The city was in ruins.
The city’s name was unknown.
The city was a tad mysterious.
As far as could be ascertained, the city had once been a great conurbation, renowned far and wide for the strength of its commerce, the creativity of its artists, the skill of its artisans and the depths of its depravities. In its hubris, however, its collective wisdom had been insufficient to stop it angering something or somebody.
Probably a god.
Probably Nyarlothotep.
Cabal had paused when he saw this, closed his eyes for a long moment, breathed heavily, then returned to his reading.
The somebody or something had sent a monster or, if it really had been Nyarlothotep, assumed the form of one of his larger and more antagonistic avatars. Beneath a red and gibbous moon, doom had crawled from the lake and crept through the city, entering every home and every hostel, every bed and every cradle. By dawn, the city was dead and empty, with not a person or animal left in the place. A merchant caravan that had left the day before and had returned after a night of vile portents was the first to discover the horror.
It was not the first time such a fate had befallen a city in the Dreamlands – Cabal noted that the tale was very similar to the infamous fate of Sarnath – but this event seemed to predate even that. The lesson seemed to be twofold: do not anger the gods, but if you must, at least make sure your city isn’t next to a lake, as that’s just asking for trouble.
The lake looked, if anything, more forbidding than it had the previous evening. The sun was barely above the horizon, so was too low to cast its light directly upon the waves that jagged across the surface to lap at the banks. It left the waters themselves dark and unknowable, doing little for the approaching men’s mood. The Lake of Yath was huge, only the distant hills and mountains giving any indication that it was not a sea, and its depths could only be guessed at.
‘The hermit moved here only about three years ago,’ said Corde, repeating a briefing he had already given before they had left Baharna and again the previous night as they ate. ‘He is believed to reside in a temple on a hilltop in the most regal canton. Presumably some aspect of the temple, its construction or perhaps its significance, keeps creatures like the wamps at bay. That would be useful to discover straight away, as it would give us a secure camp overnight. Failing that, we must be out and clear of the city by dusk.’ He looked at Holk, the image of exposed ribs covered only with scarred pink skin evidently large in his mind. ‘That is imperative, for all our sakes.’
The city walls were still standing in long stretches, but breaches were common and large. They found a tumbled gatehouse with the remains of a tariff-taker’s house outside and hitched their zebras’ reins to a dead tamarind tree that grew by the ruin. Then, heavy with misgivings, they picked their way over the rubble and entered the nameless city.
Cabal had wandered around a few ruined villages and towns in his time, but this was the first city he had entered that still looked anything like a city. Nature reclaims quickly, especially when there is sufficient water to support significant plant growth. Oriab was a temperate island, with no shortage of fresh water, yet the city seemed in remarkably good condition. Scrubby grass grew in patches by the roadsides, ivy tangled the statues, bushes grew at cornices, and some buildings even had trees thrusting up through shattered walls, but it all seemed very mannered and controlled to Cabal’s eye, as if it were the work of an artist portraying an abandoned city rather than the natural actions of time.
‘Sergeant,’ Cabal addressed Holk. He spoke quietly: the city pressed tightly upon the nerves and there was a sense that speaking loudly or even normally might somehow awaken the place. ‘How long ago was this city abandoned?’
Holk did not answer for a moment as he adjusted the buckler strapped to his left forearm. ‘Centuries ago, Master Cabal. Perhaps millennia.’ He drew his sword – his men already had theirs in hand – and scanned the rooftops for movement.
‘Impossible,’ Cabal said. He turned to Shadrach, Bose and Corde. ‘This place would be a forest in less than two hundred years.’
‘On Earth, Cabal,’ said Corde.
‘Yes,’ admitted Cabal. The way this place failed to behave scientifically never ceased to irritate him. ‘On Earth.’
The city clustered up the hillside above the lake. On their approach, they had seen the remains of the docks and the simple housing that huddled near them. It seemed likely that the ‘most regal canton’, in Shadrach’s phrase, would be at the top of the hill, and this area they therefore headed towards as quickly as they dared. They discovered a great city square and followed a broad road that led straight up the hill from there. Holk made a point of keeping the party in the middle of the road: if there had been any risk of coming under arrow or quarrel fire, he would have used cover, but as the primary concern was wamps, some dead ground between them and any potential ambush places could give them vital seconds. At least they had light: there was barely a cloud in the sky, and the sun made the pale volcanic stone of the buildings gleam.
They had been on the road for only a minute or two when Cabal saw the skull. He signalled the sergeant to form a perimeter while he examined it.
‘It’s a city of the dead,’ muttered Corde. ‘A skull is hardly a surprise.’
‘You forget the story, Herr Corde,’ said Cabal, not paying him much attention as he crouched by the skull and examined it cautiously. ‘Whatever happened to the citizens of this place ultimately, the point is that they all vanished from the city beforehand. Besides, this skull is evidently not human.’ He pushed it over with the tip of a stick and examined the jaw. ‘It is similar to a bat skull, but obviously much larger. The orbits are atrophied. This creature had no eyes.’
‘A wamp!’ gasped Bose.
‘Well, of course it’s a wamp. Why do you think I’m not touching it directly? What intrigues me is how it died. The skull is broken.’
‘It’s how they breed,’ said Holk. ‘They can burst out of the skull of anything that’s dead in an abandoned place like this. If the skull’s big enough to house a new wamp – and a human skull works fine – they just grow in there and smash their way out when they’re ripe. They can grow in adult wamp skulls, too. They’re not fussy.’
‘They lay eggs in skulls? I’m confused,’ said Shadrach. ‘How exactly do they reproduce?’
‘They don’t,’ said Cabal. ‘Spontaneous generation. It doesn’t happen on Earth but, as has been made apparent to me on many occasions so far, this is not Earth. An abandoned place of foul repute and a large corpse. That’s all you need for a wamp infestation. However,’ he tapped the broken side of the skull with the stick, ‘this skull has not been burst from the inside. It has been smashed from the outside. Nor is the damage directly over the brainpan. The fact that there is no skeleton or bones around is also significant. This wamp was killed with great violence, and the skull damaged in such a way as to prevent a new wamp forming in it.’ He straightened up and looked around, throwing the potentially contaminated stick into an overgrown garden as he did so. ‘We must consider the possibility that wamps are not the main threat here. There may be something or things here that efficiently hunt wamps and that are, in all likelihood, not going to want to be our friends.’
Three hundred yards further up the hill they found a more complete skeleton, albeit one that somebody had played ‘She loves me, she loves me not’ with. Cabal stood by one of the skeletonised legs while the others located others, around the roadsides. None was closer than three yards to its nearest neighbour. ‘These limbs were torn off and thrown away when they still had flesh upon them,’ said Cabal. ‘See? The bones lie close to one another as they did in life.’ He walked over to the torso and skull in the middle of the avenue. The skull had been crushed in the same way as the previous example. ‘This creature was torn limb from limb while it was alive. So, we can conclude that whatever killed it was very powerful physically, and entirely undaunted by the diseases wamps carry.’