Glen Cook - Dread Empire 01 - The Fire in His Hands(1).pdf - Glen Cook - Punkroc

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

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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.

Glen Cook - Dread Empire 01 - The Fire in His Hands(1).pdf

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