The Prophet of Akhran Read online

  The Prophet of Akhran

  The Rose of the Prophet Book 3

  By Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

  The Book of Quar

  Chapter 1

  The desert burned beneath a summer sun that blazed in the sky like the eye of a vengeful god. Beneath that searing, withering stare, few things could survive. Those that did so kept out of the god’s fiery sight, burrowing into their holes, skulking in their tents until the eye closed in night’s sleep.

  Though it was early morning yet, the heat was already radiating from the desert floor with an intensity that made even the djinn, Fedj, feel as if he been skewered like shishlick and was being slowly roasted over the coals of an eternal fire.

  Fedj wandered disconsolately through the camp around the Tel—if camp it could be called. He knew he should be in attendance upon his master, Sheykh Jaafar al Widjar, but given the Sheykh’s humor these days, the djinn would have preferred attending an imp of Sul. It had been the same every morning for the past few months. The moment Fedj sprang from the ring upon his master’s hand, it began.

  First, the whining. Wringing his hands, Jaafar wailed.

  “Of all the children of Akhran, am I not the most unfortunate? I am cursed, cursed! My people taken captive! Our homes in the hills destroyed! The sheep that are our lives scattered to the winds and the wolves! My eldest daughter, the light of my old age, vanished!”

  There was a time and not long ago, Fedj always thought sourly at this point, when that daughter’s disappearance would have been considered a blessing, not a curse, but the djinn—not wanting to prolong the torture—always forbore mentioning that.

  The whining and handwringing escalated into loud exhortation and breastbeating, silently punctuated by the inward comments of the longsuffering djinn.

  “Why have you done this to me, Hazrat Akhran? I, Jaafar al Widjar, have faithfully obeyed every one of your commands without question!”

  Without question, master? And I’m the son of a shegoat! “Did I not bring my daughter, my precious jewel with the eyes of a gazelle—”

  And the disposition of a starving leopard!

  “—to be wed to the son of my ancient enemy—may camels trod upon his head—Sheykh Majiid al Fakhar, and did I not further bring my people to live around this cursed Tel by your command, and further, did we not reside here in peace with our enemy as was your will, Hazrat Akhran, or would have lived in peace had not we been pushed beyond provocation by the thieving Akar—”

  Who, for some reason, took it into their heads to be outraged by the Hrana’s “peaceful” stealing of Akar horses.

  “And have we not suffered at the hands of our enemies? Our wives and children swept from our arms by the soldiers of the Amir and held prisoner in the city! Our camp destroyed, the water in the oasis dwindling daily before our eyes—”

  Fedj rolled his eyes, sighing, and—knowing there was no help for it—entered the tent of his master, catching him in midharangue.

  “—and still you insist that we stay here, in this place where not even Sul could long live while we wait for some accursed plant—whose brown and driedup appendages are beginning to look as wasted as my own—to bloom? To bloom? Roses will sprout from my chin sooner than they will from that sandsucking cacti!” shouted Jaafar, shaking a feeble fist at heaven.

  The temptation to actually summon forth blooms from the old man’s grizzled chin was so acute that Fedj squirmed in an agony of torment. But now the exhorting and fist shaking had ceased. It was always followed by sniveling contrition and groveling. Fedj tensed. He knew what was coming.

  “Forgive me, Hazrat Akhran.” Jaafar prostrated himself, nose first on the felt floor of his tent. “It is only that your will is harsh and difficult for us poor mortals to understand, and since it seems likely that we will all perish from the harshness and the difficulty, I beg of you”—a beady eye, peering out from the folds of the haik, fixed itself intently upon the djinn—”to release us from the vow and let us leave this accursed place and return to our flocks in the foothills. . .”

  Fedj shook his head.

  The beady eye became pleading.

  “I await your answer most humbly, Hazrat Akhran,” Jaafar mumbled into the tent floor.

  “The God has given you his answer,” said Fedj in grim and dour tones. “You are to remain camped at the Tel, in peace with your cousins, until the Rose of the Prophet blooms.”

  “It will bloom on our graves!” Jaafar beat his fists into the ground.

