The Lion of Cairo

by Oden, Scott

  The Heretic bowed. “An initiate failed us, my lord. I used his disgrace as a lesson to the others. But, he brought disturbing news. Our enemy has reinforced.”

  Ibn Sharr’s eyes blazed. “You are certain?”

  “His three brother initiates were slain in the home of the last of Alamut’s spies—and the only one we have yet to account for—by a scarred man who wielded a long Afghan blade. It is a peculiar detail and one that cannot be mere chance. I believe the Emir of the Knife has come to Cairo, my lord, and the Devil only knows how many of Alamut’s fedayeen he has brought with him.”

  Far from being perturbed, Ibn Sharr allowed himself a smile, nodding as though suddenly privy to a wondrous revelation. “Rejoice,” he said, his dark robes rustling around him as he stood. “Rejoice, for the gods have handed us the means to snatch a great victory.”

  “A victory, my lord?”

  “Indeed. By my art and by your skill have we not blinded Alamut’s feeble master? Blind and soon deaf, Badr. To compensate, to keep from falling, he has foolishly thrust out his right hand. What does instinct tell you?”

  “That we should deprive him of that outstretched hand!”

  “And so we will, but carefully,” Ibn Sharr said, turning to his lieutenant. “This Emir is your nemesis, Badr. As foolish as it would be to underestimate you, it would be equally lethal to misjudge him. He is like water on the fire of your soul, and he stands between you and the gates of Paradise. You must overcome him, if it is truly the will of the gods that we triumph here. For the glory of Massaif, my son, you must kill the Emir of the Knife. Kill him and bring me his corpse. O, what tales his soul will tell!”

  The Heretic’s eyes glowed with a murderous light. “Then for the glory of Massaif, it will be so!”

  The Third Surah

  DESTROYER OF

  DELIGHTS

  1

  Dawn colored the eastern horizon; overhead, the cloudless sky faded from lapis to turquoise, glazing with heat even as the sun’s first blistering rays crept over the ridges of the Muqattam Hills. Golden light fired the domes and minarets of Cairo’s innumerable mosques, surfaces of stone and carved stucco growing hot to the touch despite the early hour. A breeze whispering across the Nile brought little relief to the muezzins, those solemn men who rose from their beds to sing the adhan, the call to prayer, from balconies high above the city.

  The song began at al-Azhar Mosque, where a gnarled old muezzin—blind and near crippled—clutched his great-grandson’s arm for support, so frail that the breeze threatened to carry him off. Still, the graybeard’s voice had power. The adhan rose from the depths of his thin chest and drifted over the city, its words lilting and poetic: “Allahu akbar…”

  In turn, muezzins from every quarter of Cairo picked up the thread of the song, their voices commingling, merging into a single call to prayer:

  God is most great.

  I bear witness that there is no god but Allah,

  And Mohammad is His Prophet.

  I bear witness that Ali is the friend of God.

  Come ye to prayer.

  Come ye to salvation.

  Come ye to the best deed.

  God is most great.

  There is no god but Allah.

  “La ilaha illa’llah…”

  And from his balcony high atop the minaret of al-Azhar Mosque, the ancient muezzin held the final note of the adhan longest of all. Hands gripping the railing, sightless eyes closed, he presented the picture of divine rapture even as the power of his voice faltered and failed, leaving him to sag against his great-grandson.

  The haunting echo of his call drifted through a city gone eerily silent.

  2

  Groggy with sleep, Parysatis heard the muezzin’s cry as it reached its crescendo and slowly faded away. She heard, but did not respond. The young woman lay on her back, her pillows scattered, a rumpled cotton sheet across her midsection. Exhaustion added to the despair already weighting her limbs; it required titanic effort for Parysatis simply to breathe.

  She’d been right about the passage in the courtyard wall. Despite a series of maddening twists and turns, it delivered her back to the harem by way of a secret door in an unused bath inside the women’s quarters—and blessedly close to her own tiny cell. A small triumph, to be sure, but bittersweet: the knowledge that she could reach the Caliph’s side unseen—indeed, at will—only served to deepen an already overwhelming sense of helplessness. What can I do? It was a question to which Parysatis had no easy answers.

