Throne of the Crescent Moon

by Saladin Ahmed

  Again Adoulla heard Mouw Awa’s words in his mind. The flippant one hath told thee soothing stories of medicant magics? Ha! His quest is doomed! The Cobra God doth not love life and kindness!

  Then the creature was upon him, and Adoulla felt his soul being slowly torn from his body.

  Chapter 19

  ALL WAS CHAOS. Everywhere Litaz heard the thunder of boots and the clanging of weapons. Horns and bells blasted alarms, and from somewhere, the cry of “To arms, to arms!” rang out. Guardsmen hacked at one another with swords as those loyal to the Prince revealed themselves. Many gurgled from slit throats and died before they even realized what their turncoat fellows were doing.

  Adoulla, Pharaad Az Hammaz, and the Khalif had been separated from them by extraordinary false walls that no amount of bashing could break. The walls had even blocked her scrying solutions. They were wandering rooms at random now, looking for their friend, but that was their only choice.

  “We’ve got to find Adoulla!” she shouted to her husband as they followed Raseed down a hallway, blessedly empty.

  Dawoud gave only a curt nod in response. His teeth were gritted in that way that told her he was holding some unbearable energy at bay within himself, a spell that would rot him from within until he released it upon some unfortunate enemy.

  They dashed into a roofless room of blue marble. The sun stood high in the sky above them, a great golden ball of light. Raseed led the way, his sword out and his blue silks blending with the walls in a way that made him nearly invisible.

  They were in the middle of the blue room when two groups of a dozen men—half wearing the falcon livery and half apparently loyal guardsmen—charged in from opposite doorways. They shouted, brandished weapons, and flew at one another.

  And Litaz and her companions stood between them.

  She lifted her spraying-dagger, letting her thumb float over the several buttons concealed in its handle. Raseed took a step toward the tribeswoman and assumed a defensive stance.

  Then there was a strange shift in the energy of the air, a dazzling golden light, and both groups of men stopped charging. A loud growl rent the air beside her.

  And suddenly Zamia Banu Laith Badawi stood beside her in the lion-shape, her golden coat glowing. A more-than-animal fury lit those emerald eyes, and her tail switched in the air. And the girl had been so worried that she’d be unable to take the shape!

  The Prince’s men whispered sharply among themselves, then the whole knot of them turned about and ran. Half of the Khalif’s men did the same, but six idiots with spears and swords stepped forward.

  The lioness—Zamia—slashed at two of them with lightning quick claws, and they fell bleeding. A spearman tried to stab her but found that his weapon couldn’t pierce that golden hide. Zamia crushed the man’s arms in her fanged maw and whipped him away like a doll.

  His companions fled just as Raseed reached them, ready to offer the lioness aid she didn’t need.

  “I Praise Almighty God and give thanks to his Ministering Angels!” Zamia said when their group was alone again. Litaz didn’t know if she’d ever heard more sincere thanks. “All of your distillations and diagrams will not find the Doctor, Auntie. But I have scented the Doctor already. He’s this way.”

  Despite her training and experience, Litaz found it a bit disconcerting to watch a lion face speak these words and lope off. And where have her clothes gone? the scholar in her wondered. But there was little to do but follow the lion-girl, who took the lead, following some scent that no human could find and padding swiftly past Raseed. The dervish’s gaze followed Zamia for a long moment before he, too, followed. The holy man who loved a lioness—it would make a good shadow-puppet show if—

  A man lunged at her from a wall-niche.

  One of the Khalif’s loyalists, but he’d apparently lost his weapon. Clearly, he saw her as an easy target. Before she could get her dagger up, the man punched her in the face. Stars of red light and burning tears filled her eyes, and blood flowed from her nose. She was a woman. God had not made her body for this.

  But she had been making herself do this for years. She backed up a few steps and caught the man in the face with a spray of burning pepper-powder. He rubbed at his eyes, screaming. It was an easy enough thing to stab him in the gut after that.

