Throne of the Crescent Moon

The guardsman did not know how many days he had been held in the red lacquered box.

The lid opened and the gaunt man’s hard hands pulled him, naked and whimpering, from the box. The gaunt man threw him to the dirt floor. The guardsman lay there, his throat burning with thirst, trying to remember his name. All he could remember was that he was a guardsman, born in the Crescent Moon Palace and sworn to service there. That the other guardsmen served under him. The gaunt man and his shadow-creature would not let him forget that.

And he remembered the street thief and the beggar. The gaunt man had killed them both slowly, letting their blood spatter onto his already filthy kaftan. He had made the guardsman listen to their pleas. Made him smell their waste as they soiled themselves in fear.

He did not know where he was now. A room. Rafters and scrabbling rats. A cellar? A cell?

Then he heard the squealing in his mind, and the jackal-thing’s voice was in his head again.

Listen to Mouw Awa, once called Hadu Nawas, who speaketh for his blessed friend. Thou art an honored guardsman. Begat and born in the Crescent Moon Palace. Thou art sworn in the name of God to defend it. All of those beneath thee shall serve.

Listen to Mouw Awa, who is unseen and unheard by men until he doth strike! Who doth laugh away sword-blade and arrow! Who was remade by the Jackal God and freed from his prison by his blessed friend.

Listen to Mouw Awa and know no hope. Know that none shall save thee. Mouw Awa doth use his powers to sneak and smuggle and kill his blessed friend’s enemies. The fat one, the clean one, the kitten.

The shadow-jackal-man continued to whisper in the guardsman’s mind of blood and bursting lungs. Again he felt hard hands under his armpits. The gaunt man dragged him to the other side of the dark room, where a great black kettle bubbled and hissed and smelled of brimstone, though there was no flame beneath it. The liquid within the kettle looked like molten rubies, and the red glow of it lit the gaunt man’s black-bearded face.

He felt himself being lifted and plunged into the kettle. He felt his skin being scalded. And somewhere he heard the shameful screaming and pleading of a man who had once been strong.

Chapter 7

Zamia Banu Laith Badawi breathed in the scent of her family’s death again. She bolted awake, screaming and growling and reliving that horrible night when she’d found her band.

No, it was just a dream. This is a new night. She was not in the desert. She was lying on a pallet in Doctor Adoulla Makhslood’s townhouse.

But that cruel crypt-scent was still there.

Not just a dream! Out of the corner of her eye, Zamia saw motion. Something lunged at her. Only her Angel-touched reflexes and the years of training with her father saved her. Something—something almost man-shaped—smashed into the pallet where she had lain a breathspace ago.

No! Mouw Awa the manjackal is unseen and unheard by men until he doth strike. But the kitten hath scented him!

The thing before her was shadow-black, save for glowing red eyes. Somehow she heard its words with both her ears and her mind. The creature held a vague shape—something like a jackal walking about on a man’s two legs. But the edges of its outline whipped and wavered like tent flags in the wind.

The reek of her band’s death wafted from the creature. The smell of burnt jackal-hair, and of ancient child-blood. Its eyes. They were a brighter version of what she had seen in her dead bandsmen. And looking at the abomination before her, Zamia knew that it was this thing that had eaten the souls of her band—of her father.

She screamed in fear. The thing lunged at her again, and she barely managed to dodge back from its shadow-wrapped fangs. She shouted.

“RASEED! DOCTOR! ENEMIES!” It came out lioness-loud, louder than any girl’s shout could be, as she took the shape. When she was younger, she had needed to try, over and over again sometimes, to take the shape. But now it came without thinking, in the space of a breath. One moment she was a woman, the next a great golden lioness. One moment a girl’s fear filled her, the next her veins raced with sunlight.

With the claws and fangs and gold coat came confidence. She dodged another lunge and growled at the creature. “Whatever you are, you have murdered the Banu Laith Badawi. I’ll tear out your throat!”

The thing before her made a sickening whine, between a dog’s and a vile man’s. Mouw Awa is alone no more. He hath been found by his blessed friend. And he shall slay the kitten and the fat one and the clean one for his blessed friend. Mouw Awa doth shiver, knowing how salty-sweet will be the kitten’s soul-of-two-tastes!

Hearing this thing’s voice in her head was disturbing, but her father had taught her years ago to pay attention to an enemy’s body rather than their words. Zamia roared again to rouse her allies. Then she leapt at the foul creature before her.

Even as she did so, she tried to understand what this monster was. Could her claws cut a shadow?

Zamia raked out a left paw and found her answer. The foul thing—Mouw Awa, it had called itself—spit and whined and danced back in pain.

The kitten hath cut Mouw Awa! Savage as her father, the cruel cutter of Mouw Awa’s blessed friend!

The sheer speed of the creature as it leapt at her caught Zamia off guard. She managed to stay a half-step ahead of one snap of its maw, then another. But she was tiring already and all signs were that this creature was not. And she was not used to fighting in these cramped conditions.

She scrabbled back and tipped over a small bookstand, which pinned her rear paws. God help me! The creature closed, and its scent threatened to overwhelm her.

A streak of blue flew at the thing that called itself Mouw Awa. Raseed!

The dervish’s sword was out, and he slashed at the creature, drawing its attention away from Zamia. Once, twice, and thrice Raseed’s forked sword cleaved into the thing, but it made no mark.

“Be careful! This thing—it has the stink of my father’s wounds!” Zamia growled. Then she flexed her back legs and shattered the wooden bookstand. Splinters bit into her flesh, but she ignored them.

She watched monster and dervish, looking for an opening. Again Raseed’s sword slashed into Mouw Awa, but the thing just whined and sneered. Mouw Awa’s fangs missed their mark once, then twice. The creature lashed a forearm across the dervish’s chest. Raseed went flying as if he’d been kicked by a horse. Zamia’s heart sank into her stomach.

Out of the corner of her eye, Zamia saw the old man appear on the stairs, shouting. She ignored the Doctor, though, and flew at Mouw Awa.

Neither sword-blade nor prayer doth stop Mouw Awa. He hath smuggled in the spell-makings. He shall savor the twin tastes of lion and child while his blessed friend’s creatures slay the clean one and the fat one.

The creature dodged her strike and threw something at the ground. There was a sound like wind whipping, and suddenly two man-sized sandstorms were boiling in the middle of the room. Then the small storms took shape—arms, legs, fangs.

Merciful God! If the desert dunes were made monsters, they would look like this! The man-shaped things snapped their jaws, showing teeth like jagged rocks. One darted out a forked tongue. No, not a tongue. A pink rock viper. The desert’s deadliest snake.

Zamia saw these creatures come between her and her allies, and that was all of the attention she could spare. The mad, murdering monster before her had earned death, and her only purpose on God’s great earth was to kill it.

She slashed out again and again, but Mouw Awa always seemed a step ahead of her blows. That shadow-wreathed snout seemed to sneer. The kitten doth hiss and spit, but she shall die in the mangling maw of Mouw Awa, once called Hadu Nawas.

The other combatants were to her back now. Behind her she heard shouted scripture, Raseed’s cries, and magical sounds like small thundercracks. It took all of her discipline not to turn from her foe. Something was on fire, and the smoke, along with the creature’s cruel scent, made her gag.

She growled loudly. Her band’s enemies had fled like children from that growl. But Mouw Awa just pressed the attack again, coming close enough that Zamia could feel a strange heat coming from its maw.

The creature lunged again and missed. She saw her chance. She sprang, seizing the opportunity the overconfident monster had given her.

Given me!

Too late, Zamia realized that it was she who was overconfident. Mouw Awa was not off balance. The thing had feigned and drawn her in. Her claws raked out, and dug deep into shadow-flesh. But the creature shifted position, and its black jaws snapped, digging into her ribs. Zamia screamed and hissed and clawed at the thing again. Mouw Awa stumbled away from her, grievously wounded.

But its fangs had done their damage. Now she was aware of nothing but her pain. The pain, and a burning red heat that made her whimper. Then there was only darkness.

Merciful God help me! Only half believing what he saw, Adoulla watched two sand ghuls come to false life in his library. Zamia was locked in battle with a creature like the shadow of a jackal come to life—the likes of which he’d never seen. Raseed was struggling to his feet.

Adoulla noticed these things, but the sand ghuls were what held his attention. The power involved in raising such creatures from a distance, in commanding them from some unseen place, in subverting the ward spells Adoulla had worked here, was incalculable. The number of men that would have had to be murdered and maimed to work these magics… They faced a dire threat indeed.

One of the ghuls charged Adoulla, a snarl etched on its grotesque almost-human features. Adoulla’s hands were already in the pockets of his kaftan. He drew forth a small vial and uncorked it with his thumb. The sand ghul’s raking claws were now only inches from Adoulla’s eyes, but he stood his ground calmly, sprinkling crushed ruby in the air before him and reciting.

“God is the Oasis in the Desert of the Soul!” The ruby dust turned to ash in midair. The ghul collapsed into a pile of loose sand and dead beetles. Adoulla felt grains of sand and less pleasant things blow across his face as the creature was drained of its animating magic. In a sort of reflection, he felt the drain of the invocation hit him hard—his chest tightened, and a stitch stung his side. After their battle the night before, he didn’t have much left in him.

Too old, he thought. But even as he thought it he saw the lion-girl fighting desperately against that shadow-thing and watched Raseed trying hopelessly to slay a sand ghul with his sword.

No, not too old he told himself. These children will die if I am. He summoned strength from God-alone-knew-where and fumbled in his satchel for some remedy against these creatures.

He thanked Beneficent God aloud when his fingers closed around three smooth stones the size of grapes. He gathered the lightning beads—each a swirl of mother-of-pearl—and looked up to see that Raseed had been knocked to the ground again. He was already getting to his feet, but the ghul he’d been battling now darted toward Adoulla.

Adoulla twisted as the thing hissed and swung at him. He somehow managed not to be torn open by those rocklike claws. But the flat of the ghul’s great forearm caught him across the chest like an iron bar. He fell backward, landing on his ass with a grunt, the wind knocked out of him.

He started to throw the beads, then hesitated. They’d cause a fire, no doubt. His home…

But he had no choice. Adoulla threw.

The sand ghul hissed loudly as the tiny stones struck it. They were sucked immediately into the thing’s abdomen, sand shifting away from sand to briefly reveal a writhing mass of scorpions and shiny black beetles. Adoulla spoke the invocation.

“God is the Lightning That Strikes Thrice!” It was slurred with pain and regret, but it was enough. There was a loud but muffled noise, like a peal of thunder wrapped in a wool blanket, and the sand ghul froze in its tracks. Then another muffled peal and another as the beads exploded inside the creature. Sheets of lightning-fire shot out from the sand ghul’s midsection, scalding the arm Adoulla threw up to protect his face. Small fires caught in the room and spread with magical speed. Adoulla could smell paper burning and wondered in agony what books and scrolls he was losing. He saw his furniture catch fire, the very walls of his home aflame. Then the invocation’s drain hit him and he collapsed, pain and smoke filling his mind.

Raseed watched one of the sand ghuls crumble from the Doctor’s invocation and thanked God as he faced off against the second one. He had never fought sand ghuls before, though the Doctor had spoken of them. It was not like fighting bone ghuls or water ghuls. No matter how many times Raseed swung his sword, the blade found no flesh to bite. Every thrust slid into loose sand, and it took every bit of Raseed’s skill just to dodge the ghul’s blows as he freed his sword.

Almighty God, what can I do against such a monster? But his thoughts were dashed out of him as the creature slammed him to the ground with a great, grainy fist. He came to his feet quickly and saw the Doctor toss something at the ghul and speak an invocation before passing out. There was a thundercrack sound, and Raseed threw up an arm to shield himself from a sheet of fire. He turned his face from the blast and saw Zamia fighting that shadow-creature.

Raseed’s skin and silks were singed, but he ignored the pain. When he turned back to the sand ghul, he saw that the Doctor’s invocation had had a remarkable effect. At the sounds of the small explosions, the creature had stopped moving, incapacitated by whatever passed for pain in such a monster. The magical heat of the explosions had caused the palm-tree-thick midsection of the sand ghul to melt into glass! The melted remains of scorpions and centipedes clouded the glass with black. The sand ghul was stopped in its tracks.

Small fires burned about the room, catching and spreading with astonishing speed. But Raseed focused on his enemy. He knew an opportunity when he saw one. Glass could be broken.

He sheathed his sword, extended his right arm and pointed his fist at the sand ghul. With a loud shout that focused his soul, he flew forward, thrusting his fist into the thing’s stomach. If it has a stomach!

There was an earsplitting crack. Then a thick tinkling sound like a thousand tiny bells. Raseed felt countless splinters of hot glass digging into his skin, from his knuckles all the way up his arm to his elbow. But he was focused, and not a glimmer of pain made it through his training. Praise God.

In a blur of movement he withdrew his arm from the monster’s midsection. The sand ghul collapsed in a rain of sand, broken glass, and dead centipedes. Raseed turned from the waist high pile before him, scanning the room.

The whole house was filling with smoke and fast-spreading fire. The townhouse walls were blackening with flame. The Doctor lay moaning in pain but did not seem to be badly wounded. A golden lion—Zamia!—squatted in the corner, growling and whimpering as she bled. Raseed’s breath caught in his throat.

The jackal-creature, clearly wounded, struggled to stand and make its way to the window. It whined as shadow-stuff whirled about it in tattery flags. Raseed heard it speak somehow in his mind even as he moved toward it.

No! Mouw Awa hath been cut and bitten! Might this mean his death? No! His blessed friend shall heal him. His blessed friend shall sit on the Cobra Throne while Mouw Awa’s howls doth hound the air!

The thing clawed at the lattice window, splintering the dark wood and howling in pain. Before Raseed could reach it, it leapt from the second story window to the hard-packed dirt road below. The fall will kill it, Raseed half-hoped. But as the thing hit the ground it seemed to simply… melt away. He himself had a remarkable skill in stealth, but this was different. Mouw Awa did not hide… it joined with the lamp-shadows. The thing had fled but it was not dead—Raseed could sense that much.

It was Raseed’s duty to pursue, but his eyes were drawn to the limp forms of Zamia and the Doctor. They needed him now. The tribeswoman had changed shape again in the space of a moment. He felt his heart would burst, seeing this girl of five and ten years with a grisly wound in her side. The Doctor moaned and sat up, coughing from the smoke around them. The flames blazed hotter, the wood of divan and bookshelf cracking and popping in the fires.

Zamia whimpered. Only her mouth moved, making pained, pleading sounds. His gaze returned to the street below. O God, is it wicked to let such a monster flee just to save the lives of friends? But even as his soul asked Almighty God for guidance, his body choked from smoke and moved to Zamia’s side.

Suddenly a glowing green light filled the townhouse. As he reached Zamia, he saw a hundred tiny hands the color of seawater stamping at the flames and waving away smoke. Magic. But not the sort of spell the Doctor worked. Whatever it signified, Raseed didn’t care. All that mattered was Zamia’s wound, which was bubbling and hissing horribly, as if with an alkhemist’s acids. Raseed felt tears filling his eyes and not only from the smoke.

He felt the Doctor’s large hand on his shoulder and heard that gruff voice in his ear. “Come, boy. Help has arrived.”

Raseed snarled at his mentor. “We should not have brought her here, Doctor! She’s just a child!” An incoherent cry escaped from his throat. “We should not have brought her!” He was startled by the sudden impulse to strike the Doctor.

The Doctor winced from the smoke and the pain of his wounds. “Snap out of it, boy! I said there is help here!”

Raseed saw, more than felt, a bony, red-black hand on his forearm. Dawoud. Litaz. The Doctor’s friends. The smoke filled his eyes and his mind. He let himself be guided out of the burning townhouse, only half-aware of what was happening.

The next thing he knew, he was standing in front of his ruined, soot-blackened home. The spell-fires were already dying, but they had done their damage. The Doctor sat on the street, his head in his hands. His Soo friends—the tall, bald magus Dawoud and his wiry little wife Litaz—stood beside him, gently setting Zamia’s unmoving body onto a litter.

“The fire’s been dealt with,” Dawoud was saying to the dazed-looking Doctor. “We got to it before it could spread to the neighbors. My magics keep them from seeing or smelling what has happened here. But what in the Name of God has happened here, Adoulla? And who is she?”

The Doctor stuttered, obviously trying to regain his wits. Raseed heard himself doing the same thing.

“Questions for later,” he heard Litaz’s voice say from somewhere. “Whoever she is, she’s dying here. We have to get her to our home, now. Raseed!”

He realized he’d been staring uselessly at Zamia’s unmoving form, her soot-stained face, and her closed, long-lashed eyes. Again he tried to speak, but his throat burned from smoke and tears. Ash caked his silks. “Auntie?” he finally managed.

The little Soo alkhemist’s voice was sharp, and her blue-black features were stern. “We’ve brought a litter,” she said, the rings in her twistlocked hair clicking as she nodded toward the wood and leather frame. “Help me carry it.”

His hands and feet moving without his seeming to will it, Raseed obeyed her command. As they lifted the litter, Zamia shrieked once in pain. Raseed felt as if the sound were tearing out his insides. Zamia grimaced and then fell silent.

“There’s hope here yet,” Litaz said. “Move, boy!”

Raseed blinked away more tears, and he moved.

Chapter 8

In the hour or so that was neither night nor morning, the Scholars’ Quarter of the great city of Dhamsawaat was quiet. The most indefatigable of the street people had finally gone to bed, even if bed was merely a bit of dirt lane. The first of the cart-drivers, porters, and shopkeepers would not hit the street for another hour or so. Litaz Daughter-of-Likami stared out her cedar-framed window, rubbing her temples and thanking Merciful God for small blessings—the soothing quiet had made the first part of her work a bit easier.

The busy, rough Scholars’ Quarter was usually so noisy that its name—a vestige of the city’s long past, Adoulla had told her—seemed an intentional irony. But Litaz prided herself that she, her husband, and their old friend Adoulla kept the bookish appellation from becoming a total lie. Ages after the neighborhood’s sages and students had been replaced by cheap shopmen and pimps, the three of them ensured that learning still lived in the Quarter. That their learning pertained to unnatural wounds and creatures made of grave-beetles made no difference.

Litaz turned from the window and considered the half-dead girl lying on the low couch before her, her coarse hair splayed across the cushions. The tribeswoman’s labored breathing was the loudest sound in the room. A sharp contrast to a few hours ago, when they’d come charging in with a dying, Angel-touched girl on a litter.

The wound was like none Litaz had ever seen. The tribeswoman had been bitten, though not so badly as to be life-threatening. But within the wound, it was as if the girl’s soul had been poisoned rather than her body. It didn’t fit any of Litaz’s formulae. Praise God that Dawoud—as he had in so many of their past healings—had intuited what to do. Her own tonics and wound poultices had stabilized the girl’s health. But it had been Dawoud’s powers—his mastery of the weird green glow that rose from within him as his hands snaked back and forth above the girl’s heart—that had truly brought her from the brink of death.

The smell of brewing cardamom tea brought her out of her thoughts. She could hear Dawoud in the next room, clinking cup against saucer for her. Making each other’s tea was half the reason they had such a happy marriage. It was one of the most important lessons of alkhemy, one that had stuck with her from the first days, when she’d left behind the stifling lifestyle of a Lady of the Soo court to pursue her training: Simple things ought not be taken for granted. She’d seen a horned monster from another world kill a man because of a small error in a summoning circle. She’d seen a husband and a wife grow to hate each other because they’d forgotten each other’s naming-days.

A shout came in the window from the street: a late drunk, or an early cartman. As if in response, the Badawi girl—Zamia, Adoulla had called her—made a pained noise. Litaz said a silent prayer for the girl and worried over the limits of her own healing-craft. She pulled a clay jar from one of the low visiting room shelves and scooped a handful of golden yam candies from it. The sweet, earthy flavor filled her mouth and calmed her. They were expensive, these tiny reminders of home, but there was nothing quite like them.

“You deserve the whole jar of them, hard as you have worked these past few hours. I think the girl will live because of it.” Her husband came into the room bearing a tea tray in his bony, careworn hands. Concern for her was etched on his wizened red-black face.

“Where are Adoulla and Raseed?” she asked.

He jutted his hennaed goatee at the stairway. “Both upstairs. The boy is in some kind of self-recriminating meditation. Adoulla is mourning his home and wracking his brain regarding this attack.”