  She pried her eyes open, looked around. Measured against the sprawling space of her childhood home in Persia, in the hills above Shiraz, her room in the Caliph’s harem was but a closet—ten paces on a side with a curtained door of heavy brocade and a latticed window high up on the wall. Besides the bed, she had room enough for a colossal wardrobe of warm mahogany, a cedar chest, and a small ivory-inlaid table holding her cosmetics, along with a collection of delicate carvings—a family of horses—she had brought from home.

  The size of her living quarters reflected her status as a minor concubine, while her position on the periphery of the harem, well away from the apartments of the Caliph’s aunts, was intended as a slight. It was their none-too-subtle way of reminding Parysatis that she would never be anything more than an inconsequential rustic. She didn’t mind their scorn; indeed, she even relished it. The less they thought of her, the less inclined they would be to meddle in her business. Now, however, the young woman cursed her own standoffishness. Either of those loose-lipped old whores would have made an invaluable ally.

  Parysatis sighed, closed her eyes again. She wanted to sleep, to forget what she had seen, but she kept picturing Rashid’s thin and wasted frame. The Caliph was alone, surrounded by enemies. He needed her. Allah, guide me upon the right path …

  The sound of her door-curtain rustling jerked Parysatis away from the threshold of sleep. She heard her young slave, Yasmina, enter; heard her tsk in disapproval. “Come, mistress.” Yasmina spoke Arabic with a thick Egyptian accent. “It’s time you were up and about. Your prayers—”

  “Remain unanswered.” Parysatis groaned as she struggled to raise herself up on her elbows. Through bleary eyes, she watched Yasmina place a heavy silver tray on the table beside her bed. She’d brought breakfast—a small loaf of bread with butter and honey, a wedge of cheese, a bowl of fresh dates, and a cup of warm khamr—along with towels and a ewer of water for her mistress’s morning ablution. Parysatis caught one whiff of the cheese and felt her stomach heave.

  “You look unwell, mistress.” Yasmina frowned, unhappy that Parysatis had decided to get involved in matters beyond her reckoning. Barely fifteen, Yasmina possessed a maturity that belied her years. In a gown of saffron linen, thin and shapeless, she reminded Parysatis of the women who had followed her father’s soldiers out on campaign—women of twisted sinew, sun blackened, all trace of softness carved from their bodies by horrible privations; women who had borne too much death and suffering. Alone of any in the palace, Parysatis trusted Yasmina. Trusted her as much with her secrets as with her life. “Did you not sleep?”

  “I tried,” Parysatis said. Her voice dropped to a whisper so the women chattering in the courtyard outside her door could not hear. “But I couldn’t get him out of my mind. You weren’t there, Yasmina. You didn’t see him, didn’t see how they treated him. Merciful Allah! I don’t know what to do or where to turn … our lord is suffering and I can do nothing to aid him!” Tears of frustration spilled from the young woman’s reddened eyes.

  Yasmina sat on the edge of the bed and clasped Parysatis’s hand. “Please, mistress, if you’re going to persist in this folly, at least let me go into the city and seek out she who gave me to you. She will know best what you should do.”

  “How can a mere courtesan aid me?”

  “The Gazelle is more than a mere courtesan, mistress,” Yasmina replied, a hint of defiance in her voice. “She is acquainted with men of high repute, nobles who doubtless ha
ve long-simmering grievances against the vizier. She knows better than any the sort of man who could aid you in protecting the Caliph.”

  “But what if she can’t … or won’t?”

  “But she can! And I know she will, mistress! We have only to ask! If you are uncomfortable with my telling her what you’ve discovered, then I will beg her to come and talk to you in person! She will come! As Allah is my witness, I know she will!”

  “Perhaps,” Parysatis said. “But I must find a way to help Rashid now, today, before the vizier and his minions can do him more harm.”

  Yasmina fell silent; her chisel-sharp features—framed by long, straight hair like midnight silk—bore the stamp of single-minded concentration. After a moment, she said: “If he is as ill as you say, mistress, we should seek a physician. Could a doctor not prepare a draught for you to administer … something to counteract any poison?”

