Chapter 3 — The Demon Awakens

Night woke him.

Cold tightened on his skin, turning sweat into a shiver. Weight pinned his ribs and thigh. His right hand ached. When he tried to open it, he found he had clamped a foreign sword so tightly the studs in the hilt had stamped their shape into his palm.

Smoke rolled low across the stones, thick with pitch and fat. The strip of sky he had last seen was gone. Above him glowed only red fire behind the smoke.

Boots scraped close by. Voices followed — harsh, drunk, careless. Not words of the market. Torches bobbed through the wreckage, light coming and going like a man’s breath.

A spear jabbed down into a body two corpses over, then again. Each time came the dull sound of iron punching what was once flesh. A torch bent lower, tracing across shields and broken men until it found Ahmad’s face.

The man holding it gasped. The torch dipped. “Diable,” he stammered. Louder, voice cracking: “Diable!”

Ahmad didn’t know the word, but he knew its weight. The same as those other shouts on the wall — Deus, Christe. Words that cut instead of spared.

The others looked up just as Ahmad heaved.

He shoved the dead from his chest and stood. The sword came with him because his hand would not let go. His eyes were only eyes, but the men saw more than a man. One dropped his blade before he could lift it. Ahmad stepped in and drove the point up under his jaw. The sound ended before the cry left his throat. Hot blood ran across Ahmad’s wrist.

“Stand,” Ahmad rasped. The word was torn by smoke and blood, but to the Franks it was only noise.

The torch-bearer panicked and hurled the light at him. Oil caught splinters and rags, fire spreading across the stones in a crawling sheet. Another man thrust carefully with a spear, steady as practice.

Nahhas burst from the dark, jaws clamping the man’s knee. The scream was high and short. The spear dropped. Ahmad snatched it, flipped it, and pinned the man’s shoulder to the ground.

Reeh fell from the smoke, talons raking the torch-bearer’s face. The man shrieked, clawing at his own eyes, and staggered away. The one with the ruined leg crawled after, leaving a red trail.

“Diable,” another spat as they fled. “Il marche avec des bêtes.”

By morning, the story would be simpler — and worse.

Ahmad stood. The ground tilted, then steadied. His skull hammered. He forced shallow breaths until the blood in his throat shifted and let him breathe. The sword dragged heavier now, in his arm and in his mind. He stepped out of the pile of bodies.

Ma’arra burned. Fire licked its alleys as if it had always known them. Doors stood open, houses spilling silence.

He passed a table where a cracked bowl held blackened bones, split and boiled. Flies worked a strip of meat on a plate. In another lane, a woman lay on her back, dress torn, fingers twisted in her own hair. Ahmad pulled down a burned curtain and covered her. Further on, a child’s body lay face-first into a wall. He stood over it a moment before forcing himself to move.

At the slope to the fields, a column of prisoners shuffled south under guard. Rope bound them in groups. A child whimpered, hushed by her mother. Franks followed behind, swords loose at their sides.

Ahmad’s leg trembled. His breath tore. Even whole, he could not have reached them. He said nothing. To cry out would only give the night his voice.

Watching the captives stumble, Ahmad felt that sight cut like a blade.

His lip curled. “Where were the men who swore to defend Ma’arra, then fled? Where were those who guided the Franks for coin? They feasted while their brothers bled. They bargained while our daughters screamed. Their silver is the blood of the helpless.”

He raised his eyes to the smoke-choked sky. “Allah, strip them of honour if they will not fight for their own. If I ever stand before them, let them see what I will do to them.”

His voice dropped. “O Allah, have mercy on the dead. Give me strength for the living. I will not rest while my people are in chains.”

He moved deeper into the ruins. Nahhas padded ahead, ears pricked. Reeh circled above, a fleck against the glow. Twice he passed homes turned into kitchens of horror — meat roasting where children once slept. Once he saw a knuckle bone on a plate like a plum stone. He refused to name it. Names gave things weight, and this was already too heavy.

At the gate-tower, stalls lay buried under ash. A broken yoke leaned in the rubble. A shape shifted in shadow.

“Adham,” Ahmad said.

The horse stepped out, soot dulling his black coat, eyes bright. He pressed his head into Ahmad’s chest, steady as a heartbeat. Ahmad pressed his forehead to the stallion’s, and the world steadied a little.

He slid the sword under the saddle strap, his hand unable to close properly. He mounted with effort, breath ragged.

Nahhas leapt to his side. Reeh swept low once, then climbed.

They left not by the gate but by a narrow break in the wall. The horse pushed through smoke into the fields, ash falling like frost. Behind them, Ma’arra groaned under fire.

The road of captives was empty now. Frost hardened the stubble. Ahmad let his hand sink into Nahhas’s fur for warmth.

He had no far thoughts left. Only this: he would not pass chains and call it wisdom. He would not lose his name to the smoke of this night.

The horse walked on. The world slid between waking and dark. Reeh’s cry thinned and vanished, then came again from another angle.

Adham carried him from the burning city, with Nahhas pressed to the stirrup and Reeh circling high, all three moving into the pale of morning while Ahmad’s head fell to Adham’s mane and his hands hung slack on the horse’s neck.