by Glen Cook
The Fire In His Hands
Book One of the Dread Empire Series
Glen Cook
Copyright © Glen Cook 1984
Cover by Carl Lundgren
First Printing: January, 1984
This ePub edition v1.0 by Dead^Man Jan, 2011
Once A Mighty Kingdom Reigned -- Now All Is Chaos And Darkness!
In the vast reaches of the desert, a young heretic escapes certain death and embarks on a mission of madness and glory. He is El Murid -- the Disciple -- who vows to bring order, prosperity and righteousness to the desert people of Hammad al Nakir.
But among the warriors, rebellion seethes as they plot to execute the justice of the desert on their evil leader. For after four long centuries, a sorcerer appears among them -- a savior destined to build a new Empire from the blood of their enemies!
Contents
Chapter One Making of a Messiah
Chapter Two Seeds of Hatred, Roots of War
Chapter Three A Minor Squabble in Another Land and Time
Chapter Four A Clash of Sabers
Chapter Five A Fortress in Shadow
Chapter Six Into Strange Kingdoms
Chapter Seven Wadi el Kuf
Chapter Eight The Castle Tenacious and Resolute
Chapter Nine Ripening Soldiers
Chapter Ten Salt Lake Encounter
Chapter Eleven Lightning Strikes
Chapter Twelve Nightworks
Chapter Thirteen Angel
Chapter Fourteen Stolen Dreams
Chapter Fifteen King Without a Throne
Chapter One
Making of a Messiah
The caravan crept across a stony wadi and meandered upward into the hills. The camels boredly tramped out their graceless steps, defining the milemarks of their lives. Twelve tired beasts and six weary men made up the small, exhausted caravan.
They were nearing the end of their route. After a rest at El Aquila they would recross the Sahel for more salt.
Nine watchers awaited them.
The camels now carried the sweet dates, emeralds of Jebal al Alf Dhulquarneni, and imperial relics coveted by the traders of Hellin Daimiel. The traders would purchase them with salt recovered from the distant western sea.
An elderly merchant named Sidi al Rhami mastered the caravan. He was captain of a family enterprise. His companions were brothers and cousins and sons. His youngest boy, Micah, just twelve, was making his first transit of the family route.
The watchers didn’t care who they were.
Their captain assigned victims. His men stirred uncomfortably in the shimmering heat. The sun’s full might blasted down upon them. It was the hottest day in the hottest summer in living memory.
The camels plodded into the deathtrap defile.
The bandits leapt from the rocks. They howled like jackals.
Micah fell instantly, his skull cracked. His ears moaned with the force of the blow. He hardly had time to realize what was happening.
Everywhere the caravan had traveled men had remarked that it was a summer of evil. Never had the sun been so blistering, nor the oases so dry.
It was a summer of evil indeed when men sank to robbing salt merchants. Ancient law and custom decreed them free even of the predations of tax collectors, those bandits legitimized by stealing for the king.
Micah recovered consciousness several hours later. He immediately wished that he had died too. The pain he could endure. He was a child of Hammad al Nakir. The children of the Desert of Death hardened in a fiery furnace.
Plain impotence brought the death wish upon him.
He could not intimidate the vultures. He was too weak. He sat and wept while they and the jackals tore the flesh of his kinsmen and squabbled over delicacies.
Nine men and a camel had perished. The boy was a damned poor bet. His vision doubled and his ears rang whenever he moved. Sometimes he thought he heard voices calling. He ignored everything and stubbornly stumbled toward El Aquila in exhausting little odysseys of a hundred yards.
He kept passing out.
The fifth or sixth time he wakened in a low cave that stank of fox. Pain lanced from temple to temple. He had suffered headaches all his life, but never one as unremitting as this. He moaned. It became a plaintive whine.
“Ah. You’re awake. Good. Here. Drink this.”
Something that might have been a small, very old man crouched in a deep shadow. A wrinkled hand proffered a tin cup. Its bottom was barely wet with some dark, fragrant liquid.