  Parysatis stiffened. A physician! How foolish was she not to have seen the obvious? In order for the vizier’s minions to poison the Caliph, they would need to subvert the palace doctors, or more likely deny the physicians’ access until the toxins had a chance to settle in. But, what if she made the physicians aware of the plot? Did she dare believe the answer might be as simple as that? “A physician,” Parysatis said, nodding to Yasmina. “I think you may be right.”

  A rare smile brightened the younger woman’s austere countenance.

  Parysatis glanced about until her eyes lit upon the silver tray holding her untouched breakfast; she grimaced, her stomach churning, as she reached for the mug of khamr and the cheese. “Go find the chief eunuch. Tell him I am not feeling well.”

  3

  In a room on the third floor of Abu’l-Qasim’s sanctuary, Assad answered the morning’s call to prayer. It was not piety that compelled him. Indeed, save for rare occasions like today when he had a deception to prepare for, Assad had not performed the salat, the ritual prayers, in a number of years—not since a previous Hidden Master of Alamut had freed the followers of Ibn al-Sabbah from the burden of Holy Law.

  Still, the Assassin rose promptly as a true believer should and made the proper ablutions before turning his scarred face toward Mecca; clad in his white galabiya, he knelt on a fringed rug of patterned wool. The practiced rhythms of the salat returned easily enough: the recitations of “Allahu akbar” and the opening verses of the Qur’an, followed by a series of gestures and prostrations called rak’as; at the end, Assad muttered the Shahada, the Statement of Faith, and then lapsed into silence, presumably in private prayer.

  After a long moment, he nodded, satisfied his actions would withstand the most rigorous scrutiny; he glided to his feet and went about making sure his appearance matched his performance. To get near the Caliph, Assad meant to adopt the oldest ruse in al-Hashishiyya’s considerable arsenal—he would don the robes of a holy man, a Sufi. This sect of long-haired dervishes lurked in the corners and colonnades of mosques throughout the Moslem world; some sought oneness with God through asceticism, and others achieved it by embracing the mystic traditions and philosophies of Old Persia.

  Assad had assumed the identity of a Sufi in the past—what Daoud ar-Rasul called “taking the wool,” after the coarse cloaks some members of the sect preferred—and he had done so in each instance armed only with a small knife, one easily secreted on his person, trusting he could do away with his victim and escape in the confusion. This time, he had to chuckle at the irony of it all: he was taking the wool in the name of peace, to save a man’s life rather than end it; if things went awry he would need something much larger than a dagger to make good his escape—something large enough to stand out. God, it seemed, was not without a raucous sense of humor.

  The Assassin caught up his salawar, sloughing off the surge of emotions emanating from the blade; he ignored the deep hunger, the yearning, the hate it created in the pit of his stomach—no doubt echoes of the lives it had cut short. Steel rasped on leather as he bared its killing edge.

  Assad had seen few weapons in his lifetime to match the salawar’s simplicity. Only three fingers at its widest, near the hilt, the weapon tapered gradually to a diamond point, its delicate appearance belied by the blade’s thick T-shaped cross section; this made it heavy and flexible, the perfect tool for piercing mail, flesh, and bone. Yet, it was not a subtle weapon, not one easily concealed on his person. It needs to be hidden in plain sight, he reckoned. But how?

  Wrapped in contemplation, Assad tossed the sheath on the bed. He rummaged through his meager belongings and came up with a whetstone, an old cloth, and a small vial of oil. With these, he crossed the room to a cushioned window seat where the light was good. In time, the methodical slish of oiled stone against Damascus steel competed with the sounds filtering in from beyond the tightly latticed window screens.

  Assad’s perch overlooked an intersection of two narrow lanes, both deeply rutted and now clogged with foot traffic—porters swaying beneath the weight of baskets and bales; water carriers with tinkling brass cups, their goatskins bloated and sweating; braying donkeys laden with goods and toiling under the reed switches of their young masters. Groups of veiled women chatted as they walked, guarded by cousins and uncles armed with walking sticks, bronze-skinned toddlers astride their shoulders. Runners threaded through the tumult, coarse linen tunics flapping. Their bare feet kicked up puffs of dust that added to the miasma of the street—a haze of sweat and musk, incense and offal, rancid fat and wood smoke that seemed to breed flies as punishing as those Moses called down from the heavens.

