"The Black Abbot of Puthuum" by Clark Ashton Smith

Let the grape yield for us its purple flame,
And rosy love put off its maidenhood:
By blackening moons, in lands without a name,
We slew the Incubus and all his brood.
-Song of King Hoaraph's Bowmen

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pulchritude: beauty

candent: glowing from, or as if from, great heat

debouchment: emerge, issue

piebald: having irregular patches of two colors, typically black and white

cataphract: in this context, a suit of armor for the whole body

gelding: a castrated male horse

sendal: a fine, rich silk material, chiefly used to make ceremonial robes and banners

sistra: plural of sistrum, a musical instrument of the percussion family, used most notably by the ancient Egyptians. It consists of a handle and a U-shaped metal frame, made of brass or bronze and ranging from 30–76 cm (12–30 in) in width. When shaken, the small rings or loops of thin metal on its movable crossbars produce a sound that can vary from a soft clank to a loud jangling.

welkin: sky or heaven

seraglio: the women's apartments (harem) in an Ottoman palace

nictitation: a reflex that closes and opens the eyes rapidly; repeated blinking or winking

trow: believe

hebetude: the state of being dull or lethargic

dubitation: doubt or hesitation

syenite: a coarse-grained intrusive igneous rock with a general composition similar to that of granite, but deficient in quartz

susurrous: characterized by whispering

expiation: the act of making amends or reparation for guilt or wrongdoing; atonement

interstice: intervening space, especially a very small one. My whole life I never came across the word until I started doing these short stories here on youtube. Now I've come across it quite a few times in these stories, although still never in any other circumstance. And no matter how many times I encounter it, I can never remember the correct pronunciation and always have to re-record it in edit. Ugh.

3 inches = 7.6 centimeters

fledging: I'm pretty sure Smith meant fletching, but both my text and the online text use fledging here. Which is a real word, and the best fit would be 'to provide an arrow with feathers', but clearly it should be fletching. That said, despite the obvious error, I left it as it appears in both texts.

aurochs: an extinct cattle species, considered to be the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. The last known aurochs died in 1627 in Poland.

captious: marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections

sortilege: divination by lots. (Also apparently some liqueur made from Canadian whisky and maple syrup. Not sure how I feel about that... either whisky from Canada or the addition of maple syrup to it!)

The picture used is an illustration by Virgil Finlay for the story as published in Weird Tales

To follow along: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/15/the-black-abbot-of-puthuum