Throne of the Crescent Moon

The world was made of pain and the guardsman’s soul was formed from fear. How long had he sat unmoving in this cauldron, with only his head above the roiling red glow? He recalled, like dreams, slight sips of water and gruel. Some small, still-thinking part of him said that he was being kept alive while his body macerated slowly in the sparkling ruby oil.

The gaunt man in the filthy kaftan was there, holding open a sack of rich red silk. The shadow-jackal was beside him. The gaunt man upended the sack into the cauldron. Bones and skulls—men’s, but too small for men’s—spilled out with a ghastly clatter. Fragile looking skulls, tiny ribcages and fingerbones…

The shadow thing’s voice squealed again in his mind. Listen to Mouw Awa, 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 ye shall serve.

Thou doth see the baby-bones. Infants fed and fed and then bled dry. All for the fear that doth now waft from thee.

Listen to Mouw Awa. His blessed friend hath waited so long for the Cobra Throne. Shortest days hath come and gone and gone and come. Never one quite right. Mouw Awa the manjackal knoweth well the pain of waiting. He helpeth to deliver his blessed friend from waiting, as his blessed friend did for Mouw Awa.

The gaunt man burned things before him. His eyes burned with smoke as the jackal-man droned on.

Thou smelleth the smoke of red mandrake and doth recall fear. Thou smelleth the smoke of black poppy and doth recall pain.

And suddenly, a whole piece of the guardsman’s mind slid back into place. He was Hami Samad, Vice Captain of the Guard, and there was nothing he could do but beg for his life through a cracked throat. “Please, sire! I will tell you whatever you wish! About the Khalif, about the palace!” He began to weep wildly. “Ministering Angels preserve me! God shelter me!”

The gaunt man stared at Hami Samad with black-ice eyes. The guardsman felt the gaunt man’s spindly fingers dig roughly into his scalp. The gaunt man’s eyes rolled backward, showing only whites. Horrible noises filled the room, as if a thousand men and animals were screaming at once.

There was a tearing noise, and there was pain a thousand times more searing than anything he had yet felt. Impossibly, he felt his head come away from his body. Impossibly, he heard himself speak.

“I AM THE FIRSTBORN ANGEL’S SEED, SOWN WITH GLORIOUS PAIN AND BLESSED FEAR. REAPED BY THE HAND OF HIS SERVANT ORSHADO. THE SKINS OF THOSE-WHO-WERE-BELOW-ME SHALL MOVE AT THE MUSIC OF MY WORD. ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE.”

The last thing he saw was Hami Samad’s headless body in a great iron kettle, spurting blood that mixed with a molten red glow of boiling oil.

Chapter 17

The sun was halfway up in the sky, and its heat was already making itself known. Dawoud sweated and huffed to keep up with the two young warriors and his indefatigable wife. He and Adoulla walked several strides behind the others, the ghul hunter’s breath coming nearly as heavily as Dawoud’s own. Ahead of them, Litaz spoke softly to Zamia and Raseed, but Dawoud and his old friend kept silent as they strode, saving their breath for breathing.

An hour passed, and the sun climbed a bit higher. They made their way through the large paved caravanserai that marked the entrance to the Palace Quarter. Ahead of them, a group of merchants argued heatedly with one of the Khalif’s coin collectors.

“Do you see this, brother-of-mine?” Adoulla asked quietly. “It’s not just the poor that the Falcon Prince speaks to. The Khalif has made his own bed of scorpions. He has even alienated the minor merchants with his taxes and his half-day-long tariff lines. The small timers are just waiting for an excuse to join the Prince’s supporters.”

Dawoud laughed. “That would be some alliance! Like a bad prophecy: ‘O watch for the day when the thief and the shopkeepers lie down together!’ ”

Adoulla gave him a sidelong glance. “It’s not so impossible. The Prince has always been daring. His targets have always been those with the biggest purses, men that most stall-keepers and middling merchants are happy to see get robbed.”

The road followed the new canal that had been diverted from the River of Tigers. Dawoud poked Adoulla and gestured to the tiny boats that moved along the canal, knowing that his friend had not yet seen this newly made marvel. The swift, magically moving water that the little boats bobbed on fed into a massive waterwheel. “Follow a twisty route of wafting spells and copper pipe, and this is the other end of the stink that now haunts our neighborhood every month. This thing can grind as much grain as ten normal mill wheels, you know.”

Adoulla snorted. “Yes, the end of the stick with no shit on it. Of course all the money from this monstrosity goes into the Khalif’s coffers. And now we’re off to save the son-of-a-whore’s dynasty.”

“Quiet!” Dawoud hissed as a watchman stepped out of a side alley, rudely crossing their path without so much as a glance at them.

The party stood and waited for the man to pass.

They approached the wheel. The noise it made—creaking wood, splashing water, groaning chains—was deafening. It was monstrous, Dawoud had to admit. One could scarce believe it was made by men.

Then they passed through a marble arch, and a path of smooth white paving-stones, wide enough for six riders, stretched ahead of them for a hundred yards. At the end of the great path, which was grander than the Mainway itself, lay the Crescent Moon Palace, behind a high wall. As always it forced Dawoud’s attention, though he’d been here just the other day.

Yet this time he found his eye drawn even more forcefully to the thin silvery spindle that was the minaret of the Court magi. So much space for seven men when seventy could live there. The Khalifs of Abassen had apparently never learned of the foul power that, for generations, had literally sat untapped beneath them. But what did the court Magi know? How would they fit into this mad sequence of magical events? He felt his tired mind spinning with too many damned-by-God complications.

As they made the long walk to the gates of the palace, Dawoud shifted his attention to Raseed. The boy’s eyes kept darting to the tribeswoman and then to the paving stones before him. He is worrying about protecting her. Wondering how to fulfill his duties and keep the girl safe at the same time. This worried Dawoud. Not the dervish’s cloaked devotion to Zamia—Dawoud accepted his wife’s claims that the obvious feelings between the two young ones would not be an impediment; that in fact “love was what made everything else matter,” despite the fact that young people’s love was a thing of foolishness and first sights. No, it wasn’t Raseed’s interest in the girl that worried Dawoud. It was the dervish’s obvious struggle with that interest, and the second-guessing that came with it. They were hunting monsters in the Crescent Moon Palace. In a situation like this, second-guessing could mean the death of the world.

They were about a dozen yards from the gate to the palace courtyards when a gray-eyed young officer of the guard stopped them.

“Hold! Who are you that you dare approach the palace of the Defender of Virtue wearing weapons?” The man’s hand rested easily on the pommel of his sword.

“God’s peace, guardsman. I am Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed, a friend of Captain Hedaad’s. I must speak to the captain at once. He is expecting me to call upon him.” It was true enough that he could say it with authority.

“Captain Hedaad?” The man looked uncertain but not unfriendly. “Well, I can’t leave my post, Uncle. But if you truly have business with the captain, I will send for him.”

“That will be fine. The matter is urgent, though, so please hurry.”

“As you say.”

Dawoud had been prepared to press silver into someone’s palm in order to get his message up to Roun. But apparently his and his friends’ fates were kind. In their hour of need, they had met with an honest guardsman. It was gratifying, while on this mad quest in a land not even his, to see Abassen’s agents acting as they ought.

The young officer called a slender guardsman over. “Kassin! Send word to Captain Hedaad that—”

“Why, now, are we disturbing the captain?” a vaguely familiar voice broke in.

Name of God, no!

The long-faced minister from the Khalif’s court came walking up surrounded by a retinue of a half-dozen guardsmen. What on God’s great earth is he doing here? “What do we have here?” he said. The gray-eyed officer started to explain, but the minster waved the young man back to the guardhouse. Then he turned to Dawoud.

“You were warned to stay away from the palace, old man. And instead you have returned with armed friends! You are either mad or the foulest of traitors.”

Dawoud knew better than to try and speak to this man of the threat that loomed over the throne. “A thousand apologies, your eminence. I am here only because I need to see Roun Hedaad.” He heard his friends shuffling nervously around him.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “The captain is busy. And you have disregarded most traitorously the express wishes of his Majesty. Your friendship with the captain does not change that. Men! Seize them!”

Dawoud heard Raseed mumble a prayer. The Badawi girl growled. Dawoud looked a question at his wife and Adoulla in the wordless near-language that the three had developed over decades of fighting together. What do we do now?

But neither his wife nor Adoulla seemed to have any answers. And really, there was nothing they could do. Even if they were somehow able to kill a squad of guardsmen, more would show, and they would die before ever getting inside the palace. Their only hope was going along for now and waiting for an opportunity—or creating an opportunity—to get word to Roun Hedaad. And to hope that he could actually do something to help them. The guardsmen took his wife’s knife and Raseed’s sword, and marched them at spearpoint away from the gate.

