Throne of the Crescent Moon

by Saladin Ahmed

  Adoulla followed through another long hall, dashing past a pack of skirmishing men in livery. The combatants looked up at him in surprise but were too busy trying to kill each other to bother with trying to kill him. He caught a glimpse of the Prince darting through a set of great ornate doors, thrown open. He followed.

  He stepped into a huge room lit by perpetually burning magical lamps. In the uncanny glow of the flames he could see, lining the left and right walls, dozens of great cases of gold-lined glass. Each of them held a huge turban. The Hall of the Heavenly Defenders! The legendary symbolic resting place of the dead Khalifs, each of which was represented by a resplendent turban. Purple silversilk, peacock feathers, pearls the size of a child’s fist. Adoulla forced himself not to gawk and strode on.

  Another grand room near as big as a city block. The ceiling was worked with pearl, platinum, and gold. Brilliant tapestries depicting the Ministering Angels hung from the walls. Adoulla huffed his way past columns of rose marble, cunningly carved so that the waves and veins spelled out the Names of God. These Khalifs really do believe they are God’s Regents-in-the-World! Everywhere this palace calls out His Names, Adoulla thought, yet His work is nowhere to be found.

  From somewhere in the palace men were now shouting, and a loud bell was clanging an alarm. Much closer by, he heard the clash of weapons. Adoulla rounded a corner just in time to see Pharaad Az Hammaz exchange a brief series of sword strokes with two men who were guarding a small bronze door.

  His broad-bladed saber feinted and parried like a masterfully made rapier. It glowed golden as it stabbed at the guardsmen. Weapon magic. The kind that cost a fortune. Again Adoulla marveled at the depth of Pharaad Az Hammaz’s coin purse. The guards were dead within seconds, and the Prince flung open the door. Adoulla followed him in.

  The room was smaller and daintier than most of those he’d seen in the palace, as if in reflection of its occupant: a frail-looking boy of nine years, wearing optical glasses and gemthread robes that must have cost as much as Adoulla’s townhouse. He looked up and blinked as they entered.

  The boy had the same face-shape as the Khalif. The Heir. Little Sammari akh-Jabbari akh-Khaddari sat cross-legged on a cushion in the center of the room, a huge illuminated book open before him. His mild expression was replaced with shock as he seemed to suddenly notice the mad racket filling the palace. Adoulla guessed that there had been a silencing spell cast on the brass door. So much money and magic wasted on sheltering these fools from unpleasantness.

  “You— You are— You are him,” the boy stammered with a bit more grace than his father had. “The Falcon Prince!”

  “INDEED I AM, O TYRANT-IN-TRAINING!” the Prince boomed, advancing with his sword still drawn on the timid-seeming boy, who was practically bowled over by the sound. “I am the Falcon Prince, and my wrath is terrible! I have come to—”

  “You are my hero,” the boy said quietly, brushing a strand of long black hair from his face.

  “I warn, you, spawn of a—eh?” Pharaad Az Hammaz blinked, his bombast dropping away. It was the first time Adoulla had seen the thief look unsure of himself. “What did you say?”

  The boy looked ashamed that he had spoken, but he repeated himself. “I said ‘you are my hero.’” The Heir looked at Adoulla, but only seemed to half-see him. An alarm bell clanged again.

  It was quite a thing, Adoulla thought, to see the loudmouthed Falcon Prince speechless. It only lasted for a moment, though. The Prince turned and closed the brass door behind them, cutting off the sounds of chaos. With an effortless strength he dragged a heavy ebonwood couch over to bar the door.

  “Hero?” The Prince asked at last.

  “Yes!” the Heir said, closing his book and growing more excited. The Thousand Tales of the Pirate Pasha, Adoulla noted. Probably the most expensive edition of the cheap, tawdry book that had ever been scribed. The Heir stood up. “Yes! A hero like those in the books! Feeding the poor. Vanquishing villains with a sword and a smile. My advisors say there are no such men, but I know better. Almighty God willing, someday I will do the same!”

  Adoulla thought that, if the Prince had been a pious man, he would have dropped to his knees right there and thanked Beneficent God for this bit of kind fate.