Micah drained it. Oblivion returned.
Yet he heard a distant voice droning endlessly of faith, God, and the manifest destiny of the children of Hammad al Nakir.
The angel nurtured him for weeks. And droned unceasing litanies of jihad. Sometimes, on moonless nights, he took Micah aboard his winged horse and showed him the wide earth. Argon. Itaskia. Hellin Daimiel. Gog-Ahlan, the fallen. Dunno Scuttari. Necremnos. Throyes. Freyland. Hammad al Nakir itself, the Lesser Kingdoms, and so much more. And the angel repeatedly told him that these lands must again bend the knee to God, as they had done in the day of Empire. God, the eternal, was patient. God was just. God was understanding. And God was distressed by the backsliding of his Chosen. They were no longer bearing the Truth to the nations.
The angel would answer no questions. He merely castigated the children of Hammad al Nakir for having allowed the minions of the Dark One to blunt their will to carry the Truth.
Four centuries before the birth of Micah al Rhami there was a city, Ilkazar, which established dominion over all the west. But its kings were cruel, and too often swayed by the whims of sorcerers interested only in advancing themselves.
An ancient prophecy haunted the wizards of Ilkazar. It declared that the Empire’s doom would find it through the agency of a woman. So those grim necromancers persecuted women of Power without mercy.
In the reign of Vilis, the final Emperor, a woman named Smyrena was burned.
She left a son. He persecutors overlooked the child.
That son migrated to Shinsan. He studied with the Tervola and Princes Thaumaturge of the Dread Empire. And then he returned, embittered with the bile of vengeance.
He was a mighty wizard now. He rallied the Empire’s foes to his standard. The war was the cruelest that earth remembered. The wizards of Ilkazar were mighty too. The Empire’s captains and soldiers were faithful, hardened men. Sorceries stalked the endless nights and devoured nations entire.
The heart of the Empire, then, was rich and fertile. The war left the land a vast, stony plain. The beds of great rivers became channels of lifeless sand. The land earned the name Hammad al Nakir, Desert of Death. The descendants of kings became petty hetmen of tattered bands which perpetrated bloody little butcheries upon one another over mudhole excuses for oases.
One family, the Quesani, established a nominal suzerainty over the desert, bringing an uneasy, oft broken peace. Semi-pacified, the tribes began raising small settlements and refurbishing old shrines.
They were a religious people, the Children of Hammad al Nakir. Only faith that their trials were the will of God gave them the endurance to weather the desert and the savagery of their cousins. Only an unshakable conviction that God would someday relent and restore them to their rightful place among the nations kept them battling.
But the religion of their Imperial forebears was sedentary, a faith for farmers and city dwellers. The theological hierarchies did not fall with the temporal. As generations passed and the Lord did not relent, common folk drifted ever farther from a priesthood unable to shed historical inertia, unable to adapt dogma to the circumstances of a people gone wholly nomadic and grown accustomed to weighing everything in the balance scale of death.
The
summer had been the hardest since those immediately following the Fall. Autumn promised no relief. Oases were drying up. Order had begun to evade the grasp of Crown and priesthood. Chaos threatened as desperate men resorted to raid and counterraid and younger priests split with their elders over the meaning of the drought. Undisciplined anger stalked the barren hills and dunes. Dissatisfaction lurked in every shadow.
The land was harkening for the whisper of a new wind. One old man heard a sound. His response would damn and saint him.
Ridyah Imam al Assad’s best days were far behind him. He was nearly blind now, after more than fifty years in the priesthood. There was little he could do to serve the Lord any longer. Now the Lord’s own must care for him.
Nevertheless, they had given him a sword and set him to guard this slope. He had neither the strength nor the will to employ the weapon. If one of the el Habib came this way, to steal water from the springs and cisterns of Al Ghabha, he would do nothing. He had his weak sight to plead before his superiors.
The old man was true to his faith. He believed that he was but one brother in the Land of Peace and that such good fortune as came his way should be shared with those whom the Lord had called him to guide.
