The City Beyond Time
An adventure for Istanbul PCs, working for the Manzikert Hotel.
Gerard and Norman Nairn, two laconic Kiwi brothers, run an automobile mail service across the desert from Damascus to Baghdad.
Served with General Allenby’s motorised divisions in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the Great War. Lost two cars last month. Would like you to find out why.
Desert-adapted Cadillac Type 63s. Drivers in smoked goggles - one-eyed Yank Jack Reid, who likes to chase down cheetahs with his car, and Ryan the Australian who keeps his water bottles full of potent arak.
Following an ancient caravan route, re-opened by the sheikh and gold smuggler Mohammed ibn Bassam. Travelling in pairs. Going without sleep for forty-eight hours straight.
Damascus - Palmyra - Rutbah - Ramadi - Baghdad.
Right across the heart of the sandless Syrian Desert. Plains of flat packed clay that turn slick and greasy in the rainy season. Lava beds strewn with fist-sized boulders. Outcast Bedouins lurking in dry wadis and oases, in the ruins of Umayyad outposts, who’ll rob and strip naked any traveller. Riding white camels and stolen Cadillacs of their own.
The desert’s a strange place.
Mirages. White towers on the horizon. Palm-fringed lakes where no water has flown for millenia. Caravans of dancing girls, silk tents, turbaned men with huge jewelled scimitars - dissolve into smoke when you get too close. Jinn. Packs of chuckling striped hyenas who dig corpses out of the barren earth.
The Nairn Transport Company sets each convoy driver up with a house and a woman in Damascus.
Ryan’s shacked up with Mervat, a Circassian nightclub hostess, in a cramped two-room apartment, strewn with Persian rugs, behind an ice cream parlour in the al-Hamidiyah souq. When he isn’t drunk you can find him smoking his nargilah on the roof.
Ghouls attacked his convoy last week.
Brutes in bug-eyed insectoid helmets, wielding laser guns. On metallic discs that skimmed over the surface of the desert, atop clouds of smoke. He shot three of them and knocked one’s helmet off - saw the dead blank eyes and the dopey flat hyena smile. Jack Reid took a laser to the thigh, and was dragged away - he might be still alive.
Ryan fled into the desert.
Hid all night long in a dry wadi, listening out for the canine howling of the search parties and the discs’ aerodynamic hum. Drank his own urine to stay alive. Rescued by Bedouins after three days - lucky they didn’t cut his throat.
The French Army is fighting to pacify Syria.
Led by Maurice Gamelin. A stubborn old man with nineteenth-century ideas about “fighting spirit” and a bodyguard of Malagasy tirailleurs. Bogged down in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and the dead volcanic plateaus of the Jabal al-Druze, fighting guerilla rebels that spring up as quickly as they’re put down.
Scarred Foreign Legionnaires from all corners of the world clash with Druze mountain warriors. Student nationalists in the Ghouta countryside. Bedouin raiders from the Euphrates town of Deir ez-Zor. Most of the rebel leaders have been killed by now - captured and hung, or poisoned outside cafes by French spies.
Gendarmes tramp the streets of the Druze capital of Soweida, where prophets are kept chained to dungeon floors, and mystics can make eggs jump from boiling water by reading certain passages from the Koran. Palaces on snowy mountainsides are raided - young men dragged away in cuffs to squalid jails.
Sultan al-Atrash, the great chief of the Druze, has fled with all his men to the castle town of Karak in Transjordan. Continues to raid across the border. Won’t give up.
The Druze never lie.
Eternally hospitable. Give freely to the poor. Kill or exile anyone who marries outside the faith. Believe that if there aren’t enough Druze babies, the excess souls of dead warriors will reincarnate on a mountain in western China. One day the Chinese Druze will link up with the Syrians to take over the world.
Recently their soldiers have been armed with laser guns. Making life hard for the gendarmes.
It’s said they trade with jinn in the heart of the al-Safa lava field in the dead of night. On the shores of a boiling magma lake. By a cairn inscribed with ancient Safaitic inscriptions.
They sell guns and other artefacts - brass eggs that hatch into smoke demons, fish-scaled invisibility cloaks - to other Syrian rebel factions. The Veiled Lady of Mukhtara, in the Jumblatt Palace. The Rufai Howling Dervishes, who self-mutilate with red-hot skewers in order to see God.
