Throne of the Crescent Moon

by Saladin Ahmed

  Just for that? Or because you have grown lazy, and he gives you an excuse? His own reprimanding voice echoed through his head. Next time he would walk, he resolved.

  They spent hours riding, moving past suburbs and outlying farms until there were no signs that they had left the world’s greatest city behind them. There were few people moving along the hard-packed road now, only one or two carts or camels at a time. Since leaving the Lodge, Raseed had spent little time outside of Dhamsawaat, and as he rode he marveled again at how the sky seemed to open up above them.

  Finally, when the sun had sunk halfway to the horizon, and they were alone on the road, the Doctor brought his mule to a halt, struggling briefly with the beast. Raseed pulled up beside him. “Well,” the Doctor half-shouted, “this is as good a place as any to cast the tracking spell. Come!” He gestured Raseed to the side of the road and dismounted with a loud grunt. The Doctor then reached into his satchel and hunched down to the ground with an even louder grunt.

  He is always making rude noises, Raseed thought with irritation. Grunting, scratching, laughing too loudly. But it is my duty to keep him safe. In one motion Raseed also dismounted, gathering the reins of both mules and standing over the Doctor protectively as he worked his spell.

  The Doctor had pulled out a bit of paper, the bloody scrap of the child Faisal’s clothing, a vial, and a long platinum needle. He wrote something on the paper, pricked his finger with the needle, and pinned cloth and paper both to the ground. Then he stood, closed his eyes, and recited from the Heavenly Chapters, sprinkling out a dark green powder—mint?—with each Name of God he spoke. “‘God is the Seer of the Unseen! God is the Knower of the Unknown! God is the Revealer of Things Hidden! God is the Teacher of Mysteries!’”

  Nothing happened, so far as Raseed could see, but the Doctor, his brow sweaty now, opened his eyes and took his mule’s reins from Raseed. He remounted and continued down the road. He said nothing, not even turning to see if Raseed was following. As Raseed mounted and trotted up beside the Doctor he realized why. He’s winded—the traveling, the spell—it’s all taking its toll on him. Raseed tried not to be worried by this.

  Raseed gave the Doctor a few minutes to catch his breath before he spoke. “You have found the ghuls’ trail, Doctor?”

  “Aye,” was all the Doctor said.

  Mile after mile they rode the mules at a brisk walk, moving at a slant toward the sinking sun. As the road veered further west and closer to the River of Tigers, the land swiftly sank and grew marshy. The air grew more humid and more and more gnats filled it, irritating Raseed’s eyes and nose. When the sun was touching the horizon with pink and purple, Raseed saw a scrawny, bearded farmer walking toward them—the only traveler they’d come across in an hour. The man gave the mules a wide berth and mumbled “God’s peace” from the opposite side of the road as they passed, avoiding eye contact. Is he afraid of us? Or does he have something to hide?

  He is not why you are here, Raseed chided himself. Stay focused.

  The landscape was dotted with large boulders that might hide anything. Raseed watched for signs of movement about them. The River of Tigers lay just out of sight on their right, its presence indicated by a clean, wet scent, by date palms and by the great patches of steelreed that clacked in the evening breeze.

  “Stop.” The Doctor spoke the word loudly enough to startle two marshbirds into flight. It was the first time he’d spoken in a long while. “The trail veers off here, but something is not quite right.”

  “What do you mean, Doctor?”

  Raseed’s mentor looked truly confused—a rare sight. “I don’t rightly know, boy. In all my years of casting tracking spells, nothing like this has happened. Normally I feel—maybe better to say I hear within my mind—God’s prompts in the direction of my quarry. And this is still the case. Our prey is close and in that direction.” The Doctor pointed off the road to the left, toward a dense patch of boulders and a lone hill with a pointed top. “But I also hear His hints about other dangers. ‘The jackal that eats souls.’ ‘The thing that slays the lion’s pride.’ I…I don’t know what it means. In all my years I’ve never…” The Doctor let go of his reins and held his head in his hands. Raseed tried to hide his worry.

