On the banks of the ageless Nile, from a palace of gold and lapis lazuli, the young Fatimid Caliph Rashid al-Hasan rules as a figurehead over a crumbling empire. Cairo is awash in intrigues. In the shadow of the Gray Mosque, generals and emirs jockey for position under the scheming eyes of the powerful grand vizier, Jalal; in the crowded Souk, these factions use murder and terror to silence their opposition. Egypt bleeds and the scent draws her enemies in like sharks: Shirkuh, the swaggering Kurd who serves the pious and severe Sultan of Damascus, and Amalric, the Christian king of Jerusalem whose insatiable greed knows no bounds.


Yet, the Caliph of Cairo has an unexpected ally - an old man who lives on a remote Asian mountaintop, a place where eagles fear to tread. This benefactor, the Shaykh al-Jabal, the Old Man of the Mountain, holds the ultimate power of life and death over the warring factions of the Moslem world, and he sends his greatest weapon into Egypt.


He sends Caliph Rashid al-Hasan, a single man. An Assassin. The one they call the Emir of the Knife . . .