Throne of the Crescent Moon

by Saladin Ahmed

  Zamia scowled at Adoulla, and Raseed mumbled some outraged denial. Adoulla went on. “He won’t so much as smile at pretty city girls. But put a plain-faced savage who kills in the name of the Angels before him, and his soul’s all aflame! Oh, stop your sputtering protests, boy! So insistent on denying the obvious. Yes to head-chopping, no to kissing!” He looked to the sky. “How in the Name of God did I become a part of such a world?”

  He turned back to Zamia. “Listen to me! This was the only way to save you. You owe Dawoud and his wife thanks. Indeed, were they living by your barbarous Badawi codes, you would owe them some sort of ridiculous life-debt, no?”

  Zamia growled a sulky little lion growl. How does she make lion noises with a girl’s throat? the scholar in Litaz wanted to know.

  The girl nodded once at Dawoud and pushed words out as if each one wounded her. “The Doctor is right. You did save my life, and I…I owe you a debt.” Dawoud patted the girl’s shoulder with a dark, bony hand, but Zamia looked at it as if a rock-snake had dropped onto her.

  Her husband spoke bemusedly. “Where does this fear come from, young one? Stories you heard round the campfire? Where the magi are all dressed in red robes, cackling amidst mountains of skulls? Drinking blood from a chalice, while the newborn babe cries on the altar? Hmph! Such dark assumptions from a girl who grows golden fur and rips out throats with her teeth!”

  Zamia lifted her chin, her scraggy hair falling back. “The shape is a gift from the Angels! Where does your foul power come from?”

  Litaz was thankful her husband was being patient with the child—he could be a hard man with anyone but Litaz. When he spoke, though, he still wore the same bitter smile. “God gave me my gifts. I draw my power, girl, from my own lifeblood. From the days that I have left in this world. Now. You still owe my wife thanks, do you not?” At this, he turned and walked out of the room.

  Zamia said nothing for a moment, then dipped her head. “I have been remiss with rightful gratitude, Auntie. I thank you for your aid and beseech God’s blessings upon you.”

  So there are some doorways in that wall of tribal pride and distrust. Good. “‘God’s blessings fall on he who helps others,’” Litaz quoted. “Just remember that the next time you are in a position to do so.”

  The tribeswoman started to ask a question, but Litaz cut her off. “You’ve done too much talking already, child, and you are not in the clear yet. If Almighty God wills it, your shape-changing powers will return to you in time. But now is the time for rest.” Litaz filled a mug from the pot of hemlock tonic that had been steeping on the stove and gave it to the girl. “You will wake every few hours now, and that is best—it will keep your body from forgetting that you live. Each time you wake, you must force yourself to look around and talk a bit. Then you must take one long draw from this mug before you fall back asleep—no more than that, if you wish to wake again! Do you understand?”

  The girl, already growing tired, nodded sleepily.

  “Good, now take that first draw.”

  The girl did, and a moment later she sat up energetically in bed and started fidgeting impatiently. Good. The other herbs in the tonic needed to overstimulate her for a few minutes before the hemlock could force her into a restful sleep.

  At that moment, Adoulla trundled down the stairs, bellowing. “‘Hadu Nawas’—that is what the foul creature said of itself. I know that name, Litaz! I’ve read it somewhere. A history? An old romance?” He looked at her beseechingly, but she was quite sure she’d never read whatever book Adoulla had half-recalled.

  Her friend cracked his bumpy knuckles irritably, then slumped his shoulders. “Of course, whichever book it was is a heap of wet ashes now.”

  Litaz saw Zamia trying to stand and laid a restraining arm across the girl’s flat chest. Zamia slurred angrily. “You had knowledge of this murdering thing, and you don’t remember?” The girl’s voice was scornful but weaker, drug-heavy. Good. She would be asleep in moments.

  Adoulla showed what passed for patience with the wounded child. “Well, if I’d memorized every book in my library, my dear, I’d have had no need for a library!”

  “City men and their books!” Despite the drugs and the wound, the girl’s savage haughtiness seemed to animate her. “If this knowledge had belonged to my people,” the girl hissed with surprising strength, “it would be passed down in song and story, so that ten men would know—”

  Litaz saw the patience flee her old friend’s eyes. “And, tell me, where is all of that knowledge now, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi?”

