The Waters of Eternity

by Howard Andrew Jones

  “Why, that’s Rana,” Bassam said quietly. I pulled him back down. The four of us, Dabir, myself, the idiot, and his bodyguard Ubu, watched through the wagon wheel spokes as everyone converged upon the tavern and walked inside.

  “Rana?” I asked.

  “Daughter to Quadi Bashir. Lovely girl. What’s she doing here, Dabir?”

  Dabir put his finger to his lips, for Bassam had spoken loudly. “Is she someone you used to court?”

  Bassam grinned.

  “And these others?” Dabir asked him softly. “Are any of them known to you?”

  Bassam’s handsome forehead wrinkled as he stared. “That’s…”

  “Softly. Yes or no will do.”

  “Yes—a hundred times yes.”

  There may not have been a hundred women, though there were probably a dozen or more, with attendants or other family members. And as they drew near I overheard some asking if they’d heard how Bassam had died and asking whether or not orange or red had gotten him.

  “God gives,” Dabir said. “If I’d known how well this was going to work, I’d have told Captain Fakhir to get here sooner.”

  “By Allah,” Bassam said. “Do you suppose—do you think they were betting on who would kill me?”

  “Yes,” Dabir snapped.

  “He’s quick,” I said, then shook my head, marveling.

  “Well—that’s just…that’s…” Bassam was actually at a loss for words.

  From within the inn came the sounds of voices raised in anger.

  “Troubling?” Dabir offered. “Vexing? Irritating?”

  “Disappointing,” Bassam said finally. And he climbed to his feet, casting back his cloak.

  “What are you doing?” Dabir asked him as we rose to pull him down.

  “I’m going to give them the surprise of their lives.” He started forward. “Come, Ubu.”

  Bassam did not hear me draw. Ubu’s eyes flicked up and he went for his own weapon, but by the time his sword was already half out, I’d hammered the back of Bassam’s head with the flat of my blade, and he went down with a groan.

  Bassam was not completely unconscious, as you might think would happen from various tales, but he was groaning and stunned, which was all that I’d intended. I leveled the sword at Ubu, who was showing me his teeth. “That was for his own good. Do you truly want to go alone against fifty men who’ve bet on killing your master?”

  Ubu considered that, his sword still half drawn, then eyed the point of my curved blade. “No,” he conceded.

  “Guard him,” Dabir instructed, “and await Captain Fakhir. He assured me that he would soon arrive.” Dabir turned to me. “Bassam was right about one thing—these folk will not long remain in one place.” He pulled forth the receipt he’d found on the Berber. “Let us go talk with them.”

  I did not know what that would avail us, but after a last warning look to Ubu I followed them into the tavern.

  The long rectangular room was not quite crowded to bursting, but there were many folk there, aye, both men and women, and from various classes. The more well-to-do were crowded about the front, near Samar. Many of the men wore blades. One portly fellow was standing upon a stool, trying to calm a mass of folk who were all shouting and waving their arms. Near at hand a reedy man clutched at a sheaf of paper, all but cowering beside a deadly looking Nubian whose blade was up.

  So intent were the shouting folk that they paid us no heed. After all, it was dark, there were but a few lanterns in the place, and the crowd had been growing steadily over the last few minutes. Why be suspicious of two more men?

  “I cannot authorize any payments out until the death is confirmed,” the heavyset man on the stool was saying. He had a booming voice and one drooping eye.

  “What confirmation do you need?” one gruff fellow said. “The whole city has heard he was carried back to his home, covered in blood.”

  “It has not said he is dead,” Droopy-eye countered. “Friends, we cannot be premature. Let us wait until the morrow, and—”

  “You mean to keep it, Muwaffaq,” a woman shouted at him, and others chimed in as well.

  “I still want to know who authorized the attack without informing me!” Samar called over the mob. “If we are business partners, you owe it to me—”

  “I owe you nothing, Samar!” Muwaffaq rounded on her. “Nothing!”

