The Lion of Cairo (38 page)

“Why?” Yasmina hissed. The youthful Egyptian Zaynab had saved from a life of misery was no more; in her place stood a grim and haunted figure, unrecognizable under a patina of gore. Musa flinched as she knelt by his side. “Why? Do you see the blood on your hands, Musa—on my hands? It’s not yours or mine … it is Zaynab’s! You called me a fool for thinking we’d failed her, but I know whereof I speak.
We let her die!
And as she suffered, so must we … and so must he!” She jerked her chin toward the cleft in the square. “It is Allah’s will.”

“You … you s-stupid little bitch!” Musa gasped. “He’ll k-kill you!”

“Not before I kill him. It is Allah’s will.” And with that, Yasmina rose and stepped over the beggar’s writhing form. She stalked toward the cleft between the tenements. A ribbon of blood drooled from the knife clenched in her fist.

She was a killer. Yasmina wanted that pale-eyed Frank to remember his words.
She
was a killer …

15

All but invisible in the stygian murk cloaking the foot of the nearest tenement, the black-clad Syrian tasked with guarding the stairs heard a bellow of agony erupt from one of the nearby alleys. Such cries were commonplace amid the dregs of the Foreign Quarter, where a knife in the back remained the preferred method of settling disputes. Still, the Syrian glanced up out of curiosity and saw a young Egyptian woman step from the alley mouth, entering the moonlit square.

His hot stare missed nothing, in particular the moist stain molding the fabric of her gown to the swell of her breasts. He drank in her midnight hair, her narrow waist, her long brown legs; the knife clutched in her right hand he dismissed as a curious affectation, nothing more. Fresh blood spiced the night air.

Closer she came, on an unerring path for the head of the stairs. The Syrian’s lips peeled back in a predatory smile; he dropped his hand to his crotch, feeling the too familiar stirrings of lust. She—

Iron fingers dug into the Syrian’s shoulder; he winced, pain and apprehension dispelling whatever salacious thoughts he entertained. Only one man could move with such utter stealth, unseen and unheard even by a soldier of
al-Hashishiyya
. The sentry swallowed hard; he glanced to his right and quickly averted his eyes as he received the full measure of the Heretic’s eerie gaze.

“She’s mine,” Badr al-Mulahid hissed …

16

Yasmina reached the cleft and peered over its edge. Moonlight lent a pale luster to the flight of rough-hewn steps leading down into the earth. Apprehension constricted the muscles of her chest.
What if the stairs go nowhere? What if that wretched Djuha was lying all along? What if …

But her fears evaporated when a whisper of air—faint and hot—caused fabric to rustle at the bottom of the cleft. For an instant, an oily yellow glow limned the ragged outline of a doorway hacked into the wall. The air stilled again; a curtain of heavy cloth settled back into place to await the next phantom exhalation.

Yasmina’s lips curled in a predatory sneer. She tightened her grip on the bloodstained knife as she hurried down the stairs, left arm thrust out to the side for support. Her fingers brushed deep furrows scored into the sandstone wall, crumbling and uneven, abraded by time and the elements. Curiosity drew her gaze to these carvings. After a moment’s study she apprehended a monstrous figure in the moonlight: a falcon-headed devil hewn of stone and shadow. It emerged from the rock with axe upraised, in defiance of the Prophet’s admonition against graven images. Yasmina flinched away from it. Here was a thing of Old Egypt, a relic of the Time of Ignorance; she had seen its like before, smaller and more careworn, hacked deep into the ancient columns the Gazelle scavenged for the courtyard of her home.
Abu’l-Saqr,
she had called it,
Father of the Falcon.
Shivering, the young woman averted her eyes and made her way down to the curtain-hung fissure.

Another breath of air sent fingers of light escaping into the cleft, and with it the mingled smells of dust and old resins, natron and cerecloth, hashish and dried blood. The soles of Yasmina’s bare feet rasped on stone as she shifted her weight. In one hand she clutched her knife, blade angled up and ready to strike; in the other she gripped the edge of the heavy curtain.

The young woman paused. She exhaled, her every nerve tingling. Death lay beyond the curtain. Death and Vengeance—the pair entwined like desperate lovers awaiting the release only consummation could bring. Yasmina’s slim brown fingers grew white-knuckled tight around the haft of Musa’s knife. Death and Vengeance waited for her.
It is Allah’s will. Strike quickly. Don’t hesitate
. Anything less would give the pale-eyed Heretic a chance to gain the upper hand.
To hesitate is to fail.

