Gates of red granite so huge they could hold back an army. Now swung wide.

Past them the Old Ones eternally slumber – dreaming, and still reaching out to us.

And the Earth shall fall before they rise.

Abdul Alhazred, from the Al Azif (The Book of the Dead)

Prologue

City of Damascus, Syria, 738 AD

Abdul Alhazred dodged his way down the street, weaving between stallholders and layabouts and mothers with too many small children. He passed the newly built Umayyad Mosque, and briefly contemplated entering, before swerving hard, knowing that there would be no sanctuary anywhere for him now.

He babbled and cursed in between ragged breaths, and even giggled as people stepped from his path, thinking he was mad. Alhazred threw back his head and roared with laughter. He was mad – the Mad Arab – insane, sent insane by the things he had seen, things he had uncovered through his travels and then his further studies.

He looked up, and saw birds circling above him, faster and faster – sparrows, wrens, shrikes, geese, and dozens more species all twisting together in a tornado of feathers and flesh.

He screamed at them, and cursed again at mankind’s stupidity, his stupidity, and…curiosity. A scrap of information here, a whisper there, and he’d been off like a hound on a scent. He had travelled to the ruins of Babylon, and then meandered into the great red deserts of Arabia, that vast and empty sea of nothing but heat and sand and scorpions. And then he had found them – the caves; he wished now he hadn’t. The legends said they were protected by djinn, evil spirits and monsters of death. He had found out too late that in their depths lay things far worse than that.

Alhazred felt the book under his robe. His fingers touched the soft cover of forbidden leather, and pictured the words he had transcribed within in a mixture of blood and charcoal as he had been instructed. Some of the words were incomprehensible even to him – the Old Ones spoke a harsh tongue the primitive mind of man could not possibly understand.

The book, the Al Azif, had taken him half a lifetime to write, and now he needed to hide it, get rid of it or pass it on, the ideas too important for mankind’s future to be reclaimed now by the Old Ones or their vile servants. The information was not just for the living, but instead, was a book of the dead.

Alhazred had been given their secrets, told to him in fever dreams, in return for the betrayal of his race. But the more he wrote down, the more frightened he became, and the more his sanity left him. They had promised him a kingdom, but all he saw was slavery to masters who would look upon him in the same light as he viewed an ant.

He turned briefly, glimpsing from the corner of an eye the shape appear and then dissipate like oily smoke. Too late: they’d found him.