Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

Jeremy Robinson & Sean Ellis




PROLOGUE: ZERO



Baghdad, 656 A.H. (1258 A.D.)



The most beautiful city in the world was dying.

Nasir al-Tusi sat astride his horse at the edge of the River Tigris and wept.

As an advisor to the Great Hulagu Khan, he should have rejoiced at this victory, but he felt only bitter sadness in his heart.

He couldn’t believe what he was seeing—not just the horror of the city’s destruction, the smoke and the blood, and the absolute ruin everywhere he looked, but what defied belief was that this had been allowed to happen in the first place. The Khan’s quarrel was with the rogue Nizari Muslims, not the Abbasid Caliphate. Yet, seemingly against all reason, Caliph Al-Musta’sim had refused to pay tribute, in the form of military support, to the Mongol ruler. As a result, he had also become the Khan’s enemy.

The Caliph had bragged that if the Khan tried to attack Baghdad, the women of his city would drive the Khan off. Indeed, when the Mongol army arrived at Baghdad, they found a city barely ready to repel an invasion. No army had been summoned. The walls had not been fortified to withstand the Mongol artillery. Even when Hulagu deployed his forces on both banks of the Tigris River and began preparations for the siege, the Caliph barely took note.

Too late to accomplish anything, the Abbasid ruler eventually sent out 20,000 horsemen to engage the enemy. Hulagu’s forces, led by the cunning Chinese general Guo Kan, had destroyed several dikes, flooding the plain and drowning the cavalrymen, obliterating the Caliph’s forces in a matter of hours. Instead of sending a fraction of his military force and paying a token tribute to the Khan, the Caliph had chosen instead to sacrifice his entire army in a futile display of arrogance.

The siege had been brutal and brief. The Mongols encircled the city with a palisade and commenced an artillery assault that shattered the city walls. Thirteen days after the Mongol army assembled on the banks of the Tigris, the Caliph signaled his surrender.

Hulagu was in no mood to negotiate. “Now that I have beaten him, the fool wishes to make peace? His treasury overflows with gold, yet he did not spend even a dinar to defend it. I will shut the fool up in his treasury. If he prizes his gold so highly, let him eat it.”

As a scholar, al-Tusi cared nothing for the fate of the Caliph or his wealth, but there was something of inestimable value inside the walls of the defeated city that did interest him. Baghdad’s greatest treasure was not its gold, but rather its scholars and its libraries, foremost of which was the House of Wisdom.

“You rule all the Earth now, Great Khan,” al-Tusi had told Hulagu as the siege began. “With the knowledge in the House of Wisdom, you and your sons will rule Heaven and Earth for a thousand years…no, a thousand times a thousand years. You must preserve it.”

Hulagu however had been unmoved. “Knowledge is like anything else that may be lost and found again. The Caliph’s arrogance cannot be excused, and if it means the destruction of every book in the city, then so it will be.”

Al-Tusi knew better than to argue with the Khan, though he knew of one book kept in the House of Wisdom that could never be replaced.

“However,” Hulagu had continued, “there is truth in what you say. I appoint you, Nasir al-Tusi, as the protector of this great trove of learning. When the city falls, you will gather whatever remains, and then use it to establish a new House of Wisdom.”

Despite the concession, al-Tusi had not expected the siege to end so quickly or so dramatically. Already, Guo Kan had led his forces into the city to ‘prepare’ for the Khan’s arrival.

Al-Tusi wiped the tears from his eyes and urged his mount to continue toward the ravaged shell of Baghdad. The Tigris was running red with spilled blood, but there were pools of a black, oily substance on its surface, which al-Tusi recognized immediately. It was ink, the ink of thousands of scrolls and books that had been thrown into the river by the marauding invaders.

The destruction of the House of Wisdom had already begun.

I’m too late, he thought, and the tears began flowing again. But perhaps they haven’t found the Book yet.

In his despair, he thought he could hear his father’s voice, echoing from out of Paradise. Inshallah, my son. If Allah wills it, you will save the Book. If it has been destroyed, then it is because Allah does not will you to possess it again.