Throne of the Crescent Moon

by Saladin Ahmed

  Dawoud came to stand between his wife and Raseed. “These things don’t happen in the blink of an eye, boy. The cipher-spell takes as long to work as a careful spell-scrivener’s hand. We’ll have whatever answers this scroll may hold, but we’ll have to wait until morning to do so.”

  “We have some time for the luxury of rest, then,” the Doctor said.

  Raseed tried to speak in further protest, to insist that they had no such luxury, but Litaz cut him off with an upraised hand. “Indeed, and furthermore,” she continued, flashing an annoyed glance in Raseed’s direction, “we have need of rest.”

  “Zamia Banu Laith Badawi certainly does, whether she knows it or not.” Dawoud added. He looked at Zamia, and Raseed was impressed to see how little she seemed to still fear Dawoud—or at least how little she now showed.

  Litaz went on. “And we shall not just rest, but celebrate! For sunset marks the Feast of Providence.”

  The magus arched a white eyebrow. “So it does! You know, I had almost forgotten.”

  “As had I,” the Doctor admitted.

  Litaz rested a hand on her husband’s shoulder but spoke to the group. “We must never forget our feasts. Tonight is dedicated to thanksgiving for the bounty that God provides us. On such a day it is our duty to celebrate life through food and drink. The Heavenly Chapters say ‘O believer, thou shalt smile for God’s Providence at festival and at funeral.’” The alkhemist turned to him. “Am I wrong, Raseed?”

  He bowed his head. “An obscure verse, Auntie, but…but you are not wrong.”

  Dawoud and Litaz went into their workshop, the magus carrying Miri Almoussa’s scroll, the alkhemist carrying Yaseer’s.

  Minutes later they emerged. Then Raseed heard the unmistakable sound of a pen on paper begin to scratch away in the workshop, though there was no longer anyone in there.

  “The cipher-spell has been set to work,” Dawoud announced. “Now, Almighty God knows, it is well past time to eat!”

  Somewhere in the past few days, Litaz had managed to request the feast foods ahead of time. An old man and his son arrived, whisking in with half a dozen copper-covered dishes from a high-priced hire-kitchen off of Angels’ Square before whisking back out. They all sat down, and Raseed’s stomach growled. A white block of creamed cheese glowed with magenta turnip slices. Steam wafted from risebread with roasted chickpeas. Sour-and-sweet pickles, mutton cubes with peppers and nuts, garlicky greens, fruit, and salty almond pudding.

  And when did you come to have such gluttonous eyes? a reprimanding voice within him asked.

  At Litaz’s request, Raseed said a simple prayer over the food. Then they ate.

  Raseed pushed his teacup away, and declined each plate passed to him. He sipped his water, and took a few bits of turnip and bread. As happened so often, the Doctor’s loud voice boomed in on his thoughts.

  “Well!” said the Doctor, standing up a bit stumblingly as he spoke. He is getting drunk, Raseed worried. “Well!” the Doctor repeated, “I have learned, over the years, to trust my soul’s senses. I’d guess I’m not the only one who believes that this blood-storm that’s been gathering about us will soon thunder down. But I thank you, All Provident God, for giving me this meal with beloved friends beforehand.” The Doctor rubbed his big hands together and looked out on the array of plates before him. “Name of God,” he half-shouted. “Litaz, you know how to set a table!”

  Zamia spoke softly, brushing her hair from her eyes. “The Doctor speaks truth, Auntie. You and your husband’s hospitality is generous enough to make a Badawi jealous!”

  Dawoud chuckled gently. “Heh. It doesn’t come cheaply, let me tell you. Now you see why I married a rich Blue River girl!”

  The alkhemist looked worried at this. Raseed could not say why, and truly it was none of his affair.

  The old people ate and drank and talked. They regaled Zamia with tales, which Raseed had already heard more than once, of the foes they had vanquished over the years. Of the Invisible Robbers and the Golden Serpent, of the Four-Faced Man and a dozen minor magi.

  Raseed only half-listened, sipping his water, until he heard Zamia speak.

  “The Lady of Thorns! My father told me of her famous crimes! It was said that her father was a wicked djenn.”

