Swords v. Cthulhu

Two Suns over Zululand Ben Stewart

“You are certain that the item we seek is in the midst of that?” asked Lwazi. He and his companions — four fellow warriors and Mandlenkosi the Sangoma, resplendent in his headdress of feathers and bones — looked down at the swirling chaos that surrounded Rorke’s Drift from their vantage point atop a nearby hill. The British had erected makeshift barriers around the station’s few buildings using crates and mealie bags, and the fighting around those bulwarks was savage. Shot after shot spat from the defenders’ rifles, cutting down charging men by the dozen, and yet the Zulu attack did not falter. Each fallen warrior was replaced by two more rushing forward to add their spears to the assault.

“The Englishman is in there, of that I am certain,” replied Mandlenkosi. The little Sangoma shook his staff, causing the bird skulls tied along its length to rattle, and pawed at the ground with his bare feet as he hopped in a small circle. He tasted the air a few times with his tongue, and then nodded in satisfaction. “No doubt about it. The man called Rafferty is in there, and the idol of H’aaztre is in his possession.”

Lwazi crouched down on his haunches and thought carefully for a moment. In doing so, the towering Zulu — who was the best part of a head taller than the largest of the other four warriors — brought himself almost to eye level with the diminutive witch doctor.

“It would seem wisest to wait until the battle is done before trying to root him out,” he ventured, but Mandlenkosi shook his feathered head.

“No, Lwazi. The idol has already been away from the Cave of Spirits for too long. The birds of the sky tell me that three days have passed since Rafferty arrived at this place. The Sangoma of the nearest kraal, who knew Rafferty from when the white man prospected for gold nearby, says he passed their huts four days ago. Given the distance to the cave, I fear as many as six days have passed since he found the idol — H’aaztre will have noticed, and H’aaztre will have spoken to him, Lwazi. We cannot risk waiting any longer.”

Lwazi stood to his full, impressive height again. He was already dressed for war, clad only in a loincloth with no ornamentation adorning his muscular frame. His fellow warriors were likewise ready for action — their spear-blades were freshly sharpened, and their faces betrayed no fear at the thought of the task that faced them.

“So be it,” said Lwazi. “We shall return with the idol within the hour. We will not fail you, Mandlenkosi.”

“See that you don’t, Lwazi — of all the horrors you have faced for me in the past, this is truly the greatest. If you do not retrieve the statue, then the death and destruction of King Cetshwayo’s war with the British will be as insignificant as the bite of a horsefly. If the two suns rise over Zululand, then there is no hope for our people... or any other people of this world. Go now, and may the Amatongo guide your hand.”

“Usuthu!”

Bellowing the feared Zulu battle cry, Lwazi and his hand-picked warriors charged through the gun smoke and over the bodies of their fallen brothers toward the British defenses. Running barefoot so as to be unhindered by clumsy footwear, they covered the distance at a remarkable speed. They had chosen to disregard their traditional shields to further improve their pace — the bulky oval frames of wood and ox-hide would have been an unnecessary burden, and besides, they were little use against the bullets that buzzed about their ears. Each man carried only his iklwa, a short, stabbing spear named after the sucking noise the blade made when pulled from a foe’s flesh, and a stout knobkerrie club in his belt.

Their destination was the hospital block, the nearest wall of which formed part of the station’s western defenses. According to Mandlenkosi’s mystical intelligence, Rafferty had arrived at Rorke’s Drift dehydrated and ranting three days earlier, so it seemed reasonable that he would have been accommodated in the hospital. Fortunately for the Zulus, the volume of British fire from that quarter had lessened as they approached — most of the rifles had been withdrawn from the loopholes knocked into the building walls, and defenders were falling back to reinforce other parts of the barricade. Noting the behavior of the British, and the black smoke that was starting to rise from the hospital roof, Lwazi urged his men to quicken their pace.

“The hospital is ablaze!” he yelled over the gunfire. “If they evacuate that building, our quarry is lost!” The warriors redoubled their efforts, sprinting to the utmost of their capabilities. Lwazi was only a young man, much younger than those that followed him — some of whom even wore the umqhele headband woven into their hair to signify they had earned the right to take a wife — but still they followed the young giant without question. Not only did they hold the utmost respect for his remarkable martial prowess, they knew that when it came to the dark ways of the Sangoma, it was Lwazi that was the true veteran, given his history of serving the mysterious Mandlenkosi.

