In 'Ygiroth

This story was accepted by August Derleth for The Arkham Collector, a news booklet thatArkham House used to put out, that also included short stories and poems by promisingnew writers. Unfortunately, Derleth passed away a few days later. The story lay in limbofor several years, and Walt offered to buy it back from Arkham House. They declined,however, and it was eventually published in Nameless Places. It was then reprinted in LinCarter's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 2 and later translated into German, Italian andRussian.

Derleth had asked Walt to add a few more words to this story to connect it more closelywith the Cthulhu Mythos, but it more properly belongs to the fantasy world of theDreamlands. The reference to "the Thing in the Yellow Mask", however, may be Walt'sunique version of the High Priest of Leng, also known as the Elder Hierophant and theTcho-Tcho Lama, who dwells in a monastery at the foot of the Pharos (a lighthouse) onthe Plateau of Leng.

In 'Ygiroth, where once the vileAnd hairy things that passed for menIn long forgotten elder timesDid strut in arrogance and bowTo nameless things from outer spheres,Now only baneful shadows crawlIn 'Ygiroth.

High above him rose the city, deep in a shadowed cleft where the gentle lowerslopes of Lerion ended and the jagged, slender spire of her uttermost peak began itslong thrust into the hazy sky of Dreamland. Unpeopled and dreaming it had lainthrough the slow centuries of solitude and decay, and until now no man had come toseek out its dark secrets. Only he, Nylron the Acolyte, had dared follow the sparklingriver Skai north to its headwaters in the high valley of Mynanthra between Lerion andcraggy Dlareth and then travel the rock-strewn meadows on Lerion's northernshoulder around and upward to where brooding 'Ygiroth slumbered. He tilted thefurred brim of his hat to shade his eyes from the setting sun and urged the wiry Bnazicpony on toward the low outer wall.

No one knew where the men of 'Ygiroth had come from or when they came,for the green shadows of Mynanthra had already flickered with their furtive stalkingand echoed to their eerie hunting cries when Nylron's ancestors had come from theeast forty centuries ago to settle the fertile valley of the Skai and build Ulthar and Nirand Hatheg. Those sturdy tribesmen had instinctively disliked the men of 'Ygiroth,finding them a little too short, a little too hairy, and a little too silent as they creptthrough the forests. Perhaps if their brow ridges had not jutted so far forward, givingthem an unpleasantly beady-eyed look, or if they had cooked the flesh of thebuopoth before dining, the men of the Skai valley might have sought peacefulintercourse with them but as it was, none but a few adventurers of dubious reputehad ever bothered to learn their coarse whispering language. It was from these ill-regarded and invariably ill-fated individuals that such scraps of lore as were knownto the men of the Skai had come.

Not clever were the men of 'Ygiroth, and their stone spears and necklaces ofwolves' teeth seemed ludicrously backward to the intelligent and inventive men of theSkai. Very arrogant they were about their skill in hunting the gentle buopoth, thoughmost of their success came from the use of the half-tame kyresh as both hound andsteed. This morbid relic of an older time, long extinct in other parts of Dreamland, hada basically equine body which could be ridden by the more intrepid chieftains, a longblood-hound muzzle which could scent prey at great distances, and enormous clawswhich, together with a mouth full of great irregular fangs, did much more damage inthe hunt than the crude spearheads. It did not seem to bother the 'Ygirothians that thevicious and excitable brutes took as great a toll among the hunters as of the hunted —if the hunt succeeded it left fewer to divide the spoils; if it failed, fallen comrades wouldnot be wasted by the hungry.

Even the domestication of this treacherous monstrosity had been beyond theabilities of the 'Ygirothians themselves. They had been taught and aided by a moreformidable and sinister being. Their notion of time was so vague that they could notsay whether it was ten or ten thousand centuries since the Thing in the Yellow Maskhad come to them and taught them to make spears and ride the kyresh and eat fresh-killed meat. And when asked what the Thing demanded in return, they smirked evillyand made crude evasions.

It was the Thing which had made them build 'Ygiroth to honor It and Its unseenbrothers, eldritch abnormalities from outer spheres of time and space whose ineffableforms and non-forms could never have been made tolerable to men by any amount ofyellow silk or hypnotic incense. It had taught them to place stone upon stone in a

remote cleft on Lerion which had been a place of outer evil before men existed, and Ithad directed the labors of countless terrified generations until the inept beast-men hadcompleted a citadel of horror unmatched in Dreamland (for grim Kadath is not trulycontiguous with any space men know or dream of).