  As it was, the master thief smiled from ear to ear and clapped a big hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Well! It would appear my spies don’t know everything about what goes on in the palace after all. You are certainly a better fruit than the rotten tree you fell from, boy. Not nearly the insufferable, power mad little shit I expected you to be.”

  The Heir smiled the smile of a child that had never been allowed to be naughty. “You don’t call me Young Defender! I like that. Do you know that even my playmates called me that when I was a little child?”

  “When you were a little child?” Adoulla sputtered. “You are—”

  The Prince cut him off. “Well, you don’t call me Pretender or Madman. We shall get on splendidly, boy!”

  The Heir’s glowing smile slipped. “But, uh, what is going on here, O Prince? Do you mean to kill me? Have you killed my father already?” To his credit, the boy did not sound frightened.

  Pharaad Az Hammaz gave the boy a long look. “I will not lie to you, child. I am here to seize the Throne of the Crescent Moon. It holds grand magics locked within its marble, magics with which I can help the good people of Dhamsawaat. And I mean to seize the palace, too. There are sick people who need the medicines kept here. Starving people that might feast on the palace granaries.”

  The boy smiled sadly. “When I speak of such things to my tutors they say it is the will of Almighty God that some have and some have not. And that I should not admire you because you are not a prince at all, but a murderer and a bringer-of-terror.”

  Pharaad Az Hammaz took a deep breath, and then his voice took on a booming tenor again. “I am a murderer? And what of your father, who dares call himself ‘Defender,’ but has others do the fighting and bleeding and killing and dying for him? Beggars and street-widows starve to death while your father’s grainhouses are bursting, but that is the ‘will of God,’ eh? Cartmen and porters waste away from fevers that your father’s physicians could cure! But I am the violent one! The bringer of terror! I have felt both hunger and the sword, my young friend! I would rather die of the sword. It is kinder. Faster. I’ve killed men, yes, but with my own hands, looking them in the eye. Your father, though, is the weak and lazy sort of killer. The kind who pretends he is not a killer. Is that what you wish to become?”

  “No,” the boy said, strong and clear as one of the alarm-bells that was still ringing away outside the room. “But what of my father, O Prince? What of me?”

  “Your father has the blood of many men and women on his hands, Sammari akh-Jabbari akh-Khaddari. But if you aid me in this, I will let you and him go peacefully into exile, perhaps to—”

  “No,” the boy interrupted with an air of easy command that belied his bookish appearance. “If you want my help with this, O Prince, you must kill my father. I have sworn an oath before God that I would see him dead.”

  Adoulla watched the Prince gape at the boy and didn’t doubt that he was gaping also.

  “I…but.…Why…?” Pharaad Az Hammaz stammered.

  “You are wrong about my father’s laziness in killing, O Prince. Perhaps you have heard that my mother, God shelter her soul, died from a fever. She did not. I watched my father strangle her because he thought he had seen her make sugar-eyes at one of his aides. When I tried to stop him, he beat me. He said I would understand when I grew older. This was five years ago, before he became the Khalif. All I have come to understand in that time is that it is my sacred duty to see him slain.”

  Behind them, the couch blocking the door creaked and began to split as someone tried to force their way in. The familiar bloodlust lit Pharaad Az Hammaz’s eyes. His saber was at the ready.

  This boy’s storybook notions will fly out the window if he sees the Prince slaughter his protec
tors before his eyes. Adoulla put up a hand to the Prince. “Please. There is another way here—if, Young Defender, you will follow my lead.” The Prince considered him and seemed to understand. The Heir said nothing.

  The door behind them burst open in a shower of ebonwood splinters, and three armed guardsmen flew into the room.

  “Young Defender!” the foremost of them shouted, his body starting to bow before his mind recalled the circumstances. “Who are these men? Is that…? Almighty God, stand back, Young Defender! We’ll save you from this thug!”

  Adoulla stepped forward. “Are you men mad? If this were truly Pharaad Az Hammaz, do you think the Young Defender would still be alive? Would we be here chatting? We are agents of the Defender of Virtue, assigned to protect the Young Defender in a time like this, and disguised to sow confusion in the Defender’s enemies!”

  The man looked skeptical, but he and his men did not advance. “Who are you, old man? What is your name? Why have I never—?”

