The Steel Seraglio (17 page)

The assassin school was not in Bessa itself, because Bessa’s caliph, Bokhari Al-Bokhari, didn’t approve of freelance killers (while being wholly comfortable with the idea of killers in his own employ). In fact it was a private fiefdom in the mountains beyond the city of Perdondaris. It was owned and run by the so-called Caliph of Assassins, the legendary Imad-Basur, who personally vetted all potential students. Entry was by fee (strictly non-returnable) and audition (oftentimes fatal).

While he was waiting his turn to be interviewed and tested by the great master, Hakkim was permitted to wander within the grounds of the school and take in something of its atmosphere. Most of what he saw there pleased him: the students were hugely and relentlessly focused on their learning, and lived the frugal life that befitted such serious aspirations.

One thing, however, disturbed him. In a courtyard toward the rear of the building, a slender young woman, dark of hair and of eye, was sharpening a blade against a whetstone. Five or six other knives of varying sizes were lying at her feet, neatly arrayed, ready to be whetted in their turn.

All the students Hakkim had seen were—of course—male: he assumed that the servants would be, too. Such was the norm in schools, as in monastic retreats. He could not understand the woman’s presence. He asked a passing attendant who she was.

“A cousin of Imad-Basur,” he was told. “Zuleika. She lodges here.”

“But she has no converse with the students?”

The attendant was mildly scandalised. “Certainly not!”

Hakkim thanked the man, who scurried on his way. He watched the woman for a while longer, somewhat impressed despite himself at the diligence with which she stropped the knife, forward for twenty strokes, backward for twenty strokes, forward again. Though he abhorred the bodies, minds and speech of women, he found her dedication to the task pleasing.

Hakkim passed his audition with flying colours and was accepted as a student.

He stayed with the assassins only for two years, which meant that he did not finish out his studies and his name was never written in black ink upon a black scroll. But he took from them what he needed, and he parted with them on the best of terms—so much so, in fact, that before he left, he was summoned into the presence of Imad-Basur himself. The Caliph of Assassins asked Hakkim why he did not wish to graduate and then to remain at the school as an assassin plenipotentiary, taking such commissions as the elder masters chose for him and sharing in the wealth these bespoke murders brought in.

Hakkim explained that his was a religious vocation, to which murder, as such, was only an adjunct. Imad-Basur showed a flattering interest. The two men talked at length about asceticism; it was a discipline which had a certain appeal to the Assassin King, and he was impressed by his young charge’s passion and conviction.

For whatever reason, he felt moved to make Hakkim a gift. He asked the younger man whether—despite his contempt for earthly pleasures—there was any particular thing he craved.

Hakkim thought of the dreams which had troubled him in his childhood, and which still recurred even now, of the dark tide that hated him and rose to whelm him while he slept.

“I would like to see the face of my worst enemy,” he said. “I believe there is one who hates me, and will cog and cumber me wherever he can—though it may be that we have yet to meet.”

Imad-Basur nodded thoughtfully at this short, blunt speech. He knew that there were many ways, both good and bad, in which souls could be twinned. He also knew that there were pharmacons and magics that could help in identifying such invisible entwinings long before they became apparent. However, he wanted to be sure that he had understood his pupil aright.

“In any life,” the Assassin King said, picking his words with care, “there is a striving toward a desired or destined end. That striving calls forth its opposite, or else is called forth by it. Is it your wish to discern the shape of your opposite? Of the man or force or idea against which you must strive and over which you must triumph, if your life is to have meaning?”

Hakkim nodded fervently. “That is exactly what I desire!” he agreed.

Imad-Basur crossed to a chest of oak chased in iron, unlocked it by means that Hakkim couldn’t see, and took from it a pouch of soft leather. He took it back to Hakkim and handed it to him. Hakkim opened the pouch and saw within a quantity of powder the colour and texture of fine ash.

“It’s called
siket arilar
,” Imad-Basur told him. In the tongue of the Heshomet, which Hakkim vaguely knew, the phrase meant “the light shining from the knife blade.”

“Take it at midnight,” Imad-Basur instructed his student, “in a completely darkened room. The visions that come to you then will show you your opposite, your nemesis, though there may be veils of illusion and metaphor that you have to pierce first.”

