Throne of the Crescent Moon

by Saladin Ahmed

  The thugs took it in stride. Headknocker bowed half-jestingly. “If you really want to know, Auntie, my mother named me Fayyaz.”

  “What do you know? Your mother named me ‘The Bedchamber Stallion!’,” one of Headknocker’s fellows broke in, snorting a laugh.

  In spite of her snoot Litaz laughed, too. “O believer! When you meet a man on the road, know that God, who makes broken things whole, has cobbled your kindest fates together,” she recited, turning to the Prince. “I needed that laugh. May it please God to make us friends rather than enemies, Pharaad Az Hammaz.”

  She’s still a spoiled Blue River girl at heart, Dawoud thought. Charmed by cold-blooded killers whom she thinks are loveable rogues. Not for the first time in his life, Dawoud felt a burning hatred of men with able bodies and too-quick smiles.

  The Falcon Prince inclined his head in agreement with Litaz. “May it indeed be so, Auntie, but I will not bother to ask it of God, who has left man to fight and scramble over bits of food and land. Who lets flesh-burning diseases kill children!”

  Raseed snarled, and it was as bestial as any growl from the tribeswoman.

  “Be as angry as you like, dervish,” the Prince said. “God hasn’t given three shits for His children in six thousand years! Do you really believe that He sits in the sky, smiling upon us? Look around you! Look at this mad, bloody, muddy world of ours. He made the world, He made us, and then he left us to fend for ourselves. And so far, my friends, we’ve made it a pile of monkeyshit.” The bandit’s eyes lit again. “But even shit has its uses. Fertilizer. Fuel. Oh, yes. But to serve these purposes it must be ground to bits. Or burned.”

  “Madman! Blasphemer!” Raseed took a long, threatening stride toward Az.

  The bandit held up a hand to restrain his men and leveled a steely gaze at the dervish. “Watch yourself, young man. This is the real world, not a dueling circle. As you know, I fight dirty.”

  The dervish’s hand darted to his swordhilt before he seemed to recall that he had no weapon.

  Then Litaz jumped between them. My wife, the peacemaker, Dawoud thought. She drew herself up to her full height, which made her nearly as tall as Raseed but still left the top of her head well below the Prince’s shoulders.

  “Are you two mad? Are you thoroughly mad? There are God alone knows how many lives at stake right now and you buffoons are thumping your chests at each other? We don’t have time for this! Idiots!”

  Well, maybe not “peacemaker,” exactly.

  The Prince smiled. “You remind me of my mother, Auntie. And my mother was not a kind woman. But I will stand down if your yapping little holy man will.”

  “I will not allow blasphemy to pass unanswered,” the dervish said coldly.

  Litaz wagged a finger in Raseed’s face, though her voice softened. “Answer me this, dear: Is this truly what you think God would have of us? Fighting one another over careless words while the world is carved into bloody pieces by the Traitorous Angel? We have precious little time. Are you serving the All-Merciful by wasting it here, shouting about how devout you are?”

  Suddenly there was a series of frantic footfalls from the far tunnel. A man in the Falcon livery came trotting out, and the Prince went to confer with him. Then the master thief spoke to all assembled in the cave chamber. “The Soo woman is right, my friends—time is precious, and all is finally in readiness! Our time is at hand! We could have started a second civil war in this city years ago. But the Falcon knows when to strike and when not to. Have we screeched at the people about the injustice they face? No! We have stabbed fat jewelers in their asses and stolen their rubies for the poor! And now we stab the fattest jeweler of them all and toss the world’s greatest ruby to the crowd! Many of our friends have paid great costs to make this day possible. Will we let their sacrifices be wasted?”

  “NO!” the master thief’s men shouted in unison.

  “Our timing must be exact!” the Prince boomed. “We’ve but one chance to suddenly appear in the midst of the palace, weapons whirling, bold plans flying into glorious motion as—” The man was lost in his own storytelling, and the rest of his words were lost as he led the way out the far tunnel.

  When they’d marched for a few minutes through another twisting tunnel, the Prince trotted back again to Dawoud and his friends. He spoke in low tones quite unlike his bombastic bluster of moments before.