  So intense was this denunciation that the crowd quieted somewhat. Muwaffaq’s eyes shifted as he seemed to consider options. He held up his hands. Low, discontented mumbling continued, but he spoke with authority. “Friends—you have wondered how it is Bassam survived so many attempts unscathed? I shall tell you! Samar has been sending him warnings!”

  At this he brandished a paper. “This was brought to me this morning by one of Bassam’s servants! A note! In her handwriting!”

  The crowd gasped.

  “It seems you are not the only one who knows that trick,” I said to Dabir.

  He sighed. “This I did not foresee. We may have to intercede.”

  A lesser woman might have shrunk back against the pillar, but Samar held up her beautiful head. “Who can tell such a thing from a note! Is it signed?”

  “Nay—”

  “Then it might be from anyone!” Samar said.

  “It is hers!” Muwaffaq shouted. “Is it not true that all attempts failed until this one…tonight? And this was the first one Samar was not informed of!”

  The crowd had been held back from acting by the thinnest of cords, and I sensed their mood shift as Muwaffaq’s words sank in. They faced Samar and her maid with a single mind, and some of them began to shout curses while the dancer held up her hands and called for calm. The bodyguard who’d come in with them had slunk away and was even now doing his best to vanish into the shadows. Samar searched for him as rough hands grabbed her. And then she spotted us, and I could almost see the wheels turning in her head as her eyes narrowed.

  “It is Dabir and Asim!” she cried, pointing to us. “We have been found out! Run!”

  Samar was a clever one, you see. It is true that many in Mosul knew us by sight. Many more knew us by reputation and knew that we were friends with both governor and caliph. Which is to say the law, and we had witnessed them in criminal acts.

  We might have turned tail then, for we were fairly close to the door, but I did not want to open us to attack.

  “We must delay them so they do not scatter,” Dabir told me. I sighed a little as I unsheathed my blade.

  Most of the crowd shouted and rushed for the doors and windows, as you would expect, but some took to hurling whatever was handy at us. One bull-headed man charged me, head down, as another rushed in with a knife. We barely had our swords out.

  I clouted the first with the hilt of my sword and slashed out at the second. He screamed and dropped to his knees, his arm sliced open—he was lucky I had not cut it off entirely. Beside me, Dabir waved his sword at a gap-toothed fellow who threw up his hands and dropped. But then a plate came sailing over one attacker’s shoulder and struck Dabir in the chest. He let out a groan and opened himself for a clubbing from a hook-nosed Bedouin. I kicked the man before he could close and as he staggered off the big Nubian came at us both.

  This fellow was naked to the waist and formed all of muscle. His biceps were wide around as the thighs of most men, and he topped me by a head. I ducked his swing, thinking it folly to parry such strength, and the strike swished over my turban. The fellow was nimble, too, for he sidestepped my counter blow. I leapt to gain the height of a low table and struck out at his skull, but he ducked, and my weapon cut three quarters of the way into one of the support timbers, where it stuck. The Nubian grinned at me and stabbed.

  From out of nowhere Dabir jumped up beside me and parried the blow, only to have the table collapse beneath us. Dabir dropped with a cry of surprise. I caught hold of a ceiling joist and swung with both feet into the Nubian’s face. There came a cracking noise and a spurt of blood, and the fellow tripped backwar
ds, the sword clanging to the floor. I dropped, snatched up his blade, and helped Dabir to his feet. About us the gamblers were all of them shouting and crying out, falling back from the door before a familiar stout figure with six guardsmen. Captain Fakhir had arrived.

  The struggling was all over in another few minutes, and Captain Fakhir shortly had everyone parted from their weapons. The aristocrats and their bodyguards he separated from the common folk with Muwaffaq. At some point Bassam had come in from the street and now stood with an arm about Samar, her nervous servant standing close beside. The dancing girl had either been injured or pretended it, for she pressed close to the rich man.

  “Well, here we are, Dabir,” the captain said, “and here they all are, just as you said. Are all of them guilty?”