Only one man of the Skai had ever been within the walls of 'Ygiroth andreturned, and Lothran the Necromancer had said little that could be understood. Hehad reached Ulthar at sunset, raving hysterically of formless horrors from which hefled, horrors which he refused to name. He had been quieted with a strong dose ofpoppy gum and left to rest in an upper room of the inn, but in the morning whenthe elders of Ulthar entered the room in hopes of a more coherent revelation, theyfound nothing but an open window and a stench of carrion, of lightning and ofsinged flesh. Nothing, that is, unless one credits the tale whispered by foolishgossips, that old Atal found one of Lothran's boots behind the bed, and that theboot was not empty.

The men of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg would have been content to leavesuch unpleasant neighbors alone in their high valley were it not for thedisappearance of several of their young maidens each Walpurgis and Yule and ofplump specimens of both sexes at odd times throughout the year. The people alongthe Skai were quick to connect the former with strange lights and drumming in thedistant hills and the latter with the footprints in their gardens of short, broad-footedmen. Thus from the earliest times small bands of brave men had set out to destroy'Ygiroth and its inhabitants. Each time, as they approached the shadowy forests ofMynanthra, heavy clouds would gather and they would find themselves ringed withmany-colored bolts of lightning. Most turned back at this point; but the survivors

among those who did not told of discordant music heard beneath the howling andlaughter of the unseen men of 'Ygiroth, of charnel vapors and a distant form drapedin yellow silk. Few indeed lived to tell of the sentient whirlwinds that keened andrushed through the murky glades and set upon men like unseen hounds, rendingand mangling body and soul.

It was in the reign of King Pnil of Ulthar that the warriors of the Skai hadchallenged 'Ygiroth for the last time. Every able-bodied man had marched, armed thistime with charms and spells of the Elder Ones as well as tools of war. No resistancewas met, although the vanguard heard padding feet retreating through Mynanthra andfollowed fresh claw-marks of the kyresh right up to the gates of the city. Arriving atsunset and not wanting to assault the unknown defenses in the dark, they campedbefore the walls.

No warrior of the Skai-lands slept during that long night of suspense andbrooding menace, none could forget the night-long crescendo of asymmetric rhythmson drums of stretched hide and hollowed bone or the jeering and insinuating voicesfrom the dark crowing of the incomprehensible horror to be unleashed at dawn. Asthe first saffron rays struck the spire of Lerion silence fell with the force of thunder.For an interminable moment no one breathed, no eye moved from the still shadowedwalls of 'Ygiroth. Then began that hideous silent exodus which haunts the legends andfireside tales of Ulthar.

As the first of the men of 'Ygiroth came scrambling over the walls and the gateswere flung wide to let out dozens, then hundreds and thousands, all running straightfor the ranks of the Skai, it was taken to be a charge, an attempt to overwhelm thebesieging forces. But men wondered why they ran in silence, and as the first of themdrew near it was seen that they were unarmed. Then as they rushed heedless ontothe waiting spears men at last saw their mad, mindless eyes and knew that a terrorbeyond knowledge or nightmare had come to Ygiroth, and that 'Ygiroth was doomed.

When the last beast-man lay crumpled on the gory meadow, the warriors ofUlthar departed in awe, not daring to enter the city and raze it. Since then no man hadventured there, and were it not for the whispers of Lothran the Necromancer perhapsnone ever would. But before he vanished Lothran had whispered certain things to thehigh priest Atal, and in his old age Atal had tried to banish these things from hisdreams by writing them down on parchment. Too cleverly he had hidden thatparchment, and the priests of Nodens had been unable to find and destroy it despitehis incoherent deathbed pleas. And now Nylron the Acolyte had found it and had readthings which should never be written down.

Among less mentionable things Nylron had read of the evil secrets taught bythe Thing in the Yellow Mask to the priests of 'Ygiroth, secrets they had neither thewits nor the courage to exploit, secrets which could have made them masters of allDreamland and perhaps even of the waking world. They had merely carved them onthe walls of the labyrinth beneath their temple in the foul Aklo tongue taught them bythe Thing. Unfortunately for Nylron, he was a true scholar of this primordial language,and not without ambition.

The journey had taken him four days; the first along the fertile banks theSkai, whose shady fringe of willows bade him rest and delay; the second throughgradually rising hills where spring wild flowers questioned the value of ambition; the

third in dark and cool Mynanthra, where a silent buopoth warned that time maystand still; and the fourth up stony mountain paths where the sky grew inhospitable.As he entered the city black clouds were rolling in from the north and the sun lostsight of Lerion.

He found the city surprisingly well preserved. Few of the buildings hadcollapsed, the tread of time being shown more subtly by cracked stone, precariouslyleaning walls and an occasional fallen roof. Only twice were the narrow, tortuousstreets blocked with rubble, forcing him to detour through even narrower alleys. Hethought of certain rumored corpses, in which decay is said to be unnaturally slow andcircumspect. The great beehive-shaped temple was on a high ledge at the rear of cityand by the time he had threaded the convoluted streets up to the broad plaza in frontof it the first heavy raindrops had splattered on the pavement. He paused only amoment to wonder how the vast dome had survived the centuries of mountain stormsand led the pony up the gentle ramp through the only opening, a tall narrow trapezoidtopped by a small capstone.

