PROLOGUE
AL-MALHAMAH AL-KUBRAH
Last Day of Autumn
The dawn of the last day. The heavens ring as thunder condenses into a triumphal shout. The western horizon shudders and disgorges a blood-red sun, rising whence it had lately set. Throughout this final morning, the ruddy orb will ply its retrograde course toward the zenith, but slower, ever slower, until it halts and hangs motionless, nailed to the noonday sky, its surface boiling in turbulent unrest. It is only then that, bubbling up out of the photosphere, there comes into view the likeness of a human countenance.
It is the face of the Deceiver—obscenely corpulent, blinded right eye protruding like a rancid purple grape, forehead branded with the word “infidel,” though in such wise that none but the faithful might discern it.
… The Great Deceiver, whom the People of the Book variously call Dajjal or Armilus or Antichrist.
Of the Minor Signs of the Hour none remain to be accomplished: the nations of the earth compete with one another in raising towers to the clouds even as their morals descend to the depths of depravity. Men aspire to become women; women, men. Global prosperity grows so great the wealthy can find no one to accept their alms, and yet a man passing by the grave of a friend can only shake his head and mutter, “Would that I were in his place.”
And now the Major Signs are become manifest. Earthquakes and celestial portents, wars and rumors of war. The red death of ethnic cleansing vying with the white death of the AIDS plague. Unbelief reigning triumphant everywhere, atheistic science usurping the true faith.
Now the Christian West has gathered its forces, twelve thousand arrayed under each of its eighty banners, before the gates of Jerusalem. So, unwittingly, has Rome set in motion al-Malhamah al-Kubra, the Great Slaughter, the Final Sign ushering in the Day of Judgment.
Parading before Islam’s third holiest city, that mighty infidel host moves as a single man. In a sense, it is a single man, for at its head rides the Deceiver, and the Deceiver has laid his mark upon each and all of them, filled them each and all with his own corruption so as to magnify his own hideous essence a millionfold, until now it is the Deceiver’s will alone that inspirits their minds and moves their limbs, his monocular gaze alone that stares out of a million pairs of eyes at a world that lies prostrate at his feet.
Far as those eyes can see in every direction, none venture to challenge the might of the Deceiver. Save only to the east, where, out in the wastes of the Judean desert, there waits one who dares stand against him.
Lord of the Age, Guided One, Hidden Imam—he is known by many names, this man whom God has raised up to oppose the Deceiver. It is said that he is of the family of the Prophet, peace and blessings upon him. It is said that he has remained in seclusion, in occultation, since the year 874 of the Common Era, biding his time until God should decree his return.
It is said that his Advent at this moment heralds the End of Days.
His appearance betrays none of this. He is a comely youth, with a broad forehead framed by dark, curly hair and peace shining from his countenance, yet nothing in his demeanor hints at how he might hope to withstand the onslaught that the Deceiver is about to unleash.
Nor do his prospects seem improved when he and his ragtag band of followers fall to their knees and make salaat, praising God, calling on His mercy and compassion.
The Deceiver raises his right hand to signal attack—a gesture immediately mimicked by his million puppets—and they begin to march, down through the verdant hills of Jerusalem onto the dusty sand of the desert floor.
In his eagerness to slay this opponent, the Deceiver abandons his accustomed place at the rear of his armies and forces his way through to the front ranks. This “Guided One” is unarmed, after all. What possible danger can he pose?
The Deceiver is within two arm’s lengths of his intended prey, his sword raised high for the death stroke, when the man ceases prayer and raises his eyes to look the Deceiver in the face.
Blankness. White, searing light. The world shrinks to the compass of the man’s gaze.
Caught in that pitiless regard, the Deceiver cries out, or tries to. He cannot. Cannot move at all. His army, the extension of himself, is frozen motionless as well. And then …
If only he could, the Deceiver would scream. Scream, as the flesh boils off his bones. Scream as he, and all his host, disintegrate, dissolve into their component atoms, under the calm, compassionate gaze of the Guided One.
