Throne of the Crescent Moon (19 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawoud appeared in the doorway and snorted. “‘Once in a rare while’? Do not let him fool you, girl. Adoulla Makhslood has handed out cracked ribs and swollen skulls a good bit more often than ‘once in a rare while’!” The magus walked over and patted the ghul hunter on his shoulder. “This one’s as much. H9;s as mu a savage as any Badawi, make no mistake!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And yet you two have no children?”

Litaz smiled a small, sad smile and said nothing.

“Forgive me Auntie, I should not have—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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