Throne of the Crescent Moon

by Saladin Ahmed

  Dawoud told what little they knew of Mouw Awa and his master Orshado. The names. The killing they had done. As he told his tale, the captain’s unsubtle face was easy for Dawoud to read—shifting from annoyed disbelief to deeper consideration to half-skeptical fear. But the captain was respectful enough not to interrupt.

  “All I ask,” Dawoud began, then fell silent when a richly-dressed page came darting in. The page ignored Dawoud and whispered something to the captain. Dawoud’s old ears could only make out the words he wants, your turn, and Roun’s protests, before the boy left the room.

  Roun grimaced at him. “Well, Uncle, you’re in luck—His Holiness asks me on occasion to bring before him whatever security matter I am dealing with at a given time. He does the same with his ministers of treasury and his under-governors. He does it to show his active interest and to let the many arms of his government benefit from his wisdom.” There was no irony in Roun’s voice—indeed, the Captain made an admirable effort to infuse the words with sincerity, but Dawoud needed no magic to tell the man’s true feelings.

  Still, this may be for the best. Perhaps the Khalif will actually listen.

  Dawoud was shown not into the Court of the Crescent Moon, but into a small audience chamber. “Small” for the Crescent Moon Palace, of course, meant that the room was larger than Dawoud’s whole house, but it felt different from the publicly visible parts of the palace Dawoud had seen. Here the auras of opulence and command did not exactly diminish, but they took on a kind of intimacy. This was a place for a powerful man to pretend he was lending his ear. Almighty God willing, he will lend it in truth.

  Dawoud was announced with a string of the tepid pleasantries spent on common people. The court-speaker boomed in his baritone that the guests were honored to be in the presence of “God’s Regent in the World, the Defender of Virtue, the Most Exalted of Men, His Majesty the Jabbari akh-Khaddari, Khalif of Abassen and of all the Crescent Moon Kingdoms.” Then, in unison with Roun, Dawoud knelt and bowed as deeply as his weak limbs would let him.

  High windows displayed Names of God in glass ground with emerald and opal. No noise from the palace bustle outside came through the plush brocade drapes. Off to one side, court musicians played reed pipes and two-stringed fiddles, all plated in platinum. Thick carpets of puzzlecloth, worked over and over again with the Khalific seal, muffled the sound of footfalls. At the far side of the room, just below the ceiling, a strange gold lattice box, the size of a small carriage, protruded from the wall just above head height. The Khalif’s speaking-box. Designed so that Abassen’s ruler could hold court without enduring the profane gazes of his subjects. And within sat the Defender of Virtue.

  The small, rose marble archway below the box was flanked by two cowled, black-robed men who gave off, to Dawoud’s sorcerous senses, a heady waft of magical power. Court magi. Legally, no one in Dhamsawaat worked spells without the permission of the Khalif’s own enchanters. In reality, a number of minor spells, invocations, and ghul-raisings went on without this handful of men being able to stop them. The true purpose of the court magi was preventing the practice of any magics that might harm the Khalif or his wealth. Dawoud knew little of their ways, though—they spent their time cloistered in their own minaret behind the palace proper. What went on within that thin spire of silvery stone, God alone knew. Dawoud knew only the scorn with which this sort regarded the vulgar magics of a man like himself.

  Dawoud saw vague movement behind the golden grillwork of the speaking box. Does he always hold court from within that stifling cage? The idea made Dawoud ill, but it lent a sudden sense to some of the Khalif’s more ruthless acts. Ruling from such confinement could make a man mad. This is what Adoulla—and that mad Falcon Prince he admires so much—do not see: that everyone pays a price for the way the world works, even the so-called powerful. That power is a trap as well. The effects of magery on his own body had long given Dawoud a keen—not to say, brutal—awareness of such facts.

  The sun shone through the jewel-tinted windows and the Khalif’s box seemed to be wreathed in rainbows. Cage or no, for a moment Dawoud almost believed the man was God’s Regent in the World.

  The court musicians stopped playing. A long-faced man dressed in rich silks, clearly a senior minister of some sort, asked Roun what matters of guardsmanship he brought before the court.

