Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

“Captain Hedaad, we are no traitors. We are here in the hopes that—”

Dawoud’s explanation was drowned out by the sudden moaning of a half-dozen mouths. All around Roun Hedaad, his men shuddered strangely, their skins shriveling up and their eyes simultaneously rolling back until only whites showed.

In unison, each of those now-monstrous mouths chanted “ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE. ALL OF THOSE BENEATH SHALL SERVE,” as if reciting after some unseen tutor. Then, as one, they turned on their captain.

These were not mere turncoats, and this was not Pharaad Az Hammaz’s doing. That much she knew at once. There was something in the air here that was unmistakably related to the tainted blood she’d touched in her workshop days before. But beyond that she knew not what she was watching now.

“Skin ghuls,” her husband whispered in awe.

Skin ghuls . But they are just a legend. If she was not quite so old as Dawoud or Adoulla, she still had spent more than a score of years fighting foul magics. But nothing in her training had quite prepared her for this. She had seen things and done things that ordinary folk considered the stuff of stories. Now Litaz knew how those people felt when they saw her work.

Despite his age and his broad bulk, Roun Hedaad moved cat-quick, dodging the skin ghuls’ sword-swings. He lashed out with his mace, caving in one of the things’ skulls. But that barely seemed to slow it.

The dervish and the lioness shook off their shock at the same time and shot forward. Raseed leapt, his sword whistling out in a slanted arc and slicing clean through the neck of the closest skin ghul. Its head fell to the floor and its body stumbled a step before collapsing. Then the head began to hiss, and the sprawled body began grasping around blindly in search of it. Raseed, his tilted eyes wide with shock, kicked the gibbering head away like one of the wooden balls Soo children played with.

Zamia had already pounced onto one of the things, and the silver flash of her claws was too swift for the eye to follow. She leapt away and on to her next target, leaving a bloody mass of mangled body in her wake.

But already the skin ghul’s shredded flesh was, before Litaz’s astonished eyes, weaving itself back together. By the time the girl had disemboweled another foe, her first victim stood again, not a mark marring its body.

Groaning, one of the things shambled toward Litaz and her husband, still brandishing the sword it had wielded as a natural man. As it splashed through one of the larger pools dotting the room, a green-brown blur leapt up and attacked it. A crocodile, the most fearsome animal of her homeland. The thing was tiny—either young or magically stunted in growth—but even a half-sized crocodile was fearsome. With three snaps of its jaws it bit the skin ghul in half. But as the ghul reassembled itself, one of its arms clawing its way out of the crocodile’s mouth, the leathery beast dashed away in primal fear.

Zamia darted back and forth, harrying the monsters and dodging their fists and blades. Raseed’s sword sliced through a skin ghul’s wrist, severing its hand. Even as it hit the ground, though, the hand began to walk on its fingers back toward its body, looking like some sort of hideous spider. The dervish was back-to-back with Roun Hedaad now, and both men were bleeding. Both clearly wondering how to kill a foe that couldn’t die.

From the doorway leading back to the blue room, there was groaning and hissing. More of the things were stumbling in. Almighty God help us .

“This isn’t working. You have to do something,” she said to her husband. She felt his long-fingered hand on the small of her back and some part of her was less afraid.

Then she heard him mumbling sonorously in that magical nonlanguage that she’d never come any closer to understanding in their thirty years together. He was preparing to release the energies he’d been holding at bay.

“All of you, get behind Dawoud!” she screamed at her companions.

Raseed and Zamia obeyed. But she saw sadly that Roun Hedaad could not—he lay dead, half his head cleaved off. Two of the skin ghuls were tearing at the dead captain’s chest, trying to get at his heart. Trying to feed .

She stepped behind her husband, whose chanting had grown unnaturally loud. His sweet, gravelly voice never sounded so strong as when he spoke a spell, she thought. It was in the instant that a spell left his lips that he seemed most a man to her.

He fell silent and pointed his palms at the advancing horde of monsters—there were near a dozen of them in the Green of Beasts now.

A great blast of light—a glowing, golden beam as bright as the midday sun above them—shot forth from her husband’s hands and slammed unerringly into the skin ghuls. She’d once seen that beam reduce a standing man to ashes. And for a moment, as the beam bowled over the whole pack of creatures, Litaz dared to hope her husband’s magic had prevailed. Every single one of the skin ghuls lay still, smoke rising from their bodies.

She heard Dawoud draw in an exhausted, rattling breath, watched two new wrinkles suddenly seam his face.

Then she saw movement among the skin ghuls’ bodies. Her heart dropped. The creatures had simply been slowed—already, they were starting to scrabble back to their feet.

“What now?” Dawoud asked, panting such that she thought he might die.

Only ten years ago, he’d have been standing tall after casting that spell , she worried.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We can’t fight these things, though. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Dawoud’s spell bought them enough time to race through a great archway, out of the Green of Beasts and into a roofed room—a small stone antechamber.

Raseed and Zamia followed, but the dervish made an annoyed noise. “Auntie! Retreat is not the way of the Order—”

“Nor of the Badawi,” Zamia’s half-lion voice broke in.

Through the archway she saw the skin ghuls gather themselves into a mockery of a guard-squad and march slowly toward them. They had no time for this.

“Stupid children!” Dawoud bit off between breaths, echoing her thoughts. “Those are skin ghuls! Lion-claws, spells and solutions, forked swords—they are all of them useless against those monsters, if the old books are to be believed. Only Adoulla would know how to kill these things. And if we can’t—”

He stopped speaking as a blood-curdling scream rent the air—a scream Litaz recognized. It was coming from the next room. Adoulla! Hold on, old friend, we’re coming! At the very least, we’ll all die together!

Zamia and her companions stood in a small antechamber off of the Green of Beasts.

“Only Adoulla would know how to kill these things.” Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed said. “And if we can’t—”

Zamia heard a familiar voice scream from the next room. The Doctor!

With lion-speed she flew forward into a great columned chamber, Raseed moving beside her. She was still weak from her earlier injuries, and holding onto the shape took every bit of strength she could muster.

The room was a riotous mix of scents and sights. The Falcon Prince and a boy sitting on a throne, shouting. Men’s corpses. A wall of light. More of those gibbering monsters. A gaunt, black-bearded man who smelled of unnatural filth.

Zamia shut it all out and focused on what had brought her here—Mouw Awa the manjackal, hunched over the body of the Doctor. She pictured her band’s bodies, and drew new strength from her rage.

She shot past Raseed, never taking her eyes off of Mouw Awa. “This one is mine!” she growled.

She slammed into the shadow-creature, raking out with her claws and knocking the thing yards away from the Doctor. Raseed turned to face some new threat and was lost to her sight.