Lwazi was the first man to the barricade and he flew over the stacked mealie bags like a leaping springbok. The British had almost completed the retreat to their second line, but two red-coated white men still remained in the area behind the barrier, and both raised their rifles to their shoulders at the sight of the towering Zulu. One managed to discharge his weapon and the ball flew past Lwazi’s head, so close that he heard it sing as it sliced through the air. Phumlani, the second man to the barrier, was not so fortunate, and died instantly when the round took him squarely in the chest as he mounted the wall of burlap sacks.

Thanks to his lengthy stride, Lwazi covered the twenty yards to the shooter before the Englishman could consider reloading or employing his bayonet, and with a cry of “Usuthu!” the Zulu plunged his iklwa into the man’s chest. The second white man abandoned his attempts to clear the jammed round from his rifle breech and lunged forward with his bayonet. Lwazi grabbed the barrel of the rifle with one powerful hand and yanked the man off balance. The unfortunate soldier died swiftly from a single spear-thrust into his exposed throat. Lwazi felt no pleasure at killing the Englishmen — they may have been at war with his people, but they were not his true enemies. His real nemesis in this battle was altogether a far more complicated and dangerous foe than the military might of the British army.

The four remaining Zulus wasted no time in mourning their fallen companion but went directly into the building in which they hoped to find the man known as Rafferty. On entering the hospital they were met with thick clouds of black smoke.

“We must be quick,” called Lwazi. “Check each room — if he is here, we must find him.”

The first few rooms contained little but empty beds and burning sheets — the building looked completely abandoned. Lwazi offered a silent prayer to his ancestors that they had not arrived too late — if Rafferty had escaped them, the consequences would be unthinkable. But Lwazi’s prayer was answered when Sizwe, the oldest man among them, cried out that he had found something.

The other Zulus raced to Sizwe’s side. The room in which the gray-haired veteran stood was as yet untouched by the spreading fire, but black smoke still hung heavy in the air.

“There, Lwazi,” said Sizwe, pointing with his iklwa at a wooden linen cupboard in the corner of the room. “Something moved in that box — I heard it banging around.”

Lwazi threw the cupboard door open — huddled among the sheets and pillows was a small, thin white man with prematurely graying hair and the tanned skin of an Englishman who had spent a decent span in the African sun. The man was naked, and sat shivering and twitching in a tight ball, but Lwazi doubted he was cold or struck by the poison of the mosquito. More likely his ague was related to what he clutched to his chest.

The idol was only a small thing, less than a foot tall, and fashioned from a dark hardwood. The carving depicted a roughly humanoid shape, though it was difficult to tell if its indistinct outline was due to the skill of the craftsman or because the figure was intended to be appear swathed in heavy robes or a hooded cloak. The idol’s left arm was extended forward, and its outstretched hand held a small tube about two inches long, carved from some kind of bone, decorated with an intricate pattern of swirling lines carved into its surface. Upon seeing the effigy, Lwazi took an involuntary step backward — he had found the dread idol of H’aaztre, and the terrible stories that Mandlenkosi had told him of that foul object were more frightening than a whole regiment of British riflemen.

Lwazi quickly marshaled his courage and pointed his spear at the naked man.

“You are the man called Rafferty, yes?” he asked, using the English he had learned as a child from the missionaries. The shaking man did not answer, but his eyes flicked up to Lwazi, as if noticing him for the first time. Those eyes were wide and filled with terror. Sizwe stepped forward to seize the statue, but Lwazi halted him with a gesture.

“Careful, Sizwe… we don’t know what foul curses that thing has worked on him,” he said in Zulu. “If he feels threatened, he could react in unpredictable ways.” Switching to English, Lwazi turned back to Rafferty. “Give me the idol, friend. I have heard talk of you from the people of the kraals you visited over the years, and I know you are a good man who always dealt fairly with the Zulu. Our nations may be at war, but we need not be. Give it to me and we shall leave you in peace.”

“I only came looking for gold,” whimpered Rafferty in a faltering voice. “I was mining for metal, but the charges blasted into that cave… it spoke to me, you see… it made me take it…”

“Hand it to me and we shall take it away,” replied Lwazi. He tried to keep his tone friendly and calm, but he was all too aware of the battle that raged around them and the rapidly spreading fire that would soon consume the building. “Then you shall be free of it, yes?”

“Oh no… I can’t. It won’t let me, you see? It whispers to me all the time, and I can’t block it out… it has shown me such sights… I have seen the terrible emptiness, the black chasms between the uncaring stars… I have seen the great lake… it tells me the Byakhee are on their way to take me there… I shall see the city with my own eyes… ”

Rafferty trailed off and broke into fits of ragged, body-racking sobs. He screwed his eyes shut and tears flowed freely down his cheeks.