  Only then did Roun seem to recognize the wispiness of what he knew. His face flashed confusion, but he spoke steadily. “This man beside me, O Defender of Virtue, is Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed. He is a true servant of God who once saved my life when a poisoner tried to kill me to stop me from serving your father. More to the point, your Majesty, this man has spent many years hunting the minions of the Traitorous Angel. He was in the midst of telling me about a potential threat to Your city, majesty, when you summoned me here. It is, perhaps, best if I let him tell the court.”

  “O Most Exalted of Men, I am here to ask you—” Dawoud began, trying in his rough Red River way to use court phrasings the way Litaz had taught him long ago.

  The long-faced minister’s scandalized eyes bulged. “You are neither minister nor captain! You must speak to the court, sir! You shall not speak directly to His Majesty!”

  He’d miscalculated. Despite her having forsaken her family, Litaz was a Pasha’s niece. She had taught him an etiquette appropriate to a man of much higher station. She’d warned him of this when she’d tried to train him years ago, of course. Why did he only ever seem to recall his wife’s warnings in the moments after failing to heed them?

  Within the golden box Dawoud heard a man clear his throat. The court fell completely silent.

  “He is a streetman, Jawdi. He cannot be expected to speak like a man of Our court. Continue, O venerable subject, and know that We hear you.”

  Perhaps he is not so bad as the city’s wagging tongues claim. Dawoud didn’t fool himself that the Khalif had anything but scorn for him. But showing polite respect to the scorned was as sure a measure of character as Dawoud knew. He dragged a labored breath deep into his chest and chose his words carefully.

  “I am as honored as a man can be to be permitted to speak before you, O Defender of Virtue. As Captain Hedaad says, I have made a life of fighting the influence of the Traitorous Angel. The Captain can tell your Majesty that I am no madman. Of the lives I have saved…” He paused, searching for his next words.

  The long-faced minister broke in here. “I hope, sir, you have not come into the radiant presence of the Defender of Virtue merely to boast of your back-alley accomplishments. His Majesty’s every moment is worth your weight in gold. To waste them is a crime worse than murder! Speak, sir, if you’ve something of import to say!”

  “Of course, your Eminence.” The man looked slightly mollified. Good, he’d got that title right. No doubt it pleased these men to see a common man like Dawoud try nobly to match their ways of speaking—so long as he wasn’t too good at it. Not that they needed to worry about that.

  “I will come to the point. A strange threat is looming over your Majesty’s city. One as learned as His Majesty knows better than I that before the Great Flood of Fire, the Kem ruled this land. We know that God punished them, and that they were wiped from the slate of the world. Some things from their age—a bit of statuary here, a buried wall there—remain, perhaps left to us by God as a warning against wickedness. Yet other foul things from God-scoured Kem have survived, O Defender of Virtue. Or at least, the influence of their cruel magics has.”

  “You speak of the Dead Gods?” one of the court magi asked scornfully, the first words that either of the black-robed figures had spoken. The man’s voice said he did not take the threat seriously. The memory of the tainted soul he’d touched with his scrying spell filled Dawoud. He had to make these men take him seriously.

  “Yes, your Eminence. One of the Dead Gods of Kem—or the potent shadow of their power—has taken hold of a man who was already a vicious killer. It has given him power and freed him from fear of swords and fire. T
heir magic has mingled with this dark soul, and the creature born of this union calls itself Mouw Awa the Manjackal. This thing is loose in His Majesty’s city. It has killed dozens already. What’s worse, its master is—”

  “Why, sirrah, have we of the court heard nothing of these murders, then?” the long-faced minister interrupted scornfully. “Where is—”

  The second court magus silenced the man with an upraised hand. So that’s how the whipping order goes here. “This man’s ramblings are not fit for the blessed ears of the Defender of the Faithful. At most perhaps one of his fellow streetmen with a few trick-spells has murdered a few other streetmen.” That black-cowled head turned to Dawoud. “The court commands you to return to your home. Speak to the first watchman you see there, and he will address this matter in the manner already ordained by His Majesty’s Law.”

  Dawoud dared to speak when he should have kept his mouth shut. When would he again have the ear of the Khalif? “Ten thousand apologies, your Eminence, but this Mouw Awa and its master—he is called Orshado, though we know little more than that—are no streetmen. They will kill again. And they will not be satisfied with killing tribesmen and street-people. Powerful villains aim their arrows at the powerful. The danger to the palace is—” Too late, Dawoud fell silent, realizing his mistake. Idiot! Tossing threats at the most powerful man in the world!

