Throne of the Crescent Moon

by Saladin Ahmed

  But this city of his—his for some sixty years—well, there was nothing to compare with its streets. The crowds had annoyed Adoulla all his life. But of all the places in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms he had been, Dhamsawaat alone was his. And somewhere in his city, murderous monsters were preying on people.

  And so, you old fart, Dhamsawaat needs you. Rotating this truth proudly in his mind made Adoulla feel just a little bit less tired. But as his sandaled feet brought him closer and closer to the house of Miri Almoussa, his fatigue returned twofold.

  True to the code of the ghul hunter, Adoulla had never married. When one is married to the ghuls, one has three wives already, was another of the adages of his order. He didn’t know much about the old order—a few adages and invocations passed down many years ago by his teacher, old Doctor Boujali, and learned from old books. The ghul hunters had never been as cohesive a fraternity as the Dervishes’ Order—and any man could wear white and claim to chase monsters. Still, over the years, Adoulla had tried to adhere to what he had learned of the ways of his ancient order. He was a permissive man in many ways—no less with himself than with others, he had to admit. But in some things rigidity was the only way. Saying marriage vows before God would cause a ghul hunter’s kaftan to soil, and it would cost him the power of his invocations. As with so many of God’s painful ways, Adoulla did not know why it was so, only that it was.

  The crowd thinned and Adoulla strode through Little Square, his kaftan billowing in the breeze. Little Square was not little at all—in fact, in all the city it was second only to Angels’ Square in size. But the name was old, from the days when Dhamsawaat had first been built on the ruins of a Kemeti city, and had only had two squares. Long rows of brown, thorny shrubbery framed its eastern and western sides. These low, desert bushes served as a back wall for the stall-less, beggarish sellers who lined the square to Adoulla’s left and his right.

  Little Square was a haven for the less prosperous merchants and tradesmen of the city—those too poor or too unreliable to have earned, through honest work or bribery, a real shop or stall in one of the better markets. The square was flanked by these men and women, sitting on rugs or standing beside sorry piles of goods. Adoulla’s eyes moved up the column of half-rate cobblers and rotten-vegetable sellers to his right.

  He cursed as he caught sight, a dozen yards ahead, of a skinny man in the white kaftan of his order. He strode over and made the noise in his throat that he made when genuinely offended. Litaz had once said that it sounded like he was being pleasured by a poorly trained whore.

  For all that he mocked Raseed’s dervishhood, Adoulla had also pledged his life to an antiquated order that Dhamsawaatis knew mostly from great-grandparents’ tales and bawdy shadow-puppet plays. Adoulla had learned long ago that most men professing his life-calling were charlatans who had bits and pieces of the proper knowledge but had never been face-to-face with a ghul. They used cheap magic to make their robes appear moonlight white and took the hard-earned money of the poor, mumbling a few bogus spells and promising protection from monsters.

  The hairy young man with an oily smile who stood before him wore such cheap robes. He was the sort who claimed to hunt the “hidden spirits” supposedly behind working peoples’ every trouble. The sort who claimed to tell the future. The rotten-vegetable sellers of my order.

  When he was a younger man, and more defensive of the honor of his order, Adoulla had thought it his duty to root out such hucksters and send them packing with their robes dirtied and their noses and false charms broken. But the decades since had taught him resignation. Other charlatans would always pop up, and the people—the desperate, desperate people—would always go to them. Still, Adoulla took enough time now to give the fraud a long, scornful glance. They knew Adoulla, these men, knew him to be the last of the real thing—was it wrong that he took some pride in that? This one, at least, had the decency to lower his eyes in shame.

  That such thieves thrived was sad, but it was the way of the world. Adoulla passed the fraud by, spitting at the man’s feet instead of throwing a punch as he once would have. The fool made an offended noise, but that was all.

  By the time he reached Miri’s tidy storefront it was past midday. The brassbound door was open and, standing in the doorway, Adoulla smelled sweet incense from iron burners and camelthorn from the hearth. For a long moment he just stood there at the threshold, wondering why in the world he’d been away from this lovely place so long.

