The sound of mallets rang across the valley, each dull thud driving a sharpened pole deeper into the ground. The Persian slaves wept in fear as they tilted up each pole, for those that they had emplaced before were now festooned with the bodies of their fellows.

C'hu-lo thought it was a good touch to put the bodies of your enemy's strongest men on display. Each priest of the twelve who had fought and struggled and died in the camp during the night battle had merited his own post. Some of them could no longer be recognized as the bodies of men.

The T'u-chueh Prince took a long swallow of wine. This was thirsty work.

"You see? The fire is dead. Even the ashes are cold."

Arad felt nothing, staring down into the rubble-choked pit. Some fragment of his consciousness railed at him, urging him to lash out at the serpent who walked beside him. But his limbs did not obey his will, and the anger had dulled, becoming a dim flicker in the back of his mind. The horrors of the night- the heady rush of a dying soul flooding his body, the taste of blood and cracked bones, even the sickening delight that seeped from the cold mind of the sorcerer as his thumbs punched into the gelid wetness of a man's eye sockets- they were muted. The sun, riding high above the haze, seemed cold and distant.

This place, this acre of shattered walls and gravel and splintered marble strewn across the hillside, felt empty. The sorcerer crawled among the rocks and poked down into dark recesses in the tumulus with a long iron staff. Dahak seemed filled with a bubbling joy, constantly talking to himself as he bent to pick up a broken bit of pottery.

"They thought that this fire would burn forever," Dahak said, smiling as he rummaged among the stones. "See? They were wrong. This fire will never be lit again."

Arad looked away at the sky. It was a pale blue. Mountains rose up in the west, high and dark with only a glimmer of ice crowning them. He ignored the sorcerer, who continued to talk to himself while he dug about in the ruins. Memories stirred in the man, something bright and shining with the sun, somewhere in the west. Was it beyond these mountains? he wondered. Something beyond this cold world?

"Their light has failed!" the Lord Dahak screamed at the sky. The sound died quickly, swallowed by the empty air.

The Ka'ba, Near Mekkah, Arabia Felix

The old house stood alone at the center of the plaza. After the fire had gutted the temple, workers had cleared away everything but the original, open-roofed building. Hundreds had labored for weeks under the guidance of the Ben-Sarid, carrying away the broken stone and brick. The ash had been swept up and carried out to fertilize the fields that lined the wadi. The old statues had been broken up with mallets and iron bars and used to repair the walls of the city. Only the oldest temple remained, as Ibrahim had raised it at the founding of the shrine. It was small and dark, its walls of fieldstone blackened by centuries of ceremonial fires. At one corner of the square building, a section of the old wall was still smooth. In some unimaginable past, men had carved a block of fine-grained sandstone and- by great labor- had carried it to the precincts of the well of the Zam-Zam and placed it here.

Within that smooth facing, in a cavity worn by the hands of countless pilgrims, a stone gleamed. It was a stolid black, uncut, unmarked. Altogether unremarkable to the eye.

Mohammed stood before the stone and heard it singing.

Though he knew that no other person in all the great throng that filled the plaza to capacity and beyond could hear it, he knew it was the voice of his god, the great and compassionate one who had made the world. "And men," he whispered to himself, "from clots of blood."

Clad in enveloping robes of white and brown, a tall, thin young man edged his way through the throng of people standing in the square of the Ka'ba. His face, half shrouded by a gauze scarf, was grim. He limped slightly, for he had taken a bad fall from a horse. Despite this, he wore heavy armor of iron lamellae bound with loops of wire to a tunic of cured leather under the robes. It was blasphemy to bear arms within the precincts of the Zam-Zam, but the young man was well past caring.

Before the fall of Yathrib, he had been an acolyte in the Temple of Hubal. He had been a quiet, rather reserved young man. Like his father before him, he was named Maslama. Thoughts of his family brought fresh pain. They were all dead, murdered or killed in the fires that had raged through the city in the wake of the Mekkan capture of the eastern gate.

Under his robes, his fingers were firm on the hilts of a sword. He had found it- along with the armor- on a dead Mekkan soldier outside the city. It had taken a long time to crawl through the desert night and steal the body. But it was worth it. Ancient tradition drove himhis family had been killed- and he was due recompense in blood. His height let him see over the heads of the men and women pressed together. The old temple-house loomed up. The chieftains of the Mekkans would be nearby.

It was midday. The sun rode the meridian, a pale white disk of fire. The air was still.

Even among the tens of thousands of men and women and children that filled the square, there was silence. It was not complete- robes brushed against robes, children coughed, there was the quiet susurration of a multitude breathing- for there is always sound. Mohammed bowed and stepped back from the stone. He felt a great peace fall over him, even as it had upon the mountaintop once he had heard the voice speaking from the clear air.

The Tanukh that hovered nearby, their dark faces taut with worry, moved away and the crowd pressed back. The Ka'ba was ringed by a thick crowd of those who had followed Mohammed to fight at Yathrib. Beyond them were the multitudes of the city and the surrounding districts. The word of the war among the Mekkans and its fierce end in the fall of Yathrib had traveled far and wide. Men and women alike had come on camel or horse or shank's mare to look upon the man who had ended a generation of strife.

Mohammed heard the stone singing, and he paced along the outside of the old building.

The Tanukh moved with him, hands on spears and bows. As the Tanukh moved, so did the crowd of veterans of the fighting against the Hashim and their allies. Mohammed circled the building, listening to the song, letting his heart fill with the word of the Lord who spoke from the air.

This place was raised by the first of men, he thought to himself. His eye sought out the careful placement of the stones in the foundations. He knew that the first man had raised up the black stone and had placed it in the wall. He knew that six hundred years later, the sons of that first man had carefully removed the stone from its crude mortar and placed it within the sandstone facing. He knew that those men, who could still hear the Lord of the World speaking in the dawn and in the dusk, did not bow down and worship the black rock.

How could they? The stone was not the merciful and compassionate one.

Mohammed completed his circuit of the house of the black stone. He looked up and saw the crowd standing in the hot sun. He was surprised to see the number of people who had gathered.

"Jalal?"

The burly mercenary came up, his eyes squinting and nervous. The soldier was watching the crowd, one hand close to his saber. Mohammed frowned, but then saw that all of his other men- the companions who stood with him in his struggle, these Sahaba- were equally wary.