CLAN NOVEL
ASSIMITE
By Gherbod Fleming
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Clan Novel Assimite is a product of White Wolf Publishing.
White Wolf is a subsidiary of Paradox Interactive.
Copyright © 1999 by White Wolf Publishing.
First Printing December 1999
Crossroad Press Edition published in Agreement with Paradox Interactive
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Table of Contents
part one: who stand arrayed in rows
part two: wall between heaven and hell
part three: the cleaving
part one:
who stand arrayed in rows
Saturday, 3 July 1999, 3:18 AM (local time)
Caves of Ten Thousand Sorrows
Near Petra, Jordan
Elijah Ahmed, caliph of Alamut, walked silently through the darkness toward his destiny. His sandals had been left miles behind, neatly arranged before the threshold of the caverns. His feet, the soles of which had not felt the fire of sun-scorched desert sands since the first days of the Holy Prophet, did not so much as displace a single pebble or disturb a granule of dust from its resting place upon the sandstone.
Elijah’s mind was quiet. Calming scripture arose from his soul like the cool evening breeze blowing from the north. He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten, and none is like Him.
The darkness was complete, yet the caliph stepped with surety. Countless passages branched off from the winding tunnel he followed, but Elijah’s deliberate pace did not once slacken. Never before had he traversed this path, but the twists of the rough-hewn corridors were as familiar to him as the weave of his simple muslin robe. He could not deny that which drew him forward. He could not lose his way.
The passages wound this way and that, seemingly without reason; sharp, spiraling curves that nearly met themselves, broad arcs to the northwest, squared turns to the south, zigs and zags leading tangentially eastward but never directly toward the rising sun. Among the sculptured chaos, however, Elijah Ahmed’s steps carried him always down, always deeper toward the heart of the earth.
He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten, and none is like Him.
When finally Elijah had taken his last step, he stood not in one of the corridors of the past hours, but in a vast chamber. Darkness opened before him like the void, but not even the absence of light could hide from his eyes the presence of the herald.
It sat upon an arrangement of mammoth stones, an unadorned throne crafted from bedrock. The herald, too, was unadorned. Its naked, childlike body resembled a sculpture of hard-packed coal, each fissure, each crack in the kiln-hardened surface actually a jagged scar streaking like black lightning across the blackest midnight sky—black except for a crescent and a handful of matching bone-white stars. The crescent moon of this midnight was a necklace of bone that lay draped across the chest of the herald’s perfectly motionless body. The stars were bone as well, though no mere accoutrements; they were the bones of ur-Shulgi, visible where the midnight skin had peeled back or cracked and fallen away; they were the sheaths of the herald’s essence, and his marrow was vengeance.
Thus was the being Elijah Ahmed faced.
Elijah Ahmed, caliph of Alamut, one of the tripartite du’at, looked into the deep emptiness that should have been the herald’s eyes. The sockets were set beneath sharp ridges of bone, and the gaping nothingness was like an accusation of wrongdoing and injury thousands of years old, as if Elijah himself had gouged out the eyes in sport or cruel jest.
And yet the herald looked upon Elijah, and the herald did see.
“Elijah Ahmed,” spoke ur-Shulgi.
At once, Elijah prostrated himself before the herald. The sandstone, which should have been cool within the womb of the earth, burned the caliph’s forehead. But he did not stir.
“Childe of Haqim,” spoke the herald. “Blood of his blood of his blood of his blood.” Ur-Shulgi’s voice filled the chamber like the south desert wind. His words stung like the first pricks of the sandstorm that gnaws flesh from bone.
“Rise, Elijah Ahmed.”
The caliph obeyed, as would he have even had he desired otherwise. He rose to one knee. The sandstone, to the touch, had become the wide desert floor at noon. He needn’t look at the palms of his hands to know that his own dark skin crisped—the left knee, on which his weight rested; the sole of his right foot; the top of the left. Head bowed, eyes downcast, Elijah ignored the fire of his body and paid silent homage to the herald of his master.
But a storm was rising.
The desert winds, an open furnace stoked by the rage of ancients, tore at him. His thin muslin robe quickly burned away, as did his hair, his eyebrows, and lashes. The caliph closed his eyes against the heat, but his eyelids soon curled back like singed paper. He had no choice but to look upon his reckoning.
In that instant, Elijah Ahmed knew fear. It was a mark of his wisdom. For who but the fool does not fear the power of heaven unleashed? In that instant, Elijah knew also the unvoiced question given form in that fiery desert wind:
Who gives you life, Elijah Ahmed?
