Glen Cook - The Fire In His Hands

The Fire In His Hands

Book One of the Dread Empire Series

Glen Cook

Copyright © Glen Cook 1984

Cover by Carl Lundgren

First Printing: January, 1984

This ePub edition v1.0 by Dead^Man Jan, 2011

Once A Mighty Kingdom Reigned -- Now All Is Chaos And Darkness!

In the vast reaches of the desert, a young heretic escapes certain death and embarks on a mission of madness and glory. He is El Murid -- the Disciple -- who vows to bring order, prosperity and righteousness to the desert people of Hammad al Nakir.

But among the warriors, rebellion seethes as they plot to execute the justice of the desert on their evil leader. For after four long centuries, a sorcerer appears among them -- a savior destined to build a new Empire from the blood of their enemies!

Contents

Chapter One Making of a Messiah

Chapter Two Seeds of Hatred, Roots of War

Chapter Three A Minor Squabble in Another Land and Time

Chapter Four A Clash of Sabers

Chapter Five A Fortress in Shadow

Chapter Six Into Strange Kingdoms

Chapter Seven Wadi el Kuf

Chapter Eight The Castle Tenacious and Resolute

Chapter Nine Ripening Soldiers

Chapter Ten Salt Lake Encounter

Chapter Eleven Lightning Strikes

Chapter Twelve Nightworks

Chapter Thirteen Angel

Chapter Fourteen Stolen Dreams

Chapter Fifteen King Without a Throne

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, exhausted 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 companions 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 cruelest that earth remembered. 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.