Dawoud cursed the slow roll of this own thoughts and saw his frustration reflected in his wife’s and Adoulla’s eyes. There was a way out of this—the three of them had destroyed the Kemeti Golden Serpent and bested a whole band of invisible robbers. These were just men with weapons. They had only to puzzle out…

His train of thought broke as he realized the minister and his men were leading them away from the palace. This can’t be good. After a few minutes they were well away from the gates, in a secluded alley of the Palace Quarter. They came to a small, windowless house with a barred iron door. The minister opened this door himself with a set of three small keys. Once they were inside, the guardsmen closed the door behind them.

Adoulla was the first to finally find his tongue. “Why on God’s great earth have you brought us here?”

A big guardsman casually shoved the ghul hunter with his spear-butt and told him to shut up. The minister, still not saying a word to them, went to the center of the house’s one room and lifted up a dusty old rug. Beneath the rug was a metal grille, which the minister opened with yet another key. Though it was rusty, the grille made no noise when the minister swung it up. There was a stairway—wide enough for two men—carved into the stone floor beneath the grille, leading down to God-alone-knew-where. Some dank hole where we can be slain without the Captain of the Guard knowing about it, no doubt.

“No more of this!” Zamia shouted suddenly, her thoughts clearly going down the same road. She drew herself up fiercely and, Dawoud noticed, tried to hide the pain still in her side. “I can smell the deceit on you! A Banu Laith Badawi is not marched into murder quietly like some docile townsman!”

“I said, be QUIET!” the same guardsmen who’d jabbed Adoulla said, accentuating the last word with a much crueler jab of his spear into the small of the tribeswoman’s back. Zamia cried out and buckled but did not fall.

Dawoud didn’t even see Raseed move. But the next thing he knew the little dervish was, with one hand, holding the big guardsman aloft by the throat. If Dawoud had ever doubted Adoulla’s tales of the boy’s more-than-human prowess, he couldn’t doubt them now!

There was a sudden clatter of weapons, and another group of armed men came pouring out of the hole in the floor like ants from an anthill. They and the guardsmen formed a circle around Dawoud and his friends.

The new men were armed with daggers and cudgels. They wore the simple clothes of laborers or apprentices, though here and there Dawoud saw a bit of incongruous ornament: a silk scarf around the neck of the lanky man in front of him, an embroidered vest on a short but hard-looking boy to his right. At equidistant points of the circle of plainly dressed toughs were figures wearing some sort of livery. One of these was an ugly woman, tall and stout as a man. They were dressed identically, in tight-fitting linen breeches and thigh length overshirts the color of wet sand. The image of a swooping black falcon was dyed across the front of each shirt. These were better armed than the others. Each held a well-made cutlass and wore a small buckler made of steel-reed.

A bombastic voice boomed forth from the new group. “Leave the man be, Master Dervish! He has brought you here to speak with me, so let us start speaking!”

Pharaad Az Hammaz, the Falcon Prince, stepped into the center of the room. He moved like liquid in a man’s shape, though he was well over six feet tall and had the thick, sinewy arms of a blacksmith. His hand was on the black-and-gold handguard of his saber. Raseed let go of the big guard who had struck Zamia and the man collapsed, clutching his neck and desperately sucking in breath.

Dawoud found himself fumbling for his thoughts like a boy playing Beat the Blind Man. “You… you…” he turned to the long-faced minister, “you work for him?”

The minister scowled and said nothing, but the Prince sketched a half-bow to Dawoud and his friends. He put one of his massive hands on Adoulla’s shoulder. “What are the chances, Uncle, that we should meet again like this?” the bandit asked. “That, in surveying the crooked gatekeepers of the palace, my men should see your bright white kaftan cutting through the crowd? And with such a strange assortment of friends about you? ‘Az,’ I said to myself, ‘What are the chances? There must be something to this. Let’s have a talk with the Doctor and find out what that something is.’ ”

One of the men wearing the falcon livery—a burly fellow with only one ear—spoke up. “Aye, sire, there be little enough chance of it. Little enough chance that it’s a-makin’ me suspicious. Something here be smelling of the Khalif’s shitty finger, and this ain’t a day for surprises. All of your work, sire, for all of them years, leadin’ to today. They’ve already harmed one of ours.” He gestured at the still half-choking guardsman. “Ask me, the only safe thing now would be to kill ’em.” The matter-of-factness in the man’s voice chilled Dawoud.

For a long, moustache-stroking moment, the Falcon Prince seemed to consider his lieutenant’s suggestion. But the Prince’s brown face split in a broad smile as he spoke. “No. No, Headknocker, that would be a dreadfully poor repayment to the Doctor here, who, mere days ago, nobly misdirected the watch to save my hide. And it would be a rotten foundation for our new order. Besides, this man earned his own throttling. Striking an unarmed girl like that!” The Prince tsk-tsked at the big guardsman even as he helped the man to his feet.

Misdirected? What is he talking about? Dawoud wondered. He could not imagine his old friend had become an agent of the Falcon Prince without his knowing it. And though he’d half expect Adoulla’s assistant to leap at the chance to confront the most wanted criminal in the city, the boy was strangely still—as if paralyzed by some internal anguish.

“I’m afraid, however,” the Prince continued, “that you are all my prisoners. And if you are agents of the new Khalif, that no-good son of a half-good man, I must warn you: I am not foolish enough to underestimate you. Even you, girl,” he said, turning to Zamia and eyeing her rudely from head to toe, “are perhaps more than you seem, eh?” The Prince turned back to Adoulla. “So why are you here?”

What do we do now? Dawoud found himself wondering again. What to tell, and what not to?

“We are here,” Adoulla said, “because we have read the same scroll as you. Because we know, as you do, that the Throne of the Crescent Moon was once the Cobra Throne.”

Well, that decides that.

The Falcon Prince’s dark eyes went wide. “Remarkable. I am not often surprised, Uncle, but you have managed to surprise me. Yet this knowledge is all the more reason that I must detain you until this business is done with.” The bandit spread his empty hands before him and grimaced apologetically.

Adoulla’s look was dark enough that even the imperturbable Prince took a step back. “Pharaad Az Hammaz, listen to me. We are not the only ones who know of the throne’s powers. You have heard the people speak of me and of the dangers I have saved them from over the decades. I tell you now that there is another after the throne’s power. Another who will strike the palace on this shortest day of the year. A man who is both more and less than a man. A man whose powers are greater and crueler than any of the magi and ghul-makers I have ever faced. He is called Orshado, and if he and his creatures beat you to the throne, I swear before God that the bat-winged shadow of the Traitorous Angel shall fall over all of us for all our days, and for all days to come.”

For a moment, the Prince looked genuinely concerned. But the smile swiftly returned. “The Traitorous Angel, eh, Uncle? I am sorry, but I have little time for such grandiose mysteries! I am a foe of the traitorous man! Of the traitorous Khalif!”

“And are you not troubled by the strange deaths of your men and of the beggars you have sworn to protect?” Adoulla asked.

Suddenly the Prince’s sword was out of its scabbard. “What had you to do with that, old man? If you had a hand in those foul murders, we will not go easy on you.”

“I swear before God that I did not. In fact, we seek to slay the foul beings who did.”

The master thief stared hard at Adoulla then sheathed his sword. “Well, then, Uncle, we must speak.” He looked around the windowless house cautiously. “But not here. You and your group will accompany us.”

The Prince’s men marched them down the stairway in the center of the room. They entered a stone cellar, and here the long-faced minister again stepped to the center of the room. The man produced a thin wand from his sleeve and traced a series of symbols in the dust on the floor. Dawoud recognized magic at work, and he was only half-surprised when, without a sound, the seemingly solid stone of the floor slid open to reveal a tunnel that sloped sharply downward. The minister then said a familiar-seeming farewell to the Prince and went back up the stairs, two of the guardsmen following.

Dawoud and his friends were, in turn, marched wordlessly down through the tunnel, which quickly leveled off. A few minutes later they found themselves in a chamber the size of a small tavern’s greeting room, with another tunnel leading out of its opposite end. The Prince’s men produced clean-burning torches—the expensive sort treated by alkhemists—and took up positions along the walls.

“Here our words will not be heard by any ears above,” the Prince said, bringing the group to a halt at last. “We shall wait here for word from my men in the palace. And you, Uncle, will tell me a story.”

As they waited for some signal from the Prince’s agents, Adoulla and Litaz told the bandit the little they had learned of Mouw Awa and Orshado. Dawoud stayed to the back of the group with Zamia and a still strangely silent Raseed, and he did not catch all of their urgent-sounding words, but he heard his wife ask, “Do you understand what a true servant of the Traitorous Angel could do with the same power you seek?”

He had never been able to effect the shifts in manner that Litaz could—from steel to honey and back again, as the occasion called for it. In this strange life they shared, she tended to do the talking unless what was called for was to frighten someone with dire prognostications. In those cases, Dawoud would screw his face up into an ominous scowl and roll his eyes back

“You’ll need our help,” Adoulla said finally. “Hunting ghuls is not your province, Pharaad Az Hammaz.”

