Clan Novel Assamite - Book 7 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  “We are not Muhammadans,” Fatima said sharply. “Muhammad is the last prophet. We revere the prophets. We do not worship them. We worship God.”

  “Do you try to lecture me, childe?”

  “Do you try to insult me?” Fatima shot back. “Leading me here and telling me such rubbish—that there is no longer—”

  “Fatima.”

  The sharp tone of his voice brought her up short; that and the cold fire suddenly visible in his dark eyes. They were standing only feet apart, and Fatima’s stance was as intentionally casual as that of her sire. Among the children of Haqim, however, the line between casual and violent was thin indeed. But Thetmes’s face softened just as suddenly as it had grown hard, and his voice took on a more sympathetic tone. “The faith of your fathers is a mortal crutch, but you are mortal no longer. This wishful thinking that God is in His paradise—it is time to set it aside. The herald is among us. The Eldest of our blood is not long behind.”

  “La ilaha ilia ’LLah,” Fatima closed her eyes and muttered. “Wa Muhammadan rasula ’l-Lah.”

  “I am not here to insult you,” Thetmes insisted. “I am here to instruct you. I have always been here to instruct you.”

  “Some night I may no longer need instruction."

  "Then you knew already all that I have told you tonight?”

  Fatima forced herself not to dig her fingernails into her palms, not to flinch. She could not rebuke her sire, could not contest him on this point. She did not know what he knew. Though she had walked the earth for nearly a millennium, Thetmes had existed easily twice as long. He was stronger in the blood.

  As if to drive home the point, Thetmes was on her. From those few feet away, he was suddenly in her face, his strong fingers clutching her shoulders like a tree clinging to the slopes of a rocky mountain since the beginning of time.

  Fatima’s instincts took over. She began to slap upward with her hands—but she could not. His grip kept her arms pinned at her sides. The shock of his strength jarred her from her battle instincts. Not severely, but enough that her conscious mind took over. Enough that she did not attack her sire, did not smash her forehead into his face, or crush his kneecap or pelvis with her own knee.

  She froze.

  She froze and saw the anger in her sire’s eyes—the anger that almost concealed his imploring pain. This being, his strength and knowledge so much greater than her own, his blood so close to Haqim’s, wanted desperately to save her. He squeezed until her bones were about to snap, until her arms almost wrenched free of their sockets. His face was inches from hers. His spittle landed on her cheek.

  “Do you think any of the others had this chance, girl? Do you think anyone warned them before the dreams came?”

  “Then why?” Fatima spat the words at him. She was cowed for only a second, then her rage took hold. She struggled in her sire’s grip but restrained herself from striking him.

  Thetmes shoved his face against hers, bellowed at her with their foreheads and noses touching: “Because I’ll not see a childe of mine prove unworthy! I will not!”

  Then he thrust her away. Fatima stumbled but caught herself, and they again stood several yards apart. The blood of Haqim was rushing through her. Her body was more ready for attack than she was. She fought down the impulse, did not lash out, did not draw her blade. Who knew what the outcome might be if her sire desired violence? Had he not already proven his mastery over her? But sheer strength was not combat; raw power was not life and death.

  “Are you here to test me, then?” she asked.

  Her question cracked Thetmes’s solemn mask, and he laughed a dry, mirthless laugh. “I do not need to test you.” He thought on that idea a moment, then scoffed openly. “Ha! If only I dared test you…but I would prove too lenient. The task is not mine. I am not the herald, to visit dreams upon you, to look into your heart.”

  Dreams.

  But must the roads diverge?

  That is a question to be answered in dreams.

  The Way of Allah. The Path of Blood. Thetmes spoke openly of what the amr had merely hinted at. Al-Ashrad had asked her questions. Thetmes handed to her the answers, though they be answers she did not want to believe.

  The spreading silence of the gardens struck Fatima all at once, though undoubtedly it had begun with Thetmes’s outburst. The hungry, feral cats sensed that death—and the bringers of death—was at hand. They were silent, probably fled. All save the one whose life had served her sire.

  “We must go,” Thetmes said, also aware of the attention having shouted might bring.

