Martin McFriend

At 23, and having just spent two years parlaying in the wash with wizards of the old cloak, the boy had become a jagged, olive man, tall enough to lean under the crackling spray of the windswept Shomali downpours. Clean bearded and wiry, he wandered the streets of old Lahore, eyeless screamers of the lowlands well behind him, his embittered gaze trained for the cleric minstrels that were his quarry. The hearts of his enemies beat within the city’s high stone walls, and beneath its marble-slabbed corridors blood crust gave way to ghosts. He was ready to face them.

His long journey took him through the Turkish salt marshes and fetid shit-dens of southern Persia, and preceding these nightmares, the alabaster swathes of Arabian dust from whence he began.

The name given to him was Qudamah Al-Ayman, but he had long forgotten all but Q. His mother had been a whore and a thief, who was flayed from end to end by a merchant sheik who kept a scimitar handy. His mother’s blood had dabbled Q’s infant face as he lay nearby on a bed of camel cloth. Minutes later, that very sheik was bludgeoned to death with an oblong stone by a man who could have been Q’s father. That man, it was whispered, had been drawn and quartered a day or two after the fact. The baby Qudamah was left alone, soiled and hungry.

As fate would have it, Q’s life was saved by a daimon, bread breaker of Iblis and servant of the desert underworld. No more than a creeping shadow to the naked eye, the daimon, which was called Katib, slipped into the gore-smattered tent and retrieved the wailing boy, ushering him therefore into a life of invisibility and silent ire.

By the age of 16, Q had slaughtered more than five dozen men and women in the service of Katib, who required his lamb to do the bidding of the ever-greedy, nightshade race of jinn. Katib was never cruel or callous to his innocent, involuntary retainer. He accepted the boy’s role of submission without excitement, and placed his devilish demands in Q’s unconscious, waking dreams. Understanding his own servitude before the scorching hearth of Iblis the deceiver, Katib knew well the pulsating fury and untapped wisdom locked within the youthful killer.

Q became an assassin of such notorious repute that his stealth and dexterity with a crooked blade was instant legend from Sana’a to Jerusalem. But his intensity and focus as a scholar were his true virtues. Katib, dark poet and relentless cannibal, invoked the worst of the human spirit in his orders to Q, but also granted his slave access to deep scrolls of the secret mystics. Despite daily forays into larceny and severed throats, the boy retained a venerable heart, longing always for the ancient texts, wherein perhaps the answers lay to the sadness that pained his desperate soul.

It is said that some are born with an unconscious affinity for worlds beyond this one, manifesting in a taciturn recognition of powers greater than those dictated in the realm of man. These rare beings suffer their lives in obscurity, hoping some day to breach the gap between life and death in an instant of gratitude and understanding. Thus afflicted, Q detested the impure deeds that were his repertoire, but stomached them patiently, as a man prepared to accept responsibility for his sins in the spirit house. He catered to Katib’s bloodlust and bided time until the moment of his true vocation arrived.

At 21, Q’s daimon keeper offered him apprenticeship with the most arcane charnel creatures of the middle kingdom. Tasked with entering a seething vortex of sun washed Arabian desert, and forced to last three days without food or water, he was then presented with the right to follow the four defunct imams of yesterday’s descent. These hooded masters existed on the lathe of flesh, and it was only at the moment of ultimate despair that their wicked sovereignty revealed itself in moon rendered opaque.

Hallucinating and sun sick, Q leapt into the astral gate, grasping for the blasphemous robes on camelback, and his future was thereafter altered.

To be continued…