At the last, all that remains of the Deceiver is a single eye. A blind eye glaring out sightlessly, oozing redness onto the bloody sands …
An eye of blood.
☯
The man who called himself Hamza Nassiri was almost grateful when the four am call roused him from fitful sleep, from the dream. Always the same dream, or rather always the same ending: that wounded, bleeding eye fixing him with its baleful stare …
Hamza shook his head to clear it of the nightmare’s fading remnants, then retrieved his handset from the nightstand and thumbed the unit open. Its backlit display held the caller’s name: Mahmoud Rasti. What in God’s name was the night-duty monitor thinking, to call at this hour?
“Report,” Hamza rasped.
“Mr. Nassiri, sir, please you must come at once. Something is happening!”
“Calm yourself. What is happening?”
“Possessed!” Mahmoud was shrieking now. “The laboratory is majnoun, possessed. It is the experiment: it has called forth an evil spirit. I can feel it, feel it reaching out for meeeee—” The last syllable stretched into a piercing, high-pitched wail, followed by silence.
“Mahmoud? Mahmoud?” Hamza glanced again at the handset display. No signal—the line had dropped. So had the video feed from the lab to his bedroom’s closed-circuit monitor.
In the moments it took to throw a robe over his outsized frame, exit his quarters, and walk to the elevator, there chased through Hamza’s mind a myriad of possibilities, none of them good. The one he kept coming back to was that Mahmoud had suffered some sort of psychotic break. Sitting down there alone in the subterranean lab all through the long night, with only the dreamers for company, who knew what thoughts might come?
But he knew Mahmoud: The man was stolid, dependable, not given to flights of fancy, nor easily rattled. And what could he have meant by “possessed”?
Hamza was still pondering that riddle when the elevator doors sighed open again, now giving out on a corridor three floors below ground level. He hastened down to the laboratory, keyed in the code that retracted its fire door, and peered cautiously into the gloom.
Nothing seemed out of place, at least not at first glance: As Hamza’s eyes adjusted to the wan glow shed by consoles and service lamps, he could make out the half-dozen experimental subjects nestled in their infuser stations, their limbs swaying in syncopation to an unheard melody, their faces slack, devoid of any spark of intellection or emotion: dreamers, dreaming their collective dream. Nothing unexpected in any of that.
Then he saw it: the six dreamers had added a seventh to their number: Mahmoud Rasti had joined the others in their silent dance, their communal reverie.
What had the fool done? Mahmoud’s job was to observe and report, nothing more. He had been warned not to come in contact with the test subjects, nor with the technology that engendered their strange trancelike state.
Intent on getting to the bottom of this, Hamza strode into the lab. Halfway across the floor, it registered: Mahmoud, arms waving to and fro in time with the others, was still seated at the monitor’s console—nowhere near the infuser workstations that induced the effect.
Hamza began to back up toward the door. He was nearly there when the dream reached out to embrace him as well.
This was not supposed to happen: Hamza was not linked into the grid, nor was his gray matter infested with the nanoscale neural implants that provided the physical substrate for the phenomenon.
But it was happening. Hamza gasped as the seductive pull redoubled in strength.
He’d become trapped in his own experiment.
Too long. He had let this latest trial continue for far too long. But what choice had he had? He’d needed to find some weakness in the NSA’s new analytical capability, yet with only a scaled-down replica of the real thing at his disposal they’d been hard put even to reproduce the consciousness-binding effect, much less to test out whatever inherent limits it might have.
But if Hamza could not match the Agency in sheer wherewithal, he far exceeded them in his willingness to sacrifice his human guinea pigs in the quest for an answer—after all, martyrdom would ensure them immediate entry into paradise in any case.
