The Waters of Eternity by Howard Andrew Jones

attention. The scholar let go his daughter and fumbled with something at his neck as he backed toward the side of the cave. He produced a small gold tablet hung on a neck chain. “Stop him, daughter!”
    But the golem came on, its fist rising.
    “Stop him!” The scholar lifted the tablet with shaking fingers.
    It was no shield for the coming blow. The fist of the thing smashed through the scholar’s tablet, hand, and rib cage. Blood and skin and flecks of bone sprayed outward. The girl screamed.
    Her father gurgled and slumped against the golem’s arm. It ceased motion altogether.
    “Butrus!” Rabi cried. “Butrus!” She clutched his arm, weeping. “Why don’t you move?”
    Dabir shook his head, slowly, and his eyes were sad.
    Musa, panting, stared toward the direction the Greeks had gone. “Should we go after them?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “No. Tell me, where were your eyes, when the Greeks sneaked close?”
    Musa lowered his head.
    “I thought as much. Give thanks to God that we all still live, and ask him to strike me with lightning when next I think to set you watching.”
    Musa hung his head farther and slunk out to peer into the darkness.
    The girl clung to the golem’s unmoving arm, crying.
    I stepped up to my friend. “Dabir,” I said quietly, “what’s wrong with the golem?”
    “When it killed Azzam it also destroyed the tablet that brought him life. The creature’s one weakness.”
    “That is a shame. It was a mighty warrior. I am glad it chose to fight at our side.”
    Dabir’s tired look spoke volumes. “The girl chose its side, not the golem. It was a thing of stone.”
    “But she said…”
    “You were kind to her; who else in her little world was ever so? She showered affection upon a creature with no heart, no feelings, and imagined it gave them back. Perhaps she even thought it avenged her honor against Sabih. I do not know.”
    “So she has killed her father.”
    “Yes.”
    “And her friend.”
    “Yes. With them dies the secret for the golem’s making. It may be we are fortunate in that, Asim.”
    I did not see how we were so, but I did not press him. “It has all been for nothing, then.”
    “Indeed.” He raised a hand, as if he meant to rest it upon the girl’s shoulder, but did not touch her.
    And then there was only the sound of the pounding rain, and a girl weeping.

Sight of Vengeance
     
I
     
    “There.” Captain Fakhir threw back the winding sheet. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”
    I had looked on scores of dead men, and at first I saw nothing remarkable about the one who lay upon the table in the guard captain’s office. When alive he had been a young man of moderately wealthy means. His arms and legs were bent stiffly in his well-tailored red jubbah. His thin brown beard stretched down his chest, as if he’d sought to make up in length what he lacked in thickness.
    In the dust-speckled light that filtered in from the high, narrow windows I did not immediately see why Dabir muttered a curse and reached out to touch the corpse’s face.
    And then I stepped closer, and cried out to God.
    The corpse had no eyes.
    Fakhir reached up with one broad hand and brushed his own beard. “What do you think of this, Honored One?”
    Dabir said nothing. He removed the emerald ring from his left hand and set it down near the corpse’s head. Then he probed one of the empty sockets carefully with his fingers. His cool blue eyes narrowed, and the mobile lips above his spade-shaped beard shifted to the right and left.
    “How did he die?” Dabir did not look up from his inspection.
    “We have found no wounds,” Fakhir answered.
    “Asim,” Dabir asked me, “does this man’s flesh seem a little rosier than common in death?”
    “Perhaps he was always so complected,” I remarked, thinking of my unfortunately ruddy cousin Qaraja.
    Dabir made no reply but pinched his fingers within the corpse’s beard. He raised his hand into one of the sunbeams.
    “What