  “If so, then so be it. All praise to the wisdom of Akhran.”

  “All praise to the wisdom of Akhran!” Jaafar mimicked. Leaping to his scrawny legs, he made a pounce at the djinn. “I want to hear from Akhran himself, not from one of his messengers who has a full belly while I starve! Go find the God. Bring him to me! And don’t come back until you do!”

  With a meek salaam, Fedj took his leave. At least this command was a change and gave the djinn something to do, plus leave to be gone a long time doing it. Standing outside the charred and tattered remnants of what had once been a large and comfortable dwelling place, Fedj could hear Jaafar raving and cursing in a manner that would have done his wild daughter credit. Fedj stole a glance across the desert, on the opposite side of the Tel, where stood the tent of Majiid al Fakhar, Jaafar’s old enemy. The sides of Jaafar’s tent heaved and quivered with the old man’s anger like a living, breathing entity. By contrast, Majiid’s tent seemed a husk whose life juices had been sucked dry.

  Fedj thought back to the time, only months before, when it had been the giant Majiid—proud of his people and his warrior son—who had thundered his rage to the dunes. Now Majiid’s people were imprisoned in Kich; his warrior son was at best dead, at worst a craven coward skulking about in the desert. The giant was a broken man who rarely came forth from his tent.

  More than once Fedj wished he had not been so quick to carry to his master his sighting of Khardan, eldest son of Majiid and Calif of the Akar, slinking away from the battle of the Tel, hiding from the soldiers in the rosecolored silk of a woman’s chador. Certainly if he had foreseen the wreckage of spirits and valor that would follow after—far worse than any damage done by the Amir’s soldiers—the djinn would have peppered his tongue with fire ants and swallowed it before he spoke.

  Wholly dispirited, Fedj wandered aimlessly in the desert, soon leaving the Tel far behind. The djinn might have acted on his master’s order and gone out to search for Akhran, but Fedj knew that the Wandering God could be found only when he wanted to be found, and in that instance, Fedj would not have to look very far or very hard. But Akhran had not made himself visible for months. Fedj knew that something was going on in the heavenly plane. Just what, he didn’t know and couldn’t guess. The tension hung in the air like a circling vulture, casting the shadow of its black wings over every act. It was extremely unfair of Jaafar to accuse the djinn of feasting while his master starved. Fedj hadn’t dined well in weeks.

  Drifting through the ethers, far from camp, absorbed in gloomy thoughts and forebodings, the djinn was jolted out of his grim contemplations by the sight of unusual activity on the desert floor beneath him. A sparse scattering of tents had sprouted during the night where the djinn could have sworn there had been no tents yesterday. It took him only a moment to realize where he had traveled. He was at the southern well that marked the boundary of Akar land. And there, camped around the well, using Majiid’s water, was another old enemy—Sheykh Zeid!

  Thinking that this encroachment upon Majiid’s precious water might bring the dispirited Sheykh back to life, the djinn was just considering how he should impart the news to one who was not his master and, moreover, an enemy, when he caught sight of a
form coalescing in the air in front of him.

  “Raja?” questioned Fedj warily, his hand straying to the hilt of the huge saber at his side.

  The heavily muscled, duskyskinned body of Sheykh Zeid’s djinn, also with hand on sword hilt, shimmered before Fedj in waves of heat rising from the sand.

  “Fedj?” queried the other djinn, floating nearer.

  “It is Fedj, as you well know, unless your sight has taken the same path as your wits and fled!” Fedj said angrily. “That water you drink is from the well of Sheykh Majiid! Your master is, of course, aware that all who drink that water without the Sheykh’s permission soon find their thirst quenched by drinking their own blood.”

  “My master drinks where he will, and those who try to stop him will end their days filling the bellies of jackals!” Raja growled.

  Scimitars flared yellow in the sun, gold flashed from earrings and arm bracelets, sweat glistened on bare chests as the djinn crouched in the air, watching, waiting. . .

  Then suddenly, Raja hurled his scimitar from him with a bitter curse. It went spiraling, unheeded, down through the sky to land with a thud, carving a swordshaped ravine in the Pagrah desert that remains a mystery to all who see it to this day.

