Meryem was conscious. She smiled weakly, but did not say anything. The physician shook while Nassef questioned him. The Scourge of God had a quick temper and grim reputation. El Murid knelt, took his wife's hand. Tears filled his eyes.
"Not so bad," Nassef said. "I've seen many a man survive worse." He patted his sister's shoulder. She flinched. She had refused Esmat's painkillers. "You'll be up for the girl's naming, little sister." His hand settled on the Disciple's shoulder, gripping so tightly El Murid almost cried out. "They will pay for this, brother. I promise." He beckoned an Invincible. "Find Hadj." Hadj was El Murid's chief bodyguard. "I'll give him a chance to rectify his lapse." The Invincible gaped.
"Now, man." Nassef's voice was low, but so hard the warrior ran. Nassef said, "We lost a lot of men. Won't be able to follow through. Wish I could go after the mercenaries. Micah, go ahead into the city. The Shrines and Royal Compound should be cleaned by the time you get there."
"What're you going to do?"
"Go after Haroun and Megelin Radetic. They're all that's left of the Wahlig's family."
"King Aboud and Prince Ahmed?"
"Ahmed killed Aboud." Nassef chuckled. "He was my creature. Was he ever upset when I wouldn't let him become king."
The Disciple smelled the ambition hidden behind Nassef's gloating. Nassef wasn't a true believer. He served Nassef alone. He was dangerous—and indispensible. He had no peer on the battlefield, save perhaps Sir Tury Hawkwind. And that mercenary captain no longer had an employer. "Must you go?"
"I want to do this myself." Again the wicked chuckle. El Murid tried to argue. He did not want to be alone. If Meryem died...
His son and daughter arrived during the exchange. Sidi looked bored. The girl was angry and hard. She was so like her uncle, yet had something more, an empathy absent in Nassef. Nassef recognized no limitations or feelings he did not experience himself. She held her father's hand, saying nothing. In moments he felt better, almost as if Esmat had given him a potion.
He realized that he hadn't needed Esmat's painkillers tonight. Stress usually aggravated his old injuries and the curse of that beast Haroun.
The Wahlig wasn't satisfied keeping the Movement bottled up in Sebil el Selib for a decade, he had to train his whelps in sorcery as well. The kingdom would be freed of that heresy! Soon, for tonight the Kingdom of Peace had undergone its final birth agonies. He looked at Meryem, bravely trying to bear up, and wondered if the price of heaven were not too steep. "Nassef?"
But Nassef was gone already, leading most of the bodyguard out after the Wahlig's brat. Tonight the boy had become the last Quesani pretender to Hammad al Nakir's Peacock Throne. Without him the Evil One's Royalist lackeys would be left without a rallying point.
A dark, angry, vengeful sore festered in the Disciple's heart, though love and forgiveness were the soul of his message to the Chosen. The riders clattered and rattled and creaked into the night. "Good luck," El Murid breathed, though he suspected that Nassef was not motivated by revenge alone.
His daughter squeezed his hand, rested her forehead against his chest. "Mother will be all right, won't she?"
"Of course she will. Of course." He sped a silent prayer up into the night.
Chapter Two:
THE FUGITIVES
T he desert smouldered like the forges of Hell, the sun hammering the waste with sledges of heat. The barrens flung the heat back in fiery defiance, shimmered with phantoms of old oceans. Charcoal-indigo islands reared in the north, the Kapenrung Mountains standing tall, forming reality's distant shoreline. Mirages and ifrit wind-devils pranced the intervening miles. There was little breeze, and no sound save that made by the animals and five youths stumbling toward the high country. There were no odors save their own. Heat and the dull ache of exhaustion were the only sensations they knew.
Haroun spotted a pool of shade in the solar lee of a sedimentary upthrust protruding from a slope of bare ochre earth and loose flat stones like the stern of some giant vessel sliding slowly into a devouring wave. A dry watercourse snaked around its foot. In the distance, four spires of orange-red rock stood like the chimneys of a burned and plundered city. Their skirts wore dots of sagey green, suggesting the occasional kiss of rain.
"We'll rest there." Haroun indicated the shadow. His companions did not lift their eyes.
They went on, tiny figures against the immensity of the waste, Haroun leading, three boys straggling in his footsteps, a mercenary named Bragi Ragnarson in the rear, struggling continuously with animals who wanted to lie down and die.
Behind somewhere, stuck to their trail like a beast of nightmare, came the Scourge of God.
They stumbled into the shadow, onto ground as yet unscorched by the wrath of the sun, and collapsed, oblivious of their beds of edged and pointed stones. After half an hour, during which his mind meandered in and out of sleep, flitting through a hundred unrelated images, Haroun levered himself up. "Might be water under that sand down there."
Ragnarson grunted. Their companions—the oldest was twelve—did not bestir themselves.
"How much water left?"
"Maybe two quarts. Not enough."
"We'll get to the mountains tomorrow. Be plenty of water there."
"You said that yesterday. And the day before. Maybe you're going around in circles."
Haroun was desert-born. He could navigate a straight course. Yet he was afraid Bragi was right. The mountains seemed no closer than yesterday. It was a strange land, this northern corner of the desert. It was as barren as teeth in an old skull, and haunted by shadows and memories of darker days. There might be things, dark forces, leading them astray. This strip, under the eyes of the Kapenrungs, was shunned by the most daring northern tribes.
"That tower where we ran into the old wizard... "
"Where you ran into a wizard," Ragnarson corrected. "I never saw anything except maybe a ghost." The young mercenary seemed more vacant, more distant than their straits would command.
"What's the matter?" Haroun asked.
"Worried about my brother."
Haroun chuckled, a pale, tentative, strained excuse for laughter. "He's better off than we are. Hawkwind is on a known road. And nobody will try to stop him."
"Be nice to know if Haaken is all right, though. Be nice if he knew I was all right." The attack on Al Rhemish had caught Bragi away from his camp, forcing him to throw in his lot with Haroun.
"How old are you?" Haroun had known the mercenary several months, but could not recall. A lot of small memories had vanished during their flight. His mind retained only the tools of survival. Maybe details would surface once he reached sanctuary.
"Seventeen. About a month older than Haaken. He's not really my brother. My father found him where somebody left him in the forest." Ragnarson rambled on, trying to articulate his longing for his distant northern homeland. Haroun, who had known nothing but the wastes of Hammad al Nakir, and had not seen vegetation more magnificent than the scrub brush on the western flanks of Jebal al Alf Dhulquarneni, could not picture the Trolledyngjan grandeur Bragi wanted to convey.
"So why did you leave?"
"Same reason as you. My dad wasn't no duke, but he picked the wrong side when the old king croaked and they fought it out for the crown. Everybody died but me and Haaken. We came south and signed on with the Mercenary's Guild. And look what that got us."
Haroun could not help smiling. "Yeah."
"How about you?"
"What?"
"How old?"
"Eighteen."
"The old guy that died. Megelin Radetic. He was special?"
Haroun winced. A week had not deadened the pain. "My teacher. Since I was four. He was more a father to me than my father was."