by Oden, Scott
A maelstrom of steel rasped and whickered around him. A knife flashed past, a spirited lunge gone awry; Assad sidestepped and caught the man by the wrist of his knife hand. His own blade fell like a butcher’s cleaver, severing the fedayee’s arm at the elbow. The man screamed and reeled away, clutching the crimson stump to his body. Assad slung the amputated limb in the face of his nearest attacker.
As the Syrian recoiled from that grisly missile, the Emir of the Knife twisted and smote his remaining companion a terrible blow, hammering aside the long knife he hastily flung up in his defense. Assad’s salawar crashed down full upon the fedayee’s left shoulder, splintering the bone and sending great gouts of blood spurting from the wound even as it drove him to his knees. A pitiful moan escaped the dying man’s lips.
The last of the Heretic’s soldiers chose that instant to spring; thinking now was the opportune moment to sheathe his knife in Assad’s heart—before the Assassin could drag his blade free of the crumpling body. But his was a deadly miscalculation. In a spatter of gore, Assad tore his Afghan sword-knife from the soon-to-be corpse and pivoted; he caught the Syrian in mid-leap, committed to his attack and unable to check his momentum. Steel flashed in the gloom. There was an instant of impact followed by a fierce cry as the two men crashed together, their straining limbs intertwined.
But it was the Emir of the Knife alone who rose up from that deadly scrum. Blood dripped from his face and hands; it made slick the ivory hilt of his salawar, which sprouted from the fallen Syrian’s chest like a steel spike. The fellow’s ashen lips writhed. “Allahu akbar,” he whispered, again and again. “God is great.”
“And there is no God but He,” Assad said, planting a foot on the fedayee’s shoulder and prizing his blade free. The man shivered, death freezing his features in a rictus of horror.
Flames of vengeance flickered in Assad’s eyes; he glanced up, his gaze raking the shadows. “Heretic!” he roared. “Why do you hide? Come out and let us settle our accounts! Or is it you only kill beggars and women?”
A sudden gust of air, hot and stale, flowed out from the doorway where the old man had been standing. It extinguished a few of the lamps scattered about the columned hall and caused others to sputter. Darkness thickened. Assad turned, staring at the elaborately carved doorway that led deeper into the ancient temple. Is there another way out of this accursed place? The possibility wrenched a sulfurous oath from the Assassin’s lips. Perhaps the fedayeen had sacrificed themselves so the Heretic and the old man—master, he had called him—could make good their escape. “God curse the coward’s bones!” Assad started for the door.
“You take much for granted, Emir,” said a silky voice from the shadows, dripping malice. “You presume fear when none exists, and you presume I am at your mercy when, in truth, you are at mine.”
“Am I?” Assad stopped; his eyes narrowed to fiery slits. The voice came from somewhere behind him. He cocked his head to one side, straining to catch the slightest sound. “Am I at your mercy, al-Mulahid—or whatever your name is? If that is the truth, as you say, then I bid you to prove it. Come. Show me the quality of your mercy.”
There was no answer. Assad pivoted slowly in the oppressive silence, his nerves screaming, his senses whetted to razor-sharpness. The coppery reek of blood hung like a shroud in the still air; shadows flickered around the remaining lamps, dim pools of light that illuminated the carved columns but little else. Piteous sobs from the solitary fedayee left alive, his legs twisted and useless, shattered the eerie stillness. Assad shifted his weight …
The blow came with little warning—a faint whisper of cloth, a displacement of air. Before Assad could wheel to face these sounds, his left shoulder exploded in searing agony. A blade, no doubt a long Frankish dirk, sliced through taut muscle and skittered off the bone of his shoulder blade. Assad staggered, teeth clenched against the pain, and lashed out with his salawar. The ancient blade slashed empty air.
The Heretic’s mocking laughter echoed through the columned hall. “There. You see? Such is the quality of my mercy that I could just as easily have cut your throat.”
Hot blood soaked the back of Assad’s khalat. He said nothing, but slowly backed into a circle of light cast by one of the remaining lamps, shaped like a terra-cotta pitcher and sitting slightly above the level of his head on a crude wooden ledge spiked to a column.