Figuring that the pleading and sugar talk was done, Dawoud stepped to the front of the group. The Prince spared him a glance, but spoke to Adoulla. “You speak to me of ghuls, Uncle. But truth be told, such things are no scarier than watching your children die slowly on a dirty pallet from rat bites. No more frightening than having to smother your old Da-Da in his sleep to end the pain of a disease that could be cured, if only you had the coin. No worse than having your hand chopped off for filching a loaf of bread because the hunger was making you stark raving mad.”

“Your theatrics are not—” Dawoud began.

“Not theatrics!” the big man boomed. “The truth! Life in Dhamsawaat! I could take you to meet the boy right now! Ten years old and he has one hand. The wound would have killed him, had my people not treated it. The stinking watchmen didn’t even let him keep the heel of bread!”

A vicious gleam lit the man’s ebonwood eyes. “It took some work to find the names of the watchmen that did it, but find them, we did.”

Dawoud shuddered at the bandit’s smile.

“These villains,” the Falcon Prince continued, “these monsters are before you every day. But unless it hisses and has fangs made of vermin, it is not worth fighting, eh? Pain-magic, death-magic—these cull power from torture and fear, yes? Starvation. Beatings. Making men live in little boxes. How is the Khalif different? Because he takes his time in sacrificing lives for his power? Because the workers’ boxes by the tannery are a little bit bigger?”

Adoulla made an annoyed noise. “Don’t pretend to be as thick-headed as that son-of-a-whore Khalif who you claim is a fool! The same servant of the Traitorous Angel that murdered your people is seeking that which you seek. He may be here already. And only my friends and I can stop him.”

“Well, you know of things I don’t, Uncle. Very well, do a little dance. But your spies—whoever they may be, and we shall have to discuss that one day—have not told you everything. The power of the Cobra Throne is terrible. But there is another way here. Just as the blood of a throne-coronated man’s heir can grant great but cruel powers, the same heir can, of his own power, pass on the mastery of the throne’s kind magics willingly. And those magics are just as great. The power to heal hundreds of lepers in a heartbeat’s time. To feed a thousand men with bread and fishes. Some sources say the throne can even raise the dead. The Heir need only sit upon the throne, clasp another man’s hand, and say that he wishes to pass on the throne’s powers. Now imagine what a man with this power in his hands, and an honorable and wise group of ministers at his side, might do for our city. He could—”

Dawoud could not listen to any more of this. “Even if what you say is true, this is madness. No doubt you have agents within the palace ready to act on your command. But while the guardsmen are fighting with your men, Orshado and his creature will make their move—and all quarrels between men will become meaningless.”

Adoulla ran a hand over his beard and stared at the bandit. He was actually weighing the Falcon Prince’s traitorous plot!

“Adoulla—” Dawoud started to say, but his old friend cut him off with an upraised hand.

“Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed is right,” Adoulla said. “This is the life of the world you play with here, Pharaad Az Hammaz. When I helped you dodge the watch the other day, you said you owed me. Now I ask—”

The big bandit let out a booming laugh. “Uncle, do you truly believe that I needed you to save me? I could have fled from those men were I asleep and one-legged! I saw you in that alley, knowing who you were, and decided to take a moment to test which way the wind blew with you.”

“The wind blows out of my ass, man! But unlike you I am not deluded enough to call it perfume. This plan of yours is mad, and you are risking this city you claim to love for it. I ask you to call it off.”

“I owe you a debt for your intentions if not your assistance, Uncle. But I’m not so foolish as to repay a dirham with a dinar! Besides, as your assistant will attest, I have repaid that debt already—or has this paragon of honesty withheld that fact from you?” He made a tsk-tsk-ing sound at the dervish, though Dawoud had no idea what the man was alluding to. “Well, Pride can pickle even an honest man’s tongue, so no matter. But even if what you say is true, Uncle—and one-half my heart thinks it so—there’s no damned-by-God way you’d be able to get into the throne room without my aid.”

“So it would seem that we have need of one another,” Dawoud heard his friend say. He opened his own mouth again to object but found that he had no better course of action to offer.

Adoulla turned to him, his bushy gray brows drawn down with his frown. “It is either this or we allow these men to bind or kill us. Need I remind you the price if we fail?”

“So we go to rescue the Khalif, only to help his greatest enemy,” Raseed interjected, finally breaking his silence.

Adoulla waved away the boy’s words. “I was never here to save the Khalif, boy. He can choke on bones for all I care! I am here to save my city and the world it sits in.”

“Well, then.” The Prince clapped his hands together and smiled pleasantly at Adoulla, as if they had agreed on a tea date. “It shall be so: you and yours may join us—for if this Orshado proves to be real, your powers may indeed be useful. But I warn you now that if you cross me, I will kill you all.”

The steel in Raseed’s gaze could cut a man. “And if you try to harm these people, thief, I will kill you.”

Around them Dawoud heard the clatter and grumble of the Prince’s men making their displeasure known. But the Falcon Prince himself seemed more offended than afraid.

“No one has harmed anyone yet, young man,” the Prince said. “We are merely conversing. But threatening to kill me just might be enough to bring you to harm, if you are not more careful.”

The dervish cast a long look at the armed men surrounding them. “I would duel you, then,” he said at last to the Prince, “in single combat before God the Judge of All Things, for the fates of—”

“Duel me?” the Prince broke in. “You can’t be serious? What fireside tale did you crawl out of, boy?”

This from a man who calls himself the “Falcon Prince!” Dawoud thought.

“You refuse?” the boy fumed. “But a duel is the right of all–”

Thankfully, Adoulla calmed his protégé, rolling his eyes behind the boy’s back. He stepped between the two swordsmen and addressed the Falcon Prince. “Forgive him, Pharaad Az Hammaz, for he is young.”

“ ‘A genius of the sword, but an idiot of the street,’ eh, Uncle? I’d sensed as much.”

Adoulla barked a laugh, only belatedly seeming to realize that he was joining a stranger in insulting a friend. The ghul hunter lowered his head and then stepped toward Raseed, placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder and mumbling something apologetic.

“I am impressed by your eyes as you watch over these dangerous young ones, Uncle,” the Prince said. “As though they were your children, even though you bring them into battle. I understand it. Indeed all of these men you see with me are like my sons!” Dawoud was tired of the man’s big mouth, but his gravity as he spoke seemed sincere, if practiced.

A pock-marked man old enough to be the bandit’s father said dryly, “Well, Da-Da, if you ain’t gonna take Headknocker’s advice and kill these people, what’s the plan?”

“We have new allies to aid us, Ramzi, but our plans are unchanged. Speaking of which, I hear—though no doubt none of you can—our man calling me with a silent signal. I must go speak to him. Watch over our new friends with love, now, eh?”

Moving faster than a man ought to be able to move, the Prince disappeared through the room’s far exit. As soon as he did, the old tough called Ramzi stepped up to Dawoud and Adoulla and whispered menacingly, “You’d best learn to watch how you speak to our Prince!”

“Or what?” Dawoud gave the man his best just try it scowl. “You’ll kill an old man for speaking his mind?” He was tired of being ordered about by thugs. If Dhamsawaat was trapped between men like the Khalif and men like this, perhaps Litaz was right. Perhaps, if they lived through this, they should leave this damned-by-God city.

The man gave him a long, hard look, but then his expression softened. “Let me tell you a story, outlander. Five years ago. I’m a one-copper-fals-from-starving rockbreaker. Never gave a God’s peace for Khalifs and Princes and all that. One night I come home from the teahouse to find my youngest girl Shahnta dying of the three-day greenfever. No medicine for it but the tonics made by the Khalif’s physicians, and you know how that goes. I pass two days and nights with my thoughts in the Lake of Flame, working to feed my half-starved unsick child when I should be home helpin’ the wife tend to the dyin’ one.

“Then there’s a rap at our door, and the Prince is there with a handful of silver—not copper, mind you, silver, and one of the palace physicians! And the Khalif’s man is stumbling over himself to take care of our girl! I’ll never forget the look on that man’s face. He wanted to help us so badly. Almost—” here Ramzi smiled wickedly “—almost as if his life depended on it. He wouldn’t have bothered to brush flies from Shahnta’s dead face before the Prince spoke to him, though. Now my clan is the Prince’s clan.”

Dawoud realized the man was a villager originally, by his accent. Villagers took such ties more seriously than city folk.

The Prince reemerged from the tunnel and headed back over to them. Dawoud cleared his throat loudly. “Kidnapping men and forcing them to do your work at swordpoint. Wringing one man’s gain from another’s terror. And what if one of the palace boys had died while this physician was away? He would have deserved it for being the child of a rich man? You are truly a hero, O Falcon Prince!”

Ramzi put his hand on his heavy club. “I told you to watch your tone, outlander!”

The Prince flashed the man a disappointed look. “No, Ramzi. I thank you for your loyalty, but this is not our way. We are not fighting for the strongest or for he with the most armed men on his side. We are fighting for the man with right reason on his side. I have never asked that you follow me because of who I am, but because of what I stand for.”

“Aye, sire, you’ve told me. Principles. I’m a man of principles, myself. But him…” The man flashed a threatening smile and pointed to his club. “He’s an old-fashioned son-of-a-whore. He only cares about his clan.”