It’s also said they worship golden calves. Druze deny this furiously - do not bring it up.
Gamelin suspects, correctly, that the rebels are covertly funded by King Faisal I of Iraq.
Faisal wants to add Syria to his realm. Still upset about the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Believes all Arabia should be united under a Hashemite monarchy.
Has his agents digging through Baghdad’s oldest libraries. Excavating Babylon. Searching for books that escaped the destruction of Haroun al-Rashid’s House of Wisdom, burnt to the ground by Mongols in 1258.
Hunting down the lost works of Abdullah al-Hazrad.
8th-century author of the Necronomicon - the world’s most evil book. Devoured in broad daylight by invisible demons in the Damascus marketplace. Hid alien artefacts from the Rub’ al-Khali in the Aramaean crypts beneath the Umayyad Mosque.
Faisal discovered a map to Iram of the Pillars among al-Hazrad’s notes. Sent explorers to find it. Woke the city up.
Intends to marry his son Ghazi to its queen.
Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, rebelled against Rome around 270 AD.
Was defeated by the Emperor Aurelian. Fled into the desert. Accompanied by her general, Septimius Zabdas, and her court philosopher Cassius Longinus. Leaving a servant double to be paraded through Rome in her place.
There she entered Iram of the Pillars.
An ancient city of the Serpent Men, protected by illusion magic, dislodged from space and time. Perfumed gardens. Ziggurats. Towering stone columns. Water wheels turning in lotus-strewn canals.
Pools of fish sacred to the mermaid goddess Derceto - tended by long-haired dancing eunuch priests. Children playing at the feet of friendly giants. Tombs of mummified aliens - bas-relief maps of the prehistoric world. Singing colossi of Memnon, bearded with dew, vibrating in the dawn.
She became the city’s queen.
Now she’s returned. Working with the Druze and King Faisal’s soldiers. Served by headless blemmyes and cynocephali - corpse-eating hyena men, produced by grotesque Serpent Man experiments. Kits them out with sci-fi weapons. Arsenal beneath her palace not yet fully explored.
Keeps a retinue of Amazons, named for famous queens, who mutilate the men they love. Jack Reid, kidnapped and taken back to Iram, is living comfortably with their commander, Semiramis, who thinks it would be cute to cut off and eat his nose.
Zenobia plans to expel the French, make herself Queen of Arabia and use that as a foundation for global conquest. She worships the horned god Bel and disbelieves in the physical world.
Iram is yet to fully manifest itself in our reality. Zenobia feeds her captives to the fish in Derceto’s ponds. Longinus, who studied Platonism at Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas and Origen the Pagan, has advised her that enough human sacrifice will stabilise the city and enable her army to march on Damascus.
T. E. Lawrence, of Arabia fame, spent some time hunting for Iram after the war. You might find him in Damascus, monitoring the situation for the Black Pyramid Cult.
A temple in the hills of Kurdistan.
Hewn from solid rock. Among mulberry trees. Built over torchlit caverns where sacrifices are made to the brass idol of the Peacock Angel, Melek Taus.
Holds the Courtyard of the Black Serpent. Where the Satan Tower stands.
A tall white cone-shaped structure with prismatic rays flashing from its pinnacle. One of seven. Scattered across Asia. From here to Manchuria through Persia and Tibet. Each inhabited by a kolchak, a devil-priest and radio operator, who transmits evil thoughts on occult frequencies into the minds of men. So it’s said.
Home to Mir Said Beg.
The Black Pope of the Yazidi. Red turban. Black cloak. A foe of Gnosticism. Likes material reality as it is.
Supports the British, since they keep his people safe from Muslim persecution. Tells you that everyone misunderstands the devil-worship thing. We need the Satan Towers - they repel negative energy and keep the world intact.
Yazidis have some rules. At least these ones do. Might not be representative of the entire faith.
Can’t put out fires. Repulsed by the colour blue. Not allowed to leave a circle drawn around them in the dirt. Expected to kill you if they hear you say any word that sounds like “Satan”. Take these rules more seriously than you’d prefer.
Nadir-Lugh, head kolchak, has been sent to Damascus with a bodyguard of Kurdish mountain fighters. On a mission to destroy Iram. Has a prismatic powder which, if thrown into the sacred pool of Derceto, will kill all the fish and detach the city from our plane of existence for another thousand years.
More or less on your side.