  “Why?” Fatima whispered, and her sire did not mistake her question. They both knew that any mortals or Cainites that happened upon them would pose little enough threat against one of the assassins, much less both. But she and her sire might be forced to destroy someone who would be missed sooner rather than later. They could not endanger her mission. The mission was, of course, above all else.

  But why they must leave was not what Fatima asked. Her question was of the roads that must eventually diverge, and Thetmes knew this. He knew his childe.

  “Why,” he said, “do the water and the wind tear away at the strongest mountain? Why does the sun sear the flesh from our bones? Because it is so. Do you rail against the sun in the morning, or do you hide yourself away and survive? Would you deny the Eldest that which is rightfully his?”

  “Would he deny Allah that which is rightfully His?” Fatima asked.

  “Mine is not to judge.”

  “You have already judged.”

  Thetmes shook his head violently back and forth. “Insolent childe! What do you gain by defying the Eldest? What except certain death? He is like a god among us!”

  “Just as we are like gods among the mortals,” Fatima said. “And though he be the Eldest of the blood, and though he be a god among us, he is not Allah. He is not God.”

  Thetmes tossed up his hands. He paced several steps back and forth, then stopped. Fatima had never before seen in him such displays of anger and agitation as he’d shown tonight. Now he seemed focused elsewhere. He listened as if to sounds in the distance. If there was something he heard, Fatima did not hear it.

  “Come. We must go,” he said again.

  “Yes. But answer me this.”

  He stopped after just a few steps. “What, childe?”

  “The dreams…they have come to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me of them. Of the herald.”

  Thetmes shook his head slowly. “What they were to me will mean little to you, I fear. They are a calling, an undeniable summons. I traveled to the land of our ancestors and faced the herald. He is dark and terrible—the fury of your heaven and the fire of your hell. Black and impenetrable as darkest night.”

  Thetmes held his hands open before him and stared at his palms, as if he held something that he was powerless to set down and helpless to comprehend. Then the glassiness of his eyes cleared, and his mind came back from that faraway place.

  “They will come when they come,” he said. “Many of the elders have been called—some proved worthy, others…” Thetmes shrugged, but Fatima saw the sadness in his black eyes, the fear that had driven him to warn her. “Some of the fida’i have even heard the call, but I know of none who… The dreams overpower their young blood, destroy their minds. The fida’i are not meant to be so tested. They are not ready. The great fire is not meant for them, but its heat touches them.”

  “They go mad?” Fatima asked, remembering the Kurd, the insanity of his eyes, the impossible feats of his young, mangled body.

  “Yes,” said Thetmes, knowing her thoughts. “You came across one.” He reached out again, slowly this time, and took her right hand, traced the gin-gin scar along her forearm. “Your fida’i seemed more willful than the others, or so I’ve heard. The amr believes that the herald sent madness to that one—madness and cunning—as a warning. A warning to you.”

  “A warning.”

  “So al-Ashrad be
lieves. And who am I to doubt the amr in such matters?”

  “He would not speak of it to me.”

  “He did not feel it proper. His blood is that of the herald, but you are of my blood. Now come.”

  Thetmes led her from the gardens, and Fatima followed, neither willingly nor unwillingly. She was numb. And this was her sire. So much of what he had said matched that which the amr had suggested, what the amr had not quite said.

  Ur-Shulgi, herald of Haqim. The Final Nights, when Haqim would rise, and before him and his childer all the get of Khayyin would fall, their blood reclaimed for the worthy.

  The worthy. Fatima had always numbered herself among them, had thought that she had proven herself as such. But had Elijah Ahmed counted himself among the worthy? Had Jamal, the Old Man of the Mountain, he who had risen above all other children of Haqim?

  Would the Eldest have her abandon the Way of Allah and follow solely the Path of Blood? Would he demand that? Fatima’s legs grew weak at the thought. She feared she would stumble as she followed Thetmes away from the Jardines Sabatini, away from the center of the old city. He took her from the remnants of the old to the sprawling vulgarity of the new. Modern buildings, high-rises, gas stations, icons of the West that surrounded the old city like a scab, that encroached upon the very heart of Madrid like a cancer.