  Beside her, Raseed used his forked blade to wrest another guardsman’s sword away. The dervish’s sword slashed again and cut the man down. A third guardsman screamed and ran, ablaze in magical flames conjured by her husband. Then they were once again alone. Three lay at Raseed’s feet, Khalif’s men and Falcon Prince’s alike. The dervish would kill anyone armed and foolish enough to look threatening, she knew. And she was ashamed to be pleased by it. Around a corner up ahead she heard Zamia growl at them to hurry.

  They came to another open room—a vast courtyard lush with small steaming pools and potted plants and trees that would have been more at home in the jungles of the Republic. There was mighty water magic at work here, of that there could be no doubt. And the place was alive with animal sounds.

  “The Green of Beasts,” her husband’s wheezing voice declared. “The Khalif’s private garden menagerie—I’ve heard tell of this place.”

  “SQUAAWK! Even the Angels sing the praises of the Defender of Virtue! SQUAAWK!” A gray and green talking-bird, its voice magically altered into the most human Litaz had ever heard, flew to a higher tree branch in alarm as yet more men burst through the foliage, overturning palms and pink poisonflower bushes.

  A squat, square-shaped man in an embellished livery stood amidst six well-armed guardsmen. “Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed!” the man yelled, brandishing his steel mace, which was already black with blood. Roun Hedaad. It had been years since she had helped save his life, but his was not a face to forget.

  The compact man’s furrowed brow made the deep grooves in his face seem even deeper. “And I see Lady Litaz, Daughter-of-Likami. So you two are with this lot of traitors? I owe you both my life, but it would seem you have arranged things so that I must kill you and pay for my ungratefulness in the Lake of Flame—for I cannot allow you to pass here.”

  Two monkeys scrambled past, chattering angrily. Dawoud stepped past the dervish and the tribeswoman, showing his empty hands and eyeing the guardsmen’s crossbows warily. He spoke in a strained voice, an indication that he was still holding magical energies at readiness within him.

  “Captain Hedaad, we are no traitors. We are here in the hopes that—”

  Dawoud’s explanation was drowned out by the sudden moaning of a half-dozen mouths. All around Roun Hedaad, his men shuddered strangely, their skins shriveling up and their eyes simultaneously rolling back until only whites showed.

  In unison, each of those now-monstrous mouths chanted “ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE. ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE,” as if reciting after some unseen tutor. Then, as one, they turned on their captain.

  These were not mere turncoats, and this was not Pharaad Az Hammaz’s doing. That much she knew at once. There was something in the air here that was unmistakably related to the tainted blood she’d touched in her workshop days before. But beyond that she knew not what she was watching now.

  “Skin ghuls,” her husband whispered in awe.

  Skin ghuls. But they are just a legend. If she was not quite so old as Dawoud or Adoulla, she still had spent more than a score of years fighting foul magics. But nothing in her training had quite prepared her for this. She had seen things and done things that ordinary folk considered the stuff of stories. Now Litaz knew how those people felt when they saw her work.

  Despite his age and his broad bulk, Roun Hedaad moved cat-quick, dodging the skin ghuls’ sword-swings. He lashed out with his mace, caving in one of the things’ skulls. But that barely seemed to slow it.

  The dervish and the lioness shook off their shock at the same time and shot forward. Raseed leapt, his sword whistling out in a slanted arc and slicing clean through the neck of the closest skin ghul. Its head fell t
o the floor and its body stumbled a step before collapsing. Then the head began to hiss, and the sprawled body began grasping around blindly in search of it. Raseed, his tilted eyes wide with shock, kicked the gibbering head away like one of the wooden balls Soo children played with.

  Zamia had already pounced onto one of the things, and the silver flash of her claws was too swift for the eye to follow. She leapt away and on to her next target, leaving a bloody mass of mangled body in her wake.

  But already the skin ghul’s shredded flesh was, before Litaz’s astonished eyes, weaving itself back together. By the time the girl had disemboweled another foe, her first victim stood again, not a mark marring its body.

  Groaning, one of the things shambled toward Litaz and her husband, still brandishing the sword it had wielded as a natural man. As it splashed through one of the larger pools dotting the room, a green-brown blur leapt up and attacked it. A crocodile, the most fearsome animal of her homeland. The thing was tiny—either young or magically stunted in growth—but even a half-sized crocodile was fearsome. With three snaps of its jaws it bit the skin ghul in half. But as the ghul reassembled itself, one of its arms clawing its way out of the crocodile’s mouth, the leathery beast dashed away in primal fear.

