is old and slow and needs time to adjust to the loss of the southern desert.”
“He’d get used to it faster if that idiot Ahmed would get out of the way.”
“Maybe. Haroun, what’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. Something strange. Like this isn’t any ordinary night coming on.”
“Allegorical thought, no doubt. Beware your dreams tonight. Fuad, do tell the Wahlig not to get exercised. If he wants to make headway with Aboud he has to become acceptable company first.”
“I’ll tell him.” Fuad departed wearing one of his most fearsome scowls.
“Come, Haroun. You can help with the papers.”
Haroun’s shoulders tightened. Radetic had no end of papers and notes, all totally disorganized. He could spend years getting them sorted — by which time another mountain would have collected.
He glanced at the hills again. They seemed unfriendly, almost cold.
Lalla was the pearl of Aboud’s harem. Though she was a scant eighteen, and without benefit of marriage, she was the most powerful woman in Al Rhemish. The capital was drenched in a flood of songs praising her grace and beauty. Aboud was mad for her, a slave to her whim. There were rumors that he would make her a wife.
She had been a gift, years ago, from a minor Wahlig on the lost coast of the Sea of Kotsum. She had not caught Aboud’s attention till recently.
Aboud was an infatuated, silly and proud child. He wasted few opportunities to flaunt delights only he should have known in their entirety, taunting his court with his favorite toy. Night after night he summoned her from his seraglio and had her dance before the assembled nobles.
Yousif gazed on her lithe form. He appreciated Lalla as much as did any man, but at that moment his thoughts were far away and fraught with guilt. His heart would not accept the conclusion of his reason. He could not shake despair over having abandoned his trust and ancestral home.
He and his son Ali were guests of Crown Prince Ahmed. Ahmed was the only member of the court not yet disgusted with his attempts to initiate a major campaign against the Disciple.
Yousif was restless. There was a wrongness afoot in Al Rhemish, though it was nothing he found concrete. The feeling had been growing all week, and tonight it was strong enough to make his skin crawl.
There was a wrongness, too, about Ahmed. Especially when he looked at Lalla. His lust lay naked in his eyes, but there was more. He seemed agitated, and could not restrain a wicked, greedy smile. Yousif feared that smile foreshadowed grief.
Lalla spun close, shaking her lithe, smooth young hips inches from his eyes. His malaise lessened. When Lalla danced, even his cares soon faded. Her beauty had a narcotic quality.
How Ahmed stared! As though he had sampled those delights and become so addicted that he would kill to make them his own. Madness backlighted his gaze.
Nervousness had given Yousif a strange sensitivity to the undercurrents flowing around him. A paranoid sensitivity, he chided himself. Ahmed was not alone in staring. The faces of a dozen wild sons of the waste told him they would kill to possess the dancer.
He began to grow uneasy again. Even Lalla’s melodious zils could not still his troubled heart completely. It had been a bad day. News had come from the south, at last, and it was not good.
El Murid had climbed the Horned Mountain. Something ominous had occurred there. A fire in the sky had been seen for a hundred miles. El Murid had come down decisive and determined. He had summoned the tribes to his banner, to help extirpate the Royalists’ evil. And rumor said thousands were responding, inspired by the awesome display over the evil mountain.
There was also word that the Scourge of God had left his forces in the littoral. He had gathered the Invincibles and was on the move. The fox was loose in the henyard, and no one in Al Rhemish apparently cared.
A magical wall erected on foundations of willful blindness isolated the bowl valley containing Al Rhemish. Reality could not penetrate that rampart of wishful thinking. The Royalist overlords had retreated from the world and immersed themselves in their pleasures. Even the hardest, the most practical, the most pragmatic among them were becoming as dissolute as the Crown Prince.
Yousif was bewildered. He had known most of these men for decades. There were dark forces at work here — how else to explain what was happening? They seemed to have resigned themselves, were seizing what pleasure they could before the end.
But all was not lost. Any fool could see that. Here in the north there were enough loyal warriors to crush El Murid twice over.
Yousif cast a covert glance at his host. The Crown Prince was a sour note, a distinct off-pitch element in the festivities. Why had Ahmed insisted his remote southern cousins be his guests tonight? Why was he so nakedly excited and lustful?
Aboud could be pardoned his dissipations. He hadn’t many years left, and was terrified of the Dark Lady. He was trying to recapture the ghost of his youth. But Ahmed, Ahmed had no excuse.
Yousif had polled the more hardheaded Royalist nobility.
His brother wahligs agreed that Ahmed was a disaster in the making. He had assumed a dangerous influence over his father since Farid’s death. His suggestions had resulted in several minor defeats by guerrillas operating near Al Rhemish. But those same hardheads would do nothing when Yousif suggested they take the initiative...
Kingdom and Crown were decomposing while yet alive. The stench of corruption filled the land. And no one would lift a hand to halt the process. The pity of it all was that Aboud was so much stronger than El Murid. A determined, decisive leader could destroy the Disciple easily.
His anger stirred his adrenaline. He swore. “He can be put down!”
His neighbors looked at him askance. They did that a lot. He’d earned a reputation as a singleminded boor of a country cousin already.
