Mud Seal – Kobo eBook

Taribum sees her husband break the clay seal on a storage jar and take what their household cannot afford to lose. Iddinam is just as certain that he saw her do it. By morning neither is willing to tell the other what they think they know.

Their daughter Naramtum finds the jar. The cord is still tied. Dust lies in a tiny crack in the old clay, and the hairs caught in the seal are still there. She can show her parents what has survived the night. She cannot make them agree on what happened before it.

In the lanes of ancient Bbil, a household lives by measures of barley, promises of labour, and the marks a scribe presses into clay. Once the accusation leaves the yard, it reaches people with the authority to act on it. Naramtum’s chance to earn a place in the tablet room may disappear while the adults argue over whose account deserves to be believed.

Something has learned to wait until one of them is alone. It can make a familiar act look like betrayal, and it has discovered how much further a suspicion travels once a human being gives it a voice. The closer the family comes to comparing what they saw, the more each stands to lose by speaking first.

Mud Seal is a historical supernatural horror novel set in a fictional household in Old Babylonian Bbil. Its religious inspiration comes from Qur’an 2:102 and Sahih Muslim 2813b. The family, the events, and the creature are fictional.