“Have I stunned the great Emir of the Knife to silence?” The gloating voice came from Assad’s left. His nostrils flared; the Heretic was close … but just outside the reach of the light.
Unless the light moved.
Quick as a snake, Assad thrust his salawar out, hooking its tip in the lamp’s finger hold. The Assassin twisted and slung the lamp to the ground a few paces to his left. Pottery shattered; the flaring wick sparked a conflagration of oil, a brief inferno that bathed this portion of the hall in a greasy orange glow—and revealed the crouching form of Badr al-Mulahid, poised to strike.
Assad sprang, heedless of the wound in his shoulder. The Assassin did not waste precious breath with curses or taunts; the time for words was long past. He leaped the pool of flaming oil and met the Heretic in a swirling tempest of steel.
The Afghan blade in Assad’s fist sang a paean of hatred; its rage was the voice of the dead—the voices of a thousand souls slain, forever trapped in a web of unrequited vengeance and ancient sorcery. Savage fury drove the corded muscle of his arm, but there was nothing random or reckless in Assad’s attack. Far from it. A cold and precise intellect guided stroke after hammering stroke.
The Heretic gave ground amid the rasp and slither of steel. His dirk, its eighteen-inch blade the work of an Italian master, was no less deadly than Assad’s salawar, nor was the pale-eyed killer’s skill any less impressive. He shifted, his body swaying away from blows that would have split him from crown to crotch.
Slash and parry, thrust and riposte—their blades flickered in the dim light, grated together, and sprang apart. The Heretic feinted, cutting at Assad’s face before turning it at the last instant into a stab for his heart; Assad batted his enemy’s blade aside and countered with a furious upward rip. The Heretic danced back from that blow.
The air in the columned hall grew close and hot from their exertions; both men panted, sweat streaming down their faces. They stood now at the spot where the battle had begun, inside the ring of slain fedayeen. The Heretic took advantage of the brief lull to scoop up a fallen dagger. He dropped into a knife fighter’s stance—his dirk held pommel first, its blade close against his forearm; his purloined dagger he kept low and angled for a disemboweling strike.
Dark eyes aflame, the Emir of the Knife lunged then stopped short with a loud stamp of his foot. It was an old cavalier’s trick—one he learned from a Persian swashbuckler in Basra—and it caught the Heretic off guard. Badr recoiled, ready to parry a thrusting blade; even as he did so, Assad swept in and brought his salawar crashing down with every ounce of power in his knotted shoulders.
Desperately, Badr al-Mulahid raised his dirk to fend off the blow. The hardened edge of Assad’s salawar snapped the Italian steel of the Heretic’s dirk; it sheared through flesh and bone, severing the Frank’s forearm in a spray of blood, and continued down to bite into the juncture of his neck and shoulder.
Badr al-Mulahid reeled. A sudden pallor tinged his features; eerie eyes widened in a mingling of shock and disbelief. The Heretic’s knife clattered to the ground. He reached up and grasped the blade jutting from his upper chest, heedless of the bright gore cascading over his fingers.
“I … I hear them,” Badr croaked, glancing up. “Voices. T-they call to me…”
“Then go to them, spawn of Shaitan!” A welter of blood, and Assad wrenched his blade free, spinning it in a tight circle—a circle that ended with jarring impact and the sound of a butcher’s cleaver splitting a haunch of beef.
The Heretic’s pale eyes dulled; slowly, his head rolled off his shoulders and struck the stones with a wet crack. His blood-spa
ttered body stood there a moment longer before toppling sideways.
“Allah.” Assad wrung sweat from his brow, stared at his fallen foe. Blood from the wound in his shoulder dripped down his left arm. Already the limb was stiff; pain made it increasingly difficult to move. Still, he had one last Syrian to account for. The old man the Heretic named as his master.
“Come out, graybeard.” Assad turned and staggered to the carved doorway, its posts and lintel still limned by a faint ruddy glow. “I have no call to harm you.”
Assad paused, a supernatural thrill crawling down his spine. The glyph-etched walls of the room beyond were black as soot and cut with a dozen deep niches, each one sheltering the nearly identical statue of a man wearing a serpent-browed headdress—his pose rigid, his angular beard unnatural, his eyes cold and hawkish. Is this the god of this accursed place?