  A corded forearm blocked his way, and a man’s shadow fell over him. A muscular man even taller than Adoulla stood scowling before him, a long scar splitting his face into gruesome halves. He placed a broad palm on Adoulla’s chest and grabbed a fistful of white kaftan.

  “Ho-ho! Who’s this forsaker-of-friends, slinking back in here so shamelessly?”

  Despite all his dark feelings, Adoulla smiled. “Just another foolish child of God who doesn’t know to stay put, Axeface.” He embraced Miri’s trusted doorman, and the two men kissed on both cheeks.

  “How are you these days, Uncle?” the frighteningly big man asked.

  “Horrible, my friend. Horrible, miserable, and terrible, but we praise God anyway, eh? Will you announce me to Miri, please?”

  Axeface looked uncomfortable, as if he was considering saying something he didn’t want to say.

  “What is it?” Adoulla asked.

  “I’ll announce you, Uncle, and there’s not a man in the world I’m happier to see pay the Mistress a visit. But she isn’t gonna be happy to see you. You’re lucky her new boyfriend isn’t here.”

  Adoulla felt his insides wither. For a moment he had no words. “Her…her…what?” he finally managed. “Her who?” He felt as if he’d suddenly been struck half-witted.

  “Her new man,” Axeface said with a sympathetic shake of the head. “You know him, Uncle. Handsome Mahnsoor, they call him. Short fella, thin moustache, always smells nicer than a man should.”

  Adoulla did know the man, or at least knew of him. A preening weasel that twisted others into doing his work for him. Adoulla’s numbness burned away in a flame of outrage.

  “That one!? He’s too young for her! Name of God, he’s clearly after her money!” He gestured with one hand to the greeting room behind Axeface. “The son of a whore just wants to get his overwashed little hands on this place. Surely, man, you must see that!”

  Axeface put up his leg-of-lamb-sized hands as if frightened of Adoulla. “Hey, hey, Uncle, between you and me, you know I love you. You’d make a great husband for the mistress. But you’ve made some damned-by-God stupid choices far as that goes. Surely, man, you must see that, huh?” Axeface poked him playfully, but Adoulla wasn’t in the mood.

  At all.

  Seeming to sense this, Axeface straightened to his full, monstrous height. “Look, Doctor, the bottom line is, I don’t see nothin’ Mistress Miri don’t want me to see. That’s how I stay well-paid, well-fed, and smiley as a child. But if you want to see the Mistress, hold on.”

  Adoulla was announced and ushered into the large greeting room. Scant sunlight made its way through high windows. Tall couches lined the wall opposite the door, and a few well-dressed men sat on them, each speaking to a woman.

  Then she was there. Miri Almoussa, Seller of Silks and Sweets. Miri of the Hundred Ears. Miri. Her thick curves jiggled as she moved, and her worn hands were ablaze with henna.

  “What do you want?” she asked him, a cold wind blowing beneath her words.

  Adoulla’s irritation briefly eclipsed his longing. “You may recall, woman, that you asked for my help, even after your having asked me to ‘walk my big feet out of your life and never come back.’ But this is not the place for us to speak.”

  Miri arched an eyebrow and said nothing, but she led him to the house’s tiny rear courtyard, sat him down at a small table, and brought him a tray with fruit nectar, little salt fish, and pickles. She sat down beside him and waited for him to speak. But for a moment Adoulla just sat there, list
ening to the birds chirping in the courtyard’s twin pear trees and avoiding Miri’s eyes.

  He didn’t break the silence until Miri began to tap her silk-slippered foot impatiently. “I’m here, Miri, because I have learned something of your niece’s killers. But not enough yet to stop them from killing others. I would like to speak to your grandnephew again, as he may have recalled something new.”

  “Faisal is not here. Some of the girls went on a workbreak trip to see the new menagerie the Khalif has set up outside the city, and I thought it a good idea for him to try and forget his pains, so I sent him with them. He won’t be back for a day or so.”

  Adoulla plucked up a pickle and smiled to himself at the thought of a whores’ holiday to see strange beasts—surely Miri was the only proprietor in the city who would allow such a thing.

  As happened so often, Miri seemed to read his thoughts. She did not seem amused. “All people who work deserve days away from their labor, Doullie,” she said flatly. “And whores are people, even if my business depends on letting men forget that fact.”