Litaz had been doing the same since Adoulla had hurriedly explained that the girl was Angel-touched and described the creature that had attacked her. It would not be madness enough, some sliced-off, calloused part of her thought, for our Adoulla to bring us a dying Badawi girl. She would have to be a shape-changer, too. As though seized by her old friend’s soul, Litaz snorted out a bitter laugh. She took a teacup from Dawoud and sipped as she sat by the girl’s side.

The tribeswoman wore a pained grimace as she slept. Again Litaz found herself troubled by the strangeness of the girl’s malignant wound. For decades she had traveled with her husband and their various companions, dealing with creatures and spells that most men thought unfathomable. But Litaz knew that everything in this world could be analyzed. The ghuls, the djenn, balls of fire, and bridges made from moonrays. All of it made sense, if one understood the formulae. She had given up years ago on searching for liquors of agelessness and turning copper into gold that stays gold. Nor did she waste her talents on the stupid duties that employed the city’s handful of other master alkhemists. Working for weeks at a time to separate alloys or encourage crops—and make rich men richer—was not a way to spend a life, no matter the wealth such work might bring.

But helping hurt people was different. Looking at the girl’s wound again, Litaz once more set to work as an assessor-of-things. She had only ever read about soul-killing. It was new to her, though she knew it was an ancient magic. What mattered here, though, was that it had nearly killed a girl in the home of her and her husband’s closest friend. That made it their problem, too.

She set down her teacup and put a hand to the carved wooden clip that held up her long twistlocks. Dawoud, her opposite in so many ways, had often teased her that it was a fussy, Eastern Soo hairstyle. Years ago he’d proposed that she shave her head, like one of his red-black countrywomen from the Western Republic! The thought still horrified her.

Her husband stepped wordlessly to her side and put his hand on her back. She felt the pressure of his long, strong fingers and thanked God, not for the first time, that someone so unlike her could be such an inseparable part of her.

Litaz heard a noise on the stairs and turned to see Adoulla wearily making his way down them. Dawoud’s hand left her back, and he went over to embrace their friend. She didn’t really see the pain in Adoulla’s heavy-lidded eyes until she heard him speak in a voice not his own—the small voice of a weak man.

“My home. Dawoud, my home. It… it…”

He trailed off, his eyes shining with tears, and his big broad shoulders slumped. It troubled her to see Adoulla this way—he was not easily shaken. Her husband stepped back from embracing his friend and shook the ghul hunter by his shoulders.

“Listen to me. Look at me, Adoulla! God is the Most Merciful, do you hear me? It will take money to repair, and time, but six months from now you’ll be back where you started, minus a few old books and scrolls.”

Adoulla swallowed and shook his head. “Six months from now, I’ll probably be a crimson-eyed corpse whose soul has been severed from God.”

With their main patient resting, Litaz and Dawoud tended to Adoulla’s bruises and tender ribs. Their friend sat with vacant eyes as they worked, flinching in pain, but saying nothing. Afterwards he fell into a deep, snoring sleep on a pile of cushions in the greeting-room corner. Then, with Adoulla’s hard-eyed young assistant insistently keeping watch, she and Dawoud slept as well.

Upon waking a few hours later, Litaz made more tea and Adoulla thanked her for it as if she had saved his mother’s life. He was a bit less inconsolable after his rest, grim planning clearly giving him purpose.

“That jackal-thing that calls itself Mouw Awa, and its mysterious ‘blessed friend’—they must be stopped. Somewhere out there is a ghul-maker more powerful than any I’ve ever faced. I fear for our city,” Adoulla said. He took a long, messy slurp of tea and wiped the excess from his beard.

Your city, my friend, not ours, some resentful part of her protested. She’d lived in and loved Dhamsawaat for decades now, but the older she grew the more she pined to return to the Soo Republic. This city had given her meaningful work and more exciting experiences than she could count. But it was in this dirty city that her child had died. It was in this too-crowded city that her husband had grown older than his years. She did not want to die saving this place—not without having seen home again.

She spoke none of this, of course. And she sat complacently as Dawoud said, “Whatever help you need from us is yours, brother-of-mine. Whatever this is you are facing, you will not face it alone.”

For a long while, the three of them sat sipping tea. Then Dawoud spoke again, a hard smile on his face as he poked a long finger at Adoulla. “You know, despite the dangers facing you, you should thank Beneficent God. Thank Him that we live two doors down. That we came home late at night rather than in the morning. That we were walking home when we saw the smoke from your house.”

At the word ‘house,’ Adoulla sighed, his eyes wet and shining. He thanked Litaz again for the tea, stood, and walked forlornly out the front door.

Dawoud stood with a grunt and followed Adoulla. She heard the men walk slowly away from the shop, talking however men talked when they were alone with one another.

Litaz set sad thoughts aside and went to check on Zamia. The girl’s teeth had unclenched, and she slept untroubled now. It was time to apply the second poultice. Litaz placed a small pot of mixed herbs over the hearth.

A few minutes later they began to boil, leaving behind a sticky residue. She removed the girl’s bandage and cleaned the wound again. Then, with a small wooden paddle, she applied the still-hot muck from the pot. She watched her poultice burn magically away from the wound, absorbing the girl’s pain. Wisps of smoke curled into the air, leaving half-healed flesh in their wake. Using her other hand, she pushed pressure points on the girl’s palms.

As if struck by lightning, Zamia sat up and screamed until she was out of breath. Then she sucked in a great gulp of air and screamed again. Litaz felt badly for the neighbors, but they were used to the cries of the afflicted that sought relief in her skills.

Raseed jumped up from the pile of cushions where he’d been sleeping. “Auntie! Wh-what?” he said, blinking sleep from his tilted eyes and going for his sword.

“Go back to sleep, Raseed. All is well here—the screaming is a good sign. Evidence that the girl’s soul is still strong.” Even as Litaz spoke, Zamia lay back again, falling into a deep sleep.

Dawoud and Adoulla entered the room, drawn by the screams. Just as well. It was now Dawoud’s turn to treat the more metaphysical pain that consumed the girl.

He looked a question at Litaz, and she nodded. He crouched before Zamia’s sleeping form, his hands moving in slow, serpentine circles as they hovered an inch from the girl’s boyish body. He closed his eyes and winced as if he were in pain. A slight glow of green surrounded his hands. He kept his eyes closed tight and his hands danced until the glow faded and her husband collapsed onto a stool, clutching at his chest.

It’s been a long time since he’s strained his powers so. It’s aging him almost before my eyes! Litaz thought again of their homeland and prayed that her husband would live to see it once more before the body-costs of his calling claimed him. She ran to him and placed an arm around his bony shoulders.

He spoke through clenched teeth, clearly exhausted. “It is time to wake her.”

“Wake her?” The dervish frowned at them. “Forgive me, Auntie, Uncle—but she has been grievously wounded. We must let her rest, yes?”

The boy nosed in where he didn’t belong, and there was something behind it. Does he think he loves her? Litaz wondered. “The girl was too close to death, Raseed. She must be awakened—if she can be awakened—in order to remember that she is still alive. There will be time to let her rest later.”

She turned to her juniper wood case and removed a vial full of big pinkish salt grains. Bringing the vial over to the Badawi girl and placing it under her nose, Litaz pulled out the stopper and turned her own nose away from it.

Zamia jerked upright. She began to cough and moan in pain. As she coughed, blood stained her mouth and nostrils.

Thank Almighty God. Though Raseed looked terrified, Litaz knew the blood was a sign of further recovery. She just might make it through this all right.

Raseed was now close at the girl’s side, clearly wanting to do something but not knowing what that something was. “What is happening to her?” he shouted.

Litaz rubbed her temples and forced patience. She pushed the boy back and dabbed away the girl’s blood. “It is hard to explain, Raseed. We have, for a few moments, fooled her soul into thinking it is in an unwounded body. Her soul will be forced into remembering this attachment. She will wake, in shock but aware and able to speak. Then she will need rest before we complete our treatment. If God wills it, the bonds that He has tied between body and soul will reattach.”

Litaz stood back, and a moment later the girl opened her bright green eyes.

“Did… did I kill it?” were her first words. There was no need to ask what she meant.

To Litaz’s surprise—and, she would swear, his own as well—Raseed stepped forward to answer her. “You gave me an opening, but I failed, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi.” He bowed deeply, shame etched on his face. “I beg you, accept my apologies. But know that it was your valor that drove the creature off.” The boy fell silent and took a step back, looking ashamed to have spoken.

Ah, Litaz thought, thinking on the beautiful, foolish ways of young people. He doesn’t think he loves her. He worries he loves her!

The girl spoke strongly in response to the dervish’s words, as if she’d been awake half the day and had not been sitting between death’s teeth mere moments ago—another good sign. “What did you expect?” she said, “I was trained by my father.” Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep again.

When afternoon came, Litaz sat with Dawoud and Adoulla in the kitchen over small bowls of goat’s milk and cherryfruit, discussing their next moves. Raseed, as usual, stood.

“So what now?” her husband asked.

Adoulla’s whiskers were tinted with burgundy. He wiped his face on his sleeve, and the stain slid sorcerously away as he spoke. “In the past day and a half I’ve fought bone ghuls and sand ghuls and some half-mad thing I’ve no name for. The man who commands these creatures must be found. I took this from the girl—it belonged to her father,” Adoulla said, producing an ornate curved dagger and laying it on the table before him. “We were, in fact, planning to visit you before…” he stopped, swallowed, and went on weakly, “before these monsters attacked us. I’d hoped that your scrying spells might—”

A wordless cry—Zamia’s—broke in from the sitting room.

They all rushed to her. The tribeswoman was awake, but she ignored their hails. She lay there squinting and craning her neck, as if concentrating fiercely on something unseen. Ah. She is trying to take the lion-shape, Litaz realized. And she was apparently unable to do so.

Zamia’s eyes grew wide and wild, and she started to thrash about. It was Dawoud who finally stepped forward and laid a calming hand on the girl’s forehead.

“Settle down, now, child. I said settle down! Thank Merciful God that you still live. We have brought you back before death could quite snap its jaws on you. But my wife is tired, and you have no idea the costs of a magus’s magics. Lay still and don’t waste our work.” It was as close to tender as he ever got with a patient.

But the girl jerked back. “A magus? You worked your wicked magics on me? O God protect me! The shape has been taken from me! Better to have died!” A lionlike growl came from somewhere within her.

Not two and ten hours ago, the child had been dead in most of the ways that matter, and now she was well enough to be fiercely displaying Badawi prejudices. Litaz couldn’t take all of the credit here. The girl’s Angel-touched healing powers were truly wondrous.

Adoulla ran a hand over his beard and fumed at the bedridden girl. “Better to have died, eh? Damn you, girl! Asking no questions and taking no coin, my friends have exhausted themselves to heal you. Worked wonders with spell supplies that cost a year of workman’s wages! Not to mention the deeper costs. And you repay them with this savage superstition?”

With each exasperated word, Adoulla’s color deepened. Litaz wondered whether Adoulla knew what he was doing here—a bit of provocation like this could be good for rousing the girl’s spirits to a temporary rally before she passed back into a deeper, recuperative sleep—or if he was just taking out anger on a barely living child. She stepped over to him and laid a hand on his arm, but he went on.

“If Dawoud had let you die, girl, your band would go unavenged. Isn’t vengeance what you live for? Killing and codes of honor and all that?” He turned to Raseed. “God save us from obsessed, ungrateful children. No wonder your eyes go so googly when you look at her, boy! You’ve found your mate-of-the-soul!”

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 alone.”

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. Familiarity. 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—”

Hidden script and dead children! That’s it! God forgive me, why didn’t I think of it before? All his other thoughts fell away as Adoulla realized that Beneficent God had at last handed him a clue. “Of course! Curse my fuzzy-headedness, of course! That’s it!” Adoulla leapt up and grunted with the exertion of it. It was so sudden that Baheem actually stopped talking.

Baheem came to his feet more easily, clearly ready to fight despite the hashi-haze. “What is it, Uncle?”

“Baheem, my beloved, right now I am on a hunt that could kill me. And if that happens, many others in our city will die. But if it doesn’t happen, I owe you a night of feasting on the silver pavilion!”

Baheem had the good street sense to ignore the more dire part of Adoulla’s pronouncement. “The silver pavilion! I’d rather you just pay my rent for a month! If I knew I had information that valuable, Uncle, I would have sold it!”

“Not information, Baheem, just the gift of your company. God’s peace be with you.”

“And with you, Uncle.”

Adoulla cheek-kissed the thief and left the gardens, fragile hope finding a home in his heart.

Chapter 10

Raseed bas Raseed watched the Doctor storm out of the shop and slam the front door. He was used to his mentor’s irascible temper, but had never seen him quite so furious. Raseed had felt his own cheeks flush with anger at the Doctor for scolding Zamia Banu Laith Badawi so. She was not responsible for the Doctor’s loss, and did not deserve to be mocked. But Raseed supposed her words had been the bushel that proved the camel’s bad back. The Doctor was old, and seemed to grow more worn and weary with each passing day.

For the weary man, virtue is the strongest tonic, Raseed recited in his mind. The Doctor merely needed to be reminded of the good works he had done to further God’s glory, Raseed realized. He started for the door, intent on consoling his mentor.

But Litaz’s small hand gripped his bicep and pulled him back. “Adoulla needs to be alone now, Raseed. Trust one who knows the ways of old men. He will be fine.”

Raseed started to protest. But when he thought on it honestly, he doubted that his pious advisements would mean much to the Doctor. He sighed and nodded and sat on an ebonwood stool. With effort, he kept his gaze on the ground, and away from Zamia Banu Laith Badawi’s sleeping form.

“You can look at her, Raseed,” Litaz said. “She will not be violated by your eyes, you know.” Instead of doing so, though, Raseed looked at the alkhemist.

She had taken down a small, nearly empty vial from a shelf. She held the vial aloft, eyed its blue glass suspiciously, and sucked her teeth in annoyance. “I was afraid of this,” she said more to herself than to Raseed.

“What is the matter, Auntie?”

She stared at the stoppered vial for another moment, shook her head, her hair-rings clinking, and looked at Raseed. “A small setback. The tribeswoman’s healing is going well. Remarkably well, thanks to her angel-touched powers. But we have hit a hitch here. I am all out of crimson quicksilver. It is a powerful solution that causes blood to flow more freely. We need it for two purposes: it is necessary for completing the healing spells we have worked on the girl, but it will also help to distill the blood on the girl’s dagger so that we can try to use it to learn more of our enemies. I’ll need you to go fetch me another vial.”

Annoyance rose in him—he was a holy warrior, not an errand boy! But he smothered his irritation, knowing that an unacceptable pride was at the root of it.

“Of course, Auntie. Where can crimson quicksilver be had?”

Litaz set down the vial, and her dark, heart-shaped face grew grim. “The jungles of Rughal-ba. There is a powerful monster there called the Red Khimera whose horn must be cut from its—”

Raseed’s blood began to race, but he quickly felt the fool as Litaz’s sober instructions slid into a snicker.

“Hee! Oh, forgive me, Raseed! I am only teasing you. No, no, do not be angry with me. It is just that there are so few occasions for jest in my life these days. But God’s truth be told, the determination I saw in the set of your jaw is a tribute to your valor.”

Raseed accepted this compliment without comment and set aside his annoyance at being teased.

“In fact,” Litaz went on, taking up charcoal and paper and writing as she spoke, “you need only go six streets over to the Quarter of Stalls. Just past the Inspector’s stall you will see the shop of Doctor Zarqawlayari on the left. You will know it by the green-painted door. Give him this. He will fill my order and charge me later.” The alkhemist handed him the note and ushered him out the door and into the warm afternoon air.

As he walked, Raseed thought he heard the voices of the Doctor and Dawoud coming from around the corner behind him. But he figured that they would wish to be left alone, so he headed on without stopping. The late afternoon sun half-dazzled his eyes as he walked. He passed a man making water against the stone wall of a shop, and another man who was healthy enough to work begging for alms. He noted each of them with contempt and walked on.

The tempting scent of frying earth-apples welcomed him to the Quarter of Stalls. Raseed passed the row of rough-hewn food stalls, ignoring his stomach-rumbling hunger. A few minutes later he reached the green painted door Litaz had described.

It sat half-open, and he stepped inside, knocking once to let the shopkeeper know of his arrival. The room was unfurnished, save for a shelf of neatly sorted bottles and boxes against the far wall and a worktable not unlike the one in Dawoud and Litaz’s shop.

A middle-aged Rughali man in a tight-fitting turban—Doctor Zarqawlayari, no doubt—looked up from the worktable in distracted annoyance. As he took in Raseed’s blue silk habit with a surprised look, however, he straightened and then bowed formally.

“God’s peace, Master Dervish. Well, this is an honor! One does not see many men of the Order in this city. I… what may this humble and unworthy shopkeeper do for you?”

Though the praise or scorn of mere men should mean nothing to a true servant of God, Raseed found himself quite thrilled to be treated with such respect. The people of Rughal-ba were less lax in such matters than the Abassenese. Not for the first time in his life, Raseed wondered whether he’d been born in the wrong realm.

You were born exactly where Almighty God decreed—now keep to your business, the reprimanding voice within him scolded.

“God’s peace to you, sir,” Raseed said. “I have been sent here by Lady Litaz Daughter-of-Likami.” He handed the man Litaz’s note.

The shopkeeper read the note slowly in silence, then looked up with an apologetic grimace. “Ah, yes, Lady Litaz. A good woman, and one of my best customers, even if she is sometimes late in paying her accounts. But I regret that I must disappoint you both, Master Dervish.”

Raseed arched an eyebrow in inquiry.

Again Doctor Zarqawlayari grimaced in real-seeming regret. He scratched at his goatee nervously. “Left and right, men are preparing for the worst, and thus crimson quicksilver is in even greater demand than normal these days. It is a rare solution in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. I’ve but the one vial left. And a Tax of Goods has just been announced in the name of the Defender of Virtue himself. The Inspector of Shops will be visiting tomorrow morning to collect his levy, and I must save this vial for him.”

For a moment Raseed found himself struck dumb. Finding and defeating a vicious ghul-maker. Saving Zamia Banu Laith Badawi’s life. Surely these were crucial things in God’s eyes. That something so simple, so profane, as the vagaries of trade and politics could interfere seemed impossible.

“But… but we need that vial!” he finally managed to say. “There are lives at stake!”

The shopkeeper spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I am sorry, Master Dervish. Truly I am. But there are lives at stake on my end of the stick as well. If I don’t hold the required portion of my goods for the Khalif’s requisition, they’ll throw me in the gaol. My family would starve. What am I to do?”

But without crimson quicksilver, Zamia will die. And we will be no closer to finding the foul killers we hunt. Raseed pictured walking back into Dawoud and Litaz’s home empty-handed, and something within him snapped.

I could simply take what we need here. The thought pierced his heart like a poisoned arrow. He felt sick just thinking it. Our need is great, and our cause is just. Would God—

Behind him, the shop door slammed shut, rattling the bottles on shelf and table. Even before he turned, Raseed sensed the presence of other men. He spun around and saw three rough-looking figures fill the other end of the room.

A small man with a face like a rat’s brandished a long knife. He was flanked by a burly man with one eye wearing a brass punching glove and a tall red river Soo with a fighting staff. “Ahh, God’s peace again, Doctor Z!” the rat-faced man said. “You know why we—eh? Who’s this fool?”

The shopkeeper spoke in frightened tones. “Damned-by-God extorters! This is the second time this month they’ve come for my goods. Please, Master Dervish, help me!”

Raseed felt uncertainty fly mercifully from his heart. This was thievery, and he knew what he had to do. He drew himself up and faced the trio. “If you are here to take that which God has not given you, this will not go well for you. I suggest you leave now, wicked ones.”

The one-eyed man spoke, his voice like a blacksmith’s bellows. “ ‘Master Dervish,’ huh? Look, we got no bones to pick with the Order, boy. This business is between this greedy son-of-a-whore and our Prince. So why don’t you just make your scrawny ass scarce before we grown men have to spank it, eh?”

The Soo man spit once, smiled, and thumped the steel tip of his staff against the stone floor.

At last, something that makes sense again. A clear path of action. “Defend yourselves,” Raseed said softly.

Then he leapt.

There was too little room in the confines of the small shop to draw his sword. Instead, Raseed lunged at the rat-faced man first, palm-punching him in the face and breaking his nose. In the same motion, he grabbed the man by his throat and tossed him at the one-eyed man, sending both of them down in a heap.

