Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

Adoulla’s whiskers were tinted with burgundy. He wiped his face on his sleeve, and the stain slid sorcerously away as he spoke. “In the past day and a half I’ve fought bone ghuls and sand ghuls and some half-mad thing I’ve no name for. The man who commands these creatures must be found. I took this from the girl—it belonged to her father,” Adoulla said, producing an ornate curved dagger and laying it on the table before him. “We were, in fact, planning to visit you before…” he stopped, swallowed, and went on weakly, “before these monsters attacked us. I’d hoped that your scrying spells might—”

A wordless cry—Zamia’s—broke in from the sitting room.

They all rushed to her. The tribeswoman was awake, but she ignored their hails. She lay there squinting and craning her neck, as if concentrating fiercely on something unseen. Ah. She is trying to take the lion-shape, Litaz realized. And she was apparently unable to do so.

Zamia’s eyes grew wide and wild, and she started to thrash about. It was Dawoud who finally stepped forward and laid a calming hand on the girl’s forehead.

“Settle down, now, child. I said settle down! Thank Merciful God that you still live. We have brought you back before death could quite snap its jaws on you. But my wife is tired, and you have no idea the costs of a magus’s magics. Lay still and don’t waste our work.” It was as close to tender as he ever got with a patient.

But the girl jerked back. “A magus? You worked your wicked magics on me? O God protect me! The shape has been taken from me! Better to have died!” A lionlike growl came from somewhere within her.

Not two and ten hours ago, the child had been dead in most of the ways that matter, and now she was well enough to be fiercely displaying Badawi prejudices. Litaz couldn’t take all of the credit here. The girl’s Angel-touched healing powers were truly wondrous.

Adoulla ran a hand over his beard and fumed at the bedridden girl. “Better to have died, eh? Damn you, girl! Asking no questions and taking no coin, my friends have exhausted themselves to heal you. Worked wonders with spell supplies that cost a year of workman’s wages! Not to mention the deeper costs. And you repay them with this savage superstition?”

With each exasperated word, Adoulla’s color deepened. Litaz wondered whether Adoulla knew what he was doing here—a bit of provocation like this could be good for rousing the girl’s spirits to a temporary rally before she passed back into a deeper, recuperative sleep—or if he was just taking out anger on a barely living child. She stepped over to him and laid a hand on his arm, but he went on.

“If Dawoud had let you die, girl , your band would go unavenged. Isn’t vengeance what you live for? Killing and codes of honor and all that?” He turned to Raseed. “God save us from obsessed, ungrateful children. No wonder your eyes go so googly when you look at her, boy! You’ve found your mate-of-the-soul!”

Zamia scowled at Adoulla, and Raseed mumbled some outraged denial. Adoulla went on. “He won’t so much as smile at pretty city girls. But put a plain-faced savage who kills in the name of the Angels before him, and his soul’s all aflame! Oh, stop your sputtering protests, boy! So insistent on denying the obvious. Yes to head-chopping, no to kissing!” He looked to the sky. “How in the Name of God did I become a part of such a world?”

He turned back to Zamia. “Listen to me! This was the only way to save you. You owe Dawoud and his wife thanks. Indeed, were they living by your barbarous Badawi codes, you would owe them some sort of ridiculous life-debt, no?”

Zamia growled a sulky little lion growl. How does she make lion noises with a girl’s throat? the scholar in Litaz wanted to know.

The girl nodded once at Dawoud and pushed words out as if each one wounded her. “The Doctor is right. You did save my life, and I… I owe you a debt.” Dawoud patted the girl’s shoulder with a dark, bony hand, but Zamia looked at it as if a rock-snake had dropped onto her.

Her husband spoke bemusedly. “Where does this fear come from, young one? Stories you heard round the campfire? Where the magi are all dressed in red robes, cackling amidst mountains of skulls? Drinking blood from a chalice, while the newborn babe cries on the altar? Hmph! Such dark assumptions from a girl who grows golden fur and rips out throats with her teeth!”

Zamia lifted her chin, her scraggy hair falling back. “The shape is a gift from the Angels! Where does your foul power come from?”

Litaz was thankful her husband was being patient with the child—he could be a hard man with anyone but Litaz. When he spoke, though, he still wore the same bitter smile. “God gave me my gifts. I draw my power, girl, from my own lifeblood. From the days that I have left in this world. Now. You still owe my wife thanks, do you not?” At this, he turned and walked out of the room.

Zamia said nothing for a moment, then dipped her head. “I have been remiss with rightful gratitude, Auntie. I thank you for your aid and beseech God’s blessings upon you.”

So there are some doorways in that wall of tribal pride and distrust. Good. “ ‘God’s blessings fall on he who helps others,’ ” Litaz quoted. “Just remember that the next time you are in a position to do so.”

The tribeswoman started to ask a question, but Litaz cut her off. “You’ve done too much talking already, child, and you are not in the clear yet. If Almighty God wills it, your shape-changing powers will return to you in time. But now is the time for rest.” Litaz filled a mug from the pot of hemlock tonic that had been steeping on the stove and gave it to the girl. “You will wake every few hours now, and that is best—it will keep your body from forgetting that you live. Each time you wake, you must force yourself to look around and talk a bit. Then you must take one long draw from this mug before you fall back asleep—no more than that, if you wish to wake again! Do you understand?”

The girl, already growing tired, nodded sleepily.

“Good, now take that first draw.”

The girl did, and a moment later she sat up energetically in bed and started fidgeting impatiently. Good. The other herbs in the tonic needed to overstimulate her for a few minutes before the hemlock could force her into a restful sleep.

At that moment, Adoulla trundled down the stairs, bellowing. “ ‘Hadu Nawas’—that is what the foul creature said of itself. I know that name, Litaz! I’ve read it somewhere. A history? An old romance?” He looked at her beseechingly, but she was quite sure she’d never read whatever book Adoulla had half-recalled.

Her friend cracked his bumpy knuckles irritably, then slumped his shoulders. “Of course, whichever book it was is a heap of wet ashes now.”

Litaz saw Zamia trying to stand and laid a restraining arm across the girl’s flat chest. Zamia slurred angrily. “You had knowledge of this murdering thing, and you don’t remember? ” The girl’s voice was scornful but weaker, drug-heavy. Good. She would be asleep in moments.

Adoulla showed what passed for patience with the wounded child. “Well, if I’d memorized every book in my library, my dear, I’d have had no need for a library!”

“City men and their books!” Despite the drugs and the wound, the girl’s savage haughtiness seemed to animate her. “If this knowledge had belonged to my people,” the girl hissed with surprising strength, “it would be passed down in song and story, so that ten men would know—”

Litaz saw the patience flee her old friend’s eyes. “And, tell me, where is all of that knowledge now, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi?”