Throne of the Crescent Moon (16 page)

They’d had this discussion many times before. Dawoud was not quite five and ten years older than his wife. But her vitality made her
seem younger, while the physical toll of Dawoud’s sort of spells made him seem older. Most folk would guess there was thirty years separating them. Over the decades, Adoulla had had friends with grim diseases or horrible old injuries. Such catastrophes came to fill a certain place in people’s lives, like a second spouse or an extra-demanding child. So it was with Dawoud and the withering costs of a magus’s magics.

A pleasing breeze cut between the buildings, and Dawoud breathed it in. “There were times,” the magus chuckled ruefully, “that I thought I wanted such a thing—a so-much-younger wife. What man does not? But now…I do not know. Part of me just wants to let her go…to make her go home to the Republic.”

“How many times are we going to have this conversation, brother-of-mine? We both know you couldn’t live without her. Besides, you act as if it were your choice! As if Litaz would ever let you go! And ‘make her go?’ Ha! I would like to see that!”

Adoulla felt a familiar small sting of jealousy. He had always admired Litaz. She was brilliant, evenhanded, and simply one of the prettiest women Adoulla had ever known. More than once he had had lovemaking dreams of her, had woken half-wishing she was his. Once every few years, over a chance meal together when Dawoud happened not to be around, Adoulla found himself wishing it again for an evening. But he took such moments for the fancies they were. Adoulla was happy for his friends. Their two lives had long ago become one—of that there could be no doubt.

Adoulla had never known such a love. He did not hold Miri Almoussa any less dear than Dawoud held Litaz, but a twenty-years’ flame was different than a wife, as Miri had reminded him, tearfully and testily, over the years. Before she had told him never to visit her again.

He shook off his morose heart’s musings. There was work to be done. But he had little to go on. If he knew the name of the ghul-maker—the man this thing Mouw Awa called “blessed friend”—he could cast a tracking spell. Sadly, the names the jackal-creature had called itself—Mouw Awa, Hadu Nawas—would not serve for such a spell. But they might still be of use—if only Adoulla could recall where he’d heard them before.

Again, he tried to force open his memory. And again he drew a blank. Somewhere buried in his brain was a clue that could help save his city. But this was not the place to dig it up. He said goodbye and God’s peace to his best friend in the world and then went to think.

Adoulla didn’t know if it was his imagination or if there was really still a charred stink to the air of the block from the night before. He started to turn back to his townhouse—to make himself see the smoking shell of it. But he found he couldn’t quite force his feet eastward. To face that sight right now.…He thought it might finally break him.

It was just as well. He could do nothing there, and maudlin wallowing wasn’t going to stop the monsters that were loose in his city.

Adoulla turned his steps to Gruel L ha to Gruelane. As he walked, he gingerly touched his chest where the sand ghul had slammed its ironlike arm into him. But the flesh there was no longer tender. Compared to the girl’s wound, his own bruises had been easy enough for his friends to heal. Adoulla shook his head, impressed yet again by his own poor fate. No matter how many times his extraordinary friends managed to patch him up, he ruminated, he always managed to show up again with a fresh wound.

He made his way to the great public garden and found a tiny hillock on which to sit, his bright white kaftan splayed around him. He loved this place that came to life at this late afternoon hour. It was nothing like the Khalif’s delicate gardens, where quietly chirping birds selected for their song dotted the branches of the orange and pomegranate trees that suffused the air with their soft scents. In the Khalif’s gardens, rippling brooks flowed magically upwards and filled the gardens with their lulling babble. No one there spoke above a whisper.

It was supposed to be soothing—the perfect place for princes, poets, and philosophers to be alone with their thoughts. But Adoulla, whose calling had more than once brought him to gardens that his station should have barred him from, thought he would go mad in such a place. For one, the tranquility was got by keeping the city’s rabble away at swordpoint. But there was more to it than that: He simply could not
think
in the Khalif’s gardens. He felt as if doing so might break something delicate.

The public garden of the Scholars’ Quarter, on the other hand, hosted some of the most riotous smells and sounds in all Dhamsawaat. Uppermost were piss, porters unwashed after a day of lifting in the sun, and a thousand kinds of garbage. But beneath these were layered the smells that said “home” to Adoulla—if anything in this unwelcoming world did.

