Afrasiab's Sentinel

An excerpt from my work-in-progress, The Word of the Enemy

From time to time I’ll post excerpts from my work-in-progress for premium subscribers. The Word of the Enemy is a sequel to my novel The Thread of Reason and tells the story of the civil war that shook eastern Islam following the death of the Sultan Malik-shah and his vizier (prime minister) Nizam al-Mulk:

The Damascus Highway was treacherous in the dark. Omar struggled to maintain his footing. With moonrise still six hours away—when you’re Astronomer Royal you know these things—he was forced to guide his steps by the meager cold starlight and the faint glow of the neighborhoods on the horizon. Closer to him, structures of broken stone and crumbling brick lined both sides of the road. Some still held the shapes of the architectural gems they had been centuries ago: a doorway with no door; the interior of a room, its ceiling collapsed into a pyramid of rubbish on the floor; a three story wall standing by itself, its black outline jagged against the night sky. Others were merely shapeless heaps. The unforgiving passage of time—not to mention the scavenging of building materials—left no clue as to what useful purpose they had once served for the people who lived and worked here. The road itself was uneven, a poorly maintained dirt track, where pits and drifts and patches of weeds lay in wait to trip the unwary. But here and there, stretches of broken paving stone testified to the enormous wealth that had once flowed into this part of Baghdad.