“The man’s mind is broken,” muttered Sizwe in Zulu, and Lwazi was inclined to agree. Deciding that no amount of cajoling would convince Rafferty to hand over the artifact, he cautiously reached out to take it from the Englishman’s trembling arms.

The instant Lwazi’s fingers brushed the idol, Rafferty wrenched it away, twisting his body to hide it from the Zulu’s grasp. His head snapped upright and his abject weeping abruptly halted. Moments earlier, Rafferty’s eyes had been pits of despair — now they were nothing even remotely human, transformed into two bright yellow orbs, like chunks of amber.

“By his Sign shall you know him!” he screamed, his voice reverberating unnaturally around the small room. “The Feaster from Afar wishes to receive me! The heralds come to transport me to the Nameless One’s majestic presence! Iä! Iä! Hastur n’ah Hali! Ygnaiih, thflfthkh’ngha! Iä Yogge-Sothothe!”

The inhuman syllables that tumbled from Rafferty’s mouth were accompanied by an earsplitting whistle that emanated from the bone tube clasped in the effigy’s hand, as if it were being blown by unseen lips.

Lwazi’s spear tumbled from his grasp. He was forced to clap his hands over his ears to try and block out both the piercing whistle that drove into his brain like an iron spike and Rafferty’s chanting, the strange words making his skin crawl and stomach churn.

“Yogge-Sothothe y’bthnk! N’grkdl’ly eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah! Iä! Sh’tak erklos!”

His warriors were similarly affected. Two fell to their knees under the terrible onslaught, and Sizwe stumbled into a bed and was sent sprawling to the floor… but the floor he landed on was not the smooth wooden planks of the hospital, but gray stone covered with a thin layer of fine black sand. All about them the room shifted and faded. The walls and ceiling disappeared, revealing a landscape that resembled no part of Africa, or anywhere else on Earth. The Zulus and Rafferty now stood on a sandy plain, a few miles from a vast, irregular cluster of huge, cyclopean towers that loomed against a deep yellow sky. Some of the towers were taller than the highest mountains of Zululand and yet were unfeasibly narrow for their height, and possessed curves and angles that should have been impossible for a construction of stone. This forest of bizarre monoliths stretched across the perfectly flat horizon as far as they could see, and in every other direction there was naught but an endless expanse of desolate desert. The landscape was illuminated by two ominous black discs that hung high above in the yellow sky — with mounting dread, Lwazi recognized the twin suns that were the mark of H’aaztre’s demonic realm.

As he stared at those baleful, alien suns, a flicker of movement caught Lwazi’s eye — four shadows broke away from one of the taller towers and soared through the sky like birds on the wing, growing larger as they drew nearer. The terrible whistle and chanting persisted, but the approach of what could only be enemies spurred Lwazi into action. Gritting his teeth against the sounds assailing him, he snatched up his iklwa and tried to rally his men.

“Sons of Shaka! The enemy comes! We must be ready to fight!” Lwazi called out as loudly as he could, but his voice was lost among the cacophony of the bone whistle and Rafferty’s foul paean.

“Yogge-Sothothe ngh’ aaa! Iä! Iä! Radagastrask cetos sihn! Ceddi-ak tribh Azathoth!”

The young warrior had no time to try and rouse his companions again, for the creatures of H’aaztre were almost upon them. They were of roughly human shape, but there was an insectoid quality to their black, chitinous hides, while their long necks and hideous heads owed more to a foul crossbreed of vulture and lizard. Huge, leathery, bat-like wings carried them aloft, and as they swooped down toward the beleaguered Zulus they brandished wicked claws from the end of each malformed limb. Lwazi threw himself to the side to evade the creature that plummeted toward him, but the other Zulus were still incapacitated by the mind-wrenching shriek of the bone whistle and easy prey for H’aaztre’s demons. As Lwazi regained his feet, he was splattered by a fountain of blood and viscera as one of the monsters drove its claws into Sizwe’s stomach and ripped the veteran warrior in half. The other two Zulus fared no better, and were torn to bloody ribbons by the bat-winged horrors before they even had a chance to fight back.

Having to watch the gruesome deaths of such fine Zulu warriors was the last spark Lwazi needed to ignite the ancient fires that burned deep in his indomitable soul. At that moment all distractions fell away. He no longer heard the whistle or Rafferty’s profane liturgy. It did not matter that he stood before an alien city beneath twin suns that no human eyes should behold. He did not care that he faced twisted demons that served an evil deity which had been feared by his people and their forebears for millennia. All that mattered was that he was a Zulu warrior, a proud Son of Shaka, with his iklwa in hand and enemies before him.