  The golden grille of the opulent box swung up with a sudden bang. Dawoud felt his old heart seize up at the sound. Please God, do not let him be angry with me. I want to see my wife again. The might such a man commanded. This was what Adoulla did not understand. That all the scorn in the world could not protect one from such power. Dawoud still could not see within the box—there was a more than natural darkness at work there, unless he missed his magus’s guess—but a thin, pale hand shot out from the shadows. The Khalif jabbed two fingers, ablaze with huge rubies, out angrily at Dawoud. Courtiers and servants alike gasped and shot their eyes downward.

  “After Captain Hedaad’s introduction, We were inclined to be kind toward Our Venerable Subject. But after this nonsense We are displeased. You should thank Almighty God that We have not had you thrown in the gaol.”

  Dawoud had faced death a hundred times. He had not survived to die at an annoyed ruler’s whim. He deepened his bow, punishing his old limbs and holding in his grunts. “God grant you ten thousand blessings for your mercy, Majesty.”

  God’s Regent in the World must have sensed some insincerity in Dawoud’s words, for the Khalif broke from the formalized language of the court sovereign. “Shut up, you old fool! You come in here, making threats to Our city and Our Palace!? You tell nail-biting tales of a phantom killer as if We were some merchant’s boy and you were Our fright-mongering nurse? And, no doubt, this threat’s shadow would lift from Our Court if only We were to buy some trinket or spell from you, eh? Bah! My father would have had your head, old man!”

  Your father would have pulled his head from out of his backside and taken such a threat seriously. Dawoud kept the words to himself.

  Beside Dawoud, Roun bowed deeply. “I beg your Majesty to forgive this old fool for bothering you. I swear by God that Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed would never dream of offering your eminence any harm or threat of harm. His feeble old Soo mind is rattled with imaginary threats, is all.”

  The Khalif was silent for a moment, and the court seemed to hold its breath. When he spoke again, his intonation was unabashedly rude. “Bah! Captain, We should have you flogged for wasting Our sacred moments with this idiocy. Name of God, you are both fortunate that We are known for Our mercy. If We are ever made to look at your ugly face again, magus, We shall part your head from your shoulders. The same goes for you, Captain, if you do not bring matters of real urgency to Us next time We ask. Now begone, both of you!”

  Dawoud bowed deeply three times, backing away as he did so. The fool! Name of God, if one uncouth old Soo is enough to make the man drop his court-phrasing, maybe Adoulla’s right.

  Roun escorted Dawoud to the palace gates in silence. He led Dawoud to a small, secluded courtyard with a tiny fountain and waved away a solitary guardsman. When they were alone, the square-shaped man let out a breath and threw up his hands.

  “You see how things stand, Uncle,” the captain said. “Truth be told, this sort of recklessness is rampant now. The watchmen…” The man trailed off, clearly aching to relieve himself of his thought-burden but reluctant to do so.

  Dawoud encouraged him. “With apologies for knowing that which I ought not, Captain, I have heard that there is…tension between the guard and the watch.”

  Roun spoke half to himself. “Look, in every city there will be watchmen who harass blacksmiths’ daughters and knock down old men for a few coins or a laugh. But there is cruelty and there is cruelty. There is corruption and there is corruption. People can no longer afford to pay the taxes we’re asking. Too many are finding their way into the gaol. Far too many. And every debtor imprisoned, even for a fortnight, is a recruit for that preening traitor Pharaad Az Hammaz!”

  “Indeed,” Dawoud agreed.

  “And then there is the thief-purging. Here in the palace matters legal and martial fall to me. But in the streets the captain of the watch rules, and he was appointed because he has never in his life balked at a chance to bully. This new drive to wipe out pickpocketry is madness. There will be a lot more one-handed men in Dhamsawaat before it’s through. The last amputation I saw was of a boy of ten years. But at least the boy only lost his hand! Too many men have been made to kneel on the executioner’s leather mat of late.”