It was quite dark inside, but he kindled a resinous torch and soon saw that thetemple was one enormous chamber, cluttered with a gloomy forest of pentagonalcolumns. At first he saw in them no geometrical arrangement at all, but gradually heperceived an odd asymmetrical regularity which he found disturbing to contemplate.He could barely make out seven large statues of kyresh spaced along the circularwall, some blindfolded, others with staring eyes and open jaws. There was a peculiarsour smell in the air and each step echoed from the dome above. The only naturalaisle among the columns led straight back to be rear of the temple and Nylron led thehorse, skittish now from the approaching storm, as far as a small stone post ofindeterminate purpose. Tethering the horse to the post and removing the heavy pack,he proceeded down the aisle to what appeared to be the main altar. It was a wideirregular heptagon surmounted by a statue of a robed and hooded figure holding aspear in one band and a small figure of a buopoth in the other. Before the statue layan oval opening and, climbing up on the altar stone, he found stone steps leadingdownward into the living rock of Lerion.

Downward be went in a huge spiral, circling until he had lost all sense ofdirection. At last the stairs ended and he found himself in an intricate labyrinth ofnarrow passageways whose moss-grown walls sloped inward at the top, occasionallyopening into substantial low-ceilinged rooms partitioned with arcades of trapezoidalarches. To be certain of finding his way out again Nylron turned always to the rightand found himself again spiraling, this time inward.

In the center of the labyrinth was a room almost as large as the temple aboveand arranged similarly with seven kyresh and a central altar. Before the statue on thealtar was a large flat stone, suggesting a covered opening. But what arrested Nylron'sattention was the circular wall of the room, for it was completely covered with aninscription in the Aklo tongue.

The uncouth characters of brutish scribes were not easy to read, but Nylroncould follow most of them and knew that the rest would yield to patient scholarship inthe archives of Ulthar. He read of the feeble gods of earth and how they can bemanipulated. He read of the Other Gods who once ruled and shall rule again, ofAzathoth, the centripetal impetus of all cosmic chaos, of Yog-Sothoth, the all-

pervasive horror which lurks in the inner spheres of existence, of Nyarlathotep, whosometimes shrouds his form in yellow silk and sometimes in mind-blurring illusion.He read of the rewards for their chosen instruments, and hints of what might befallthose instruments which failed. And finally he read a terrible passage, carved inimmaculate calligraphy on an iridescent plaque harder than Nylron's garnet ring,which told of the joke played by Nyarlathotep on his minions when they summonedhim and he declined to come. For he had sent instead his half-brother and otherface, a ravenous and by no means sane entity which could radiate intolerable horrorlike a poisonous vapor.

As he finished this vile postlogue his torch began to flicker wildly and he sawthat it had nearly burned out. He thought of the difficult way back through thelabyrinth and shuddered. His composure did not improve when, passing the altar, hesaw the symbol carved on the flat covering stone and noted the recent disturbanceof the moss around it.

The way back proveddisconcertingly difficult. At times healmost believed that the arcades andpassages had been shifted since his tripinward. Faster and faster he went,frantically exploring multiple branches anddead ends. The padding echoes of hissoft-soled boots seemed to conceal morestealthy footsteps and a distant grating ofstone on stone. Once he could havesworn he caught a glimpse of yellow silkdisappearing into a trapezoidal archway.He found the entrance to the upwardspiral just as the torch winked out.

He calmed down somewhat in thespiral shaft and made his way rapidlyupward by feeling along the left-handwall. Total lack of sight raised his othersenses to an acute pitch and he couldplainly hear the stamping of the horseafter each burst of thunder. As he nearedthe top he could hear the rain itself andfeel the dampness in the air. Emerginginto the inky blackness of the temple bewas unpleasantly aware that the moisturehad brought out the odd sour smell muchmore strongly. He felt his way to theedge of the altar, climbed down, thenmoved out blindly toward the shufflingand stamping of the horse. He almosttripped over the pack and his reflexivelyoutstretched band touched the smooth

hair of the pony's flank. He was patting and stroking it reassuringly when he heard thesound, so incongruous that he took a full second to identify it as the frantic whinny ofhis horse. What made it incongruous was the fact that it came from outside thetemple. At that instant a lightning flash lit up the doorway, silhouetting the gaping jawsof the kyresh and the masked monster that held its reins. He felt its hot fetid breathjust before the teeth closed on his head.

Outside in the rain and the dark the horse's hooves clattered madly awaythrough the dead streets of 'Ygiroth.