Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West

Palabaristas Press

Gijón

First published in 2012.

Copyright (c) 2012 Ian Watson & Andy West.

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

Cover Design Copyright (c) 2012 Ana Díaz Eiriz.

All rights reserved.

All characters and events in this publication, other
than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any
resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.

www.watersofdestiny.com

Elburz Mountains, Northern Iran: July 1986

Out in the fierce sun Mahmoud was writhing on the
rough ground, whimpering. His hands clutched a strip of cloth which
Yasuf had evidently bound over his eyes. Not for Mahmoud any sight
of the stark peaks surrounding them, nor the heavens beyond, which
now he must seek in a different way.

“Let him go to Paradise,” commanded Jafar.
“We’re a long way from medical help. A soldier of God can’t be
blind.”

Yasuf pulled out Mahmoud’s own pistol. The
candidate for eternity screamed a plea and waved his arms
frantically.

A single shot rang out. This echoed,
amplified, around the empty mountains, becoming many reverberating
shots, just as the
waters of life
and of
death
would
multiply…

An hour earlier, the slow clicking of the
metal-detector had risen suddenly to a continuous buzz, like a
Geiger-counter near a radioactive source. Except that what they
searched for here was potentially much more deadly; yet contained
salvation too, Jafar hoped. He’d chosen this type of detector as
they could also use it underwater. Its mechanical vibrator made his
hand quiver, though his heart quivered more.

“Here!” he called urgently. “I think we’ve
found it!”

After almost seven centuries, the floor of
the cave as illuminated by the men’s torch-beams was a seamless sea
of dusty rubble. Even back in the distant past, it would probably
have taken a practised eye to detect that a hole had been hacked
out and then camouflaged afterwards.

The predecessors had been cunning. Burial
deep inside an isolated cave not only hid the item twice over, but
protected the fragile apocalypse it contained from freezing during
bitter winters. And a constant level of moderate cold helped with
preservation; the blazing heat of summers never reached inside this
dark sanctum. Outside in the trembling air of July, sunshine baked
a scrub-covered mountain side; but the cave’s interior was cool,
almost chill.

Even armed with a painstakingly assembled
list of clues, it had taken a very long while indeed to locate this
secret place. Or maybe it had taken
exactly
the right
length of time
. Enough for the rise of molecular biology, and
too for Islam to rouse itself at last, once more becoming militant…
here at least in Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini reigned from his
house in Tehran; also in Afghanistan of course, where the
Mujahideen Alliance used rockets and guns from the stupid infidel
CIA to slaughter atheist Russians. All this allowed them to hi-jack
certain sympathies and facilities for their own hidden agenda,
pursuing the pure route that long ago Islam
should
have
taken.

“Allah be praised.” The buzz of the detector
almost drowned Mahmoud’s murmur, and he repeated more loudly, “Be
praised!” Quite so; to make this discovery now was surely His Will.
And to find this
must be
to make use of it, otherwise why
the finding?

Two of the four men in the cave, Yasuf and
Ali, were armed. Discarding the metal detector, Jafar knelt. With
gloved hands, he and Mahmoud began lifting aside stones large and
small, until both men sweated.

Half an hour later, torchlight played upon a
Samarkand carpet, costly in its time and now a rare if musty
antique. Carefully unfolding the delicate but intact fabric
revealed a chest of black wood. The lid was exquisitely inlaid with
silver Arabic, its style of calligraphy late medieval.

“Beware,” read Jafar. “For the
water of
death
is within.”

“Let us hope the
water of life
too,
praise the Prophet,” said Ali. “I don’t suppose there could be two
chests? Another, hidden elsewhere?”

Underneath the carpet’s mustiness, Jafar
scented fear borne on sweat. His own? Or Mahmoud’s, who crouched
next to him? Cold apprehension, blended with triumph, stretched all
their faces into ambivalent grins.

“Obviously they inscribed a
warning
on
the lid,” he responded, “not an
invitation
, in case someone
ignorant stumbled upon this.”

“You mean someone who couldn’t read? As used
to be mostly the case.” Ali could sound flippant at times. Perhaps
this was the young man’s personal way of coping with the exigencies
of holy war and of death, and consequently of being reliable in
that war, but Mahmoud frowned at him reproachfully.

It took three of them to heave the chest out
of its stone bed and place it gingerly on a level space of the cave
floor. They propped their torches on rocks and gathered about the
dark artefact. A carved knot of writhing monkeys, with staring pits
of eyes, surrounded a large keyhole. Underneath, inlaid in humble
copper turned green and in a less elaborate script than the silver,
were the words ‘
pray to me
’.

Jafar’s veins thrummed. He scarcely believed
this was real and not myth, yet he felt chosen, nominated as God’s
warrior for the ultimate task. He fished from his bag the Key of
the Imams, which featured seven teeth of varying lengths. Months
earlier, it had proved difficult to retrieve the weighty brass
object; onlookers at the local beauty spot of Lake Evan, crouched
at the feet of the mountains, had been intensely curious about a
search of its muddy bottom. But eventually and discreetly the
precious item was found, sealed inside a glazed pot of Persian
blue.

It was much better to have the key. Forcing
their way inside not only risked losing the contents, but also
their lives in a terrible disaster. Yet at that moment his hand
hung in doubt before the sacred chest.