Raseed spun just in time to dodge a staff-blow from the third thug, who was having a hard time wielding his weapon in such tight quarters. With a chop of his hand, Raseed split the astonished man’s staff in two, then sent him flying into the wall with a spinning kick.

One-eye was back on his feet now, and he stood back warily, looking for an opening. The man threw out a punch but found only air. Raseed drove his elbow up, shattering the man’s jaw, and he collapsed.

Rat-face, who was still on the ground nursing his broken nose, tried to stab Raseed’s leg. Raseed snaked back and stomped on the man’s wrist, which broke with a satisfying crunch. The little man dropped his knife and curled into a ball, whimpering in half conscious pain.

The Soo threw his staff halves at Raseed, yanked the shop door open, and ran. Raseed started to pursue, but first turned back to make sure the shopkeeper was safe.

The man’s mouth hung open, a gratifying look of awe on his flushed face. “Oh, thank you, Master Dervish, thank you! And God’s blessings upon you! Those thugs were—”

Raseed heard a noise. Without warning, his feet were swept out from beneath him. He fell hard onto his back, the wind knocked out of him. Above him a light flashed in his eyes, and he felt suddenly nauseated and disoriented.

Sorcery of some sort. These villains had accomplices outside the shop, he realized and cursed himself for being ambushed so easily by common criminals.

He fought past the sickness in his stomach and the after-light still dancing in his vision and started to rise to his feet.

And suddenly a sword was at his throat.

Raseed looked up past the light motes swirling in his eyes to see the suede- and silk-clad Falcon Prince, holding a small mirror in one hand and a saber in another. The edge of the blade grazed Raseed’s neck.

“We meet again, friend of Adoulla Makhslood! And you’ve damn near killed two of my men!”

Raseed said nothing, but waited for his dizziness to fade and watched for a moment’s inattention in order to knock away the thief’s blade.

“Boys!” the impossibly tall bandit said to his men, his eyes and his sword alike still glued to Raseed. “No shame in getting whipped by this one—he fights as well as any man I’ve ever seen, save perhaps myself. But stop your groaning and moaning. Grab that jar of blue powder there and get out of here! A thousand apologies, O noble shopkeeper, but we must, in the name of the good people of Dhamsawaat, confiscate your supply of nightpetal essence. Worry not, though—I swear to you in God’s name that it will find a loving home in the hands of my master alkhemist, who will make good use of it.”

Thievery, mockery, and vain Name-taking all in one swoop of his tongue! It was disgusting, and Raseed’s blood burned at not being able to do anything to stop it.

“Oh, come now,” Pharaad Az Hammaz said, speaking again to Raseed as his men made their escape. “Don’t look so upset, young man. You’re only on your back now because I resorted to dirty tricks. When I saw how well you fought, I wasn’t about to take a chance on face-to-face foolishness. I had to use all my stealth and my very last dazzle-glass.” He tossed the small mirror to the stone floor, where it shattered.

“Your sight and stomach will return to normal in an hour’s time. Just lay there for a moment and catch your breath. As for me, well, I must be elsewhere. But perhaps our paths will cross again.” The bandit backed away and toward the shop door quickly, keeping his sword pointed in Raseed’s direction until he was out the door and out of sight.

The moment the sword edge left his throat, Raseed tried to stand. He was still disoriented from the effects of the thief’s magic mirror and, as he came to his feet, he barely managed to keep himself from being sick.

An hour to recover, the bandit had said, and Raseed did not doubt that was the case for normal men. But Raseed was a weapon of God, not some hapless watchman. Ignoring the whimpers of the still-shocked shopkeeper, he forced himself to take step after step and moved, as fast as he could, out the green-painted door and after the bandit.

Stepping out onto the street Raseed scanned the crowd and saw a knot of gawkers staring and pointing at the side of a townhouse. There he saw Pharaad Az Hammaz climbing to the building’s roof, obviously aided by the same remarkable leaping magic he’d used after thwarting the execution in Inspector’s Square.

Shoving his way through the crowd, Raseed grit his teeth against his rioting stomach, took a few soul-focusing breaths, and leapt up to a second story window box. His feet and fingers found holds in the wood latticework of the building’s window-screens, and he climbed as quickly as he could. For a moment his head swam in dizziness, and he thought he would fall. But he called on all the strength he had, kept climbing, and finally hoisted himself over the edge of the rooftop.

He stood and, on the other side of the flat roof, saw the Falcon Prince, his brawny arms crossed and an impudent grin on his moustachioed face.

Raseed drew his sword.

“Most impressive, young man!” the bandit boomed. “God’s balls, I’ve never seen a man recover from the dazzle-glass’s magic so swiftly!” Suddenly the man’s saber was in his hand.

Despite his dizziness, Raseed sped at the thief, swinging his sword. Pharaad Az Hammaz parried one blow, then another, and another.

Steel sang out loudly each time their weapons met, and with the impact of each blow Raseed thought he would vomit. But he grit his teeth and fought on, pressing the attack, looking for an opening in the thief’s defenses.

There was none. The Falcon Prince was sweating now, but the smile never left his face. “Do you know, I think you might have had my head by now, if you weren’t still sick and dizzy,” he shouted. “But you are. And so—”

The bandit darted back, dodging yet another of Raseed’s blows. Then, with a speed Raseed would have thought impossible, Pharaad Az Hammaz kicked a booted foot into Raseed’s midsection. Raseed fell backwards, his stomach emptying, and his sword flying from his hand.

This is it, then, the voice within him spit. Death at the hands of a common criminal. And you dared to call yourself a weapon of God!

But, instead of closing in for the kill, Pharaad Az Hammaz reached into his tunic and produced a small object, tossing it at Raseed.

“I’ve no more time for this,” the thief bellowed, “but I leave you with a gift. Catch!”

Acting purely on reflex, Raseed caught the small glass bottle the thief tossed at him. What new trick is this? he wondered, seeing the bright red liquid that sloshed and sparkled in the late afternoon sun.

“Doctor Zarqawlayari’s last vial of crimson quicksilver, young man! It’s yours, now—take it with my blessings. I heard your plea to the shopkeeper before my men made their presence known. The Falcon Prince is in the business of saving lives when he can. Better that you and yours should have it than that tyrant the Khalif.”

As the man babbled, Raseed started to go for his sword, which lay a few feet away.

“The seal on the vial has been broken, though,” the thief continued, edging back toward the opposite side of the rooftop. “Open air is slowly creeping in now, which means you have less than an hour to get it to Lady Litaz. We can do our little sword dance up here all day, if you wish. Or you can save whomever’s life it is you came here to save.” The bandit kept backing away as he spoke, making his escape.

Raseed came to his feet and looked toward his sword.

“You can thank me later!” the Falcon Prince shouted mockingly, and he leapt effortlessly—sorcerously, no doubt—to another rooftop, leaving Raseed staring stupidly at the vial in his hand.

His stomach cramped in agony, and his throat burned with bile. His head still swam, and for a moment he stood motionless. The scales of his soul weighed stolen goods against the life of an angel-touched girl.

Then Raseed silenced the outraged voice within him and began to make his way back to the Scholars’ Quarter.

Chapter 11

Zamia Banu Laith Dadawi found herself amidst a confusing rush of sounds and sights and smells. The keening winds of the Empty Kingdom. The sweet smell of dried dung burning in the air. The tanned tents of her people. The happy cries of those she knew to be dead.

A dream.

She floated just above the tents, as if sitting in a tree that was not there, and watched the Banu Laith Badawi go about their work—cooking, cleaning hides, grooming camels, mending clothes. She tried to call out to them. Her throat grew sore with the trying, but no words came. She growled, she tried to approach them, but nothing happened.

Her father stepped into view, speaking to someone she couldn’t see.

I am a Badawi chieftain, not some slavish townsman! Laith Banu Laith Badawi decides what is best for his tribe! God took your mother, Protector, with the same hand he used to give you to me. And the Angels gave you this gift. I will not reject what God, and the Ministering Angels, and the woman who was my night air, gave to the band because of the idiocies of the Banu Khad or the Banu Fiq Badawi. They are fat, weak bands full of hypocrites. Let them say what they wish among their own damned-by-God tents about my choice for Protector of the Band. But they will deal with you at council with the same respect that we show their Protectors or there will be blood feud!

These words. Zamia knew these words. Her father had spoken them to her not a year past. It had not come to blood feud, but instead to the water-shunning of her band. And then something had struck the Banu Laith Badawi, something more foul than any feud. She had known, when she had come across the heart-robbed corpses of her tribesmen, that it had not been the Banu Fiq or the Banu Khad.

Suddenly her father was gone, and the desert with him. Zamia woke and slept and woke and slept and it was all as one. Once, a cloud seemed to lift from her eyes and mind. She saw, for a few clear moments, that she lay in the Soo couple’s shop. Then the cloud of sleep lowered again.

She was back in the desert, far from any tents, deep among the dunes. She watched a green-eyed girl a bit younger than herself pick her way quickly across the sand. The girl was dressed in Badawi camel-calf suede, but she traveled alone, with no other tribesmen in sight. Suddenly the girl stopped and turned and looked at Zamia. Then, before Zamia’s eyes the child began to grow taller, her mouth growing hard and her eyes going cold. Aging.

And Zamia screamed as she saw that the girl was her. She watched herself, bandless, tribeless, and alone, growing old and then shriveling into a skeleton. Then bones turned to dust and blew away in a howling wind.

She woke with a scream and sucked in air. Then she vomited, tears filling her eyes. She felt weak and wasted, like the old woman she had become in her dream. Suddenly there was a loud banging, and she heard shouted words that made half of her want to flee and half of her want to kill.

“Mouw Awa! Mouw Awa!”

The Doctor’s voice. It took a befuddled moment for Zamia to realize that these were real sounds, not dream-echoes. The monster strikes again! Fear filled her. She tried to take the shape. Her body burned with the effort, like trying to draw breath in a sandstorm. But the shape did not come. She was helpless. She tried feebly to gather her strength.

But after a moment she realized that there was no attack, praise be to God. She was in the Soo couple’s home. The Doctor was stomping about the shop shouting, and Zamia realized the banging noise had simply been the heavy door slamming as he’d entered.

“Mouw Awa! Mouw Awa!” the ghul hunter shouted again. “It’s Kemeti hidden script—Name of God, why didn’t I recall right away? The ‘Child Scythe’—now I know where I’ve read that name! Litaz! Litaz Daughter-of-Likami! Where are you, woman? Dawoud! Where is your wife?”

Both of the Doctor’s friends appeared on the stairway. Litaz’s expression was one of stern irritation. “Name of God, Adoulla, I told you the girl needs quiet in order to rest. Have you lost your mind? What is all this shouting?”

Zamia was fully awake now, and she managed to sit up on the cushioned divan. She was pleased to note that where her wound had burned before there was only a light stinging.

To her left, Raseed leaned against the white-painted wall, looking even more uneasy than usual. His silks were dusty, and he looked pale, almost as if he’d been sick.

Not wanting to look at the dervish too long, she turned back to the Doctor. His smile was broad as he boomed words at Litaz.

“Litaz! My dear, please tell me you recall my lending you a book—”

“You’ve lent me many books, Adoulla. Which one?”

“Written by the court poet Ismi Shihab. A rare copy of his private memoirs from just before the civil war—remember? It took Hafi five years to find me this book! Remember?”

Litaz rolled her eyes. “Right. I remember you forcing it on me. You were so excited to have found it. Boring stuff, nothing like his poetry. I read a few pages of meaningless royal intrigue and set it aside. It’s still upstairs somewhere.”

“Thank All-Provident God that you are such a poor returner of things, my dear! Praise God!” The Doctor leapt up the steps, positively beaming. The Soo couple followed. Zamia heard the sounds of frantic rummaging upstairs, and more shouted conversation between the Doctor and Litaz about books.

Zamia longed to fight someone. She was uneasy with the poking around and reading that the Doctor seemed to find so necessary. The urge to leave these dawdling old people nearly overtook her, and again she forced herself to face rock-hard reality. A Badawi warrior always found the most effective way to deal with enemies. And trying alone to find her enemies and stage a suicidal ambush was not the most effective way. She had no one else to turn to. She could expect no help from her people, even in fighting creatures such as these. In fact, Zamia knew, there would be those who would blame the appearance of such monsters on her band’s supposed corruption.

She was again overcome with a terrible sense of all she had lost. She thought of home—of spiced yoghourt and fresh flatbread. She wished, with tears forming in her eyes, that she could see her father, or her cousin, or any of her band, one more time.

With my father against my band! With my band against my tribe! With my tribe against the world! The old Badawi saying echoed mockingly through her head. She was the last of the Banu Laith Badawi, and she had no children. What was band now? What was tribe?

Her thoughts were interrupted by the Doctor’s shouts from above “A-ha! It is here, praise God!” The ghul hunter came running downstairs, the others behind him. He sat at the low table beside her divan and opened a small black book.

“You have more right to hear this than anyone, Zamia.”

She nodded appreciatively, still feeling weak.

When they were all gathered around, the Doctor jabbed a thick finger at the book before him and bellowed, “This book! This is where I know the names Hadu Nawas and Mouw Awa. Ismi Shihab’s memoirs. Listen to this, all of you.

“Hadu Nawas was the last living member of a once great family. He was wealthy and kept a fine mansion near the Far Gardens, on the outskirts of the city. Once, twice, thrice did dark rumors arise among the poor people of that neighborhood about children disappearing into Hadu Nawas’s mansion. The Khalif knew of the man’s warped ways, but Hadu Nawas was a political ally, so the Khalif did nothing.

“The winds of politics shift quickly, though. A series of events—intricate as puzzlecloth, quick as lightning, made Hadu Nawas an enemy of the court. And suddenly the pious Khalif was outraged by Hadu Nawas’s child butchery.”

Here the ghul hunter looked up at Litaz. “And you say you found this book boring, my dear?”

Litaz shrugged. “I did not read that far.”

The Doctor turned back to the book and kept reading.

“I was there—sent as a recorder of crimes—when the watchmen burst in on that man-shaped monster. He had made an unspeakable little lair for himself beneath his mansion. There were indecent drawings on the walls and child-sized cages. We found Hadu Nawas with a hatchet in his hand and a gratified snarl on his face, standing over a little girl’s body.

“I cannot lie to God, so why lie to the page? We bound that man and beat him. Tore out his nails, stabbed at his olive sack and tortured him right up to his trial. Some wished to put the fiend on display but the Khalif forbade speaking of the crimes to the common people.

“The web of influence was woven such that the Khalif wished to purge the perished Nawas family’s name of this last-of-the-line madman. So Hadu Nawas’s name was stripped from him. It was decreed that he would be sealed in one of the tainted tombs of the Kem—destined to die of thirst or madness in the deep desert ruins.

“As a part of this punishment, the murderer was given a new name, a name tainted by the corrupt old Kem, to mark him for his imprisonment. It was not Hadu Nawas that was sealed in that tomb. It was Mouw Awa, the Child Scythe.”

The Doctor closed the book and scratched his big nose. “That is all the poet has to say.”

Zamia shuddered, and not only from her weakness. More than once, her band had spotted the imposing ruins of an ancient Kemeti pyramid or obelisk. But no Badawi in his right mind would go anywhere near these places, which were known to be tainted by the foulest sorts of magic. To be imprisoned in such a place…

“Cast into a ruined pyramid to die,” the old magus said. “Well, something obviously found him there. Something that would not let him die. That had a use for the soul of a killer of children.”

“The Dead Gods,” Litaz said, her voice eerily flat.

The Doctor scratched his balding pate in thought. “Well, my dear, you Soo know more about the heathens of old than we Abassenese do, but there are books that say that the Faroes of Kem ruled with soul-eating magics from their gods.”

Raseed, who had been long silent, narrowed his tilted eyes. He drew his sword and began to clean it. “With apologies, books and history are not our concern. This creature Mouw Awa is murdering men and women. Worse. If the Doctor speaks true, it keeps their souls from God’s presence. It—and whoever set it to killing—must be found and slain now.”

The way the dervish stood and spoke made Zamia want to be nearer to him. Were she not lying down, she feared she would have taken a step toward him against her will.

“So how can we hope to kill this foul thing?” Raseed continued. “My sword made no mark on it. My boldest blade-strokes did nothing.”

Dawoud’s brow furrowed in thought. He pulled at his hennaed goatee. “I am not surprised by that,” he said. “This Mouw Awa was apparently born of ancient Kem magics—twisted spells that your steel and even my own powers and Adoulla’s invocations could well be useless against. What say you, beloved?” Dawoud turned to his wife, not looking hopeful.

The alkhemist shook her head, her hair-rings clinking. “Given God’s help and months of study, perhaps I could try and devise some substance to fight such a thing, but we don’t have months.”

Zamia found herself speaking the words almost before she thought them. “It fled from my claws. I wounded it badly. Sense says I am the only one who can kill it.” She was very aware of what her next words were, and speaking them filled her with nausea. “Except that I am, myself, wounded and half dead. And I cannot take the shape.”

Litaz sniffed at her. “Don’t insult our craft, child. You’re not half dead. The way you heal, you’ll be back on your feet in a couple of days.”

Zamia turned her head and found the Doctor looking at her so hard that she felt certain he could see through her.

“Indeed,” the ghul hunter said. “And may it please God that it be so. For the child may be right about her claws.” He stopped staring at her and seemed now to stare hard at nothing. “Do you know, I’ve read translated accounts by barbarian priests in the Warlands? The land of Braxony was once tormented by creatures half wolf, half man. The heroes of that land were able to slay the monsters with silver swords—swords that they claimed were touched by Angels, as I recall. Of course those were just books and histories, and thus not our concern,” he said, sparing a droll look for Raseed.

Raseed made a noise in his throat. “The Angels would never visit blessings on those heathenish lands! Their favors are not for thieves and blasphemers! They—” he fell silent and looked at the floor. For the first time since she’d met him, Zamia scented something impure wafting from the dervish’s body. Something almost like deception. Impossible, she told herself. Perhaps her senses had been a bit confounded by injury and healing drugs.

The Doctor shrugged his big shoulders at his assistant. “I don’t know about that. But this is similar to what your people say of the lion-shape, is it not, Zamia? When you told me you carry no weapon, what was that bombastic bit of verse you spoke?”

It disturbed Zamia that she was growing so used to the Doctor’s insults to her people that she had begun ignoring them. “I am a Badawi, not a timid townsman. Bombast is not an insult to a true tribesman.”

“Fine, fine. The saying, child, what is it?”

“My claws, my fangs, the silver knives with which the Ministering Angels strike.”

Then without warning, she felt tears begin to well up in her eyes. She wiped them away. “I am the only one who can avenge the Banu Laith Badawi, and I cannot take the shape!”

“You will avenge your band, Zamia. Rest easy in that,” the Doctor said, and Zamia thanked God for the confidence in his eyes and scent.

The ghul hunter went on, his voice growing softer. “Child… you should know… That is… well, your pain is the freshest here, Zamia, but it is not unique. God’s truth be told, girl, we’re a veritable orphan hall here! The boy’s kin left all claim to him behind at the gates of the Lodge of God. My friends are a thousand miles and twenty years away from anyone they called family. And they’ve lost…” the Doctor stopped himself from saying something. “They’ve lost much more than you could know to this half-secret war we fight against the Traitorous Angel.”

Zamia looked over at Litaz. The alkhemist’s normally warm smile was nowhere to be seen. She gave Adoulla a sad look and stood up. In her small blue-black hands she held Zamia’s father’s dagger.

Zamia reached out weakly, wanting to hold the weapon in her own hands. “That dagger. My band’s…” she started to say.

“Don’t worry,” Litaz said, “I will return it. But—thanks to Raseed—we now have a solution that will distill the strange blood that blackens it to an analyzable essence. It will take me a little while to prepare it, though.”

The alkhemist darted another look at the Doctor—irritated rather than sad. “Adoulla, since you are so set on sharing secret pains today, maybe you should speak to the girl about your own family.” She left the room. Dawoud followed her out, throwing the Doctor an apologetic glance as he did so.

“And what, Doctor, was that about?” Zamia asked.

“Ask Litaz some time, and she will tell you, child. She is right, though, that I owe you a bit of my own story—for there should be a balance, between allies, in what we know of each other’s pain.”

