Hours later, while he was frying some flour in lard and chewing on a greasy stick of dried mutton, Rostam’s voice called to him from the bottom of the hill. The old man sounded frightened. That made Jân Muhammad laugh, but it was a somber and dangerous laugh. Jân Muhammad was curious if Rostam had been sent to try another scheme of some kind. The old man was a fool, and Jân Muhammad might have been amused, except he understood clearly that if Rostam had been successful, Jân Muhammad might well be dead now.

“Yaa sarbaaz!” Rostam’s voice quavered in the hot, still air. “Yaa sarbaaz, we must talk!”

Jân Muhammad kept scraping the browning flour in the pan. He added another spoonful of lard and watched it melt. “Rostam?” he called.

“We must talk!” The spy was terrified.

“Why do you say that? What do we have to talk about?”

“Don’t act that way, aga. Please let me explain. Let me come Up.”

“Explain if you want to, but do it from out there. This bunker stinks enough as it is.”

“I can’t just stand here and shout at you, aga.”

“Why the hell not?”

There was a pause. Jân Muhammad glanced out and saw Rostam shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He held his large stick, but the mule was nowhere to be seen. “Listen, O worthy one: It is true that I did as the Mohâjerân ordered, but I was forced to do it. They threatened me. I’m many times a grandfather, I’m all used up. I can’t stand up to strong young men when they force their way into my home.”

“They gave you something to put into my data deck?”

“Yes, aga.”

Jân Muhammad muttered a curse. “Did you think you were helping me, when you did what they told you?”

Another pause. “No, aga, but I had no choice! The shopkeeper in the village, he was with them, and he said that I’d die slowly in front of everyone if I did not cooperate. He said that he’d never sell me another loaf of bread, another bottle of wine for solace in my old age.”

“But you never thought to warn me. You were more afraid of this shopkeeper and the refugees than all of the Mahdi’s army. You are worse than the Mohâjerân; you have refused the service of the blessed Mahdi. You think only of your worthless belly, when you were given an opportunity to benefit the deputy of Allah.”

“I was afraid, aga!”

Jân Muhammad spat in disgust. “You’ve made that very clear, old man. You threw in your lot with the Mohâjerân, so now you’ll have to ask for protection from them. I wish you luck.”

“But, sarbaaz, the entire village…when they heard, they drove me out, into the desert — “

“And what do you want from me? Sympathy?”

Rostam began to weep. “I can’t live without food, without water. Where will I go?”

Jân Muhammad had stopped paying attention. He tapped a few keys on the data deck.

Do you wish to fire submachine guns?

Enter l=yes, 0=no

Jân Muhammad typed 1.

“Sarbaaz! Help me! I beg you, as one servant of Allah to another!”

“You submit when it serves your purpose,” shouted the soldier. “And when it doesn’t serve your purpose, you break every law of the Prophet, may blessings be upon his name and peace.”

Do you wish continuous fire?

Enter l=yes, 0-no

Jân Muhammad typed 1.

“Pity me!” Rostam was hysterical. He had fallen to his knees in the stony soil, and now he raised his arms in supplication. “Think of your own father. Would you treat him this way?”

“My own father would not have left me weak and vulnerable to my enemies, and he wouldn’t have taken sides with the haters of Allah.”

To commence firing on your mark, type 1.

“Bismillah!” screamed Rostam. He fell forward, laying his forehead in the dust, trembling with terror.

Jân Muhammad’s finger descended over the keys, hesitated, then hung motionless in the air. He could not bring himself to murder this wretched old man. “Go!” he called. “Get off my hill! Go starve to death in the wilderness! Walk to Jerusalem and ask the forgiveness of the Mahdi!”

“‘Whoever forgives and amends, he shall have his just reward from Allah,’” quoted Rostam. He staggered off, away from the young man he had betrayed, away from the village that had turned him out.

Jân Muhammad closed his eyes tightly, wondering at his sudden change of heart. “In the profane mouth of an unbeliever,” he murmured, “even the words of the Prophet can lose their beauty.” Behind him, unheeded, his poor midday meal burned and was ruined. With his augmented vision, Jân Muhammad watched the old man until he was out of sight, swallowed up by the seared and withered expanse of waste.

This was the first portion — two chapters — of the fourth Budayeen book, Word of Night, and the only part to actually have been written. When I met George in 1990 (not counting the several times we’d been in the same room and HADN’T met, but that’s another story), he was working on these. The Exile Kiss had just been published, and the editors asked him for an outline of Word of Night (untitled, then) so they could get a cover-painting done. George didn’t have an outline, but since they needed to know SOMETHING that happened in the book, he said it started out with a party at Marîd’s club, which was all he knew about what happened in the book at the time. Later he and I worked out an outline for it, a wonderful story which I had hoped, in the fullness of time, to see through to fruition.

When he died in 2002, these first two chapters were still all he had written.

Brilliant chapters, and what promised to be a wonderful book.

— Barb Hambly 

I KNOW THE MOST FRIGHTENING WORDS IN THE world.

Imagine waking up and having someone say, “Do you know what you did last night?” I shiver just thinking about it. I’ve heard those words before, and I pray to Allah I never hear them again.

It was Kmuzu who murmured that horrible question to me one morning. Kmuzu was a black African given to me by Friedlander Bey. I had not wanted a slave, just as I hadn’t wanted any of the other things Friedlander Bey had given me. Still, it just wasn’t good policy to turn Papa down. Everyone in the Budayeen — hell, everyone in the entire city — knew that.

Over the last few years, however, Kmuzu had become quite a lot more than a slave to me. He was someone I’d come to depend on; God well knew that I couldn’t always depend on myself. I needed someone like Kmuzu to look out for me from time to time. He was loyal and honest, a good man for a Christian.

Despite that, I could’ve done without the disapproval in his voice when he woke me up. I looked at him, my eyes bleary and my mouth tasting like I’d French-kissed a pigeon coop. “Yallah,” I groaned, feeling a booming throb in my head just behind my eyes.

“You need some breakfast, yaa Sidi,” Kmuzu said.

That was an infidel’s answer for everything: food. I didn’t want food, not ever again. The whole idea of breakfast was already nauseating me. “All right, you’re going to tell me anyway,” I said. “I’m a tough guy, I can take it. What’d I do last night?”

“There was a party.” He watched me trying to maneuver myself out of bed.

Yes, there had been a party, all right. It had been at my nightclub — well, the club I own with my partner, Chiriga. It had been a going-away party in my honor, because in a few days Papa and I were embarking on the pilgrimage to the holy city of Makkah.

This is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, something required of every Muslim at least once during his lifetime. Neither Friedlander Bey nor I had fulfilled that obligation, although we had spoken of making the hajj every year as the month of Dhul-Hijjah approached. Now this year, 1632 on the Islamic calendar, 2205 of the Christian era, we’d decided that we were at last both healthy enough and able. There was no way of knowing, of course, how many dead bodies would accumulate during our sacred and spiritual quest.