  The Doctor snorted scornfully as he poured himself more wine. “The uninformed always say that when they meet someone who can do things that they think impossible. ‘The blood of the djenn!’ Idiocy! The Thousand and One can bear no children, any more than a man can give a child to a bear!”

  Dawoud reached rudely across the table and poked the Doctor in the gut. “Do you mean to tell me, you old fart, that I have been wrong all these years? That your father was not a bear?”

  The Doctor laughed. “Well, at least a bear is a noble animal! At least my father never begat a child upon a damned-by-God goat.” The Doctor reached over and pulled on the magus’ hennaed goatee and the old men laughed tipsily.

  They finished with the dishes, and the table fell quiet for some time. After a while the Doctor let out a loud breath. “Yes, well, all of this talk has made me hungry for sweets.” Dawoud brought his wife’s cup, then Adoulla’s, then his own, to the lip of the large pitcher of palm wine, tipping the golden liquid into each glass carefully.

  Zamia declined a second cup, Raseed was pleased to see. She took only one small morsel when Litaz passed around a plate with varied teacakes and preserved fruit.

  Yet this was not out of caution. Raseed saw that, if Zamia seemed to be less afraid of Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed, she’d apparently quickly grown most warm and at her ease around his wife. Litaz explained to the tribeswoman, “The rug is from my husband’s part of the Republic. Where I come from, we didn’t eat on rugs—we sat in tall chairs—at a waist-high table. It’s taken me many years to get used to the squatting. When I first—”

  The alkhemist was interrupted by the Doctor’s snickering. He was entertaining himself and the magus with his juvenile antics. On his plate, he’d built a face from teacakes of various shapes. He commenced to perform a little show in which the face’s spice cookie “lips” begged, in a high-pitched puppet-show voice, “No, Doctor! Pleeease don’t eeeat me! In the Name of Merciful God, I beg of you don’t eeeat meee!”

  “But in the Name of Beneficent God,” the Doctor said to the teacake in his own voice, “I was made to devour you, little cakes, and my fate cannot be changed!” Litaz and Dawoud guffawed.

  They are worse than children sometimes, Raseed thought. He was pleased to note that Zamia seemed unamused. She is serious about life, as a young woman should be. Chosen by God’s own Angels.

  But then, as she continued to watch Adoulla’s bizarre little show, Raseed saw a smile creep across the tribeswoman’s full lips. Then a small, modest giggle.

  Raseed found that he was not disappointed. He found, in fact, to his shame, that he could not look away from that smile. He found that Zamia’s little laugh cut through him like a sword poisoned with pure happiness. He tried to force his disciplined eyes to look away, but he could not. Zamia turned and looked directly at him. As her green-eyed gaze met his, and she saw him staring at her, a look of pure terror replaced the smile on her face.

  She covered her mouth with her hand and bowed her head again. He followed suit, casting his eyes to the neatly swept stone floor. You were staring at her! You were staring at her, and you’ve shamed her. Have you no shame? Do you serve God or the Traitorous Angel?

  He needed to be alone with his meditations—or as alone as he could be in this crowded house. He finished his bit of food and water, then begged to be excused.

  “Go on, then,” the Doctor said. “I’ll be going to sleep soon myself.”

  “Perhaps at this very table, big nose down in the teacakes, if precedent is any indication,” Dawoud said with a wicked smile.

  The Doctor harrumphed, and the two old men started going at each other again. Raseed stood and headed down to find a quiet cellar corner.

  “Don’
t stay up all night praying and protecting, you hear me, boy?” the Doctor called after him. “You take a turn at watch, but get some sleep, too. On a hunt this dangerous, if you don’t stay alert you end up dead. Even you.”

  Raseed made ablutions and meditated until he had pushed fear and the soft sound of Zamia’s laughter out of his thoughts. He’d thought he was too fired with duty to sleep, but sleep came.

  The next thing he knew, Dawoud was waking him to take the last two hours of watch. As thin slivers of pink and orange light began to be visible through the window, he heard the strange magical pen-scratching sound of the cipher-spell at work, just as he’d heard it when going to sleep.

  An hour later, as he sat on a stool by the front door, a loud voice suddenly boomed through the shop. Raseed leapt up in shock, his sword in his hand.