  Beneath him, Assad heard a ramshackle souk blossom into existence, a ragpickers’ bazaar where men in colorless galabiyas and filthy turbans squatted in the shade with their meager wares spread before them. Singsong voices rose above the clamor, hawkers touting scavenged pottery as new or poorly dyed cloth as the finest Damietta cotton; their endless palaver vied against the bleating of goats, the laughter of children, and the staccato paean of an itinerant coppersmith’s hammer.

  This was the city he’d forgotten. The city of his youth, its mesmerizing flow of humanity broken up by islands of commerce; he cared nothing for its noisy, shifting, restive, particolored currents and, in return, it cared nothing for him. Who was he but one face among thousands? Across the breadth of the world, men might step aside and whisper his name with superstitious awe—beware the Emir of the Knife!—but to the city of his birth, Assad’s existence was of no more consequence than a single grain of sand beneath the mighty pyramids …

  The Assassin shook his head. He’d forgotten Cairo for a reason … its air, its water, its monuments, all of it made him as mawkish and self-indulgent as an old widow. Assad scowled; stone scraped against steel as he turned his mind’s eye away from the maudlin and concentrated on the task at hand. The Caliph. How would he react upon learning that the Hidden Master of Alamut sought an alliance with him? Would the importance of it even register with him? Still, Assad thought, I am sworn to defend him, to make him strong, and to sow fear in his enemies. But what if he is his own worst enemy…?

  A soft knock at the door broke off Assad’s introspection. Scowling, he paused in mid-strop and glanced up as Zaynab entered. She moved quietly, clad in a gown of shimmering blue brocade that whispered with each step, a bundle cradled in the crook of her arm. The sight of Assad awake and sitting in the window, his scarred face cast half in shadow, caught her by surprise.

  “I thought to still find you abed,” she said.

  “There is too much to do.” Rising, he drove the point of his salawar into the windowsill and left it there, quivering. “Have you brought the things I asked for?”

  Zaynab handed him the bundle. “Black woolen cloak, a belt, sandals. All of it used, but serviceable. Also an old Bedouin prayer rug and a copy of the Qur’an I borrowed off one of my father’s more devout Berber guards.”

  “Good. It seems Ibn al-Teymani shall live once again.”

  “Who?”

  “Ibn al-Teymani.” Assad glanced sidelong at th
e young woman. Something in the tilt of Zaynab’s head, in the way her delicate eyebrows arched in expectation, provoked desire in Assad. His rational side knew he was simply responding to her mystique—the Gazelle’s livelihood depended on her ability to set a man at ease, to enter into his confidence quickly and unobtrusively. But Assad’s irrational side, flattered by her attention, seized upon it and craved more. “You’ve never heard of Ibn al-Teymani?”

  “Never,” she replied. “Was he a follower of the Hidden Master?”

  “His messenger, more like.”

  Zaynab sat at the edge of Assad’s bed, stiff-backed and proper. From under a loose shawl of pale muslin her hair glistened like polished mahogany; she watched him open the bundle and examine the items one by one. “And these things will make him live again? I sense the beginnings of what surely must be a profound story … or a profound ruse.”

  Assad flashed a sharp smile. “Both. ‘Ibn al-Teymani’ is a ghost, a name I inherited from my mentor, Daoud ar-Rasul.” The Assassin let the sandals fall to the floor and then slipped them on. Woven hemp and old leather creaked; he flexed his toes, rocked back onto his heels and then up onto the balls of his feet. Nodding, he picked up the threadbare black cloak and shook it free. “Daoud was never a soldier of the fedayeen. When the Hidden Master dispatched him, say, to Baghdad or Damascus, it was because he wished to send an undeniable message. As our enemies tend to be of the devout sort, Daoud made an art of taking the wool in order to get near them. He took to impersonating an Arab holy man, whom he called Ibn al-Teymani, and would attend mosque day after day; afterward, he engaged those around him in conversation or debate—making sure the recipient of Alamut’s message was among them.”

  “And this bit of subterfuge well and truly worked, with no other form of persuasion?” Zaynab held her head just so, her curiosity tempered with skepticism.