Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon

To my parents, Ismael Ahmed, and the late Mary O’Leary,

who introduced me to the fantastic world of books;

to my wife, Hayley Thompson,

who supported me in countless ways as I wrote this one;

and to my children, Malcolm and Naima, who make this broken

world beautiful enough to keep living and writing in,

this is for you.

Nine days. Beneficent God, I beg you, let this be the day I die!

The guardsman’s spine and neck were warped and bent but still he lived. He’d been locked in the red lacquered box for nine days. He’d seen the days’ light come and go through the lid-crack. Nine days.

He held them close as a handful of dinars. Counted them over and over. Nine days. Nine days. Nine days. If he could remember this until he died he could keep his soul whole for God’s sheltering embrace.

He had given up on remembering his name.

The guardsman heard soft footsteps approach, and he began to cry. Every day for nine days the gaunt, black-bearded man in the dirty white kaftan had appeared. Every day he cut the guardsman, or burned him. But worst was when the guardsman was made to taste the others’ pain.

The gaunt man had flayed a young marsh girl, pinning the guardsman’s eyes open so he had to see the girl’s skin curl out under the knife. He’d burned a Badawi boy alive and held back the guardsman’s head so the choking smoke would enter his nostrils. The guardsman had been forced to watch the broken and burned bodies being ripped apart as the gaunt man’s ghuls fed on heart-flesh. He’d watched as the gaunt man’s servant-creature, that thing made of shadows and jackal skin, had sucked something shimmering from those freshly dead corpses, leaving them with their hearts torn out and their empty eyes glowing red.

These things had almost shaken the guardsman’s mind loose. Almost. But he would remember. Nine days. Nine…. All-Merciful God, take me from this world!

The guardsman tried to steady himself. He’d never been a man to whine and wish for death. He’d taken beatings and blade wounds with gritted teeth. He was a strong man. Hadn’t he guarded the Khalif himself once? What matter that his name was lost to him now?

Though I walk a wilderness of ghuls and wicked djenn, no fear can… no fear can… He couldn’t remember the rest of the scripture. Even the Heavenly Chapters had slipped from him.

The box opened in a painful blaze of light. The gaunt man in the filthy kaftan appeared before him. Beside the gaunt man stood his servant, that thing—part shadow, part jackal, part cruel man—that called itself Mouw Awa. The guardsman screamed.

As always the gaunt man said nothing. But the shadow-thing’s voice echoed in the guardsman’s head.

Listen to Mouw Awa, who speaketh for his blessed friend. Thou art an honored guardsman. Begat and born in the Crescent Moon Palace. Thou art sworn in the name of God to defend it. All of those beneath thee shall serve.

The words were a slow, probing drone in his skull. His mind swooned in a terror-trance.

Yea, thy fear is sacred! Thy pain shall feed his blessed friend’s spells. Thy beating heart shall feed his blessed friend’s ghuls. Then Mouw Awa the manjackal shall suck thy soul from thy body! Thou hast seen the screaming and begging and bleeding the others have done. Thou hast seen what will happen to thee soon.

From somewhere a remembered scrap of a grandmother’s voice came to the guardsman. Old tales of the power cruel men could cull from a captive’s fear or an innocent’s gruesome slaying. Fear-spells. Pain-spells. He tried to calm himself, to deny the man in the dirty kaftan this power.

Then he saw the knife. The guardsman had come to see the gaunt man’s sacrifice knife as a living thing, its blade-curve an angry eye. He soiled himself and smelled his own filth. He’d done so many times already in these nine days.

The gaunt man, still saying nothing, began making small cuts. The knife bit into the guardsman’s chest and neck, and he screamed again, pulling against bonds he’d forgotten were there.

As the gaunt man cut him, the shadow-thing whispered in the guardsman’s mind. It recalled to him all the people and places that he loved, restored whole scrolls of his memory. Then it told stories of what would soon come. Ghuls in the streets. All the guardsman’s family and friends, all of Dhamsawaat, drowning in a river of blood. The guardsman knew these were not lies.

He could feel the gaunt man feeding off of his fear, but he couldn’t help himself. He felt the knife dig into his skin and heard whispered plans to take the Throne of the Crescent Moon, and he forgot how many days he’d been there. Who was he? Where was he? There was nothing within him but fear—for himself and his city.

Then there was nothing but darkness.

Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, the last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat, sighed as he read the lines. His own case, it seemed, was the opposite. He often felt tired of life, but he was not quite done with Dhamsawaat. After threescore and more years on God’s great earth, Adoulla found that his beloved birth city was one of the few things he was not tired of. The poetry of Ismi Shihab was another.

To be reading the familiar lines early in the morning in this newly crafted book made Adoulla feel younger—a welcome feeling. The smallish tome was bound with brown sheepleather, and Ismi Shihab’s Leaves of Palm was etched into the cover with good golden acid. It was a very expensive book, but Hafi the bookbinder had given it to Adoulla free of charge. It had been two years since Adoulla saved the man’s wife from a cruel magus’s water ghuls, but Hafi was still effusively thankful.

Adoulla closed the book gently and set it aside. He sat outside of Yehyeh’s, his favorite teahouse in the world, alone at a long stone table. His dreams last night had been grisly and vivid—blood-rivers, burning corpses, horrible voices—but the edge of their details had dulled upon waking. Sitting in this favorite place, face over a bowl of cardamom tea, reading Ismi Shihab, Adoulla almost managed to forget his nightmares entirely.

The table was hard against Dhamsawaat’s great Mainway, the broadest and busiest thoroughfare in all the Crescent Moon Kingdoms. Even at this early hour, people half-crowded the Mainway. A few of them glanced at Adoulla’s impossibly white kaftan as they passed, but most took no notice of him. Nor did he pay them much mind. He was focused on something more important.

Tea.

Adoulla leaned his face farther over the small bowl and inhaled deeply, needing its aromatic cure for the fatigue of life. The spicy-sweet cardamom steam enveloped him, moistening his face and his beard, and for the first time that groggy morning he felt truly alive.

When he was outside of Dhamsawaat, stalking bone ghuls through cobwebbed catacombs or sand ghuls across dusty plains, he often had to settle for chewing sweet-tea root. Such campfireless times were hard, but as a ghul hunter Adoulla was used to working within limits. When one faces two ghuls, waste no time wishing for fewer was one of the adages of his antiquated order. But here at home, in civilized Dhamsawaat, he felt he was not really a part of the world until he’d had his cardamom tea.