Throne of the Crescent Moon (30 page)

T
HE 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 unt Bawihicof the Capped 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, yo Bawix2001D;

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’ Bawie Qle der;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 fee Bawig, our nt.

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.