Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

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 turned 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.

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.