  The tribeswoman wore the memory of dead family on her face. Adoulla’s words were cruel. But Litaz knew her friend well enough to know where they came from. He mourned his books as much as the girl did her tribesmen, and he no doubt found it hard to stand by while this supposedly ignorant savage of a girl made mock of his life of word-gathering.

  Still, this was too much excitement. A line was being crossed that could hurt the girl’s recovery. Litaz placed a hand on Adoulla’s arm. It was enough. The ghul hunter threw his hands up and looked disgusted with himself. “Aaagh. I need to think. Some fresh air,” he blurted and bolted for the door, slamming it behind him.

  The girl narrowed her emerald eyes in her own apparent self-disgust. As if she were willing the lioness within her to kill the weak little girl. She mumbled something about revenge, then closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  Raseed started after Adoulla, but Litaz dissuaded him. The ghul hunter needed to be alone with his thoughts, not preached at by a boy a fraction of his age.

  Litaz looked at Zamia and allowed herself a moment to celebrate her own skill. Because of her efforts, Zamia just might live. Then she looked at her front door, which Adoulla had just slammed. He would live, too, despite his pain.

  She took a deep breath. Dhamsawaat was already half-mad with the tension between the Falcon Prince and the new Khalif. Now there was this threat. She hated being dragged back into this bleak world of cruel magics and monster-hunting. But somehow this would work out, she told herself. Somehow God would guide them through this, and then perhaps she and Dawoud would finally return home and leave this thrilling, beautiful, damned-by-God city behind them.

  Chapter 9

  ADOULLA SLAMMED THE HEAVY WOODEN DOOR to his friends’ shop behind him. How low he had sunk, shouting at a half-dead child! Though he called her “girl,” he had begun to think of Zamia as a lioness, or a desert stone. He reminded himself that she was a child, even if she was also more than that.

  Dawoud stood a few yards away from the shop, his arms folded, staring out at the street. The magus turned at the noise Adoulla made and arched a white eyebrow at him. Adoulla was in no mood for more talking. He tried to stride past his friend, but Dawoud’s talon of a hand grabbed Adoulla’s arm.

  “Are you all right?”

  Adoulla laughed mirthlessly. “All right?! The love of my life wants nothing to do with me except to avenge her dead niece. I have a savage girl’s near-death on my soul. I’m old and ready to die, and God is testing me with monsters fouler than I’ve ever faced. My home—” and here, Adoulla knew, his voice cracked “—my home is charred and smoking and every book I’ve ever owned is gone. On top of all of this, my dreams are of rivers of blood in the streets.”

  Dawoud stroked his hennaed goatee and frowned. “Rivers of blood? I had almost the same dream. But it was in the Republic.”

  That news did not help Adoulla’s mood. “Well, it seems that we dream-prophets are a dirham a dozen. May it please God to make us both false prophets.”

  Dawoud nodded grimly. “Walk with me,” he said, and they began a slow stroll up the block.

  Adoulla filled his lungs and emptied them, calming himself. “It’s just too much, brother-of-mine. God has given me more than I can carry.”

  A man with a camel plodded by, mumbling happily to his animal. The magus put a thin hand on Adoulla’s shoulder, gripping fat and muscle. “Not alone, do you understand? You will not carry it alo
ne.”

  Dawoud was talking about taking on these creatures with him, as they had done in years past. Adoulla couldn’t let this happen. “I can’t ask that of you two. Name of God, I’m sorry to have involved you as much as I have.”

  “This thing that tried to kill your little lion-girl, Adoulla. It frightens me. You know how much it takes to frighten me. You know the things I have seen, because you have seen them too. But soul-touching that wound! The creature that bit Zamia is like cruelty…cowardice…treachery, given form. I could feel it. But twisted up inside all of that was something even worse…a grisly kind of loyalty. Loyalty to a very powerful man. There is something wicked at work here that I cannot ignore. Something that would never let my wife and me sleep quietly in our beds. I know you feel it, too.”

  A stream of screaming children shot down the street, playing some chase-game. Adoulla wiped a hand across his beard, feeling spent though it was barely afternoon. “Aye. I hate to think of what sort of man that thing calls ‘friend.’” He shook himself and stole a sidelong look at Dawoud. Perhaps he felt like talking after all. “How are you? Those healing magics you worked.…Well, we’re none of us as young we used to be.”

