitor of Nyarlathotep, and he had been promised by the Lord in Ebon that if he were to worship in the temple deeps and bring all of the ancient tablets of his treasuries hence, and read of them in the temple depths, immortality would come to him and his bride.

And Nebuchadnezzar did learn from these tablets that the Temple of Etemenanki was built where it was for one great reason:  it covered a great fissure of oracular gases, and in its core there loomed an ancient and crumbling shrine, beneath which the fissure itself loomed inside the earth:  the oracle.  This shrine, which I have never found, was restored by the King’s favorites.  It is said that once the shrine was repaired and the tablets all brought forth, Nebuchadnezzar’s slaves who labored there were all slaughtered by the King’s guards.  Then the guards were in turn murdered by a royal executioner; and the executioner was strangled by the King himself.  Therefore, the secret of the inner shrine was known only to him, and to Queen Amytis, and to the thirteen priests of shadow which he selected from amongst the wise men of Babel to worship there.

The Lord in Ebon himself reveled there and was pleased, and the rites were spoken.  What did the Queen believe of all this horrid sacrifice?  Was she so in love with her King and the idea of their immortality that she too worshipped there in adoration?  Was she drugged with arcane spice and made to lie there in slumber, as her soul journeyed through the Empire of the Blackened Mind?  There are many whispered tales; I do not know.  But the Lord himself has shown me in a vision what the fissure itself had held:

The oracular chasm was home to an un-god, a Thing which licked the blood of slaves from the fissure’s walls and reveled then in the slaughter and the songs sung by the shadow priests.

And so did crawl up from the deeps the Fluting One, that horrid Thing which Nebuchadnezzar and his shadow priests did worship in the name of Nyarlathotep.  The Fluting One was primordial and wise.  It spoke with its terrible mind of many things.  In reverence, Nebuchadnezzar knelt before it and the Lord in Ebon was pleased.  Nyarlathotep did come, and did promise the King that if the Fluting One were to be fed the blood of another thousand-and-one slaves, the un-god would grant the King and his consort immortality.

The price would be dear, and madness would wrack the mortal leavings of King and Queen; but what greater gift than eternity can a mortal ever desire?

~

So it was that ever more wild orgies of slaughter took place beneath the temple’s core.  And when the time came when the King himself was feeble and near to death, the Fluting One did demand its final sacrifice. The Ebon Man came one last time.  The Codex was opened unto the King of Kings.  Nebuchadnezzar the triumphant, the Seizer of Fate in Victory, cast his soul-name into the Blackened Codex of Azathoth.  It is told that he and his consort thus ascended in their essence and did become the exalted Ancient Ones, honored among those sacred few who stand forever in the Endless Hall beyond the Great Gate of Yog-Sothoth.  There in immortal love, the King and Queen wait for the End of Days and their final revelation.

So it is written in the tombs in the necropolis of Saqqara, near to Lacus Moeris, where the Ghul Hetshepsu reigns over his blind kingdom under Khom.

~

There is more to tell.

Once the King and Queen ascended in apotheosis into the Endless Hall, the Fluting One crawled back into the deeps.  When the Tower of Babel crumbled, the oracular fissure was sealed.  Over the centuries, the glory of Babylon itself fell forever.  The Temple of Etemenanki again decayed, teethed away by river and sandstorm and the incessant cruelties of Time.

As had been the fate of the Hanging Gardens, so the fate of the Tower:  a great flood silted and crumbled the southwest corner of its base.  The entirety of the structure began to erode, and in Babylon’s own crumbling, the Tower fell prey to dune and silt as the river ebbed and flowed.  But the shrine beneath its core remains untouched, though nearly gnawed away.

When Babylon the city-heart had ceased to bleed, when the Kingdom of Babilu at last lay dying, and the shadow priests perished one by one, their corpses were honored with a final grace.  Each corpse of those blasphemers had liquid gold poured down its throat, and the mouth sewn shut forever.  These corpses were sealed each to a secret tomb beneath the temple, very near to the shrine itself.

~

Many have heard the legends, and the echoes thereof, which tell us that the architecture of the tower was not Babylonian in nature, but rather inspired elsewhere.  Be it known that the outside of the tower was a labyrinth of arches and of stairs.  This detail of its structural beauty, seemingly irrelevant, is the secret which brought me to discover the Tower’s core.

The foreign architectural faces of the Tower were merely a facade, only a few feet deep.  This layer of marble archways covered a massive core made of fired bricks and massive stones.  Poorly anchored—for the marble, when drilled through with support rods, did grow frail—this facade was destined to fall away.  Much of this facade was torn away by flood, and an earthquake ravaged all the rest.  Thus was the Tower of Babel in ruin laid bare as a gigantic black monolith, an unadorned pyramid of stony shadow.