Elijah could no longer reason, so great had become the heat, but he didn’t need reason in the face of this challenge. The question was not new to him; it had dogged him as long as he remembered, since before wise Thetmes Embraced him into unending death, since Elijah’s mortal days following behind in the footsteps of the Holy Prophet. From deep within Elijah’s soul, the answer rose full like a gourd dipped in an oasis well.
Allah gives me life.
The fiery wind grew to a raging maelstrom. It roared in Elijah’s ears, those fragile shells of flesh that began to melt and run down the sides of his face. His naked eyes, too, were assaulted by the storm. His tears dried before he could cry them.
And then the herald was no longer sitting far across the chamber upon his great throne. He had not moved, but now ur-Shulgi stood motionless before Elijah, mere inches from the caliph. The herald’s craggy, coal-black skin shone amidst the violence of the vortex.
“Young Allah,” said ur
-Shulgi. “Are you certain, childe of Haqim?”
Elijah’s face was now upturned, though he did not remember moving. His eyes became pools of blood, as the tender flesh disintegrated beneath the fury of ur-Shulgi. The caliph’s skin cracked and peeled away. As the last of vision fled, Elijah was not aware, could not be aware, of the eternal moment in which he resembled nothing so much as the herald before whom he knelt. Elijah wanted to open his mouth, wanted to speak, but the muscles of his jaw were beyond use and his tongue was shriveled away to a smoldering lump.
As flesh burned away, one belief resounded from the core of Elijah Ahmed’s being: Haqim has stretched my existence, but it was Allah gave me life. He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten, and none is like Him.
“Very well,” said ur-Shulgi. His words found their way through Elijah’s ruined ears, within the mind that was beyond pain. “In the name of the Eldest, I reclaim that which is rightfully his.”
No sooner was it said than the blackened form that had been Elijah Ahmed, caliph of Alamut, vomited forth the blood of Haqim into a large earthen pot.
Many hours later, the winds settled, and all was again silent stillness of the void.
Friday, 9 July 1999, 1:10 AM
Hall of Ikhwan, Alamut
Eastern Turkey
Eight killers circled Fatima al-Faqadi in silence. They watched her closely and tested the weight of their various blades.
Fatima watched them also. She had no need to test the jambia in her right hand. The thin dagger with its slightly curved tip was as familiar to her as her own almond-shaped eyes staring back from a mirror. How many nights had she carried it on her belt? How many souls had it reclaimed for the greater good of Haqim?
She rotated slowly in the center of her assailants and noted the telltale signs that they had not yet learned to conceal completely, signs that would be invisible to most but told Fatima what she needed to know about which assassin would strike first.
Fatima knew their names, but that knowledge was held in a part of her mind that, for the moment, had relinquished control to more primal awareness, to skills that had been practiced and used over the centuries until her trained responses were more instinctive than instinct itself.
For now, the circle of killers was a collection of stances, head tilts, weapons, careful movements. As Fatima turned, she noticed and prioritized a multitude of details: The Omani held a three-and-a-half-foot sword; the Irishman, only light-skin among the group, wielded a warhammer. The rest carried smaller blades of various design, though the Algerian and the Egyptian had broken with the tradition of choosing ancestral weapons. The Tamil Tiger held his pihakaetta an inch or two lower than he should. The Kurd separatist’s stance was slightly off; his shoulders were taut instead of relaxed and flexible.
The eight circled, moved almost imperceptibly closer.
Without warning, Fatima lunged to the right with her dagger. As the assassins reacted to her feint, she lashed out with her left foot and crushed the knee of the Omani. His sword clattered to the stone floor, and he collapsed, his leg at a distinctly unnatural angle to the rest of his body.
Before his first moan had died, Fatima leapt from the path of the strike aimed at her back—she’d known it would come; the only question was from whom? The Russian. Former KGB, only other woman present. Simultaneously, Fatima snapped the Russian’s wrist, wrenched the woman’s arm around so that her own kinjal stabbed her in the back, and shifted her into the path of the warhammer’s arc.
The Irishman’s attack caught the Russian square across the temple. A sharp crack echoed from the stone walls of the Hall of Brotherhood. As the slightly built KGB operative crumpled, Fatima snapped the new assailant’s forearm and jabbed her dagger into his vitals for good measure. Having disarmed him to her satisfaction, she dove through the now large gap in the circle, turned her back to the wall, and, in a rare show of charity, waited while the remaining five assassins adjusted their positions.
But Fatima’s pause was not an act of benevolence. These assassins were her pupils. With almost half their number disabled in fewer than thirty seconds, panic or at the least frustration might set in. If she defeated them all in such short order, Fatima would be unable to observe their responses to a desperate situation.
So she waited, and she watched. Bare feet moved silently over the cool stone of Alamut.