  Zamia darted back and forth, harrying the monsters and dodging their fists and blades. Raseed’s sword sliced through a skin ghul’s wrist, severing its hand. Even as it hit the ground, though, the hand began to walk on its fingers back toward its body, looking like some sort of hideous spider. The dervish was back-to-back with Roun Hedaad now, and both men were bleeding. Both clearly wondering how to kill a foe that couldn’t die.

  From the doorway leading back to the blue room, there was groaning and hissing. More of the things were stumbling in. Almighty God help us.

  “This isn’t working. You have to do something,” she said to her husband. She felt his long-fingered hand on the small of her back and some part of her was less afraid.

  Then she heard him mumbling sonorously in that magical nonlanguage that she’d never come any closer to understanding in their thirty years together. He was preparing to release the energies he’d been holding at bay.

  “All of you, get behind Dawoud!” she screamed at her companions.

  Raseed and Zamia obeyed. But she saw sadly that Roun Hedaad could not—he lay dead, half his head cleaved off. Two of the skin ghuls were tearing at the dead captain’s chest, trying to get at his heart. Trying to feed.

  She stepped behind her husband, whose chanting had grown unnaturally loud. His sweet, gravelly voice never sounded so strong as when he spoke a spell, she thought. It was in the instant that a spell left his lips that he seemed most a man to her.

  He fell silent and pointed his palms at the advancing horde of monsters—there were near a dozen of them in the Green of Beasts now.

  A great blast of light—a glowing, golden beam as bright as the midday sun above them—shot forth from her husband’s hands and slammed unerringly into the skin ghuls. She’d once seen that beam reduce a standing man to ashes. And for a moment, as the beam bowled over the whole pack of creatures, Litaz dared to hope her husband’s magic had prevailed. Every single one of the skin ghuls lay still, smoke rising from their bodies.

  She heard Dawoud draw in an exhausted, rattling breath, watched two new wrinkles suddenly seam his face.

  Then she saw movement among the skin ghuls’ bodies. Her heart dropped. The creatures had simply been slowed—already, they were starting to scrabble back to their feet.

  “What now?” Dawoud asked, panting such that she thought he might die.

  Only ten years ago, he’d have been standing tall after casting that spell, she worried.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We can’t fight these things, though. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Dawoud’s spell bought them enough time to race through a great archway, out of the Green of Beasts and into a roofed room—a small stone antechamber.

  Raseed and Zamia followed, but the dervish made an annoyed noise. “Auntie! Retreat is not the way of the Order—”

  “Nor of the Badawi,” Zamia’s half-lion voice broke in.

  Through the archway she saw the skin ghuls gather themselves into a mockery of a guard-squad and march slowly toward them. They had no time for this.

  “Stupid children!” Dawoud bit off between breaths, echoing her thoughts. “Those are skin ghuls! Lion-claws, spells and solutions, forked swords—they are all of them useless against those monsters, if the old books are to be believed. Only Adoulla would know how to kill these things. And if we can’t—”

  He stopped speaking as a blood-curdling scream rent the air—a scream Litaz recognized. It was coming from the next room. Adoulla! Hold on, old friend, we’re coming! At the very least, we’ll all die together!

  Zamia and her companions stood in a small antechamber off of the Green of Beasts.

  “Only Adoulla would know how to kill these things.” Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed said. “And if we can’t—”

  Zamia heard a familiar voice scream from the next room. The Doctor!

  With lion-speed she flew forward into a great columned chamber, Raseed moving beside her. She was still weak from her earlier injuries, and holding onto the shape took every bit of strength she could muster.

  The room was a riotous mix of scents and sights. The Falcon Prince and a boy sitting on a throne, shouting. Men’s corpses. A wall of light. More of those gibbering monsters. A gaunt, black-bearded man who smelled of unnatural filth.

  Zamia shut it all out and focused on what had brought her here—Mouw Awa the manjackal, hunched over the body of the Doctor. She pictured her band’s bodies, and drew new strength from her rage.