  Dawoud smiled sadly. “And, you are thinking, some of us are growing old more quickly than others, eh? How am I? Worn out, Adoulla. Three-quarters dead, the same as your fat old ass, or worse. But it would not matter to me if my wife did not seem younger and younger than me each year.”

  They’d had this discussion many times before. Dawoud was not quite five and ten years older than his wife. But her vitality made her seem younger, while the physical toll of Dawoud’s sort of spells made him seem older. Most folk would guess there was thirty years separating them. Over the decades, Adoulla had had friends with grim diseases or horrible old injuries. Such catastrophes came to fill a certain place in people’s lives, like a second spouse or an extra-demanding child. So it was with Dawoud and the withering costs of a magus’s magics.

  A pleasing breeze cut between the buildings, and Dawoud breathed it in. “There were times,” the magus chuckled ruefully, “that I thought I wanted such a thing—a so-much-younger wife. What man does not? But now…I do not know. Part of me just wants to let her go…to make her go home to the Republic.”

  “How many times are we going to have this conversation, brother-of-mine? We both know you couldn’t live without her. Besides, you act as if it were your choice! As if Litaz would ever let you go! And ‘make her go?’ Ha! I would like to see that!”

  Adoulla felt a familiar small sting of jealousy. He had always admired Litaz. She was brilliant, evenhanded, and simply one of the prettiest women Adoulla had ever known. More than once he had had lovemaking dreams of her, had woken half-wishing she was his. Once every few years, over a chance meal together when Dawoud happened not to be around, Adoulla found himself wishing it again for an evening. But he took such moments for the fancies they were. Adoulla was happy for his friends. Their two lives had long ago become one—of that there could be no doubt.

  Adoulla had never known such a love. He did not hold Miri Almoussa any less dear than Dawoud held Litaz, but a twenty-years’ flame was different than a wife, as Miri had reminded him, tearfully and testily, over the years. Before she had told him never to visit her again.

  He shook off his morose heart’s musings. There was work to be done. But he had little to go on. If he knew the name of the ghul-maker—the man this thing Mouw Awa called “blessed friend”—he could cast a tracking spell. Sadly, the names the jackal-creature had called itself—Mouw Awa, Hadu Nawas—would not serve for such a spell. But they might still be of use—if only Adoulla could recall where he’d heard them before.

  Again, he tried to force open his memory. And again he drew a blank. Somewhere buried in his brain was a clue that could help save his city. But this was not the place to dig it up. He said goodbye and God’s peace to his best friend in the world and then went to think.

  Adoulla didn’t know if it was his imagination or if there was really still a charred stink to the air of the block from the night before. He started to turn back to his townhouse—to make himself see the smoking shell of it. But he found he couldn’t quite force his feet eastward. To face that sight right now.…He thought it might finally break him.

  It was just as well. He could do nothing there, and maudlin wallowing wasn’t going to stop the monsters that were loose in his city.

  Adoulla turned his steps to Gruel Lane. As he walked, he gingerly touched his chest where the sand ghul had slammed its ironlike arm into him. But the flesh there was no longer tender. Compared to the girl’s wound, his own bruises had been easy enough for his friends to heal. Adoulla shook his head, impressed yet again by his own poor fate. No matter how many times his extraordinary friends managed to patch him up, he ruminated, he always managed to show up again with a fresh wound.

  He made his way to the great public garden and found a tiny hillock on which to sit, his bright white kaftan splayed around him. He loved this place that came to life at this late afternoon hour. It was nothing like the Khalif’s delicate gardens, where quietly chirping birds selected for their song dotted the branches of the orange and pomegranate trees that suffused the air with their soft scents. In the Khalif’s gardens, rippling brooks flowed magically upwards and filled the gardens with their lulling babble. No one there spoke above a whisper.

  It was supposed to be soothing—the perfect place for princes, poets, and philosophers to be alone with their thoughts. But Adoulla, whose calling had more than once brought him to gardens that his station should have barred him from, thought he would go mad in such a place. For one, the tranquility was got by keeping the city’s rabble away at swordpoint. But there was more to it than that: He simply could not think in the Khalif’s gardens. He felt as if doing so might break something delicate.