The Prince smiled and clapped the man on the back. “You’re a hopeless one, Ramzi. In any case, stand ready—you too, Headknocker—our people say it’s nearly time for us to move.”

Beside Dawoud, Litaz sniffed. “Headknocker! Camelback! Such names you Quarter boys give yourselves!”

Dawoud squeezed her arm. This is not the time for your Niece-of-a-Pasha snoot, my love! he said with his eyes. But she ignored him.

“Really! Are these the names your mothers gave you?” She clucked her tongue.

The thugs took it in stride. Headknocker bowed half-jestingly. “If you really want to know, Auntie, my mother named me Fayyaz.”

“What do you know? Your mother named me ‘The Bedchamber Stallion!’,” one of Headknocker’s fellows broke in, snorting a laugh.

In spite of her snoot Litaz laughed, too. “O believer! When you meet a man on the road, know that God, who makes broken things whole, has cobbled your kindest fates together,” she recited, turning to the Prince. “I needed that laugh. May it please God to make us friends rather than enemies, Pharaad Az Hammaz.”

She’s still a spoiled Blue River girl at heart, Dawoud thought. Charmed by cold-blooded killers whom she thinks are loveable rogues. Not for the first time in his life, Dawoud felt a burning hatred of men with able bodies and too-quick smiles.

The Falcon Prince inclined his head in agreement with Litaz. “May it indeed be so, Auntie, but I will not bother to ask it of God, who has left man to fight and scramble over bits of food and land. Who lets flesh-burning diseases kill children!”

Raseed snarled, and it was as bestial as any growl from the tribeswoman.

“Be as angry as you like, dervish,” the Prince said. “God hasn’t given three shits for His children in six thousand years! Do you really believe that He sits in the sky, smiling upon us? Look around you! Look at this mad, bloody, muddy world of ours. He made the world, He made us, and then he left us to fend for ourselves. And so far, my friends, we’ve made it a pile of monkeyshit.” The bandit’s eyes lit again. “But even shit has its uses. Fertilizer. Fuel. Oh, yes. But to serve these purposes it must be ground to bits. Or burned.”

“Madman! Blasphemer!” Raseed took a long, threatening stride toward Az.

The bandit held up a hand to restrain his men and leveled a steely gaze at the dervish. “Watch yourself, young man. This is the real world, not a dueling circle. As you know, I fight dirty.”

The dervish’s hand darted to his swordhilt before he seemed to recall that he had no weapon.

Then Litaz jumped between them. My wife, the peacemaker, Dawoud thought. She drew herself up to her full height, which made her nearly as tall as Raseed but still left the top of her head well below the Prince’s shoulders.

“Are you two mad? Are you thoroughly mad? There are God alone knows how many lives at stake right now and you buffoons are thumping your chests at each other? We don’t have time for this! Idiots!”

Well, maybe not “peacemaker,” exactly.

The Prince smiled. “You remind me of my mother, Auntie. And my mother was not a kind woman. But I will stand down if your yapping little holy man will.”

“I will not allow blasphemy to pass unanswered,” the dervish said coldly.

Litaz wagged a finger in Raseed’s face, though her voice softened. “Answer me this, dear: Is this truly what you think God would have of us? Fighting one another over careless words while the world is carved into bloody pieces by the Traitorous Angel? We have precious little time. Are you serving the All-Merciful by wasting it here, shouting about how devout you are?”

Suddenly there was a series of frantic footfalls from the far tunnel. A man in the Falcon livery came trotting out, and the Prince went to confer with him. Then the master thief spoke to all assembled in the cave chamber. “The Soo woman is right, my friends—time is precious, and all is finally in readiness! Our time is at hand! We could have started a second civil war in this city years ago. But the Falcon knows when to strike and when not to. Have we screeched at the people about the injustice they face? No! We have stabbed fat jewelers in their asses and stolen their rubies for the poor! And now we stab the fattest jeweler of them all and toss the world’s greatest ruby to the crowd! Many of our friends have paid great costs to make this day possible. Will we let their sacrifices be wasted?”

“NO!” the master thief’s men shouted in unison.

“Our timing must be exact!” the Prince boomed. “We’ve but one chance to suddenly appear in the midst of the palace, weapons whirling, bold plans flying into glorious motion as—” The man was lost in his own storytelling, and the rest of his words were lost as he led the way out the far tunnel.

When they’d marched for a few minutes through another twisting tunnel, the Prince trotted back again to Dawoud and his friends. He spoke in low tones quite unlike his bombastic bluster of moments before.

“I can see the words ‘Where are we?’ etched on your faces,” he said. “I’ll tell you. We are in an underground passage to the palace. There are several such tunnels, some even the Khalifs never learned of. Older than the Khalifate itself, dating back to the days of the Kemeti Underground City. Known only to one who’s spent half a lifetime learning this lore. One tunnel in particular leads directly to the ruined Kem temple that the heart of the Palace was built upon. Unfortunately, the tunnel follows a rather circuitous route, snaking back and forth until ten minutes’ walk becomes an hour’s. Sound carries in here, so from here forward silence is required of us. And I don’t like to threaten newfound friends, but I must warn you that silence will be enforced if necessary. Oh, and I’d nearly forgotten—you may have your weapons back.” The master thief gestured to one of his men, who handed back Raseed’s sword and Litaz’s dagger, then he scampered back to the front of the line.

They walked for an hour, back and forth, upslope and downslope, through tunnels and rooms of pale stone and packed earth. As they walked, Dawoud’s feet ached and a thousand grim thoughts filled his head. But not a word escaped his lips.

Chapter 18

Nearly an hour after Adoulla and his friends were hushed by the Falcon Prince, the tunnel sloped sharply upward, steep enough that Adoulla found himself breathing heavily. The tunnel then opened into a massive… cave? Room? Whether the space itself was made by man or nature, the great stone-walled expanse about him was dank, a series of huge pools intersected by thin walkways and tall columns of shaped stone. Water gurgled all around him, and he had to keep himself from cursing aloud from the shock of what he was looking at. A cistern! Older than the Crescent Moon Palace and sitting smack dab beneath it! How long has it been since men walked down here?

He felt as if the city he knew were transforming beneath his feet. His head spun such that it took him a moment to process the fact that there were already men there when the party entered the cistern—it was their low, clean-burning torchlight he saw by.

Two muscular young men stood in the center of the great space, making adjustments to a long ladder-like contraption of poles and ropes. This ladder climbed to the ceiling, where it was almost lost to his old eyes. But as he stared up into the darkness, he made out a small hole in the ceiling which the ladder was somehow lashed to.

A well, Adoulla realized, a well that opens up within the palace. The city was shifting beneath his feet! The simple existence of that little hole of stone was astonishing—would the ages-ago civil war have gone differently, had the Holy Usurper’s forces known of this chink in the Khalifs’ armor? How might the last—?

His thoughts were interrupted as the Prince turned to them and raised a finger to his lips, again demanding silence. The Prince strode forward and, using a series of hand signals Adoulla could not begin to follow in the half-dark, consulted with the two men at the ladder. A moment later, the bandit gestured for the group to gather around the ladder. A few of his men were already climbing it.

The Prince gestured for Adoulla and his friends to climb. Adoulla heard Dawoud curse softly beside him. But as the magus climbed, he seemed to have an easier time than he’d expected. As Adoulla began to climb he could feel why—there was something ingenious about the ladder’s construction that made moving up it less arduous than it ought to have been. As the well-hole above him slowly drew closer, Adoulla sensed more than heard another group of the Prince’s men enter the cistern below him and head for the ladder. Of course. The Prince had had some special climbing-device rigged here because he intended for a good number of armed men to quickly make their way up it and into the palace.

Adoulla’s palms burned a bit from gripping rope, and he was sweating beneath his kaftan. A few feet above him he heard Dawoud breathing hard. Ingenious device or no, he was thankful when they finally reached the top, climbed out of the well-hole…

And emerged right in the midst of a knot of tense-looking guardsmen brandishing weapons. Adoulla nearly dropped back down the rope-and-pole ladder in fear. Then he saw that these men were exchanging hand signals with those of the Prince’s men who had climbed up before him. More infiltrators. He didn’t know if he was pleased or disturbed by how pervasive the Prince’s influence seemed to be within the palace.

The room they’d reached was two dozen feet on a side and made of gray stone. It smelled of the well water below. The Prince gestured Adoulla and his friends over to a small, arched doorway in the far wall. Dervish and magus, alkhemist and Badawi gathered around the Prince, as did a half-dozen of his men. Glancing behind them, Adoulla saw that the room was already filling with armed men, a steady stream of whom were quietly making their way out of the well.

The Prince led them through the doorway into a huge kitchen filled with low stone ovens. Two other doorways led from the kitchen to other rooms, and each of these was flanked by two guardsmen. Their lack of alarm at the Prince’s entrance meant that they, too, were his agents. The smell of baking bread filled the room, but beneath it was another scent that Adoulla knew—blood.