  THE BROKEN WORDS ARE NOW MADE WHOLE! THEIR TRUTH FOR EVERY EYE AND SOUL!

  It was the voice of Yaseer the spell-seller, coming from the workshop. Raseed cursed his own incompetence. How could the man have entered the house without Raseed seeing him?

  But when he shot into the workshop, ready to kill if need be, there was no fat spell-seller there. The Doctor and Dawoud both followed him in, looking sleepy-eyed and unalarmed.

  “Doctor, I heard an intruder’s voice!”

  The Doctor looked at him sleepily, as if wondering who Raseed was.

  “There’s no intruder, Raseed,” Litaz told him as she, too, entered the workshop, Zamia trailing behind her. The alkhemist wore her houserobe, but Zamia was already clad in her Badawi camel-calf suede. “That’s just Yaseer’s signature. A reminder, when the spell has done its work, of the man who crafted it.”

  Raseed kept his eyes from meeting Zamia’s. He looked to the workshop table and saw that the scroll the Doctor had brought from Miri Almoussa’s was now glowing faintly. Beside it, atop a pile of what looked like burnt parchment, was the scroll case Litaz had been carrying.

  Dawoud picked up the intact scroll and unfurled it, whistling an impressed whistle. “That Yaseer may be a sack of unprincipled scum, but he does good work, there is no denying. The scroll has been deciphered.”

  “Now let us see if it’s got anything worth telling us,” the Doctor said.

  They all settled into seats as Dawoud read aloud.

  “No one knows how the Throne of the Crescent Moon was made. And few know that it was once called the Cobra Throne. Its great curved-moon back, which was once carved in the shape of the Cobra God’s spread hood, takes no mark or burn. The Kemeti Books of Brass, lost to us now, claimed that the Faroes, called also the Cobra Kings of Kem, sat upon it for their coronations, just as the Khalifs would come to do. But though the Khalifs have sat on it in coronation for centuries, there are those who say they know not its true power. That the throne was ensorcelled with unseen death-diagrams; bewitched by the Dead Gods, who loved treachery. That this power could be called only by spilling the blood of a ruler’s eldest heir upon it on the shortest day of the year. The Books of Brass claimed that he who managed to drink blood so spilled would be granted command of the most terrible death magics the world has ever known—master of the captive souls of untold numbers of long-dead slaves. The dark arts of the Cobra Kings, scoured from the world by God, would return.”

  “It ends there.” The magus rolled the scroll and set it down.

  The Doctor buried his face in his hands and let out a low groan. “Litaz, my dear, tell me, in the Name of Almighty God, who is Our Only Refuge, that you have some good, strong cardamom tea.”

  A quarter hour later, they all sat planning in the greeting room, the elders drinking tea and smoking, the smell of apple tobacco wafting up from a water pipe.

  “I do not want to do this,” the Doctor said. “We had a fine feast last night, and to open the morning with this dark talk…. But, I’ve been beaten and bruised, and my home lies burnt and ruined. I have lost my one true beloved and the promise of a peaceful life. I won’t lose my whole city as well. I won’t.”

  He gestured with the pipe’s long mouthpiece at Dawoud. “But perhaps it won’t even come to that,” he said, sounding to Raseed as if he were trying to convince himself. “Do you think this Orshado is even capable of this? To break into the palace, let alone to wrest control of it from the watchmen and murder the Khalif’s son? Even to one such as I, who has seen his share of impossibilities, these seem near-impossible tasks. He would need allies within the palace, a dozen age-old incantations to get past its ward-spells—not to mention that there must be a thousand men guarding the Khalif.” The Doctor passed the pipe’s mouthpiece to Litaz.

  Dawoud looked at the Doctor. “You don’t understand, brother-of-mine. You didn’t feel this ghul of ghuls. His cruelty. His power. How much these enable him to do when the Traitorous Angel works through him.”

  “But even with war spells and death-diagrams,” Litaz broke in, exhaling smoke, “a throne is but a symbol. Without an army, without watchmen, his bloody design will only get him an angry mob storming the palace.”

