Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

“I… but…” The guardsman said nothing more but waved his men on and trotted off in search of other enemies.

When they were gone, the Heir looked down at the corpses and let his sadness show. “Ayyabi was a good man,” he said simply.

“Listen, child, we must—” Adoulla began, but he may as well not have been there for all the attention the boy paid him.

“Good man or not, my friend, he was your gaol-keeper,” said the Prince. “I know the life you live here. Under your father’s stifling wraps for nine years now, unable to befriend whom you wish. Unable to leave the palace without two days’ preparation. Forced to study things that couldn’t matter less to you. Do I call it true or not, boy? Think of the kind and carefree fates that could be yours if you were not entombed in the Crescent Moon Palace.”

The man was a master lutist, playing on the heartstrings of a child. The idea-seed of the freedom that would come with giving up the throne had been planted in the boy’s head, and its fruit was already blossoming in the boy’s eyes. A thousand possibilities that he had thought impossibilities were arrayed before him. Adoulla could see it in the boy’s smile. Pharaad Az Hammaz didn’t lie. He simply laid out the truth, in brash and dramatic ways. Adoulla supposed it was what people wanted to hear.

Perhaps he himself had been taken in a bit by it.

“And how could I escape this, O Prince?” the Heir asked, still staring at the corpses.

“Follow me to the throne room, boy, and I will show you.” As the three of them walked, Pharaad Az Hammaz explained about the simple ritual that would allow the Heir to pass mastery of the throne’s beneficent magics and rulership on to the thief. He said nothing of the death-magics the throne held, or of the blood-magic version of the spell.

“But what about recognition from the other realms?” the boy asked. “Rughal-ba? The Soo Republic?”

The Prince shrugged his large shoulders. “Let me worry about that. I have diplomats and clerks-of-law working for me as well as thieves and sell-swords.” He winked at the boy incongruously. “Believe me, the clerks-of-law are scarier than the thieves! So. What say you, Sammari?”

“I’ll give you the throne, O Prince. If you swear before God that you will use its power as a hero ought, and if you will kill the Defender of Virtue for what he did to my mother.”

“I swear it before Almighty God, who witnesses all oaths.” Pharaad Az Hammaz took the Heir’s small hand in his huge one. Adoulla followed as the thief guided the boy through a series of opulent rooms that Adoulla had no time to stop and gawk at. Twice they dashed past men fighting, but the Prince kept the Heir moving.

And then they entered the throne room.

It was empty of men, as big as any of the rooms Adoulla had yet seen, and as rich in decoration. Carved wood that glowed with alkhemists’ magic, puzzlecloth carpets woven from gold, perfumes and incenses wafting through the air in a dozen lovely scents. There were few pieces of furniture, however, save for the throne at the center of the room.

The Throne of the Crescent Moon sat atop a small dais. It was a cold, glowing white, as spotless as Adoulla’s kaftan. The back of the throne was a ten-foot-tall slab of strange pearlescent stone, carved into a vague, delicate shape that might have been a crescent moon—or a hooded cobra.

Pharaad Az Hammaz let out a low whistle. “At last,” he whispered.

They approached the throne. They’d almost reached it when a knot of men stormed into the room from the opposite archway. The Khalif, his sumptuous silk robes disheveled, was accompanied by a half-dozen armed guardsmen and a black-robed man who could only be a court magus.

For an instant they all stared at each other across the huge room.

“Kill them!” the Khalif shouted. “They have abducted your Young Defender! Kill them!”

Pharaad Az Hammaz’s saber was out of its scabbard and glowing golden, but the Heir jumped in front of him. “They have not abducted me, Defender of Virtue! The good Prince has shown me the magic of the throne—a way to grant him dominion over the palace. And vengeance for my mother!”

The guardsmen halted, unsure what to do.

“Good Prince?” the Khalif sputtered. “Your head has been turned by idiot tales of noble robbers!” He turned to his magus. “What is he talking about? Magic of the throne?”

The cowled man shook his head. “Defender of Virtue, I do not—” Words died on the man’s lips as a jackal-shaped shadow shot at him from the doorway behind.

Everyone in the room froze, hearing the hideous sounds of Mouw Awa savaging the magus. Before a single word of magic could pass the man’s lips, he had been reduced to a crimson-eyed corpse. In the stunned silence that followed, soft footsteps drew all eyes to the archway.

Orshado . He was tall but reed thin, and his flesh was jaundiced. A patchy black beard covered his face, and his kaftan was the same cut and color as Adoulla’s, but soiled with waste and blood. In his hands he held a red silk sack.

Adoulla suddenly recalled his nightmare from a week ago, before all of this horror had happened. The rivers of blood. His own kaftan stained with gore. It was said of the ghul of ghuls that his kaftan could never come clean. This, then, was the man that God had whispered of in the strange language of dreams. The foul man Adoulla was hunting. The man who had killed Miri’s niece and slaughtered the Banu Laith Badawi. Who had murdered Yehyeh and burned down Adoulla’s house and all of the precious memories it held.

Adoulla heard the manjackal’s voice in his head as he had on that night. The fat one doth preen in his unstained raiment. He hath tasted only the first of this burning world’s ashes. He knoweth not the sweet fires of the Lake of Flame, which shall soon wash over all of this. As Mouw Awa’s voice echoed in Adoulla’s head, Orshado waved a bony arm in a dismissive arc that somehow took in palace, city, and God’s great earth all at once.

Mouw Awa leapt upon the Khalif, its shadowy jaws snapping. As Adoulla heard the Defender of Virtue’s whimpering turn to screams, he was reminded that the murderous tyrant of his city was, after all, only a man. All of the Khalif’s pomp and power, and all of Adoulla’s grand hatred of him, were ripped away in an instant. Jabbari akh-Khaddari screamed again and was silent.

Adoulla was paralyzed with shock and fear, and he saw that even Pharaad Az Hammaz was, too.

Orshado withdrew a human head from the sack he held. In an unearthly voice, the head jabbered, “ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE. ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE.”

All around Adoulla, the guardsmen’s eyes rolled back, their skin shriveled, and their mouths echoed these words. As one they turned on Adoulla, the Prince, and the Heir.

In that instant, Adoulla knew, they had become something more and less than men.

Skin ghuls. Monsters made by twisting a living man’s soul inside out. Even amidst all of the shocks he had seen in the past week, this was a shock to Adoulla. He had only ever read about them—had thought the foul art of their raising was thankfully lost to the world. Neither spell nor sword could destroy a skin ghul. The old books said that tainted flesh would rejoin tainted flesh and corrupt bones would reknit with corrupt bones until the death of the skin ghuls’ maker drove the malign false life from their stolen bodies.

Mouw Awa crouched over the dead, red-eyed Khalif, blood and something half-tangible dripping from its jaws. Behind Adoulla, the Heir was whimpering.

The skin ghuls began to shamble toward Adoulla. Beside him, the Heir and the Falcon Prince still stood frozen with fear.