“What does it mean?” he questioned earnestly
of his God.

Ali’s eyes shone devilishly in the upward
pointing beams.

“Open it!” he urged.

Still Jafar hesitated.

“Our brethren of old were trained in the
arts,” he cautioned, “even as we are.”

Jafar recollected the Black Stone secured by
a silver band and silver nails to the eastern corner of the Ka’aba
in Mecca. Rarely for an Ismaili, he’d been on the Hajj. When the
pilgrims were perambulating around the great cube, Jafar had been
able to quickly stoop and kiss the sacred stone that was the same
colour as this chest.

Pray to me.

Towards Mecca? But the elite of the ancient
Nizari Order, those who had hidden this terrible power from the
world, would surely not have bowed towards Mecca in their prayers.
They had transcended such things.

Impatiently, Mahmoud plucked the key from
Jafar’s hand and knelt before the chest. He inserted the object
and, with some difficulty, twisted it. A loud click issued
forth.

“Two more to go,” exclaimed Ali. Yet even as
he spoke, a peculiar whine and a simultaneous sigh emanated from
inside the aged walls of wood. Mahmoud snapped up straight.

“Dust!” he spluttered, rubbing his eyes.

Jafar breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing
serious.

“Turn it again.”

But Mahmoud was blinking furiously now, and
gasping too.

“Shit! It hurts. Aah it… ahh…”

Pray to me.

They should have obeyed!

Mahmoud clutched at his eyes and
squealed.

“Water!” yelled Jafar. Their water was
outside. “Get him to the entrance! Get him out!”

Yasuf dragged Mahmoud up and pulled him away.
Moments later, blood-curdling screams entered the cave, echoing
around within it. But even as the cries of pain diminished, Jafar’s
keen mind dismissed them.

Pray to me.

When the fourth Master of Alamut, Hasan Ali,
declared the
qiyama
, the new age, the Resurrection, he’d
done so with his back to Mecca, emphasising the overthrow of
dogmatic
Shari’ah
law, which insisted that worshippers face
the holy city. Yet in subsequent centuries the true Nizari faith
couldn’t always be practised openly. Harsh political realities had
at times forced the Nizaris into
taqiyyah
, dissimulation,
their tactic to avoid persecution. In such cruel times they’d
pretended to once again obey
Shari’ah
law, the pedantic law
of the vast Sunni majority. Was this chest buried during the
blessed decades of the
qiyama
? Or later,
after
Jalal
al-Din Hasan, the sixth Master, had re-imposed
Shari’ah
practices?

“Do you have your compass?” he asked of
Ali.

Jafar reasoned and fervently hoped that,
whether or not dissimulation was in force, the super-elite of the
Nizari Ismailis would still have prayed with their backs to the
mihrab
, the niche that pointed to Mecca. This would
demonstrate their pure spiritual state, their high ascent above
ordinary rules. And most likely their booby-traps were designed to
harm lowly initiates and the over-eager and despised unbelievers
alike, as Ali had unfortunately just discovered.
Only the
super-elite were ever intended to regain this buried power
.

For once without comment, Ali had drawn a
bush-knife from his boot and flipped the compass out from its hilt.
Under Jafar’s direction they got the deadly chest as level as they
could using a makeshift plumb-line, then turned it so that the
front precisely faced Mecca. To kneel before the keyhole, was now
to have one’s back to the holy city.

“We aren’t meant to
actually
pray to
the box,” Jafar explained. “That’d be blasphemy. But in a physical
sense we must obey its instruction literally,
and in exactly the
same fashion as our ancient brethren
. Then we’ll be safe.”

Ali nodded nervously. “Sure,” he said.
“Whatever. Just don’t expect
me
to turn that key again!”

Jafar considered covering the chest with
their shirts and shemaghs, particularly those monkeys’ eyes. But a
sudden calm settled upon him and an inner light filled his mind, a
gleam of the
Nur
, God’s light, granted him at this critical
time. He was
chosen
for this ritual, and he knew he’d
interpreted the signs. He must take this test,
and he would pass
it
. He knelt as though to pray and, open-eyed, he turned the
key once more.

Once more came the click, and to his
momentary dismay the whining sigh too. But no dust issued from the
staring simians, and his shock soon passed.

A third sequence, just the same, except that
this time the lid shifted noticeably.

Jafar bent forward and opened the chest. Ali
peered over his shoulder.

The unexpected size and weight were
explained. Thick copper lined the inside. Waxed and twisted cables
held a casket suspended in the centre.

The mechanism of the booby trap was also laid
bare. Thin wires ran from the lock up to three copper tubes, down
which glass or steel balls had no doubt dropped to create a pulse
of air. Fed to narrower piping for an increase in pressure, and of
course to pick up the poisonous powder, these led to the front of
the chest. Yet a paper-thin gap separated them from the holes of
the monkey’s eyes. And into this gap, by way of a fluted channel,
had slid a wafer of ivory so thin it was transparent, preventing
the toxic cloud from blowing out. The wafer was attached to a large
and primitive needle-compass, suspended by a thin thread. Only on
the current and
exact
geographic orientation of the chest
would the simple trap be disabled in this way.