A Tale of Two Sorcerers - Sinister Cutlass (good books to read for adults .txt) 📗

It was early summer, and the day had been oppressively humid. Now, evening breezes swept through the streets of Agrabah, lifting the aroma of cooking meat in the marketplace, drifting over the heads of sleeping children, and guttering the lamp flames in scholars' windows. The sweet scent of orange blossoms crept into the palace on playful zephyrs, meandering through the garden into a chamber where Sultan Talal Sayegh hosted an evening of public discussion.

A comfortable, spreading man in his sixties, Talal had mastered the art of mixing business with pleasure.

Around a large carpet, under the dusky glow of iron chandeliers, he and twenty-four of his advisers, diplomats, and financial managers lounged on couches, making a low din of conversation. Talal had arranged for coffee and sweet tea on small tables, and for dishes of rice, lamb, aubergine and other vegetables. He thoughtfully held audience in this hall, where access to the garden through the loggia allowed drowsy guests to carry their conversations on a walk, and to refresh themselves in the night breeze.  Purple vistas of the glittering city, as well as the pervasive fragrance of flowers and shisha smoke, charmed the night.

Well, let it never be said that Talal Sayegh lacked style.

Yes, he had set up rather an elegant fortnightly ritual in this hall, and these nights pleased his heart as well as his ego. Each of Talal's ministers, while they happily enjoyed conversation with colleagues, also vied for the chance to educate and impress their sultan (whether all of them received this boon by the end of the night was another matter entirely). Talal basked in the glow of their regard, and mulled over the new information they provided him from each department of his administration. A skinny young scribe, seated cross-legged at a small mint-green writing desk behind the sultan, took down volumes with his reed pen.

Talal had even taken the liberty of inviting a philosopher, a humorist, and a mathematician to these discussion evenings, just to add some spice.

Some men discreetly turned away from the mathematician's and philosopher's abstruse musings. Others, however, genuinely enjoyed the intellectual challenge of listening. Talal, for his part, really liked it when the humorist teased him.

Not all members of Talal's senior staff were quite so jolly during these discussion evenings. It was no secret that the sultan was self-indulgently fickle about his conversation partners, and the list of people he invited into his salon had little to do with his true preferences. It's just that he thought it was a crying shame to discuss sordid matters of shekels and dinari on such lovely nights like this.

Most of Talal's financial men were forced to compete for his attention, many times spending several hours in the sultan's hall, waiting for a chance to speak to him... that might never come. Many of these men commiserated over coffee about this ignominious and inefficient state of affairs, but they eventually passed off Talal's eccentricity as a symptom of his advanced age, and went back to work.

Jabril Halabi was not like these men.

On his way to fourty years old, Jabril was bald on the top of his head, with an expanding paunch and protuberant brown eyes. He sagged resignedly into the couch's depths, and his cheek rested in his palm. Circles hung under his eyes, as if someone had pressed two large coins into the padded flesh. He looked mournful, like a genie forced to fetch water and vegetables when in one finger he knew he had the power to split apart the earth.

Jabril was manager of the army accounts, and son of Talal's greatest warrior, Saddaq Halabi... but Jabril could earn a nice sum, betting against the likelihood that the sultan would speak to him tonight.

Not that Jabril made bets, oh no. Saddaq had modeled for him a standard of "clean" behavior, which was rivaled in its stringency only by its self-conciousness. "Bad habits blacken the soul," he had advised his son, when warning him against 'the petty vices'.

Now approaching middle age, Jabril still occasionally wondered if there were crimes other than 'petty' that might blacken the soul...

But philosophy had always exhausted Jabril after only a few pages, so these moral inquiries never nettled him for long.

It had been twenty-five years since General Saddaq Halabi had claimed Ahsa Asmara for the sultan. That small settlement, which had by now become a small city, lay on the nearest edge of the mysterious, forbidding region known across the deserts as "The Land of the Black Sand". In Agrabah, Saddaq's victory had put his name on everybody's lips. Everyone spoke glowingly of the Halabi family and predicted a grand future for Saddaq's young son. Indeed, Jabril had experienced no trouble winning associates and constructing robust professional networks within the palace; this, even after an intractable leg injury drew his father away from public life.

Unfortunately, favor with the sultan was largely dependent on Talal's caprices, and one could not earn special privileges simply by having a famous father and performing diligent, antisocial ledger labor. As time went by, Jabril began to perceive that his trajectory had... plateaued.

He found himself nights at his accountant's desk with the tip of his reed pen mid-stroke on the ledger, as he reflected on Talal's blithe disregard for him. Jabril could not help but compare it with the bounty of Agrabah's love that had enfolded his muscular, full-bearded father, following the man's grand penetration of the Land of the Black Sand.

Slamming shut the ledger and resolutely putting away his pen, Jabril usually fled from these thoughts as he strode briskly home through the cool night, clutching at his chest as coffee-and-sweets-induced inflammation mingled with irritants of an emotional variety.

Jabril convinced himself that, in his career, he had somehow done something wrong... somehow missed a crucial step.

But all of that was changing, tonight.