  Fatima barely felt her legs carrying her forward. She thought that perhaps her legs had been cut off, that her soul had been harvested, that she had at last reaped the death that for so long she had sown.

  This wishful thinking that God is in His paradise—it is time to set it aside. The herald is among us. The Eldest of our blood is not long behind.

  Her sire’s words rang in her ears. Thetmes had always taught her faithfully. Never had he led her astray. Even now, warning her, he was doing that which al-Ashrad did not dare.

  Fatima did not disregard her sire’s warning. She did not underestimate the risks he took for her sake. Yet when she considered that which he urged, the world no longer made sense. Concrete, plaster, tarmac surrounded her. If she cast away her faith—thinking just for an instant that she could commit such a base act—then the secular and the vulgar were all that remained. Gone was all that tied her to her beginnings, to the world of the day. Already life was a faint memory, something distant that she saw but did not feel. Night and darkness were not one and the same. She had given herself to an existence of night; but remove memory of the day, and only darkness re of dignity.

  “You seek knowledge of Monçada and his lair,” Thetmes said.

  One of the hooded figures produced a notepad and handed it to Fatima. She met his gaze, and there was something familiar about his eyes, something she might possibly recognize from long ago—but she could not quite place it. After glancing at the notepad, however, she was completely absorbed by what she found there and not by eyes beneath a hood. Her inner turmoil, though far from resolved, gave way to her ingrained dedication to the mission: The notepad pages were full of scribbling and tiny drawings—maps and diagrams.

  Monçada’s haven. Traps, defenses.

  Fatima flipped through the pages. The church and opera entrances were heavily guarded by ghouls and the cardinal’s legionnaires. The tunnels also were trapped—giant stone slabs that would fall at intervals and trap an intruder so that she might be easily dealt with when Monçada was ready. Fatima saw one entrance that had not been sniffed out by Mahmud, Anwar, and Pilar’s teams.

  The maps wound from one sheet of paper to another. The tunnels seemed to meander without reason. Some areas were more detailed than others. Not all the portions were linked. Faulty memory? The blame certainly did not lie with a lack of zeal on the part of the interrogators. Fatima suspected they were of the blood; she sensed that of them, though she could not place them, and the children of Haqim took pride in the fact that they convened fairly often. There should be none of the brotherhood that were strange to her. Yet she did not know them. She could not place the familiar eyes. The strangeness of their anonymity gnawed at her.

  Fatima glanced at the Cainite on the bed. The information on these pages was remarkable—if it was accurate. The Cainite’s features were distorted by lack of blood. He had been drained, and then fed only enough to tantalize him into speech. How many nights this had been going on, Fatima could only guess. Still, like the one Assamite beneath the hood, the victim was vaguely familiar to her. She imagined him fuller of face and body—and suddenly she realized.

  “The Black Hand had been considering moving against Ibrahim for quite some time,” Thetmes said.

  Don Ibrahim. Archbishop of the Sabbat but in life a Muslim cleric, long-time rival-turned-associate to Monçada, the Christian priest. Fatima recognized the slight remaining similarity to the pre-op pictures she had studied. She wondered if he still served Allah faithfully—did his masters permit it?—or if he were corrupted completely by the blood of Khayyin. She imagined for an instant that, were the circumstances different, she could ask him. But she knew that was not true. Though ostensibly a follower of the Prophet, Ibrahim was kafir. He was the enemy, and to be destroyed.

  Fatima’s surprise at recognizing Ibrahim, however, was less than at what else Thetmes had said: The Black Hand had been considering…

  The Black Hand. Fatima looked at the two hooded brethren, the two childer of Haqim whom she should know but did not. The Black Hand. Elite killers among the Sabbat. They answered to the regent, titular leader of that factious sect. Many of them were reportedly Assamite antitribu—childer of Haqim gone rogue, not for traitorous reasons like the antitribu of other clans, but because, in defiance of the elders, they had refused to submit to the curse of the vile Tremere. Though there were elders, too, among their number. Fatima had seen them go. She had been prepared to go with them, but her sire had counseled her otherwise: If all of the best refuse the decree, then the munafiqun will hunt us down. Fatima had listened to him. Those had been the nights of weakness, the darkest time of the clan.