  “Slay me where I stand!” shouted Raja. Tears streamed down his face. Spreading wide his arms, he thrust forth his darkskinned chest. “Kill me now, Fedj. I will lift no hand to stop you!”

  Though the effectiveness of this display was somewhat blunted by the fact that the djinn was immortal and Fedj might run his scimitar through Raja a thousand times without doing him any harm, it was a noble gesture and one that touched Fedj to the core of his soul.

  “My friend, what does this mean?” Fedj cried aghast, lowering his weapon and approaching Raja, not without a certain degree of caution. Like his master, Zeid, the warrior djinn Raja was a cunning old dog who might still have a tooth or two left in his head.

  But as he drew nearer, Fedj saw that Raja was truly little more than a whipped pup. The husky djinn’s despair was so obvious and real that Fedj sheathed his weapon and immediately put his arm comfortingly around the massive, heaving shoulders.

  “My friend, do not carry on so!” said Fedj, distressed by the sight of this grief. “Matters cannot be this bad!”

  “Oh, can’t they?” cried Raja fiercely, shaking his head until his huge, golden earrings jangled against his jaw. “Tell Sheykh Majiid that Zeid is stealing his water! Bring him to fight, as would have happened in past months, and he will have the very great satisfaction of watching my master slink on his belly back into the desert where he will shrivel up and die like a lizard!”

  Fedj could easily have sworn that he would do just that. He could have gloated over Zeid’s downfall and glorified Majiid to the skies. But he chose not to. Raja’s pitiable plight was deeply akin to his own, and Fedj guessed that Raja must know something of the true circumstances of his enemies, or he would not have revealed such weakness, no matter what his own inner turmoil.

  The djinn heaved a sigh that shifted the location of several sand dunes.

  “Alas, friend Raja. I will not hide from you that Sheykh Majiid would not raise his voice in anger if your master came into his tent and gouged out his eyes. And my Sheykh has taken to cursing the God, which does no one any good since we all know that the ears of Hazrat Akhran are stuffed with sand these days.”

  Raja lifted a grim face. “So it is true, what we have heard— that Majiid and Jaafar are in a situation almost as desperate as our own?”

  “Almost!” said Fedj, suddenly indignant. “No situation can possibly be more desperate than the one in which we find ourselves. We have taken to eating the camp dogs!”

  “Is that so?” said Raja, with growing anger. “Well, camp dog would seem a treat to us! We have taken to eating snake!”

  “We ate the last camp dog yesterday, and since we have devoured every snake in the desert, we shall soon be forced to eat—”

  The air was split by what to a mortal would have appeared to be a tremendous bolt of lightning streaking from heaven to the ground below. The two djinn, however, saw flailing arms and legs and heard an explosive curse boom in a voice of thunder. Recognizing one of their own, both djinn swallowed their words (more nourishing than either snake or dog) and immediately accosted the singed and smoking stranger who lay on his back, breathing heavily, at the bottom of a dune.

  “Arise and declare yourself. Name your master and tell us what he is doing in the lands of the Akar and the Aran!” demanded Raja and Fedj.

  Undaunted, the strange djinn rose to his feet, his own sword in his hand. Noting the richness of this djinn’s clothing, the jewelencrusted weapon he bore, and his air of superiority that was not put on as one puts on a caftan, but was inborn, both Fedj and Raja exchanged uneasy glances.

  “My master’s name is not important to the likes of you here on this plane,” stated the djinn coolly.

  “You serve one of the Elders?” asked Fedj in subdued tones, while Raja instantly made the salaam.

  “I do!” said the djinn, glaring at them severely. “And I would ask why two such ablebodied men as yourselves are skulking about down here below when there is work to be done above?”

  “Work? What do you mean?” said Raja, bristling. “We skulk down here below in service to our masters—”

  “—when there is a war in heaven?”

  “War!” Both djinn stared at the stranger.

