Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

Her offended expression melted away, and she took on the look of Miri, knower-of-many-things, narrowing her smoky eyes and crinkling her nose. Miri’s face when she was trying to recall something was the same as when she was rifling through her cabinets for a particular blouse. “ ‘Orshado’… it sounds like a northern name, perhaps? I couldn’t say for sure. But Hadu Nawas… he was an enemy of the throne, yes? One of the many conspirators killed in the civil war?”

“Not quite killed, it seems,” Adoulla muttered.

Miri gave him a perplexed look but continued. “If I recall correctly, he was also rumored to be a child-killer. Now, ‘Mouw Awa’… Hm. All I could tell you is that it sounds like… like Kemeti hidden script?”

Adoulla snorted. “Indeed. Though it took me a full day to have that lock click open in my mind. Sometimes, my sweet, your erudition makes me sick with jealousy.”

“Well, even leaving aside our difference in age, I’ve been hit on the head far fewer times than you, Doullie.” She deigned to smile at him, and he felt his soul warm.

Adoulla winced theatrically, as if he’d been punched in the gut. This response to Miri’s jibes had always made her laugh in the past. But instead when she met his eyes, she let her smile slip and turned away from him.

There were a thousand things he wanted to say to her when he saw that, but none of them would do any good.

“How is your grandnephew faring?” he asked.

“How is he faring?” Her thick braid with its streak of silver whipped as she spun to give him an incredulous glare. “How is he faring !? He’s broken! How else could he be after what happened to him? You see so much of this horror that you don’t even see it for horror anymore! He is a boy, Doullie! A boy of eight! Not one of your suicidal, fanatical friends! Not some ‘foe of the Traitorous Angel’!” She bit off her next words quietly. “This—it’s this madness that drove us apart.”

This time Adoulla’s wince was not feigned. Miri had always had unhappy words for the life he led, and for the friends who shared it, but those words had never been this sharp, this scornful.

She wasn’t stopped by his pained face. “Look at the world around you, Doullie! Forty years you’ve spent in this hunting. All that death. Why? What has come of it? Is the world a safe place now? A happier place?” She sank into her chair and put her face in her hands. “Merciful God, I’m sorry. Now you’ve upset me. What I meant to say was—” But she said nothing more.

“Your niece’s killers are still out there, Miri. They… they burned my house down.”

“I heard.” Of course Miri of the Hundred Ears had heard. Yet still she had all these hard words for him. “God protect you,” she said now.

Miri and he had been closer in the days when the townhouse was new, he reflected. Much closer. She had helped him choose it. Adoulla said nothing for a long time. Then he started to speak, though he didn’t know what he was going to say. “Miri, I—”

Miri held up a silencing hand and, with her other, wiped away the beginnings of tears. She took a deep breath and looked at Adoulla. Her eyes were weary but filled with love, and she spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Doullie. I didn’t mean the things I said.”

Adoulla had never been more tired in his life, and he tried to keep the pain out of his words. “Yes, you did.”

Miri’s voice was steadier now, and she twined the end of her long braid around her hand—a habit Adoulla had noticed long ago, a sign that she was steeling herself. “Well, yes, I did, but… I do know why you do what you do, Doullie. You—” A smile spread across her face, and she started laughing, at the same time that Adoulla did.

“ ‘Why you do what you do Doullie, you’?” he said, imitating the funny sound of her words. They both laughed. And Adoulla hurt again, knowing that it would end very soon.

Why had this been his fate? Why could he not have been one of the men he often walked past in the early morning light of the markets? Selling lemonjelly cubes and going home every evening to a deliciously fat wife who drenched herself in rose oil. Laughing at stupid things and keeping one another warm when the night wind whipped through the windows. Taking the day off to be with her and losing only a few coins in his pocket. But his job—his calling—was different. When Adoulla neglected his duties, gruesome things happened in the sleep-rooms of children. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t.

His eyes burned, and he realized that they were beginning to tear up. What is wrong with me? I’m a breath away from crying like a woman!

Mistress Miri Almoussa of the Hundred Ears showed the secret, defenseless self that she only ever showed late at night to him. “I… I am sorry, Doullie. So often I have had such hard words for what you do. And yet I am here like all the rest, begging your help for my family.”

Miri’s kohl-lined eyes were furious and on the verge of tears. When the first few fell, Adoulla placed an arm around her broad shoulders and wiped them away. Being seen crying would hurt her reputation.

“How long have we known each other, woman? Thirty years, now? Don’t you worry about such things. My help is always yours. Why these tears, huh? Everything will be fine, God willing.”

She sniffed once again, wiped away another tear and set her jaw. “Fine? O Merciful God! My niece is dead! Everything will not be fine, Doullie. Everything is going down to the Lake of Flame and the Traitorous Angel. But you’re right… there’s no point in crying. Not where men can see, anyway.” With one last sniffle, she was all calmness again. “So. Have you any more clues as to who or what is behind her murder?”

Adoulla struggled to recall all that the mad creature Mouw Awa had revealed. “There was one thing more,” Adoulla said at last. “The monster I am hunting… it spoke of its master sitting on ‘the Cobra Throne.’ Have you ever heard of such a thing? Do you know where it might be?”

Miri bit her lip and looked troubled. “I have,” she said. She took a breath, then a sip of nectar, and went on. “It was years ago—after one of the Falcon Prince’s first raids. All of the city’s talk was on the gold and weapons he’d stolen from the old Khalif’s treasure house. But my sources told me that the Prince himself was most interested in a dusty old scroll he’d found.”

Adoulla was as impressed as always with the things Miri knew, and it must have shown on his face.

Miri shrugged “Of course I was interested. I am the font of all knowledge in this city. No one in Dhamsawaat would know anything if not for my spies. And books are like spies’ reports frozen in amber. If the Falcon Prince wanted to know something that bad, it must have been valuable, I figured. So I had one of my Ears within his organization act as eye and pen, copying as much as he could of the stolen scroll. Those were different days, of course. Pharaad Az Hammaz’s operation was not quite so airtight then. In any case, my spy had to use a very expensive scrivening-spell, but the scroll proved useless to me. It cost an obscene amount to copy it, but the jest was on me—all but the title of the thing was in a thrice-ciphered version of hidden script. The characters were there, but pricey, pricey magics which might not have even worked were required to break the cipher-spells. Wealthy as I am, I still didn’t have enough to waste on trying to translate it.”

Adoulla, growing impatient, spoke around a mouth of saltfish. “Forgive me, my sweet, but I asked you about—”

“ ‘The Cobra Throne.’ That was the title of the scroll. It was about ancient Kem. But as I say, not worth the price of translating. For all I knew it was about some old buried hoard of the Faroes somewhere, which may or may not have ever existed and may or may not have already been hit by graverobbers. And I’m not the sort to go funding a grave-digging. Then there was the possibility that the Falcon Prince had stolen it only because the original was valuable. I didn’t know, and it wasn’t worth wagering further funds to find out. God’s truth be told, I don’t think that the gold-grubbing Khalif had ever bothered to translate it, either. At least, my spies at the time had heard the Falcon Prince mock this fact.”