Clan Novel Assamite - Book 7 of The Clan Novel Saga
Page 2
Or so Fatima thought, until she noticed movement from the direction of the downed, treacherous Kurd—the Kurd who should have been down. He was climbing to his feet, a task made more difficult by the tangle of his entrails underfoot.
Fatima was surprised, but not distracted as was the Egyptian killer. His distraction cost him. Two quick swipes of Fatima’s blade and he was doubly hamstrung and lay writhing on the floor in agony.
Now Fatima directed a thrust at the Tiger, which he easily sidestepped; but his dodge allowed her to return her attention to the Kurd. He still held his poisoned blade, and the agitation Fatima had noticed in his eyes earlier had given way to madness. He stumbled toward her.
Fatima’s arm throbbed from hand to shoulder. Her blood fought the poison and slowed its spread, but, lacking her full attention, the gin-gin ate away at muscle and nerve. Soon the bones in her arm would grow brittle and snap under their own weight.
The Kurd, his eyes glazed with hatred and madness, was on her now. Fatima moved, for her, awkwardly, the dead weight of her arm a drag on her maneuver, but she compensated enough. A sweep and flick of her wrist brought jambia against khanjar, and the Kurd’s weapon clattered to the floor. Fatima slashed upward, and her blade laid open his throat and the underside of his chin.
Still the insane Kurd, his intestines trailing behind, pressed her, despite injuries that should have disabled any childe of Haqim or get of Khayyin. What was this creature? Fatima didn’t sense elder blood in him, yet there was a power about him, a wildness in his mad eyes, violence as old as the earth itself.
The Tiger, too, was closing, seeking to do that which had proven beyond his comrades: to strike the telling blow against their teacher. Was he confederate or earnest pupil? Either way…
In one fluid motion, Fatima turned and flung her jambia at the Sri Lankan. The weapon was not balanced for throwing, but hundreds of years of practice proved their worth. The blade sliced through larynx and esophagus and held fast. The Tiger dropped to his knees, as if his feet had been cut from beneath him, then tumbled over to the floor.
Without hesitating, Fatima spun and kicked. Her foot snapped the Kurd’s head sideways. The crack of his jaw almost covered the sound of teeth rattling on the stone floor. He dropped to one knee, but not in defeat. His hand shot out toward the poisoned khan jar that lay nearby.
Fatima snatched a torch from its bracket and smashed the flaming club onto the Kurd’s head, then again across his face. He sprawled on his face to the floor. Fatima was on him in an instant. She crushed one of his hands with her heel and slammed the torch down on the back of his neck. Then she held the firebrand there against his neck, allowing the flame to go to work on his hair and undead flesh. He bucked and screamed, but Fatima’s grip, even one-handed, was firm.
The fire licked greedily at the skin and sinew that should have turned to dust years before. After a few seconds, Fatima had to jump back; she was no more immune to the ravages of flame than was the Kurd. The Kurd who, somehow, clambered to his feet and charged at her again like some fiery jinn.
Fatima swung the torch again. It struck him square across his burning face and wrenched his head around and up with a series of pops and cracks. The force of her blow checked his forward progress, and for a long moment he stood there, as if staring at the ceiling behind him. Then he collapsed, and the flames completely engulfed him.
Fatima sank to the floor, pulled down by the weight of her dead arm. She was surrounded by smoke and the moans of those of her disarmed pupils who remained conscious. She barely felt her face strike stone. She was lost within herself, bringing the full force of her blood, the blood of Haqim, against the poison in her arm. She kept expecting another blade at her throat. Where was the accomplice to the Kurd? This would be his chance, as she fought the poison. She could not hope to defend herself. But no conspirator stepped forward to claim his prize. There was only the fire burning in her arm.