The Assassin shook his head to clear his mind of distraction. There is no God but Allah, he reminded himself. Aloud, he said: “You have no need to hide, old man.” Light seeped around the edges of another curtained entry. He heard nothing beyond it. The air was thick with the stench of slaughter, but underlying the coppery reek of blood was the aroma of oils and unguents, dust and salt, and the none-too-subtle hint of decay.
Assad scowled, ripped the curtain aside … and recoiled from the overpowering stink that billowed from the room. What deviltry…? Inside, a trio of copper lamps cast their ruddy light over low tables cluttered with bits of stone and scraps of paper, with frayed rolls of papyrus and half-burned candles, with delicate alabaster jars and vases of murky glass. A gold knife sat atop a bundle of dried herbs; pots of ink stood beside a mortar of heavy stone that looked better suited for grinding flour than for mixing … what? Assad could make little sense of any of it. Was the old man an alchemist of some sort? A concocter of potions and poisons? Assad stepped over the threshold …
… and stopped short; by instinct, he tightened his grip on his salawar.
Bodies lay scattered across the floor of the small chamber. Six were ancient, like desiccated manikins of wood and leather swathed in crumbling cerements of age-blackened linen. A seventh body reclined among them like the Devil’s own courtesan—a naked young woman, her eyes open and staring; in the cool, dry air her mottled flesh was just beginning to show signs of putrefaction. The eighth and final corpse was familiar to Assad: it belonged to one of the men he killed in the Rub al-Maiyit, the one with the infected eye.
The Assassin’s jaw clenched in revulsion. The old man was no alchemist. He was a defiler of the dead—a necromancer. And he was gone. Assad saw no sign of him. How? The chamber was small; it afforded few places to hide and no other exits. How did he escape? A hidden door? With a muttered curse, Assad drove his salawar point-first into the top of one low table—upsetting a pair of jars whose human head–shaped stoppers were fashioned from alabaster—and moved to snatch up a copper lamp. This place and everything in it should burn, but something the old man had said stayed his hand. History … antecedents—such things are as alien to you as the meaning in these carvings.
Assad turned slowly, studying the walls. Carvings covered every inch, creatures and glyphs chiseled in stone. His eyes shifted from the walls to the items on the tables. Many of the same symbols he saw repeated. What was the link between these carvings and the old man’s presence here? What meaning…?
Weariness left Assad’s limbs cold and leaden; the ache of his lacerated shoulder dulled his thoughts. He blinked and shook his head. Whatever the old man’s plans might have been, the Assassin had little doubt the death of the Heretic and his fedayeen had disrupted them. The advantage lay within his grasp, now. And wherever the necromancer’s powers had spirited him off to, Assad would find him and send him on to a well-deserved grave. For that to happen, however, he would need fresh eyes and ears.
He would need the King of Thieves.
Assad’s lips set in a thin line, a humorless smile; he sighed, staring at the bloodstained ivory djinn grinning up from the pommel of his salawar. Abu’l-Qasim would need a peace offering …
9
The King of Thieves slept uneasily. Sweat beaded his brow. Moaning, he thrashed against his bedclothes; one hand flailed about, hitting a pottery wine jug that stood atop a low table near his divan. It toppled, rolled off, and struck the tiled floor in an explosion of terra-cotta fragments and wine lees. The sound jolted Abu’l-Qasim from his restless slumber.
“No!” he cried out, his hands flying to his throat. Abu’l-Qasim ripped away the bandages to touch the thin laceration left behind by Assad’s blade, relieved to find it unchanged. In his nightmare, something had tried to claw its way out …
Abu’l-Qasim sank back against the cushions of his divan. Through shuttered windows, dawn’s gray light suffused the air of his bedchamber with rising warmth. He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds filtering in from outside: the furious barking of a dog; wagon wheels rattling on the hard-packed street; babbling voices; and, in the distance, the blaring of trumpets. It was too early for such a cacophony.
He heard a slight knock at the door to his bedchamber before it creaked open; pottery crunched under the soles of soft slippers. Abu’l-Qasim felt a stab of anguish—as a little girl, Zaynab would often steal thusly into his room, her soft voice begging him to take her up on the roof so she might watch the sun rise.