  The Heir’s voice took on a powerful tone of command. “You have never seen these men because you are a mere guardsman and not privy to the Defender of Virtue’s plans! Our father has assigned these two to protect me until the real thief has been found and killed! Half of your order has betrayed Us—indeed these two men tried to slay Us,” the Heir said, gesturing to the corpses of the two door-guards the Prince had dispatched. “Go, now, and do your duty to Us! Now!” Perhaps he is not so soft after all.

  “I…but.…” The guardsman said nothing more but waved his men on and trotted off in search of other enemies.

  When they were gone, the Heir looked down at the corpses and let his sadness show. “Ayyabi was a good man,” he said simply.

  “Listen, child, we must—” Adoulla began, but he may as well not have been there for all the attention the boy paid him.

  “Good man or not, my friend, he was your gaol-keeper,” said the Prince. “I know the life you live here. Under your father’s stifling wraps for nine years now, unable to befriend whom you wish. Unable to leave the palace without two days’ preparation. Forced to study things that couldn’t matter less to you. Do I call it true or not, boy? Think of the kind and carefree fates that could be yours if you were not entombed in the Crescent Moon Palace.”

  The man was a master lutist, playing on the heartstrings of a child. The idea-seed of the freedom that would come with giving up the throne had been planted in the boy’s head, and its fruit was already blossoming in the boy’s eyes. A thousand possibilities that he had thought impossibilities were arrayed before him. Adoulla could see it in the boy’s smile. Pharaad Az Hammaz didn’t lie. He simply laid out the truth, in brash and dramatic ways. Adoulla supposed it was what people wanted to hear.

  Perhaps he himself had been taken in a bit by it.

  “And how could I escape this, O Prince?” the Heir asked, still staring at the corpses.

  “Follow me to the throne room, boy, and I will show you.” As the three of them walked, Pharaad Az Hammaz explained about the simple ritual that would allow the Heir to pass mastery of the throne’s beneficent magics and rulership on to the thief. He said nothing of the death-magics the throne held, or of the blood-magic version of the spell.

  “But what about recognition from the other realms?” the boy asked. “Rughal-ba? The Soo Republic?”

  The Prince shrugged his large shoulders. “Let me worry about that. I have diplomats and clerks-of-law working for me as well as thieves and sell-swords.” He winked at the boy incongruously. “Believe me, the clerks-of-law are scarier than the thieves! So. What say you, Sammari?”

  “I’ll give you the throne, O Prince. If you swear before God that you will use its power as a hero ought, and if you will kill the Defender of Virtue for what he did to my mother.”

  “I swear it before Almighty God, who witnesses all oaths.” Pharaad Az Hammaz took the Heir’s small hand in his huge one. Adoulla followed as the thief guided the boy through a series of opulent rooms that Adoulla had no time to stop and gawk at. Twice they dashed past men fighting, but the Prince kept the Heir moving.

  And then they entered the throne room.

  It was empty of men, as big as any of the rooms Adoulla had yet seen, and as rich in decoration. Carved wood that glowed with alkhemists’ magic, puzzlecloth carpets woven from gold, perfumes and incenses wafting through the air in a dozen lovely scents. There were few pieces of furniture, however, save for the throne at the center of the room.

  The Throne of the Crescent Moon sat atop a small dais. It was a cold, glowing white, as spotless as Adoulla’s kaftan. The back of the throne was a ten-foot-tall slab of strange pearlescent stone, carved into a vague, delicate shape that might have been a crescent moon—or a hooded cobra.

  Pharaad Az Hammaz let out a low whistle. “At last,” he whispered.

  They approached the throne. They’d almost reached it when a knot of men stormed into the room from the opposite archway. The Khalif, his sumptuous silk robes disheveled, was accompanied by a half-dozen armed guardsmen and a black-robed man who could only be a court magus.

  For an instant they all stared at each other across the huge room.

  “Kill them!” the Khalif shouted. “They have abducted your Young Defender! Kill them!”

  Pharaad Az Hammaz’s saber was out of its scabbard and glowing golden, but the Heir jumped in front of him. “They have not abducted me, Defender of Virtue! The good Prince has shown me the magic of the throne—a way to grant him dominion over the palace. And vengeance for my mother!”

  The guardsmen halted, unsure what to do.

