Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

He wheeled on Raseed. “Do you have jackal fangs, boy? Not so far as I can see. So how in the name of Merciful God is it your fault the girl was wounded? The life you have chosen is war, young dervish. A war against the Traitorous Angel. The sort of thing your Order talks about in all of their oaths and Traditions. Well, this is the reality. The girl ought to praise God that she’s still alive. People—people we care for—die in wars. You seem unprepared for this. And perhaps unprepared to do the duty you left the Lodge for.”

Raseed lowered his head, his blue turban bobbing “You are correct, of course, Uncle.” The boy’s look said that each word was pulling a sword blade through his guts. “I must put ‘the sun of God’s good before the candleflame of one life.’ I just… I… it was my fault that—”

Litaz reappeared in the doorway, apparently having put the tribeswoman to bed. “What with the enemies that are after Adoulla, I would feel better if I could work without worrying that a ghul pack is going to knock down the door. Let the boy stay here with me and act as a guard.”

Dawoud nodded. “Anything to keep you safe, beloved.”

He and Litaz spent half that night lying beside each other, too anxious to sleep and not secluded enough to make love. Dawoud held Litaz’s small hand in his, but they said little. Finally, they drifted into sleep.

When he woke at dawn he did not wake Litaz. Instead he said silent goodbyes to her and a loudly snoring Adoulla, and stepped quietly out the door into the still half-dark morning.

Soon the nights would be growing shorter. The Feast of Providence, the night before the shortest day of the year, was almost upon them—though he’d do no celebrating until this Orshado and the things that served him were destroyed.

Dawoud started walking and soon left the Scholars’ Quarter behind him. He breathed deeply of the early morning air, trying to drive from his body the taint he’d felt when he’d worked his scrying spell last night. The power behind that taint… there was more to this than a handful of killings, Dawoud felt certain. That sort of power aimed at bigger things.

For the first time since he and Litaz had seen the smoke rising from Adoulla’s townhouse, Dawoud really turned over events in his head. He was angry to have been dragged into this business. For decades, his and his wife’s work had drawn them away from all that was normal and happy. Dawoud’s body wrecked by magic. Their baby boy murdered by monsters. When they had fought and traveled beside Adoulla and others, the hypnotic song of responsibility had called them onto paths of danger and madness, like the snake-tailed dune maids that lured desert travelers to their doom. But they’d left that all behind. Dawoud’s greatest worries these past few years had to do with ministering to the poor without going broke, and with his wife’s increasing desire to leave this city he had made his home. But now…

He passed a shuttered storefront, then stopped walking as his chest suddenly tightened and blazed into pain. In the course of his calling Dawoud had been both stabbed and poisoned, and this felt like both at once. He began to cough and nearly collapsed from it.

It was several minutes before the coughing fit passed. Standing frozen there on the street, he panted painfully, feeling his body taking on more age than was its due. The healing and scrying magics he had worked over the past day—it had been many months since he’d done such. He felt the toll with every labored breath. Loudmouthed Adoulla liked to complain about his old man’s aches, but he knew nothing of pain. Of weakness. When Dawoud worked his magic—Name of God, when he simply walked down a dusty Dhamsawaat street too fast!—it felt as if God’s great fingers were pinching his lungs shut.

With this Orshado and his monstrous servants out there, Dawoud, his wife, and his oldest friend were needed more than ever before, but he did not know how long he could last back in this life. Not for the first time, his head was filled with visions of himself as a doddering invalid who needed his wife to spoonfeed him.

He tried unsuccessfully to keep his face from betraying his pain to the porters and cartmen passing by. But, he saw, he needn’t have bothered—for the busy people of Dhamsawaat didn’t give three shits for a dying old man’s agony. The only looks he received were looks of disgust. After a moment his breathing began to return to normal, and he gave the self-centered people around him his own look of disgust. Perhaps Litaz is right. Perhaps it is time at long last for us to leave this cold-hearted city.

He leaned heavily against a stone wall and allowed himself one deep shudder. Then he focused his soul and drew himself up. There was a task at hand. And if he was going to be there for Litaz, he had to be strong. He clenched his fists and pressed on, trying not to feel the ache that was building in his back.

He stepped out onto the Mainway, ignoring the hawkers’ shouts. For half a moment he toyed with the idea of hiring a sedan chair. But it was only toying. In all his years in Dhamsawaat, Dawoud had only ridden in one a handful of times. As with other things, his wife had been able to move from the Soo way to the Abassenese with more ease. When she was not with him she often hired chairs. Being a rich Blue River girl prepared her for having men carry her on their backs, he supposed with a snort, dodging past a bowlegged pistachio seller.

For an honest Red River Soo like himself, such a way of moving through crowds was simply wrong. Not doing so on the way to the palace, though, meant a long, hard walk. At least the day promised to be a cool one.

He walked for an hour and a half down broad roads before turning down Poulterer’s Row, which was packed with people preparing for the Feast of Providence. Every neighborhood in the city had a chicken seller, of course, but on Poulterer’s Row one could peruse the rare delicacies of the great master merchants: purple partridge, sun-dove, heron-stuffed swan. It was also the only place in all of Dhamsawaat that one could buy a pickled ostrich egg from the Republic. The smells of death and feather were thick here, and Dawoud was seized by a dry retching. He sat for a moment and gave a copper fals to a water seller who poured from his skin a cup of water so welcome it made Dawoud thank God aloud.

After yet another hour of his sandals slapping stone and packed dirt, Dawoud made it to the western gates of the Crescent Moon Palace. It had been a couple of years since he had been down this way, and he found himself newly dazzled by the building’s brilliance. Rising from the great white dome on a thin spire of gold was a sculpture of a man on horseback wielding a long lance. The head of the statue was changed to resemble each new Khalif. Dawoud realized he’d not been to the Palace since the new Khalif had taken the Throne of the Crescent Moon.

The statue gleamed, showing the lean-featured Khalif’s martial prowess against God’s enemies. Of course, everyone in Dhamsawaat knew that the new Khalif, like his father, had never once been in battle in his pampered life. It was the kind of hypocrisy that made Adoulla choke on his breakfast, but Dawoud wasn’t much bothered by it. Matters of state were about hypocrisy as much as anything else. The Soo people understood this as a simple fact that needn’t be condemned—a thing that simply was.

Dawoud approached the squat stone guardhouse that stood beside the gate. Calling on Roun Hedaad meant getting word to him by way of a helpful watchman. Dawoud did not have Adoulla’s total scorn for the Khalif’s men, but he did know that most of them could not be truthfully described as helpful. A pair of them exited the guardhouse and walked by, wearing steel-studded leather jerkins and displaying the slim maces that were their weapon of office. They eyed Dawoud as they did everyone they passed—with a vaguely menacing squint, ready, almost eager, for trouble. Dawoud gave these two a deferential old-mannish nod and sought out the least hostile looking watchman he could find: a lanky boy with soft eyes.