  “I can see the words ‘Where are we?’ etched on your faces,” he said. “I’ll tell you. We are in an underground passage to the palace. There are several such tunnels, some even the Khalifs never learned of. Older than the Khalifate itself, dating back to the days of the Kemeti Underground City. Known only to one who’s spent half a lifetime learning this lore. One tunnel in particular leads directly to the ruined Kem temple that the heart of the Palace was built upon. Unfortunately, the tunnel follows a rather circuitous route, snaking back and forth until ten minutes’ walk becomes an hour’s. Sound carries in here, so from here forward silence is required of us. And I don’t like to threaten newfound friends, but I must warn you that silence will be enforced if necessary. Oh, and I’d nearly forgotten—you may have your weapons back.” The master thief gestured to one of his men, who handed back Raseed’s sword and Litaz’s dagger, then he scampered back to the front of the line.

  They walked for an hour, back and forth, upslope and downslope, through tunnels and rooms of pale stone and packed earth. As they walked, Dawoud’s feet ached and a thousand grim thoughts filled his head. But not a word escaped his lips.

  Chapter 18

  NEARLY AN HOUR after Adoulla and his friends were hushed by the Falcon Prince, the tunnel sloped sharply upward, steep enough that Adoulla found himself breathing heavily. The tunnel then opened into a massive…cave? Room? Whether the space itself was made by man or nature, the great stone-walled expanse about him was dank, a series of huge pools intersected by thin walkways and tall columns of shaped stone. Water gurgled all around him, and he had to keep himself from cursing aloud from the shock of what he was looking at. A cistern! Older than the Crescent Moon Palace and sitting smack dab beneath it! How long has it been since men walked down here?

  He felt as if the city he knew were transforming beneath his feet. His head spun such that it took him a moment to process the fact that there were already men there when the party entered the cistern—it was their low, clean-burning torchlight he saw by.

  Two muscular young men stood in the center of the great space, making adjustments to a long ladder-like contraption of poles and ropes. This ladder climbed to the ceiling, where it was almost lost to his old eyes. But as he stared up into the darkness, he made out a small hole in the ceiling which the ladder was somehow lashed to.

  A well, Adoulla realized, a well that opens up within the palace. The city was shifting beneath his feet! The simple existence of that little hole of stone was astonishing—would the ages-ago civil war have gone differently, had the Holy Usurper’s forces known of this chink in the Khalifs’ armor? How might the last—?

  His thoughts were interrupted as the Prince turned to them and raised a finger to his lips, again demanding silence. The Prince strode forward and, using a series of hand signals Adoulla could not begin to follow in the half-dark, consulted with the two men at the ladder. A moment later, the bandit gestured for the group to gather around the ladder. A few of his men were already climbing it.

  The Prince gestured for Adoulla and his friends to climb. Adoulla heard Dawoud curse softly beside him. But as the magus climbed, he seemed to have an easier time than he’d expected. As Adoulla began to climb he could feel why—there was something ingenious about the ladder’s construction that made moving up it less arduous than it ought to have been. As the well-hole above him slowly drew closer, Adoulla sensed more than heard another group of the Prince’s men enter the cistern below him and head for the ladder. Of course. The Prince had had some special climbing-device rigged here because he intended for a good number of armed men to quickly make their
way up it and into the palace.

  Adoulla’s palms burned a bit from gripping rope, and he was sweating beneath his kaftan. A few feet above him he heard Dawoud breathing hard. Ingenious device or no, he was thankful when they finally reached the top, climbed out of the well-hole…

  And emerged right in the midst of a knot of tense-looking guardsmen brandishing weapons. Adoulla nearly dropped back down the rope-and-pole ladder in fear. Then he saw that these men were exchanging hand signals with those of the Prince’s men who had climbed up before him. More infiltrators. He didn’t know if he was pleased or disturbed by how pervasive the Prince’s influence seemed to be within the palace.

  The room they’d reached was two dozen feet on a side and made of gray stone. It smelled of the well water below. The Prince gestured Adoulla and his friends over to a small, arched doorway in the far wall. Dervish and magus, alkhemist and Badawi gathered around the Prince, as did a half-dozen of his men. Glancing behind them, Adoulla saw that the room was already filling with armed men, a steady stream of whom were quietly making their way out of the well.