To hesitate is to fail
. This awareness steeled her to action. Yasmina ripped the curtain aside …

… and swore under her breath as she beheld not the covey of killers she had expected, but rather a deserted anteroom, its pitted sandstone walls lit by a pair of small clay lamps. Cobwebs fluttered in the corners; the stones underfoot were dusty and irregular, cracked with age and marred by dark splotches of what may have been dried blood. Yasmina took a hesitant step over the threshold, her eyes searching from side to side. A dozen paces ahead a yawning doorway led deeper into the silent edifice.

No,
she realized, her head cocked to the left,
not silent
. Sound reached her, faint yet unmistakable: a singsong voice chanting in a tongue she could not understand, accompanied by the sharp pulse of a drum—a rhythmic throb that sent chills down her spine. It reminded Yasmina of the beating of her own heart.

The Egyptian crossed the anteroom on cats’ feet, pausing in the open doorway beneath a lintel carved with the likeness of a winged dung beetle. Of the chamber beyond, Yasmina could make out precious few details. A forest of thick columns stretched off into darkness, their immense stone trunks covered in a veneer of symbols; vertical registers of deeply etched glyphs surrounded images of men in tall headdresses and falcon-headed devils. The otherworldly figures flickered and danced in the feeble lamplight.

How the Heretic and his men could live underground like this, amid the djinn and the
ghuls
, was a mystery to Yasmina—and not a mystery she cared to plumb. It was unnatural, but Allah had set this task before her and she gave thanks for the gift of opportunity. Lips set in a grim slash, the young Egyptian padded through the doorway and bore left, creeping between columns, skirting the rare pools of light as she let the murmur of the drum guide her.

For an instant Yasmina’s eyes flicked to the ceiling. Despite the oppressive gloom, she could yet see traces of pigment glittering on stone architraves and roofing slabs, swirling constellations of silver and copper oxide blending to form a picture of the ancient firmament, the heavens frozen in time. The girl’s pace faltered. She was accustomed to the spectacle of extravagance, to the jeweled gardens and gilded arcades of the Fatimid palace, but nothing in the short span of Yasmina’s years had prepared her for the awesome antiquity of this place. Its witchery was breathtaking, its mystique infectious. How many such crypts—how many statues and colossi, obelisks and columns—lay beneath the streets of Cairo, buried and forgotten? Who had built them and for what purpose? What—

The eerie harmony of voice and drum reached a shuddering climax, which gave way to heavy, pregnant silence. Its ominous weight smothered the questions smoldering in the forefront of Yasmina’s mind. Mouthing a litany of curses, she shook off her lethargy and resumed her path through the stone forest, her attention fixed firmly on the task at hand.

At the end of the great hall an elaborate post-and-lintel doorway opened on a smaller chamber, one lit by a bloodred glow that streamed out around the edges of another curtained entry. By this feral light Yasmina observed deep alcoves carved into the walls, each one sheltering a statue in a flowing headdress, arms rigid at its sides, a stone serpent perched upon its brow and an angular beard jutting from its chin. Cobwebs hung from broad shoulders like ghostly mantles. Whether of gods or men Yasmina could not say, only that their flawless features were as cold and aloof as those of the Caliph himself.

The girl crept nearer to the curtained doorway, her eyes sweeping from side to side. She wrinkled her nose at the stench in the air. The miasma of blood, offal, salt, and incense reminded her of the slaughterhouses south of the Zuwayla Gate.
Fitting,
she thought,
a fitting place to confront my mistress’s killer.

The knife in Yasmina’s fist lent her a measure of bravado matched only by her thirst for vengeance. She bared her teeth, lips peeling back in a vicious smile.

I will see that pale-eyed bastard dead!

Closer, she came; on the balls of her feet now.

I will cut his black heart out and offer it up to the gods of this forbidden place!

Edging to the right, twisting her torso, she reached with her left hand for the rough hide curtain.

I will …

A low moan turned her marrow to ice. It came from the chamber beyond, a bestial sound, like the death rattle of an animal trapped on a huntsman’s spear. Yasmina froze; the moan resolved into a single word, distant and sepulchral as though the very act of articulation had sapped the speaker of his will: “W-why…?”

Another voice answered, one that did not belong to the Heretic. “I have need of answers. Do you remember your name?”