Gin-gin. Essence of gin-gin root boiled with sulfur in a goat’s bladder. Slowly the blood of Haqim pushed the invader back down her arm, overwhelmed the toxin, tore it asunder. Icy numbness replaced the burning pain. Fatima’s thoughts were a jumble. Had treachery truly come to pass in the halls of Alamut, in the Hall of Ikhwan? Her strength lasted just long enough see the poison destroyed, and then torpor rose up to envelop her.
Monday, 12 July 1999, 11:15 PM
Thames Street
Baltimore, Maryland
Parmenides strolled casually along the edge of the harbor. None of the ghouls on guard duty outside the Lord Baltimore Inn would recognize him. To be quite honest, he had only recently begun to recognize himself on a regular basis. Glancing in the mirror and seeing the face of the ghoul Ravenna—dead at Parmenides’s own hand—staring back at him was no longer a complete shock. With a minimum of forethought, Parmenides could pretend he was used to it. What the situation lacked in humor, it more than made up for in cruel irony, a quality that emanated from Sascha Vykos as steam and ash once had from Mount Vesuvius.
His limp, at last, was completely gone. Parmenides could get about as dexterously as ever he could, and on nights like these, when Vykos rewarded his good behavior with assignments that took him beyond the limits of the vampirically overrun capital of this brash young nation, he could almost forget that which he could not escape—the visage of the erstwhile Ravenna. To wear the face of another man—die face and the body, for there was no detail of his physiology that Vykos had neglected in her endeavors—was sometimes very nearly maddening. He found himself entirely too often speculating on exactly how deep beneath the skin, beneath the musculature and bone structure, were the changes that Vykos had wrought upon him. There were times that he found himself failing into the persona she had crafted for him, times that he was forced to remind himself—
Useless thoughts. Parmenides smoothed back Ravenna’s dark hair and took the opportunity to dig his fingernails into his scalp, reminding himself of what was real and immediate, what among all of creation was unchanging: pain and blood.
Tonight, more so than at any time since he had been delivered into the hands of fiends, Parmenides was sure of who he was. As samite. Childe of Haqim. The pain that Parmenides had suffered was nothing compared to the humiliation his clan had suffered for centuries—but no longer. And tonight, there would be a small measure of vengeance, one grain of sand to add to a desert that would in time stretch across the face of the earth.
He circled around the inn to the service entrance in the rear. Here also, ghouls stood guard, two of them. But Parmenides’s passing disturbed them no more than did the breeze off the harbor. To their eyes, all was as it should be.
The assassin slipped past others within the building as well. He quickly found a back staircase and made his way to the fourth floor, where security was relatively light. More sensitive areas, the meeting hall where Camarilla business was conducted, not to mention Prince Garlotte’s personal chambers, were on the sixth and seventh floors. Parmenides, if his information was correct, had no need to invade those places tonight.
He made his way undetected past another ghoul sentinel—the Camarilla really did rely far too heavily on these untested creatures rather than treating them as the untrained children they were—and around the corner to the inn’s sole passenger elevator. From one of many hidden pockets, Parmenides produced a small electronic device. One edge was a flat, metal plate, which he slid between the elevator doors. He pressed a button on the device and, almost immediately, the doors slid open, prompted by a sonic pulse that the door sensors interpreted much as they would contact with a person while the doors closed. The bell that normally sounded at the opening of the doors was silent. In fact, nothing in Parmenides’s direct vicinity made the slightest sound. Just as silently, Parmenides climbed onto the service ladder in the shaft and began his descent even as the doors above him closed, sealing him away from the brightly lit corridor.
Shortly, he was prone atop the elevator car itself. Waiting. Listening.
Then the elevator shuddered again and began downward. Parmenides couldn’t help remembering an elevator journey of his own a few weeks before and not so many miles away in Washington, D.C. That time he had been the conventional passenger, while a stowaway had ridden above the ceiling hatch. For where else could the Nosferatu have been when he spoke to Parmenides?