  He would not rise to the bait. “Of course. In any case, I did not come only to speak to Faisal. I came also because Miri’s Hundred Ears are always open, sometimes to songs the rest of us don’t hear. For instance, does the name ‘Mouw Awa’ mean anything to you? Or the name ‘Orshado’? And what do you know of the case of Hadu Nawas?”

  Her offended expression melted away, and she took on the look of Miri, knower-of-many-things, narrowing her smoky eyes and crinkling her nose. Miri’s face when she was trying to recall something was the same as when she was rifling through her cabinets for a particular blouse. “‘Orshado’…it sounds like a northern name, perhaps? I couldn’t say for sure. But Hadu Nawas…he was an enemy of the throne, yes? One of the many conspirators killed in the civil war?”

  “Not quite killed, it seems,” Adoulla muttered.

  Miri gave him a perplexed look but continued. “If I recall correctly, he was also rumored to be a child-killer. Now, ‘Mouw Awa’…Hm. All I could tell you is that it sounds like…like Kemeti hidden script?”

  Adoulla snorted. “Indeed. Though it took me a full day to have that lock click open in my mind. Sometimes, my sweet, your erudition makes me sick with jealousy.”

  “Well, even leaving aside our difference in age, I’ve been hit on the head far fewer times than you, Doullie.” She deigned to smile at him, and he felt his soul warm.

  Adoulla winced theatrically, as if he’d been punched in the gut. This response to Miri’s jibes had always made her laugh in the past. But instead when she met his eyes, she let her smile slip and turned away from him.

  There were a thousand things he wanted to say to her when he saw that, but none of them would do any good.

  “How is your grandnephew faring?” he asked.

  “How is he faring?” Her thick braid with its streak of silver whipped as she spun to give him an incredulous glare. “How is he faring!? He’s broken! How else could he be after what happened to him? You see so much of this horror that you don’t even see it for horror anymore! He is a boy, Doullie! A boy of eight! Not one of your suicidal, fanatical friends! Not some ‘foe of the Traitorous Angel’!” She bit off her next words quietly. “This—it’s this madness that drove us apart.”

  This time Adoulla’s wince was not feigned. Miri had always had unhappy words for the life he led, and for the friends who shared it, but those words had never been this sharp, this scornful.

  She wasn’t stopped by his pained face. “Look at the world around you, Doullie! Forty years you’ve spent in this hunting. All that death. Why? What has come of it? Is the world a safe place now? A happier place?” She sank into her chair and put her face in her hands. “Merciful God, I’m sorry. Now you’ve upset me. What I meant to say was—” But she said nothing more.

  “Your niece’s killers are still out there, Miri. They…they burned my house down.”

  “I heard.” Of course Miri of the Hundred Ears had heard. Yet still she had all these hard words for him. “God protect you,” she said now.

  Miri and he had been closer in the days when the townhouse was new, he reflected. Much closer. She had helped him choose it. Adoulla said nothing for a long time. Then he started to speak, though he didn’t know what he was going to say. “Miri, I—”

  Miri held up a silencing hand and, with her other, wiped away the beginnings of tears. She took a deep breath and looked at Adoulla. Her eyes were weary but filled with love, and she spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Doullie. I didn’t mean the things I said.”

  Adoulla had never been more tired in his life, and he tried to keep the pain out of his words. “Yes, you did.”

  Miri’s voice was steadier now, and she twined the end of her long braid around her hand—a habit Adoulla had noticed long ago, a sign that she was steeling herself. “Well, yes, I did, but…I do know why you do what you do, Doullie. You—” A smile spread across her face, and she started laughing, at the same time that Adoulla did.

  “‘Why you do what you do Doullie, you’?” he said, imitating the funny sound of her words. They both laughed. And Adoulla hurt again, knowing that it would end very soon.

  Why had this been his fate? Why could he not have been one of the men he often walked past in the early morning light of the markets? Selling lemonjelly cubes and going home every evening to a deliciously fat wife who drenched herself in rose oil. Laughing at stupid things and keeping one another warm when the night wind whipped through the windows. Taking the day off to be with her and losing only a few coins in his pocket. But his job—his calling—was different. When Adoulla neglected his duties, gruesome things happened in the sleep-rooms of children. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t.