The Al Ghabha Shrine had water. El Aquila had none. He did not understand why his superiors were willing to bare steel to maintain that unnatural balance.
El Aquila lay to his left, a mile away. The squalid village was the headquarters of the el Habib tribe. The Shrine and the monastery where al Assad lived rose two hundred yards behind him. The monastery was the retirement home of the priests of the western desert.
The source of the noise lay somewhere down the rocky slope he was supposed to guard.
Al Assad tottered forward, trusting his ears far more than his cataracted eyes. The sound reached him again. It sounded like the muttering of a man dying on the rack.
He found the boy lying in the shadow of a boulder.
His “Who are you?” and “Do you need help?” elicited no response. He knelt. With his fingers more than his eyes he determined that he had found a victim of the desert.
He shuddered as he felt cracked, scabby, sunburned skin. “A child,” he murmured. “And not of El Aquila.”
Little remained of the youth. The sun had baked most of the life out of him, desiccating his spirit as well as his body.
“Come, my son. Rise up. You’re safe now. You’ve come to Al Ghabha.”
The youth did not respond. Al Assad tried to pull him to his feet. The boy neither helped nor hindered him. The imam could do nothing with him. His will to live had departed. His only response was a muttered incoherency which sounded surprisingly like, “I have walked with the Angel of the Lord. I have seen the ramparts of Paradise.” He then lapsed into complete unconsciousness. Al Assad could not rouse him again.
The old man made the long and painful journey back to the monastery, pausing each fifty yards to offer the Lord a prayer that his life be spared till he had carried word of the child’s need to his abbot.
His heart had begun skipping beats again. He knew that it would not be long before Death took him into Her arms.
Al Assad no longer feared the Dark Lady. Indeed, his aches and blindness made him look forward to the pain-ease he would find in Her embrace. But he begged an indulgence, that he be allowed to perform this one final righteous deed.
The Lord had laid a charge upon him, and upon the Shrine, by guiding this victim of the desert to him and Shrine land.
Death heard and stayed Her hand. Perhaps She foresaw richer harvests later.
The abbot did not believe him at first, and castigated him for having abandoned his post. “It’s an el Habib trick. They’re out there stealing water right now.” But al Assad convinced the man. And that left the abbot no happier. “The last thing we need is more mouths.”
“‘Have you bread and your brother naught to eat? Have you water and your brother naught to drink? Then I say this unto you...’”
“Spare me the quotations, Brother Ridyah. He’ll be cared for.” The abbot shook his head. He got little thrills of anticipation when he thought of the Dark Lady claiming al Assad. The old man was one too sincere pain in the neck. “See. They’re bringing him in now.”
The brothers dropped the litter before the abbot, who examined the tormented child. He could not conceal his revulsion. “This is Micah, the son of the salt merchant al Rhami.” He was awed.
“But it’s been a month since the el Habib found their caravan!” one brother protested. “Nobody could survive the desert that long.”
“He spoke of being tended by an angel,” al Assad said. “He spoke of seeing the ramparts of Paradise.”
The abbot frowned at him.
“The old man is right,” one of the brothers said. “He started talking on the way up. About seeing the golden banners on the towers of Paradise. He said that an angel had showed him the wide earth. He says he has been told by the Lord to bring the Chosen back to the Truth.”
A shadow crossed the abbot’s face. That kind of talk distressed him.
“Maybe he did see an angel,” someone suggested.
“Don’t be silly,” the abbot countered.
“He’s alive,” al Assad reminded him. “Against all the odds.”
“He’s been with the bandits.”
“The bandits fled across the Sahel. The el Habib tracked them.”
“Someone else, then.”
“An angel. You don’t believe in angels, Brother?”
“Of course I do,” the abbot replied hastily. “I just don’t think they reveal themselves to salt merchants’ sons. It’s the desert madness talking through him. He’ll forget it when he recovers.” The abbot looked around. He was not pleased. The whole Shrine was gathering over the boy, and in too many faces there was a desire to believe. “Achmed. Bring me Mustaf el Habib. No. Wait. Ridyah, you found the boy. You go to the village.”