  The Prince led them through the doorway into a huge kitchen filled with low stone ovens. Two other doorways led from the kitchen to other rooms, and each of these was flanked by two guardsmen. Their lack of alarm at the Prince’s entrance meant that they, too, were his agents. The smell of baking bread filled the room, but beneath it was another scent that Adoulla knew—blood.

  In the center of the kitchen stood a massive dark brown woman, as big as Adoulla, wearing a cook’s apron and holding a big, bloody cleaver. A dead guardsman lay slumped at her feet, his head opened by a nasty gash. The Prince dashed to the woman and exchanged a few quick hand signals. Then, with that more-than-human speed, he ran in a circle about the kitchen, sprinkling some sort of powder on the ground until it surrounded the whole room. He produced a flintbox, and lit the powder, which didn’t burn with a visible flame, but surrounded them with a low blue glow. Alkhemy, Adoulla knew, but he knew little more than that. He looked a question at Litaz, but she only shrugged. It was a rare compound indeed that could baffle her. For what felt like the hundredth time that day, he was impressed by the Prince’s resources.

  “Well!” Pharaad Az Hammaz boomed, breaking the silence. “We can speak now, and the powder of the panthers will keep our words from being heard outside this room. My friends, meet Mother Midnight, Queen of the Khalif’s Kitchens. For years now, she and the minister you met earlier have been helping me arrange this little festival of ours. If we survive this day, we will owe it all to her.” The Prince turned to the big woman. “I presume, from the lack of shouts and bell-ringing, that we remain undetected?”

  “Aye, Pharaad,” Mother Midnight said, her voice sounding like a rockslide. “The few fools who stuck their noses in the wrong place at the wrong time have been dealt with, but we won’t be able to keep these bodies hidden forever.” She gestured with her crimson-stained cleaver to the dozen great ovens that dominated the room. Here and there, sticking out of the ovens, Adoulla saw a man’s hand or booted foot.

  He felt sick. The dice have fallen from the cup, then. We are a part of this mad usurpation whether or not we wish to be.

  Beside him, Raseed and Zamia started to speak outraged words, but he turned to them with his hardest glare. “Orshado. Mouw Awa,” he whispered harshly. “There is no other way to stop them now. That matters more than anything.” Praise God, neither warrior-child said anything more.

  “He’s two rooms down, Pharaad. In the Velvet Chamber, about to take his private Thirdday Noonmeal. The Defender of Virtue is never truly alone, but this is the closest he gets to it all week. Everything is as you planned—this is the moment we’ve waited for.”

  Raseed broke his brief silence. “And do you feel no shame, woman? No shame at all in betraying your Khalif and master in this way?”

  The Falcon Prince turned an angry eye on the boy, and Mother Midnight scowled and sucked her teeth. “Ask the Defender of Virtue about my daughter and his…appetites, holy man. Ask him about Mother Midnight, who loyally served him and his father before him, and was repaid with the rape and rejection of an only child who killed herself. Then speak to me of shame and betrayal.”

  To Adoulla’s surprise, that shut the boy up. Behind them, more of the Prince’s men filed quietly into the kitchen.

  The Falcon Prince put a big hand on Mother Midnight’s shoulder. “Auntie, I swear by my soul that in half a day’s time you’ll be able to ask the sack of scum yourself. Though I fear the only answer you’ll get will be the sound of his head hitting the executioner’s leather mat!”

  He turned to Adoulla. “I don’t see that there are any monsters here, save the one I’ve come a-hunting, Uncle. But two rooms from this one lies the man who is strangling our city. I give you and yours one more chance to choose. Follow me into that room and live with the consequences, or go back down that well—under my men’s guard, of course—and sit this adventure out, despite your wild warnings of ghuls. Either way, the dervish’s words make me wary. I will have your oaths before God that you will not betray me,” he said, looking pointedly at Raseed, “or you will go no further with us.”

  The heretic who asks for oaths, Adoulla thought bitterly, and saw his wry expression reflected on his friends’ faces as they each said “I swear it before Almighty God.” All except Raseed, whose face may as well have been carved from marble for all that it revealed. He knows, as I do, that this Orshado will show himself, and that it is his holy duty to help me stop such a man. And no doubt another part of him wishes to watch over the tribeswoman.