  The Doctor took a deep breath and noisily exhaled. He looked up, shook his head, and ran a hand through his beard. “Gone. Whatever it was, it’s gone.” He looked around as if he’d been woken from a dream. Another deep breath and an exhalation loud enough to be a camel’s. “Forget it, boy, never mind. I’m old and tired and haven’t had enough to eat today.” Raseed’s mentor clearly did not believe this, but if the Doctor wished to say no more, Raseed could do little about it. “Let us continue,” the Doctor said, turning his mule off the road and picking his way downward with the slight decline of the land.

  Raseed followed.

  After another quarter hour it was dark, save for the faint light of the stars and the moon, hidden behind a silvery shroud of cloud. They came to the base of the point-topped hill, and Raseed saw that it wasn’t a hill at all, but a sloping rock formation that jutted up fifty feet from the ground at an angle, like a tiny mountain. The Doctor guided his mule’s steps onto the rock, and its hooves clopped loudly against the stone. Behind, Raseed rode his own mount up the incline as it steepened sharply. The Doctor, following prompts that Raseed could neither hear nor see, then turned, to ride across the huge wedge of stone.

  The precision of the rock’s triangular shape and the smoothness of the stone made Raseed wonder whether the slope they were riding across had been shaped by men. If so, what sort of men walked on it?

  “Doctor where does this stone come from? What building once stood here?” Raseed asked quietly. He prided himself that he did not feel fear easily, but there was something troubling about walking across the floorstones of the long-dead.

  The Doctor spoke distractedly, looking all about him as he did. “It’s from the Kem empire, that’s for sure. Maybe the cornerstone of—”

  The Doctor let the sentence die on his lips and drew his mule to a sharp halt, the animal objecting noisily. He narrowed his eyes and peered about. “Dismount!” he whispered, and clambered off his mule.

  Raseed obeyed. He gathered both animals’ reins, but let them fall as the Doctor whispered again.

  “Let them go. No time to tie them.” Again Raseed did as he was told, and the beasts trotted down the slope toward a patch of thornclover near the stone’s base.

  “Bone ghuls. More than one…nearby.” the Doctor said, cocking his head. It looked as if he were listening to something inside his skull. He shot his big hand into his satchel. “Bottom of the slope!” he barked.

  Raseed did not ask how the Doctor knew. He drew his sword and scanned the near-darkness below them. Suddenly the mules began braying fearfully. Raseed’s keen eyes made out their dark shapes, fleeing the stone slope.

  Then he saw other shapes, man-like—one, two, three of them—stepping from behind boulders, moving up the incline. And he heard the hissing.

  The hissing of ghuls was like no other sound in this world. A thousand serpents rasping with a man’s hatred. Raseed had heard the sound more than once. But it still made his skin crawl.

  The clouds blew across the sky and the scene below them was bathed in moonlight. Even the Doctor’s old eyes would be able to see plainly now. Three bone ghuls, all claws and jaws and gray skin, were scrambling up the slope of the huge stone block.

  “We have gone from hunters to prey, Doctor.”

  The Doctor grunted and pulled something from his satchel. Two of the three ghuls had closed to twenty yards. The Doctor regarded them coolly, held aloft a small stoppered vial and threw it to the ground. The glass shattered, the smell of vinegar and flowers filled the air, and the Doctor bellowed scripture.

  “God is the Mercy That Kills Cruelty!” There was a sound like a landslide and the two closest ghuls, their false souls snuffed out, lost their man-like shape and collapsed into piles of tur
ned earth and graveworms. Two of the monsters at one stroke! Not for the first time, Raseed marveled at the Doctor’s powers. He felt reassured to be admiring his mentor and not fearing for him.

  One of the ghuls still stood. The Doctor leaned forward with his hands on his knees, clearly worn out by his spell. “Your turn, boy!”

  Even as the words left the Doctor’s lips, Raseed sped toward the last creature, his sword flying out in search of ghul-flesh. The thing hissed with mindless malevolence and raked its long claws, but Raseed kept it at a double swordlength’s distance.

  He danced in two steps and slashed out, feeling his sword bite into the monster. There was a loud hiss and the ghul’s severed claw went arcing through the air, maggots dripping forth like drops of blood. One of the maggots landed on Raseed’s cheek. The ghul didn’t even pause. It swung out with its mutilated stump and Raseed took a darting step back, not daring to brush away the itching insect.