Hakkim thanked the great assassin, for this gift as well as for the less tangible gifts he had received at the school, and so departed. But he experienced a certain ambivalence about the powder, and for a long time after he returned to Bessa he did not touch it. He knew of marabouts who used chemical compounds to achieve visions, and he had the utmost contempt for them. It seemed to him that in most cases their transcendence was illusory, and their quest for it concealed a hunger of a baser and more material kind.

On the other hand, to know the face of one’s enemy was a great good. Hakkim thought about the black tide that persecuted him in his dreams. He considered his own strength of will, and the probability that—should the pharmacon prove to be addictive—he could conquer his body’s cravings.

The cult he led was a considerable power in Bessa now, numbering more than two thousand adherents. Hakkim chose the four strongest and most zealous from these and ordered them to guard the door of his chamber, permitting entrance to no one. Then he went inside and closed the door.

Imad-Basur had instructed him to take the smallest possible amount of the powder on the tip of his finger and touch it to his tongue. He did so now, and for a moment was convinced that it had had no effect on him; then, looking up, he perceived that the walls and ceiling of his room had melted away. He was standing in a forest glade, under the light of a sickle moon.

It was something of a relief. Hakkim had been sure in his heart that the dream of darkness would come again, rising like a flood tide around him and seeking to devour him in one peristaltic heave. At the same time, however, he felt himself at a disadvantage: if his enemy were watching, he presented a very easy target standing there in the openness of the glade. Crouching low, and careful to make no sound, he moved swiftly through the long grass and merged with the shadows under the trees. There he waited for a long while in perfect stillness and silence, but nobody appeared.

Emboldened, Hakkim searched the environs. If anything living was within that wood, he felt sure that he would find it—the assassins had taught him how to move so silently and swiftly that his passage would not stir a single leaf upon a tree, nor make a tear even in the fabric of the wind.

There was nobody in the glade, or in the trees around it. Hakkim ventured further afield, and saw, now, a watering hole nearby. He circled it carefully from a great way off, approached it with exquisite care, and found it deserted.

From the waterhole, however, he saw a cliff with many caves set into its face. He found a path that led to it, and searched the caves one by one. A million bats had made the caves their home, but nothing else lived there.

What is time within a dream? Hakkim Mehdad journeyed far and wide, for what seemed like months and years, across trackless plains, up and down mountains, along dry river beds and through meadows lush with dew-soaked grass. Nowhere in his journeying did he catch a glimpse even of his enemy’s shadow, let alone his face.

Wearied by the quest, and by the solitude, and by the sense of a mystery he could not solve, he sat down at last on a rock beside the shore of a black and silent ocean. He pondered there, in this forbidding place, wondering why the powder had not seen fit to bestow its wisdom on him. Perhaps it had no revelations to give in the first place.

Gradually, though, as the waters of the black sea rolled around his feet, a conviction stole over Hakkim. He knew this place. He studied the contours of the beach, the dunes, the cliffs that overhung on all sides. None of them were at all familiar: none of them explained the sense of homecoming he felt.

It was only when he looked beneath him that he realised what it was that he was sitting on: though it was much larger, its shape was unmistakeable. It was the boulder of negative thought, which he had brought with him from the house of his first master, Rasoul, and which he still kept in a curtained closet within his private chambers.

With that realisation, and from that vantage point, the scene before him took on a different aspect. Revelation came to him, and enlightenment opened its beneficent inner eye within him. He knew now that he need seek no further—that the vision was indeed showing him what had erewhile been promised.

His enemy was nowhere to be found in the world, because his enemy was the world:
qu’aha sul jidani,
the labyrinth of masks, which postures before man’s eyes like the gaudiest and most hollow-hearted of whores, and betrays him from the path of righteousness with blasphemous display. Hakkim’s mission was to turn men’s eyes inwards to the truth; to make them shun the beauties and the pleasures of life as the lethal snares they were.

The scale of the task both dizzied and elated him. In order to succeed in it, he would need to become the marabout of marabouts, the caliph of caliphs: he would need to extend his rule not just over the whole of Bessa, but over the whole of the east—and then, after that, over the barbarous nations of the west, where men ate excrement and talked in barks and whines like dogs.

