Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

The little holy man could be so thick sometimes. “I sent him to his Auntie’s house. To one of the few places in the city where a penniless little orphan would be well-treated even were he not related to the proprietress. Miri and her girls always have need of an errand boy or two.”

“ ‘O believer! If a man asks you to chose between virtue and your brother, choose virtue!’ ” Raseed quoted from the Heavenly Chapters. “There are charitable orders where the boy would be better served. To grow up among such degenerate women is…”

Adoulla felt his fire rise at the boy’s words. The last time he’d seen her—almost two years ago now—Miri Almoussa had made it clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him. Nonetheless, he’d be damned if he’d stand for her being insulted. He made his voice dangerous. “About whom exactly are you speaking, boy?”

The dervish clearly thought better of elaborating. His blue turban bobbed in a bow. “My apologies, Doctor. I meant only that a virtuous upbringing in one of the city’s orphan halls, where the boy could learn a trade, would—”

“Would doom the boy to six nights a week of under-the-sheets upbringing by some drunken ‘Godly servant of children.’ They’d leave him alone on Prayersday. Hmph. He’d learn a trade all right.”

“Doctor! I can’t believe—” Raseed’s words were cut off when a big bull of a woman shouldered her way between the pair, cursing them for standing idle in the street. Adoulla started walking again, and the dervish followed.

“Please, boy,” Adoulla said, “spare me your solemn protestations regarding that which you know nothing of. He’d be more likely to become a whore in one of those terror houses than he would if he’d been living at Miri’s from the day of his birth. In my orphan days, I dodged such places for the dungeons they were. Nothing’s changed. Now!” Adoulla half-shouted, clapping his hands together in an effort to disperse the argument. “I need to go home to gather some spell supplies. Then we head out of the city. Let’s get moving. If we linger too long, I’ll end up thinking better of this.”

They quickened their pace as much as the press of people would allow. The sun shone clearly as they stepped out of the street and its building-shadows and crossed the open space of Angels’ Square. Adoulla did not stop and marvel yet again at the almost-living expressions on the ancient statuary faces of the Ministering Angels. He did, however, push brusquely through a knot of oddly dressed, gawking city-visitors who stood staring crane-necked at the lifelike marble work. Bumpkins! Adoulla griped to himself, but he didn’t really blame them.

Even when civil war had wracked the city two hundred years earlier, Angels’ Square had been a sanctuary of sorts. All sides had agreed to shed no blood on its stones. Though crowded cheek-by-jowl with refuge-seekers, one could taste the peace of the place in the air, or so the historians and passed-down stories said. Today, aside from the pack of sightseekers, the square was largely quiet. If there weren’t such grim work before him, Adoulla thought he might have felt some of the old peace. Instead, his thoughts were on tracking spells and a child’s bloodied clothing.

He and Raseed left Angels’ Square behind for grimy Gruel Lane. On the Khalif’s maps, the narrow, dirty street that led from the Square to Adoulla’s neighborhood bore the name of some long-dead ruler. But for centuries Dhamsawaatis had called it Gruel Lane for its poverty and its inhospitable inns. Avoiding the occasional puddle of piss, Adoulla made it to the corner that marked the border of his rough neighborhood, the ironically named Scholars’ Quarter.

Pious old Munesh, with his wisps of white hair and his roasted-nut stall, stood on the corner agitating fire-heated trays of sugared almonds and salted pistachios. The aroma made Adoulla’s mouth water. He stopped to buy a handful of roasted pistachios.

“Doctor!” Raseed had been silent for much of their walk home, and Adoulla had almost forgotten he was there. The dervish was clearly scandalized by the delay. Adoulla wished he were young enough to believe that zeal and an urge to combat monsters were enough to fill one’s stomach. But the years had taught him otherwise, and he had a long day ahead of him.

“I’ve had only half a breakfast, boy. I need sustenance to think clearly, and a handful of moments here will matter little enough. The Heavenly Chapters say ‘A starving man builds no palaces.’ ”

“They also say ‘For the starving man, prayer is better than food.’ ”

Adoulla gave up. He grunted to Raseed, thanked Munesh and walked on, cracking shells and munching noisily.

His assistant was a true dervish of the Order, truer than most of the hypocritical peacocks who wore the blue silks. He had spent years hardening his diminutive body, his only purpose to be a fitter and fitter weapon of God. To Adoulla’s mind, it was an unhealthy approach to life for a boy of seven and ten. True, God had granted Raseed more than human powers; armed with the forked sword of his order, he was nearly invincible. Even without the sword the boy could take on half a dozen men at once. Adoulla had seen him do it. But the fact that he had never so much as kissed a girl lessened Adoulla’s respect for him considerably.

Still, it was Raseed’s pious discipline that made him such a good battle companion. A man’s character was most clearly displayed in the uses he put his gifts to. In his forty years as a ghul hunter, Adoulla had seen a man jump twenty feet into the air and had watched a girl turn water into fire. He had seen a warrior split himself into two warriors, then four. He had watched as an old lady made trees walk.

What he had seen people do with such powers varied as much, or as little, as people themselves. Their motivations covered the same range of reasons all men and women did things. Occasionally they helped other people and made sacrifices. More often, they acted selfishly and did wrong to their fellow children of God. Raseed, for his part, always went the first route.

A neighbor’s child hollered Adoulla’s name and waved in greeting from across the packed-dirt street. Clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts and slurping the last bits of salt and pistachio from his fingers, Adoulla waved back and stepped onto his own block.

He passed the small sandstone shop that belonged to his friends and ex-traveling companions, Dawoud and Litaz, a Soo couple who had lived in the city for decades. Apparently they were not home—the shop’s cedar shutters were drawn tight. Too bad. Adoulla would never have asked his retired friends to accompany him on this ghul hunt, but Litaz had kept up with her alkhemy, and it would have been nice to borrow one of her remarkable freezing solutions or explosive preparations to aid in his work.

But it was Idesday, so Adoulla guessed that the couple would be spending the day and perhaps the night with friends at the Western Market, where traders from the Soo Republic swept in once a month with ivory, gold, and the yam candies that Litaz always had on hand to remind herself of home.

Finally, he and Raseed reached the pale stone townhouse that had been Adoulla’s thin slice of Dhamsawaat for twenty-odd years. Adoulla opened the white-painted wood door of the townhouse and stepped through the gently arched doorway, the dervish following.

It was no palace. But it was much better than the hovels that were his origin and likely inheritance as an orphan on Dead Donkey Lane. That he’d been able to buy the building at all had been due to the vagaries of his calling, which for once had worked to his advantage. Many years ago he had, with Dawoud and Litaz, fought a golden snake forty feet long, with huge rubies for eyes—an ancient monster created in the days of the Faroes of Kem and awakened by a greedy man’s digging. Just looking at the glittering serpent caused magical fear in even a stout heart, and it had already slain a squadron of the old Khalif’s watchmen. But Adoulla and his friends had ambushed the creature and drained its animating magic.