In the center of the kitchen stood a massive dark brown woman, as big as Adoulla, wearing a cook’s apron and holding a big, bloody cleaver. A dead guardsman lay slumped at her feet, his head opened by a nasty gash. The Prince dashed to the woman and exchanged a few quick hand signals. Then, with that more-than-human speed, he ran in a circle about the kitchen, sprinkling some sort of powder on the ground until it surrounded the whole room. He produced a flintbox, and lit the powder, which didn’t burn with a visible flame, but surrounded them with a low blue glow. Alkhemy, Adoulla knew, but he knew little more than that. He looked a question at Litaz, but she only shrugged. It was a rare compound indeed that could baffle her. For what felt like the hundredth time that day, he was impressed by the Prince’s resources.

“Well!” Pharaad Az Hammaz boomed, breaking the silence. “We can speak now, and the powder of the panthers will keep our words from being heard outside this room. My friends, meet Mother Midnight, Queen of the Khalif’s Kitchens. For years now, she and the minister you met earlier have been helping me arrange this little festival of ours. If we survive this day, we will owe it all to her.” The Prince turned to the big woman. “I presume, from the lack of shouts and bell-ringing, that we remain undetected?”

“Aye, Pharaad,” Mother Midnight said, her voice sounding like a rockslide. “The few fools who stuck their noses in the wrong place at the wrong time have been dealt with, but we won’t be able to keep these bodies hidden forever.” She gestured with her crimson-stained cleaver to the dozen great ovens that dominated the room. Here and there, sticking out of the ovens, Adoulla saw a man’s hand or booted foot.

He felt sick. The dice have fallen from the cup, then. We are a part of this mad usurpation whether or not we wish to be.

Beside him, Raseed and Zamia started to speak outraged words, but he turned to them with his hardest glare. “Orshado. Mouw Awa,” he whispered harshly. “There is no other way to stop them now. That matters more than anything.” Praise God, neither warrior-child said anything more.

“He’s two rooms down, Pharaad. In the Velvet Chamber, about to take his private Thirdday Noonmeal. The Defender of Virtue is never truly alone, but this is the closest he gets to it all week. Everything is as you planned—this is the moment we’ve waited for.”

Raseed broke his brief silence. “And do you feel no shame, woman? No shame at all in betraying your Khalif and master in this way?”

The Falcon Prince turned an angry eye on the boy, and Mother Midnight scowled and sucked her teeth. “Ask the Defender of Virtue about my daughter and his… appetites, holy man. Ask him about Mother Midnight, who loyally served him and his father before him, and was repaid with the rape and rejection of an only child who killed herself. Then speak to me of shame and betrayal.”

To Adoulla’s surprise, that shut the boy up. Behind them, more of the Prince’s men filed quietly into the kitchen.

The Falcon Prince put a big hand on Mother Midnight’s shoulder. “Auntie, I swear by my soul that in half a day’s time you’ll be able to ask the sack of scum yourself. Though I fear the only answer you’ll get will be the sound of his head hitting the executioner’s leather mat!”

He turned to Adoulla. “I don’t see that there are any monsters here, save the one I’ve come a-hunting, Uncle. But two rooms from this one lies the man who is strangling our city. I give you and yours one more chance to choose. Follow me into that room and live with the consequences, or go back down that well—under my men’s guard, of course—and sit this adventure out, despite your wild warnings of ghuls. Either way, the dervish’s words make me wary. I will have your oaths before God that you will not betray me,” he said, looking pointedly at Raseed, “or you will go no further with us.”

The heretic who asks for oaths, Adoulla thought bitterly, and saw his wry expression reflected on his friends’ faces as they each said “I swear it before Almighty God.” All except Raseed, whose face may as well have been carved from marble for all that it revealed. He knows, as I do, that this Orshado will show himself, and that it is his holy duty to help me stop such a man. And no doubt another part of him wishes to watch over the tribeswoman.

The boy said nothing. Adoulla cleared his throat. Mother Midnight, who’d been busy stuffing the guardsman’s split-skulled corpse into an oven, tapped her foot and said, “We haven’t time for this, Pharaad.”

Adoulla gripped the dervish’s elbow and squeezed. He saw Raseed’s gaze dart once in Zamia’s direction before the boy whispered, “I swear it before Almighty God.”

Following the master thief, they moved from the kitchen into a room with intricately engraved white walls. The light scent of pleasant perfumes—more subtle than incense and no doubt disbursed by wafting-spells—filled the space. An ebonwood door in the opposite wall was the only dark mark in the room. Before Adoulla could begin to think about what a monumental moment he was partaking in, the Prince and a knot of his men had crossed the room and slit the throats of two guardsmen. The Prince kicked in the big doors with a seemingly impossible strength and flew into the far room. There was nothing Adoulla and his friends could do now but follow.

The Velvet Chamber, Mother Midnight had called it, and it was obvious why: ceiling, walls, floor, and a great canopied couch were dripping with the plush purple material. And in the center of it sat a lean, youngish man dripping with jewelry and resplendent robes, staring in stupefaction at one of his guardsman who had just cracked open the skull of another.

By the time Jabbari akh-Khaddari, God’s Regent-in-the-World, found voice enough to scream, the Falcon Prince had already dashed about the room again with that glowing blue powder of his. Clearly, the sound of the screams was reaching no one.

“You… you’re… how did…?” the Khalif stammered without one whit of court-phrasing in his speech. “No intruder could have made it into…” He fell silent, clearly at a loss. He looked at Dawoud, and his kohl-lined eyes grew even wider. “You! Where did—?”

“No questions, tyrant!” the Prince shouted, his mad eyes ablaze with crazed purpose. “But I have a question for you! How does it feel to—”

The Prince’s words were cut off as the Khalif touched one of his rings and a flash of light filled the room. Adoulla, sensing danger in that way that had become second nature over the decades, dashed toward the Khalif, and he saw Pharaad Az Hammaz do the same. Something slid into place behind him, and before him, he saw a thick panel of wood slide down from the ceiling, cutting him off from the Khalif. False walls, he realized, and they had cut him off from his friends as well.

The Falcon Prince stood beside him, pounding on the panels with the pommel of his sword. “God’s balls!” the thief shouted, “These are made of ensorcelled wood. That sneaky son of a whore! Though in truth, I suppose it’s no great matter. Dispatching him first would have helped, but he is not my true quarry anyway. In a sense, this makes things easier for us—he is cut off from the Heir.”

“Easier for you perhaps, you damned-by-God madman!” Adoulla fumed. “My friends are on the other side of this thing! I won’t leave them.” Adoulla pounded on the wooden wall and shouted for his friends, not caring whether he was drawing down the attention of the guardsmen. He knew Dawoud and the others would be doing the same on the other side of the panel. But he heard no shouts, felt no pounding from the other side of the thin wood. More magic at work.

Genuine sympathy lit the Prince’s eyes, but his tone was practical. “Do as you must, Uncle. But unless I miss my guess, breaking this wall down would be a whole day’s work even for a master alkhemist such as the Lady Litaz Daughter-of-Likami.”

Some part of Adoulla’s mind noted that the Prince knew his friends’ reputations as well as he’d known Adoulla’s.

“Your most guaranteed gamble,” the thief continued, “is to follow me. Without me by your side, you’ll have trouble with both the guardsmen and my people, not to mention with finding your way through this monstrous maze of a palace.”

The man was right, of course.

In frustration, Adoulla kicked the wooden wall that separated him from his friends, getting a stubbed toe for his trouble. He looked up in time to see Pharaad Az Hammaz tear down a velvet curtain and dart through a stone passageway that was hidden behind it.

The master thief had clearly memorized the layout of the palace, for he strode through confidently, making left and right turns down passageways and through rooms so quickly that Adoulla could not keep up. Adoulla huffed out, “I’ll catch up,” but the Falcon Prince was wild-eyed with purpose and paid Adoulla little mind anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hero?” The Prince asked at last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then they entered the throne room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guardsmen halted, unsure what to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All around Adoulla, the guardsmen’s eyes rolled back, their skin shriveled, and their mouths echoed these words. As one they turned on Adoulla, the Prince, and the Heir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Litaz and her companions stood between them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A man lunged at her from a wall-niche.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Skin ghuls,” her husband whispered in awe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No! She hath hurt Mouw Awa!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She rose shakily to her feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raseed didn’t know or care what the traitor was going on about. His attention was on the floor beside the dais, where Mouw Awa crouched over the Doctor, who screamed in pain.

He had to help his mentor. The manjackal was distracted and Raseed, moving faster than he’d ever moved in his life, flew at the thing.

But, fast as he was, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi was faster. A bolt of golden light, she shot past him, growling “This one is mine!” and barreled into Mouw Awa, knocking the manjackal from the Doctor.

Raseed spared a glance at the combatants, light and shadow battling in a tangle of claws and growls. Then he saw the man in the soiled kaftan—Orshado, it had to be—dash forward and calmly touch the wall-of-light. There was a flash of red, and the wall was gone. At a gesture from Orshado, the skin ghuls, no longer impeded, strode toward the throne.

