Throne of the Crescent Moon (5 page)

“So here we are again,” he grunted at Raseed, tired of the silence between them. “Leaving behind safety and comfort to kill monsters. Maybe to be killed. Almighty God knows I don’t have much more of this left in me. You’ll soon have to do this without a mentor, you know.”

“You don’t really mean that, Doctor.” The boy crinkled his fine featured face in distaste as they passed a refuse cart, broken down in the middle of the street and stinking in the morning sun.

“I don’t mean it? Hmph. Need I remind you of our last excursion? I was nearly beheaded, boy! This is how an old man should be living?”

“We saved lives, Doctor. Children’s lives.”

Adoulla managed to half-smile at the dervish.
I wish the knowledge of that still kept my feet from aching, the way it did when I was your age
, he thought.
I wish it could keep me from freezing up and accepting death.
But what he said was, “Yes, I suppose we did.”

They kept walking, making their way past the gaudy storefronts that lined the Lane of Monkeys. Adoulla watched an ancient husband
and wife sitting cross-legged on a long reed mat in front of a teahouse ahead of them. They were all dirty gray hair and wrinkled brown skin, playing a fierce game of bakgam. The man moved his token across the board’s painted sword tips and, with a loud clack and a victorious smile, landed on the first sword. The old woman was about to lose. She scowled and spat, the glob nearly hitting Raseed as he and Adoulla walked by.

Just after they passed the old couple, Adoulla heard the rattle of triangle dice in the bakgam cup, the clatter as they hit the board, and a series of shouts. The old woman cackled and began a taunting, incomprehensible victory song as her husband cursed in disbelief. She’d rolled an eight!

That should be Miri and me,
Adoulla couldn’t help thinking. He should have married Miri a long time ago. He should have left the lunatic life of a ghul hunter. Instead, year after year, he had foolishly decided that fighting fanged things and stopping the spells of wicked men was more important than happiness. Instead of a blissful marriage, he had monstrosities on his mind and a pile of “should haves” pressing down upon his soul.

He and Raseed finally neared the western gate which would take them out of the city. As they crossed a small alleyway, a doe-eyed girl of an age with Raseed smiled a none-too-shy smile at the dervish. Raseed made a choking noise and kept his eyes on the ground until the girl was a block away.

Though he knew it was a lost cause, Adoulla couldn’t help himself. “What is wrong with you, boy? Did you not see the way that little flower looked at you? You could have at least smiled back!”

“Doctor, please!” The boy paused. “This attack. You spoke of the extraordinary powers of this ghul pack’s master. Do you think one of the Thousand and One, rather than a man, made these ghuls?”

So much focus on duty, so much neglect of what really matters. He doesn’t know the painful end of this road….

Adoulla abandoned his avuncular attempt to get Raseed to act like a living, breathing young man. The dervish would rather think about
monsters than smile at a girl. Very well. But he sounded too eager about the possibility of fighting a djenn.
If he’d ever actually faced one of the Thousand and One in battle, he’d feel differently
.

“It wasn’t a djenn, boy. When one of the fire-born strikes, no one escapes, least of all a child.”

The dervish nodded thoughtfully. Whatever else Adoulla found irritating about Raseed, he was at least deferential to Adoulla’s experience.

“I wonder—” Adoulla continued as they rounded a corner, but the words twisted into a shouted curse as he saw the massive crowd that lay before them.

“Ahhh, God’s balls! The Horrible Halt!” Adoulla pronounced the Dhamsawaati term for the complete standstill of traffic with a familiar disgust. Before them, a wall of people seemed to rise up as the blocks-long tangle of carts, camels, and fools slowly pinched its way through the wide western gate. Adoulla collided with an unwashed little man who had been walking in front of him. He barely acknowledged the man’s loud admonition to watch where he put his big feet.

“Some sort of gate inspection?” Raseed asked.

Adoulla snorted. “‘Gate inspection,’ ‘tariff-checks,’ ‘watchmen’s business.’ It’s all the same monkeyshit. And there’s more of it every day.” At the rate the line was moving, it would be another hour before they were through.