  “No,” the Doctor said, and Raseed saw the reluctant resolve rise in his eyes. “No, my dear, your husband is right. It’s not that simple. These are not dinar-grade magics we are dealing with here—no spells to rob houses or to make a murder look like an accident. These are the sorts of death spells the old books speak of—cruel magics through which every child, woman, and man in Dhamsawaat—aye, even the birds and the beasts—would wake one day to find themselves drowning on air, their lungs bursting like rotted fruit. The sorts of war spells that would allow one man to slay a horde, that would make an attacking army’s blood turn to boiling venom, that would turn a whole mob’s intestines into cobras. But it is even more than that. Such magics work as a…a focus. A man who knows how to use that magic could kill thousands in the space of a day. And then he would cull the foul power from those unwilling sacrifices to kill more men.”

  Litaz’s expression was one of pure horror, and Raseed had no doubt that his own face wore the same look. “Madness,” she said at last. “Madness! Even if—God forbid it—even if he murdered all of Dhamsawaat, every other realm would rise against him. The Soo would send our mercenary legions, the Heavenly Army of Rughal-ba would—”

  The Doctor’s eyes were cold as stone now. The water pipe’s flaming coal fizzled and died. “If he seizes the throne, he will not have to worry about these things. He will become the Traitorous Angel’s Regent-in-the-World. Armies will not be able to stop him.”

  “But why?” Zamia asked. “Why would any man—even a cruel man—do these things? What could he possibly gain?”

  “Power,” the Doctor answered without hesitation. “The same thing that a man gains when he murders one of his fellow men. The same thing that a ruler gains when he sends his armies to kill and die. Power and the promise of a name that will live forever. What the Traitorous Angel offers his servants is no different. Though this man’s ambition is as a sea next to the puddles and ponds of earthly killers.”

  Raseed spoke quietly “Praise be to God that the Khalifs of Abassen have been secure enough in their majesty that they have never used these foul powers.”

  The Doctor farted loudly. “Oh! Pardon me! But perhaps my body responded of its own accord to your foolish suggestion.” He wagged a finger at Raseed. “Do you really believe, boy, that the Khalifs have never used this power because they have righteously chosen not to? No. Men do not pass up power, least of all Khalifs. No doubt the powers of the throne were never known to them. The Court magi have always been puffed-up thugs, confident in the simple brute force of their own magery. They have never been great readers or researchers. The coronation likely lives on as an ignorant inheritance, a reason for royal pomp and ostentation in which power is nominally passed from one generation to the next. But my guess is—and for this I do praise All-Merciful God—my guess is that this scroll hasn’t been read in hundreds of years.”

  Litaz kneaded her forehead with a knuckle. “Until now,” she said. “Unti
l now, when it has been read not only by a half-cracked would-be usurper but by a powerful servant of the Traitorous Angel—more than that, a man who carries a true shard of the Traitorous Angel within his soul.”

  Zamia took a sip of tea. “But if this scroll’s knowledge has been so secret, how is it this Orshado knows of it?”

  Raseed was impressed to see a look of calm enemy-assessment rather than fear on her face.

  “That one has ways of learning things,” the Doctor said, and his expression was as close to fear as Raseed had ever seen. “Ways that no man who values his soul can even fathom. The Traitorous Angel grants powers that God will not. He demands the sort of thing he has always demanded. Fear. The entrails of innocent old women. Pain. The eyelids of children. No books or clumsy rumors for the servants of the Traitorous Angel.”

  Dawoud spoke with a hollow voice. “Orshado. When I touched that blood.…I swear that none of you know the depths of the cruelty we face. With this one in command of such magics, the whole world will drown in blood within a week.”

  “Six days thine to make man’s world, six days mine to unmake it,” Raseed recited. “The Traitorous Angel’s taunt to God upon his expulsion.” He had always hoped to be part of a battle that mattered this much. But he found now, to his shame, that he wished otherwise.

  “We must stop him, then,” Litaz said matter of factly. “For reasons heavenly and earthly both. The new Khalif is a fool and a murderer, but his son…it was the boy’s idea to build those new poorhouses last year on the other side of Archer’s Yard. To put a hospice house there for the street people. Small gestures but more than his father makes. It is said he is a sweet-tempered boy, full of love for the common folk.”

  The Doctor snorted “Give him another decade of life in the palace, and that will change! I can’t claim to be pleased with the notion of rushing to rescue the Khalif or his little shit of a son.”