Yasmina heard nothing for a moment, then a racking croak that barely resembled human speech: “I … I was Gamal. Why have you called me forth? Release me…”

“In due time. What happened to you?”

“I … I…”

“What happened to you, Gamal?” the questioner pressed. “Do you remember?”

“I … I was slain!” Something elicited such a groan of agony from the man called Gamal that even Yasmina felt a momentary twinge of compassion. He was on the verge of death, surely; delirious, his words made little sense. “The pain … you cannot begin to fathom the pain of its touch! It hungers! Even n-now, I feel it … I feel its hatred!”

The questioner’s voice quivered with excitement. “
It?
What is
it
? Do you mean his knife? Is the Emir’s knife a thing of power?”

Gamal hissed. “Old, it is … forged of strife and agony … quenched in blood! Its hate…”

“Does it have a name, Gamal?”

“A … name…?”

“The blade! Has the blade a name?” The questioner’s voice grew sharp. “Speak, Gamal! I command you!”

“No! Do not … do not make me…!”

“Speak! What is its name?”

Yasmina heard a piteous gurgling that trailed off into muffled pleas for succor, as though the very name the questioner sought caused Gamal unbearable anguish. While she did not pretend to understand what was going on, the exchange nevertheless stoked Yasmina’s curiosity. She shifted her knife to her left hand, leaned the right side of her body against the doorjamb, and with two fingers gingerly nudged the curtain aside until she could peer within.

She beheld a room bathed in the ruddy glow of bronze lamps, its walls carved in the same peculiar style as the columns of the great hall—with glyphs and animal-headed djinn. To one side, on a low table jumbled with papyrus scrolls and scribe’s implements, coils of yellowish smoke rose from a bronze chafing dish to drift in the unnaturally chill air. A man knelt at the center of the room, a hide drum at his side. He was turbaned and clad in rich black brocade with a face as sharp as a hawk’s and a beard peppered with gray. Terrible wrath blazed in his eyes as he stared hard at a supine figure before him.

“Its name, Gamal!”

The figure stretched out upon the ground writhed, or seemed to. In truth, Yasmina had trouble discerning even the slightest detail about him, save that to look at him made her skin crawl.
Something
obscured his features from view; something gauzy and vaporous—a milky-white mist that shifted and stretched, opaque tendrils straining upward like tongues of flame only to peel away and vanish amid a haze of incense. Surely this was but a trick of the light…?

“Give me its name!”

Whatever else was afoot, the wet, mewling voice that came from the prostrate figure was no illusion; its desperation raised gooseflesh on Yasmina’s skin. “The b-blade … it called itself …
Matraqat al-Kafer
! The Hammer of the Infidel!”

Yasmina saw the black-clad man’s eyes narrow. He rocked back as though Gamal’s words had dealt him a physical blow. “The Hammer? May the gods bear witness: I will cast you down into a lake of fire if you think to lie to me! I ask you once more—”

Gamal wailed. “The … the Hammer it was,
ya sidi
!
Matraqat al-Kafer!
M-my soul upon it!”

The questioner said nothing for a long moment, his brow furrowed as though lost in thought. Finally, he nodded to himself. “You have served me well, Gamal. I release you.” He made a complex gesture in the smoky air above Gamal’s head. “Begone! I command thee!” No sooner had he spoken those words than the mist cloaking Gamal’s form began to break down, to lose its cohesiveness. Curling ribbons of vapor drifted away. Some of it evaporated; the rest sank to the floor, soaking into the bare stone like water into a sponge.

The mist’s dissipation gave the Egyptian her first clear look at the recumbent figure. Yasmina recoiled from the sight of it, blood draining from her dark features as she bit back a horrified scream. The figure, the man called Gamal, the man who had pleaded and begged with the black-clad questioner but a moment ago was already a day-old corpse, naked and swollen, its skin purple with putrefaction …

She stumbled back from the curtain. Her skin crawled; she tasted the sting of bile on her tongue.
How could it be? What deviltry—?

And in that instant terror stripped away every last vestige of her resolve, leaving a glacial abscess in the pit of her stomach. The room spun. Fear assaulted her from all sides—fear of the inhuman statues and the bestial carvings, fear of the cloying darkness and the memory of the caravanserai. Tendrils of dread slithered up her spine and threatened to choke off her air. The knife in her hand forgotten, Yasmina turned to run even as a familiar voice shattered the grim and terrible silence.