Fatima continued downward, and soon all sound but two sets of footsteps faded into the distance. The echoes of combat gave way to the silence of ages. Here the air was slightly warmer, unaffected by variations of external temperature. Little in the way of draft survived this deep within Alamut, and few were those of the brotherhood who had cause to walk upon the stone of this, the heart of the mountain.
They came to a wooden door, tall and strong, one of the few imported along the treacherous paths to the fortress. Fatima waited, standing perfectly erect, chin raised, while the messenger took hold of the large, metal ring handle, tugged the door open, and stepped within. Several minutes passed. Eventually, the messenger ghoul stepped back through the doorway and led Fatima through a series of tight passages to the proper room. There he left her, standing before the pale blue, shimmering silk curtain that hung across the stone archway. Fatima gently pulled the curtain aside and stepped inside.
Al-Ashrad sat not far away, on the other side of the bookshelf-lined room. He was a single diamond among the coal-blackness of his brethren, his skin the color of ivory. An actual diamond filled the place where his left eye should have been, countless facets of white upon white tucked within one of the deep crags of his angular face. His head was clean shaven, but rather than a smooth dome resembled more a mountain bald, worn by weather and time yet stolid and strong. Along the hems of his white muslin robe, only faint stitches marked where garment ended and flesh began. One sleeve of his robe, pinned up to his shoulder, was empty. He neither wore nor carried any regalia of office; the empty left sleeve and diamond eye were his only visible badges of distinction—for arm and eye, so said the lore, were taken in judgment by Haqim himself. For the great magician had walked the earth during the nights of the Eldest Elder and was blood of Haqim’s blood. Al-Ashrad had offended in some way, yet the wizard had been too valuable for the Eldest to destroy. The amr was said to have served Haqim for millennia.
Al-Ashrad did not acknowledge Fatima. His right eye, pale blue like the curtain across the doorway, stared in her direction but did not see. What he observed through the diamond orb—this room or some place thousands of miles away, centuries long passed or yet to come—she had no way of knowing. There were legends of ancients whose eyes were scattered about the earth, and thus they saw—and ruled—where they could not be.
The cleft of al-Ashrad’s sharp chin rested on his thumb; index finger crossed his lips, as if shushing Fatima before she spoke. The shelves lining the room were filled with worn tomes, their leather spines cracked with age and use. The right wall supported a rack overcrowded with scrolls. There was only the one stool, upon which the amr sat, and even had there been more chairs, Fatima would not have presumed to sit in his presence. She stood and waited as the lone candle in the room burned lower. She was anxious to ask him about the Kurd, but whereas if she’d been facing the caliph, with whom she might speak more freely, she would not ask the amr unless he first broached the topic.
She waited for an hour. And much of another. All this time, al-Ashrad did not move or change expression. As always when in his presence, Fatima felt that the very air itself was charged with…energy, magic? The hair on her arms tingled; she felt every so often what might be a breeze, but there was no breeze. The space between her and the amr seemed to ripple at times, but she would notice this as if it were happening just beyond her peripheral vision—though she had been watching all the while—as if her eyes were too weak, her mind too feeble to capture reality. And so she waited, very nearly in awe.
Then al-Ashrad did move. He cocked his head slightly, and the gaze of his remaining eye, the gaze that had traveled through Fatima to somewhere beyond, came to fall upon her.
“Ah. Fatima,” he said, a spark of recognition crossing his features. “I have kept you waiting. You will forgive me.” His words echoed within Fatima’s chest cavity; the restless air, chased by his voice, had seemingly crept inside her body. He spoke casually, but there was a gulf of …experience between them, a chasm of qualitative existence that Fatima could not begin to bridge, as if she were a desert flea and the amr a great ocean.
“Salaam,” she bowed to the amr. “There is nothing to forgive.”
And then a strange thing happened. The slightest bemused smile crept over the amr’s face. His gaze, without shifting, again traveled far away. Fatima thought for a moment that she might need to wait again to speak with the wise and mighty al-Ashrad, but his distant preoccupation passed after just a few seconds, and he was with her again. He regarded her with the piercing blue eye; it burned cold like a star of ice fallen from the northern sky.
“Always there is something to forgive,” he said at last.
Fatima knew not how to respond, and so kept to her silence.
Al-Ashrad held her in his gaze. It was as if such intense scrutiny was the only way he could maintain his attention on her, as if whatever he saw through his diamond eye demanded his undivided energies and only by conscious act of will did he navigate the immediacy of here and now. And all the while, the air around him seemed to shimmer, to grow restless and stir of its own accord.
“Do you rest well?” the amr asked. Then, in response to Fatima’s puzzlement, added, “During the hours of the sun, do you rest peacefully?”
Fatima thought on this for a moment. Though she could not divine the purpose of al-Ashrad’s question, neither did she believe that he had summoned her here for idle conversation and pleasantries. She had hoped to speak of the Kurd’s attack, of the impossibility of it all, but it was the amr who would decide that of which they spoke. “I do,” she answered truthfully, speaking to him forthrightly as would a child to her father.