Raseed, looking disgusted with himself and still smelling atypically of deception, stepped out of the room, giving her and the Doctor a bit of privacy. She watched the dervish go, puzzled, then forced her attention back to the ghul hunter. “Litaz mentioned your family,” she said.

“Aye. She means my parents, really. I only have the dimmest memories of them alive. Mostly I recall finding their bodies. As a boy, I told myself stories about them every day: they were killed because they were really a Khalif and queen in disguise and I, like a story hero, was a secret prince.

“But they weren’t royalty,” the Doctor went on. “They were a porter and his wife, ordinary people of the Scholars’ Quarter, who left me, through no choice of their own, to a cruel fate with no kin and no money.”

The Doctor paused to fetch Zamia a clay cup of cool water. She took a long drink from it, felt the sweet pain of her parched throat coming to life again. She didn’t know what to say to the Doctor’s words. “How did they die?” she asked, realizing too late that to these too-subtle city men, such a question might be taken as rude.

But the Doctor only sighed. “Pointlessly, my dear. They died pointlessly. No grand prophecy, no dark mission of the servants of the Traitorous Angel. Just a pathetic, desperate piece of shit with a knife, who was drunk or stupid enough to think he could somehow get a few coins out of my completely coinless father.” Vacantly, the ghul hunter plucked up a bit of brown cloth from a Soo sewing tray sitting on the cushion beside him. As he spoke he began to twist the cloth in his hands, apparently unaware of what he was doing.

“When I was barely a man I managed to track their killer down. He had ended up a one-legged gutter-sitter, obliterated by wormwood wine. I had started to study my craft then, but in truth I was still the street tough that had led the other young troublemakers of Dead Donkey Lane. But when I found that man, I was more vicious than I’d ever been in any brawl. I killed him with a knife. Stabbed him ten times. It takes a man a long time to die from a short-bladed knife. Long enough for me to wake from my rage. Long enough to find myself holding a bloody blade, hovering over the body of a still-begging cripple.”

The Doctor shook himself. “I still can’t explain what I felt at that moment. But you and I have more than one thing in common. To this day I keep my hand free of the feel of killing-steel. I’ve seen enough knives and swords. Now, instead of killing, I do all that I can to keep men from dying.”

“When we met, I wondered why you were traveling on such dangerous errands unarmed.”

“Aye. I am not a soft man, Zamia. I travel with those willing to kill. I flatter myself that I can still throw a punch as good as a man half my age. But… well, there is a difference between cold-blooded guttings and giving a cruel man a bloody nose once in a rare while.”

Dawoud appeared in the doorway and snorted. “ ‘Once in a rare while’? Do not let him fool you, girl. Adoulla Makhslood has handed out cracked ribs and swollen skulls a good bit more often than ‘once in a rare while’!” The magus walked over and patted the ghul hunter on his shoulder. “This one’s as much a savage as any Badawi, make no mistake!”

Zamia was about to take the magus to task for thus characterizing her people, but a sudden stink—so strong that to Zamia’s keen senses it was almost a physical object—filled the room. At first she was sure one of the old men had broken wind. They kept pointing accusing fingers at each other and snickering like children. But it was a different sort of stink, a scent her senses didn’t recognize. And it was streaming in from the small shop’s cedar windows. “What is that smell?” she asked, gagging around the words.

The Doctor stopped snickering and, as he spoke, his voice dripped with disdain. “That is the smell of the dyers and the tanners. The new Khalif, in his infinite wisdom, had the wafting-spells reroute the stink through the Scholars’ Quarter last year. Now one evening each week that damned-by-God smell gets dumped upon us and lingers for an hour. Were it any more than that, I swear to you the Khalif would have a riot on his hands.”

Dawoud grumbled something, walked over to a large knit pouch that hung on the wall, and produced from it two pieces of folded cloth. He handed them to Zamia and the Doctor. “Sad to say, I’m almost growing used to it. But Litaz has taken to keeping these around.”

“Praise God for your wife’s wisdom, brother-of-mine.” The Doctor held the cloth over his mouth and nose. As Zamia followed suit, she was surprised by the pungent but pleasant smells of mint oil and cinnamon and under these the stinging scent of vinegar.

The magus’s eyes tightened, and his voice grew firm. “I won’t let her be hurt,” he said. He spoke to the Doctor as if Zamia were not right there. “We are with you, my old friend, you know that. But this isn’t like the old days. I will not let Litaz be hurt. Now it is that before anything else.”

Zamia felt words rising up within her but she kept them down.

The Doctor set down his scented cloth. He put a big brown hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I will not let her be hurt either, brother-of-mine.”

Zamia believed him. In that moment, the Doctor seemed frighteningly alert to her. His face looked less round, somehow. Hard and haggard. She wished her will alone could heal her wounds and return her powers. To be lying in a sickbed while brave old men—yes, Doctor Adoulla Makhslood was brave, Zamia had to confess it—did the work of avenging her tribe… It twisted her stomach.

Zamia vomited over the edge of the divan. Thin yellow bile splashed onto the Doctor’s kaftan, then slid away.

Zamia was mortified. Her stomach twisted into further knots from pain and drugs, stink and embarrassment, and the taste of bile. She vomited again, this time at least finding the copper pail Litaz had placed beside the couch.

At that moment, the alkhemist swept into the room and began shooing out the men. “Out, you two! Out! This child is a chieftain’s daughter, and she has just emptied her guts before you. Do you think she needs two old goats hovering over her? No! Leave this between us women of high station. I said go! Name of God, can you men not make yourselves useful elsewhere?”

Zamia was as thankful for the alkhemist’s presence as for any rescue by an armed ally. She felt better now that her stomach was empty and, when the men had left, she smiled weakly at Litaz. But the little woman looked heartbroken as she sat beside Zamia.

“Do you know, only a day ago I was dreading the drudgery of drawing up accounts after Idesday? I thought that was going to be the great pain of my week. Now? I have a houseful of pain and loss.”

Shame flooded Zamia’s heart. “I am sorry, Auntie, to have brought my troubles to your door.”

Litaz waved away the words. “I’m not speaking only of you. Adoulla Makhslood lost a lifetime’s worth of books and talismans in that fire, Zamia. He is doing things only a young man should do in order to re-arm himself: sleep-stealing spells, self-bleedings, and such. We fought side by side for many years, dear, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him more determined.”

Zamia found comfort in this. She felt her respect for Doctor Adoulla Makhslood deepen almost physically. Litaz continued as she cleaned up the mess Zamia had made.

“You must understand what he has lost, Zamia. That townhouse… it was a sign of something. A sign that this man without wife or child or high station held something in this world.” The alkhemist shook her head. “But I suppose these things would make little sense to a tribeswoman, especially to one as young as you. ‘With my father against my band! With my band against my tribe! With my tribe against the world!’ You think us all quite strange—this little family of not-blood—do you not?”

Zamia thought for a moment before speaking. “Strange? Perhaps. But also admirable. So different from one another, yet so dedicated to each other. God’s truth be told, I’ve never seen such a way of being before. My own band feared me, even as they were happy enough to call me Protector.” She stopped herself before saying any more. How dare she speak ill of her band—her dead band!—to this woman who was practically a stranger!

She changed the subject. “You and your husband, Auntie. You have been married to him a long time, yes? And you sleep with him despite his tainted powers?” Only after she’d spoken did she realize that, to a townsman, this was inappropriate talk.

But Litaz just laughed. “Ha! Do you think he’s grown hooves or something? He has all the same elements that make a man. We may not be the hot-blooded couple we once were, but yes, of course I sleep with him!”

“And yet you two have no children?”

Litaz smiled a small, sad smile and said nothing.

“Forgive me Auntie, I should not have—”

“No, no, there’s no need for forgiveness, child. We had a son, Dawoud and I. It was a long, long time ago. He was a beautiful boy, and in his beaming little face was everything that was handsome of the Red River Soo and the Blue.”

The air was thick with the sadness in the woman’s words. “He… he has gone to join God, Auntie?”

A tiny, graceful nod. “Yes. Twenty years dead. He would be older than you, had he lived.” She looked at Zamia as if trying to decide how to say something. “Dawoud and I were taught hard lessons when we were young, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi. Lessons about the wrath of the Traitorous Angel. And about… vulnerabilities.” For a few long moments the alkhemist seemed to stare at something far away.

“Well,” Litaz finally said, standing up. “My scrying solutions should be boiling by now. I must attend to them. You should eat something and sleep a bit more now. And take this tea, which will complete your healing.” The alkhemist fed her pocketbread filled with chick peas and olive oil, then gave her a too-sweet medicinal tea. Zamia had barely set down the cup before her eyelids began to droop and she slid into a dreamless sleep.

She half-woke several times from her feverish healing sleep. Each time she caught the Doctor’s scent, awake and active. More than once she looked around and saw him there in the sitting room, pounding out some herb or filing some metal into a vial, mumbling some invocation as he did so. Once she saw him slash his own forearm and drip blood onto a piece of vellum. Litaz’s words about the Doctor’s determination floated through her head as Zamia drifted in and out of sleep.

When she finally, truly woke she was alone. The wound in her side still ached painfully, but the nausea was gone, and she felt a renewed strength in her limbs. It was hard to tell time by the city’s sun and moonlight—buildings warped it in weird ways—but from the dark outside the windows, Zamia guessed that it was very late at night.

Again she tried to take the shape and again felt as if she were trying to breathe sand. She stifled her tears, though, and shakily brought herself to her feet. From another room she heard voices—the Doctor’s, Litaz’s, Dawoud’s. Zamia’s steps were slow and awkward. She followed the sound of the voices to the room adjoining the sitting room.

The room was crowded with things and people. A shelf of books, racks of bottles, and strange tubes made of glass. The only relatively clear surface was a large table made of some strange metal. The Doctor’s white-kaftaned bulk was perched on a low stool, and Raseed leaned against the wall beside him. Litaz sat in a tall chair before this table, her husband hovering over her shoulder, both of them looking at a massive wood-bound book that lay open there. Beside the book was a bizarre brass and glass apparatus. One part of the thing looked like a small claw, and Zamia saw that this claw clutched her father’s knife. Litaz was looking into another part of the device—shaped like a huge eye—and evidently comparing what she saw to the figures and words in the book.

Study, the memorization of plants, the intricacies of the stars. For years, her father had tried to teach her that these were a part of being Protector of the Band. “Patience, little moon, is a warrior’s virtue,” he would say. “Your strength alone is not enough. You must have knowledge, too, little rose. And judgment. And, as I say, little emerald, patience.” Though she was always ‘Protector’ when there were others to overhear, in private her father had perhaps a dozen “little” nicknames for her. She loved the way he’d peppered his speech with them, even as he had raised her to be a warrior.

Her father’s greatest worry had been that Zamia was too lion-like. “You’d do well to spend more time learning the townsmen’s letters and less time stalking sandfoxes! There are many ways in which the Protector must defend the band,” he’d said just a fortnight ago, looking so disappointed that it hurt Zamia inside. Just to make her father happy, she had tried to pay attention to the book full of meaningless marks as he tried to teach them to her. Had tried hard. But try as she might, she was not made for such things.

Her new allies all looked up as they heard her approach. Raseed stopped leaning on the wall and took a step toward her before he seemed to stop himself. The Doctor’s eyes were wide, perhaps surprised that she was on her feet. Litaz looked at her with the same puzzled face that she’d worn when looking through that glass eye.

The old magus, though, was the first to speak. “Name of God, child, you should be resting! How is it that you’re on your feet? God’s balls, how is it that you’re awake? You should be heal-sleeping for another two or three days!”

Litaz bit her lip, looking as if she were still puzzling something out. “The touch of the Angels,” the alkhemist said. “Amazing. Clearly, the power God’s ministers granted you goes beyond your lion-shape. Even with our healing magics helping, you should not have been able to walk for a week.”

Zamia raised her chin just a bit. “Perhaps we ‘savages’ are more resilient than the soft townsmen you are used to treating, Auntie.”

The Doctor made a farting noise with his mouth and laughed. “Yes, yes, surely it is the innate bravery of the Badawi at work here, girl.”

Before Zamia could respond, Raseed was at her side. “ ‘God’s mercy is greater than any cruelty,’ ” he quoted from the Heavenly Chapters. “You were grievously wounded, Zamia. Praise God that you are recovering swiftly, but still you ought to be resting now, for—”

Litaz made an irked noise. “Please,” she said to Raseed, “don’t give advice when you know not of what you speak. The best thing for Zamia now is not to sleep. The crimson quicksilver is reawakening her blood, just as it is the blood on this knife. If she can walk, let her. And speaking of blood, she has a right to see whatever answers we may glean here.” The Soo woman turned to Zamia and gestured to the only other stool in the room. “Sit. I was just making the final adjustments to my scrying solution. I was asking the men, but you’d know better than they—when you wounded this Mouw Awa creature, did it bleed?”

Zamia forced herself to think of those few moments that had nearly killed her. Of her fangs digging into that monster’s foul flank. It had been both like and unlike tearing into flesh. There was shadow and pain but…“No, Auntie. No, it did not bleed.”

“As I told you,” the Doctor said, stroking his beard in thought. “The girl also said that to her remarkable senses, the blood on this knife smelled of neither man nor animal, whereas this Mouw Awa smelled of both. As I’d suspected, this must be the blood of the one who made those ghuls. The one whom that monster called ‘blessed friend.’ ”

“Well, whatever its source, it is the strangest blood I have ever seen. Full of life and lifeless. All of the eight elements are here, but they are… negated somehow. Sand and lightning, water and wind, wood and metal, orange fire and blue fire! How could they all be in one drop of blood, and yet not be there?” The little woman turned to her husband. “Stranger still, within the clots there are creeping things moving about. It is as if this blood came from some mix of man and ghul. It makes no sense. Still, my love, you should work your magics here. God willing, they may give us better answers.”

Using a tiny silver spoon, the alkhemist scooped a bit of white powder from a jar into a glass vial filled with red liquid. The liquid began to bubble and froth and turned bright green. Litaz then took this liquid and poured it over the bloodied knife that had been Zamia’s father’s.

A bright green light began to shimmer off of the knife. The light grew brighter and brighter until it filled the room.

“You can begin,” the Soo woman said to her husband. “Stand back,” she said to the others, doing so herself as she spoke.

The magus stepped forward, placing his gnarled hands a hairsbreadth above the knife. An eerie green light began to glimmer about his fingers as they weaved back and forth around the blood-stained blade. The old Soo’s eyes rolled back, and he chanted a wordless chant in an oddly echoed voice. Wicked magics, Zamia thought. Instinctively, she started to take the shape…

And of course found that she couldn’t. Panic rose in her again—she could feel the shape just beyond her reach, and feel the pain of her wound keeping her from her lion-self. Almighty God, I beg you, help me!

But then the magus was speaking, and she had to heed his words, for that was the path to vengeance for the Banu Laith Badawi. Tears burned in her eyes, but again she shoved thoughts of the shape aside and listened.

“This blood is like… like the cancellation of life,” Dawoud said as his long dark fingers darted back and forth above her father’s knife. “More than that, the cancellation of existence. Like the essence of a ghul, whose false soul is made of creeping things. But with will. Cruel, powerful will.”

The Doctor spoke quietly to Litaz, as if Zamia and Raseed were not there. “This all makes a horrible sort of sense, when I think on it. There’s an old tale of a man called the ghul of ghuls—a man who was like a ghul raised by the Traitorous Angel himself. A man who’d cut out his own tongue to better let the Traitorous Angel speak through him. Who had his soul emptied, then filled with the will of the Traitorous Angel. He is supposed to wear a kaftan that can never be clean and—”

The Doctor fell silent as Dawoud’s head tilted back and the magus grimaced as if in great pain. The old Soo was touching the knife now with his fingertips, and he screamed.

It was a wordless screaming chant at first, but the pain-laced sounds resolved into words: “THE BLOOD OF ORSHADO! THE BLOOD OF ORSHADO!” The magus’s body jerked about strangely as he screamed, but he kept his hands on the knife. “THE BLOOD OF ORSHADO!”

Litaz leapt up and pried her husband’s fingers from the blade. Dawoud stumbled into the corner and collapsed onto a cushion with a pitiful moan. He held his head in his hands and sat there, shuddering.

The Doctor wore worry for his friend on his face. “Your magic takes its toll on your body. For that, brother-of-mine, the world owes you.” He clasped a hand on the magus’s shoulder. “But magic can also take its toll on the mind. Praise be to God that the girl’s would-be assassin was unhinged enough to rattle on so. Clearly, this Orshado is the one who that monster called ‘blessed friend.’ I’ve long said that my order was misnamed. For in realty it is men, not ghuls, that I hunt. And now we have a quarry. With a tracking spell and a name we—”

The Doctor’s eyes flashed, almost as if he would cry, Zamia thought.

“I’ve forgotten,” he said softly. “I’ve no scripture-engraved needles. They were ruined in that fire, like everything else. Soiled beyond use if not destroyed.”

Zamia wanted to insist that there must be another way, but she found that gathering her thoughts and words was an effort. She was weaker than she had admitted to the others. Her heart swelled when Raseed seemed to speak her thoughts for her.

“Are there no other spells you might work, Doctor? Is there nowhere else you might buy such needles?”

The Doctor shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that, boy. Those needles take weeks to make. If we were in a remote location, or facing a novice magus, I might try a cruder invocation. But the city is full of life-energy that will confuse a tracking spell, and this Orshado no doubt commands powerful screening magics. Only flawless components and impeccable invocations would have even a chance of finding our foes.”

The Doctor looked around at each of them and seemed to force a smile. “But let’s not all look so hopeless, eh? We’ve a couple of names to aid us now, at least. Almighty God willing, even without a tracking spell, we will find this damned-by-God monster and its ‘blessed friend.’ ”

In the corner of the workshop, Raseed shifted uneasily. His sharp features drew down in a frown. “That phrase bothers me, Doctor. How could such a creature have friends?”

The Doctor raised a bushy eyebrow. “You know, boy, I’ve heard people ask the same about Raseed bas Raseed! ‘His face is so sour,’ they say!”

He is always making mock, even of matters of life and death, Zamia thought, noting the Doctor’s oafish smile as he poked the dervish in the ribs.

As if he were thinking her thoughts, Raseed frowned. “Apologies, Doctor,” the dervish said, “but there is little cause for jesting here.”

The ghul hunter smiled a frustrated smile. “Wherever on God’s great earth a man tries to make light of his troubles, trust a damned-by-God holy man to open his mouth and put a stop to it! And here I thought this one—” he jabbed a fat finger again at Raseed “—had been learning to loosen up a bit.”

Though Zamia could not say why, Raseed reacted as if struck. “Loosen up? May God forbid it. If anything, this is a time for redoubling virtue and vigilance. The Traitorous Angel’s foulest servants stalk the city,” the dervish said forcefully. “May it please All-Merciful God to protect us all!”

“May it please God,” all present echoed ritually. When Zamia looked back at the Doctor, he was no longer smiling.

Chapter 12

“May it please God,” Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed said, and heard his words spoken simultaneously by the others. “So now we know some of what we face,” he said. “What do we do about it?”

For a long few moments there was nothing but silence. His words hung in the air, and the group’s grim expressions reflected the enormity of the situation. Dawoud scanned the faces that filled his sitting room. His wife’s eyes carried the impression of having seen too much, and Adoulla’s features displayed a weariness that Dawoud knew was reflected in his own. The young warriors’ expressions were different, though, Dawoud thought. The emerald-eyed girl and clean-shaven boy were more determined than resigned. The older trio’s stances were set by weary habit, but Raseed and Zamia’s were set by will.

Adoulla’s assistant was the first to speak, and he did so heatedly. “We must warn the watchmen, Doctor. Or perhaps the Khalif himself. Someone in authority needs—”

The ghul hunter snorted in disbelief. “You still think this is where our energies should go, boy? After two years in this city even a slave-to-titles such as yourself must recognize that the Khalif isn’t going to believe such as us. And even if he did believe there was a threat to Dhamsawaat, his greatest concern would be how it affects his coin purse. It is a waste of time trying to convince a selfish man to care about what lies beyond his nose. No. The Khalif will be as helpful as a hole to a pail. But I have learned that the Falcon Prince may share some of our troubles. He could—”

He cannot be serious! Dawoud cut his friend off, putting a hand on Adoulla’s big shoulder and wagging a finger in his face. “How can one man be so wide-eyed and so damned-by-God cynical at the same time, brother of mine? Even if we could find Pharaad Az Hammaz, linking our fates to his would bring more trouble than aid. Half this city is hunting him! And besides, there are a few good guardsmen out there, you know. Most notably their captain.”