“But why?”
A technicality had occurred to the abbot. It looked like the perfect exit from the difficulties the boy was generating.
“We can’t nurse him here. He hasn’t been consecrated. And he would have to be well before we could do that.”
Al Assad glowered at his superior. Then, with anger to banish his aches and weariness, he set off for the village of El Aquila.
The hetman of the el Habib tribe was no more excited than the abbot. “So you found a kid in the desert? What do you want me to do about it? He’s not my problem.”
“The unfortunate are all our problems,” al Assad replied. “The abbot would speak with you of this one.”
The abbot opened with a similar remark in response to a similar statement. He quoted some scripture. Mustaf countered with the quote al Assad had used earlier. The abbot kept his temper with difficulty.
“He’s not consecrated.”
“Consecrate him. That’s your job.”
“We can’t do that till he recovers his faculties.”
“He’s nothing to me. And you’re even less.”
There were hard feelings. It had been but two days since Mustaf had petitioned the abbot for permission to draw water from the Shrine’s spring. The abbot had denied him.
Al Assad, cunningly, had brought the chieftain up by way of the Shrine’s gardens, where lush flowerbeds in careful arrangements glorified God. Mustaf was in no mood to be charitable.
The abbot was in the jaws of a merciless trap. The laws of good works were the high laws of the Shrine. He dared not abrogate them before his brothers. Not if he wished to retain his post. But neither was he ready to allow this boy to mutter his heretical insanities where they could upset the thinking of his charges.
“My friend, we had hard words over a matter we discussed recently. Perhaps I reached my decision a bit hastily.”
Mustaf smiled a predatory smile. “Perhaps.”
“Two score barrels of water?” the abbot suggested.
Mustaf started toward the doorway.
Al Assad shook his head sadly. They were going to dicker like merchants while a boy lay dying. He departed in disgust, taking himself to his cell.
Within the hour he surrendered to the embrace of the Dark Lady.
Micah wakened suddenly, rational, intuiting that a long time had passed. His last clear memory was of walking beside his father as their caravan began the last league to El Aquila. Shouts... a blow... pain... reminiscences of madness. There had been an ambush. Where was he now? Why wasn’t he dead? An angel... There had been an angel.
Snatches returned. He had been returned to life, to become a missionary to the Chosen. A disciple.
He rose from his pallet. His legs betrayed him immediately. He lay panting for several minutes before finding the strength to crawl to a flapway.
The el Habib had confined him to a tent. They had quarantined him. His words had made Mustaf tremble. The chieftain could sense the blood and pain beyond such mad perspectives.
Micah yanked the flap.
The afternoon sun slapped his face. He threw an arm across his eyes and cried out. That devil orb was trying to murder him again.
“You idiot!” a voice snarled as someone pushed him back inside. “You want to blind yourself?”
The hands that guided him to his pallet became tender. The afterimages faded. He discovered his companion to be a girl.
She was about his own age. She wore no veil.
He shrank away. What was this? Some temptation of the Evil One? Her father would kill him....
“What happened, Meryem? I heard him yell.” A youth of about sixteen slipped inside. Micah retreated in earnest.
Then he remembered who and what he was. The hand of the Lord had touched him. He was the Disciple. No one could question his righteousness.
“Our foundling got himself an eyeful of sun.” The girl touched Micah’s shoulder. He flinched away.
“Back off, Meryem. Save the games for when he can handle them.” To Micah he said, “She’s father’s favorite. The last born. He spoils her. She gets away with murder. Meryem. Please? The veil?”
“Where am I?” Micah asked.
“El Aquila,” the youth replied. “In a tent behind the hut of Mustaf abd-Racim ibn Farid el Habib. The Al Ghabha priests found you. You were almost dead. They turned you over to my father. I’m Nassef. The brat is my sister Meryem.” He sat down cross-legged facing Micah. “We’re supposed to take care of you.”
