THE MATING OF THE BLADES
CHAPTER I
A prologue—yet quite necessary to the tale—switching incongruously and illogically from the heart of Asia to the gray heart of London Town. Also introducing a dead Ameer, two oily, shuffling Babus out of Bengal, and a sandy-haired gentleman who likes the view of Poultney's Inn.
Thus, on an auspicious day in the dark half of the sacred month of Dhu'l-Hijja, did they bear to his last resting-place Syyed Mazud Mirza Ahmet Nazredeen el-Arabi el-Husseinyieh Kajar Gengizkhani, Ameer of Tamerlanistan and thirty-ninth of his dynasty, while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while the conches brayed and the tomtoms sobbed and reed pipes shrieked, while white robed, green turbaned Moslem priests chanted the liturgy, and while the smoke from many ceremonial fires ascended to the lapis blue sky in thick, wispy streamers and hung in a ruddy, bloodshot cloud that lit up the palace and told to all Central Asia that the last male member of the Gengizkhani family—Zi'l-Ullah, “Shadow of Allah,” was their arrogant, hereditary title—had gone to join the spirits of his kinsmen in the seventh hall of Mohammed's paradise.
Out of the palace, that crowned the basalt hillside with turrets and bartizans and bell-shaped domes and
