Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

They walked for an hour, back and forth, upslope and downslope, through tunnels and rooms of pale stone and packed earth. As they walked, Dawoud’s feet ached and a thousand grim thoughts filled his head. But not a word escaped his lips.

Nearly an hour after Adoulla and his friends were hushed by the Falcon Prince, the tunnel sloped sharply upward, steep enough that Adoulla found himself breathing heavily. The tunnel then opened into a massive… cave? Room? Whether the space itself was made by man or nature, the great stone-walled expanse about him was dank, a series of huge pools intersected by thin walkways and tall columns of shaped stone. Water gurgled all around him, and he had to keep himself from cursing aloud from the shock of what he was looking at. A cistern! Older than the Crescent Moon Palace and sitting smack dab beneath it! How long has it been since men walked down here?

He felt as if the city he knew were transforming beneath his feet. His head spun such that it took him a moment to process the fact that there were already men there when the party entered the cistern—it was their low, clean-burning torchlight he saw by.

Two muscular young men stood in the center of the great space, making adjustments to a long ladder-like contraption of poles and ropes. This ladder climbed to the ceiling, where it was almost lost to his old eyes. But as he stared up into the darkness, he made out a small hole in the ceiling which the ladder was somehow lashed to.

A well , Adoulla realized, a well that opens up within the palace. The city was shifting beneath his feet! The simple existence of that little hole of stone was astonishing—would the ages-ago civil war have gone differently, had the Holy Usurper’s forces known of this chink in the Khalifs’ armor? How might the last—?

His thoughts were interrupted as the Prince turned to them and raised a finger to his lips, again demanding silence. The Prince strode forward and, using a series of hand signals Adoulla could not begin to follow in the half-dark, consulted with the two men at the ladder. A moment later, the bandit gestured for the group to gather around the ladder. A few of his men were already climbing it.

The Prince gestured for Adoulla and his friends to climb. Adoulla heard Dawoud curse softly beside him. But as the magus climbed, he seemed to have an easier time than he’d expected. As Adoulla began to climb he could feel why—there was something ingenious about the ladder’s construction that made moving up it less arduous than it ought to have been. As the well-hole above him slowly drew closer, Adoulla sensed more than heard another group of the Prince’s men enter the cistern below him and head for the ladder. Of course . The Prince had had some special climbing-device rigged here because he intended for a good number of armed men to quickly make their way up it and into the palace.

Adoulla’s palms burned a bit from gripping rope, and he was sweating beneath his kaftan. A few feet above him he heard Dawoud breathing hard. Ingenious device or no, he was thankful when they finally reached the top, climbed out of the well-hole…

And emerged right in the midst of a knot of tense-looking guardsmen brandishing weapons. Adoulla nearly dropped back down the rope-and-pole ladder in fear. Then he saw that these men were exchanging hand signals with those of the Prince’s men who had climbed up before him. More infiltrators . He didn’t know if he was pleased or disturbed by how pervasive the Prince’s influence seemed to be within the palace.

The room they’d reached was two dozen feet on a side and made of gray stone. It smelled of the well water below. The Prince gestured Adoulla and his friends over to a small, arched doorway in the far wall. Dervish and magus, alkhemist and Badawi gathered around the Prince, as did a half-dozen of his men. Glancing behind them, Adoulla saw that the room was already filling with armed men, a steady stream of whom were quietly making their way out of the well.

The Prince led them through the doorway into a huge kitchen filled with low stone ovens. Two other doorways led from the kitchen to other rooms, and each of these was flanked by two guardsmen. Their lack of alarm at the Prince’s entrance meant that they, too, were his agents. The smell of baking bread filled the room, but beneath it was another scent that Adoulla knew—blood.

In the center of the kitchen stood a massive dark brown woman, as big as Adoulla, wearing a cook’s apron and holding a big, bloody cleaver. A dead guardsman lay slumped at her feet, his head opened by a nasty gash. The Prince dashed to the woman and exchanged a few quick hand signals. Then, with that more-than-human speed, he ran in a circle about the kitchen, sprinkling some sort of powder on the ground until it surrounded the whole room. He produced a flintbox, and lit the powder, which didn’t burn with a visible flame, but surrounded them with a low blue glow. Alkhemy, Adoulla knew, but he knew little more than that. He looked a question at Litaz, but she only shrugged. It was a rare compound indeed that could baffle her. For what felt like the hundredth time that day, he was impressed by the Prince’s resources.

“Well!” Pharaad Az Hammaz boomed, breaking the silence. “We can speak now, and the powder of the panthers will keep our words from being heard outside this room. My friends, meet Mother Midnight, Queen of the Khalif’s Kitchens. For years now, she and the minister you met earlier have been helping me arrange this little festival of ours. If we survive this day, we will owe it all to her.” The Prince turned to the big woman. “I presume, from the lack of shouts and bell-ringing, that we remain undetected?”

“Aye, Pharaad,” Mother Midnight said, her voice sounding like a rockslide. “The few fools who stuck their noses in the wrong place at the wrong time have been dealt with, but we won’t be able to keep these bodies hidden forever.” She gestured with her crimson-stained cleaver to the dozen great ovens that dominated the room. Here and there, sticking out of the ovens, Adoulla saw a man’s hand or booted foot.

He felt sick. The dice have fallen from the cup, then. We are a part of this mad usurpation whether or not we wish to be.

Beside him, Raseed and Zamia started to speak outraged words, but he turned to them with his hardest glare. “Orshado. Mouw Awa,” he whispered harshly. “There is no other way to stop them now. That matters more than anything.” Praise God, neither warrior-child said anything more.

“He’s two rooms down, Pharaad. In the Velvet Chamber, about to take his private Thirdday Noonmeal. The Defender of Virtue is never truly alone, but this is the closest he gets to it all week. Everything is as you planned—this is the moment we’ve waited for.”

Raseed broke his brief silence. “And do you feel no shame, woman? No shame at all in betraying your Khalif and master in this way?”

The Falcon Prince turned an angry eye on the boy, and Mother Midnight scowled and sucked her teeth. “Ask the Defender of Virtue about my daughter and his… appetites, holy man. Ask him about Mother Midnight, who loyally served him and his father before him, and was repaid with the rape and rejection of an only child who killed herself. Then speak to me of shame and betrayal.”

To Adoulla’s surprise, that shut the boy up. Behind them, more of the Prince’s men filed quietly into the kitchen.

The Falcon Prince put a big hand on Mother Midnight’s shoulder. “Auntie, I swear by my soul that in half a day’s time you’ll be able to ask the sack of scum yourself. Though I fear the only answer you’ll get will be the sound of his head hitting the executioner’s leather mat!”