  The boy said nothing. Adoulla cleared his throat. Mother Midnight, who’d been busy stuffing the guardsman’s split-skulled corpse into an oven, tapped her foot and said, “We haven’t time for this, Pharaad.”

  Adoulla gripped the dervish’s elbow and squeezed. He saw Raseed’s gaze dart once in Zamia’s direction before the boy whispered, “I swear it before Almighty God.”

  Following the master thief, they moved from the kitchen into a room with intricately engraved white walls. The light scent of pleasant perfumes—more subtle than incense and no doubt disbursed by wafting-spells—filled the space. An ebonwood door in the opposite wall was the only dark mark in the room. Before Adoulla could begin to think about what a monumental moment he was partaking in, the Prince and a knot of his men had crossed the room and slit the throats of two guardsmen. The Prince kicked in the big doors with a seemingly impossible strength and flew into the far room. There was nothing Adoulla and his friends could do now but follow.

  The Velvet Chamber, Mother Midnight had called it, and it was obvious why: ceiling, walls, floor, and a great canopied couch were dripping with the plush purple material. And in the center of it sat a lean, youngish man dripping with jewelry and resplendent robes, staring in stupefaction at one of his guardsman who had just cracked open the skull of another.

  By the time Jabbari akh-Khaddari, God’s Regent-in-the-World, found voice enough to scream, the Falcon Prince had already dashed about the room again with that glowing blue powder of his. Clearly, the sound of the screams was reaching no one.

  “You…you’re…how did…?” the Khalif stammered without one whit of court-phrasing in his speech. “No intruder could have made it into…” He fell silent, clearly at a loss. He looked at Dawoud, and his kohl-lined eyes grew even wider. “You! Where did—?”

  “No questions, tyrant!” the Prince shouted, his mad eyes ablaze with crazed purpose. “But I have a question for you! How does it feel to—”

  The Prince’s words were cut off as the Khalif touched one of his rings and a flash of light filled the room. Adoulla, sensing danger in that way that had become second nature over the decades, dashed toward the Khalif, and he saw Pharaad Az Hammaz do the same. Something slid into place behind him, and before him, he saw a thick panel of wood slide down from the ceiling, cutting him off from the Khalif. False walls, he realized, and they had cut him off from his friends
as well.

  The Falcon Prince stood beside him, pounding on the panels with the pommel of his sword. “God’s balls!” the thief shouted, “These are made of ensorcelled wood. That sneaky son of a whore! Though in truth, I suppose it’s no great matter. Dispatching him first would have helped, but he is not my true quarry anyway. In a sense, this makes things easier for us—he is cut off from the Heir.”

  “Easier for you perhaps, you damned-by-God madman!” Adoulla fumed. “My friends are on the other side of this thing! I won’t leave them.” Adoulla pounded on the wooden wall and shouted for his friends, not caring whether he was drawing down the attention of the guardsmen. He knew Dawoud and the others would be doing the same on the other side of the panel. But he heard no shouts, felt no pounding from the other side of the thin wood. More magic at work.

  Genuine sympathy lit the Prince’s eyes, but his tone was practical. “Do as you must, Uncle. But unless I miss my guess, breaking this wall down would be a whole day’s work even for a master alkhemist such as the Lady Litaz Daughter-of-Likami.”

  Some part of Adoulla’s mind noted that the Prince knew his friends’ reputations as well as he’d known Adoulla’s.

  “Your most guaranteed gamble,” the thief continued, “is to follow me. Without me by your side, you’ll have trouble with both the guardsmen and my people, not to mention with finding your way through this monstrous maze of a palace.”

  The man was right, of course.

  In frustration, Adoulla kicked the wooden wall that separated him from his friends, getting a stubbed toe for his trouble. He looked up in time to see Pharaad Az Hammaz tear down a velvet curtain and dart through a stone passageway that was hidden behind it.

  The master thief had clearly memorized the layout of the palace, for he strode through confidently, making left and right turns down passageways and through rooms so quickly that Adoulla could not keep up. Adoulla huffed out, “I’ll catch up,” but the Falcon Prince was wild-eyed with purpose and paid Adoulla little mind anyway.