Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

The tribeswoman wore the memory of dead family on her face. Adoulla’s words were cruel. But Litaz knew her friend well enough to know where they came from. He mourned his books as much as the girl did her tribesmen, and he no doubt found it hard to stand by while this supposedly ignorant savage of a girl made mock of his life of word-gathering.

Still, this was too much excitement. A line was being crossed that could hurt the girl’s recovery. Litaz placed a hand on Adoulla’s arm. It was enough. The ghul hunter threw his hands up and looked disgusted with himself. “Aaagh. I need to think. Some fresh air,” he blurted and bolted for the door, slamming it behind him.

The girl narrowed her emerald eyes in her own apparent self-disgust. As if she were willing the lioness within her to kill the weak little girl. She mumbled something about revenge, then closed her eyes and fell asleep.

Raseed started after Adoulla, but Litaz dissuaded him. The ghul hunter needed to be alone with his thoughts, not preached at by a boy a fraction of his age.

Litaz looked at Zamia and allowed herself a moment to celebrate her own skill. Because of her efforts, Zamia just might live. Then she looked at her front door, which Adoulla had just slammed. He would live, too, despite his pain.

She took a deep breath. Dhamsawaat was already half-mad with the tension between the Falcon Prince and the new Khalif. Now there was this threat. She hated being dragged back into this bleak world of cruel magics and monster-hunting. But somehow this would work out, she told herself. Somehow God would guide them through this, and then perhaps she and Dawoud would finally return home and leave this thrilling, beautiful, damned-by-God city behind them.

Adoulla slammed the heavy wooden door to his friends’ shop behind him. How low he had sunk, shouting at a half-dead child! Though he called her “girl,” he had begun to think of Zamia as a lioness, or a desert stone. He reminded himself that she was a child, even if she was also more than that.

Dawoud stood a few yards away from the shop, his arms folded, staring out at the street. The magus turned at the noise Adoulla made and arched a white eyebrow at him. Adoulla was in no mood for more talking. He tried to stride past his friend, but Dawoud’s talon of a hand grabbed Adoulla’s arm.

“Are you all right?”

Adoulla laughed mirthlessly. “All right?! The love of my life wants nothing to do with me except to avenge her dead niece. I have a savage girl’s near-death on my soul. I’m old and ready to die, and God is testing me with monsters fouler than I’ve ever faced. My home—” and here, Adoulla knew, his voice cracked “—my home is charred and smoking and every book I’ve ever owned is gone. On top of all of this, my dreams are of rivers of blood in the streets.”

Dawoud stroked his hennaed goatee and frowned. “Rivers of blood? I had almost the same dream. But it was in the Republic.”

That news did not help Adoulla’s mood. “Well, it seems that we dream-prophets are a dirham a dozen. May it please God to make us both false prophets.”

Dawoud nodded grimly. “Walk with me,” he said, and they began a slow stroll up the block.

Adoulla filled his lungs and emptied them, calming himself. “It’s just too much, brother-of-mine. God has given me more than I can carry.”

A man with a camel plodded by, mumbling happily to his animal. The magus put a thin hand on Adoulla’s shoulder, gripping fat and muscle. “Not alone, do you understand? You will not carry it alone.”

Dawoud was talking about taking on these creatures with him, as they had done in years past. Adoulla couldn’t let this happen. “I can’t ask that of you two. Name of God, I’m sorry to have involved you as much as I have.”

“This thing that tried to kill your little lion-girl, Adoulla. It frightens me. You know how much it takes to frighten me. You know the things I have seen, because you have seen them too. But soul-touching that wound! The creature that bit Zamia is like cruelty… cowardice… treachery, given form. I could feel it. But twisted up inside all of that was something even worse… a grisly kind of loyalty. Loyalty to a very powerful man. There is something wicked at work here that I cannot ignore. Something that would never let my wife and me sleep quietly in our beds. I know you feel it, too.”

A stream of screaming children shot down the street, playing some chase-game. Adoulla wiped a hand across his beard, feeling spent though it was barely afternoon. “Aye. I hate to think of what sort of man that thing calls ‘friend.’ ” He shook himself and stole a sidelong look at Dawoud. Perhaps he felt like talking after all. “How are you ? Those healing magics you worked… Well, we’re none of us as young we used to be.”

Dawoud smiled sadly. “And, you are thinking, some of us are growing old more quickly than others, eh? How am I ? Worn out, Adoulla. Three-quarters dead, the same as your fat old ass, or worse. But it would not matter to me if my wife did not seem younger and younger than me each year.”

They’d had this discussion many times before. Dawoud was not quite five and ten years older than his wife. But her vitality made her seem younger, while the physical toll of Dawoud’s sort of spells made him seem older. Most folk would guess there was thirty years separating them. Over the decades, Adoulla had had friends with grim diseases or horrible old injuries. Such catastrophes came to fill a certain place in people’s lives, like a second spouse or an extra-demanding child. So it was with Dawoud and the withering costs of a magus’s magics.

A pleasing breeze cut between the buildings, and Dawoud breathed it in. “There were times,” the magus chuckled ruefully, “that I thought I wanted such a thing—a so-much-younger wife. What man does not? But now… I do not know. Part of me just wants to let her go… to make her go home to the Republic.”

“How many times are we going to have this conversation, brother-of-mine? We both know you couldn’t live without her. Besides, you act as if it were your choice! As if Litaz would ever let you go! And ‘make her go?’ Ha! I would like to see that!”

Adoulla felt a familiar small sting of jealousy. He had always admired Litaz. She was brilliant, evenhanded, and simply one of the prettiest women Adoulla had ever known. More than once he had had lovemaking dreams of her, had woken half-wishing she was his. Once every few years, over a chance meal together when Dawoud happened not to be around, Adoulla found himself wishing it again for an evening. But he took such moments for the fancies they were. Adoulla was happy for his friends. Their two lives had long ago become one—of that there could be no doubt.

Adoulla had never known such a love. He did not hold Miri Almoussa any less dear than Dawoud held Litaz, but a twenty-years’ flame was different than a wife, as Miri had reminded him, tearfully and testily, over the years. Before she had told him never to visit her again.

He shook off his morose heart’s musings. There was work to be done. But he had little to go on. If he knew the name of the ghul-maker—the man this thing Mouw Awa called “blessed friend”—he could cast a tracking spell. Sadly, the names the jackal-creature had called itself—Mouw Awa, Hadu Nawas—would not serve for such a spell. But they might still be of use—if only Adoulla could recall where he’d heard them before.

Again, he tried to force open his memory. And again he drew a blank. Somewhere buried in his brain was a clue that could help save his city. But this was not the place to dig it up. He said goodbye and God’s peace to his best friend in the world and then went to think.