  “It seems so,” Dabir answered. “A number of Bassam’s old lovers joined forces to seek revenge, by the most expedient means possible. These others gambled on who would succeed, probably because each of the women preferred their means of killing him. Any one of these,” Dabir gestured to the crowd at large, “might have done the proper thing and turned over the matter to the city guard, but they were all too eager to lay their money down.”

  Fakhir chewed at his thick beard and scowled. “What am I to do with so many prisoners? And rich men’s daughters!”

  “You shall not arrest this one,” Bassam said, clasping Samar tighter, “for I am taking her to wife.”

  There was a combined gasp from the assembled crowd, and mutters of disbelief.

  “She alone sought to warn me,” Bassam declared.

  “She set the whole thing up!” someone called. And others shouted, but Fakhir called for quiet.

  Bassam spoke on. “She was afraid to warn me directly, because she knew how these murderers would react.”

  There were more shouts now about him being a dolt, and various cries of innocence, and improbable speculation about Samar’s ancestry. Again Fakhir called for quiet. He turned to Dabir. “Is this as he says?”

  Dabir looked pained. He considered the crowd, and Bassam and Samar as well. “Captain,” he said finally, “here is my thought. Take down the names of all those who are here, and if Bassam ends up murdered, throw all of them into prison. As to their fine, give over all the wagers in yon coffer to the night watch so that more men can be hired and less mischief can be done.”

  At this there was a great outcry, if you can believe it, for many of those gamblers thought this unfair and wanted their money back, no matter that they had been taking odds on a murder. Fakhir was arbiter, though, and thought this a fine idea, so long as it pleased Bassam.

  The rich man nodded. “Aye. For if not for them and all this nonsense, I would never have learned of the strength of Samar’s love.”

  So did matters conclude in that tavern. Bassam was as good as his word and immediately turned over a small fortune to the Tower of Iskander so that they might repair their roof and expand their collection of books besides. Even more money was spent upon the wedding ceremony, which was held only two weeks later. We received an invitation, and a personal note from Bassam, thanking us both at great length. I heard from Captain Fakhir and other friends that it was a most magnificent feast. There were lavish gifts for all comers, and entertainers had been summoned from as far away as Baghdad—indeed, there was so much celebration that it went on for nearly a week. Yet Dabir and I ate quietly at home each evening. Sometimes the glad shouts from the house three streets over was loud enough even to reach us.

  Finally, one evening over dinner I could bear it no longer. “Dabir,” I said, “why are we not there?”

  “I cannot decide if I did the right thing,” he said, setting down his knife and looking over at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Samar wasn’t warning him to save him—she was trying to drive up the price of the wagers. I’m sure of it. Likely she planned to have the deed done properly after a few more attempts on him failed.”

  He amazed me. “You knew that, and said nothing?”

  “Well.” He sheepishly offered empty palms. “I thought both of them might be less trouble if they were married. And it did save Fakhir from finding room to jail all that crowd. And,” he added, “it was a very lovely neck for the headman’s block.”

  I stared at him a moment, then laughed. “Do you think she knows?”

  “That I know? Oh, I’m sure. Did you not see the way she was watching me while I talked to Captain Fahkir? She was certain I would call her out.”

  “And you do not think that she will kill him now?”

  “Why would she? She has him, and his gratitude. And he has a great deal of money.”

  I mulled this over.

  “Some marriages are built on much less,” Dabir said. “And she will surely watch her step, knowing that I know the truth.”

  “In most marriages,” I said, “the murder attempt comes after the vow. Perhaps they’ll have a better chance with it out of the way beforehand.”

  Dabir chuckled. “Aye, well, we shall simply have to hope that the odds are with them.”

  Author’s Note

  Asim stalked out of my subconscious with his personality and authorial tone pretty much fully formed. The setting where he and his best friend were going to adventure, though, wasn’t as clear, and I toyed briefly with the idea of a fantasy world loosely modeled on ancient Arabia before I decided to follow the lead of Clark Ashton Smith, who’d invented an imaginary corner of medieval France for a short story cycle. I fashioned a quadrant of the Abbasid Caliphate that never really existed, north of Mosul, and that is where I set Dabir and Asim’s first short stories.