  The ghul pressed in, but Raseed had the advantage now. The creature didn’t feel pain, and one-clawed it could still have easily killed most men. But Raseed was not most men. He snaked left, then right, always keeping the ghul’s good claw at a distance. He waited for an opening and found it when the thing lunged at him with its snapping jaws.

  Raseed shifted, brought his sword up, brought it down. The ghul’s head flopped from its shoulders. Its body trembled and dissolved into a pile of maggots and grave soil.

  Raseed brushed a maggot from his face and stepped back to the Doctor’s side, finding him winded but unharmed. “Doctor! Where do you think—”

  More hissing. The words died on Raseed’s lips.

  Two more bone ghuls clambered up from the ledge of the sheer far face of the stone block. Merciful God! Raseed had fought bone ghouls since joining the Doctor. But always one or two of them. He hadn’t known a ghul pack of this size could be made. The Doctor still huffed beside him, likely unable to work another invocation so soon.

  Raseed charged at the ghuls, his two-pronged sword out to his side as he slashed past them. His sword bit into one ghul’s neck, was nearly wrenched from his hands. He drew the blade back and kept moving. He dodged claws, drew their attention away from the Doctor. The ghuls pressed him back until his heels were less than a yard from the cliff edge of the massive stone block. He tried to get a glimpse of the Doctor, but the creatures blocked his view.

  Maggots dribbled from one ghul’s neck-wound. That one staggered, its energy clearly unfocused. The other stared at Raseed with empty eyes. Some vicious unliving instinct within the monster was weighing when to strike.

  The Doctor’s big white kaftan-clad form shuffled forward, shouting. His voice was weak as he pronounced, “God is the Hope of the Hopeless!”

  The wounded ghul collapsed. The other one flew at Raseed. The wind was knocked out of him as the monster slammed into him. He scrabbled back two steps.

  The ground give way beneath Raseed’s feet.

  He and the ghul went plummeting in a tangle of limbs over the edge of the stone block.

  Raseed tensed his body and focused his soul. He twisted, letting his sword fly from his hand and kicking the ghul away as he fell. The rocky ground rushed toward him, but Raseed was calm within the slow-time sense of his training. His acrobatic skill was God-blessed, beyond that of any rope dancer or tumbler. This fall would not harm him.

  He tucked himself into a ball and hit the ground rolling with only a hard grunt. He continued the roll for another twenty feet and stood, panting. His keen eyes caught the moon-glint of his sword a few feet away, and he scooped it up, reassured by the familiar feeling of its hilt in his hand.

  Where is the ghul? Raseed looked around, bracing for another fight. He saw the bone ghul ten feet away, sprawled on the ground, twitching. The monster had landed head first, cracking its skull open upon a sharp, man-sized rock. The thing hissed feebly, twitched once more, and dissipated into a heap of dead vermin.

  Praise God! Only then did Raseed allow himself to feel the stinging pain across his chest and ribs. The thing had raked him with its rancid claws, shredding his silk robes and grazing his flesh. The wound will need herb-purging. The Doctor had taught him some time ago that the old tale of ghul-wounds turning men into ghuls was nonsense, but the charnel monsters’ dirty claws could still kill with any number of very real diseases.

  Raseed heard the Doctor shouting from the top of the stone block. Still more of the creatures? He ran to the sheer face of the block and started climbing with the speed that ordinary men found so amazing. The Doctor had already been exhausted when he’d spoken his last invocation. In such shape he was a poor match for the minions of the Traitorous Angel. Raseed climbed faster. He ignored his wounds and the painful scrape of rock against his fingertips and hoped he wasn’t too late.

  Chapter 5

  ADOULLA HAD BEGUN THIS BATTLE feeling like a cocksure younger man—he’d sensed the ghuls early, dispatched several, watched his assistant sever another ghul’s head. But that first burst of nostalgic bravado was gone now. Adoulla didn’t doubt that Raseed had survived that fall, but he might need Adoulla’s help. And there might be still more ghuls about. Adoulla was drop down tired, but professional pride and worry for his assistant kept him from collapsing. He turned toward where Raseed had fallen, digging into his satchel again and producing a small vellum envelope.