  “Aye,” Dawoud said. “I’d heard about the boy who was to be executed before the Falcon Prince—”

  Roun’s expression turned dangerous. “The bastard’s name is Pharaad Az Hammaz, Uncle! He’s not a Prince! Anyway, incidents like that are driving good men away from the guard and the watch. A fortnight ago my second-in-command, Hami Samad—a man born and raised in this palace, and as steadfast a man as I’ve ever met—left the guard, abandoning his duties without saying a word to anyone.” Roun knuckled his moustache and sighed, fatigue overtaking his features.

  “Well, I am sorry to have added to your troubles. The Khalif was not happy with you for bringing me before him.”

  Roun waved a dismissing hand at Dawoud’s apology, but there was real worry in the captain’s eyes. He frowned, and his brow knitted even tighter. “What is going on, Dawoud? Whatever the Khalif’s flatterers think, I know you would not be here if there was not dire reason.”

  “And there is, my friend. The servants of the Traitorous Angel are at work. But I don’t know much more than the little I’ve told you. As soon as I learn more I will let you know, Captain, I swear it.”

  Roun gave him a long look. “Very well, Uncle. Just be sure that you do. And I’ll set my street spies a-digging at these names and crimes you’ve told me of. I am always here at the Palace, so when you wish to speak to me again, just have a guardsman summon me.”

  Dawoud exchanged cheek-kisses with the Captain, then made his way back to the street. Pain raged in his muscles and bones. Too much bowing and walking. He needed rest and, more than anything on God’s great earth, he needed to see his wife again. I could have died in there on a fool’s whim.

  Dawoud thanked Almighty God aloud that he lived. Then he achingly made his way home.

  Chapter 13

  WALKING DOWN BREADBAKERS’ BYWAY, Adoulla passed a public fountain of once-white marble. Children played in its basin, and their shrill shouts shoved their way into his ears. “Brats,” he huffed to himself, though he knew he’d been twice as loud and obnoxious when he was a street child.

  To save one child from the ghuls is to save the whole world. The professional adage came to Adoulla for the thousandth time. But what would it cost to save the whole world? His life? O God, does not a fat old man’s happiness matter, too?

  This fight had already cost him his home. The place that he had loved so for so long was ruined. Vials of powdered
silver and blocks of ebonwood. The Soo sand-painting he’d bought in the Republic, and the Rughali divan that fit his backside so comfortably. But most of all, the books! Scroll and codex, new folio and old manuscript. Even a few books in tongues he’d once hoped to learn—leatherbound volumes in the boxy script of the Warlands to the far west. He’d only ever managed to learn to read a few of their strange, barking words. Now he’d never learn more.

  He moved against the onrushing flow of foot traffic, making his way over the smooth, worn stones of the Mainway. He was comfortable moving against the crowd. How many times had a mob of sensible men been running away from some foul monster while foolish Adoulla and his friends ran toward the thing? Irritated anew at the thought of the things his calling made him do, he pushed his big body grumpily up the downstream of people.

  Another pack of children chased each other through the crowd of walkers and pack animals. The little gang threatened to careen into Adoulla, but the group split before him like a wave, half the brats flowing to either side. He reminded himself that, if he didn’t do his duty, more little faces like these could soon be smeared with blood, their eyes aflame and their souls stolen. In his practiced way, he kept panic from rising at the thought of the threats that were out there, unseen.

  Adoulla passed men from Rughal-ba, with their neatly trimmed goatees and tight-fitting turbans. He saw Red River and Blue River Soo. He heard the false promises of a hundred hawkers, the single-stringed fiddle of a roving musician, the argument a feral-eyed, twitching man was having with himself. Unlike most sons of Dead Donkey Lane, Adoulla had seen many towns. Those folk he’d grown up around would leave the city only a handful of times in their lives—even going to another quarter was an occasion for some of them. Adoulla, on the other hand, had seen the villages of the Soo Republic with their low, bleached-clay houses of hidden luxury. He had seen the strange mountain-hole homes of the far north, where rain froze. He’d been to the edge of Rughal-ba, where, instead of being a character from lewd shadow-puppet plays, the ghul hunter was respected by powerful men as an earthly agent of God, and was considered a slave of the Rughali High Sultaan—if a rich and powerful slave.