Two monks arrive at the keep and are allowed to shelter from the midday sun. They are admitted to see the lord of the keep, the Emir, and enter his chamber a little past noon. Their appointment was a spontaneous one, but the Emir would never refuse an audience with a holy man, heathen or not.
After an hour, the guards hear no response when they knock at the door. They force their way in after the captain arrives.
Inside they find the Emir, two daggers plunged into his chest, and the monks gone.
The Emir had, for some time, threatened war on the small, independent keep up in the mountains above his country.
These quiet rebels paid no taxes and rarely left the confines of their walled settlement. They had no army to speak of, no king to rule them, and as far as anyone knew, no goods to trade.
Inside the keep, it was said that the arts were taught to the highest level. Though what these arts constituted remains unspecified.
The Emir's war ended before it began. His successor, his own brother, was too afraid that the same fate would befall him should he threaten the tiny mountain keep.
Years passed.
Thus it was that when the powerful crusader kingdom in the north threatened yet another invasion of the holy lands, the King there was found in his bed, two daggers in his chest. The war never came to be.
When the hordes from the steppes washed over the land and plundered all, the Khan was found inside his yurt with two daggers in his chest, a few miles from the tiny mountain keep. The great horse lords bickered among each other and the momentum of their conquest was shattered, and they feld back home in tattered groups.
Again and again, whenever the tiny mountain keep was threatened, the daggers fell, and one man would die in the place of thousands.
Paddy Dobson
2nd August 2022