  Once I sat down to draft a Dabir and Asim novel I decided to ground the setting even more firmly in our own reality, with Mosul taking the place of the make-believe Dariashan, and I’ve updated the older short stories to reflect that change.

  Very few people who actually existed appear in these stories, though they are occasionally mentioned. Creatures of myth wander through, and, in order to keep readers guessing, they may not necessarily act as described in legend. But then it must be remembered that different storytellers themselves did not consistently describe monsters, no matter that the monsters had the same name. The idea of traits that can be cataloged for creatures like vampires and werewolves is more of a modern conceit. Specific attributes and behaviors tended to be more fluid, even if some of the basics remained the same.

  Almost all of Dabir and Asim’s short adventures are included here (although I fully intend to write more). There are three exceptions. One of the stories, “Whispers from the Stone,” is incorporated into the narrative of The Desert of Souls. Another, “The Dream Horn,” is slated to be printed in an upcoming anthology from Rogue Blades Entertainment. The third, “An Audience with the King,” was the first Dabir and Asim story I ever wrote and is, frankly, goofier than anything else that followed. For now at least I’ve decided to leave it out of circulation. Perhaps I’ll release a revised version someday as an apocryphal story.

  A few might be interested to know that not all the stories collected here take place in the interval between the first and second novel. Asim wrote of his adventures with Dabir late in life, and did not always recount things in chronological order. Thus “The Waters of Eternity” takes place at a later time than anything yet written about the characters. More obviously, so does “The Slayer’s Tread,” by which point Jafar al-Barmaki has become the vizier and Dabir and Asim have already encountered the villainous Acteon at least once before.

  I’ve discussed how much these stories owe to reading the works of favorite authors (Harold Lamb, Robert E. Howard, Leigh Brackett, Roger Zelazny, Catherine L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Fritz Leiber, C. S. Forester, and others), but in a very real way they might not have existed without a series of gifted editors. Fraser Ronald was the first of these; he gave the original Dabir and Asim story a home beside some of my early fiction on his Sword’s Edge Web zine. Daniel Blackston was a f
riend and enthusiastic supporter both at Future Mystery Anthologies magazine and in his Pitch-Black anthologies. Without the encouragement of these two men I might not have kept on with the writing of the tales. Later came the talented Chris Cevasco, who published the late lamented historical magazine Paradox, and Eric Flint, who ran Jim Baen’s Universe, among other fine (and even better known) accomplishments. I am grateful to both of these men, as well as to Ahmed Khan, who helped me fix some historical flaws in “Servant of Iblis” when he reprinted it in his excellent anthology, Mosque Among the Stars. John O’Neill, Black Gate’s publisher and editor, has provided a safe haven not just for my work, but for the work of countless other writers of the fantastic. He is long overdue recognition for his commitment to modern speculative fiction with an adventurous twist, and I am particularly grateful to him for championing heroic fiction and sword-and-sorcery, subgenres that in too many other quarters are dismissed out of hand. Most recently, Peter Wolverton of Thomas Dunne Books has stepped in to offer sage advice for final cleanup on these tales. Like my wife, sometimes it seems he knows the voices of Dabir and Asim better than I, for both Pete and Shannon are never shy about letting me know when my heroes don’t sound quite like themselves.

  Over the years the drafts of these stories passed through the hands of talented critiquers who provided feedback and brilliant suggestions, most especially Shauna Bryce, Chris Hocking, Eric Knight, Angela McConnell, Beth Shope, Clint Werner, Dr. Mark Krahling, and my beloved wife and muse, Shannon. To all of them, and many more, I am indebted, though I owe my deepest thanks to you, the reader, for taking the chance on them. It is my sincere hope that you enjoy what you find here.

  “Filled with adventure, magic, compelling characters and twists that are twisty. This is seriously cool stuff.” -- Steven Brust, New York Times bestselling author of the Vlad Taltos series