“USUTHU!”

Lwazi’s first thrust drove his spear straight into the chest of the creature that had slain Sizwe. The iron blade shattered its carapace, splashing purplish gore from its belly to its vulture-like neck. Lwazi’s left hand snatched his knobkerrie from his belt, and he slammed the stout wooden club into the snapping, fang-filled protrusion of the creature’s maw with a bone-crunching thud. The thing crashed to the ground in an ungainly tangle of limbs and wings, surely dead, and its fellows flapped a few yards away from the enraged Zulu, howling a weird, undulating cry as they went. Perhaps the creatures were not used to their victims fighting back, and so were surprised by Lwazi’s onslaught, but no human reactions could be read on those otherworldly faces. If they were caught off guard they quickly rallied, and with fangs and claws bared, they swept down upon him.

Lwazi met the charge head on, chopping his iklwa downward like an axe while thrusting his knobkerrie forward. The razor-sharp edge of the spear sheared through the left wing of one of the demons, slicing the appendage clean off at its shoulder, and the outstretched bludgeon crunched into the center of its torso. The monster was sent sprawling in the black sand by the thrust of his club, spraying more purple blood from its ruined wing. Lwazi was confident the beast would not rise again, but by focusing his attack on one opponent he had left himself open to its kin. He managed to parry one claw swipe with the shaft of his iklwa, but another raked across his ribs, leaving three deep, bloody runnels in his flesh.

His instinctive reaction to the pain was to lash out, and in doing so he rammed his spear-point into one of the monsters’ elongated necks, almost severing its head. Lwazi hopped backward and adopted a defensive posture to face off against the last of the creatures. The proud warrior did his best to ignore the searing pain in his torso, in the same way he was blotting out Rafferty’s chanting and the bone whistle’s malevolent shriek. The Englishman was now a good twenty yards from where Lwazi stood, still clutching the idol of H’aaztre to his chest as he continued his incantation. The last of the flying fiends was between Lwazi and Rafferty, and, judging by its stance, the Zulu reckoned it was trying to protect the wooden statue and its bearer… but then the thing’s hideous head swung toward the distant city and it once again let loose with its bizarre, wailing cry.

Lwazi followed the creature’s gaze, and to his despair he saw dozens of black shapes slip free of the dark towers and soar into the yellow sky — reinforcements were on the way, far more than he could hope to overcome. But then he realized that the winged horde was the least of his concerns — some of the towers were moving. At first he thought that a cluster of about a dozen of the tallest structures had begun to collapse, but he quickly understood that they had in fact started to writhe and squirm against the horizon with an undeniably organic movement. Those towers were alive, like the gigantic appendages of some unspeakably huge nightmare that lurked just over the distant horizon — a nightmare that had now awoken.

“The Feaster from Afar comes!” screamed Rafferty, his jubilant voice crackling with madness. “Ngh’h’yuh! Hastur Iä! N’ah Hali yaa!”

Lwazi knew all was lost. H’aaztre’s demons would be upon him in seconds and would tear him apart in a terrible frenzy. Even if he could fight them off, there was nothing that any mortal creature could do to withstand the gargantuan horror that had begun to rise beyond the horizon — surely now there was nothing that could stop that awakened devil from passing into the realm of man and wreaking unspeakable evil across Africa and all the lands beyond. Lwazi knew he had failed, and just as Mandlenkosi had feared, the two suns would rise over Zululand.

Yet even here, where all hope had fled, Lwazi could not countenance any course of action that did not involve him fighting with all of the strength in his mighty sinews, of selling his life as dearly as he could. The scream that burst forth from his lips was not one of the traditional Zulu war cries, but something much more ancient and primal that sprang from the core of his very being, as he spun his iklwa around in his hand so that he held the weapon with the blade pointing downward. The winged legions swooped down to attack, but Lwazi ignored them and leapt forward, toward the last of the original four monsters that had slaughtered Sizwe and the others, drawing back his iklwa as if he intended to hurl the spear rather than stab with it. The creature threw back its wings and surged forward to meet the Zulu’s charge, just as Lwazi let his spear fly. The demon jinked to one side and the iklwa darted harmlessly past its shoulder, but the evasion had been unnecessary — the monster had not been the spear’s target. Lwazi’s aim was true, the iklwa thudding into the wooden idol cradled in Rafferty’s arms and shattering the bone whistle into a hundred shards.