But now Parmenides caught his error of logic, his unsubstantiated assumption that the sewer rat had ridden atop the mechanical carriage. It was possible, if not likely, that the creature had been inside the elevator with Parmenides, that it had occupied the same space without him knowing. Stranger, more impossible stories circulated among the elder children of Haqim. And Parmenides had not been at his best that night. He had struggled against his mistress, against the fresh infirmities of his newfound body, and he had struggled against himself. All of his pain and humiliation had been given release in a chance to kill—it was his calling, his eternal duty—and he had failed. That shock was heaped upon the physical tortures at the hand of the Tzimisce and the gut-wrenching realization that he’d been placed in the hands of the fiends by his own. His only comfort and consolation that night and those following had been in the arms of Sascha Vykos, his tormentor, his bane…his love.
Parmenides, in his discomfort, shifted position. His soft boot rubbed across the metal beneath him. He caught his mistake at once and cursed himself for giving in to distraction. But had he given himself away? There was no indication from within the elevator, now coming to rest at the lobby, that he had. He could flee, but he dismissed that thought as soon as it entered his mind, so distasteful did he find it. If he failed and was destroyed, there would only be himself and Vykos to blame—him for weakness, her for base inhumanity disguised as affection. But perhaps he, trained for years upon years in the art and science of taking life, was not the best judge of humanity and inhumanity. On the other hand, what throughout history was more consistently an element of human nature than killing?
Useless thoughts. Again intruding when they shouldn’t.
Below, the passenger stepped from the elevator and was greeted at once by several people. “Ms. Ash,” they called her. “Good evening, Ms. Ash.
Is there anything I can bring you, Ms. Ash?” They fawned over her like slaves. Her sweetly worded responses dripped with condescension and contempt: “Why, thank you. How very dear of you.”
Ash. Victoria Ash. Parmenides knew the name. He mused over how easily he could have destroyed the Camarilla elder, but why bother? Clan Assamite had no particular enmity against the Toreador. Even acting on Vykos’s behalf, there was no reason to risk revealing his presence prematurely. Wiping out the entire Toreador clan might not significantly hamper the Camarilla war effort. In fact, it might help.
More importantly, despite the fact that his elders had handed him over to Vykos, Parmenides felt no compulsion to further the Sabbat cause beyond those areas where it coincided with Assamite goals. That was how he interpreted his overall mission. Why else would the elders have utilized the freakish Nosferatu to maintain contact with him? Certainly every morsel of information they relayed made its way also to the Camarilla. So even though Parmenides might personally be subservient to Vykos, the children of Haqim were by no means subjugated by the Sabbat. That revelation was one of the factors that allowed Parmenides to persevere through this ordeal rather than falling victim to despair.
Tonight’s mission was one in which Assamite and Sabbat aims irrefutably merged. Knowing so, Parmenides was able to quiet the troubling thoughts, the rationalizations, that dogged him too often these nights. As he’d been taught so many years before, his mind assumed the silence of death. The minutes passed more easily thus, slipping by without the specter of self-doubt to impede them.
Then Parmenides heard Victoria Ash’s voice again, the tone quite different from that she used with the servants. Still patronizing, but in a more respectful manner. “Maria,” she said. Two sets of footsteps were coming toward the elevator. Victoria babbled on. “I took it upon myself to wait for you personally—how very gauche, I know….”
The second set of footsteps was lighter than Victoria’s. No high heels, not for Maria Chin, Tremere witch of the Washington, D.C. chantry.
Parmenides’s entire being was focused on the sounds beneath him. The elevator doors slid closed. A key scratched against the brass panel, then slid into its proper place. The elevator rumbled to life and began to climb. Victoria chattered away.
Above, in complete silence, Parmenides reached into the folds of his cloak and withdrew the garrote he had crafted for this occasion—the wire longer than was customary, and the handles modified and reinforced to produce incredible leverage even if the victim was several feet below. No Toreador socialite would prevent him from claiming warlock blood. Under the tradition of hadd, vengeance, the Tremere vitae was forfeit.