“Do you rest as might a mortal, asleep, or as one who has cheated death?” he asked impassively.
Fatima pondered this question also—it was not a distinction that had concerned her for centuries, not since the earliest nights of her Becoming—then spoke: “For me, there has never been much difference between the two, the sleep of a mortal and the rest of our kind.” She thought back to those nights so long ago. “As a mortal, there were sometimes sleepless nights…from worry or sickness or dreams. Now there is only rest.”
“There are no dreams?” He asked the question in the same tone as those earlier. He did not lean closer to her or harden his gaze, yet the words echoed within Fatima, his voice rattled with great weight in her chest. Perhaps there was also a crackling of electricity in the air, a stirring of forces invisible to her, but she could not be sure.
“There are no dreams,” said Fatima. “I have not dreamt since…” She searched her mind, sought out the memories of the last time. It had been so very long ago. Nearly a millennium had passed since her mortal life. But she remembered. The dream had not been of a young lover, as might have befitted a woman of tender years. No, it had been of violence and fire and death, of barbaric marauders, armed, bloodthirsty Christians hacking her family to pieces, raping her mother and sisters before the eyes of her male relations, all bound, and then killing them all. It was a dream that, in what had been left of her mortal days and in the nights since, she had made sure was not fulfilled. It had not come to pass. She had protected her family. Some had died in the cause, as was fitting, but none like lambs at the slaughter. In time, each of them had passed beyond. There were, of course, descendants. Many descendants, in fact. But at some point after the grandchildren of her parents’ grandchildren, the connections grew too distant. How many times could she watch from the distance as a babe was born, grew and played and lived, loved and married, had children of his own, grew old and died? The cycle was ever-repeating, and though she was removed from it, it was her very separation, her exclusion from the cycle, that had ensured the family’s survival. They were spread across the world now, blood of her siblings’ blood. Her duty to them was complete.
“I have not dreamt since long ago.”
Al-Ashrad said nothing, yet Fatima felt he knew her every thought, her every sorrow, her every longi
ng. And for a reason she could not quite touch, the feeling disturbed her unduly.
“You rest without dreams,” said the amr, “and rise each night to serve your master.”
“Yes, my amr.”
“And his name is the first from your lips. Your first thoughts each night are of your duty to him.”
Fatima paused. The statement—for it was not spoken as a question, but as fact—seemed innocent enough at first, but then she realized the dilemma in the words. Her mouth had opened slightly, but she did not speak. She was wise enough not to speak words of a forked tongue to al-Ashrad.
“We do not speak of the same master,” said the amr.
“Not entirely,” she assented.
She thought briefly that al-Ashrad was drifting away again to that other place beyond her comprehension, but then she was suddenly overcome by the feeling that he saw her only too well, that he gazed within the very essence of her being and uncovered contradictions that she hadn’t known were there. Was that a glint of light in the diamond eye? Did it see within her soul, knowing the secrets of her heart more completely than she could? Or, more likely, the glint was merely light reflected from the candle on the small table in the corner.
“There is no creature that walks the earth who may long serve two masters,” spoke al-Ashrad.
“It has ever been, my amr, that I have served my two masters.” Fatima’s words, though she disagreed with the amr, were not haughty; they were spoken from conviction, from faith, and she hoped that al-Ashrad would hear the words for what they were, that he would see her heart as it truly was—but she also feared that. And the fear was growing.
“It has ever been,” he repeated quietly, and the rumbling echo of his voice in her chest spread clear her error before her.
It has ever been.
“Since the night of my Becoming,” Fatima retreated in her assertion. “Since the first nights of my training, I have served Haqim. Before that, there was only Allah.”
“That which is ever to some,” said al-Ashrad, “is not so much as long to he who turned his back on the sun before the Holy Prophet walked the earth, to he who knew the rites of blood before the Christ, al-Masih, called in pain to his God, to he who was ancient before Musa toiled in the land of Egypt, to he who stood against Khayyin before the fall of the First City.”
His words gripped her more firmly than even the gaze of the diamond eye; they took hold of her from within. Fatima hung her head. “It is as you say, my amr. I spoke from pride.”
“Not pride,” spoke al-Ashrad. “From single-mindedness. The desert mouse that watches only the snake does not see the owl.”
“But do you not…?” Fatima’s words trailed off. She realized the scale of her distraction, that she would speak unbidden to al-Ashrad, and this after just having spoken hastily. The questions thundered in her breast; a storm raged in her heart. There was great meaning in the amr’s words, if only she could see beyond her own confusion. Perhaps it was the diamond eye that let him see such things.
“Speak, child. You do not offend.”
She began again. “Do you not, wise one, walk the night single-minded? How else might you have achieved the Tajdid? You have broken the curse. You have restored the Path of Blood to those who would follow.”
Fatima almost thought she saw al-Ashrad wince at the words. Perhaps it was merely another ripple of the air, her young eyes playing tricks in the presence of one so aged and potent.