The whistling instantly stopped, replaced by an even more nerve-wrenching, discordant noise — anguished screaming the likes of which Lwazi had never before heard. Lwazi had managed to block out the whistle and the chant during the battle, but even he could not close his ears to the earthshaking screams of pain and frustration that poured from the entity that lurked beyond the towers. Lwazi collapsed to the ground and wrapped his arms around his head in agony, feeling as if his brain would explode from the sheer pressure of the noise that assailed him. The flying creatures were not immune to their master’s woes, and they too howled in torment, clawing at their own faces as they fell from the sky to break upon the hard surface below. The young Zulu added his own cry of pain to the tortured chorus, but his comparatively puny voice was lost among the unimaginable suffering of a mercifully forgotten god… but then there was nothing but silence.

Not quite silence, though. As he slowly opened his eyes, Lwazi began to notice other sounds that must have been drowned out by H’aaztre’s scream. The first was his own ragged breathing and the frantic pounding of his heart. Next he realized he could hear the crackle of burning wood, the pop of gunfire, the war shouts of the Zulus, and the screams of the dying… all sounds that would have been a terrible onslaught on the senses normally, but they were nothing to that which Lwazi had just endured. That he could hear the battle at all could mean only one thing — the Zulu staggered to his feet and was amazed to find himself back in the hospital room at Rorke’s Drift. All around him lay the ruined corpses of his comrades, hacked to bloody lumps by the claws of the winged devils. When they stood before the city of H’aaztre, the four warriors had been far more spread out, but now reality had reasserted itself, the bodies lay close by Lwazi’s feet, just where they had been before the bone whistle had sounded. Rafferty too was where he had been before the statue had worked its vile magic, sitting in the linen cupboard mere feet from Lwazi. He still clutched the effigy of H’aaztre to his chest, but now the carving had an iklwa protruding from it, the blade buried several inches deep into its body. There was no trace of the bodies of the creatures Lwazi had slain, not even a splash of their purple blood. Nor was there any sign of the fragments of the shattered whistle.

Not daring to touch the statue itself, Lwazi picked up the idol of H’aaztre using the spear, as he would meat spitted on a cooking skewer. Rafferty did not try to prevent him from taking the idol this time, for the Englishman was quite dead. Moments earlier, Rafferty’s eyes had been two balls of blazing amber; now he had nothing but two empty, bloody sockets, as if the eyes themselves had burst under the pressure of the forces that had been channeled through his mortal body. He lay slumped against the side of the cupboard, with his face still contorted by the pain that had consumed him during his final moments. Lwazi offered a quick prayer to his ancestors that whatever remained of Rafferty’s soul was beyond the reach of foul H’aaztre, and then he slipped away through the burning hospital to return to the Zulu lines.

When Lwazi finally found Mandlenkosi, squatting alone beside one of the many night fires in the Zulu encampment, the old Sangoma barely looked up at him. He simply nodded from the thing impaled upon Lwazi’s spear to the flames. Lwazi did not need any further prompting to drop both the carving of H’aaztre and his iklwa into the fire. He then sat down beside the Sangoma to watch the accursed item burn, along with the trusted weapon that he feared might be tainted by the idol’s evil.

“Should have done this a long time ago,” muttered Mandlenkosi. “Some of the other Sangoma insisted it was still a holy item, even if it was dedicated to a fiend like H’aaztre, and so should be preserved… not all Sangoma are wise men, eh?”

Lwazi did not reply. He was too busy watching the fire lick around the dark wood. The flames that touched the figure’s surface danced and flickered in different shapes from those that sprang from the normal fuel — here and there Lwazi could make out shapes that resembled the impossible structures of the alien city, or flecks of ash that fluttered like the bat-winged killers leaving their lairs to spill the blood of terrified mortals. Some of the flames even twisted and writhed as if mimicking the immense tendrils of the dark god himself, reaching out to try and drag the world of men into its unearthly domain beneath twin suns…

“I’ll fetch some more wood, shall I?” said Mandlenkosi, springing to his feet with a rattle of bones and trinkets. “Looks like that thing will take quite a while to burn.”

Lwazi nodded. The carving would indeed take a long time to be consumed, and he was determined not to take his eye off it for moment. He would sit by the fire as long as it took to make sure that nothing remained — only then would he be confident that his foe was defeated and that the twin suns would never rise over Zululand. Only when a lonely yellow orb crested the mountains to the east and the effigy of H’aaztre was nothing but ash and dust did he leave the fireside.