A ghul pack was loose, which meant lives were at stake. But Dhamsawaat’s hundred headaches hurried for no man. One did not walk through the gates of Dhamsawaat the way one walked through a townhouse door. There was first the gray stone inner wall, then one passed through Inspector’s Square, and then through the great main wall, a hundred feet thick.
Then
one crossed a house-la c Q a houseined lane past the last guardwall before taking the Bridge of Yellow Roses over a ditch. The process had never been a quick one, and due to the new Khalif’s poor city management, it took longer than ever.

The duo cut through the throng as best they could without being truly rude. Adoulla did not want to start a fight, and fights were not uncommon in situations like these. Another quarter-hour and he and
Raseed managed to get near the wide gate at the main wall. There the road rose slightly, and Adoulla saw that this was more than a simple traffic tangle.

An execution!
The great gray paving stones of Inspector’s Square had been cleared of carts. At its center lay a worn leather mat. A boy of no more than two and ten kneeled on the mat, his hands and feet bound and his eyes wide with terror. A huge, hooded man with a broad bladed sword stood over him.

Adoulla stopped walking, transfixed with horror.
Name of God! What could a child that age have possibly done to deserve such a fate?

As if in answer, a high-pitched voice assaulted his ears. Turning toward the sound, he saw a liveried crier standing in an alcove carved in the stone archway above the gate. The man shouted shrilly through a metal cone.

“O fortunate subjects of God’s Regent in the World, the Defender of Virtue, the Most Exalted of Men, His Majesty the Khalif, how God smiles upon you to provide you with such a ruler! See how your benevolent monarch, Jabbari akh-Khaddari, Khalif of Abassen and of all the Crescent Moon Kingdoms, protects you from the grasping hands of thieves! See how he punishes the wicked swiftly and terribly!”

Traffic still moved at an inchworm’s pace, but most of the folk on the road were now gawking at the square. Adoulla stood still, wanting to stop this wickedness but knowing he could not. Someone behind him pushed past, trying to get forward in the press.

He looked back to the leather mat.
Almighty God, why do you allow this? Why do you send me to fight monsters outside of my city while such monsters live within it?

God did not answer.

Raseed, who had also stopped, looked at him with concern. “Doctor, what do you—”

Without warning, something flew at the hooded executioner’s face, covering it in an amber goop. Then the man’s chest exploded in red.

A crossbow bolt!
Men and women screamed. There was a sound like a thundercrack and a puff of orange smoke suddenly obscured the
square. A moment later, the smoke cleared and Adoulla saw only the sprawled form of the dead executioner.

The bound boy was gone.

What could—?

There was another thundercrack, this one from the alcove above the gate. More orange smoke wreathed the recess where the crier had stood. It cleared almost instantly, and Adoulla made out the crier’s liveried form slumped at the feet of a tall, broad-shouldered man. This man wore a costume of calfskin and black silk, emblazoned with falcons. His arms were as thick as some men’s legs, but he moved like a dancer as he stepped to the alcove’s lip.

It’s him!
thought Adoulla, who’d heard much of the man but never seen him.
Pive Qhim.

“The Falcon Prince!” The words left a dozen mouths around Adoulla.

More trouble.
A confident grin split the famous thief’s moustachioed face. Adoulla shouldn’t have been able to read the man’s facial expression quite so clearly at such a distance. An address-spell was at work, then—the kind that, supposedly, only the Khalif could afford. Every person in the crowd would have the same clear view of the Falcon Prince, would hear his words as if he stood beside them, and would find themselves…not
coerced
by the Prince’s magic, but
open
to hearing what he had to say. It was likely the only reason they weren’t panicking and fleeing.

Raseed growled. “The criminal!”

Well,
most
people would be open to hearing the man, Adoulla corrected himself. Technically, Adoulla could not dispute Raseed’s epithet. Ten years ago, a string of flamboyant robberies of the city’s wealthiest citizens were showily announced to be the work of a single brilliant bandit, who called himself the Falcon Prince. Pharaad Az Hammaz, as he had later revealed his name to be, never himself claimed to be true royalty, but the rumors persisted that he was the last heir of a kingly line from Abassen’s dim past.

Royalty or not, the Falcon Prince was one of the most powerful men in Dhamsawaat. He and his small army of beggars and thieves had become an almost governmental force, the semiofficial voice of the
poor. And while the landowners and merchants who took up the cry of “share the wealth” were few and far between, Adoulla had heard from sound sources that a few of the Khalif’s most powerful ministers, due to personal conviction or bribery, secretly backed the bandit.

