Glen Cook - Dread Empire 01 - The Fire in His Hands

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The Coming of Evil

El Murid threw his arms up and cried, "The Power of the Lord is upon me! The Spirit of God

moves me! Witness, you idolaters, you wallowers in sin and weak faith! The hours of the

enemies of the Lord are numbered! There is but one God, and I am His Disciple! Follow me, or

burn in Hell forever!"

He hurled his right fist at the earth. The stone in his amulet blazed furiously.

A lightning bolt flung down from a sky that had not seen a cloud in months. It blasted a ragged

scar across the gardens of the Shrine. Singed petals fluttered through the air.

Thunder rolled across the blue. Women screamed. Men clutched their ears. Six more bolts hurtled

down like the swift stabbing of a short spear. The lovely flowerbeds were ripped and burned.

In silence El Murid stalked from the grounds, his strides long and purposeful. At that moment he

was no child, no man, but a force as terrible as a cyclone. ...

Books by Glen Cook

The Swordbearer

The Fire in His Hands

Published by TIMESCAPE BOOKS

Most Timescape Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums or fund raising.

Special books or book excerpts can also be created to fit specific needs.

For details write the office of the Vice President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York

10020.

THE FIRE IN HIS HANDS

GLEN COOK

A TIMESCAPE BOOK

PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or

are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Another Original publication of TIMESCAPE BOOKS

A Timescape Book published by

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

address Timescape Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

ISBN: 0-671-45907-4

First Timescape Books printing January, 1984

10 987654321

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Use of the trademark TIMESCAPE is by exclusive license from Gregory Benford, the trademark owner.

Printed in the U.S.A.

This one is for Jenny Menkinnen, librarian, whose tireless efforts kept me in skiffy fixes

throughout my boyhood years. Maybe it's your fault.

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, ex-

hausted 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 compan-

ions 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 crudest that earth remem-

bered. 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 coun-

tered 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 dis-

gust, 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 Mer-

yem." He sat down cross-legged facing Micah. "We're supposed to take care of you."

He did not sound enthusiastic.

"You were too much bother for them," the girl said. "That's why they gave you to Father." She sounded bitter.

"What?"

"Our oasis is drying up. The one at the Shrine is still wet, but the abbot won't share his water rights. The holy gardens

flourish while the el Habib thirst."

Neither mentioned their sire's pragmatic deal.

"Did you really see an angel?" Meryem asked.

"Yes. I did. He bore me up among the stars and showed me the lands of the earth. He came to me in the hour of my

despair and gave me two priceless gifts: my life, and the Truth. And he bade me take the Truth to the Chosen, that

they might be freed of the bondage of the past and in turn carry the Word to the infidel."

Nassef flashed a sarcastic look in his sister's direction. Micah saw it plainly.

"You too shall know the Truth, friend Nassef. You shall see the flowering of the Kingdom of Peace. The Lord has

returned me to the living with the mission of creating his Kingdom on earth."

In ages to come there would be countless bitter words spilled over El Murid's returned-to-life remarks. Did he mean

a symbolic rebirth, or a literal return from the dead? He would never clarify himself.

Nassef closed his eyes. He was four years older than this naive boy. Those years were an unbridgeable gulf of

experience.

He did have the manners to refrain from laughing. "Open the flap a crack, Meryem. Let the sun in little by little, till

he can face it."

She did so, and said, "We should bring him something to eat. He hasn't had any solid food yet."

"Nothing heavy. His stomach isn't ready." Nassef had seen victims of the desert before.

"Help me bring it."

"All right. Rest easy, foundling. We'll be right back. Think up an appetite." He followed his sister from the tent.

Meryem paused twenty feet away. Softly, she asked, "He really believes it, doesn't he?"

"About the angel? He's crazy."

"I believe it, too, Nassef. In a way. Because I want to. What he says ... I think a lot of people want to hear that kind

of thing. I think the abbot sent him down here because he was afraid to listen. And that's why Father won't have him

in the house."

"Meryem-"

"What if a lot of people start listening and believing, Nassef?"

Nassef paused thoughtfully. "It's something to think about, isn't it?"

"Yes. Come on. Let's get him something."

El Murid, who was still very much the boy Micah al Rhami, lay staring at the tent above him. He let the leak of

sunshine tease his eyes. A compulsion to be on his way, to begin preaching, rose within him. He fought it down. He

knew he had to recover completely before he began his ministry.