He turned to Raseed, who looked desperate to kill something. “Your idea is sound, Raseed. And the Captain of the Guard, Roun Hedaad, is known to me. Indeed, Litaz and I once saved his life. Tomorrow morning I will go to the Crescent Moon Palace and try to speak to him about what we’ve turned up. It is a vague warning I’ll be bringing him, but he will be thankful for it nonetheless. It cannot hurt to have the guard aware that this threat is out there. And it just might help.”

Adoulla stroked his beard. “Hm. Roun Hedaad is a good man as guardsmen go. A very good man. But everyone knows he is a holdover from another era and wields little power these days. The Captain of the Watch holds the real power. Still, it’s not a bad idea, I suppose. If anyone in the palace is going to look past his self-interest long enough to wonder about the slaughter of poor people, it will be Captain Hedaad. So perhaps someone should speak to him.” Adoulla turned to Raseed. “Are you satisfied, boy?”

The dervish inclined his turbaned head in acknowledgement, then turned to Dawoud. “And thank you, Uncle.”

Beside him, Litaz stood and spoke softly. “Roun Hedaad will make a good ally in this. I wish I could accompany you, my love. But the girl’s healing is still incomplete. Come tomorrow morning she’ll need crimson quicksilver, and I’ll need to be here with her in order to apply it. Speaking of which,” she turned her beautiful eyes to the tribeswoman, “it is about time to apply a sleeping salve. Come with me, Zamia. This is a private matter between women—let us leave these oafs to themselves.”

To Dawoud, the girl seemed about to protest—no doubt she fumed at the idea of being left out of battle planning—but her head drooped and her body was clearly putting the lie to her will’s stubborn resilience. With weak steps, she followed his wife out of the room.

Dawoud turned to Adoulla and Raseed and shrugged. “So I will go alone. Litaz must stay here, and the Khalif has little respect for your order, Adoulla.”

Adoulla rolled his eyes. “Aye, and the feeling couldn’t be more mutual. We’re best off dividing tasks, anyway. As for myself,” he started, then looked hesitant, embarrassed even, to speak his next words.

What is this? Dawoud wondered. His old friend was rarely embarrassed by anything.

“As for myself,” the ghul hunter continued, “come morning I will go to the Singers’ Quarter to speak again to the boy Faisal, whose family was slain.”

So that’s it. Adoulla was ashamed of his own weakness. Afraid he was making selfish choices. Anxious that Dawoud would judge him harshly for it. Well, Dawoud could never pass judgment on this man whom he’d been friends with for a long lifetime. But neither would he let Adoulla lie to himself.

He smiled as he spoke. “Aye, speak again to the boy. And while you are about it—what do you know?—you will be at the house of the only woman that you have ever really loved. It is funny how All-Provident God arranges these things, eh?”

He’d meant only to tease his friend, but Adoulla’s expression was dark and troubled. “Miri Almoussa knows a great deal about the history of this city—she may have more information on our enemies.”

At this the dervish, who Dawoud had nearly forgotten was there, chirped up. “With apologies Doctor, I hope you will excuse me from accompanying you tomorrow, for—”

“For a holy man ought not be seen traipsing about a whorehouse, eh? And ought not associate with certain types, eh?” Adoulla’s tone spoke of the weariness of an old argument. “I grow truly tired of this, boy. You cannot call a man ‘partner’ and insult his friends at every turn.”

The boy’s tilted eyes went wide, and Dawoud thought his own might have, too. Adoulla seemed unaware of his surprising choice of words.

“I… I have never dared call myself your partner, Doctor. I am merely your assistant.”

Adoulla shrugged. “You’re my assistant in ghul hunting, true. But you and that forked sword of yours are near as good at it as I was in my prime.”

The boy looked profoundly embarrassed, and pink points tinted his golden cheeks. “I thank you, Doctor. But in any case I do not ask to be excused for the reason you named. Rather, I ask to remain here and act as a guard for the women.” Now it was the boy’s turn to look ashamed of himself and stammer. “The monster may return. I’ve… I’ve failed once to protect Za—er, the tribeswoman. Due to my lack of diligence, she was attacked, and if I am to—”

Dawoud could not listen to this. Adoulla teased the dervish but essentially coddled the boy’s rigid nonsense. Dawoud would not. If the dervish wished to judge himself guilty on the basis of nothing, that was his business. But Dawoud and his wife were being drawn back into grim matters that they’d left behind long ago. They had little choice—as foul a force as Dawoud had ever sensed threatened their best friend. But he’d be damned by God if he was going to go into battle with confused warriors at his side.

He wheeled on Raseed. “Do you have jackal fangs, boy? Not so far as I can see. So how in the name of Merciful God is it your fault the girl was wounded? The life you have chosen is war, young dervish. A war against the Traitorous Angel. The sort of thing your Order talks about in all of their oaths and Traditions. Well, this is the reality. The girl ought to praise God that she’s still alive. People—people we care for—die in wars. You seem unprepared for this. And perhaps unprepared to do the duty you left the Lodge for.”

Raseed lowered his head, his blue turban bobbing “You are correct, of course, Uncle.” The boy’s look said that each word was pulling a sword blade through his guts. “I must put ‘the sun of God’s good before the candleflame of one life.’ I just… I… it was my fault that—”

Litaz reappeared in the doorway, apparently having put the tribeswoman to bed. “What with the enemies that are after Adoulla, I would feel better if I could work without worrying that a ghul pack is going to knock down the door. Let the boy stay here with me and act as a guard.”

Dawoud nodded. “Anything to keep you safe, beloved.”

He and Litaz spent half that night lying beside each other, too anxious to sleep and not secluded enough to make love. Dawoud held Litaz’s small hand in his, but they said little. Finally, they drifted into sleep.

When he woke at dawn he did not wake Litaz. Instead he said silent goodbyes to her and a loudly snoring Adoulla, and stepped quietly out the door into the still half-dark morning.

Soon the nights would be growing shorter. The Feast of Providence, the night before the shortest day of the year, was almost upon them—though he’d do no celebrating until this Orshado and the things that served him were destroyed.

Dawoud started walking and soon left the Scholars’ Quarter behind him. He breathed deeply of the early morning air, trying to drive from his body the taint he’d felt when he’d worked his scrying spell last night. The power behind that taint… there was more to this than a handful of killings, Dawoud felt certain. That sort of power aimed at bigger things.

For the first time since he and Litaz had seen the smoke rising from Adoulla’s townhouse, Dawoud really turned over events in his head. He was angry to have been dragged into this business. For decades, his and his wife’s work had drawn them away from all that was normal and happy. Dawoud’s body wrecked by magic. Their baby boy murdered by monsters. When they had fought and traveled beside Adoulla and others, the hypnotic song of responsibility had called them onto paths of danger and madness, like the snake-tailed dune maids that lured desert travelers to their doom. But they’d left that all behind. Dawoud’s greatest worries these past few years had to do with ministering to the poor without going broke, and with his wife’s increasing desire to leave this city he had made his home. But now…

He passed a shuttered storefront, then stopped walking as his chest suddenly tightened and blazed into pain. In the course of his calling Dawoud had been both stabbed and poisoned, and this felt like both at once. He began to cough and nearly collapsed from it.

It was several minutes before the coughing fit passed. Standing frozen there on the street, he panted painfully, feeling his body taking on more age than was its due. The healing and scrying magics he had worked over the past day—it had been many months since he’d done such. He felt the toll with every labored breath. Loudmouthed Adoulla liked to complain about his old man’s aches, but he knew nothing of pain. Of weakness. When Dawoud worked his magic—Name of God, when he simply walked down a dusty Dhamsawaat street too fast!—it felt as if God’s great fingers were pinching his lungs shut.

With this Orshado and his monstrous servants out there, Dawoud, his wife, and his oldest friend were needed more than ever before, but he did not know how long he could last back in this life. Not for the first time, his head was filled with visions of himself as a doddering invalid who needed his wife to spoonfeed him.

He tried unsuccessfully to keep his face from betraying his pain to the porters and cartmen passing by. But, he saw, he needn’t have bothered—for the busy people of Dhamsawaat didn’t give three shits for a dying old man’s agony. The only looks he received were looks of disgust. After a moment his breathing began to return to normal, and he gave the self-centered people around him his own look of disgust. Perhaps Litaz is right. Perhaps it is time at long last for us to leave this cold-hearted city.

He leaned heavily against a stone wall and allowed himself one deep shudder. Then he focused his soul and drew himself up. There was a task at hand. And if he was going to be there for Litaz, he had to be strong. He clenched his fists and pressed on, trying not to feel the ache that was building in his back.

He stepped out onto the Mainway, ignoring the hawkers’ shouts. For half a moment he toyed with the idea of hiring a sedan chair. But it was only toying. In all his years in Dhamsawaat, Dawoud had only ridden in one a handful of times. As with other things, his wife had been able to move from the Soo way to the Abassenese with more ease. When she was not with him she often hired chairs. Being a rich Blue River girl prepared her for having men carry her on their backs, he supposed with a snort, dodging past a bowlegged pistachio seller.

For an honest Red River Soo like himself, such a way of moving through crowds was simply wrong. Not doing so on the way to the palace, though, meant a long, hard walk. At least the day promised to be a cool one.

He walked for an hour and a half down broad roads before turning down Poulterer’s Row, which was packed with people preparing for the Feast of Providence. Every neighborhood in the city had a chicken seller, of course, but on Poulterer’s Row one could peruse the rare delicacies of the great master merchants: purple partridge, sun-dove, heron-stuffed swan. It was also the only place in all of Dhamsawaat that one could buy a pickled ostrich egg from the Republic. The smells of death and feather were thick here, and Dawoud was seized by a dry retching. He sat for a moment and gave a copper fals to a water seller who poured from his skin a cup of water so welcome it made Dawoud thank God aloud.

After yet another hour of his sandals slapping stone and packed dirt, Dawoud made it to the western gates of the Crescent Moon Palace. It had been a couple of years since he had been down this way, and he found himself newly dazzled by the building’s brilliance. Rising from the great white dome on a thin spire of gold was a sculpture of a man on horseback wielding a long lance. The head of the statue was changed to resemble each new Khalif. Dawoud realized he’d not been to the Palace since the new Khalif had taken the Throne of the Crescent Moon.

The statue gleamed, showing the lean-featured Khalif’s martial prowess against God’s enemies. Of course, everyone in Dhamsawaat knew that the new Khalif, like his father, had never once been in battle in his pampered life. It was the kind of hypocrisy that made Adoulla choke on his breakfast, but Dawoud wasn’t much bothered by it. Matters of state were about hypocrisy as much as anything else. The Soo people understood this as a simple fact that needn’t be condemned—a thing that simply was.

Dawoud approached the squat stone guardhouse that stood beside the gate. Calling on Roun Hedaad meant getting word to him by way of a helpful watchman. Dawoud did not have Adoulla’s total scorn for the Khalif’s men, but he did know that most of them could not be truthfully described as helpful. A pair of them exited the guardhouse and walked by, wearing steel-studded leather jerkins and displaying the slim maces that were their weapon of office. They eyed Dawoud as they did everyone they passed—with a vaguely menacing squint, ready, almost eager, for trouble. Dawoud gave these two a deferential old-mannish nod and sought out the least hostile looking watchman he could find: a lanky boy with soft eyes.

“God’s peace, young man. I must get in touch with Captain Hedaad immediately regarding an urgent matter.”

The boy said, more politely than Dawoud expected from a watchman, “If you’ve got a complaint about the watch, Uncle, I’m afraid you’ll need to take it to the eastern gates office. They’ll get you an audience with a vice captain and in a few days perhaps—”

“Forgive me, young man, but this is not a matter that can wait. My name is Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed, and I am well-known to Roun. I promise you that if you give him my name he will want to see me right away.”

The boy fixed those soft eyes on Dawoud, trying to somehow spy out ill intent. He put an idle hand on his mace and scratched his nose. “Well-known, huh?” Another long look. “Fine. But you’d better not be jerking me about here, Uncle.”

Dawoud inclined his head graciously.

Half an hour later a different watchman led Dawoud into a small chamber just inside the palace proper. The room was crowded with grain sacks and coils of chain, but there was a small divan in the corner. The watchman gestured to it gruffly, then left. No sooner had Dawoud settled gratefully down onto the dark wood than Roun Hedaad’s wide frame filled the doorway.

Dawoud started to stand, but the Captain of the Guard kept him from doing so. He bent down to embrace Dawoud and they exchanged greetings. Then Roun sat beside him.

The squat man had always seemed to Dawoud to be cut from a block of brown stone. There was the slightest bit of gray in his thick black moustache now and a few tiny lines at his eyes. But he looked as hard as ever, as did the masterwork four-bladed mace at his side.

“Thank you for making time to see me, Captain.”

The man scratched his club-shaped nose. “I can always make time for a man who saved my life.”

Dawoud waved a dismissive hand. “Well, my wife’s tonics had as much to do with that as anything. Besides, we were paid a good price for our work then.”

“Fair enough. So what is it you have come here to ask then, Uncle?”

If it were Litaz here, she’d have planned all of the words to use here. But that was not how he did things. “You know some of the strange, cruel magics my wife and I once made a life of fighting,” he said to the Captain of the Guard. “I’ve come to you because such a threat is loose in Dhamsawaat now.”

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. Their 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.

But this city of his—his for some sixty years—well, there was nothing to compare with its streets. The crowds had annoyed Adoulla all his life. But of all the places in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms he had been, Dhamsawaat alone was his. And somewhere in his city, murderous monsters were preying on people.

And so, you old fart, Dhamsawaat needs you. Rotating this truth proudly in his mind made Adoulla feel just a little bit less tired. But as his sandaled feet brought him closer and closer to the house of Miri Almoussa, his fatigue returned twofold.

True to the code of the ghul hunter, Adoulla had never married. When one is married to the ghuls, one has three wives already, was another of the adages of his order. He didn’t know much about the old order—a few adages and invocations passed down many years ago by his teacher, old Doctor Boujali, and learned from old books. The ghul hunters had never been as cohesive a fraternity as the Dervishes’ Order—and any man could wear white and claim to chase monsters. Still, over the years, Adoulla had tried to adhere to what he had learned of the ways of his ancient order. He was a permissive man in many ways—no less with himself than with others, he had to admit. But in some things rigidity was the only way. Saying marriage vows before God would cause a ghul hunter’s kaftan to soil, and it would cost him the power of his invocations. As with so many of God’s painful ways, Adoulla did not know why it was so, only that it was.

The crowd thinned and Adoulla strode through Little Square, his kaftan billowing in the breeze. Little Square was not little at all—in fact, in all the city it was second only to Angels’ Square in size. But the name was old, from the days when Dhamsawaat had first been built on the ruins of a Kemeti city, and had only had two squares. Long rows of brown, thorny shrubbery framed its eastern and western sides. These low, desert bushes served as a back wall for the stall-less, beggarish sellers who lined the square to Adoulla’s left and his right.

Little Square was a haven for the less prosperous merchants and tradesmen of the city—those too poor or too unreliable to have earned, through honest work or bribery, a real shop or stall in one of the better markets. The square was flanked by these men and women, sitting on rugs or standing beside sorry piles of goods. Adoulla’s eyes moved up the column of half-rate cobblers and rotten-vegetable sellers to his right.

He cursed as he caught sight, a dozen yards ahead, of a skinny man in the white kaftan of his order. He strode over and made the noise in his throat that he made when genuinely offended. Litaz had once said that it sounded like he was being pleasured by a poorly trained whore.

For all that he mocked Raseed’s dervishhood, Adoulla had also pledged his life to an antiquated order that Dhamsawaatis knew mostly from great-grandparents’ tales and bawdy shadow-puppet plays. Adoulla had learned long ago that most men professing his life-calling were charlatans who had bits and pieces of the proper knowledge but had never been face-to-face with a ghul. They used cheap magic to make their robes appear moonlight white and took the hard-earned money of the poor, mumbling a few bogus spells and promising protection from monsters.

The hairy young man with an oily smile who stood before him wore such cheap robes. He was the sort who claimed to hunt the “hidden spirits” supposedly behind working peoples’ every trouble. The sort who claimed to tell the future. The rotten-vegetable sellers of my order.

When he was a younger man, and more defensive of the honor of his order, Adoulla had thought it his duty to root out such hucksters and send them packing with their robes dirtied and their noses and false charms broken. But the decades since had taught him resignation. Other charlatans would always pop up, and the people—the desperate, desperate people—would always go to them. Still, Adoulla took enough time now to give the fraud a long, scornful glance. They knew Adoulla, these men, knew him to be the last of the real thing—was it wrong that he took some pride in that? This one, at least, had the decency to lower his eyes in shame.

That such thieves thrived was sad, but it was the way of the world. Adoulla passed the fraud by, spitting at the man’s feet instead of throwing a punch as he once would have. The fool made an offended noise, but that was all.

By the time he reached Miri’s tidy storefront it was past midday. The brassbound door was open and, standing in the doorway, Adoulla smelled sweet incense from iron burners and camelthorn from the hearth. For a long moment he just stood there at the threshold, wondering why in the world he’d been away from this lovely place so long.

A corded forearm blocked his way, and a man’s shadow fell over him. A muscular man even taller than Adoulla stood scowling before him, a long scar splitting his face into gruesome halves. He placed a broad palm on Adoulla’s chest and grabbed a fistful of white kaftan.

“Ho-ho! Who’s this forsaker-of-friends, slinking back in here so shamelessly?”

Despite all his dark feelings, Adoulla smiled. “Just another foolish child of God who doesn’t know to stay put, Axeface.” He embraced Miri’s trusted doorman, and the two men kissed on both cheeks.

“How are you these days, Uncle?” the frighteningly big man asked.

“Horrible, my friend. Horrible, miserable, and terrible, but we praise God anyway, eh? Will you announce me to Miri, please?”

Axeface looked uncomfortable, as if he was considering saying something he didn’t want to say.

“What is it?” Adoulla asked.

“I’ll announce you, Uncle, and there’s not a man in the world I’m happier to see pay the Mistress a visit. But she isn’t gonna be happy to see you. You’re lucky her new boyfriend isn’t here.”

Adoulla felt his insides wither. For a moment he had no words. “Her… her… what?” he finally managed. “Her who?” He felt as if he’d suddenly been struck half-witted.

“Her new man,” Axeface said with a sympathetic shake of the head. “You know him, Uncle. Handsome Mahnsoor, they call him. Short fella, thin moustache, always smells nicer than a man should.”

Adoulla did know the man, or at least knew of him. A preening weasel that twisted others into doing his work for him. Adoulla’s numbness burned away in a flame of outrage.

“That one!? He’s too young for her! Name of God, he’s clearly after her money!” He gestured with one hand to the greeting room behind Axeface. “The son of a whore just wants to get his overwashed little hands on this place. Surely, man, you must see that!”

Axeface put up his leg-of-lamb-sized hands as if frightened of Adoulla. “Hey, hey, Uncle, between you and me, you know I love you. You’d make a great husband for the mistress. But you’ve made some damned-by-God stupid choices far as that goes. Surely, man, you must see that, huh?” Axeface poked him playfully, but Adoulla wasn’t in the mood.

At all.

Seeming to sense this, Axeface straightened to his full, monstrous height. “Look, Doctor, the bottom line is, I don’t see nothin’ Mistress Miri don’t want me to see. That’s how I stay well-paid, well-fed, and smiley as a child. But if you want to see the Mistress, hold on.”

Adoulla was announced and ushered into the large greeting room. Scant sunlight made its way through high windows. Tall couches lined the wall opposite the door, and a few well-dressed men sat on them, each speaking to a woman.

Then she was there. Miri Almoussa, Seller of Silks and Sweets. Miri of the Hundred Ears. Miri. Her thick curves jiggled as she moved, and her worn hands were ablaze with henna.

“What do you want?” she asked him, a cold wind blowing beneath her words.

Adoulla’s irritation briefly eclipsed his longing. “You may recall, woman, that you asked for my help, even after your having asked me to ‘walk my big feet out of your life and never come back.’ But this is not the place for us to speak.”