“God’s peace, good people of Dhamsawaat!” The thief boomed, his outstretched arms embracing the crowd. “Our time together is short! Hear the words of a Prince who loves you!” A small, cautious cheer went up from a few corners. “I’ve freed an innocent boy from the Khalif’s headsman. His crime? Being fool enough to think he could pick coins from a watchman’s purse and feed his ailing mother! Now, we grown folk know that watchmen are as attached to their purses as normal men are to their olive sacks.” The bandit grabbed at his crotch and the crowd laughed hesitantly at his bawdiness. “But did the child deserve to
die
? Do we Dhamsawaatis care more for the ill-earned wealth of bullies than for the life of a child?”

The crowd grew bolder, and shouts of “No, no!” and “May God forbid it!” erupted from all corners.

The Falcon Prince stood, hands on hips, drinking it in. “I am guilty, good people! I freed the boy. I hit the headsman with a honey pie before I killed him! Only a hungry, hungry man would chop off a child’s head for a few filthy coins. So I fed him! Honey and steel, good people!” The crowd laughed loudly now at the Falcon’s cheerful, casual tone, and he went on.

“The old Khalif and I were enemies. He was no hero, but he spent fifty years watching over this city, which he loved. But for three years now, his fool of a son has bled Dhamsawaat. He has tried to find me and kill me. He! Has! Failed!” With the help of the address-spell, the Falcon boomed each word with a great drum’s rumble.

Thoce Qh="1em">e crowd sent up a boisterous cheer, and a small knot of men took up a chant:

The old-as-sand song—in which a noble falcon gouges out the eyes of a cruel king—had become associated with the Falcon Prince, and the new Khalif had made the singing of it punishable by flogging.

There’s going to be real trouble here
. A dozen watchmen in riveted jerkins shoved their way through the packed crowd toward the gate. They brandished slender steel maces and tried to keep their eyes on the alcove and the crowd at the same time.

As the Khalif’s men moved toward the knot of singers the song died down. At once, though, a fresh round of “Fly, O Falcon” went up on the opposite side of the crowd. The watchmen’s heads all whipped toward the sound in unison, but they let the singers be and tried to reach the Prince himself, who had stopped speechifying to caper to the tune as best he could in the small alcove. The bandit’s jollity only caused the singers in the crowd to sing more boisterously. This time, men did not stop chanting when the knot of watchmen passed. And Adoulla saw the Khalif’s men were scanning the crowd more anxiously as they made their way toward the gate.
A dozen against hundreds
.

Beside him, Adoulla sensed a sudden battle tension in his protégé. Raseed drew his sword soundlessly, and everyone around him took a step back. The blade was two-pronged, according to the Traditions of the Order, “in order to cleave right from wrong.” Adoulla feared that Raseed was about to try to do so now.

“What are you doing?” Adoulla whispered.

“I’m going to help the watchmen, Doctor.”

“The Falcon Prince is not our enemy, boy.”

“With apologies, Doctor, he is
not
a prince. He uses magic to commit crimes. Exactly the sort of thing that we are obligated to fight!”

Raseed started to move again, but Adoulla grabbed his slender shoulder. He could hardly restrain Raseed if the dervish chose to interfere, but Adoulla hoped his age and authority would prevail.

“We are obligated to fight the servants of the Traitorous Angel. Pharaad Az Hammaz may be a criminal, but he feeds the poor and chastens the proud. Surely even your zealous eyes can see the virtue in that!”

The boy said nothing. He frowned hard at Adoulla. Then he sheathed his sword.

In the alcove, the Falcon Prince spread his huge hands wide as if welcoming the approaching watchmen to a banquet. “The Khalif’s dogs come for me, my friends! If you hear their yappy mouths a-cursing, it is because some scoundrel has sabotaged their crossbows! But this is only the beginning, dear Dhamsawaatis! Stand ready! The day comes soon when we take back what is ours! There will be choices before us all, though some would have us believe that
they
are meant by God to do our choosing for us! But are we of Dhamsawaat bound by chains forged by the tyrants of pasteig Qts of pa days? Does a man rule us without limit or wisdom just because his father ruled?”