E-Books: Clan Novel: AssamiteGherbod Fleming
Saturday, 3 July 1999, 3:18 AM (local time) Caves of Ten Thousand Sorrows Near Petra, Jordan
Elijah Ahmed, caliph of Alamut, walked silently through the darkness toward his destiny. His sandals were left miles behind, neatly arranged before the threshold of the caverns. His feet, the soles of which had not felt the fire of sun-scorched desert sands since the first days of the Holy Prophet, did not so much as displace a single pebble or disturb a granule of dust from its resting place upon the sandstone.
Elijah’s mind was quiet. Calming scripture arose from his soul like the cool evening breeze blowing from the north. He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten, and none is like Him.
The darkness was complete, yet the caliph stepped with surety. Countless passages branched off from the winding tunnel he followed, but Elijah’s deliberate pace did not once slacken.
Never before had he traversed this path, but the twists of the rough-hewn corridors were as familiar to him as the weave of his simple muslin robe. He could not deny that which drew him forward. He could not lose his way.
The passages wound this way and that, seemingly without reason; sharp, spiraling curves that nearly met themselves, broad arcs to the northwest, squared turns to the south, zigs and zags leading tangentially eastward but never directly toward the rising sun. Among the sculptured chaos, however, Elijah Ahmed’s steps carried him always down, always deeper toward the heart of the earth.
He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten, and none is like Him.
When finally Elijah had taken his last step, he stood not in one of the corridors of the past hours, but in a vast chamber. Darkness opened before him like the void, but not even the absence of light could hide from his eyes the presence of the herald.
It sat upon an arrangement of mammoth stones, an unadorned throne crafted from bedrock.
The herald, too, was unadorned. Its naked, childlike body resembled a sculpture of hard-packed coal, each fissure, each crack in the kiln-hardened surface actually a jagged scar streaking like black lightning across the blackest midnight sky-black except for a crescent and a handful of matching bone-white stars. The crescent moon of this midnight was a necklace of bone that lay draped across the chest of the herald’s perfectly motionless body. The stars were bone as well, though no mere accoutrements; they were the bones of ur-Shulgi, visible where the midnight skin had peeled back or cracked and fallen away; they were the sheaths of the herald’s essence, and his marrow was vengeance.
Thus was the being Elijah Ahmed faced.
Elijah Ahmed, caliph of Alamut, one of the tripartite du’at, looked into the deep emptiness that should have been the herald’s eyes. The sockets were set beneath sharp ridges of bone, >>>>>
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