Miri arched an eyebrow and said nothing, but she led him to the house’s tiny rear courtyard, sat him down at a small table, and brought him a tray with fruit nectar, little salt fish, and pickles. She sat down beside him and waited for him to speak. But for a moment Adoulla just sat there, listening to the birds chirping in the courtyard’s twin pear trees and avoiding Miri’s eyes.

He didn’t break the silence until Miri began to tap her silk-slippered foot impatiently. “I’m here, Miri, because I have learned something of your niece’s killers. But not enough yet to stop them from killing others. I would like to speak to your grandnephew again, as he may have recalled something new.”

“Faisal is not here. Some of the girls went on a workbreak trip to see the new menagerie the Khalif has set up outside the city, and I thought it a good idea for him to try and forget his pains, so I sent him with them. He won’t be back for a day or so.”

Adoulla plucked up a pickle and smiled to himself at the thought of a whores’ holiday to see strange beasts—surely Miri was the only proprietor in the city who would allow such a thing.

As happened so often, Miri seemed to read his thoughts. She did not seem amused. “All people who work deserve days away from their labor, Doullie,” she said flatly. “And whores are people, even if my business depends on letting men forget that fact.”

He would not rise to the bait. “Of course. In any case, I did not come only to speak to Faisal. I came also because Miri’s Hundred Ears are always open, sometimes to songs the rest of us don’t hear. For instance, does the name ‘Mouw Awa’ mean anything to you? Or the name ‘Orshado’? And what do you know of the case of Hadu Nawas?”

Her offended expression melted away, and she took on the look of Miri, knower-of-many-things, narrowing her smoky eyes and crinkling her nose. Miri’s face when she was trying to recall something was the same as when she was rifling through her cabinets for a particular blouse. “ ‘Orshado’… it sounds like a northern name, perhaps? I couldn’t say for sure. But Hadu Nawas… he was an enemy of the throne, yes? One of the many conspirators killed in the civil war?”

“Not quite killed, it seems,” Adoulla muttered.

Miri gave him a perplexed look but continued. “If I recall correctly, he was also rumored to be a child-killer. Now, ‘Mouw Awa’… Hm. All I could tell you is that it sounds like… like Kemeti hidden script?”

Adoulla snorted. “Indeed. Though it took me a full day to have that lock click open in my mind. Sometimes, my sweet, your erudition makes me sick with jealousy.”

“Well, even leaving aside our difference in age, I’ve been hit on the head far fewer times than you, Doullie.” She deigned to smile at him, and he felt his soul warm.

Adoulla winced theatrically, as if he’d been punched in the gut. This response to Miri’s jibes had always made her laugh in the past. But instead when she met his eyes, she let her smile slip and turned away from him.

There were a thousand things he wanted to say to her when he saw that, but none of them would do any good.

“How is your grandnephew faring?” he asked.

“How is he faring?” Her thick braid with its streak of silver whipped as she spun to give him an incredulous glare. “How is he faring!? He’s broken! How else could he be after what happened to him? You see so much of this horror that you don’t even see it for horror anymore! He is a boy, Doullie! A boy of eight! Not one of your suicidal, fanatical friends! Not some ‘foe of the Traitorous Angel’!” She bit off her next words quietly. “This—it’s this madness that drove us apart.”

This time Adoulla’s wince was not feigned. Miri had always had unhappy words for the life he led, and for the friends who shared it, but those words had never been this sharp, this scornful.

She wasn’t stopped by his pained face. “Look at the world around you, Doullie! Forty years you’ve spent in this hunting. All that death. Why? What has come of it? Is the world a safe place now? A happier place?” She sank into her chair and put her face in her hands. “Merciful God, I’m sorry. Now you’ve upset me. What I meant to say was—” But she said nothing more.

“Your niece’s killers are still out there, Miri. They… they burned my house down.”

“I heard.” Of course Miri of the Hundred Ears had heard. Yet still she had all these hard words for him. “God protect you,” she said now.

Miri and he had been closer in the days when the townhouse was new, he reflected. Much closer. She had helped him choose it. Adoulla said nothing for a long time. Then he started to speak, though he didn’t know what he was going to say. “Miri, I—”

Miri held up a silencing hand and, with her other, wiped away the beginnings of tears. She took a deep breath and looked at Adoulla. Her eyes were weary but filled with love, and she spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Doullie. I didn’t mean the things I said.”

Adoulla had never been more tired in his life, and he tried to keep the pain out of his words. “Yes, you did.”

Miri’s voice was steadier now, and she twined the end of her long braid around her hand—a habit Adoulla had noticed long ago, a sign that she was steeling herself. “Well, yes, I did, but… I do know why you do what you do, Doullie. You—” A smile spread across her face, and she started laughing, at the same time that Adoulla did.

“ ‘Why you do what you do Doullie, you’?” he said, imitating the funny sound of her words. They both laughed. And Adoulla hurt again, knowing that it would end very soon.

Why had this been his fate? Why could he not have been one of the men he often walked past in the early morning light of the markets? Selling lemonjelly cubes and going home every evening to a deliciously fat wife who drenched herself in rose oil. Laughing at stupid things and keeping one another warm when the night wind whipped through the windows. Taking the day off to be with her and losing only a few coins in his pocket. But his job—his calling—was different. When Adoulla neglected his duties, gruesome things happened in the sleep-rooms of children. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t.

His eyes burned, and he realized that they were beginning to tear up. What is wrong with me? I’m a breath away from crying like a woman!

Mistress Miri Almoussa of the Hundred Ears showed the secret, defenseless self that she only ever showed late at night to him. “I… I am sorry, Doullie. So often I have had such hard words for what you do. And yet I am here like all the rest, begging your help for my family.”

Miri’s kohl-lined eyes were furious and on the verge of tears. When the first few fell, Adoulla placed an arm around her broad shoulders and wiped them away. Being seen crying would hurt her reputation.

“How long have we known each other, woman? Thirty years, now? Don’t you worry about such things. My help is always yours. Why these tears, huh? Everything will be fine, God willing.”

She sniffed once again, wiped away another tear and set her jaw. “Fine? O Merciful God! My niece is dead! Everything will not be fine, Doullie. Everything is going down to the Lake of Flame and the Traitorous Angel. But you’re right… there’s no point in crying. Not where men can see, anyway.” With one last sniffle, she was all calmness again. “So. Have you any more clues as to who or what is behind her murder?”

Adoulla struggled to recall all that the mad creature Mouw Awa had revealed. “There was one thing more,” Adoulla said at last. “The monster I am hunting… it spoke of its master sitting on ‘the Cobra Throne.’ Have you ever heard of such a thing? Do you know where it might be?”

Miri bit her lip and looked troubled. “I have,” she said. She took a breath, then a sip of nectar, and went on. “It was years ago—after one of the Falcon Prince’s first raids. All of the city’s talk was on the gold and weapons he’d stolen from the old Khalif’s treasure house. But my sources told me that the Prince himself was most interested in a dusty old scroll he’d found.”

Adoulla was as impressed as always with the things Miri knew, and it must have shown on his face.

Miri shrugged “Of course I was interested. I am the font of all knowledge in this city. No one in Dhamsawaat would know anything if not for my spies. And books are like spies’ reports frozen in amber. If the Falcon Prince wanted to know something that bad, it must have been valuable, I figured. So I had one of my Ears within his organization act as eye and pen, copying as much as he could of the stolen scroll. Those were different days, of course. Pharaad Az Hammaz’s operation was not quite so airtight then. In any case, my spy had to use a very expensive scrivening-spell, but the scroll proved useless to me. It cost an obscene amount to copy it, but the jest was on me—all but the title of the thing was in a thrice-ciphered version of hidden script. The characters were there, but pricey, pricey magics which might not have even worked were required to break the cipher-spells. Wealthy as I am, I still didn’t have enough to waste on trying to translate it.”

Adoulla, growing impatient, spoke around a mouth of saltfish. “Forgive me, my sweet, but I asked you about—”

“ ‘The Cobra Throne.’ That was the title of the scroll. It was about ancient Kem. But as I say, not worth the price of translating. For all I knew it was about some old buried hoard of the Faroes somewhere, which may or may not have ever existed and may or may not have already been hit by graverobbers. And I’m not the sort to go funding a grave-digging. Then there was the possibility that the Falcon Prince had stolen it only because the original was valuable. I didn’t know, and it wasn’t worth wagering further funds to find out. God’s truth be told, I don’t think that the gold-grubbing Khalif had ever bothered to translate it, either. At least, my spies at the time had heard the Falcon Prince mock this fact.”

Adoulla snorted. “Aye, that sounds like the work of Khalifs—locking away knowledge and words without even reading them.”

“Why is this important, Doullie? What is going on?”

Adoulla ignored her questions. “Please, my sweet, tell me that you still have a copy of this scroll.”

Miri’s offended sniff cut through her worried expression.

“Have you ever known me to throw away something of potential value? Name of God, for thirty years I didn’t throw you away!” Weariness overtook her smoky eyes. “Be careful here, Doullie. If the Falcon Prince is involved in this… I know you admire him, but he’s a dangerous madman. And from what my Ears tell me, he is furious right now about the murder of a beggar family who was under his protection—mother, father, and daughter all found with their hearts carved out. Apparently the same fate struck a squad of his men as well.”

Adoulla had nearly forgotten Baheem’s giving him that last bit of interesting and troubling news. But he only half-analyzed it now as he was overcome with thankfulness. Whatever else was wrong in the world, God had seen fit to keep this woman in Adoulla’s life, worrying over him. This funny, strong, bedchamber-skilled woman who loved him. Manjackals and ghuls could not change that fact.

Still, this news increased Adoulla’s sense that Pharaad Az Hammaz might make a useful ally. “Can you put me in touch with him, Miri? It may help me put an end to these murders.”

She squinted in thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Perhaps… perhaps I could. But I’m sorry, Doullie, I won’t. That would require my making more contact with his people, and after he killed this last headsman… No, it’s just too dangerous. The man has lots of right-sounding ideas,” Miri continued, “and I must admit, he is remarkably handsome. I’d wager you didn’t know that I once saw those calves very close up. Did you know? Never you mind where or when.”

She was trying to make Adoulla jealous. To upset him. It was working. He felt—not in a pleasant way—that he was a boy of five and ten again.

“But despite these things,” she went on, “he is, beneath all his pretty words, talking about civil war. Wars are bad for business. And a war inside the gates of the city? Almighty God forbid it. Do you know what happens to whores in a war, Doullie? Of course you do. I’ve got arson and rape on the one hand and a clinking coin purse on the other, Doullie. For me and mine, it’s an easy choice. I’ve got a house full of innocent girls to protect here.”

Adoulla smiled despite his frustration. “Innocent? A funny word, all things considered.”

Miri did not smile back. “Yes, you damned-by-God oaf. Innocent. My new girl Khareese fled her father not three weeks ago. What does she know of war?”

Adoulla sighed. “Well, Pretty Eyes, I know well enough that you won’t be budged when you won’t be budged. But at least tell me what your Ears have heard of these murders.”

Miri shrugged. “Not much. The watchmen marked it up to street folk killing street folk. The family did their alms-seeking outside of Yehyeh’s teahouse, and they were found dead there, along with old Yehyeh himself. They—”

“What? Yehyeh? When did…? Who…?” Words failed him and his stomach sank as he watched Miri’s eyes widen.

She took his hands in hers. “Oh. Oh, Name of God, Doullie, I’m so sorry. I’d forgotten what friends the two of you were.”

Adoulla felt a sob begin to rise within him. He smothered it, and something within him went cold. “Yehyeh… Minstering Angels… Yehyeh.” He spoke absently. “Oh, Miri, don’t you see? Things can’t stay safe forever, no matter who rules. You with your Hundred Ears know that better than most.”

She sighed and nodded. “I know. But maybe they can be bearable for another few years. That’s all I dare ask of God.”

He ran his hand through his beard. “And then what, my sweet?”

“Then I’ll climb warm and sleepy into my grave, God willing.”

She rose and kissed his forehead. Then she went in search of the scroll she had mentioned, leaving Adoulla alone with birdsong, the scent of pear trees, and thoughts of his dead friend.

Dead. May God shelter your soul, you cross-eyed old rascal. He recalled Yehyeh’s words of a few days ago—before Faisal, before the giant ghul, before Zamia, before Mouw Awa. Before he was killed. “May All-Merciful God put old men like us quietly in our graves.”

The teahouse owner had no family that Adoulla knew of. Likely the watchmen had already tossed his body in the charnel commons. Adoulla thought about going to his own grave alone. And then he thought, as he had not allowed himself to while Miri was before him, of the words Axeface had said just an hour ago. Her new man.

When she returned a few minutes later, handing him a scroll-case, he found he couldn’t quite keep his thoughts to himself. “So what’s this I hear about Handsome Mahnsoor spending his time around here? Everyone on the street knows the fool is too cheap to be an honest customer to you.”

She stared at him then, and her face took on the angriest look Adoulla had ever seen her wear. “May God damn you, Doullie,” she said in a near whisper. “May God damn you for daring to be jealous.” Something cruel grew in her eyes. “Do you want to know the truth? Do you? Well, I will tell you. Yes, Mahnsoor has been spending his time with me, Praise be to God. And, praise be to God, last night he asked me to marry him.”

Last night. When I was busy learning about a living-dead killer and his master.

“And what did you say?” Adoulla heard some man somewhere ask with a weak voice like his.

“That is none of your damned-by-God business. Unless you are prepared to compete for my hand?”

Adoulla felt the familiar pain of having no good answers for the person on God’s great earth he cared most about. “Oh, Pretty Eyes. I know you don’t want to hear this, but there are… ways other than a formal marriage before God. We could live—”

“Lake of Flame! Do you think, because of what I do for a living, that I am completely bereft of virtue?” Miri’s eyes tightened. “Well, I’m not. And what is a woman’s greatest chance at showing her virtue? In marriage.”

“I know that you possess a thousand virtues, Miri.” Adoulla meant every word. But Miri just threw up her hennaed hands in exasperation.

“Oh, no. No more of that damned-by-God sugar talk. It’s been many years since I could keep myself warm at night remembering your words while you were nowhere to be found. My niece is dead, Doullie. It is a reminder from Almighty God. I’ve got a good twenty years left in this world if God wills it. Thousands of days, thousands of nights. I’m not going to spend them all alone. I’m not.”

She fell silent, gazing up into the tree branches. When he looked at the line of her broad neck, the sand-brown skin smooth despite her near fifty years, he felt like he would weep.

Adoulla kneaded the flesh of his forehead with his knuckles, trying to somehow rouse the right words. He kept picturing Yehyeh, who had always said that marriage was a fool’s move. Dead. Yehyeh was dead. Perhaps Miri was right. Perhaps there was some message from God to be found in these murders. About priorities. About what was left of his own life.

Adoulla stared at his hands. If he and his friends found this Orshado—this ghul of ghuls—and defeated him, then what? Would God’s great earth be purged of all danger? Would the Traitorous Angel’s servants all just go away? No. When would Adoulla’s work be done? He’d asked himself the question many times, but today he faced the honest answer for perhaps the first time in forty years. His work would end only when he was dead. Or when he ended it.

He swallowed hard and looked up from his hands. “Miri.”

“Yes?” she said, her voice flat.

“This is it, my sweet. I… I cannot let a man who has murdered my friend—and your niece—stalk this city any longer. But if I live through this… That’s it for me, then. I’m done. Men can find someone else to save them from the ghuls.”

Miri rolled her eyes, the hardness he knew so well returning to her voice. “Do you want me to do a little dance? I mean, I’ve only heard that ten times before, Doullie! Don’t you think I know by now that such declarations are just words on the air? They’ll be blown away by the first strong breeze that comes along.”

Adoulla swallowed again and took hold of Miri’s shoulders, giving her the most level look he could. “Not this time.” He found himself speaking formal words that he’d never said, not in thirty years of half-meant promises. “I swear this to you, O Miri Almoussa. In the name of God the All-Hearing, who Witnesses all Oaths. In the name of God the Most Honest, who loves truth and not lies. I swear to you that when this is done I will return here and, if my fate is so kind that you haven’t yet married this money-grubbing fop, I swear in the name of God the Great Father that I will touch my forehead to the ground before you and beg you to marry me.”

He knew that she understood what such an oath meant to him, but Adoulla also knew that Miri lived in a world of oath-shatterers. He expected more scornful skepticism. But Miri Almoussa just stood there, eyes shining, lip trembling, looking as lovely as the day Adoulla had met her.

And she said not a word.

Hours later, he found himself walking wearily back into Dawoud and Litaz’s greeting room. The Soo couple sat on a divan speaking quietly. Raseed sat cross-legged on the floor, engaging in one of his breathing exercises, but the pallet where Zamia had been recuperating was empty. A good sign.

His friends looked up as he entered.

“What news?” Dawoud asked. “Did the boy have anything new to tell?”

“The boy?” Adoulla asked, confused for a moment. “Oh, him. Little Faisal. He was not there, as it happens. But,” he said, brandishing the scroll Miri had given him, “Miri Almoussa gave me this, which may hold some answers for us. What of you, brother of mine? How went your meeting with Roun Hedaad?”

Litaz answered for her husband. “Dawoud managed not to get himself killed by the Defender of Virtue himself. And to give a vague warning, but that is about all. But tell us, how is Miri?”

Adoulla frowned, sensing the subtle edge beneath the alkhemist’s words. “Please, my dear, none of your snobbish scorn for the whoremistress, eh? Of all days, not today.”

Dawoud snorted. “You forget that my beloved wife is, even after decades in Dhamsawaat, a slightly prudish Blue River girl at heart.”

Litaz’s eyes filled with half-serious lividity. “Prudish?! You of all people, husband, know that—”

“He said slightly prudish,” Adoulla pointed out with a smile, feeling buoyed a bit by the presence of his bantering friends.

Litaz rolled her eyes. “You know it has nothing to do with that, my friend. We just want better for you. It’s all we’ve ever wanted. I have no problem with… with what Miri is, but she won’t let you be what you are! So I’ve been squawking this tune for near twenty years, so what? It’s as true today as it was a dozen years ago: There are women—younger women, pretty women—who would be able to live realistically with the white kaftan you wear.”

Adoulla plopped down onto a brocaded stool and let out a loud sigh. “Even if that were true, my dear, it wouldn’t matter.” For a long while the room was silent, save for the soft sounds of Raseed’s inhalations and exhalations. Then Adoulla heard himself say, “She is going to marry another. At least, another man has asked for her hand. A younger man.”

Dawoud gave him a look of loving sympathy. Litaz stood, walked over, and took his big hands in her tiny ones. She squeezed, smiled sadly, said nothing.

Raseed, finally looking up from his exercises, spoke confusedly. “Doctor, I don’t understand—”

“You and your understanding can go down to the Lake of Flame, boy! Now shut up—we’ve more important things to discuss! Where is the tribeswoman, anyway? Off stalking the city for gazelles?”

“I’m here, Doctor,” Zamia said, emerging from the back of the house where she’d no doubt been making water. Adoulla noted that she walked more or less steadily on her feet and that much of the weakness he’d seen in her only last night was gone. “Did you learn anything that will help me avenge my band?”

To his surprise, Adoulla found that he could not speak of Yehyeh’s murder. It was foolish, he knew—these were his closest friends in the world, and allies who needed all of the information they could get. But Adoulla thought of Litaz trying to find drops of Yehyeh’s blood or some such, or trying to analyze the angle at which his heart had been ripped out. And he felt that his own soul would somehow snap if he did not keep this one bit of grimness to himself for now. So, as his friends and allies listened, Adoulla instead recounted what little else Miri had known, and told them about the thrice-ciphered, hidden script scroll that spoke of the Cobra Throne. “Though All-Merciful God alone knows how we’re going to unravel these cipher-spells. The costs and the expertise involved…” he trailed off, exhausted and daunted by just about everything in his life.

Litaz shot a worried look in her husband’s direction. “Actually, I do know of one man who might have the skill and inclination to help us with this. And he would do it quickly if I asked.”

Dawoud’s expression was perplexed, then bitter. “Him. Well, I have no doubt that that one will be all too ready to help. He will be falling all over himself to give you what you need. At a price.”

Adoulla smiled. “Yaseer the spell-seller. Of course. It seems, then, that I am not the only one fated by God to get help from an old heart’s-flame.”

Litaz sighed. “He will gouge us but will do so less severely than others would. And he’ll do honest and discreet work. If I send a messenger now, I should be able to see him by tomorrow.”