As an orphan-boy, as a ghul hunter’s apprentice, as a young rascal and sometime hero, and now, as an old fart, he needed to breathe these scents. The brewing cinnamon-paint of the fortune tellers, the shared wine barrels of gamblers and thieves forgetting their troubles, the skewers of meat that dripped sizzling juices onto open fire pits and, here and there, a few flowers that seemed to be struggling to prove that this was a public garden and not a seedy tavern…Adoulla took it all in.
Home.

Then there were the sounds. His calling had taken him many places, but Adoulla had yet to find a people as loud as those of his home quarter. The children and the mothers scolding the children. The roving storytellers and those who applauded and heckled them. The whores who offered warm arms for the night, and the men who haggled shamelessly with them. All of them going about their business in the loudest voices they could find. For cruel fate or kind, Adoulla thought, these were his people. He had been born among them, and he hoped very much to die quietly among them.

Bah. With your luck, old man, you’ll be slaughtered by monsters in some cold cavern, alone and unlamented.

For what seemed the hundredth time that week, Adoulla silenced the discouraging voice within and tried to focus on the problem before him. He sat and breathed and thought.

“Hadu Nawas,” the creature had said. The meaning of it was at the edge of his thoughts, but the harder he tried to grasp it, the more he felt like a man with oiled fingers clutching at a soapcake.

Baheem, an aging footpad who tried to rob Adous ato rob Adlla twenty years ago and, ten years ago, saved him from a robbery, walked past. He gave a friendly nod and pulled at his moustache, not bothering to speak, understanding that Adoulla was in meditation. Adoulla was known
here, and that was why, of all places in the city, he could do what must be done here. Familiarity. It put him at ease, and when he was at ease he noticed things, put things together in their proper place.

Adoulla beckoned to Baheem, gesturing at a flat grassy spot beside him. His thoughts were not going where he needed them to, and trying to force them would only give him a headache. He knew from experience that distraction and idle chatter could help.

Baheem and he said God’s peaces and Baheem sat. The thick-necked man then produced a flintbox and a thin stick of hashi. “If you don’t mind, Uncle?”

Adoulla smiled negligently and quoted Ismi Shihab. “‘Hashi or wine or music in measure, God piss on the man who bars other men’s pleasure.’”

Stinky sweet, pungent smoke soon surrounded the pair as they sat talking about nothing and everything—the weather, neighborhood gossip, the succulent shapes of girls going by. Baheem offered the hashi stick to him more than once, and though Adoulla refused each time, he could feel the slightest hint of haze begin to creep in at the corners of his mind just from sitting beside Baheem.

It was pleasant, and Adoulla happily let his thoughts get lost in the rhythm of Baheem’s complaints. For a few moments he managed to almost forget all of the grisly madness that filled his life.

“I’ve heard a pack of the Falcon Prince’s men were found dead in an ambush,” Baheem said. “Word is, their hearts were torn from their chests! It has to have been the Khalif’s agents, though you think they’d have gone for the public beheadings they love so much.”

Adoulla’s distracted half-cheer evaporated.
Hearts torn from their chests?
He struggled to think through his secondhand hashi haze. It sounded as if the Falcon Prince faced the same foe as Adoulla and his friends.
And Pharaad Az Hamaz could prove a powerful ally in this.
Adoulla started to ask about this, but Baheem was on a hashi-talkative roll now, his complaining uninterruptable.

“And then there’s the damned-by-God watchmen and this dog-screwing new Khalif!” the thief said quietly but forcefully, punctuating
each word with a pull of his moustache. “These rules they have! Take the other day. I’m trying to move goods through Trader’s Gate for my sick old Auntie—” he smiled shamelessly “—and two watchmen stop me, asking for a tax pass. Now, of course, I
have
a tax pass. An almost legitimate one! But these sons-of-whores start talking about new taxes and tariffs on this gate and that gate, at this rate and that rate, and pretty soon I’m headspun and copperless. Their rules and regulations are all hidden script to me, Uncle, but I know well enough when someone wants to starve my children to death. I—”

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

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

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

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

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

“And with you, Uncle.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is the matter, Auntie?”

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

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

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

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