So it was that he’d ordered the infuser stations equipped with intravenous feeding tubes and waste evacuation facilities, then linked his six volunteers into the quantum computer cluster once again and left them there for … how long? Must be going on ten days now.
And all that time the entity formed from the fusion of the six test subjects’ individual minds had been brooding there, gaining in strength.
It had become a strength beyond imagining: Hamza’s clenched teeth gleamed white in his dark face, sweat beaded his cheeks and runneled down into his beard as he dug fingernails into palms and willed his sinews to break the catatonia that had seized them.
Hamza swept his gaze around the lab, desperate for anything that might offer hope of escape. All he saw was his impending fate: the lax, uninhabited faces of the test subjects floating in the dark, looking for all the world like drowned men. Soon he would be one of them.
He shuddered. The metaphor of drowning seemed only too apt, now that he could experience for himself the onset of the assimilation effect. It felt like nothing so much as a great, slow undertow sucking at the foundations of his soul, extinguishing the last fitful sparks of coherent thought, whirling the flotsam of his fragmenting mind down to the depths of a cold, dark sea. He could feel his consciousness ebbing, attenuating, dissipating into the abyss. Still he struggled on against the encroaching dark, trying to focus his willpower, to concentrate his essence into a dense hard knot, a fist tightly clenched around … Nothing.
It all felt so futile. His vaunted individuality seemed but a taint, a trace impurity, a small patch of scum momentarily contaminating the surface of a vast ocean of nonbeing, destined to dissolve into it.
The void, impersonal and implacable, beckoned to him.
One last shuddering breath, and Hamza let go, finally submitting to the inevitable, the inexorable. After all, was not the act of submission the very essence of, the whole meaning of, Islam itself? Why not submit, then?
Hamza caught himself then. Submit? Yes, but to the will of God and God alone, not to this—this thing.
Almost without thinking, Hamza began rehearsing the familiar words of the Shahadah, the first and greatest profession of faith: la ilaha illa Allah—there is no god but God. He clung to the testimony like a drowning man.
There is no god but God.
Still paralyzed head to toe, he could at first only repeat the Shahadah in silence. But, as the hallowed syllables filled his soul to overflowing, he found his lips beginning to mouth them as well. Then he was uttering them aloud, barely whispering to start, but soon testifying in a clear, firm voice:
“There is no god but God.”
The more he focused on the profession of faith, the more the immaterial force that held him seemed to loosen its grip.
Could it be?
Hamza gathered his strength. The tendons of his calves and thighs, locked as rigid as the rest of him throughout this struggle, now obeyed his will, flexing and tensing for one last supreme effort. He took a deep breath, held it as long as he could, then released it all at once in a booming shout—“There is no god but God!”—and in the same instant thrust himself bodily backwards towards the still-open lab door.
He landed flat on his back, smacking his head hard against unyielding concrete. His momentum carried him a short distance across the conductive flooring before its anti-skid surface brought him to a stop—hopefully now far enough away from the epicenter.
The effect must diminish with distance, or it would have engulfed him—and everyone else—anywhere within the compound. The only question was whether he was now beyond its reach. Even from where he lay half-dazed, he could feel the hive-mind groping after him, seeking to reestablish its hold on him, but feebler than before.
Hamza didn’t try getting to his feet or even rolling over, just levered himself up onto hands, hams, and heels and skittered backwards in what he hoped was the direction of the exit. As soon as he was out in the corridor, he scrambled up and hit the plate that would slide the door shut and seal it. He slumped against the wall, his breath coming in short gasps. It had been a near thing. Minutes passed before he could stagger to his feet. Even then he stood there, head held down, shaking with reaction at the narrowness of his escape.
And pondering.
Perhaps, perhaps his dream of the Malhamah, of the Great Slaughter, had not been a nightmare after all.
Perhaps it had been … prophecy?
It was more than sheer relief that reshaped Hamza’s features into a grim smile. He was beginning to glimpse the outlines of a monumental destiny.