Chapter 195
It was about one meter in diameter, a perfect circle, as though it had been dug by a tool no human of the seventh century could possibly possess, round like a gaping mouth leading into a darkness with no bottom.
When Nirma took a small pebble from Arya's pocket and tossed it into the hole, there was no sound at all.
No thud.
No splash.
No rumble of stone striking stone.
Only a silence that grew heavier and denser, a silence like sound being swallowed by a void that could never be satisfied.
"An emergency portal," Arya whispered.
His voice was barely audible above the wind slipping through the holes in the woven walls, trembling like someone standing at the edge of a cliff, staring into an abyss with no end.
"They used it to escape after the kidnapping. But look, Nirma. There are footprints around the hole. They aren't human footprints."
Nirma knelt beside the opening.
Her left eye narrowed as it recorded details that others might have overlooked: uneven footprints that looked as though they belonged to feet without big toes, impressions left by creatures that walked in ways no school had ever taught, and there were dozens of them.
Dozens of beings had stood here, crowded together, perhaps waiting their turn to leap into the same hole, perhaps carrying something, or someone, with them.
They left the portal with a feeling they could not put into words.
It was neither fear nor disgust, but the realization that the enemy they faced possessed not only technology from the future, but also allies who did not breathe, allies who left behind nothing except footprints without big toes and letters that ended halfway through their sentences.
When they stepped into the single multipurpose room where Anas slept, ate, and received guests without partitions, Nirma immediately saw that Anas ibn an-Nadhr's body was nowhere to be found.
He was not lying on the floor like the victims of the sleeping gas.
He was not sitting silently in a corner like someone under hypnosis.
He had simply vanished.
Vanished like water seeping into sand.
Vanished like a name erased from the pages of history before anyone had the chance to read it.
"Only his robe remains," Arya whispered, pointing toward a piece of cloth hanging from a wooden peg on the wall.
It was a robe of coarse wool, the kind commonly worn by middle-class young men of the Khazraj tribe.
There was nothing remarkable about it.
Except for one thing that should never have been there.
A burn mark around the collar, as though it had been struck by a small burst of flame, a flame that had not consumed the entire robe but had been hot enough to shrivel the fabric and blacken its edges.
"Fire?"
Nirma repeated the word in disbelief.
She examined the scorch marks up close, her unseen fingers brushing across the charred wool fibers.
From the lingering smell, she concluded that the fire had not come from a stove or an oil lamp.
It had come from something hotter.
Faster.
Something more like a blast from an unfamiliar device.
Perhaps a weapon.
Perhaps a teleportation device that had exploded during activation.
Or perhaps something entirely different that they would never understand, because the only eyewitness was no longer in the room.
"Look at the floor," Arya said.
His voice suddenly became sharper, more urgent.
When Nirma lowered her gaze, she saw drag marks.
Not footprints.
Marks left by a body scraping across the hardened earthen floor, leaving behind shallow yet unmistakable grooves that stretched from the wooden peg where Anas's robe still hung, across the doorway, and ended at the portal in the courtyard.
"He was dragged into that hole, Nirma. Maybe he was still alive. Maybe he was already unconscious. But his body was taken through the portal while his robe was left behind. Maybe because of the fire. Maybe because they didn't care about the robe. Maybe because they only wanted his body, not his clothes, not his memories, not even the prayers that might still have been leaving his lips when he briefly regained consciousness on the journey into that bottomless darkness."
Beside the wooden peg, Nirma found a clay plate containing a half-eaten meal.
The wheat porridge had hardened.
The meat had begun to spoil.
When she picked up a tiny crumb with the tip of her unseen finger and touched it to her tongue beneath the edge of her veil, she tasted the sweetness of honey mixed with the bitterness of something unfamiliar.
A bitterness like poppy seeds.
Like a sleeping drug administered not to heal but to incapacitate.
Like kindness concealing an evil intention no one could have expected.
"A two-layered method," Nirma said.
Her voice emerged from behind her veil as clear as water flowing over stone, yet beneath that clarity was a tremor she could not hide, like the string of a violin plucked far too hard.
"An extremely concentrated sleeping gas filling the air, combined with food laced with narcotics. They weren't taking any chances with Anas. The gas in the other houses may have been enough to incapacitate people, but here they made certain there was no possibility that Anas could resist, scream, run outside, or warn anyone else. They treated him differently. More carefully. More cautiously. As though Anas was the key to something, and if that key were damaged, every door would remain closed forever."
Arya nodded.
Then his gaze shifted toward a dark corner of the room, near a bed that consisted of nothing more than a worn leather mat, worn down from years of use by a young man who had never complained about how hard it was, who was simply grateful to have a place to rest after spending his days working, teaching, and welcoming friends who hungered for knowledge and brotherhood.
"Nirma, over here. There's a stack of small notes," Arya whispered.
His voice nearly broke as Nirma walked over.
She found several sheets of parchment written in different hands.
Some were bold and hurried, like Mush'ab's.
Others were neat and orderly, like Sa'd's.
Some trembled slightly, like Amr's.
And one sheet bore handwriting she recognized from Abdullah's house.
The handwriting of Abdullah ibn Jahsh, whose house they had already searched, whose chest containing his hair and fingernails they had already seen, and who was now nowhere to be found because he had already been abducted by those breathless creatures.
Nirma picked up one of the sheets.
Beneath the moonlight streaming through the gaps in the woven walls, she read the same sentence repeated over and over again.
On every page.
In every handwriting.
In every stroke of a different pen.
Yet the message never changed.
"Tomorrow night, gather at Anas's house. Don't tell anyone. Not even the Messenger of Allah."
"A trap," Nirma whispered.
Her voice emerged from behind her veil with a calmness that was far too serene for a situation that was anything but calm, like the surface of a lake concealing currents strong enough to drown anyone unable to swim.
To be continued…