  She shot past Raseed, never taking her eyes off of Mouw Awa. “This one is mine!” she growled.

  She slammed into the shadow-creature, raking out with her claws and knocking the thing yards away from the Doctor. Raseed turned to face some new threat and was lost to her sight.

  The manjackal’s eerie voice filled her head. The Kitten! No! She hath been slain by Mouw Awa! The savage little lion-child hath been slain! Mouw Awa’s shadowy shape backed away as Zamia approached.

  Zamia snarled. “Not quite. You are afraid, creature? Good!” She felt bold, as a Badawi tribeswoman ought to. It felt as if her father were speaking through her. She tensed herself to strike.

  She leapt, but Mouw Awa moved too quickly. It scrabbled back, and her claws cleaved only air. The monster snapped at her once, twice. But she was ready for its every desperate strike. Mouw Awa was fighting fearfully. The thing was truly part jackal—cruel to a helpless foe, but cowardly when facing one who could kill it.

  She slashed out again with her claws and made deep gouges in the shadow-flesh. Mouw Awa howled in pain.

  No! She hath hurt Mouw Awa!

  The creature lunged and missed again. Her counter-strike only grazed it.

  They circled each other, each searching for an opening. It tried to rattle her with that mad mouthless voice.

  Dost thou remember the pain? The sickness when Mouw Awa’s fangs sank into thy soul? Yes! Thou dost recall it.

  She paid little attention to the words in her head. Her vengeance was at hand.

  Mouw Awa feinted, then, more quickly than she’d thought possible, snapped at her again. Its jaws found only air but it grappled her to the ground. Corpse-stinking, shadowy claws dug into her flanks. The pain nearly made her black out.

  She could feel more than see something that was once a man sneer somewhere within those shadows. The kitten doth hope to baffle his blessed friend’s plans! No! Mouw Awa’s mangling maw doth—

  She saw her chance and struck. Swooning with pain and calling upon the Ministering Angels, Zamia twisted violently. Now her forepaws pinned the screaming monster to the ground.

  No! Cheated! Mouw Awa the manjackal hath been cheated!

  The rest of the room melted away. Zamia saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing except the
foe before her. Bracing herself, she plunged her maw to Mouw Awa’s throat and tore, ripping away shadows as solid as flesh. The manjackal, howling without words now, punched and clawed at her sides.

  But she sank her teeth deeper and deeper until she tore Mouw Awa’s throat out. The manjackal’s clawing briefly grew stronger, then stopped completely.

  She choked, the foulest of foul tastes filling her mouth and nostrils. Without willing it, she shifted out of the lion-shape.

  She rose shakily to her feet.

  The shadows that Mouw Awa had seemed to be formed from swirled and rose like smoke. Some unseen, unfelt wind tattered the shadows until they were but dark wisps. Then the wisps themselves gusted into nothingness.

  What was left on the palace floor was a man’s skeleton. Hadu Nawas. The Child-Scythe. Instead of a man’s skull, the corpse had the skull of a jackal. The sight brought to mind wind-stripped bones of the desert—and all she had lost among the sands.

  She kicked the skeleton with a booted foot, and it instantly crumbled to dust. She closed her eyes against the agonizing pain of her wounds and sank back to the stone floor.

  My band is avenged. The Banu Laith Badawi are avenged.

  Zamia dared to tell herself that her father would be proud.

  And then she was sick. Over and over again, until tears filled her eyes and her stomach ached, she was sick.

  Raseed heard the Doctor scream and, heedless of whatever danger might lie ahead, shot forward as fast as his feet could carry him. He entered a vast columned room with a great dais at its center. He saw the corpses of the Khalif and a black-robed man—a court magus, he guessed—sprawled on the ground. A gaunt man in a filthy white kaftan stood above the corpses. Several skin ghuls were pounding on a wall of shimmering light.

  Upon the dais was a high-backed throne of bright white stone. The Falcon Prince sat on the throne, hands clasped with a long-haired young boy by his side. Pharaad Az Hammaz was shouting. “It’s not working. IT’S NOT WORKING!”