Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

The pair thundered up and Adoulla could smell their sweat. “You! Did you see—”

“That way!” Adoulla shouted, pointing in the wrong direction. He put on his best irked-uncle face. “He ran down that turn-off! That dirty, damned-by-God bandit! He nearly knocked me over! What in God’s name are you men doing to stop this, I ask? Why, when I was your age, the watchmen would never let—”

The two men shoved past Adoulla, running in the direction of his pointing finger. When they were out of sight, Raseed stepped from the shadows.

It was Adoulla’s turn to shake his head. “We’ve lost a lot of time, boy. Looks like we’ll be doing some night riding.”

Raseed nodded with a grim relish. “Ghul hunting in the dark.”

Adoulla smiled in spite of himself, feeling buoyed just a bit by his assistant’s indefatigability. “Aye. And only a sword-for-brains little madman like yourself would be excited by the prospect.”

Not quite wanting to know what Almighty God had in store for him next, Adoulla gestured to his assistant and walked on.

On the dusty western outskirts of Dhamsawaat, Raseed bas Raseed watched the Doctor huffing as he clambered down from the sedan chair they had hired. Foul tannery smells pierced the air, mixing strangely with birdsong. The buildings here were fewer and farther between than they were within the walls. Hut-like homes of sun-baked mud and small, prosperous-looking houses of burnt brick lined the road. Even here, where the crowds were much thinner, a motley assortment of people filled the street. Some part of Raseed, intensely aware of his surroundings, as always, noticed all of this. But his uppermost thoughts were on the brief encounter with the Falcon Prince, and his own conduct during it.

Hiding from men of authority to protect a miscreant! You should have captured him, the dervish chided himself. You should have insisted, no matter the Doctor’s words. Pharaad Az Hammaz was a criminal, after all. And a traitor to the Throne of the Crescent Moon, though the Doctor insisted that the bandit’s cause was just.

The Doctor . Raseed had helped a seditious thief escape justice, and why? Because the Doctor had asked it. The wrongness of it struck him anew. It was true, Raseed had put himself into a sort of apprenticeship, and thus he owed the Doctor loyalty, but this business with the Falcon Prince… Raseed wondered what his Shaykhs at the Lodge of God would say if they could see him now. And he worried—as he did every day—that his actions had displeased Almighty God. How could he know, after all? Every night his meditation exercises helped him to settle his restless soul enough that he could sleep, but it was never easy.

A long-haired girl in a tight-fitting tunic walked by, and Raseed knew that Almighty God was testing him yet again. He averted his eyes and smothered the shameful ache that began to fill his body.

Life had been less confusing at the Lodge of God. But in the two years since High Shaykh Aalli—the most venerated and also the most permissive of his teachers—had sent him to train with the Doctor, Raseed had learned that the world was complex. When you meet Adoulla Makhslood, little sparrow, you will see that there are truths greater than all you’ve learned in this Lodge. You will learn that virtue lives in strange places.

Raseed had spent two years learning just how true his old master’s words were. He thought back on the first ghul-hunt he had undertaken with the Doctor, when they had rescued the wife of Hafi the bookbinder from the magus Zoud and his water ghuls. Raseed had begun that hunt amazed that this impious, unkempt man was in fact the great and virtuous ghul hunter whom High Shaykh Aalli had praised so lavishly. But by the time the wicked Zoud lay dead, Raseed had been forced to see the truth of the Doctor’s powers—and of his devotion to duty.

Even so, in his first days working with Adoulla Makhslood, Raseed had thought of leaving a dozen times, finding the Doctor oafish and irreverent. But High Shaykh Aalli had been clear in his orders, and a newmade dervish did not dare question the High Shaykh.

And, again and again over the past two years, Raseed had seen proof that somewhere amidst all of the Doctor’s belching and cursing and laxity was a fierce foe of the Traitorous Angel. A man who served God with a soul-deep dedication that was not so terribly different from High Shaykh Aalli’s. A man blessed by the All Merciful, and beloved unto Him.

Still, Raseed worried about what would happen when, someday, he returned to the Lodge to become a Shaykh himself. Each of his actions in the outside world would be judged, and when he thought on his own laxity in matters such as this business of the Falcon Prince, he feared the judgment would not be kind.

The Doctor turned from paying the chair-bearer and gave Raseed a piercing stare from beneath bushy gray eyebrows. “You’re worrying about that business with the watchmen, eh?”

He did not ask the Doctor how he knew. “Yes, Doctor. It is just that—” Upset words burst forth, surprising himself with their intensity. “Whether or not he is a foolish man, we must respect our Khalif and his Heir! We must defend them! If that goes, what else will we lose respect for? The Ministering Angels? God himself?”

The Doctor rolled his eyes and scratched his big nose. He put his arm around Raseed’s shoulder and steered their steps down a packed-dirt footlane that led to a pair of long, low buildings. “You know,” the Doctor said as they headed for the stables, “there is nothing more upsetting than young people who sound like old people! Do you hear your own hysteria? Do you think that there have always been Khalifs, boy? God and man loved one another before there were palaces and puffed-up rulers. And if the Crescent Moon Palace crumbled tomorrow, God would love us still. ‘For yea, they are the kings of men’s bodies, but God is the King of Men’s Souls.’ ”

The Doctor’s quoting of the Heavenly Chapters was punctuated by the smell of animals—mule, horse, and camel—wafting toward them as they approached Sideways Sayeed’s stables. The stablekeeper, an impeccably dressed but deformed man whose spine was bent nearly parallel to the ground, came out to greet them, his fine mother-of-pearl-worked cane thumping in the dirt. The Doctor made the arrangements, as Sideways Sayeed was one of his seemingly countless old friends.

Even were this not the case, Raseed knew, the Doctor would have insisted on doing the talking, as he considered Raseed too naïve to be trusted with certain tasks. A month after coming to live in Dhamsawaat, Raseed had gone supper-shopping. The Doctor had laughed at the scant bushel of wilted vegetables Raseed had brought home, asserting irritably that he’d have bought twice as much food with half the coins. Though two years had passed since then, Raseed knew his mentor still considered him to be “a genius of the sword but an idiot of the street,” as the Doctor, quoting some poet, had once put it.

A few minutes later the Doctor cheek-kissed and God’s-peaced Sideways Sayeed goodbye and handed Raseed the reins of a hardy looking mule. Leading his own mount back to the road, the Doctor looked anxious, scratching at his beard and glancing about him as if searching for something. Raseed guessed that it had to do with departing from Dhamsawaat. Leaving the city behind seemed to make the Doctor fidgety and melancholic by turns.

Raseed did not think he had ever met anyone so attached to a place. The ghul hunter complained about city life often, but Raseed knew that he loved it—perhaps because the King of Cities was a place that the Doctor could complain of familiarly, comfortably, endlessly. Raseed hoped it would please God to bring this good if flawed man back to his city soon. He pledged silently to use his sword arm and his virtue to make it so.