But he was so impatient!

He knew the wayward habits of the Chosen, now that the angel had opened his eyes. It was imperative that he bring

them the Truth as soon as possible. Every life the Dark Lady harvested now meant one more soul lost to the Evil

One.

He would begin with El Aquila and Al Ghabha. When these people had been saved he would send them to minister

to their neighbors. He himself would travel among the tribes and villages along his father's caravan route. If he could

find some way to bring them salt . . .

"Here we are," Meryem announced. There was a musical note in her voice Micah found strange in one so young.

"Soup again, but this time I brought some bread. You can soak it. Sit up. You'll have to feed yourself this time. Don't

eat too fast. You'll make yourself sick. Not too much, either."

"You're kind, Meryem."

"No. Nassef is right. I'm a brat."

"The Lord loves you even so." He began talking softly, persuasively, between bites. Meryem listened in apparent

rapture.

He spoke for the first time in the shade of the palms surrounding the el Habib oasis. Little but mud remained of that

once reliable waterhole, and that had begun to dry and crack. He made of the oasis a parable paralleling the drying up

of the waters of faith in the Lord.

His audience was small. He sat with them as a teacher with students, reasoning with them and instructing them in the

faith. Some were men four times his age. They were amazed by his knowledge and clarity of thought.

They threw fine points of dogma into his path like surprise pitfalls, baiting him. He shattered their arguments like a

barbarian horde destroying lightly defended cities.

He had been more carefully schooled than he knew.

He made no converts. He had not expected to do so. He wanted to start them gossiping behind his back, unwittingly

creating a climate for the sort of speeches that would win converts.

The older men went away afraid. They sensed in his words the first spark of a flame that could consume the Children

of Hammad al Nakir.

Afterward, El Murid visited Mustaf. "My father's caravan? What became of it?" he asked the chieftain. Mustaf was

taken aback, for he did it as an equal, not a child to an elder.

"Ambushed. All wiped out. It was a sad hour in the history of Hammad al Nakir. That I should have lived to see the

day wherein men turned upon a salt caravan!"

There was something a little evasive in the way Mustaf had spoken. His eyes had become shifty.

"I have heard that the men of el Habib found the caravan. I have heard that they pursued the bandits."

"This is true. The bandits crossed the Sahel to the country of the western infidel."

Mustaf had become nervous. Micah thought he knew why. The hetman was essentially honorable. He had sent his

own people to extract justice for the al Rhami family. But there was a little of the brigand in all the Children of

Hammad al Nakir. "Yet there is a camel outside which answers to the name Big Jamal. And another which responds

to Cactus. Could it be sheer coincidence that these beasts bear names identical to those of camels which belonged to

my father? Is it coincidence that they bear identical markings?"

Mustaf said nothing for nearly a minute. Coals of anger burned briefly in his eyes. No man was pleased to be called

to account by a child.

"You are observant, son of al Rhami," he finally replied. "It is true. They were your father's animals. When news

came of what had happened, we saddled our best horses and rode swift and hard upon the trail. A crime so hideous

could not go unpunished. Though your father's people were not of the el Habib, they were of the Chosen. They were

saltmen. The laws shielding them are older than the Empire."

"And there was booty to be had."

"And there was booty, though your father was not a wealthy man. His entire fortune could scarcely repay the cost we

paid in horses and lives."

Micah smiled. Mustaf had revealed his bargaining strategy. "You avenged my family?"

"Though our pursuit carried beyond the Sahel. We caught them before the very palisades of the heathen traders. Only

two passed the infidels' gates. We were gentlemen. We did not burn their wooden walls. We did not slay the men and

enslave the women. We treated with their council of factors, who knew your family of old. We presented our proofs.

They took council, then delivered the bandits into our mercy. We were not merciful. They took many days dying, as

an example to others who would break laws older than the desert. Perhaps the vultures still pick their bones."

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TheComingofEvilElMuridthrewhisarmsupandcried,"ThePoweroftheLordisuponme!TheSpiritofGodmovesme!Witness,youidolaters,youwallowersinsinandweakfaith!ThehoursoftheenemiesoftheLordarenumbered!ThereisbutoneGod,andIamHisDisciple!Followme,orburninHellforever!"Hehurledhisrightfistattheearth.Thestoneinhisamule...

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Glen Cook - Dread Empire 01 - The Fire in His Hands

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