“By all means, send a messenger. And you should take the boy with you tomorrow.”

Both Litaz and Raseed started to speak, but Adoulla cut them both off. “I know, I know. You can take care of yourself,” he said, gesturing with one hand toward Litaz. “And your place is protecting me, or Zamia, or whomever you’ve decided duty dictates today,” he continued, gesturing with his other hand toward Raseed. “But between Dawoud and Zamia and myself we can, Almighty God willing, handle any threat that might strike here. You’ll be carrying a great deal of coin, Litaz—and even aside from that, the more I think on it, the less comfortable I am with any of us being alone out there. Indulge me, eh?”

With that Adoulla walked off and made water before dragging himself to the makeshift bed his friends had set for him. He was exhausted, but he could not stop thinking about Yehyeh. And about Miri. The choice she had made. The oath Adoulla himself had made. Miri’s words, thousands of days, thousands of nights, echoed in his head, as did Yehyeh’s words about old men and graves.

Sleep was a long time in coming.

Chapter 14

There was a clean tang to the late morning air, and Raseed bas Raseed breathed it in deeply as he made his way toward the North Inner Gate. Litaz Daughter-of-Likami walked a half step in front of him, dressed more richly than Raseed had ever seen. Her long dress was embroidered with amethyst gemthread. She wore rings of gold and coral in her twistlocks, and a jewel-pommeled dagger sheathed in dyed kidskin on her belt. Is she expecting a fight? Raseed resolved to be even more watchful than usual.

The inn where they were meeting Litaz’s contact was in the Round City, the innermost part of Dhamsawaat. A sixty-foot wall of massive, sun-dried bricks surrounded the Round City, with great gates of iron in its northern and southern sections. The pair joined a line of people making their way through the North Inner Gate and, in a short time, reached the gate itself. As they walked through, Litaz smiled and nodded at one of the watchmen on duty. The man eyed Raseed’s habit and sword but said nothing.

As soon as they passed through the gate they turned from the huge gray paving stones of the Mainway. Litaz led the way confidently and Raseed followed. They rounded a corner and stepped onto Goldsmith’s Row, a paved lane that was narrower than the Mainway but still quite broad. Leaving behind the press of pedestrians and shouting porters already building up, the pair joined a traffic flow that was decidedly quieter and less crowded.

Litaz bit her lower lip and mumbled to herself, obviously deep in thought. So Raseed remained silent and took in his surroundings. He had been in Dhamsawaat for nearly two years now, but he’d never been down Goldsmith’s Row. He looked about with interest.

Tidy storefronts and splendid houses lined the street here, the crude, open, stone windows of the Scholars’ Quarter replaced by fine sandalwood screens and, in the more opulent shops, leaded glass. Though one could walk here from the Scholars’ Quarter in less than an hour, the two neighborhoods were a world apart.

Here were the homes and shops of Abassen’s wealthiest merchants and most distinguished craftsmen—elite importers and perfumers, gemcutters and jewelers, bookbinders and glassblowers. Here also, in decadently furnished mansions, lived the courtiers and viziers and their families—those who did not live at the palace itself. Raseed marveled at how few people there were, and what little noise they made.

No doubt many of them were home preparing meals for the Feast of Providence, which was this evening. But there was more to it than that, Raseed thought. This was the sort of place where one could be alone with one’s meditations. The streets of the Scholars’ Quarter were never this quiet, or this empty, or this clean. Raseed envied the residents the solemnity of their surroundings. No great stinking puddles. No loud donkey-whipping. No hashi smoke drifting in the window. No muttering madmen. Would that I had a place like this to meditate and train. He tried to smother this unacceptable covetousness. O Believer! Worship God wherever fate finds thee—whether prison, prairie, or Prayersday table, the Heavenly Chapters say.

His service with the Doctor did not bring him into contact with the overfed inhabitants of the Round City. It was probably just as well. The denizens of the Doctor’s home quarter disgusted Raseed with their degeneracy and lewdness. But while the hashi-smokers and whores of the Scholars’ Quarter were foul, the men and women here were perhaps even more foul. Here was wealth, as much wealth as anywhere in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms. Here was every opportunity for virtue and learning, with none of the dire incitements to vice that poverty brought. But the Doctor claimed that the people of Goldsmith’s Row ignored such opportunity, using their incalculable riches only to devise new and more luxuriant vices.

Partner, he had called Raseed the other night. But Raseed was unworthy. He’d said nothing to the Doctor or the others about his encounter with Pharaad Az Hammaz. About taking the stolen goods the thief had given him. He hadn’t gone so far as to utter a falsehood—when he’d returned to the Soo couple’s shop and Litaz had asked after his dusty silks and disheveled appearance, he’d put off her questions, and she hadn’t pressed him. The wrongness of it burned his soul, like a foretaste of the Lake of Flame.

Partner. Again he turned the word over in his mind. Unworthy though he was to speak prayers to God, he prayed now that the Doctor was safe. There was no telling when that Mouw Awa creature would strike again.

“Raseed?” Litaz’s voice intruded on his thoughts.

“Yes, Auntie?” He scanned the thin crowd about them as he answered.

“Zamia Banu Laith Badawi—she is interested in you. Do you see this? Do you understand how careful you must be with this?”

He felt as if she had slapped him. Without meaning to, he stopped walking. He closed his hand around his swordhilt, said nothing, and started walking again.

Litaz’s heart-shaped face split in a patronizing smile as she walked beside him. “And you have taken an interest in her, too. Anyone with eyes can see that plainly enough,” she said, sounding amused.

He began to dispute the alkhemist’s words but found that he could not quite do so without speaking a falsehood, which was forbidden by the Traditions of the Order. He tried to find something to say. But all that he could come up with were questions. “With most humble apologies, Auntie, you should not say such things,” he said at last.

“She’s a Badawi, Raseed. Even as she is fixed on revenge, she will be thinking about keeping her band from dying out.” Litaz’s smile deepened. It was the smile of one who knew more than Raseed did about certain matters, and he found that it upset him. He kept walking, keeping his gaze straight ahead, hoping to force an end to the conversation.

But Litaz continued. “It’s all right, you know. What you feel when you look at her. You’ve been holding a sword so long that you’ve known little else. But there is nothing wrong with what you feel when you look at her.”

The Soo people had a frankness in speaking of things inappropriate—it was not surprising that the Doctor was so comfortable among them. Raseed felt his face flush, and he bit off his words. “You speak of such things too openly!” he said. And surely none could blame him if he was more curt than one ought to be with an elder.

But if annoyance was edging into his voice, it was annoyance with himself as much as anything. He wanted to be comforted, despicably weak as he was. He wanted to reach out to Litaz and talk to her about these things. But that was simply unacceptable. He fell silent.

She smiled gently. “If you want to talk, young man, I swear before God that I’ll say not a word to anyone. Not even to Adoulla or my husband.”

They moved on, turning off of Goldsmith’s Row to enter a neat but narrow cobblestone alleyway. Something in his soul clenched and then relaxed. He felt the words come without his bidding them.

“I don’t have any secrets, Auntie. It is just that… she has been chosen by the Angels themselves! I wish that… It… it is so… difficult sometimes. When I went to seek the crimson quicksilver I—”

“You would do best to answer quickly, harlot, and truthfully!” The harsh voice came to Raseed’s ears at the same time that the speaker—a robed man with a whip—came into his field of vision. The man was lean and gray-haired, and two big men with short, thin clubs stood with him. These other two might have been twins—both young, huge, and hook-nosed. All three men were clean-shaven and wore plain turbans and heavy robes of brown sackcloth belted with coarse rope. They had a girl trapped in the alley.

The Humble Students! Wandering mendicants that scoured wickedness from the streets and taverns of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms. Raseed felt even worse than he had a moment before. He glanced at Litaz. Her smile had twisted into a hard line; she looked more the old warrior than the kind grandmother now.

The Humble Students were charged with chastising those who needed to be chastised, helping men and women to walk the path of God. But Raseed had learned that some Humble Students did this more out of greed or cruelty than righteousness. Praised in Rughal-ba, mocked in the Soo Republic, in Dhamsawaat the Students were few in number—tolerated by the Khalifs, disliked by the people.

Unsurprisingly, Raseed’s mentor was among their despisers. “I don’t trust anyone who claims to serve God by beating up dancers and drunks,” the Doctor had growled once.

The trio stood shoulder-to-shoulder twenty yards down the cobbled alley. They were facing in Raseed and Litaz’s direction. Their gazes, however, were set on a girl wearing a gauzy blouse and tight leggings with pale laces. Raseed picked up the cloying smell of cheap oil of violet from the slender girl, far away though she was. Trouble, the dervish knew. As he stood surveying the scene, Litaz shot forward. The Students and the girl all locked their eyes on her.

“What is the matter here?” Litaz’s voice was bold, and it instantly agitated the Students.

The gray-haired leader frowned. “The matter? An unclean girl is to be shown the way of God. Do you wish to watch and learn from her example, outlander? The Republic is a decadent place. The Soo more than most would benefit from our lessons.” There was no emotion but scorn in the man’s voice.

Litaz flashed a caustic smile. “I’ve seen the Students’ lessons before, brother. I’m afraid I can’t say that I always approve of them.”

The man arched an eyebrow. “Watch yourself, woman. We do not need the approval of outlanders. We found the tramp going about her foul business in plain view. The whorehouses of this city have been left to fester, and now their rotted fruit spills onto respectable streets. But if the watchmen will not do their duty, we will do it for them. Ten lashes is the punishment.” Leather creaked as the man flexed his whip.

The girl jumped in, sensing her chance. “I… I wasn’t working on the street, Auntie, I swear it! I… I wouldn’t do that. I was just coming from… coming from a… from a friend’s house.” The girl lowered her eyes in shame. She can’t be more than four and ten, Raseed thought, disgusted. But he felt something shameful—painfully shameful—race through his body as he looked at her.

“What is your name, girl?” Litaz asked.

The girl looked at the alkhemist with hunted-gazelle eyes.

“Suri.”

A look of surprise crossed Litaz’s face. “Suri? Truly? That is one you don’t hear every day.”

The girl made a noise in her throat and ducked her head.

“Suri,” Litaz repeated. “A beautiful name. And a very, very old one.” She turned to the Students with a clearly forced smile. “Surely you brothers see the sign from Almighty God here? The Heavenly Chapters’ story of Suri says ‘O Headsman, drop your sword and serve His mercy! O Flogger, drop your whip and serve His mercy!’ ”

The gray-haired Student spread a conciliatory hand, but he sneered as he did so. “The Chapters also say ‘And yea, proper punishment is the sweetest mercy,’ do they not? A new era is coming, outlander! An era when only those who walk the path prescribed will prosper.”

The two big men were tensed for a fight. Raseed found that he was as well. He took a step toward Litaz.

“The ‘path prescribed’? And the Students will be the ones to judge what that is?” The alkhemist’s eyes narrowed as she spoke. “Please, let the girl go. I ask you to indulge an old woman.” When this earned no response, Litaz’s pleading slid into threat. “Look, we’re not on the riverdocks, brothers. Do you think the respectable people of this neighborhood—who you know can’t stand your order anyway—do you think they will sit idly by while you beat a girl in their streets?”

The eldest Student’s sneer deepened. He ran a hand over his smooth brown jaw. “Listen to me, woman. Leave now. Please. Do you see? I say please. Go back to one of your perverted outlander neighborhoods. I will not ask you again.” He turned his head toward Raseed. “And you, Master Dervish?” The man’s brittle-sounding voice made the title a mockery, but for the first time he looked unsure of himself. “Are you truly keeping company with this trash?” Raseed parted his lips, but no sound came out. Words flew into his head.

I am here in company with her, but—

Please forgive her, brother, she—

I am afraid that I must—

But none of them made it through his suddenly dry and cracked throat. Raseed had faced and killed highwayman, Cyklop, and ghul, but he now found himself paralyzed and unable to speak.

The gray-haired man’s uncertain expression evaporated, replaced by a cold scowl. “I take it by your silence that you are here with this mad old degenetress! Where is your virtue? Have you stopped serving God already, young man?” The two big hook-nosed men began to shift, clearly itching for a fight.

There was the incongruous sound of laughter as two young couples entered the alley, took one look at the scene before them, and swiftly turned back.

Litaz drew her dagger from the kidskin sheath at her waist. What is she doing? Long and broad-bladed, in her little hand it was a small sword. “Leave, Suri,” the alkhemist said with a deadly calm in her voice. When the girl didn’t move, Litaz shouted “Leave! Now!”

The girl ran before the men could grab her. The two big Students started to follow, but their leader held up a hand and they froze. Suri flew from the alley without a word or a backward glance.

“This old whore’s vice is greater than the other’s was,” the lead Student spoke to his men with an eerie calm. “She will take the girl’s punishment.” He focused his words on Litaz. “And who are you, whore-with-a-knife, to think you can interfere in God’s work with impunity?” The man seemed genuinely curious.

Litaz gave no answer.

The veins in the man’s neck bulged. “Whoever you are, you will find that you are sorely mistaken!” Raseed did not approve of the man’s tone—there was an unvirtuous anticipation there at the thought of proving Litaz mistaken in some brutal manner.

Raseed’s hand went to the hilt of his sword before he thought about who his opponents were. The Order held ties with the Humble Students. These men might be unpleasant and overbearing, but they were Raseed’s allies as far as duty was concerned.

But. Litaz Daughter-of-Likami was a true servant of God who had doubtless fought more real battles than all three of these men combined. And she was one of the Doctor’s dearest friends. Raseed’s mind raced, and his hand flexed on his pommel.

Litaz broke the silent moment. “The Father of the Universe does not tell us to beat frightened girls, brother! Can your kind can find no other way in which to spread virtue?”

One of the big men began to slap his club against his open palm. He moved two steps closer to Litaz. The men were nearly in swinging range now, and Raseed took two long strides closer. The gray-haired man shot Raseed a warning look then spoke more calmly to Litaz. “Such rude words. Come, woman. Old and withered or young and hale, all must live by His words. Come and be chastised. It will be quick and feather light for one so small as you, I swear in the name of God.”

Litaz laughed a bitter little laugh. “Come try and chastise me, brother. You’ll end up lying in the street.”

Everything happened at once.

The two hook-nosed Students lurched at Litaz. They were not fighting men. That was clear enough to Raseed. No need for his sword. He blocked the assailant closest to Litaz and thrust a fist out.

Raseed didn’t realize he’d decided his loyalties until the man was lying bloody-nosed and unconscious on the ground.

For what seemed the thousandth time that week, Raseed’s stomach lurched with the wrongness of his actions, but he looked up, ready to do the same to the other two Students. Litaz stood between him and them. He froze as he saw the alkhemist was offering up the jeweled pommel of her dagger to the men. She’s surrendering her weapon?

The leader hesitated, confusion and rage battling on his beardless face. “What—?” he said.

The dagger’s pommel-stone hissed. A jet of bright green vapor shot forth, a small cloud of it seeming to wrap around each man’s head. Litaz spryly jumped back a few steps, dodging a few clumsy club swings. On the edges of the cloud, Raseed felt the vapors sting his eyes and nostrils.

The Students reacted more dramatically. They slid coughing to the cobblestones, the bigger man’s wooden club clattering as he fell. A moment later, all three men fell still as corpses. They were breathing, though barely, Raseed’s keen senses told him.

Litaz coughed a hacking cough a few times, and Raseed echoed it, wincing at the acrid green smoke that was already dissipating on the clear morning air. The alkhemist brushed some sort of residue from her dagger-hand onto the skirt of her dress. It left a little green-black stain. Litaz looked down at the unconscious Students with grim satisfaction, and there was no mistaking her pride in her handiwork. She carefully sheathed her dagger, looked at Raseed and shrugged her shoulders.

“ ‘Lying in the street.’ I warned them, did I not?”

“Auntie! How? What?”

“A rare solution called the Breath of Dargon Loong.”

“Like the monster from the stories?”

Litaz shrugged again. “Yes. Though, to hear Adoulla tell it, the Dargon Loong is real enough, even if most think him a mere story.”

Only then did Raseed notice the several onlookers who now darted away from the scene. Raseed began to warn Litaz of the danger she had gotten herself into but thought better of it. She has pulled you into it, too, his doubting voice told him. He looked down at the immobilized Students. I am on the right side of this, he told himself. I am!

“Let us keep moving, Auntie,” was all he said.

Her confident grin slipped, and for a moment she looked every bit an old woman. “Listen, Raseed. I am playing brave about this because I have just assaulted the Humble Students. This is going to bring trouble to my already troubled house.” A sadness entered her eyes. “O God, please let them be safe!” She clearly was not speaking of the Students. “Raseed, if that creature, that manjackal, strikes again…” She left the thought unfinished and gestured to Raseed that they should walk on.

Eventually, Litaz brought them to a halt at the threshold of an elegant two-story inn of green glazed brick. Huge lattice screens hid the inn’s courtyard from the eyes of passersby. They stepped through a small open section of the screen into that courtyard, which was decorated with twin fountains of almost translucent marble. Two big, well-dressed men ushered them into the inn itself. Guards, Raseed guessed, though they acted more like hosts and wore no visible weapons. They respectfully took his sword from him, promising to return it upon his departure. He noted approvingly that they handled the weapon with a proper reverence.

The greeting room of the inn was massive, almost as open and airy as the courtyard. A dozen parties sat at low tables of white wood worked with tortoise shell. Litaz smiled and waved to a fat man at a round table, hard against the far wall. The wall was dominated by a jade and emerald gemthread tapestry depicting a verdant grove of olive trees. The fat man, alone at the table, waved back, smiling cheerfully at Litaz as they approached. He looked as if he were an olive. The almost greenish sheen of his complexion matched the tapestry, and he was little, as short as Raseed, but egg-shaped and strangely sleek skinned despite being of an age with Litaz. To top off the effect, he wore rich, dark green silks.

“Lady Litaz Daughter-of-Likami!” As they approached, the olive man leered at them, stood, and bowed, making fussy noises all the while. Raseed gave a slight but respectful nod. Litaz embraced the man warmly. “You’ve kept me waiting, wonderful one. But the Ministering Angels know any wait would be worth it.”

Litaz’s smile was bright. Raseed found that he was not cunning enough to determine whether or not it was a false smile. “Beloved Yaseer,” she said, and grazed the man’s forearm with her small hand. “I am very sorry we are late, old friend. We ran into a little trouble on the way here.”

Yaseer waved away an invisible trifle. “Not at all, my dear, not at all. I will refrain from asking you what sort of trouble. No doubt it’s best that I don’t know. No doubt.”

Raseed did not like this too-smiling fool with his shifty movements and shifty words. But he kept silent, forcing his features to neutrality.

Yaseer did not return the favor. The man’s smile dropped as he looked Raseed over, and he frowned a puzzled frown. “Who have you brought with you, Lady? I’ve never known you to need a bodyguard, excepting that sour-faced husband of yours.” Yaseer stared rudely at Raseed but still spoke to Litaz. “Is he truly a holy man? You are a friend of the dervishes now? You who once told me they were the pompous peacocks of the—”

“That is enough, Yaseer!” the alkhemist broke in. She flashed an apologetic glance at Raseed.

The olive man spread his soft-looking hands, the picture of openness. “As you will, my dear, but you know I don’t discuss business with strangers. Especially not the clean-shaven sort that use forked swords ‘to cleave the right from the wrong in men.’ You will have to tell your virtuous bodyguard to leave.”

Raseed took an angry half-step forward before he remembered himself. Somehow he kept his voice level. “I will not leave her alone if—” he began.

Litaz put her blue-black hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Raseed, please.”

There is too much at stake to be stiff-necked now. He bowed his head in acquiescence and found himself wishing for some reason that the Doctor were there right then. “I will wait by the door, Auntie,” Raseed said.

“Thank you, dear.”

Raseed moved to the inn’s entrance. He grasped for a swordhilt that wasn’t there. Then he waited, his thoughts still racing, his soul still uneasy.

Chapter 15

Litaz remained standing and watched Raseed move to the corner of the inn’s greeting room. She was agitated. She could not stop thinking about the encounter with the Students and the trouble it might bring. She had not killed anyone today. She had not even really harmed anyone—the Breath of Dargon Loong was essentially harmless and only rendered its victims unconscious for a few hours at most. Still, she had made dangerous enemies. Given the chance, Litaz knew, the Students would be brutal in their retribution. The fact that it was only their pride that was wounded would not make them go lightly on her. But what had her options been, after all? To let the girl be whipped like an animal?