A hand touched his shoulder. “I beg your pardon, effendi.” It was his Berber spymaster.
“What is it, Derna?” Abu’l-Qasim opened his eyes. Derna looked disheveled, heavy-eyed, as though someone had just roused him from slumber, too. His face was the color of curdled cream.
“The army of Damascus, effendi! Just as you forewarned! They came up from the south and circled around the city during the night!”
That explained the noises, the trumpets. With a sigh, Abu’l-Qasim flung off his bedclothes and got to his feet, his careworn face settling into a mask of resolve. “Fetch my stewards and send for my captains. I want the doors to remain open and food prepared for any who desire it. Put forth the word, Derna: all who seek succor are welcome in the house of Abu’l-Qasim.” Abu’l-Qasim’s eye flicked to a settee at the foot of his bed, where a tray covered by a wicker dome awaited his pleasure. He gestured. “Take that away. I will let you know when I am ready to break my fast.”
Derna’s narrow eyes crinkled in confusion. “Of course I will take it away, effendi, but I did not bring breakfast to you. That must have been brought in last night.”
“What?”
“It was here already, as Allah is my witness.”
Abu’l-Qasim’s beard bristled with suspicion. His gaze slid from Derna to the tray; carefully, he reached out and raised the wicker dome. Its contents gave off the metallic aroma of spilled blood. Behind him, he heard his spymaster gasp. “Allah preserve us!”
Abu’l-Qasim grunted in equal parts surprise and perturbation.
A severed head lay on the tray—its angular, Frankish features clean-shaven, its close-cropped hair the color of heavy gold. Eyes a pale shade of blue stared through half-closed lids. From between its lips protruded a roll of papyrus. This Abu’l-Qasim took; gingerly, he smoothed the papyrus out and held it so he could read the two words written in a firm hand upon its surface:
As promised.
Below this, daubed in blood, was the sigil of an eagle, its wings outstretched. He had seen such a symbol before, among Zaynab’s things. It was the mark of Alamut.
Derna wrung his hands. “What means this, effendi? Is it a threat? A warning?”
Abu’l-Qasim crumpled the papyrus in his fist; turning, he walked to the window and nudged open the shutters. A Nile breeze carried away the smell of blood. Outside, the rising sun turned the dusty sky above Cairo into a canopy of orange and gold. Pigeons rose like a smoky cloud and wheeled over the domes of the distant palace. Brazen-throated horns continued their clamor, calling soldiers to their posts; fear rustled through the streets as self-appointed heralds spread news of the adva
ncing army like bearers of a plague. Yet, for all the promise of chaos the day held, Abu’l-Qasim’s heart felt suddenly light, unshackled. “He kept his word.”
“Effendi?” Derna said.
“The Emir of the Knife kept his word. He brought me the head of my daughter’s killer. Take it down into the courtyard, Derna. Spike it to a lance and put it where everyone can see.”
Derna bowed. “It will be as you wish, effendi.”
And breathing deeply of the morning’s breeze, Ali abu’l-Qasim—whom the folk of Cairo called the King of Thieves—smiled.
The Sixth Surah
LION OF CAIRO
1
The surgeon hunched over Assad’s lacerated shoulder was a smooth-faced eunuch, slender and severe in a khalat of green silk and a turban-wrapped fez; he approached the stitching of flesh with the single-minded intensity of a master tailor. Assad clenched his jaw as the eunuch sluiced cool brine over the wound, inspecting its edges with a critical eye. Salt water tinted with blood spattered the golden travertine underfoot.
Stripped to the waist, Assad lay on his stomach on a stone bench, on a keel-arched portico of a pleasure kiosk standing alone at the heart of a jewel-green garden. Early morning sunlight slashed through a haze of dust; heavy serpentine columns upheld the graceful arches, striping the flagstones with alternating bands of light and shadow. Assad heard the eunuch mutter to himself about the dust as he readied a curved golden needle attached to a length of catgut thread.
From the corner of his eye Assad caught the Caliph pacing. The young man wore the rich white robes of his office, his undervest and silken girdle sewn with gold and silver thread; his bulbous turban sported a brooch of electrum inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a snowy egret feather bobbing above it. He turned suddenly, hands clasped at his back and his brow furrowed. “You will not tell me what happened?”