  “Good Prince?” the Khalif sputtered. “Your head has been turned by idiot tales of noble robbers!” He turned to his magus. “What is he talking about? Magic of the throne?”

  The cowled man shook his head. “Defender of Virtue, I do not—” Words died on the man’s lips as a jackal-shaped shadow shot at him from the doorway behind.

  Everyone in the room froze, hearing the hideous sounds of Mouw Awa savaging the magus. Before a single word of magic could pass the man’s lips, he had been reduced to a crimson-eyed corpse. In the stunned silence that followed, soft footsteps drew all eyes to the archway.

  Orshado. He was tall but reed thin, and his flesh was jaundiced. A patchy black beard covered his face, and his kaftan was the same cut and color as Adoulla’s, but soiled with waste and blood. In his hands he held a red silk sack.

  Adoulla suddenly recalled his nightmare from a week ago, before all of this horror had happened. The rivers of blood. His own kaftan stained with gore. It was said of the ghul of ghuls that his kaftan could never come clean. This, then, was the man that God had whispered of in the strange language of dreams. The foul man Adoulla was hunting. The man who had killed Miri’s niece and slaughtered the Banu Laith Badawi. Who had murdered Yehyeh and burned down Adoulla’s house and all of the precious memories it held.

  Adoulla heard the manjackal’s voice in his head as he had on that night. The fat one doth preen in his unstained raiment. He hath tasted only the first of this burning world’s ashes. He knoweth not the sweet fires of the Lake of Flame, which shall soon wash over all of this. As Mouw Awa’s voice echoed in Adoulla’s head, Orshado waved a bony arm in a dismissive arc that somehow took in palace, city, and God’s great earth all at once.

  Mouw Awa leapt upon the Khalif, its shadowy jaws snapping. As Adoulla heard the Defender of Virtue’s whimpering turn to screams, he was reminded that the murderous tyrant of his city was, after all, only a man. All of the Khalif’s pomp and power, and all of Adoulla’s grand hatred of him, were ripped away in an instant. Jabbari akh-Khaddari screamed again and was silent.

  Adoulla was paralyzed with shock and fear, and he saw that even Pharaad Az Hammaz was, too.

  Orshado withdrew a human head from the sack he held. In an unearthly voice, the head jabbered, “ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE. ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE.”

  All around Adoulla, the guardsmen’s eyes rolled back, t
heir skin shriveled, and their mouths echoed these words. As one they turned on Adoulla, the Prince, and the Heir.

  In that instant, Adoulla knew, they had become something more and less than men.

  Skin ghuls. Monsters made by twisting a living man’s soul inside out. Even amidst all of the shocks he had seen in the past week, this was a shock to Adoulla. He had only ever read about them—had thought the foul art of their raising was thankfully lost to the world. Neither spell nor sword could destroy a skin ghul. The old books said that tainted flesh would rejoin tainted flesh and corrupt bones would reknit with corrupt bones until the death of the skin ghuls’ maker drove the malign false life from their stolen bodies.

  Mouw Awa crouched over the dead, red-eyed Khalif, blood and something half-tangible dripping from its jaws. Behind Adoulla, the Heir was whimpering.

  The skin ghuls began to shamble toward Adoulla. Beside him, the Heir and the Falcon Prince still stood frozen with fear.

  So this is how it ends. His befuddled old mind fumbled for thoughts. Tea and poetry. His friends and his city.

  Miri, whom he wished to Almighty God he had wed.

  No. No, it cannot end here. I will not let it.

  Skin ghuls could not be slain, but they could be hindered. He could buy the Prince time to take the throne, or kill Orshado, or get the Heir to safety, or…something.

  He dashed forward. His satchel had held little when he’d saved it from his burning townhouse. But it held what he needed now. He withdrew a small tortoise shell and shook it above his head, the three sapphires sealed inside making a rattling sound.

  “Beneficent God is the Last Breath in our Lungs!” he shouted. It was an old invocation, one that would raise a wall that no ghul could cross. But it would do little against the even older magics of the Dead Gods. He would be at the jackal-thing’s mercy.

  A sheet of iridescent light rose up before him just as the ghuls neared him. Their blows did not touch him, though with each of their strikes the wall-of-light shimmered. Behind him, he heard the Prince finally snap out of his fear trance and trot forward.