The
King of Cats
By EDG
In 1593, invaders from Morocco attacked the
legendary city of Timbuktu. In mere
days, a center of Muslim learning and trade was reduced to a shadow of its
former self, its spirit broken, its walls destroyed and its leaders driven
away. Timbuktu never recovered, and was
conquered by a succession of neighboring peoples until it was finally captured,
three hundred years after its fall, by France.
Conquering Timbuktu was not, at that point, hard,
and the men who captured it felt, with some justification, that they had a
right to it afterward. They had no
inkling that there was a man in the desert, living in an undiscovered palace
miles from the city, who felt that he had prior right.
The King of Cats
An adventure seed for In Nomine
There are no paths leading to the Great Palace, no
roads that even venture near it.
Animals will not walk to it, vehicles will shy away before it comes into
sight, and anyone who walks to the Palace will either pass it by without seeing
or, if they are truly willful, encounter a thousand hardships on their way
before they reach the Great Palace.
Only the true of heart and pure of faith may approach without fear or
penalty, and then only those to whom Allah is God, to whom Mohammed is the Prophet.
The Palace is made of black African marble with
silver veins, of glass forged by lightning coursing through sand, of wood from
the heart of the Dark Continent. It is
guarded by an army of cats of all sorts and sizes, from Egyptian black cats to
the lions who hold sway over the savanna.
It is ruled by a man with a golden crown and skin as black as the night,
whose name must never be spoken aloud lest he lose his power yet may be written
in the script of his fathers both of the flesh and of the spirit: Okai Dikko is
his name, and he is the King of Cats and the last living Lord of Timbuktu.
It is not for nothing that the King of Cats has
survived this long; he is as ancient as any man you will meet and yet looks as
though he has not aged a day since the time when his city was still a power in
the Muslim world. By Flowers, Stone,
and Lightning he was given wood, stone and glass to build the Great Palace in
the desert; by War and Animals he was given his warrior-cats to defend the
Palace; by Destiny he was given life beyond aging to watch from the Palace; by
Judgment he was given the power to take his city, from his Palace, when the
time was right. Each Archangel gave
unto the King of Cats a gift, and then a smaller gift, and finally a still
smaller gift, such that the Palace runs with water even in the desert, and that
the garden with its miniature statuary and great topiary blooms throughout the
year, and that to approach the Palace is to pass by your greatest desires and
through your greatest fears, and that he - the King of Cats as anointed by the
Archangel of Animals himself - can stalk the darkness and yet not be seen, and
can die eight times and remain whole.
And yet, through all of these gifts and defenses, a
thief has visited the Great Palace in the desert, and has stolen the contents of
the treasury: blank coins, countless in number, waiting until Timbuktu was
reclaimed forever so that its people might live again in glory and power.
The King of Cats is angry, and all of Heaven recoils
before his wrath.
Heaven in turn has sent down angels to investigate,
and the King of Cats has in turn opened the gates of the Palace to them. They will not be harmed while they are
within the walls of the Great Palace, and although the King of Cats cannot
offer this protection to them outside the great black marble walls, he can send
his servants, one cat to an angel, to guard and stand by them in their search
to recover the lost treasure of Timbuktu.
In their search they will find clues to the identity
of the thief, clues which lead directly into the city of Timbuktu itself, now a
modern tourism and trade center, where a vile demon, a betrayer of trust with
the tongue of a serpent, waits for a sinister woman with eyes like the depths
of the ocean and a voice like the step of a hundred spiders to trade him salt,
thousands of pounds of salt, for the billions of dollars of gold that he has
stolen from the King of Cats. If they
are fast enough, the angels might find the betrayer in the city, where he is
emplaced as a humble merchant among the hundreds in the market; if they are
slower, they will find the pile of gold in the desert along an ancient trade
route, perhaps along with a pile of salt on a silk blanket; slower still, and
only by the grace of Allah will they trace the woman to a hotel in Morocco,
where the stockpile of riches will be used, if the angels are too slow even for
this, to invoke an ancient and powerful demon to begin eternal war on Earth.
If the angels are too late for that, then perhaps
only the great Archangels may save them and the world from their fates.