  His eyes burned, and he realized that they were beginning to tear up. What is wrong with me? I’m a breath away from crying like a woman!

  Mistress Miri Almoussa of the Hundred Ears showed the secret, defenseless self that she only ever showed late at night to him. “I…I am sorry, Doullie. So often I have had such hard words for what you do. And yet I am here like all the rest, begging your help for my family.”

  Miri’s kohl-lined eyes were furious and on the verge of tears. When the first few fell, Adoulla placed an arm around her broad shoulders and wiped them away. Being seen crying would hurt her reputation.

  “How long have we known each other, woman? Thirty years, now? Don’t you worry about such things. My help is always yours. Why these tears, huh? Everything will be fine, God willing.”

  She sniffed once again, wiped away another tear and set her jaw. “Fine? O Merciful God! My niece is dead! Everything will not be fine, Doullie. Everything is going down to the Lake of Flame and the Traitorous Angel. But you’re right…there’s no point in crying. Not where men can see, anyway.” With one last sniffle, she was all calmness again. “So. Have you any more clues as to who or what is behind her murder?”

  Adoulla struggled to recall all that the mad creature Mouw Awa had revealed. “There was one thing more,” Adoulla said at last. “The monster I am hunting…it spoke of its master sitting on ‘the Cobra Throne.’ Have you ever heard of such a thing? Do you know where it might be?”

  Miri bit her lip and looked troubled. “I have,” she said. She took a breath, then a sip of nectar, and went on. “It was years ago—after one of the Falcon Prince’s first raids. All of the city’s talk was on the gold and weapons he’d stolen from the old Khalif’s treasure house. But my sources told me that the Prince himself was most interested in a dusty old scroll he’d found.”

  Adoulla was as impressed as always with the things Miri knew, and it must have shown on his face.

  Miri shrugged “Of course I was interested. I am the font of all knowledge in this city. No one in Dhamsawaat would know anything if not for my spies. And books are like spies’ reports frozen in amber. If the Falcon Prince wanted to know something that bad, it must have been valuable, I figured. So I had one of my Ears within his organization act
as eye and pen, copying as much as he could of the stolen scroll. Those were different days, of course. Pharaad Az Hammaz’s operation was not quite so airtight then. In any case, my spy had to use a very expensive scrivening-spell, but the scroll proved useless to me. It cost an obscene amount to copy it, but the jest was on me—all but the title of the thing was in a thrice-ciphered version of hidden script. The characters were there, but pricey, pricey magics which might not have even worked were required to break the cipher-spells. Wealthy as I am, I still didn’t have enough to waste on trying to translate it.”

  Adoulla, growing impatient, spoke around a mouth of saltfish. “Forgive me, my sweet, but I asked you about—”

  “‘The Cobra Throne.’ That was the title of the scroll. It was about ancient Kem. But as I say, not worth the price of translating. For all I knew it was about some old buried hoard of the Faroes somewhere, which may or may not have ever existed and may or may not have already been hit by graverobbers. And I’m not the sort to go funding a grave-digging. Then there was the possibility that the Falcon Prince had stolen it only because the original was valuable. I didn’t know, and it wasn’t worth wagering further funds to find out. God’s truth be told, I don’t think that the gold-grubbing Khalif had ever bothered to translate it, either. At least, my spies at the time had heard the Falcon Prince mock this fact.”

  Adoulla snorted. “Aye, that sounds like the work of Khalifs—locking away knowledge and words without even reading them.”

  “Why is this important, Doullie? What is going on?”

  Adoulla ignored her questions. “Please, my sweet, tell me that you still have a copy of this scroll.”

  Miri’s offended sniff cut through her worried expression.

  “Have you ever known me to throw away something of potential value? Name of God, for thirty years I didn’t throw you away!” Weariness overtook her smoky eyes. “Be careful here, Doullie. If the Falcon Prince is involved in this.…I know you admire him, but he’s a dangerous madman. And from what my Ears tell me, he is furious right now about the murder of a beggar family who was under his protection—mother, father, and daughter all found with their hearts carved out. Apparently the same fate struck a squad of his men as well.”