And Parmenides would see that justice was done. He turned the handle on the elevator hatch.
Thursday, 15 July 1999, 1:08 AM
The outer walls, Alamut
Eastern Turkey
Fatima leaned heavily on Mahmud Azzam. Her steps were short and labored. Clouds lay all about them like thick smoke, and lazy snowflakes clung unmelting to their skin like ash.
“The caliph ignores your request for audience,” Mahmud said, allowing his indignation to seep out among the clouds.
“As is his privilege,” Fatima reminded her younger clansman.
“But he has always been supportive of you in the past.”
“Not always,” Fatima corrected, “but when he has been able. The caliph must be careful when he supports a woman over men, a Muslim over…” she paused, searching for a word suitably delicate, “over others.”
“There have never been so many others,” Mahmud said, mimicking her term but without the delicacy.
“Haqim walked the earth long before the Holy Prophet,” Fatima reminded him. “We Muslims are, in our own way, but newcomers to the blood. You are correct,” she cut off Mahmud’s objection, “that never in our time have so many non-Muslims been accepted into the brotherhood.”
The two walked in silence for some while. Every so often, the clouds would part and the surrounding peaks—an outermost ring of battlements—were visible through the gloom. Beneath Fatima’s robes, her right forearm was still bandaged. Much of Fatima’s strength had returned over the past six nights, though depending on Mahmud’s support kept her from tiring as quickly. He had ministered to her in her convalescence, and al-Ashrad, amr of Alamut, had provided a libation derived from the blood of elders so that she might recover more quickly.
Once before, Fatima had been poisoned with gin-gin. During the first years after her Becoming, as part of her training as a fida’i, her wrist had been sliced open with a poisoned blade. She was left to draw on the power of her blood or perish. In that instance, the poison had not long stayed in her system. This time, there had been those other matters to attend to before she was able to combat the toxin, and the damage it had wrought on her body was many times more severe. Again, she had survived the gin-gin. All the questions remained, however, concerning how she had come to face such an ordeal a second time. “What of Gharok?” she asked Mahmud.
“He still stands guard over the poisons, though he is branded every hour with hot irons, as he will be for one hundred nights. His attention will not wander again.”
“He will be strengthened,” Fatima ag
reed. “Imagine the shame of having a fida’i sneak past and steal from the supplies.” Mahmud shook his head in disbelief.
“If he did sneak past,” said Fatima.
Mahmud stopped, forcing Fatima to stop as well. “You think Gharok was party to the attack?”
Fatima shook her head, motioned for him to continue forward. “Gharok would not do such a thing, but neither would he allow a mere fida’i to best him. Ever.”
“Then who?”
Fatima shrugged. “The elders have spoken.” The judgment of the elders was that the Kurd, whose name was never again to be uttered, so that his stain might be cleansed from the clan, had acted alone. For reasons unknown, he had stolen the gin-gin and poisoned his weapon to attack Fatima. She knew the way of such judgments—the explanation that would most strengthen the clan became ‘truth’. Never mind that the crimes ascribed to the Kurd were beyond him.
Gharok was both competent and honorable. He would endure punishment so that the brotherhood might grow in strength. Fatima, eventually, would gain audience with the caliph and ask questions privately. Though she had disagreed with the judgment of the elders, she would not challenge the conclusion. Such would not be honorable. But neither would she forget.
Fatima nudged Mahmud forward again. She appreciated her protege’s presence and his strength, but she’d had enough conversation. She answered his other questions only with shrugs or abbreviated replies.
Long ago, as a fida’i, Fatima had accepted as a matter of course die pronouncements of the elders, had believed them. Now, as a rafiq, a full member of the brotherhood and an elder herself, she knew enough to question—patiently, cautiously—when intuition demanded. Still, that her intuition raised suspicion in her was troubling. Perhaps soon Elijah Ahmed, her broodmate as well as caliph, would agree to meet with her, and he would lay her doubts to rest.