“Two roads may lead the same direction,” he said. “The sure of mind and heart may follow with one foot on each road. But what of when the roads diverge?”
“Then the traveler must choose. Or go no farther.” The swirling grew fiercer in Fatima’s heart. The road of the Holy Prophet, that God might be glorified; the road of Blood, that the faithful might rise to be one with the Eldest—long had they been the twined cord of her existence, yet now was al-Ashrad suggesting…a fraying?
“But must the roads diverge?” she asked.
The eyes of al-Ashrad, blue and white, flesh and stone, were now inscrutable as the stars in the heavens, his face clean as the desert floor after a scouring storm. “That is a question to be answered in dreams.” In dreams. In dreams that Fatima, like all of her kind, did not have—or had not had…yet.
“Now is the time,” said al-Ashrad, “for the faithful to prepare themselves, to make themselves worthy, so that they might endure.”
Prepare themselves. Prepare themselves for what? she wanted to ask, but her question was held in check by a subtle change that came over al-Ashrad. Fatima wasn’t sure how she recognized the change; perhaps it was her years of study, learning to read the emotions, almost to read the thoughts, of those around her. But the amr did not shift in his seat, nor did he visibly soften his expression, and she was not so proud as to think she could know his thoughts if such was not his intent. Perhaps it was instead the restless air, the energy that seeped from al-Ashrad like light through a thousand pinholes, that conveyed his mood to her. Whatever the medium, she could feel reluctant, almost wistful kindliness radiating from him. And sorrow. There was sorrow, as well.
“My hope,” said al-Ashrad, “is that you might prove worthy.”
His words, in a vague way, were kindly as well. There was a hint of fondness that, on rare occasion, crept into the speech of the elder of the elders. Such was never the case with those younger of the blood. Even one of Fatima’s age and status could afford no lapses into sentimentality, for therein lay the seeds of betrayal. While the brotherhood was intensely personal to each individual, dealings within the brotherhood were necessarily impersonal, for only the strong survived to serve. Attachment was weakness. And yet here were the words of al-Ashrad, he who had no fear for his position, he who was closest in blood to Haqim as any among the clan. Thetmes, her sire and once caliph, had spoken to her in such a manner, though rarely; Elijah Ahmed, now caliph, had also. Yet coming from al-Ashrad, the words were more ominous, more confusing.
“My hope is that you, Fatima, might endure.”
She stood dumbfounded; she could find no words to respond. But the rumble of his voice in her chest, the swirling chaos in her soul grew into an ache, as if al-Ashrad had not only seen her heart but had also taken hold of it with his one hand. And with gentle words he would rip it from her body.
Prepare herself. Prove worthy. Endure.
She had spent over nine hundred years enduring. Every day and every night of that time, she had spent attempting to make herself worthy in the service of Allah, in the service of Haqim. How else was she supposed to prepare? Was this what he meant about the roads diverging?
Al-Ashrad watched Fatima as she puzzled these questions, and though still she could not pinpoint the telltale sign that indicated his mood to her, the softness, the concern, was gone from him. Absent, though gaze of eye and diamond still held her. Gone so completely as to make Fatima wonder if she had not imagined it entirely. The amr was from a world as removed from hers as was hers from that of a mere mortal. Could she truly expect to comprehend him? Or must she wait for the dreams?
The confusion and unease did not sit well with Fatima. They rankled like leeches burrowing into flesh. The foundations of her existence had always been solidly laid, and for quite some time her every act had been an effort to build upon that foundation. Yet now, those of the clan elder to her said and did things that she did not understand, that undermined her foundations. The generalities and abstractions that al-Ashrad spoke of were shifting sands, and they threatened to swallow Fatima.
She grasped for any stone-hard fact within her reach, even at the risk of presumption in the face of the amr. “I have endured an attempt on me within these sacred walls,” she said.
A flash that might have been anger crossed al-Ashrad’s face. The shadows cast by his sharp brow seemed suddenly darker, harder. “The elders have spoken on that matter,” he said. Nothing more.
There was nothing else for Fatima to do but bow her head in acquiescence. The subject
was off limits. To such an extent that the amr had grown short with her. Was it really anger that she had sensed in that brief instant—or alarm? But what on heaven or earth could alarm the amr? Another riddle. But Fatima preferred the riddle beyond her to those within.
Watching her with again inscrutable expression, al-Ashrad reached out with his hand. At once, a goblet fashioned of bone rose slowly into the air from its place beside the candle on the corner table. The goblet’s mate as well as a bone-white decanter also rose into the air and made their way dutifully across the room. Al-Ashrad took the first goblet. The second presented itself to Fatima. She took it in hand. The decanter, she now saw, was an inverted skull lacking mandibula. Orbits and nasal cavity served as handle, while the occipital protuberance was filed back to form a small but functional spout. The decanter—seemingly of its own accord, for al-Ashrad had given no obvious instructions since raising his hand—poured first into the amr’s goblet, then floated to Fatima and half-filled hers, and finally returned to its place on the table.
Clan Novel Assamite - Book 7 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 4