Hakkim rose to his feet, his arms outstretched as if to receive an embrace. “I am ready,” he whispered.

The landscape faded from around him as the powder’s efficacy waned. Daylight and consciousness resumed their mundane duties, and Hakkim Mehdad, thenceforth and forever after the scholar with the strangling cord, went forth from his chambers to sing the dawn prayer. In his heart there was a louder singing, and in his mind the beginnings of a plan so insane in its ambition that the gods must either bless it or bow down to it.

The disciples marvelled, not just at the unwonted ferocity with which their master prayed, but also at his feet. For though he had washed them before retiring the night before, as was most proper, they were dirty and dripping now—not with mud, but with the blackest ink.

Hakkim Mehdad had found his enemy. But his eyes were on loftier things, and he did not see.

Issi the chief camel-driver woke from a restless sleep to find someone pressing on him. It was not unheard of; his assistants often huddled together on cold nights, when the fire had died down and the only warmth was the nearest body. This, though, was altogether too much—he was being crowded on both sides. Irritable and only half-awake, he made to cuff one of them.

“Get off me, you son of a donkey . . .” he began—and realised that he had not moved. His arm was pinned to the ground; both arms. And his legs. A hand was laid over his mouth.

“Don’t move. Don’t try to shout,” said a woman’s voice.

Issi’s eyes shot open. It was still the pit of night, but he recognized the woman leaning over him as one of the concubines, the tall fierce-looking one that the Legate had taken. There were other women kneeling around him, one holding his left arm, and someone else pinning down his legs.

“We need some camels made ready,” the tall woman said. “Also the litters. If I uncover your mouth, will you answer softly? There’s no need for your men to see you like this.”

She was—astonishingly—stronger than he was. Issi struggled but could not move a limb. The woman waited calmly until he nodded, then took away her hand.

“Let me go!” Issi demanded in a furious whisper. He had seen that En-Sadim was a man of effete appetites, unlike most of the new sultan’s followers—but what sort of perversion required a litter, and forcible holding-down by women? “What can the Legate want with me? I’m an honest working man.”

“The Legate is dead,” the tall woman said. “I killed him, and all his soldiers. It may be that I don’t have to kill you. Will you help us, or must I think again?”

Something cold was pressed against his throat. This was clearly a madwoman. Issi fought to hide his terror. “I’ll help you,” he croaked.

“Good,” the woman said. In the darkness he could not read her expression, but she took the knife away from his neck and summoned one of the others to help him to his feet. Issi’s legs gave way beneath him, and the two women half-carried him to the makeshift enclosure where the camels were penned.

Another group of women were waiting there, and to his inexpressible relief Issi recognized one: Lady Gursoon, a senior concubine whom he had sometimes met at the stables. She had always treated him civilly, and had once brought him water with her own hands. A woman like her could surely be trusted to keep her head. He broke away from his two guards and ran to her. They did not follow him, but still, he kept his voice low, not wanting to antagonise the madwoman.

“Lady, you must go and wake the Legate at once! That lady there” (he gestured with his eyes, afraid to move his head) “is sun-struck. She’s seeing visions of murder—and she has a knife.”

Lady Gursoon did not move. He tried again: “Lady—we must get help now!” But he saw with disbelief that she was shaking her head.

“Zuleika told you the truth,” the old lady said. “She did kill the Legate, and we helped her to kill the others. It was to save our own lives. But you and your men are safe.” She moved away from Issi, settled herself heavily onto one of the rocks that bordered the enclosure and patted the place beside her. “Here. Sit down, and I’ll tell you what happened.”

They had to use seven camels, and all the litters that Issi kept for travellers laid low by the sun. He helped the women to load the dead men four or five to a litter, trying not to look at the gaping wounds and the staring eyes. Then he and six of the women—they would not let him wake any of his own assistants—led the camels out toward the eastern dunes, while other women walked alongside the litters to make sure their runners did not catch on rocks, and to prevent their grisly burdens from slipping off. There was no light but the stars, and their progress was slow. When they reached the dunes they scraped a shallow trench in the ground and laid the men in it, side by side, covering them with sand. Issi knew they would be uncovered again in a day or so, to be stripped by the birds and jackals, but by then the women and their children would be long gone.