Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

Darkness parted and showed abyssal black. Ten thousand tiny points of light burned in an ebon firmament. The cold that had gone before was swallowed up in icy darkness. Khadames clutched at the lip of stone, screaming in fear that he would be thrown off into that void of night. Great clouds of hanging fire burned and boiled in the titanic realm beyond the door that now yawned wide.

Khadames could feel the stones ripple and contort under his fingers as the door opened, flexing the world around him. There was a massive rushing sensation, and the pit inverted. Khadames clung to the stones, though they writhed like living flesh under him, and the pit became a sky above. At his side, the sorcerer remained standing, though now he did not look down, but out, into the void.

Something was coming, rushing across the abyss of space, there between the dead suns.

Something that blotted out whole constellations with the shadow of leviathan tripartite wings.

It came on searching, seeking for the door that now stood ajar. Khadames could feel it, though it was still unguessably far away, hunting in the sea of night. Hunting for the scent of living men and a green world under a yellow sun, where blue seas surged against a white shore. Planets cracked into powder in its passage, shattered by the beat of its wings. Suns, bloated and red, withered and were snuffed out, guttering down to coal-black cinders. Khadames scrabbled on the living stone, feeling the heat of blood pulsing under the rock, searching for the glass knife.

The sorcerer swayed, reaching out with a hand for support. Khadames forced himself to stand, though the reptile mind hiding at the base of his skull gibbered and screamed that they would fall up into the sky. Dahak clutched his shoulder, digging sharp talons into the general's jacket.

"The knife," the sorcerer breathed, turning away from the vast impossible shape that rushed closer and closer. The yellow eyes were lit with fire, and Khadames felt the knife pressing into his hand, cutting at the edge of his thumb. Over the sorcerer's shoulder, the sky was blotted out. Something writhed there, in that darkness.

Khadames reversed the knife, the hilt nestling into his palm.

He stabbed, twisting his body into the thrust, feeling the hot breath of the sorcerer on his cheek.

The flint blade met resistance, doughy and stiff, then something parted wetly, and the world inverted. The black sky was below, and the living stone cracked and shattered in the cold. An invisible fist slapped Khadames away like a siege engine's arm, and he felt stone crack against his back. There was rushing air and a shrieking wail. Then Khadames fell forward to sprawl on the stone floor of the room.

The sorcerer staggered back from the lip of the pit, wreathed in cold blue fire. Then he raised an arm, and fire crawled across his chest and upper arms to collect, pooling like mercury, in his open hand. He turned, his lean face lit by the glow. Khadames levered himself up, feeling every muscle and bone groaning in agony. The black knife jutted from the sorcerer's chest, a dark trail of blood seeping down his waist.

Dahak smiled and seemed to swell, filling the room.

"Oh, bravely done," the sorcerer cooed. "Now let us begin."

Nothing human remained in the burning yellow eyes, only an echo of the vast shape that had blotted out the stars.

But the stone door was shut.

The next day, the body that had lain on the slab in the cold room was carried to the height of Damawand, and priests anointed the corpse with oils and spices. Though their eyes had been put out, they labored diligently, laving the withered flesh with scented waters and daubing paint upon it. They worked in great haste, for the desire of their master was like a whip. Jagged stone surrounded the open space where the body lay, and the sky above was filled with troubled clouds. The sun rarely shone down upon the old mountain now, and the valley below was filled with dirty gray mist and smoke.

Zam-Zam, Southern Arabia Felix

"This is an abomination!"

Scowling, Mohammed pushed through the crowd, the hulking shapes of the Tanukh at his back. Hundreds of men and women crowded into the square, dressed in their holiday finest. Mohammed pressed on, though the crowd was getting thicker and thicker as he approached the gates of the shrine. Around him, turbaned men carried tall poles with offerings and painted cloths hanging from them. Women, dressed in heavy dark dresses, held plates of grain and salt over their heads. A constant noise rose from the crowd like the surf on the distant shore. A tight wedge of Tanukh in black robes, Jalal among them, flowed after their commander. Their swords, still sheathed, held back the crowd like a steel fence.

Within fifteen feet of the temple, all movement ceased, and Mohammed was forced to step back and stretch, looking over the heads of those in the press before him.

Two great doors rose above him, each three times the height of a man, set into a large square brick building. The bricks had been polished smooth and then painted; first black, and then with thousands of tiny white, yellow, and blue stars. Above the doors a great yellow-white disk had been painted-the eternal sun-to signify the center of the vault of heaven. From his youth, when he had spent much time to little end in the precincts of the temples, Mohammed knew that on the opposite side of the building, a moon was painted. At the side of each door, statues loomed, carved from the desert stone in the shape of the gods of distant Greece. Apollo stood on the left, holding a great sun-disk, and Hermes on the right. The likeness was crude and stiff, nothing like the graceful marbles in Caesarea or Damascus, but that had not mattered to the artisans who had labored on them for years.

Jalal shouldered past his master and cracked the man in front of him on the head with the heavy iron pommel of his saber. The man slumped soundlessly to the ground, and Jalal stepped forward over the body. The other Tanukh pushed into the gap, shoving men and women aside. Mohammed opened his mouth to shout a command, but then a way cleared to the foot of the steps before the doors. He shut it with a snap and slid sideways into the gap.

At the top of the stairs, a phalanx of priests blocked passage into the temple itself. They were dour-looking men with long braided beards and heavy caps of black cloth sewn with topazes and garnets. Their long brocaded robes hung to their sandalled feet. Mohammed put his boot on the bottom step, and his eyes narrowed in anger. Some of these men had been acquaintances of his father, in the long-ago days when Abd of the Al'Quraysh had served in the temples of Zam-Zam. Now they held the door to the temple closed against his son, even on a day of worship.

"The Lord who made this world has no shape," he shouted at them as he advanced up the stairs. "You cannot give him a man's face! You are impious to confine him in a form of clay or wood!"

The priests glowered down at him, but did not answer. Mohammed stopped one step below them and put his hand on his saber hilt. Those nearest him flinched, but they did not move.

"You priests, hear me!" Mohammed's voice boomed off the metal doors and echoed across the throng packed into the courtyard. "The murderer of my daughter hides in your house of stone. I will have him, whether you will it or no. Stand aside!"

The priests did not move, and some in the rear ranks linked their arms. In the crowd behind him, Mohammed could hear a muttering rumble begin to rise among the people who had come to lay their offerings on the hundred altars within the sacred precincts. He could hear the Tanukh, too, spreading out on the steps behind him. He raised his arms and turned slowly, watching the crowd with an eagle eye. "Is this your god?" He jabbed a finger out, pointing up at the great weatherworn statue of Apollo. "This is a god of the Greeks, who live far away by the side of the green sea. Is this the god who watches over your flocks? Is this the god who breathes in the deep desert, raising the kamshin?"