  The public garden of the Scholars’ Quarter, on the other hand, hosted some of the most riotous smells and sounds in all Dhamsawaat. Uppermost were piss, porters unwashed after a day of lifting in the sun, and a thousand kinds of garbage. But beneath these were layered the smells that said “home” to Adoulla—if anything in this unwelcoming world did.

  As an orphan-boy, as a ghul hunter’s apprentice, as a young rascal and sometime hero, and now, as an old fart, he needed to breathe these scents. The brewing cinnamon-paint of the fortune tellers, the shared wine barrels of gamblers and thieves forgetting their troubles, the skewers of meat that dripped sizzling juices onto open fire pits and, here and there, a few flowers that seemed to be struggling to prove that this was a public garden and not a seedy tavern…Adoulla took it all in. Home.

  Then there were the sounds. His calling had taken him many places, but Adoulla had yet to find a people as loud as those of his home quarter. The children and the mothers scolding the children. The roving storytellers and those who applauded and heckled them. The whores who offered warm arms for the night, and the men who haggled shamelessly with them. All of them going about their business in the loudest voices they could find. For cruel fate or kind, Adoulla thought, these were his people. He had been born among them, and he hoped very much to die quietly among them.

  Bah. With your luck, old man, you’ll be slaughtered by monsters in some cold cavern, alone and unlamented.

  For what seemed the hundredth time that week, Adoulla silenced the discouraging voice within and tried to focus on the problem before him. He sat and breathed and thought.

  “Hadu Nawas,” the creature had said. The meaning of it was at the edge of his thoughts, but the harder he tried to grasp it, the more he felt like a man with oiled fingers clutching at a soapcake.

  Baheem, an aging footpad who tried to rob Adoulla twenty years ago and, ten years ago, saved him from a robbery, walked past. He gave a friendly nod and pulled at his moustache, not bothering to speak, understanding that Adoulla was in meditation. Adoulla was known here, and that was why, of all places in the city, he could do what must be done here. Famili
arity. It put him at ease, and when he was at ease he noticed things, put things together in their proper place.

  Adoulla beckoned to Baheem, gesturing at a flat grassy spot beside him. His thoughts were not going where he needed them to, and trying to force them would only give him a headache. He knew from experience that distraction and idle chatter could help.

  Baheem and he said God’s peaces and Baheem sat. The thick-necked man then produced a flintbox and a thin stick of hashi. “If you don’t mind, Uncle?”

  Adoulla smiled negligently and quoted Ismi Shihab. “‘Hashi or wine or music in measure, God piss on the man who bars other men’s pleasure.’”

  Stinky sweet, pungent smoke soon surrounded the pair as they sat talking about nothing and everything—the weather, neighborhood gossip, the succulent shapes of girls going by. Baheem offered the hashi stick to him more than once, and though Adoulla refused each time, he could feel the slightest hint of haze begin to creep in at the corners of his mind just from sitting beside Baheem.

  It was pleasant, and Adoulla happily let his thoughts get lost in the rhythm of Baheem’s complaints. For a few moments he managed to almost forget all of the grisly madness that filled his life.

  “I’ve heard a pack of the Falcon Prince’s men were found dead in an ambush,” Baheem said. “Word is, their hearts were torn from their chests! It has to have been the Khalif’s agents, though you think they’d have gone for the public beheadings they love so much.”

  Adoulla’s distracted half-cheer evaporated. Hearts torn from their chests? He struggled to think through his secondhand hashi haze. It sounded as if the Falcon Prince faced the same foe as Adoulla and his friends. And Pharaad Az Hamaz could prove a powerful ally in this. Adoulla started to ask about this, but Baheem was on a hashi-talkative roll now, his complaining uninterruptable.

  “And then there’s the damned-by-God watchmen and this dog-screwing new Khalif!” the thief said quietly but forcefully, punctuating each word with a pull of his moustache. “These rules they have! Take the other day. I’m trying to move goods through Trader’s Gate for my sick old Auntie—” he smiled shamelessly “—and two watchmen stop me, asking for a tax pass. Now, of course, I have a tax pass. An almost legitimate one! But these sons-of-whores start talking about new taxes and tariffs on this gate and that gate, at this rate and that rate, and pretty soon I’m headspun and copperless. Their rules and regulations are all hidden script to me, Uncle, but I know well enough when someone wants to starve my children to death. I—”