'What if they travel all night?'
'It will make no difference for that is what we will be doing. It will only prolong the chase a few more hours, no more. Be patient, Shojan. Be patient. We will have them, this I swear.'
Bu Ali made no camp. They traveled all that night stopping only to water their animals, then to cover more miles before the heat of day turned the seabed into an inferno. With first light they sought what thin shelter they could, using their cloaks to make tents to shield them and their animals from the hammering rays of the demon sun. Three more days and nights passed in this manner till they reached the base of the Elburz Mountains still in darkness. Dawn found them climbing a steep trail on foot, the horses left behind with a single Mameluke to guard them. Casca had one rope noosed around his thick neck, a second tied securely to his waist. The ends of both were in the hands of Karzan, who was quiet for the first two thousand feet. But when the sun warmed their backs in full light, he looked up at the steep climb ahead and muttered to no one, 'I hope Bu Ali calls a rest when we get to that level site ahead.' Never once had he or the other Mamelukes questioned why Bu Ali was taking them to Elburz instead of back to Baghdad and their Master Mamud. They, like Karzan, left the problem of thinking to others. Their job was only to obey and Bu Ali was in command therefore he must know what he was doing.
Casca also hoped for a rest. His legs were cramped from being tied under the belly of his horse and burned with each labored step up the foot trail. He had never been on this path before and wondered how long it would take them till they reached the summit of Alamut, where he would face Hassan and find out why this was being done to him.
Not once in the days of their trek had Bu Ali spoken to him, and after seeing Karzan do so had ordered all the Mamelukes to avoid any conversation with their prisoner at the risk of losing their tongues. Another hundred yards of climbing and Casca could barely make out the parapets of Castle Alamut still two thousand feet above them. He knew of this place. One of the Novices at Alamut had pointed it out to him from the Castle walls and had told him that this was where many who had transgressed were sent to their maker.
He looked down. There were jagged rocks below, and to his left, the black cleft that was the opening to the Bottomless Pit, which was, as the Novice had said, the entrance to death for many. Casca grunted knowing that every pit had a bottom. It was only a matter of reaching it.
A jerk on his lead rope and Casca stumbled over a rock to fall on his face. It distracted Karzan's attention and that of the other Mamelukes in front of him and behind him at the very instant that Yousef and his men attacked. They poured out of the rocks circling the level site by the Bottomless Pit.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Casca rose in time to be hit by Shojan's cane spear, its tip made of iron. Karzan dropped his rope in order to defend himself against an attack by two of the bandits. Casca staggered to the edge of the dark hole. The spear had passed through his right side, the head extending two hands breadth out the other side of his body. In his pain he stumbled again at the edge of the Bottomless Pit and tried to regain his balance. For what seemed an infinitely long second he wavered there, body half cast over the brink. Then the earth gave way. He fell far and long, his body bouncing off of boulders and branches that poked out from the sides of the pit. Then he was no more to be seen or heard from.
When Casca fell the fight at the top of the pit came to a quick conclusion. Though Yousef and his men outnumbered the Mamelukes they were by no means their equal in battle and none of the outlaws had a desire to die for such little profit. They fled the scene leaving Bu Ali looking over the edge of the Bottomless Pit wondering how to explain things to Hassan.
Back down the mountain the bandits fled. One had died in the exchange but the others all had minor wounds. Still Yousef gloated. He had accomplished his main purpose and the scar-faced one was finally dead. No one could live through such a fall. Perhaps now their luck would change and he would be able to pursue his dream of being a bandit chieftain.
Bu Ali had no such dreams of glory for he had to stand before the Master and explain his failure. To Karzan he ordered, 'There is no need for you to go any further. Take the others and go back to Mamud. Your job here is finished.' Karzan saw a look of desolate acceptance of fate on the face of Bu Ali. Yet this was no concern of his. He was to do as he was ordered. He asked no questions but merely nodded his head in agreement, glad to be rid of whatever job it was that Bu Ali had led them on.
They left Bu Ali at the edge of the pit tossing rocks over the side then cocking his head to listen. He never heard any of them hit bottom. Raising his eyes to the mountain above and the Castle Alamut he resigned himself to whatever fate was in store for him at the hands of the Old Man of the Mountain. There was no use trying to fight one's destiny for it had long ago been written by the hand of Allah and what would be would be.
Yousef's troubles were not yet over. The next dawn left him with two of his men gone, one of them Shojan, who had decided that he had seen and tasted enough of Yousef's generalship and would do better on his own. He had made the right decision, for on the following day, Yousef and what remained of his band ran straight into the captain of the Emir's guard and were taken prisoner.
Each of them was carefully skinned alive and staked out on the desert floor to slowly roast under the relentless sun of Persia. It was a horrible, torture-filled death. Without their skins to keep in the moisture, in less than a full day their bodies would be dried to rubbery husks which the captain would bring back to Apnea in triumph.
Casca was just beginning to experience his own kind of torture, torture worse than any he had ever known in the centuries since the Jew had damned him to eternal life.
The first plunge into the blackness of the Bottomless Pit was of course filled with pain — pain Casca had known. But when his body had hit the jagged rocks, the jirad shaft inside him had splintered, the two sawtooth edges raking back and forth inside his burning gut, and that alone would have made him scream. But a rock had smashed into his head and had broken bones, pinched his nerves, and paralyzed the functions of his voice as well. He jerked into and out of consciousness, awake when his falling body smashed into the rocks on the side of the pit so that he knew the full pain of the thousand-foot drop, unconscious as he entered the complete darkness.
He was awake, though, when he hit the water, shockingly cold water that gagged him, suffocated him, drowned him.
Death.
He had often longed for death, longed for the eternal sleep that would end the misery of his eternal life. But this was not death as an eternal sleep. It was a gagging, suffocating horror that repeated itself over and over and over. Quite literally, he was dying a thousand deaths, one by one. In one of his conscious moments he surmised that he was in a qanat, in one of the underground rivers the wise men had said existed, but he had no way of knowing whether he was being carried along by the river or simply hanging in one spot. He had no sense of time whatever. The recurring horror he was experiencing could've taken hours, days, weeks, or years. He had no idea. At first he wondered how he could return to consciousness, then gag, suffocate, and drown again. Finally he realized that the strange healing powers of his body were working. When he was below water, he was dead, drowned. But apparently there were pockets of air over parts of the river, and when his dead body would rise into such a pocket, the healing would bring him back to life — only to suffer the gagging death again when the waters swept him under.
But was the water carrying him along? Or was it that his body was simply bobbing up and down in the same spot, the same pocket of air? He had no way of knowing. The wise men had said that the qanats fed the oases. If that was so, and the river was carrying him along, then he might have some hope of getting out of here. But how long would it take? And would he have gone completely mad by the time it happened?
But what if it was the same spot, over and over and over again?
He was certain of one thing.
He knew time passed because his wounds healed. Sometime during the ordeal he even pulled the two ends of the broken jirad from his body. Finally, in the brief moments of waking, he was completely healed. When that happened he found that he could prolong his time of 'life' by treading water until the swift current forced him under