Raseed reached the Doctor. Claw-marks had shredded the Doctor’s kaftan, though Raseed could see no blood. Around the rims of the Doctor’s eyes, Raseed could see a red that was brighter than bloodshot.

“Ministering Angels! Doctor, are you… What can I do?” he asked, ashamed to feel as frightened as he did.

“Raseed bas Raseed,” the Doctor said, his voice hollow and vacant. “A good man… a good partner.”

Raseed grabbed the ghul hunter by the shoulders. “Doctor, please! How can we kill these things?”

The Doctor’s bright brown eyes seemed to struggle against the red light that rimmed them. “Hunh? Be… behead. Stop skin ghuls!”

“I did behead one, Doctor, it just—”

“O… Orshado.” It was the last thing the Doctor said before he fell into some sort of sorcerous death-sleep.

Orshado. Then the ghul of ghuls himself must be beheaded!

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw gouts of magical flame—Litaz and Dawoud battling yet more skin ghuls. He didn’t know what had become of Zamia.

Raseed laid his mentor’s big limp body carefully upon the dais. He looked up and saw Orshado leap impossibly—magically—onto the throne itself. The ghul of ghuls backhanded Pharaad Az Hammaz with a, no doubt, sorcerous strength. The master thief dropped his sword and fell from the throne onto the dais. Then Orshado, one foot planted on the throne, grabbed the child—the Heir, Raseed realized—by his long, jet-black hair and drew a knife.

He’s going to drink the Heir’s blood, just as that scroll said.

Orshado’s curved knife darted up and down, and the Heir screamed in pain. A red spray spattered Orshado’s kaftan.

At the same time, the half-conscious Falcon Prince spoke a single word and made a strange gesture. Then he reached past the bleeding Heir and pressed something on one of the throne’s armrests. Raseed heard a loud click and a groan of shifting stone.

Another secret that the Khalifs never learned of? It seemed so, for below him the floor swiftly receded as the throne and the entire dais it sat on—with Raseed, the Doctor, the Heir, Pharaad Az Hammaz, and Orshado all on it—rose on some sort of column.

Raseed gave the Doctor’s limp form one last pained glance, then looked back to Orshado. The ghul of ghuls plunged his knife into the Heir’s chest a second time.

Raseed leapt toward the throne. Almighty God, though I know I am unworthy, I beg You to grant Your servant strength!

He flew at Orshado. But the ghul of ghuls waved his hand, and then something strange—something impossible—happened.

The throne room around them ceased to be. Where stone walls and ceiling had been there was only swirling red light. Raseed’s companions were gone. Orshado and his monsters were gone. Raseed was alone.

What foul magic is this?

Raseed looked around frantically, trying to find a ceiling, a floor, or a door. But there was only the churning whorl of red light.

He went into his breathing exercises, and with them came a degree of calm. He recited scripture. “Though I walk a wilderness of ghuls and wicked djenn, no fear can cast its shadow upon me. I take shelter in His—”

The Heavenly Chapters died on Raseed’s lips as a man appeared before him.

The man carried a spear. He was roughly dressed and had a gruesome sword wound through his middle. He should not have been able to stand. Something about his face was familiar to Raseed…

One of the highwaymen! When Raseed had first left the Lodge of God two years ago, he had been ambushed by three highwaymen on the long road to Dhamsawaat. He had slain them with ease.

This was the first man Raseed had ever killed.

The man looked at Raseed with empty eyes and spoke.

“ ‘O BELIEVER! KNOW THAT TO MURDER ANOTHER MAN IS TO MAKE GOD WEEP!’ ”

At the sound of that voice quoting from the Heavenly Chapters, Raseed froze in fear. The man’s mouth moved, but the voice that spoke the scripture was Raseed’s own—the doubting internal voice he often heard in his head.

As the man spoke, the other two highwaymen whom Raseed had killed on that day appeared. One had half his head missing, the other bled from his chest. They joined in the chanting, each speaking in Raseed’s own voice.

“ ‘O BELIEVER! KNOW THAT TO MURDER ANOTHER MAN IS TO MAKE GOD WEEP!’ ”

Another mangled man blinked into existence beside Raseed. The magus Zoud, who had been kidnapping women, wedding them, then feeding them to his water ghuls. Raseed had killed the man on his first ghul hunt with the Doctor.

“ ‘O BELIEVER! KNOW THAT TO MURDER ANOTHER MAN IS TO MAKE GOD WEEP.’ ”

Another wicked man whom Raseed had slain appeared. Then another. As one, the dead men stepped toward him. And at last Raseed felt movement return to his limbs.

He slashed out with his sword at the closest form, but the forked blade whistled through the highwayman as if through empty air. He feared the touch of those dead men’s hands more than he had ever feared anything, though he could not say why. He backed away step by step, keeping his eyes on them.

Behind him he heard a great whoosh of fire. He felt his blue silks singeing. Prying his eyes from the dead men, he turned toward the horrible heat. He saw a vast chasm filled with water-that-was-fire.

The Lake of Flame! I have been consigned by God to the Lake of Flame!

The dead men advanced. Raseed backed away a few more steps and felt the heat at his back begin to scald his skin. From nowhere and everywhere he heard a soft weeping that sounded like the universe being torn in two.

But then, beneath that, he heard another voice. Dim and distant, he heard Doctor Adoulla Makhslood’s words from moments ago.

“Raseed bas Raseed. A good man… a good partner…”

Raseed clung to the words as if they were the sheltering embrace of God Himself. He found power in them.

No. This flame is not real. These men are dead. I have served Almighty God as best I can. I have failed at times, but “Perfection is the palace in which God alone lives.”

Around Raseed, the thick, roiling red glow wavered and seemed to thin. The dead men disappeared. For the briefest of moments, he saw a gaunt figure in a soiled kaftan before him.

Orshado! This is his doing, not God’s!

It lasted only an instant, and then the dead men were on him again, herding him toward the Lake of Flame. Raseed felt his flesh burn but he stifled his screams.

He forced focus upon his thoughts as he never had before. He pictured the Doctor, Litaz, and Dawoud. He pictured Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, who had dared to speak to him of marriage. He thought of the flaws they all had and the good they had done. And he heard himself chanting.

“ ‘Perfection is the palace in which God alone lives. Perfection is the palace in which God alone lives. Perfection is the palace in which God alone lives.’ ”

Again the churning red light wavered and thinned. Again he saw Orshado standing there.

Raseed flew forward, the chant on his lips, his head filled with thoughts of his friends. The red light dispersed. The dead men did not return. He slashed his sword at Orshado, and felt as if he were breaking through a brick wall.

He heard the gurgling scream of a man with no tongue. Then he was in the throne room again, on the rising dais. The Heir lay bleeding on the throne and Orshado stood before Raseed, clutching his temples in pain. It was as if time had stood still while he’d faced the death-specters.

The agony they’d caused was still with him. Pain blazed through Raseed’s body, and his back burned. But he forced himself forward, slicing out again with his sword as he did so.

Manjackal, sand ghuls, skin ghuls. Again and again these past few days, Raseed’s sword arm had proven too weak to vanquish the creatures of the Traitorous Angel. But now he felt filled with God’s power. He was the Weapon of the Wisely Worshipped.

This was the moment that he had lived his whole life for.

The force of Raseed’s blow carried him and Orshado both away from the throne and over the edge of the dais, which had now risen halfway to the ceiling. They plummeted to the floor as Raseed’s sword sliced through the ghul-of-ghuls’ neck.

The man in the soiled kaftan made no noise, even as he died.

Raseed felt his bones break as he hit the stone floor. He cried out in pain, but in his mind he heard only the Heavenly Chapters. God is the Mercy that Kills Cruelty.

Beside him he saw Orshado’s headless corpse twitch once and fall still.

Raseed tried to stand but felt the pain pulling him down into darkness. He watched the dais—with the Doctor, the Heir and the Falcon Prince still on it—rise on a notched column of marble carved to look like the scaled length of a cobra. A stone block in the ceiling slid aside. The throne ascended through the resultant hole, the underside of the dais fitting perfectly into it. There was another loud sound of grinding stone and the contraption stopped moving.

For another astonished moment, Raseed just stared at the ceiling that had swallowed the Doctor. He noted with satisfaction that the skin ghuls were all falling to the ground.

Then the pain blazed again and darkness took him.

Adoulla Makhslood felt as if a great gray boulder were crushing down upon his soul, smashing to bits everything within him that had ever been happy. He half-sensed things happening around him—a lion running by, bursts of fire in the air, the soft footsteps of a man in a filthy kaftan, his own mouth mumbling words to a man in blue—but they meant nothing to him. He felt that he was dying and that he was being shoved from the sheltering embrace of God. In all his years on God’s great earth, he had never felt such despair.

Then he heard the howl of a jackal that was somehow also the scream of a man. And the next moment he felt the merciful hand of Almighty God rolling the soul-crushing boulder away.