Jabril had been attempting to pass the time making formulaic small talk with the manager of land taxation, but they had now run out of topics. Jabril's colleague turned to chat up his other neighbor, and though this sort of behavior usually offended Jabril, he used the opportunity tonight to take account of the time. When he had mentally reckoned how much had passed since he'd entered the sultan's chamber, his body tautened with a thrill. This night would end extraordinarily – he knew, he'd been there in the planning stages – and its conclusion was, oh, so near.

All that was required now was a bit of patience, and Jabril was well-practiced at performing that virtue.

A small hexagonal wooden table stood at the accountant's feet, and on it, a coffee pot glinted in the candle-dimness of the hall. Jabril had a small copper demitasse, and he leant to fill it, attempting to relax by inhaling the scent of the cardamom. He decided to see how Maziyar and Adhemar Anvari - Talal's ambassadors to Ramahdiya and Iznikora, respectively - were comporting themselves in this tense game of waiting.

Across the hall, Adhemar perched on the edge of his couch in the exact attitude of a famous sculpted thinker, listening to Talal's ambassador to Agios Varvaros pronounce and gesticulate from plump recumbence. Though Adhemar was quite tall, he moved about quietly and unobtrusively, like a widow at market. His seal-brown facial hair and large, limpid brown eyes resembled those of a small, bearded dog, members of whose breed Jabril had seen in diplomatic entourages from the northeastern kingdoms.

Though a cool-tempered observer might have described Adhemar's appearance as guileless, and found it endearing, Jabril wasn't fooled.

He plays at humility quite well, doesn't he? Jabril inwardly sneered. His memories of Adhemar's past clevernesses raced towards him like a wave, breaking over him repeatedly. Jabril resented the man for his cool intelligence. He decided that the ambassador must be listening intently to a dense exposition on the state of Varvaran politics, architecture, and oh, probably mathematics too.

An objective, cool-tempered observer would find that Adhemar's face was not characterized by the proud, open mouth of the lecturer. It was not volubility by which Adhemar inspired dislike; on the contrary, he disconcerted Jabril (among several others, in fact) with his parsimony of speech, and his tendency toward spells of thick-knitted-brow-and-carpet-calligraphy-staring as his mind eagerly chased comprehension. His predilection for unceasing private analysis and his calculatedly noncommittal half-smirks convinced Jabril that there was a small kernel of evil in the diplomat: one that fed gleefully on the social blunders of other men.

The accountant had shared these thoughts many times with Adhemar's handsome, charismatic, younger brother, Maziyar, with whom Jabril had for years been developing a workable - if not exactly easy - rapport. Maziyar smiled on Jabril's musings, and the accountant believed these smiles were borne of sympathy.

At this moment, in his current attitude of pupil to the Varvaran ambassador, Adhemar's back was turned sharply on Maziyar. The younger Anvari brother sat with the posture of a king, cool in a long straight black abaya buttoning at the neck, idly tapping his armrest. Garnets glinted at his knuckles, and his imperious gaze swept the hall. Wisps of silver would inevitably begin threading themselves through Maziyar's generous black curls, but - if you cornered him on the subject - Jabril would fondly predict the ambassador would only look better, the lucky jackal.

Maziyar had accumulated many admirers over the years, and Jabril was not least among them. As adolescents in the government school, the pair had frequently shared a study table, where Jabril had made the most queries and Maziyar had offered the most suggestions.  His charm always managed to soften any condescension that slipped from his laughing eyes and sensuous lips.

By contrast, Adhemar had studied alone, and longer, which earned him the habitual coldness of the two younger men. 

As Adhemar continued to nod his head during the Varvaran diplomat's monologue, Maziyar smiled knowingly. Jabril perceived that his friend was amused by Adhemar's intellectual foraging. The accountant felt comforted that he wasn't the only one who could see through the humble deceiver.

An objective, cool-tempered observer would have noticed by now that Adhemar was not actually deep in thought, but rather, was growing weary from the Varvaran diplomat's pet discourse on the preparation of yoghurt.

It has perhaps been established by now that it was precisely an objective, cool-tempered observer that Jabril was not.

The accountant leant forward on his plump elbow in order to check up on nine other men out of the twenty-five in attendance tonight. Each of said nine was around Jabril's age, provided reasonably warm company, and had recently professed loyalty to him. He knew he had Agrabah's cultural memory of Saddaq to thank for that, and he had made peace with this debt he owed to his father. Tonight, Jabril would pay it off.

The accountant looked forward to his friendships with these nine men growing much more comfortable in the coming years. He was pleased to see each appropriately wracked with nerves, like they should be, tonight, the accountant thought.  He mentally chastised Adhemar for his smooth, imperturbable front.  Some people have no sense of the seriousness of a situation...

As each of the nine returned scared glances to the son of Saddaq Halabi, Jabril relaxed back in the couch, satisfied.

Only about an hour more, now.

As he waited for the evening's close, when he would make the first great chess move of his life, Jabril dwelt on pleasant thoughts of the grand future his own son, Hamed, would enjoy.