Fatimid Palace, Cairo
The great hall of the Fatimid palace stank of fear and sweat.
Teenage Caliph al-Adid sat slumped on his golden throne, thin fingers gripping the armrests like a drowning boy clutching driftwood. Around him, the remnants of his court huddled in panicked clusters, their silk robes rustling like the wings of frightened birds.
The news had arrived at dawn—three thousand dead, the legendary Nubian archers annihilated, the Nile itself running red with blood.
Vizier Shawar, once proud, now pale and trembling, clutched a bloodstained scroll bearing the grim report. "They walk on water," he rasped. "Our scouts swear the infidels marched across flooded fields as if on solid ground."
A shocked murmur rippled through the court. The younger courtiers—soft men who had never held a sword—shrunk back, eyes darting toward the exits as if Salahuddin's army might burst in at any moment.
From behind a marble pillar, a woman watched their terror with quiet disdain. They called her Al-Saqr—the Falcon. Dressed in the plain robes of a scribe, she stood unnoticed among lesser functionaries, her sharp eyes recording every tremor of fear.
"The Nubians were the best we had," groaned General Jawhar, his bulk sagging against the wall. "If they fell so easily—"
"Then we must negotiate!" cried a fat eunuch, jowls quivering. "Offer gold, land—anything!"
"Fool!" Shawar slammed his fist on a low table, sending a goblet crashing to the floor. "Do you think these are ordinary men? Salahuddin's advisor—this 'Taimur'—he's no mere scholar. They say he conjures weapons from the air... reads men's thoughts!"
The Falcon's lips curled. Exaggerations. She had spent years weaving her web of informants across the Levant. No man was invincible. No network untouchable.
Suddenly, a commotion broke at the entrance. A mud-spattered rider, half-dead from exhaustion, staggered in clutching a torn banner—the last standard of the Nubian host.
He collapsed before the throne, voice a raw whisper. "They... they impaled Commander Abubakar on his own bow. Made us watch... the crocodiles..." His voice dissolved into sobs.
The Caliph moaned, pressing a scented cloth to his face. "What manner of demons have we provoked?"
The Falcon had heard enough. She slipped from the hall without a sound, gliding through the palace's hidden corridors like a ghost. In the silence of her private chambers, she unfurled a crude map—positions of Salahuddin's forces, supply lines, command posts. Everything her spies had gathered.
Her fingers traced the path northward to Cairo. Let the Caliph weep. Let the court cower.
She would prove this Taimur was just a man. A man who could bleed.
Outside, the city stirred with panic. Some swore they saw fire in the northern sky. Others claimed the Nile had begun to flow backward.
The Falcon smiled.
Tomorrow, her best knives would slip into the dark. Let the Sand Foxes try to stop what they couldn't even see coming.
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The first whisper came from a dying man.
Taimur stood over the captured Fatimid courier, watching as the Muezzin's Daughter pressed a blade to his throat. The man's breath came in wet gasps, his blood staining the reeds along the Nile's bank.
"Speak," the girl murmured, her voice sweet as poisoned honey. "Who moves through our dead like a shadow?"
The courier's eyes bulged in terror. "Al-Saqr… the Falcon… she watches… always watches…" His last words dissolved into a gurgle as the knife did its work.
Taimur frowned. A name. Finally.
Three Nights Later
The Muezzin's Daughter knew she was being followed.
She'd sensed it first near the spice market—shadows that moved just a heartbeat too slow. Then came the scent of lotus perfume—expensive and rare—clinging to alleyways where only beggars slept. A trap.
She walked anyway.
The attack came in a narrow street between tanneries, where the stench of curing hides masked all else. Five figures dropped from the rooftops, blades flashing. The first died before his feet touched the ground, her dagger finding his eye. The second screamed as she shattered his wrist and opened his belly with his own sword.
Then the Falcon appeared.
Dressed in flowing black, her face veiled save for piercing amber eyes, she moved like liquid darkness.