The five remaining killers cautiously closed ranks. Fatima, though she had never before fought this group of fida’i, had in these first few seconds of combat familiarized herself with the movements of her opponents and gauged the threat that each posed her: very little. With the warhammer and the Omani’s sword out of the mix, and the numbers now five to one, the odds had swung dramatically in Fatima’s favor.
Not long ago, these fida’i had been among the deadliest of mortals, but among the children of Haqim, they were babes. For each of their years since being brought into the fold, Fatima had plied her trade for a century. Though accomplished killers, they were still mastering the subtleties of the newfound strength in their every muscle. There were some, Fatima knew, who never regained the intuitive command of their bodies after the Becoming, some who never achieved in unlife the balance of physique and temperament that in life had rendered them so lethal. But this group showed promise.
Torches in wall brackets were the only furnishings in the Hall of Ikhwan, and the flames cast dancing shadows across the rich browns and smooth olive tones of the assassins’ faces. In time, their skin would darken, more like Fatima’s, and in the bosom of Alamut they would find a unity denied the unworthy.
As they inched toward her, Fatima spared a handful of seconds to glance at their faces; there were none among the lot strong enough in blood to bend her will. Five hawks—detached, centered, inscrutable, predatory—regarded their prey. Of the five, only the eyes of the Kurd displayed the slightest agitation. Fatima noted that he might need to revisit earlier trainings of the fida’i, but her reprieve, and with it the moment for reflection, was no more—
The Yemeni closed with a slashing attack. His jambia didn’t draw blood, but his strike wasn’t intended to do so. He continued his swipes. They were defensive in nature, useful to turn aside any attack Fatima might launch, as he maneuvered to her side hoping to force her to turn and face him, in the process exposing her back to the others.
Suddenly Fatima’s right hand swept high. The Yemeni slashed high to counter—but Fatima’s jambia was now in her left hand. She slashed upward and rent his abdomen, and then, with a flawless shift of weapon back to her right hand, whipped around to fend off the Kurd’s attack from her rear.
She intended only to force the Kurd back, to turn aside his attack and then launch an attack at the Tiger back to her left. But the Kurd did not dodge. He did not make the least pretense of avoiding her blow.
Instead, he charged onto her blade. Fatima’s jambia dug deep into his gut. Between the force of his charge and her in-and-upward thrust, hilt and fist alike plunged into his belly, and in that instant, that split second before he fell backward disemboweled to the floor, the Kurd’s khanjar sliced across Fatima’s forearm.
She felt the poison at once, knew it for what it was.
Gin-gin.
The skin of her lacerated forearm blistered and popped. Fire shot through her bones to the tips of her fingers. Already the muscular spasms began. Instinct took control. There was no time for thought of how this impossible treachery could ever have come about, from what quarter betrayal could have originated. Fatima shifted her weapon back to her left hand fractions of a second before the cramps rendered her right useless. She tried to clench her right hand into a fist and managed not even to move a finger.
The fire was spreading up her arm.
Fatima had long studied the assassin’s concoctions, both modern and ancient. Gin-gin was one of the oldest, one of the most obscure, one of the most potent. Few substances, few poisons, remained deadly when subjected to the blood o
f Haqim; few could prove fatal to one of his childer. Gin-gin was one of those few, and it flowed now in Fatima’s veins.
A broad swipe kept her three remaining opponents at bay for the moment. There was no surrender in such training, only victory or defeat. Defeat for a teacher was practically unheard of, but Fatima faced worse than embarrassment.
She willed blood to the burning arm. A weaker poison she could boil away in an instant, for she could transform her own blood into a potent toxin, but gin-gin resisted her attacks. With time and complete concentration, she’d be able to cleanse the poison from her body, but currently she could afford neither. Unless she dispatched her remaining pupils, and quickly, the gin-gin would keep spreading through her body, crippling her muscles as it went. And if she lost consciousness—a certainty, if she were paralyzed in the face of her pupils’ attacks—the poison would eat away her insides until there was nothing left for even the blood of Haqim to heal.
The three assassins now seemed to Fatima more like vultures than hawks; but what, she wondered, would it matter to the desert hare whether noble hawk or opportunistic vulture gorged upon its carcass? She stared at the three, scouring their faces for the slightest sign of complicity. A conspiracy among the fida'i. They lacked both cause and ability, not to mention access to gin-gin. It would take an elder….
But the truth would have to wait until later—if she survived.
The Algerian to her right saw opportunity in the arm that hung useless at Fatima’s side. He swooped in—but not quickly enough. Left-handed, Fatima deflected his wide-bladed dha and, almost simultaneously, smashed her forehead into his face. A spinning kick snapped his neck and left two opponents.
Clan Novel Assamite - Book 7 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 1