She turned to Yaseer and forced herself back into tranquility. The encounter with the Humble Students had been an hour ago. And there was work to be done in the present. Best to get this over with.

She made her tone businesslike but gracious as she spoke. “I am pleased the messenger got my note to you. And that you were able to fulfill such an unusual request so quickly.”

Yaseer was listening to her but was not-so-subtly watching Raseed, craning his neck to get a better look at the dervish. The spell-seller’s smooth features crinkled in troubled scrutiny, then returned to Litaz with a warm, and she was fairly certain, unfeigned, smile.

“Hm. I’m glad to see you are still in one delicious piece, O-Eyes-of-Starlight! Your message made me think you were in mortal danger. ‘Emergency,’ ‘Most crucial,’ ‘Our city threatened’—these sorts of words filled your little letter. You had me up all damned-by-God night, O Breath-of-Roses! And it was remarkably expensive scribing this spell—powdered emeralds, those damned-by-God ink mushrooms that only the Banu Kassim Badawi-trained camels can sniff out! Such things are far from trifles, even to one with as much coin as the eternally heartbroken spell-seller before you. ‘What could be so crucial about some dusty old scroll in thrice-ciphered hidden script that she would need my cipher-spells so damned-by-God quickly?’ I asked myself. ‘And why should I do this, when I know I won’t even be able to bring myself to charge her what I ought to?’ For love?”

The wounded lover was a half-serious role that Yaseer had always played around her. She couldn’t help but smile. For a sweetly painful moment, she thought about what life with such a robust man would be like. She was glad that Dawoud had not come. He would be furiously jealous right now. As she thought of her husband, Litaz’s smile faded, and the weariness returned.

“But you have never been a woman to scream ‘ghul’ when no monster is about,” Yaseer continued, “ ‘There must be something to it,’ I said to myself, ‘if she is in such a lather over this.’ You have always been a woman of sense, save for your refusal to marry me.”

She thought of that years-ago time, just after the one trip home she and Dawoud had ever taken. Of finding the cologned letter with Yaseer’s scandalous proposal to her—her, a woman already betrothed. She had barely kept Dawoud from killing the man. “I was already married when you asked me, Yaseer.”

Again the plump man waved away something invisible and unimportant. The long-bearded owner of the inn directed his servants in setting out an array of plates, and he bowed obsequiously to Yaseer the whole while. When the host withdrew, Yaseer shook himself as if waking up from a bad dream.

“Oh, my dear, forgive me. Breakfast is served. Will you join me?”

Spread before the spell-seller was a breakfast that would have made Adoulla whimper in joy. Medallions of clove-and-mint mutton, poached pigeon eggs, honey-fried colocasia roots, fine grain date porridge, hundredflake teacakes, dark and light teas, and two-fruit nectar. Litaz was not the eater Adoulla was, but the fight earlier had made her ravenous, and the dozen layered aromas made her stomach rumble. But she would not share a full meal with Yaseer. Too many invisible snares.

She measured the proper response as if she were in her workshop, filling a notched bottle. “I am afraid I have little time, my friend. I am in a great hurry.” She bobbed her head deferentially, and the rings in her twistlocks clinked lightly. “But I will take a teacake, if you do not mind?” She could not be utterly rude if she was doing business with the man. She sat at the white wood table, plucked up a hundredflake cake, and nibbled at it. It was delicious, and she had to resist devouring it as ravenously as her body told her to. “Thank you.”

Yaseer shrugged his fleshy shoulders, the green silk of his shirt rippling. He smiled naughtily and gestured toward the corner of the room where Raseed now stood. His tone was conspiratorial. “So. A dervish, is it? And young enough to be your baby boy. Is it true what they say? That they shave everywhere?” Again the olive oil smile. “No, no, don’t answer, don’t deny. I’m just happy to see that you do have some scandal left in you, my dear. I am so very glad to know that you are enjoying life despite your muck-and-hovel, care-for-the-poor lifestyle. A lithe little baby boy of the Order, forked sword and all! Name of God! It’s so decadent I’m almost inclined not to be jealous. Ahh, but I can see I’m embarrassing you. How are you, anyway?”

Finally, Yaseer had to stop for breath. Litaz refused to be drawn in to the banter, and she jumped into the brief silence with the most polite directness she could muster. “As I said, Yaseer, I am in a hurry. I am sorry. I am doing just fine, though, praise be to God. Speaking of enjoying life, you seem to be doing quite well for yourself. That brooch alone could feed a family for a year. Who have you been working for?”

The soft man’s eyes crinkled again, this time in a mild taunt. “Oh, pretty one, you know that I can’t tell you that. Let’s just say that those rare individuals like you and I—we who know certain secrets and crafts—are in great demand these days.” He sipped a leisurely spoonful of porridge before continuing. He was clearly not concerned with Litaz’s hurry. “Talk of rebellion and chaos has men and women of means preparing for all contingencies. Such preparations are very good for business, praise be to God.”

The diplomatic thing then would have been to be quiet. But Litaz found she couldn’t help herself. “And it is all still just trade to you, Yaseer? These gifts that have been given to us by God? A way to make coin, with no thought to those who cannot pay?”

Yaseer smiled without a trace of guilt. “Not all those with knowledge disdain it so much as I sometimes think you do, O Lips-of-Lavender, giving your skills and your time away to flea-ridden idiots who don’t appreciate it anyway, who throw stones at people like you and I. If I’m going to be praised sycophantically when my skill succeeds and called ‘charlatan’ or ‘witch’ when it fails, I’ll at least have some coin in the bargain, thank you very much. Should I bother telling you yet again that there are much handsomer places in the world for you than in that filthy alley with that gnarled husband of yours? Places where your unmatched skills and your more-vital-than-its-years body would receive all the appreciation they deserve?”

As in years past, Yaseer was so ridiculously earnest that some part of her did want him. Still, it was not too difficult to assume her most off-putting smirk and get back to business. “No, Yaseer, you should not bother. But do be careful, will you? There are dangerous days coming, and there is more than talk on the horizon.” She took a deep breath. “Now…”

Yaseer bowed his head slightly. “I thank you for your concern, O Voice-of-Birdsong. As to your commission, I have the scroll right here.” The shiny man attempted a reprimanding glare. “As I said, it kept me up all damned-by-God night. You will pay steeply for that rush and for my lost sleep. Now, increasing the cost of the scroll is the obscurity of the words that—”

Litaz grit her teeth. She did not have time for this.

“What’s the bottom line, Yaseer?”

There was nothing soft or oily about Yaseer now. He looked around for unwished observers and, finding none, produced a small piece of paper and a stick of charcoal. He jotted down a number and slid the paper to Litaz. “This is the total cost. It is not negotiable, since your note commanded that I start work right away, and stated that you would pay ‘any price.’ ” The spell-seller melodramatically drew from beneath the table a thin, foot-long, ebonwood cylinder. The dark scroll case was etched with gold and jade.

“That’s a fortune!” She quickly ran tallies in her head. Things had changed so much since she’d left the Republic. Years ago, her husband had teased her for being a rich Blue River girl who knew not the value of money. And it had in fact taken years for Lady Litaz a-Likami of the High Line of Illuminated Pashas to become simply Litaz Daughter-of-Likami. Now it was she—with her numbers-and-measures way of seeing the world—who managed the money matters of their shop and household. She thanked all-Merciful God that she was good enough at it that Dawoud didn’t know how close in circumstances they’d grown to the poor folk they ministered to.

She was ready to pay Yaseer’s price if she had to. Still, haggling was always worth trying. She put on a courtly smile and toyed with her twistlocks. “You speak of the appreciation I deserve—but does this price reflect it, my dear?”

Yaseer shook his shiny head sadly. “I am sorry, Eyes-of-Starlight, but we both know that appreciation only goes one way between us. Since you think me a contemptible mercenary, I’ll be getting no kisses any time soon, I know. Therefore I am forced to treat you as a simple customer, I’m afraid.”

She gave him a wry smile. “And am I paying extra for the scroll case?”

He smiled back. “My work cannot be carried around folded up in one’s pocket—not even your paradisiacal pocket, my dear.”

Enough of this bantering, Litaz thought. She was tired and she was worried about her husband and her friends. And, she admitted to herself, the longer she sat there the more she felt jealous of Yaseer’s wealth. This sort of high-living—this and more—had been her inheritance once. And she’d thrown it away to follow her heart and to learn arts that she’d never have been allowed to pursue had she remained a respectable Lady of the Court of Three Pashas. She’d never truly regretted her life choices. But she did sometimes find herself wishing that God, From Whom all Fortunes Flow, had not forced her to make such choices in the first place.

But He did, whatever your wishes, she told herself. Now focus! “Very well,” she said to Yaseer. “I do hope, though, that I can trust you to be discreet about this transaction?”

“Hmmm. Yes. Discretion. Why are you suddenly interested in thrice-ciphered hidden script, anyway? It’s as obscure as it gets, cipher-spell-wise. What dusty old thing are you deciphering with this spell, anyway? No, no, I know you won’t answer. Well, discretion is a commodity like anything else. But that is a commodity that I will grant you in honor of my appreciation for you. Now, the fees please.” Again Yaseer had to stop for breath.

Litaz reached into the folds of her embroidered robe and withdrew from a secret bosom pocket a parcel of coins, tied up in a piece of lavender cloth. “There are a few extra dinar in there. Keep them, my friend.”

She could admit to herself, if to no one else, that she enjoyed the look on Yaseer’s face as he nuzzled the bag with his lips. “Gold was never drawn from a sweeter mine, my dear. I thank you, I thank you, I thank you.”

And, at last, after a few more polite gestures and words, Litaz was finally able to say goodbye and God’s peace to the spell-seller and make her way toward the inn’s exit. It seemed that her fate was growing kinder. With the spell in hand, she and her friends could stop stumbling about in the dark. She hoped.

Litaz allowed herself to feel a small sense of victory. It was a lot of coin to part with—a good part of the little she and Dawoud had—but then, she’d known Yaseer’s help would not be cheap.

With a glance, she collected Raseed from his anxious guard duty at the gilded doorway. He reclaimed his precious blade, and they stepped from the inn into the courtyard. She said nothing to the boy until they reached the street.

“Well, dear,” she said when they’d left the courtyard, “despite our earlier troubles I think we can tell the old men that we—”

“Halt!” The word was shouted at them by a handsome young watchleader with an ugly look in his eyes. Beside him stood the gray-haired Humble Student whom they’d encountered earlier. Behind him were four other watchmen. The two big Students were nowhere to be seen—probably still sleeping on the street, Litaz guessed—but every man had a weapon in his hand.

“Do you think that God sleeps while you wicked folk live your unrepentant lives?” the gray-haired man asked. If a man could kill with his eyes, she and Raseed would be dead right now. “As I told you, outlander witch, you will be chastised! And, praise God, his merciful fury demands that your punishment reflect the enormity of your sins.”

The watchleader cut annoyed eyes at the man, but his look for Litaz was even less friendly. “You will come with us, woman. And you, too, dervish.”

This man is no zealot, Litaz guessed at a glance. The Students found some greedy, demand-a-dinar thug of a watchleader. The analyzer-of-things in her went to work: What can be done here?

“Sirrahs, I most humbly beg—” she began, just as she heard Raseed beside her say something about his authority and the Traditions of the Order.

“Shut up, both of you!” the Student shouted. “No more words!”

The watchleader sighed. “Oh damn you all, by God!” he said, taking in the Humble Student as well. He pointed at Litaz, however. “Just come with us. Now. And we’ll take your weapons.”

“What is this?” She hadn’t realized that Yaseer was in the courtyard archway behind her until she heard his voice, quiet and forceful and with none of the play that had been in it moments before.

“What concern, Sirrah, is this of yours?” the watchleader asked. The barest hint of fear entered his voice, fueled no doubt by the obviousness of Yaseer’s privileged position.

“My concerns are those which I declare mine, man.” The spell-seller fumbled for something in his silken belt pouch. When he brandished it—a four-finger ring set with a purple stone that shone with engraved lines representing the sands, seas, and cities of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms—Litaz heard herself gasp out loud. The Khalific seal!? So that is who he’s been working for! She’d known only that he’d been living in the Palace Quarter.

The Humble Student barely seemed to notice. “Watch yourself! You have wealth and some token of state, man, but Almighty God, who—”

The watchleader turned to the gray-haired man. “Be quiet, damn you by God! I know the Khalif’s Seal when I see it, and as I think on it, this man’s face is familiar to me from the Palace Quarter. Still…” He weighed something on the scales of thought. “Forgive me, Your Eminence, but you have not announced yourself aloud in the Defender of Virtue’s name. Because…” Doubt became certainty as the man’s eyes locked on Yaseer’s. “Because, perhaps, you—ah, forgive me—perhaps Your Eminence is engaged in that which the other ministers would question, eh? Again, I humbly beg His Eminence’s forgiveness.”

“You presume much,” Yaseer said in a cold voice.

The watchleader bowed low, and there was genuine apology—the sort fueled by fear—in his voice. His men looked terrified. And even the Student seemed to doubt himself. But Litaz could sense Yaseer’s nervousness as well. This was no dim-witted watchman they were dealing with. The man was a watchleader in the Round City and would know as well as Yaseer that news of the misuse of the seal could bring great trouble.

“A thousand apologies to Your Eminence,” the man said at last. “But tonight is the Feast of Providence and my thoughts are on feeding my family. It would take the merest of gestures—the merest of pittances—to destroy my presumption.”

Money. Without a second thought, Litaz dug out a handful of dirham and offered them to the man—far more than she could afford, but she could not think now of next year’s expenses.

The man looked as if he wished to spit on her, but he took the coins just the same. “Leave,” he said, clearly feeling daring. “Leave now. Take your filthy poisons back to the Scholars’ Quarter. If I see you in this neighborhood again, I won’t be responsible for what my men do.” The man spared a long, despising look for Raseed, then turned and walked off, his men trotting down the block after him.

The gray-haired Humble Student lingered long enough to give a last glare. “This is not over for you, Soo witch. Or for you, false dervish. You two will be easy enough to find.” Raseed winced at the word false, but Litaz just stared at the Student until the watchleader shouted at him to follow, and he stalked off.

Then she turned to Yaseer. “Thank you,” she said, feeling, against her every wish, her heart half in her throat. “Thank you, Yaseer! I could kiss you!”

“But you won’t.” The spell-seller’s soft face was not jovial or playful now. His eyes were as hard as Litaz had ever seen them. “You owe me a great debt. A great debt.” He shot a poisonous look at Raseed and turned and walked away coldly.

Some part of Litaz started to reach out to Yaseer, to stop him from going. But it was only a part of her. What the whole of her wanted was to see Dawoud. It was long past time to go home.

Chapter 16

As the sun was just beginning to set, Raseed followed Litaz into the Soo couple’s home. He was pleased to see that Dawoud Son–of-Wajeed, the Doctor, and Zamia Banu Laith Badawi were all there in the greeting room, safe.

“We would have been here sooner,” Litaz said upon entering, “but we ran into some… complications with a group of the Humble Students.”

“What?” the ghul hunter and the magus shouted at the same time.

“Complications? What are you talking about?” Dawoud asked.

Zamia said nothing, Raseed noted. But she looked healthier than she had even the night before. “Praise God.” He whispered the words without meaning to, and Zamia looked at him quizzically. He lowered his eyes in shame.

“I had to put a couple of them in their place, but that is not what is important right now. This is,” the alkhemist said. She placed the ornate scroll case on a low tea table. Then she collapsed onto a cushion. “Name of God! It will feel good to rest tonight.”

Raseed had to speak up. “And you have earned rest, Auntie. But I cannot allow myself to rest now. If this scroll will help us learn more of the fiend Orshado’s plans, I must—with apologies—I must have that information as quickly as possible.”

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. “Until 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.”

Litaz rolled her eyes. “We don’t do this for their sakes, Adoulla. You know that. But we have little choice here.”

Dawoud lifted his teacup and drained its dregs. “So we go to the palace,” the magus said, “though we’ll not have an easy time getting an audience, no matter how many wild-eyed warnings we bring. Especially after my last visit. We’ll be lucky not to be taken for assassins ourselves. Roun Hedaad is a good man, but his guardsmen will be happy enough to fill us with crossbow bolts with little provocation. And even if we get past them, the Khalif will not see us.”

Adoulla wore a dark scowl as he spoke. “And what if the Khalif does listen? What if we somehow stop this Orshado? Then this foul power will be the Khalif’s to seize. Do any here truly doubt that he would slay his own son in order to do so?”

Raseed started to say that such a thing was not possible, but he knew the Doctor would mock him. And, as he thought on it, he was not sure that he could speak such words without uttering a falsehood.

For a long moment, none of the others answered the Doctor either. Then Dawoud stood. “It matters not. We can only do what we know we must do and leave the rest to the merciful hand of Almighty God.”

“Yes, it is all cut-and-dried,” the Doctor said sarcastically. “We need only defeat the most powerful ghul-maker we’ve ever faced. And somehow slay his unkillable creature while we’re at it.”

“The monster Mouw Awa is not unkillable, Doctor,” Zamia said, her voice half growl. “God willing, I will be the one to prove this.” Raseed’s heart beat faster, hearing such brave words.

The Doctor stroked his beard. “Aye, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, may it please God to make it so. It has been only few days since the creature left you lying on a litter, all but dead. Your healing, praise God, goes miraculously well. Do you think—” the Doctor’s voice grew as gentle as Raseed had ever heard “—do you think you can take the lion-shape again?”

Tears filled Zamia’s emerald eyes, but they did not fall. Raseed felt sick with knowing that he wanted—wickedly!—to go to her and to hold her as he had sometimes seen men hold women on Dhamsawaat’s streets.

A rueful scowl spread across Zamia’s face. “I don’t know, Doctor. Each month for several days, when I am—when women’s business is upon me—I am unable to take the shape. Yesterday was the last of those days. Even were I unwounded I would not be able to take the shape until the sun is at its highest point today. Come noon, though, I will try. If, may Almighty God forbid it, I fail, I will at least die trying.”

Raseed was incredulous—to make the tribeswoman speak of such shameful things, and then to ask this sacrifice of her! “Doctor, she was nearly killed the last time we faced this creature! We cannot ask her to—”

The girl’s growl was louder than any she’d made before. “No one is asking anything of me, Raseed bas Raseed. Things are as they are. I know the murderer of my band. Through my own carelessness he… it… escaped once. It will not happen again.”

The Doctor nodded. “Sometimes even a blind man can see the hand of God working. This thing Mouw Awa must be destroyed. Of that there can be no doubt. And God’s Angels have very clearly given us the proper weapon to do so. ‘To break down a wall when God grants a door is the work of fools.’ ”

Dawoud broke in, his words sounding hard and dry. “It is as it is, then. Zamia, you shall travel with us to the palace, and if we cross paths with this Mouw Awa, it falls to you to kill it.”

The old people went to prepare themselves, and Raseed found himself alone with Zamia. As soon as they were gone, she stepped close to him, and he fought furiously with himself to keep from breathing in her scent too deeply. When she spoke, he jumped, startled.

“Raseed bas Raseed,” she said quietly, “before we go to face our deaths, I would ask a question of you.”

“Yes?”

“Do you understand that, with my father dead, you must ask me directly if you wish for my hand in marriage?”

Raseed felt as if a sword had been slid into his guts. “I… I… Why would you ask…” he found he could not form words from his thoughts.

But the tribeswoman simply shrugged her slender shoulders. “The Heavenly Chapters tell us, O woman! Ask a hundred questions of your suitor and a hundred questions of yourself.”

“Suitor!?” Raseed had never before felt so lost within his own soul. Ten different men warred within him. “May God forgive me, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, if I have behaved in a manner that… if I have shamed you by…”

“Shamed?” She looked baffled, which only confused him more. “How does shame come into this? I have simply seen the way you look at me. The only shame here would be born of deception. Can—?” she broke off at the sound of the Doctor’s heavy footsteps approaching from another room.

“If God grants us our lives beyond this day, we will speak of this again,” she said quickly. Then she nodded formally to him, ending the conversation.

Raseed went into his deep-breathing exercises, feeling more need for the calm they brought than he ever had. He stretched and prepared his mind and his body for battle, wondering whether he would die this day or live on with a soul full of shameful desires—and not knowing which would please God more.