"Little mouse," she purred, circling. "You'll tell me of your master's plans. Willingly or otherwise."
The Muezzin's Daughter spat blood. "My master eats arrogant birds for breakfast."
Their blades met in a shower of sparks. The Falcon fought like nothing the girl had seen—slashing and feinting in a blur, her curved jambiya probing for the kill. But arrogance made her sloppy. She talked as she fought.
"Taimur thinks himself invincible," the Falcon hissed, dodging a cut. "But even lions sleep. My knife will find his throat before—"
An arrow took her remaining assassin through the neck. Then another. And another.
The Falcon barely escaped as the Sand Foxes emerged from the very shadows she thought were hers—the Leper garroting one attacker from behind, the Brothel Mistress slitting another's hamstrings with practiced ease. Bloodied, she fled across the rooftops, a trail of crimson marking her path.
Taimur listened as the Muezzin's Daughter gasped out her report. The Falcon's boast—her plan to assassinate him—hung in the air like a death sentence.
"Three days," he said softly.
The Sand Foxes moved like a plague.
Day One
The House of Seven Veils had stood in Cairo's pleasure district for a century, its marble floors worn smooth by generations of dancing feet. The Falcon's favorite informant, a woman called Layla, held court in its gilded upper chambers, trading secrets for silver.
She was applying kohl to a young girl's eyes when the first screams echoed from below.
By the time she reached the balcony, the lower floors were already burning. Not with ordinary fire—this was Greek fire, clinging to flesh and stone alike. The Brothel Mistress stood in the street below, watching calmly as her men barred every exit.
Layla fled across the rooftops. She made it three buildings before the Leper's garrote found her throat.
At dawn, the muezzin climbing the minaret of Al-Azhar found her corpse dangling from the highest balcony, her own intestines coiled around her neck like a macabre necklace.
The message was clear.
Day Two
The dockmaster's son saw the bodies first.
They floated face-down in the Nile's sluggish current, a line of seven men in merchant's robes. When pulled ashore, the horror became clear—each corpse bore the Falcon's signature silver wire. But where she had used it to stitch shut the mouths of traitors, now it pinned their tongues to their cheeks.
The Scholar's Disgrace personally oversaw the operation, his ink-stained fingers checking each body for marks.
"She had three more couriers," he murmured to the Merchant. "Find them."
By nightfall, all ten of the Falcon's message runners decorated the riverside, their lifeless eyes staring at the approaching Muslim army across the water.
Day Three
The Scholar's Disgrace entered Taimur's tent as the sun bled across the horizon. Under one arm, he carried a leather-bound ledger, its pages filled with meticulous script.
"Every agent," he said, placing it on the map table. "Every safehouse. Every bribe paid and secret whispered."
Taimur flipped through the pages. The depth of the Falcon's network surprised even him—spies in the bakeries, the bathhouses, even among the palace eunuchs.
"Clean it," he ordered.
The Sand Foxes fanned out through Cairo like a scythe through wheat.
The baker was found with coded messages hidden in his loaves. He died with his head in his own oven. The bathhouse attendant who passed secrets in soap bubbles drowned in his own cauldron.
By sunset, the city's gutters ran crimson, the Falcon's once-proud network reduced to corpses and ashes.
From a crumbling watchtower, the Falcon watched her world end.
Below, Salahuddin's army gathered like a storm—steel-clad legions, monstrous siege engines that shouldn't exist, and above all, that awful silence of men who no longer feared death.
Her network was gone. Her arrogance had cost her everything.
And somewhere in that sea of death, a scholar turned reaper waited, his gaze already carving through Cairo's trembling walls.
The walls of Cairo rose from the desert like a dying man's final breath.
Taimur stood atop a wind-swept dune, the morning sun casting jagged shadows across the sand. Before him stretched the fortress city—its towering stone ramparts manned by gaunt, hollow-eyed conscripts whose spears trembled in unsteady hands. The once-proud Fatimid banners hung limp and faded, dulled by dust and dread. After the massacre in the Delta, the shattered remnants of Egypt's army had dragged themselves behind these stones like wounded beasts seeking refuge.