  “The plane of the immortals has erupted in fire,” said the strange djinn grimly. “By some means, the Lost Immortals were discovered and freed from their imprisonment. The Goddess Evren and her counterpart, the God Zhakrin, have also come back to life and both accuse Quar of attempting to destroy them! Some of the Gods support Quar, others attack him. We fight for our very existence! Have you heard nothing of this?”

  “No, nothing, by Akhran!” swore Fedj.

  Raja shook his head, his earrings clashing discordantly.

  “It is not to be wondered, I suppose,” reflected the stranger, “considering the chaos up there. But now that you know, there is no time to be lost. You must come! We need every sword. Quar’s ‘efreet Kaug grows in strength moment by moment!”

  “But if all immortals leave the mortal realm, what dreadful things will happen down here?”

  “Better that than if the immortal realm collapses,” said the stranger. “For that will mean the end of all.”

  “I must tell my master,” said Fedj, his brow knitting.

  “As must I,” stated Raja.

  “And then we will join you.”

  The strange djinn nodded and leapt back into the heavens, creating a gigantic whirlwind that swept the sand into a billowing cloud. Exchanging grim glances, Fedj and Raja both disappeared, their going marked by two simultaneous explosions that blasted holes in the granite and sent concussive waves throughout the Pagrah Desert.

  Chapter 2

  The lookout ran wildly across the desert sand, often stumbling, falling, picking himself back up and running again. As he ran, he shouted, and soon every man remaining in the decimated tribes of Sheykhs Jaafar and Majiid had left the shelter of their tents and was watching the lookout’s approach with tense interest. He was an Akar, a member of Sheykh Majiid’s tribe, and he was on foot rather than horseback. The few horses remaining—those who had been found wandering in the desert after being cut loose by the soldiers of the Amir—were considered more precious than all the jewels in a Sultan’s treasury and were rarely ridden.

  One of these horses was Majiid’s own, the story being told that after the stallion’s master had fallen in battle, the gallant horse stood guard above the body of his rider, fighting off the soldiers with vicious, slashing hooves. Another of the horses remaining was Khardan’s. No man could get near him. Any who tried were warned away with a flattening of the ears and bared teeth and a low rumbling sound in the massive chest of the black charger. But Khardan’s horse remained near camp, often seen at dusk or at twilight, a gho
stly black shadow among the dunes. The fanciful claimed this meant that Khardan was dead, his spirit had entered the horse, and he was guarding his people. The practical said that the stallion would never wander far from his mares.

  The lookout stumbled into camp. He was met with a girba filled with tepid water, which he drank thirstily but sparingly, being careful not to waste a drop. Then he approached. Majiid’s silent tent. The flap was closed, a sign that the Sheykh was not to be disturbed. It had been closed almost continuously since word came of Khardan’s disgrace and his father had broken his son’s sword and declared him dead.

  “My Sheykh,” cried the man. “I bear tidings.”

  There was no reply.

  The lookout glanced around uncertainly, and several of the other men motioned him forward, urging him with gestures to continue.

  “Effendi,” continued the lookout desperately, “Sheykh Zeid and his people are camped around the southern well!”

  A low murmur, like wind among the sands, ran through the Akar. The Hrana, led by Sheykh Jaafar who had come out of his tent to see what was transpiring, glanced at each other wordlessly. This was war. Surely, if there was one thing that could rouse Majiid from his grief, it would be this unwarranted invasion of his territory by his ancient enemy.

  The mutterings of the Akar swelled to angered talk of defiance, accented by loud calls for their Sheykh, and at length the tent flap opened.

  Silence descended so abruptly, it seemed the men must have had the breath sucked from their throats. Those who had not seen Majiid in some time averted their heads, tears welling up in their eyes. The man had aged a decade, it seemed, for every month that had passed since the raid upon the Tel. The tall, strong frame was bent and stooped. The sharp, fierce gaze of the black eyes was bleary and lackluster. The bristling mustaches drooped beneath the hawk nose that was now as white and wasted as bare bone.

  But Majiid was Sheykh still, respected leader of his tribe. The lookout fell to his knees, out of either reverence or exhaustion, while several of the aksakal, tribal elders, stepped forward to discuss this news.