  She turned toward Thetmes. If he had contacts among the Black Hand…

  “I am not of the manus nigrum,” Thetmes said, as always seemingly two steps ahead of Fatima. “But there are those among them who share our sympathies.”

  Fatima’s thoughts were racing. She, like all of the brethren who had remained obedient to the clan, had never borne any enmity toward those who had chosen the route of defiance. Quite the opposite. Though she had attempted to secure the survival of the clan and followed the letter of the decree, she accorded the antitribu a grudged respect and admiration. None could imagine Haqim subordinating himself to another—not even to God, it now seemed. But to discover that there existed not just tolerance but cooperation between the highest echelons of the children of Haqim—those within the clan and those of the Black Hand—was simply amazing.

  “The time you have been away…?” she began to ask her sire.

  “Not spent in torpor, but arranging that which must come,” he said. “We have achieved Alamut and Tajdid. The third castle of three along the road of the hijra is Umma.”

  Umma. Community. That the brotherhood should again be one and undivided.

  “The beasts of the Sabbat cannot stand before us,” Thetmes said. “Many of the brethren among them see that, and in time, they all will see it.” His eyes narrowed. Though his tone was harsh for the benefit of other ears, the imploring pain was again in his eyes, that his childe should prove worthy. “And not all of the prophets of Allah will keep us from the Final Nights and Haqim’s will.”

  Fatima ignored Thetmes’s jibe, lest she grow disturbed again and lose her focus on the mission. It was not the insult to her faith that bothered her, but the obvious concern for her wellbeing—obvious to her, concealed from the others.

  She concentrated instead on the revelations of this room. It was not all of the Black Hand, then, in league with the powers of Alamut. Fatima found this a slight relief in a way, for though she was amazed to learn of Thetmes’s deceit of the past years, as well
as of his true activities as liaison with sympathizers of the Black Hand, her pride was wounded that the secret had been kept from her. That it was a smaller secret—and not that the entire Black Hand was a puppet of Alamut—made it bearable at least.

  You did not know. You had no need to know.

  Still, Fatima was among the eldest and the most respected of the children of Haqim. How many other great secrets were kept from her? At what point could she expect to know, would she need to know?

  The two hooded interrogators, not interested in Thetmes and Fatima’s conversation, returned to their task. The one Fatima did not recognize—perhaps he had been Embraced since the division of the clan—went briefly into the bathroom. Fatima heard him scoop liquid from the bathtub. He returned with a glass of blood, lighter colored and less viscous than it should be. Watered down. But the scent was unmistakable. Mortal blood.

  Don Ibrahim caught the scent as well. His nostrils began to flare, and he roused quickly from his stupor. He tried to speak, but his jaw hung slack, and his tongue was shriveled and useless—except for wagging at the air, seeking that for which he so desperately hungered.

  Fatima returned the notepad to the familiar Assamite, as his partner dribbled the weakened blood onto Ibrahim’s face. The captured Lasombra opened his mouth wide, invested all his strength in flinging his face from side to side, capturing as much of the sustaining liquid as he could. Satisfied that he was at least temporarily returning to his senses, Ibrahim’s tormentors poured more of the glass’s contents into his mouth. Ibrahim bucked against his chain. He grunted for more, like an idiot child, but no more was forthcoming. What he was given gurgled in his throat as he tried to gulp it down while lying on his back.

  Just that small amount of diluted blood returned a semblance of awareness to Ibrahim. As he licked at the tiny splatters on the bare mattress, his shriveled tongue took on a more natural aspect. His eyes filled out the slightest bit in their sockets, though his gaze remained obviously unfocused. He would stay blind unless he was given more blood and was able to heal more satisfactorily. Fatima doubted that would happen. The Black Hand would not move against an ally of Cardinal Monçada and then suffer that person to survive. No, poor Ibrahim had most likely worn out his existence, or, if he were lucky, they might hide his staked, torpid body and save it for some future need.