He blinked away tears of grateful joy. He heard a loud sound of grinding stone and a click like something sliding into place. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. His chest blazed with pain and his kaftan was shredded. But when his fingers felt for wounds they found none.

And then it all came back to him. The things his eyes had seen while his soul was behind a screen of shadow. Mouw Awa attacking him. Zamia attacking Mouw Awa. Orshado stabbing the heir. The throne climbing to the ceiling.

Adoulla struggled to his feet and tried to sort his thoughts. I am alive. Which must mean that Mouw Awa has been destroyed. But what of its master? He saw no sign of Orshado.

He was in a very small stone room without windows or doors. The throne-dais had somehow risen into this chamber, and it filled most of the room. The Heir’s unmoving body was sprawled across the Throne of the Crescent Moon, which was spattered with the boy’s blood. Pharaad Az Hammaz was hunched over the dead Heir.

And there was blood dripping from the man’s lips.

Adoulla fell to his knees, and his joy at having dodged a dark death fled. He screamed wordlessly at the foul act he was witnessing.

The Prince looked at him, the guilt on his face as visible as the blood was. “The boy asked me to do this, Uncle. He knew he was dying.” His voice was a rasp, with none of its usual bravado. “The passing of the Cobra Throne’s powers through hand-clasping was a lie, it seems. Its feeding and healing magics were a myth. But the blood-drinking spell. The war powers. These are real. I can feel their realness coursing through me.”

Adoulla wanted to vomit. He wanted to choke the Prince then and there. But it took all of Adoulla’s strength just to rise to his feet. He bit off angry words as he did so. “He was a boy, you scheming son of a whore! A boy of not-yet-ten years!”

And, just like that, the madman’s smug mask dropped. “Do you think I don’t know that, Uncle? Do you really think my heart is not torn apart by this?”

“Better that your heart were torn apart by ghuls, than that this child should die. You are a foul man to do this, Pharaad Az Hammaz, and God will damn you for it.”

The bandit wiped blood from his mouth onto his sleeve. “Perhaps. I did not kill the boy, Uncle. But he is dead now. His father is dead. There will be a struggle for this damned-by-God slab of marble, and I will need all of the power I can muster if I am going to keep it from falling back to some overstuffed murderer who lives by drinking the blood of our city. What was I to do?” The smug smirk returned.

The Prince’s matter-of-fact manner made Adoulla furious. Without quite realizing what he was doing, Adoulla lunged at the bandit, throwing out the right hook that he’d mastered back when he was the brawniest boy on Dead Donkey Lane. The man was absorbed in his newfound power, or Adoulla would never have been able to lay a hand on him. But the punch connected with a crunch.

The master thief’s eyes flashed with hatred and his hand went to his sword. Adoulla had doomed himself.

But then a slow, sad smile spread across the Prince’s face. “I suppose I deserve that, Uncle. That and more.” Pharaad Az Hammaz winced as he touched the corner of his mouth, which now dripped with his own blood. Adoulla looked at the floor, disgusted with the Falcon Prince, disgusted with himself—disgusted with everything on God’s great earth.

“Look at me, Uncle, please,” the Prince said. He sounded different, now—like a frightened child. Adoulla looked up and locked eyes with the man.

“Even… Even without the benevolent magics I’d hoped to hold,” the thief continued, “there is a chance to begin something new here. This is why, before he died, the boy asked me to do this thing. The Khalif claimed that it was God who set his line on the throne. I now know that you spoke truly that this man Orshado was sent by the Traitorous Angel to seek the throne. But me? I am just a man, Uncle. Just a man trying to do what is right.

“When I saw Orshado stab the boy, I knew what I had to do. And thanks to a trick of the old stonework I was able to do what needed doing in private. Now the question is what will happen when I lower the throne back into place and try to wrest order from this chaos. There are still ministers who support me, and my diplomats and clerks-of-law will help me twist recognition from the other realms. There is still some small chance to avoid soaking the streets in blood. Given time, my scholars might even find ways to use the Cobra Throne’s powers to help the people. But if word of this—” he gestured at the dead Heir and faltered.

The Prince swallowed and began again. “If word of this part of things gets out, even that small chance will fly out the window. It will mean another civil war, of that we can be certain. You and I are not here together through mere happenstance, Uncle. You would call it the will of God. I will simply say ‘Great sailors sail the same seas.’ But either way, I need your help. Your silence about what you have seen.”

Do you know what happens to whores in war? Miri’s question of two days ago echoed in Adoulla’s ears. He looked at the limp form of the Heir sprawled on the Throne of the Crescent Moon. If he kept this vicious, villainous secret there was a chance—a chance only—that this could happen smoothly, without ten thousand corpses in the streets. Adoulla watched a small splotch of blood—whether the Prince’s or the Heir’s, he couldn’t say—slide magically from his kaftan. Again he remembered his God-sent dream—a befouled kaftan and a river of blood. Was it Orshado that God had been warning him of? Or was it himself?

What a damned-by-God mess. He would keep the Prince’s secret. It was wrong, and it was foul, and he didn’t doubt he would answer for it when called to join God. But it was also the only way. And it might—right here and right now—save his city, his friends, and the woman he loved. He looked up toward Beneficent God, He From Whom All Fortunes Flow, and begged silently for forgiveness.

He looked at the Prince and made his voice as hard as he could. “If you turn out to be a liar, Pharaad Az Hammaz—if you don’t do everything in your power to keep this city safe and to feed its people—there will be a price to pay. A very heavy price. Don’t think that palaces and death-magics will protect you. If you betray this city, I swear in the name of Almighty God that I will drink your blood.”

The Prince bowed solemnly to him and said nothing.

Chapter 20

Zamia stood with her companions in the early morning sunlight, staring at the burned and broken wreck that had been the shop of Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed and Litaz Daughter-of-Likami. The stink of burnt wood and charred stone stung her sensitive nostrils, and she had to stand back farther than the others.

Litaz had finally stopped screaming. The anger in her voice now was cold but no less powerful. “The Humble Students. May God damn them all to the Lake of Flame. While we were saving this damned-by-God city from the Traitorous Angel, they were doing… they did this.”

Raseed, his arm bandaged and his face bruised from the battle, frowned at the burned-out building. “This… this is not the work of God that they have done, Auntie. I am sorry.”

“It is the work of wicked men,” the Doctor said weakly, putting one arm around Litaz’s shoulders and the other around the shoulders of her husband. Even before they had discovered this destruction, Zamia noted, the Doctor had seemed unusually subdued.

After the group’s wounds had been treated by Pharaad Az Hammaz’s healers, they had left the chaos of the Crescent Moon Palace stealthily and under escort, the quiet thanks and blessings of the Falcon Prince following them out the gates. Even Raseed had stayed silent as they left, though his eyes had been like swords leveled at the master thief.

And now there was this.

“All I can say,” the Doctor half-whispered, “is what you said to me days ago: with weeks of work your home will be restored. You will—”

Dawoud held up a long-fingered hand and silenced the Doctor. For a long time they all just stood there staring.

Hours later the five of them sat in Mohsabi’s teahouse, sipping nectar and cardamom tea, and nibbling unhappily at pastries. The teahouse owner, a well-groomed little man with a goatee, had, for a few extra coins, shooed away his other customers and left the companions alone to discuss in private the aftermath of their battle in the Palace.

“So is he still the Falcon Prince,” Dawoud was saying, “or is he now ‘The Defender of Virtue, Khalif Pharaad Az Hammaz?’ Well, whatever he decides to call himself, the madman has his tasks cut out for him. I’d still bet a dinar to a dirham that there will be war in these streets before it’s all over. And as great as Dhamsawaat is, it is only one city. The governors of Abassen’s other cities, the Soo Tripasharate, the High Sultaan of Rughal-ba—how will these men respond? The Crescent Moon Kingdoms have always been stitched together with delicate threads. After last night…” the old magus shook his head, looking even older than he had before the battle. “What of the guardsmen, by the way? Orshado’s spell must have seized the souls of a half-thousand men,” Dawoud said to the Doctor. “Will the guardsmen survive now that this ghul of ghuls is dead?”

The Doctor shrugged. “According to the old books, it depends on the man. Some will die. Some will live but will not be what they once were—indeed, some will go mad. A few—the strongest, the closest to God, will survive whole, with only a few days’ illness and a few hours’ blank in their memories. But we have more important things to talk about. As we were walking over here, you and Litaz were whispering quite furiously about something. And twice now when I’ve brought up rebuilding your shop you’ve shut me up. Are you planning what I think you’re planning?”

The magus stretched and looked at his wife, who smiled sadly, then nodded.

“You know us too well, brother-of-mine,” Dawoud said at last. “It’s time we left Dhamsawaat. Litaz has been saying for years that she’d like to see the Republic again, and now I feel much the same. We’ve always intended to make another visit. Other things just kept getting in the way. And… this last battle, Adoulla. It cost me. Weeks, months of life. Soon I’ll be too old to make such a journey.”