Salahuddin reined in beside him, his gaze sharp and silent as he scanned the defenses.
"They've sealed the gates with rubble and iron," he noted grimly. "No conventional siege engines will break those walls before winter."
Taimur smiled.
The first horror fell at dusk.
The Sand Foxes had spent days harvesting corpses from the delta—Nubian archers, preserved in desert heat, their own poisoned arrows still embedded in their flesh. Now, the siege engines groaned as they hurled the bloated bodies into the city. Each one landed with a sickening thud, a grotesque parody of Cairo's once-feared archers returning home in death.
The city held its breath.
Then the screaming began.
By midnight, panic spread like fire in dry grass. Soldiers, already fraying at the edges, broke as they saw comrades from the Delta twitch and slump against the stones. Some swore the dead moaned. Others fled outright, refusing to guard gates haunted by the restless damned.
And beneath it all, the Muezzin's Daughter slipped through Cairo's veins.
She stalked the ancient aqueducts, where crumbling stone channeled water through the city's belly. There, in algae-slick tunnels, she poured her poisons—precise vials of emetic, just enough to sicken, never to kill. By dawn, the garrison heaved in the streets, spears forgotten as they clutched their stomachs and vomited bile into the gutters.
Then came the flame.
On the second day, Taimur unveiled the monsters he had wrought from advanced blueprints in the Siege Manual.
Bronze tubes mounted on wheeled platforms—Greek Fire Lances, the 'Siege Volume' called them. But no Greek had imagined such horror.
When lit, they vomited jets of liquid fire across a hundred paces, flames that clung to stone and skin, devouring both.
The first salvo struck the northern gatehouse.
Fatimid defenders became living torches, their screams piercing the dawn. The walls blackened and cracked, weeping fire. The scent of seared flesh drifted over the battlefield like a curse.
Still, it was only the beginning.
Taimur's trebuchets—centuries ahead of their time—launched not stones but sealed barrels filled with naphtha, pitch, and quicklime. They burst on impact, transforming battlements into infernos, the air thick with smoke and ash.
Inside the palace, terror bloomed.
Caliph al-Adid awoke screaming.
His chambers, once a sanctum of silk and gold, now dripped with donkey's blood—splattered across walls, bedding, and curtains. The Sand Foxes had struck again, a warning etched in gore: If we can touch your bed, we can touch your throat.
By noon, the defenders shattered.
The gates creaked open—not to the thunder of charging warriors, but to absolute silence.
The Asad al-Harb stood in perfect formation—one thousand elite horsemen in gleaming Milanese armor, lances raised in disciplined unity. Not a foot shuffled, not a breath wasted. The stillness of them, the precision, was more terrifying than any war cry.
[System Notification: Conquest of Cairo Completed]
[+3000 Merit Points]
[Total Merit Points: 14,800 / 100,000]
The Falcon tried to vanish as the city fell.
Disguised as a slave girl, head bowed, amber eyes hidden beneath soot and linen, she might have escaped—had the Muezzin's Daughter not been watching the brothel district with a predator's patience.
A small hand gripped her hair like a snare, yanking her into the dirt.
"Going somewhere, Al-Saqr?" the girl whispered, pressing a dagger to her throat.
Dragged barefoot through the rubble-strewn streets, gagged and bound, the once-proud spymaster knelt before Taimur amid the ruins of her domain.
Taimur didn't even glance at her.
"Interrogate her," he said coldly, handing the Muezzin's Daughter a crystalline vial—truth serum, distilled from the Spycraft Manual. "I want her origins, her sponsors. Then dispose of her."
As the Falcon's screams echoed through the marble corridors, Taimur turned and looked out over his conquest.
Cairo had fallen.
In just three days, the Fatimid Caliphate was dust.
And the road to Jerusalem stood wide open.