  Something at the edge of his vision moved toward him. Adoulla spun away from whatever it was. Something heavy struck him across his back.

  He went sprawling, the envelope and his satchel flying from his hands. A large form snaked between him and his bag. Stubbornly, he pushed away the pain in his back. He scuttled away from the creature, breathing heavily as he came to his feet.

  Adoulla shouted out in shock. Another bone ghul. A massive bone ghul. The largest ghul he’d seen in forty years.

  Impossible! To make a creature of that size—along with all of these others! The power involved was incalculable. The creature towered over him, and he was not a small man. Who could make and control this nine-foot monstrosity?

  It took a step toward him. Adoulla looked from the thing’s soulless eyes to its broad claws. One of those claws could crush his head like a melon. Indeed, only his half-conscious dodge had saved him from a broken back. And despite the world-weariness with which he faced each day, Adoulla was not ready to have his head crushed like a melon just yet. If nothing else, Raseed needed him.

  He stared into the ghul’s flat, pupil-less eyes. Softly, desperately, he began to whistle “Under the Pear Tree, My Sweet.” As soon as the first notes left his lips, the monster froze in its tracks. A confident gaze and the ghul-soothing sound of a favorite song. It was an unreliable, old womanish charm, with none of the power or grace of scripture invocations. Sometimes it didn’t work, and when it did it was effective for only a minute or so. But it had saved his life more than once.

  The huge monster’s claws were draped at its sides, and it swayed slowly with the tune. Adoulla tried to whistle, hold the ghul’s eyes, and consider his options, all at the same time. The phrase I am too old kept getting in the way of his thoughts.

  Not now! one part of him barked at the other. His satchel, with all of his components, lay on the ground just past the giant ghul. It might as well be in Rughal-ba. If he took a step toward it, he’d break the whistle charm. He kept whistling, but he was coming to the end of the song—and thus the end of the ghul-soothing.

  Adoulla prayed that the ghul’s claws would not catch him when he dove for his medicine bag. He didn’t like his chances. This is it, then, Adoulla thought. An ignoble death courtesy of a hissing abomination. He couldn’t say he was surprised. What I wouldn’t give for one last cup of cardamom tea, or one last meal in my townhouse.

  He weakly whistled the last note of the tune through dry lips and tensed his muscles. The creature squealed.

  Then something leapt at the ghul.

  It wasn’t Raseed. Adoulla saw a flash of golden fur and a lashing tail. Some sort of
animal had fastened itself to the giant ghul’s back. The monster’s milky white eyes widened and then contracted. It squealed again in pain.

  Adoulla shoved melancholic thoughts to the side and tried to gather facts. What had hurt the ghul, and how could Adoulla use it to his advantage?

  The gray-green monster twisted as it tried to shake this new attacker from its back. As the ghul turned, Adoulla got a better look at the extraordinary animal that had saved his life. A sleek she-lion with eyes like green fire and an impossibly shimmery gold coat.

  Adoulla’s mind raced with remembered lore. Not an animal at all. In fact, if the desert legends were to be believed, a creature such as this was an agent of the Angels’ justice—and thus of God’s. Adoulla said a quick, silent prayer of thanksgiving.

  Still, “God helpeth most the man who helpeth himself.” Adoulla risked grabbing for his satchel.

  By the time he scooped it up and had his hand in it, though, he saw an invocation would not be needed. His rescuer had snuffed out the false soul within that monstrous mock human frame. As the thing died, it burbled in that manner that still, after all these years, turned Adoulla’s stomach. Then, with a sound like the scrape of a great grave lid, the ghul crumbled, a carpet of cemetery soil and dead coffin-moths spilling forth.

  A bright flare of sun-like light rippled out from the lioness’ coat. When the flare subsided, a plain-faced brown girl of perhaps five and ten stood where the lioness had been. She was dressed in the simple sand-colored camel calf suede of the Badawi tribesmen. It was as if Adoulla had blinked and someone had replaced the razor-mawed creature of a moment ago with this green-eyed little girl.