Litaz laid her small hand on her husband’s shoulder. “This business with the Humble Students, the unrest in the city—maybe they are all signs from God. Perhaps it is time for us to return home.”

“I… You… You’ll be missed, my friends,” the Doctor said, his eyes shining with unshed tears. “In the Name of God, you will truly be missed.”

Litaz’s own eyes were moist now. “You could come with us, of course, Adoulla. But I suspect you have business of your own to see to, now that our part in this foul madness is over. Perhaps you will soon announce a blessed event for us to attend before we leave?”

Zamia knew not what the alkhemist meant by this, but the Doctor looked suddenly embarrassed.

Litaz went on, looking less sad now. “In any case, on the walk over here, I must confess that we tried to steal away your assistant, asking if he’d like to join us. The young man needs to see more of the world,” she said, smiling at Raseed, who lowered his eyes. “He politely declined, of course.”

Litaz turned to Zamia. “What of you, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi? You could travel with us if you wished. The open road is not the desert, but you might find it less stifling than this city. Dawoud and I are a band of only two, but we would still be honored to have you as our Protector.”

Zamia didn’t know what to think, let alone what to say. Finding a new band to roam with—and roaming so far—was a strange notion, with nothing of the ways of the Badawi to it.

And then there was Raseed bas Raseed. She wished that she and he could leave this frightening city together. With him, she thought, someday she might forget that she was Protector of the Band, might find a place where such things did not matter. A place where enemies never threatened. Surely there was such a place somewhere on God’s great earth? She was ashamed that this sounded so appealing to her.

But she knew that these were only wishes. She could not allow herself to ever forget that she was Protector of the Band. Or that the world was full of the enemies of mankind. The Ministering Angels had not granted her the power of the lion so that she could shirk her duties. And she loved the dervish—yes, she told herself, you love him!—because of his own devotion to duty.

“I… I will have to think on this, Auntie,” was all she could say.

She looked at Raseed. Despite his gruesome-looking injuries he sat crosslegged on the puzzlecloth-carpeted floor, his forked sword lying across his lean thighs. She nearly jumped when he stood with a pained wince and approached her.

“Zamia…” he said and trailed off, looking as if someone had stabbed him. She flattered herself that his expression was not merely due to his injuries. He continued. “I would… I would speak to you in private, if you do not mind.” He gestured toward an unused side room away from the old people.

Keep your mind on your duty, she told herself. She gripped her left hand with her right, her fingernails digging into her flesh, and followed him.

Raseed bas Raseed struggled to keep his mind on his duty. He led Zamia into a private part of Mohsabi’s teahouse, a small room out of earshot of the Doctor and his friends. The place was empty of other customers, due not only to the owner’s facilitation but also to the fact that word of events in the palace—distorted, fanciful word—was already trickling onto the street. People were scurrying about, buying food and fighting-staves then locking themselves in their homes, making vague preparation for the unknown.

Raseed turned to Zamia. He looked at the tribeswoman for as long as he dared, then darted his eyes to the ground, only to bring them back up to meet Zamia’s bright gaze again. His body ached, and his soul had never been more unfocused. Still, he had to speak.

“You fought fiercely yesterday, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi,” he said, feeling foolish as the words flowed out.

“As did you, Raseed bas Raseed.”

“Zamia… I… I wish you to know that, of all the women on God’s great earth, you are the only one I would ever wish to wed.” He felt his cheeks burn with shame, and he could not believe he had forced the words out.

Zamia’s green eyes—the most beautiful eyes Raseed had ever seen—grew wide. But she said nothing.

“But…” he continued, wishing he were dead, “but the Order forbids Shaykhs to marry. If I asked for your hand I would be turning my back on any chance of advancement in God’s eyes. I would forever remain a dervish in rank and would never be able to teach at the Lodge of God. Until I met you, I was certain that to ascend from dervish to Shaykh—to become a fitter weapon of God—was the kindest fate I could possibly pray for.”

Zamia’s eyes were wet, but she shed no tears. She swallowed hard and it took every bit of training Raseed had to refrain from reaching out to her. “And now?” she asked at last.

“Now… now I do not know. Perhaps I will return to the Lodge of God. I plan to leave this wicked city. That much I do know. After that…” He trailed off, not knowing what else to say.

“Raseed?”

“Yes?”

“What happened there? In the throne room?”

Raseed tried to speak, but the words would not come. For a moment, his weak body almost betrayed him by crying.

Finally he heard himself say, “A vision from a cruel man’s magic. I will not speak of it, Zamia. But it… it has made me think about… about many things. Almighty God forgive me, but after these past few days I no longer know just what my place in His plan is. But I think that I must take some time to find out. Alone.”

She ran a hand across her eyes and nodded once. “Then that is what you must do,” she said. Then she smiled sadly at him, kissed him once on his cheek, and turned away.

His cheek burned like the Lake of Flame. If his Shaykhs had seen that kiss, they would have been scandalized. But Raseed could find no fault with Zamia Banu Laith Badawi. All he could do was force back the tears he felt filling his own eyes, and follow her back to join the others.

Adoulla sipped his tea and looked at his oldest friends in the world. His heart nearly broke, looking at Dawoud. Adoulla was used to seeing his friend look bleary-eyed and haggard after a fight, but this was different. A day later and Dawoud’s shoulders were still stooped. He had lines around his eyes and a hitch in his walk that hadn’t been there yesterday morning.

They’re really leaving, Adoulla thought, and he felt an almost physical ache. Everything had changed now, and not all of it for the better. He looked about Mohsabi’s formally decorated teahouse. The place was fine enough—fancier than Yehyeh’s had been, to be sure—and Mohsabi himself was a generous host, but the tea was a bit bland and…

Oh, Yehyeh. My friend, you deserved a quieter end than what God granted you. But may your soul find shelter in His embrace.

Adoulla silently mouthed lines from the last passage of Ismi Shihab’s Leaves of Palm:

So this is old age! I’ve seen half my friends die.

I say prayers at their passing, too tired to cry.

Raseed and Zamia, both looking somewhat stricken, emerged from a side room and walked back toward the table, finished with whatever private talk they’d had. Adoulla looked at the two young warriors and sighed. They frightened him and made him wonder about the future, these zealous children who longed to kill. Who considered killing a calling and a path to honor. Would that we lived in a world that needed no swords or silver claws, he thought. But that was not the world he lived in. Without meaning to, he moaned in pain, thinking of the world as it was.

He knew that Dawoud was right about the chaos that was likely to come. But regardless of what was coming, regardless of what building Adoulla lived in, or where he took his tea, Dhamsawaat was his home. At the end of the day, nothing could change that. And, for whatever it was worth, Adoulla did not think that Pharaad Az Hammaz could possibly make a worse Khalif than the last. He even dared to hope that the man—the blood-drinking usurper—might just make a better one.

As he moaned, his companions—not just his old friends, but the two youths as well—looked over at him. In each pair of eyes—tilted, bright green, rheumy, and reasonable—he saw concern for him. More—he saw love. It was disguised by degrees of gruffness and grim honor, but it was love nonetheless. Each met his gaze with a silent offer to lend him their strength. Four fine people who wished to save him pain.

Perhaps this world is not in such bad hands, after all.

He and his friends had faced their most powerful threat yet, and defeated it. And everything and nothing had changed. The sky had not split open to reveal the Ministering Angels singing that all ghul-makers were dead. There was no shower of flowers from a forever-safe populace. Tomorrow, or the next day, or a month from now, some fishmonger or housewife would come to Adoulla with more terrified tales. God had not rewarded Adoulla with retirement in a peaceful palace full of food and friends. The half-mad Falcon Prince, armed with the tainted powers of the Cobra Throne, ruled Dhamsawaat tenuously. And the people Adoulla cared about most were either leaving that city or dead.

But not Miri.

Not Miri, who mattered more than anything. He had made a sacred oath to her. More than once in his life Adoulla had found himself regretting a sworn oath, but he had never broken one.

His obligation to God had never felt so sweet.

And so, despite all of the horrors Adoulla had seen, despite all of the horrors that were yet to come, he felt a small smile steal across his lips. There were ways to help men other than ghul hunting, he told himself. Men had managed to survive without him once. They would do so again. He had paid his “fare for the festival of this world.”

Now it was his turn to dance.

That evening, Adoulla again found himself standing on the doorstep of Miri Almoussa’s tidy storefront. The brass-bound door was closed, a rare sight. No doubt some of her Hundred Ears had brought her tales of the battle in the Palace. If that was the case, pragmatic Miri was likely preparing herself as best she could for the chaos that was to come.

He pounded on the door, and when it opened it was not Axeface but Miri herself who stood there. Adoulla’s breath caught in his throat, and he found he couldn’t speak.

Miri said nothing, but she looked at him, her eyes bright with an unasked question.

Adoulla swallowed hard, clutched at his kaftan, and nodded once. As Miri took a step toward him, he allowed himself a small smile.

Then Doctor Adoulla Makhslood got down on his knees, touched his forehead to the ground, and wept before the woman he would wed.